Perspective: 2017 in Review

Other Years in Review.

This was not my most productive year of film criticism. As always there are several reasons; I had a busy and artistically active middle of the year, for one. I barely caught any movies during that period, let alone had the stamina to write about them.

Beyond that, though, there were many times throughout the year when I struggled to find purpose in my writing. In a year of cultural upheaval, sending out rarefied opinions about art into the void felt especially inessential. Trying to confront one’s privilege involves listening, and it’s hard to listen while speaking. There were even moments in which I questioned my motivations and considered putting this project to bed.

Yet for all that, I continue to receive lovely encouragement from folks in my life that would be wrong to dismiss. So I have ended up spending a lot of time considering the role of the critic. What is film criticism beyond building up or tearing down the art we consume?

All this crystallized in the cultural impact of the new Star Wars movie. The vehement backlash smacked of outrage for all the wrong reasons, making clear an important truth. If we spend all our time listening, the most misguided voices will always be the loudest. Futile or not, criticism is an opportunity for action in at least one key sense: it provides a platform for discourse. And when criticism is well done, that discourse sets healthy terms like rigorous argumentation and a baseline of empathy.

Perspective is crucial to explore, and it cannot be boiled down to “well this is what I think and you can’t tell me I’m wrong!” I hope that this platform will be generative, not destructive, and only ever combative for the right reasons. It may feel indulgent to air my thoughts for all to see, but it’s a way to actively engage with the art I care about. I will try to keep improving and learning with each passing year.

Anyway, here are some stats:

This year Post-Credit Coda featured a total of 42 blog posts, including 39 movie reviews, 23 reviews of 2017 films, 1 top ten list, and 2 Oscars posts.

Of the 39 movie reviews, the average score was a 7.3 out of 10.

The highest score was a perfect 10, the first since 2015, for Alien.

The lowest score, a measly 2, belongs to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.

The breakdown is as follows:

Score - Number of Movies with that Score

10 - 1
9/9.5 - 10
8/8.5 - 8
7/7.5 - 8
6/6.5 - 6
5/5.5 - 2
4/4.5 - 1
3/3.5 - 2
2/2.5 - 1
1/1.5 - 0
0/0.5 - 0

The total number of hits for this year: 90,115. The total number of hits for each 2017 post adds up to 13,166.

Of the 42 eligible posts, the average number of hits per post was 313.

The highest number of hits: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter with 749.

The lowest number of hits*: Justice League with 95. (hahaha)

*not posted in the past day

I'll see you next year.

THE SHAPE OF WATER: Fish Love

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones
Runtime: 123 mins.
2017

Guillermo del Toro's American movies have tended to be feasts of design and concept that leave lingering questions in terms of execution. His strengths as a filmmaker are specific and his weaknesses are vague. Every time he puts out a movie, though, it's worth paying attention; it's clear the man is a visionary.

With The Shape of Water, it's especially difficult to ding the movie for being worse-executed than its peers, because as far as I can tell it has no peers. Shape is, after all, a comic drama romance sci-fi horror fairy tale thriller. Some of those categories might be a stretch, but perhaps Shape is ill-used by categorization in general. The plot involves a mute cleaning woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who befriends a Creature from the Black Lagoon-esque fish monster who has been contained in the facility where she works. As usual, though, del Toro has little interest in foregrounding the plot, so neither will we.

DUNKIRK: Stress/Disorder

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy
Runtime: 106 mins.
2017

Dunkirk begins with a ticking clock. British soldiers pick through rubble as demoralizing fliers float down from the sky. The quietude is suddenly ripped asunder by the deafening pop of gunshots from unknown assailants. A young boy's companions fall away one by one; these shots are the starting pistol for a narrative that will not stop. Nor will the clock.

Dunkirk is everything Christopher Nolan has been working towards for the past twenty years, the magnum opus of his career. Who would have thought that a director who so adores high concept sci-fi would find his ultimate muse in World War II history? For Dunkirk is a culmination, the purest and most precise version of Nolan's creative mechanism. Accused of cold, systematic, unfeeling narratives--he has made a film about the cold, systematic, unfeeling nature of large scale military efforts. Accused (justifiably) of fridging women to motivate his protagonists--he has excised all women to create a hell of masculinity, and done away with all personal motivations beyond that of survival. Accused of hamfisted exposition and sloppy plotting--he has made a film in which the plot and dialogue only matter insofar as they allow the viewer to understand the magnitude of danger weighing on any given moment.

MOTHER!: Wife Material

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson, Kristen Wiig
Runtime: 121 mins.
2017

A man and a woman make a home together. Their labors do not fall equally. The man is the worker, the breadwinner, the tortured genius, the star, the hero, the subject. The woman works too, but it is a labor of love. She is the caretaker, the homemaker, the bearer of life, the vessel of inspiration, the enabler, the sustenance, the muse, the object.

These are the brigade of gender norms that make up the steel trap of the perfectly titled mother!. In this movie director Darren Aronofsky has created a... fairy tale? allegory? parable? domestic drama?... about the infinite patriarchal cycle of husband and wife. This is the kind of film to achieve an F on Cinemascore, and it has very knowingly earned its ghastly marks. I can only imagine the revolting experience mother! must have been for those more literal minded folks looking for a good scare. To give you some idea of the level of abstraction at play, the script eschews character names in favor of titles: Mother, Him, Man, Woman, Cupbearer, Consoler, Whisperer, Zealot, Defiler, Lingerer, Devotee, Novitiate, Herald.

As with every aspect of mother!, the curious naming conceit is not merely meant to inflame. Every choice has a clear, ringing purpose. In this case, not only does the namelessness boost what is being represented into a more conceptual space, but it eradicates the humanity of the film's characters, replacing identity with a mythic social role.

STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI: Toxic Masculinity

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Rian Johnson
Writer: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, Benicio Del Toro, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Frank Oz, Lupita Nyong'o
Runtime: 152 mins.
2017

Spoilers throughout, though this was the second largest opening weekend of all time so I guess you've seen it?

I'm going to start by establishing some crucial context, because I'm about to be combative and I want folks to understand exactly how I mean to be combative.

A primary role of the critic is to provide a perspective and a platform that allows people to further engage and play with the art they consume. The role of the critic is NOT to decide whether a piece of art is good or bad. Any critic who believes this about himself (and I say "himself" because the ones who believe this tend to be men) is full of shit. Nobody should ever presume to tell you that your experience is wrong. Yet despite the inherent subjectivity of art, I maintain that it's not all relative. What this means is that we can have substantial discussions not only about our own experience, but about whether a work of art works or doesn't work within the context of itself. So basically, I would be a fool to ever suggest that someone should or shouldn't like something, but I could disagree about an argument they put forward concerning how the movie functions.

Which brings us to the explosive cultural phenomena shitstorm the recent release of Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. You've probably noticed that The Last Jedi has been widely divisive in a totally different way than its predecessor. The responses to The Force Awakens tended to fall into two categories: effusive praise and shrugging acceptance (of which I fell in the latter). But The Last Jedi has caused a stunning outpouring of hate, buffeted by an equal and opposite outpouring of love.

To play my hand, I liked The Last Jedi. A lot. Probably more than any Star Wars movie since Empire. And yet I very soon discovered that the internets have been aflood with fans expressing hatred, anger, disgust, sadness, and crushing disappointment. It reached epidemic proportions when fans expressed their ire by descending upon Rotten Tomatoes to torpedo the film's score, currently at 93% for critics and 55% for audiences. This swing of 38 percentage points is not unheard of. The unprecedented part is that for a blockbuster like Star Wars, the disparity between audiences and critics always goes in the opposite direction. So what's going on here?

STAR WARS: EPISODE V - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: A Force to Be Reckoned With

Other Reviews in this Series

Director: Irvin Kershner
Writers: Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas
Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz
Runtime: 124 mins.
1980

With the possible exception of Rogue One, The Empire Strikes Back is the last Star Wars film to actively try something new. In the thirty-seven years since its release, the most successful film franchise of all time has completely failed to match Empire's innovation. Maybe part of the problem is that Empire was so successful at shaping the identity of Star Wars that everything thereafter necessarily returned to the same well.

That's the double-edged sword of making something iconic: forging a memorable identity for your property also means putting it in a box. And it doesn't get more iconic than The Empire Strikes Back. Consider how many aspects of it have been canonized and remixed over and over again in the form of video games, merchandise, books, other movies. Empire defined a generation.

It's easy to see why, looking back from our perch in the middle of the newest Star Wars trilogy. Empire is the best kind of sequel in that it expands on its predecessor with seeming effortlessness, something no other Star Wars movie has managed. Everything in Empire feels more epic, grander than before. Yet it accomplishes this without artificially inflating stakes by doing something dumb like giving our heroes a newer, bigger Death Star to tangle with (they'll save that trick for Episode VI... and Episode VII).

LADY BIRD: Coming of Age

Director: Greta Gerwig
Writer: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Beanie Feldstein, Lucas Hedges, Timothee Chalamet, Tracy Letts, Jordan Rodrigues, Odeya Rush
Runtime: 94 mins.
2017

Of all its best qualities, I am most taken by Lady Bird's fantastically subtle exploration of empathy. It's a coming of age story, after all. Not only do these types of narratives pit young people against the growing urgency of external pressures like economic struggles and repressive gender roles, but they also force these young people to come to terms with the monsters inside themselves. Kids are sociopaths in a most general sense: it is impossible for them to see or feel outside of their own experience. The function of the coming of age story is to represent a character slowly emerging from solipsism into a cold social reality, as well as a warm interpersonal one.

Lady Bird does all this in a way that feels true rather than forced, which is probably the highest compliment one can give a story like this. Writer/director Greta Gerwig makes a point of eschewing cliches, or at least setting them up in order to subvert them. People's lives don't change in clean moments of catharsis. Rather, their experience shifts gradually, around the edges of their life, until one day some event throws into stark relief the long-developing tectonic shifts that have been happening all along.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: Minor League

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon, Zack Snyder
Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Ciarán Hinds, Amber Heard
Runtime: 120 mins.
2017

PRODUCTION

Warner Bros. and DC have been trying to cobble together a Justice League film for a decade. The twists and turns of that saga are numerous yet not terribly worth enumerating. This particular intellectual property has been a potential cash cow that Warner Bros. has been trying unsuccessfully to exploit for quite a while now.

The production of the Justice League that is currently wallowing at your local cineplex, however, began in April 2016 (though the film had been in the works for at least two years before that). With significant reshoots taking place in May 2017, that makes Justice League one of the more prolonged film productions of all time. The reshoots were in large part a course correction imposed on the film due to near-universal revulsion of its predecessor, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Clocking in at $25 million, Justice League's reshoots were around four times as expensive as a typical blockbuster's reshoots would be. In fact, Justice League was one of the most expensive film ever made, coming in at an estimated $300 million, although we can't know for sure because Warner Bros. conspicuously refuses to release the numbers.

Although Zack Snyder directed the lion's share of the film, Joss Whedon was brought on in an uncredited directorial capacity after Snyder had to leave production due to a family tragedy. So what we have is one of the lengthiest and most expensive film shoots of all time, accosted by course corrections, and containing the watered down visions of two very different directors.

If there is one perfect anecdote that sums up the haphazard slapdashery of the Justice League production, it is that of Henry Cavill's mustache. The unanticipated and Superman-heavy reshoots of this May ended up coinciding with the shooting of another of Cavill's upcoming movies, Mission Impossible 6, in which his character will be sporting quite a fashionable mustache. The MI6 shoot required Cavill to keep his mustache, but he also needed to portray Superman, so Warner Bros.' solution was to erase his mustache with some quick and sloppy CGI, making this a likely candidate for Most Expensive Mustache of All Time.

