It’s been a tumultuous road in the 2020’s for Pixar Animation.  They were caught up in the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, with their spring 2020 release of their movie Onward (2020) getting shut off once theaters began closing for the lockdown.  Then for the next 3 releases on their line-up, the powers that be at their parent company Disney decided to skip theatrical releases altogether and take their movies directly to streaming. Pixar wouldn’t see the big screen again until the release of the Toy Story (1995) spin-off film, Lightyear (2022), which was a highly divisive film that alienated longtime Pixar fans.  While a lot of Pixar’s problems were out of their control, such as with the pandemic, they were nevertheless determined to keep their high quality standards up at the studio, but internal pressures were also taking their toll.  The re-shuffling of management at the top of Disney, with the much disliked Bob Chapek lasting only 2 disastrous years as CEO before being replaced by his predecessor Bob Iger who came back to clean up his mess, also negatively affected Pixar.  During Pete Doctor’s tenure as head of the studio, Pixar has unfortunately seen massive layoffs come down on them from Disney’s corporate offices, and it has affected the creative culture that helped to fuel Pixar’s rise.  Doctor has tried the best that he can do to keep Pixar humming along through all the turmoil.  Despite the falling box office, audiences are still approving of Pixar’s output, with their movies often getting strong critical and audience scores.  Elemental (2023) managed to survive a disastrous opening weekend and become a modest hit through strong word of mouth.  And Pixar did have it’s biggest hit ever a year later with the box office phenomenon Inside Out 2 (2024).  But a year later they suffered their biggest box office failure ever with Elio (2025), which became their first non-pandemic affected film to ever fail to gross over $100 million.  It seems that Pixar’s only saving grace now is in making sequels to their past hits, and that in itself is yet another demoralizing blow to the studio.

It’s disheartening to see Pixar having to justify it’s existence now by banking on their already established franchises, but sadly they are at the mercy of the accountants over at Disney.  The corporate offices aren’t taking into consideration the quality of the story or the animation.  What they look at is the fact that Elio lost Disney a lot of money, while Inside Out 2 made all of the money.  That’s why the future line-up of Pixar Animation is so sequel heavy, with movies like this summer’s Toy Story 5 in the works as well as Incredibles 3, Coco 2, and Monsters Inc. 3 all coming in the years ahead.  Now, of course Pixar is no stranger to sequels.  In the past, they have put out four Toy Story’s and three Cars film, plus sequels to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc. and the aforementioned Inside Out 2.  But in between all of these sequels, they have continued to also put out original movies, and these are the ones that more often have the longer staying power.  In fact, the eras that seem to define Pixar the most are when they are trying new things.  The 2000’s was the time period where Pixar was at their strongest, with movies like The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), Wall-E (2008) and Up (2009) helping to define Pixar as not just another animation studio, but as a brand that defined quality.  The 2010’s saw them still continue to perform strong, but they also seemed to be relying a bit too much on sequels to help boost their box office.  However, their justification for these sequels was that it would help keep them financially secure so that they could keep experimenting with their untried new ideas.  Sadly, the pandemic cut short what would have been a planned roll out of nothing but originals for a solid five year run.  Onward, Soul (2020), Luca (2021), and Turning Red (2022) all were movies that came from new original ideas from first time filmmakers who were being promoted through the ranks at Pixar (except Soul, which Pete Doctor made himself).  Because none of these movies got the big screen exposure that they deserved, they unfortunately have muted Pixar’s reputation as an innovator, and now they are sadly trying to play it safe.  There is one last original film coming this year from Pixar that could help salvage the studio and prove that they can still prosper on original ideas.  The only question is whether Hoppers (2026) can be the movie that can do that?

Hoppers tells the story of a spirited young woman named Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda).  Mabel is passionate about nature, which was passed down to her from visits to a special secluded glade outside of town with her Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie).  Unfortunately, the glade is about to be paved over for a new beltline freeway, promoted by Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm), who Mabel has had a longtime beef with.  Mabel has tried every tactic to slow down the construction of the freeway, but to effect.  She then comes up with the idea of reintroducing the beaver population into the area, with the hopes that their construction of a beaver dam will help bring the wildlife back.  However, when she finds a beaver in the wild, she sees it behaving very weirdly.  She follows it to a secret laboratory at Beaverton University, where she attends school.  There Mabel finds her professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) has created a top secret program that allows human consciousness to be transferred into robotic animals, which has allowed them to better observe the behavior of animals.  Seeing this technology as a perfect way to communicate directly with the animals in nature, Mabel puts herself into the machine and transfers her mind into that of a robotic beaver.  She manages to make it to the woods outside of town, where she quickly realizes that she can understand everything the animals are saying.  Not only that, but she also learns there’s a code that they all live by called Pond Rules.  Confused by their social order, a couple of the animals called Ellen the Bear (Melissa Villasenor), Tom Lizard (Tom Law) and Loaf the Beaver (Eduardo Franco) decide to bring Mabel to the Pond where she can talk to King George (Bobby Moynihan), the leader of their animal community.  George turns out to be a welcoming leader who respects Mabel’s passion about saving their community from human development.  But, Mabel wishes to stop Mayor Jerry’s plan once and for all, so King George summons the Animal Council, which includes the Bird King (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), the Amphibian King (Steve Purcell), the Fish Queen (Ego Nwodim), the Reptile Queens (Nichole Sakura), and the most feared member, the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep).  Mabel makes her case to the Council, but they unfortunately take the wrong conclusion and decide that Mayor Jerry must be “squished,” leading Mabel to realize that she may have gone a tad overboard in her crusade.

The one thing that helps Hoppers to stand out is the fact that it not only is an original idea for a movie, but it also is one that never once goes down a familiar path.  One of the great things about Pixar Animation is that their ideas for movies have always been atypical, and embraced original concepts that may have sounded too weird at first.  That’s why you had movies where Monsters power their energy grid off the screams of children, or a rat becoming a gourmet chef by puppeteering a human by pulling on his hair.  They are a studio that has always embraced weird ideas and it’s what has made their movies feel so fresh over the years.  Hoppers thankfully embraces that oddball spirit, and even goes a step further.  What I particularly loved about Hoppers was the fact that it was so unpredictable.  The concept itself is not the strong point of the movie.  The idea of our main character doing a body swap to put their mind in the body of an animal is nothing we’ve never seen before.  In fact, the movie itself points this out with Mabel herself saying this is just like Avatar (2009), to the chagrin of Dr. Sam.  But it’s what the movie does with that set-up afterwards where the story really shines.  The story doesn’t just follow plot points, it just kind of unravels in an ever escalating series of chaotic situations, each more bizarrely inspired than the next.  It has a very stream of conscious flow to it, where one bizarre idea flows into the next, and that made the movie all the more enjoyable because it always kept us the audience guessing what may happen next.  And yet, in typical Pixar fashion, it doesn’t lose track of the heart at it’s center.  There in fact is a strong through line of Mabel learning to be more responsible with her activism and finding better ways to inspire others to follow her lead.  The friendships she builds along the way are also a strong point of the movie, especially the bond she makes with King George.  The movie also delivers a potent message about conservation and living in communion with nature that thankfully naturally flows out of the story and never feels heavy handed.

If the movie has a flaw, it’s that it doesn’t really find it’s footing until midway through the film.  The pacing in the first half of the movie is a bit too frantic, making it difficult at times to connect with Mabel and her plight.  I’d say it’s at the point where King George enters the picture close to the mid section of the movie that things start to settle, and that’s also the point where the movie begins to let loose and defy convention.  One of the most surprising things about Hoppers is just how funny it is, and I don’t mean in the usual Pixar family friendly way.  Hoppers‘ sense of humor can get surprisingly dark at times, to the point where I was shocked that Disney allowed them to get away with some of these gags.  Not that this is adult humor that is inappropriate for children, or something that may end up traumatizing little kids.  It’s just so surprising that this movie was allowed to be as weird as it is.  There’s a bit with a shark that especially had me giggling in the theater.  There’s also another moment where something is “squished” that may be the darkest gag that Pixar has ever put into one of their movies, and it got a massive reaction out of the audience I was watching the movie with.  This is the thing that I think may be the difference maker for Pixar with Hoppers; the fact that it didn’t try to play things safe and just repeat formula.  While many of their recent slate of films have all still had a lot of heart and charm to them, Pixar also really hasn’t taken this big of a swing either.  By embracing a wildly stranger tone and sense of humor, Hoppers really does feel the most like the Pixar of old, where the attitude was more centered around “anything goes.”  When they were creating the original Toy Story, the Pixar creative team actually threw out much of their original script because it was too formulaic, and they instead went with the philosophy of making something that isn’t aimed at all audiences, but rather aimed at what they themselves would want to see, and that in turn made their movie funnier and more daring in the flow of it’s story.  From that point, Pixar followed this ethos for a long time, making sure they only put the work into the movie if the story felt right.  Hoppers feels like the best implementation of that idea from Pixar in a long while.

One of the reasons why the humor in this movie hits so well is because the voice cast does such a great job of bringing character and personality to the film.  Piper Curda brings a lot of passion and energy to the character of Mabel.  She may come across as too strong in the beginning, which may be a result of the first half’s awkward pacing, but Piper manages to nail the more heartfelt moments later on in the film when Mabel goes through her realization phase in the story.  But perhaps the one who stands out the most in the film is Bobby Moynihan as King George.  Moynihan is no stranger to voicing cartoon characters, and in fact he’s been in a couple past Pixar films already in minor roles, such as Monsters University (2013) and both Inside Out movies.  Here he now gets to play a featured role for the first time for Pixar, and the Saturday Night Live alum makes the most of it.  He brings so much warmth to the character of King George, making him a bright ray of optimism in an often cynical world.  He might actually be my favorite character from a Pixar movie in a very long time, just based on his upbeat demeanor that both is funny in contrast with Mabel’s sharper edges and also in how he constantly tries to make the best out of impossibly bad situations.  Moynihan embodies that perfectly in his vocal performance, managing to deliver on both the more hysterical and tender moments with the character.  The remainder of the cast also delivers some great moments, and in typical Pixar fashion, they always look for the voices that are best suited for the characters, rather than chasing after a big marquee name.  Jon Hamm does a great job voicing Mayor Jerry, allowing him to be more than just a stock antagonist for the film and even finding ways to be as silly in his performance as the rest of film.  It’s also hilarious how they end up using Meryl Streep in the film, given how prestige she brings with her.  Just like the movie itself, it’s great to see the cast letting loose in their roles, embracing the oddball vibe that pervades the story.  But, Pixar also manages to make their roles work in service of the story as well.  It’s one thing that I always appreciate about Pixar movies, where you feel like the voice actors are embodying the characters, and you never get the sense that this was just a quick job in a recording booth for them.

Hoppers is also a visually impressive movie as well, which for Pixar is standard practice.  A lot of naysayers of recent Pixar have lamented over how the studio has changed their style in recent years, particularly with their character animation.  This has been dubbed the “bean mouth” era of Pixar by some critics, as Pixar has used a simplified character modeling style where the characters (particularly human ones) have open mouths that appear bean shaped.  This can be seen in movies like Luca, Turning Red, and Elio, where the human characters are very much more stylized and simple in design that Pixar characters of the past.  I for one don’t mind this kind of style, because one I find it charming and two Pixar isn’t the first animation studio to try to update their house style.  Look at their sister animation studio Disney, which has updated their house style many times; even in Walt’s era this was true, with Sleeping Beauty (1959) looking vastly different from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937).  Hoppers continues this trend with the “bean mouth” style, and it honestly helps to make the movie look even better.  I love the highly expressive faces that these characters make, and their more stylized look fits better with that manic nature of the humor in this movie.  One of the best visual ideas in the movie is how characters appear different through the perspective of hopping from human to animal.  From the perspective of the humans, all the animals (including the robotic ones) looking like animals, with beady eyes and expressionless faces.  But once the characters transplant their consciousness, or find a way to communicate with the animals, the faces on the animals change, with big expressive eyes and human like mannerisms.  It’s a simple visual idea, but one that works very well and also helps to enhance some of the comedy, especially when the perspectives suddenly change.  The movie is also colorful and beautifully detailed.  This will be a movie that’ll play especially well on home video, especially if people have HDR set ups on their TV sets.  But, it should definitely be experienced on a big screen first, because it’s a beautifully immersive experience.  It’s great to see that even through the ups and downs of Pixar’s fortunes, they still haven’t lost their edge as visual artists.

It may not be the absolute pinnacle of Pixar Animation overall; seriously this studio has the highest bar to clear of any animation brand in the world.  But, Hoppers is probably the most assured and daring movie they have made in quite some time.  I’ll need to stew a bit longer over where I would rank it among the best of Pixar’s films, but for what it is, I definitely say that I had a lot of fun watching this movie.  The thing I appreciate the most is that it refuses to stick with formula and go by the Pixar playbook.  The way this movie unfolds, with each twist and turn being unexpected is what really helped to make this movie so entertaining.  In an animation industry that has been hit hard by layoff and facing the existential threat of AI, it’s inspiring to see Pixar defying the headwinds that’s pushing them towards just coasting on their brand.  Pixar has always been an industry leader, setting the bar high, and they should indeed continue to be challenging themselves by taking chances.  It’s certainly seems like Hoppers is an unexpected example of this, because on the surface a movie about talking animals seems like the most formulaic movie idea of all in animation.  And yet, Hoppers throws out convention at every turn and makes this a movie that truly does feel unlike anything you’ve seen before.  I love the bold swings it took to make it funnier at every turn, and not be afraid to go a little dark at times.  This is the same kind of spirit that fueled Pixar’s rise in the first place, and it’s inspiring to see a little bit of that still alive at the Emeryville, CA based studio offices.  Whether we can still see that spark of creativity inspire more original ideas in the future remains to be seen, as Pixar’s upcoming slate seems to be very sequel heavy.  My hope is that Hoppers manages to do well enough to convince Disney that there needs to be more original films sprinkled within all these sequels to help keep the spark of originality going, both at Pixar and at Disney’s own studio.  For the time being, Hoppers proves to be a genuinely pleasing surprise that I think represents the best of what Pixar has to offer, and hopefully audiences will agree and help bring Pixar back to the peak of their powers once again.

Rating: 8.5/10

Few works of literature have managed to enchant generations of readers the same way the Wuthering Heights has.  The sole published novel of 19th century author Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights has remained one of the most beloved stories of lost love ever put on page since it’s debut in 1847.  It is the quintessential story of forbidden love that has inspired countless imitators throughout the years.  And of course, it was perfectly suited for the cinema as well.  There has been over 30 film and television adaptations of the story throughout the years, ranging from the very faithful to the wildly re-imagined.  Of course, the most well known version is the 1939 Hollywood classic, directed by William Wyler and starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.  It’s also a surprisingly international story as well, with adaptations found throughout the world in places like India, the Philippines, and Mexico.  But given that the story has been re-adapted so many times, one has to wonder if there is anything new that can be brought to the story that can make it feel new to a whole different generation.  Some have tried to re-examine the story through a different prism of context.  British filmmaker Andrea Arnold famously created a very stripped down version of the story, keeping it within it’s Victorian setting but shooting it in a very modern documentary like style.  She also finally realized something from the book that has never truly been done in other adaptations, which is to cast an actor of color in the role of Heathcliff, whom Emily Bronte described in novel of being of Romani descent.  But, even by modernizing the aesthetic used to tell the story, the roots of Wuthering Heights are still bound by the gothic Victorian setting, though Bronte’s novel was still ahead of it’s time in many ways.  There are many different ways to modernize the story, but the most effective way to help audiences today connect with this nearly 200 year old tale is to stick close to what is at the heart of the narrative.  In essence, it a story about the obstacles we put upon ourselves in the pursuit of love, and the terrible things that can come from unquenched desire.

What is interesting now is what a provocative filmmaker like Emerald Fennell saw in Wuthering Heights that made her want to adapt the story her way.  Fennell has been something of an interesting rising star in filmmaking recently.  After working for a while as an actress, including a featured supporting role on the hit series The Crown, Emerald got her chance to write and direct her debut feature film.  The film was a thriller called Promising Young Woman (2020), starring Carey Mulligan, and it won enough acclaim to propel Emerald to an Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay.  And while Promising Young Woman had it’s provocative moments to be sure, it was nothing compared to her next film, Saltburn (2023).  Saltburn was a daring and taboo busting satire of wealth inequality that has since become something of a cult hit.  While the movie didn’t do much at the box office, and was completely ignored during Awards season, it became a streaming sensation, especially with reactions to some of the movie’s more shocking and gross out moments.  It certainly showed us what Emerald Fennell was capable of as a filmmaker.  She could create these lush, exquisitely produced shot compositions with incredible artistic vision, and use that same vision to showcase the grotesque and weird, as well as frame it in a shockingly erotic manner.  Saltburn’s twisted story of decadence and desire was well suited for Emerald’s provocative vision, and for me personally it was one of the best movie experiences that I had that year, mainly because I just admired the daringness of the whole thing.  But, what was Emerald going to do as a follow-up.  In a way, Wuthering Heights seemed to be an odd choice.  As daring as Bronte’s novel was at the time, it is still chaste compared to what we have now in modern media.  Could the shocking sensibilities that we saw in Saltburn work in a classic piece of romantic literature that has lasted centuries, or was Emerald going to have to tame her directorial instincts in order to remain faithful to the book.  Regardless, Emerald Fennell managed to get Warner Brothers to finance her adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic novel, and place it in an ideal pre-Valentine’s Day release window.  But, does Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights breath new life into this classic tale, or was she a bad fit from the beginning.

