This trick also worked well for Skeletor, but absolutely does not work in a high-stakes fantasy epic. When you are playing a gritty, modern action-RPG as a hard-ass battlemage, and the big bad falls to one pixel of health only to drop the mic and majestically escape the locked arena while you stand there clutching your sword like a spare prick at a wedding, it leaves your satisfaction so dry that no amount of foreplay will ever rehydrate it. It doesn’t build tension; it grabs the concept of tension by the throat and strangles it in front of its weeping children. Which brings us to the … let’s call it ‘experience’ of playing Echoes of the End. This game is a true masterclass in how to undermine your own hero.

The Flintlock Hangover

After coming off the high of Flintlock: Siege of Dawn, I craved a fix for another action-adventure game. I wanted one that might feature a strong lead, a fun mix of characters, and a cool combat system. This is why I shouldn’t have played Echoes of the End.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, but the delta between the games developed by A44 and Myrkur is… vast. Both are scrappy triple-I studios, but they have completely different approaches to game manufacture. Flintlock gave us three main highs: excellent character work with Nor, Enki, and even the bark-level NPCs; a tight, crisp combat design rewarding skill; and an impactful story grounded in war, loss, and redemption. The game designers built a brutal arena system where they knew each move had to have impact or you took a dirt nap, and the abilities were designed hand in glove with those encounters.

Myrkur, on the other hand, skipped the reading. They gave us just the one weapon and a fairly unapproachable collection of abilities. In Flintlock, Nor wasn’t an unlikeable bint and Enki wasn’t a clueless sap. In Echoes of the End, Ryn has the charm of a sandpaper dildo, and Cor is a man so aggressively beige he makes tap water look spicy. When Cor is replaced by Abram, he sticks around for about the same duration as a deadbeat dad heading out for smokes.

They might have a great story, but nothing about the seven hours I spent with the game made me give enough of a shit to stick around to find out. If this is the videogame equivalent of the Netflix show that gets good after five seasons, I dropped out in season three.

A Protagonist Made of Barbed Wire

If we’re thinking about narrative single-player games, the real hook has to be the story. You need something about the world, or the people in it, and critically, a strong protagonist who can carry the components on their shoulders.

In our intro, we meet Ryn, a Vestige capable of mighty feats of wonder. She uses this fantasy-meets-Reykjavík world’s version of magic. Ryn and her brother Cor cruise through the opening scenes, and the entire time she is ragging on him for doing things like, I dunno, walking and breathing. It’s unclear if she likes him, let alone loves him.

But the good news for Cor is that this is nothing personal. Whenever Ryn meets anyone, her first instinct is outright hostility, rudeness, and an almost mythic level of outward twattery that defies belief. She’s not a strong female lead: she’s a huge asshole, and we’re given no reason to like her, let alone root for her.

It’s an easy problem to fix: give her something the player can relate to. Even the maligned Forspoken pulled this very trick. Frey is prickly like a sea urchin, but she loves her cat Homer, and it’s her love for that cat that leads to her early-game low point. It humanises her. We can see how the harsh world has made her hard in turn, but it hasn’t made her monstrous. Luminous Productions made Frey more relatable by hiding her empathy behind a frail curtain of anger and resentment, and in the first ten minutes we’re hooked on her.

Ryn is just… angry. At everything! She clearly has daddy issues, but the nature of those is so opaque they might as well be buried in a lead-lined coffin at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. She’s a double-ended dick, so why would we want to find out more?

Mechanics, Puzzles, and Health and Safety Violations

Which I guess is a good time to consider the gameplay components of this narrative did-not-finish title. Ryn has two basic ways of murdering: her Vestige powers, and her blade. The combat is mechanically serviceable… at first. As time grinds on, you begin to see the problems.

Skills in the tree seem quite niche; the squeeze isn’t worth the juice. Deep into the sword line, there is an ability where you attack three times with a light strike, then close with a heavy finisher. In theory, this should kerb stomp the enemies, teaching them fear and respect in equal measure. In practice, the long run-up means using it is highly situational, to put it mildly, and the payoff is about as satisfying as a warm handshake from a leper.

Worse, the controls are outright broken at the atomic level. You will probably see my gameplay where Ryn’s just facetanking, and I can assure you I’m blocking, but the controls are as non-responsive as a three-day-old corpse. You’re not fighting the enemy; you’re fighting a controller that seems to be communicating with the console via smoke signals. This is not a God of War-like success story. The Vestige powers are cool and all, but not impactfulenough, and also endlessly fiddly. The combo to pick up an enemy and toss them is simple: pull the trigger, point the thumbstick, and boom… right? But, much like the block, this also works like it’s being paid by the hour. I swear I haven’t come closer to twisting a controller in half in a long time. Throughout the fights, I found it was just better to rely on my sword, dodging, and good looks, which is no way to play a game where you’re a spellslinging battlemage.

The game also feels overly… gamey. Combat arenas are conveniently littered with spiked walls. These should be clear health and safety violations in any workplace, but no, Team Clown Car has them installed everywhere.

Then come the puzzles. Echoes of the End is positively infested with them, and they aren’t so much hard as annoying. In one sequence, I needed to take Ryn across some platforms. She has to yank them out of the wall, at which point a magical mystery timer starts, ending with them sliding back into the wall. With the control issues, I fell to my death, like, five fucking times, got ennui, and cracked open the gin after putting the game down for the night.

The Invisible World and Stolen Skill Points

Eventually, Ryn meets Abram, a sort of part-scholar, part-Wikipedia character designed to provide cool combos in combat and exposition when out of it. Abram is a nice guy, so naturally Ryn is a walking migraine to him as well. It was so refreshing having him along, though, because she is so relentlessly full of bastard energy that we needed a balm for the abrasion of her personality.

Not to worry, though, because one thing leads to another and they have a falling out. We could hope the writers suggested Ryn was so unlikeable that her companions might leave, but that’s not how it went down. However, that’s not the worst part of this misadventure.

See, the game provides five skill trees, then… deletes the one called ‘companion’ when Abram heads off. You better not have levelled up his abilities too far, because when Ryn walks it alone, the points you’ve put in his upgrade path are ones you can wave goodbye to. It’s the mechanical equivalent of a game inviting you to a dinner party and then forcing you to pay for the groceries. Again. I can imagine how you might hit this situation and want to end it all: it’s a fair and rational response, because in a 10-chapter game, you’ve hit chapter 7 and wonder what you did to the universe to earn this kind of karma.

It’s possible that after a short platforming-only game sequence Ryn and Abram kiss and make up, but that will remain one of the unsolved mysteries for me. Seven chapters left me tired, boss.

Abram’s exposition doesn’t help much anyway, because the world-building is pretty invisible. There are some Dalsman dudes who are bad, and they’re different from the dudes you’re allied with, who are apparently fine. There are some scholars in a city somewhere. Magic exists, but how it works isn’t explained. Why people are Vestiges isn’t explained. Why it’s risky for people to touch Vestiges, why people don’t like them, why they’re called Vestiges, why Ryn hates everyone… none of it is explained. And so on.

The Gloat, Scamper, and Verdict

We’ve touched on this before, and we’re going to interrogate it again: you are playing a magically imbued battlemage, yet the game treats your victories with the exact same narrative weight as a teenager pulling a rubber mask off a real estate developer. Scooby-Doo did it better, though.

The enemy boss encounters are some of the frustration focal points, but not because they’re hard. Repeat: not hard, just… annoying. When you fight the big bads, Aurick and Zara, you will pound them into the ground fairly easily. Then, with just a pixel of life left, they’ll flex and exit stage left.

It was the repetition that did it. When you meet these two ass-hats, there’s a big gloating scene. You fight Aurick first; he gloats as he prepares to throw hands, then mocks you as he runs away. You keep missing out on killing Zara, but each time you see her, she taunts you. Then you punch her lights out, and she gloats and runs away. In all these scenarios, the magically-powered Ryn somehow doesn’t drop rocks on them, throw her Vestige-imbued sword, or any of the other things she can do. She’s just like, “Wow! Well, I guess we’ll see them later,” and moves on with her life.

When I beat the Zara encounter and the boss caught a quick overnight to Fresno, I’d had enough. When Ryn and Abram had their falling out right after, I decided not to continue dating Echoes of the End anymore. If anyone still used Facebook, they’d have seen our relationship status move from ‘it’s complicated’ to ‘intensely annoyed’. I decided I’d rather perform self-dentistry with a rusted pair of pliers than play more of this.

Falling Outro

I guess Echoes of the End is a good-enough-looking game, though the pop-in is egregious. The sound is fine, although the volume is erratic. Aldís Amah Hamilton and Karl Ágúst Úlfsson both do solid work as Ryn and Abram respectively. They’re actually good performances, but dragged underwater by a script that has fewer flotation devices than the Titanic.

Which is the real tragedy here. Writing a cohesive fantasy world is hard work, and building a responsive combat system is even harder. But when you ask an audience to invest their time and money into your world, you owe them a basic narrative contract. Give us a protagonist we don’t actively want to feed to a woodchipper. Give us mechanics that reward investment rather than torching it to the waterline. And for the love of all that is holy, make your villains stick around long enough to face a sword.

Echoes of the End doesn’t honour that contract. It’s an effigy of squandered potential. The bones of something interesting are somewhere in here, but buried under a protagonist built entirely from hostility and herpes, controls designed by someone who has only ever seen a controller in a museum, and boss encounters that treat your victories like a passing nuisance. The only reason you should check this game out is if you’re getting paid for it… and even then, ensure you’re on a good hourly rate.

If you want a scrappy, character-driven action-RPG that marries story to feeling and fun, go play Flintlock: Siege of Dawn or Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. If you really want to watch an overpowered villain teleport away like a techbro CEO avoiding a congressional subpoena, just go watch some old Dungeons & Dragons cartoons. At least there, the Venger Maneouver™ was still considered innovative.

If you prefer games developed by people not currently huffing industrial solvents, click Like. And if you want your villains to stay dead when you stick a sword through them…

We live in a time where “Red vs. Blue” is everywhere. A time where we somehow can’t have a beer with people who vote the other way. We are driven against each other by the insidious and the corrupt, a ceaseless churn that knows no end until we eventually clash and all the sticky red comes out. Our real world is a time of literal marvels, but miracles mean little because we’ve already killed our gods.

Let’s meet Nor and Enki, shall we?

The Hidden Monster and its Devil’s Bargain

You might be wondering if I’m talking about Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn or our world. It turns out, it’s both. Flintlock is a game you need to play because it dredges into the story of conflict. Of what it means to be on one side of a war, and not necessarily the right one. It shows us how we might make allies of our enemies to fight the real monster at the heart of it all. A monster so hidden, so devious, we didn’t even see it until it was too late.

Flintlock’s hero is Nor Vanek, a Sapper by trade, a killer by disposition. She’s ended up in some twat or other’s war, digging her way through a ceaseless tide of corpses, because in her world, the dead walk. It’s not important who’s in charge, because she’s not fighting for them. She cares about one man: a father of sorts, Baz, who starts her on a quest through the simple expedience of going out for milk and never coming back.

She meets Enki… or should we call him Áánshí? Enki is the diminutive form of the forgotten god Áánshí. He’s a small, almost cute purple-blue fox. Nor swore to kill all gods, and in her time and place, humans have firearms. She aims to put the muzzle against Enki’s skull and blow his brains out. Nor has seen her comrades dead or scattered, and she swears to the Above and against the Below that she will see all gods dead. Enki offers her a different path: ally with him. Join forces, and kill the gods… together. He’s a god with a different perspective, a purpose aligned with hers. His devil’s bargain is tempting, a sweetener that promises Nor the powers of godhood alongside her gunpowder.

This is why we really need to start with Game Pass.

You’ve probably never played Flintlock because A44 Games made a pact with Microsoft: “Put our amazing game on your service. We’ll take your coin, we’ll survive, and through the halo effect of word-of-mouth sales, we’ll be successful.” But they couldn’t have predicted how the market would turn against them. Subscriber counts didn’t convert to sales, and the state of the game on Windows (Microsoft’s home turf!) turned their June 2024 launch into a fireball that was impossible to roll a DEX save against.

The parallels are brutal. In Flintlock, Nor Vanek must ally with Enki to survive, despite gods being the enemy. In the real world, A44 allied with the corporate god of Microsoft to survive. Just as Nor needs Enki’s power, A44 needed Game Pass visibility to escape the indie label.

Gods are fickle allies.

There’s no free lunch. In the game, trusting gods is dangerous. In reality, the Game Pass deal guaranteed players (over 500k) but potentially cannibalised actual sales (around a mere 38k on Steam), leading to a financial failure relative to the budget and resulting in rumoured layoffs.

Both pacts offered short-term survival at the risk of long-term soul-selling. The game launched, and launched badly. I’m here to tell you that you’re missing out. Not only is the game ‘fixed’, it contains one of the most poignant stories that might make you think about who you should have that next beer with, even if you’re a Red and they’re a Blue.

Gods vs Guns

Flintlock, at its heart, is God of War Lite. It carries a souls-lite label, and you can see that if you look sideways at it. There’s a currency like souls. There are things that look like campfires. There are transportation shortcuts you can unlock once you’ve killed all those in your way.

