Category Archives: 2024 Movies
Uglies (2024)
Even though Uglies is based upon a book series that hails back to 2005, it feels so much like it was developed in a vat subsisting on the runny discharge from other YA dystopian projects, finally settling into an unappealing mixture of familiar tropes. In this post-apocalyptic future world, society has rebuilt itself with a caste system that celebrates beauty. Teenagers undergo surgical operations and brainwashing to make themselves a member of the Pretties, the cool kids. If you’re even remotely familiar with YA storytelling, you can likely guess exactly where the movie goes from here. Our heroine is called Squint because society seems to think her eyes need work. There’s another character named Nose for the same reason, meaning that upon birth, I guess the doctor just holds up you baby and starts verbally roasting them. Squint is played by Netflix staple Joey King (The Kissing Booth, A Family Affair) and therein lies one of our central adaptation problems. The rules of Hollywood will not allow unattractive lead actors in movies like this, so the filmmakers give her brunette hair and less makeup, as if we’re supposed to find movie star Joey King to be naturally hideous. It’s the same with every actor in the movie. Now, if you were going to adapt this to a visual medium, maybe you lean into the visual contrasts in a more specific manner: all the “Uglies” are minorities and all the “Pretties” are lighter-skinned or white. That would bring an added colorism commentary but it would also be steering the movie into a more dangerous relevancy. The plot is all simplistic high school battle lines about individualism versus conformity, self-acceptance versus assimilation, though the optics of having a trans woman (Laverne Cox) being the evil head of education forcing surgery on teens and brainwashing them feels quite problematic considering grotesque conservative theories endangering the lives of actual trans people. There is one surprise in Uglies, one that I’ll spoil for you, dear reader. It doesn’t end. It sets up the next adventure with Squint supposedly bringing down the corrupt society from the inside, but I challenge anyone not familiar with the book series to be that compelled to put right the unresolved storylines and character arcs from this stalled launch.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Reagan (2024)
My seventy-five-year-old father doesn’t get out to see as many movies as he used to, but one he was dead-set on seeing in theaters was Reagan. My sister took him and he came back singing the movie’s praises, celebrating Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of the 40th president of the U.S. of A. and extolling the virtues of this trip down Boomer memory lane. I’m glad my father enjoyed the movie. I’m glad the filmmakers could provide him two hours of uplift and entertainment, especially during times like these where my whole family can use the escape from present-day worries. I’m also retroactively relieved that I didn’t see the movie with him, though as a dutiful son and his movie buddy for decades, I would have. I’m glad because our opinions on the overall artistic merits would have been significantly different, and I wouldn’t want to rain on my father’s personal enjoyment (that’s what the written word is for).
For the benefit of analyzing Reagan as a movie first and foremost, I’ll reserve my reservations about his political legacy for the end of the review, but even as a standard presidential biography, Reagan the movie is a disappointing and reductive trip through one man’s Wikipedia summation of a career. I’ve become much more a fan of the biographies that choose a seminal moment from a public figure’s life to use as a framing device for the larger legacy (think 2012’s Lincoln focusing on the passage of the thirteenth amendment). I’d prefer that approach to the more familiar cradle-to-grave structure that often feels like a zoom through their greatest hits where none of the events are granted the consideration or nuance deserved. With Reagan the movie, we’re sprinting through history, although Reagan doesn’t even become president until an hour in. Instead, the focus is unilaterally on Reagan’s opposition to communism and the Soviets. Obviously distilling eight years of a presidency into a couple hours is a daunting and improbable task, the same difficulty for distilling any person’s complicated life into an accessible two hours of narrative. Still, you should have expected more.
For those coming into the movie looking for a critical eye, or an even-handed approach to this man’s faults and accomplishments, the movie condenses itself into a narrow examination on communism and the Cold War, a story we already know proves triumphant. The cumulative problem with Reagan the movie is that it doesn’t really add to a deeper understanding of the man. With its streamlined narrative and pacing, the movie sticks to its Greatest Hits of Reagan, especially his speeches. There are several famous Reagan speeches littered throughout the last act of the movie, and it doesn’t do much for a better understanding of the man delivering those remarks as just hitting upon people’s memories of the man in public venues. It would be more insightful to watch the team behind the scenes debating their choices. The movie portrays Reagan the man more like Saint Regan, arguing if there are any presentable faults they should be readily forgiven because it was all in pursuit of morally impregnable goals (he remarks that the vicious right-wing contras remind him of George Washington and the early colonial army…. yeah, sure). The filmmakers are too afraid to say anything too critical but also to reveal anything truly revelatory about their subject. So the movie becomes a glossy nostalgic-heavy drama without much in the way of drama because Reagan will always persevere through whatever hardships thanks to the power of his convictions, which will always be proven right no matter the context and repercussions. The movie seems to imply all his decisions led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it all must have worked out, right? Well, not for everybody, movie, but we’ll get to that in due time.
The filmmakers elect to frame the movie through a curious narrator – a retired KGB officer (Jon Voight) that has followed the life and times of Ronald Reagan going back to his early days. Apparently, this Soviet spy saw true greatness in Reagan way back and thought he might become a threat to the continuation of communism. It’s a strange perspective to be locked into, the enemy complimenting Reagan from afar and ultimately crediting the man’s faith in God as the reason that America triumphed over the Soviets. It means then that every scene has to be linked to our KGB narrator, and sometimes that can get questionable, like when he’s talking about Reagan’s time as a teenage lifeguard, or the time Reagan was being bullied by local kids, or Regan’s intimate conversations with his first wife, Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari). The scenes in Hollywood are so clunky, especially a dinner where the movie wants us to look down on Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted Hollywood Ten writer. This man stood for his principles and suffered a real backlash, and you want me to think of him as misguided and part of some liberal communist cabal (the movie also includes a picture of Oppenheimer as part of its Soviet influence targets)? By insisting upon a narrator that’s not Reagan, that means this KGB spy it also means that we’re seeing the world of Ronald Reagan through an interpreter’s prism, which makes the scenes even more curious for being such an unexpected cheerleader over Reagan’s amazing instincts and abilities. It would be like having Stalin narrate a biopic about FDR and showering the president with gushing praise.
Limiting the movie’s focus to Reagan’s lifelong battle against communist forces makes for a much cleaner and more triumphant narrative, and also leads to an ending we all know is coming, not that surprise or nuance is what the primary audience is looking for. The movie posits that Reagan pursued becoming the country’s chief executive for the selfless mission of standing up to the nefarious forces of communism. Then again, in the opening moments, the movie also tacitly implies that maybe it was the Russians who shot him back in 1981 when it was really an incel who thought he might impress Jodie Foster. Those opening moments also present a cliffhanger to come back to, as if there’s a gullible portion of the audience that is hanging on pins and needles in anticipation whether or not Reagan really was killed back in 1981 (“But… but if Ronnie dies, then who was left to beat the commies?”). It’s a very selective narrative framing that makes the movie easy to celebrate because Reagan is presented as America’s steadfast defender who stood up for our apple-pie American values and brought down the Soviets. Reagan certainly played his part in helping to facilitate the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he was one man coming in at the end of a chain of events spanning decades. I liken it to having a group project in school where you and your cohorts work steadily all week, and then the day it’s due, a kid who’s been absent all week except for that day comes onto the project, adds some contributions, and then takes credit for everything accomplished. Reagan gets his due but so do the other U.S, presidents, secretaries of state, and lots and lots of ambassadors that also helped reach this monumental conclusion. However, the biggest contributor to the collapse of the Soviet Union belongs to the Soviets themselves and their rejection of living in a reality in conflict with the dogma of their political leaders (sound familiar to anyone?).