THOR: RAGNAROK - Rok and Roll

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Taika Waititi
Writers: Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson, Karl Urban, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, Taika Waititi
Runtime: 130 mins.
2017

The Marvel Cinematic Universe here enters its 17th entry, and for at least the last ten of those it hasn't been able to shake a particular debate: Are all Marvel movies the same?

For my part, I tend to be impressed by the malleability of Marvel's formula. Ever since the anonymous Thor: The Dark World, every new film has very explicitly staked a claim to its own genre identity. The Winter Soldier is a political thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy is a space opera comedy, Ant-Man is a heist movie, Iron Man 3 is a Shane Black movie. These movies have gotten to a comfortable enough place that they can take aesthetic risks, and visually each film seems more differentiated than the last, a trend that is set to continue if the entrancing footage from Black Panther is any indication.

That being said, there are commonalities between the films that are worth paying attention to. Cameos, post-credit scenes, regrettable forgettable set-ups for future movies, weak villains, generic CGI portal-based action climaxes. By themselves these surface-level resemblances do not make the franchise samey, but they are interconnected with some deep tissue storytelling tendencies that I suspect are the major factor in making audiences feel like they are watching something they've seen before. Chief among these are a lack of consequence and character arcs that slyly cut corners in order to perpetually sustain the regressive status quo.

Ragnarok is very much a Marvel movie in that it yet again features all these issues in some measure. Despite being played by one of the most talented actors in film, Hela (Cate Blanchett) is somehow yet another underwhelming villain. The climax is trying its hardest to enliven the cliches, and it is admittedly badass eye candy, but remains a CGI throwdown with faceless villains and portal macguffins. The themes and character motivations are present throughout, but often occluded. Fortunately, just like Guardians of the Galaxy before it, Marvel found a director uniquely suited to exploit the shortcomings of the Marvel model.

GET OUT: Once You Go Black

Director: Jordan Peele
Writer: Jordan Peele
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lil Rel Howery
Runtime: 104 mins.
2017

Get Out is a horror thriller (with a dash of comedy) about Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black man in his twenties who is being dragged to the suburbs so that he can meet the family of Rose (Allison Williams), his white girlfriend. Despite the anxieties programmed into him by a whole life of discrimination, he trusts her dubious assurance that her family is not prejudiced in the least. For their part, Rose's parents Missy (Catherine Keener) and Dean (Bradley Whitford) go out of their way to reassure Chris about that exact thing. Yet between the white parents who doth protest too much and the black servants who doth protest too little, Chris quickly realizes that there is something deeply wrong with this estate, and that he must, at all costs, get out.

Spoilers ahead.

IT COMES AT NIGHT: Home Sick

Director: Trey Edward Shults
Writer: Trey Edward Shults
Cast: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough
Runtime: 91 mins.
2017

There's misleading advertising, which is frustrating but understandable. Creatives typically have no sway over what marketing does with their work. After all it is marketing's job to make a thing seem as appealing as possible, regardless of quality or content.

Then there's false advertising. In 2002, Warner Bros. released a trailer for their new family-aimed comedy, Kangaroo Jack, which heavily featured a computer animated kangaroo with a Hawaaian shirt and sunglasses. This kangaroo saw fit to rap at the audience. A great many 90's kids sought the acquaintance of this rapping kangaroo.

To the chagrin of all, the film consisted entirely of two idiots chasing a legitimate kangaroo across the Australian outback. The film was paced like settling bricks and contained what even child me recognized to be an overabundance of fart jokes. Still I waited for the kangaroo to anthropomorphize itself, but all of the rapping kangaroo content was restricted to one measly dehydrated dream sequence.*

*The counterexample to all this is the woman who sued Drive for false advertising. The advertisements promised a slick action thriller, but the movie itself was a lugubrious meditation on masculinity and violence. I side with Drive in this example, but I side with the audience in the Kangaroo Jack example. I don't know whether there's a distinction to be made between types of false advertising, or if I just like Drive far more than I like Kangaroo Jack. If there is a distinction, it might be between a marketing department that probably didn't know how to advertise the film it had (Drive), and a marketing department that went to great lengths to occlude the actual content of their film (Kangaroo Jack).

My point is that It Comes at Night comes dangerously close to Kangaroo Jacking us. The film has been marketed and heralded as a new indie horror contender among the likes of The Witch, The Babadook, or It Follows. Yet It Comes at Night is not such a horror film.

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE - A Juvenile Product of the Working Class

Director: Matthew Vaughn
Writers: Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
Cast: Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Julianne Moore, Colin Firth, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, Jeff Bridges, Edward Holcroft, Hanna Alström, Elton John
Runtime: 141 mins.
2017

Matthew Vaughn is known as a director who doesn't return for sequels. It's easy to see why after Kingsman: The Golden Circle. All of the familiar Kingsman elements are back: edgy humor, slick aesthetic, zippy action, quirky characters, a maniac villain at the helm of a world-threatening plot. The issue is that none of them congeal into anything of note. Every aspect of the film feels like it has reported dutifully to the set, ready but not enthusiastic about another day's work.

At 141 minutes, we're talking about a long time of feeling nothing in particular. The Golden Circle's problems issue outward from the script. Goldman and Vaughn are longtime writing partners, but their heart wasn't in this one. Kingsman: The Secret Service had a great structure to hang its narrative on: no-name kid gets recruited into a secret agent training program and while trying to prove himself gets tangled up in a larger plot. The Golden Circle has no such elegant structure, instead opting for the scattershot approach. Over here we have a secret agent trying to figure out who killed his organization, over here we have a crazy villain abusing her henchman somewhere in the jungle, over here we have the American version of the Kingsmen, over here we have a romance and fidelity plot, over here Harry (Colin Firth) is alive but suffering memory loss. These vignettes cut between each other without any cross-pollination for so long that you begin to wonder why you should care about any thread in particular. So much of it feels tacked on, especially the gutless Harry subplot that apparently exists just to rekindle the most resonant central relationship from the first movie. Instead we spend a lot of pointless time listening to a brain damaged Harry talk about butterflies.

