Movies

On the masterwork of Tenet

~ AF

Christopher Nolan is unarguably one of the most talented filmmakers working today. I’ve loved his work since we saw Memento in a tiny little theater on a whim, and walked out with a different view of what a film could be. His work is smart, it’s challenging, and it’s gripping and engaging. Tenet seems to have received a mixed reception. I don’t think it’s my favorite of his movies, but it is certainly my favoritely crafted. It’s not very easy to follow the actual story, but it dives headfirst into creating a mood. Again, it’s unlike any other film I’ve ever seen, with multiple layers of meta structure. There were a lot of complaints about how the dialogue is inaudible over the blaring soundtrack, but I found that everything that was important for the viewer to know came through clearly enough, and the sound design itself was amazingly immersive and worked as a powerful element of the film’s environment. The action scenes were fresh and intense, the humor is tight and subtly delivered, and the storytelling aims high and almost entirely hits its target.

If you haven’t seen it, my recommendation is to watch it once, think about it for a little while, and then watch it again. Then come back here and enjoy these videos and articles:

A visual breakdown of the car chase scene:

A visual breakdown of the final attack scene:

This is the (real life) historical key to the entire movie, which fundamentally is just a huge pretentious pun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sator_Square

And some more background on this.

I like this video essay about the craft of the film:

And this may answer some of your lingering questions:

I hope you enjoy this movie as much as I do.

The great wasted opportunities of the Revenge of the Sith with some spoilers and musings about the life we live in and the nature of stories

~ AF

In preparation for the finale of Clone Wars, I did a binge watch through the highlights of the first seven seasons. The show starts a bit slow and takes some time to get its footing, but once it gets rolling, it’s absolutely great – easily one of the most fully realized elements of the Star Wars universe beyond the original trilogy. It does a great job with fleshing out its corner of the story and breathing life into all of the characters it touches. But there’s one glaring place it falls down – it does not give us any sort of adequate explanation for how Anakin becomes Darth Vader and turns to the Dark Side, or why. This was left to remain with Episode III, which also did a dismal job of showing this transition. It’s simply not believable that the character of Anakin, as he’s portrayed even to the very end of Clone Wars, becomes the greatest villain the universe has ever seen. There are a few glimmers of rule breaking – sometimes he kills someone to fix a problem and Obi-Wan shrugs disapprovingly. But even to the end, he’s still Anakin Skywalker, hero of the Clone Wars, and you’re rooting for him. There’s really no Darth Vader there.

As you might expect, I have a way to fix it.

Let’s back up a bit more and start with something else that’s completely unbelievable – Anakin’s relationship to Padme. As portrayed in Episode II, Padme goes from not really wanting to be around Anakin to being in love with him very quickly. There’s no real explanation offered for this change of heart, though it’s hinted at a bit. Anakin is probably the most powerful Force user… ever. It’s never explicitly stated that this is possible, but we know that the Force can have effects on people who aren’t Force-sensitive. What if the Force could be used to manipulate someone’s emotions and make them fall in love? If that’s not a Dark Side power, I don’t know what is. But what if a sufficiently powerful Force user could do this subconsciously, without even realizing they were doing it? Let’s say that’s what happened. Padme isn’t really in love with Anakin, but she thinks she is due to the effects of the Force, and he doesn’t even realize what’s going on. Things go on like that for a while, their relationship progresses. And then, eventually, she gets pregnant, with at least one extremely powerful Force sensitive fetus (Leia’s Force-sensitivity is up in the air, we’ll discuss that another day). As this child grows within her, a protective aura follows, and she starts to resist and realize what has transpired. Padme goes to the only person she can trust with this information, General Kenobi. Anakin doesn’t understand, he’s confused. Maybe this is the point at which Palpatine throws the switch and convinces Anakin that Padme and Obi-Wan are conspiring against him. In a jealous rage, he confronts them.

Anakin has always been the better warrior, more cunning, more daring, more bold. Obi-Wan is losing, but maintaining his ground. Anakin starts to get frustrated with the fight, and Padme tries to break it up. Anakin loses control and inadvertently unleashes a Force lightning blast, which stands to mortally wound Padme. At the last minute, Obi-Wan inserts his lightsaber into the blast, turning it back on Anakin. The feedback leaves his body badly scarred and damages his limbs. Obi-Wan speaks some reason into him, but it’s too late. Anakin is devastated by what he’s done. His body is wrecked, and his mind is crushed under the weight of years of guilt, brought to a head by the murder of the woman he does truly love. Padme is rushed to a medical droid where the twins are saved, but she doesn’t survive. Palpatine arranges for Anakin to be transferred to his private hospital for special care, but no one ever checks up on him because they’re distracted with the fall of the galactic Senate and the massacre of the Jedi which somehow takes 20 more years to result in the destruction of the Republic.

Anyway: Arise, Lord Vader.

