EVERY MOVIE I SAW IN 2015!

Wow, I saw a ton of movies this year! And like everyone on the internet, I’ve got rankings of them! But this is no mere mortal top ten! Not on your life! This is…

EVERY!

MOVIE!

I!

SAW!

IN!

2015!

So strap yourselves in and prepare to rage, as I surely rank one of your favorites way too low or I deify something you wouldn’t wipe your ass with!

1. CINEMATIC PERFECTION

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

You cannot overstate the greatness of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. Action-driven characterization, brilliantly realized thematic cipher characters, a pulse-pounding yet contemplative score, worldbuilding through suggestion, top tier actors at the top of their game, car chases, explosions, fight scenes, “OH WHAT A LOVELY DAY!” FURY ROAD is brilliantly in the moment, capturing the ethos of 2015: from the inequality and sexualization of women across the globe, to the suffering of the masses at the hands of the few, to the chains of capitalism, to the shackles of religion, to the horrors of war and conscription, all so a few can get a little fatter. FURY ROAD challenges us to acknowledge that it is allegorical and it demands us to take action. It challenges Hollywood, too, to recognize its own complacency in endlessly casting white leads, in endlessly rebooting and playing it safe. FURY ROAD subverts on every level and is an unspeakably good blockbuster to boot. With action sequences so perfectly executed and SO FUCKING POWERFUL, the group I saw it with still had an adrenaline high hours later. This is why we go to the movies.

EX MACHINA

Is she human? This question embodies everything about EX MACHINA. Its tense psychological thriller about Domhnall Gleeson’s Caleb trying to determine if Alicia Vikander’s Ava, a robot, can pass for human gives way to biting themes of patriarchy, feminism, neutrality, reciprocity, agency, and social structure. Oscar Isaacs’ Nathan terrifies as a brutally masculine robotic engineer and Alicia Vikander is nothing short of mesmerizing. With only her face visible, Vikander carries a myriad of complex emotions so, robot or no, you’re instantly on her side. MANY arguments can be made about whether or not EX MACHINA’s plot are at odds with its themes –which debatably take over in the third act, but EX MACHINA is absolutely the feminist movie for our times. It forces all of us to examine just what role we play in upholding rape culture, The Glass Ceiling, and the countless other social constructions that hold women back.

INSIDE OUT

Disney-Pixar knows how to approach real, deep issues by way of anthropomorphism and structure. BIG HERO 6 did it with the 5 Stages of Grief, and INSIDE OUT does it with Psychology 101. While the human story relates to the young Riley coming to grips with moving to a new town with her family, the larger story is interior and concerns her key emotional states –Fear, Disgust, Anger, and especially Joy and Sadness. What begins as a simple bad day in their office leads to an adventure to save Riley’s psyche from total collapse, framing the dissolution of her youthful innocence as an apocalypse. Understandable. Growing up feels like that. As Joy and Sadness race to save Riley from the brink, they explore her entire psyche, from her memory, to her consciousness, to even the depths of her subconscious. It posits that while emotional and psychological complexity can be hard, it’s absolutely essential to the human experience. An intellectual but accessible charming tearjerker, INSIDE OUT is an absolute must-see.

IT FOLLOWS

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s IT FOLLOWS is an instant classic, taking a relatable concept like venereal disease, and turning it into something (even more) hellish. Something is always following you. If it ever catches you, it kills you. The only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else via sex. But if it ever catches them, it chases you again. In this way, ‘The Monster’ is more than an STI allegory, but a metaphor for the omnipresence of death and how many cope with that understanding. Shot in the urban ruin of Detroit, this is all the clearer. Beyond the mere concept, Mitchell’s expert and often experimental cinematography grips you in paranoia, making you try to spot the Monster before the characters do. It’s surreal, nightmarish, and conveyed expertly by the cast –especially Maika Monroe’s Jay, whose youthful indiscretion warps into existential torment, self-examination, and even cultural examination. What’s more, it was shot in my home state on a shoestring budget! It’s the first time I’ve been able to say, without a drop of sarcasm, “Pure Michigan.”

CREED

CREED is what happens when a master class director understands what makes a franchise great and uses its mythology to tell a similar story within its universe. An inverse of Rocky, Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed (who disappeared into the role, btw) has inherited the wealth of his illegitimate father, Apollo Creed, but wants none of it. His journey to become a boxing champion is one of self-worth and self discovery; he’s absolutely determined to prove that he’s more than an accident. That he is a valid person. Heartwrenching, to say the least. Writer/director Ryan Coogler inflects the story with a voice that’s unmistakably black and modern. Adonis’ voice and his interactions with his girlfriend Tessa Thompson’s Bianca could be nothing other than black. Given all that’s gone wrong with America in the past two years, giving the black community a pioneering spirit and true hero to rally behind is of utmost importance. Rocky was an underdog from the slums; Creed is an underdog of the mind, and his value is instantly legendary.

PADDINGTON

Forget Superman; PADDINGTON is the true immigrant story. Paddington himself is an accident-prone Peruvian bear who is adopted by an English family and undergoes constant culture shock while trying to get naturalized. Knowing that he’s a nuisance to his adoptive family, he attempts to return to Peru, all while a Nicole Kidman’s Millicent Clyde, a maniac taxidermist, is after his pelt. PADDINGTON comes to us at a time of maximum xenophobia in the world from threats at all angles. For immigrants, this is especially challenging as integrating into English-speaking white culture can be daunting, morally compromising, and even hostile. Paddington epitomizes this in the form of a sweet child of a bear, who makes mistakes in his ignorance and naiveté, but showers his adoptive family and country with his gratitude and love. It’s sincere, poignant, funny, adventurous, and optimistic, and, putting us the audience squarely in Paddington’s perspective, it’s all so very personal. I cried more times during this sweet little movie than any other movie of the year.

2. DAMN GOOD MOVIES

KRAMPUS

I’ve been describing this as “NATIONAL LAMPOON’S FAMILY CHRISTMAS meets GREMLINS,” and there really is no better comparison. A troubled upper-middle class family deals with blue collar in-laws enduring the worst family Christmas ever… until Krampus, the shadow of St. Nicolas arrives to punish them all. Featuring nightmarish monsters and in some of the most mindblowing horror setpieces ever (Jesus God Christ, the attic scene. Hell, the climax in the street…), Krampus is all about perverting Christmas iconography… every bit as much as it is about preserving them, surprisingly. It’s a testament to KRAMPUS’ script and ideology that you’ll begin the story loathing the characters, and end it hoping they’ll survive against the odds. It’s easy to dismiss these as stock characters, but each of them, like the story itself, subverts expectations to reveal unexpected depth, duality, cynicism, and hope. Gimmick slasher movies? Here’s your new gold standard.

THE MAN FROM UNCLE

This is pure cinematic joy. THE MAN FROM UNCLE filters the Cold War posturing masculinity, sexual rivalry, and barely repressed homoerotic tension –traits typical of Guy Richie movies. It’s the kind of instant classic movie that we used to die for: snappy dialogue rife with double entendres; experimental, joyful action sequences; brutal tension; sexy comedy; a wicked toe-tapping score; and standout performances from Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, and Alicia Vikander. The Cold War was a dick waving contest, and while THE MAN FROM UNCLE is a few decades too late, it makes this point hilariously clear. It’s an unforgettable work of genius, and I say, no bullshit: This was 2015’s best Bond movie.

WITCH

I wish there were more movies like WITCH –utterly unfraid to chart new genres, settings, periods, characters, themes, and ideas. Set in mid-late 1600s, a Puritan family in colonial America takes to the woods after exile from their community. There, their infant son goes missing, and they begin to suspect a witch is cursing them from the woods… if not, their daughter. Spoken entirely old English, WITCH represents the forces of regression and traditionalism as anchors and seed to our superstitions, generalizations, and scapegoating. It’s at once a horror thriller as much as it is a family drama. What’s more, it’s a textbook about gender politics, family, growing up, sexual rivalries, and religion. The only reason it wasn’t higher on the list was because I honestly didn’t think it was as scary as it could’ve been.

KINGSMAN

KINGSMAN is an on-the-nose pastiche of James Bond-esque spy thrillers –even to the point of name-dropping and trope-stealing directly, but it’s a pointed deconstruction. It’s a hyper-masculine fantasy tearing down one of the longest lived hyper-masculine fantasy franchises in all of cinema. Teenaged English Chav Eggsy (Taron Egerton) gets recruited to the KINGSMAN spy agency, where he competes against and triumphs over the privileged class, which is only a small facet of the script’s class warfare text. Hell, Sam Jackson’s Richmond Valentine’s evil plan is to murder all the lower classes out of sheer fucking spite. More tangibly, KINGSMAN is a watertight script with slick action, gut-busting dirty humor, some imaginative setpieces, and the single greatest uses of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” ever. There’s a discussion to be had about the trope reward sex by the movie’s defacto Bond girl, but that discussion is largely pointed at the institutionalized sexual objectification that we, as a people, regularly ignore.

