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We deserve ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.’

Overstuffed, overcorrecting, and overthought, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a confused, enthralling mess disguised as a love-letter to a fandom that long ago showed they didn't deserve it. It doesn't suffer for lack of craftsmanship or performance or even spirit, necessarily. This is, if nothing else, a very fun movie. But it's content to paint with a broad brush in a way that falls between smug and skittish; Skywalker merrily rehashes old plot lines, digs up old characters (alternate title: Star Wars — Episode IX: Hey, It's That Guy!) and shoehorns any and every element of fan service it can think of on the way to a conclusion that is rather moving in spite of itself. Here, it seems to be saying, is the Star Wars you all wanted.

In this film's defense, pandering might not be the worst thing in the world — the Marvel movies are 75% fan service and are reliably good to very good — but what this one suffers from is a distinct lack of imagination in a way that none of the other movies could truly claim. The prequels had their sprawling, elemental planets; Return of the Jedi had its toy chest of creatures; even Solo had a droid with a sex drive. In contrast, there's nothing in Skywalker you can't see coming, or at least vaguely sense from a mile off.

That's doubly disappointing in the wake of Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, which gleefully set fire to almost every Star Wars plot convention and took the new films' dangling story threads in strange, interesting new directions. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) turned out to be a grizzled, regret-filled hermit; Poe Dameron's (Oscar Isaac) dashing pigheadedness got a lot of people killed; looming final boss Snoke (Andy Serkis) got sliced in half at the top of Act Three. The fanboys hated it. So, duly chastised, J.J. Abrams returns to the director’s chair, cracks his knuckles and undoes or muddles nearly all of Johnson's creative choices to bring the saga back to safe, more palatable harbor by bringing an old villain back from the dead and awkwardly maneuvering the boat back into the lane he'd laid out in 2015's fun, reverential reboot The Force Awakens.

To its credit, The Rise of Skywalker retains the zippy joy of that ebullient thriller. This is a very enjoyable movie to watch, all constant motion, thundering pathos and a fair amount of genuine emotional weight. But Abrams' rough remolding unwittingly strips away the nuance from a story that had begun to show tantalizing signs of grey. Rey (Daisy Ridley) always had the potential to move (or destroy) worlds and The Last Jedi fascinatingly cast her as a nobody, toying with the idea that anyone possesses the capacity to do great and terrible things. Now, in keeping with the mysterious groundwork Awakens laid about her parentage, she is revealed to be very much somebody, the heiress to legacies both literal and figurative and thus a more fitting wielder of power. The violent longing of the lonely Kylo Ren (an unchallenged Adam Driver) is folded into the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid, still having way more fun than anybody in these movies); for much of Kylo’s screen time he’s an errand boy for the big bad, finally the Darth Vader knockoff he always wanted to be and that much less interesting as a result. Even the people in the new Star Wars want to be in the original Star Wars, seems to be the message. 

Luckily for them, the people making the new ones want to be making the old ones, too. Abrams opens the gates so legacy characters can pass through for a cup of coffee (Hi, Lando!). Dead characters walk as ghosts. Dead actors are oddly though not unlovingly shoehorned into the narrative. (Farewell, Carrie Fisher. It shouldn't have been like this.) It's not all unpleasant. We, too, are fans of Star Wars, and watching the Millennium Falcon lead an armada into the final battle is not without its visual grandeur, nor is the battle between Rey and Kylo on the splintered, shipwrecked hull of the Death Star. But I kept wishing there was more of Keri Russell's masked bandit, or Kelly Marie Tran's rudely sidelined Rose Tico, or even John Boyega's Finn, who went from rudderless turncoat to generic good guy so fast it barely registered. (Luckily, Boyega's not-asexual chemistry with Poe is one of the movie's consistently entertaining high points, but his connection with another rebel played by Naomi Ackie goes underexplored.) 

That these fascinating characters — born into loss and trauma and the responsibility of finishing the work their parents abandoned — are forced to cede the stage to the familiar comforts of Good vs. Evil may make the internet happy, but it does no service to a story whose charm always lay in its complexity and its imagination. As it is, Rise of Skywalker doesn't have a lot of either. It wants to love and be loved unconditionally and collapses under the weight of its own devotion. It's an IOU that knows not what it's apologizing for, a beautiful bouquet that smells like your ex. It is, undoubtedly, the Star Wars we wanted; it is, depressingly, the Star Wars we deserve.

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“Godzilla: King of the Monsters”: Just go with it, people

The new Godzilla should come with a disclaimer at the beginning asking you to turn off your brain along with your cell phone, and I mean that as a compliment. But also kind of as an insult. But mainly a compliment. Unless it's an insult. Which makes me think that it's more of a compliment.

Look, point is, when the big guy himself is onscreen, brawling against or alongside the scores of hairy, scaly, winged creatures that have risen to ravage our worthless asses, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is frankly spectacular summer entertainment on par with anything the final battle of Avengers: Endgame cooks up. But when the film turns its gaze towards the hapless humans scurrying around in the lizard king's wake, it turns into a different kind of stupid, where paper-thin characters shift motivations seemingly at random, profanely talented actors stare ponderously into the middle distance (better to do the math on the zeroes in the paychecks) and a crew of military jocks/science dorks sprout impenetrable jargon that serves as exposition. Ultimately, whether this movie is worth your while will depend on where you land with respect to that dichotomy: Is numbingly silly human drama worth sitting through to get to the endorphin high of a monster rumble?

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In fairness, this movie has not been remotely shy about what it's selling us. Gareth Edwards' 2014 Godzilla, which this movie serves as a sequel to, teased the monster as a malevolent natural force and pump-faked him into a surly protector of humanity, albeit one with a conspicuous disregard for collateral damage. This one, from jump, has been marketed as a four-way showdown featuring Godzilla and three of his most notorious frenemies: The glowing insect Mothra, fiery pteranodon Rodan, and three-headed dragon, King Ghidorah. It shares a central thesis with its predecessor — long story short, humans are wasteful, horrible creatures who've ruined the planet, and we deserve what's coming to us — but to its credit, has no patience for the ponderousness with which Edwards approached the subject. Instead, it settles for a blunt-force, here's-what-I'm-doing-and-why speech by a scientist (Vera Farmiga) who seeks to use the monsters to restart the earth alongside someone the script has seen fit to designate as an "eco-terrorist" (a harrumphing, underused Charles Dance). What earned him that reputation is left mostly to the imagination; he is quiet, British, speaks in monosyllables and shoots a lot of extras, ergo, he is bad.

Along for the ride is Farmiga's daughter, Eleven — err, Madison (Millie Bobbie Brown from Stranger Things), who has been drawn into her mother's plan as ... a co-conspirator, I think? She seems oddly willing to go along with the extinction of humanity in principle, though her mom's execution of the plan leaves a lot to be desired. On the other end of the spectrum is her father (Kyle Chandler), another scientist of sorts who is trying to repair his own relationship with Madison -- her brother was lost in the events of the previous film, as established in a prologue that recalls Batman v Superman, of all things -- while also reconciling his own feelings about ... Godzilla? I think?

Yes, it's all very silly. And the director, Michael Dougherty, is visibly lacking the personal touches he brought to his last feature, the nasty, nihilistic horror-comedy Krampus from 2015. (Worth a watch, by the way.) But to his credit, he also seems to realize that this is not the reason for whence you have come. And when it comes time to get to the smashy-smashy stuff, he excels. His King of the Monsters may have ditched Edwards' sense of seriousness, but it wisely retains that filmmaker's eye for sheer, awe-inspiring scale. He knows how to use it a little better, I think, lingering less on the shots emphasizing the monsters' enormity and using them more as beats in the kind of viciously streamlined action sequences Edwards never felt the need to attempt. (The scene where the military tries to bait Rodan away from the Mexican village he's nesting above is so thrilling it took me out of the movie for a bit.)

It's to Dougherty's credit the effect isn't diluted despite the movie's dumbing down: Even if some of the best shots have been spoiled in the trailers, there's still something primally majestic about the sight of these monsters among us and the merciless destruction they wreak in a battle that is revealed to be, quite literally, older than time and beyond the scope of our world. It makes you wish both movies had done away with the speechifying entirely; the imagery in them is, frankly, enough to speak for themselves, and the people speaking are blindingly puny in comparison anyway. (That's is no reflection on the actors, a talented bunch that brings back Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins and David Strathairn from the first movie and expands to include Ziyi Zhang, O'Shea Jackson, Jr., Bradley Whitford, Aisha Hinds and Thomas Middleditch. They all seem pretty happy to be in a Godzilla movie. Good for them.)

Like all good bad movies, King of the Monsters does contain one single germ of a good idea: That all these other monsters are the only thing stopping Godzilla from turning his attention to us, the reason he has to come back in the first place. Edwards reimagined Godzilla as a burly, glowering sort, but his movie didn't go far enough to establish any kind of relationship with the humans at his feet. Dougherty, again to his credit, at least tries to create a dynamic: This beefy, lumbering Godzilla has the air of a blue-collar dad who comes home to find his spoiled kids have trashed the joint and wearily resigns himself to setting things right. He lumbers from mess to mess, spewing fire and moving on to the next one before things get really out of hand. (As if to drive the point home, at one point in King of the Monsters, he actually takes a nap.) Unspoken in all of this is whether we as a species are worth this aggravation, save for a throwaway line at the end, and you wish the script, by Dougherty, Zach Shields and Max Borenstien, had made a little more room for the kind of existential query that would give this movie some urgency, especially in an age where climate change has become an existential question.

Alas, no time for that. There's cities to smash, some queasily so (Boston is completely disintegrated in a nuclear holocaust — go Yankees?), people to eat, overqualified actors to kill off and a hairy fellow glimpsed only in shadow on the periphery, patiently awaiting his own throwdown next year. (Stay through the very entertaining, creative credit sequence for some setup on that front.) Again, this isn't necessarily an insult. Godzilla may have begun as a metaphor for Hiroshima, but it's worth noting that his legacy is probably more in line with the cheesy, B-movie, man-in-suit movies that followed suit, so the movie isn't quite as out of line as you might think by choosing destruction over allegory. Nonetheless, even the most forgiving of viewers might be tested with its final sequence, a bombastic, ridiculous scene that is probably the dumbest thing ever put to film — unless it's your thing, in which case it's the coolest thing you've ever seen. (Full disclosure: It’s totally my thing.) It's to King of the Monsters' credit that it plants its flag, then and there, as to what kind of movie it's trying to be, and if I do say so myself, it's to your credit if you go along with it: You're allowed to like a dumb movie. But there's nothing wrong with quietly wishing that it was a little smarter, too.

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“Star Wars” movies, ranked

There’s a new Star Wars out, and the fanboys are mad as hell! What else is new.

The galaxy's most fickle fan base unfailingly has a lot to say about its various plot points, which alternate between adulation and blasphemy, depending on how sacred you rate the text of the original films — for better or worse, a trilogy that looms large over all of its offshoots. Truthfully, that’s a little heavy a burden to place on a space opera: The Star Wars films run the gamut from pleasantly disposable to essential viewing for anybody who calls themselves a cinephile, and maybe there are one or two that suck. So, as Episode IX presents itself to be torn apart by the opinions of the internet, I figured I might as well do my part and give mine. 

Obviously, there are spoilers.

11: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Look. If you’re going to make a trilogy of movies focusing on the fall of an entire government, kicking it off with the petty political malevolence that topples the first domino makes perfect sense as an idea. Some of the banality-of-evil aspects of Episode I play better today than writer-director George Lucas, or anybody, probably ever foresaw. But the whole thing is too mired in bureaucratic minutiae, too bereft of stakes (nobody thought Liam Neesons was making it through this thing alive, did they?) and a bit too stately to ever take flight.

Very little about this movie has aged well, from the writing to the acting (here we pause to note, however, that while Lil’ Anankin Skywalker is plenty irritating, the fanbase did Jake Lloyd so unnecessarily dirty after this. He was a kid, people.) to the racial caricatures of the aliens. (The Trade Federation dudes may, in hindsight, be worse than Jar Jar Binks.) The podrace and the final duel with Darth Maul remain among the saga’s more remarkable set pieces, but you could honestly skip this movie and lose nothing but preamble.

10: Solo (2018)

There's nothing wrong with making a movie no one wants. You might get to surprise people with one of those. But if you're making a movie nobody needs, you at least better make it interesting. This side-yarn detailing Han Solo's origin story is only that in fits and spurts, and due to its much-documented behind-the-scenes turmoil, it's hard to put a finger on why. Is it a miscasting of Alden Ehrenreich as the young smuggler, unquestionably the most thankless role in the history of the galaxy's call sheet? (Yes and no: He's rakishly charming, but you-know-who's shadow looms large.) Is it a tonal clash between directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, whose penchant for subversion and improv got them both hired and fired, and steady-hand relief pitcher Ron Howard? (Again, yes and no: Howard's nobody's idea of a hack, but his straight-and-narrow style suppresses the tantalizingly batshit echoes of Lord and Miller's movie that keep popping up.)