The screenwriters also position the Great Communicator as being so powerfully persuasive that all it took was one speech and everyone was left helplessly in thrall of this man’s honeyed words. It takes on such a grandiose scale that makes Reagan look like a superhuman. The movie sets up its climax over whether or not Reagan will say “tear down this wall” in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, which heightens the drama to a level of self-parody. Is there any spectator wondering if Reagan will eventually say the words that became famous? Beyond the false drama of whether or not Reagan will utter this phrase, the movie tries to fashion some unconvincing behind-the-scenes hand-wringing over what it will mean if Reagan says these words while in Germany. As if the man has ever been shy about denouncing communism and the Soviet state beforehand. The movie also exists in a world where every world leader and responsible adult is glued to a TV set watching Reagan speechify at any key moment. Hilariously, after Reagan does indeed say “tear down this wall,” the film cuts to Margaret Thatcher watching and solemnly saying, “Well done, cowboy.” The rousing music reaches a crescendo, the Reagan team celebrates like they just landed a man on the moon, and the implication is that now that Reagan has put these four words together in sequence, well that Gorbachev fella has no choice now. The movie is set up like this speech is the final blow that pushes the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history. And yet, the next scene of the Berlin Wall coming down has a helpful on-screen designation of time: “two years later.” So Ronnie gave his amazing speech and it immediately led to the end of East Germany… two years later. Does George H. W. Bush get all the credit for being president when the Soviet Union actually collapsed in 1991? I’m sure we can find a speech somewhere where he said something bad about them, and if Reagan the movie is an indication about political persuasion, all he had to do was say the words out loud. Then the wicked communist curse is broken, but few people knew that, only those who worked for Ronnie.
The movie goes to this magical solution time and again, as Reagan is able to solve any crisis with just the right combination of words. Whether it’s Vietnam protestors he cows into retreat by shushing them, or even a debate where all he has to do is throw out a joke and the opposition must crumble because nobody can recover in the face of a joke; the movie presents time and again a silly and reductive version of politics where all it takes is for people to hear the cherished words of Saint Reagan and be converted. Look, Reagan was an influential figure and inspired a generation of Republican leaders to follow in his wake, and yes his telegenic skills were an asset to his understanding of how to handle issue framing. But to reduce everything down to his overwhelming oratory powers of persuasion makes it seem like everyone in the world is falling prey to a linguistic cheat code they are unaware of. It’s the kind of deification that we might see in a North Korean movie extolling the powers of Kim Jong-Un (“He golfed a hole-in-one with every hole”). This is what a hagiography does rather than an honest biography, and that is why Reagan becomes a relatively useless dramatic enterprise except for those already predisposed to wanting to have their nostalgia tickled and their worldviews safely confirmed.
I wasn’t exactly expecting, say, an even-handed review over Reagan’s legacy, but there’s something rather incendiary about how it distills all of the opposition to Reagan and his policies. Our KGB narrator intones that not everybody was a fan of good ole Ronnie, and then in an abbreviated montage we get real news footage of protestors with placards condemning the Reagan administration for ignoring the AIDS epidemic, for tax cuts for the rich, for supporting the apartheid government of South Africa, for gutting social safety net programs, etc. The handling of the Iran-Contra scandal is hilariously sidestepped by the same Reagan who is shown on screen being so dogmatic about sticking to law that he fired all the striking air traffic control workers. It’s not enough that the movie reduces all relevant critical opposition to Reagan to a brief music montage, it’s that the movie then quickly transitions directly to a map of the 1984 electorate with Reagan winning in a landslide, as if to say, “Well, these cranky dead-enders sure were upset by these issues, but they must be wrong because the American people overwhelmingly re-elected him.”
I never found Quaid’s performance to be enlightening or endearing, more mimicry that settles into an unsettling cracked-mirror version. It always felt like an imitation for me, like something I’d see on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s with Phil Hartman. He holds the grin and nasally voice but delivers little pathos. It’s not exactly the actor’s fault when the screenplay gives him such little to do. There was a real opportunity to better humanize him toward the end as his mental decline was becoming more of a force. Instead, it’s relegated to the very end, as a gauzy way to usher the man off the stage with our sympathies. Voight (Ray Donovan) gets the most lines in the whole movie and really seems to savor his Ruskie accent. Curiously, his character is talking to a promising KGB pupil trying to learn where they went wrong and it’s not set up to be Vladamir Putin, himself a former KGB agent. The only other significant supporting role that lasts is Nancy Reagan played by Penelope Ann Miller (The Shadow, Carlito’s Way) and she’s relegated to the suffering spouse on the sidelines that always has the steel spine and the word of encouragement. Her best moment of acting was her embarrassment as a captive witness to Ronnie, before his step into politics, awkwardly dancing on stage with the PBR players as a shill for the beer company.
Let’s be honest about who Reagan is aimed at, an older, mostly conservative audience looking back at the time of Reagan’s reign and thinking, “Those were the good old days.” It’s not made for people like me, a progressive who legitimately believes that many of our modern-day problems can trace their source from the eight years of the Reagan administration. I’m talking about the trickle-down-economic fallacy that girds so much Republican magical thinking when it comes to taxes. I’m talking union busting, I’m talking his “welfare queen” projection, I’m talking the selling of arms for hostages (bonus fact: the Reagan campaign was secretly negotiating with Iran not to release the hostages until after the election to better doom Jimmy Carter’s chances of re-election), I’m talking about making college education far more expensive by massive cuts to state funding, I’m talking the rise of the disingenuous “textualist” judicial philosophy that only seems to mean something when its proponents want it to, I’m talking about training and arming Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan (wonder why the movie chose not to include this since it is Reagan fighting communism), and so on and so on. Naturally none of these are held to scrutiny by Reagan the movie because it’s from the writer of God’s Not Dead and the director of Bratz.
Suffice to say, Reagan has many notable shortcomings depicting a president who, with every passing year, only seems to add to his own shortcomings in legacy (the Party of Reagan has willfully given up all its purported principles to become the Party of Trump). If you’re looking for an overly gauzy, sentimental, and simplistic retelling of what people already know about Ronald Reagan, then this movie is for you. If you’re looking for anything more, then this is the New Coke of presidential biopics.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Rebel Ridge (2024)
It only took minutes for me to be both engrossed and enraged by Rebel Ridge, the latest film from Jeremy Saulnier, a master of genre elevation. The scene begins with Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierce) riding his bike down a country road. A police cruiser appears behind him impatient to get around, and eventually the officer decides to use his vehicle to ram the bicyclist off the road. Afterwards, the officer tells Terry to stay on the ground and, upon a search of his belongings, discovers a stack of cash. Terry explains he cashed out his ownership in a restaurant and he’s on his way to do two things: buy a truck, and post bail for his cousin who was recently arrested for a minor drug possession. The police confiscate the money, accuse Terry of being involved with a drug conspiracy, and tell him that if he wants to fight for his money back, he’ll need to hire a lawyer and petition the court. Oh, and also the casual racism of the police officers is galling. With just his opening scene, Saulnier and his actors have made me feel vivid emotions and given me an underdog who I’m pulling for, a man who will come to serve as an honorable wrecking ball to this small-town police force who think they are above the law as it suits them. Saulnier’s movie tackles pertinent social topics with great care and detail, but it also delivers a masterful and satisfying action-thriller that knows how to entertain first and foremost rather than just incite.
There are some serious criminal justice topics here dealt with unusually convincing clarity and accessibility, and that proves to be the ethos of Rebel Ridge, a message movie that knows it needs to be a movie first and a good one. Saulnier’s prior film work just oozes with dread and menace, though Blue Ruin and Green Room and even 2018’s Hold the Dark, by far the lesser work, dwell in bleak human outlooks. Very bad things will happen to people who stumbled into situations beyond their control, and usually by the end of the movie, there’s no recompense and we’re left to wonder about the empty cost of suffering. With Rebel Ridge, it feels like Saulnier has taken an assignment, like Netflix said to make one of your movies with your level of craft and thought, but also make it so the underdog is a badass and wins. I suppose one could argue that it’s turning a formula meant to defy convention back to convention, but by providing a crusader, we’re given a champion to root along that we can share confidence with. Terry isn’t invincible, some fearless behemoth who goes unopposed at every turn. He’s a formidable force but he’s also one man fighting against the forces of injustice and one black man fighting against racist white men in authority (superbly epitomized by Don Johnson’s good ole’ boy chief). Even with the power at his disposal, there are still limitations, which still makes the movie thrilling even if we ultimately suspect good might win out at the end. There’s nothing wrong with a triumphant ending as long as the work before establishes it as a fitting conclusion; tragedy and misery are not somehow more meaningful endings just because they are more serious or subversive. More people will learn valuable lessons about civil asset forfeiture and bail reform from this movie because it has a stirring and accessible story for a mass audience. The genuine thrills allow the messages to prosper.
