Reviews

The first sign I knew that I was going to like this series was the choice in pacing: It switches it up from the usual fare these days. Instead of being shown a rapid summary edit (protagonist goes into trap and gets out), we're shown characters who have time to think, feel, be puzzled in situations, and watch objects crumble. At times, it reminded me of moments in the older films like Luke at Dagobah.

The next thing that jumped out at me was the color schemes used in this show. Some scenes clearly draw from the painted backdrop look of the old films, but then shots here and there will use surprisingly modern schemes I associate with weird music videos. This is fitting, given that Sabine Wren is introduced with a Star Wars punk soundtrack, barreling down the highway with a look reminiscent of classic recruitment posters, off to see her Star Wars cats. Fantastic. I'm finding it hard not to like these characters.

Also liking the mysticism approach that is such a throwback to that classic 80s merger of high fantasy, sorcery and sci fi. It's also also got a few quotable lines about life and politics, as you'd expect.

I'd give it even higher marks, but most of the major plot points so far have been standard. The delivery is so much fun however that it doesn't matter. Hopefully subsequent episodes up the plot but if the first two episodes are any indication, I'm going to enjoy the mitochondria out of this series.

Whether or not the characters are believable to you will likely reflect the kinds of people you've encountered in your life. Myself, having been around the less than ideal internal workings of large groups dealing with politics and beliefs vs facts, I find many things in this series quite timely and relatable.

I loved the Asimov universe when I was a kid, not to mention a lot of sci fi from that period. This series seems to take mid 20th C idealism and update it for slightly more jaded audiences who no longer believe that rationalism itself will save us, or in phrases like "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

Instead, the show thematically demonstrates the perils, complexities and importance surrounding these themes, with parallel stories often running between the protagonists and antagonists. All the while Hari's work remains enigmatic but is a perfect thematic launching point for issues of faith, power and denial.

This is important because as other reviewers have mentioned, Asimov's books are a sacred text of sorts. In the show the younger characters ask pragmatic questions but are still naïve and inexperienced, while the older characters are trapped in their interpretation of an artifact written by a long deceased man. It almost is as if they are poking at the audience.

While this series takes a lot of liberties it remains sci fi that deals with big ideas rather than action. Maybe it is a tad too subtle about it going by how themes that should be obvious are being glibly missed by some reviews. Maybe it needs a couple jokes to please people who find it too serious.

Or maybe it just needs more of a chance to build the characters and plot, given that it's only four episodes in and much of those were spent jumping around in time. Then, find the right audience of people who probably enjoy complex humanistic sci fi series like The Expanse.

For myself, having grown up on the big ideas sci fi of the 1930s to 1960s this is a treat and I'm eagerly awaiting to see what happens next. For a first season it's an immense effort. The high production values are a perk too.

At the start of the episode it was gratifying to see an important character realize that he'd never get a real answer from a team of scientists who had been coerced all their lives to be yes-men. It seems timely somehow..

I also found it wryly amusing that the entire point of Hardin's dismissive response to "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" was easily missed. The rebuttal Hardin got, not to mention the whole theme of the episode (not to mention that another important character far away is grappling with it at the same time) is exploring this very point that becomes their quote later

It's character development, and it's a way of showing the point rather than spelling it out in a date with Doctor Obvious. But if I've learned anything from reading sci fi all my life, including all the Asimov universe books (Robots and Foundation), you can't please everyone if you avoid Doctor Obvious. However, if you often find you need to hand hold people through basic points when talking about the sci fi you like, you might find yourself enjoying this show.

Although this is billed as a thriller/horror film, I'd place it more in the category of Black Mirror or Twilight Zone in that it's a satire about the state of things in the world, told with surreal/absurd elements. For example there were themes of people being disbelieved, while holding to an every-person-for-themselves attitude, further preventing people from getting support. There's much more to it than that (gender and class) so I'm summarizing very briefly.

Other points: Some of the acting was stiff at times but that became an advantage during brief kafkaesque scenes of the protagonist attempting to communicate. With surreal elements, it often comes with the territory in any case. The music was minimal and rather than announcing everything that was about to happen, it left space for the imagination to fill in the blanks, only containing a few themes that repeated, along with a few key visual leitmotifs.

I can see how a person following this as a literal story with a straightforward protagonist might expect things to go differently, but I felt a definite tension leading up to the end, wondering how the director would play out the themes presented in the story. Perhaps intentionally on the part of the director, while I felt sympathy for the main character, I felt even more for a few of the side characters, especially toward the end of the movie.

Overall I enjoyed the movie, found the themes timely, and will look up other movies by this director.