Whatever it is, Solo never quite gels; more to the point, it doesn't seem to know what to do with the parts that do work (Donald Glover as the young Lando Calrissien; DP Bradford Young's luxurious cinematography; Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Lando's droid; the Kessel Run heist that began Han's legend in earnest) except treat them like checks on a list. The sum total isn't terrible going down, but it's the only installment that leaves no lasting impression and seems painfully unsure of what it was even supposed to be in the first place. That's about as devastating a missed opportunity as you can think of. Given an almost entirely blank canvas to fill in, the filmmakers ended up with Star Wars by numbers.

9: Attack of the Clones (2002)

Not as bad as it gets a rap for, mainly because it’s a lot of fun. This movie came out in between the first two Lord of the Rings installments, and the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if all its digital trickery wasn’t Lucas engaging in some kind of passive-aggressive dick-measuring against Peter Jackson. Visual thrills abound, and if the performances lack something of a soul — while Hayden Christensen gets more crap than he deserves for these movies, he was clearly not ready to play a sulky, teenaged Anakin Skywalker — Clones still has a kind of wish-fulfilling charm about it. Star Wars has sometimes buckled under the weight of its own legacy, including here (you mean to tell me ... the forbidden love that destroyed the Jedi and crumbled the Republic ... came down to some low-key stalking and a bit about sand?!), but you get the sense that this cheesy, bodice-ripping shoot-‘em up is the movie Lucas always saw in his head.

8: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

The best of the prequel movies by default, even if Lucas still overthinks his way out of sticking the landing entirely. With his pregnant wife in mortal danger, young Skywalker is manipulated into burning down the Jedi Order, all in the long-shot hope that embracing the dark side might teach him the “unnatural” power he needs to save her. A tad operatic, but not a bad idea. The execution, however, is too broad to truly land, and the actors’ mileage varies way too wildly when it comes to delivering the most crucial script of the entire series. (Christensen improves while Natalie Portman regresses, though in fairness she has absolutely nothing to do except give birth and die. Uh, sorry, spoiler.)

It all comes down to an epic battle on a river of fire and a legitimately affecting moment between master and apprentice as the latter burns for his sins. (“You were the chosen one!” is the big monologue, but it’s Ewan McGregor’s miserable, resigned delivery of “I have failed you, Anakin” that gets me every time.) It’s an objectively thrilling scene, as is the long-awaited moment when the mutilated Skywalker is finally entombed in Darth Vader’s armor. But it doesn’t help that the trio of scenes Revenge of the Sith hinges on are either genuinely unsettling or unintentionally hilarious, with no in-between. Truly, this is a film that deals in absolutes, for better and for worse.

7: Return of the Jedi (1983)

My favorite of the original trilogy when I was a kid. As an adult, it’s easy to see through the cracks in its execution — Harrison Ford clearly wants to be far, far away from this particular galaxy by now — but Lucas lets his creature-feature flag fly in a way that remains winning even when the story itself has nowhere to go (this was not the first time a Death Star would be prominently featured, nor, remarkably, the last). For all the movie’s faults, it’s fun to watch the effects department one-up itself, from Jabba the Hutt to the Rancor to the Sarlacc, finally peaking with the withered grotesquerie of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). And it nails its big finish, when the dying Darth Vader unmasks to look on his son with the sad, pathetic gaze of a man wondering what might have been.

6: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Chastened by a harsh online reaction to The Last Jedi's narrative choices, J.J. Abrams reassumes directorial duties for the Skywalker Saga finale and awkwardly steers the ship into safer, much less interesting waters. Plot twists are untwisted, souls are saved and an old evil is brought back from the dead to much fanfare but curiously little impact beyond a nostalgic titter. The movie is loud, it's fun, and it doesn't stop moving, but there's not much there beyond hero worship and homage. Is this really the Star Wars we wanted?

In a sequel trilogy that was explicitly focused on passing the baton, it's curious that the ending should cede so much ground, literal and metaphorical, to what came before. Seemingly every good choice Abrams makes — rousing space battles, a new bounty hunter played by old muse Keri Russell and a hero moment for C-3P0, of all people — is negated or off-put by a bad one. Kelly Marie Tran is rudely sent to the bench after a heartfelt debut in The Last Jedi; an unchallenged Adam Driver goes through the motions as Kylo Ren, and the late Carrie Fisher is oddly though not unlovingly shoehorned into the narrative from beyond the grave. The idea that these new Star Wars characters venerated the old guard as much as we did was a fun, meta wrinkle in The Force Awakens, but the whole idea was that the veterans would eventually get off the stage.

The ending is, to be fair, actually quite moving, and briefly relieving, with an implication that old things may finally be allowed to die and the galaxy can move forward. But its final line, shot and setting make clear that the Skywalker lineage, in one way or another, will never be allowed to expire. The audience demands it, and the customer is king. Abrams set out with The Rise of Skywalker to deliver the Star Wars everybody wanted; he gave us the Star Wars we deserve.

5: The Force Awakens (2015)

The afterglow of this movie was so strong you could have convinced me it was better than Empire, and I did think for a while that it ranked above the original. But, as Rogue One and The Last Jedi took the saga in weirder, newer directions, you could kind of see the long-awaited Episode VII for what it was: A tremendously fun cover of a near-flawless original.

Yes, it’s the same movie as A New Hope in the broader sense, but give J.J. Abrams credit for making such a joyful film out of the first Star Wars under the Disney umbrella, wherein he reintroduces the galaxy’s original figureheads, ushers in a diverse trio of newcomers (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac) and turns Adam from Girls into a worthy heir to Darth Frickin’ Vader. 

There’s is, sneakily, a little bit of a slap-in-the-face quality to this movie. It pays the appropriate lip service to Lucas’ creation, while seemingly validating everyone’s suspicion that his unchecked instincts had run the ship so far aground that the next guy up had to start from square one. But, of course, Abrams’ fealty to the story beats of the original only goes so far, as the film takes a murderous turn in the final act that’s still stunning in hindsight. For the first time in a Star Wars movie, you left the theater feeling that no fave was safe.

4: A New Hope (1977)

I know, I know, it’s probably too low for everybody but me. But if anything keeps the original Star Wars — the only one to receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination as well as an acting one — out of this particular top three it’s that it feels so comparatively quaint. The movie is so introductory in hindsight (I can only imagine seeing this in 1977 as a self-contained film and not the midpoint of an entire saga) that it’s tough to square it up against the sprawl of what came before and after, though I’d imagine it’s a refreshingly narrow tale when viewed chronologically. Other directors would tell more interesting, essential stories with these characters. But for all the indulgences that would lead his vision astray down the line, George Lucas built an entire galaxy in the span of two hours that was teeming with heroes and villains just waiting to be discovered. Nobody has pulled such a thing off before, or since.

3: Rogue One (2016)

Star Wars has a well-earned reputation as a kids’ franchise; despite being ostensibly about a war, the movies have all been conspicuously bloodless, even the one where a bunch of children get murdered. Enter Rogue One, a movie that dove headfirst into the grit and grime of Star Wars through one of the few unexplored kibbles of franchise lore: How the Rebels ended up with the all-important Death Star plans. 

The result is a gorgeous (director Gareth Edwards has the most distinct visual style of anyone in the saga) and harrowing movie, one in which our ragtag group of appealing new characters is picked off one by one over the course of the film’s kamikaze mission. The film is ruthlessly efficient in its mercilessness, especially when it comes to the Rebel redshirts who are fed to Darth Vader in its horrifying closing moments. Ironically, though, Rogue One is also sneakily one of the funniest Star Wars movies, particularly in the case of Director Krennic (a wonderful Ben Mendelsohn), an Imperial official whose greatest enemy isn’t the Rebellion but his own inescapable status as an disrespected middle-manager. War is hell in the galaxy, but office politics are somehow worse.

2: The Last Jedi (2017)

There is Star Wars before this movie, and Star Wars after this movie. That’s not hyperbole either; this is the single most divisive film of the saga, one that inspired an online backlash so ferocious it’s rumored to have triggered the reshoots of Solo and the hiring of safe bet J.J. Abrams to land the plane on The Rise of Skywalker. Last Jedi’s reputation as a childhood-ruiner certainly smacks of fanboy tears, though it does have an admitted affinity for killing its (and your) darlings: here, Luke Skywalker is a bitter old recluse with no taste for the Force, and The Force Awakens’ dashing pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is revealed to have a conspicuous blind spot for collateral damage. These ain’t your dad’s Star Wars heroes, in other words.

This is a movie that cares very little for what came before, preferring instead to blaze a trail on its own. Accordingly, your opinion of this one probably lines up exactly with where you land on its biggest narrative feint: Jedi goes out of its way to dismiss every dangling plot thread from The Force Awakens as red herrings in a way that might leave modern audiences feeling slighted. Seemingly teed up for some kind of grand inheritance, Rey (Daisy Ridley) is fumbling with the weight of both destiny and anonymity as she struggles with the idea she might not be as important as she thinks. The patricidal Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) cuts a more sympathetic figure, violently reaching out for a connection he’ll ultimately push away. 

But there’s a freedom to the way writer-director Rian Johnson plays with those expectations, taking the characters to their presumed destinations through unexpected routes, finding connections that might otherwise not have been there in a more simplistic story. Star Wars has always been about good and evil, this is the only one that examines how, why and if those labels get to be applied, and the ripple one person’s actions can cause across an entire galaxy. The focus would disappointingly close for Episode IX, but for one tantalizing moment, Star Wars’ horizons were actually as broad as they claimed to be.

1: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Still the gold standard, for all the reasons you’ve heard. The writing is tight. The acting is committed, the imagery haunting. If you’re watching the movies in the order of their release, you see the story begin to expand with the first glimpses of Yoda, Boba Fett and Emperor Palpatine, not to mention Darth Vader’s soul-shattering revelation to Luke Skywalker at the end of their lightsaber battle in Cloud City. If you’re watching chronologically, though, it’s the kick in the ass you dreaded was coming.

Most sequels give its characters an opportunity to rise and meet new challenges, but Empire’s innovation was leaving its heroes to be totally and utterly owned by a superior foe that saw them coming a mile away. By the end of this movie, Luke is beaten and maimed, Han Solo is betrayed and captured, Leia bereft at the loss of her love. Even then, Star Wars was too optimistic to let you think the Rebellion wouldn’t bounce back, but this is still the only movie in the saga to end on a force stronger than hope: Doubt.

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The DC Extended Universe is in rebuild mode, and “Justice League” is the first step

In all of sports, there are few terms more loaded than “rebuild.” That’s the euphemism given when a team finds itself mired in mediocrity and decides to pivot away from a win-now mentality, dumping its resources instead into the prospect of winning later. To do that, they’ll usually dump a lot of their tenured veterans in order to free up money, then draft and develop young talent that can provide the core of a contender in a few seasons’ time. The Houston Astros just did it; the Los Angeles Lakers are in the middle of it; the New York Giants are about to do it and the Cleveland Browns have been attempting to do it for what seems like 20 years now. It’s a unique combination of white flag and hopeful eye towards the horizon: We suck now, but we’ll be back in the saddle a couple years down the line.

That’s the DC Extended Universe, and truth be told it has been for a while. The comic-book giant boasts two of the mightiest IPs in the world — Batman and Superman — but its attempt to build a counterpart to Marvel’s bulletproof Cinematic Universe has been a creaky, accursed enterprise since it launched in 2013 with Man of Steel. Under the creative auspices of Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), DC attempted to shy away from Marvel’s zippy, quippy, made-for-mass consumption franchise machine by grinding out lengthy, humorless epics about gods and men. It wasn’t the worst idea int he world at the time — coming off of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the market was still ripe for “gritty” superheroes — but returns on these modern-day tomes have been increasingly diminishing, from the thunderous nonsense of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to the bullet-ridden vomitorium of Suicide Squad. (There was, as we know, one glorious exception, which we’ll get to momentarily.) Justice League, the long-awaited culmination of DC’s first wave of movies, doesn’t exactly reverse the trend — it’s fun, both because of and despite how much of a mess it is — but it does contain some long-awaited signs of hope that the franchise is finally willing to throw its original plan out the window and start from scratch.

For one, there’s not a lot of Zack Snyder to be found in this movie, even though he’s technically credited as director. A gifted adapter with a near-unparalleled visual palette, Snyder’s singular vision for the DC Universe certainly provided a viable-on-paper alternative to Marvel’s product, but his two movies — 2013’s Man of Steel and 2016’s Batman v Superman — simply weren’t good enough to pass muster. That his fingerprints have been all but excised from this one is due to some truly horrifying circumstances: The death of Snyder’s daughter forced him to step away from Justice League, and Joss Whedon (The Avengers) took over for writing and directing the reshoots. And this wasn’t some second-unit formality, either: Whedon did enough to get the second script credit after Chris Terrio, and even though Snyder is the only credited director, Justice League feels very much like Whedon’s film. This is occasionally for the worse — he lacks Snyder’s gift for sumptuous visuals and his attempts to replicate them are middling — but even as the stitches show on the movie, Whedon brings out a lighter, funnier side of the characters that Snyder seemed genetically incapable of delivering. He does so by moving the majority of the film away from its hoo-ha of a plot and its two biggest anchors, focusing instead on the four backups who all prove to be infinitely more interesting.