ATOMIC BLONDE: Blondes Have More Gun

Director: David Leitch
Writer: Kurt Johnstad
Cast: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Eddie Marsas, John Goodman, Toby Jones, Sofia Boutella
Runtime: 115 mins.
2017

In 2014, two career stuntmen, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, teamed up to make a movie about a retired assassin who seeks violent retribution for the murder of his dog. That film was John Wick, and its stylized yet brutally functional brand of gun-fu was a shot in the arm for the western action movie landscape, which hadn't experienced a proper paradigm shift since the Bourne films in the early 2000s. We're presently seeing the results of that impact, with John Wick clones already seeping down the pipeline. First to the party, though, were Leitch and Stahelski themselves. Stahelski stuck around to take the John Wick franchise to its next entry, John Wick: Chapter 2. Meanwhile, David Leitch split off to direct Atomic Blonde.

The two films function well as complementary variations on the John Wick formula. In John Wick: Chapter 2, Stahelski amps up the mythic, larger-than-life elements from the original and fills his movie with wall-to-wall action. Leitch instead opts to ground Atomic Blonde in a spy narrative that's more subdued, patient, and convoluted.

In fact, Atomic Blonde is patient to a fault. The story is foregrounded, yet largely inconsequential. Maybe even a bit dull, with its cluttery frame narrative and perfunctory number of twists and turns. It is a shoddy scaffolding for Leitch's masterful action choreography, which made me realize something remarkable: Atomic Blonde is a rare film in that it seems to exist almost entirely for the purpose of one scene, a scene that arrives towards the end of the movie.

BRIGSBY BEAR: Does a Brigsby Shit in the Woods?

Director: Dave McCary
Writers: Kevin Costello, Kyle Mooney
Cast: Kyle Mooney, Mark Hamill, Jane Adams, Greg Kinnear, Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins, Ryan Simpkins, Alexa Demie, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Claire Danes
Runtime: 97 mins.
2017

For a while, my favorite youtube videos were Kyle Mooney's series of incomprehensible interviews. Kyle would show up at public events with a cameraman and a microphone, and he would speak nonsense at people until they responded in some way. He was the master of the empty signifier, rolling out fragmented sentiments in such a way that they gave the impression of meaning while being entirely inscrutable. It was a deft manipulation of the cultural logic surrounding interviews, and the real fun of it was seeing how the passersby would choose to engage.

Kyle has since graduated to SNL--sort of. As I understand it he mostly does the digital content. In the meanwhile, he's used his newfound semifame to bankroll a passion project called Brigsby Bear, a uniquely white male film about living in a nostalgic fantasy land. You see, James (Kyle Mooney) was abducted as a child by Ted (Mark Hamill) and April Mitchum (Jane Adams). James grew up in a bunker, convinced that the outside world was an apocalyptic desert. His only access to culture was Brigsby Bear, a very 90's television show about a magical bear out to save the universe. When the police raid the bunker and he discovers that everything he believed was a lie--including Brigsby Bear, which was secretly crafted by his captor Ted--he must figure out how to adjust to living with his birth parents. Ultimately, he works through his latent trauma by writing and filming the finale to Brigsby Bear with the help of his sister (Ryan Simpkins) and some new friends.

I was an easy mark for this film. I wanted to love it, expected to love it, but I couldn't. The first sign of trouble was the inciting incident. Up until the raid, Brigsby Bear casts a casually menacing vibe over the innocence of Mooney's experience. Brandon Tonner-Connolly's production design, both within the Brigsby Bear show and inside the bunker, is stellar. All of this evaporates the moment James is thrust into our world. The visuals, the tone, and the dialogue all become pedestrian.

WONDER WOMAN: What a Wonderful World

Director: Patty Jenkins
Writers: Allan Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Jason Fuchs
Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Neilsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Lucy Davis, Elena Anaya
Runtime: 141 mins.
2017

Ever since 2016 kindly reminded us that seething racism, sexism, and class inequality are still the primary forces behind America, folks have been searching desperately for heroes. It makes sense that those hopes would be hung to Wonder Woman and all that it represents, as it is embarrassingly the first female-helmed superhero movie in the current decade-long era of superhero movies. Superheroes are the pop cinematic genre of our time, so the importance of this moment cannot be understated. This was further amplified by the hiring of Patty Jenkins as director. The frequency of hiring women for movies of this magnitude is just about zero. We see this evidenced in the career of Jenkins herself, who directed a killer first feature in Monster, then was left to molder in televisionland where she's been quietly doing tremendous work for a decade and a half.

I remember coming in contact with two thinkpieces in close succession: One argued that Wonder Woman is bad because Gal Gadot didn't have visible body hair, and the other argued that Wonder Woman is good because Gadot's thigh juggled while she was running. As discourse becomes increasingly compartmentalized on social media, we tend to double down on partisanship. A thing must be either good or evil, acceptable or unacceptable, easily characterized or dismissed in 140 characters. Yet we do a disservice to art when we eradicate nuance in favor of easily digestible political capital. Every work of art is political, yet it exists in the political sphere in myriad and complex ways.

Representation in Wonder Woman is boundary-pushing in a lot of the ways that count. Simply putting a woman at the helm of an action movie means that we get to see Wonder Woman shot and framed iconically, a treatment usually reserved for our Indiana Joneses and Spider-Mans. Too often women in action movies are vacant sex symbols, or characters who can be summed up as beautiful but dangerous. Diana, however, has a distinctive personality and value system--one that the film is structured around.