The novel Wuthering Heights has been a part of many English and Literature class curriculums throughout the world, making it one of the most widely read novels in history.  But if you did manage to miss out on the novel through both your high school and college years, here’s a brief over view.  Set in the Yorkshire moors of Northern England during the early 19th century, the story centers on a young girl named Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) who lives in a dreary old manor house called Wuthering Heights.  Her father Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) one day brings home an orphaned boy (Owen Cooper) whom he takes in as a ward of the estate, mainly to keep Catherine company as something like a pet. The boy has no name, so Catherine names him Heathcliff.  Over time, Catherine and Heathcliff grow closer together, and Heathcliff becomes very protective of her, shielding Catherine from her father’s alcohol fueled fits of rage.  As they grow older, Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) remain friends but something between them seems to be building, which is noticed by Catherine’s close friend Nelly Dean (Hong Chau).  But, the years of drinking and gambling by Mr. Earnshaw have take their toll on the wealth of the Wuthering Heights estate.  In order to avoid financial ruin, Catherine takes it upon herself to attempt to court the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), who live on his vast estate with his eccentric sister Isabella (Alison Oliver).  Linton is smitten by Catherine almost immediately upon their first encounter, and in a short amount of time he asks to wed her.  Despite getting what she wanted, Catherine feels like she is betraying her love towards Heathcliff, whom she loves in a more visceral way than she does Edgar.  But, the choice to marry becomes more essential when Heathcliff suddenly leaves Wuthering Heights.  Years pass, and Catherine is living a luxurious life at the Linton estate, though she is largely romantically unfulfilled.  Then she learns that Heathcliff has returned, now a man who has gained his own fortune and has just bought Wuthering Heights from her dead beat father.  Is it too late to rekindle the flame of their old love, and will it bring both Catherine and Heathcliff to ruin if they act on their desires while she remains a married woman?

Emerald Fennell has more than just the classic Bronte novel to live up to with regards to her adaptation.  Her film is also going to have to stack up to the classic 1939 adaptation, which many herald as one of the great works of early Hollywood cinema.  Indeed, it’s hard not to think about the version with Olivier and Oberon when watching this movie, but I’m also an avid consumer of classic cinema as well.  I don’t think most modern day audiences are as familiar with that movie, and that’s probably who Emerald Fennell is appealing to more with her version of Wuthering Heights.  Her take on Wuthering Heights is definitely made to appeal more to a millennial and Gen Z audience, especially with a lot of the modern touches she adds to the film, including a soundtrack with contemporary sounding original songs by Charli XCX.  It’s definitely a modern kind of movie with the trappings of a period costume drama.  But, for literary purists looking for a faithful adaptation of the novel, this is definitely not it.  Emerald’s adaptation is very loosely tied with the original novel, retaining it’s core premise and characters, but throwing in some bold detours away from the original narrative itself.  But, does it all work out?  In some ways yes, and in other ways no.  The generally positive side is that the movie is never boring.  In it’s nearly 2 hours and 20 minutes, the movie manages to keep us engaged with it’s often manic pacing and bold choices that definitely cause a stir.  But, Emerald Fennell also perhaps pushes a bit too much in the direction of being provocative and shocking that she in a way kind of misses the point of the story in general.  Wuthering Heights at it’s heart is a tragedy, even before (Spoilers ahead, even though this widely read book has been around for almost 200 years) Catherine dies at the end.  It’s a tragedy about how two soul mates miss their opportunity for happiness together due to finances, and when they reconnect years later, it’s too late.  And that unrequited love turns toxic as a result, leading to a lifetime of bitterness, especially for Heathcliff who far outlives her and remains haunted by her memory.  Emerald Fennell seems less interested in that, and sees the story more as a vehicle to present some twisted portrayals of sexual awakenings through the prism of a classic literary romance.

It stands to reason that Emerald Fennell is very much a fan of the novel; I don’t think that she would have chosen it otherwise as her next movie project if she wasn’t.  But there is so much more to Bronte’s novel that Fennell chooses to leave out.  What is interesting about this in comparison to the classic Olivier version is that both movie adaptations stop at the same point; at Cathrine’s tragic demise.  Bronte’s novel actually has this as the halfway point, where the story skips ahead many years later in the second half of the novel.  There we see the toll of losing Catherine has had on Heathcliff, as he has become bitter and meanspirited.  That’s the tragedy of the novel, Heathcliff becoming a far worse person over time as his time with Catherine was all too brief and un-fulfilled, and he spreads that pain to the next generation, with Cathine’s only child Cathy being the target of most of his wrath.  In a strange way, both movie adaptations look more kindly upon Heathcliff than Emily Bronte does, where she largely portrays him as brute.  I can see why the change is made, because it makes the role a more attractive one for leading men, and Heathcliff is inherently the most fascinating character of the whole book.  In place of that darker aspect of the character, the classic 1939 makes Heathcliff and Catherine’s story more about the tragedy of lost love.  You would think that Emerald Fennell would use her version to examine the dynamics of passionate love versus a life of privilege creating friction between these two tragic characters, but that seems to get lost in some of her cinematic indulgences.  The movie treats it’s romance in a steamy way, but Emerald rather interestingly doesn’t seem to portray any of her characters in a favorable light, and that makes it more difficult to sympathize with the romantic side of the story.  Heathcliff is a brute, but Catherine is also equally detestable in the way she manipulates everyone around her in order to get her way.  And it seems every character has that flaw, treating each other poorly in the pursuit of their own gain.  It seems like Emerald still seems to be in the mindset of what she brought to the narrative of Saltburn, where everyone was contemptable in that story.  It worked spectacularly in that story, but feels out of place in Wuthering Heights.

On the positive side, Emerald does make this movie look gorgeous from beginning to end.  Not only that, but her fearlessness in visual aesthetic actually helps to make this movie stand out that much more.  I certainly would never have expected some of the bold design choices in this movie.  The design of Wuthering Heights itself, built in the middle of these jagged, black stone rocks jutting out of the ground, feels like something out of a Tim Burton movie, and that’s just the first taste of all the weird things to come.  The interior design of the Linton estate is equally bizarre in concept.  There’s one room that has a floor that is blood red, and it spotlighted by the sheer white walls that rise up from it.  There’s also a clever reference to Jean Cocteau’s classic 1946 re-telling of Beauty and the Beast, with the wall sconces holding up the candles that light the room being modeled after human hands.  Fennell also does a remarkable job of shooting the remarkable landscapes of the moors.  The movie was shot by DP Linus Sandgren, who has worked on films like La La Land (2016), No Time to Die (2021), and of course Emerald  Fennell’s Saltburn.  For this film, he shot much of the movie with Vistavision cameras, marking yet another major studio movie to re-vitalize this long dormant format after The Brutalist (2024) and One Battle After Another (2025) have brought it back to prominance. The results are undeniable, as some of the wide angle shots in the outdoor scenes has some epic sweep to them.  This is definitely a movie that benefits from a large screen experience.  I also appreciate the fact that Emerald Fennell isn’t afraid to get a little strange in her visual storytelling.  There is one room in the Linton estate that is made to resemble the color and texture of human skin on it’s walls, even with the details of imperfections like moles included.  It’s where Emerald Fennell’s oddball sensibilities work in the film’s favor, even while the story is a let down.  It’s a mess, but it’s one of the prettiest messes you’ll ever see.

The film also benefits from committed performances from the actors.  This movie wasn’t just a passion project for Emerald Fennell, it was also spearheaded by Margot Robbie as well, who also served as producer.  The two have history of working together, with Margot being a producer on Emerald’s first two films in addition to this one, and Emerald getting to appear alongside Margot in the movie Barbie (2023), playing Midge, the pregnant Barbie doll.  While the character herself may be a tad difficult to like as a whole, you’ve still got to give Margot credit for her committed performance.  She balances the performance well, playing so many sides of the character including being charming, amusing, and also cunningly manipulative.  Jacob Elordi does fine in the role of Heathcliff, though I do think that he gets less to do here than he should.  It may be an unfair comparison, but I feel that Olivier brought a lot more gravitas to the role of Heathcliff.  Olivier made his version far more brooding and a force of nature.  Elordi’s Heathcliff is certainly an imposing figure, with that 6’6″ frame of his making him tower over everyone else.  But his Heathcliff is a lot more passive in this version of the story, never quite leading us to believe that he becomes the brute that he eventually turns into in the book.  It’s interesting that this is the second movie in a row where Elordi has brought to life one of the great brutish characters of English Literature.  However,  I feel like he brought a lot more to his performance as Frankenstein’s creature in last year’s film from Guillermo Del Toro.  Even still, Elordi does deliver when it comes to the romantic fireworks boiling under the surface.  There’s also a lot to be said about the strong performances coming from the young actors who play Catherine and Heathcliff in the opening part of the movie.  For Charlotte Mellington, this is her film acting debut, and she does a great job portraying the chaotic, impulsive nature of Catherine in her youth, and she is complemented perfectly by young actor Owen Cooper in the role of Heathcliff, with this coming off the heels of his awards winning performance in the hit Netflix series Adolescence.  Another standout is Alison Oliver as Isabella, whose eccentric performance helps to bring some unexpected levity to this film.

I do admire the fact that Emerald Fennell wanted to take on this classic story and do it in her own way.  And the movie is elevated by it’s incredible visuals and strong performances.  But I also feel that it falls way short in it’s re-telling of Emily Bronte’s classic story.  Wuthering Heights has endured because it’s far more than just another steamy romance about forbidden love.  It’s also a great exploration about the way love and desire can turn even the purest souls into dark and meanspirited people when it’s denied them, and how that extends across generations.  Emerald seems to have gotten the steamy romance part right, but she doesn’t add much else.  It’s a very shallow examination of the themes of novel, and for the most part it just seems like Emerald is using the premise of the story as a means of injecting her own indulgences.  While Wuthering Heights has never truly been adapted fully on the big screen, with most adaptations leaving us with the two lovers being seperated by a tragic death, Emeral Fennell’s version seems even more detached from the source novel.  It’s going to be interesting how people will react to this movie.  I feel like most people who are familiar with the book probably won’t like it, while casual audiences might embrace it more; if they aren’t put off by all the weird choices Emerald Fennell made with her version.  For me, I feel like you’ll get a better understanding and experience overall if you seek out the classic Laurence Olivier version.  While it isn’t perfect, it’s closer in spirit to the original book than this new version.  All that being said, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is still a visual treat that warrants seeing it in a theater.  And some of her artistic choices are pretty bold and daring, even if they clash a bit too much with the story being told.  I’d say go in with an open mind and see if the weirdness works for you.  Emerald Fennell certainly loves this strory and it’s characters, but her indulgences don’t do a whole lot of favors for them in the end.  I’d say if you end up being quizzed about the story in literature class, don’t uses this version as you Cliff Notes quide to the story’s meaning.  It’s very much Emerald Fennell’s take on this story for better and worse, and while she delivers on the visual spectacle, I feel like she should probably choose something other than a beloved literary classic as her next project, unless it’s something that makes for a better fit for her style.

Rating: 6.5/10

It feels like it was only yesterday that we were revisiting the post-apocalyptic world of the 28 Days Later series on the big screen, and that’s not too far off from the truth.  It took 20 years for director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland to revisit their zombie movie classic with a fresh new sequel, 28 Years Later (2025).  In that time, Danny Boyle would become an Oscar winning filmmaker with the success of Slumdog Millionaire (2008).  Also in that same time, Alex Garland would become a director of note, with movies like Ex Machina (2015) and Civil War (2024) to his name.  So, a lot of fans of the original 2002 classic were very happy to hear that both Boyle and Garland were coming back to this franchise; hoping that they would bring all the prestige that they’ve acquired over the years and bring new life into this world of the living dead.  And for the most part, the long wait was worth it.  While it was not as groundbreaking as the original film, 28 Years Later nevertheless was a strong return to form for the series, and the film received praise from audiences and critics.  But what surprised many was that there wouldn’t be a long wait for another film in this series.  In fact, we wouldn’t even have to wait a full year.  A mere 7 months after the release of the last film, we are getting another movie picking up right where the last one left off.  This was always by design, as Alex Garland conceived of this new story thread as a trilogy.  And Sony Pictures, the studio behind this series, remarkably agreed to this concept, greenlighting the two films to be shot back to back.  There was only one big difference in the development of this project; Danny Boyle would only be directing the first film.  Instead of filming one movie at a time, these two films would be getting made simultaneously, and that would require the talents of two directors.  Surprisingly, Garland did not take up the opportunity to direct the second film himself.  Instead, the team looked outside their pool and sought someone else who would be a good match for the series.

They managed to find that someone in American filmmaker Nia DaCosta. DaCosta has had experience working in the horror film genre, having directed the Candyman (2021) remake.  She also was just coming off a stint working at Marvel, directing the Captain Marvel centered The Marvels (2023), which unfortunately ran into some headwinds at the box office due to the strikes that year.  She may have been an outside the box choice for this very British production, but DaCosta was very much up to the challenge.  The only question though was if she could pick things up from where Danny Boyle left off.  Boyle is a filmmaker with a very distinct style.  He shoots his movies in almost a guerilla like way, often handheld and with something as simple as a camcorder.  The original 28 Days Later was filmed using MiniDV tapes, which gave it that very gritty, visceral look; like we were watching found footage a la Blair Witch Project.  28 Years Later did something very similar, albeit with updated technology, by shooting the movie using iPhones.  Nia DaCosta by contrast is a much more conventional filmmaker, shooting her movies with industry standard digital cameras.  While the movie may have a different overall look to it, it’s still carrying over a lot from the last film.  Alex Garland is still the writer of both movies, and much of the same crews of production designers who crafted this post-apocalyptic world have their fingerprints in both movies.  For both Garland and Boyle, they clearly saw what Nia DaCosta could bring to this series and they trusted her with telling this next chapter in their story.  But, the question remains if audiences will react to this movie in the same way.  We barely digest the last film from seven months ago, and now it’s time yet again to pick up the story.  So, does 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple maintain the momentum of the last film or is it all too much too early.

In the closing minutes of 28 Years Later, the young man at the center of that film named Spike (Alfie Williams) has chosen to leave behind the commune that he had called home and instead live out on his own in the pandemic ravaged wasteland that was once Northern England.  Out in the wild, there are still dangerous hordes of zombies, all infected with the Rage Virus that instantly turns it’s victims into mindless feral beasts.  But that’s not the only danger out there.  In the final scene of the last movie, Spike has been captured by a gang of track-suit and blonde wig wearing warriors known as the Fingers.  Their leader, Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) is a ruthless man, leading his follower with a cult like fervor, terrorizing any small civilized settlement they come upon.  He names them each Jimmy, including Jimmy Shite (Connor Newall), Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), Jimmy Jones (Maura Bird), Jimmy Snake (Ghazi Al Ruffai) Jimmy Jimmy (Robert Rhodes), Jimmy Fox (Sam Locke) and Jimmima (Emma Laird), and they look up to him like he’s the second coming.  But Jimmy Crystal is not a Christian man, instead leading his followers in worship of the Devil, or Old Nick as he likes to call him.  Spike is about to become their latest victim, but he manages to become accepted into their gang after he defeats one of them in combat.  Meanwhile, the doctor who had helped bring a human and peaceful end to Alfie’s ailing mother’s life days before, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is conducting a new experiment with one of the zombies that has been roaming his territory.  An “alpha” zombie, which has evolved over the years to be able to command the lesser specimens, has been given the name Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) by Kelson and the doctor believes there may be something to the monster’s display of intelligence.  Using a powerful sedative, Kelson has managed to subdue and even domesticate the powerful creature, and his hope is that with a careful dosing of drugs on hand, he may have found a cure to the virus.  But Kelson’s plans may run into some interference when Jimmy Crystal and his Fingers come across the Bone Temple that Kelson has spent years erecting from the bones he’s collected.  Can Kelson and Spike manage to survive the threats they face from both zombie kind and human kind, and which one is more likely to spell their doom.

When two movies from the same franchise release in such close proximity to each other, there is inevitably going to be immediate comparisons between the two.  While 28 Years Later was a very well made movie, it was also not without some flaws.  The inconsistency of tone was a major issue, with Danny Boyle being somewhat scattershot in his approach to telling the story.  With a different filmmaker taking the reigns for the second movie, many people became interested in seeing how someone else would approach this same world in their own style.  While I do admire what Danny Boyle did with 28 Years Later, I do think that Nia DaCosta did things much better with her film The Bone Temple.  Tone wise, this film is just much more consistent and free of the abrupt shifts that Boyle included in his movie.  The Bone Temple is a much more methodical movie; allowing scenes to flow better together.  Danny Boyle has a very flashy sort of style when it comes to editing his movies together, harkening back to his Trainspotting (1996) days, which also harkens back to the original 28 Days Later.  This works well in some parts, like the harrowing montage early in the film, underscored with the haunting reading of the Kipling poem “Boots.”  But other time, it just makes the scenes where they are being hunted by killer zombies feel too disjointed and artificial.  Nia DaCosta avoids that, and instead allows for scenes to build through atmosphere, which sometimes takes it’s time to pay off.  And it’s not just with the scenes with the zombies either; there’s some very effective tension built up with the Fingers gang too.  The way that she films the scenes where the Fingers are torturing their victims brings us the audience uncomfortably close to the action and holds us there.  This allows for the moments when the chaos happens to feel all the more visceral.  But Nia DaCosta also balances things out with some beautiful natural photography as well.  The way she films the Bone Temple itself is pretty captivating, making it feel like a character onto itself.  One show near the end in particular, where the point of view is literally flipped on it’s head, gives the Temple a very otherworldly feel.

