Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

After thirteen weeks of priming the pump with re-viewing and reviewing the thirteen Fox X-Men films, I thought I was as excited for Deadpool & Wolverine as I could get. Then I heard that film critic Mark Kermode was comparing the film to the fall of the Roman Empire, and my anticipation went through the roof. While that might not seem like a compliment to anyone else, I recall hearing that same sentiment from Kermode upon the release of the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, which Kermode likened to “the collapse of western civilization.” 
 
I was excited because At World’s End happens to be my favorite of the five Pirates films, and I feel similarly high about Deadpool & Wolverine, a love letter to twenty-five years of occasionally unloved superhero films that somehow manages to have its Marvel cake and eat its Fox cake, too.
 
Hitting a midlife slump, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is searching for his purpose when he draws the attention of the TVA and their regional supervisor, Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen). In order to save his timeline from being destroyed, Wade suits up as Deadpool and recruits the Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) for a multiversal road trip, where they run afoul of the telepathic mutant Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin). 
 
It’s become almost cliché to be surprised by a Deadpool movie having a heart, but there is a very uncynical joy and affection at the core of Deadpool & Wolverine. Not unlike Zack Snyder’s Justice League, there is a profound sense that this particular movie wasn’t meant to happen. The film is littered with second chances and reminders of second chances, and right at the center of it all is the ghost of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The last time Reynolds and Jackman shared the screen together, it didn’t quite go so well, but in the intervening fifteen years Reynolds has built up enough popular capital to give the team-up another try. Never mind that Jackman’s Wolverine is supposed to be dead, and disregard the corporate changeovers that have put the mutants on the back burner. (Forget that Deadpool 2 was six years ago, too.) When Deadpool tells Wolverine how much he’s meant to him, it’s not just franchise puffery; we can actually hear Ryan Reynolds’s sincerity behind the words.
 
Reynolds continues to prove he’s just about the only person who could play Deadpool, but Jackman, too, has not missed a step. It’d be spoiling to say how and why Wolverine returns, though the movie is adamant (if outright impertinent) about insisting that the events of Logan did happen. Nonetheless, Jackman does check a few boxes you hadn’t realized he’d missed, and the wry jokes about his inability to retire have new oxygen, given this weekend’s news about Robert Downey, Jr.
 
No one’s more respectful of spoiler culture than I am, and so there’s a lot I can’t discuss. Suffice it to say, though, Doctor Strange walked in the Multiverse of Madness so that Deadpool & Wolverine could run. There were surprises I expected, surprises I didn’t predict, and at least one that made me gasp in my seat. (All right, two, but for entirely different reasons.) Of the performers we’re allowed to acknowledge, Emma Corrin is sinister and delightful as Cassandra Nova, whose powers are icky and squishy in the best way. Cassandra is the perfect villain for a story like this, perhaps a little too weird for the Fox films but one of the better untapped antagonists of the X-Men comics. (Mister Sinister, we’re still waiting...) And Matthew Macfadyen is fun as Mr. Paradox, channeling all the smarm of his Succession stint while feeling at home in the TVA milieu established by the Loki series; budget aside, there’s a plausible reason why we don’t see Owen Wilson or Ke Huy Quan, but I’d love to see either walking the hallways with Paradox in the future.
 
I’d have a great deal more to say about Deadpool & Wolverine if I could speak freely, but so much of the fun of the film is the unexpected zigs and zags, the surprise cameos, and the plot points you didn’t see coming. The inciting incident for Deadpool’s self-reflection, for example, hits early and brilliantly, and there are at least two sequences that will make you long for a pause button (and, as Kevin Feige has teased, a feature on Disney+ to see comic book inspirations in a pop-up window). I clocked most of them, I think, and it was the kind of endeavor that made me glad I’d put in the work. Sure, I didn’t need to have seen all the X-Men films; I didn’t need to have read all sixteen years of Chris Claremont’s X-Men in a single year. (It was a pandemic; we all needed a project.) But those labors of love pay off in Deadpool & Wolverine, which shares with its zealous audience a diehard devotion to these four-color heroes. Look no further than a heartfelt mid-credits sequence – which, this being a Deadpool film, serves also as the straight man for the post-credits rimshot.
 
I laughed, I clapped and stomped my feet, I felt my heart leap. (I didn’t cry, though almost a little bit from laughing so hard.) This has not been true of all the recent Marvel films – a fact on which Deadpool is all too keen to hang a lampshade – and with superhero films at large settling for the middle tier of “just fine,” it’s a pleasant surprise to see a film as ecstatic as Deadpool & Wolverine. It is, I guarantee you, not the film you’re expecting, but it is so much more – particularly quantitatively. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to agree with Deadpool in dubbing him “Marvel Jesus,” but I’d venture to say that it is the second best since Avengers: Endgame (which, I’ll remind you, was five years and eleven films ago). 
 

Deadpool & Wolverine is rated R for “strong bloody violence and language throughout, gore, and sexual references.” Directed by Shawn Levy. Written by Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Shawn Levy. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, and Matthew Macfadyen.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Last week was the fifteenth anniversary of The Dark Knight. It was a seismic and seminal moment in blockbuster cinema, a sort of coming-of-age for me as a filmgoer and for superhero cinema writ large. It was the movie that made comic book movies a billion-dollar business, and after a decade and a half it hasn’t lost a step. But it also made Christopher Nolan a household name – no mean feat for a director to become ostensibly the auteur star of his own show.
 
Oppenheimer is Nolan’s sixth film since The Dark Knight, which is (for better or worse) the North Star for his entire career. I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that The Dark Knight isn’t still his best film, a perfect diamond absolute of a film, but Oppenheimer is in a way his most ambitious since, precisely because it’s Nolan without his characteristic science-fictional flair, his high concept effects wizardry. It’s still got all his stylistic quirks and puzzle-box structure, but for a director who has been criticized for being impersonal and unemotional, Oppenheimer is a riveting three-hour character study of one of history’s greatest enigmas.
 
Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of American quantum physics and director of the Manhattan Project, which yielded the world’s first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nolan’s intricate approach to the biopic catches three distinct moments in Oppenheimer’s life – his path to Los Alamos, his 1954 security clearance investigation, and a 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), an American bureaucrat who frequently butted heads with Oppenheimer.
 