ALIEN: COVENANT - King David

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: John Logan, Dante Harper, Jack Paglen, Michael Green
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
Runtime: 122 mins.
2017

Can one consider Alien: Covenant in a vacuum? Half of the movie is a dogged continuation of the slapdash philosophical noodling that Ridley Scott brought to the franchise with Prometheus, and the other half is a herky-jerky course correction towards a more classic Alien styling. This is indicated first and foremost by the title, which hearkens desperately back to the original run of films. It is also indicated by Scott himself, this quote about the backlash to Prometheus coming to mind:

. . . we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They want to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: Wow, OK, I'm wrong. The fans, in a funny kind of way--they're not the final word--but they are the reflection of your doubts about something, and then you realize 'I was wrong' or 'I was right.' I think that's where it comes in. I think you're not sensible if you don't actually take [the fans' reaction] into account.

It is strange to see Scott make such a boneheaded remark. Not only is it a shocking misunderstanding of his own work, but it's a misrepresentation of audiences' very valid complaints about Prometheus, of which lack of Xenomorph tended to be low on the list. I can only really grok this comment by assuming that Scott was being defensive and a bit petty about unfavorable responses to a passion project.

That pettiness worms its way into the DNA of Covenant, which trots out Xenomorphs with dutiful regularity. The now entirely CGI Xenomorphs (or Neomorphs, I think this iteration is called) are gratuitous. It's not that they don't fit the plot per se. It's that these Aliens swagger through the film like slasher villains. In fact, the Alien-heavy half of the movie behaves very much like a schlocky slasher, right down to the utterly disposable characters who make baffling choices and ultimately get dispatched whilst having sex in the shower.

PROMETHEUS: Dumpster Fire from the Gods

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Sean Harris, Rafe Spall, Emul Elliott, Benedict Wong, Kate Dickie
Runtime: 124 mins.
2012

Unless you're specifically writing a comparative piece, a critic must strive to engage with a film as a standalone artifact. Drawing parallels and making value judgments based on other films is a slippery slope. It can lead one to commit the cardinal sin of criticism--not approaching the art on its own terms. It is with that in mind that I have been frustrated by my tendency to see the Alien sequels through the prism of their progenitor, Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien.

On the other hand, it may be that such purity of critical lens is unattainable. What else is a franchise but a demand that you consider a certain work in conjunction with others? There are countless ways to sequelize a property, but one thing they all have in common is a link, however obvious or obscure, to the original.* Although one wants to respect the agency of a sequel, its ability to tell a coherent story is often predicated on some narrative or thematic information that cannot be found in the domain of its own runtime.

*With the rare and deranged exception of something like Troll 2, a "sequel" that has no discernible connection to Troll, including a complete absence of trolls.

What emerges is a difficult balancing act of acknowledging the expectations that come with being a part of a larger franchise without being bewitched by them. Then there is the additional can of worms of whether a sequel retroactively changes the meaning of an original. (It certainly does in our cultural consciousness, though perhaps it need not for certain critical endeavors.)

Believe it or not, all this discourse is germane to discussion of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to the franchise he birthed thirty-three years previous. One of the more interesting aspects of this return is the tortured relationship it has to its own standing within that franchise. On the one hand, it's clear that Scott wanted to distance Prometheus from Alien as much as possible. Where Alien was a lean thriller, Prometheus aspires to be a grand epic exploration of the Big Questions of life--with a heavy garnish of horror imagery. On the other hand, some of the most desperate-to-please moments of Prometheus involve feverish Alien references and mystique-destroying prequelicious explanations. The film even has the gall to end on a bit of fan service utterly transparent in its desire for the audience to feel a base swell of nostalgia.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION - Metastasis

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Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Writers: Joss Whedon
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Kim Flowers, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Raymond Cruz, Leland Orser
Runtime: 116 mins. (theatrical cut 109 mins.)
1997

I am here reviewing the extended edition, which this time around is a bit worse than the theatrical cut. Not enough is added to make a significant difference: two jokes that I absolutely hate and a cool but pointless altered ending, in which Ripley and Call crash land outside of a ruined Paris.

It has taken me until the final movie in the original quadrilogy to realize the Alien series' fundamental guiding principle: Each film must be a direct and biting refutation to the film that came before it. Let's recapitulate.

James Cameron's Aliens took the simple, elegant narrative of Alien and blew it up to epic proportions. We are made to believe (and convincingly so) that the unstoppable antagonist from the previous film could be defeated en masse by the love that Ellen Ripley feels for her companions.

David Fincher's ALIEN CUBED took that love and crumpled it into a dirty little wad before incinerating it and stomping on the ashes. Then it paraded around town with those ashes just to make sure everyone understood how pathetic they were. Having no time for Cameron's sentimentalism, Fincher dumps his audience into a broken world where everyone and everything you love are dead, and there is no longer the slightest reason to remain alive. Killing Hicks and Newt offscreen remains a colossal refutation to Cameron's happy ending (one that a lot of people hated and Cameron himself called a slap in the face), but the film only doubles down from there by corrupting Ripley's body and forcing her to choose death over misery.

Now we are come to Alien: Resurrection, a movie that finds its own bizarre way to exist as the antithesis to ALIEN CUBED. For A:R not only half-assedly undoes the grandiosity of Ripley's sacrificial gesture that culminated the themes of ALIEN CUBED and, in some ways, the entire franchise; it does so flippantly. Had I been tasked with designing the antithesis to Fincher's film I certainly wouldn't have come up with this, but I can't offhand think of any inversion that would be more emblematically discordant.