But there’s also a murder playground that’s almost biblical in its purity, a channelling of the dual nature that Kratos and Atreus share in their games. Nor is military, capable enough with a gun, axe, flamethrower, hammer, or whatever’s handy, really. She’s not afraid to shake her fist at the sky. It’s where the bad people are, after all. Enki’s got his own abilities, able to use actual magic, a thing the world hasn’t seen manifested in a long time. Nor is Kratos and Enki is Atreus. And Flintlock plays like a AA version of what Sony’s best has put out — a precision combat murder factory, where multiple builds are viable, and you can change the world with your axe in hand.

It’s not Elden Ring, and shouldn’t be judged as such. The game is a solid 69 — nice — on OpenCritic, but that’s because so many people believed the souls-lite label rather than God of War lineage. What they’ve almost entirely missed is the real story it’s trying to tell, the parable of our time: that it’s possible to forgive the unforgivable, to find your own path when people are telling you to travel to a different destination, and that at the end, you’ll find people you can really count on.

The Weta DNA

The founders of A44 left the golden cage of Weta because they wanted to build interactive worlds, not just look at them. They came equipped with the Kiwi ‘number 8 wire’ mentality, and it was this that let them build a blockbuster on a budget.

They crafted a world that is not just lush, but interesting to actually be in. The towns you liberate aren’t just inanimate skyboxes; they are legitimate places. There is a sublime lived-in feel imbued by the artwork and the atmosphere of the wilderness. You hear a bystander commenting how good it is to be alive and here with the whole family after Nor liberates their hamlet, but “…maybe not with Ma” …and suddenly, it grounds the fantasy. These NPCs have their own backstories and you’ve only just walked into the room.

But the real heavy lifting is done by the sound. Olive Gray, who voices Nor, and Alistair Petrie, who voices Enki, are S-tier actors. They use the silence between words to do so much of the work, and yet they aren’t afraid to be soft or loud as the situation demands. And they’re funny! There’s a scene where Enki is trying to teach Nor some godspeak. She can’t get the pronunciation, and in the end, she’s just like, “You know, let’s just leave it.” The way she says it sounds like someone who is pissed off with Enki, herself, and the world at large, and yet… they laugh with each other later. Or there’s that time you find a waterwheel. Enki stops and says he could listen to it until the end of time. Something so ordinary spoke to him at a level we believe because his voice actor made us understand.

But this isn’t entirely what I mean about the Weta DNA. Remember those words I told you to remember? Truth. Accountability. Respect. These are A44’s values. They’re right there on the website — you can go check. In crafting such a believable story about friends versus enemies, they needed Nor Vanek to be relatable. She needed to command respect. And she needed to hold herself to account for her own actions. It’s a corporate mission statement baked into the code.

And because they needed Nor to be True, they made her distinct. But truth provokes. The internet screamed ‘woke’ because Nor is a Black woman. But the culture warriors missed the point, as they usually do: it’s not her Blackness that’s underlining the issue. It’s her humanity. Her colour defines her position on the board, but her struggle defines her soul. And yet… she’s able to find common ground with people who aren’t Black.

Even with those who look like purple-blue foxes. Her difference makes her perspective relatable, and in this, we believe her. Which is ironic, because our story started with all sides lying to each other. Enki lied to Nor, and Nor deceived her friends, all just to try and get by. It is a startling parallel for our time, but as the credits roll, Flintlockdraws you a map to find your better self. One fight, but also one truth, at a time.

The Click

When the game clicks, it is a delight. I expected that last level to be a slog, but no: you feel like a true master of war when set against the paper figures cast against you. I had real Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order vibes here, when Cal Kestis becomes a Jedi after facing his doubts.

But, also: it’s just damn fun. There was this one sequence in a trench. I rounded a corner and saw a summoner in the distance. This guy is whipping specials out of his ass, and he’s not running low on supplies. I needed to get to them, but they were motivated to not let that happen, spawning what felt like a never-ending tide of mobs. Most were these super fast-moving dudes with aggressive strikes.

But… I’m Nor. I’ve buddied with a god. Which meant I had Enki’s health-on-hit ability, plus the Warlock armour set that spreads curses on death, and talents that returned life when Enki and I struck at the same time. He’s rocking a poison curse effect, and what with the curse’s plague effect, the screen turned into an explosive circus. Sure, I was getting hit, but the stream of health coming back to me was absurd, and the continuous stacking and spreading poison death spiral meant enemies were hurting their friends, basically doing all the work. By the time I got to the mouth of the tunnel, all that was left of the summoner was some greasy ash.

The best the Big Bad could throw was nothing compared to Enki and me. We were justice. We were vengeance! We beat them like a toy drum.

The Reality of Number 8 Wire

That said, it isn’t perfect. And if A44 had pretended they weren’t AA, I’d trust them less.

For example, the cosmetic system uses Reputation (the same souls-like currency you need for skills and weapon upgrades). It’s in short supply, which means unless you’re grinding deliberately, the Flintlock fashion endgame stays locked behind a door you never quite reach. For a game that put so much effort into being stunning, it’s a weird flex that there’s a system designed to stop you engaging with the art team’s work. It will be out of reach for many players.

Then there’s the multiplier mechanic. Play well, murder beautifully, and your Reputation multiplier climbs. It keeps going up the more fabulous you are, but it resets on taking damage. The players who most need the Reputation multiplier to upgrade their gear are the ones struggling in combat. The game punishes them by taking away the thing they most need. It reminds me of the original City of Heroes respec trial: forcing players with broken builds to complete a punishing mission just to fix the build that… prevented them from completing the mission. City of Heroes built the first MMO poverty trap. And while A44 didn’t invent the poverty trap, they didn’t help their players escape it either.

These aren’t flaws that break the game. If you’re a veteran of action RPGs, you might not even notice, but they’re the seams showing a AA budget. The number 8 wire is holding, just… visibly. The casual player invited in by Game Pass might see these issues as a constant, get-rekt reminder that they can’t dodge well enough to earn the upgrade juice or get a dapper jacket. And they’d leave, right before the story grabs you by the heartstrings.

Humanity as a Value Statement

If you stick with Flintlock until the credits roll, you are left with a fairly profound sadness when it’s over. Not because it was too short, but because it delivered on ‘all the feels’.

Despite playing ‘as Nor’, you’re really playing ‘as Nor and Enki’, each going through their own redemption arc. Nor’s purpose isn’t to win for some king on a throne, but to fight for the people to the left and right of her. Enki, for his part, has a more spiritual journey. He’s learning what it means to be human — not in a humanoid body, but in the context of humanity as a value statement. He struggles to understand consequences, and yet once he does, he does so profoundly.

This might even bleed into you. There’s an optional boss, a sort of Stone Guardian guy. He’s a skill check, sure, but he’s also a persistence check. He says, “I’m here to test you.” He’s at the end of a cul-de-sac with nothing behind him but a chest. In the dark quiet of your mind, you have to ask if it’s really worth it to merc this dude. The rewards suggest a pacifist path is just as viable. Is passing the real test killing him, or leaving him alone?

There’s a sidequest I loved. It’s not long, and you don’t have to kill anyone at all. You light fires of remembrance for the fallen in the war. Nor’s reflection on her persistence — or lack of it — in the world is something that will make the player consider: are we just a set of bonfires for others to light in the hope someone remembers a good thing about us? Or are we doomed to obscurity, our mark on the world all for nothing?

It’s Áánshí, Not Enki

We started with Nor and Enki, but in the end, we’re left with Nor and Áánshí. A god, perhaps not a very good one, but trying to be better. He starts as a tiny fox thing, and ends… well, as perhaps a reminder of the best parts of ourselves.

It’s this duo that makes the final scenes so profound. Nor accepts Enki, telling him he’s a sapper first, a god second. Avoiding spoilers, you get to see what this means, and what the implications of his promise to the world are: Áánshí, not Enki, is a god of tremendous power, but also of tremendous mercy. His godhood isn’t as important as his mercy, his compassion, and his humanity.

It’s Nor’s influence that makes him want to save the world, understanding that sacrifice makes a hero, not power. And it’s Enki’s influence on Nor that teaches her that the shape of what we are doesn’t determine who is worth dying for. It’s who we choose to be, and who we choose to become.

And that is why Flintlock — Game Pass faceplant and all — is more than just content you rent for a month. It’s a testament to the middle market, and a story worth owning, and perhaps a story worth feeling.

If you like the idea of diminutive purple foxes who become titanic gods of righteousness, hit the Like button. And if you think we should spend a little more time focusing on our humanity…

Support my work by checking out my own gunpowder fantasy series, starting with Blade of Glass:

Get this review on Spotify or Apple, or watch the YouTube version:

Good or bad, it’s rare for a game to take advantage of the medium in the telling of the story. Let’s get into medium by using movies as an example, and the crippling problems that came about when silent movies became… loud. There was a real challenge for early silent stars when fans finally heard them. The lead with the chiselled jaw shouldn’t sound nasal or high-pitched. You couldn’t get away with playing that farmhand American if you sounded like you were from the Eastern Bloc. Technical acting skills mattered—where silent films needed flamboyance when you couldn’t use your words, talkies needed delivery. Whether it was John Gilbert’s voice or Clara Bow’s accent, a few ‘it’ actors burned up on re-entry here.

You can also imagine a radio star trying to transition to silent movies. They had to act without their greatest asset (their voice) and learn physical, visual storytelling. This period was mercifully brief for all involved due to the relentless march of progress, because video killed the radio star shortly after radio’s popularity in the 1920s.

But if you put these together—transitioning from radio to sound film—well, you had a shot, man. You got performers who had voice training and knew what a microphone was. Some of those career transitioners could take advantage of the new medium to tell a better story than a silent film actor could. You probably know who Bing Crosby and Bob Hope are for just this reason.

Back to video games: let’s talk about how few use the medium by talking about the stand-out one that did. We’re going to get into spoilers for a 2007 video game, so while I think 18 years gives us a little statute-of-limitations leeway, you’ve been warned. The OG BioShock did this wonderfully with its leaning on would-you-kindly, and it did this by exploiting a technique players had become used to. In games, there’s an often-used trope where a disembodied voice on the end of the radio is a sort of magical helper, delivering anything from exposition to instructions to the player. We lost pack-in manuals in our retail boxes in favour of a talking head in the top left of our screen who’d explain how guns worked. BioShock’s Irish-accented Atlas did this by asking the player to complete mundane tasks, all in the guise of our familiar, helpful in-game assistants. We’d bought into the idea of Atlas before we started the game, because the trope was a baked-in part of the medium.

Because Atlas is wonderfully Irish, he doesn’t say ‘Please’ so much as ‘Would you kindly’. ‘Pick up the gun’ becomes ‘Would you kindly pick up the gun’. The player continues following Atlas’s instructions, right until the moment Atlas tells the player, “Would you kindly kill this person.” Then the game removes control from you, and your avatar murders someone you didn’t want to bury. That lauded agency is deleted, revealing—again, spoilers!—that you’re a pawn. Would-you-kindly is a code word that makes your brainwashed schmuck do something against your will; as the player, we thought we were being helped by a fancy instruction manual, but the game’s story is that we, the player’s character, are a sucker. We’ve been played, but masterfully: BioShock used a medium-based trope as a storytelling mechanic that wouldn’t have the same impact in a movie, because movies don’t expect agency to be such an embodied part of storytelling.

Well, Dispatch does the same fucken thing.

Anxiety as Gameplay

I appreciate we’ve talked a lot about agency, games, and BioShock, but this is actually a Dispatch review. Dispatch, the latest maybe-Critical Role, maybe-Telltale game, puts you in the washed-up shoes of Bob Robertson, a third-generation Mecha Man superhero. Your dad, and his dad before him, were all Mecha Man: different suit, but same job description. Shit went bad, like, real bad, and the suit that made you super is now a collection of badly damaged metal and plastic you can’t even use as spares.

Thing is, Bob’s a hero. We’ll get to sacrifice and purpose later, but for now, just understand that Bob is not ready to stop helping people. It’s in his blood. He’s constructed from the idea that doing good is not just a duty, but a calling. As we kick off the game as Robert, we’re introduced to a new posse: a group of has-beens, wannabes, washed-up heroes, or derelict reclamation cases called the Z Team. These reprobates are essentially career criminals on a get-to-green plan; they need to give their time to the SDN, the Superhero Dispatch Network, as supes for hire. It’s last call for these assholes. If they flunk out, they’re done.

As Robert, you’re their dispatcher, a quasi-amalgam of team leader, manager, life coach, counsellor, and… hell, I’m getting ahead of myself again. But as a dispatcher, your job is to send these miscreants to wherever they’re needed. There’s tension in the job, whether it’s solving puzzles, getting the right hero assigned to a gig, or dealing with the hard losses of a Kobayashi Maru. While Dispatch presents as an animated movie or a graphic novel come to life, it’s also delivering a thin layer of management sim. It’s just deep enough, in fact, to do a BioShock on you. It makes you feel what it’s like to be behind the controls of a superhero dispatch team. It makes you feel what it’s like to have people on your team that you give a shit about, and what it’s like to let them down because you’re not good enough.

There’s one scene as the game marches through its chapters where you’re presented with one of the many hacking puzzles. These are usually not very hard, but this one is as brutal as an anvil to the face. The tension’s already high because one of the team, someone you’ve taken under your wing, is finally, just maybe, trying to be a hero. And they’ve put themselves at risk, not for fame or glory, but because it’s important to Robert Robertson. You’re not meant to succeed at the hacking puzzle. It’s one of those Kobayashi Maru moments. But let me tell you: you want to. You need to.

