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Thunderbolts (2025)
I will tell you right now, dear reader, that I’m never going to include the asterisk when I type the title of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) newest epic entry, Thunderbolts. The reveal one week into its theatrical release that the team was rebranded “The New Avengers” seemed at best like a peculiar marketing gimmick to try and boost ticket sales after its opening weekend. “Oh, there’s an ‘Avengers’ in this movie title? Well I’ll go see that now,” said likely nobody ever. It just felt like a marketing ploy and the presence of the asterisk in the title, meant to symbolize and facilitate that identity transition, is just a symbol of trying to be too cute by half. Just be the Thunderbolts. Accept yourself as the Thunderbolts. Isn’t that part of the lesson of the movie, finding acceptance despite your misgivings and doubts? Refreshingly, while there are the occasional action sequence and general fisticuffs, Thunderbolts proves to be a much more probing and psychological MCU entry and entertaining beyond just the escapism.
Yelena (Florence Pugh) feels adrift as a secret black ops agent doing the government’s dirty work. Her handler, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has promised to let her retire after one last job. It just so happens that job is a scheme to have all of Valentina’s black ops killers to take each other out to spare her any embarrassing details coming out while she’s under Congressional investigation. That includes John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a disgraced Captain America place-holder, and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), the villain of Ant-Man and the Wasp who could phase through matter, and some mysterious man named Bob (Phillip Pullman) who suffers from amnesia and seems out of place. Along the way they’ll pick up other characters, like Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who is serving as a freshman Congressman, and Alexei a.k.a the Red Guardian (David Harbour), Yelena’s adopted father who is eager to support his daughter and bridge a divide that has grown between them recently. The constantly bickering group of malcontents, antiheroes, and misanthropes band together to survive as well as figure out Bob’s importance for a person as dangerous and manipulative as Valentina.
Thunderbolts is about a group of screw-ups who know they’re screw-ups, who know the world sees them as screw-ups, trying to be something more, and it doesn’t take much to see larger themes surrounding depression, loneliness, and community. There’s long been a pleasure in watching oddballs, let alone an unorthodox team of them, find solace and camaraderie they have been missing. It’s satisfying under most circumstances. It also helps when we are given the understanding of why these characters feel so alone and so useless. I’ll freely admit, in the first months of 2025 with the current government doing everything in its power to make people feel scared and alone and useless, I connected with the themes and eventual uplift of Thunderbolts perhaps at a level I might not have had the movie been released in 2023 or, say, under a President Harris. Regardless, I found this movie engaging because it focused less on the literal and metaphorical strengths of its characters and more on their weaknesses and fragility and needs. There is no giant sky beam, nor any faceless easily disposable swarm of CGI robots or aliens, nor any real world-ending apocalypse they have to thwart in that final climax. It really all comes down to combating an epidemic of loneliness, and the only way to do so is to willingly open one’s self to the possibility of pain, of disappointment, of embarrassment, or rejection, and to do so anyway because the alternative is just too grim and self-defeating an option. It forces characters with very real pain and regrets to confront that pain and to still keep trying. The scary enemy is not resolved through a punch but through a genuine hug. You can’t punch out depression. For me, that’s far more engaging and emotionally resonant for the thirty-sixth movie in the MCU than just more punching and explosions amidst a CGI-laden morass.
This is proof that Florence Pugh (Dune: Part Two, Oppenheimer) can power anything with her acting chops and charisma. Her character was a breakout scene-stealer in 2021’s Black Widow, and I’ve been glad every time since she’s popped onscreen. I find Pugh to be such a compelling actor, but she’s driven by movies that tend to put her through an emotional wringer so much I’m worried her face will permanently lock into a sob. She’s great, but it’s also just nice to watch her cut loose and have fun playing a character too. Even though Yelena has a darkness to her, and I would argue qualifies as depressed, this is still a role that allows Pugh to play with lighter elements, giving her a sardonic bounce that makes her even more appealing. This is a character worthy of headlining the team, and Pugh shines once again given an even bigger Marvel spotlight. I also want to sing the praises of Dreyfus (HBO’s Veep) and Harbour (Stranger Things) as near-perfect encapsulations of their respective characters. She’s all blistering cynicism and he’s a blustery teddy bear.
Another refreshing aspect for Thunderbolts is how it feels like a real movie. Obviously the other 35 MCU entries are movies by definition, but here is a movie that feels more authentic. It looks and sounds better in presentation. You can tell there are real locations. The cinematography is by Andrew Doz Polermo, the same man who photographed The Green Knight. The musical score is by Son Lux, the same composer responsible for the eclectic and sensational music for Everything Everywhere All at Once. The co-writers are from Netflix’s acclaimed miniseries Beef, as is the director, Jake Schreier, whose first film was the 2012 amiable indie dramedy Robot & Frank. There is a genuine effort to do something a little different from the factory setting of modern Marvel movies. It was just nice to actually take in real surroundings, real terrain, natural light, and composed by such a skillful director of photography. The technical elements are blockbuster level but also infused with a little indie sensibilities, bringing a different visual flavor to this studio tentpole. It might sound like a backhanded compliment (“Oh, a movie that is, gasp, made outside a giant green screen warehouse or LED screen”) but I am genuinely grateful. This is a Marvel movie whose Act Three chase takes more notes from Being John Malkovich and its jaunt through repressed memories than any standard superhero action climax. After so many MCU entries, you celebrate the ones that not only try something different but succeed, especially after the impulse to be more of the same is so strong.
That’s not to say that there still isn’t more that could have been done to better shape and develop Thunderbolts. Ultimately it feels like a more solid idea with some good characters and themes than a fully realized screenplay making the best use of its two hours. The movie isn’t quite the ensemble it may appear from the outside. One of the characters is removed so unceremoniously early that I question why this character was even brought back, especially since nobody would qualify this specific character as a favorite. I suppose it’s to present the appearance of elevated stakes, but it just reminds me of the 2016 Suicide Squad that introduced Adam Beach (Windtalkers) as Slipknot, the man “who could climb anything,” who just gets his head blown off so casually before their first mission even begins. However, with Thunderbolts, the movie really has a top tier of characters, primarily Yelena and John Walker and Bob. There’s another lower tier of characters that kind of come and go and provide moments, either levity or convenience, like Ghost and Red Guardian. Then there’s another lower tier of characters with even less time who pop in to scramble things or remind everyone of the exposition or stakes, like Bucky and Valentina. It doesn’t feel as fully integrated as an ensemble as the best Marvel team movies, like James Gunn’s Guardians films, so it can be a little frustrating when we’re celebrating the value of a community but not everyone is pulling their own narrative weight. I’m sure I could fall in love with Ghost as a character, but when she just poofs in and out and her whole arc is, “Hey, she came back,” that’s not going to do it. I also find the whole superhero science experiment a little late in the MCU to be introduced. We have characters talking about being in grade school when the Battle for New York, the centerpiece fight of 2012’s Avengers, took place, like Millennials today speak about where they were on 9/11, so it seems very late for the government to be trying to produce their own superheroes they can control. Weren’t they already making superheroes in the 1940s anyway with the likes of Captain America? This is old hat.