ANT-MAN

This is everything I love about Marvel movies; human & simple. On the surface, Peyton Reed’s ANT-MAN is a heist movie about a guy who can shrink –and while that’s imaginative, beautiful, exciting, and laugh out loud funny—it’s thematically a story about parents and children. Love, regret, fears, insecurities, bitterness, and forgiveness. EVERYTHING in ANT-MAN revolves around these kind of relationships, and between Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym and Evangeline Lily’s Hope Van Dyne, they’re especially poignant. I wrote about Hope Van Dyne, thinking her sidelining deeply unfair, but when I realized that Peyton Reed created these scenes to directly address former Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter’s overbearing misogyny on the MCU, it’s clear how elegant it is. OF COURSE it’s unfair that women don’t get to be protagonists, even when they deserve it. And THAT was the manifesto of 2015 at the movies.

BLACK SEA

We don’t get many submarine thrillers, and in today’s increasingly blockbuster-soaked landscape, it’s easy to understand why. They’re about waiting. Tension. Survival. Character. Things only a movie that knows how to take its time can do well. BLACK SEA is that movie. A joint English & Russian illegal salvaging mission in the Black Sea for Nazi gold, tensions mount in the rusting sub over nationality, paranoia, greed, and sheer mania. Jude Law gives a stirring performance as Robinson, a world-weary, blue-collar salvager with nothing to lose and nothing to live for. Suspenseful doesn’t begin to cover it. By the time this white knuckle descent into hell was over, my fingers had dug holes in the armrests.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION

Ostensibly a structural remake of the first movie, ROGUE NATION’s strength can be summed up in two words: Ilsa Faust. Rebecca Ferguson’s Faust is an incredible spy who brings true intricacy and depth to a movie that might be a little paint by numbers without her. Just as FURY ROAD is a baton pass from Max to Furiosa, so is ROGUE NATION one from Tom Cruise’s Ethan to Ilsa. Seriously, I can’t say enough good about her. Featuring incredible sequences like the opera sniper duel and a cross-desert motorcycle chase (I wasn’t wowed by the plane-hanging or the water tank dive), and the interesting employment of seemingly stock characters, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION is definitely one to see.

SICARIO

The strength of SICARIO is in its duplicity. Every shot highlights a dichotomy that’s often thematic, but just as often social, which is the heart of its HEART OF DARKNESS-esque journey through the complexities of the Mexican drug trade. Emily Blunt’s FBI Agent Kate Macer is our lens into a brutal and amoral world policed by CIA sociopaths like Josh Brolin’s Matt Graver and by psychopaths like Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro Gillick. It’s impossible deny the potent undertones of double-standards and sexual violence, and to that end, the movie is brilliantly crafted. My lingering question is just how relevant those ideas are.

FURIOUS 7

As much of my list will begin to show, 2015 was the year of indulgence at the box office. “You can have candy for dinner” said the movies, “But they’ll probably give you a tummyache.” FURIOUS 7 is no tummyache. Campy, proud, exciting, sexy (for a cismale perspective), and hilarious, it expertly achieves its goals of ensemble blockbuster mayhem. What was your favorite part? Vin Diesel jumping a car between three skyscrapers? The Rock tackling a drone with an ambulance? Jason Statham’s death mobile? Vin Diesel swordfighting with car parts? Nathalie Emmanuel in a bikini? FURIOUS 7 is the kind of cinematic bliss that comes from taking your camp seriously and giving the audience what they don’t know they want, even if it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure. It’s nonsense, but damned satisfying nonsense.

3. MIDDLING FUN

THE MARTIAN

“I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.” Made firmly in the moment making the language of millennials accessible to other generations, THE MARTIAN combines the cinematography de jour of Matt Damon’s Mark Watney’s reality-style confessional booth interviews with the grandeur of prestige cinema in photographing the surreal landscapes of Mars. Plausible science fiction, it’s as creative as it is fun, and centered in humanity and optimism. Despite all this (and its all-star cast!) THE MARTIAN is still a fairly toothless experience, with nothing feeling as desperate, dangerous, or pulse-pounding as its various elements want you to feel. It’s forgettable, but you can’t help but think about it with a warm feeling in your heart.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT

Don’t get me wrong; Tarantino’s a great director and this is still a great movie, but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. Enough cannot be said about Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, pitch perfect over the frozen wastes. Prior to the intermission, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a fantastic little character piece, exploring everyone’s dark and complex history, juxtaposed against how they like to imagine themselves. You have typical great Tarantino dialogue, tension, blocking, and acting, and a fantastic monologue flashback, but the story takes awhile to present itself. When it does after the intermission, we’re treated to a rushed closed-door mystery with a cheated solution, a tonally dissonant flashback, and a sudden realization that only five of eight characters were as deep as you thought they’d be, and they weren’t even THAT deep. Thematically addressing a brevy of unfortunately still relevant topics such as institutionalized racism, sexism, hegemony, and more, THE HATEFUL EIGHT IS vital and I can’t recommend seeing it enough… I just wish it was structured to better support that.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

I wanted to love AGE OF ULTRON way more than I did, but it’s a classic example of forcing a story. This isn’t about Hawkeye’s family; it’s about Tony Stark’s hubris in creating Ultron and his relationship to it. Acting under a desire to minimize Tony Stark’s role in a story that is ostensibly his, Whedon’s disparate themes and actions without consequences leads to a third act that feels like an entirely different movie. The classic snappy Whedon dialogue and emotional stakes & consequences are still here… they’re just diluted by all the poor structure. It doesn’t help that the movie was edited to death and was forced to pointedly “set up” (a blight of modern cinema) CIVIL WAR and INFINITY WAR. Despite all that AND that that many threads had no explanation or consequences, it speaks volumes to Whedon’s skill and to Marvel’s production philosophy that it was still super fun.

SPOTLIGHT

A divisive choice, considering its Oscar push, but SPOTLIGHT felt to me like a tepid ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. While the story of the Boston Globe revealing the Catholic priests molestation scandal pandemic  was vital and interesting, the human drama was rendered almost entirely in exposition (a huge detraction from my personal investment), nobody felt personally invested in the investigation until seemingly very late in the movie, and the stakes of publishing the story felt very nebulous at times. I know people who love this movie and felt the tension that I did not, but it just wasn’t my speed. Live Schreiber rocked in it, though.

TRUMBO

A phenomenal performance by Bryan Cranston as the titular blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, this is a historical drama detailing his blacklisting from Hollywood during the communist scare, his stint in jail, and his slow clawing back to success. Much of it falls emotionally flat because the story can’t stay on a story beat long enough for us to get invested. Featuring strong, if typical performances by John Goodman, Alan Tudyk, Diane Lane, C.K. Louis, and Elle Fanning, TRUMBO is enormously competent, but without much to say beyond “the Hollywood blacklist was bad.” Quality filmmaking, albeit forgettable.

SPONGEBOB: SPONGE OUT OF WATER

Do you like Spongebob? Would you like to see four original episodes of Spongebob stitched together, each with a different genre and goals? Here’s your movie. Your mileage on Spongebob may vary. I find him intermittently fun, but mostly insufferable. I guess that makes me a Squidward.

PEANUTS

Using a beautiful, tactile animation technique, PEANUTS has a real and present texture, making you feel like you could reach out and pull it apart with your hands. Effortlessly charming, PEANUTS the movie feels like a year’s worth of the comic strips seamlessly stitched together, with every character as you might remember from A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. Snoopy’s WWI antics with the Red Baron provide the greatest comedy beats and the most blockbustery action setpieces in what’s otherwise a lighthearted character piece of Charlie Brown trying to befriend his crush, the Little Red Head Girl. While Charlie Brown’s misadventures are meant to highlight his goodness and compassion, the movie suffers from having little to offer subtextually and from regressive plot devices such as the Maiden in Distress and two Women as Rewards. Youthfully innocent, but it’s still a male entitlement fantasy.

BRIDGE OF SPIES

This is a spy thriller that is not a thriller, per say, and it is a courtroom drama that is not a courtroom drama, either. With great actors in a few decent roles, BRIDGE OF SPIES is family-safe on all fronts. Its condemnation of American provinciality arcs to a triumph of American perseverance and ethics; its vision of the Cold War is bloodless, save for a chilling moment at the Berlin Wall; and it has enough “good people” to root for. There are just too many characters in too scattershot a structure with too-long of a first act to feel anything more than relative passing interest.

MINIONS

In a world of Disney and Pixar animated masterpieces that bring so much more to the table than mere text, along comes MINIONS to basically entertain kids for a few hours. The Minions still make for great comedy, even in a solo venture, but when they’ve got to do double duty as semi-serious protagonists, they lose a bit of that off the cuff magic. While Jon Hamm and Sandra Bullock provide great voicing to the movie’s villains, they just don’t inhabit a world that’s interesting enough for investment. Everything about the movie –and especially those characters- is vapid posturing and joke-explaining. I’m not wild about DESPICABLE ME’s humor, but at least it was never this obvous.

THE LAST WITCH HUNTER

Buckle down for the most metal sword and sorcery opening sequence ever, featuring vikings getting THE FUCK magicked out of them— Then slouch as it dissolves into a tepid urban fantasy movie. To its credit, LAST WITCH HUNTER has some impressive creature design and CGI… but that’s a low bar for success these days. Vin Diesel is typically growly, but atypically uninteresting; Elijah Wood doesn’t get enough to do; Michael Caine is an afterthought; and it utterly misuses GAME OF THRONES’ Rose Leslie. Mediocre and uninteresting, two massive points against the sadly under-represented action/horror genre.