And what thrills there are. There’s a staggeringly taut sequence where Terry is racing against time to get his cousin’s bail money deposited to prevent him from being transferred to prison. He’s checking the clock, looking down the small courthouse hallways, waiting for the officers he indisposed to come rushing back to arrest him. If only he can get this money deposited first. Saulnier does his own editing and creates a masterful sequence that left me nervously tapping my foot and awaiting the worst. The later confrontations with the police have a deeply satisfying turnabout, as these bullies come to realize far too late that they picked on the wrong man. Terry is an ex-Marine who taught martial arts and hand-to-hand combat to the Corps, but the most dangerous weapon he has is his mind. He’s constantly thinking about plans and implementation and adaptation. He’s intimidating already, but then when he starts to adapt, the sheer force of what this man is capable of makes him that much more incomparable. Even as a man on a mission, he’s still one black man fighting against a system of entrenched power that doesn’t like to bend when it comes to compromise or imposed oversight. He’s still got institutional power against him, and in one of Sauliner’s other movies, he probably would end with Terry winning a Pyrrhic victory but with the system ultimately standing, readjusting to maintain its dominance against further reforms. Here, that may still be true in a larger sense, but at least this one man can make a difference and bust a few racist bullies.
This experience wouldn’t be nearly as awesome without the commanding presence of its leading man. Pierce has had some noteworthy roles in Krypton and The Underground Railroad (he was also the amazingly named rapper “Mid-Sized Sedan” in M. Night Shyalaman’s Old). Originally, John Boyega (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) was the lead role of Terry but Boyega bowed out weeks into filming in 2021 reportedly for “creative differences.” I cannot fathom any other actor in this role now that I have seen how thoroughly magnetic Pierce comes across. He’s a future star in the making and this should serve as a showcase for Hollywood. I like Boyega as an actor and have since 2011’s Attack the Block, but Pierce is a far more intimidating presence and likely candidate for action retribution. I cannot overstate how much better this movie is because it found the perfect leading man for its hero. Saulnier’s excellent command of the genre and tension is made even more compelling because of Pierce being our vehicle for comeuppance. His smooth intensity beautifully amplifies Saulnier’s percolating dialogue, finding the exact right tone and presence to make the challenges to power feel oh so combustible.
I wish the second half of Rebel Ridge was as perfectly structured and executed as that first scene. The second half gets a little lost in the details of its overarching small-town conspiracy. The momentum of the movie starts to slag a bit, and the clear connection of cause-effect plotting gets bogged down. There’s still important revelations and you get nice moments from the likes of James Cromwell as a judge and Steve Zissis as a courthouse clerk trying not to make waves within a system he acknowledges is unjust. The real significant supporting character is Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) as a lawyer with a past of drug addiction that she’s still trying to put behind her to earn back parental rights to her kids. She’s a good foil for our crusading hero, and her storyline also smartly allows for more social-political tangents to be hit about the difficulty of addicts and ex-cons to try and start over in the workforce. I wish she was more involved in the climax, as she’s relegated to being mostly a damsel needing to be saved after she proved so capable and cunning throughout the rest of the movie assisting Terry. The second half just isn’t as strong as the first half because the movie overextends with its conspiracy and history without the same tremendous clarity and urgency that drove the first hour of Rebel Ridge. The ultimate conclusion, while still satisfying, lacks the fireworks that we crave. It’s more a race against time and hoping that certain elements finally stand up against the corrupt police forces. It’s a solid ending, enough for a catharsis that Saulnier so rarely allows, but it’s not quite the release we might want, and maybe that’s the ultimate point.
Rebel Ridge is a great genre movie that flirts with true excellence. It’s Jeremy Saulnier’s most accessible and crowd-pleasing movie, an action-thriller that executes its sequences of tension and retribution with as much care as it incorporates its Big Ideas for viewers to think over. Genre movies have long tackled relevant social and political topics, sometimes in ways that are far more meaningful and impactful than message movies that get bogged down in didactic dogma. But if you can link a relevant social issue to a story that grabs us and makes us want to inch closer to the screen, something that links a larger problem to a personal story, then you’ve found an accessible illustration that people will actually want to see. Rebel Ridge stands out among the Netflix house of action movies and proves that even a mainstream Saulnier can deliver the goods. Just because he’s working with a more conventional formula doesn’t mean that he hasn’t put thought and care into his characters and action. Rebel Ridge may leave you wanting a little more with its ending, but what it supplies is so engaging and entertaining that I’m happy to report Saulnier hasn’t lost his edge. Keep ‘em coming like this, Jeremy.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Thanks to some release shuffling, there was only one Marvel movie being released in 2024, the fewest since 2012 (excluding the COVID punting of 2020). There’s been a lot of ink spilled over “superhero fatigue,” especially the recent downturn of certain Marvel movies like Quantumania and The Marvels, though as I’ve written before, I don’t think audiences have become sick of superhero cinema, they have become more demanding from mediocre superhero cinema. Audiences just want something more than the same old same old. Enter Deadpool & Wolverine, resurrecting one of the greatest Marvel heroes and transplanting the first new Fox hero into their new corporate landscape. It’s the least serious Marvel movie yet by design and, judging by its runaway box-office success, that was what the people wanted in a summer blockbuster that made them remember the escapist joys of men in tights with anger issues.
Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), a.k.a. the merc with the mouth Deadpool, is a man out of time. His universe is scheduled for elimination by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) because of the demise of Logan (Hugh Jackman) who served as an anchor being. Apparently, for reasons that don’t seem to make sense if you think of universes lasting longer than one human lifespan, once the anchor being goes, the universe dies out. Wade is thus in search of another Wolverine, but the one he finds is “the worst Wolverine,” a tragic hero drowning his sorrows and refusing to help. The two bickering mutants get cast to a dimensional dumping ground where they run into all sorts of castoffs and forgotten figures, chief among them Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the twin who ate Professor Xavier in the womb rather than the other way around. She holds dominion in this strange realm, and Wade has to appeal to her, or eliminate her, to get out of this ashy purgatory and convince this wounded Wolverine to be a hero.
The Deadpool half of the title means that this movie is interested in serving as a meta-satire of superhero cinema, which means its breezy, surface-level charms can feel after a while like a fanboy sugar high. It’s hard to maintain the novelty of a fourth-wall breaking vulgar superhero with the third movie, but now we have Deadpool closing the book on the Fox era of twenty-first century superhero cinema as well as getting to play in a new sandbox of pop-culture references and superhero cliches. Welcome to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Wade Wilson, though, as stated on-screen, you’re entering at a bit of a low point. For a while, at least, the movie can get by by having its resident prankster mug his way through the MCU catalog, fawning like the biggest fanboy (he did unsuccessfully audition for the Avengers). The opening sequence literally involves Deadpool digging up the adamantium corpse of Logan and using his unbreakable bones to inflict bloody carnage. It’s quite an attention-getter as well as something of a promise: we’re not going to undo the dramatic conclusion of 2017’s Logan, and even though this is the MCU, this movie isn’t going to go soft as it wades in its signature off-color comedy and bloody chaos.