Nolan has cited Oppenheimer as “the most important person who ever lived,” which – coming from one of the most important directors who ever lived – is high praise and certainly fair justification for the man who created Inception to turn his camera toward one particular scientific genius. Nolan has become one of those directors whose decisions (and films) may seem initially inscrutable, but like any good magician (cf. The Prestige) Nolan has a way of hiding his endgame in plain sight, only revealing his purpose at the moment when it best suits him. There are many moments in Oppenheimer that take one’s breath away – the Trinity bomb test certainly is orchestrated that way – but the film’s final exchange of dialogue recontextualizes the film by delivering Nolan’s ultimate thesis.
 
Nolan is both academic and prestidigitarian, technician and artisan, but what’s somewhat surprising about Oppenheimer is the example it sets of Nolan as a friend – of humanity, sure, but of his entire cast of players. Cillian Murphy has been a veteran of Nolan’s company since 2005’s Batman Begins, but his turn as Oppenheimer is a gift any performer would be envious to receive: three hours of, more or less, a one-man show about a living cipher, a man who embodied contradictions and challenged binaries, insisting all the while on neutrality and unreadability. Even his greatest triumph, the creation of the bomb, cannot be rendered in anything but code, as when he tells his wife over the telephone, “Bring the sheets in.”
 
As his wife, one of the two unwieldy women in his life, Emily Blunt is another performer treated by Nolan with kindness and grace. While the film is nominally her husband’s, Kitty Oppenheimer is given her own moments to shine, her own room to be her complicated self, petty yet resilient, sturdy and yet agreeing with her husband that they are “awful selfish people.” Blunt can do plenty with a steely look, particularly in two impactful sequences late in the film, but she can equally channel that quiet nerve into an explosion of emotion. Meanwhile, Florence Pugh is heartbreaking as Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock, unable to articulate her own desires or her needs from a man who is himself less than forthcoming. Pugh is arguably one of our preeminent scene stealers; case in point, she was the only ray of sunshine in the paint-by-numbers Black Widow, though her work in fare like Midsommar proves she’s equally gifted as a lead performer.
 
And speaking of Marvel performers, Robert Downey Jr. is already being fitted for a Best Supporting Oscar for his monochromatic antagonist Lewis Strauss. For those of us who are used to Downey as the flawed-yet-saintly Tony Stark, his turn as Strauss is a reminder of how versatile he can be. Strauss is instantly dislikeable, vindictive and self-righteous, and Downey creates an all-time classic screen villain. I can’t recall ever seeing a Downey character as loathsome as this one, but I certainly hope it’s not the last time he plays the heel, because it’s equally apparent that he is having a ball interpreting Strauss’s version of the story.
 
I did not join with so many of my fellow moviegoers in partaking of the “Barbenheimer” double feature. Truth be told, I was enervated after three hours of Oppenheimer. Not that the film was overlong and stupefying – quite the opposite. The cast is chock full of characters, some of whom are played by quite famous faces in surprisingly small roles, but each of them adds something quite special and unique to the stew. (Shout-out to Gary Oldman in one scene as Harry S. Truman.) But in telling a story out of sequence, as Nolan is wont to do, he takes the audience on a scenic tour through one man’s life, which as it turns out might well be the fulcrum point of human history. But Nolan’s method of delivery is not unlike an atomic bomb itself – a bright flash of light, followed by a roaring shockwave of impact. If you let out a breath as the credits rolled, as I did, it would have been one of recognition, of understanding. And before you draw air again, you’ll have to reckon with a sobering proposition that followed Oppenheimer all his life. And that, dear readers, is the most amazing magic trick of all – that Nolan created a biopic with a surprise ending, an interpretive twist that shouldn’t be spoiled.
 

Oppenheimer is rated R for “some sexuality, nudity, and language.” Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, and Kenneth Branagh.

Babylon (2022)

I became a fan of Damien Chazelle almost overnight. I rented Whiplash, one of the only films ever to leave me physically shaking, shortly before seeing La La Land in theaters (twice) and breaking down in full sobs. First Man was an odd follow-up, a spaceman biopic after a big Hollywood musical, but Babylon feels a bit more a return to form. Again (and still), Chazelle is looking at what makes successful people tick, what pushes them to succeed beyond their comfort zones, and what price fame exacts on their souls. 

Babylon is bigger and it is more boisterous, a three-hour version of Hail, Caesar! by way of Quentin Tarantino, which begins with a pachyderm’s diarrhea and concludes with a long montage that serves as – unsurprisingly, given his past work – Chazelle’s big love letter to the movies. For my money, it’s a grand success until that finale, which overinflates the point made by La La Land in a movie that is already perilously extravagant.

 

Babylon is a sprawling film epic in the tradition of, say, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, featuring a bevy of characters bumping into each other on the way up the showbiz ladder: aspirant and ingenue Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), whose dreams of stardom occlude the perils along her way; silent star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), who speaks bad Italian while proposing marriage to a different woman every other scene; accidental stagehand Manny Torres (Diego Calva); jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo); and gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who sees all and writes even more.

 

I knew just from the runtime that the decadence of Babylon was going to be the point, that its sheer exorbitance would likely be a comment in itself. La La Land was a tight two hours, but it seems that three-hour runtimes are becoming the way of the future; James Cameron needed the full three to give us the next Avatar film, while Wakanda Forever landed only twenty minutes shy. After the aforementioned elephant sequence, Chazelle stages an exorbitant party sequence that would make Baz Luhrmann blush with envy. It’s The Great Gatsby times a million, and how our protagonists react to and inhabit it will set the course for the next two hours and change.

 

Chazelle is a confident filmmaker, and the vast majority of the film is leisurely world-building, episodic sequences that explore the consequences of Hollywood’s meteoric rise. In some such episodes, our protagonists are asked to make moral sacrifices in exchange for fortune and glory; in others, they voluntarily sacrifice their dignity or their physical well-being for a shot at the big time. To sustain this episodic structure, a storyteller must be supremely confident and adept in ferrying the audience along, and Chazelle is certainly that, but he’s helped ably by a terrific cast.

 

As Nellie LaRoy, Robbie is electrifying. I’m not sure if her performance is sufficiently different from, say, her Harley Quinn to land her an Oscar, though the idea is being bandied about; she’s certainly manic and magnetic, like a dark Judy Holliday. Her chemistry with Diego Calva’s Manny is supposed to be star-crossed, but I sense that only Manny feels that way, and that’s precisely the point. This is a far cry from Mia and Sebastian of La La Land, perhaps because Babylon is largely more cynical. Meanwhile, Pitt’s terrific, as he always is, though one may be wondering why Jean Smart was given a role as toothless as Elinor until the third act, when Smart – in her role as scribe, prophet, and gatekeeper – gets an incisive monologue that could very well crop up in an awards season sizzle reel. Indeed, Elinor’s big speech makes a better summation of the film than Chazelle’s ending proper, which leads me to my conflicted feelings about the film’s ending.