The MCU has been in a bit of a slump since the conclusion of Endgame, though I would also maintain the “death of the MCU/superhero fatigue” storyline has been over-dramatized and beaten to death. Thunderbolts has some very appealing and refreshing elements, focusing more on its characters and their faults so that their eventual triumphs will feel even more emotionally resonant. It’s nice for the action to support the characters and their drama rather than the other way around, and especially refreshing for the climax to be one about acceptance and vulnerability rather than over-powering some physical menace. I liked the Thunderbolts characters and their combustible energy and banter and would have liked them even more if more of them felt more fully integrated into the movie and given richer arcs. Still, it’s hard to reinvent any franchise thirty-six movies deep, and Thunderbolts, or The New Avengers depending upon what Disney decides to do with its titling from here out ( a real Live, Die, Repeat situation), takes what works with quirky oddball team-ups and makes it work with refreshing artistic sensibility. It won’t be for everyone but it’s got enough going for it that, damn, these crazy kids might just make something of it.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Companion (2025)
Confession: several years ago, my good friend and I co-wrote a movie for the Chinese film market that had several similarities with Companion. It was about a robot designed to be everything her owner desires turning on her owner. I’ll freely admit: Companion is better. While the movie doesn’t reveal that its robotic companion, Iris (Sophie Thatcher), is indeed made of circuits and screws until twenty minutes in, there are so many better twists and turns that come later. It begins with something relatively standard, a girlfriend nervous to meet the friends of her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) during a lake house retreat. The film takes a dark turn that forces the characters to question how far they would be willing to go to cover up a crime as well as their own culpability. The second half of the movie becomes a very engaging and twisty cat-and-mouse game with Iris trying to escape from pursuers. Writer/director Drew Hancock (My Dead Ex) had put plenty of thought into the story mechanics of his thriller set pieces, connecting them to character decisions and the desperation of trying to outwit one another. The entire movie is elevated and then some by the terrific lead performance from Thatcher (Heretic, Yellowjackets) who becomes our emotional anchor and Final Girl worthy of rooting for. Thatcher can be heartbreaking one minute, hilariously deadpan the next, like when she’s stuck speaking German, and a tremendous source of empathy as she fights for her survival. Upon my first watch, I felt there might be too many twists and turns right up to the very end, but having re-watched Companion, I appreciate how much Hancock really thinks about move-countermove plotting, making sure that we experience many avenues from this premise. It’s a vicious take-down of viciously exploitative control freaks, with some strong satirical dark humor elbowing you in the ribs. It very much reminded me of 2019’s Ready or Not and would pair well as a double-feature of feminine empowerment amidst horror manhunts. While it might not have much on its mind as far as larger social commentary, there’s enough cooking here to keep me entertained, laughing, wincing, with my eyes glued to the screen to see where exactly it could go next. That’s a rarity. Companion is built different.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
After seventeen years of constructing interconnected fables, not every Marvel movie is going to be exceptional, as each one serves as a mighty oar to propel the larger entity that is the Marvel cinematic Universe (MCU) forward. With over thirty movies, there are going to be duds and there are going to be movies that get lost in the machinery of the cinematic universe grinding onward. Consider Captain America: Brave New World one of those sacrificial offerings that nobody will remember in short order.
Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) has taken over the mantle of Captain America in the wake of the original, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), retiring. General Ross (Harrison Ford) has recently been elected president and he wants Sam to reconstitute the Avengers. However, someone is triggering sleeper agents to try and kill Ross, and Sam is entrusted to get to the bottom of this conspiracy.
Brave New World is certainly trying to relive the formula that made 2014’s Winter Soldier such a genre standout, upending the status order of good versus evil through the prism of a political thriller. There’s an assassination attempt on the newly elected president, and it also happens to be brainwashed sleeper agents that can be activated at a moment’s notice. What helped make that 2014 movie work was that the sleeper agent happened to be Steve Rogers’ former best friend he thought had died back in WWII. There was a personal connection to the mystery and especially the figure of destruction. With this movie, the personal connection that Sam has to the mystery is almost immediately locked away, made to be an objective needing to be saved by eventually capturing the real bad guy in the shadows. Rather than having to face down a ghost from the past, a personal friend gone rogue, now we have Sam just chasing one shady bad guy to link to the next shady bad guy to a conspiracy that doesn’t even involve him. That was another aspect that made Winter Soldier excel, Steve’s allegiance and sense of patriotism running in direct conflict with the wishes of his government. It was personal and meaningful and challenged his perception. With Brave New World, it could have literally been any character uncovering this very limited conspiracy. That’s not a great start, making your lead character practically superfluous to the larger plot.
Much of this lingering conspiracy also hinges upon the identity of the Red Hulk, which might have been mildly surprising had Red Hulk not been such a vital element of the movie’s marketing. He’s in the TV ads, he’s in the trailers, he is the poster. This movie had more Red Hulk advertising than its titular hero. Unless you’ve walked into the theater blind, and congrats to you, for all intents and purposes this has been sold as the Red Hulk movie, and even if you’re walking in hoping for some wall-to-wall Hulk smash, then you’ll be sorely disappointed. There’s perhaps ten minutes at most of Red Hulk action, and it’s saved for the very end. It’s a climax that feels more perfunctory than satisfying, with the obvious reveal being held as something revelatory and meaningful when it’s just going through its basic blockbuster dance moves.
As is typically the case with movies that undergo many delays and re-shoots, Brave New World feels like it has far too many things going on and also simultaneously not enough going on. This is an unexpected sequel to 2008’s Incredible Hulk, generally regarded as one of the weakest MCU movies. The only thing that survived that movie was William Hurt (R.I.P.) as General Ross. I don’t think too many Marvel fans have been dying to have those characters and storylines picked back up after 17 years, but at long last you can see Tim Blake Nelson’s character again. Do you know what his character’s name is? Unless you’re the keeper of the 2008 Incredible Hulk fan wiki, I strongly doubt it. Quick, what’s his name without looking it up? It’s Samuel Sterns. Did you even remember Tim Blake Nelson being in the 2008 movie? The movie also has a global resource land grab to finally explain the frozen celestial body rising from the ocean ever since the events of 2021’s Eternals, a movie I fear we’ll wait an additional 17 years to get its own conclusion. This colossal being is the source of a new all-purpose element – adamantium, and that name should be instantly familiar for fans of the X-Men, as this movie pushes their inclusion that much closer. If The Marvels gave us Kelsey Grammar and Patrick Stewart’s return as Beast and Professor Xavier, this one boldly gives us… an elemental alloy (at this rate, two movies from now will introduce the X-Men’s jet as another sign to those in the know about what’s to come). It’s taking the leftovers from another movie to set up the larger scope of a branch of new movies down the road, while also tying back elements and characters from the earliest days of the MCU. It’s all a lot of table-setting unless there’s a compelling storyline with engaging characters and relatable conflicts and drama, and Brave New World does not. As a result, it’s all like watching a fast-moving assemblage of familiar parts trying to package itself together as a cohesive movie, and it just cannot. It’s one of those sacrificial movies at the altar of larger stories.
Which is a shame because there was a really fascinating and thought-provoking story at the core of Brave New World that barely gets any recognition amidst the explosions and gunfire, namely what does it mean for there to be a black Captain America? How does society respond when their patriotic symbol of American might now has more melanin? Considering how the Internet has throngs that lose their mind whenever a traditionally white male character gets changed into something different, I have to imagine there would be waves of people grumbling that this new “thuggish” Cap isn’t “their Captain America.” This is epitomized in the character of Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a veteran who was also selected for the Army’s experimental super soldier project that gave birth to Captain America. Except because he was black during a time of segregation as the norm, he never got the adoration of Steve Rogers, and his accomplishments were ignored. In our current political climate, where diversity has become a convenient boogeyman, it would have been interesting to explore how the culture responds to a black man picking up the shield and being the next Captain America. It also would have invited a worthy conversation about where this country has let down its black populace, symbolized with Bradley’s past. Some of these themes were explored in the 2021 Disney Plus TV series Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be meaningfully revisited given the elevated platform of the Captain America moniker. This was also the TV show that argued refugees could be terrorists, so there was room to grow. Unfortunately, this is only ever given passing mention, as institutional racism gets in the walk of Hulk smashing.
There was possibility with Brave New World but it too often seems to run aground with too many conflicting directions, underdeveloped ideas, and unfocused themes. The political complications, as well as evaluating the sins of the country’s past, could have made for a poignant and relevant movie with bigger things on its mind rather than getting to the next CGI slug-fest. It’s a Captain America with a new Captain America, so let’s explore what that means. It’s the franchise’s opportunity to begin anew with a different hero at its helm, and yet it feels more like an over-extended, disappointing finale to the Falcon/Winter Soldier TV series. It feels like an unneeded epilogue to an epilogue, and tying in so many disparate elements from films that people have forgotten or care less for seems like a strange creative choice when Marvel is looking to find its way in the wake of its post-Endgame walkabout. The worst crime with Brave New World is merely how boring all of it turns out to be. Far from brave, far from new.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Soul to Squeeze (2025)
It’s been some time since I’ve reviewed an Ohio-made indie (having a baby and adjusting to a new job will do that). My goal has always been to discover the rare diamonds in the rough and to provide professional film criticism to these smaller-scale movies trying to make some noise. I’ve been doing this for a few years now and I’ll admit I haven’t found that many diamonds, so to speak. My wife has long since stopped watching these movies with me and declared me a masochist for continuing this quest. What can I say, I’m still hopeful to discover what Ohio filmmakers can do when given a platform. One such filmmaker, who has since relocated from Ohio to the City of Angels, is W.M. Weikart. I reviewed his 2019 short film Pure O and we have several mutual friends. He asked me to review his next project, a feature-length movie shot with some Ohio-bred talent in front of and behind the camera, so I’m considering Soul to Squeeze as Ohio-indie-adjacent. It’s a trippy, beguiling experience, and it’s one that will prove befuddling to some but is an experience that gets better with every additional minute.