Whether this finally means the end of the great Batfleck experiment remains to be seen — the top-billed star still seems somewhat disinterested here, but he fares better than Batman v Superman because he’s given a bit more to play — but the shift in focus does provide ample opportunity for Gal Gadot to continue on her star turn from Wonder Woman. A utility player brought in from the Fast & Furious franchise to play sixth man in Batman v Superman, Patty Jenkins’ megahit from the summer turned Gadot into a megastar and a feminist icon. Less than two years from starring in B-rate action comedies, Gadot now has the kind of box office pull and cultural cache that hasn’t been seen in a long time. Whedon, who made his name in part on Strong Female Characters, knows he’s got the biggest one in decades on his hands, so it’s surely no accident that Wonder Woman gets most of the best scenes here. One minute she’s slicing and dicing through a horde of malevolent bug men, the next she’s slugging a dickish Master Wayne in the sternum so hard he goes flying across the room. It’s to Affleck’s credit that he seems to be having fun even as his minutes decrease, but it’s the movie that reaps the benefits of the change under center.

Flanking Gadot are a trio of greenhorns who give the movie a jolt of energy each time the plot starts to sag, which, given that this movie has a terrible plot, is often. As The Flash, Ezra Miller is wide-eyed, scared shitless (the bit about how he’s never fought anyone is great) and ultimately thrilled to be there. He’s a caffeinated mix of earnestness and annoyance, and if he were ten years younger Marvel would have scooped him up to be Spider-Man. Jason Momoa reimagines the oft-maligned Aquaman as a hard-drinking swingin’ dick with mommy issues; he’s not around to do much besides slug back whiskey and make fun of Batman’s getup, but you get the sense that the Game of Thrones veteran might have finally found a role worthy of his online reputation. And, as Cyborg, Ray Fisher gets an intriguing, Frankenstinian backstory — he’s a prodigy reborn as a machine with a tenuous grip on his humanity— which he plays with a muted resignation that occasionally spills over into outright panic each time his transformation leaps forward. 

Either Whedon recognizes what he has here or realizes he’s got a lot of makeup work to do to give the team the same care he afforded to the Avengers. Either way, he cannily works in a series of scenes with each of these characters that don’t do much to advance the story, but give the actors something to play, the audience something to connect with, and the movie to boast in the way of genuine enjoyment. The most affecting of these is a heart-to-heart between The Flash and Cyborg as they exhume Superman (Henry Cavill) from his grave; the funniest is a scene when Aquaman accidentally sits on Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth and tells his new teammates what he really thinks about all of them.

Between those charming non-sequiteurs and his low-key Twitter shade to the movie’s villain, you get the sense Whedon couldn’t give a shit less about Justice League’s plot. But as a previous franchise steward, he knows that no matter his misgivings, he’s got to both deliver a decent movie and right the ship as best he can. There have been way too many missteps on DC’s part for one movie to correct, but it helps that Whedon has a good sense of where to patch the holes. So, he wisely builds upon what worked in the previous films while minimizing what didn’t (Jeremy Irons’ Alfred gets more scenes; Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor gets less) and even manages to offer some much-needed rehabilitation to their original leading man once Superman is inevitably resurrected.

The question of what to do with the white-bread Man of Steel has been bugging the movies for a while, and while Snyder’s gritty approach was certainly a novel concept, it seems now like the wrong idea at the right time. Cavill cut an imposing presence, but his Kal-El was a morose, occasionally misanthropic demigod who wasn’t afforded the slightest bit of levity even as the adorkable Clark Kent. The man playing him has as much matinee-idol charm as you could want in an actor — The Man From U.N.C.L.E. isn’t quite as good as people online think, but Cavill is a Movie Star in it — but he wasn’t allowed to be half as charming as Christopher Reeve or even Brandon Routh. (Who, as a side note,  rebuilt himself as an MVP of DC’s TV universe playing The Atom on Legends of Tomorrow — it’s a fun show and he’s great in it.) Justice League fixes that, giving the Last Son of Krypton a complete personality change once the team brings him back from the dead. It’s not enough to entirely rehabilitate the character, and Cavill is still oddly humorless in the role, but as the fun mid-credits scene with The Flash shows, even a little bit of awkward goofiness goes a long way.

There are more signs of a rebuild outside the movie as well, all of which are harbingers of positive change down the line. Affleck was brought in as a top-flight star to anchor the franchise, but rumors have swirled for a while now that he wants out. Matt Reeves, who’ll write and direct the upcoming The Batman, supposedly has his eye on a replacement already. The upcoming Flash solo movie will reportedly adapt the reality-meddling Flashpoint arc, potentially giving DC the opportunity to make a trade. Coming out of Suicide Squad, Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is rumored to be returning in a movie about Gotham City’s villainesses, while the horror/action stylist James Wan (The Conjuring, Furious 7) will tackle the Aquaman solo movie for next year. There’s also the rumors of a set of movies outside the Justice League continuity, both giving DC a chance to adapt its entire Multiverse and start fresh with the characters its already bungled in the runup to Justice League. Jared Leto’s much-maligned Joker might already be getting subbed out for Leonardo DiCaprio in just such a movie.

Of course, there is the lingering doubt that all these efforts may be too little, too late. Generally speaking, rebuild is an exercise in hope, but it’s also a test of fans’ faith in the franchise. Despite a weird Rotten Tomatoes embargo that held off mass consensus for an extra day or two, Justice League was still subjected to a drubbing that muted enthusiasm to a disheartening degree. Box office returns for the first weekend topped out at around $94 million, which is almost unthinkable for a tentpole featuring the two biggest superheroes of all time and a glass-ceiling smashing movie star. Any staying power this movie has will be on word of mouth alone, and while it’s certainly entertaining in a disheveled kind of way, there simply might not be enough there there to warrant two hours and $20 at the multiplex.

It’ll probably do well on cable and Blu-Ray, which feels appropriate and, to a degree, necessary. The DCEU experiment has been steadily building to at least one outright failure, which is always the catalyst for any rebuild. Watching Justice League, it’s hard not to get the sense everybody saw the L coming and decided to shore up the ranks for next season. That’s sort of optimistic in and of itself, and while saying the movie delivers on the meagerest of promises is damning praise, it’s praise nonetheless and a positive notion of things to come. The night has been dark, but the dawn might finally be on the horizon.

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Thor’s got jokes in “Ragnarok,” until the fireworks come

As is befitting a movie about gods and men, we begin at the altar of Rotten Tomatoes. In its infinite, aggregate wisdom, this alleged maker and breaker of box-office fortune has christened Thor: Ragnarok as the best film of the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe with a hosanna of 93%. That’s divine enough to top 2014′s Captain America: The Winter Soldier (89%), largely (and incorrectly) considered to be the best Marvel flick, as well as both installments of Guardians of the Galaxy, largely (and correctly) considered the best of the MCU’s intertwining franchises. 

As Marvel flicks go, that puts Ragnarok in rarified air. Only the first Guardians 91%), the third Captain America (90%) and the recent Sony halfsie Spider-Man: Homecoming (92%) have managed to sniff the same critical heights as Ragnarok, but what befuddles about this particular benediction from cinema’s merciless sabermetric god is that the Thor flicks have generally garnered a lot less respect than they’re owed. Even without taking The Great Tomato into account, The God of Thunder’s original outing in 2011 has largely been forgotten by the faithful, while its 2013 sequel is generally (and incorrectly) considered to be the worst of the Marvel flicks. (For those of you who are asking: 77% for Part 1; 66% for Part 2; and the worst Marvel movie is this -- but in fairness, it is close.) 

And true, the thunderous hoo-ha of a frat-bro deity is and was hardly groundbreaking material -- we were less than a decade out from Lord of the Rings when the first Thor bowed -- but what always made those movies better than they appeared to be was that they were funny. Both the pop Shakespeare of Kenneth Branagh’s original and the campy bombast of Alan Taylor’s sequel had a sneaky sense of humor that provided the backbone to all the mystic mumbo-jumbo, even if the jokes inevitably had to defer to it. Ragnarok does too; director Taika Waititi ultimately succumbs to the Marvel Commandments same as his forbearers. But before that happens, his movie is a sprightly, hilarious affair, and crucially, it’s as weird as you’d expect from the guy whose biggest effort to date was a mockumentary about bored vampires in New Zealand.

What I’m trying to say is: This time around, Thor’s got jokes. Good ones, too, and strange ones. Lots of ‘em. He’s got zingers, he’s got banter, he’s self-depreciation, he’s got that skeeved-out thing movie bros do when one of their bros walks in front of them naked and they can’t make eye contact with said bro. And Chris Hemsworth, who has rocked and rolled as the thunder god since Day One, delivers it all with the relish you’d expect from a man who’s been sprung from a faux-Shakespearean prison and told to let his freak flag fly. 

Of course, before then, there is a requisite bit of board-resetting to attend to, and the script (by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher Lost) yada-yadas away the franchise’s loose ends with an efficiency so ruthless that it’s almost a joke unto itself. The disappearance of Odin (Anthony Hopkins) is resolved via a funny cameo by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Thor’s running mates are whacked so heartlessly that poor Zachary Levi doesn’t even get a line off before he meets his maker. Jaimie Alexander is spared because she’s not in this one (praise be to Blindspot), and Idris Elba lingers because nobody in their right mind would dare kill him, though he’s got a forgettable plot. (Ironically, the only director who knew what to do with Elba in these movies was Branagh, who altered his voice and gave him an otherworldly presence the sequels diluted into the garden-variety swagger of your average swashbuckler.) Thor’s hammer is destroyed with the arrival of Cate Blanchett’s vamping Hela, Goddess of Death, he and Loki are banished to a junkyard planet, and there our story begins.

That setup strips the franchise to its barest bones and sets up a story that skews closer to the original Star Wars than the Guardians movies ever really did. Thor encounters all manner of outsize, intergalactic personalities, most notably a drunken Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), the preening emcee of an intergalactic gladiator ring whose reigning champion is none other than the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). it’s an absurd premise, even by comic book standards, and the movie, and its stars, have a lot of fun with it. Thompson is swagger incarnate; Ruffalo is a walking panic attack and Goldblum delivers the kind of performance that suggests he is, indeed, aware of his Internet reputation and has decided to live up to it. Hopkins, meanwhile, is livelier than usual in his handful of scenes, though in fairness he might just have been happy he only has three of them.

Hemsworth and Hiddleston have struggled somewhat outside the umbrella of this franchise, but as Thor and Loki, they tend to not skip a beat. Waititi rightfully recognizes that the best thing about the first two movies were the way the characters played off each other, so he leans away from the melodrama of their Avengers storylines and back into familial squabbling. The difference here is that he allows it to go somewhere. As Thor wises to Loki’s tricks, Hemsworth grins with the self-satisfaction of a jock who finally manages to outsmart his Ivy League brother, while Loki finds a genuine heroic streak that is still somewhat shadowed by his little-brother inferiority complex; you get the sense that he could live with being upstaged over and over again if Thor just wasn’t so petty about it.

It’s all unexpectedly good stuff, and Waititi keeps the engine humming and the funny coming, at least until the big finish. You see, every Marvel movie must end in a giant, CGI fight scene of some kind; it is the blood price to be paid for whatever originality the director of the day is allowed to inject into the script. Spider-Man’s John Hughes high-schoolery pivoted with a fistfight on a jet; the Avengers’ squabbling landed them in the path of a robot James Spader and his armies, et cetera. Here, it’s the big fight between Thor and Hela for the fate of Thor's homeworld. Only we don’t really care enough about her to be invested in the result, which unfolds, of course, according to the prophecy of the one-off villain. That’s a shame, because she’s got enough presence to make you wish she could stick around, but her very character is a stopgap between Thor and what’s to come. (As her morally conflicted lackey, Karl Urban is ten times more interesting, if twenty times more disposable.) It says something about Waititi’s vision that he still manages to pivot to a delightfully quirky ending, but then we’re onto the credits and a teaser that finally -- finally -- tees Thor up for the long-awaited Avengers: Infinity War that will tie all the Marvel flicks together for a fate of the universe adventure.

That we’re at last approaching the finish line is something of a relief, but it’s also a bit of a downer considering everything that came before. For all Waititi’s ingenuity, he’s operating within a larger framework, and beholden to a sacred text that he can only deviate from so much. The lingering lesson of Thor: Ragnarok is that a Marvel movie can be genuinely funny and the fates of a franchise can be reversed, but it will always be a Marvel franchise first and foremost, which means the most important movie is always the next one. It is truly the hungriest god of all, and it cannot be stopped. It can only be fed.

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A “Kingsman” sequel to be laughed at, not with

The central joke of 2014′s ultraviolent spy sendup Kingsman: The Secret Service was that it literalized every icky spy-movie cliché that the Bond franchise had only previously addressed with a wink and a smirk. The violence was unrepentant, the language was street-level foul and the sex, while never shown per se, was the butt (so to speak) of one of its most divisive -- and, in my mind, jarringly funny -- scenes. There was even a running thread of spy-flick references that, if they didn’t break the fourth wall, at least rapped on it with a sledgehammer once or twice, culminating in the villain requesting a clever pun as he expired only to be informed by our young hero that “This ain’t that kinda movie, bruv.” (His response? “Perfect.”)