ALIEN³: Hell Hath No Fury

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Director: David Fincher
Writers: Vincent Ward, David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Lance Henrisken
Runtime: 145 mins. (114 mins. theatrical)
1992

Rather than the theatrical cut of Alien³, I watched (and will be reviewing) the "assembly cut" first released in 2003. For most films, the only difference between the theatrical and extended cut is that the latter is a bit shaggier, but for Alien³ it makes all the difference. After an endless mire of pre-production, dozens of abandoned scripts, and millions of wasted dollars, Alien³ was always going to be a hot mess. It's just that the theatrical cut, cobbled together after David Fincher stormed off the project, is hotter and messier than it needs to be. All manner of connective tissue is stricken from the theatrical version, including a stellar opening sequence that sets the mood and establishes the world. The assembly cut, even with the added bulk of thirty-odd extra minutes, flows smoother than the original. Their final scores would be notably disparate.

Were I to go into the details of Alien³'s notoriously hapless production cycle, this review would turn into quite an extensive history lesson. Suffice it to say that unlike Aliens, in which Fox delayed production so that James Cameron could make The Terminator, Alien³ is a case study in bureaucratic obstruction. Creatives were fired, factions were split, actors were artistically manhandled*--all manner of horsey nonsense.

*As Ralph Brown tells it, his character Aaron was originally supposed to be savvy and resourceful, but his intelligence got nerfed in the rewrites. When he complained about playing a dummy, the writers gave his character the disparaging nickname "85," after Aaron's officially reported IQ.

So it is quite an achievement, and a great testament to the talents of then-undiscovered visionary David Fincher, that Alien³ (the assembly cut, mind you) is compelling and worthwhile in a number of ways. This is as good a time as any to admit something dastardly. Although by any and every objective standard Cameron's Aliens is the superior sequel, I prefer what Fincher is up to in Alien³. Specifically, I'm a fan of Alien³'s most controversial and besmirched decision: the immediate, ruthless, offscreen deaths of Aliens heroes Hicks and Newt. The chipper happy ending of Aliens, though perfectly earned, has always struck me as dissonant with the heartless fatalism of Alien. The extermination of Aliens's happy ending is an inspired statement of intent, both setting the tone for Alien³ and kicking off Ripley's darkest arc.

ALIENS: One Bad Mother

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Director: James Cameron
Writers: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Jenette Goldstein, Al Matthews
153 mins. (137 mins. theatrical)
1986

This is a review for the director's cut of Aliens which adds about sixteen minutes of footage. Although the pacing is bogged down by unnecessary pre-alien footage of the functional colony, the cut includes some worthwhile backstory about Ripley's daughter and a really excellent sequence involving remote turrets, so in terms of quality it's basically a wash.

As far as I'm concerned, the decades-old Alien vs. Aliens debate is clear-cut. When dozens of aliens can become cannon fodder, albeit terrifying cannon fodder, the mystique of the original is lost. Indeed, it is immediately apparent that Aliens is playing a different, and in my opinion inferior, game altogether when Ripley has a jump scare dream sequence involving a chestburster. Alien would have featured nothing so gauche as that.

Yet the more I think about it, the more I realize that it was genius of Cameron to shape the sequel this way. By shifting the genre and hyping up the tone, Aliens hews closer to his particular directorial strengths. This was the right choice; there would have been no way to improve upon the mastery of Alien had Cameron tried to replicate Scott's opus.

ALIEN: The Perfect Organism

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Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto
Runtime: 117 mins.
1979

As the quote from Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon goes, "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" There is some certain truth to that, insofar as the blistering originality of Alien comes from being at the nexus of a myriad of influences while not being beholden to any single one.

O'Bannon got the germ of his idea after working with John Carpenter on Dark Star. The texture of the story snapped into place while working with several artists on the infamously scrapped Jodorowski's Dune. One of those artists was H. R. Giger, whose psychosexual monstrosities left their mark on O'Bannon long before Giger was himself signed on to design the alien. The script went through incremental development, gaining the alien's reproductive cycle from co-writer Ronald Shusett, and reluctantly picking up the android subplot from studio writers David Giler and Walter Hill. The title of the script was blessedly changed from Star Beast to Alien. Ultimately, the crux of the film fell into place when a wet behind the ears Ridley Scott signed on to direct.

Alien is arguably Scott's crowning achievement. There is a strict purity to its elements, from O'Bannon and co.'s script, to Giger's ruthless creature design, to Derek Vanlint's creeping cinematography, and so on. Yet a director's job is to tie elements together into a greater whole, and Scott does exactly that. Alien is a bereft sexual nightmare full of foreboding, menace, and isolation.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2: Leggo My Ego

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Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Kurt Russell, Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Gunn, Chris Sullivan
Runtime: 136 mins.
2017

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has lower highs and higher lows than its predecessor. It fixes some of the more obvious problems of Guardians, like painful expository dialogue, a few ugly underlit sequences, and a plot shamelessly centered around feverish MacGuffin-chasing. Vol. 2 is more visually arresting all around, and its villain is tied intimately to our protagonist. On the other hand, Vol. 2 struggles with the law of diminishing returns. It is impossible to replicate the joy of discovering all these bizarre and instantly endearing characters, so writer/director Gunn is tasked with keeping said characters fresh and interesting. Much like Age of Ultron, which similarly has a lot of interesting stuff going on but feels overstuffed and undercooked, Vol. 2 cannot quite capture the woozy highs of the first film.

There is one exception to this. I'm referring to the opening sequence with Baby Groot dancing to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" while the obligatory opening action sequence happens out of focus in the background. This is Gunnian subversion at its finest, trading off an indulgent CGI-fest for an expression of pure joy. The sequence is well-staged in one long, fluid cut that follows Baby Groot through adorable piecemeal interactions with each of the main characters. The film never recaptures the elation of its opening minutes, but the prevalent sense of fun is what makes Vol. 2 far more watchable than much of its ilk.