The story itself is relatively simple. Jacob (Michael Thomas Santos, CSI: Vegas) is a young coed who agrees to be the subject of a mysterious experiment. He lives in a house for days and experiences a series of bizarre auditory and visual hallucinations, picking at his mind, memories, and hidden trauma that he’s been trying to ignore for years. Or are they actually hallucinations after all? Can his mind survive?
These experimental/psychological triptych kinds of movies hinge on a few points of potential viewer engagement. First, the most obvious is simply being interesting and memorable in its weirdness. If you’re going for a crazy sensory experience, it helps if there’s actually something crazy worth watching. This was one of my biggest issues with the 2023 horror indie Skinamarink, a strange nightmare that mostly felt like the same ten boring images jumbled around for 80 very tedious minutes of dashed hopes. There’s only so much formless imagery I can watch without some larger connection, and if your movie is going to live or die based upon your outlandish nightmare imagery, then you better rise to the challenge. Skinamarink did not. Thankfully Soul to Squeeze has a larger agenda that reveals itself over the course of its 80-minute running time. We have a character trying to hide from some trauma he’d rather ignore, so we know this experience will force him to confront those feelings and, hopefully, find some way to process his intense emotions and come out the other side a better person. Or it will drive him completely mad. Either storytelling path offers intrinsic entertainment value. There’s purpose under the imagery so it’s not all abstract nonsense waiting for someone else to project meaning onto the disconnected pieces.
Now, it takes a little long to get going to begin to reveal that trauma and that connectivity. For the first forty minutes, weird things are going down without much in the way of a larger set of rules, which could have benefited the engagement, such as disturbing or confounding visions happening between certain hours of the day, allowing our protagonist time to anxiously dread their arrival. Or there could be an escalation in the intensity of the visions and their duration. There could also be the question over whether the visions are real or not, especially if they’re occurring after he’s forced to eat the provided food in the house. Perhaps he even tries to abstain from eating to then discover they still come like dreadful clockwork. Unraveling past residents of this experiment could also foretell what possible fates, both helpful and harmful, could await. Our protagonist could also try and escape as the visions get more personal and find he cannot escape. The character could be a little more active. Jacob seems very compliant for a wounded character undergoing psychological experimentation, which begs the question why he would continue with this treatment after it begins picking away at the secret he doesn’t want to face. There are other directions that the main character could have gone through while we waited for the larger thematic clarity to come into focus with the visions after 40-minutes of atmospheric noodling.
When you’re going for a more experimental narrative with heavy visual metaphors, it can be tricky to find a balance between arty and pretentious, or, to put it in other words, between David Lynch and student films. This balance is tipped toward the latter early, especially when I think a blue flower comes to life and is… a French woman… spouting platitudes before turning back into a flower. It’s stuff like that which can seem a little daft but without the intention of weird humor. In contrast, there’s a strange but amusing scene where our character comes across a sitting mermaid on display in a museum. She literally eats a pearl necklace from Jacob’s hands and then smiles mischievously as it reappears around her neck, now her own possession. There is a larger metaphorical connection here that’s revealed later, with the necklace having a connection to Jacob’s traumatic past and even the concept of the mermaid too. There’s a phone conversation that we get both sides of that ends up starting as one of the earliest points of confusion and agitation for Jacob and then, by its return, serves as an unexpected vehicle for our protagonist’s emotional growth and reflection. It’s a clever and rather satisfying creative boomerang.
Soul to Squeeze impressively masks its low-budget nature through creative choices and elevated technical craft. Weikart has a natural eye for visual composition and lighting especially, so there’s nary a moment where the movie isn’t at least appealing to the eyes. Having a director who can frame an engaging shot is a godsend when you’re primarily going to be stuck in a single location for 80 minutes. A smart and talented visual artist can really hide the limitations of a low budget well. This is also by far one of the best sounding low-budget indies I’ve heard. The sound mixing is impeccably professional and the score by Sonny Newman (Burn the Witch) is very pleasant and evocative and soothing when it wants to be. Sound design is one of the biggest areas that holds back so many micro-budget film productions, and it’s so refreshing to have a movie not only where sound has been given great attention but also incorporated into the presentation and experiences in meaningful and artistic ways. The visuals can be rather eye-catching, like when Jacob’s TV transforms into a multi-screen monster where eyeballs and a giant mouth take up residence on the various screens, and aided by a slick sound design, it all allows the sensory experience to be even more compelling and accessible. As the film progresses, the bigger picture comes into focus, which means more exposition is thrown at the viewer. Weikart and his team cleverly find ways to present the information through a series of sufficient images and sounds that imply plenty with minimal (some of the sound and picture arrangements can take on a certain true crime dramatic recreation feel). I don’t have a final budget number but it looks better than many indies I’ve seen with considerably higher budgets.
There is one very significant technical choice that I wish had been more essentially incorporated into the story of Soul to Squeeze. As its promotional materials declare, this is the “the first film ever to have a continuously changing aspect ratio throughout the entire film. It begins in a 4:3 aspect ratio and expands out to a 2.35:1 by the end.” For the layman, that means throughout the film the aspect ratio is changing from the old boxy TV standard to a wider and wider widescreen. Now, you could make an argument that this is meant to represent the progression of Jacob’s thinking, that his world is literally expanding, but if that’s the case it feels a little too metaphorical to land as an essential tool for this story to be told at its best. It’s kind of neat but ultimately feels more like a gimmick. Perhaps the nights could have been labeled sequentially, and with each additional night the aspect ratio alters, expanding the horizons. You could even make it a Wizard of Oz motif, with Jacob opening a door and coming out the other end with a different aspect ratio to communicate the transition to a new plane of thinking and reality. Without calling more attention to its changes, and without connecting it more deliberately with the onscreen action, it becomes only a slightly noticeable visual choice over time that may go ignored by most.
By design, Soul to Squeeze is meant to be mystifying and experimental, which will try some people’s patience if they don’t find the ensuing imagery and weirdness to be entertaining. I wish there was more of what I appreciated in the second half to be present in the first half, and I’ll freely admit that I might have missed some of those clues and connective tissue just due to the strange and abstract nature of the movie. I was never bored and often amused at the various ideas that animate the movie (a game show host narrating breakfast is quite surreal and hilarious). The movie looks good, sounds good, and moves along at a fitting pace. The biggest gripe I have with these kinds of movies is whether it will ever add up to anything or is every moment just another in a chain of interchangeable weirdness? With Soul to Squeeze, there is a connection to much of the imagery and hallucinations, so there is a larger design that coalesces. I think there are some specifics that would have potentially aided the overall experience, but adding specificity could deter the immersion and grasping for understanding desired from these kinds of movies. Soul to Squeeze might not be that quintessential diamond in the rough I’m in search of with these Ohio (and Ohio-adjacent) indies, but it’s still a professionally made, creatively engaging, and fairly entertaining curio that can surprise at a moment’s notice.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Electric State (2025)
The fire hose that has been the Netflix cash flow may be reigning in, but that didn’t stop the streaming giant from making another attempt at a huge blockbuster to rival those Hollywood designs for the big screen. The Electric State is a $320-million sci-fi adventure spectacle from the Russo brothers, Anthony and Joe, the team that gave us the highs of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) later Avengers movies, and the lows of, well, everything after their MCU movies. Netflix is actively trying to compete with the theatrical experience brought to you at home, so they take these big expensive swings on large-scale, quippy, action vehicles like Red Notice and 6 Underground every so often to mixed results. Netflix has become the go-to place for a kind of movie that has altogether vanished in the studio sphere, the mid-tier movie for adults. We need those stories. What Netflix hasn’t done as effectively is compete with the big studios for comparable expensive action spectacle. The Electric State is further proof.
In an alternate America, robots were created and given menial tasks by mankind. Naturally, they grew tired of this and attempted a revolution for their equal rights. Mankind was on the brink when an unlikely savior emerged. Tech CEO Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) created an army of humanoid drones controlled via VR helmets. This disposable army of avatars was able to beat back the robots and forced their leader, literally an animatronic Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson), to sign a “peace treaty.” The results exiled the robots into a walled off wasteland in the American southwest, and humanity went on its merry way, now with VR-controlled avatars that allowed every American the luxury of staying on their duff. Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown, contractually obligated to be in every Netflix original not starring Joey King) is an orphan WITH AN ATTITUDE. One day she’s greeted by a pint-sized robot looking like the Cosmo cartoon character her younger brother was obsessed with. The little robot says he is her brother and Michelle realizes that maybe she has some family left after all. She and the Cosmo bot are on the run from scavengers and bounty hunters trying to stop their fateful face-to-face reunion.