 

I was deliberately not looking at my watch throughout the film but felt it must surely be on its way toward denouement when Chazelle began to stage his final episode before the film’s coda. Nothing I had seen so far prepared me for a terrifying performance from Tobey Maguire as mobster James McKay. In the film’s final act, Chazelle ratchets up the tension until the film descends into its own version of Dante’s Inferno – itself a perfect inversion of Babylon’s opener – with the ghastly Maguire as Virgil, our sunken-eyed guide into the underbelly of Los Angeles. From there, the film wraps up by telling us who will and won’t change, just in time for an epilogue that puts a button on the story. 

 

It’s almost as though Chazelle is in a rush to conclude the movie in time for his final sequence, which feels less like a satisfying and integrated climax and more like the final moments of Walt Disney World’s The Great Movie Ride. Without spoiling, Chazelle’s grand point had always been clear, and the extended conclusion feels like a less successful version of La La Land’s ending – which worked precisely because it was rooted in the characters. Here, though, Chazelle is making a broader point about the filmmaking industry, and when he acknowledges, for example, Singin’ in the Rain, he tips his hand, gilding the lily and unfortunately suggesting that Babylon has just been an R-rated remake of the 1952 classic.

 

Babylon isn’t Singin’ in the Rain, but nor is it La La Land, which I maintain is still Chazelle’s best. If there’s an issue with Babylon, it isn’t that it lacks restraint or focus – its madcap meandering is precisely the point – but if it’s a shaggy dog story, the punchline needs to be a little more substantive and personal than where Chazelle leaves it. I still don’t know if La La Land ends on a happy, sad, or wistful note, but Babylon closes with one foot firmly in treacle, which is a sentiment the movie never fully earns. If the film had ended ten minutes earlier, this might have been a different review, but Babylon trips over its own feet right at the finish line – but what a race up until that point.

 

Babylon is rated R for “strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.” Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Eric Roberts, Jeff Garlin, and Tobey Maguire.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

After I saw Prometheus in 2012, ostensibly returning director Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien, I had such a viscerally negative experience that I’ve never gone back and rewatched the film. It worked on an instinctive level, with enough scares and dread, but the meandering narrative left me unfulfilled. It was a film without an ending, a prequel without a need to participate in the same universe. 

In fact, Prometheus was such an overall negative experience for me that it took me four years to watch its sequel, Alien: Covenant, which came out in 2017. At least this time, the film is unabashed about its ties to the Alien franchise, but it is so unbearably ponderous, and it takes far too long for much of anything to happen. By the time the film hits its strongest notes, most in the audience may have long since fallen asleep.

 

Android Walter (Michael Fassbender) awakens his ship of colonists after a solar flare damages their vessel. Once the repairs are complete, Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) and his second Daniels (Katherine Waterston) discover a mysterious broadcast that leads them to a planet perfectly suited for their settling mission. The planet, however, is home to a giant storm, a few mysterious creatures, and another android (also Fassbender) who appears to be the only survivor of a doomed ship ten years ago.

 

Alien: Covenant begins with a lengthy sequence between Fassbender’s robotic David and his human inventor, played by an uncredited Guy Pearce. The dialogue is laborious and painstakingly self-serious, as though this is the first time that such a scene has been presented between creator and creation. Pearce and Fassbender limp their way through dismally tedious monologues about creating life, and just when you think the scene can’t verge any further into cliché, Fassbender begins playing, of all things, Wagner on a conveniently adjacent piano. It’s guaranteed to induce a hearty groan from anyone who’s seen a science-fiction movie in the last forty years, yet this prologue is so sententious that it casts a dour pall over the rest of the movie.

 

It’s another forty minutes or so before the plot of the film really gets going, after taking much too long to introduce a crew of no fewer than nine characters – half of whom, don’t worry, will be alien fodder before too long. You’ll have to wait nearly an hour before seeing so much as a hint of an alien, which is a bit of a problem, especially because the alien hijinks in Covenant aren’t anything we haven’t seen before. There are blundering humans who unwittingly infect themselves with alien spores, alien eggs that ought to ring a bell for fans of this franchise, and things that go bump in the dark. There’s even a familiar piece of heavy machinery that plays a significant role early in the film’s climax; it’s not the cargo-loader from Aliens, but it’s close. 

 

Indeed, Mark Kermode has rightly called Alien: Covenant a “greatest-hits” collection, reprising so many recognizable moments to diminishing effect. One senses that Ridley Scott is re-staging them with all the dramatic flourish of the original King Kong, as if to say it’s all been building to this – ta-da! Yet we’ve been down this road once or twice already; we’ve seen it all before. There’s an instinctual fear of the darkness and of sudden scares, and Scott is deft at manipulating the audience into being startled, but at the same time any eagle-eyed Alien fan will probably spot some of these jumps coming. (Cautionary tale: if you’re in space, never ever go into a medical bay.)

 

Just about the only fresh thing the film does is to cast Fassbender as the dueling android twins David and Walter. Fassbender shines in these twin roles, not least of all because of the different accents he employs. He manages to make both characters visually distinctive in their mannerisms and bearings, yet Alien: Covenant finds a way to wear out your patience in a few navel-gazing sequences where the two androids explain the plot to each other before – and I cannot make up this level of narcissism – kissing. It’s a perfect metaphor for how enamored the film is of itself and its own weighty, needless mythology. 

 

You sense that the makers of Alien: Covenant are trying, really trying. Katherine Waterston is a fine update on the Sigourney Weaver archetype, and the film gives her enough room to carve out a unique take on the role. But no one else is quite trying at the level of Fassbender and Waterston, and the film is mired in its own reflection. There are things that will always work in an Alien film, but that doesn’t mean you can string them together time after time for a guaranteed winner. It took me four years to watch Alien: Covenant; maybe I should have waited a little longer.

 

Alien: Covenant is R for “sci-fi violence, bloody images, language and some sexuality/nudity.” Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Jack Paglen, Michael Green, John Logan, and Dante Harper. Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, and Demián Bichir.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

If you asked me to explain the multiple alternate and parallel timelines at play in The Terminator and its sequels, I’ll quickly change the subject. I don’t fully understand them myself, nor do I believe any of the filmmakers have tried to keep the continuity house in order. What’s more, though, all these disparate timelines are far and away the least interesting thing about any Terminator film, which are at their best when they mash up impressive action sequences with an unstoppable metallic killer whose immortality may as well be lifted from a slasher horror film’s antagonist. 