It was a gruesome movie, too, but charming in its self-effacing ridiculous, so it’s doubly disappointing that there’s no such winking self-awareness in the sequel, subtitled The Golden Circle. If The Secret Service took Casino Royale’s subversion and wrapped it in comic-book excess, this is just a flashier update on the latter day Brosnan Bonds. A spy movie through and through, in other words, and not even one with the good sense to be pleasantly disposable. The comparison that comes immediately to mind here is Die Another Day, down to the the occasionally heart-stopping action scene, the appearance of a famous pop star (there it was Madonna; here it’s Elton John) and the casting of Halle Berry. 

And, most crucially and disappointingly, the utter lack of a story. Whereas the original Kingsman managed to ground the maturation of Eggsy (Taron Egerton) from street urchin to superspy in gravitas and humor, this mainly exists as a showcase for the suits he wears, the women he beds and not so much the people that he kills as the ways in which they die. (Some highlights: Neck-breaking, explosion by landmine, overdose, shot, bisection by electric lasso. Two poor bastards go headfirst into a meat grinder.) It assembles a crew of good-looking superstars, finely tailored outfits and increasingly ridiculous gadgetry in a messy story that unites the English Kingsmen agents with their stereotypically American counterparts, the Statesmen, against a nostalgia-obsessed drug baroness (Julianne Moore). Everybody’s back -- even the presumed-dead Harry (Colin Firth) is Deus Ex Machina’d back to life by the Statesmen, undoing one of the original’s most impactful twists -- but almost nobody has anything to do besides shoot stuff and look good doing it. This movie is a mess from the get-go, albeit a gorgeous one. It’s the kind that foregoes any kind of a slow burn for a whammy of an opening; here it’s an impressively staged but kinetically empty fight in the back of a moving cab while Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” squeals over the action. 

That scene tells you everything you need to know: You’re in for big, dumb action and lots of it, which wouldn’t be a problem if the thing was, you know, fun, or at least halfway clever. Instead, it’s just big and dumb. Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn attempts with all his heart and soul to one-up the original’s outrageousness, down to repeating some of its plot twists verbatim. There’s a villain with a lethal prosthetic, (MILD SPOILER ALERT) a prominent scene-stealer dies towards the end and (LESS MILD SPOILER ALERT) another character is revealed as a double agent. (END SPOILER ALERT) He does manage to recreate the wild violence of Part One, though there’s nothing as viscerally obscene as The Secret Service’s church shootout, or its most profane and indisputably funny moment in which the heads of various world leaders (including then-president Obama, for what it’s worth) balletically exploded over the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

Credit where it’s due, this looks like it was a very fun movie to make. Vaughn assembles an impressive array of veterans, character actors and unknowns to fill his world, though Firth seems noticeably less inspired this time around, and you can practically see Egerton gnawing at his immaculately tailored wrist to be given better material. (It’s telling, and unfortunate, that the apparent lead of the movie is still fourth billed in the cast.) Of the Statesmen, Pedro Pascal from Game of Thrones swings an electrified lasso with style, Channing Tatum oozes charisma as a trigger-happy yahoo before he’s sidelined for most of the movie and Jeff Bridges does his Jeff Bridges thing -- a compliment -- as the head honcho, Champagne. (In a neat variation on the Kingsmen’s Arthurian code names and cover as tailors, the Statesmen hide out in a bourbon distillery and are all named after various types of hooch.) Berry and Mark Strong, as the two agencies’ gadget masters, spend most of the movie unforgivably confined to a single room together, though the latter does get a few scenes to chew on here and there. Elsewhere, the Elton John cameo admittedly goes on for a bit too long, but the movie does keep finding increasingly amusing ways to use him. (He is, refreshingly, totally game for the absurdity of it all.)

The women, it must be said, are less fortunate. While the men are at least given cool gadgets and varying degrees of character arcs, the ladies don’t really have anything to play besides helpful (Berry), crazy (Moore), doting (Hanna Alström as Eggsy’s girlfriend), flighty (Poppy Delevigne as one of the villains’ girlfriends) or dead (Sophie Cookson, a scene-stealer from The Secret Service who’s blown to smithereens 20 minutes into this one). If we’re being honest with ourselves, this didn’t necessarily have to be a dealbreaker: The subjugation of women is a constant if unfortunate aspect of the spy genre, and you keep waiting for Vaughn to do something clever with that trope the way, say, Paul Feig did in Spy a couple years back. But the moment never comes for that, or for anything else.

It does appear, to be fair, that The Golden Circle is more of a re-setting of the board for what’s to come (it’s implied that a Part Three will have a bigger spot for both Berry and Tatum), but you leave the movie wondering why such a move was necessary in the first place. The Secret Service was that rare brew of a sharp script, unexpected casting (Firth as an action hero never sounded plausible before or since) and a young star coming into his own. The sequel takes all of those elements and does nothing with them. In this age of carefully plotted follow-ups and meticulously plotted character development, you’d have hoped The Golden Circle wouldn’t succumb to the very tendencies of the genre it’s trying to mock, and that it would instead rise to the occasion of something more. But this ain’t that kinda movie, either.

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‘It’: The summer’s hot, the music’s good and the clowns have fangs

"It's summer. We're supposed to be outside having fun!" is a common refrain in Andy Muschietti's It, a sleek, entertaining and charming-if-thin adaptation of Stephen King's doorstop (the first half of it, anyway) about a bunch of self-dubbed losers who spend their summer skirting both the promise of adulthood and the clutches of an evil, child-devouring clown.

The recurring refrain, first played straight by the story’s tut-tutting grownups and then for laughs among its rebellious kids, ends up summarizing a lot of what Muschietti's film -- and King's novel -- attempt to accomplish, using horror as a metaphor for the line between childish things and adultish responsibilities. While the losers are ostensibly ditching the arcade to battle a shape-shifting demon that feeds on kids’ fears, the real terror is the prospect of no longer being kids at all, of accepting losses both fresh and ancient, confronting a first love or even wrapping their heads around idea that they can only be kids for so much longer.

Muschietti, working from a script by Chase Palmer, Gary Dauberman and original director Cary Fukunaga, knows full well that this is the meat and bones of the story, so while the selling point of It is and always has been the monstrous clown at its center (we're getting to him), he gives the lion's share of the movie to the cadre of scene-stealers and stars-in-waiting that make up the "Losers’ Club." These are the social outcasts lurking around the fringes of Derry, Maine, and while they're all Hughesian preteen archetypes on their face -- we have a stutterer (Jaeden Lieberher), a smartass (Stranger Things' Finn Wolfhard, stealing the movie), a wimp (Wyatt Oleff), an "outsider" (Chosen Jacobs), a hypochondriac (Jack Dylan Grazer), the new kid at school (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and a token girl (Sophia Ellis) -- the actors imbue their characters with depth and humor that leave a frankly deeper mark than any of the movie's impressively-orchestrated jump scares. (This is due in no small part to the movie's R rating, which, among other things, gives the kids the full range of vocabulary a 1980's brat might have enjoyed among the company of friends. The rest of it you chalk up to good old fashioned chemistry.) 

As in King's novel, our pre-teen heroes eventually run afoul of the monster-of-title and its preferred form, a leering, dead-eyed clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). Muschietti knows good and well that this is what you have come for, and so he stages the creature’s reveal in an oustanding prologue wherein Pennywise rips off the arm of Loser leader Bill's (Lierberher) kid brother and drags him into the sewers. That famous scene lands, but each of the clown’s subsequent appearances seem to dull his edge. Whether that's because we've hit Peak Clown or because the scares start to skew a little too late-period Freddy Kruger is up for debate, but it certainly can't be laid at the feet of the actor playing him. 

As portrayed by Tim Curry in the seminal 1990 miniseries, Pennywise was a campy, red-nosed goon with the general demeanor of a catcalling plumber. (”YOU WANNA BALLOON JAW-GEE?”) That he occasionally sprouted a set of fangs launched a thousand cases of coulrophobia, but he seems almost quaint stacked up against what his successor brings to the table. Skarsgård's Pennywise is a drooling, lolling monster with a gargling voice, a lopsided grin and an unsettling tendency to look in two directions at the same time (not GCI, apparently). He commits himself so fully to the role's monstrous physicality that you almost wish the script had more of a place for him than jump-scare boogeyman. That it doesn’t is the most disappointing thing about what turns out to be an impressive performance that, thankfully, never quite veers into the self-indulgence of, say, Jared Leto’s Joker, even if it can’t help but dance along that very perilous razor’s edge.

That said, by and large, Muschietti does fantastic work with source material that skews towards the unadaptable in about a hundred different ways. His main order of business is to streamline a lot of King's novel, which made room for a vision quest, a talking turtle, expanded backstory for both Pennywise and the local bully (Nicholas Hamilton, fantastic) and, yes, a jarring pre-teen orgy that is entirely and mercifully done away with here. Much of the subtext provided by those elements (that last one excepted) is missed, and it's tough not to wonder what Fukunaga, who directed the entirety of True Detective's freaky first season, might have wrangled out of this story. But Muschetti, who made his name with 2013's Mama, is a creative interpreter of both King’s arcana and his acute talent for creating dread; one of King’s, and now Muschietti’s, favorite tricks in It is Pennywise's ability to warp reality around him, which is terrifyingly staged in the book and impressively interpreted in the film (at one point, he AirPlays himself into an old family slideshow to terrorize the kids; in another, he materializes in an after-school special in an attempt to goad one character into cold-blooded murder).

Ultimately, It is a bit too lopsided for all its elements to land, and the better aspect of it ends up taking a backseat to the scare show that ends on a note that’s decidedly, and somewhat deflatingly, ambiguous. That’s by design, however: The credits add a "Chapter One" to the movie's title, and it seems entirely likely that we'll see a sequel, where the Losers’ Club return as adults for Round 2 against Pennywise. (The movie was originally conceived as a two-parter with Fukunaga at the helm.) The blood oath that will lead to that confrontation is meant to be a sort of triumph, but Muschietti never loses sight of the fact that It, at its heart, isn't just a story of coming of age but of a forced coming of age. It's impressive that Breakfast Club knockoffs manage to turn themselves into the Avengers, but the fact that they have to at all is, perhaps, the scariest thing about this story. 

It’s also kind of the saddest: At the end of the movie, one of the kids has already begun to lose their memory of the fight with Pennywise, another strange side effect of the monster’s magic detailed in King’s book. Like a lot of the story, it isn’t quite as artfully rendered here, but there’s something sad about it all the same. It’s hard to know, ultimately, what’s scarier: That these kids will eventually have to grow up, or that when they do, they won’t remember the sweet bliss of being young, horny and afraid for their lives. 

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GIVE YOURSELF TO THE HELLISH EMBRACE OF “TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT”

Look, Transformers: The Last Knight is bad. 

The good news, at least, is that it isn’t bad in the same kind of depleted, soggy way that the new Pirates of the Caribbean is bad, like everyone realized halfway through that they were making a turd and limped across the finish line accordingly. Nor is it bad in the way that, I don’t know, the new Alien is bad, where you shoot for the moon and end up with an admirable miss. No, this movie is gleefully, bombastically, aggressively bad. There is no bullet chamber unemptied, no explodable structure left un-exploded, no early-2000s gangsta lingo left unspoken by the robotic miscreants of title and no character developed; this movie is so balls-to-the-wall that the only sign of restraint is that there are no actual balls in it, which, oddly enough, you can’t say of some of the other, less bad Transformers movies. It is swolled-up, testosterone-fueled, smash-your-head-against-a-brick-wall bad, and for that, it is almost kind of ... good?

This is a remarkable five movies into the franchise, which, you might remember, actually started with a pretty good Spielbergian riff on a boy and his car back in 2007. Since then, Michael Bay, who has been directing these movies since what feels like the dawn of the nickelodeon, has piled on the bullshit to a staggering degree, eschewing even the bare minimum of logic something like this requires in favor of the most bonkers, Mad-Lib style plot that can possibly be thought up. Part 2 incorporated the pyramids. (Which, incidentally, get obliterated here.) Part 3 had the moon. (Ditto.) Part 4 had robot dinosaurs. (They're back for a hot minute and make it out unscathed.) This one loops in the Knights of the damn Round Table, whose battle against the Saxons was aided and abetted by a soused Merlin (Stanley Tucci, very funny) and a cadre of Transformers back in what a chyron helpfully informs us as “England -- The Dark Ages.”

Basically, Merlin’s staff is the MacGuffin of the day, and it’s the only thing that can save us from an imminent collision between Earth and the Transformers’ home planet, a world-ending event led by an evil robot witch and a heel-turned Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), who blasted off into space at the end of Part 4.

And listen. I could pick this shit apart all day if I wanted to. I could tell you that I distinctly remember the Transformer planet getting blown up two movies ago and Bumblebee getting his voice back four movies ago, or that it’s absurd that there are a bunch of baby robot dinosaurs roaming around and nobody seems to have any idea as to why. I could tell you that Cade Yeager is still a ridiculous, ridiculous name (all apologies to the actual Cade Yeagers out there); that Laura Haddock probably deserves better than to be Bay’s screen siren du jour and fill the estimable shoes of Megan Fox (who, you’ll remember, quit the franchise), Rosie Huntington-Whitely (who, you might remember, was actually pretty good in replacing Fox) and ... *looks up Age of Extinction on IMDB* Nicola Peltz, who I clearly didn’t remember was in these movies at all. I could tell you that Bay’s persistence for weird, 7th-grade level sex humor is just that -- weird -- and that Austin Powers did the inevitable “it’s so huge!” gag a lot better, both times. I could tell you that the best thing you can say about Jerrod Carmichael’s appearance in this movie is that he doesn’t get killed like T.J. Miler did. I could tell you that five -- five! -- movies in, nobody has yet been able to assemble a logical conversation between a human actor and the Transformers, who speak in non-sequiturs so random it’s like someone pulled a cord on their back. I could tell you that the action is incoherent even by the standards of this franchise; existing only to showcase the formidable might of the United States military just in case any Russians are getting any funny ideas or whatever.