The Electric State is lacking such vital creative sparks to feel anything more than the ramshackle sum of its derivative sci-fi parts. It began as a melancholy mixed media book from the same Swedish author behind Tales From the Loop and it’s become a giant lumbering mess of mediocre and familiar elements. It kind of feels like the newer Ready Player One-era Steven Spielberg trying to emulate early E.T.-era Spielberg, but then that would give us an artist on the level of Spielberg, and that’s not what we have here. It’s standard adventure fare with a brother and sister crossing the country to save the day and thwart a big evil corporation along with scrappy, rakish rogues joining them along the way for fun and life lessons. Chris Pratt’s character is so transparently a Han Solo clone but he’s an empty vest with eye-rolling quips. This is an alternate history story with a literal robot uprising but it devotes so little interest in its own world building and history. The movie essentially castigates all the robots to a forbidden zone that naturally will be visited by our plucky heroes. The majority of the movie is watching these robotic avatars (reminded me of the Geth from Mass Effect) for people who can’t be bothered to leave their VR helmets. If this new world has devolved human interaction into a series of screens (commentary!) then maybe let’s explore that with meaning. If robots are going to be an exploited labor class (commentary!) then maybe let’s explore that too. If this is a future world where robots have been exiled and feared as an Other (commentary!) then let’s explore that too. There’s one moment where Evil Steve Jobs enjoys a VR recreation of his deceased mother, except he admits that this version is the version he wishes he had, and the real figure was far less doting and far more abusive. That’s an interesting concept, that VR offers users the ability to live in a reality of their own desires. But this isn’t a movie that wants to take time to explore interesting and relevant themes, because that would get in the way of action set pieces and goofy robot action. Seriously, there’s one fight where a U.S. postal service robot is literally hurling undelivered mail at a killer robot avatar and succeeds. Because this isn’t a deep movie, we have essentially good robots and bad robots, and if you’re shocked that the robots may have been misunderstood, well congratulations on seeing your first movie. I assure you, they mostly get better from here if you give them a chance.
The inclusion of robots is so underutilized, tapped for ready sidekicks and villains, that you could have replaced them with aliens or clones or any other disposable science fiction element. In this parallel world, Walt Disney created the robots for Disney World, so wouldn’t it be worthy of exploring that history and the sense of Victor Frankenstein-style paternal obligation? Wouldn’t the robots retreat to their ancestral home of Disney World? Or perhaps they view this as the birth of their enslavement? What about different generations of robots, especially older models being replaced with newer ones, thus creating class warfare within an exploited secondary class? What about looking at robots having to subsist off junk to continue with their meager existences? What about robots still living in forbidden zones that are hunted by the government and its armada of robot drones? There are so many possible ideas and stories and characters that are open through the inclusion of robots, but the movie doesn’t have the interest or drive to make them matter. As a result, it’s mostly a swift-moving travelogue with some ugly-looking or cranky guests riding shotgun. Occasionally The Electric State will remember, oh yeah, robots can do stuff people cannot, like having one of them hack into a server or having a smaller robot inside like a high-tech Russian nesting doll.
I think it was a combination of the uninvolved storytelling as well as the character design that left my emotional attachment to be null and void. I hated the Cosmo character design. He’s this big spherical head with little skinny limbs, but the head might as well be an un-moving mask. A giant toothy smile is drawn on the front and it’s so inexpressive. Also, the fact that the kid has to exclusively rely upon only using sound bytes from this canceled cartoon series makes for a quickly annoying little brother. I didn’t care about this kid, human or robot, and I didn’t care if Michelle ever reunited with her brother. Then the fact that the movie’s climax involves such a serious and emotional choice seems absurd considering what has been underdeveloped up until this abrupt shift in intended emotional stakes. It’s such an out-of-left field escalation that I almost laughed out loud at what the movie was asking me to feel, as well as what it was asking its protagonist to decide. Likewise, the betterment of robot-kind is given such little recognition, culminating in a showdown between the avatar of good robots and evil robots essentially going to revise a treaty that we don’t know much about. For a movie about how easy it can be to distance ourselves via technology, it sure fails to reasonably make the viewer care about robot equality.
Then there’s the fact that this whole enterprise cost an astounding $320 million for Netflix to platform it as its next hit movie to doze off to while in the middle of doing laundry. The Russo brothers have retreated back to Marvel to handle the next two Avengers movies, and it seems like at a time where both parties have missed and could use one another. Outside of Marvel, the Russos have delivered one super expensive action movie (The Grey Man), a super expensive spy action series (The Citadel), and one lackluster biopic that used every Scorsese stylistic trick they’ve been saving up (Cherry). With The Electric State, we have the brothers’ more familiar mixture of large-scale action and special effects in a mass appeal studio blockbuster space. However, every movie outside of Marvel has made me question their capabilities of handling these big movies. I know the Russos can be fantastic with comedy, as some of their TV episodes are the best of recent memory, and their stewardship of the big MCU movies in the wake of Joss Whedon’s departure was undeniably successful. So why isn’t The Electric State successful? It comes down to the screenplay which is so disinterested in its own ideas, world, and characters, held together by the familiarity of other adventure blockbuster staples like loose chewing gum. It’s a movie replete with famous faces and big effects but feels so devoid of life and creativity, a blockbuster automaton intended to hold the attention but rarely engage one’s imagination and emotions.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Mickey 17 (2025)
Bong Joon Ho is one of those filmmakers that has earned the right to make any movie he wants. Hollywood might not feel the same, but the filmmaker behind Snowpiercer, The Host, and the triumphant Oscar-winning Parasite, the first time an international movie won Best Picture, is an amazingly versatile storyteller who seamlessly blends different genres and tones into unique and mesmerizing film experiences. If he’s interested in telling a story, then that guarantees I’m interested in watching it. This is especially true if he steps into the realm of science fiction. After the worldwide success of Parasite, Bong Joon Ho was given $100 million dollars and final cut from a big studio to make whatever he wanted, and he chose an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s novel, Mickey 7, telling the story of the world’s most/least fortunate expendable in a fledgling space colony. I read the book last year and it was quite good, so my anticipation was even higher for the feature film Mickey 17, especially after Warner Brothers delayed the movie an entire year. Now, after the long wait, we can all finally enjoy Bong Joon Ho with peak artistic freedom, a position that will likely not be repeated. It’s a grand movie with big ideas, vision, satire, and also enough underutilized ideas and distracting characters and performances to quibble over “what if’s.”
In the distant future, Earth is overrun in population and low on natural resources, so the next space race is to find habitable colony worlds. Mickey (Robert Pattinson) gets in over his head to shady loan sharks and looks for any possible way off of the planet. The only position he can sign up for is that of an expendable, a person who can be cloned from a biological printing machine. These expendables are put in dangerous jobs and different science tests because, well, if they die, you can start over. It’s a terrible job, one that involves dying repeatedly, and Mickey agrees to be the human crash test dummy. He’s on a multiyear colony ship traveling across space to find a habitable world. The planet they land on is bitterly cold, impossible to farm, and crawling with its own crawly wildlife. Mickey 17 is left for dead after falling down a chasm but he survives, trudges back home, only to discover another Mickey in his bed. They’ve assumed Mickey 17 died and already printed out his replacement. There’s a rule about there not being multiples and, if discovered, both expendables would be killed. They have to hide their secret and work together while still vying for dominance over one another and staying out of the crosshairs of buffoonish yet powerful political leaders Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife, Yifa (Toni Collette).
Mickey 17 is a smart, weird, and consistently fun and thoughtful movie. It doesn’t waste any time getting started, literally with Mickey 17 on the cusp of dying with his looming interaction with the aliens. Bong Joon Ho adapted the screenplay and has a nimble way of dealing with the conflicts and setting. I appreciated that he doesn’t prolong different storylines beyond their point of interest. He’s always got another development or joke or set piece to provide. There’s a fun sense of discovery with the movie as well as satisfaction to watch how he slides all the pieces into place. I appreciated how he imbues character notes so easily with supporting characters, giving this universe a larger personality that resonates. I love the setting and the reality it presents of a long-voyage space colony fighting for resources and struggling to keep the lights on. The sets and photography are gorgeous to behold but also filled with details to help make the world feel lived-in. I loved that even in the far-flung future, technology can still work in fits and starts, like watching Mickey slide out of the printer conveyor belt only to lurch backwards before going forward again, like the printers of the 1980s. I love the alien creature design that resembles an armadillo crossed with the subterranean worms from Tremors. I loved how they were able to defend their queen/mamma in Act Three. I love the goofy comic flourishes too, like the fact that there’s a guy just walking around in like a pigeon mascot costume that is never really explained. This is also the same movie where characters constantly ask Mickey what it’s like to die and you realize that every version of Mickey doesn’t know because he’s never experienced it personally, only born from the aftermath. The way this movie is capable of marrying big ideas with silly visual jokes and slapstick and explosions is impressive and a reminder that certain artists will prosper on big stages when given ultimate freedom. Come for the star power and slapstick, stay for the existential dread.