It didn’t have to go specifically this way, there are a lot of other ways to tweak it. Maybe Obi-Wan and Padme have a secret attraction and there’s a love triangle, more motivation for Palpatine to spark. Maybe there’s some other event that doesn’t involve fridging Padme (like even the canon version does). Maybe you don’t like the whole Force lightning thing and that’s too close to how Palpatine got the way he was (but I’d get rid of that too). The point here is that like so much other recent Star Wars, they were so close to having this be epically great, and missed the mark with sloppy storytelling and weak character motivations. Anakin being such a powerful Force user that he can tap into Dark Side powers without even realizing it, and then becoming addicted to it after a mental collapse from accidentally hurting people he loved – that would have been a pretty interesting arc to me. We’re never given a compelling reason why Anakin turned to the Dark Side, and the masterful filling in that the rest of Clone Wars did brings this into even harsher focus.

The great wasted opportunities of the Rise of Skywalker with some spoilers and musings about the life we live in and the nature of stories

~ AF

I was going to let this go, but I had some followup discussion about my comment about how Finn and the other characters in Rise of Skywalker were wasted, and I needed to get some more thoughts out.

Star Wars story structure has a long history of parallel forks – more than one plotline whose tines interlock. This, I hope you’ll agree, heightens the sense of tension and creates the illusion of a more coherent world. These storylines are independent and sometimes stray, but they connect at key points to bring the characters together emotionally and create meaningful bonds. In the Star Wars mainline trilogies, these storylines have traditionally been: 1) Jedi mysticism, a sense of wonder about and inclusion in the unknown forces and powers that guide the universe. This is the lure of power. 2) the galactic government / Empire / Republic, the background of the structure of how the people in the galaxy fight for what they think is power over other (mostly) humans in the absence of the direct line to power that The Force represents, and 3) the regular people just trying to make a living by trying to ignore the power struggles of the various elites. In the original Trilogy, these storylines are clearly represented by Luke, Leia, and Han, and the interesting parts are where they overlap (Han joins the rebellion after all, Luke and Leia are opposite sides of the same hereditary thirst for power, etc…).

This structure is largely blown apart in the recent Trilogy, but mostly unintentionally, through sloppy storytelling. Let’s look at how this could have gone.

Finn is introduced in a very strong way. He’s a First Order trooper raised in a life of faithful service to the government with a moment of clarity that he’s actually the bad guy. So he defects, and this story… really goes nowhere at all. Finn would have had a much more interesting arc if his realizing he could break away from the First Order could be the seed of an actual rebellion in the First Order. We don’t get any insight into the rank and file of the stormtroopers in the movies, and this could have been a great entry point into that. Are they evil? Are they brainwashed? Are they religious zealots? Are they acting out of fear? Do they think they’re doing the right thing? On the face of it, they’re the legit government, but this story also crosses over to the lines of the regular people. They’re pawns, but they can have some power. Here’s your allegory about the influence of individual actions on collective waves of accomplishment. All it takes is the right spark to trigger a movement.

Poe… I’m not really sure what to do about Poe. The character as written in the trilogy is fairly bland and uninteresting, but I actually liked what they started to do with him in Rise of Skywalker the best out of the three. Exploring his checkered past with the criminal underbelly could have had some crossover with his escape from that world and a similar liberating element to bring others out into legitimate enterprises. I need to think about this one some more.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about Rose except that she’s criminally underutilized in this movie. She could very easily have been worked into all of these plot threads as an actual character with agency. She probably deserves her own movie.

And then there’s Rey. Quite frankly, bringing Palpatine back as the big bad pulling the strings behind the curtain is some bullshit right there. But they could have turned into the wind and pulled an interesting story out of this. I’ve already talked about how it was totally in line with the rest of Star Wars that her parents were nobody and that was fine. It didn’t need to be Palpatine per se, and it didn’t need to be about her lineage – it could have been about the overall influence of the formerly living Sith. Given that light Jedi have a sufficient connection to the Force that they can attain some life after death, it’s not entirely unreasonable for the Sith to be able to do this too. In the Star Wars movies, this has never been straight up resurrection. I would have even been okay with the spirit of Palpatine as part of the Sith collective if it hadn’t been “literally Palpatine’s body and legacy”. Imagine if you will that the crux of this conflict was not “we have to find a thing to find a thing to find the Sith who are trying to conquer the galaxy again and kill Palpatine fucking again” but instead – we need to understand this ability for the dead to keep interfering in the affairs of the living, and in order to stop the Sith from doing it, we also have to cut off the Jedi. We wipe the slate clean. No more Sith coming back from the dead, but also no more Force ghosts of dead Jedi. They could have used this to make a point about the way we hold onto the things we have great memories of in history, and have trouble letting go. We could have made a formal goodbye, and had a proper sacrifice that felt real, with deep emotional consequences. Our heroes get to save the day again, but they also get to pass the baton.

Star Wars is a big part of our modern mythology. The end of this story could have been a powerful fable about enjoying what we’ve done before, honoring it, and letting it go to let something take its place and bloom with a renewed sense of energy. Star Wars has always been about hope, but it’s also been about wanting to know what happens next. I want to want to know what happens next.