A lot of praise should also certainly go to Alex Garland as well for finding a way to avoid just telling the same story over again in the same world.  This movie in particular is very different from any other zombie movie, because it really isn’t about the threat of zombies.  28 Years Later was much more of a survivalist story, with Spike and his mother (played by Jodie Comer) having to survive out in the wild with zombies at every turn.  In this movie, the zombies are almost an afterthought, with the focus put far more on Dr. Kelson and Jimmy Crystal’s gang.  But this opens up the film to a whole lot more different opportunities.  For one thing, this is the first zombie film that I can think of that puts some hope into the fate of the zombies.  The character of Samson, who was merely an existential threat in the first movie, is actually given some character development here, as we see him actually evolve and remarkably find a way out of the nightmare that has been his existence as a monster.  While the first movie did it’s job as a fairly harrowing coming of age tale in a zombie filled apocalypse, The Bone Temple is a story that ponders how a world like this can find ways of rebuilding itself.  I get the feeling that this movie is closer to what made Alex Garland want to revisit this world again, and the first movie was just a prelude to get here.  The hope in a hopeless world angle is a far more thought provoking one, and it shows much more than the first 28 Years movie that there are fresh ideas to explore in this series.  I also appreciated the subtext of the story, where science and reason are the paths to a brighter future, and not superstition and false prophecies from flashy con artists.  While some may lament that characters like Spike take a back seat in this story compared to how they were in the first, I think that this is the aim of Alex Garland with regards to how he sees this series progressing from here out.  The way he wants to tell the story is to casually move around this world finding the different tale within it.  Some stories will intersect, but for the most part, Garland sees this world as a very broad canvas.  Spike had his story told, now it’s time to see others.

In the whole of the movie, there is now doubt that the one who stands out the most is Ralph Fiennes.  He was already great in the first film, playing the eccentric hermit Dr. Kelson.  But here he is the primary focus of the story, with his (perhaps foolhardy) pursuit of a cure being the driving force.  The way he deals with Samson in particular, gently nursing him back to health and even over time considering him a friend, is captivating to watch.  Fiennes hits just the right tone for the character, making him deeply sympathetic, but also showing that he’s got a dangerous streak within him as well.  A lot of praise should also go to Chi Lewis-Parry, who brings a surprising amount of humanity to the character of Samson.  Similarities to the development of Frankenstein are probably intentional, as Samson goes from animal-like back to being human in a surprisingly emotional way.  Some of the most surprising moments in the film come from him showing that there is indeed intelligence behind those crazed, bloodshot eyes and that he needed the help of Kelson to bring that dormant humanity back out.  On the opposite end we also have Jimmy and the Fingers.  Jack O’Connell is having a pretty good run lately playing some memorable villains in high profile horror flicks.  Just last April, he was a scene-stealing vampire in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, and through this and last year’s 28 Years Later he’s proven he can be equally as sinister a presence.  Jimmy Crystal is a truly terrifying presence in the film, lording over his cult followers like a king, espousing platitudes that sound erudite, but are in fact all hogwash.  Jack O’Connell does a fantastic job portraying the character, making him both unnerving while also funny in many ways.  The way his flashy style clashes with Fiennes very subdued performance as Kelson also makes for some of the film’s most entertaining back and forth exchanges.  When the characters are this rich and full of personality, you really forget that this is a zombie film at it’s core, and that’s a good sign that Alex Garland has managed to enrich his post-apocalyptic world with enough fascinating stories to sustain this series for years to come.

One other thing to appreciate with Nia DaCosta’s direction on this movie is just how good it all looks.  For this film, she’s working with veteran cinematographer, who among other things was the DP on films like 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Judas and the Black Messiah (2021).  He gives the movie a gritty but still naturalistic feel.  It’s very different than Danny Boyle’s handheld, guerilla style approach to shooting the movie, which was done with Anthony Dod Mantle (who also won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire).  Both styles work for their respective films, and it’s interesting to see them both work in service of showing the same world.  I for one just appreciated that we get to live within this one more without all of the Boyle flourishes that get a little distracting.  The production design across both films is exceptional, making this feel like a world being reclaimed by nature.  We’ve seen that many times before, like with the recent Planet of the Apes movies, but perhaps not with this kind of accuracy involved.  The bones of the old world are still there, and perhaps could still function if things were to improve.  As it stands, it’s the world we know, but twisted ever so slightly into a harsher reality.  Of course, the location that stand out is the titular Bone Temple itself.  We were introduced to it in 28 Years Later, but it definitely plays a more significant role in this movie, and the filmmakers knew exactly how to film it to make the place feel both foreboding and also ethereal.  The movie’s make-up and effects team also do an amazing job with this movie, and that’s not just with the work they did to create the many different zombies.  The look of Dr. Kelson is pretty iconic, with Ralph Fiennes covered in orange paint for most of the movie.  Also the costume choices for Jimmy Crystal and the Fingers bring a lot of personality to the characters, especially with the combo of track suits and platinum blonde wigs.  I also love how Jimmy Crystal’s whole get up involves him wearing all the jewelry they’ve stole off unfortunate victims, including a tiara.  And there’s a sequence towards the end of the movie that I don’t want to spoil, but it does something pretty spectacular with the Bone Temple itself with the way it’s lit up at night.

It’s not a flawless movie, but 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is still a worthy successor to the film we saw last summer, and in many ways it’s an improvement.  The first 28 Years seems much more now like a warm up for what Alex Garland and Danny Boyle really want to do with this franchise, which is to broaden the scope of their world and tell many more stories within it.  Sure it picks up where the last one left off, but after the quick reintroduction, the movie moves away from Spike’s story to tell an entirely different one.  I like that these filmmakers aren’t trying to serialize this narrative, but instead introduce the idea that the world itself has many different stories worth telling.  The next film we get in this franchise may not even have any connection to the first two at all, though the final scene in this movie (without spoiling anything) hints at more familiar character returns.  I like the fact that these movies aren’t just recycling old zombie movie cliches.  They are exploring all the quirks and odd things that may occur when society falls apart, and having that be the thrust of their storyline.  The original 28 Days Later was perhaps the most influential film to come to the zombie movie subgenre since George A. Romero’s Dead series; creating it’s own set of rules and also changing the way movie like it could be presented.  While Danny Boyle’s iPhone shot style is perfectly suited for him, I actually prefer the more traditional approach that Nia DaCosta brought to this movie.  It may be less experimental, but it at least works in the service of allowing us to absorb this world and it’s many intricate details better.  It will be interesting to see who takes the reigns next.  Does either Boyle and DaCosta make a return behind the camera, or does Alex Garland close out the trilogy himself?  Or do they find someone else outside of their circle.  Regardless, this and the movie we got last summer proves that this franchise is very much alive and well, and in many ways is getting even better.  It was a short, 7 month downtime between these movies, and usually absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that’s not an issue with Bone Temple.  It is a movie that only builds on the goodwill set by the last film, and it hopefully is a positive sign of things to come.

Rating: 8.5/10

When James Cameron became “king of the world” with his astronomical success making the movie Titanic (1997), many wondered what he would do for a follow-up.  Well, he did have an idea about what he wanted to do next, but we wouldn’t know what that would be for another 12 years.  Even before Titanic, Cameron had a seed of an idea for a movie set on an alien world very much like Earth, but with it’s natural beauty still unmarked by mankind.  It would be a world populated by creatures unlike anything we had ever seen on the big screen before, with a blue skinned tribal race known as the Na’vi being the most advanced civilization on this alien world.  With Titanic providing him with the capital to get anything he wanted to make in Hollywood greenlit, he decided that this would be his next project.  The only thing was, visual effects had not advanced to the level needed for what he envisioned.  He didn’t want his Na’vi characters to be simple computer animated creatures; he wanted them to have the full expressive range that a real physical actor could bring.  Motion capture technology made it possible for Cameron to bring his vision to reality, and he went to the digital artist who made that leap forward in visual effects possible to bring them on board to realize that vision.  The folks at Weta Digital, the Oscar winning team behind The Lord of the Rings, were now tasked with helping to push motion capture to the next level.  Cameron, as we have seen, is a patient man and he will not execute his vision unless he knows he has the tools necessary to make it happen.  It would be a process that would go on for a decade, but eventually James Cameron got to the point where he was satisfied with the results.  He was now able to get his actors’ performances to shine through with these digitally rendered puppets, and he had the confidence to finally get his vision on the big screen.  The movie, Avatar (2009) as it would be called, hit theaters in the same holiday time window that Titanic opened in, and while it started off with modest box office, it remarkably kept bringing in people week after week until Cameron managed to top his own record and have the highest grossing film of all time, 12 years after he did the same feat with Titanic.

Of course, after you’ve managed to take the box office crown twice in your lifetime, people are going to wonder if you could do it again.  James Cameron did have plans, but they would still remain in the Avatar world that he created.  In fact, he had ideas for as many as four more Avatar films.  People expected that he would quickly try to get another Avatar film out soon after the first, but it wouldn’t be that simple.  Ever the perfectionist, Cameron was not ready to dive back into the world of Avatar until he felt he was confident that he could pull it off.  With the first film, the challenge was in perfecting the look of the Na’vi characters.  For his next film, Cameron wanted to explore a different environmental setting within that same world of the first movie; one set around a lot of water.  Creating water in a digital environment had been tricky.  The way water physics work has been difficult to simulate with computer animation.  In most films up to that point, water effects often looked either plastic-y or were only possible with live action mattes.  For someone like James Cameron, who has spent a good portion of his adult life in and around water, both as the director of Titanic and as a deep sea explorer, he had a particular high standard for how water should look, and digital effects needed some extra time to advance to get to the point where it met his high standard.  But, the team at Weta Digital managed to finally crack that nut after another decade of work, and Cameron was finally able to get rolling on his next Avatar film, with a release date now a whole 13 years after the last one.  Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) had a lot to prove.  It had been so long since the last Avatar.  Would audiences still care?  It turns out they did.  The Way of Water performed at the box office nearly identical to how the original did, and while it didn’t achieve the same height at the box office, it came pretty close.  But, audiences wouldn’t have to suffer through another decade long wait for another Avatar.  Cameron planned to shoot two of these Avatar sequels back to back, utilizing the same crew and cast, and developing the visual effects in tandem.  So, only three years after the last one, we now have Avatar: Fire and Ash coming to theaters.  The only question is, can James Cameron do it again?

Avatar: Fire and Ash picks up right after the events of Way of Water.  Jake Sulley (Sam Worthington) and his family are still reeling from the loss of their eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) in their last battle with the human beings they call the Sky People.  Jake’s wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) is particularly taking the loss very harshly, and has isolated herself from the others.  But their time of peace proves to be shortlived.  The human boy who lives with the Sulley family named Spider (Jack Champion) is running low on batteries for his oxygen mask, the thing that helps him to breathe because of the toxicity of the Pandoran atmosphere to human beings.  The Sulleys decide that it is safer for Spider to return to the research base where he was born, because they’ll have the supplies he needs to survive.  They say goodbye for now to the Metkayina clan that has protected them, including their Chief Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his wife Ronal (Kate Winslet), and set out on their journey.  Unfortunately on their way, they are ambushed by a clan of volcano-dwelling Na’vi known as the Mangkwan, who are led by their blood-thirsty queen Varang (Oona Chaplin).  The skirmish ends up splitting the family up.  Neytiri becomes wounded but escapes.  Jake Sulley ends up getting captured by an old adversary, Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) who keeps defying death and remains determined to destroy Jake and his family.  The children of the family try to remain hidden in the forests of Pandora, led by the now oldest son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton).  Unfortunately for them, Spider’s mask starts to malfunction, nearly out of juice.  The adopted Sully daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) uses her connection with the spirits of the natural world to try something to save Spider.  Miraculously, she manages to save him, and he can breathe the Pandoran air without a mask.  This causes profound curiosity amongst both Na’vi and human alike.  What does it mean for Pandora and the Na’vi now that there is a way for the humans to freely breathe their air, and why was Spider saved by the goddess Eywa in this way and for what purpose?

There’s one thing going into any of the Avatar films that we all seem to understand, and that is that these movies are far more about spectacle than substance.  James Cameron is unequalled when it comes to crafting spectacle.  It is quite remarkable that even 3 movies into this series, he’s still able to create a sense of awe and wonder for his audience.  There is indeed a lot to admire with Avatar: Fire and Ash.  I for one still love the fact that Cameron allows for the movies to take their time, allowing us the chance to be immersed in this world.  The dedication to world building is incredible, and that is likely what Cameron loves most of all about making these movies.  He wants to make us all believe that Pandora is a living breathing world with sights and sounds unlike anything seen on the big screen before.  But, the Avatar movies also have the same weaknesses that most of Cameron’s other films have and that’s the story and writing itself.  Cameron, ever the perfectionist, is committed to putting his voice throughout all his movies, and that includes writing the screenplay.  While Cameron remains strong in plotting his movies (very few of his films ever feel like they drag) he unfortunately still proves to be very amateurish when it comes to dialogue, and Fire and Ash is no exception.  James Cameron is corny and prone to cliché, and his characters often feel more like archetypes than actual people.  While he can from time to time come up with a clever line, most of his films still show their weakness in the dialogue.  This was true even with his Oscar-winning Titanic.  While Fire and Ash continues Cameron’s trend of sophomoric level dialogue (just count how many times they say ‘bro’ in the movie), the movie thankfully still attains the director’s high level of visual storytelling.  The movie does soar when it’s using the mood and setting to tell part of the story.  There are some especially interesting uses of eclipses in this film, which provides some very striking visuals.

There’s one other issue that plagues this movie as well.  When Avatar came out 16 years ago, it stood out because it was unlike anything we had seen before.  The Way of Water managed to overcome the sophomore slump because it came out so long after the first one that it made us the audience feel like we were rediscovering the world of Pandora again because of that long absence.  Fire and Ash doesn’t have that benefit of re-discovery, because it’s getting released after a relatively short 3 year gap.  One thing that Cameron could have done with this movie to help make it feel new and fresh was to allow us to see a whole other biome of Pandora and spend most of the film there, making it distinct from the visuals of the other movies.  For a while, it looked like that’s what Cameron was about to do, given how prominently the character of Varang and her tribe or Ash Na’vi featured in the marketing of this movie.  But, alas, we only spend a brief time with her clan in their home environment, on the slopes of an active volcano.  It would’ve been very exciting to have used this ash covered wasteland as a key battleground within the story, but sadly that’s not what we get.  Instead, this story chooses to re-tread most of the same locations we saw before in the series; the forests and the oceans of Pandora.  It all makes Fire and Ash feel less like it’s own movie and more like The Way of Water Part II.  It’s also sad that even with a 3 hour and 17 minute run time (the longest so far in the series) the story still doesn’t feel like it advances that much more than Way of Water did.  At least Cameron keeps things active, so it’s not a dull three hours.  But, this is the first film in this series where I feel like the novelty is clearly wearing thin.  If James Cameron says there are still 2 more films to go in this series, he needs to shake things up big time from here out because otherwise audiences are going to stop caring.

At this point, it’s the visuals that are carrying the series more than anything else.  I feel like I got the most out of the experience based on my choice of presentation.  In a select few IMAX theaters nationwide, not only are audiences able to see the film projected in 3D, but also at a high frame rate.  The high frame rate craze never really took off in the 2010’s, with it quickly fizzling out after the mixed reactions from the Hobbit trilogy’s usage of the format. 3D as well has been in a steady decline over the years.  But, James Cameron is still choosing to present his Avatar movies with these gimmicks still a part of the experience, and strangely enough it actually kind of works.  The high frame rate does take some getting used to, but over time it actually looks quite good.  I think it has to do with the fact that the majority of the movie features digital animation (whether it’s the environment or the actor’s motion capture performances) which looks better in a higher frame rate than live action.  And without a doubt, the Avatar movies feature the best uses of 3D photography ever put on screen.  It helps that Cameron made these movies with high frame rate 3D in mind, and crafted his movies to better integrate the gimmicks into the experience.  One of the best uses of the formats is a scene when Quaritch meet with Varang, and she gives him a powerful hallucinagenic drug to allow her to read his mind.  Cameron allows us to see from Quaritch’s POV in this scene, so we get the full hallucinagenic experience, which looks wild in 3D and with the smoothness of the high frame rate.  While we aren’t seeing the giant leap forwards in visual effects that the first two films represented, the Weta Digital team still delivers some incredible visual treats throughout the film, and it’s good to see this legendary visual effects studio continue to push the limits thanks to the challenge of keeping up with James Cameron’s vision.  Even if you are unable to see this movie in the ideal High Frame Rate IMAX 3D experience, you’ll see be amazed by the imaginative things that Cameron and company came up with for this third chapter.