POWER RANGERS: The Morph the Merrier

Director: Dean Israelite
Writers: John Gatins, Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney
Cast: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Ludi Lin, Becky G., Elizabeth Banks, Bryan Cranston, Bill Hader
Runtime: 124 mins.
2017

One of the first lines of Power Rangers is a joke about masturbating a cow. Power Rangers features three characters who are or have been dead, but never bother to dwell on the ramifications of that fact. The only straight white male on the Power Rangers team is the de facto leader, and he is told outright that his opinion matters more than the others'. In Power Rangers, wise mentor Zordon is an enormous cock, berating the Rangers constantly, acting needlessly petty, and manipulating them towards his own ends. Power Rangers ends the way Toy Story 3 would have ended if the toys actually did fall into the fire pit, and instead of getting burnt up, they inexplicably become one powerful Megatoy that kicks the purple bear's ass.

Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa is both sexy and grody, and she drips everywhere she goes. Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa goes a lot of places, yet she only seems to saunter casually whenever we see her on the move. Power Rangers' version of Rita Repulsa also straight up murders a bunch of people and eats their gold.

In Power Rangers, a building may explode despite being a jewelry store with no flammables inside. Power Rangers features an autistic character who figures out the location of an important MacGuffin using only maps and the power of his autism. The Power Rangers crew slaps a character so hard she flies into space. The CGI in Power Rangers is so vomitously designed that one can tell that the red ranger's Zord is a T-Rex, but the rest are pretty much a grab bag of prehistoric-seeming Transformers knockoffs. There are about ten scenes in Power Rangers in which the corporate franchise Krispy Kreme is either mentioned or attended.

KONG: SKULL ISLAND - Run Through the Jungle

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Writers: Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly, John Gatins
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John C. Reilly, John Goodman, Corey Hawkins, John Ortiz, Tian Jing, Toby Kebbell
Runtime: 118 mins.
2017

Twelve years ago Peter Jackson's King Kong was released. Hot off the monumental success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson tackled another passion project. The result was an overbloated labor of love, its failures symptomatic of Jackson's indulgent impulses, its successes clearly issuing from passion and immense skill. Its legacy endures thanks to the lavish attention Jackson paid to Skull Island. The film was swimming in Jackson's signature talent for all-encompassing dread. That mystique is embodied in Kong himself, as motion captured by the great Andy Serkis. Jackson/Serkis's Kong is a high mark for CGI creations. He is the soul of the film, a brute that exudes empathy, and one of a long line of Serkis motion capture triumphs.

PJ's King Kong exhibited all the strengths and pitfalls of the auteur-driven style of Hollywood filmmaking. Now a dozen years later we have a film that exemplifies the producer-driven model. For Kong: Skull Island is, to nobody's surprise, the impetus for a shared cinematic universe. Kong and Gareth Edwards' Godzilla are slated to tussle in 2020. To establish this universe Warner Bros. has tapped second-time film director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, no doubt a talented creator, and no doubt one who doesn't have the clout or the vision to stand up to the studios. Kong is an exercise in style over substance. It's clear that there are strong ideas at the core of the reboot, but they suffer from a backslide into generic blockbuster territory.

GHOST IN THE SHELL: A Pale Imitation

Director: Rupert Sanders
Writers: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt, Peter Ferdinando
Runtime: 107 mins.
2017

Ghost in the Shell is a thin movie, thinner than the white sheet that covers a spectral being. You suspect there is some substance beneath the surface, but once you remove the sheet and look at it directly you discover that there is nothing to be seen. The apparent substance was in truth the echoes of a long distant, watered down source material.

To be more specific about Ghost in the Shell's thinness: it's an adaptation of the then-ahead-of-its-time 1995 anime of the same name. The bare bones of the plot remains the same. Major (Scarlett Johansson) is a cyborg with a human brain. She's the centerpiece of a squad of variously-upgraded soldiers working for the Hanka corporation. They track down this cyber terrorist fellow Kuze (Michael Pitt) in order to assassinate him, but Major finds that he has answers to questions she's been asking about herself. In the original this interplay has a philosophical bent; in the new release, it's all profanely literal-minded.

MONSTER: Dissent of a Woman

March is Women's History Month, so let's continue last year's tradition of highlighting a weekly movie by female filmmakers. With the recent global resurgence of toxic masculinity and fascist norms, it's all the more important to seek gender parity in the director's chair. For the director is as much an embodiment of the soul of a movie as any one person can be, and the souls of men are clearly not good enough.

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Director: Patty Jenkins
Writer: Patty Jenkins
Cast: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern
Runtime: 109 mins.
2003

Monster is based on the true story of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron), a Daytona Beach prostitute who begins killing clients in order to support her runaway girlfriend, Selby (Christina Ricci). At least that's what happened, but it isn't the story.

Typically biopics play up the spectacle of real life events, even when there isn't any spectacle to be found. Certainly Monster had no shortage of spectacle to draw from; the media circus surrounding Aileen's trial dubbed her America's First Female Serial Killer. Yet writer/director Patty Jenkins makes the bold, crucial choice to move away from the spectacle. The first half of the film is more of a romance than anything else. Jenkins ensconces us in the relationship between Aileen and Selby. That is where the true story of Aileen Wuornos lies, and any other approach would lead rapidly to shock schlock and window dressing.

PERSEPOLIS: Personal / Political

March is Women's History Month, so let's continue last year's tradition of highlighting a weekly movie by female filmmakers. With the recent global resurgence of toxic masculinity and fascist norms, it's all the more important to seek gender parity in the director's chair. For the director is as much an embodiment of the soul of a movie as any one person can be, and the souls of men are clearly not good enough.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud
Writers: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud
Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Simon Abkarian, Gabrielle Lopes Benites
Runtime: 96 mins.
2007

Years ago I read Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel upon which this was based. It accomplished the monumental task of making me, a privileged white American, care about the politics and people of Iran. An exercise in empathy foremost, history secondarily, Persepolis is a coming of age story that digs deeply into the personal life of its author--and as we know, the personal is political.