CINDERELLA

I forgot I saw this. Branaugh’s CINDERELLA has incredible mis en scene, one of the single greatest dresses I’ve seen in movie history (aesthetically AND thematically perfect!), and fantastic performances by Cate Blanchett and Lily James… but it’s utterly paint by numbers with absolutely no surprises and even less to say. In a world where MALEFICENT (2014) offered a credo on women’s relationships in a world dominated by the Patriarchy, CINDERELLA represents a missed opportunity to condemn female in-fighting and rivalry. Without a single song to its credit, CINDERELLA is a pale shadow of the animated masterpiece it adapted.

4. NOT SO GREAT AND MAYBE EVEN BAD
   
5. STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS

Another controversial choice, but while Abrams’ love letter to the Original Trilogy may have nailed its tone while bringing a more diverse (and talented!) cast and staging a couple great fist-pumping moments, it’s script is way more miss than hit. Sure, there are great exchanges between certain characters and individual scenes work in a vacuum, but as a whole, nothing gels the way it should. It’s a greatest hits of the Original Trilogy without understand how or why any of it worked the first time. My feelings were so complex on this one, I pretty much dissected it entirely. For me, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS is about as good as the prequels; there are a few great standout moments, but not enough to redeem it from its numerous flaws. In some ways, the prequels are its superior; they are at least original.

CRIMSON PEAK

I wanted to rate this higher, and there are many who will argue with me, but del Toro’s gothic horror/romance epic fails to work as a script. You couldn’t ask for a greater mis en scene of the slowly sinking Allerdale Hall, or a more perfect cast than Mia Wasikowska as the silver tongued writer and romantic, Tom Hiddleston as her ominous suitor and lonely baron, and Jessica Chastain as his venomous sister with ever-increasingly rivalry… but the story just doesn’t know what it is. Is it a mystery? Is it a horror movie? Is it a romance? CRIMSON PEAK can’t decide, resulting in a movie that’s a tepid and painfully obvious. It may be a 1:1 recreation of all the strengths and weaknesses of a Hammer horror film, but it could’ve been so much more.

JAMES BOND: SPECTRE

SPECTRE’s opening long shot tells you everything you need to know about the movie: surface-level style with an emphasis on mood, padding between beats, and gritty realism. The ensuing helicopter fight offers little in the way of real tension or excitement, and so the movie continues, jadedly hitting all the bullet points of “A JAMES BOND MOVIE,” without any real care or understanding for how they work. Christoph Waltz’ Blofeld hams it up as a Bond villain nearly reaching Dr. Evil heights. The lighting alternates between impenetrably dark and blasting white for the villain’s base. I’d call this a wash if not for the side story of Q, M, and Moneypenny, who are engaged in a Le Carre’-esque spy thriller more about the organization of spy organizations than the spy work itself. It’s clear that director Sam Mendes cares much more about these politics than he does about James Bond, which is why the “Bond story” feels so tacked on and rote. This was a snooze. …but I kind of loved Sam Smith’s “Writing on the Wall.” Sorry, rest of the world.

TERMINATOR: GENISYS

Controversial for not being lower on the list, TERMINATOR: GENISYS attempts to ride on nostalgia for a property that’s long since burned up all its goodwill. It’s every bit as mismashed, fanservicy, predictable, and unoriginal as THE FORCE AWAKENS and JURASSIC WORLD, but at least it’s tonally unified with plenty of standout beats acting as callbacks to Terminator 1 & 2. The best way to think of it is an event comic where your mind is supposed to be blown because Bruce Wayne died instead of his parents, Uncle Ben didn’t die, or whatever. Action-packed, character-driven, and with a surprisingly touching father-daughter relationship between Sarah Connor (Clarke) and her personal T-800 Terminator (Schwarzenegger), TERMINATOR GENYSIS succeeded on its own terms. Too bad for it that nobody cared. Have you seen Matt Smith’s scenes in it, though? Textbook unintentional comedy.

FANTASTIC FOUR

I like that director Josh Trank tried to make a Cronenbergian body horror aimed at millennials. With better structure, it could’ve been that and more. Instead, last-minute budget cuts and executive interference from FOX took this self-serious, gritty coming-of-age sci-fi movie, and forced it into a self-serious, self-conscious superhero movie that was embarrassed to be in its own skin. With an overlong first act, an out of place second act, and a preposterously rushed third act, it’s a superhero movie straight out of the 2000s: no idea how to best execute its ideas, and summarily misses the point of all of them. Miles Teller, Jaime Bell, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Toby Kebbell give it all they’ve got, and for a brief moment, you can see the mad genius this all could’ve been.

HITMAN: AGENT 47

Were it not for my uncle, I would’ve been alone in the theater. It’s obvious why. A turgid rebootquel of a poorly received video game movie from 2007 featuring none of the same cast, its most interesting feature was that it was one of several baton passes from a male star to a female star. Rupert Friend’s Agent 47 trains Hannah Ware’s Katia to be the next-greatest super-assassin. There are moments of genius in this lackluster affair -Exotic deaths and hints of a brother-sister rapport- but it’s all lost in its tedious, exposition-driven mythology and in its drivel action scenes. Someone in casting thought Zachary Quinto would make a perfect Wolverine. With liquid metal under his skin, we watched this super assassin “die” multiple times. You’d think that’d be entertaining. It wasn’t.

5. ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE

JURASSIC WORLD

Nostalgia is all apologists have to defend this mess. “John Williams’ score! An operational park! Dinosaurs!” they cry, realizing there’s nothing else to defend. The characters all seem to operate independently of one another in different movies with disparate moods, stakes, goals, and arcs. Even scene-to-scene, the movie cannot decide on a tone. Is it a sulky understated divorce drama between brothers? A snarky science thriller between researchers? A violent dino-on-man survival horror? Or a comedy between gatekeepers calmly watching oncoming, bloodthirsty pterodactyls? It’s everything and all of it abominably executed. By the time the movie was over, I didn’t feel bad for laughing at it so hard. If this is the best Colin Trevorrow can do with a beloved sci-fi franchise, I’m horrified to think what he’ll do to STAR WARS EPISODE IX.

JUPITER ASCENDING

Holy fuck this was bad. Cool, it’s space Cinderella. Too bad it’s embarrassingly bad. Mila Kunis walks doe-eyed from one scene to the next making weird, bestiality-ridden comments about wolf-man Channing Tatum. Sean Bean tries to sell being a bee-hybrid as best he can with laugh-out-loud bad dialogue. Eddie Redmayne is the only man on Earth who knows what he was playing in JUPITER ASCENDING, randomly alternating between whispering effeminately and yelling like his balls were in a vise. Give the man credit, he made something out of the role, but that something wasn’t pretty. In the movie’s defense, there’s a bizarre moment dead in the middle where Mila Kunis must go through Gilliam-esque space accounting to truly become a space princess, a sequence capped by Terry Gilliam himself wearing something straight out of BRAZIL. I dunno why the fuck it was there or necessary, but at least it distracted me from the movie’s godawful structure and painfully imagined sci-fi universe. The space dogfights were so overblown and particle-ridden, it made the TRANSFORMER movies look restrained. Next time, let the grown-ups write your script, Wachowskies.

CHAPPIE

Holy fuck, this was worse. Coupled with ELYSIUM, CHAPPIE was the one-two punch that killed Neil Blomkamp’s chances of directing an ALIEN movie and thank fucking God for that. CHAPPIE’s got an interesting premise: what if a sentiment machine chose the ghetto lifestyle rather than the generic white mentality we usually see in such films. The problem is, there’s absolutely no internal logic in the movie as Dev Patel and the members of Die Antwoord give Chappie conflicting advice resulting in actions that never seem appropriate or cause and effects that have even less logic. At one point, Hugh Jackman’s I’M A BAD GUY character pulls a gun on Patel’s I’M A GOOD GUY character in the middle of a crowded office then passes it off as a joke. Nobody bats an eye. Die Antwoord are Chappie’s unlikable caretakers and, apart from one comedic scene where they trick Chappie into stealing cars for them, they are abominable. The movie climaxes in separate sequences of urban warfare desperately aping –and pissing on- ROBOCOP, culminating in Chappie fighting a robot with a name that that Sigourney-fucking-Weaver has to sell credibly: “THE MOOSE!” Unoriginal, tone deaf, hateful, unintelligent, structureless, illogical, indulgent, pandering, and soulless, it is the absolute wrong way to make a movie about finding what makes us human. It’s an extra kick in the nuts because I LOVE transcendence stories.

So concludes my list for this year. My 2016 resolution? More indie and foreign movies!

Thanks for reading, you starved-for-something-better-to-do-masochists, you!

HOW TO FIX THE FANTASTIC FOUR (2015)

The stars were aligned against Josh Trank. Fox greenlit his Fantastic-Four-by-way-of-Cronenberg’s-The-Fly-Laboratory-Sci-Fi-Thriller, but nobody seemed to want it. When Fox realized that, they didn’t seem to want it and forced changes upon an already troubled production –much of which attributed to Trank himself. The result was, of course, an uneven mess with hints of Trank’s passion amid a whole lot of squandered potential.

While Fox wonders what to do with the Fantastic Four (2015) or just let the rights revert to Marvel, let’s talk about what they could’ve and maybe should’ve done.