But you know what? I’m not gonna do that. Because about a third of the way into The Last Knight, which, coincidentally, is when the early charm of the movie wears off, you realize that this is not a movie you critique. It is not a movie you judge. It is a movie you surrender to. And really, once you do that it actually isn’t that bad. Still aggressive, yes, but it becomes almost charming. Oh look, another car chase. Cool, they got John Turturro to come back. This kid with the scooter Transformer (Isabela Moner) is kinda good, hope she ends up being something. This last scene makes no sense but it is beautifully shot. Wow, Mark Wahlberg’s arms are big as hell, and hey, he actually has a fun little bit of chemistry with Laura Haddock. 

And once you surrender, to be honest, there are a few genuine pleasures to be had. The dragon is cool. Little nuggets planted in the beginning pay off. There’s a funny joke about Cuba’s policy towards Transformers, and an even funnier one involving a swelling score during a major exposition scene that both reminds you Bay can be very entertainingly self-aware when he wants to, and mildly infuriates you that he never wants to often enough. Wahlberg commits to this stuff with a surprising amount of gusto, and Josh Duhamel is actually pretty good as a soldier from the original trilogy making his return to the narrative. And, of course, there’s this movie’s centerpiece: Anthony Hopkins as a doddering English lord with a maniacal robot butler named Cogman. 

Sir Anthony has been cultivating paycheck roles like these over the last few years, but you seem to get the idea that he’s enjoying this one a lot more than, I don’t know, playing Odin in Thor. He’s long since tired of regality. He snits, he snorts, he curses out fussy British types and delivers this absurd exposition with a wink so profound the whole movie is elevated for a brief second wind once he appears. If anyone can steal his thunder it’s his French Lamborghini Transformer (Omar Sy, I shit you not) or the butler Cogman, but they know better than to try. The butler, however, does get the best lines after him, as well as one of the truest: (Spoilers incoming) After Sir Anthony meets his doom at the hand of the villainous Megatron, Cogman eulogizes him thusly: “Of all the Earls I have had the pleasure to serve, you were, by far, the coolest.” The lesson being, of course: Sir Anthony could have done something quote-unquote smarter with his time. He could have nitpicked the logic. He could have resisted the bullshit. But no. He surrendered to the world of Transformers, fired his weapon like a man, and became a damn hero as a result. We should all be so lucky.

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“Wonder Woman”: Relax, it’s really good.

It is not your patriotic duty to see Wonder Woman, though you could be forgiven for thinking that it is. The feature-length debut of the Amazon warrior queen first glimpsed in last year’s overstuffed Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is charging into theaters to a chorus of hand-wringing both from the DC comics folks -- who could really, really use a win in the movie department -- and media and industry types, who’ve been harboring a barely-unspoken fear that Wonder Woman, the first live-action, female-fronted superhero movie to actually be directed by a woman, might bomb. If it did, logic goes, it would be a good long time before another gal got a bite at the apple either in front of or behind the camera ever again. (The assumption is not entirely off: The last superhero movie starring a woman was Elektra in 2005; the last directed by one was Punisher: War Zone in ‘08.)

That’s a lot of baggage to put on the shoulders of something as frilly as a summer tentpole movie, especially considering we already did this dance last year and it didn’t turn out so great. But luckily, Wonder Woman turned out to be good. Maybe even great, though that might just be the afterglow talking. It’s a crowd-pleaser in every sense of the word, anchored by a breakout performance from Gal Gadot and directed with a combination of grace and aplomb by Patty Jenkins, whose elegant style is much more at home here than it ever would have been in the Thor sequel she ultimately ditched. It’s an unavoidable and exhausting side effect of the age of Donald Trump that every piece of entertainment must be taken as a referendum on the times, but Wonder Woman is so wholesome, straightforward and satisfying a piece of entertainment that it largely manages to leave its own politicization at the door.

Its story is simple: Diana of Themiscyra (Gadot) sails from the land of the Amazons straight into the muck of World War I after a spy named Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crash-lands on her shores, because she believes the literal god of war has orchestrated the conflict and that by defeating him, she can restore mankind to a state of peace and prosperity. While that plot borrows heavily from both the original Thor (what with its basic, gods-among-us setup) and the original Captain America (what with the general time period and the guy named Steve played by a guy named Chris), Wonder Woman mostly sheds itself of the baggage of its genre and its particular extended universe, which has been defined more for its missed opportunities than its infrequent, if tangible, successes. (All together now ... you can leave during the credits; there’s no extra scene.) Modern superhero movies are always better when they’re freed from the obligation of selling the next installment, and screenwriter Allan Heinberg (working from a story by himself, Zack Snyder and Jason Fuchs) wisely keeps this story a self-contained one. There’s little to no allusion to Batman, Superman and the rest of the boys’ club; save for an awkward framing device featuring a present-day Diana in Paris, this is, essentially, a soft reboot of the wretched franchise machine that came before it.

Starting over from scratch does present some challenges. Wonder Woman’s belabored first act is weighed down by an extended dose of Olympian hoo-ha and a seriously questionable Robin Wright accent (she plays Diana’s aunt on Paradise Island; Connie Nielsen is her mother), though the gorgeous imagery does redeem it somewhat. (Think this shot from the new Thor trailer, or maybe the original credits from The Leftovers.) The movie also doesn’t entirely reconcile this eternal optimist with the slightly more cynical character audiences first glimpsed in Batman v Superman, nor is it as effective in conveying its all-you-need-is-love message as you’d like it to be.

That it all comes together is a feat in and of itself. This is a sneakily ambitious movie, sliding between fish-out-of-water comedy to PG-13 level wartime drama to an effects-driven bonanza in its final moments. Jenkins keeps a steady hand on the movie at all times, holding it together even when it threatens to collapse under its own lengthy plot or, even worse, devolve into a low-rate James Bond spy picture. (There’s a scene at a German gala that probably could have gone, even if we’d lose this instant-classic shot.) And if she does get lost in the weeds, she leans, wisely, on Gadot’s performance. 

The ensemble veteran seizes the spotlight as a benevolent protector in an age of tortured heroes (think more Christopher Reeve than Christian Bale) and the cast wisely gets the hell out of her way while also tailoring their performances perfectly to hers. Pine slides into the oft-fraught territory of the superhero love interest with an appealing performance that’s more vulnerable that it appears; he plays Trevor like a puppy dog who saw too many John Wayne movies. Elsewhere, Saïd Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner and Eugene Brave Rock play nicely off Diana’s idealism as the roughnecks who make up their ragamuffin spy unit in the final act; Brave Rock even gets an interesting conversation about genocide that you wish the movie lingered on a little longer. (David Thewlis and Lucy Davis are delightful as a pair of baffled Brits, but the bad guys -- Danny Huston as a German general and Elena Anaya as a mad scientist in a Richard Harrow mask -- go sadly underused.)

Gracious as she is to share the spotlight, however, the movie belongs to Gadot, and the character she plays. Diana’s optimism lends the movie a level of infectious delight, and Jenkins never places the weight of the world on her shoulders even during what’s sure to be its enduring scene, a lone charge into No Man’s Land (heh) that another movie might have played for torturous martyrdom. While that approach does tend to work, and occasionally work perfectly, this movie refreshingly plays the moment for a bold statement of purpose, and it lends Wonder Woman the most profound of its spontaneous applause moments. (That it doesn’t overtly take the opportunity to play on “No Man’s Land” with something like this is its lone, forgivable, flaw.) 

Being a superhero movie, Wonder Woman does, eventually, pivot back into the tropes of the genre: A fiery final battle, a late-game “surprise” you probably called out in the beginning, a heroic sacrifice that hits harder than you expect it to. And, ultimately, the crossover team-up. Wonder Woman will be back this fall for Justice League, where she’ll team up alongside the likes of Ben Affleck, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa and Ray Fisher. At the risk of playing into the politicization Wonder Woman is so wise to ignore, it’s a little disappointing that she has to cede the spotlight just four months after she finally seized it. But as Gadot, and Jenkins, and Diana herself, and more than a few women out there can probably attest, there’s something to be said for persistence.

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“Pirates of the Caribbean” sprints dutifully toward the horizon

For all the theme-park tie-ins, goofy catchphrases and freewheeling action, the Pirates of the Caribbean moves ran pretty dark as far as family-friendly franchises go. Allegiances shifted on a dime, characters were murdered and resurrected as needed, and while the ass-backwards swashbuckling of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) had its yuks, there was always a kind of frantic desire for survival running throughout each of his increasingly improbable adventures. These movies were always a bit deeper, and darker, than they appeared to be, and six years after 2011′s woebegone On Stranger Tides, it’s a fair bet to say there might be treasure found in them yet. But despite an enticing setup, the fifth entry in the series, subtitled Dead Men Tell No Tales, settles mostly for surface trappings and reflections of former glory.

That sounds harsher, perhaps, than it should. On a certain level, it’s hard to knock a Pirates movie at this point for giving you exactly what you paid to see, and Dead Men Tell No Tales offers up a well-crafted remix of the franchise’s greatest hits. Depp slurs and swans as Captain Jack, while Geoffrey Rush (who was always low-key the best thing about this franchise) makes a meal of the magnificent scenery as his frenemy Barbossa. Elsewhere, a famous actor (this time it’s Javier Bardem) is transformed into a CGI monstrosity; a famous rock star (this time it’s Paul McCartney) cameos as a member of Jack’s family; two young lovers played by relative unknowns (this time it’s Brenton Thwaites, late of Gods of Egypt, and Kaya Scodelario from the Maze Runner movies) trade witty banter; and maritime mayhem ensues as all parties pursue a mystical MacGuffin that will oh no I’ve gone cross-eyed. (In Dead Men’s most overt nod to the originals, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley return for about five minutes apiece after sitting out On Stranger Tides, though only one of them gets any lines. You can probably guess who from the trailers.)

If you yearn for a return to the full-bodied adventure of Pirates 1-3, this one is probably for you, which is ironic considering the movie is, on paper, a complete and total effort to take the franchise somewhere new. In the director’s chair, Dead Men Tell No Tales boasts the Oscar-nominated duo of Joachim Rønning and Epsen Sandberg (Kon-Tiki), and they bring with them a sumptuous visual palette that’s unmatched by anything in the franchise. Its central conflict has a much darker setup, too: Not only is Jack penniless and washed-up at the movie’s beginning, this is the first time he’s placed against an enemy he’s actually killed.

That the movie ultimately leans back into what’s tried and true and doesn’t even stick the landing is somewhat deflating, but in fairness, it’s not entirely accurate to say Dead Men Tell No Tales is bad. The first 45 minutes or so are a blast, even. Following the return of Bloom’s Will Turner -- Thwaites plays his grown son and is on a quest to liberate him from a sinister curse -- Rønning and Sandberg stage a preposterously fun sequence wherein Captain Jack absconds with an entire bank, then follow it up with a bench-clearing melee during a botched execution. But things start to sag a bit when the action pivots from Jack to the villainous Captain Salazar (Bardem) who’s vowed revenge on Sparrow after their last encounter left him transformed (though it’s never made clear exactly how) into a waterlogged ghoul.

Bardem himself is tragically underused -- Salazar is a one-note avatar of revenge, though hearing him gargle “Yack Sparrrrrrrow” is a persistent delight -- but the CG department does some serious heavy-lifting here. Bardem’s hair floats in midair like a drowned man’s, bits of bone jut from the back of his head, black ooze seeps from his lips and his crew, who are lovingly photographed being burned alive, are mostly made up of the charred remains. (One guy is just a floating hand.) But for all the energy of Bardem’s performance, the movie never does anything interesting with him, nor does it find a way for the other characters to do anything interesting with him; he is, simply, uninteresting, which is a shame given what Bardem’s done with one-off villain appearances like this.

What the script does do, however, is tee the actors up to do what they do best, and they rise -- sometimes a little too dutifully, but still -- to the call. Truth be told, most of them could play these roles in their sleep, and some of them seem like they are. But it’s not often that the filmmakers can’t find a way to make something work. That’s admirable on the directors’ part, but it also means that the big action finale ends up being as hollow as it is kinetic, a case of the everyone mistaking zany action for satisfying resolution. Which isn’t to say they don’t push hard for it. There’s a death that is, I think, ill-advised, followed by a post-credit sequence teasing a return that holds promise should Part Six materialize, and not one minute of it feels as earned as it should.

You can’t help but feel that this is due to a misreading of the franchise’s appeal by the filmmakers. True, Gore Verbinski caught lightning in a bottle with Depp-as-Sparrow the first Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003, and the irreverence of that performance is what pushed that film into the Oscar conversation. But Verbinski also imbued that movie with an old-school robustness (That score! That scenery! Those cheekbones on Orlando Bloom!) and a genuine respect for his characters. When their fortunes rose and fell, it felt earned, or at least exciting, because the audience knew what they had been through. Dead Men Tell No Tales reads like someone bought the Curse of the Black Pearl DVD, skipped to each of the action scenes, decided to make that movie and fill in the blanks on the fly.