Pattinson presents another wildly weird performance that reminds me how exciting he is as an actor. He’s got these movie star good looks but he really wants to play all the weirdos he can with the most eclectic filmmakers, and I love it. His Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 may be constructed from the same DNA but they come across as vastly different iterations of our hero. This provides a more assertive version of Mickey to try and shape up our more passive Mickey into standing up for himself, taking chances, and taking charge when the situation calls for it. He’s like a mentor. Mickey 18 isn’t featured that often in the story, and truthfully he wasn’t featured that often in the book as well. It’s mostly the story of the hapless and whiny-voiced Mickey 17 and his journey of self. It’s a familiar yet enticing formula to watch a character gain agency and go from pushover to defender of the vulnerable. Pattinson finds little sparks to grab onto with the character, little pieces of weirdness that really help crystalize our understanding of Mickey. Of course the human lab rat would have the fight bred out of him through resignation, and it’s still gratifying to see him stay who he is while also rising to the challenge of the moment. In interviews, Pattinson has said that he modeled his two Mickey performances after the cartoon characters Ren and Stimpy. This actor is perfect for the wacky, tone-blending worlds of Bong Joon Ho. He’s game for everything.
It’s not hard to see the entire enterprise as a crafty critique of capitalism, not exactly a new point in the Bong Joon Ho movie universe. Mickey’s value to his mission is the literal exploitation of his body. He’s callously tested upon for vaccines and weapons and whatever the scientists may cook up. Because they know they can download another Mickey, it changes how they view the current iteration: he’s not a person, he’s only whatever they want him to be at whatever moment. His value is what he can offer to them as a test subject, as a pile of flesh to be experimented upon. Therefore, the casual cruelty in the name of science and “progress” is yet another example of how we can easily dehumanize our fellow man in a system that profits from their labor and exploitation. Bong Joon Ho also provides a more compassionate view of the downtrodden Other, in particular the indigenous alien species on the colony world (to be fair, as is pointed out by another character, the humans are the actual aliens in this scenario). The creatures are viewed as unworthy of co-existence, in the way of man’s intergalactic manifest destiny, and so they must be wiped out for greater conquest. It’s not a huge surprise that the aliens might not be the stupid and scary creatures that they’ve been projected to be, and this is revealed very early when a collective herd saves the wounded Mickey 17. He views this as an insult, that he’s not even seen as worth eating, but the reading should be obvious to everyone in the audience. Thus we spend the rest of the movie for the other characters to realize the reality of these strange creatures. I did appreciate that the end of the movie coincides with a battle for primacy versus cooperation and compassion, which centers some of the major themes and ties the movie’s character arcs and significant messages together. Plus there’s also explosions.
And yet, there are ideas that could have been explored for even more depth and contemplation. There’s a very intriguing question concerning the different personalities of Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, which begs the follow-up question whether or not they are indeed one hundred percent replicas. Their personalities are such wild swings away from one another, with one being much more the laconic pushover and the other being the aggressive and assertive ideal Mickey. The next Mickey is built upon the recorded memories of the previous memories, so in theory there wouldn’t be many significant differences. However, the big personality differences are not explored or even questioned. This is a missed opportunity that could have gotten to something deeper philosophically and with the revelations of its world-building tech. Perhaps the cloning device doesn’t actually work as advertised and each new Mickey is a close proximity but there are minute yet distinct differences, meaning each new Mickey is his own person deserving of identity. This could then also further connect with the religious objection to cloning that one body should only have one soul. This could lead to Mickey 17, and even 18, debating whether or not they have souls of their own and their conception of life and sacrifice, being more than just the living equivalent of a punching bag. It could also bring into a spiritual element about possibly having a celestial reward after their extra-solar toils, at least the hopeful belief. There were real thematic qualities to explore and provide meaningful texture to the whole movie, and yet they’re disappointingly ignored.
The Trump buffoonery avatar stuff is a little harder to take in early 2025 with the fallout of a second Trump presidency still having its far-reaching, chaotic, despotic consequences. The character and his wife are invented entirely for the movie by Bong Joon Ho, and clearly he had some things he wanted to say about the former and now-current president (there are even followers wearing those signature red caps). I just don’t know if there’s anything of real substance to this portrayal. He’s a cartoonish idiot villain overcome with vanity, ego, overconfidence, and craven manipulation, but there’s not much that is gained from his multiple appearances. Ruffalo is doing fine work jutting out his jaw and making sure to show those upper teeth as often as possible. It’s just that the character is an exaggerated all-purpose blowhard villain, and it makes for a character you desperately want to see brought lower, to be exposed as a fraud, to get their cosmic comeuppance. The problem is that the appearances are all hammering away at the exact same point that I began to tune Marshall out. In our current political landscape, with the intended target taking up every iota of oxygen in the public sphere, it just becomes another reflection point of the exhaustion felt from the Trump administration. One character verbally lambastes the political bully as a world-class idiot and says, “That’s why you lost the elections.” Plural. It’s then I recalled Mickey 17 was delayed a year, and this would have played differently for me in early 2024 than 2025.
There’s also a very late sequence I would like to analyze why it doesn’t quite work as conceived, but this will enter into some spoilers, so skip to the next question if you’d like to remain pure, dear reader. During the epilogue or coda, Mickey is seemingly remembering something from his past until it’s revealed to be a nightmare and thus having little consequence beyond insight into Mickey’s subconscious anxiety. In this nightmare, Mickey stumbles upon Yifa in the midst of her printing out a new version of her husband through the cloning machine. We’d been previously told that after her husband’s death that Yifa had been locked away and supposedly slit her own wrists. This raises the question whether the Yifa that we see at the machine is her or a clone, and that tantalizing possibility unlocks a new world of story for the movie that seems completely natural and essential. It’s the kind of twist hiding in plain sight that could have worked, that there were two Yifas at the same time there had been two Mickeys or long predating. This is because once you start thinking of this possibility it’s too obvious that it would happen. Of course the rich and famous blowhards who regard themselves as more important than others would see the expendable process as a means of living forever, or at least having a back-up plan. Of course the Marshalls would be hypocrites about their moral righteousness against cloning being an affront to God and creation. Of course these people would use whatever means they could to extend their power and their lives. Just like that, the very end of the movie has an extra layer to it that also provides more purpose for Yifa as a character. Then, just like that, it’s revealed as a nightmare, and all that intriguing possibility is wiped out, and I was left wondering why even produce this moment after the duplicating machine has been destroyed?