I didn't get around to the film at the time because I assumed it would be a competent retread of the book. After all, graphic novels and animation are two mediums with a great deal of overlap: two dimensional frames meant to give the illusion of movement that are more reliant on images than words. How wonderful to discover, then, that Satrapi's foray into directing improves upon its original in every aspect, engaging with what is specifically cinematic about the material rather than letting it stagnate in the act of translation.

The story remains mostly unchanged. We see Marji progress through her idealistic youth, troubled adolescence, and frustrating love life. Each of these life stages is inextricably tied to Iran's progress through dictatorship, revolt, regression, and war. Marjane seeks to honor the memory of her fallen family members, whose fates are tied to the various regime changes. Marjane's identity will always be tied to her roots, which is both a rich premise and a resonant lesson that her character must learn over the course of the film.

DANCE, GIRL, DANCE: The Gaze Pays

March is Women's History Month, so let's continue last year's tradition of highlighting a weekly movie by female filmmakers. With the recent global resurgence of toxic masculinity and fascist norms, it's all the more important to seek gender parity in the director's chair. For the director is as much an embodiment of the soul of a movie as any one person can be, and the souls of men are clearly not good enough.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Dorothy Arzner
Writers: Tess Slesinger, Frank Davis, Vicki Baum
Cast: Maureen O'Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Virginia Field, Ralph Bellamy, Maria Ouspenskaya, Mary Carlisle
Runtime: 90 mins.
1940

Dance, Girl, Dance is a late career film by Dorothy Arzner, a filmmaker with the distinction of being the only female director working in Hollywood during the 1930s. The only one. She got to such a prominent position simply by being such an essential editor that when she threatened to leave Paramount if she wasn't given the director's chair, they relented. In Arzner's words, "I remember making the observation, 'if one was going to be in the movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone else what to do.' "

Her career is crucial for several reasons beyond her penetration of an uncrackable glass ceiling. For one thing, her desire for more performer mobility in the early days of talkies led her to invent the boom mic by attaching a microphone to a fishing rod.* Beyond that monumental advancement of the craft, she was a public (if closeted) queer icon,** and she consistently made great films that represented an oasis of female agency in a sexist industry.

*Naturally, it was patented a year later by some other dude.

**Although a queer reading of Dance, Girl, Dance is less obvious than some of Arzner's other films, there is something striking about the homosocial way that Judy and Bubbles relate via their mutual romantic target Jimmy.

Indeed, that is as good a description as any of what Dance, Girl, Dance is all about. Our hero is Judy O'Brien (Maureen O'Hara), a dancer with tremendous potential as a ballerina. Despite her talent, she is continually upstaged by the self-aware, attention-seeking sexpot Bubbles (Lucille Ball). After Bubbles makes it big as the headliner of a burlesque act, Judy's mentor Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya) tries to ensure Judy's path to fame by arranging a meeting with the discerning and influential Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy). A series of unkind coincidences, including the death of Madame Basilova, keep that plan from panning out; Judy instead ends up as the stooge for Bubbles' act. Her purpose is to dance beautifully while the men in the audience jeer and call for Bubbles' return. On top of all this professional tension, Bubbles makes a point of going after Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward), a rich playboy with whom Judy has developed a promising connection. All of this culminates in a series of media scandals and public outbursts that bloodthirsty reporters are eager to lap up.

LOGAN: Hurt

Director: James Mangold
Writers: James Mangold, Scott Frank, Michael Green
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Richard E. Grant
137 mins.
2017

Logan exists at a fascinating nexus in the development of the superhero genre, a genre which has reigned supreme in Hollywood for a decade and a half. For one, it could not exist as it is without the meteoric influence of Deadpool. That property--the red-suited stepchild that Fox wanted badly to forget about--forcibly redefined the four quadrant parameters of mainstream superhero movies simply by being likable. Everything about Logan was a far riskier proposition than everything about Deadpool, and was certainly only entertained in the wake of Deadpool's box office blowout.

Logan also only makes sense at this point in the careers of Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart. Not counting this film, Jackman has played this character for seventeen years in a total of eight films, approximately four of which were any good.* That ubiquity is, I believe, unprecedented in film history (at least until Robert Downey Jr. surpasses it in half a decade). Thus the death rattles of an ultrapopular screen portrayal happen to dovetail nicely with the first time said character's violent nature can be fully portrayed under the aegis of the MPAA.

*Feel free to check my math: X-Men 3/4 good, X2 1 good, X-Men: The Last Stand 1/4 good, X-Men Origins: Wolverine 0 good, The Wolverine 3/4 good, X-Men: First Class 3/4 good, X-Men: Days of Future Past: 1/2 good, X-Men: Apocalypse 0 good.

Even more perfect is the timing for Logan mastermind James Mangold. In the third decade of a storied career that includes the excellent 3:10 to Yuma, and coming off one of the more respectable X-Men movies in The Wolverine, Mangold was in the perfect position to use his influence to shape the legacy of Wolverine as he saw fit.

In addition to all that, Logan deals heavily with themes of hopelessness and fatalism in the face of bigotry as our country is confronted with just such a plight. Despite being written a couple years back, Mangold's script proves shockingly prescient. The plot revolves around a cabal of technologically enhanced white men pursuing a little Mexican girl they wish to control. Non-normative children seek asylum by crossing the border into Canada. Frat boys swill beer and chant "USA! USA!" at the heavily militarized Mexican border. And the only relief from the pervading cultural sense of ennui and apathy is found in adverts for junk food and energy drinks. The masses are content as long as they get their corn syrup. I don't know how Mangold did it, but with every passing day this 2029 proto-apocalypse feels more astoundingly plausible.