Shazam is a riot! #Shazam #MarkStrong #moviereview

Shazam is a wish-fulfilment movie in which a foster kid becomes the adult superhero he’s always dreamed of being. He (and we) have great fun childishly experimenting with his super-powers and buff body in an adult world. There’s also a suitably menacing supervillain to be confronted (played by the ever cool and cold Mark Strong), not to mention a demon horde (the seven deadly sins).

There are lots of self-aware references to DC’s Batman v Superman film, but the tone of DC’s Shazam is more akin to Marvel’s Deadpool, in truth. And DC are right to follow Marvel’s lead, cos Shazam really works as a consequence. Shazam even brings something new to the party, because where Deadpool is all adult cynicism and self-indulgence, Shazam is all youthful innocence and generosity of spirit. It is huge credit to the writers and director that they managed to pull off a PG-13 film that still offers enough for an adult audience.

There are also meta references to the usual ‘Chosen One’ and ‘Hero’s Journey’ motifs of superhero stories (see Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces if you want to know more). Shazam subverts them very entertainingly. We realise that anyone can be hero if they choose to be so. Hand-in-hand with that, we understand that anyone can be a villain if they choose to be so. So this is a story about the risk, self-knowledge and bravery one requires if they are going to self-actualise. It’s a healthy message in this infantalised (and infantalising) era of nappy-wearing self-obsession.

So Shazam is more than just a rites of passage movie. It is more than just a superhero movie. It is more than just a kids’ movie. It is more than the sum of its parts. Give it a watch – you’ll eventually enjoy it despite yourself… I did, anyway. (Okay, it’s a bit slow at the start, but it gets there in the end.) It scores a hugely respectable and feel-good 8 out of 10 from me.

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I’m a Star Trek fan, so I live in hope – review of Star Trek Disco, season 2 #StarTrekDiscovery #Netflix

Guest review supplied by Nadine West @andiekarenina…

Let me be clear: I absolutely love the individual members of the cast and crew of Star Trek: Discovery. During Season 1, I was obsessed with “After Trek”, the Netflix banter-with-the-stars show that was available to watch once the episode of the week had aired, because Sonequa Martin Green, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp et al were just all so darned adorable. Their respect and love for each other shines through, and the showrunners have made sterling efforts to craft a piece of popular science fiction that embraces diversity with true Trekkian IDIC fervour. I would squeeze every man, woman and tardigrade involved in the series, make them mojitos and cupcakes, and have their babies.

And yet. And yet. There is a big problem, and the problem is that now, at the end of Season 2, I am so unbelievably sick of this ponderous first person Star Trek that I could scream.

Let me explain. Just in case you don’t know, the designations of first and third person come from prose fiction: first person means a narrator who tells the story as “I”, like in Jane Eyre or To Kill a Mockingbird, and third person is where no one character is speaking, where the author can move more fluidly around the stories of the characters, who are “he/she”, like in Of Mice and Men or Harry Potter. First person means you’re deep inside one head, seeing only what that person sees, and you’re also a bit stuck there…and you begin to see my drift. I am so sick to the back teeth of being stuck in Michael Burnham’s head that I want to smash my way out of her fictional skull with a claw hammer and experience anything, ANYTHING, beyond her frame of reference.

Now I know Trek has always had central characters. Yes, there were more Spock episodes than Sulu episodes, more Picard episodes than Geordi LaForge episodes. And yes, there was a point at which the Voyager writers’ room forgot that any character except Seven of Nine existed, but I blame that on the hip-to-waist ratio hypnotism effect and forgive them. But broadly speaking, all previous Trek series have been confidently, vibrantly third person storytelling which allows us to see a full spectrum of characters’ lives – both those in our regular crew AND those we meet along the way. Some token examples amongst so many: in TNG, we saw more minor characters like Deanna Troi drive many episodes, delved into her complex relationship with her mother (all hail Lwaxana!) and even saw her involved with complex storylines like working undercover as a Romulan officer to aid Romulan defections (Face of the Enemy, TNG 6:14). In DS9, Quark, Dax et al drive several humorous and moving episodes: in Voyager, even the omni-tedious Tom Parris gets to be the star of his own Sliding Doors-style narrative in Non Sequitur, amongst many others. Even cameo characters – Joan Actual Collins, anyone? – are allowed room to grow and become firm fan favourites.