Mickey 17 is an engaging, funny, enraging, and silly example of what science fiction can do. It can explore existential and essential questions about what it means to be human while also employing cartoonish slapstick, as well as cartoonish political satire. Not everything comes together smoothly; it’s a true jumble of tones and ideas, a Bong Joon Ho staple, but he’s typically so skilled at hiding the transitions and seams so you don’t even notice the genre movement until it’s already happened. There are intriguing directions and ideas I wish the movie had explored more, and the climax is a little conveniently tidy but suitably fitting as an invention for a showdown. As a reader of the novel, I can say that it’s an entertaining and fitting adaptation but also one that works on its own while I can still encourage people to read the novel. Mickey 17 is ambitious and messy and also very human, finding grace inside the darkness and absurdity. It’s not perfect but it is worth celebrating, just like each of the put-upon Mickeys.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Gorge (2025)
While watching the action-thriller The Gorge, I kept thinking, “Wow, I’m surprised this didn’t get a theatrical release at all.” The Apple Plus original is the kind of movie you’d want to watch on the big screen, with large-scale action, atmospheric imagery, and a creepy sound design meant to elicit shudders. It has a dynamite premise that grabbed me right away: two elite snipers from the East and West, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya-Taylor Joy), are tasked with manning watchtowers overlooking a cavernous and mysterious gorge. They have heavy-duty Gatling guns to make sure whatever is in the gorge stays in the gorge. It’s a year-long tour of duty and both snipers are forbidden to communicate with one another. Naturally, out of boredom and necessity, they break the no-contact rule, first through white board messages, then through shared experiences and competitions, and finally coming face-to-face. For the first 45 minutes or so, The Gorge is actually a pretty lean and effective long distance romance of sorts. There’s ingenuity in the process of getting to know someone from across a large hole in the ground, and both actors have solid chemistry that will help make you silently yearn for a little global collaboration. The movie also has an intriguing scenario with tantalizing details that point to its secret history, until everything is literally spelled out in Act Three. The monsters, who look like a combination of Groot and zombies, are an unsettling character design, though I wanted more variety in their appearance. When the characters finally delve into the gorge for the majority of our climax, we got some new and nasty creepy crawlies, like a tree with rib bones like insect mandibles that ensnare like a Venus flytrap. Alas, I found the stuff inside the gorge to be fun and creepy with a great atmosphere to play upon what we can and cannot see, but it was the stuff above and outside the gorge that made the movie for me. That’s The Gorge for ya: come for spooky monsters, stay for the surprisingly involving romance between monster killers.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Megalopolis (2024)
Trying to make sense of Megalopolis is something of a fool’s errand. It clearly means something significant to its creator, legendary director Francis Ford Coppola. He’s been wanting to make this movie for decades and finally the urge just became too strong to ignore, so he sold his successful Zoetrope winery and put over $100 million of his own fortune into this movie to ensure his vision would be unclouded by meddling studio execs and moneymen. It’s the kind of bracing act of artistic hubris and ambition that is worth celebrating. It’s a big swing from a legendary filmmaker who has quite often gone overboard only to return from the brink with cinematic classics, like Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Given his filmography, you would think that Coppola has more than earned the benefit of the doubt. Except… the Coppola of today isn’t exactly in his prime. He hasn’t had a great movie since 1992’s Dracula, and in those ensuing 30 years, he’s made inexplicable movies like Jack, where Robin Williams plays a kid who ages rapidly, and Twixt, a bizarre misfire with Edgar Allan Poe and vampires that was reportedly inspired by a dream he had. I would expect any new Coppola project to lean more towards these kinds of artistic follies than his generation-defining classics. The man is 85 years old and put all his remaining artistic cache and wealth into guaranteeing that we live in a world with Megalopolis. After seeing his long-gestating opus, I cannot say we are better for the trouble.
It’s hard to condense the plot of Megalopolis because so much is happening while nothing seems that important. For example, brilliant architect Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver) wants to build a new wondrous city he calls Megalopolis, a utopia for the masses. The power brokers of New Rome, including Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and CEO of the largest bank Hamilton Crassu III (Jon Voight), are against such radical changes and see Caesar as an upstart. It also so happens that Caesar can stop time at will, until he cannot. He also has discovered a miracle material to build his futuristic city, but nobody seems to care. The masses of New Rome are more interested in whether or not a pop star is still really a virgin. Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s party girl daughter, witnesses Caesar stopping time, which is a big deal, or maybe it’s not, but she’s intrigued by the mercurial artist seeking to bring to life his unique vision. But Caesar only likes people interested in art and philosophy and books. Could he fall for her, and will it possibly cost his artistic vision from becoming a shimmering reality of hope?
This is a $100-million-dollar movie created entirely for one person, and if you happen to be Francis Ford Corolla, then congratulations, you will understand and properly appreciate the artistic messages and bravado of Megalopolis. For the rest of us poor souls, we’ll be struggling for meaning and insight. The movie almost exists on a purely allegorical level, or at least it must considering that so much of the scene-to-scene plotting is haphazard and underdeveloped.
Let’s start with the central conflict: why are these forces so immovably against one another? If you were the mayor of a city with a raft of problems, it would sure seem like a great move for a utopian addition. I suppose he and the other men in power are afraid of ceding some of their influence and status to this newcomer, and that is something that could have been explored stronger through generational conflict, the old having a stranglehold on power and losing sight of relevance but still clinging to their storied perches. Caesar should be a threat, an appeal to the people that they no longer truly serve. However, in this story, Caesar is so brilliant and any person standing in his way is meant to look foolish or evil. It reminded me a lot of Ayn Rand’s terrible book Atlas Shrugged that was turned into a terrible trilogy of ideologically rotten movies where the brilliant billionaires are tired of their genius being wasted by government regulation. Obviously Caesar is meant to represent The Artist who is being doubted or interfered with, which is how Coppola views himself, or at least filmmakers in general. Therefore this character can have no flaws and must always be right because the message is to give the great artists their space to be great, to challenge our preconceptions of what art can be. He must be vindicated, so it makes him a rather boring and simplistic character who wants a glorious future for the people.
But what exactly is Megalopolis as a utopia? All we know is that it has moving sidewalks and gyroscope orbs for traveling and it’s very glowy. Visually it reminds me of another Adam Driver movie, 2016’s Midnight Special, when the alien world began co-existing with our world. This magic future city is made of a magic future element that also has the magic ability to heal Caesar after he gets critically injured. All of those details beg for more clarity or development, along with Caesar’s ability to stop time, which I guess is hereditary. These elements should be more impactful, but like the utopian city of Megalopolis, they’re just convenient devices, to simply provide the protagonist with a means of solution whatever his dilemma may be. There’s another conflict in the middle where Caesar is framed with an altered video of him having sex with that virginal pop star, but this too is resolved ludicrously fast. Even this scandal cannot last longer than a few minutes before once again dear Caesar is proven virtuous and unassailable. When he has a magic solution for every problem, including reconstructing a hole in his face, and he can never be wrong, and he has no complexity except for his supposed genius, but his genius is also vaguely defined as far as the actual outcome of his supposed utopia, it makes for an extremely uninteresting main character that gets tiresome as we never flesh out his important attributes.
Likewise, the satire of Megalopolis is fleeting and broad and hard to really engage with. There’s the rich and powerful living in excess and with a sense of depraved callousness toward those they feel are lesser. This is best epitomized by Aubrey Plaza’s tabloid journalist character with the exceptionally bad name of Wow Platinum. She’s a gold digger and flippantly shallow as well as super horny, starting as a fling with Caesar before moving onto Clodio (Shia LeBeouf), the grandson to the CEO of the big bank. This woman has no guile to her and is transparently voracious for all she covets, whether it be sexual or material. With Plaza giving a delightfully campy performance, really digging into the scenery-chewing villainy of her character, it makes her the most entertaining person on screen, and a welcomed respite from all the other actors being so self-serious and stodgy and haughty. This tempers the satiric effect because now I’m looking at Wow Platinum as a godsend. Obviously New Rome is meant to represent the United States, so all of its foreboding narration about the death of empires is meant to make the audience compare the end of Rome to the internal fissures of America. Like everything else in the movie, the comparison is only skin deep, and it’s merely asking you to juxtapose rather than critically compare modern-day to the collapse of Rome. By the end, there’s some definite unsubtle swipes at topical political culture, like when Clodio adopts himself as a humble man of the people to “Make New Rome Great Again” and foments an army of red-hatted rabble. But what exactly is Coppola saying with this? That the people in power will pose as populists to manipulate the lower classes into action that benefits them? Not exactly breaking news, nor is it explored on a deeper or more complex or at least more interesting development. Much like the plotting of Megalopolis, the satirical elements are a cacophonous mess of dispirit ideas and directions.
It’s staggering to believe that the man who wrote Patton and The Godfather is the same man who wrote such lines like, “You’re anal as hell whereas I am oral as hell,” as Plaza looks face-first at Driver’s crotch. The dialogue in this movie is tortured and feels like it was written by A.I., or by aliens who were trying to recreate human social interactions but whose only archive of study was the amazing catalogue of movies by Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau. The “Entitles me?” conversation that repeats itself four times, the “riches of my Emersonian mind,” to “when we ask questions, that’s basically a utopia,” to what might be the most eye-rolling line of 2024, where a vindictive Voight hides a tiny bow and arrow under a sheet by his waist and literally says, “What do you think of this boner I’ve got here?” Yes, the man who gave us The Godfather has also now given us, “What do you think of this boner I’ve got here?” The movie is so preoccupied with the fall of empires and yet a line of dialogue like that is a sign of the decline of an empire.