Case in point, Terminator: Dark Fate, which ignores most of the sequels and pretends – just like its predecessors, Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys – that only the first two Terminator films “actually” happened. For a franchise that continually rewrites itself, Dark Fate is an oddball legacy sequel (or legacy-quel, if you will) that works much better when it’s not sidestepping its own prismatic past.

 

Years after Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) averted Judgment Day and the rise of Skynet, a new Terminator (Gabriel Luna) arrives in Mexico City to kill Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Assuming Dani will be the mother of some new future messiah, Sarah rushes to her side, only to find the cybernetically-augmented Grace (Mackenzie Davis) has already time-travelled to save Dani from the forces of the future.

 

What separates Dark Fate from the other Terminator sequels is the return, supposedly triumphant, of franchise forefather James Cameron, who had no hand in the preceding three films. Here, Cameron is one of six credited writers, but one senses that his voice rings the loudest. Each of the trio of protagonists is that very specific Cameron brand of Strong Female Protagonist – tough and resilient with only enough emotional complexity to feel human; indeed, their heroic prowess seems measurable by the size of their firearms, a Freudian insight which feels almost retrograde for 2019. What felt innovative for the 1984 original (and Cameron’s Aliens two year later) now feels familiar and perhaps overdone. It’s as though Cameron has returned to the franchise both to save it and to insist upon reminding us (however spurious the claim) that he invented tough-as-nails heroines. 

 

In short, it’s the girlboss Terminator, even if it doesn’t quite explore that concept until very late in the film, when we finally learn why Dani is essential to the future (in a plot twist that is telegraphed either effectively or obviously, depending on where you’re sitting). Dark Fate asks, “What if, this time, a lady helped a lady save a lady?” Points for finding a new angle on an old favorite, I suppose, and kudos to the trio of women anchoring the film for all doing a credible and watchable job. Hamilton’s return is ostensibly the centerpiece of the film, even more so than Arnold Schwarzenegger reinventing his role as an aging Terminator, while Davis is a clever update on the Kyle Reese archetype. The film does her a disservice, though, to focus more on her physicality than her personality, given a brief flashback that only teases what she’s really like.

 

Then there’s Natalia Reyes, who has the closest thing to a character arc in the film, and it’s because of her emotional attunement as Dani that the film’s third-act twist lands at all. The film asks her to be John Connor and Sarah Conner and her own person all at once, and Reyes manages to take the film’s thin character sketch and finds a way to track Dani’s evolution from factory worker to future hero. I’d be just as happy to see any of these three come back for a future Terminator film, though I would recommend audiences not get too attached. We’ve been down this road before, with Terminator 3 and Salvation and Genisys each promising a new direction that never came to pass. 

 

We don’t, however, come to a Terminator film for internal logic or amazing new characters. After decades of fits and starts, we keep coming back for the bang-up action sequences, and on that count Dark Fate truly delivers. The film’s first act includes a freeway chase that’s very nearly as good as the one at the heart of The Matrix Reloaded (though I’m sure the proper antecedent is in Terminator 2, which I haven’t seen recently enough to recall with precision), and the pace never quite lets up. We’ve also got a claustrophobic sequence within an immigration detainment center, with a climax set amid an expansive pursuit over land, sea, and air. Throughout, director Tim Miller is constantly recalibrating the bar, both raising it for effect and narrowing his scope to give this action film a welcome degree of versatility. 

 

Dark Fate is very seldom boring, and perhaps the only sense of fatigue in the film is the idea that we’ve been told four times now that, no, no, this is what a Terminator film ought to do. At the core of the franchise is an irresistible – and proven – premise, though the box office receipts seem to be a tale of diminishing returns. As these films often remind us, the future is not written – and nor, it seems, are the sequels this film had been hoping to greenlight. Dark Fate may have portended its own future with its eponymous subtitle, casting the franchise prospects into uncertainty. 

Terminator: Dark Fate is rated R for “violence throughout, language, and brief nudity.” Directed by Tim Miller. Written by James Cameron, Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman, David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray. Starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, and Gabriel Luna.

Licorice Pizza (2021)

After a titanic and prestige showing in 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has somewhat returned to form – his particular brand of oddball character pieces driven by episodic plot happenings that seem to follow dream logic more than strict realism. In this way, Anderson has become one of the directors in whose brain I’d most like to rent a room, curl up with a blanket, and snuggle in for a few hours. His latest, Licorice Pizza, is precisely one such cozy dream, a meandering fantasia of late-70s Los Angeles that comfortably finds its groove, if not its purpose.

Child actor and high school entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) falls head over heels with Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a photographer’s assistant nearly twice his age. While Gary tries to convince Alana that the age gap doesn’t matter, he embroils her in his myriad schemes, which include selling waterbeds, opening a “pinball palace,” and jump-starting Alana’s own budding Hollywood career. Her showbiz path takes her into the orbit of a gin-soaked legend (Sean Penn) and his director (Tom Waits), mayoral candidate Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), and blustery film producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper).

 

The plot of Licorice Pizza, such as it is, meanders between the twin itinerant protagonists and their respective trials to find meaning and purpose. While Gary Valentine moves from hustle to hustle, Alana works fame like the gig economy, first modeling then auditioning before moving into politics. This episodic structure makes Licorice Pizza feel a bit plotless, but in the compelling and oddly comforting vibe of other recent Anderson films like The Master and Inherent Vice. Perhaps, if Alana and Gary are not the protagonists of the film, Los Angeles is; not unlike the underrated Shane Black film The Nice Guys, LA is here a place of mystery, but it’s an ineffable, unknowable mystery rather than a mystery to be solved.

 

Licorice Pizza is not quite a bildungsroman, insofar as its protagonists don’t seem to have changed all that much by the end of the story. But it’s a film more about a journey than a destination; it’s a love story where the love is peculiar, unlikely, and largely unilateral. At 15, Gary is in love with Alana, who finds his romantic fixation amusing but never reciprocates his frequent professions of love, recognizing them for the immature infatuations they are. This is not a story of predators and prey, but rather one of arrested development; despite being 25, Alana is the youngest and least mature of her sisters, with little in the way of career or romantic prospects until she finds both, such as they are, in Gary. It’s to the credit of the performers that this dynamic never feels creepy. Instead, it’s understandable, human, and perhaps even a little sweet, despite being completely impossible and inherently ridiculous.