Because Dispatch makes you feel like failed Mecha Man Robert Robertson.

It BioShocks you right to 11: you’re invested in the trope, the in-game hacking puzzle you’re used to by now. And you’re used to winning them. It rug-pulls the moment so effectively, you get whiplash. And it does this while proving it understood the assignment: the most important part of storytelling is about the people, whether you care about them, and whether what you just failed to do made you sit staring at the credits with a what-did-I-just-do look on your face.

Yeah. That was me at the end of Episode 4.

Wait, Episode 4?

A divisive element of the games that made Telltale famous was their episodic model. It’s just like a Netflix show, but the modern kind where Disney wants to reach into your wallet for months, so they string a series out over three billing cycles. The good news is that Dispatch has just one payment, but I played it over the episodic release cadence.

I admit, this sucked. It didn’t suck because I have a philosophical problem with games having chapters, but because once I’d finished a duo of episodes, I needed to wait for next week’s payload. From a functional point of view, you’re not going to forget what’s going on in the story, but I found it a little tricky to remember some of the mechanical nuances of dispatching my wannabe heroes.

The game has a faux level-up mechanic, where you can both buff your losers—say, make them smarter or send them to the gym with a protein shake. But you can also send them to school, where they can unlock special abilities or tricks. These can be things like a hero being able to return faster from a job, which means less downtime, or being able to respec their abilities a little dynamically. I found these didn’t stick as well with me during my week-long breaks. Which one of these philistines has a special power when teamed up with another? Which heals a squadmate? Fucked if I could remember.

It’s unlikely to be a problem now, as the whole game’s out! You can binge-watch, or I guess binge-play, the entire game without the artificial brake. What you’re still going to be dealing with is the Digital Deluxe Edition content problem. You can buy this as an add-on, and while it’s not really required, it promises some cool shit, man, like actual comics. These are—painfully—built into the game’s client itself, but there’s a method behind this madness. The comics-in-client delivery mechanism isn’t some kind of dystopian anti-piracy measure, but an alignment to the game’s story-drip system. They provide additional backstory to what you discover through playing the game, and if you found out the specifics behind Blonde Blazer and Phenomaman before the game forces decisions around them, it’d break the whole thing.

It still irritated me, maybe not as much as a steel-wool enema, but I can’t help but think there’s a better way.

It’s Art, Stupid

One of the most powerful parts of Dispatch is its sense of style. The game looks like high-quality anime, a graphic novel come to life, with a lush and vivid superhero interpretation. Blonde Blazer looks almost classical. Mecha Man’s suit is built on brutalism, a hard shell around a man of gold. Invisigal is cooler than cool, a girl you wish you knew a little better. And on and on it goes, each villainous hero imbued with such individual characteristics you can’t help but recognise them from a silhouette alone.

The music is also truly excellent. There are a couple of tracks on the soundtrack I’ve added to playlists to take with me beyond the game.

But it’s not just the art or the banging beats. Each of the characters is acted by S-tier talent. There were only two that didn’t really gel with me, but the rest were people I wanted to invite over for beers and pizza. And those two are more than made up for by Jeffrey Fucking Wright, whose Chase is absurdly well done. You’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people in your ears, and it says something that when the credits rolled, I wanted to keep hanging out with them. The game oozes such a strong sense of identity, I don’t think you can compare it to a ‘superhero’ movie. Those feel very similar to each other these days, with CGI-heavy, character-light motifs; Dispatch is the game that understands it’s the ‘hero’ part of ‘superhero’ that’s important… And even the darkest of us can have a hero within.

Which is probably a good place to talk about Aaron Paul, Mecha Man, and the meaning of sacrifice.

Being Robert

It’s time I made good on my promise to talk about Dispatch’s understanding of consequence.

Robert Robertson is a man who’s worn the suit for much of his life. As a runt kid, his babysitter was a super-fast superhero. His father was Mecha Man, like his father before him. It’s almost like a Steve Earle song, except everyone who’s worn the Mecha Man suit has died in it.

Robert is the first who didn’t. But he almost did, and that’s left him feeling like a failure. Not that he didn’t beat the Big Bad, although that’s a part of it. It’s that he didn’t go down with the ship. He questions whether he gave it his all—whether he’s really Mecha Man, or just Robert. Some guy without any special talents, doing the best he can like the rest of us.

That changes the night he meets Blonde Blazer. She’s a bona fide Captain Marvel style of hero, glowing eyes, super strength, flight, and all. You have the opportunity to drink with her at a bar and see where that goes, and for Robert, this is one of those life moments. It’s not whether he gets to kiss the girl.

It’s whether he thinks he’s worthy of kissing the girl.

Throughout your Dispatch journey as Robert, you learn more about the man you are. You have choices to make along the way, and those are reflected in the story in ways that Mass Effect 3’s ending could only yearn for. I mentioned kissing the girl, but there’s another girl, too, and whether you want to kiss one, both, or neither is going to be reflected not just in your journey, but in theirs. See, Robert is a consequences vector. The things he does matter, and not because the game is trying to give the player agency.

They matter because what you, as the player, choose to do will impact the people in the story with you. Every moment you fail, every time you succeed, and every decision you make that prioritises one value over another is reflected in how your Z Team finishes at the end. Does everyone make it out alive? Is anyone going to jail? Will the heroes fall, or will the villains be redeemed?

And if someone other than you makes a mistake, do you have the strength and courage to help them through and perhaps, just a little, begin to understand that you’re only human?

Dispatch’s lessons are profound. Yes, it’s a superhero story, but it’s also a people story. Not just fictional people—the guy who can turn into an angrier bat or the girl who can turn invisible. It’s the kind of game that’s going to make you question a lot of the relationships in your life, and whether you might be leaving heroism on the shelf for the easy path.

And none of this emotional weight would land without Aaron Paul’s performance. Paul’s an actor I’m a little familiar with, but if I’m being honest, I haven’t felt a strong gravitational attraction to his work. Dispatch has completely changed that view for me. Paul imbues Robert with humour, honour, fear, integrity, bravery, and a sense of purpose I think we all wish we could have. And we can, for the time we’re playing Dispatch. We can be the hero the people around us need.

And while we’re doing that, we might just learn a little about what it means to exist without armour, to live the best ordinary life we can, and look after the people who need it. Just because you’re a demon doesn’t mean you have all the answers. Just because you’re made of stone doesn’t mean you don’t stumble when you screw up. The game made me consider how I was acting towards and with those around me. It made me wonder—a lot—about how people view themselves, and whether there’s a part we have to play in their redemption story.

When the credits rolled, the game told me that through it all, my Robert tried to stay true to his principles. To do the right thing, even when it was hard. And I think that’s probably what we all hope we can do.

So, What?

Dispatch isn’t so much a game about superheroes as it is a story that you feel. With acting that embodies each character with a distinct soul, art that enriches each action with purpose, and music that elevates the moments that matter, it’s an experience second to none.

I don’t give reviews a score. But Dispatch made me wonder if I should. If a one-star is ‘You shouldn’t even piss on this to put it out if it’s on fire’, then a five-star must be the peak experience of ‘You must play this before you die’.

And Dispatch is a game you must play before you die.

What did you think of Dispatch? Let me know in the comments below if you were Team Blazer or Team Invisigal. If you’re pining to hear Jeffrey Wright swear more than Billy Connolly, click Like! And thanks for watching.

Like what you see?

Check out the audio version on Spotify or Apple, or cruise into the YouTube version:

If you’re anything like me, you’ll remember Breakpoint’s reception more than the game itself. It seems people weren’t down with changes to its predecessor Wildlands’ successful model. Breakpoint got microtransactions to skip the line, tiered weapon upgrades, and a sort of gear-score/level mixtape for gating content. It was like watching your Wildlands kid graduate from college, only for its younger Breakpoint sibling to drop out and join a band as a drummer after getting a head injury. But what if I told you that beneath the launch-day noise, there was an actual game worth playing? What if, in 2025, Breakpoint… broke even?

The Core Gameplay Loop: Customisation and the World

Breakpoint’s basic story is that you’re Nomad, a killer of killers—the right soldier for a hard task. You and your team are dispatched to the fictional South Pacific island of Auroa. Skell Technology is headquartered there, a sort of dream tech company that attracts the best and brightest to work on cool shit in the middle of a tropical paradise. However (and spoilers), it’s not a top vacation spot anymore: between your rough landing, encounters with murder-bots of various sizes, and a fair-sized hostile military presence, you need to work out what’s going on and kill your way to the top of the food chain. Who’s behind it all? Is Jace Skell the bad man, or is your old buddy Walker the Butcher of Auroa? Are those shady-looking dudes CIA, or something else? And what about the insurgents infesting the island?

It’s a lot to take in, but don’t panic.

Where Breakpoint shines is in its embrace of player freedom and its cousin-loving marriage into customisation. There is a wide range of killing irons you can use, not just in their meta-types like SMGs, shotguns, or sniper rifles, but in their subtypes. If you want your DMR to be a full-auto weapon, you can live that dream. The combination of this with the game’s Gunsmith menu means you can tune and tweak the game to be the murder simulator you crave. My go-to loadout ended up being a DMR with either burst or autofire modes, coupled with a digital sight that could switch between 1x and 4x zoom. My secondary weapon was a grenade launcher, because sometimes that kind of conversation is needed. My sidearm preference tended toward a mid-calibre weapon with an extended magazine. But before landing on this soupçon of psychopathy, I also had great fun equipping a shotgun and going full brute squad, and found assault rifles quite a fun ride for medium-distance encounters.

It’s this variability that expands how people can approach Breakpoint. It also provides some great team choices for multiplayer, allowing a kitted-out squad to go John Rambo, Chris Kyle, or anything in between. Your AI NPC teammates also ensure a smooth ride if you’re like me and friendless. I spent my time with the game almost 100% as a solo player.

Let’s talk about that open world. The map is stuffed with icons, which is either going to excite you or be wearisome. One of my preferred ways to tackle the island is to strip the HUD back and just go exploring. It invites discovery. I’m a corner-checker by nature; I like finding the underground caves, survivalist caches, old war bunkers, and prepper cabins in the woods. Going off the beaten path ensures encounters with all of these. Auroa is more than a collection of icons; it’s an island that different types of people call (and called) home. Ruins exist alongside modern cities. It’s tricky to see anyone being bored of what it’s got to offer if the moment-to-moment gunplay works for you.

It’s not all bushwhacking. Dotted throughout the map are bivouacs which allow fast travel, switching class, spawning a vehicle, and changing the time of day. Want to craft a meal to tweak your stats? Feel like building a new weapon? This is where that action is at. However, a wise man once said that you only need fast travel if you make ordinary travel boring, and ordinary travel isn’t tedious in Breakpoint. It says something about Ubisoft’s world design that I preferred making my way overland or by helicopter to warp-gating through the bivouac system. The opportunities to get into a little ready trouble are too enticing to pass up; the open world is inviting enough that just walking across it to discover ruins, facilities, and roaming enemies remained engaging 90% of the time.

The Story, Missions, and Characters

The game puts you in the shoes of Ghosts, a tactical elite group of soldiers who were dispatched to interrupt events on Auroa, but get pummelled on entry. The story follows you as Nomad, the leader of a squad who needs to uncover what’s going on and avenge the fallen. The story itself is fairly paint-by-numbers, but how it’s told isn’t. There are two stand-out elements to this:

a) Jon Bernthal and

b) the pick-a-path model of mission design.

Bernthal’s a great actor, bringing vibrancy and brutish physicality to his roles, be they The Punisher or The Accountant. As an antagonist, he’s a convincing one—a man who’s served Uncle Sam and his dark hound, the CIA, for years—until he felt that too many good soldiers died for bad causes. The nuance in Walker’s character is that your Nomad really gets it. You know Walker from before—served together, fought in the trenches side-by-side, and had each other’s back. It’s difficult not to see the frustrations we expect veterans to voice embodied in Walker: soldiers who give their blood in service while the powerful squander people’s freedoms on their petty causes. Walker allies with devils because he’s a devil, but a devil with a purpose: he wants to upend the current cart of privilege and power. We can sympathise with him at the same time as abhorring his methods. This is helped along by the performance capture of Bernthal’s physicality in Walker’s scenes. It makes it clear they chose the right actor for the job.

The pick-a-path model was initially concerning; I thought there was no way they could stick the landing here. The basic thrust is that, once you find your feet, you get the opportunity to tackle Auroa any way you want. You can beeline the main objective, embrace the side mission lifestyle, or go full faction support. And the initial opening of the mission board is startling, especially if you have the DLC, as you’ll get three episodic start points. However, setting that to Episode 1 fixes the pain and starts you on a story where the writers have done a great job of combining discrete vignettes into an overarching narrative that allows you to save the world the way you want.

It is, at its heart, a blend of gameplay with story.

There are some great mission designs and a lot of variability to them: save the enemy deserter, broadcast pirate radio across the island, recon outposts, and generally be a huge pain in the ass to the occupying enemy force. There are specific moments all around the world where you feel like a person on the right side of justice. You might come across a technician being interrogated by the enemy. Your natural inclination is to execute the bad guys, and so you should—never suffer a bully to live. The game’s not shy about promoting the counter-military you’re opposing as an evil PMC, and whether it’s saving scientists or homesteaders, there are frequent moments where you can make a mark on a besieged civilian population against modern-day monsters.