The movie does also benefit from a committed cast of actors who over time have gotten better working with the motion capture technology over these last 16 years.  Zoe Saldana still remains the MVP of the series.  While Neytiri takes a bit of a back seat in the plot of this movie, Zoe nevertheless still shines in every moment she appears on screen.  Sam Worthington also seems to improve his portrayal of Jake Sully with every new film.  Starting off as pretty wooden in the first film, he has managed to become more forceful with his portrayal in the these last two.  He’s also becoming more flawless with that American accent, to the point where you can’t even hear any trace of his natural Australian accent anymore.  But, much like with many other space fantasy films, it’s the villains that become the favorites.  Stephen Lang returns again as the primary antagonist Colonel Quaritch, and he still is a blast to watch with his scenery chewing performance.  But, the best thing about his role here is that they paired him with another equally fascinating villain to work off of.  Oona Chaplin is easily the best new member of this cast, delivering a delightfully deranged and venomous performance as Varang.  She is a very compelling villainess, and she brings an incredible, sinister presence into the movie.  I also love the unique design of her outfit too, with the mix of blacks and reds making her feel all the more twisted.  The best part is also how well she works off of Stephen Lang’s performance as the Colonel, making their scenes together all the more electrifying.  The downside of the cast in this movie is that Cameron perhaps has too many characters taking up space in the plot, to the point where some even get neglected despite there being 3 hours to tell the story.  The Sully’s youngest child Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) for instance is barely a presence at all throughout this story.  And some performances seem to suffer from that lack of focus.  I still find Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Kiri to be a little off.  It’s distracting when you are listening to a older aged woman attempting to play a teenager.  It’s clear that James Cameron and the actors love these characters, but it also feels like the movies are not doing them justice either with it’s odd choices in pacing and stilted, unnatural dialogue.

In the end, my feelings about Avatar: Fire and Ash are pretty much the same with regards to how I felt about the other two Avatar films; that they are good but fall short of being great.  There are many times throughout this franchise where I do feel James Cameron coming very close to achieving greatness with these movies.  But, then he’ll drop the ball by falling back on clichés and making his characters deliver some pretty clunky dialogue.  In comparison, I believe that Fire and Ash falls a bit short of The Way of Water, mainly because so much of it feels like a retread.  But, at the same time, I like both of the sequels better than the original.  As flawed as these sequels are, I still feel the ambition behind them, and Cameron is working with a full deck of spectacle that is far ahead of what we had seen in the original.  It’s quite a feat to make these two, 3 hour long epics feel like they breeze by.  Truth be told, I was feeling the movie drag in it’s last hour, especially with a battle scene that felt like it went on a beat too long, but it never got me to the point where I was checking my watch, hoping it would be over soon.  I feel like this movie is unlikely to sway audiences one way or another.  People who hated the other two will like hate this one as well, while people who loved the other movies will get exactly what they want with this new film.  I for one liked revisiting this beautifully realized alien world on the big screen once again, but I feel like the novelty has worn off as well and it’s time for James Cameron to start reconsidering where he should go with the next film.  It’s not enough to keep making the same style of movie over again.  There is potential to be mined here in the world of Avatar; like say taking us to a completely new location on Pandora, like maybe a desert or the frozen polar regions.  Avatar needs variety to help make us care about returning to these worlds.  That’s the thing that I felt was lacking the most with this new release.  At the same time, I was mostly having a good time watching the flick, because Cameron can still deliver some exhilarating action sequences.  We’ll see what the future holds for this record-shattering franchise as James Cameron maps out his final two chapters and whatever lies beyond.  For what it’s worth, he did manage to do it again, but again merely means making almost the same movie as the other two, and we’ll see if that’s enough to set a fire to the box office again.

Rating: 7/10

Animation is in a weird fluctuation state right now, where what worked in the past doesn’t seem to be sure bets anymore.  The last 20 years in animation has been dominated largely by the trifecta of Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks, all of whom have built their brands on the strength of their innovation and storytelling through computer animation.  But, the computer animation craze seems to have died out, as the artform no longer has the novelty it once had.  Animated movies are still being made with computers, but they no longer look like computer animation.  Now films are being made that blend 3D computer animation with what looks like traditional hand drawn artwork.  Sony Animation Studios has been leading this shift in the animation industry with their innovative work on the Spiderverse movies, as well as their breakout hit KPOP Demon Hunters (2025) this year.  We are also seeing small independent studios adopting this new look in animation as well, including this last year’s Oscar winning entry from the nation of Latvia called Flow (2024).  And the bigger animation giants are seeing the results of this shift as their own film have been losing audience interest to newcomers.  This has been effecting original films from the big studios more than anything.  Pixar, which previously had one of the strongest track records of any animation studio in the world, has recently been struggling getting audiences to come see their new original films, like Elemental (2023) and Elio (2025).  Elio became the first non pandemic effected film by Pixar to not turn a profit in it’s theatrical run.  But even while these newer, original films struggle, we are also seeing record breaking success with sequels to past animated classics.  Between Elemental and Elio, Pixar had it’s biggest hit ever with Inside Out 2 (2024), which shows us that the only way these traditional animation powers are able to stay on top at the moment is to capitalize on their past glories.

Pixar’s sister studio Walt Disney Animation is also experiencing this same kind of cycle.  After the release of Frozen II  (2019), Disney has seen all of their original films fall short of crossing the $100 million mark at the box office.  Sure, in the case of Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto (both 2021), they faced headwinds from the lingering effects of the pandemic, but even as audiences were returning to the theaters (especially for animated films) Disney still was struggling at the box office, with both Strange World (2022) and Wish (2023) both becoming big box office bombs.  So, what was Disney going to do to salvage their reputation at the box office?  The answer would come in capitalizing on their past wins.  During the 2010’s, Disney had a strong resurgence in box office fortune with a steady stream of hits that all were brand new stories.  Frozen (2013) certainly got the ball rolling, but they continued to build upon that success with movies that hit with both audiences and critics, such as Big Hero 6 (2014), Zootopia (2016) and Moana (2016).  And while the pandemic era threw a wrench into Disney’s plans at the turn of the decade, the popularity of these films only continued to grow.  What Disney saw with the launch of their streaming platform, Disney+, was dominant numbers being put up by these movies from the past decade.  Moana in fact is not just the most watched film on that platform, but one of the most streamed movies ever across all platforms, even beating out many Netflix titles in the same time frame.  So, with their original films struggling to find their audience, it was time to look back at what worked before and try to replicate it.  A Disney+ original Moana series was quickly reworked into a feature film, and even though critics found it to be a cheapened cash grab, the gamble still worked, and Disney Animation had it’s first billion dollar film in 5 years.  Unfortunately, this means that we are going to be in a period of sequelizing rather than taking a shot at making new and original films in animation when it comes to Disney and Pixar, because these are the only ones that are bring in the money right now.  We’ve already seen this work out for Moana 2 (2024), despite it being a quickly slapped together sequel.  Does Zootopia 2 manage to overcome it’s intentions as a cash grab and actually justify itself as a worthy follow-up to it’s predecessor?

The story of Zootopia 2 picks up right on the heels of the first film.  Police officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) has finally earned the respect of her department as it’s first rabbit recruit after solving the case of 13 missing animals from the city.  Her accomplice in solving that crime, Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) has also been accepted into the department and the duo have been assigned as partners in the Investigative division.  Unfortunately their different methods in solving crimes have led to some incidents that have gotten out of control, which has forced their superior Chief Bogo (Idris Elba) to declare a separation of their partnership, unless they seek counseling or voluntarily remove themselves from cases.  Despite Bogo’s warning, Judy is determined to follow up on the smuggling case they were just kicked off of.  It leads them to an elite party in the Tundra Town district of Zootopia, hosted by one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the city, The Lynxleys.  On display at the party is a historical artifact called the Lynxley Journal, which has the original plans and patent for the city’s weather walls.  While investigating, Nick and Judy catch a mysterious figure that has invaded the party.  The figure turns out to be snake, the first appearance of one in Zootopia for many years.  The snake makes off with the Journal, but when confronted by Judy, he reveals that snakes like him have been unfairly scapegoated by people like the Lynxleys and that the journal is the key to helping him return to his rightful home.  Judy seeks to learn more from the snake named Gary (Ke Huy Quan) but both her and Nick are threatened by the head of the Lynxley household Milton (David Strathairn), who commands great power in the city, with the support of his equally ruthless children Cattrick (Macaulay Culkin) and Kitty (Brenda Song), and less so from his black sheep son Pawbert (Andy Samberg).  The pursuit of the truth takes Judy and Nick deep into the less travelled sides of the city, including Marsh Market, where the duo recieves help from an eccentric beaver named Nibbles (Fortune Feimster).  Can they solve the mystery of Zootopia’s shady past and help the reptile population from being wiped out ever further by the Lynxley’s devious plans.

It’s not a huge surprise that Zootopia would get the sequel treatment, given that the story left things open for further adventures of Nick and Judy.  There’s a ton of justification for developing Zootopia into a franchise because the world of the film is so rich with detail that there is a lot to further explore.  The only question is, did they have the right kind of story to follow up the first.  For me personally, I had very high expectations for a Zootopia sequel.  The first film is easily my favorite animated film of the last decade, and it has a place on my list of the Top Ten Movies of the 2010’s, found here.  Suffice to say, even if the movie is very good, it still has to contend with a movie that I hold in very high regard.  So, how does Zootopia 2 contend?  While I do think it falls short of the original, there is still a lot to like about this movie.  What Zootopia 2 does really well is build upon the world created in the first movie.  One of the great things about the world of Zootopia is the way that animators put in all these details about how the society is built around the different shapes and sizes of the animals that inhabit it.  Animals big and small call Zootopia home, and the architecture reflects this mix, as the society accommodates all the different aspects of the animal kingdom while they live and work in a way that looks so much like human civilization.  Zootopia 2 continues this, and gives us a look at the parts of the city that went unexplored in the first film.  In particular, we get a better view of the parts of the city away from the city center, in what human society would consider the suburbs.  The movie also uses it’s animal puns well, including some blink and you’ll miss them ones, like “Gnu Jersey.”  I have a feeling that this movie will benefit from a lot of re-watches in order to catch all of the different details.  The movie knows it’s strengths and plays to them pretty well, allowing us to see more of the world while at the same time allowing it’s two charismatic leads, Nick and Judy, to carry us through it all.

The only thing that is lacking from the experience is the novelty of the original.  Zootopia was a genuine surprise when it first came out because I feel like a lot of people (including myself) weren’t expecting it to be as deep and thought-provoking as it turned out to be.  A lot of us came to Zootopia thinking it was just going to be a simple, harmless animated romp meant for the whole family.  What we were surprised to find was that Zootopia was actually a profound commentary about modern society with a shockingly poignant message about institutionalized racism and how it unfairly drives people apart.  Sure, the kids would still get all the funny little animal moments to be entertained by, but for the parents there was a thought-provoking subtext to it all that you really didn’t expect to find worked into a Disney cartoon.  That’s what helped to make Zootopia stand out so strongly when it first came out, and in the years since, it’s message has only become even more prescient.  Zootopia 2 doesn’t quite have that element of surprise, since you already know going in that there will be a message in there.  Not that the message is bad by any means.  Instead about being institutional racism woven into society, Zootopia 2 is more about red-lining and gentrification splitting generational communities apart, which in a way is just a branch off of the message of the first movie.  I do appreciate that the movie is still trying to say something about society, but it doesn’t have the same punch as the first film.  Also, the plot twists feel a tad too familiar compared to the first film.  At least this time, the antagonistic force is set up much earlier instead of feeling like an afterthought in the first movie.  We don’t have to wait until the third act to realize the Lynxley family are bad people.  But, most of the rest of the movie lacks the element of surprise that made the original film so shockingly refreshing.

One the things that hasn’t been lost between films is the perfect chemistry between the two leads.  Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are some of the best characters to come out of Disney Animation in recent years, and they continue to be endlessly engaging in this sequel.  Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman both return to these iconic roles, and haven’t missed a beat.  I’m still struck by how much heart Goodwin puts into her vocal performance, making Judy’s emotional moments feel genuinely profound, while also at the same time nailing the more comical moments as well with Judy’s bubbly personality.  And Jason Bateman again proves that his personality was perfectly suited for slick, wise-cracking fox.  A lot of the heart of this sequel still remains the remarkable chemistry between these two.  I really do wonder if there were scenes which they recorded together, because their banter feels so perfectly in sync.  If not, the film’s vocal directors deserve a lot of praise for making the back and forth of these characters feel so perfectly in tune.  There are a lot of returning favorites from the first movie, though a couple of them like Chief Bogo and Officer Clawhauser (Nate Torrence) get their screen time diminished significantly in favor of introducing a lot of new faces.  One of the chief newcomers is Gary De’Snake, whose the heart of the plot of this story.  Ke Huy Quan delivers a very heartfelt performance as the newcomer to this world.  Given that Quan’s own family came to America as refugees must make this portrayal of a displaced animal like Gary something very close to home for him.  One of my favorite new characters though is the new horse mayor of Zootopia named Mayor Winddancer, voiced by a scene-stealing Patrick Warburton, here in a new Disney character role 25 years after his first when he voiced Kronk in The Emperor’s New Groove (2000).  Also looking through the cast list of this movie you’re going to see a surprising amount of cameo voices from some pretty big names sprinkled throughout.  These include pro-wrestlers like CM Punk and Roman Raines playing “Ze-Bros,” or the real CEO of the Disney Company playing Bob Tiger.  It may be somewhat of a gimmick to give all of these cameos to big names, even if it’s just for one throw away line, but thankfully it doesn’t take away from the stand out performances of it’s lead actors.

Once again, the incredible design work of the animation team delivers some incredible visuals for us to enjoy in this film.  The movie sees the return of the original directors, Byron Howard and the newly promoted chief creative officer of Disney Animation Jared Bush, and they continue the same outlook over the world of Zootopia that they devoted to the first movie.  This time around, they get to showcase more of the city we haven’t seen, but still keep it familiar enough to feel like a natural extension of what we saw in the first movie.  We saw a little bit of Tundra Town in the first movie, but it was mostly limited to seeing an inner city environment in a deep freeze during the winter.  In this movie, Tundra Town is expanded out more, and the grounds around the Lynxley mansion has the feel of a ski resort after a winter storm.  There are also completely new places shown in this movie like Marsh Market, that definitely have a Deep South vibe to them.  The variety of animals are also incredibly realized.  One particular scene when Nick and Judy visit an underground hideout of reptiles shows just how much fun the filmmakers were having in using all of the characteristics we know about these animals get reworked into a human like behavior.  This film definitely has a more expansive scope to it than the first film, which largely stuck pretty close to the inner city.  You really get a sense of the scale of the city of Zootopia from this film, which includes not just urban centers, but mountain ranges and deserts as well.  It’s also great that we get a lot more of the lore of Zootopia in this city, particularly with regards to how it was all built.  The engineering of the weather walls becomes a crucial part of the plot, and in this movie we get a lot more detail about how it actually works.  For a lot of this movie, it does exactly what you want a good sequel to do which is to give you more; fleshing out ideas from the first movie and enriching it.  But, given the strength of the first movie and how it was so unexpectedly rich, I feel like it elevated it ahead of this one, which does the job right but doesn’t go any further than that.

As far as Disney animation sequels go, Zootopia 2 is undoubtedly one of the best ones.  It’s lightyears ahead of the travesty that was Frozen II and even though I liked Moana 2 better than most critics, I do recognize that it is a lot messier than the original film.  Zootopia 2 may fall short of it’s predecessor, but it still does enough to make it a worthy sequel.  I love the richness of the world it portrays and a lot of the new characters are a ton of fun to watch.  But, I doubt this movie is going to make my Best of the Decade list like the first film did, and it may miss out on my yearly list as well.  All that said, it’s still a film very much worth seeing; it just has the disadvantage of coming after a masterpiece.  Zootopia was going to be a hard act to follow no matter what.  It quite simply is one of the best animated films ever made; by Disney or anyone else.  I would say that it’s unfair to compare one with the other, but it was only a year ago where I saw Pixar follow up one of their best films with a sequel that surpassed it in almost every way, delivering one of the best best films ever with Inside Out 2.  Maybe I’m being a tad too critical because this sequel wasn’t as good as the original, but it’s only because the first Zootopia is still so fresh in my mind, and that affected my viewing of this film.  That said, it still is a worthy follow up to the sequel that doesn’t take anything away from the original and compliments it well.  No matter what I say, this is going to be another massive success for Disney Animation, giving them two wins in a row at the box office which they desperately needed.  I just hope that the success of Moana 2 and Zootopia 2 alongside Inside Out 2’s record breaking success doesn’t lead to a cycle of sequels for the foreseeable future.  It doesn’t bode well that we are getting another Toy Story next summer, and though I am still looking forward to that too, I just wish there was also news of more original films coming as well.  Disney and Pixar can’t just coast on sequels forever.  They need to find ways to improved their marketing of their fresh new films; and to also make them as good as they can be.  People do want to see new things; look at the buzz around KPOP Demon Hunters for example.  Disney has the talent to bring new, fresh ideas to reality; they just need to find ways to reconnect that desire to see new things from the audience to what they have being worked on in their studio.  Zootopia 2 is fun no matter what, but Disney needs to improve their game otherwise their output will just devolve over time into managing aging franchises.

Rating: 8/10

One can’t imagine a world in which we never had a story like The Wizard of Oz in our lives.  Since author L. Frank Baum wrote down his imaginative tome about the magical world of Oz and the little Kansas girl who found her way there, we have been collectively enchanted for generations, finding new and creative ways to bring Oz to life.  No other adaptation has had as deep an impact as the big screen MGM production in 1939; a technicolor masterpiece that has been declared the most watched movie in history.  The Wizard of Oz (1939) remains the gold standard for all adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s stories, particularly in the visual iconography it created.  But, that hasn’t stopped many other people from trying to put their own spin on the Oz mythos.  One of the more creative came in the 70’s, when the musical The Wiz premiered on the Broadway stage and infused the familiar story with contemporary African-American culture and music.  The musical would later be adapted into a movie by Sidney Lumet and starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.  But that wouldn’t be it for The Wizard of Oz on both the Broadway stage and on the big screen.  In 1995, writer Gregory Maguire wrote an alternate history version of Baum’s original tale, recounting the events of The Wizard of Oz, but from the point of view of it’s villain, the Wicked Witch of the West.  Maguire’s book used the Oz story to deconstruct the notion of evil in the stories we tell, and whether people are born wicked or are made to be wicked, and how stories often are used as weapons to villainize the wrong people.  It was a compelling re-imagining of the Oz narrative and that gained the attention of some key people in the musical theater world.  Composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz had been wanting to do a musical themed around the Land of Oz and he was instantly drawn to Maguire’s book and found it to be a perfect subject for adaptation.  Working alongside stage book writer Winnie Holzman, Wicked was realized into a lavish, high spectacle musical in 2003, and it has been playing non-stop on the Broadway stage ever since, becoming one of the longest running and most profitable shows ever on the Great White Way.