THE FILM ITSELF

To recap: a Young Reed Richards and a Young Ben Grimm teleport a toy car to another dimension.

Seven years later, they’re recruited at a science fair by Dr. Franklin Storm and his shy daughter Susan to make a bigger, more stable interdimensional teleporter. Their teammates will include Sue, her adrenaline-junkie brother Johnny, and the criminally troubled Victor Von Doom. After some montages showing their “chemistry,” the teleporter is ready. With NASA threatening to steal the glory, the team decides to dimension-hop pre-emptively. So Reed, Ben, Johnny, and Doom go to another dimension, where they play with some magic green goo and everything goes wrong.

They return from this alternate dimension -minus Doom- with varying -and initially crippling- super powers and stuck in military custody. Reed escapes, leaving Susan (Invisible Woman), Johnny (the Human Torch), and Ben (The Thing) conscripted into military black ops missions. A year later, they are forced to track down Reed to force him to rebuild the interdimensional teleporter so the military can create more superpowered beings.

When Reed does this, the teleporting team retrieves Doom from the alternate dimension, only now he’s made of metal and has a messiah complex. He kills his way out of the military base and launches a scheme to destroy the world. After a fight, Reed, Susan, Johnny, and Ben defeat him, negotiate autonomy from the military, and rename themselves the Fantastic Four.

THE PAGE ONE REWRITE

Look at all the time jumps! A total of 8 years jump between story beats, and it’s all unnecessary. It makes it feel like we’re following a plot, not characters. The only jump this might’ve needed is the 7 year jump from children to teens, and even that is being generous.

What’s more, there are three separate movies here.
1. We have a protracted sci-fi lab thriller. Decently characterized with the occasional strong beat, but VERY by the numbers, even on the interdimensional journey.

2. We have a sci-fi military thriller, where the military tries to force the team into something they are not (could this be a winking parallel to impositions forced by the studio?).

3. We have a superhero movie, where Doom threatens life as we know it for thinly explained reasons.

None of these work well together. It’s clear the Fox wanted the Interstellar-esque lab drama , and it’s also clear that it’s the only part of the movie operating with real authenticity. It’s clear they also felt that the military’s oversight was the only way to 1. Ground the characters and 2. Moor it to the Ultimate Fantastic Four comic, supposedly the movie’s key inspiration. The military angle is a shaky transition from the lab thriller, and one could be forgiven for assuming that they were going to be the film’s central antagonists. Problematically, Fox got cold feet when they heard the fan backlash to the liberal adaptation, and called for reshoots –most of which seemingly including the bloated and sudden Dr. Doom fight at the climax. It’s very likely that Doom had been intended to return for the sequel, but nothing else.

So what would’ve been the best version of this? What would’ve been the strongest sci-fi-laboratory thriller possible with this set up?

Simple.

A motley crew of researchers visit an alternate dimension and find themselves permanently changed. When they return, they discover to their horror that something returned with them.

Simple lab horror movie with the potential to grow. And you get there by the simplest, most concise means.

First off, don’t waste time establishing childhoods and how people got on the team; just have them on the team preparing for the momentous trip across dimensions. Start the story as late as possible to keep a steady momentum and to organically develop character in a way relevant to genre. Don’t tell us for a half hour before the mission that this is a team; let the mission show how they become a team.

Secondly, no green goo. Don’t waste time in this alternate dimension if it’s not where your story wants to go. All you need is a containment suit breach or suits that didn’t perfectly protect against the dimension’s radiation. That causes the team to “develop random mutations” or something. You don’t need for the heroes to touch green goo and directly encounter the elements that mirror their prospective power-set.

Thirdly, no Victor Von Doom. He’s too interesting a villain to squander on an identical origin story as your protagonists. Save him for the sequel when he can be your Heath Ledger Joker.

Here’s what I’m getting at: the acquiring of super powers isn’t your Act One Turning Point; it’s your Inciting Incident. The act one turning point is the conflict they must face.

So the team is horrified by their transformations, but not so horrified by what they find: husks of their scientist friends and soldiers around the base. Something has been killing and digesting them. Pulling themselves together as much they can -they’re all blaming each other for their mutations- they find the killer: a monstrous, insectile thing with a crazy appetite, crazy powers, and a crazy growth rate.

Yeah, that’s a bastardization of Annihilus, but it doesn’t HAVE to be Annihilus; it could just be a random monster. It could also be a new villain -another scientist who they went on the mission with. The point is, we establish by minute 25 that this ragtag team has to stop this monster before it gains more power and escapes into the world. THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is our Act One Turning Point.

From there, Act Two is the still-learning Fantastic Four fighting Alien on steroids-and much of it plays out like Alien. The creature keeps jumping out and killing people, the Fantastic Four surviving by the instinctual & accidental use of their powers. As this thing grows in size and power, so does the scale. Jump scares turn into small skirmishes, which turn into destructive battles, which finally turns into a full-on Kaiju battle as this thing escapes and threatens all life on Earth. The whole while, the Fantastic Four are getting acclimated to their powers, conflicting with each other, and trying all they can to stop this thing to no avail.

Act Three, the Fantastic Four realizes that they can’t fight it conventionally and the military -try as they might- sure as hell can’t. So the answer lies in science. Eventually, in the midst of a crazy kaiju fight, Reed Richards gets the team to act as unit to science this thing to death. Or to another dimension, whatever. Having saved a city from destruction, the Fantastic Four are hero-celebrities and return to the Baxter Building, where they continue to use science to benefit mankind.

Boom. Themes of teamwork, unison, and the triumph of science, all within an organically structured movie that smoothly transitions from body horror flick to super hero epic.

LINGERING PROBLEMS

That said, none of this changes the fundamental issues at play:

1. Fantastic Four is a fun, lighthearted family team of sci-fi explorers. Trank’s vision and this proposed rewrite simply could not and would not deliver that. It could’ve been a great superpowered horror movie (and that kind of thing should exist, damn it), but it would never have been a Fantastic Four movie in the minds of fans.

2. It would not have been a Marvel movie, which is an insurmountable, emotionally-set goalpost that would’ve been impossible to meet. Even if the movie had been Marvel-styled and perfect, people would’ve hated the movie for not being in Marvel’s possession and for aping Marvel’s style.

So, best case scenario, ignoring point #2 for the fallacy it is, what could Fox have done to make a faithful and appropriately updated Fantastic For movie?

THE OBVIOUS

1. Don’t make it a Cronenbergian body horror in a laboratory. I love Cronenberg, but the Fantastic Four doesn’t fit his worldview.

2. The Incredible Hulk. Seriously, there had already been a Hulk movie, nobody needed another protracted retelling of the origin story. Incredible Hulk recapped the origin story in its opening credits. Arguably, Fantastic Four should’ve done that. With the origin out of the way, the movie would’ve been free to tell whatever story it chose with whatever elements it chose. It also wouldn’t have felt so prosaic. By now, we’ve seen countless superhero origin stories. We can do without for awhile, especially on an established property.

3. Wonder. I made a point of mentioning how Reed and Ben teleport a toy car to the alternate dimension. It’s such a simple, but elegant beat, but when they eventually travel to the alternate dimension, they should’ve found the car. Maybe it’s warped all to hell, foreshadowing their future, or perhaps it hasn’t aged a day, and reminds them of how far they’ve come. Of how long they’ve been friends. That they’ll always be friends. The alternate dimension is such a cool idea, and it’s played so matter of factly, erasing it’s potential to be a fanciful daydream that inspires us for the better. It SHOULD do that.

4. Take my proposed outline and make the alternate dimension monster Annilihus, a conqueror with a massive bug army. When they escape -gaining powers in the process- Annihilus and his army force their way into our dimension to take over. The Fantastic Four comes together as a unit to science them away, everyone’s skills coming into play at least once.

DOOM

And you know what? With my outline, it would’ve been crazy easy to set up Doom for the sequel. Maybe Annihilus is stopped/banished/killed with outside aid, like a hacking code from Latveria. Maybe Richards “borrows” Latverian tech, not realizing the source. Maybe Dr. Doom straight up appears and fights this thing with a pre-existing and suggested rivalry. The point it, is sets up that Doom was in some small way instrumental to defeating Annihilus and thus, in his mind, KEY to defeating Annihilus. That would give a sequel an emotional foundation: Doom constantly reminding Reed of his superiority.

And if we want to get crazy, all we need to show is a deep-space imaging device, a space radar, or something showing a blip. Maybe a dark spot in space. Maybe an energy spike. Doom was monitoring something approaching and was preparing. Maybe Fantastic Four 2 would’ve been about Doom attempting to take over the world to prepare for the coming onslaught. And if that panned out, Fantastic Four 3 could’ve been about that onslaught: Galactus, and whether or not the world was ready.

…and whether or not the deposed Doom would deign to save it.

FANTASTIC FINALE

The Fantastic Four is a property with infinite storytelling potential. Unfortunately, that property is continually squandered by inappropriate creative visions, studio mismanagement, and total lack of foresight –issues which resound throughout Fantastic Four (2015). Clearly there’s a creative spark behind Trank’s effort, but it’s not faithful to the material. Fox wanted a quality movie –not to mention one to do gangbusters at the box office- but the studio seemed driven by “make money; don’t spend any,” “not Marvel,” and “not comic-booky.” Those are typical sentiments of the mediocre pre-MCU Phase 1 era, and they’re a recipe for disaster with the project’s other idiosyncrasies.