Let’s turn, then, to Season 2 of Discovery. If Season 1 was focused on Michael Burnham, then Season 2 developed a kind of Michael Burnham OCD which deformed everything else around it. Tilly’s genuinely interesting confidence growth arc? Sidelined. Ariam, a fascinating character with great story potential? Featured, corrupted, spaced and exploded in five minutes flat for dubious plot reasons. Stamets and Culber’s hideously painful reunion, separation and resolution? Nah, eight lines of dialogue across five episodes ought to do it

Stamets: Everything is super perfect now you’re back from the dead, golly gee.

Culber: I have seen too much. I am no longer the man you knew. We must break up.

Stamets: *sad eyes*

Culber: Now I shall have a fight with Tyler.

Stamets: *sad eyes*

Culber: I shall now go and work on the Enterprise for reasons.

Stamets: *sad eyes, melancholy astrophysics*

Culber: PSYCH! I shall stay with you now you are injured and we might die, love puppy.

Stamets: K. I’m very bleeding. I miss my spore drive.

I exaggerate. But honestly not by much. The writers clearly also have no idea what to do with Jet Reno, my actual favourite new Trek character in eons, so they just give her two lines of “generic acerbic lesbian bantz” every three episodes. As for everyone else on the bridge who’s not Saru, you would have to google their names before you could discuss them. Don’t pretend to me. You refer to her as “redhead who looks a bit like Willow from Buffy with the face-thing” too. Indeed, at the end of Season 2, Admiral Cornwell (Who? The one who’s been hanging around without much to do who isn’t Michelle Yeoh, that’s who) is summarily exploded by a photon torpedo in what is clearly intended to be a heart-rending moment…but since we know next to nothing about her, we simply go “eh, torpedoes” and shrug, before flashing back to yet another endless scene of Michael and Spock droning on about their feelings.

And droning feels like the operative work here: S2 Discovery was remarkably one-note from start to finish, because it abandoned episode variation in favour of through-arc. There’s no room for more light-hearted, positive, even fun episodes here, when everything is wall-to-wall Vulcan childhood trauma and looming apocalypse. (Sidebar: tv writers? Enough apocalypse already, guys. Seriously. Umbrella Academy, Sabrina, Thrones, Disco and sundry others – make us genuinely care about saving ONE life. I promise you faithfully that it will be more emotionally powerful than all your “oooh the world nearly ended but it didn’t” shenanigans, however much brass-and-string music you wheel out. Wrath of Khan, guys. Joyce on Buffy. Re-watch and learn.)

By far my favourite episode of this series was the most traditional Star Trek episode of them all, New Eden, closely followed by the next most traditional, Sounds of Thunder. In New Eden, the crew discover a human civilisation on a remote planet, living in prelapsarian harmony; our crew must wrestle with the dilemma of whether to leave them in their innocence or to tell them the truth some of them half suspect – that they belong to an advanced and intergalactic species. In Sounds of Thunder, we meet Saru’s species and their eternal enemies, the Ba’ul, and our preconceptions of the history between these two races are skilfully and enjoyably subverted. These two episodes stand out because they are the best of Trek: outward looking, full of the spirit of – ironically – discovery, and focused on exploring the universe and the moral dilemmas that arise as we learn more. In both of these episodes, I genuinely cheered at the intelligent writing and plotting that took me out of Michael bloody Burnham’s endless psychodrama and into the starry galaxy instead.

Perhaps next season, with the confirmation of a new showrunner and the option to re-boot a little, Discovery will begin to find its feet and its wider horizons. I’m sceptical, but I’m a Star Trek fan, so I live in hope.

Embodiments of evil!

Luna Press Publishing are soon to be publishing A Shadow Within: Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’ve got an essay in the collection entitled ‘Embodiments of evil and reflections of social change in second-world fantasy’. You can read about it here: https://www.lunapresspublishing.com/single-post/2019/04/14/C4P-A-J-Dalton—Embodiments-of-evil-and-reflections-of-social-change-in-second-world-fantasy

Remarkably un-male-gazey – Captain Marvel review #BrieLarson #CaptainMarvel #GooseTheCat

Guest review supplied by Nadine West @andiekarenina…

I don’t remember the 1990s being this cool. Truthfully, if you actually lived through the 1990s you will probably have a split thought process as you watch Captain Marvel: firstly, that Garbage, Hole, top-gun shades and flannel shirts were all much more awesome than pop culture history has given them credit for; secondly, that this pop culture has been pretty strenuously cherry-picked…and anyway, it’s Brie Larson who makes it all cool.