Your mileage will vary depending upon what the hit-to-miss percentage is with the comedy. I found a lot of the homoerotic/homophobic banter to be dull and repetitive, but this kind of comedy ethos has been present from the first movie, the more-is-more approach. There’s an extended series of cameos that are fun castoffs from Fox comics universes, and the actors are definitely having a blast reliving their characters, or in one very special case, getting to live it once and for all. I wish there was more specific MCU commentary, but I cackled loudly when Reynolds turns to Jackman and taunts, “Disney’s going to make you keep doing this until you’re 90!” I really wish there was an extended critique of the state of post-credit scenes introducing new characters that we all know will never be seen again (remember Harry Stiles or Brett Goldstein?). Deadpool could have gotten stuck in an endless loop of end credit sequences. I enjoyed that a car’s product placement was subject to constant abuse and destruction, while still trying to maintain that sleek car commercial framing. The angry/shouty dynamic between Wolverine and Deadpool makes up for a lot, so even if the jokes are less than stellar, the cranky buddy dynamic still delivers.
However, much like the 2022 Multiverse of Madness, the actual multiversal trips are quite few and quite disappointing. There’s a silly montage of Wade approaching the different Wolverines of different universes (no Dougray Scott, huh?) but almost all of the movie is spent between a dusty netherworld and a subway station. Again, with the promise of great possibility, these movies seem to say, “Will you settle for maybe TWO gray locations?” I was let down by the main setting reminding me of 2009’s Land of the Lost dumping ground for the nexus of discarded universes. When this whole multiverse phase comes to its inevitable conclusion, it’s going to feel like a promised epic family vacation that went about an hour down the road, visited two gas stations, a McDonalds, and then hastily turned around.
On the other side of the titular ampersand, Jackman is acting in a completely different movie, perhaps giving one of his most dramatically rich performances as the superhero. This is a different Wolverine than the one we saw in 2017’s Logan, so it allows Jackman the freedom to be able to hit some of the essential elements of the character while also getting a new opportunity to follow a different direction. This is a Wolverine haunted by his own sense of cowardice and blaming himself for the death of his X-Men. This is less the grumpy antihero we’ve grown to love over twenty years and more akin to the main character in 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, a war veteran who folded under pressure and attempts to live through their guilt and shame, ultimately finding solace in seeking the noble sacrifice but on the bigger stage now. This is a genuinely traumatized character working through the different dimensions of his trauma, and Jackman doesn’t for a second treat it like a joke. He’s set up to be the cranky straight man to Reynolds’ chatty goofball, and there is comedy to be had with that dynamic, but Jackman is so convincing with his portrayal, again twenty-four years into this character, that he made me tear up at a few points. That’s right, dear reader, Hugh Jackman is so great in his role, that he almost made me cry. Yes, in a third Deadpool wankathon movie. And that is why Jackman is such an incredible actor. The attempt at heart has never felt authentic for me with Deadpool, no matter how many side characters he collects and assures us that they “mean something.” However, by including Wolverine, the filmmakers allow the viewers to import our decades of accrued feelings onto him. It’s a cheat, but it works with an actor of Jackman’s caliber. Plus, who wouldn’t want to see more of this man in the role that he defined for a generation?
Look, the movie operates more so than any other MCU enterprise on an expectation reflection system, likely supplying what you want out of a project like Deadpool & Wolverine. If you’re looking for a darker, sillier jaunt, there’s probably enough to serve as a diversionary change-of-pace. If you’re looking for a low-stakes reset, you’ll likely find it, though much depends on Where We Go From Here. If you’re looking for the same brash sense of humor and vulgarity from the two previous Deadpool movies, you’ll be satisfied. If you’re looking for something a little more thematically rich and rewarding, well this is the third Deadpool movie and I would ask why that’s a priority, but Jackman practically delivers just that. If you’re looking for a movie that rewards impish fan service, then here’s your winner, rewarding viewers who can even recall the vague minutia of the rise and fall of studio projects of old. I’ll always wish that more of the jokes hit their marks, or that the action could be a little more stylish, or that Reynolds and company had more trenchant satire for their corporate overlords rather than an occasional naughty tweaking that feels pre-approved, like writing a roast of a host. I would say it’s no more than the sum of its parts, but it almost made me cry and ended in such a jubilant fashion that I didn’t really care about the wishy-washy timey-wimey nonsense that the movie barely wants to pay attention to as well. Deadpool & Wolverine is an unexpected elegy for the Fox universe but also a reminder of the appeal of both of its titular stars.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Alien: Romulus (2024)
I will maintain that over the course of forty years that there have been no bad Alien movies. While 2017’s Alien Covenant gets the closest, I think each of the four Alien movies from 1979 to 1997 are worthy of praise for different reasons. The Alien franchise is unique among most sci-fi blockbusters in that each of its movies feels so radically different. The groundbreaking first movie is the hallowed haunted house movie in space; the 1986 sequel set the foundation for all space marine action movies, with Sigourney Weaver earning a Best Actress nomination, a real rarity for any sci-fi action movie; the much-derided third film from 1992 is much better than people give it credit for, and while flawed it has really intriguing ideas and characters with a unique setting and a gutsy ending; the fourth film from 1997 might just be the most fun, going all-in on schlocky action and colorful characters. Each of them is different with a style and tone of their own, and each is worthy of your two hours. Enter director/co-writer Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, meant to take place between the fifty-year time span between Alien and Aliens. It was intended to be a Hulu streaming movie but got called up to the big leagues of theatrical release, and while it has some underwritten aspects and clunky fan service, Romulus is another worthy sequel for a franchise that admirably keeps marching to its own beat.
It’s 2142 and life on an off-world colony isn’t exactly the adventure advertised. It’s a mining colony that’s slowly poisoning its huddled masses. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) has just finished her two-year contract only to be informed by her greedy company that, because of worker shortages, she’s locked in for another two years of indentured servitude. She’s also in charge of her adoptive brother, Andy (David Johnsson), a malfunctioning android that her late father reprogrammed. An ex-boyfriend comes back into Rain’s life with a plan: there’s an old derelict research station that they can scavenge and retrieve the cryo chambers, which can make long-term travel to a new life in a new system a possibility. There’s also a catch: they need Andy because only he can open the ship’s locked gates. The ragtag crew flies out to the derelict ship orbiting a ringed planet and, of course, discovers far more than they bargained for as the ship, of Weyland-Yutani origins, is crawling with face-hugging fiends just waiting for new faces.
Despite my grumbles, I found Alien: Romulus to be a very entertaining new entry that had the possibility of genre greatness. The setting and central character dynamic are terrific. The Alien franchise hasn’t exactly been subtle about its criticisms of multi-faceted corporations and their bottom-line priorities, but it’s even more effective to see the dinghy world of this mining colony. It’s a bleak existence of dystopian labor exploitation and you get an early sense of the desperation that motivates the characters to flee at any opportunity. Eventually, the evil corporation’s big plans for the “perfect organism,” a.k.a. the xenomorph, are to replace the depleting labor force. Humans, it turns out, aren’t built to work in space long-term, and the human cost is felt effectively in Act One. Another key part of what made the movie so immediately engaging for me is the sweet surrogate brother-sister relationship between Rain and Andy. He’s vulnerable, an older android model who needs some repairs, but he’s loyal and kind and loves pun-heavy jokes. This central relationship hooked me and gave me something to genuinely worry over as things get more dire, and it’s not just the scary aliens. Once onboard, Andy uploads the programming of a different android, and the competing objectives make him become a different person, all wonderfully played by Johnsson, who was supremely appealing in Rye Lane. While literally every other character is remarkably underwritten (this one doesn’t like robots, this one is pregnant, this one is… Buddhist?), the genuine bond between Andy and Rain grounded me.