I never thought they would sink Solo

~ AF

I saw Solo, and while I was somewhat hesitant going in, I was at least hoping it to be a solid and fun heist movie. The initial reviews seemed to point towards “Alden Ehrenreich isn’t a great Han Solo as we know him, but if you can forget that, it’s all ok”. That would have been just fine, I’m not as emotionally tied to Han Solo as some are. Unfortunately, the movie is a near-complete mess. It’s made up of pieces that could fit together well, but in practice don’t. None of the jokes land with any force, several major plot elements make no sense whatsoever, and it ends up just being a complete waste of time. The movie has nothing interesting to say, there’s no there there, and the entire thing is simply trite. Donald Glover’s performance as Lando is entertaining, particularly his capes, and L3’s robot rebellion is probably the best part of the movie. My overall impression of this movie is that they got a bunch of people in a room to do some free association about what reminds people of Han Solo, and they just made that into a checklist. I imagine something like this:

  • Millennium Falcon. Nice ship. What’s up with the two things in front where there should be one thing?
  • Not the lightsaber guy.
  • The Kessel Run but that line about 12 parsecs never made any sense. Better explain.
  • Sometimes he runs away from things and then accidentally runs into the thing he’s running away from. Do that again! So funny.
  • He used to be a pilot in the Imperial Army.
  • No one has properly examined the provenance of his name. Better explain.
  • He humorously calls his furry friend “Chewie”. That might be short for something. Better explain.
  • Said furry friend likes to play 3D chess. Who does that?
  • Said furry friend was rescued by Han at some point, so he sticks around. Better explain.
  • Remember, no lightsabers, no matter how much you like that noise. Do a thermal detonator joke instead.
  • Lando is a dude.
  • His career before Star Wars is deeply connected to the origins of the Rebellion. No wait, it’s not. Do that anyway though.
  • Holy shit we forgot about the dice.

A brief interlude: the dice are not a thing. The dice are never explained as a thing of importance. They just … appear one day and they’re supposed to be this totem for Han. There were some dice hanging in the Falcon cockpit for one brief moment in the original movie as a joke, they were not inscribed with an alien language, and both this movie and The Last Jedi have somehow latched onto them as if they were some iconic element that represents everything about our favorite gambling scoundrel in one neat little golden package. Except… no. There’s no backstory, there’s no meaning, and there’s no actual emotional weight. On second thought, maybe this is a perfect metaphor for this movie.

Some other things in no particular order that don’t work:

  • The first sequence doesn’t fit together. I guess that trying to escape and then running into the people he was escaping from is “a thing that happens to Han” now, but this is really silly for it to be a thing that happens over and over again. The setup is out of place – it seems like this entire first part was written for a 16 year-old Han, and it might have worked ok if they did that, but then it might have come off as an awkward replay of the opening scene of the Star Trek reboot. 
  • I don’t like that they made Lando an out-and-out cheater. He’s a manipulator, sure, but that entire sequence left me with a really bad taste in my mouth, and that kind of behavior would definitely have gotten him killed at some point along the path _waaaay_ before this. I liked the performance, but this felt really wrong.
  • Qi’ra should not have been a love interest from Han’s childhood (er… earlier adulthood?). Not everything has to be a connected thing. 
  • Han joining the Imperial Army as it’s presented here makes no sense. I haven’t seen Clone Wars or Star Wars Rebels, but this is supposed to be some amount of time before the beginning of Star Wars. The Empire isn’t really THE EMPIRE yet, until the Emperor dissolves the Senate at the beginning of Star Wars. Han joining the Imperial Academy is… signing up to work for the legitimate government. It would be much more believable if that was where he became disillusioned with the atrocities they were committing. Artfully done, this is probably a whole movie by itself.
  • Wait… was Chewbacca straight up murdering and eating people in the pit before Han came along? Somehow he can’t eat a porg, but this is fine?
  • It makes no sense that an orphan from Corellia speaks Kashyyyk.
  • I’m still not sure why the Kessel Run is a thing with a name that people do and other people recognize. 
  • So… L3 is a crusader for robot rights, leads an actual robot rebellion (successfully, I might add), and Lando’s response is “we’re just going to merge you with the navigation computer for the ship condemning you to a lifetime of horrible slavery but at least you’ll be close to me forever… until I lose you in a card game to evidently the galaxy’s worst smuggler who will himself eventually just misplace you and you’ll end up in a junkyard for a while”. But then you’ll end up with Rey, which I guess is nice. Please don’t let this be a thing in the next movie.
  • None of the heists actually make any sense. We can’t invade this rival gang’s turf because we have an uneasy agreement with them, but maybe that’ll be okay because we’re not associated with you, but just in case, bring my extremely highly visible known associate who I throw lavish parties with. And especially don’t bring an ice pack or specially designed canister to help keep this highly unstable chemical from overheating.

I was disappointed that the movie was as bad as I was expecting it to be from the initial trailer. There’s definitely more, but I’m out of energy and really I just wanted to use the pun in the title. So we’ve got that going for us.