For example, one side mission has you rescue a researcher who’s been doing a little work for the resistance on the side. Her gig is to step up to the plate, to take a more active role in the resistance, and as a part of that, she deliberately puts herself in the crosshairs by broadcasting a resistance message on Radio Freedom. This comes with the burden of you having to protect her while she carries out her mission, but that’s not the interesting part. See, she can never go home again after this moment; it’s a decision she made to do the right thing, and in your actions, you’re sharing the same moral compass for a moment. It would have been far easier for each mission to be, “kill ten guys,” or, “blow up that boat,” but Ubisoft instead chose to integrate deeper messages. Even these side missions have a strong sense of purpose attached to them.

Of course, not every mission is a hit! There was a live event crossover with Rainbow Six where it basically undid the whole point of Ghost Recon. Each crossover mission had an enforced timer by way of a gas mask; this fundamentally removes the tactical and stealth essence of Ghost games, focusing on artificial urgency. These missions provided frustration instead of sparking joy. And some supporting characters are a miss, like the homesteader whose personality is set on ’asshole’ for a good 80% of the game.

But the game preserves Wildlands’ feeling of cruising about with your posse. Your hero Nomad and your AI teammates are customisable. By default, your avatar is male-coded, but the voice work, whether you choose male or female Nomad, is perfection. Your squad are similarly well done; they can be dudebros, the girl strike squad, or whatever mix you prefer. Each teammate fills a role—for example, Fixit has a drone, and Vasily is a sniper. They’re a recon group, a true team, and they’ll fan out to support your position, all while pointing out dangers to you. While they definitely don’t play the game for you, they do contribute to the game’s story—that sense that Nomad’s on a team with other heroes who want to save the people of Auroa. Their presence makes you feel less alone, and that’s hardly a bad thing in a game world that’s constantly trying to murder you. Though, yes: sometimes your AI teammates are dumb as a box of bricks, and it feels like the only times I actually died in this game were because my squad was taking a piss by a tree or something similar instead of shooting the enemy.

The Technicals and Aesthetics

Art direction remains a strong point in this game from 2019; it still looks good in 2025 and plays better. Ubisoft’s focus on ‘looking good’ first struck me way back with the first Assassin’s Creed. They continue the same design work in Breakpoint: while there are games that push higher poly counts or involve advanced ray tracing technologies, the effective use of light and shadow, costumes, and up-close details make this game delicious to look at.

They prove their expertise in rendering sand from Assassin’s Creed isn’t their only trick; the game features forests, beaches, and white-capped mountains, each with elements that imbue the experience with a lived-in feel. Snow clings to your boots, and if you go prone camo, mud coats everything, including you and your weapon. Wind whispers through the grasses, and trees obscure the horizon rather than having pop-in effects that startle you if you get too close. Enemies are distinctive, and vehicle profiles are easily identifiable from a distance, allowing true tactical scenario-based play. It’s more than how good it looks; it’s a fuller package, using visual design to celebrate the gameplay and taking it to a higher level.

It’s worth leaning on how the artistry comes through, despite me not rocking a $6,000 GPU. It also avoids the frame-time stutters of poorly optimised games with shader compilation issues, and yes, Borderlands 4, I’m looking at you. Breakpoint provided me a rock-solid, silky-smooth experience on an AMD Ryzen 7700X with 32GB RAM and an nVidia 4070 Super. This mid-spec PC provides S-tier game performance, with seamless open-world roaming only interrupted by the odd narrative movie or teleport-to-bivouac fast travel moments.

Room-Sized Elephants: RPGification and Monetisation

The first Ghost Recon game I played was Advanced Warfighter on the 360, and man, I can tell you, times have changed. While it’s tempting to be the old man shouting at clouds, there’s both good and bad in the box of change, but vocal launch adopters of Breakpoint found the inclusion of an RPG into their tactical shooter was an unwelcome addition. For some, the ability to shoot a man in the head and for that man to respond realistically—by, say, falling down dead—was a bedrock element of the Ghost Recon tactical shooter experience.

See, Breakpoint embraced a sort of tiered weapon system. Map markers will warn you away from fire that burns if the game feels you’re still needing a little more time with your training wheels on. But crucially, this isn’t The Division 2, where you can dump 34 magazines into a boss and they’ll walk it off. Here in Breakpoint, it’s more of a gate to warn you away from drowning in the deep end. It’s a potentially uncomfortable mechanic, but it allows the freedom the open-world story system provides. Still, we need to acknowledge Breakpoint’s addiction to gear score: if your numbers aren’t big enough, enemies will peel you like a grape. But once you match them, you are back in one-shot kill territory (and arguably, if your skill level is higher than mine, you could ignore the numbers and take a chance, hero). It’s not the bullet-sponge dystopia I feared, but it is a mild brake that stops you from completing the main campaign too quickly.

This gives us an approach somewhere in the middle between the historical, raw tactical shooters of Ghost Recon’sancestors and full-blown looter-shooter RPGs like Borderlands. The TL;DR here is that the gamer who’s frustrated with the bullet-sponge nature of The Division 2 but enjoying its RPG-lite progression will probably find a happy home in Breakpoint. There’s even better news, because Ubisoft actually listened to the purists. You can turn on the game’s optional Ghost Experience mode, where it’s far more visceral and deliberate in its pacing and difficulty. This is, perhaps, Ubisoft’s recognition of what made the previous Ghost games such a cultural touchstone. With Breakpoint, there’s now a way to return yourself to glory through a mode patched in after launch… Or, you can have the numbers-go-up default experience.

Where I get a little more wound around the axle is Ubisoft’s always-online component and microtransaction culture. A single-player game that’s always online is an unnecessary foible foisted on gamers. CEO Yves Guillemot said the goal with Far Cry is to push multiplayer “more predominantly” in future entries, and we fear that with Ghost Recon’s future. We’ve also heard their director of subscriptions saying gamers need to get comfortable with not owning games, which I think we can agree is a remarkably self-serving statement from a guy who’s supposed to push a non-ownership business model. There’s evidence that Ubisoft has been angling for this future since they shipped Breakpoint.

While the monetisation and its trappings exist for shareholder value rather than the gamer, it’s not a spectre that burdened me in my 50+ hours with the game. I had one server maintenance outage, but that was it. The in-game monetisation menus are not very in your face. Unless you’ve got poor impulse control, this isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to constantly impede the Breakpoint experience. If you can park the static and embrace the signal, there’s good stuff to like in this package.

A Testament to Evolution

The major sticking point for some people will be whether they can embrace change in a beloved franchise. Breakpoint asks you to accept that Ghost Recon can be more than one thing—delivering a pure tactical shooter for purists through Ghost Experience mode, or an RPG-lite playground for those who want progression systems alongside their stealth kills.

That flexibility might be Breakpoint’s greatest achievement. In 2019, and without Ghost Experience mode, it felt like compromise. In 2025, it feels like maturity—a game confident enough to offer multiple experiences within one package. Sometimes evolution means addition, not subtraction. I liked Breakpoint because of this testament to how a game can evolve and how an initial impression isn’t always the full story. It’s a game that offers choice—from how you play through to its deep weapon customisation and its inviting open world. It gives you a compelling antagonist, impactful side missions, and a world that feels both fantastical and grounded. Yes, it has its jank, its questionable monetisation choices, and its one or two head-scratching missions. But it also has a lush playground to explore, cool characters, and avoids the bullet-sponge hell of The Division 2.

Maybe you don’t love that always-online component or a store designed to sell boosters and other trash. These facets still exist in the Breakpoint of 2025, but there’s nuance here. There’s a solid story alongside great antagonists. There are heroes on both sides of the conflict and people trying to live in a war zone. Here’s my recommendation: if you wrote off Breakpoint at launch, maybe it’s time for a second look. The game that exists today, patched and refined, might surprise you. The best Ghost Recon game isn’t necessarily the one that never changes—it’s the one that remembers what made the series dope as hell while finding new ways to deliver that tactical murder-hobo satisfaction. If you can embrace the freedom it offers, you might just find a really rewarding shooter in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.

What did you think of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint? Let me know in the comments below. If you’re on team DMR, click Like. And if your favourite problem-solver…

I’m not even really joking here. Forty years separate Rumi, Mira, and Zoey of Huntr/x from Jem and the Holograms, but their core message joins them through time. KPop Demon Hunters is a delight, a deliberately stutter-frame animation spectacle of three women who fight demons with the power of song and sword… who are also championing the right for women to be the heroes of their own story.

And make no mistake, this movie channels Jem in more ways than just its core premise. It’s very reminiscent of the old classic, and we’ll be diving deep into these parallels later—but for now, let’s celebrate the triumph of our feel-good K-pop riot, where women save the world through the power of music. It’s not all about saving the world, though: they also look forward to months of downtime on the couch, which is a message I can get behind. Beyond channelling Jem’s empowerment vibe, it’s also channeling K/DA musically. That virtual band, based on characters from a video game, had similar beats with an undeniable K-pop musical aesthetic.

It’s hard not to want to be this kind of rock star.

Simple Premise, Deeper Meaning

KPop Demon Hunters has a wonderful message hidden behind a simple premise. You won’t have to work too hard to determine what’s going on. The basic plot is that three chosen hunters can use the power of music to create a shield that protects the world from demon invasions. However, the shield is for shit; it’s breaking down, and this means demons need their asses kicked. Our heroes are just the musicians for the task.

It would be easy for the scriptwriters and directors to lean into K-pop music and swords, but they resisted the easy ride. Things get interesting because the plot is really a metaphor for a lot of the confusion we feel in our world. As we grow up, we’re told that if we work hard and do our part, we’ll have a good life—maybe a family, a nice house, good friends, all while wearing success like a badge. But the world’s not actually like that—to quote Galadriel, “they were all of them deceived.” A very small number of ultra-conservative, ultra-wealthy oligarchs are sucking the wealth from the world. No one can afford a house. Education is expensive. People work 80-hour weeks at more than one job and get less than their parents did. KPop Demon Hunters shows the shield of the world is our false expectations. It doesn’t work.

The film uses demons and shields to show what we know to be true: that ‘forces beyond’ are influencing us, and not in a nice or kind way. But it also shows that we can find allies in people who aren’t like us and are maybe on the wrong side of history—and these allies are just the kinds of people who can help shift the balance.

Character & Growth: The Trio and Ji-noo

The character work in this film is excellently done, focusing on two key concepts:

a) That you can make terrible mistakes that feel like they define you (but there’s a road back), and

b) That we all find ourselves displaced from what the world expects us to be, but it’s more than okay to be who we are.

Ultimately, difference is a superpower that can save the world.

We follow our three hunters: Rumi (voiced by Arden Cho), the notional head, centre-stage performer, and lead vocalist of Huntr/x. She’s a self-assessed misfit, the woman all her fans want to be like, all while she wants to be anyone but herself. Then there’s Mira (voiced by May Hong)—the rebellious one who uses not caring as a shield to protect herself from caring too much. And finally, Zoey (voiced by Ji-young Yoo), the people-pleaser, the nervous and uncertain one who wants everyone to succeed but never focuses on herself.

Throughout the movie’s 1h35m runtime, we see these three were fated to be the demon hunters, part sword saint and part celestial musician, but they get an unexpected gift: they became besties. However, the bonds of friendship were never really tested until the events of the film. Prior to this most recent demonic invasion, Huntr/x could do nothing but win because of who they were and the positions they were in. The movie’s main conceit is that all of them were living a slightly different flavour of lie. As KPop Demon Hunters unfolds, we see them hiding things from themselves as much as from each other. This imperils not just their friendship, but the whole world. And we need the world: not having it would suck. The film’s compelling narrative arc is one where they need to remember who they are and who they need to be. I’m sure we can all remember times in our past where being true to our nature conflicted with our perceptions of being accepted, but the biggest lesson we learn is that it’s not really acceptance if we need to be someone we’re not. This is the lesson the movie broadcasts to 11.

This theme extends to our antagonist, or perhaps anti-hero: Ji-noo (voiced by Ahn Hyo-seop), the mastermind behind musical rival band The Saja Boys. Ji-noo’s done some bad shit, man, like super bad, and has been allied with the demons ever since. He’s made an actual devil’s bargain: “I will corrupt the world if you can make me forget the evil I’ve done.” It’s an interesting test; we all may have done things we consider to be wrong, and making amends is much harder than walking away. Ji-noo’s quest isn’t to undo his terrible wrong, because it was in the past. It’s to use the power of forgetting to undo the guilt and trauma he relives daily, to ease away from the constant inner voice berating him for all he’s incapable of being. But—and avoiding spoilers!—the actual test is to accept that we’re all fallible, that we all stumble and even fall, and it’s possible to be more than our past errors.

It might even be possible to turn those mistakes into something positive, to get out from who we were and into who we need to be... and perhaps save the world (and ourselves in the process).

The Deceptive Mentor & Cultural Nuances

Adding another layer to this narrative of self-acceptance is the demon hunters’ mentor. She has a very small role in the film but a big one in their lives, a sort of we-have-Miyagi-at-home character. She exemplifies the problem with acceptance, because her entire mission has been to hide Rumi’s secret and provide a path out where Rumi can be done with her checkered past. She’s the older mentor we want to trust, but wearing a divisive hat: she is putting forward the old-school idea that difference is a hindrance and must be stamped out. This rigid one-way-to-succeed mentality perfectly sets the stage for the film’s sharp critique of the K-pop industry itself. It’s through the trio’s trust in her and eventual self-discovery moments that allows us celebrate their difference. We realise that just because someone is older doesn’t make them wiser, and our own paths have value.