Romulus also has some sneaky good set pieces that kept me squirming in my seat or inching closer in excitement. Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) can concoct some dynamite suspense sequences and knows how to draw out the tension to pleasingly anxious perfection. This is the best Alien movie yet to really sell the danger of the springy face-huggers. There’s a taut sequence where the humans have to slow their movements to walk through a face-hugger minefield lest their spike in temperature alert the deadly creatures. There’s another later sequence that ingeniously utilizes space physics to escape the xenomorph acid blood. I loved how well it was set up and then the fun visuals of zero-gravity acid blood. The practical effects make for lots of great looking in-camera effects, and the production design is incredibly detailed while achieving a chilling overall mood of dread. Alvarez leans upon the visual frameworks of Ridley Scott and James Cameron, as who doesn’t, but finds ways to make his Alien movie his own. I really appreciated the dedication to the sprawling vistas of space, like extended shots outside the ship that really translate the sheer majesty and terrifying scale of space. The last-second threat of demolition is made all the more arresting by crashing into the rings of the planet. I think most people confuse a planet’s rings like it’s some kind of water vapor when instead it’s like a crowded highway of debris.
However, there are some misguided nods toward fan service that go overboard and become groan-inducing. There’s a fine line between homage and back-bending fan service, and Romulus skirts over occasionally into the dangerous territory, given over to references to the other movies that lack better context to make them anything more than contrived callbacks. Take for instance a triumphant killing of a xenomorph where a character utters, “Get away from her,” which itself would have sufficed, as any Alien franchise fan knows this reference point. Then the character continues, in an awkward pause, almost stumbling over the words and translating the awkwardness directly for us, as they add, “…You bitch.” Why? Why would this character need to say this exact same line (although, timeline-wise, this is now the first use of the phrase as Ripley is still in hypersleep)? The moment doesn’t call for this specific line; it could have been anything else, but they made it the line we all know from Aliens. There’s also the familiar ending where the characters think they’ve won and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s one more tussle to be had with a xenomorph who has snuck onto the escape ship. I’m less bothered by this continuation as it’s almost a formula expectation for the franchise at this point, though keeping Rain in her sleeping undies for the final fight seems like another unnecessary nod to the 1979 original. They even tie back the mysterious black goo from the Engineers via Prometheus, though as a vague power-up when, if I can recall, it was a biological weapon of mass destruction, but sure, now it’s a power-up elixir.
But the worst and most misguided act of fan service is where the movie literally brings a performer back from the dead (some spoilers ahead, beware). When Rain and the gang stroll through the derelict company ship, they discover the upper torso of a discarded android, like Ash (Ian Holm) in the original Alien. Not just like Ash because for all intents and purposes it is Ash, as the filmmakers resurrect Holm (who passed away in 2020) and use Deepfake A.I. technology to clumsily animate the man. This isn’t the first instance of a deceased actor brought back to screen by a digital double, from Fred Astaire dancing with a mop to Peter Cushing having a significant post-death supporting role in 2016’s Rogue One. Here’s the thing with just about all of these performances: they could have just been a different actor. Why did it have to be Grand Moth Tarkin (Cushing) and not just any other obsequious Empire middle manager? With Alien: Romulus, why does it have to be this specific version of an android when it could have been anyone else in the world besides the dearly departed Holm? I just can’t comprehend why the filmmakers decided to bring back Holm in order to play A DIFFERENT android who isn’t Ash but might as well be since he’s also been torn in half. Why not have the android be another version of Andy? That would have presented a more direct dichotomy for the character to have to process. The effects reanimating Holm are eerie and spotty at best, apparently built from an old scan from The Lord of the Rings. It’s just a distracting and unnecessary blunder, the inclusion of which can only be justified by trying to appeal to fans by saying, “Hey, remember this character? Even though he’s not that character. Well. Here.” We used to readily accept other actors playing the same character before the rise in technology. Nobody watching The Godfather Part II wondered why Robert DeNiro wasn’t a slimmed-down Marlon Brando.
As an Alien movie, Romulus starts off great and settles for good, but it still has several terrific set pieces, its own effectively eerie mood and style, and a grounded character dynamic that made me genuinely care, at least about two characters while the others met their requite unfortunate ends. It doesn’t have the Big Ideas of a Prometheus or the narrative arcs of Aliens, or even the go-for-broke schlock of Alien Resurrection, but Romulus delivers the goods while also feeling like its own movie, a fact I still continue to appreciate with the Alien franchise. It’s an enjoyable genre movie that fits in with the larger franchise. I wish some of the clumsy nods to fan service, especially the resurrection of a certain character, had been reeled back with more restraint to chart its own course, but it’s not enough to derail what proves to be a winning sequel.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Borderlands (2024)
I’ve never played the popular looter-shooter video game that Borderlands is based upon, but I have to say that the fan base certainly deserved more than a low-rent combination of Guardians of the Galaxy merry pranksters with Mad Max freakazoid wasteland gangs. You can clearly tell the specific X-Meets-Y of the pitch, although apparently writer/director Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, The House with a Clock in the Walls) was auspiciously inspired one day by, literally, watching his dog squat over and poop and said, “This, this has to be in the movie.” So, from those noble creative origins comes a movie that labors so hard to be breezy and fun but feels so gassed and desperate. In this future sci-fi universe, there’s a special planet that is populated with different space crooks and gangs all fighting to discover a hidden vault of legend. The world is overrun by masked marauders known cheerfully as “psychos.” There’s also a prophecy about a chosen one, a kidnapped daughter to a very dangerous man, and Jack Black voicing one of the most obnoxious sidekicks in recent memory. That’s the thing about Borderlands: everyone is obnoxious or trying badly to be so indifferently cool. It doesn’t work. Cate Blanchett is not the right fit for the lead character of Lilith, a blase bounty hunter/for-hire killer that finds herself gathering a band of bickering bandits. The movie wants us to see them as a dysfunctional family of lovable losers, but each mediocre character is distilled to an underwhelming essence of quips, snark, and stylish killing. If there was a whiff of personality to be had with the different characters, their different and conflicting perspectives, this universe and its interesting locations for world building, even the unique weapons and fighting abilities, there might be even some fleeting entertainment to be had. Alas. It’s not funny. It’s not exciting. It’s not visually appealing. It’s not interesting. It’s not surprising. It’s just sort of loud with capital A-attitude and a forced sense of jocular PG-13 whimsy. It’s not… a lot of important things. Instead, Borderlands only makes me reflect how much better James Gunn has proven himself with these kinds of funky found families.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Challengers (2024)
The sweaty, sexy indie hit from the spring is about a tennis throuple told over the course of one pivotal match, where our two male athletes are at very different points in their careers and the woman who came between them. Patrick (Josh O’Conner) and Art (Mike Faist) are the best of friends when they started on the tennis circuit with dreams of making the big tournaments. They both set their sights on Tashi (Zendaya), a tennis phenom since her teenage years who is starting to reach her prime. The movie bounces back and forward through time (like a tennis ball!) to chart the changing relationships between the three, as we’re left to pick up the pieces as to what happened, who fell for who, who broke up with who, and how it relates to the central battle of wills playing out in the present-day match. The best part of Challengers are its characters and ever-shifting power dynamics, which makes each scene rich to digest and examine, especially once Tashi’s career takes an unexpected turn. Director Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, Call Me By Your Name) keeps things lively with plenty of style including exercising every POV imaginable from the floor, to a tennis balls, and the players with racket banging in hand. We might have gotten a POV from a passing bird had it only gone longer. The movie is electrified by a pulse-pounding score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, a propulsive energy that reminded me of the similar service of the Run Lola Run soundtrack. What holds back the film for me is that the last act is dragged out and it culminates in an ending that is the most obvious as well as underwhelming, which makes the extended dragging even more ultimately tedious. The acting is good all around with each member getting to experience a high-point and low-point of their career and personal lives. However, it’s really Art and Tashi’s movie as Patrick serves as an elevated supporting role. And for a movie with such heat and hype, I guess I was expecting a little more action, if you will. Challengers is an intriguing, entertaining, and refreshingly adult sports drama that I wish had, forgive me, some more balls.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)