It was a rush job created solely to keep the property out of Marvel’s hands, and with a little foresight, it could’ve been as transcendent as everyone hoped it’d be. A story of family coming together under unimaginable circumstances. Of vistas and beings beyond our wildest dreams. Of optimism for tomorrow and all the challenges it brings. It could’ve been a perfect update of a classic comic.

It could’ve been fantastic.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist C;

The Dark Knight Trilogy Revisited

With the release of Interstellar, Christopher Nolan came crashing back into the front of the public consciousness along with all the dialogue that follows.

Considered one of, if not the contemporary blockbuster auteur, Nolan’s chromatically washed-out, borderline deafening, thinkpiece extravaganzas always create discussion, chiefly between the enormity of their themes and action vs. their characters, pacing, and plotholes. No two of these movies exemplify this more than Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises.

The latter, considered the worst of Nolan’s movies, especially compared to the lauded Dark Knight (TDK), is by no means a bad movie, but the second to fall prey to the aforementioned “Nolanisms” (themes and action vs. character, pacing, and plotholes). While the exposition-heavy Inception, gets a pass from many by sheer virtue of its novelty and mind-bending metaphysical narrative, The Dark Knight Rises’ (Rises) heavy handed themes failed to save its padded, expositional script. However, Rises doesn’t exist in a vacuum. While much has been said about Nolan’s challenges entering production of Rises (http://badassdigest.com/2012/07/26/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs.-the-dark-knight-rises/), the movie’s shortcomings can be traced all the way back to Nolan’s first installment in what is now referred to as “The Dark Knight Trilogy.”

Appropriate.

1. The Evidence

Here, rather than get into a tedious recount of each movie, it’s much easier and much more effective to list what of the many things the three movies had in common and circle back around.

1. All three had Nolan’s signature monochrome palette: Batman Begins: brown; TDK: Blue; Rises: Black

2. All three are about dissolution of self. In Batman Begins, it’s becoming an ideal; in TDK, it’s compromising morality; in Rises, it’s atoning for and transcending one’s weaknesses

3. All three are about villains motivated by fear and chaos: In Batman Begins, the Scarecrow literally uses a fear gas on his victims while Ra’s Al Ghul hopes to use that gas to make Gotham’ inhabitants destroy themselves; in TDK, the Joker controls the city through fear and chaos, leading Two-Face to follow a life of chaos; in Rises, Bane & Talia bring Gotham City to chaos and ruin by inciting panic and fear in the upper class, Catwoman is terrified of her past catching up with her; and in all through movies, the mafia controls Gotham through fear alone.

4. The villains of all three believe humanity will tear itself out through fear and chaos: In Batman Begins, this is the whole of Ra’s Al Ghul’s plan; in TDK, this is Joker’s modus operandi; in Rises, Bane & Talia destabilize the city to enact this, purely to torment Batman, and Catwoman is controlled by Bane, in part, by fear.

5. All three feature a prison breakout and rule of prisoners: in Batman Begins, the prisoners escape from Arkham Asylum and roam the fear-toxin-clogged streets; in TDK, Arkham Asylum inmates are chief among Joker’s crew, along with a ship full of mutinous prisoners who factor into Joker’s endgame; in Rises, Bane’s army consists of freed criminals and the working class.

6. All three feature an assault of the lower and working class on the upper class: In Batman Begins, the impoverished literally killed Bruce Wayne’s family, are complicit in many mafia crimes, and are the principle adversaries in the Narrows; in TDK, Joker’s primary goal revolves around destabilizing the ruling government and authority figures to incite a state of anarchy; in Rises, Bane’s rhetoric and recruitment methods are 99% vs. the 1%, as are Catwoman’s sensibilities.

7. All three have ‘uncompromising’ villains: In Batman Begins, Scarecrow and Ra’s Al Ghul cannot be persuaded by coercion or the promise of money; In TDK, Joker burns money to prove how useless it is to him; in Rises, Bane cannot be persuaded by coercion, the promise of money, or the threat of death, and Talia is driven by sheer zealotry to complete her father’s work.

8. All three focus heavily on mobsters types: In Batman Begins, Batman’s crusade leads him to confront Carmine Falcone directly; In TDK, the majority of the movie revolves around the mass-indictment and conviction of Gotham City’s gangsters; much of Rises, deals with the aftermath of ‘the Dent Act,’ which incarcerated Gotham’s gangsters under questionable auspices and deals with their mass release and their subsequent execution by ‘the people.’

9. All three have villains who meet pathetic ends: In Batman Begins, a log falls on pseudo-Ra’s Al Ghul, Scarecrow gets tasered by a side character, and Ra’s Al Ghul doesn’t think to jump out of a train; in TDK, Scarecrow gets arrested, Joker gets tied up, Two-Face falls off a building hours after becoming Two-Face; in Rises, Catwoman turns face, Bane gets punched in the mouthpiece, and Talia Al Ghul is a crappy driver.

10. All three are based on one or more graphic novels: Batman Begins is a loose adaptation of Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller; TDK is a loose adaptation of Batman: The Long Halloween, by Jeph Loeb; and Rises’ first act is The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller, its second act is Batman: Knightfall, by various, and Batman: Cataclysm, by various, and its third & fourth acts are Batman: No Man’s Land, by various. Rumors suggest that had Heath Ledger not passed away, Rises, whatever it would’ve been called, would’ve been based on Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean.

11. All three use post 9/11 signs and symbols, preying on the fears of the age: Batman Begins featured villains inciting fear through a fear-toxin and attempted to employ it by ramming a train into the largest building in the city; TDK was the War on Terror, featuring concepts of extradition, torture, suspension of rights, mass incarceration, and the Patriot Act; Rises was the public backlash to the War on Terror, with every proponent of that time (Dent, Gordon, Dawes, Batman, etc.) considered useless relics, Gotham being, despite its peace, a more precarious place, and existing in a poverty where only the extreme rich have flourished under conservative leadership, signified through law enforcement.

12. It’s also not TOO much of a stretch to make the argument that Batman stands in for George Bush and his presidency. Batman Begins being the Fahrenheit 9/11 of the movies, with Batman having full knowledge of a terrorist cult out to destroy Gotham and doing the base minimum, which leads to the partial destruction of Gotham; TDK being Bush’s War on terror and all of the numerous tactics used by his administration and the CIA to apprehend suspected war criminals; and Rises sees Batman as a disused and much-disliked criminal for “failing” the citizens of Gotham, even 8 years (two presidential terms) after his last public/high profile-appearance.

13. Yeah, I know I’m stretching a bit, but The Dark Knight Rises is a wacky, complicated, thematically unsound movie, so screw you.

14. Finally, all three movies have Batman.

2. So What’s the Point?

Some big themes pop out of this: a legacy of exorbitant ideals warped into zealotry followed by semantic “scrubbing” (let’s not forget, we knew about “advanced interrogation techniques” in the 00s); villains who aren’t as threatening as they appear; fear as a means of controlling the populace and criminals alike; ordinary criminals standing in for terrorists; and class-based worlds that seem rife for social upheavals that happen, but no matter how extreme, are ultimately impermanent.

Sound familiar? This was the War on Terror in what could laughingly be called its “entirety.”

3. So What’s Wrong with The Dark Knight Rises?

Beyond the fact that its script was a structural mess, was unwanted fan service, failed to deliver knockout story beats, and clearly had no comprehension of Batman?

It was thematically flawed.

Let’s be real, here. The Dark Knight isn’t what most think of when thinking of Batman. He doesn’t consider himself above the law, he’s not exclusively a one-man-anti-mob policeman, and he’s not willing to compromise basic human and American values –looking at you, cell phone surveillance. He’s the world’s greatest detective, who is some mix of detective, policeman, EMT, firefighter, and globetrotting adventurer.

He looks like this guy.

But audiences accepted the TDK’s vision of Batman almost exclusively for how he dealt with an unstoppable force and unforgettable presence like Heath Ledger’s Joker, a nightmare of morality who seemingly forced Batman to compromise his own beliefs to apprehend. More than loving TDK’s crazy twists and turns, audiences connected to the nuance that Batman might be little better than the criminals he pursues –a central theme in Batman lore. All this, naturally, blossomed from seeds planted in Batman Begins, with characters questioning at every turn if Bruce might not be going too far, and if there’s not a better –saner- way.

As eluded earlier, the early rumors surrounding Rises were that it would revolve around the Joker, perhaps being a court case with a copycat criminal (the Riddler) making his merry way across Gotham. It might even have gone so far as to have similar workings as Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, where Batman’s sanity and moral fiber were called into question. Returning to Film Crit Hulk’s article, the passing of Heath Ledger weighed heavily on Nolan. In respect for Ledger, his loss must’ve narratively closed many doors for the sequel, which might explain rather than crafting a focused narrative around Batman & Joker’s relationship, Rises became Nolan’s “Idea” movie: legend, iconography, legacy, capitalism, class warfare, anarchy, fear, love, determination, individualism, collectivism, the 99% and more.