If there’s one thing it absolutely gets right, though, it’s the casting of the lovers. Thwaites and Scodelario crackle with the same kind of chemistry that Bloom and Knightley struck in the original movie, and they quickly become the best thing about this one. That doesn’t seem to be an accident. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales toys with the idea, for the first time, that the pirate’s life is a finite one, and that eventually all the swashbuckling has to come to an end. It seems as though the story is priming us, sometimes explicitly, for a passing of the torch. But of course, Captain Jack Sparrow is once again roaming the seas by the movie’s end, so, like everything else here, it’s an interesting concept that doesn’t get taken nearly far enough.

All of this doesn’t leave you nearly as hopeful for a potential Pirates 6 as the filmmakers would probably like you to be. It certainly doesn’t seem like Pirates can re-capture the old magic like it so explicitly wants to. But at this point, it’s best to follow what has turned out to be Captain Jack’s most prescient pearl of wisdom: Take what you can.

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“Alien: Covenant" plays the hits, bitterly

The latest installment of a sci-fi franchise that is, perhaps, held in better regard than its output warrants, Alien: Covenant represents the latest and most overt attempt yet to recapture the magic of Ridley Scott’s petrifying 1979 film about a space serpent run amok aboard a stranded intergalactic freighter. That bare-bones thriller opened the gateway to one true-blue classic (James Cameron’s shoot-em-up Aliens in 1986), two movies where your mileage probably varies (David Fincher’s notoriously troubled Alien3 in 1992 and the weirdly Cormanesque Alien: Resurrection in 1997), a two-part crossover with the Predator franchise in the aughts and, most recently, a Scott-directed origin myth in 2012 called Prometheus that bowed to much general harrumphing, both over its overly philosophical plot (courtesy of Damon Lindelof -- who, in his defense, is the guy you go to when you want ideas that are so big and knotty they almost can’t be untangled, so not sure what everyone was expecting there) or its lack of the series’ signature creature. 

That’s a lot to go through to just throw out the stew and start from scratch, but Scott has said the original idea for his prequel series -- rather than delve into the origin of the monster, he would explore the world of the alabaster “Engineers” that created both the aliens and humans -- was so ill-received that this time around, he is giving us explicitly what we asked for. In other words, Alien: Covenant is the Force-Awakening of the anthology: A well-acted, well-made and incredibly familiar set of story beats. There’s a crew of a spaceship, lured mid-voyage to a planet with a mysterious distress call (here, it’s a ghostly recording of someone singing "Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which is a nice, creepy touch). A female hero (Katherine Waterston) with a bob. A rowdy space cowboy (Danny McBride). A bunch of famous folks to throw on some space suits and march dutifully to the meat grinder (no spoilers, suffice it to say that Jamal Lyon doesn’t make it). Some shady business with a robot (Michael Fassbender). And, finally, a confrontation with the alien itself both on land and on the ship, which is the literal definition of trying to solve the Alien vs. Aliens argument by having it both ways at once.

All that said, Covenant does have the added benefit of being directed by the original maestro, which The Force Awakens did not have. But unlike The Force Awakens, it’s nowhere near able to replicate the impact of the first time around. That’s hardly the fault of Scott himself, though. The truth of the matter is the only filmmaker to successfully tweak the Alien formula is James Cameron, whose Aliens was essentially a war movie between a squadron of jarheads and a hive of, well, aliens. Every movie besides has followed the same beats of the original and the same beats followed here, which is to say if you’ve never seen an Alien movie before you’ll probably be thrilled to bits at what Covenant churns out, but otherwise, what once cut primal terror through audiences has had its edges blunted by nostalgia. The Alien is cool. The Alien is iconic, to use current internet parlance. But the Alien hasn’t been scary for a long, long time.

That’s more or less what Scott has admitted led him to undertake Prometheus in the first place (he described the monster as “done” even after the movie came out), but a grim fable about pointless creation at the whim of a merciless god may have been asking a little too much. (I say this as someone who, generally, liked that movie.) So, Covenant is in the unfortunate position of both continuing a story nobody took to and course-correcting it back into something that everyone remembers fondly. That the script, credited to six writers, manages to expand on the themes of Prometheus throughout the nostalgia trip is Covenant’s biggest accomplishment. In fact, the movie’s most compelling scene is its first one, a flashback to a frank, chilling discussion between Prometheus’ duplicitous android David (Fassbender) and his maker (Guy Pearce, another returnee, though mercifully minus his old-man makeup) on the day of David’s creation. 

That scene sets the tone for a movie that doesn’t just expand on Prometheus but retroactively improves it, though that doesn’t mean you can’t see the skid marks when the hard left occurs. For all the compelling work Scott does with his character, there’s a whole middle section that veers awkwardly into fan-service, wherein Covenant yada-yadas away both the Engineers and Noomi Rapace before pivoting to the aliens in a way that is so painstakingly explicit you halfway get the sense that he’s doing it out of spite. It certainly feels a little deflating to watch, like you’re seeing an interesting, challenging idea being swapped out in real time for the low-hanging fruit everyone asked for.

That said, if Covenant is an explicit hymn to the devotees, at least it manages to string together the right notes. Waterston lacks the maternal rage of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, but she can string together some expletives and has her knack for weaponizing the nearest piece of construction equipment. Fassbender, playing both the returning David and a newer android named Walter, gives a whammy double-performance that's the most compelling thing in the movie; it’s no exaggeration to say David might be the best role he has ever played. Billy Crudup delivers a kind, vulnerable performance as the ship’s captain. There’s a vastly entertaining sequence where the alien attacks two people in the middle of shower sex. (For a franchise that was always implicitly about sexual violence, it’s surprising it took this long for someone to get got in flagrante.) The alien itself remains cool, though for the most part it’s a distractingly CGI creation, a reminder that this franchise was always scarier before you could tell that the monster wasn’t really there.

Scott, meanwhile, is knee-deep in familiar territory, for better and for worse. You get the sense he isn’t overly wild about doubling back, but he at least skillfully pilots you through the trip. And, if he had to be cajoled into bringing back his most famous creation, he at least gets his kicks in with a blindingly contemptuous critique of humanity in the process. Covenant’s final scene is a little too obvious to be as chilling as it wants to be, but it crackles in a way no other scene really does besides the opening: It’s a meditation of power, and the contemplation thereof, and you get the sense that Scott might be exorcising some demons towards the viewers who forced his hand as it unspools. There’s a truly vicious movie lurking inside this piece of popcorn about who is fit to create, and Scott seems to want nothing more than to feed his cast into the heart of darkness and be on his merry way. I kind of hope, next time, that he does. If there’s one thing to take away from Alien: Covenant, it’s that mercy, both to the characters and the audience, is overrated.

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“Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2″ goes up to eleven

With its irreverent (or at least irreverent as you can get) tone, 2014′s Guardians of the Galaxy captured the imagination of moviegoers in the way few of Marvel’s other properties did. It made a star of Chris Pratt, reintroduced Blue Swede to the national consciousness and, more importantly for a franchise whose most out-there move was to hire Joss Whedon for the crossover, showed that you could get a little weird with these movies and still make freaking bank. With all that in mind, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2, the three-years-in-the-making sequel, takes everything that made the first one a hit and cranks it all the way up to eleven. Nay, twelve. You liked swashbuckling spaceman Peter Quill’s (Pratt) ‘70s "Awesome Mix”? He’s got a new one! Did you thrill to the social faux pas of the overly literal barbarian Drax the Destroyer (the ever-wonderful Dave Bautista)? He’s back and more inappropriate than ever. Did you oo and aww when the tragically-incinerated tree-man Groot (Vin Diesel) was reborn as an adorable sapling? He’s a baby for the whole thing here. What I’m trying to say is: Vol. 2 is a lot. It’s a good lot, true. But a lot.

You feel, sometimes, like returning writer-director James Gunn is letting his freak flag fly here in a way he was too timid to do before. Of course, the reason the original’s weirdness worked so well in the was because of the blank canvas Gunn was afforded. Nobody really knew what he was doing outside of the Marvel people, and it felt like nobody would have minded all that much if he happened to fail. Here, expectation has clearly taken hold, and Gunn knows that he has to juggle advancing the story in Vol. 2 with playing the proverbial hits and calling back to the moments that got people into the theater in the first place. So, for a while, Vol. 2 dwells somewhat dispiritedly in the realm of retread. What once rolled easily out of the characters’ mouths has a forced edge to it, and the moments that are repeated (Drax and Groot do their dance-and-freeze bit again right out of the gate) don’t carry the thrill that they once did.

Luckily, once the story gets going, Gunn settles into a far more efficient pace by splitting the Guardians up after they incur a death sentence by offending a group of literal golden supermodels who’ve hired them to protect a cosmic something-or-other. Quill’s ship is destroyed, the team crash-lands, and a wrench is thrown in by the sudden appearance of Quill’s long-lost father (a devilishly charming Kurt Russell), whose identity was the most lingering of Part 1′s questions. 

Without getting into specifics, the division of the team into two separate storylines does give Gunn room to play with developing the Guardians, playing them off against characters you might not expect them to interact with. Drax, whose only expression is savage laughter, forges a connection with an alien named Mantis (Pom Klementieff) who can read others’ emotions. Former lab experiment Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) ends up sharing a jail cell with Yondu (Michael Rocker), the blue bounty hunter from Part 1 who suffers a mutiny early on here. The assassin sisters Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) fight out their feelings. 

Admittedly, some of this development is a little rockier than you’d like it to be; the characters careen from ball-busting to soul-baring confession in such jarring fashion that the movie seems on the verge of falling apart at any second. But it’s no small feat that Gunn rights the ship each time and gets things where they need to go. He’s made a much more affecting movie than you were probably expecting; if Vol. 1 was a five-guitar face-melter, Vol. 2 is the power ballad that follows, and if Gunn the writer lacks the smoothness of Whedon, who picked the Avengers apart over the course of two movies without sacrificing the flow of the story, he has every bit of his eye for advancing characters and making the beats land in a way that matter. (The moment when Drax finally does have his emotions read is probably one of the more moving scenes in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s easily the best scene in this one.)

Plus, he even learns from some of the original’s missteps. There’s very little allusion to the larger Marvel universe; it’s a sign of what passes for restraint these days that none of the five (yes, five) post-credit scenes lead into an Avengers movie. (They mostly set up what appear to be the kernels of Vol. 3) A fairly major character dies, and stays that way. The blossoming romance between Quill and Gamora is handled with surprising delicacy and restraint. The final shot is both unexpected in its focus and genuinely affecting in its execution. Gunn also has an eye for visuals unlike any other director in the Marvel repertoire. Each time you think you’ve seen, more or less, what he’s doing on screen before, Gunn slows the proceedings down for some kind of jaw-dropping, intergalactic panorama (the DP earns his money here, let me tell ya) that reminds you of both the uniqueness of his property and the command he holds over it. 

In those moments, he’s good enough that it makes you concerned somewhat for the future of the Marvel franchise. The larger gameplan seems to have been placed into the hands of Captain America’s Russo brothers, and understandably so: Over the course of their two movies, they’ve grown into the kind of expert craftsmen Marvel trusts to get the job done. But it’s hard not to leave Vol. 2 thinking that it might be Gunn who’s got the weirdness required to take this thing all the way. The question here might never have been whether or not Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 could repeat the box office of the first one, or churn out a better soundtrack or sell a bunch of Baby Groot toys come Christmas. I mean, those were always questions (the answers, by the way, are “probably,” “yes,” and “oh God yes”), but the one that seemed to matter the most was whether it could retain its unique place among the “larger universe” that has begun to look more and more like itself with each passing movie. The answer, there, is a resounding, relieving “yes.” Whatever becomes of the universe, rest assured that Gunn’s little corner of the galaxy is entirely his own, and he’ll turn up the volume if he’s so damn inclined.

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"Colossal” and the joy of monstrous bitchiness

The running headline with Colossal has been that it’s the movie where Anne Hathaway acts the way everyone seemed to think she did during that 2013-ish period when the world decided, collectively, they’d had enough of her. In hindsight, this was one of the more cruel and ridiculous cultural reactions to an actor’s moment in the sun. The worst thing you could say about Hathaway during that Oscar run was that she was strident, but in Colossal, she’s a trainwreck of the Amy Schumer mold, with the self-referential, look-at-me-I’m-a-sloppy-white-girl shtick subbed out for some truly loathsome character traits. Her Gloria is a tattooed, out-of-work burnout who mooches off her live-in boyfriend (Dan Stevens, who’s having a bit of a moment between this, Legion and Beauty and the Beast), spends most of her day hammered drunk and, when she’s ultimately forced to move back home, spends most of her after-hours time getting soused at the local watering hole with various undesirables. She is, in short, an asshole.

She’s also a monster in the literal sense, because Colossal’s big fantastical quirk is that whenever Gloria stumbles through a particular playground, a giant monster appears in Seoul and mimics her exact movements on a monumental scale. So, if Gloria stomps drunkenly through the dirt, the big guy (gal?) levels a city block. It’s not a particularly subtle metaphor -- when one behaves self-destructively, the destruction is never limited to oneself -- but it is an interesting one, and it allows Colossal to walk a particularly tangled line between sci-fi adventure, darkly comic character study and bona fide female empowerment tale, though the way it ends up getting there is frankly too delightful for me to delve into details.