I am a lifelong Ghostbusters fan, I enjoyed the 2021 reboot, and I come to the sequel, Frozen Empire, as one of those fans that grew up with the cartoon series in the 1980s. There is a contingent of Ghostbusters fans who dismiss the movie as merely a comedy about a bunch of schlubs who resort to paranormal shenanigans to make a buck, and these fans dismiss anything larger in world-building, mythology, or direct sincerity as missing the point. I disagree. There can be a vivid, flourishing world of supernatural beings and connections to the human world, if you can tell a compelling story with characters we want to follow. Frozen Empire is an okay TV episode expanded into movie form, finding little for most of the voluminous characters to do. There’s an ancient evil and tying back the legacy characters, who don’t present much meaning beyond extended cameos. The 2021 movie had me on an emotional level, saying goodbye to a character and seeing how that loss has affected multiple generations of his estranged family. The closest thing Frozen Empire features to emotion is young Phoebe Spangler (Mackenzie Grace) wanting to be treated like a responsible adult and making friends with a ghost girl. It’s kind of sweet, and it’s smart to tie this friendship into the larger threat. The movie has several side plots littering the peripheral, from Finn Wolfhard trying to catch Slimer and being trusted to drive the Ecto-One, to Paul Rudd trying to find his footing as a stepdad, to Kumail Nanjiani as a junk dealer learning to follow his family’s noble mission of protecting others. I liked learning more about Winston’s (Ernie Hudson) Men in Black-style secret agency of studying ghosts and testing out new supernatural tech, and it presents a fun new setting where we can learn more. The ultimate story about defeating an evil spirit, coming together as a team, and learning to give others room to succeed or fail all seem a little pat, a little too familiar. It’s fine that this movie has lower stakes, even with a would-be apocalyptic threat of ancient evil. Not every movie needs to avert the apocalypse. It feels like little thought has been given to extending the new characters from the 2021 movie. There are too many characters to service here, which is why everyone other than Phoebe feels like a nascent supporting character or overextended cameo at worst (did we need the return of Podcast?). It’s still a fun movie that any Ghostbusters fan will likely find enough to enjoy, but it also feels like it might be the last Ghostbusters movie, at least this iteration, and it ends with a reminder of what the franchise can be, at its best, but also a warning of what it can be without careful development and vision.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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IF (2024)/ The Imaginary (2024)/ Imaginary (2024)
Every so often, I find myself drawn to reviewing movies in pairs, whether it’s because of the same source material (the 2022 Pinoochios), similar perspectives (2018’s BlackkKlansman and Sorry to Bother You), or even diametrically opposed artistic responses to a similar theme (2016’s Manchester by the Sea and Collateral Beauty). However, in my twenty-five years as a fledgling film critic, I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed three movies at the same time for whatever relevancy, yet that is what I find most appropriate for this trio of exceedingly similar films about imaginary friends. Earlier in the year, Blumhouse released Imaginary, their horror-thriller take on an imaginary friend refusing to go away. At the start of the summer, writer/director John Krasinski gave us IF, a live-action fantasy/comedy about imaginary friends finding their former children as adults. And recently, Netflix released an anime movie The Imaginary, a Studio Ghibli-esque fantasy about forgotten imaginary friends trying to find new kids and new homes. I’ve elected to review all three at once and, much like the Pinnochios, declare a winner through different categories.
Begin the critical gauntlet! Bring on the (imaginary) bloodshed!
- PREMISE
Two of these movies went in a sweetly sentimental direction and the other went in the horror direction, so let’s tackle that one first. Imaginary gets at a rarely spoken truth: children can be super creepy. Watch a child hold an involved conversation with some entity that isn’t there, or just stare into the dark and say, so plainly, “That’s where the eyes are watching me,” or any number of personal anecdotes to make you shudder, and you’ll understand the significant horror potential with a malevolent creature that the child can communicate with that adults cannot see. This also lends itself to a low-budget film production as so much of the wicked entity is implicit and unseen. It’s a cost-saving genius when you can just use your, wait for it, imagination. Now Imaginary isn’t the first horror version of this premise, but it deserves points for taking a childhood concept and thinking of an effective way to transform it into a diseased and malignant antagonist, haunting its adult child Jessica (DeWanda Wise) and seeking a new child, likely her youngest step-daughter Alice (Pyper Braun). It then presents its conflict like a curse that the past generation is trying to spare the next generation from suffering through. Of course this also includes getting adults to recognize the threat as they are often dismissing it. Nobody wants to believe that Chauncey the teddy bear is the one urging you to self-harm.
The other two movies take a far more family-friendly approach to their imaginary premises. There’s a lot of shared real estate between The Imaginary and IF. Both are about outdated imaginary friends finding refuge together in a sort of halfway house, a… foster home for imaginary friends (someone should make a cartoon series about that). Both of the movies follow imaginary friends trying to find new children who will accept them and give them a new life. IF briefly follows the possibility of reuniting the forgotten imaginary friends (a.k.a. IFs) with their former owners now grown up into adulthood. This is actually the movie at its best, as the creatures find a renewed sense of purpose and reconnect with a person they cherished but had to let go. For a strange reason, Krasinski only dabbles with this poignant story direction, switching gears to find them new homes with new kids, which serves as another story direction that is also quickly ditched. IF seems to be trying on so many different versions of its premise and then discarding them like the IFs themselves. The Imaginary has more focus on its central predicament, finding new homes before these characters fade away, or worse, get eaten by a cannibalistic imaginary fiend looking to gain more years of his own existence by consuming the life force of his imaginary peers. It also has the urgency of its main character, an imaginary boy named Rudger, hoping that his child wakes up from a car accident, and if so, that she’ll still need him. The other characters are trying to set Rudger up for a life after his child, since they’ve all experienced the same fate and are trying to help him adjust to not just letting go but also being open to a new child. It’s simplified but has plenty to still explore, plus a creepy super villain.
Winner: The Imaginary
2. WORLD-BUILDING
This is what really separates IF from The Imaginary. The world of imaginary figures populated in Kransinski’s movie are cute but their larger world context is unfortunately underdeveloped. This is likely because much of the movie is connected to the personal journey of one twelve-year-old girl, Bea (Cailley Fleming), trying to keep herself busy while her father (Krasinski) undergoes vague “heart surgery.” The IF Coney Island respite feels like a secret nursing home where the discarded friends just kind of hang out. There’s even swimming and painting lessons. There’s no further examination on whether these are only the IFs from this zip code, though Bradley Cooper voices a talking glass of ice water whose child originated in Arizona, so that’s undetermined. I was also hoping for an imaginary friend from decades back, like Franklin Roosevelt or Alexander Hamilton’s imaginary friend, or from other countries. Each character design can say something inherently about their past child creator, what they regarded as fulfilling or lacking from their present. Alas, the world-building is mostly one little girl’s discovery of her new friends and then how they ultimately support her with her family predicament looming over every scene. Seriously, for a father going through major surgery, the family in IF is pretty blase about Bea’s whereabouts. Her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) doesn’t seem too pressed about letting an unattended adolescent run around New York City for hours. Bea’s experience with helping the IFs are reflections of her optimism and hope. It all comes back to her, so the movie chooses to ignore the larger possibilities of its magical unseen world.
The Imaginary feels modeled after the Studio Ghibli movies that have delighted children and adults for generations. Its main character is Rudger, an imaginary friend, and not the child who birthed the imaginary friend, Amanda. That creates a different sense of discovery, as Rudger also learns about the hidden library housing other imaginary friends and the rules. He’s to stare at a bulletin board and await a prospective child he feels a connection to, then holds onto a picture of them to transport into the child’s imaginative play where they can contribute to the creative adventure. However, there are dangers like if you die in the imaginary world, you can die for real, which is never fully explored as a real threat. The imaginary characters are told to stay indoors at night, as they don’t want to run into Mr. Bunting, the cannibalistic antagonist. I got a little lost with the different rules, some of which seemed to be emphasized more or canceling out previous rules, but I appreciated the level of thought given to making its world alive.