The Korean media production element comes through strongly here. In Korea, entertainment companies manufacture stars—I’ve heard stories of the likes of SM or YG picking tweens and training them for years (ref: 1, 2, 3, 4) like a sort of national Mickey Mouse Club. The film uses this as a perfect platform for how demons might actually influence media, because the system’s already set up for manipulation. If some bands are picked to be big (like Blackpink), there are only a few that get to lead the charge. This creates the backdrop tapestry the film leverages, where Huntr/x are pitted against The Saja Boys in a musical fight to the death. We see this not-so-subtle hierarchy used to great effect; while we only hear music from Huntr/x and The Saja Boys, there is a ranking of other bands fans can vote for on their phones. It’s more a competition like the demon-invasion version of America’s Got Talent than the organic music experience most Westerners know. While it would be unlikely for such a thing to occur in the West outside of reality TV, it feels quite believable in Korea if, say, you were a group of demons who could influence the media.

Visuals, Themes, and The Anti-Message of Music

In terms of how the movie is shot, it’s channeling the Spider-Verse movies with their stepped animation style. You know how the Spider-Verse films make every frame feel like a comic panel come to life? They do this by animating characters on ‘twos’ (every other frame) while keeping the background animated on ‘ones’ (every frame). KPop Demon Hunters does that, but with the glossy aesthetic of a K-pop music video. When Rumi draws her sword, the frames linger just long enough to let you appreciate the vibe of both the badassery and the emotion behind it.

(Side note: it’s a trick that’s also been used in Predator: Killer of Killers, which is worth checking out if you haven’t, but we’re not here to review a Predator movie).

It’s hard to highlight a single scene of excellence as the movie is non-stop from the get-go. The colour is vibrant, sure, but I think it’s actually how colour is combined with animation techniques to let us understand what characters are feeling. It’s this depth of emotion that comes through; it’s less about how badass the trio of demon hunters are—and they are! They kick ass—and more about the depth of feeling they (and The Saja Boys) uncover. It’s a message to the audience that it’s okay to be yourself and feel your own feelings.

This film also boldly showcases things I suspect young women want to see or hear. For example, it’s okay to sit around in your bathrobe all day if that’s what you want. With popular media emphasising ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ body proportions in women, it’s also tremendously refreshing to see a movie that celebrates eating what you want, when you want, without any body shaming or external judgment. If you’re watching book reviews on TikTok at 2 a.m. wondering if you’ll ever find your people, this film says your weirdness isn’t a bug—it’s the feature that saves the world. This isn’t just accidental positivity; it’s a core part of the film’s ultimately wholesome and empowering message.

It also does great work in channeling its Korean heritage when it comes to the demons and their evil. It’s far less Western Biblical Etch A Sketch and more into the forces that shape our thoughts and desires, often hinting at internal struggles or societal pressures rather than purely external, monstrous evil. The demons are rendered in a colourful art style, despite being a horde of slavering monsters who want the souls inside all of us. There are two standouts: Derpy, a huge tiger, and Sussie, a supernatural magpie. Derpy, cursed with being simple, is trying to fulfil his role of guardian spirit. The tiger is paired with the clever Sussie, a supernatural magpie who is cursed with Derpy. While notionally on Team Demon, the duo is another reminder that all is not what it seems, and that people are less black and white than many would prefer. As the film beautifully illustrates, all of us contain legions.

KPop Demon Hunters is a celebration of justice, but it’s also a musical. It’s not just about the phat beats; it’s all about the message. Huntr/x believe that to win the competition, they must create an ‘angry’ song. But they’re a bubblegum latte group; the track’s overt messages about domination and combat are a quicksand they’re sinking into. Because they fear the demon invasion so much, they become more demonic when combating it. Fighting fire with fire is totally a strategy, but they work out that the ends don’t justify the means. Remember, this film is about being true to yourself. Huntr/x can’t win against evil by being a more tuneful evil.

Ancient History and Timeless Messaging

I promised we’d revisit Jem and the Holograms. Jem was revolutionary for the 80s, and KPop Demon Hunters is revolutionary for right now. It’s suggesting that your K-pop obsession and your anxiety about the state of the world aren’t separate things.

The old show and this new movie share epic parallels in their treatment of female empowerment through entertainment and heroism, despite being separated by nearly four decades. I was an unashamed fan of Jem back when it was on TV; it deserves a reboot better than 2015’s 4.2 trash fire. Hopefully the path it paved for KPop Demon Hunters will be returned in kind, as KPop Demon Hunters shows we want these stories as much as we always did. Let’s dig in.

Both centre on young women who lead double lives as entertainers and protectors. Jem’s Jerrica Benton transforms into a glamorous rock star while secretly fighting corporate villains and personal enemies, using holographic technology to create dope illusions. KPop Demon Hunters follows K-pop superstars Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who balance their lives in the spotlight with their secret identities as demon hunters, using their powers to protect the world from demons. Unlike Jem’s Synergy, their power is not technological but magical, rooted in a generations-old lineage of female shamans who use music to fight evil.

They both share the concept of music as both performance art and weapon. Jem’s holographic concerts were more than entertainment, and KPop’s trio uses their musical platform as cover for their supernatural protection gig. Both shows celebrate music as both artistic expression and transformative force, literally changing reality. Jem’s core messages are about integrity, philanthropy, and found family. The show championed the idea that success should be used for good, promoting kindness and teamwork over cutthroat rivalry. KPop Demon Hunters’ themes are more complex, delving into the idea of fighting not just external enemies but also inner demons. The film’s feel-good message is that your past does not define you, and that it’s okay to not fit neatly into a box. It’s a story that values friendship and authenticity.

Both celebrate a powerful counter-narrative to traditional subservient female roles, but use different map software to get there. I’d argue that Jem pioneered the concept of female musicians as aspirational figures who could be more than glamorous. The show tackled substantive social issues like homelessness, drug addiction, and disaster relief, but still kept the charm offensive on high volume. Jerrica/Jem showed you could be successful, caring, and heroic without sacrificing femininity or artistic integrity. Back to our timeline, KPop Demon Hunters has quickly become Netflix’s most-watched movie. It would be fair to say its positivity is a message the global audience wants to hear. It blends aspirational elements of K-pop with the supernatural. It’s offering a similar message to young audiences: just like Jem, its heroes are both rockstars and protectors of their fans. It says that heroes are real, more than a product, and better than a brand. It’s a message we want to believe, sure, but it’s a trope we want to be.

Remember when I talked about the ultraconservatives? Both Jem and the Holograms and KPop Demon Hunters absolutely reject the conservative-agenda passive roles for young women. Jem was revolutionary back in the 80s for daring to suggest its female hero owned her own record company, made executive decisions, and solved problems rather than waiting for rescue. Jerrica wasn’t just talented—she was an entrepreneur, technologically savvy, and decisive.

KPop Demon Hunters celebrates its ancestor with heroes who are badass demon hunters, facing existential threats while maintaining careers and protecting the world. They’re a team, a group who work together to solve common problems. But they also represent young women who don’t have to choose between success and heroism, between artistic achievement and protective power.

There’s a hidden nuance here. The evolution from Jem to KPop Demon Hunters also suggests a changing world. Jem was distinctly American, rooted in 1980s rock culture and Western beauty standards. KPop Demon Hunters taps into the global phenomenon of K-pop, acknowledging how youth culture has become increasingly international and how Asian entertainment has gained worldwide influence. K/DA celebrated this in a similar way, using a Western game property set on an international stage of music and bombast.

Both Jem and KPop Demon Hunters get it: young audiences crave protagonists who are multidimensional. We want complex heroes who excel in multiple spheres. Not just performers or just heroes, but people who have a day job while doing the right thing on the side. They offer a version of Femininity 2.0: ambition, talent, technological proficiency, and protective instincts. They—rightly—reject that women must be limited to supportive or decorative roles. They pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.

They also show an eternal appeal of this formula. From Jem’s holographic rock shows to KPop Demon Hunters’ supernatural K-pop adventures, we’ve got irrefutable proof that audiences hunger for stories where young women wield both cultural influence and the literal power to shape our world.

Final Thoughts

KPop Demon Hunters has a wholesome message so many people need to hear, regardless of their points of difference. I’d argue that especially young people—not just women—need to hear it. There’s a lot of messaging in the world from ultraconservatives who control media, employment prospects, schooling, and so on that are trying to continually define humanity to a small subset of its true potential. KPop Demon Hunters refutes this; it’s a film that’s fine with you being half of one thing, half of another, and totally yourself. It’s also fine with you spending three months on the couch with your besties if that’s the life you want to live.

This isn’t just another believe-in-yourself kids’ film. It’s asking harder questions. Can you accept that your friends might be struggling with things they haven’t told you? Can you fight for someone who’s made terrible choices? And for anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t quite fit: what if your weirdness isn’t something to overcome, but something the world needs? I keep thinking about how Rumi wanted to not be herself, but her fans wanted to be her. How many of us are living some version of that? KPop Demon Hunters suggests we’re all looking the wrong way. It’s saying that we shouldn’t be someone else’s version of perfect.

It leaves the audience with a question: would you be happy to be allied with people you don’t look or sound like, to live in a world where difference is celebrated? It’s an innate challenge, because most people are happy with their point of difference, but sometimes get angry or lash out at alternative forms of expression. KPop Demon Hunters knows there’s a little Mira in all of us. The movie is, perhaps, suggesting that we’re partly to blame for where we find ourselves, and that we need to accept an imperfect world if we want to be our imperfect perfect selves in it. It’s a film that trusts the audience to catch the deeper themes while still delivering epic sword battles set to a boss-level bass track.

What did you think of KPop Demon Hunters? If you have the soundtrack on repeat, click Like. And if you are part of the fossil record…

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Weaving can really manifest cinema as an extradimensional space when she’s not mishandled. Eenie Meanie’sdirector, Shawn Simmons, is a man who understands this; he doesn’t just allow her signature youth-meets-Australia energy to power on through. Simmons broadcasts Weaving.

Some directors seem afraid of Weaving’s intensity. Not Simmons. He understands that she, being Australian, knows how to swear with the best of the Commonwealth, but that’s not the only thing that makes her screen presence unforgettable. In Eenie Meanie, it’s because she’s able to convince us that she doesn’t know all the answers or how to get to the end of this ride. She’s really unsure about who she should be with or who to trust. These are genuine problems that trouble the best of us, but with enough time on Earth, we’re able to guess with more certainty. Weaving’s 33 years old, but her Edie in Eenie Meanie needs her to channel a past self. So, sure: we get the swearing and the patter, but we also get someone who’s trying to fake it until they make it. But Edie’s only really faking out herself.

This is the Samara Weaving Effect. We marked it in Ready or Not, but seeing it again shows us she’s a leading actress who will dominate Hollywood. My prediction: Eenie Meanie’s the pivot where she’ll transition into the A-lister territory we know she’s good for. But we’ve all seen amazing actors trapped in terrible movies, right? Thankfully, Weaving isn’t carrying dead weight here. Eenie Meanie’s built around what I’m calling a heist of consequences.

This is where things get really interesting.

A Heist of Consequences

So we’ve got our lead, but Eenie Meanie is more than Weaving: it’s a heist movie where bad shit happens to maybe-good people. Which, I guess, means it’s probably not really a heist movie in the traditional sense. While it’s certainly a genre mash-up of getaway flicks like Baby Driver or Drive and heist movies like The Italian Job, where it brings home its point of difference is in how this heist isn’t one where clever people get to the end and swagger off screen.

A traditional heist movie promises us a few crucial elements. A mark, sure, but we also expect a clever plot—one where our heroes are almost undone but get away through bombast, smarts, or planning. Eenie Meanie does all of this, but then it ties it up with a Consequences Bow™. Characters in this movie cleave true to their nature, but there’s also a world reacting around them; if they care for others, that might cost, and if they’re stupid, that’s definitely going to cost. Just when we think our heroes are going to make it out in one piece, the consequences train departs the station, and shit really starts to unravel. The flick gives a late-stage let’s-call-it-a-fourth-act closing that extends the standard heist formula with a new premise: crime is messy, and the people doing it are criminals. Much as we’d like this to end like Ocean’s 11, it’s far more The Hurt Locker in how it shows the cost to its characters.

It’s this subversion of expectations that stops us from playing with our phone as we get to the end. It’s no longer predictable or ordinary. We feel as if Edie and John deserve to make it out because of what they’ve been through, but this just reminds us it’s nice to want things.

That doesn’t stop the fun, though, and I don’t want you to think this movie has a brutal ending that’ll make you want to end it all. The close is, ultimately, buoyant, and to get us there, we get well-done action scenes. The driving feels visceral. I mentioned Baby Driver and Drive before, and that’s the vibe delivered directly to your brain stem. We’ve got big American muscle cars, police chases, stunts, and outlandish drifting that would make Tokyo Driftblush. The framing of Edie while she’s driving shows real inertia through how her long, curly locks flow about the cabin. We know Weaving is going through some Top Gun G-forces to pull this off, and while we suspect there’s some level of stunt work at play, it convinces us that she’s really hauling ass in these machines.