Even as an idea movie, which arguably could’ve been more coherent in a focused narrative, the script structure of Rises was inappropriate for what’d come before. The first two parts of The Dark Knight Trilogy aren’t building up to a guy who needs to come out of retirement then man up; they’re building up to a guy who’s got some serious issues to work through, especially if he’s our Strawman for the War on Terror and its fallout. Nolan probably still could’ve had half of the above themes, but they would’ve had focus, and they would’ve been channeled through a story.

To that end, a structure like Batman: the Animated Series’ “The Trial,” Batman: Arkham Asylum, or Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, wherein Batman is forced to face a gamut of his foes, all thematically tied to a fragment of his shattered psyche would’ve suited his chapter much better. We’d learn why Batman is Batman and why, for the love of him, he can’t stop being Batman, no matter how hard he tries.

Featured: tons of dudes waiting for their gritty reboot.

The problem with that idea, though, it’s been speculated, is that doesn’t feel like a Nolan movie, at least on the surface. To potentially campy, too small-scale (Unless he took cues from Arkham City), and too divorced (again, on the surface) from the 9/11 anti-terrorism critique he established in the first two movies. What’s more, with The Dark Knight being, for all intensive purposes, a perfect critique, why would you need any more?

Should Nolan have stepped back to a producer’s role, letting someone else bring fresh ideas and meaning to the franchise? Perhaps, but broken as Rises is, it’s certainly not without weight or merit; it just had, in large part, the rotten luck of being the wrong script for the material. Thematically ambitious to the point of exorbitance, but sort of a beautiful mess like Interstellar.

Besides, we needed a new Bane.

We really, REALLY needed a new Bane.

Who Should Appear in Guardians of the Galaxy 2?

::Guardians of the Galaxy spoilers, obviously::

Yeah, I know, another fluff piece, but let’s be honest here:

August sucked. Like, a lot.

Ferguson, the attacks on female game journalists, and the celebrity nude photo hack -all of which highlighting the very worst in our country. Double standards of race, internet laws, and gender that, time and again, Americans blind themselves to. There are signs of progress, thankfully, but the shift is glacial and traumatic. This on top of greater world issues like the Russian/Ukraine conflict, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Ebola, multitudes of undocumented immigrant children, global warming, and more.

So maybe we need a little fluff. A breather from the hard truth that this world has a long, long way to go. And the one thing we all seem to agree on? Guardians of the Galaxy.

My GOD, did we love that movie. Breaking records left and right, Marvel’s “biggest risk since Iron Man” just seems to keep winning people over. Sure, it’s a little rough around the edges with a lot of exposition and plenty of little bumps in internal logic, but that ain’t half bad for a movie starring a gung ho raccoon and a silly tree man. Characters like that made the movie.

Never thought these two would win you over, did ya?

And that’s what this was. A character movie. From the man-child Star-Lord to the arrow-whistling Yondu, Guardians was filled to the brim with unforgettable, quirky characters in an unforgettable, quirky version of space, and I’m sure you’d be utterly unsurprised to learn that it was just the tip of the iceberg. So why not, here’s a list of my most-wanted characters for Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Buckle in. You thought Rocket Raccoon and Groot were weird?

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

10. THE CHURCH OF UNIVERSAL TRUTH

An ultra-dogmatic space religion literally powered by the faith of their congregation. Each of their crusaders –“Cardinals”- are as dogmatic and twisted in their beliefs as Claude Frollo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Their wackiest ability? They’re able to manifest nearly any power by shouting, “I BELIEVE!” Naturally, the power of their faith affects the strength and duration of the power employed.

He’ll later do penance for checking her out.

Sure, they seem a bit overpowered, but simplified considerably, a group of space zealots with a black and white morality could be perfect villains for the much grayer Guardians of the Galaxy, policing the galaxy with an insane gusto that’d make Ronan the Accuser seem understanding.

“…and I hereby ban The Five Stairsteps…”

9. EGO THE LIVING PLANET

The name pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? An omniscient, omnipotent world capable of shaping its surface at a whim and space-travel, he devours everything in its path. He also has a penchant for toying with its hapless victims before consuming them. Ego’s been a thorn in just about everyone’s side: Thor, the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and even Galactus, the OTHER devourer of worlds.

They fought, by the way, to a standstill until Thor and the Fantastic Four bumped up Galactus’ power.

Ego seems like he’d make a great choice for a “Belly of the Whale” segment of Guardians 2. Perhaps he detains the team on their way to save something, or perhaps they have to stop him from eating a planet. That kind of insanity is movie gold, my friend.

8. STARHAWK

 

“Here’s the weird one,” I say, realizing that’s not terribly specific.

Starhawk’s a member of the future Guardians of the Galaxy (3014, to be precise), and he’s basically like“Space Batman.” Long story short, he and his sister Aleta wound up being mystically fused into one behing by a Hawk God, causing them to occupy the same space in time and space, constantly swapping who’s entire being was present in the universe. Eventually, Starhawk and Aleta more or less gained separate bodies, but retained their space-faring superpowers. Crazy shit, huh? That’s before I mention that Starhawk and Aleta got married and had three children.

To get even crazier, Starhawk was ripped from his native era to 2012,  to prevent an unknown time/space anomaly from ending time an existence . With the Guardians’ every action altering the future, Starhawk existed in a constant state of flux, often swapping sexes in the blink of an eye.

If you’ve seen my Star Trek or Man of Steel posts, you’ll know how much I like alternate-dimension-time-traveling-mindfuckery, and Starhawk here promises that in SPADES. Think of it this way: the movie Guardians have settled their broad goal of unity, but what happens when their personal goals supersede that and they have tangible evidence in Starhawk that their actions could dramatically change the future? A WHOOOOLE LOTTA interesting sci-fi drama, that’s what.

I also picture Star-Lord having trouble deciding whether or not to hit on her/him.

7. J’SON OF SPARTAX ::Probable Guardians of the Galaxy 2 SPOILERS!::

How about an easier one before diving back into insanity?

J’Son of Spartax, is, the Emperor of Spartoi, one of the ruling races in all of space. He’s forged alliances with countless alien races, and has ruled his people through a combination of propaganda, technology, direct manipulation, and outright war. And he fathered a child with an Earth woman. That child was Star-Lord.

In recent comics, J’Son manipulated the rest of galaxy’s leaders into making Earth a DMZ, making it a ripe target for space-pirates. When the Guardians of the Galaxy intervened to save Earth, they were promptly arrested as criminals –all so J’Son could exert control over his ‘failure’ of a son.

Dickhead, right?

What’s interesting about the MCU version of Star-Lord is that his dying mother describes his father as “an angel” and “made of light,” leading me to believe that a potential movie J’Son wouldn’t be quite so mortal –especially since Star-Lord was able to hold, let alone wield the Power Gem. That leads me to think that the MCU J’Son might be mixed with someone a little more overpowered… and a little more weird…

6. MICHAEL KORVAC ::Possible Guardians of the Galaxy 2 SPOILERS!::

Another universe-hopping villain, another day.

Let’s see how simple we can keep this: an office worker from another dimension was caught napping by his alien masters, so was grafted to a computer, only to be sucked through an interdimensional wormhole where he gained unlimited cosmic powers, rendering him psychotic and unstable.

Yep. That’s a fail.

Determined to reshape, Earth, the Galaxy, and the universe into a utopia in his own image, Korvac came into conflict with the Avengers and the Future Guardians of the Galaxy, who eventually defeated him at the cost of nearly their entire team. Realizing the hell he’d wrought, Korvac committed suicide, using the last of his power to resurrect all those he’d slain.

Naturally, should Korvac find his way into Guardians 2, his origin would be considerably simplified, but his unlimited power and apparent godlihood may be a sticking point for combining him with J’Son. Afterall, in Guardians, the Collector suggests that mere mortals are incapable of handling the Power Gem, but immortals, well…

And there’s more than enough reason to believe that Star-Lord might be at least half-immortal. After all, the guy survived the void of space, didn’t he?

5. STARFOX

No, not the amazing Nintendo 64 game.

Also known as Eros, Starfox hails from a race known as the Eternals, all with various superhuman abilities. Starfox’s? Seduction. More or less the god of pick-up artists, the guy’s seduction skills are basically mind-control, and they’ve gotten him into all kinds of trouble. This culminated with a sexual assault case that spun out of control until it surfaced that Starfox had even manipulated She-Hulk –his defense attorney. Now stripped of his powers, his current fate is unknown.

Pictured: Galaxy’s biggest sleazeball.

James Gunn has a talent for reinvention. Ever seen the original Yondu? Glad Michael Rooker didn’t play that. I’d picture Starfox as some washed out, universally reviled bum, slumming in the depths of Knowhere. Something like Star-Lord’s drinking buddy. Maybe Starfox once picked up a girl and named himself that after Quill named himself Star-Lord. Or maybe he really is a higher being just down on his luck. Either way, I picture him as a sleezy informant who Rocket regularly abuses.

4. ANGELA

More universe-hopping, but this one’s a doozy: Angela made the leap between comic book companies. Created by Neil Gaiman in Spawn #9, Angela’s a relentless bounty hunter angel who trades in the pelts of slain hellspawn. Like Spawn. Who is a hellspawn.

After decades of lawsuits between Image Comics founder Todd MacFarlane -who’d stated that creators owned their characters- and Gaiman -who wanted his character- Gaiman recovered the rights to Angela and sold her to Marvel comics. They introduced her in their Age of Ultron event, and quickly made her a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and of the Avengers.