There is something remarkably un-male-gazey about this latest instalment in the MCU, something that felt fresh and different in a way that DC’s Wonderwoman from 2017 failed to fully deliver. Maybe it’s partly the 1990s clothes after all: it’s hard to let your camera crawl all over your female protagonist’s curves if said curves are hidden under Gen-X layering and baggy jeans, but it’s a long cold drink of fresh water, as a woman in the cinema, watching a comics franchise, to see a female hero framed, shot and lit like a character, not a pneumatic ass-robot. Partly, though, it’s the writing. Hat tip to Ryan Fleck, the only chap in the writing and story-creation process, but this is a film that wears its women-positive credentials all the way down to the bone. Anna Boden (writer/director) and Geneva Robertson-Dworet (writer) offer us a script that is refreshingly free from heteronormative tropes and forced love-interests from top to bottom: Jude Law’s Yon-Rogg could have been the sexy mentor with an erotic hold over his beautiful protégé, but he isn’t. Young Nick Fury – an eerily de-aged Samuel L. Jackson – could have been lechily fascinated by young Carol, or paternalistically amazed by her talents, but he isn’t. It’s almost as though the writers were interested in getting a hero story told, and didn’t need a digression into “yes, but boobs” getting in the way.

Brie Larson, as Vers/Carol/Captain M, has been criticised for being too bland, too baffled, but I found her compelling throughout. She has humour, not in “wisecracking banter” – and yes, Iron Man et al, I’m rolling my eyes at you – but as in wryness, a sense of the absurd and an understated intelligence that informs her performance. A story that spends a good half of its running time with an amnesiac protagonist is always going to result in a confused central character, which makes it all the more moving when Danvers finds herself reunited with her best friend and co-pilot Maria Rambeau, and pieces together the legacy of love and found family that the Kree have stolen from her. Lashana Lynch is brilliant here: Maria’s character is wounded by loss, protective of herself and her daughter, loves Carol fiercely and, just when the viewer might begin to feel a bit queasy about the POC-as-sidekick trope, is given lots of agency and action that’s all her own.

The plot is largely cleverly handled: it has divided critics, and the sympathy-switcheroo halfway might have been ultimately unsurprising, but the narrative risk to begin in the Kree world with minimal exposition pays off, just as the second half with its refugee/oppressed group allegory works well as far as it goes – these are broad strokes administered without subtlety, absolutely, but they are not without resonance to a 2019 audience. The other caveat I have about the plot is towards the end, and this one I can’t quite get past: once Carol is freed from the control of the Kree, she essentially becomes unstoppable, firing lasers from her hands, knocking missiles out of the sky, flying around, doing energy booms to scare bad guys, GLOWING FROM WITHIN…and, well, meh. Superpowers ain’t no fun if they’re limitless, as we’ve all learned, and the finale of Captain Marvel leaves us with a rousing butt-kicking that has no damn jeopardy left in it.  Of course she’s going to win. Of course she’s going to hang in the sky glowing yellowly like we’ve learned nothing from the misery of watching Iron Fist.

That said, there’s plenty to leave an audience happy. Goose the cat is everything everyone has said he is, and more. Nick Fury is just wonderful in every way, as is sarky Australian Skrull-fella Talos. The meta-Marvel stuff is as fun as ever, with even a final-reel gag about how you pronounce “Marvel” to cheer up the fan-boys and girls. The locations and set-dressings are brilliant, and anyone over the age of 35 will be insufferable as they shout “Ooooh, PJ Harvey poster! OOOOOH, Jumping Jack Flash with Whoopi Goldberg VHS case! OOOOOH I had that Sony Sports Walkman!”

Young people, let them have this one. It’s not very often that you get to have a fun superhero movie with incredible women at its heart that ALSO allows you to believe, for two hours, that the 1990s were brilliant.

Some proper Airyfairyiam – review of Star Trek Discovery episode 9 #StarTrekDiscovery #ProjectDaedalus

Good episode, this one. We learn that Airiam was a normal Starfleet officer who was in a horrible shuttle crash: her husband died and she could only survive as a cyborg; and every night she has to decide which memories to delete because of her limited capacity. There is a moral dilemma here, as in many ways she doesn’t wanna hang on to the painful memories, even though they define her. It makes her an intriguing and compelling character from the get-go. She is lonely and only has emotional input from playing various parlour games with others – without a human body, her social options are entirely limited. It makes her a tragic figure really, and this is the main interest of the episode.

It starts poorly. The female admiral (Cornwell) arrives on the Disco to give us all the exposition and scenario we need for this episode. Sigh. Bad writing. And SPOILERS straight from the beginning. Very bad writing. We are told we have to get to the HQ of Section 31, known as ‘Control’, which is the superbrain of Starfleet. The thinking is Control has lost control to ‘logic extremists’ (Vulcan terrorists). Meanwhile, Airiam’s eyes go red every now and then, due to the alien infection she got several episodes back.