 

Indeed, Anderson invents a world without imposing a moral judgment on it, leaving it to the audience to discern that, yes, some of these people are outlandish and absurd. John Michael Higgins, for example, plays a restaurateur fetishizing Japanese culture to the point where the joke is on him, not his Japanese bride(s). Anderson trusts we can figure it out, that the humor is in Higgins’s failure to recognize the irony of his inability to speak Japanese. The others in the film are all in a sense using Alana, projecting their own desires onto her. It’d be spoiling to say what any of those desires are, but never is the tableau clearer than when Bradley Cooper quite literally storms into the picture (leading a woman a few rows behind me to intone, in a momentous whisper, “This is the best part”). As real-life producer and Streisand beau Jon Peters, Cooper is sound and fury signifying only self-aggrandizement, building himself up by threatening the life of a mattress delivery boy while making the world’s most shameless pass at his driver. It’s not hard to imagine that this Peters is the same producer who would famously demand a giant spider in Kevin Smith’s aborted Superman screenplay.

 

There are moments of genuine pathos in Licorice Pizza, as when Alana learns why her mayoral candidate boss has asked her to dinner, that show Anderson is truly in command of a narrative that seems otherwise wandering. While I’m still not sure anyone can recount the plot of Inherent Vice (thanks in no small part to the deliberate illogic of its author, Thomas Pynchon), Anderson takes the same shambolic narrative anarchy but finds his own kind of odd purpose in it. What Licorice Pizza is “saying” is anyone’s guess, but we can feel what it’s doing, even if we can’t rationalize it. Anderson takes the framework of a Hollywood love story, builds his own chassis around it, and guides the plane in for a landing on a runway that looks like “happily ever after” but might not actually be.

 

Licorice Pizza is rated R for “language, sexual material and some drug use.” Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, and Benny Safdie.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

The Matrix franchise is in a weird place, historically speaking. The 1999 original is an unquestionably seismic event in pop culture writ large, and as a film it holds up. Its sequels are almost universally reviled (albeit undergoing a bit of a reexamination), while its expanded universe has been nigh forgotten. And so it was that we were all a bit surprised that original director Lana Wachowski announced she’d be returning to the franchise, without sister Lilly but with returning stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. Did we need this, we asked, and would it be any good?

For my part, I found The Matrix Resurrections to be fantastic, almost as good as the original despite playing an entirely different game in a creative sandbox I didn’t realize had much more to say.

 

Video game designer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) has the suspicion that his world is not real. When his boss (Jonathan Groff) insists that Mr. Anderson revisit his most famous creation, a trilogy of games called “The Matrix,” the déjà vu starts hitting pretty intensely. There’s Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss), the woman at the coffee shop to whom he feels inexplicably drawn; the colorful Bugs (Jessica Henwick), who insists she knows Mr. Anderson as the savior Neo; and a dapper man in sunglasses (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who looks and acts a great deal like Morpheus, one of the characters from the “Matrix” games. 

 

I’m being a little bit vague about the plot of the film because I think The Matrix Resurrections works best when you allow it to unfold itself like a puzzle box. Embrace the cognitive dissonance, ride the wave, and let the story play itself out. Put another way, no one should explain The Matrix Resurrections to you, but you should experience it for yourself. From the earliest trailers, fans were starting to piece together some of what the film might be about, but we only scratched the surface of the plot. Underneath the literal level of things that happen in the film, there is a wealth of self-aware and recursive subtext, somehow managing to reenact the original film while commenting on it and doing something different.

 

As before, the film is a kind of “awakening” story, and once again Wachowski has managed to put the audience right next to Neo as he discovers the truth about the world around him. We too are just as disoriented as Neo; we’ve seen The Matrix and its sequels, and we know that there are characters in this film who are supposed to be dead, while others are wearing new faces. Lines of dialogue, visual motifs, and even musical cues recur in unexpected ways, to say nothing of the intrusive but compelling smash cuts of archival footage from the original films. Like a two-hour mainline dose of mystery, The Matrix Resurrections keeps you engaged and guessing without losing sight of the emotional relationship that holds these characters – and this universe, this franchise – together. It’s the bond between these characters, Wachowski argues, not the sci-fi trappings or the kung fu action, that makes The Matrix what it is. It’d be overly on-the-nose if it weren’t so effective.

 

Of course, I’m a big fan of successful puzzle box movies like this one, so it really strikes a chord for me. I understand it may not land as well for someone expecting more of, say, the innovative bullet time sequences or the note-perfect freeway chase setpiece of The Matrix Reloaded. But that again is sort of the point of the film; having done those films already, Wachowski and her characters are doing something new, living a new life in something that both is and is not the Matrix we remember. From a certain vantage point, the action sequences are unfulfilling and unsuccessful, failing to push the boundaries of choreography and special effects the way the originals did. However, I don’t think Wachowski is as interested in those aspects of her story, just as her characters are equally keen to avoid them.

 

Though twenty years have passed since The Matrix Revolutions, Reeves and Moss slip into their roles with grace and precision. While they are getting back into themselves as characters, the audience never feels as though these aren’t Neo and Trinity. Keanu Reeves has been achieving a Neeson-in-Taken level of success in headlining the John Wick films, but here he truly reminds you that Neo was the role he was born to play; meanwhile Moss is so compelling that you’ll wonder why she hasn’t been a bigger star post-Matrix. I can’t say too much about the new stars without getting into spoiler territory, but I will note that Neil Patrick Harris is a real scene-stealer as Thomas Anderson’s therapist, helping him come to terms with his failing grasp on reality. Harris is a kind of update on one of the original trilogy’s most thankless roles, but with his blue glasses and air of legitimate concern, Harris’s analyst makes one of the strongest arguments for more of these films. 

 

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the end of Matrix Resurrections seems to be a collision of the endings of the last three films; there’s an impossible feat or two, a monologue from a program about the future, and the promise of a new tomorrow. Lana Wachowski has expressed no interest in a fifth or sixth Matrix film, though one imagines Warner Bros. would like to see at least one more. (Indeed, one of the film’s best gags is when Thomas Anderson learns that his Matrix video game sequel is being commissioned by his parent company, Warner Bros. itself.) If there’s more, I am just as surprised as you are to want it. But The Matrix Resurrections is – for lack of a more colorful descriptor – really, really good. It’s better than I expected, and it turns out to have been exactly what I wanted from a legacy sequel.

 

The Matrix Resurrections is rated R for “violence and some language.” Directed by Lana Wachowski. Written by Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, and Aleksandar Hemon. Starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Jonathan Groff, and Neil Patrick Harris. 