Ultimately, Megalopolis reminded me of Richard Kelly’s 2007 flop, Southland Tales, a connection I also felt while watching 2023’s Beau is Afraid as well. I wrote, “It’s because both movies are stuffed to the brim with their director’s assorted odd ideas and concepts, as if either man was afraid they were never going to make another movie again and had to awkwardly squeeze in everything they ever wanted into one overburdened project.” It’s an ungainly mess, a protracted and self-indulgent litany of Coppola’s foibles and follies, and it’s practically impenetrable for an audience. I challenge anyone to seriously engage with this movie beyond rubbernecking. I cannot believe this movie cost $100 million dollars and for a passion project there’s so little that makes me wonder how someone would be so passionate about this. It’s not a good movie but it has its own ongoing fascination for cinephiles morbidly curious what Coppola had to make. These are the kinds of bold artistic swings we should cherish, where filmmakers with storied careers are willing to burn it all down for one more project that must be just so, like Kevin Costner’s four-part Horizon Western that we’ll probably never see completed. I wanted artists to test the waters, to chase their visions, to be ambitious. But that doesn’t mean the art is always worth it.
Nate’s Grade: D
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Kraven the Hunter (2024)
Kraven the Hunter feels like a movie that was never meant to be seen. That seems paradoxical considering the efforts of many talented people over years took place to bring the Spider-Man villain solo movie to some form of creaking, wheezing life. Since 2017, Sony has decided to create their own Spider-Man universes minus, of course, Spider-Man. They’ve been making solo movies about Spider-Man villains and while the Venom movies have been inexplicably popular, the rest have been regarded as unmitigated disasters. In 2022, Morbius was bad enough that Sony thought they could re-release it to capitalize on the memes and derisive entertainment factor. To no avail and a total lack of morbin’ time. In 2024, Sony released three Spider-Man villain movies, though Madame Web was never really a villain per se, but then again nobody really wanted a Madame Web movie anyhow, though it once again gave us some memorable memes. Now Kraven is reportedly closing out this shared cinematic universe experiment, and the president of Sony is blaming those mean ole film critics for the failures of these would-be superhero classics (always a smart movie, assuming audiences are incapable of making up their own minds). Delayed almost two years from its original January 2023 release date, Kraven the Hunter is the death knell of this enterprise and it comes to a thoroughly mediocre conclusion, feeling even more disposable, poorly developed, and mechanical, and ultimately a footnote to a footnote of superhero cinema.
Kraven, nee Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, portraying his third superhero) is the son of a notorious Russian crime boss, Nikolai (Russell Crowe). One day on a hunting trip in Ghana, Sergei rescues his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger) from a lion. The lion injures Sergei and takes him for food, but thanks to a magic elixir from a tourist, Calypso (Ariana DeBose), who saves him. Now he has animal-like senses and speed and strength. As an adult, Kraven seeks out villains to bring to justice, but he’s also trying to square the legacy of his father and whether he is like dad. 
The problem with these Spider-Man-Minus-Spider-Man movies is making people get interested in the famous web-slinger’s rogues gallery. This usually means treating the character’s best known for trading punches with another hero as their own individual anti-hero, complete with a more villainous villain for our future villains to have to topple. Usually these villains (the actual individual movie antagonists, not the protagonists) are an imitation of our heroes (still referencing the future villains), the mirror version of them. So if your protagonist is going to be a vampire, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil vampire. If your protagonist is an alien goo monster who likes to eat heads, then your antagonist is going to be a slightly more evil alien goo monster that likes to eat heads. You get the idea. However, you digest enough of these, and it all seems a bit too perfunctory, the main character having to defeat a version of themself. The main challenge is finding a way to make an audience care about these characters, and having them rescue a love interest or defeat a new-but-same villain with the implicit promise that maybe, if you’re patient enough, you might see them eventually try to murder Spider-Man, is not it. I’m not against the idea of giving these villains their origin tales, but it feels like in order to make them more palatable to a mass audience means they’re neutering the nature of these characters. The hypothetical future Sinister Six movie can’t all be six misunderstandings against Spider-Man.
Alas, Kraven is a real bore of an action movie even with its R-rating, the first for these Spider-Man villain movies. The added bloodshed and curse words don’t exactly make the movie feel more adult when we’re still dealing with plotlines like a super lion biting our hero and giving him super lion powers, much like the origin story of Spider-Man, or another villain suffering from a very silly and similar Amazing Spider-Man 2 Goblin-itus medical malady. This is not a serious movie in the slightest but that doesn’t mean it can’t be passably fun, but everyone is just so dour and passionless that it drains all entertainment. At least Madame Web was perplexingly interesting with its bad decisions. There’s such little energy to be had through the middling two hours. Kraven is gifted superhuman powers and he uses them to hunt down bad men and big game poachers, becoming let’s say Captain Planet if he watched nothing but Charles Bronson movies. There’s got to be an exciting movie there, or at least a more interesting one than what we eventually got here. It’s hijacked by some pretty rote family drama of a bad dad who was too hard on his kids and rescuing a kidnapped little brother who he feels guilty about leaving with the bad dad after Kraven got his new powers. The family drama is pretty rote and uninspired, with both of the other characters kept to the sidelines for most of the movie, which makes it hard to care that much about either of their impacts. The haphazard integration of a romantic subplot with Calypso is even more perfunctory when I would much rather see Kraven fall in love with a lion instead.
I like J.C. Chandor as a director, and he’s someone who leaps at new challenges. His debut movie, 2011’s Margin Call, was an engrossing character piece about Wall Street traders and execs on the verge of the 2008 financial meltdown. It was so bare-bones that it was practically a play. His next film, 2013’s All is Lost, was the exact opposite: a movie completely told through visual storytelling and with a minimum of spoken words as Robert Redford tries to patch up his sinking boat. 2014’s A Most Violent Year was a slow-burn crime drama about the lengths people will go to escape their past and their nature. From there, Chandor has been circling larger studio projects, leaving 2016’s Deepwater Horizon and then replacing Kathryn Bigelow for Netflix’s action thriller, 2019 Triple Frontier. He’s a chameleon of a director and the only real point of interest I had with Kraven. What would he do in the superhero space? Well, the answer is not much. The visual flourishes we’ve seen before in other movies but without a sense of humor. Watching Kraven periodically run on all fours may make him more animal-like but it doesn’t look good. The movie gets lost in the convoluted mythology and rules of its characters and what they’re capable of, and so the action sequences feel cobbled together and short on imagination. The climax is during a stampede of buffalo but there’s no real danger here like dodging around the animals. They very conveniently allow space for our hero to fight his battle, thus becoming a thundering backdrop. Even if you’re overly generous, there’s not much here to excite the senses or even your morbid curiosity.
There is one line of dialogue that needs to be singled out for its absurdity. While Madame Web was ridiculed for its “researching spiders in the Amazon with my mother before she died” line, the filmmakers had the good sense to eliminate it from the final film, though not the good sense not to include it in their initial marketing. With Kraven the Hunter, there’s a character who talks about her mother and literally says, “She died and I never saw her again.” That’s usually how that works.
As the final piece of Sony’s Spider-Man villain spinoff universe, Kraven the Hunter brings this diversionary superhero franchise to a merciful end. The frustrating thing is that Kraven as a character can work, as recently demonstrated in the popular Spider-Man PlayStation video game sequel. He’s supposed to be the ultimate hunter, a force of nature, but that doesn’t mean he needs to carry his own movie, just like Morbius or Madame Web or any other Spidey villain. Launching these characters could have worked but needed much more imagination and care. Instead, it was Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man and, with the exception of the Venom movies with their goofy buddy movie appeal, audiences have responded with the indifference you would assume. It’s not enough for these movies to merely be adjacent to Spider-Man to be appealing. They need to be good, to be able to stand on their own, and to support an extended time with this character. It’s hard not to see the larger machinations for eager franchise-extension as the primary motivation. But if these are the impressions of the characters we’re getting, who would want any more? Turns out nobody was actively cravin’ another underdeveloped and mediocre superhero movie.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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The Substance (2024)
In 2017, French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat released her debut movie, Revenge, her daring spin on the rape-revenge thriller. It was an immediate notice that this filmmaker could take any genre and spin it on its head, providing feminist influences on some of the most grisly and male-dominated exploitation cinema. Even more so, she makes whatever genre her own and on her own terms. The same can be said for The Substance, a movie that utilizes sensationalism to sensational effect. It’s a movie that is far more than the sum of its Frankenstein-esque body horror parts.