Costume’s a hair better, but at least she won’t be tripping over those damn ribbons.

In theory, this is a great idea, which would’ve allowed Marvel to widen the doors on its undervalued mystical universe. Instead, they made Angela an Asgardian –Thor and Loki’s long-lost sister. To me, that’s a waste of a perfectly good bloodthirsty angel, especially when Marvel has a slew of underrated horror heroes on the wrong side of Heaven. But that’s just me.

Either way, in Angela’s debut appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy #5, she’s enraged and confused at being ripped from her native universe, and is hell-bent on murdering the person responsible.

In the MCU, I could picture Angela doing gangbusters in a movie with The Church of Universal Truth and Starhawk –the Church rips her from Heaven to prove there’s a god, Starhawk comes from the future to correct this universal anomaly before existence ends, and Angela… goes from a brutal, immortal warrior, to metaphysical, existential soul-searcher, struggling to determine why she exists and if she even should exist. Heavy stuff which could hit extra hard, using Guardians’ humor to misdirect until it all comes to a head.

3. MANTIS

Mantis has a long, troubled history, where she’s been half-plant alien, a celestial Madonna, and now communications expert and medic for the Guardians of the Galaxy. Mantis is a powerful psychic with the ability to predict the future –everything from petty conversations to universe-altering events. Often, she neglects to warn the team of the latter, should intervening destroy time itself. Fatalism embodied, really. More interestingly, Star-Lord had her to ‘tweak’ everyone’s brain into joining the Guardians of the Galaxy, where they otherwise would’ve declined. As you might imagine, they were furious when they found out.

Rumor has it that Mantis was originally slated for Guardians of the Galaxy, and given her fatalistic humor, and constant spot-on predictions, it’s easy to see why. In addition to psychically bantering with everyone during missions, her predictions about people –turns of phrase, winning arguments, etc. would add another layer of depth to the team, especially in a story thematically about the natural order or universal balance.

2. PHYLA-VELL

Artificially created from the DNA of legendary space hero Quasar, Phyla-Vell later inherited his cosmic powers and joined the Guardians of the Galaxy. A beneficent heroine of justice, she’s similar to a Space Superman who’s still new at superheroing. Wielding swords comprised of pure energy, she later became the Avatar of Oblivion to save her girlfriend, Moondragon, from the realm of death and from demonic possession. The trade off? She was charged with slaying the Avatar of Life and shortly thereafter gave her life to save the Guardians.

Hey, nobody said space comics were simple.

Bright side: she lived on to be every heavy metal album cover ever.

At its heart, Phyla’s story might actually be the most human: wanting to help people, and sacrificing herself for those she loves. At full power, Phyla might be a bit much for the MCU Guardians, who are comparatively underpowered, but as a girl just coming to grips with power beyond her ken, her shaky steps into godhood could go from hilarious to heartwrenching, just as the first movie had.

1. MOONDRAGON

Ophaned after Thanos slew her family, Heather Douglas found a new home in space, where she developed enormous psychic powers and martial arts under the tutelage of Thanos’ father. Like many of the Guardians, she’s utterly obsessed with slaying Thanos for his slaughter of worlds. She’s classy, a perfectionist, and head over heels in love with her girlfriend, Phyla-Vell. She was also once became the Dragon of the Moon –death and evil incarnate.

Really.

Couple Moondragon’s superior intellect with martini-dry sarcasm and a predilection for revealing embarrassing thoughts, and Moondragon could be a perfect compliment for the movie Guardians team. Especially if you run the “ice cold psychic lady who can turn into a dragon” thing. The current line up is a hair short on super powers, and this could really shake things up.

Best part? A Moondragon/Phyla-Vell relationship could be a transformative LGBT moment, where the couple kisses… and nobody bats an eye. Just another perfectly normal part of life.

0. THE SLITHER ALIEN

Slither’s an underrated horror classic with one of the freshest takes on zombies in the past decade, not to mention one of the greatest hive-minds in cinema history. Y’all should be ashamed of yourselves for not seeing it in theaters.

The creature itself is a parasitic alien life-form that mutates its hosts into hideous mutants before bonding their flesh into a macabre blob. Once a planet’s taken over, it jumps to the next planet. And to the next. And to the next. It nearly took over Earth, but there was one thing it didn’t count on: falling in love.

Just try to tell me you wouldn’t love to see the Guardians fight or bargain with this thing. Just. Fucking. Try.

C’mon, James! You know you wanna!

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Disney owns Marvel. Disney owns Star Wars. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 needs to cameo the Millennium Falcon.

Seriously, how cool would that be?

Ghost Rider Is a Fucking Badass: a Treatise.

Ghost Rider is a fucking badass.

I could end the blog post right there. The end. Drop the mic. Walk away.

But that wouldn’t be enough, would it? Not for a character with a horrible movie reputation. Not for a character whose glory days are seemingly gone, like tail lights winking out over the black horizon. Not for a character who, despite all adversity, keeps shrieking back to the comics like a phoenix of fury, and vengeance.

Not for a character who is deeply, irrevocably, bonded to my soul.

So why is Ghost Rider such a fucking badass? Read on.

1. Ghost Rider Kicks Ass

Let’s start with the basics.

Ghost Rider once single-handedly beat the Hulk.

And the Avengers.

And the Guardians of the Galaxy.

And an X-Men/Avengers/mystical heroes team-up.

Not enough?

HOW ABOUT ONE-HIT K.O-ING MOTHERFUCKING GALACTUS?

Seriously, Ghost Rider kicked the shit out of him so hard that the Fantastic Four had to put Galactus, The Devourer of Worlds –THE SINGLE MOST POWERFUL BEING IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE- on life support.

Think about that.

He also ruled Hell for awhile, until he got bored of it.

…and there was that time saved Heaven from renegade archangels, but he had a little help.

I think the speech balloon says it all.

2. So who is this hardcore son of a bitch?

That’s a tougher question than you’d think. Ghost Rider’s got an over-complicated a rich history, and he doesn’t make a lot of sense with the typical superhero costume/secret identity set up. Because Ghost Rider isn’t a superhero.

He’s the Spirit of Vengeance.

What that means has changed a lot over the years. Sometimes, he’s a demon forged in the fires of hell, to wreak destruction upon the world. Other times, he’s the tormented soul of an ex-slave who’s clawed beyond the grave for revenge. Still other times, he’s a flaming chainsaw-wielding robot from the future.

In the best of times, he’s a fallen angel, cloaked in flame, and obsessed with avenging the innocent. This is divine wrath incarnate, able to detect, at a glance, good from evil. He’s not a persona like Batman, but an entity entire. He overtakes the wicked on a roaring hellfire motorcycle, binds them with the cold chains of hell, and subjects them to the mental agony of all the pain they’ve ever caused in their lives.

Just ask Galactus how that feels.

Why the motorcycle? All tied to the human host.

Just like the Spirit of Vengeance itself, the human hosts have just as stupidly overcomplicated rich a history. One of the hosts was a delivery boy whose sister was gunned down before his eyes. Another was a girl who’d lived the first 18 years of her life in monastic isolation. Another still was a high schooler in East L.A.

But Johnny Blaze, circus stunt biker, is the most iconic for all the right reasons. His story could be boiled down to “sold his soul to the Devil to save someone he loved,” but the full breadth of his story is one of Shakespearean intricacy, summed up by abandonment issues and family woes, and all the conflicting emotions those bring.

And after losing everything, the Devil shackled the Spirit of Vengeance to Johnny’s soul and cast him out upon America in an endless quest for absolution. The journey rendered Johnny’s passion for the road into his darkest nightmare.

This ain’t your standard superhero story. No Spider-Man great power and great responsibility; no Iron Man imperialistic rude awakening; no X-Men perseverance and tolerance story… Just the tale of a man trying to collect the pieces of his soul before the forces driving him leave them in the dust.

3. Which of his stories rock hardest?

SO MANY. My faves, though, in no particular order…

GHOST RIDER #68 (1981), By Roger Sterns and Bob Budiansky

A super atmospheric retelling of the Johnny Blaze/Zarathos Ghost Rider’s origin story, fraught with all the Shakespearean intricacy I mentioned earlier. And the horror. Did I mention the horror?

Johnny Blaze seeks shelter from a thunderstorm in a church where, in a confessional, he reveals his long, terrifying history to a Priest, who’s panicking more and more by the second.

Why? Well…

Issue 68 of the 70s-80s Ghost Rider signaled the series’s high watermark, cresting finally with its final issue, #81. Thankfully, all of these excellent issues are collected in Essential Ghost Rider #4.

AVENGERS #214, By Jim Shooter & Bob Hall (1981)

You got the gist of this earlier, but let me break it down for you. The Zarathos Ghost Rider (the megalomaniacal evil one) decides he’s not a fan of “happy” super heroes, and proceeds to burn the souls of Angel, Captain America, and Tigra. He does the same to Iron Man by burning him through his eye-slits, and concludes this by (nearly) BEATING THOR WITH HIS OWN HAMMER.

Take that, uninteresting Asgardian!