The King's Man (2021)

Matthew Vaughn knows he doesn’t need to keep making Kingsman movies, right? The original Kingsman film, The Secret Service, was a breath of fresh air (and a welcome bit of counterprogramming for those of us who didn’t want to see 50 Shades of Gray for Valentine’s Day 2015). The Golden Circle, however, was somewhat inert as a sequel, cringingly gross and overly enamored of itself. Fortunately, The King’s Man is a sight better than The Golden Circle, but it is dizzy and daft in a way that does it no favors.

The pacifist Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), wants nothing more than to keep his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) out of the military, but the rising tides of the First World War conspire against them. Orlando and his servants (Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou) form an ad hoc intelligence agency with Conrad to root out a conspiracy that includes the likes of Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), and Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl).

 

It’s worth remembering, after seven years and three films, that this all began as an adaptation of a 2012 comic book by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). I haven’t read the original comic in some years now, but my recollection was that it’s a fine soft send-up of the James Bond formula. However, as I was watching The King’s Man, I was thinking of another comic book I’d been reading earlier that day – Bill Willingham’s Fables, which imagines (in the tradition of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) what would happen if all the fairy tales were true, their characters all inhabiting the same universe. And this is exactly the conceit of The King’s Man; with so many larger-than-life historical figures running around between 1914 and 1918, what if they all knew each other? What if most of them were in an international ring of espionage together?

 

When it’s done with fictional characters, it opens up a new world of possibilities, but there’s something discomfiting when it’s a constellation of real historical figures. Perhaps it’s a failing of my own imagination, but I think it’s also true that The King’s Man mucks about with very recent history in transparent and unfulfilling ways. Ultimately, it’s a failing of the film not to do something interesting with this reckless historiography. (See instead, for example, Inglourious Basterds.) If I’m spending time trying to remember my college survey courses in history, the film isn’t working.

 

Apologies to Ralph Fiennes, who is plainly better than anything the screenplay gives him to do. He works the dialogue like a prestige World War I film, and he navigates the action sequences like something out of a Daniel Craig 007 flick. It’s when the film channels its Bond DNA that The King’s Man really sings, as in a third-act confrontation atop a mountainous plateau. The franchise seems to have jettisoned the gross-out laddish humor of The Golden Circle, and it’s for the best, yet the Bond-ier sequences remind the audience just how good The Secret Service was, and why. 

 

As the film wound down its James Bond denouement, I found myself wishing more of the film had been like that, more Spy Who Loved Me and not alternate history. As it stands, The King’s Man is very episodic, which works somewhat in its favor; if you’re not enjoying the plot, so the old saying might go, stick around for twenty minutes until it changes. But consequently the film’s big claim that it all matters because it’s all interconnected – right up to a big bad reveal that’s a bit obvious even if you don’t recognize a certain actor’s voice – falls flat when it doesn’t quite feel like a united whole. Instead, The King’s Man is a collection of bits, some better and some worse, that never exactly add up to something grander.

 

Then there’s the matter of the postcredits scene, which promises/threatens that the historical muckraking will continue, with a particular bygone villain who is so baldly obvious that it might better have been left to a satire of The King’s Man. Indeed, so outlandish is the moment when two prominent historical figures shake hands and conspire toward The King’s Man II that one can only assume from the deadly straight-faced presentation that the filmmakers know how patently silly it is. We can also hope that they know better. The King’s Man is fun but not fun enough, and I think it is high time that Matthew Vaughn move on to something else.

 

The King’s Man is rated R for “sequences of strong/bloody violence, language, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Matthew Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek. Based on the comics by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Harris Dickinson, and Djimon Hounsou.

Monster March II: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Seven months ago, we began Monster March on a Mummy Monday with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, but the first Universal Classic Monster movie was Tod Browning’s Dracula. And so it seems appropriate to return and begin again for Monster March II (cue the spooky music) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nominally more faithful an adaptation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman as the Count in all his myriad forms. 

I say “nominally more faithful,” because from frame one, Coppola’s Dracula veers wildly from the source material by reimagining the legendary vampire as a Byronic antihero, cursed by his dark past and searching for the reincarnation of his lost love in the person of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Alas for the Count, Mina is already engaged to solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and so Dracula’s journey to England becomes less a real estate game and more an amorous quest that just so happens to involve a little bloodletting. 

 

Plainly put, Oldman acts rings around everyone else in the cast, even the delightfully hammy Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing. Oldman plays Dracula in no fewer than four different iterations, and he aces all of them. Bela Lugosi was iconic, but he seems one-note in comparison to Oldman’s more sophisticated portrayal of a vampire who is alternately tortured and torturer, a lusty bedfellow and a carnivorous lover. The image of Oldman never quite supplants Lugosi, however, proof positive of just how primordial the 1931 original remains, yet Oldman’s “Old Dracula” is a close second as he defies the laws of physics, suckles at shaving razors, and commands your attention in a riveting first act.

 

That opening third of the film, in which Count Dracula holds Harker hostage in his castle, is the best the film ever gets, a note-perfect introduction to an adaptation that never quite lives up to its own beginning. The opening is so compelling, in fact, that you’ll almost forget that Keanu Reeves is madly out of his depth as a young British solicitor, encumbered by the worst British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (and perhaps even worse, given that his greeting of “Count Dracula” sounds more like “Count Chocula”). So good is Oldman, and so spooky is his castle, that Coppola might well have stopped the film there and turned in the best short film about Dracula.

 

After Dracula leaves Transylvania, however, the film slows to a crawl in its depiction of Dracula as romantic foil. Oldman is often too psychotic for the work of courtship, and it’s frequently unclear whether Mina is truly falling for Dracula or whether she’s laboring under his hypnosis, his absinthe, or both. Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time with Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), her three suitors (Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Billy Campbell), and Van Helsing, such that it feels like Coppola wasn’t quite sure which film he wanted to make – the star-crossed lovers or the paranormal medical mystery. Of the two, the latter is more compelling, but it never bears Coppola’s full attention.

 

What’s very clear, however, is that Coppola wanted to make one of the most erotic Draculas ever, filling the film with copious nudity and literalized subtext. In doing so, however, much of the tension of the film becomes inert. To borrow an unfortunately apt line from Alfred Hitchcock, the terror is not in the bang but in the anticipation; the sensuousness of Lugosi’s Dracula was all subterranean, where Oldman’s Dracula is, in the biblical sense of the word, openly ravishing. It’s an interesting forerunner to the Twilight films, of all things, with a doomed immortal languishing as an unabashed romantic, but its erotic dimension is so overblown, so baroque, that it becomes fairly ridiculous. 