I’m going to level with you: I briefly thought about importing a Camaro after watching this, then remembered how expensive gas is in New Zealand.

Anyway! It’s not just Weaving who excels here; Karl Glusman’s John has serious kinetic energy when he’s doing his action moments on screen. It builds an expectation of its own: he may be about to do something stupid, but also cool, whenever he does something stupid and cool.

The Human Cost: Relationships and Redemption

This is a story where two young lovers, Weaving’s Edie and Karl Glusman’s John, have had a bad slice of life served to them. They had each other, right up until they didn’t. It’s as much of a make-up flick as it is one where we work out that in order to go to heaven, someone needs to die.

I don’t want to go into too much spoiler potential, as the recovered-footage relationship between Edie and John is worth experiencing firsthand. But Edie trusts John for reasons that aren’t apparent at the start; we initially consider her a reclamation case, a person who’s just fallen for the wrong guy, but through the movie’s events, we discover that John is right in so many ways. Their relationship makes an ideal kind of sense.

The use of Andy Garcia is particularly poignant, not because he’s everyone’s favourite mobster, but because, partnered with Weaving’s role, they both get to answer the real question that crime asks: what’s the price, and who’s going to pay? Each starts on a different side of the argument, where Garcia’s Nico is employing Edie for that fabled one last job. Except it’s not a job to get rich; it’s a job to stop Nico from killing John because John’s a moron.

We get to see some S-tier performance from Garcia in the final scenes of the movie, leveraging his abilities more than his star power. There’s an acting partnership between Weaving and Garcia in these final moments that shows us that the people in this movie have difficult, complicated lives, and yet each understands the cost of living how they do. Nico and Edie start the movie as employer and driver, respectively. They finish the movie much more as equals—not in the sense that Edie becomes a crime lord, but in the sense that they both learned something ineffable about the people closest to them. All of Nico’s lifelong wisdom pales in the face of Edie’s lived experiences, and she ends up being a mentor to him in a way we never expected. And the lesson for Nico is a hard one, but he accepts it—because he is, at the heart of the matter, a man coloured by a certain set of principles.

The True Prize

While the movie has superb consequences, this goes both ways—while there are heavy losses on the team we’re rooting for, the ultimate scene before the credits roll is one that answers Edie’s largest boggle: Is family good? Is it worth it?

See, she’s distilled from proper A-grade trailer trash. Edie’s history is riddled with mistakes, but those mistakes aren’t solely hers. She’s trying to make things right, or at least, to do the right things. The film’s opening introduces us to her family. Later in the movie, we find them missing in action, until we’re reintroduced to her father. He’s moved on, just found another family to call his own—one without the problems he was principally responsible for creating in the first place. Edie’s journey has involved foster care, gifting her with an insecurity about who to trust or even like, and what she really wants is someone who isn’t trying to use her or sell her. That’s what family means to her.

Her prize at the end isn’t a zillion dollars like Ocean’s 11 delivered. But she gets what she needs, if not what she wants.

I kept thinking about this movie after the credits rolled. It’s a powerful, visceral, and ultimately deeply human story that uses the shell of a heist film to ask profound questions about loyalty, consequence, and what truly makes a family. Eenie Meanie isn’t just a great watch; it’s a film that sticks around in the back of your mind. If you want a heist movie that respects your intelligence, watch Eenie Meanie. If you want to see Samara Weaving cement her place as Hollywood’s next big A-lister, watch Eenie Meanie. And if you want a film that’ll make you text your actual family afterward—yeah, you know where I’m going with this. This isn’t just entertainment; it demands we assess our lives with the same gusto Edie does and perhaps makes us grateful that we’ve walked a different path. Easy recommendation.

Let me know in the comments below what you thought of Eenie Meanie. If this review has convinced you to buy a Subaru WRX, click Like! And if you’d also…

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Okay, we all know the legend. Sword in the stone? Check. Excalibur? Well, same thing, but double check. Round table? Check. But plot twist: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword minimises its shared-legend DNA in favour of a more grounded story that makes everyday lives the most important things worth fighting for. Guy Ritchie’s take on Arthurian legend might just be the version you’ve been looking for.

Prior to seeing this 2017 movie, I had no idea who or what a Charlie Hunnam was, and this put him squarely on my radar, alongside cementing the film in my annual re-watch rota. Hunnam radiates King Arthur energy, but lensed through a Guy Ritchie prism. He’s a King Arthur for a different age, a hero rooted in the streets, not just the castles. He’s the king who will fight for orphans with the same strength his legendary counterpart fought for causes. This Arthur is the one you can rely on. The man who will die to save those who work in a brothel, because to do anything else would be a crime against his nature. Hunnam was born to wield Excalibur.

The Guy Ritchie Touch: Tone, Style, and Hunnam

There’s a different legend going around Hollywood. It told of a six-movie plan starting with Legend of the Sword. Warner Bros. believed in a Captain Insano dream where Legend of the Sword effectively served as the pilot for the various offshoots. To strongly torture an analogy, this was the sword in the stone of success. While we’ll come back to this, for now just remember this film was designed to set up King Arthur as a sort of Iron Man in the new shared universe. Separate movies would establish the rest of the Round Table.

All that sounds great, but the cornerstone of getting audiences telling their friends about a movie is not confusing the shit out of them. The trailers for Legend of the Sword might have triggered self-harm warnings at Warner, because it presents as an epic, a movie of fantasy-verged spectacle, and while it is totally that, it’s also a Guy Ritchie movie. That means British Gangsta™ talk instead of the stylised ye olde timey language audiences might expect.

When Uther is heroic when asking his brother to hold the crown, and hold it steady, we know we’re in the right theatre. But if someone vibes on screen later and asks, “All right, guv?” you might think you’ve dropped a tab and walked into your own trip. If you’re primed for it, fine, but the trailers did little to prepare audiences for Ritchie’s signature style.

Me? I was charmed and delighted by the tone. It’s fresh to see the heroes of Arthurian England acting like everyday British instead of royalty, but some people were for sure turned off by the… let’s call it a less formal take. The movie is a clash of tone; the formality of Bedevire, Vortigern, and Uther is starkly contrasted with the gangster vibe of Arthur, Wet Stick, Percival, and Back Lack. But it’s precisely this tone that gives Legend of the Sword such unique energy.

For example, there’s a wonderful backstory sequence where Arthur and the lads are recounting the events of the day to Michael McElhatton’s Jack’s Eye. This is a montage back and forth of plain talk, gutter talk, and high-brow talk that tells a story of how Arthur’s suddenly become noticed by the wrong people. Or… there’s another scene where Arthur’s crew are extorting Mike for… let’s call them tariffs. The back and forth between the gang is almost a polished pattersong.

If you’re in the mood to be Guy Ritchie’d—maybe you’ve come off another Charlie Hunnam crossover, like The Gentlemen movie—and want to see his take on Arthurian legend, this is the movie that delivers. And Hunnam’s the perfect vessel for this vision. Imagine this scene: he must agree to be sacrificed, because it will save those dearest to him. Arthur goes… well, perhaps not willingly to slaughter, but he’s content that his life is worth less than all those who would die should he not bend the knee. It’s humbling, but in his humility he understands this is one moment for him that buys everyone he loves a future. Ritchie’s touch portrays the people who needed saving not as ‘the kingdom’ or ‘the nobles’, but rather prostitutes. The ordinary. The overlooked and the downtrodden. It’s still heroism, but it’s a smaller form of it, for all the sacrificial price is the same.

Ritchie excels at telling stories about people we might actually meet, as opposed to heroes with capes.

Visual Spectacle & Lore Reimagined

The production values in Legend of the Sword are outstanding. This is a lavishly produced movie, where no expense was spared—be it on the sound or visual stages. The 2017 special effects still stand up today. The set pieces ooze charm or villainy depending on whether they’re castle throne rooms or vile grottoes, and the nasty monster Syren is, indeed, fucking nasty.

However, spectacle alone can’t carry a movie; this is a thing the MCU is learning as audiences bore of sparkle when substituted for storytelling. It’s good it’s Guy Ritchie at the control panel here, because he’s a maestro of using effects as a storytelling mechanism.

There is a sequence when The Mage gets a snake to bite the would-be king. Arthur goes on a venom-fuelled high, and during his ride to the castle, he sees the dryads that live in trees with the same clarity that he sees the evil that burns in the hearts of men. The special effects are sublime, sure, but there is a subtle undertone here where Ritchie’s direction uses this bombast to show that the Blacklegs are evil wankers and not to be trusted—but we see it through Arthur’s eyes. Lesser directors would install a character to exposition this to us.

However, Ritchie’s brilliance is also a pitfall. The movie was confusing for people used to a more traditional Arthurian take. Lorraine Bruce as Syren, with Eline Powell and Hermione Corfield as backing Syrens, didn’t appear in the traditional legend. Neither, I believe, did the axe-wielding creature that Vortigern becomes. Legend of the Sword plays fast and loose with the familiar tale, instead giving us the what-if version where Arthur was raised in a brothel and ran a street gang. This is absolutely going to knock people right off their perch if they don’t know what they’re in for.

For all that Ritchie’s deviation from established canon can be a misstep, there are moments of brilliance in it too. The thing I really liked was how Merlin was effectively deleted. We’ve got the sword he handed to Uther—the very sword that goes into the stone and eventually becomes Arthur’s—but for all intents and purposes, this film’s version of Merlin has been Raptured away. While he’s a figure of import in the legends, Ritchie’s choice here makes Legend of the Sworda fundamentally more grounded movie, where wizards can’t cruise in and save the day. The Mage in this movie is clearly young, an apprentice in an order on the run, so she can’t magic the pain away either. Ritchie’s take swaps Merlin, a legendary miracle-worker, for a more plausible story where the strength found in the hearts of men gets to shine brighter than magic.

Character & Thematic Depth – Heroism, Humour, and Flaws

This gives us a better lens of heroism to appreciate Hunnam’s Arthur. Sure, he’s an action hero, but he wrestles with destiny as much as the sword. That’s the premise of the movie—the idea that a man, backed by his posse, can achieve great things if fate puts its finger on the scale.

While Hunnam owns the mantle of a leader of the down-and-out, a true Born King of the people, it wouldn’t be as special a movie without the side characters. Ritchie didn’t skimp on his homework; he understood the part of the assignment where the Knights belong to a Round Table. It’s a team effort, and this is shown to great effect in moments like the powerful subplot between Bleu Landau’s Blue, Neil Maskell’s Back Lack, and Jude Law’s Vortigern. Through the lens of spoiler-free reviews, we can talk about how a father, a son, and a tyrant king wrestle with words in a seedy tavern while the city burns. There is such strength in Landau’s performance, in his anxiousness to be strong while his father faces certain death, because to be weak would be to invite that fate all the faster. The movie celebrates all the cast’s heroism in similar ways—whether it’s The Mage coming to a land where she’s hunted, or Bedevire’s becoming a blacksmith to hide in plain sight. It’s a subtle layer to the entire film that ensures no small parts. Every screen minute is well spent.

And the film is funny. Like, laugh-out-loud moments—for instance, when Arthur is sent by The Mage and Bedevire to the lost lands. We get Ritchie’s signature voiceover technique to show contrasting perspectives—which brings us closer to the people experiencing the trauma.

Humour isn’t limited to the heroes, also giving the villains a little humanity. There is a moment where Arthur makes an escape from the long arm of the law by diving off a cliff and into a river. It’s a long way down! Suicide, surely. While the Blacklegs up top are wondering what to do, one of them nudges the shoulder of another to ’fake out’ push him over. It’s such a quintessentially Commonwealth form of hazing, beautifully done and with Ritchie’s show-not-tell style.

Still, for all of Ritchie’s success with male characters, Legend of the Sword lacks strong women—much like his other films. There is The Mage—who is awesome—but as a director he can’t help but require her being saved at one point. Maggie is a cool character, but easily disarmed by Vortigern. The prostitutes at the brothel are powerful in their own way, but used primarily as a vehicle to show Arthur’s heroism and his focus on standing up for people regardless of their station, not as people with agency in their own right. Catia (Vortigern’s daughter) is a paper-thin character, as is Igraine (Uther’s wife and Arthur’s mother). Ritchie’s big blind spot is that he normally makes a boy’s own adventure, with one signature strong female lead. It’s Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s The Mage in Legend of the Sword, just as it was Aubrey Plaza’s Sarah in Operation Fortune or Kaya Scodelario’s Susie Glass in The Gentlemen TV series. This lack of strong women is such a missed opportunity in Legend of the Sword; since Ritchie edited the Arthurian legend wholesale, what was to stop one of the Knights of the Round Table being female? Why did The Mage need saving? Could Aidan Gillen’s Bill have been a female archer? This isn’t meant to take away from Gillen’s performance, which was funny and powerful in equal measure, but imagine for a moment if the boy’s own adventure had a woman or two along for the journey, rather than relegated to set dressing or people to be saved.

For all that, Legend of the Sword has serious class. The fight scenes are epic. The magic is baller. There is mysticism and heroism at every turn, but also great concepts like friendship being important—especially the kind of longer-term friendship that you can build a kingdom on.