With the enormous success of the Wicked stage show it was easy to think that a big screen musical adaptation would follow very soon after.  But, the show’s producer Marc Platt held off bringing it to the big screen for twenty years, despite the fact that Universal Pictures was involved in the development of the show for the stage.  Platt’s intention was to allow Wicked to have a full, uninterrupted run on the stage before bringing it too the screen.  People would be less inclined to pay $50-100 per showing for the stage show if they could buy a movie ticket for a fraction of that price or rent it for even less to watch at home.   The Broadway show needed to build up that following first, and thanks to it’s record success both in New York and through it’s worldwide touring company, Wicked didn’t wane over time; it just kept growing.  So, after 20 years of running on stage (minus the Covid shutdowns for one year) it was time to finally bring the hit musical to the big screen.  But, it was going to require the right team behind it.  Mark Platt and Universal ended up turning to director Jon M. Chu , who had come up through directing music videos for the likes of Justin Bieber and many other hip hop groups, but managed to find his biggest success as a film director with the hit film Crazy Rich Asians (2018).  He came into this project with a lot of experience behind him, but Wicked was going to be a much heftier undertaking than anything he had made before.  There was also controversy surrounding the casting of the two lead characters; Elphaba, the Wicked Witch and Glinda, the Good Witch.  A lot of fans of the show wanted to see the return of the show’s original stars, Kristen Chenoweth as Glinda and Idina Menzel as Elphaba, a role that won her a Tony Award, but it was decided by the production to tap new performers for the roles; in particular Tony Winner Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and recording artist Ariana Grande as Glinda.  Also controversial was the decision to break the musical up into two films, with a year long gap in between releases.  Despite the worries of many fans, Part 1 of Wicked (2024) premiered over the holiday season and became a smashing success, creating a lot of anticipation for it’s concluding chapter this year.  The only question is, does Wicked: For Good defy gravity, or does the yellow brick road lead to nowhere.

Some time has passed between Part One of Wicked and this second act of the story.  The first part of the tale showed us the start of the relationship at the heart of the story, that between Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda Upland (Ariana Grande).  Though they started out as rivals at the prestigious Shiz University of the Land of Oz, they found themselves becoming the closest of friends.  But, turmoil would once again test their friendship.  All across Oz, animal citizens continue to loose their rights to co-exist with the humans, leading many of them to be forced into cages which leads them to loosing their ability to speak.  Elphaba sees this injustice and becomes determined to help the animals that she sees being abused and scapegoated.  She believed that if she could make her case to the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) himself, he might be able to undo this injustice.  But unfortunately, upon arriving at the Emerald City, she finds out that not only is he complicit in the mistreatment of animals in Oz, but that he doesn’t have any magical power at all, and is just a con man trying to use her real magical abilities for his advantage.  Not only that, she also learns that the dean of her school, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) is also the master mind behind this deception, making her feel even more betrayed.  After standing up against the Wizard, Elphaba is labeled a traitor and a menace to Ozians through a propaganda campaign that paints her as a Wicked Witch.  She chooses to go into exile and acts to disrupt the Wizard’s regime through select attacks.  All the while, Glinda tries to keep up appearances as a Good Witch to counter the “threat” of the Wicked one, while at the same time trying to keep Elphaba’s true whereabouts hidden.  Glinda’s attempt to broker peace between Elphaba and the Wizard becomes increasingly difficult, and it drives a wedge between her and Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Baily), the captain of the Emerald City guards and her fiancée.  It turns out that Fiyero still has feelings for Elphaba, which also makes Glinda feel all the more betrayed by those she thought were her friends.  Is there hope that Elphaba and Glinda can bridge their differences once again and bring harmony to Oz, or are the betrayals too much to overcome?  And is it possible for Elphaba to be seen for the good that she does and not for the wickedness that the powerful have unjustly labeled her with?

For me personally, I came into the first Wicked movie completely cold.  I was familiar with the Broadway show, but I had never seen it performed live.  I also haven’t read the original Maguire novel it’s based on, so the only thing I brought with me going into the first movie was my knowledge of Oz lore from the original MGM classic.  I wasn’t expecting much, because I’ve had a particularly mixed experience with modern movie musicals based on hit Broadway shows.  Some have been pretty great over the years (Sweeny Todd, In the Heights, West Side Story) while others have been pretty dreadful (Les Miserables, Cats, Dear Evan Hansen).  Given how massive of a hit the show has been on the Broadway stage, I felt like there was no way they would be able to translate it successfully for the big screen, and splitting up the 2 1/2 stage show and blowing it up into a two part, 5 hour cinematic experience just spelt disaster.  So, color me pleasantly surprised when I walked out of the first part of Wicked having really enjoyed it.  I was pretty stunned by how well the movie ended up coming together.  The entire first film is longer than the whole of the Broadway show, running 160 minutes, and yet it never felt bloated or sagging.  It used it’s run time remarkably well, and it helped to immerse us the audience into this version of Oz which was incredibly imaginative and detailed.  The movie wound up winning very deserved Oscars for for it’s costumes and production design.  And Cynthia Erivo’s performance of the show’s signature song “Defying Gravity” was such a perfect high note to close the movie on and it really got me excited to watch the second film, which I’d have to wait a year for.  So, was it worth the wait.  Well, a lot of Broadway show fans will tell you that the musical peaks at “Defying Gravity” and the second half of the musical doesn’t quite match up with the first.  That’s true of the Broadway show, and sadly also true of the movie Wicked: For Good, but that doesn’t mean that the movie is bad; not at all.  It’s just not as good as it’s predecessor, and that flaw is not really a fault of the movie so much as a flaw built into the musical from the very start.  In order to be a faithful adaptation, Wicked had to take the bad along with the good.  One would have hoped that maybe the filmmakers would’ve found a work around to make the flaws of the stage show less of an issue here, but alas we see that they still made the translation to the big screen.

There’s still a lot of entertainment to be had here.  Jon M. Chu still proves to be a great stager of musical numbers.  One of the worries I had going into the first film was the fact that it was being directed by a man who cut his teeth as a director of musical videos.  I have long said that the MTV generation ruined movie musicals for a long time, because the prevailing style of quick edits that worked for snappy music videos on MTV did not translate well into musical adaptations for the cinema.  That’s why so many musicals over the last 20 or so years look so cheap, because the music video style just chops everything up in the edit and doesn’t allow for the musical numbers to really come alive.  You look at stage to screen musicals of the past like Oklahoma (1955) or The Music Man (1962), they relied on long takes that really showed off the incredible staging of the different musical numbers, immersing the audience the same way that the stage show would.  Thankfully, Jon M. Chu is not the kind of filmmaker to chop things up.  I think what helps is that in addition to directing music videos, he also directed concerts as well, and he was the creator of the choreography centered Step Up movies, so the man knows the importance of staging.  The musical numbers in Wicked are cinematic, but still feel true to their stage bound origins, and that remains true throughout both parts of the Wicked experience.  While none of the musical numbers here reach the epic heights of “Defying Gravity,” there’s still enough creativity in their staging to still make them feel immersive and visually pleasing.  There’s one particular number, a new original song for Glinda, that does some incredible things with mirrors that I thought really helped it to stand out in the movie.  Another highlight is the song “Wonderful” sung by Goldblum’s Wizard, which has some really great visual touches.  So, even while this is the lesser half of the narrative, there are still plenty of moments that will still enchant you while watching the movie.

I think one of the big issues that ends up hurting Wicked: For Good, which is a flaw inherent from the original show itself, is that it breaks up the heart of what made the first half so powerful, which is the chemistry between Elphaba and Glinda.  One of the best things about the Wicked movies is the absolutely perfect castings of the lead characters.  Cynthia Erivo of course has an angelic singing voice which made her a perfect candidate to fill Idina Menzel’s enormous shoes in the role of Elphaba.  But, she’s also a brilliant actor as well, bringing so much depth to this character.  And despite all of the naysayers who objected to her casting in the role, Ariana Grande has proven to be just as equally brilliant as Cynthia in her role as Glinda.  I would dare say that Ariana is the MVP of this whole endeavor, because so much of this movie rides on her ability to balance her performance between the silly comical aspects of Glinda’s character and the heavier emotional moments that she has to take very seriously.  So much of the movie relies on Cynthia and Ariana’s ability to work so harmoniously together and make this friendship the beating heart of the movie, and they pull it off magically.  It’s just unfortunate that they are apart for so much of Wicked: For Good.  The beautiful chemistry of these two actors is missing for a good chunk of the movie, and that unfortunately make a lot of the film feel like much of a drag.  But the highlights do come once they are finally sharing the screen again.  There’s an especially fun scene where Glinda tries to fight Elphaba one on one that is a hilarious high point in the film, and a much needed moment of levity in an otherwise darker second half.  Thankfully much of the returning supporting cast remain strong, though sadly with less to make them stand out.  Jeff Goldblum steals all of his scenes as the Wizard, strongly leaning into his own eccentric parody of himself, which matches the character well.  It’s also nice to see Michelle Yeoh really relishing her chance to play a villain, giving the character a nice menacing presence.  The one who unfortunately gets shorted the most in this second act is Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero.  He still has his moments here or there, but unfortunately the bulk of his character development and screen presence happened in Part One, so he more or less is just here to be a key supporting player.  It’s especially unfortunate since Part One showed off just how good of a musical performer he is.

The movie also does a great job of presenting such a rich, detailed version of the Land of Oz.  One of the best decisions that was made about the adaptation of this musical to big screen was splitting it up into two movies.  If the movie had adapted the story as it is from the stage production, it would have felt rushed and truncated on the big screen.  Making the whole thing a lavish 5 hour long production allows more space to really immerse us in the world of Oz over these two films.  That way we are better able to appreciate Nathan Crowley’s lavish sets and Paul Tazewell’s amazing costumes.  There’s a big difference between what works on the stage and what works on the screen, and the best movie musicals are the ones that find that right balance.  It’s also why so many movie musicals run between 2 1/2 to 3 hours in length, because movies really need that extra time for immersion into the world of their story.  Wicked was such a monumental undertaking that it all couldn’t be contained in just one movie, unless audiences were willing to sit for a 5 hour long show.  Wicked: For Good continues the high stand of the first film’s incredible production design.  The only downside is that because this is the second film of a two part production, the novelty of seeing it all for the first time is not there.  Apart from just a handful of new locations, like the castle that Elphaba holds refuge in, every other place in this movie are holdovers from the first.  It’s probably unlikely this movie will see the same success it enjoyed from last year’s Awards season, because it really isn’t showing much that we haven’t seen before.  But, at the same time, the movie still gives us plenty of time to appreciate all the work that went into the production.  Whether it’s the amazing Glinda dresses that Ariana gets to wear, or the graceful staging of the musical numbers that John M. Chu puts together, Wicked: For Good still succeeds as a visual feast for the eyes.

Despite the strengths comparable between the two films, taken as a whole these Wicked movies are a remarkable success.  There were a lot of high expectations surrounding these movies, especially given the universal success of the stage musical, which even after the release of these movies is still selling out shows across the world.  I really appreciate that the makers of these films didn’t just make a direct translation of the musical, but instead really explored what was possible in bringing this to the big screen.  Like the best movie musicals of the past, these movies understand what it takes to make what worked on the stage become a spectacle on the big screen.  Wicked is an epic just as much as it is musical, full of lavish detail that really makes the world of Oz come alive.  And “Defying Gravity” gives the experience a cliffhanger ending for Part One that even the likes of Marvel would be jealous of.  There’s no doubt that Wicked: For Good is the lesser of the two halves, and the one that is more reliant upon the other to give it meaning.  You unfortunately loose a bit of the magic if you only watch For Good independent of the other film.  The only way that this movie could ever match up with it’s predecessor is if it had that emotional high of the cliffhanger ending, and sadly that wasn’t meant to be since the musical itself couldn’t repeat that same emotional high.  But, there’s still a lot to like, particularly with the performances of the actors.  I also loved the way that, just like the stage show, the plot of the original Wizard of Oz is playing out in the background.  We never even see Dorothy’s face, which is as it should be, because this isn’t her story.  The movie expects us to know how the original story goes, and the charm of Wicked is in how it subverts the original Oz narrative.  Over time, I do see Wicked being celebrated among the likes of The Sound of Music (1965), My Fair Lady (1964), and West Side Story (1961) as one of the greatest stage to screen musical adaptations ever made, especially for how well the spectacle of it all was pulled off.  More than likely it will be because of the strength of the first half, but I hope many out there also see the bright points of Wicked: For Good as something worth celebrating as well.  It may not be a strong finish to this adaptation, which is more the original musical’s fault than anything, but it does do the best job it can to compliment it’s sister film.  And that’s something worth the journey over the rainbow for.

Rating: 7.5/10

There are movie franchises that often take their time in releasing new entries, but when it comes to the movie Tron (1982), it’s had perhaps the longest periods of fallow that any movie franchise has seen.  The original Tron was not exactly a mega hit when it first released in 1982.  Like so other movies that summer, it got overshadowed by the box office behemoth that was Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).  It wasn’t until many years later that it received a re-evaluation by both critics and audiences.  Tron was a movie that in terms of the technology that went into it’s production was well ahead of it’s time.  It was the first studio production ever to utilize computer animation, which of course now has become omnipresent as a part of the film-making industry, to the point of replacing many once necessary jobs in the business.  The film’s story about rogue AI programs taking too much control also now seems prophetic, despite coming from very early on in the history of computing.  When computer animation started to take hold in Hollywood in the mid-90’s, a lot of the digital artists and animators often cited Tron as an inspiration.  Without Tron, we probably wouldn’t have had the digital revolution in film-making that we know of today.  And this digital revolution brought more attention to Tron itself.  Disney, the studio that made the film, put the movie out on DVD in 2002 for it’s 20th anniversary, and it became a strong seller for them, helping them to realize that the movie was indeed growing in esteem.  It was time to think about the possibility of a sequel, though this would be a gamble as well.  A lot of time had passed since the last Tron, and the world had advanced so much in those 20 plus years in terms of computer technology.  Was it possible to make a sequel to this film that would feel just as cutting edge as the original.  Despite some of those challenges, we did indeed see the Tron franchise finally come to fruition in 2010.

Tron: Legacy (2010) released into theaters during the holiday season that year.  While it did perform a lot better at the box office than the original film, it also didn’t exceed expectations either.  Audiences were mixed, as well as critics.  Much like the original film, Legacy was viewed as visually stunning but emotionally hollow.  The biggest praise for the movie went instead to the musical score written by the techno punk DJ group Daft Punk, who saw their soundtrack become an award winning best-seller.  Legacy was a valiant attempt to capture some of the unique charm of the original movie while at the same time trying to modernize it and make it relevant again.  But, Tron is still a franchise with a very niche fan base.  The people who are impressed with the Tron movies are usually people with a fair amount of knowledge about computer tech.  They recognize the technical achievements that these movies represent.  To think that the original Tron was rendered with megabyte levels of computing power is astounding.  Legacy also became one of the first movies ever to use digital de-aging on it’s actors, a tool that we are seeing being used more and more in big budget blockbusters.  But, casual audiences are not aware of those things, and the Tron films often feel too cold and detached from emotions to ever feel as thrilling as most other blockbusters from their respective eras.  But, just like with the original, Tron: Legacy has also received a bit of a re-assessment over the years.  While it’s not considered by many to be an all time great action flick, people have come to admire it’s ambition and unique style.  One thing that also has helped to give this movie some extra attention is that it was the first film directed by Joseph Kosinski, who has since gone on to become a very successful movie director in the 15 years since Legacy, including being a part of a little film called Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  With both movies now having some noteworthy attention paid to them, Disney seems to be convinced that it’s time to try again with this franchise, adding a new film into this trilogy.  The only question is, does Tron: Ares manage to justify making the return to the world of Tron after such a long absence, or is it game over for this franchise for good?

The story of Tron: Ares brings the story up to where we are in the present day.  Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the eccentric founder of the ENCOM corporation has been missing since 1989, becoming now more myth than man.  His son Sam has also abdicated his role as CEO of the company and is living off the grid, so ENCOM now lies in the guiding hands of Eve Kim (Greta Lee) who hopes to run the company in the same spirit as Flynn did.  But, she faces stiff competition from the Dillinger Corporation, run by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the grandson of it’s founder and former corrupt CEO of ENCOM Ed Dillinger.  Both companies are trying to create the next breakthrough in AI technology, which involves creating living matter out of 3D printing with AI to give them sentience.  The only problem is, the creations can only keep their structure together for a maximum of 29 minutes before they disintegrate.  Eve believes that Kevin Flynn managed to crack the code for this problem back when he was still the head of the company, creating what’s been dubbed the Permanence Code, and she’s been digging through decades old computer systems trying to find it.  She manages to find her answer in a secret lab in the frozen Arctic Circle and she hopes to bring it back home with the intent of using the Permanence Code to fix things like food and medicine shortage.  Dillinger, however, wants to use the code to mass produce soldiers and war technology.  In a desperate attempt to steal the Code, he sends out two of his most elite warrior programs, Ares (Jared Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith).  The two manage to track down and corner Eve, but Ares starts to question the motives behind his programming, believing that Dillinger is crossing the line by seeking to literally destroy his competition.  So, Ares goes rogue and elects to help Eve instead.  But, Dillinger doesn’t take the betrayal lightly, and he re-programs Athena to now hunt down both Ares and Eve together.  What follows is a battle of wills that chaotically shows what happens when AI programs with elite warrior skills take their battle out of the Grid and bring it into the real world.