Elisabeth (Demi Moore) is a television fitness instructor who has been massively popular for decades. Upon her 50th birthday, she’s promptly dismissed from her job by her studio, concerned over her diminished appeal as a sex symbol. She gets word of a mysterious elixir that can help her reverse the ravages of aging. It arrives via a clandestine P.O. box in a container with syringes and very specific instructions. She needs to spend seven days as her younger self, and seven days as her present self. She needs to “feed” her non-primary self. She also needs to understand that she is still the same person and not to get confused. Elisabeth injects herself with the serum and, through great physical duress, “Sue” emerges from her back like a butterfly sprouting from a fleshy cocoon. As Sue (Margaret Qualley), she’s now able to bask in the fame and attention that had been drifting away. Sue becomes the next hot fitness instructor and everything the studio wants. Except she’s enjoying being Sue so much that going back to her Elisabeth self feels like a punishment. Sue/Elisabeth starts to cheat the very specific rules of substance-dom, and some very horrifying results will transpire as she becomes increasingly desperate to hold onto what she has gained.
Let me start off this review looking at the substance of The Substance, particularly the criticism that there is little below its surface-level charms. First off, let me defend surface-level charms when it comes to movies. It’s a visual medium, and sometimes the surface can be plenty when we’re dealing with artists at the top of their game. Being transported and entertained can be enough from a movie. Not every film needs to force you to re-evaluate the human condition. It’s perfectly acceptable for films to just be diversionary appeals to the senses. With that being said, the simplicity of the movie’s story and themes works to its benefit. The plotting is very clear, setting aside the rules, and then we watch the spiraling consequences when Elisabeth, and then Sue, decide to go against the rules and pay dearly. The ease of the storytelling is so precise with its cause-effect escalation, so that even when things are getting crazy, we know why. The commentary on aging in Hollywood isn’t new or subtle; yes, the industry treats young women like products to be exploited for mass consumption until they get older and are seen as less desirable. Yes, the pressure to fight the irreversible pull of aging can lead to increasingly desperate actions. Yes, being forced to cede the spotlight to someone you feel inferior can be humiliating. It’s nothing new, but it presents an effective foundation for what becomes a highly engaging, garishly repellent, and jubilantly visceral body horror deconstruction into madness. Rarely do we get an opportunity to say a movie must be seen to be believed, and The Substance is that latest must-see spectacle.
I found the exploration of identity between Sue and Elisabeth to be really interesting, as we’re told repeatedly in the instructions that the two are the same person, and yet the two versions view the other with increasing resentment and hostility. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same woman trying on different outfits of herself, but that doesn’t stop the dissociation. In short order, the two versions view one another as rivals fighting over a shared resource/home. Sue becomes the preferred version and thus the “good times” where she can feel at her best. The older Elisabeth persona then becomes the unwanted half, and the weeks spent outside the coveted persona are akin to a depression. She keeps to herself, gorges on junk food, and anxiously counts the prolonged hours until she can finally transform into Sue. Again, this is the same character, but when she’s wearing the younger woman’s body, it can’t help but trick her into feeling like a different person. This division builds a fascinating antagonism ultimately against herself. She’s literally fighting with herself over her own body, and that sounds like pertinent social commentary to me.
While The Substance might not have much to say about aging and Hollywood that hasn’t been said before, where the movie separates itself from the pack is through the power of its voice. This is a movie that announces itself at every turn; it is a loud, emphatic personality that can take your breath away one moment and leave you riotously laughing the next. The vision and filmmaking voice of this movie is unmistakable, and while we’re covering familiar thematic ground on its many subjects, the director is assuring us, “Yes, but you haven’t seen my version,” and after a few minutes, I wanted to see wherever Fargeat wanted to take me. I loved the very opening sequence that catalogues our star’s career through a time lapse shot of her Hollywood Walk of Fame star. We see the public unveiling, arguably the height of her stardom, and then progress further, from tourists taking their picture with the star, to people ignoring it, a passing dog peeing over it, and a homeless shopping cart wheeling over it. In one shot, Fargeat has already efficiently told our character’s rise and fall through imaginative and accessible visuals. There are other elements like this throughout that kept me glued to the screen, eager to see the director’s take on the material.
This is a first-rate body horror parable with wonderfully surreal touches throughout. The creation of Sue, being born from ripping from Elisabeth’s back, is an evocative and shocking image, as is the garish stapling of Elisabeth’s back/entry wound (why it makes for the poster’s key image). It’s reminiscent of a snake slithering out of its old skin, but to also have to take care of that old skin, knowing you have to metaphorically slide it back on, is another matter entirely. The literal dead weight is a reminder of the toll of this process but it’s also like they’ve been given a dependant. The spinal fluid injections are another squirm factor. I loved the way the Kubrickian production design heightens the unreality of the world. I won’t spoil where exactly the movie goes, but know that very bad things will happen beyond your wildest predictions. The finale is a tremendously bonkers climax that fulfills the gonzo, blood-soaked madness of the movie. If you’re a fan of inspired and disturbing body horror, The Substance cannot be missed.
Demi Moore is a fascinating selection for our lead. While it might have been inspired to have Qualley (Maid, Kinds of Kindness) play the younger version of her mother, Andie McDowell (Groundhog Day), it’s meaningful to have Moore as our aging figure of beauty standards. Here is an actress who has often been defined by her body, from the record payday she got for agreeing to bare it all in 1996’s Striptease, to the iconic Vanity Fair magazine cover of her nude and pregnant, to the roles where men are fighting over her body (Indecent Proposal), she’s using her body to tempt (Disclosure), or she’s using her body to push boundaries (G.I. Jane). It’s also meaningful that Moore has been out of the limelight for some time, mimicking the predicament for Elisabeth. Because of her personal history, the character has more meaning projected onto her, and Moore’s performance is that much richer. It reminded me of Nicolas Cage’s performance in Pig, a statement about an artist’s career that has much more resonance because of the years they can parlay into the lived-in role. Moore is fantastic here as our human face to the pressures and psychological torment of aging. She has less and less to hold onto, and in the later stretches of the movie, while Moore is buried under mountains of mutation makeup, she still manages to show the scared person underneath.
Qualley has more screen time in the second half of the movie and has the challenge of playing a very specific kind of character. Sue is the idealized form for Elisabeth which makes her character even more exaggerated and surreal. She’s a figure of pure id, strutting her stuff because she can, luxuriating in the sense of power she has because of the desire that she produces. Qualley goes full hyper-sexualized cartoon for the beginning part of the role, where she’s the coveted version riding high. It’s the second half, where things begin to slip away, that Qualley shines the most as the cracks begin to take hold in this carefully arranged persona of confidence.
Much needs to be said about the hyperbolic sexualization of its characters, particularly Sue as the new young fitness star. Obviously our director is intending to satirize the default male gaze of the industry, as her camera lingers over tawny body parts and close-ups of curves, crevices, and crotches. However, the sexual satire is so ridiculously exploitative that it passes over from being too much and back to the sheer overkill being the point. This is not a movie of subtlety and instead one of intensity to the point that most would turn back and say, “That’s enough now.” For a movie about the perils and pleasures of the flesh, it makes sense for the photography to be as amplified in its rampant sensuality. There are segments where every camera angle feels like a thirsty glamour shot to arouse or arrest, but again this is done for a reason, to showcase Elisabeth/Sue as the world values them. The over-the-top male gaze the movie applies can be overpowering and exhausting, but I think that’s exactly Fargeat’s point: it’s reductive, insulting, and just exhausting to exclusively view women on these narrow terms. This isn’t quite our world, as the number one show on TV is an aerobics instructor, but it’s still close enough. I can understand the tone being too much for many viewers, but if you can push through, you might see things the way Fargeat does, and every lingering and exaggerated beauty shot might make you chuckle. It’s body horror on all fronts, showing the grotesquery not just in how bodies degrade but how we degrade others’ bodies.
On a personal note, while I’ll be back-dating this review, I wrote portions of it while sitting at my father’s bedside during his last days of life. He’s the person that instilled in me the love of movies, and I learned from him the shared language of cinematic storytelling, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t go see more movies with my father while we could. I really wish he could have seen The Substance because he was always hungry for new experiences, to be wowed by something he felt like he hadn’t quite seen before, to be transported to another world. He was also a fan of dark humor, ridiculous plot twists, and over-the-top violence, and I can hear his guffawing in my head now, thinking about him watching The Substance in sustained rapturous entertainment. It’s a movie that evokes strong feelings, chief among them a compulsive need to continue watching. It’s more than a body horror movie but it’s also an excellent body horror movie. Fargeat has established herself, in two movies, as an exciting filmmaker choosing to work within genre storytelling, reusing the tools of others to claim as her own with a proto-feminist spin and an absurdist grin. The Substance is the kind of filmgoing experience so many of us crave: vivid and unforgettable. And, for my money, the grossest image in the whole movie is Dennis Quaid slurping down shrimp.
Nate’s Grade: A
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