This is also where Imaginary begins to get lost in its own hazy imagination. Imagine the bedroom door-hopping mechanic from Monsters Inc. but with the narrative formula of Insidious, and there you have Imaginary. The world of imagination is treated very similarly to a hellish dimensional getaway, much like what happens in Insidious where dad had to retrieve his son in the demon’s phantasmagorical realm. Because the spooky imaginary world relates back to the main character’s childhood, we have a few other characters that have history with this trauma. Jessica’s father Ben has been committed to a hospital and seemed mentally ill, until you realize he rescued his little girl from evil Chauncey and lost his mind in the process. He’s not some lost cause, he’s a hero. Also, there’s a former neighbor and babysitter (Betty Buckely, always welcomed) who is obsessed with childhood psychology and willing to do some extreme things to continue her obsession with Chauncey. It’s at least widening the scope to look at how these traumatic events have impacted other people, not just the little girl bottling up those nightmares. However, beyond the simple explanation of Chauncey existing as a parasite feasting on the imaginative power of children, little else is established about the creature or its own world. At one point, a character relishes the possibility of imagination as a wish-fulfillment service, but why would this evil creature delegate its power? It reminds me of all sorts of other movies where characters side with some apocalyptic power thinking they’ll somehow be the lucky exception.
Winner: The Imaginary
3. CHARACTERS
This is where IF shined the brightest. The little girl is cute and optimistic, a fitting tonal foil to Ryan Reynolds being such a loquaciously sardonic naysayer. She wants to be so helpful, though keeping herself so busy might just be her coping mechanism to try and stop her dreadful encroaching thoughts about the possibility of losing her second parent. Her taking the lead to help the IFs then allows for little episodic asides for the different characters to share their stories and their former creators. Having a protagonist be so driven at being empathetic is a natural conduit for championing the feelings and triumphs of others. It works. Reynolds is still doing his fast-talking cynical schtick, so your mileage will vary how well it continues to appeal. Curiously, I don’t think the character of Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) is fully utilized. He’s a more childlike exaggeration of the character features already provided by Bea’s involvement. Blue resembles the McDonalds’ Grimace, and is outwardly friendly, unafraid of big emotions, and a bit silly, but his elevation in the script as being the primary IF sidekick is arbitrary. The same story could have afforded tapping, say, the excitable unicorn (voiced by Emily Blunt) as the primary sidekick and produce similar results. Again, I think there’s so much that could have been further explored as to the existential requirement of the different imaginary characters, how they represented what their former kids felt they needed. Their exact existence was what a child yearned for (the strong IF to protect the child who is afraid, the squishy lovable IF to comfort a lonely child, etc.).
The characters from The Imaginary fall into general archetypes that any Miyazaki fan will be familiar with. There’s the bossy know-it-all, the excitable goof, the silent contemplative, the wise and warm-hearted authority figure, the dangerous rogue. They all work but it’s the larger themes that resonate more than any specific individual character. Mostly, the conflict is whether Rudger decides to move on from his creator and find a new child/home. He has loyalty and emotional attachment to little Amanda but the reality is that, at some point, she will grow up and he’ll be left behind. Whether that happens now, because she passes away, or years later through becoming an adult, there will be a parting and he will need to consider a new life. The loneliness and melancholy of this existence is ignored through the kooky characters, strange worlds, and pressing points of danger, so the reality of Rudger’s eventual loss is thematically sidelined.
With the Blumhouse Imaginary, the characters are relatively stock types for a supernatural horror mystery. There’s some effort to make it about Jessica trying to ingratiate herself with her new step-children, the oldest who looks at the new mom with great suspicion and resentment. At one point, the old mom serves as a jump scare, hiding in the house; the old mom is mentally ill but the stepdaughter thought, erroneously, that mom was “getting better.” Jessica is trying her best to rise to the challenges of being a parent, but it’s hard when there’s a sneaky ghost trying to emotionally manipulate your youngest to hurt herself. I don’t know why Jessica decided to move her new family back into her childhood home, the source of her trauma, except if you looked at the real estate market, it might have been by far the best deal she could swing. What’s some reawakened childhood trauma when it comes to skipping ballooning mortgage payments? Have you seen interest rates and the price of houses post-pandemic? That’s the real terror for adults.
Winner: IF
4. EMOTIONAL INVOLVEMENT/CONCLUSIONS
Despite what Pixar may have set in stone, it’s not a requirement for a children’s movie to make you cry. I did end up tearing up from two of these movies, and it should likely be obvious which of the three was the outlier. Krasinski’s movie is designed as a big warm hug, complete with soothing, milky light pouring in from every setting. I thought it looked very similar to how Steven Spielberg’s preferred cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, shoots natural light, and lo and behold Kaminski was the cinematographer for IF (excuse my pat on the back here). Bea’s big emotional moment where she tells her story of adventure to her unconscious father in his hospital bed pulled some heartstrings, but what I felt even more emotionally cathartic were the asides where Bea helps the IFs reunite with their former kids. When an IF is being thought about, they start to glow from within, like happiness radiating out. It was these little moments, like Blossom (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) getting to dance with Bea’s grandmother like they used to, or the simple act of Blue wishing good feelings to his nervous former-child with a silent shoulder touch and world-clarifying exhale. It was the acknowledgement that these friends, while gone, are still fondly remembered, and that they will always have that connection even if their exact relationship has changed through the years. The Imaginary operates on a similar emotional wave of adults reuniting with their former childhood friends, and it’s that sweet acknowledgement of appreciation and love that hits hardest. It reminded me a little bit of 2001’s Amelie where she’s on a mission to help strangers remember beloved items from the past. The overarching worry about losing her father seems unnecessary as a complication, especially how “heart surgery” is kept so purposely vague and seemingly uneventful until that bedside chat. There is a difference between wanting to protect your kid from the possible trauma and downplaying it to the point where it becomes a strangely superfluous plot device.
I won’t pretend there’s much to get emotional over with the Blumhouse Imaginary, though there is one Act Two twist I thought was simply astounding, but in order to explain I will need to go into spoilers, so you have been warned, dear reader. For a solid hour, we watch Alice play with a teddy bear that she calls Chauncey, the embodiment of her imaginary friend. So far so good. Then after a disturbing session with a child psychologist, the professional shows Jessica her recorded session. This is where we discover that Chauncey the bear… has never been there. Alice has been talking to the unseen entity of Chauncey and Jessica has been the only person who was seeing a teddy bear. That’s right, the twist is that the bear was never there. Bam.
Winner: IF
Three imaginary friend movies and the exploration of the meaning these figures have to children and adults after years removed. I had my quibbles with each movie, but with adjusted expectations, each movie can supply a degree of entertainment. The animation in The Imaginary is gorgeously fluid, so that alone will prove a draw to hand-drawn animation fans such as myself. Krasinski’s family film is gooey at its well-meaning core though it has underdeveloped avenues I wish had been given more articulation and exploration. The Blumhouse Imaginary movie is fairly formulaic but has a couple enjoyable twists and turns, even if they’re ridiculous. There is a potent storytelling reservoir with imaginary friends, both benevolent and malevolent, so I imagine (no pun intended) this won’t be the end of these stories making their way to the big screen.