As the third film in a long running series such as this, Tron: Ares will undoubtedly face immediate comparisons with it’s predecessors.  It’s also difficult to really stack up each film together, considering that each one came from such different eras of filmmaking, to the point where each one almost feel more of a product in it’s own time than cohesive whole.  Tron: Legacy almost felt more like a reboot of the series rather than a straight forward sequel, only loosely tying itself to the original film through the general premise and return of Jeff Bridges.  Tron: Ares pretty much feels the same way as well.  It’s almost like Disney is once again starting from scratch, with this movie choosing not to continue the story of Legacy and instead doing something new with a whole new set of characters.  In some ways that is both a blessing and a curse.  Tron: Ares does have a lot of things going for it that it does do a lot better than the previous films in this series, but it’s also lacking some of the things that made the other films stand out as well.  Truth be told, the Tron movies have never been known for having great stories.  It’s always been a film franchise built on style over substance.  Tron: Ares keeps up that tradition by being as cookie-cutter as possible with barely dimensional characters.  It’s an unfortunate problem that definitely weighs the movie down, but at the same time, it’s kind of par for the course for this series.  The only character of note from this entire series has been Kevin Flynn, and he only stands out because of Jeff Bridges natural magnetic charm.  But unfortunately, starting over again also undercuts most if not all of the previous world-building work that had been put into the series.  There are fleeting references to the previous films (plus one admittedly pretty cool nostalgia filled scene referencing the original Tron), but otherwise Tron: Ares is carving out it’s own path.  That can be good if you want the movie to stand on it’s own, but it also means that Ares also has to go through the whole world-building gauntlet again, and that unfortunately burdens the film more with a lot of unnecessary extra exposition.  It shows Disney being undecisive in their approach to this franchise.  They want to continue to bank on the nostalgia value of the Tron brand, but they also feel like audiences can’t be trusted to already be familiar with the lore of the previous films, so unfortunately we have to have it all spelled out for us again.

But, there is one area where Ares does outdo both of the previous Tron films and that is in the action scenes.  The original Tron certainly was limited by what was possible with computer animation at the time, and still managed to make the most of it.  The light cycle race in particular is still an iconic moment in cinema and remarkably harrowing given the primitive animation used to make it.  Legacy’s biggest problem was that while it was visually a big step up in visual effects, it was also a bit lackluster in the action scenes.  It lacked a visceral feeling, with more emphasis being put on the style of the action rather than any tangible impact; ironic given that the same director went on to make the immersive Top Gun: Maverick.  Tron: Ares actually manages to be the best of both worlds.  It manages to be as thrillingly impactful as the action scenes in the original Tron, while also having the advanced visual style of Tron: Legacy.  The movie hits a high point midway through the film when we have Ares and Athena drive their light cycles in the real world for the first time.  We’ve seen light cycle races in both of the previous Tron movies, but this film makes their scene much more thrilling.  Here we finally see how these things perform under real world physics, and it creates a stark contrast.  One of the great things about this scene is that it looks like they really built physical light cycles as a workable prop in the movie.  It reminded me a lot of the bat cycle scene from The Dark Knight (2008), with this out of this world vehicle cruising through a real city street.  Director Joachim Ronning also makes the wise artistic choice of mounting the camera on the cycle itself, placing us the audience in the drivers seat.  The Tron series has been lacking in action scenes that feel immersive and that’s what helps Ares to stand out.  And while the cycle scene is a definite highlight, the rest of the movie also manages to keep the tempo moving, with a lot of bombast and style working in tandem.  It’s only when the action set pieces stop that the movie starts to lag.  Thankfully, the movie is action heavy, much more so than Legacy, and that helps to make the film a mostly fun time.

One of the things that makes Ares feel different from the other Tron movies is it’s aesthetic.  The original Tron was unlike any other movie ever made, with the use of back-lighting giving both the environments and the characters themselves a neon like glow.  That has carried on throughout the franchise.  While Tron: Legacy added in more naturalistic color, especially on the facial tones of the characters, it also maintained the back-lighting aesthetic with lights built into the costumes.  Tron: Ares does that as well, but here they really upped the contrast between light and dark.  The warrior programs created by the Dillinger Corp. all have the color definition of red in their suits (a carry-over from the original Tron where all the bad guys were in red and the good guys were in blue).  Most of the movie takes place during the dead of night, so when Ares and Athena are out on their cycles or are brandishing their weapons, that red really stands out against the darkness.  This is definitely the darkest film in the series when it comes it’s visuals.  A big reason why the movie looks as good as it does is because it was shot by celebrated cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, who has famously done many films for David Fincher including Fight Club (1999) and The Social Network (2010).  He’s a master when it comes to creating dark scenes with stark lighting contrasts, which is probably why Disney sought him out.  Another element of the movie that really adds to the experience is it’s music.  Perhaps as an answer to the success of the Tron: Legacy soundtrack, Disney wanted to get another famous rock band involved without having to go back to Daft Punk, who are not the kind of band intent on repeating themselves.  To give the movie a whole different sound, they went to Oscar winning composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.  The famed Nine Inch Nails members have been working in film composition for years now, including being employed by Disney before with their Oscar winning score for Pixar’s Soul (2020).  Given the synth style of music, they seemed like a perfect fit for Tron, but the duo went a bit further, deciding to get the entire band involved on this project.  It would have been unimaginable a decade ago that we’d see a Disney film scored by the likes of Nine Inch Nails, but that’s what make Tron so unique as a series.  And the NIN socre is perfectly suited for this movie, especially if the theater is equipped with a robust sound system.  This film score will definitely be rattling your bones with it’s aggressive sound.  Unfortunately, most of it all feels the same throughout the film, which does make it less memorable than Daft Punk’s Legacy score.  This is the one are where I feel Tron: Legacy was better, because Daft Punk put so much variety into the different themes, whereas Nine Inch Nails just stick with the same beat throughout.

One of the more controversial choices during the making of this movie was casting Jared Leto in the titular role of Ares.  Leto has, to put it lightly, been a controversial figure as of late.  Scandals aside, he’s also had a recent loosing streak at the box office, being a part of multiple box office bombs like House of Gucci (2001), Morbius (2022) and Disney’s Haunted Mansion (2023).  Not just casting him in this multi-million dollar tentpole but also placing him at the center is a major risk on Disney’s part, but Leto is far from being the movie’s main problem.  If anything, he’s appropriately cast as Ares.  Ares is by design to be devoid of character; an AI in search of an identity.  It’s in this that Leto’s understated style of acting actually fits, and I’ll take understated Leto over whatever the hell he gave us in House of Gucci or his performance as the Joker in Suicide Squad (2016).  A lot of the other actors do what they can with characters that are unfortunately just as ill-defined as Ares.  Evan Peters has a presence on screen as Julian Dillinger, but his villain role is overly eccentric and cliché and beneath the talent that someone like Peters has shown in other roles.  You definitely miss the aura of grandeur that the late David Warner brought to his villainous role as Dillinger in the original Tron.  Greta Lee also tries her best to make the most of her character, who is also very thinly defined.  The actor who stands out the most is Jodie Turner-Smith as Athena.  She brings a real menacing presence to the film and helps to make her character a lot more memorable than probably was on the page.  What does become clear while watching the movie is that a lot of the performances feel like they were more fleshed out in longer cuts of the movie.  Disney seemed pretty adamant about keeping this movie under 2 hours, and the editing done on this film seems to have mostly centered on fleshing out the action scenes.  So, a lot of character development is missing in the final edit.  Truth be told, Tron has never had the most memorable characters, other than Bridges’ Flynn (who thankfully gets a nice extended cameo here), but you definitely get the feeling that the movie would be a lot more exciting if we actually cared more about what happens to these characters.

You would think that after 15 years of development that Disney would have cracked the code over how to make a Tron movie that actually lives up to it’s potential.  Instead Tron: Ares is just another generic, albeit we-crafted, action movie capitalizing on the nostalgia of it’s predecessors.  If you’re looking for Tron to finally break out and become an elite franchise in the same class as something like Star Wars, you’ll have to wait a bit more because Tron: Ares is not that movie.  It’s hard to tell if there is any future for Tron at all, given the amount of time that we’ve waited for each installment.  If this movie underperforms, Disney may just end up giving up on it entirely.  The one thing that Tron had going for it initially was it’s ground-breaking visual effects and unique aesthetic, and that perhaps was not enough to build a long lasting franchise on, even though 40 plus years later Disney was still trying.  The positive thing about Tron: Ares is that it didn’t solely capitalize on past nostalgia.  It attempted to do things a bit different, and the result did yield some pretty impressive action sequences.  The smart thing that the filmmakers did with Tron: Ares was to keep it from being too self-important, which was Tron: Legacy’s biggest flaw.  It knows that the big selling point is the visuals and the action, and that’s where the focus was put, and the result makes this a better than average action flick that is best appreciated on a big screen with a robust sound system.  I saw this movie in 3D IMAX, and it honestly had some of the best 3D I’ve seen in a long while.  I just wish that maybe Disney would’ve given the script just a little more polish, allowing for better character development so that we could appreciate the story more.  Overall, the original Tron still stands as the best in the series, thanks to it’s pioneering visuals and overall nostalgic charm, but Ares definitely has the best action scenes in the series while Legacy has the best soundtrack.  A lot of people may end up just skipping the movie and end up buying the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack by itself, which is fair.  The sad reality is that there may have been a time and place where Tron could have turned into one of the biggest franchises in movie history, but it’s timing was at the wrong time.  It was either too ahead of it’s time, or just missed out on the right moment to reach it’s audience.  It’s hard to say if Tron: Ares will get the same reassessment from audiences and critics that it’s predecessors did in the years ahead.  Given that Disney is less inclined to give their franchises time to gestate over multiple generations of audiences, it may indeed end up being the end of line for Tron. 

Rating: 7/10

Paul Thomas Anderson is in a class of his own as a filmmaker.  I don’t think there is any other director who balances tone better than he does.  His films could feature some of the darkest, most disturbing moments ever put on screen and then within a single scene transition he can shift to something hilariously comical, and it still would fit together.  He’s made a career out of delivering some of the darkest comedies, with movies like Boogie Nights (1997), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and Inherit Vice (2014) on his resume.  His movies have also either leaned more fully into the darker side, like There Will Be Blood (2007), or the more comical side like Licorice Pizza (2021).  But one thing that remains constant in his films is a sense of keeping his audience on the edge, making sure that they’ll never know which way his films are headed.  That has made him one of the most admired filmmakers still working in Hollywood today.  Every new film he puts out always garners our attention, because we know that it’s going to be unlike anything we have seen before.  And as a filmmaker, he’s done a lot of things that we’ve thought were impossible.  He’s the guy who showed us that Adam Sandler could actually give a great performance with Punch-Drunk Love, which we’ve now learned was no fluke thanks to the Safdie Brothers several years later.  Anderson has an eye for talent and visual storytelling that is truly unique, and it has earned him a strong place in the filmmaking community.  However, as beloved as Anderson is among filmmakers, his reach still feels a bit limited.  Because of the unusual nature of his films, his reach hasn’t really crossed into the mainstream in the same way that his contemporaries have like Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan.  While many of his films are big in concept and ambitious in execution, he’s still been playing with limited budgets and small art house premieres.  But that seems to have changed.

For his newest film, Anderson is getting something he’s never had before; a substantial budget.  With the financial backing of Warner Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson for the first time is making a film with a budget north of $100 million.  Thus far, we’ve seen him be a filmmaker who has done a lot with very little in the way of funds.  There Will Be Blood was one of the most impressive looking American epics of it’s time, and remarkably it was made for around $20 million.  While it does excite a lot of Paul Thomas Anderson fans to think about what he might do with a budget of that size given his overall track record, it also leaves a lot of people worried about what that might mean for his style of fillmaking as well.  Anderson has managed to thrive being something of an outsider from the studio system.  So seeing him working with a major studio and taking their money for a film budgeted over 5x more than his average film makes many of his fans worried that he might be selling out.  Will this new movie actually still feel like a Paul Thomas Anderson film, or will it be a soulless studio product?  One of the positive signs is that the movie is not a pre-existing IP, but rather a project of Anderson’s own choosing.  It’s a loose adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel called “Vineland” and it’s pretty clear that the reason he’s making this movie is not because he needed Warner Brothers money but rather because they wanted his new film.  Warner Brothers, despite some of their own misguided steps in the past, have actually been quite good at attracting prestige filmmakers to bring their big concept projects under their banner.  It’s something they did with Christopher Nolan for a while with his films Inception (2010) and Dunkirk (2017).  Just this year they also got a big win with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025).  So, they recognize that it’s worth the investment to give a filmmaker like Paul Thomas Anderson the money he needs to make his big vision project come to life.  The only question is, does One Battle After Another prove that Anderson can still deliver on a much bigger scale, or does the movie fall apart under the weight of all those lofty ambitions?

The story of One Battle After Another is set in an America that’s been living under an authoritarian, militaristic regime that has been rounding up migrants and placing them in concentration camps.  Fighting back against this regime is a domestic terrorist group call the French 75.  Two of the members of this group are Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).  The two revolutionaries have a fiery romance that builds while they conduct their many acts of resistance against the government.  But, their love affair and antigovernmental crusade hits a roadblock once Perfidia becomes pregnant.  Once their child is born, Perfidia begins to become unhinged and it results in botched raid that gets her arrested.  In order to save herself, and protect her daughter’s secret identity, she ends up naming names of the other French 75 members.  Bob ends up going on the run with his infant daughter, who will grow up believing that her mother died in prison.  16 years later, the young girl named Willa (Chase Infiniti) finds herself suddenly thrust into the chaotic world of her father’s past once an old adversary has picked up the trail.  Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), an old enemy of the French 75 has now been given new authority to hunt down the remnants of the revolutionary group, and he’s got a personal matter involving Willa herself that he wants to settle once and for all.  While Bob is still very protective of his daughter, he’s also been out of the revolutionary game for many years, so a lot of his instincts are rusty.  He ends up seeking help from Willa’s karate teacher Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), who himself is involved in his own underground resistance movement.  As Willa becomes the target of this government crackdown, it becomes an endless race between two highly opposed forces; Bob using his network of revolutionaries to help him find his daughter’s safe house refuge, and Lockjaw using his military back might to get to her first.  And all the while, Willa desperately is trying to adapt to all the chaotic events that suddenly have been thrusted upon her.  With all that happens, it’s clear why this movie comes to us with the title One Battle After Another.

There is a lot that unfolds within the story of One Battle, but at the same time, the movie is very simple in it’s narrative.  In the end, it’s just a story about a father doing everything he can to save his daughter from a ruthless predator and the system that has propelled him to power.  A lot of people who have been worried that some of Paul Thomas Anderson’s style would get lost under the weight of a much bigger budget will be rest assured that this movie thankfully still feels like an Anderson film to it’s core.  It’s honestly kind of surprising that this movie actually cost as much as it did to make, because Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t really do much to flaunt the budget of this movie.  It still feels like one of his grounded, street level films that were made on significantly smaller budgets.  If expensive visual effects were used in the making of this movie, they are barely noticeable as the movie still feels like a very hand crafted film.  But, regardless of how the budget was used, this is undoubtedly another triumph for Paul Thomas Anderson.  It features all of the incredible filmmaking instincts that have made him one of our more exciting cinematic storytellers over the years, with perhaps a bit more scale to it.  I would also say that as entertaining as the film is, it also feels a bit slack in it’s pacing, especially compared to some of his much tighter films like There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love.  While the overall experience is still thrilling, you can feel at times when it slips into indulgence, which has hurt Anderson’s films sometimes.  But, it’s a minor nitpick on the film, because when the movie does get cooking it is an amazing thrill ride.  Again, Anderson’s skill with balancing tonal shifts is unmatched, and he does that a lot here.  At times you will be laughing hysterically at the absurdity going on in the film, and then a scene later the film will hit you with a gut punch of tension and gut-wrenching tragedy.  In many ways, that’s the biggest asset that this film has, because it is constantly leaving you unsure about what’s going to happen next, which is thrilling in it’s own way.  It’s a movie that only he can make, and that’s a rare specialty in cinema these days, especially when done on this scale.