In fact, Colossal is a tough movie to talk about without preserving the dark delights of the story. I will say that it might not be a great movie, but it is a weirdly powerful one, mainly because it doesn’t go for the low-hanging fruit of playing its plot for cheap laughs. Hathaway, who knows a thing or two about being quote-unquote unlikable, is tasked with finding a rooting interest in a character who is both gleefully unrepentant and willfully ignorant, at first, of the chaos she leaves in her wake. It’s almost beside the point to say she succeeds. She’s always been an outstanding actress, but here, Colossal gives her the chance to sink her teeth into something truly meaty and make it her own. 

You get the sense that she’s sort of enjoying the heel turn, too. Nearly every line is delivered with an eye roll and a middle finger in the direction of the audience; it might be one of the most gloriously bitchy performances I’ve ever seen, but the movie itself isn’t in a hurry to cast aspersions or label it as such. Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo is smart enough to know the audience will do that on its own, especially given the ostensible lighting rod in the lead role. He also has a soft spot for dirtbags, as he shows with a local barfly charmingly played by Tim Blake Nelson, so he’s not in a hurry to change Gloria at all. He does, however, use the story’s more fantastical elements as a way to progress the character naturally out of her rut. She may be a jerk, but how much devastation is she willing to live with?

That question quickly emerges as the central one in Colossal, and the way Vigalondo addresses it (again, not spoiling) allows for some shifting, fascinating interplay between Gloria and the men in her life, from the judgmental boyfriend to the sweet lunkhead she flirts with (Austin Stowell, the pilot from Bridge of Spies) to the childhood pal who throws her a lifeline back home (Jason Sudeikis, giving the performance of his damn life). As these dudes shift from allies to enemies and back, and and as the ramifications of Gloria’s power become clearer, Colossal assumes its final form of a hear-me-roar empowerment story with Hathaway in full force at its center. Gloria is afforded the opportunity to be both hero and villain throughout the story, but the fantastic closing seconds indicate that we’re not led to believe Gloria Is in a hurry to change who she is. Vigalondo clearly sees her boorishness as a feature, not a bug, and the movie asks, more than anything for the audience to revel in its heroine’s flaws. 

Luckily, Hathaway is game for the task. No matter the scenario, she can be counted on to drink like a sailor, curse like a dock worker or even throw down physically when called upon. Given her goody two-shoes reputation, It’s a revelation to see Hathaway act this way, but truth of the matter is it shouldn’t be. Despite the awkward origin story Colossal presents in the third act, Hathaway clearly has no interest in playing a superhero. As well she shouldn’t. We dreamed up the idea that she was a villain a long time ago, and guess what? It came true.

[downinfront]

“Power Rangers” and the glorious death of your childhood

Power Rangers comes not to kill your childhood. Well, it kind of does. But in a good way! Or rather, not in the way you might expect. Think of it less as a killing than a reinterpretation. This alone will likely cause the truest believers of the chintzy ‘90s institution (which memorably combined recycled Japanese tokusatsu footage for its monster fights and freshly-shot footage with American actors for its on-the-ground stuff) to cry heresy and run screaming from the theater to the safety of their Nick At Nite programming blocks.

Call that an unavoidable cost of doing business, especially for the reboot business and especially for the reboot business of the almighty 1990s. The kids of that decade have grown into those pesky, proprietary millennials, and the general consensus among them seems to be that anyone looking to update the shows that got them through the Clinton years can only do so much, which is why recent remakes mostly amount to a rearranging of the (occasionally enchanted) furniture. 

Of course, this negates the idea that the property being remade could, in the right hands, likely mean something very different to a newer generation of kids for whom the world is, indeed, very different. One cannot build a movie -- or a franchise -- on “remember when” alone, and if this the crew behind this sleek new Power Rangers hasn’t entirely done away with the sacred text, they’ve made it a point to give it a translation fit for the 2010s.

In other words, the basic premise remains the same -- five teenagers stumble upon an alien stronghold in their dead-end town and become intergalactic space ninjas -- but the focus has changed. The show dubbed the Rangers as “teenagers with attitude” and was content to focus on the first half of that moniker, but this movie, directed by Project Almanac’s Dean Israelite, turns its focus towards the latter. Our five heroes are now a band of misfits and weirdos that John Hughes would throw in detention in a heartbeat, and, in fact, that’s where we meet them.

The setting would seem like a cheap ploy to make the kids seem like outcasts, but the script does the extra bit of work to make sure they earn the distinction. Jason (Dacre Montgomery) is a washout football star under house arrest; Kimberly (Naomi Scott) is a cheerleader who’s embroiled in, of all things, a nude photo scandal; and Billy (RJ Cyler, far and away the best thing about this movie) is a bomb-making nerd on the autism spectrum. The punkish delinquent Zack (Ludi Lin) and the introverted, you-may-have-heard-she’s-gay-now Trini (Becky G.) show up a little later, and the quintet are quickly blowing shit up and running from the cops in a stolen van. 

This, needless to say, is a decidedly different take on the Power Rangers, one that doesn’t venture far enough to be labeled “gritty,” but one that’s definitely grimy at the very least. It also, admirably, isn’t afraid to show the slow, arduous process by which the Rangers form their bonds. They start as tenuous allies at best and aren't even that nuts about each other (“Are we friends or are we Power Rangers?” one character asks), but by the end of the movie, when they have their big moment, it feels genuinely earned. (That’s a testament to the acting, by the way, which is far, far better than you’d expect or need it to be.)

The story, amazingly, even goes so far as to muddy the halo around the Rangers’ boss, Zordon. A floating head in the original, he’s embodied here by Bryan Cranston’s giant face, looking like one of those bed-of-nails toys you used to make a handprint on ('90s kids will understand). He’s given a new backstory in the script by John Gatins and an ulterior motive that the movie deploys in a well-played reveal at the halfway point. It’s a surprisingly solid performance by Cranston, whose reputation as the ultimate good sport will only increase once everyone gets a load of him in the one-take prologue that seems, of all things, to be inspired by Adi Shankar’s bonkers Power/Rangers short from a couple years ago.

Fear not, though, there is hope for those who prefer their youth amber-preserved. Minus a slightly updated story of her own, much as you remember her is Rita Repulsa, the cackling hag played in this version by Elizabeth Banks,  who’s doing some kind of magical blend of Linda Blair, the Wicked Witch of the West and Sunset Boulevard. If there is one drawback to this Power Rangers, it’s that it takes itself just a mite too seriously. She’s clearly in it for the fun -- and, yeah, maybe the paycheck as well, but girl’s gotta eat. (Also enjoying himself is Bill Hader, who voices Zordon’s lackey Alpha 5. Yes, he says, “ai yi yi.” Too many times, I think, but he says it.)

Of course, all this Breakfast Clubbin’ has to lead to the friggin’ dinosaurs, and the movie knows that this, more than anything, is that for which you have come. Accordingly, it kicks into a frenetic and kinda sloppy finale that does, indeed, break out the legendary Zords, the legendary theme song, and a Krispy Kreme product placement that’s so ridiculously funny it will soon assume legendary status as well. It’s a little too schizophrenically put together (think less the careful beats of Captain America: Civil War’s airport fight and more the constant kaboomery of a Transformers finish) to really work in the way the movie wants it to, but it’ll be diverting for newcomers and fans will likely recognize the spirit of the original in all this harmless chaos, if not exactly the letter of it. (That said: My one beef as a devotee? The new Megazord. No, no, no. Bring back that blocky masterpiece and leave my monster be.)

Admittedly, the movie goes down better while you're watching it than it does afterwards. It’s not perfect. But the effort is there, and Israelite tries, more so than most remake directors, to make the characters mean something they might not have before. Much like the ‘90s themselves, the original Rangers met the bare minimum for inclusion, if ofttimes in a backhanded manner (the team featured a black and Asian character, but they were the Black and Yellow Rangers, respectively -- it hasn’t aged well as a look). It was enough, I guess, to let people know they were worthy of consideration. But seeing this Zack converse in subtitled Mandarin with his mother, or Billy’s painful neuroses, or Trini’s genuinely affecting monologue about not knowing how to tell her parents about the true self she’s discovering is something that will resonate a lot more with kids for whom these issues are becoming more and more a facet of daily life. (‘00s kids will understand.)

So, where does that leave the ‘90s kids, who are the reason we’re getting this movie at all? Well, consider this: If you are a ‘90s kid, see it for the memory trip. (I grinned when they hit the theme song.) And if you’re a ‘90s kid with a ‘00s kid? See it for the memories they’ll make. In fact, there’s one wrinkle that turns out to be very meta when it comes to the remake game: In order for the Rangers to assume their power, Zordon must sacrifice his own. The metaphor is as apt as it is weirdly profound, and if Power Rangers doesn’t openly advocate for putting away childish things, it definitely tips its hand in favor of passing them along. In fact, those inheritors will probably be in the theater with you. Treat them kindly if they are. Your childhood is in their hands now.

[downinfront]

In “Kong: Skull Island,” the franchise is King

The first thing to understand about Kong: Skull Island is that Kong: Skull Island serves a lot of masters. Some would say too much. I would say too much. It’s both advancing the “MonsterVerse” that began with 2014′s Godzilla and rebooting it, replacing that movie’s maudlin grandeur with a heaping of outsize creature-feature fun. (Shoot me, but stay through the credits first so you’re ready for this.)

It’s also ostensibly a star vehicle for Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, two very charming, appealing actors who give charming, appealing performances that the movie doesn’t do a damn thing of consequence with.

Skull Island is also a relaunch of the Kong character himself, who evolved over the years from envelope-pushing metaphor in the 1933 original to tragic romantic hero in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. Here, he’s a surly, hirsute ass-kicker, less a “king” than a bouncer on his fifth hour of overtime who just wants a minute to eyeball the cute blonde with the camera but keeps having to quell some nonsense over in the corner of the bar. (Every generation, I suppose, gets its King Kong. The millennials get one who javelins palm trees into choppers and slurps giant squids alive in the most improbable Oldboy homage in the history of cinema. They could have gotten worse.)

It’s also, somehow, a movie unto itself. One that’s set, interestingly enough, during the Vietnam War, though that’s an idea that the movie doesn’t nearly do enough with beyond deploying Samuel L. Jackson as a crazy-eyed military man who loves the smell of napalm in the morning. Hiddleston, ostensibly, is the tracker who’s leading Jackson’s crew, plus a team of scientists led by John Goodman (piling nicely on his comeback from 10 Cloverfield Lane) and Straight Outta Compton’s Corey Hawkins (utterly charming as a nerd), onto the uncharted island that Kong calls home. Larson, ostensibly, is an anti-war photographer who hears through the grapevine that something’s up on the island and finagles passage with her camera in tow. All manner of manly military types round out the crew (Shea Whigham and Toby Kebbell are the best and most recognizable; the rest are fine but might as well be the dudes from Tropic Thunder) and John C. Reilly shows up late in the game as a pilot who crashed on Skull Island during World War II and has lived there ever since. It’s a gleefully demented performance that would have made the movie a lot better if the trailers hadn’t given away that he was in it.

Most frustratingly, Skull Island is a pretty interesting movie hidden deep, deep inside a very outwardly dumb one. The only two characters it seems to know what to do with are Jackson, who chews the most scenery and wrings the most of a character out of the script, and Reilly, who’s far and away the most entertaining. There’s a reason for that, as it turns out. Inasmuch as this Kong has something to say (and given Kong’s thorny history as a racial metaphor, a lot of people will want this movie to say something), it’s a meditation on war and peace that Jackson (who’s spoiling for a fight) and Reilly (who’s had enough of one) represent the conflicting sides of. It doesn’t get nearly enough consideration, and the result is a half-baked idea you want to see a lot more of.

Of course, not every movie has to have A Point, especially a monster movie. Godzilla fell all over itself trying to make one, and a clumsy one at that. But Skull Island doesn’t so much course-correct as overcorrect, drowning out any semblance of a theme in an avalanche of napalm, dinosaur limbs and plot developments devoid of character or motivation in any form. This has an especially jarring effect where Hiddleston and Larson are concerned. They do their best but the script has no time for their characters; you could cut them both out out of this, Thin Red Line-style, and get a better movie. It’s rare, and disheartening, to see the nominal leads of a tentpole picture rendered so ineffectual, especially when one is coming off an Oscar win and and the other could be sending out a trial balloon as the face of a franchise. Admittedly, Hiddleston ends up getting the better deal out of the two here, but only because he participates in more of the action. Though Larson does, of course, get the requisite Fay Wray callback at the end.

Again, whether this marginalizing is the fault of the script (credited to Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, with a story credit by John Gatins) or the editor is sort of up for debate. But at least Skull Island gets the monster stuff right. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts might have a hard time balancing style and story here, but his sensibilities for Skull Island’s inhabitants are right on the money. He populates the island with a menagerie that’s half Middle-earth, half Pan’s Labyrinth, periodically pitting them against each other in bone-crunchingly satisfying battles. He also realizes, correctly, that the best thing about Godzilla was its sense of reverence for the monster itself. So he takes his cue heavily from Gareth Edwards' visual style in that movie, and even as Skull Island drags, the shots of Kong himself backlit by a blazing sunset (by far Vogt-Roberts’ favorite and most loving of the movie’s Apocalypse Now nods) never get old. 