 

Coppola’s direction, too, is sumptuous and ornate. Often Coppola is attempting to ape the filmic style of Old Hollywood, with dramatic fades and creative camera angles that would make Orson Welles blush with envy. It’s for those reasons, Coppola’s fiendish attention to classical styling, that the film’s exaggerated sexuality and violence end up distracting rather than amplifying. When Dracula licks the shaving razor that nicks Harker’s throat, it’s icky but spontaneous, yet when the vampiric Lucy vomits blood onto Van Helsing’s face, it’s nauseating for all the wrong reasons. 

 

By dubbing the film “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula, there’s an immediate claim to authenticity, an appeal to authority that suggests this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. Hokey reincarnation notwithstanding, Coppola may have succeeded in spite of himself. The film replicates the novel’s obsession with emerging technology, particularly its intersection with the epistolary mode of storytelling, and the script has a keen interest in Stoker’s most likely inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. And Keanu Reeves aside, this Dracula stars as good a cast as any (including the woefully underrated Tom Waits as the sniveling Renfield). Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula tries so hard to be grown up that it loses some of the power of suggestion. Lugosi could say more with a discreet bow than Oldman says by leaping into bed with his prey.

 

Put another way, Oldman is no Lugosi, but it’s worth it to watch him try. Gliding across the carpet and whirling a titanic sword, his Dracula is buckets of bloody fun.

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rated R for “sexuality and horror violence.” Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by James V. Hart. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

Superhero movies are like ice cream. I like ice cream. I like most kinds of ice cream. I have favorite flavors, but there are also certain flavors or toppings of ice cream on which I’m not terribly keen. I don’t like chocolate in my ice cream, for example, and too much of it ruins dessert. 

I think James Gunn is chocolate ice cream. I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy well enough but found Vol. 2 to be overly laden with Gunn’s trademark gross-out schoolboy humor, a fascination with bodily functions and jeering insults. Vol. 2still had the Marvel heart, but The Suicide Squad has boasted that it is Gunn’s unvarnished foray into the DC (Extended) Universe. If this is Gunn undisguised, it is crude, and it is cruel, and it is certainly not my favorite flavor of ice cream.

 

In The Suicide Squad (not to be mistaken with its predecessor, Suicide Squad), Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has assembled another crew of miscreants to undertake a top-secret mission with clandestine ill intent. She sends the assassin Bloodsport (Idris Elba), the fanatical Peacemaker (John Cena), the depressive Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), young Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) and King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone) into the island nation of Corto Maltese to find mad scientist The Thinker (Peter Capaldi) before his Project Starfish is exposed. Meanwhile, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Squad leader Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) are stranded on Corto Maltese, with Harley doing her Harley thing while Flag tries to get control of the increasingly manic situation.

 

From its opening scenes, The Suicide Squad is aiming for a fun and zany tone, but instead it lands somewhere just south of virulently misanthropic. If audiences complained that Zack Snyder’s comic book movies boasted too high a body count, wait until they get a load of The Suicide Squad, in which human life does not matter while the film regards each death as a punchline, an opportunity to convince the audience that Gunn’s sick, bloody nihilism is something to be cheered. As a comic book fan, I was over the moon at the cast list, scraping the bottom of the barrel for characters like Mongal and Savant, The Thinker and King Shark (never mind that the latter two had already been on the CW show The Flash). After all, Gunn had successfully introduced audiences to Z-list Marvel characters like Groot and Yondu, and we fell in love with them.

 

Not so here. At every turn, each time a character debuts, someone else on screen verbally assaults them, calling them names and mocking them. Only Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is spared this unpleasant introduction, likely because it would beggar believability to think that anyone might get the drop on Idris Elba. There is nothing redemptive like the “We are Groot” moment and nothing heartfelt like Yondu’s remark, “He wasn’t your daddy”; the only thing that comes close is the clear and predictable relationship that forms between Bloodsport and his proxy daughter Ratcatcher 2, who is herself carrying her father’s complicated and tragic mantle.

 

When the film is not actively ridiculing its protagonists or treating them like mere cannon fodder, The Suicide Squadcontinues that Gunn tradition of kneecapping its emotional moments with lowest-common-denominator humor; worse yet, just when the characters get a moment in the sun, they’re often exterminated in brutal, abrupt fashion – and these moments are, again, so predictable, lacking only the subtlety of a bright neon sign to announce a character’s imminent mortality. It is hard to imagine any of these faces becoming breakout characters because the film doesn’t often seem to care if they live or die. In a sense, Gunn might seem to have the most in common with Amanda Waller, who sees her Squad draftees as expendable grist for her own manipulative mill, yet Gunn appears to have some degree of loathing for Waller too, especially given how the film treats her in its third act.

 

But I didn’t hate The Suicide Squad. There is so much in the movie that works. Elba is a gem, and Daniela Melchior is the closest thing the film has to a real protagonist, even wading her way with aplomb through a film school student monologue about her origin story. King Shark is the closest to the film’s Groot, though Gunn makes the curious decision to write the character, the comic book son of a sea god, like a brain-damaged toddler deserving of his colleagues’ derision. Capaldi is perfectly cast as The Thinker, even though the film never gives him an opportunity to flex his augmented brain. And of course, Margot Robbie continues to be a light in the darkness as Harley Quinn, a spot-on interpretation of an unapologetic if errant feminist. It’s only too bad that the film never quite knows whether it wants to be a true Suicide Squad movie or another Harley Quinn movie (in the vein of the delightful and underappreciated Birds of Prey).

 

But as much as I wanted to like the film, and as much good material as there is somewhere in The Suicide Squad, there is a core ugliness at the center of the film, an underlying contempt for its source material and its characters. There should be zaniness and joy, especially with a cast of misfits like this. The Suicide Squad was an opportunity to tell the schoolyard bullies that they were wrong, that Polka-Dot Man isn’t proof positive that comics are inherently stupid. “This is dumb,” the film says, “and you’re an idiot for liking this.” There is nothing redemptive about The Suicide Squad, nothing but condescending spite and scorn until an emotional climax that is never really earned.

 

And yes, I am aware of the delicious grim dark irony of complaining that a movie like The Suicide Squad is mean-spirited. If you put a crew of supervillains on a helicopter together, they probably wouldn’t get along; they’d cuss and sneer and betray each other. But as much of a mess as David Ayer’s Suicide Squad was, studio interference or no, there was always a sense that Ayer liked these characters and wanted us to like them too. Gunn’s Suicide Squad is like a serving of ice cream at the Abuse Café, and it is not for everyone.