What I especially love about what Paul Thomas Anderson does in One Battle After Another is the subtle world-building.  While there certainly are a lot of parallels in the film with regards to the state of the world today, the movie also creates this heightened world that only these kinds of characters could exist in.  The shadowy government organizations feel familiar to us, but Anderson also puts his own absurdist spin on them as well, making their secret organization a joke in of itself.  I also like how the revolutionary groups have become so entrenched in their routines, that their code speak way of communications has over time devolved into something like trying to reach customer service through a corporation’s hotline.  Everything is grounded and yet heightened at the same time.  There will probably be some discussion around this film that may make it controversial.  Certainly the mass incarceration of migrant people (primarily Latin American migrants as shown prominently in the film) is going to draw immediate parallels with the current situation in America.  Also the movie isn’t afraid to define the characters in clear black and white terms; the revolutionaries are definitely the good guys here and the white supremacists coded government figures are the bad guys.  The timing of this movie couldn’t be more prescient.  And yet, Anderson doesn’t use this movie to push any agenda either.  It’s merely the backdrop for this cat and mouse chase involving DiCaprio’s Bob, his daughter Willa, and Sean Penn’s Col. Lockjaw.  I do love that Anderson shows restraint here, because I can imagine this movie loosing all of it’s subtlety if it were given over to a less skilled storyteller.  Anderson certainly wants you to think about the injustices committed in this world and be conscientious, but at the same time he knows that the story must be engaging enough to guide us through this crazy world, and that’s why it remains focused on above all else.  It’s the thing that we all will engage with the most on our first watch of the movie, but I’m sure all the extra world details will help to make people want to revisit the film many times over in order to really absorb the world that Anderson created for this film.

The thing that I’m sure most people are going to take away from watching this movie are the performances.  Anderson has always been a great actor’s director, and he’ helped many of his performers deliver some of the greatest work of their careers.  He helped launch Mark Wahlberg’s career with Boogie Nights, showed us a different side of Tom Cruise in Magnolia (1999), made us believe in Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love, and got Daniel Day-Lewis the second of his three Oscars for There Will Be Blood. Now, for the first time he gets to work with one of the greatest actors of his generation, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the long awaited team up does not disappoint.  What I especially love is how loose Anderson allowed DiCaprio to be in this movie.  One of DiCaprio’s most under-utilized talents as an actor has been his knack for comedy, which we’ve seen used only sparingly in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).  Thankfully, Paul Thomas Anderson uses DiCaprio’s comedic chops to great effect here.  It’s especially hilarious watching how clumsily DiCaprio’s Bob steps back into the revolutionary game after so many years out of loop, and his growing frustrations with how the network operates now as opposed to when he was in his prime.  DiCaprio has some pretty spectacular freak-outs in this character role, and a lot of the fun of this movie stems from his character.  But, the true scene-stealer is Sean Penn as Col. Lockjaw.  This is one of Penn’s best performances ever, and that’s saying a lot for the two time Oscar winner.  His Lockjaw is a true transformative performance.  There are so many layers to this character that Sean Penn brilliantly gets to peel back.  I love how his tough guy exterior is so extreme that all it does is spotlight his insecurities that much more.  I especially love that Penn even worked out a unusual gait to the way Lockjaw walks, like every muscle in his body is clenched at all times.  And he’s also not afraid to make Lockjaw as loathsome as he possibly can be, and that in a way makes him even more absurd of a figure.  This is the kind of performance that I’m sure we’re going to be hearing a lot about come Awards season.  The movie also gives us a breakout performance from Chase Infiniti as Willa.  This is her first ever film role, and it is an impressive debut.  She has to carry so much of the film given that so much of it centers around her character, and she manages to have an incredible on screen presence for someone fairly new to this.  It’s especially impressive, given that she’s able to command the screen even in the presence of heavyweights like DiCaprio and Penn.  And while their roles are minor in comparison, Teyana Taylor and Benicio Del Toro also manage to shine in their performances as well.  In addition, like with so many other Anderson films, even the side characters have a ton of personality.

One thing that Paul Thomas Anderson has never failed to deliver on is making his movies look good.  He always works with the best cinematographers in the business, and the production designs on his movies are always incredibly detailed.  He’s also been a purist when it comes to shooting his movies on film.  He’s worked with 70 mm photography on many of his past films, but with One Battle After Another he decided to do something different.  Here he’s working with 35mm film, but he shot the movie utilizing a Vistavision camera.  Vistavision is experiencing a rather surprising resurgence lately after going unused for decades in Hollywood.  A precursor of the IMAX process, Vistavision allowed for larger image captures on 35mm film stock by running the film horizontally through the shutter of the camera rather than vertically.  This allowed for an image that was 8 perforations wide rather than the standard 4, making the image captured twice as sharp and large as usual.  Over time, the format went out of style, but gained attention again last year thanks to the Oscar winning camera work on Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024).  While The Brutalist used Vistavision for parts of the film, Anderson made use of it for the entire movie.  The result is really impressive, as it give the movie some really breathtaking visual flair.  While Anderson doesn’t go overboard with the photography, he nevertheless allows for the Vistavision image to do interesting things with depth of field and focus in many shots.  There is a spectacular sequence involving a car chase near the end of the movie that is one of the most breathtaking uses of camera work I’ve seen in a while.  The placement of the camera in that sequence is truly inspired.  Anderson is working with cinematographer Michael Bauman for the second time after their collaboration on Licorice Pizza, and this is his most dynamic camera work that we’ve seen yet.  Another excellent part of this movie is the musical score from Jonny Greenwood.  The Radiohead band member turned film composer has written music for every Anderson film since There Will Be Blood, and this is yet another brilliant piece of work from him.  The score at times plays like a heartbeat that just keeps pounding through the movie, driving up the tension.  It’s minimalist in the right ways, at times only consisting of one note played over and over again, but it perfectly fits with the chaos that’s unfolding on screen.  Both of these elements, combined with a film production that still feels hand crafted and lived in really helps to show that even with a larger budget at his disposal, Paul Thomas Anderson still can craft a film that feels distinctively him.

While I still hold a couple of Paul Thomas Anderson movies above this one, especially There Will Be Blood which is one of my favorite movies in general, I can definitely say that this is one of the year’s best films.  It’s just great to see one of cinema’s greatest talents still taking chances as a filmmaker and coming out with his integrity as an artist still in check.  It will hopefully bode well for filmmakers in general if this movie does very well at the box office, because it will allow the major studios to see the value in giving filmmakers like Anderson the money they need to make their big original concept films knowing that there is an audience out there for them.  Not every filmmaker manages to do that working under the judemental eye of studio executives.  But Anderson has built a respected reputation over the years as a filmmaker, one that only a fool would try to stand in the way of in Hollywood, and it’s great to see a studio like Warner Brothers recognizing that too.  They know that Paul Thomas Anderson can deliver on his promises as a filmmaker, and that’s why they allowed him to have the budget that he needed for this film.  As someone who has enjoyed many of his films, it is great to see Paul Thomas Anderson succeed so well in maintaining his unique cinematic voice while working within the studio system.  It may be a costlier movie, but it still maintains his signature to it’s core.  The performances are certainly worth the ticket price alone, especially with Sean Penn’s completely transformative work here.  And there is some thrilling camera work on display as well.  It will be interesting to see what kind of replay value this movie has with audiences over time.  I’m certainly eager to see it again, hopefully to catch all the things I missed the first time.  And thanks to the Vistavision photography, this is a movie that demands to be seen on a big screen.  I caught it in IMAX, and it made the experience all the more immersive.  That aforementioned car chase is especially breathtaking on a true IMAX screen.  But even so, this is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie that is indeed going to please his long time fans, while also at the same time hopefully drawing in a few new ones.  He’s a one of a kind filmmaker who certainly deserves more attention, and while One Battle After Another may not be his magnum opus, it is still a masterpiece that hopefully will add onto his already legendary status in Hollywood.

Rating: 9/10

It has been an interesting run for Spike Lee as a filmmaker.  The Georgian born and New York raised cinema icon became a pioneering voice in Black Cinema during the late 80’s and early 90’s.  He quickly developed a reputation as a talent on the rise immediately after graduating from the prestigious Tisch School of Arts at NYU with his first two features She’s Gotta Have It (1985) and School Daze (1988).  But it was his third feature that really grabbed the world’s attention.  Do The Right Thing (1989), Spike’s multilayered meditation on racial tensions in America was a bombshell movie when it first released, bringing much needed dialogue to an issue that for the most part Hollywood had been too afraid to tackle.  The film garnered wide critical praise, was spotlighted at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and also earned Spike his first Oscar nomination for his screenplay.  However, the movie did not earn a Best Picture or Directing nom that year as some had predicted, and the top awards that year went to another movie about race relations in America, but in a more “safe” fashion: Driving Miss Daisy (1989).  Despite the snub, Spike continued to press ahead and didn’t slow down.  He made two more smaller films, Mo Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991) before taking on his dream project; an epic historical biopic on the life of civil rights icon Malcolm X.  Malcolm X would be a monumental undertaking and it took everything he had learned up to that point as a filmmaker to pull it off.  One of the strongest assets he had at his side was an actor named Denzel Washington.  Washington had already won an Oscar for his supporting performance in the movie Glory (1989) and he got to work with Spike Lee for the first time on Mo Better Blues.  There would be no one better suited to bring Malcolm to life on screen than Denzel, and indeed it was a perfect match of actor and role, and a filmmaker to bring out the best in him.  Denzel would go on to earn his first Best Actor nomination for Malcolm X but would end up losing to Al Pacino that year.  Even still, Spike Lee and Denzel would prove to be a strong collaborative team that would over time span several films.

Though their career treks have taken different paths, both Lee and Washington have stayed good friends and this has resulted in three more films they have collaborated on.  There was the basketball themed He Got Game in 1998 and the bank heist thriller Inside Man in 2006.  But, after a long dry spell, the two are finally working together on a new film.  Denzel of course has remained a well respected fixture in Hollywood, finally winning that coveted Oscar for Best Actor in Training Day (2001) and becoming a consistent box office draw in films such as the Equalizer series.  Things have been a bit rockier for Spike Lee.  Though he has kept working all this time, both in narrative films and with documentaries, he hadn’t reached that high point he experienced in his early years with Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X.  That was until 2018, when Spike delivered a critical and box office hit with the racially charged crime drama BlackKklansman.  The film was a welcome return to form for Spike, delivering a tension filled narrative that also was provocative in it’s tackling of racial issues.  In addition to the critical praise the film also finally earned Spike Lee his first Academy Award for the film’s screenplay.  Though, of course, the movie lost out on Best Picture to another “safe” movie about race in America called Green Book (2018).  But even still, Spike Lee had a renewed creative spark that he would further put to good use with his next film; the Vietnam vet drama Da 5 Bloods (2020).  Bloods received a lot of praise from critics, including myself as it made it all the way to #2 on my best of the year list for that year, but it’s visibility was limited as it was released solely on Netflix without a theatrical screening, due largely to the pandemic.  It’s a shame that Da 5 Bloods didn’t get a bigger release, because in my opinion it was Spike’s best film since Malcolm X.  But, after a couple years, Spike Lee was ready to take on another film project, and this time he finally had the project that would be perfect for both him and Denzel.  It would be a new adaptation of the 1959 Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom, which was famously adapted by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa into the film High and Low (1963).  That Kurosawa adaptation is particularly noteworthy as it’s what has inspired Spike Lee to adapt his own film, even inspiring the title itself, Highest 2 Lowest.  The only question is, can Spike Lee’s version stand up on it’s own against the Kurosawa classic, or is it a pale imitation?

The film is set in New York City, across the two boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.  David King (Denzel Washington) is one of the world’s most successful record producers, creating an empire that has launched the careers of many recording artists.  He lives the high life with his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) in their penthouse Brooklyn apartment.  Also in the King family orbit is David’s assistant and chauffeur Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), who has a teenage son of his own named Kyle (Elijah Wright) that’s one of Trey’s closest friends.  While the family is living comfortably, David is beginning to make plans behind the scenes to try to buy back the company he founded so that it isn’t sold to a corporate conglomerate that he’s fears will destroy everything he has built.  He convinces many of his business partners to give up their shares in the company in order to stave off the corporate take over, but at the same time it’s putting his financial stability at risk as getting the money is putting him in serious debt.  At the point where it looks like he might succeed in his buy outs, something tragic and unexpected happens.  He receives a cryptic phone call telling him that his son has been kidnapped and that he’ll only be returned if a ransom is paid.  David and his wife quickly get the police department involved as they try to find his son.  Detectives Bridges (John Douglas Thompson), Bell (LaChanze) and Higgins (Dean Winters) set up operations in the King’s apartment, hoping to track down the kidnapper (A$AP Rocky) once David receives another call.  Miraculously, they manage to find Trey King safe and sound.  It turns out the kidnapper made a mistake and grabbed Kyle instead, believing he was Trey.  Now, David is in the difficult position.  Does he still go through with paying the ransom to save the life of someone else’s kid, even though it will put himself at incredible financial risk?  A lot is at risk, especially when media attention is cast upon the case.  Does David King destroy his reputation in order to save his financial gamble, or does he do the selfless thing and help save his closest friend’s only son.

It’s interesting to think about Highest 2 Lowest in regards to it’s status as a remake of a Kurosawa film.  Akira Kurosawa has probably had more remakes made of his films than any other filmmaker around the world.  Sergio Leone turned Yojimbo (1961) into his spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (1964).  Hollywood would also adapt Seven Samurai (1954) into The Magnificent Seven (1960).  Even Star Wars (1977) has elements of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958) woven into it’s story.  So, it’s not surprising that Kurosawa’s High and Low would also inspire it’s own remake as well.  Truth be told, Spike Lee could’ve just said that this was just another adaptation of the original McBain novel, but giving it the title Highest 2 Lowest certainly is meant to invoke the memory of the Kurosawa classic.  Now there is the danger of doing a remake poorly.  There have certainly been many subpar adaptations of Kurosawa’s movies.  Also Spike Lee already has a bad history with remakes, given his misguided attempt to remake Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) in a 2013 film starring Josh Brolin.  One thing that works in this remake’s advantage is that it includes the involvement of Ko Kurosawa as a producer; grandson of Akira Kurosawa.  But even without that connection, this is a remake that does indeed reflect back positively on the original film.  I would say that the movie works in the same way that Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars adapted Yojimbo.  It’s tackling the same story and involves similar characters, but the film definitely feels uniquely tailored to the filmmaker working on it.  Make no mistake, this is a Spike Lee movie, complete with all the stylish editing and visual flair that he gives to all of his films, as well as his typical musings about race and class in society in modern America.  And that is what makes this remake work so well.  Spike Lee and Akira Kurosawa both were drawn to this story based on it’s provocative premise about class struggles, but their spins on the material are uniquely their own.  Kurosawa framed it through the lens of hierarchy in post-War Japan, while Spike Lee frames his story through the lens of racial identity and privilege in contemporary America.  Same story, and similar message, but in very different voices.

One of the great things to see in this film is how Spike Lee uses this particular story and makes it adhere to his own tastes.  He provides an interesting take on the material by making it a reflection about privilege in the African-American community.  David King lives a life of privilege that you realize over the course of the movie came from his commodification of black excellence for mass consumption.  Described as “the best ears in the business” he has indeed helped many black artists enter the mainstream, but over time it has also alienated him from that same community.  His take over bid for the company that he created is not about helping to preserve the cultural importance of the art that he helped create, but rather about him retaining his position as the gatekeeper of that art.  Sure, saving artistic integrity and keeping it in the hands of the black community rather than handing it over to a soulless corporation is a worthwhile thing, but in doing so, David King is also leaving many of those same black artists out of determining what they want to do with their music.  It’s a conundrum that comes to a head when David sees the faults of his own creed come back to bite him with this kidnapping plot.  When it becomes about saving someone who isn’t even his own flesh and blood, we see him fundamentally change, and that’s a compelling story no matter the story’s setting.  Spike Lee is telling more than just a story about wealth and power here.  He’s telling a story about black identity as well; how people in the community change once they do achieve wealth and success.  Whether or not David King goes through with paying the ransom or not is filtered through that perspective.  As a black man in America, he probably had to go through a lot more hurdles in order to become the tycoon that he is today, and that’s something that he doesn’t want to throw away so easily in response to this kidnapping.  That’s where Spike Lee finds his unique angle on the material, which helps to distinguish it from Kurosawa’s.  Both films still deliver on the crime procedural aspects taken from McBain’s novel, but they definitely hit their own outlooks on the themes of the story in their own special way.

Of course the main draw of this remake is undoubtedly the stellar lead performance of Denzel Washington as David King.  There’s a reason why Spike Lee and Denzel has had such a fruitful collaborative partnership over 5 films now; because they both bring out the best in each other.  Denzel is in top form in his performance here, completely commanding every scene that he is in.  It’s a very different performance than that of the legendary Toshiro Mifune in High and Low.  Mifune was very subdued in his role, brilliantly capturing a wide range of emotions with a great deal of subtlety.  Denzel is a lot more showy in his performance, but that works for this film and matches the kind of nature that this character needs to display.  Corporate culture is very different between Japan and America, with American CEO’s being more brash and flashier than their Japanese counterparts.  Plus, he’s the CEO of a music company, so he’s got to be someone who’s got to deal with a lot of clients who are as self-promoting as he is.  He is this way so that he can maintain his place at the top.  Denzel uses his magnetic charm perfectly in this role, and is able to make David King relatable while at the same time making him funny and intimidating depending on the circumstances.  It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of his performance involved a fair bit of improvisation.  But, Denzel isn’t the only standout in the cast.  Jeffrey Wright also delivers a solid performance as Paul.  His more subdued performance works perfectly against Denzel’s bombastic acting in the film.  He also perfectly conveys the internal pain that he’s dealing with, wondering if he’ll ever get his son back alive.  The trio of actors playing the detectives are also wonderful in their roles, which is actually an interesting change from Kurosawa’s version as their part to play in the story was only given to one character before, played by Kurosawa favorite Tatsuya Nakadai.  And though his onscreen role is pretty limited, rapper turned actor A$AP Rocky also stands out as the kidnapper.  His eventual scenes with Denzel near the end are definitely some of the movie’s highlights.