He also has a knack for the Man vs. Beast aspect of the movie, especially in the thrilling sequence where the soldiers first encounter Kong in their helicopters. But his film suffers because it doesn’t care nearly enough about the Man, and only cares enough about the Beast to establish that he’s there. Say what you will about Godzilla, but that movie was the product of one filmmaker’s distinct vision. Same for Jackson’s Kong. This guy, much like half of the flesh-and-blood invaders he shares the screen with, is part of a larger universe, and while the table-setting is kind of thrilling on the one hand (I’ll admit: I’m excited for the Godzilla showdown), but I left Skull Island feeling more dispirited than anything else. This singular icon of the movies is a franchise player now, which means he’s worse than chained: He’s King Cog.

[downinfront]

“Logan” and the long goodbye

When we first meet the title character of Logan, he’s passed out in the seat of a limo he’s leasing out for his job as a chauffeur until a bunch of car thieves show up to jack his ride while he’s still in it. 17 years of X-Men movies have taught us to reflexively expect what comes next: A word of warning, a couple one liners, claws, a quick, hilariously outmatched and improbably bloodless fight, and our man goes off into the distance with nary a scratch on his ride.

Except this time, Logan (Hugh Jackman) isn’t quite the badass the audience remembers. He’s drunk -- no news there, but debilitatingly so. The formerly indestructible mutant can barely stand, and in fact he walks with a limp. He really, really doesn’t want to fight. He’s slow with the one liners and ends up on his ass almost instantly. When he pops his claws, one gets stuck. And when he finally musters up the rage to slice and dice his aggressors with R-rated abandon, the effort of killing them seems to take almost as much out of him as it does them. Wolverine’s violence has always veered towards the realm of noble, if not overtly righteous, but the most striking thing about this massacre is its pointlessness; nobody involved seems to think it’s remotely worth it in the end. Logan himself isn’t even afforded a dignified victory: His whip gets shot up in the scuffle, and he’s forced to retreat to a dingy bathroom so he can ditch his cheap, blood-soaked suit and slowly, agonizingly push the bullets out of his biceps. Suffice it to say, we ain’t in Kansas anymore, bub.

In fact, while the setting is ostensibly El Paso (warning for the MAGA crowd: immigration allegories lay ahead), thematically we’re somewhere closer to Wyoming. Director James Mangold has teed up less of a superhero romp for his and Jackman’s final Wolverine go-round than a latter-period Eastwood odyssey in the vein of Unforgiven. If Logan doesn’t quite reach the operatic heights of those Western classics (though it certainly tries), it is one of the few comic book movies that attempts to infuse its story, and its character, with deliberately “low” stakes in order to create a singular experience that separates it from the rest of its epic brethren.

That sort of mild formula-tampering is rampant throughout the blockbuster realm these days  -- see Star Wars as Apocalypse Now and Ferris Bueller: The Superhero Movie -- but ultimately, Logan doesn’t quite stray that far from the pack, or at least not as far enough as it wants to. But about 90% of this grim, bitter movie is, it turns out, a welcome diversion from the usual pop pyro of modern superhero movies. Instead of pitting Wolverine against some world-conquering menace, Logan brings him down to the dirt, spinning a riff on the broken-down cowboy trying to bide out his time in as much peace as he can afford. (In one of its more overt allusions, the characters partake of the gunfighter classic Shane during a brief respite on the run.)

The movie benefits from Logan’s solitude in a way Mangold’s previous go-round, 2013′s The Wolverine, couldn’t quite muster: The X-Men themselves are long gone here; only a sickly Professor Xaver (Patrick Stewart, outstanding) remains, his omnipotent mind turned into a ticking time bomb so powerful he’s classified as a weapon of mass destruction. The albino tracker Caliban (Stephen Merchant, delightfully smarmy) helps out in caring for the old man, but knows he’s not a long-term fixture in Logan’s plans. Most crucially, in another plot point repeated from The Wolverine, Logan himself isn’t healing like he used to, only this time it’s not getting better. He’s drinking hard and trying to scrounge up enough dough to buy a boat. And should that fail, keeps an indestructible bullet in his pocket at all times -- you know, just in case. Most modern superhero movies are a soft reset of the board that came before them, but Logan the first superhero movie I can think of in a long time that actually begins with the stakes having taken their toll. The movie isn't so much a quest for redemption as a painstaking effort by Logan’s few remaining allies to claw him out of the ditch.

Logan might not take many plot points from the trippy, post-apocalyptic X-Men book that inspired it, but there’s one thing it indisputably does -- Jackman’s appearance as a hobbling, wobbly graybeard. The transformation is striking, and the performance backs up the appearance of a man who has, finally decided he may have live too long, but can’t quite bring himself to die just yet. Of course, Logan’s death wish has always been implicit, but as Logan’s script takes it into the realm of the overt, Jackman unveils a new kind of confusion bordering on wonder for the character as he finds himself faced for the first time with the idea that this might actually be it.

It takes a long time for the movie to reveal exactly why Logan is in this deteriorated state, but by the time it does it’s almost beside the point. The arrival of a charismatic mutant hunter (Boyd Holbrook, tremendously entertaining) and his quarry, a mute girl named Laura (Dafne Keen, who should one thousand percent get her own movie) with powers almost identical to Logan’s, quickly pushes the movie back into semi-familiar territory. Unfortunately, Logan’s shoot-em-up climax does somewhat dilute the character work that’s come before it, but Jackman brings it all home in the genuinely affecting final minutes.

That part, at least, is old hat: Even when the X-Men movies ran out of cards to play (both times), Jackman was always their ace in the hole. The Australian actor didn’t just infuse Logan with raw power and tragic pathos that oftentimes outkicked the material he was given, his commitment to the role was almost unparalleled for a modern movie star. It didn’t matter if his appearance amounted to a two-second cameo, Jackman always suited up when called, providing an anchor for 17 years to the franchise that made him a star. If nothing else, he’s earned the benefit of a fitting swan song, and while Logan ends on a bittersweet note that does leave hope for the franchise to follow, there’s no doubt that the X-Men movies, and the movies in general, will have to continue without the man himself. They’re both all the lesser for it.

[downinfront]

Nobody won at the Oscars

Not the viewers at home, who, between the red-carpet coverage and the show itself, were subjected to at least five and a half hours of Oscar-related coverage, a slog by any measure.

Certainly not the embattled, crowd-pleasing musical La La Land, which took home a handful of technical awards, Best Song (for the earworm “City of Stars”) and two biggies (Best Actress for Emma Stone and Best Director for Damien Chazelle) before seemingly winning Best Picture ... at least until it became apparent that Moonlight was the real winner, and presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had been given the honest-to-Christ wrong envelope. This became apparent, by the way, in the middle of the goddamn acceptance speeches from the La La Land crew, who were forced to hand over their trophies, literally mid-sentence, to the producers of Moonlight.

Not Moonlight, either, by the way. The night’s ostensible victor is something rarely seen in movies today: An immaculately-made, three-act coming of age drama about a gay black man that directly tackles issues of race, addiction, poverty and sexuality. A Best Picture win should have completed an improbable journey poised to make a significant impact within the industry. Instead, its moment comes at the expense of some well-dressed dorks who were in the middle of thanking the people who enabled them to chase their dreams. (To their credit, they forked over the hardware like professionals and got the hell off the stage.) Even Mashershala Ali, the beloved Moonlight breakout who won Best Supporting Actor in the night’s first presentation, admitted to the Hollywood Reporter that the whole thing kind of bummed him out.

Not the Academy, whose sausage-making process was put on painful display in real time for all the world to see. It’s always taken as a given that someone has to lose at an awards show, but dangling the carrot in front of a group of affable, hard-working people only to snatch it away was a bracing glimpse at the cruelty behind the curtain.

Not Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, a pair of goddamn living legends who used Occam’s Razor (his envelope read “Emma Stone - La La Land,” she assumed it meant “La La Land” and went for it) and left Beatty to come across as a doddering old man attempting to sputter out a justification for why the La La Land crew had totally gotten hosed.

Not host Jimmy Kimmel, who began the show with some surprisingly barbed ribbing of everyone in attendance (cut to Mel Gibson with murder in his eyes), only to steer the proceedings headlong into a way-too-long bit involving tourists in a bus and yet another installment of his endless blood feud with Matt Damon. Kimmel put on a brave face for the Best Picture fiasco, but it was clear there was nothing he could do to save it; he was conducting a train that had already run off the rails and into the ravine.

Not Matt Damon, by the way, who may have taken more hits than anyone during the night. Admittedly, Kimmel hijacking the orchestra to play Damon off during his presentation speech was funny, but the extended skewering of Damon’s work in We Bought a Zoo came off as too mean-spirited, especially when Damon sheepishly countered into the microphone that he was actually proud of that performance.

Not the arbiters of good taste, who must now choke out the phrase “Academy Award-winner Suicide Squad” when referring to that infamous film. (It won Best Makeup, a distinction that’s hard to dispute on merit, but still.)

Not the poor bastards who handed the wrong envelope to Beatty and Dunaway (apparently, two envelopes are created for each side of the stage, depending on where the presenters enter from). They’ll be buried under the Hollywood Bowl before the week is out.

Not Casey Affleck, who won Best Actor for Manchester By the Sea, thus emerging whole from a storm of controversy over years-old, previously-settled sexual harassment allegations that resurfaced late last year, both threatening to derail his campaign and serving as a favorite argument among the Twitter crowd for why Denzel Washington should win the Oscar instead. Judging by the early reactions to Affleck’s victory, that sentiment hasn’t faded. Despite having ridden the performance of his career to defeat industry legends, beloved veterans and promising young talent, Affleck’s win, and his reputation, now has a big ol’ asterisk attached to it. (This is to say nothing of course of his alleged victims, who certainly lost by having to watch him win.)

Not Viola Davis, who won Best Supporting Actress in a walk for Fences despite willfully subjecting herself to category fraud (hers is a lead performance in every sense of the word) so she could face the likes of Nicole Kidman, Octavia Spencer and Naomie Harris instead of Best Actress’ formidable three-headed dragon: Early frontrunner Natalie Portman (Jackie), late-breaking dark horse Isabelle Huppert (Elle) or eventual winner Stone.

Not Film Twitter, which mutated La La Land vs. Moonlight into White People vs. Everyone Else early on in the awards season and took that already-flimsy comparison to its limit, rapidly revealing itself as the very worst kind of Twitter during the broadcast. The narrative seemed to be that the times were too fraught for a frothy throwback to win Best Picture over a gay coming-of-age story, so each win for La La Land was treated as nothing less than a setback for social justice on a national scale, to to the point where everyone took up arms over the fact that a fucking musical won Best Original Score over Moonlight’s atmospheric backing track.

Not Samuel L. Jackson, who revealed on the record that he bailed on La La Land after 20 minutes, and ultimately had to give a visibly disgruntled presentation of that same Best Original Score award.

Not white people, at least according to the aforementioned Twitterati, for whom Moonlight’s victory is liberal America’s long-awaited revenge for ... Donald Trump, I guess? Still not entirely clear on that one. It also remains to be seen exactly which white people took the L here. Certainly not the three credited producers who technically won the Best Picture award, all of whom are white. And not Daniel Katz, David Finkel and John Hodges, the three heads of Moonlight distributor A24, who now have a Best Picture winner to call their very own and will likely reap as much, if not more, of the benefits as Ali or director Barry Jenkins.

Not Hamilton mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose EGOT bid was denied after Moana’s “How Far I’ll Go” lost to “City of Stars” in the Song category. (Auli’i Cravalho, who plays Moana and sang the song, was one of the night’s few winners for her seamless, mid-note recovery from being whacked in the face with a flag.)

Not the United States of America, who tuned into the broadcast Sunday night to see some good-natured back-patting by Hollywood types, and maybe a little recognition for the movies they shilled money out for and responded to, and that’s it. Instead, they somehow got roped into yet another rehash of Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton after the Super Bowl and the Grammys, and it was just as exhausting as it was the first three times around. The ass-backwards way it ended wasn’t any better. Even if the supposed champion of White America lost for once, you were still subjected to the Hillary effect, watching a bunch of people who followed a dream and did their very best only to have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory; they only made it to the stage to hand over the glory and shove their heartbreak down their throats where they hoped nobody would see.

And finally, not the people who thought the outcome of the show would somehow lead to a seismic change overnight. Tomorrow, Donald Trump will still be President. Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director of Best Foreign Language Film winner The Salesman, still won’t come into the country while the specter of the travel ban lingers. The stupid wall will still be in its planning stages, despite the elegant civil disobedience of presenter Gael García Bernal. Cultural events can galvanize change, but a quote-unquote black movie winning the Academy Award is not gonna speed up what is clearly becoming a long, fraught process. The damndest part of it is, in six months, nobody will remember who won the Best Picture Oscar, but in a dazzling display of irony, they will always remember the movie that lost it.

Shit, the only person who really won this thing was Donald Trump. At least he knew better than to watch in the first place.