We get to Control, Burnham and Spock having an argument about the pros and cons of logic along the way (vaguely relevant, but also fairly contrived). Airiam continues to act suspiciously – she doesn’t even trust herself – and nor does Commander Nhan – not that either of them bother to flag it up to anyone in a position to stop her.

The away-team (containing Burnham, Airiam and Nhan, OF COURSE) arrives in Control. It’s a mess. There’s a showdown… and it actually works. It’s emotional and tragic. And we pretty much save the universe from ‘the extinction of all sentient life’. Phew, that’s alright then.

But this episode works overall. There are decent themes about the nature of being, artificial intelligence and sentience. Worth a look.

The disorder of ‘The Order’ on Netflix #theorder #netflixreview

So, in quite orderly fashion, a college kid joins a secret magical order (called ‘The Order’). All ordinary so far. But then he’s extraordinarily kidnapped and turned into a werewolf, meaning he’s now a disorderly inside man in the werewolf fight against the Order. We never really find out why the werewolves are fighting the Order, but werewolves aren’t great thinkers, so never mind.

A love interest is chucked in. There are buff boys and bints aplenty. There’s a range of random murders (the police never get involved though, for some unfathomable reason), meaning there really can’t be many students left alive at this college. But no one seems too upset by that, since pretty much all the students are so annoying. There are enchanted blades and stabbings, but magic goo to heal the wounds, except when the series forgets about the magic goo and wants to create jeopardy. There are betrayals (sort of). There’s a kinda cool ‘necrophone’ that lets people speak to the dead, but it gets pretty promptly destroyed (shame). There’s a magical gauntlet that tortures people till they tell the truth (use it on Trump!). Oh, and there’s a deep-voiced mad supermagus with a big old grimoire that might destroy the world… or save it… we’re not sure which and it doesn’t matter really.

This series is utter junk in terms of character and continuity. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be compelling watching. But somehow it is. It’s fairly baffling how it manages to pull it off. True, it avoids clumsy exposition and there are some funny lines… but is that all we need these days? Maybe. Don’t we need logic and credible plotting? Apparently not. Expedience seems to be the name of the game. High tempo and fun rushing around is all we want these days, cos that’s all we have time for in our stressful and hectic lives. I can’t believe I’m saying this: I enjoyed the series and would recommend it to a degree. Says a lot about me, probably.

Hugh dumps Stamets! Star Trek Discovery episode 8 #StarTrekDiscovery #IfMemoryServes

Well, it’s been coming for a while. ‘New Hugh’ isn’t comfortable in his own skin… because it’s not his own skin really… cos he has a new body due to his resurrection by the Mycelium Network. Stamets prepares New Hugh’s favourite meal (date night)… except it’s not New Hugh’s favourite anymore. He has a memory that it’s his favourite, but his body doesn’t respond to it as his favourite. And his body doesn’t respond in the old way to the increasingly clingy and needy Stamets either. Stamets keeps possessively holding on to the New Hugh, which only drives New Hugh away. It’s quite moving really.

New Hugh then sees Ash Tyler in the corridor. Ash murdered Hugh, remember. It’s a surreal moment. New Hugh then attacks Ash in the canteen… and none of the crew try to stop the fight. Indeed, not even Pike can blame New Hugh. It’s a fascinating scene.

Now, if you recall, this series likes to ‘double if not triple’ its themes, so we then move to Spock, who also doesn’t fit in his own skin… or own mind to be more precise. Michael Burnham and Spock head for Talos IV so that Spock’s mind can be cured: he’s been understanding time as ‘fluid’ instead of ‘linear’, and that’s threatening to destroy all his logic, you see. And apparently Spock’s bonce is gonna be important to save the universe from being destroyed by some unknown evil alien. Actually, the Talos IV stuff is great fun cos it allows the show to have a retro title sequence that shows footage from the ‘old series’ episode set on Talos IV.

And then we move to Airiam (cyborg crew member, not as much fun as Data), who also doesn’t fit in her normal body… cos she’s been possessed by the evil alien who makes her eyes go red! No one notices how weirdly she’s been behaving (or that her eyes go red). But loads of data has been transmitted off the good ship Disco, so everyone’s on the alert. They all think Ash Tyler is responsible (sending stuff to Section 31), so Pike removes Tyler’s badge! Arggh. He needed that badge to complete his collection. It’s so unfair!

All in all, I really enjoyed the ‘If Memory Serves’ episode. You see, I’ve stopped demanding that this series should have proper stories for its episodes. I’ve given up on that. I’m now just along for the ride.