One of the things that Spike Lee likes to do in most of his movies is to pay tribute to his home turf of New York City, and this film is no different.  From the opening credits sequence that is entirely made up of aerial shots of the city, you know that this will be a love letter to NYC, and the city definitely becomes a character in it’s own right.  There are a great many glamour shots of city landmarks, particularly the Brooklyn Bridge, which becomes a pivotal setting at one point in the story.  The diversity of the people in New York is also an important factor.  One of the most pivotal scenes from Kurosawa’s film was the train sequence, where the money exchange takes place.  Spike Lee takes that same moment and does his own spin on it, utilizing all the flavors of New York to make the moment even more exhilarating.  Of course, the subway system of New York City is a natural substitute for the Japanese rail network of the original film.  But as Denzel’s David heads further down the line, a lot of Yankee fans start to fill up the train on their way to a game.  They start chanting and the film intercuts between this scene and the location of the drop off site, which happens to be where the Puerto Rican Day parade is taking place.  The mix of Puerto Rican music and the chanting of “Let’s Go Yankees” on the train makes for a beautifully chaotic sequence, and it’s a great testament to Spike Lee’s talents as a visual storyteller to create that atmosphere to set this pivotal moment in the movie within.  Lee works here with his frequent cinematographer Matthew Libatique, and they create some beautiful sweeping shots of the city.  They also do a great job with the interior spaces of the Kings’ apartment.  Composer Howard Drossin also gives the film a beautifully rich score, which also cleverly weaves in some of the melodies that would be associated with the work that David King does.  Also, Spike Lee goes the extra length in his stylish presentation by cutting scenes together with graphical wipes; some of which even include the logo of his company, which is a very Spike Lee touch to add.  Overall, a very visually inventive and beautiful movie to witness on screen.

If you are a fan of the original film, be rest a assured that Spike Lee’s remake is reverential in all the right ways, but also is different enough to make it stand apart.  Kurosawa and Lee are very different filmmakers, and these two versions of the same story make that very clear.  But, it’s a remake that compliments it’s predecessor.  I have a feeling that one of Spike Lee’s intentions with this movie is to also shine a light on the original.  If you haven’t watched High and Low, I strongly recommend you see that as well.  It’s a genuine masterpiece and easily one of the best crime thrillers ever put on screen.  I also strongly recommend watching Spike Lee’s version as well.  Between the two, Kurosawa’s is the one I’d prefer more, but I am glad that this one exists now as well.  For one thing, it’s a great showcase for Denzel Washington in his top form.  He is clearly making a meal of his performance here, and it’s a lot of fun to watch.  The movie itself is also well crafted.  I already knew the direction of the story because I had seen the original, and even yet there were several points in the film that left me surprised.  And like a lot of Spike’s movies it’s got a great soundtrack and a visual flair that only he can deliver.  It’s a wonderful thing to see these two titans collaborating again, and hopefully it’s not the last.  This is definitely a movie worth seeing in a theater with an audience.  Unfortunately like Da 5 Bloods, this is a film made by a streaming platform; in this case Apple TV+.  Thankfully Apple (in partnership with A24) is giving this a limited theatrical run before it goes on Apple TV+ in September.  It’s a very theatrical film, so I strongly suggest seeing it on the big screen while you can.  I just wish the theatrical window was longer and the roll out a lot wider than just a handful of arts cinemas.  It’s a shame that so many streaming platforms are taking away so many great filmmakers out of the theatrical market, but at the same time, they are indeed the ones putting up the money to allow for filmmakers like Spike Lee to have the creative freedom to make movies like this.  Regardless, Highest 2 Lowest is another strong film from Spike Lee, who seems to be on a roll with his last 3 movies.  It’s a remake that does justice to the original while at the same time manages to be a great movie on it’s own.  Definitely seek out Kurosawa’s original if you haven’t watched it yet, but also give this newer one a watch as well.  It is definitely delivers far more highs than lows.

Rating: 8.5/10

Marvel has managed to get a remarkable amount of their comic book characters recognized around the world thanks to their movie adaptations.  But it has been a bit more difficult for one of their most popular titles.  Marvel’s first family, The Fantastic Four, started their life on the page in 1961.  Created by legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby and chief Marvel writer Stan Lee, the quartet of super powered beings have become one of Marvel’s best selling properties, managing to top the comic book charts even to this day.  It was also the first time a comic series was built from the ground up on a team dynamic, predating the X-Men and the Avengers.  What also set the Four apart was that they were a family unit as well.  Reed Richards and Sue Storm, known as Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Girl respectively, were a married couple, and their team also consisted of of Sue’s younger brother Johnny Storm (the Human Torch) and Reed’s best friend since childhood Ben Grimm (The Thing).  With that broad appeal thanks to their comic book success, it should have been very easy for them to translate to the silver screen.  This however has been more difficult than one would imagine.  Legendary B-Movie veteran Roger Corman took his stab at it in the early 90’s, and while earnest it’s safe to say that his version is not exactly an all time classic of the genre.  A decade later, after the comic book genre was finally starting to be taken seriously by Hollywood, 20th Century Fox tried to do their attempt at launching the Fantastic Four in it’s franchise.  There are good things to say about some of their Fantastic Four (2005), particularly with casting choices like Chris Evans as Johnny Storm and Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm, but it also paled in comparison to other comic book films of the time.  It did manage to spawn a 2007 sequel that introduced the Silver Surfer for the first time to the big screen, but it also bombed at the box office and killed any further attempts to grow the franchise.  By this time, Chris Evans had already taken on the role of Captain America as Marvel Studios was starting up their own line of films.  But, Fox still wanted to hold onto the rights to the Fantastic Four and keep it out of the hands of Marvel’s parent company Disney.  Sadly what resulted was one of the worst comic book movies in history.

2015’s Fant4stic is an epically bad movie, and a shining example of how not to adapt a comic book to the big screen.  For some reason, Fox wanted to give the usually bright and colorful Fantastic Four comics a dark and gritty adaptation, akin to what DC was currently doing with their Snyderverse movies.  The result was a movie that pleased no one and ended up destroying Fox’s share of the comic book movie market even more.  The sad thing is, because Fox refused to play ball with Disney, like what Sony did with their special arrangement that allowed Spider-man to be a part of the MCU, it prevented the Fantastic Four from being apart of the Marvel’s on-going story-line leading into the Infinity War arc.  But, things would change once Fox ended up being put on the market and were bought up by Disney in the process.  Now the Fantastic Four were finally home at Marvel Studios and could take their place in the MCU.  But, plans changed due to the Covid pandemic.  Because so many projects got pushed back, the world had to wait a bit longer to see Marvel’s first family make their debut in their new home.  And in those couple of years of waiting, Marvel’s box office track record started to wane.  The studio hadn’t been able to live up to the stellar box office results of the 2010’s, and it prompted Disney to start cutting back on the output of Marvel Studios.  But, thankfully the re-shuffling may have timed out right for the studio because in the last year it seems that a lot of the production woes that plagued the films of the previous couple of years are not dragging Marvel down anymore.  Their last film, Thunderbolts* (2025) had some of the best critical reviews that the studio has seen in many years, and that has helped to build some extra confidence for this new Fantastic Four adaptation heading into theaters right on it’s heels.  But what is interesting is just how exactly Marvel is fitting their first family into their on-going story.  The Fantastic Four are coming into the MCU pretty late into it’s history, which means their introduction can’t just be yet another origin story like all the others before.  The only question is, does The Fantastic Four: First Steps do justice to the comic book icons or does it continue the string of bad luck they’ve had up to now on the big screen.

One of the biggest gambles this movie takes is that it introduces the First Family of Marvel in an entirely separate universe than the one we are familiar with in the MCU.  This Fantastic Four exists on Earth 828, while the MCU is on Earth 616, dubbed the “Sacred Timeline.”  Given that Marvel is currently in it’s Multiverse phase, it stand to reason that these two parallel universes will collide eventually.  In this particular timeline, the Fantastic Four have been around as a team for the last 4 years, reaching a point where they have become the guardians of the Earth.  They are treated like celebrities in this world, which seems to be an advanced version of Mid-20th Century America.  While on break from their crime fighting duties, the Four make their home in the lavish Baxter Building in the heart of Manhattan.  One day, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) makes an important discovery that she immediately shares with her husband Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), the smarted man in the world.  She has learned that she’s pregnant.  Reed is excited, but also troubled, because he’s worried about the effect that the cosmic radiation that gave them their super powers may have on their unborn child.  The news of the welcome pregnancy is celebrated by both Sue’s brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and the world is collectively excited about the newest addition to the Fantastic family.  But the good times come to an end once a mysterious visitor comes to Earth.  The powerful alien being, named Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner), aka the Silver Surfer, has come to deliver a message, heralding the coming of the planet devouring entity known as Galactus (Ralph Ineson).  The Fantastic Four vow to the people of Earth that they will protect them from this Galactus threat, so they head back to space, following the Silver Surfer’s power signature.  They arrive many light years away from home to find the destroyed remains of a planet that’s currently in the process of being consumed by Galactus’ enormous intergalactic ship.  They find the giant super being, who reveals that he has plans for something other than the destruction of Earth.  He gives the Fantastic Four the most difficult of ultimatums; he’ll spare the Earth if they give up their unborn child to him.  Given that impossible choice, which path will the Fantastic Four choose; save their world, or their son?

Up to this point the Fantastic Four were adrift in the old way of doing things with Marvel licenses where the studios had all the creative control and not Marvel themselves.  Now that the Fantastic Four are back in the fold with Marvel Studios firmly established, people are eagerly anticipating how they will be debuting in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Considering what has come before, Marvel had a fairly low bar to cross, but this is also a time where Marvel has lost a step from their peak days.  So, how well did the Fantastic Four do in their big debut?  I’d say that the results vary depending on the way you look at it.  As far as Fantastic Four movies go, First Steps is far and away the best film we have seen yet from the super team.  For once we are actually seeing the Fantastic Four as more than just super heroes.  In this movie, they are an actual family and that dynamic is what drives most of the film’s best moments.  But, I also have to look at this film with regards to it’s place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has had a much stronger track record over the years than the Fantastic Four movies.  And viewing it through that, I’d say that First Steps is slightly above average for a MCU film.  It’s certainly a very good movie, and even at times great.  But it doesn’t quite grab a hold of you the same way that Marvel movies at their very best do.  I feel like a big part of that is because First Steps is trying to do a lot of heavy lifting in a short amount of time, and it comes at the cost of having moments where the movie is able to let us sit and absorb the film.  It also hurts the film that it comes so soon after DC’s Superman debuted; another movie that also had to speed through a lot of world-building in a short amount of time.  While I think that both movies are successful at what they set out to do, Superman just slightly beats it out thanks to it’s more graceful landing.  What First Steps manages to do is basically get it’s super hero quartet to be on par with what Marvel has done in the past.

Where the movie succeeds very well is establishing the Fantastic Four and their world which seems to be custom shaped just for them.  It’s an interesting creative choice to have this movie set in an alternate timeline, but it’s one that makes sense because it quickly distinguishes this film from all the other versions of the Fantastic Four that we’ve seen.  The movie is very much a love letter to Jack Kirby, even down to naming their universe Earth 828 (a reference to Kirby’s birthday of August 28).  We see the Four living in a Earth where the mid-century modern aesthetic took hold and continued to influence everything beyond, in architecture and fashion.  It’s a world permanently frozen in the 1960’s, but with all the same technological advances we’ve seen in the same 60 plus years since then.  Every travels in flying cars, but they all have that shiny chrome look of Cadillacs from that era.  The movie also pays homage to the Silver Age origins of the Fantastic Four by making references to all of the different foes that they fought through the years, including the very cheesy ones.  Giganto, the lizard like behemoth that appeared on the cover of Fantastic Four #1 even makes a cameo here.  But, when the movie moves away from the cheese towards heavier stuff, it also does a fairly good job of that too.  One of the biggest upgrades that this film has over past film versions is the villain Galactus.  While still a bit limited in character development, Galactus is nevertheless far better realized here than he was in his last appearance in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, where he was depicted as a giant dust cloud.  Here, we finally get a Galactus that is true to his comic book design, and to the movie’s credit, he is a fairly terrifying presence.  If you see this movie, please choose to watch this in IMAX, purely for the Galactus scenes alone, because he will indeed feel every bit as gargantuan as he’s meant to be.

One of the movie’s other strong points is it’s cast.  One thing that the movie had to get right was the line-up of actors who had to play the iconic characters, and I’d say that they did a great job with casting all of them.  The stand out here is Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm.  In all the past versions, Sue was often the least defined character of the group, because back when those movies were made we hadn’t really seen the genre define how to write for female super heroes.  Now in a world where both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel have broken down barriers in the genre, we’re able to see the writers of these movie bring more depth to a character like Sue.  Vanessa Kirby has to do a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting in this movie and she really excels at portraying Sue as a mother who will move heaven and earth to protect her child.  Another character that also gets a lot more depth this time around is Johnny Storm.  It’s interesting how the movie portrays his brash personality and shows how it acts as a shield for some of his insecurity.  In the film, we learn that he wants to show his worth to the team beyond his super power to generate fire from his body, particularly when it comes to his intelligence.  Joseph Quinn does a great job of portraying this aspect, and he also still manages to successfully capture the playful side of Johnny too; which is pretty impressive considering the big shoes he had to fill inheriting the role from Chris Evans and Michael B. Jordan.  Ebon Moss-Bachrach had a bit of an easier time considering that he’s playing the affable Ben Grimm, the movie’s most light hearted character.  At the same time, he’s also got to act through a CGI shell which is not easy, but somehow his personality manages to shine through the motion capture performance and he makes an instantly lovable Thing.  Unfortunately, with a cast of lead characters this big, one is inevitably going to get the short end of the stick, and that would be Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards.  Pedro’s performance is naturally very strong, but Reed is not really focused on in this movie.  He’s the guy who comes up with the solutions, but we don’t explore that much of his character beyond that.  It makes me think that a lot of his character development is being saved for future sequels, and of course the Avengers films.

The other spotlight of the movie is the way that it looks.  Of course the mid-century modern aesthetic is a bold choice on Marvel’s part, and it’s a great way to try something new and different with this property.  One of the biggest complaints levied at Marvel in recent years is that all their movies look the same, and it’s a criticism that is not unwarranted.  I can still remember just how bland and unremarkable Captain America: Brave New World (2025) was, and this is a vast improvement over that movie in every way.  The visual effects are also better utilized here than some of Marvel’s other recent movies.  The Thing in particular is a great achievement.  He looks so much like the Jack Kirby design, but you can still see the actor’s mannerisms shine through in the model without it looking off.  He very much looks like he’s occupying the same space with his live action co-stars, which is what the best CGI animated Marvel characters like Thanos and Rocket Raccoon have managed to do.  Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer is also beautifully realized.  I especially like that her silver skin is now perfectly polished either; that there’s tarnish in there as well, indicating that she’s a being of very advanced age as well.  The movie also does a great job of filling every scene with a lot of creative details.  It will probably take quite a few watches to spot all the little mid-century style touches they added to fill out their alternate timeline Manhattan skyline.  But, if there is one thing that I think will be far more memorable from this movie, it’s the musical score from Michael Giacchino.  The award winning composer (who’s also responsible for the Marvel Studios fanfare by the way) delivers some of his best work here, creating a score that could very well be as iconic as John Williams’ Superman them or Danny Elfman’s Batman theme.  Marvel has struggled to find music themes that become as iconic as the ones from DC, other than Alan Silvestri’s Avengers theme itself, but I think Giacchino may have struck gold here with an epic score that not only feels right with the mid-century aesthetic, but also fits perfectly with these particular heroes.

So, while I would say that it just falls a bit short of top tier Marvel, I will without question also say that the Fantastic Four have finally broken their cinematic curse.  This is a movie that does justice to this super hero team, particularly the version of the team dreamed up by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.  I just think that there is room for improvement, and I have a feeling that we’ve got a lot to look forward to with regards to the Four in Marvel’s future.  We already know that they have a part to play in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday (2026), and the teaser at the end of Thunderbolts* hinted at just how they’ll be making their way into the MCU proper.  I would certainly like to see them explore Reed Richards as a character more in the Avengers movies, because it seemed to me that a talent as big as Pedro Pascal was underutilized in this movie.  But, nitpicks aside, there is still a lot to like about this movie.  The visuals are top notch, and the cast is likable and well-suited to their characters.  I also like the fact that even if you aren’t familiar with Silver Age Fantastic Four, you can still easily get into the flow of this movie.  Like James Gunn’s Superman, it foregoes the origin story and just throws you into the fray with the Fantastic Four already firmly established as a super hero team.  All we need is a short little montage to catch us up to speed, which this movie cleverly does through a TV special package, and then it’s all fun from there.  A lot of credit goes to director Matt Shakman for getting the tone of this film right.  He carried over his expertise of handling classic genres on television, including Marvel’s own Wandavision series, and helped give First Steps an authentic feel of the mid-century world it was supposed to convey.  Riding off the critical success of Thunderbolts*, as well as the strong responses to their TV properties Daredevil: Born Again and Ironheart, it seems that Marvel has gotten a bit of their mojo back, and The Fantastic Four is continuing that win streak.  It’s coming at a good time too, as Avengers: Doomsday is just around the corner, as well as Secret Wars, which is supposed to culminate this current era of Marvel.  Marvel needed to find it’s footing again, and while First Steps isn’t top tier Marvel, it’s still a solid effort that shows they still got it, and that things are looking up as they head into the home stretch.  And that is just fantastic for all of us.

Rating: 8/10