ALL-NEW GHOST RIDER (2014), By Felipe Smith & Tradd Moore

The most unique take on Ghost Rider yet: Robbie Reyes, a high schooler and mechanic in East L.A., is killed by a cartel and resurrects as Ghost Rider, whose vehicle of choice is a 1969 Dodge Charger. A car.

My first reaction was “A CAR?! Where the hell does this comic get off?” Upon reading it, my next reaction was “Where the hell did this comic get this goddamn good?”

5 issues in, Smith & Moore aren’t screwing around, portraying Robbie Reyes as a talented student with the capacity to improve his bad neighborhood. Murdered, his resurrection sucks him into the cycle of gang violence, spurred on by Eli Morrow, the mysterious spirit who inhabits his car and fuels his Ghost Rider abilities. It’s the small details that make this comic, the greatest being Robbie’s steady change in appearance from collected high schooler to tattooed punk as Eli’s influence on him grows, not to mention the graffiti-inspired art breathing even more life into Smith’s diverse cast.

With each issue addressing the systemic societal issues in East L.A., this is a fresh, crafty, ass-kicking take on Ghost Rider.

Buy this book.

UNCANNY AVENGERS ANNUAL #1, By Rick Remender & Paul Renaud

Funny thing about Ghost Rider: Ghost Rider tends to be at his best when he’s kicking somebody’s ass. In this case, an Avengers/X-Men/Mystical heroes team up, and a race of spineless hedonists.

Probably THE best-written single issue on this list, Remender uses the X-Men villain Mojo as a proxy for coping with corporatized storytelling, for fickle fans, and for indulgent writing in a magnificent display of scathing satire and meta-narrative. This is among the greatest examples of American comics thus far this decade.

It also doesn’t hurt that Ghost Rider kicks everybody’s asses.

GHOST RIDER 1-78 By Howard Mackie, Ivan Velez Jr., Javier Saltares, Mark Texeira, and co. (1990-1996)

This is the run the epic run that got me into Ghost Rider, and outside of the Ghost Rider: Resurrected graphic novel containing issues 1-7, it’s never been re-released in a collection.

Describing this run would quickly devolve into a list of favorite issues, all revolving around the best combination of horror/action and worldbuilding in the character’s history. Understand that in its day, this wasn’t a comic, it was a REVOLUTION.

If I HAD to pick a fave? Ghost Rider #7, where he takes on a psychotic contortionist with a thing for stuffing people with hay. Alive. Makes Batman’s Scarecrow has nightmares of this guy.

Mackie’s take on Ghost Rider was so powerful and so popular that it single-handedly kickstarted Marvel’s 90s wave of horror comics; garnered its own toy line; got two cameos in concurrent Spider-Man video games; made significant appearances in the Hulk’s and the Fantastic Four’s animated series; was planned to appear in Spider-Man’s popular show; and set the visual standard for nearly all future iterations of the character.

…it also paved the way for the movies that I’d have to address sooner or later.

4. The Second One Was OK.

You Heard Me Right. Ghost Rider: Spirits of Vengeance (2011) is a better movie than anyone gave it credit for. It’s not a transcendent movie, nor even a great movie, but an OK movie.

Yeah, it’s got problems. It starred Nicholas Cage, who by that point was more meme than man; his performance was too ‘unchained’ for its own good in places; there are some odd music video-looking moments; Christopher Lambert’s character makes no sense;  the whole thing’s blanketed with a campiness not seen since Tim Burton’s Batman (1989); and everyone knew, going in, that the movie was made purely for Sony to hold onto the rights just a little longer.

Even still, this was a raw, mean little movie that was, in every way, a triumph over its predecessor. It centered on a washed up Johnny Blaze having to guard a 12 year old antichrist and his mother from his demon father who’s bent on ruling the world. It’s a tale of broken families; being haunted by bad decisions; surrogate parentage; and ultimately making the best of bad things. Strong thematic undercurrents driven by realized characters in a decent structure and with some pretty hardcore action. It’s not elegant, it’s not pretty, it’s not as smart as the Avengers (2012), but that’s not what it is. It’s lowdown, dirty, rough-around the edges, and goddamn proud to be what it is.

And it had Idris Elba, for God’s sake.

Pictured: best character in the movie.

Unfortunately, the first movie did NOT have Ibris Elba.

5. That Goddamn Movie

Cool poster. Lame movie.

Ghost Rider (2007) is an awful mess of a movie, but its heart was in the right place. I think. I’m not sure. Film Crit Hulk tweeted “ZACK SNYDER STRIKES HULK AS SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T FULLY UNDERSTAND THEIR ATTRACTIONS,” and honestly, I think the same can be said about Mark Stephen Johnson.

Ghost Rider (2007) is a fan movie. It crams as much of the character’s history and iconography as possible into two hours without regard for character, coherency, structure, pacing, or really anything else beyond cinematography. Not, “here’s a good story,” but “here’s a bunch of stuff I really like!” It displays, in every way, as shallow an understanding of its characters as Man of Steel (2013) did.

Honestly, the only beat in the movie that really works is Sam Elliot’s character revealing that he’s an ancient Ghost Rider before riding off with Cage’s Ghost Rider into the desert.

It’s a powerful beat and makes you think the movie is suddenly going to have a kickass ending, but the moment flickers out like flashpaper when Elliot’s character just gives up for no reason after this and the movie descends into one of the genre’s silliest fight scenes. Seriously. Ghost Rider and the plastic bag guy from American Beauty have a hellfire snowball fight.

…and yet, Mark Stephen Johnson’s fan film is the reason I moved out to California.

5. A Rebirth in Flames

Ghost Rider debuted on February 16th, 2007, and I’d barely recognize the teenager I’d been. At the time, I was a strict Catholic with rigid dogmatic beliefs, and I thought quaint little mid-Michigan was all I’d ever need. I was enrolled in the local community college’s creative writing program, with middling hopes of majoring in English and Creative Writing, and honestly, I had no further plans or aspirations than that. I could only see as far as tomorrow, and tomorrow didn’t look too bad, never mind that I was poignantly aware of my lonerhood.

I was a Ghost Rider fanboy, if there ever was one. I’d started my Ghost Rider comic collection in my freshman year of high school, and by my freshman year of college, it was nearly complete. I lived and breathed the character, and seemingly, everything about him fit my insular little morality and worldview.

Seriously, where else in comics could you get a story this freakin’ metal?

I woke up on February 16th, 2007 stoked out of my mind. Ghost Rider was premiering! By the same director who’d done such an awesome job on Daredevil (long before I knew anything about film criticism)! This was a director who knew what he was doing with an amazing actor (I told myself) who had a passion for the character. I gunned down to the local mall, picked up the orchestral soundtrack, and roared into the parking lot of the theater with the earliest matinee, and for the first 10 minutes, it wasn’t too bad…

…and then the whole weight of the world came crashing down on me. I didn’t want to believe it. I willed myself not to believe it. I felt like the Star Wars nerds who’d camped out for The Phantom Menace, who’d watched, in mounting horror, as all they knew proved a lie, and how, in a futile attempt to preserve their fandom, denied themselves how they really felt.

My reaction, give or take.

I brooded on it the rest of the day, all the way through my late shift at work. Even stillt, I changed into all-blacks with my favorite Ghost Rider T-shirt, before heading out to see the movie again with my friends.

“Maybe I’ll like it this time,” I told myself as the lights dimmed. “Maybe I missed something. Maybe it was just too smart for me.” But the movie was just as banal, silly, and broken as before. I can’t tell you if it was when Nicholas Cage was drinking jelly beans from a martini glass; if it was when Ghost Rider whistled (HE HAS NO LIPS!!!) for his motorcycle; or even if it was during the cringe-inducing climax, but six fateful words spilled from my lips.

“I can do better than this.”

Arrogant, huh? I knew nothing about screenwriting, so I found a website to teach me formatting. I didn’t know a damn thing about structure, tone, or themes, but goddammit, I knew Ghost Rider, I knew character, I knew pacing, and I knew fight scenes. I wrote, what was quite possibly the worst feature script ever wrought, but I was riding high on my laurels. I sent this monstrosity, complete with three monologues too many, and MASSIVE blocks of text to Nicholas Cage, along with a manifesto of how Ghost Rider should be done. The script was sent back to me, unread, containing a letter politely suggesting going through a literary agency. From there, my track was clear: I had to become a screenwriter.

That obsession drove me to the University of Michigan, to California, and ultimately to jobs in and around the industry. What’ve I got to show for it? Half a dozen scripts and shorts, a few pilots, and a novel, all in various states of rewriting. Hell, I didn’t say the road was going to be easy, but I’ve definitely grown from it.

And really, that road, literal and figurative, sums up my relationship with Ghost Rider, from my earliest interest to my current fandom. My Catholic zeal turned to religious shame as my horizons broadened and I abandoned the Church’s regressive dogma. I keep my faith, but I often look back, seeing only a monster -even if that monster had the best of intentions. In a literal sense, I’ve traded the free, open roads of Michigan that never fail to make me feel alive for the gridlock of L.A., making every drive, no matter the destination, an exercise in monotony. And yet, this only strengthens my resolve. The harder I work, the more I listen to criticism, the more I honestly appraise myself, the closer my dream appears, even if I’ve still got a long, rocky way to go. Or even if it’s the sweetest mirage.

But then, that’s Ghost Rider in a nutshell, isn’t it?