I finally got around to seeing this film. I went in with low expecations. On the surface it's got terrible acting (which I think is deliberate--more below) and looks like a lower budget version of WKRR. To my surprise I was seeing psychotic imagery: cityscapes with faces buried in the twisting architecture and hypersexual sadistic toons frantically jumping across the screen almost nonstop, manifesting the main character's (the male cartoonist's) fantasies. Example: there's a scene where a toon character gets sucked into a pen by a toon woman as a kind of "toon murder". After she leaves the screen, it fills up with death-like toon charaters, and a single disembodied voice continually shouts "Oh, that's gotta hurt. Pen me too! Hurt me! Hurt me!" Contrasting this, Brad Pitt is the film's cock block--an older character in a position of authority. At this point it was obvious: This isn't WKRR. it's a Freudian surrealist horror comedy. I looked it up after viewing and sure enough, a screenwriter (Larry Gross, who worked on the film without credit) interviewed in the LA Times called it "an elaborate Freudian castration-anxiety dream." The movie made a lot more sense to me once this clicked. Because it's trying to fit in some difficult themes in jarring ways, I don't really know how to rate this one, so I'm giving it a slight above average score for the attempt. For those of you who worry about how women are presented, you might feel disturbed by the fantasy imagery at points, though to note, the fatale character does disrupt some of those tropes (without going into spoilers). If you keep that in mind, you might figure out whether or not this is a film you want to watch.

First: the Oz books were my favorite books when I was a child. Oz was whimsical, surreal, and had a wry sense of humor, but it was not a theme park. This film embraces that, drawing from the second and third books rather than the old musical. Nowadays we'd call this film a reboot, not a sequel. To put this expensive flop into perspective, imagine expecting a sequel to the musical. The lights dim, and within minutes Dorothy is being taken to an asylum where she is hooked up to an electroshock therapy machine with an eerie face. Suddenly her friend appears in the glass within that face. Then we enter a post-apocalyptic Oz where everything appears broken or dead. Eyes are shifting about in the rocks and monsters are everywhere. As a child who already had my own brain hooked up to EEGs and run through CT scan units, the scary imagery in the film spoke to me, rather than spooked me. That is what Oz is like: it contains darker topics, in a way that more adventurous kids can ingest, like a predatory tiger who manages to control his impulses moment by moment (not in the movie). By comparison, I've never felt nearly as much of a pull toward the musical, even though it is a technical marvel and has some lovely tunes. Films like this and Jim Henson's offerings paved the way for the slightly darker kids' fantasy fare we have these days. If you like 80s fantasy films, you should absolutely check this one out.

The plot in this film is not difficult to follow if one is familiar with cyberpunk. Here techno-optimism gets turned toward extreme human rights violations. Enter Batou on the case with plenty of mysteries to unpack. Recent criticisms of cyperpunk portray the genre as overly hopeless, this film is not, but neither does it minimize the darkness. Also important are themes, hinted at through violence and poetry, about the power of having a voice.

The film uses meditative pacing and sound design interrupted by brief action scenes, a flow that will that turn off some viewers and hypnotize others. It keeps a subjective focus on Batou's viewpoint as his perceptions are a key part of the story. This part remains relevant--we may not wander around the world in AR yet, but so much of the information we get comes from easily modifiable, hackable, fallible sources.

Probably the most polarizing aspect of the film however is that the characters often speak in quotations, reflecting how wired in they are. Wind the clock forward 15 years to 2019, where nearly everyone on social networking frequently communicates in memes and soundbite quotes accompanied by graphic images, and maybe this prediction is not all that much of a stretch. In the film sometimes this distracts, sometimes it challenges. For example in once scene the characters had a debate that left me puzzled: it involved a story about a famous French philosopher that seemed to contradict his own writings on the soul--but as it turns out, there is some weight to the tale and it is debated in obscure academic blogs.

Long and short: this film in further developing the ideas from the original is one of the stronger outings from Mamoru Oshii and a worthy follow up to the original.

This brief 15 (not 10, as posted on the page) minute episode is clearly a nod to I, Mudd in TOS, an episode that featured advanced robots long before Data and Lore, although it takes the premise in a very different direction. This Mudd is also far more entertaining than the original Mudd. If Bugs Bunny had a chaotic evil twin in space, it would probably be this version of Mudd. The incessant trouble-making and pleading when caught, the unusual ways of taking revenge--somehow it all works. This is the fun, rather than the deep side of Star Trek, but it still manages to play with some tropes along the way. Worth the watch for anyone who likes the series. .

San Juniper may have touched on the basic tropes employed in this episode, but let's face it, it was hardly the first to deal with reality swapping. We only need to wind the clock back to Total Recall or even some episodes of Star Trek--it's not a new concept. What makes this story work is the theme, that is, why the character makes the choice at the end. Their reasoning draws from something that is primal in the human condition. Not felt by everyone to be sure, but enough to drive belief systems, and when unhinged, to lead some people to make poor life decisions. If you've ever felt what it's talking about, you'll get it.