 

The Suicide Squad is rated R for “strong violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual references, drug use, and brief graphic nudity.” Written and directed by James Gunn. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, Peter Capaldi, and Viola Davis.

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

While I originally said good things – twice – about the theatrical cut of Justice League, those takes essentially amounted to “some Justice League is better than no Justice League.” As time went by, though, we could see more clearly the seams in that exquisite corpse, to say nothing of the fairly horrifying allegations plaguing an already troubled production. Cut to four years later: the #SnyderCut has been released (on HBO Max, of all places), and it may not surprise you to hear that I loved every minute of its four-hour runtime; I could happily have enjoyed another three hours of Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Guilt-ridden over his role in the death of Superman (Henry Cavill), Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) scours the globe for superpowered individuals after learning from Lex Luthor that an evil force is headed for earth. That selfsame evil, the fearsome Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), has come in search of the newly-awakened Mother Boxes, whose primordial slumber was disturbed when Superman died. Before it’s too late, Batman must convince Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) to fight beside him.

 

If Zack Snyder has a tank, I’m solidly in it. Back in 2017, I spent the better part of five months analyzing Batman v Superman, only confirming my suspicions that it’s one of my top three favorite comic book films of all time (the other two being, I think, The Dark Knight and Captain America: The Winter Soldier). So I freely admit that I’ve got a bit of a predisposition bias, but I’ll also admit that it feels good to finally see the movie I was promised four years ago. I vividly recall leaving the theater after seeing Justice League, thinking about all the scenes from the trailers that hadn’t made their way to the theatrical release. Little did I know that only half an hour of Snyder’s footage made its way into the theatrical cut – and with Snyder’s vision finally fulfilled, I don’t think I’ll ever need to go back to the 2017 edit.

 

For one, Zack Snyder’s Justice League feels so much deeper and richer, and not simply because we spend so much more time in it. Someday, perhaps, you’ll see a post (or twenty) about the differences between versions, and so I’ll not spend much time on it here. But here’s a case in point: you may recall the moment in the 2017 League when Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) launches a flaming arrow into an ancient temple in man’s world. In the theatrical cut, it’s presented as just one more thing Amazons know how to do, a way to get Wonder Woman interested in the plot, yet in ZSJL, there’s a whole ceremony to accompany it; the temple has intense significance for the Amazons; and that communication from Themyscira sets Diana Prince on a quest for knowledge. And all along, we feel Diana’s pain at leaving her homeland behind, something of which we saw not even a glimmer in the theatrical cut. Throughout ZSJL, Snyder and fellow writers Chris Terrio and Will Beall take great pains to deepen the world of the Justice League, giving the characters a full-fledged mythology to enter. Everything seems thought out, with a reason for being.

 

The greatest strength in ZSJL is its characters, especially (and perhaps surprisingly) The Flash and Cyborg – the former reduced in 2017 to a Spider-Man caricature, the latter all but erased from the film after Snyder left the project. Without a standalone film of their own just yet, both characters get to take center stage; where they felt compulsory inclusions in 2017, teases for films that never came to pass, here they feel like integral members of the team, with standout sequences that introduce them to audiences. The Flash, Barry Allen, gets a playful moment to demonstrate the full range of his powers during his meet-cute rescuing Iris West (Kiersey Clemons) from a runaway truck. Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, though, emerges as the heart of the film, with a full character arc that reminds one a great deal of Superman’s arc in Man of Steel. Put another way, after watching ZSJL, you can understand why Fisher more than the rest was embittered by the process of reshoots and reedits: this should be a star-making performance, not a footnote in a painfully brief filmography.

 

There are moments in ZSJL that you’ll recognize from the theatrical cut, shots that have space to breathe in this version. But I was truly struck by the moment when Barry Allen tells his father (Billy Crudup) he’s landed a job in a crime lab to help prove his innocence. In the theatrical cut, this felt almost obligatory, a tease for Barry’s future. Here it feels like the culmination of Barry’s arc, bouncing from dead-end gig to gig before he finds his destiny. Far from feeling compulsory, this moment actually got me choked up at Crudup’s evident joy seeing his son succeed, at Barry’s newfound confidence in his future. It’s this sort of character moment that makes ZSJL sing. Things happen in this film because they matter to the characters, and it’s the characters – not studio fiat – who drive the momentum of the plot. Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Bruce Wayne, whose immense guilt and strategic forethinking refuel his vigilante mission into forming an army to prepare for war. Now that the reshoot footage has been excised, all that’s left of Affleck’s performance is lean, peak Batman, equally driven and haunted but finally, happily, leaning on the stalwart Alfred (Jeremy Irons), who becomes like a den mother to the newly-formed League.

 

Ultimately what Zack Snyder’s Justice League accomplishes is no less than encapsulating the entire potential of the superhero genre. These stories stick with us because they allow us to imagine ourselves as our best selves; they reassure us that hope is not lost, that we will always have one more chance to save ourselves from our own worst demons. Running underneath the surface of the film is the reminder that this sort of movie isn’t supposed to happen – studios don’t change their minds and admit they were wrong. Directors don’t get second chances when an industry reboots itself away from their vision. Ever since The Magnificent Ambersons, when studio meddling literally burned the footage Orson Welles shot to spite him, filmmakers who lose control of their movies don’t get them back, and audiences seldom get to see an unexpurgated vision, least of all one restored after being looted and reanimated. But Zack Snyder’s Justice League is proof that hope is never in vain; for those of us who beat the drum for four years, hashtagging to keep the fire going, ZSJLis a promise fulfilled, a warming moment of reciprocal gratitude. And it’s a story about second chances; while the heroes all have personal wrongs they need to right, even the villain is looking for redemption from his torturous past. 

 

But above all, it’s a fulfillment of the promise Jor-El made to his son back in Man of Steel, eight long years ago: “You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.” By the end, as the heroes watch the sun rise over the battlefield, I couldn’t help muttering, “They will join you in the sun.” Zack Snyder and the fanbase have accomplished wonders. It’s a miracle this movie even exists, and after a year of endless lockdowns and the triumph of pessimism, perhaps we all need a reminder that the dawn is coming – that each one of us has the potential to save the world. The only thing holding us back is ourselves. Our nature, all of us, is to fly. 

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is rated R for “violence and some language.” Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by Zack Snyder, Chris Terrio, and Will Beall. Starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, Jeremy Irons, Amy Adams, and Ciarán Hinds.

Fear not, loyal readers – Monster March continues tomorrow.