Nate’s Grades:
Imaginary: C
IF: B
The Imaginary: B
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Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (2024)
I admire Kevin Costner throwing out all the stops to achieve his passion, a four-part, twelve-hour film series to showcase a sprawling Western epic. The man put a hundred million of his own money into the first two parts of Horizon: An American Saga, and the time devoted to this project was so all-consuming that Costner quit the Yellowstone series, a cable TV juggernaut getting bigger ratings every season. It’s ballsy all right, to abandon a monumentally successful series at the height of its zeitgeist popularity so he can direct not just one but four throwback Westerns that will ultimately be as long as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s rare to see this level of sheer chutzpah in Hollywood. Horizon’s first part was released in June, with its completed second part intended to be released a mere two months later in August. After the poor box-office of Part One, the studio decided to pull Part Two from the release schedule, ostensibly to give people more time to catch the first movie. Will we ever see Part Two in theaters? Will we ever see Part Three, which Costner is currently filming, or Part Four, which Costner is currently raising money for? Costner intended to release the whole saga as a miniseries upon completion, and this might be the best case scenario. As a movie, albeit one quarter of an intended whole, Horizon Part One feels far more structured as an incomplete and rather prosaic TV series.
Upon the completion of the 170 minutes, I was left wondering what was here that would make someone want to come back for a lengthy second part, let alone a third and a fourth. It doesn’t feel like a complete movie or even a completed chapter, and again let me cite Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series. Released over the course of three years, each movie had its own form of a beginning, middle, and end, with each climaxing around some event that left one satisfied by its conclusion. They didn’t just feel like chapters linking to the next; they felt like completed stories that pushed forward a larger overall story. Now, with Horizon Part One, it doesn’t feel like a three-hour movie, rather like three one-hour episodes of a TV series. Each of those hours feels too separate from the other. I’m reminded of television in the streaming era, where producers anticipate viewers binging through multiple episodes in speedy succession. This tacit assumption lends itself toward the general pacing issues I find with too many streaming series, where the filmmakers take far too long to get things moving in a significant manner. I’m reminded of a joke by Topher Florence that back in the day a show like Surf Dracula would feature its lead character surfing in weekly adventures, but the streaming age version would take its entire first season showing how he got his surfboard and then spend five minutes surfing in the finale. When you’re pacing out only one quarter of your possible intended story, calling it slow and lacking development and payoffs is an obvious hazard, which is why every movie needs to be its own thing, to provide a sense of conclusion even if it’s not the final conclusion.
Part One is divided into three parts: 1) the early settlers of Horizon, in the San Pedro Valley, being massacred by the Apache, 2) an old gunslinger (Kevin Costner) tasked with protecting a woman and child on the run from vengeful gunmen, 3) a wagon train of settlers headed to Horizon. Now, from that very streamlined synopsis, which of those storylines sounds the most exciting? Which of those storylines sounds like it can lend itself toward having an in-movie climax? Which of these storylines feels the most fraught with danger and intrigue? It’s the one starring Costner himself, of course, fitting naturally into the role of a tough curmudgeon.
I’m confused why the entire first hour of this movie is devoted to following the frontier town when we’re only going to get two survivors total that go forward. As far as its narrative importance, this entire section could have been condensed to a terrifying flashback from Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter after the fact. The majority of this hour is spent watching the fine Christian folk of the early days of Horizon die horribly. We’re confined inside the battered Kittredge home that serves as the foundation of a siege thriller, with the band of various townspeople trapped and trying to fight off their indigenous intruders. The attack is prolonged and unsparing in its violence, eliminating all these nice, smiling faces from before. What does it add up to? It’s the tragic back-story for Frances, but it also makes her conveniently romantically unattached so that the nice cavalryman, Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington), can swoon and she can Learn to Love Again. It also sets up a young Apache warrior, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), making aggressive moves that his elders disagree with in their continued efforts to find some balance with the American settlers grabbing their territory. It also sets up what serves as the only possible character arc completion, with young Russell (Etienne Kellici) escaping the massacre in the beginning to then witness a massacre of Apache, and as he observes the scalping butchery, it galls him, not providing the relief of vengeance he had sought. Now that’s a conceivably emotional storyline, but Russell isn’t the primary character, or even one of the most essential supporting characters. You might genuinely forget about him like I did.
Something else I forgot an hour in was that Part One opens with Ellen Harvey (Jena Malone) shooting her abusive husband and running out. This prologue eventually comes back to setting up the present-day conflicts of the second hour, where Ellen has started a new life as Lucy with her young son. She lives in the Wyoming territory with a prostitute, Marigold (Abbey Lee). This storyline picks up significantly with new characters coming into the mix and disrupting the status quo. The first is Hayes Ellison (Costner) who finds himself attracted to Marigold, perhaps recognizing a woman in over her head. The second are the Sykes brothers (Jamie Campebell Bower, Jon Beavers) who have come looking to retrieve Lucy and her child, the son of their dearly departed pa who was slain in the opening. I am astounded that Costner decided to make the audience wait an hour for this segment because it feels like a much better fit to open Part One. There’s an immediacy to the looming danger and the consequences of actions, and what would serve as the Act One break is when Hayes has to intervene at great risk. This is, by far, the best segment of Horizon Part One. The ensuing on-the-run segment doesn’t get much further, setting up ongoing antagonism between the two sides that presumably will come to blows again. It’s not exactly reinventing the wagon wheel here: drifter reluctantly becoming protector for the vulnerable and reckoning with his shady past and trying to make amends. However, for this first movie, at least this storyline provides a sustained level of engagement with needed urgency.
The weakest portion is the wagon train led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson). The most significant conflict during this section isn’t even the protection of the wagon train, it’s whether or not the hoity-toity British couple (Tom Payne, Anna and the Apocalypse‘s Ella Hunt) will assimilate to life on the prairie. They’re privileged, though at least he seems to recognize this. She bathes in the drinking water supply in an extended sponge bath sequence that feels so oddly gratuitous and leery. Two scouts are caught eagerly peeping and this seems like the most significant conflict of this whole section. They’re headed for Horizon, the setting of tragedy and indigenous conflict we know, but the entire wagon train lacks any feeling of dread or even the opposite, a feeling of yearning for a new life. It’s just a literal pileup of underwritten characters in movement without giving us a reason to care.
Costner’s Western eschews the trappings of modern revisionism, deconstructing the heroism and Manifest Destiny mythology of popular Wild West media. This isn’t a deconstruction but a full blown romantic classical Western, embracing the tropes with stone-faced gusto. In some ways it feels like Costner’s version of a Taylor Sheridan show (1883, Yellowstone). He left a Sheridan show to make his own Sheridan show. It’s more measured in its portrayal of the Native Americans even as it shows them massacring men, women, and children as our first impression. I wager Costner is showing that the evils of violent tendencies pervade both sides of the conflict, with a troop of American scalp-hunters that don’t really care where those scalps come from. It’s hard to fully articulate the themes given this is only one-fourth of the overall intended picture. The expansive settings are stunning and gorgeously filmed. I can understand why Costner would want people to watch this movie on the big screen with scenery this beautiful from cinematographer J. Michael Muro, who served as Costner’s DP on 2003’s Open Range, another muscular Western. Fun fact: Muro also served as a Steadicam operator on Costner’s Best Picture-winning Dances with Wolves, so their professional relationship goes back thirty-five years and covers Costner’s love affair with Westerns.
During its conclusion, Horizon: An American Saga runs through a wordless montage of clips that serves as a trailer for the forthcoming Part Two. It’s not edited like a trailer, more so a very leisurely preview with clips that look good but, absent context, can be shrug-worthy. Oh look, a character looking out a window pensively. Oh look, a character walking along a trail. Oh look, a character dismounting from a horse. Oh look, another character looking out a window pensively. It’s hard for me to fathom this truncated preview getting too many people excited for what Part Two has to offer, but then I think that’s the same problem with Part One. It doesn’t serve as a grabber, with characters we really care about, with conflicts that keep us glued, and with revelations and character turns that can keep us intrigued and desperately wanting more. It’s hard for me to think of that many people walking out of Part One and being ravenous for nine more hours. I accept that stories might feel incomplete and characters might feel disjointed, but Horizon is perhaps a Western best left in the distance, at least until you can binge it in its completed form, whatever that may be, though I doubt we’re going to get four full movies. Ultimately, Costner’s opus will need to be judged as a whole rather than as consecutive parts.
Nate’s Grade: C
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