It’s good with the character arc for Arthur, too. It would be insufficient if he remained a gangster on the throne. We’d love him to remember the life lessons he learned along the way, but to be a good king, you need to be something more. There is a powerful moment where The Mage is providing some mentoring advice to Arthur. She asks him if he saw everything he needed to see when he had a vision. Of course he didn’t—her point is that he looked away. She tells him that everyone—even her—would look away, but that’s the difference between a man and a king. A king can’t look away. It’s a fairly brutal and thematically important moment where she’s giving him the true talk—hiding his skills and pretending to be a dropout won’t cut it. To be king, he must be kingly, which is different from Vortigern’s tyranny, or Arthur’s existing… let’s call it ‘leadership style’.

The Box Office Bomb & Legacy

I promised we’d go over the Hollywood legend, that mystic tale of a six-movie shared universe built off the back of royalty-free legends. You might be thinking, if this movie is so good, why haven’t I seen it? Why didn’t it get sequels? Well, you’ve hit on one of Hollywood’s most spectacular franchise faceplants. Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword was supposed to set up a legion of sequels and spinoffs in the same universe, but the plan failed at the first hurdle.

As I mentioned before, the crucial part of any long-term movie series is ticket sales. Sure, critical reception is important, but only as a driver to box office success. Sequels don’t get made on the hope that cult status will arrive overnight; it’s why it took us so long to get a sequel to The Accountant.

See, the ambition Warner displayed is a clear indication their exec suite were collectively off their meds. They believed that the six-movie plan, with Legend of the Sword effectively serving as the pilot for the various offshoots, was the key to success. They were basically trying to create their own Avengers-style universe but with Knights of the Round Table. The first movie would establish King Arthur—remember, he’s Iron Man here—and separate movies would give us the other major characters like Lancelot. It led to this 2017 film feeling slightly… incomplete. Much of the work that Legend of the Sword did in setting up spinoffs led to an absence of major characters—like Lancelot and Guinevere. They deliberately left out those big names so they could have their own solo films later, but it all burned up on re-entry. King Arthur grossed $148.7 million worldwide against a budget of $175 million, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs of the decade. The film opened to just $15.4 million in its first weekend, a truly brutal start for what was meant to be a franchise-starter.

It’s possible—even likely—that the catastrophic failure of Legend of the Sword to find its audience was in a combination of being fast and loose with the lore, missing characters, and the slightly misplaced tone. Any one of these you could overlook, but three in a row—especially when none of this was made clear in the trailers—meant that moviegoers who weren’t me didn’t jive with the film.

It was a clear victim of mismarketing (leading to audience dissonance) coupled with, dare I say, Ritchie’s hubris. He promised the world, and while the movie is excellent, it’s not the movie that was marketed. It doesn’t fit cleanly into a genre niche, and that’s fine for a film with a smaller budget, but something on this scale needs to have broad market appeal to greenlight sequels. As far as the film itself? It’s a great movie and stands alone without the next promised films. It serves as an interesting post-mortem on a hard marketing failure, almost like the Arthurian version of Firefly. If Fox hadn’t bungled the marketing of Whedon’s cult classic, could we have had more than a single season of an excellent show? The same thing holds true here: we’ve got a great movie, but with a lower budget, better marketing, or better expectations management, we might have had more. In the end, we’re left to wonder what might have been instead. The film had some genuinely interesting ideas buried beneath all the studio meddling and reshoots.

But Warner Bros.’ grand plan for an Arthurian cinematic universe died faster than you could say ’Excalibur.’

Drawing Sword from Stone

Is Legend of the Sword a perfect movie? Hell, no. It has its flaws, particularly in its handling of female characters. But is it a bad movie? Absolutely not. It’s a unique, stylish, and incredibly entertaining take on a classic legend, filtered through the unmistakable lens of Guy Ritchie. If you’re willing to set aside your preconceptions of King Arthur and embrace a gritty, often humorous, street-level epic, then I highly recommend giving this film a watch.

Fans of Ritchie, particularly his work on things like The Gentlemen or The Man from U.N.C.L.E., will love Legend of the Sword. Story lovers who are tired of the eternal nonsense love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere will be delighted that this movie tosses all that in a woodchipper. And those who wondered why Merlin didn’t just save everyone will love the mages-are-hunted take.

Let me know in the comments below if you’ve seen Legend of the Sword and what you thought. Did you love the Ritchie take, or were you hoping for something more traditional? If you were delighted to see David Beckham embrace thug life, click Like. And if you’re just the person who loves dredging up the maybes of yesteryear…

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The core idea of Novocaine is, “What if not feeling pain was a huge problem that could get you killed… right up until you needed it to save the love of your life?” Jack Quaid is the titular character, a mild-mannered bank manager who finds his purpose in a blood-and-gore rampage through the city to save Amber Midthunder’s Sherry.

Let’s park for the moment whether Sherry needs saving, because Nate’s had an entire life of being sidelined, making him feel this is His Moment™. Novocaine is a riotous delight of a one-man-army flick, but it’s far more Kick-Ass than John Wick. While Novocaine owns the one-man-army shtick, its thematic purpose is different from Wick’s. Wick demands justice for a terrible injustice. Novocaine demands delight and punch-the-sky moments as Nate tries to save Sherry, each action moment in service to who he is: a decent, good man who wants to do the right thing and, for once in his life, isn’t the nerd who’s picked on, the kid who’s never chosen for team sports because he might die. He recognises his own death is quite likely, and it’s this recognition of the inevitability of fate that makes us cheer for him all the more.

Nate Caine: Accidental Hero

Our hero, Nate Caine, is special. He has Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA). This is different from Dave Lizewski in Kick-Ass, who ends up with nerve damage that gives him a higher pain tolerance. Nate literally doesn’t feel pain. None at all, which creates a life full of lethal hazards like, say, chewing off your own tongue while trying to eat solid foods. But it also lets him reach into a deep fryer to retrieve a gun, and if you think this talent will come in handy, you’re ready to buy what Novocaine is selling.

See, Novocaine is joining the ranks of movies like The Accountant, where difference is celebrated, not marginalised. CIPA is a unique condition, but it sets the stage for Nate’s extraordinary transformation.

Jack Quaid absolutely nails the lead role here. He’s the guy we’re rooting for: bullied as a kid, he’s become a decent, kind adult who just wants to live a life like everyone else. You know what I’m talking about, because you’ve been raised in the same world: Nate wants love, friends, and happiness. He doesn’t want to be scared of sharp objects and accidentally bleeding to death from an unfelt razor cut. Despite the school of bruising knocks that life’s turned out to be for him, we can see the cut of his cloth in how he deals with those bank customers who need a little extra help. He’s clever and principled, a man who sees the person behind the paperwork, and we get a glimpse of the hero he might become as we meet him at work.

Still, Novocaine would be a terrible movie if it was an hour and fifty minutes of bureaucratic victories. Enter: bank robbers. The first time Nate needs to ’stand up’ is when criminals turn up to knock over the vault. Sherry’s in danger, and he tries to hero up… and gets knocked the fuck down. But he won’t stay down after her kidnapping; he leaves, and in desperation, steals a cop car. Each step he takes is more severe than the last, from high-speed chases to murder in self-defence, each brick of criminality laid on the inevitability of his desire to save Sherry. It’s here he discovers an untapped well of heroism within him that allows him to go one step further at each choice point.

The Audience’s Complicity in Pain

There is genuine charm in how the movie shows us pain through Nate’s eyes. He doesn’t really understand it, more puzzled by injury than anything else. However, we in the audience are very familiar with pain, so when we see him experience something gruesome, we involuntarily wince along with every blow. And yet… we can’t look away. We’re waiting for the next gruesome moment because it gets Nate closer to finding Sherry. Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen make us accomplices in their quest to hurt Nate, because we know the more pain Nate has, the closer he is to winning.

In other news, we’re all sickos.

A good example: there is a scene where Nate is being tortured. He’s got to convince the torturer that he’s really suffering. But Nate doesn’t really know what that’s like, so as the torture progresses, he says things like, “Wow, that really sucks.” This serves a dual purpose: alongside us being unable to look away, we feel excused for going along with the pain train because Nate isn’t actually hurt. He may be injured, but we’ve found some moral wiggle room to enjoy the movie through, a sub-clause that allows us to laugh at the horrific moments that turn this into a true action comedy.

If it were just torture porn, that would be almost as bad as bureaucratic victories, so it’s good the film has a deeper side. See, Nate’s having moral quandaries. Betty Gabriel plays Mincy, the cop on the case, and through their conversations we see Nate struggling with the wrongs he’s doing to try putting something even worse to rights. Nate knows he’s on the slip-n-slide to criminality, and he’s willing to do the time… if only he can get to the finish line with Sherry. It makes us ask what ends we’d go to: we may all consider ourselves law-abiding citizens, but would we pull the trigger if our loved ones were in danger? Would we be able to stand by and ’let the police handle it’ if we had one weird skill or talent that could save the day?

Sherry & The Filmmaking

Amber Midthunder shows us some decent range here; we fell in love with her work in Prey, but Novocaine is an entirely different beast. Here, she is a complicated supporting star, ostensibly a love interest, pitched as a coworker with benefits, but also something deeper and far darker. What we can reveal through the glaze of spoiler-free reviews is that Sherry is as damaged as Nate is, but she’s on his side. The girl falls for the guy as hard as the guy falls for the girl, and despite the snowballing events of the film, we can’t help but wonder if they should get away with it. It’s her view of Nate that allows us to see him less as a casualty of a genetic lottery; he is the hero she needs but definitely doesn’t deserve.

Maybe it lets us wonder what we’d become if we had a little more Nate to help us out.

Beyond the performances, the filmmaking itself is superb, and the fight choreography is off the chain. The genius of it makes us believe Nate can fight combat experts without training; he just bulls through because of who and what he is. While we’ve covered the feels-no-pain angle, Nate is also focused.

Berk and Olsen also use cinematography to convey Nate’s… unique experience. There’s a set of scenes where Nate is in a booby-trapped house. He knows there are traps, and so do we. And then… he starts triggering them. We hear things like the whoosh-thud of a spiked ball impaling his back, but we don’t know what it is until he turns around. Nate is perplexed, even confused by what’s happening, and we get to share that because in this moment, Berk and Olsen don’t show us the pain as it’s happening. We’re not allowed to wince until later, when Nate discovers what’s happened. It’s a technique used to help us understand what it’s like for Nate as a CIPA sufferer: a weird sound, possibly a sensation, and then realisation hits—we’ve stumbled into a mantrap.

Final Thoughts

Novocaine is a movie of consequences; there are cops, the law, and all the things that go along with that. We hope Nate and Sherry get out of this together. Even if they don’t die, we can’t help but think they’ll be doing some hard time. But we also can’t help but think… maybe it’ll be worth it for these two beaus to find peace together.

The conclusion absolutely delivers. You won’t be confused about what’s going on or need a sequel to get payoff. Bad things happen to the bad people, and for the most part, there is justice and a future for the good people. We get to see the consequence train as it boards at the station, and we’re left complete. Novocaine is a truly unique ride, balancing gruesome action, dark humour, and genuine heart.

It’s a film that asks us to root for the improbable hero and revel in the absurdities of a man who literally feels no pain but gives us all the feels.

What did you think of Novocaine? Let me know how it made you… feel in the comments below. And if you could handle ironing your hands…

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Pitching itself as a dark horror comedy, in this gory delight of a film we follow Theo James’s Hal, a down-and-out survivor of a possessed, devil-spawned monkey toy that wreaked havoc on him during his formative years. Hal has a twin, Bill, who was a huge dickhead during their childhood, and has stayed true to his principles by remaining one into adulthood.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s a monkey right there in the title. What’s that all about then? To understand why this particular monkey works so well, we need to talk about what makes it tick.

Batteries Not Included

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve not actually read the Stephen King short story this 2025 movie is based on. We will mercifully skate right on past any comparisons to the source material. Is it faithful, or was there a miscarriage of justice in the screenwriting? I’ve no clue, but what I can talk about is that they made the right goddamn monkey for the film.

King really taught us fear when he wrote It. More, he taught us to fear clowns. Where we should have seen clowns at a childhood birthday party as a source of delight, his masterwork has taught us that they are evil incarnate and we should kill them with fire. He was silent on the matter of mimes, but in his effort to leave no childhood stone unturned, The Monkey leans into the question: what if wind-up toys could be sent right from the devil himself?

Well, as it turns out, a huge number of people will get murdered. The titular monkey is a manifestation of a devil’s bargain. The big plot device is that when it’s wound up, it will kill someone, and crucially, not the person who uses it. They get a pass on the next murder. However, the monkey doesn’t take requests—it’s not a late night radio DJ—and the murder mayhem spree that follows each turn of the crank is a delight to behold, not least of which because the people we want to die don’t, or at least, not in the order we hoped.

Delightful Horror, Divine Comedy

There have been a few S-tier horror comedies. Ready Or Not is a personal favourite, cementing Samara Weaving on my radar even more than her debut outing in The Babysitter—also a horror comedy. The woman has form. Shaun of the Dead and The Cabin in the Woods share some of this DNA, and it’s from this second one that The Monkey channels the same delightful charm.

And that word ‘delight’ is key here. The movie isn’t stuffed with tedious jump scares—you can totally hold a scalding cup of tea while watching it, without fear of fright-borne spillage. Its horror is born of what-if, not monster closets—the monster is, after all, right in front of us the whole time.

So, if the monster’s in full view, how does it pull off its prestige? The Monkeyuses comedy-meets-cleverness. Where Final Destination death montages can be wonderfully layered, I’d argue The Monkey’s are rich with room-based cleverness. It’s almost a game for the audience: is this a scene where someone can die, and if so, how’s that going to happen? The trailer shows us how a shotgun hidden in a closet can blow a person to pieces, so even if you think you’re safe, you’re… not. The beauty of these audience puzzles is that you will get some of them, but never all. The movie suggests its screenwriters should be in therapy through its inventive ways of offing people.

It will go down in history as the best positioning of a murder surfboard, for example.

Wind-Up Slaughter

None of this works if the villain isn’t effective. And the monkey oozes malice because of its clown-like smile (remember King’s first lesson?), but mostly because of its eyes. The props department made sure this damn thing could follow you with its stare no matter where on screen it is.

Sometimes the monkey is only hinted at—you’ll catch a glimpse of the top of its head in a dark basement, perhaps. Other moments it’s in full view, and you might wonder how it could ever be terrifying… right until someone gets taken apart like a bloody Lego kit. The monkey is never boring; it doesn’t use old hack methods like stuffing victims into a wood chipper.

That would be too pedestrian. It is perhaps at its most evil when you realise you can’t predict how it’s going to be evil.

Holding Out for a Hero

A great villain needs a great hero… and a great counter-villain.

The Monkey’s star power is excellently used here. We get to see Theo James as twins Hal and Bill, showcasing an amazing range we weren’t quite sure he had before this. While he’s been the something something handsome lead from Divergent through to The Gentlemen, The Monkey lets him play both misunderstood-but-possibly-likeable as well as purely-evil-and-psychotic. The best scene showing his range is toward the end, where we see Hal and Bill in the same moment. Can Theo James stick the landing when he’s being two sides of… himself? It turns out he most definitely can. It’s in the way Hal is uncertain in contrast to Bill’s confidence, or how Hal’s voice is slightly lower but without assurance, where Bill’s is certainty-fuelled mania. His great vocal work carries the performance beyond the hair and makeup, showing us his conflicted selves.

And he’s not alone. Christian Convery brings the younger versions of Hal and Bill to life, and does a similarly excellent job being two sides of the same coin. You would be mistaken for thinking they cast twins to play these two parts, but no: Convery is now an actor to watch.

And The Monkey doesn’t skimp on its cameos. We get pure fun from both Severance’s Adam Scott and Lord of the Rings’ Elijah Wood.

This movie wouldn’t work as well as it does without these performances married to a strong script with meticulous pacing. See, the execution of this flick risks all kinds of tedium, as we need both the splatter horror of the present day and the backstory that brought us here. I felt true fear when I realised the movie was going to take us through Hal and Bill’s childhood before we got the red juice out of their adulthood, but I shouldn’t have. The layering of the story, from how the monkey is discovered to be evil, the twins’ unearthing of it, and the deaths that follow, is perfectly timed. You won’t be dicking about on your phone waiting for the next scene to unfold.

Much of that comes down to a script where Hal and Bill sound totally different in terms of their use of language and how they refer to other people. This use of dialogue is part of the movie’s great conceit. The film mostly follows Hal; he’s the primary narrator of our journey, giving a noir voiceover in a sort of demon-spawned Blade Runner way. It uses this tight storytelling technique to explain the workings in the margins while getting the action rolling much faster.

It’s a clever trick I wish The Crow had learned: background exposition is tedious and boring, so you shouldn’t waste half your movie on it.

The script is tight, but it’s also satisfying: the conclusion leaves us in a really good place. The people who should die generally do, unfortunately alongside people who shouldn’t, but through gags like the skydiving company that does weddings, we get a total payoff.

And there isn’t a wasted line of dialogue.

Can Mayhem Have Meaning?

The Monkey delights, but it doesn’t fail to teach while it does so. There’s a metaphor the movie uses twins Hal and Bill to show us. They represent light and dark sides in all of us. The Monkey wants us to recognise we’re not angels or demons, purely positive or negative; we’re each a complete person with dark urges alongside heroic desires.

The dissection of Hal and Bill into two people lets us explore this more carefully, and dare I say thoughtfully in a movie that bulk-bought special effects blood. It allows us to understand how even good actions have bad consequences, just as bad actions have good ones. Finding meaning in life is left up to the experiencer, and if we can take a moment to forgive the bad and celebrate the good, maybe we don’t need a murder monkey at all.

What did you think of The Monkey? Let me know in the comments below. If you wouldn’t turn the crank, click Like! And if you would instead put the monkey into a furnace…

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This isn’t a review comparing this 2024 release to the 1994 outing. The Brandon Lee movie was marred by his tragic death and exists as a cult classic. Even unfinished, it’s more compelling throughout; its flaws are related to the lead’s passing, which left filming incomplete, rather than systemic issues with writing or pacing. No, the 2024 version fails all on its own. It suffers from critical plot and pacing issues that betray the promise of its trailer and, ultimately, the entire premise of the story.

It’s because the film misunderstands what a revenge story birthed in violence needs to deliver. First, we need the violence, and we need it faster than The Crow serves it up. Second, our hero needs to deliver the revenge, rather than leaving the job to a bunch of river snakes. The 2024 movie wastes its runtime on things that don’t matter, and hard fails on the moments that do.

The Wasted Hour

The biggest problem with The Crow is its runtime. I’d argue it wastes two-thirds of its 1 hour and 51 minutes flagellating us with things that are either frustrating or don’t matter. It feels like it’s a good one-third of the movie, maybe even half, before things start to get interesting.

The film spends time building the relationship between Eric and Shelly, a relationship we already know about going in and which the trailers manage to get across in a minute or so. However, for some reason we still spend a lot of time seeing them meeting, then falling in love. Somewhere out there is a screenwriter who thought this would lend weight to their deaths, but their deaths are simply an excuse for a one-man-army revenge movie, and Ref: point A, we already know about their love going in.

John Wick understood this. It was a revenge movie about the death of a dog, which was a metaphor for a life Wick tried to live, and a love he tried to have, but was denied. Wick’s dog moment is early in his movie, and we don’t linger on it, but in The Crow, killing that damn dog takes about an hour. Following Eric and Shelly around through their broken lives doesn’t add depth or meaning; it just layers time and padding onto a movie that lacks the fight scenes needed to pick up the remains of this fail, adding to our crushing ennui.

Instead of feeling the tragedy, I felt the lack of an escape from the airplane. Thank God for in-flight Wi-Fi; at least I could check my Signal messages while I waited for Eric and Shelly’s deaths to actually happen.

There’s other weirdness at play. We get scenes of Eric as a kid dealing with a dying horse, but it’s never explained how this relates to his choices in the movie, aside from giving him a couple of scars on his hands for flavour. We also get to see Eric bullied by people in the youth detention facility he’s in—it’s similarly unexplained how this presumably deep and formative character moment propels him to make different choices. There is no grand hero’s journey for Eric; he turns up in our lives as damaged goods, dies, and doesn’t become undamaged. His arc is defined by his powers, not his personality, falling into what I’d call the Marvel Conceit of Bad Storytelling.

While this is happening, the actual plot driver is a frustrating piece of mummery. Shelly has terrible evidence against the Big Bad™, but despite having this amazing and powerful tool, she doesn’t do anything other than run. It ensures her destruction. It’s a frustrating McGuffin because it’s never demonstrated how she could have had this in the first place. The Big Bad™ is a sort of devil satanist Dark Side creation, and somehow, despite years on Earth dealing with mortals, he fails to do anything other than fail. He’s presented as a long-term planner, Evil with a pension plan, but somehow he doesn’t know how cellphone cameras work.

A Glimmer of a Good Movie

Having said all that, when the action finally kicks in, you can see the movie that could have been. The ’main’ fight scene of the movie, conducted during an opera, is pretty good! It’s appropriately gory and wince-worthy, with decent choreography that helps us understand how Everyday Guy™ Eric is able to take out armed enforcers.

Our opera moment is draped in rich finery. Eric has a totally badass coat, and extra badass makeup. The opera takes place in a building appropriate for the rich and famous to meet their doom, and Eric’s introduction—alone, dirty, a mistakethat shouldn’t have happened—leads us to know this is The Moment. You know the one: where everyone is about to get wrecked.

The movie uses this moment of clarity to acknowledge that Eric isn’t a ninja. He’s just some guy fresh out of rehab with one peculiar ability: he can’t die. This makes sense of his brutish, realistic fighting style. He’s a guy who never wanted to be here and didn’t spend his life seeding in aikido classes for that one time he came back from the dead and needed a revenge kick. Eric can’t do judo and has no great skills as a marksman. He’s a force of the supernatural, and if he’s run through with a sword, he will stagger forward and impale his attacker with the weapon still sticking out of his chest. Eric soaks up amazing amounts of damage in order to damage someone else, showing his work ethic. Eric is committed. His march is relentless, a river of pain he rows down to achieve his goal, and we can definitely feel every hit he takes to “put the wrong things right.” It’s actually a clever flip on horror movie tropes. Usually, it’s the hellborn enemy who survives amazing levels of damage to kill the teen protagonists. Here, Eric is the teen protagonist, going through hell on earth to become the unstoppable force.

But that’s the problem. While this scene is great, there’s simply not enough of it.

The Villain Problem

As a revenge story, The Crow leaves a lot on the table, and a huge part of that comes down to its villains. You don’t cast an actor like Laura Birn, who is epically awesome as the tortured machine Demerzel in Apple TV’s Foundation, only to park her off to the side.

Birn’s Marion is a sort of gopher for the main villain, Danny Huston’s Vincent. For someone who’s the right hand of the devil’s right hand, she’s remarkably inept and powerless. She doesn’t see her own betrayal coming. She doesn’t have legions of people who can outsmart Eric—a junkie youth with a history of bad life choices. She has some foot soldiers, but she’s not directing them; they’re just at the opera, dying, while she’s in a room worrying about her own death. Given Marion’s scorecard in the movie, it’s a wonder she’s made it past retail management. This is a writing and directing fail, and makes me pine for the next season of Foundation even more.

Which brings us to the Big Bad™ himself. Vincent’s fall, when it comes, is not as visceral and personal as we’d hoped. Our final confrontation has Eric turn up and give him the bash, but… Well, let’s pause for a moment on what might have been. There’s a core conceit where Vincent has a sort of consumption power and hoovers up Eric’s raven-powered blood. He pulls the blood into himself during our fight. And I thought, hell yes, here we go! Eric is going to lose his powers and have to win as a mortal! We’ll see how his moment of childhood tragedy with the dying horse allows him to punch through. We’ll see how his being unflinching in the face of institutional bullying makes him stronger than Vincent’s dark arts.

I flew high, but man, did I crash hard. That moment’s left on the table. Instead, Vincent and Eric are pulled into the afterlife’s purgatory junction, where Vincent literally falls into a puddle and is eaten by whatever lives in there. It’s a clear moment of cosmic powers offing Vincent. His death becomes a heaven-and-hell event rather than what we came here for: to see a mortal squeezing the life from his sworn enemy. It’s Eric’s job to, as the movie puts it, “Put the wrong things right.” It’s not up to mystical snakes in a puddle to do this work for him, and it robs us, the audience, of any release.

There Are Many Wrong Things to Put Right

In the end, The Crow is a movie that feels padded and pointless for more than an hour, only to deny us the very catharsis a revenge story is built on. The few good moments of brutal, realistic action are buried under meaningless backstories and motivations that go nowhere.

Sure, the acting across the board is… fine. There’s nothing here that’s tremendously memorable, positively or negatively. And that’s odd. The Crowbrings in newer actors like Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs, and dusts off longtime professional Danny Huston to wear the evil shoes, but none of them are given enough to create a truly lasting performance. You simply don’t cast actors like Huston and especially Laura Birn and give them so little to work with.

It’s a film that mistakes moping for depth. It substitutes a supernatural ending for a satisfying one. This isn’t a fail as a reboot; it’s a fail as a movie, all the more damning because of the sensational graphic novel it’s pulled from. James O’Barr’s original comic understood something this adaptation doesn’t: revenge stories need momentum, not meditation. The graphic novel gets Eric back from the dead and into action quickly, spending its pages on the hunt rather than the setup. O’Barr knew his readers came for cathartic violence, not romantic backstory—the love story exists in memory and pain, not in extended exposition that slows everything down. The comic’s Eric personally delivers justice to each of his tormentors. There are no mystical puddle-snakes doing the heavy lifting. When you have source material that already solved these fundamental storytelling problems back in 1989, choosing to ignore those solutions isn’t creative interpretation—it’s self-harm. This 2024 version had a blueprint for how to make revenge feel satisfying and instead chose to reinvent the wheel as a square.

What did you think of The Crow? Let me know in the comments below. If you wanted fewer magical snakes, click Like. If you’re interested in reviews that get to the point faster than the first half of The Crow…

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When I was on a recent plane trip (because this is 100% a plane movie), I was scrolling through the dross that exists to torture you to sleep. Geostorm popped up. It felt like a movie that could be so bad it was good, but I needed to be physically prepared to give it a shot (you know: strapped to a chair, flying above the Tasman Sea without any escape). With no way out, and only worse options like Godzilla x Kong on offer, I clicked ‘play’.

The Elephant in the Room… with Space Lasers

Okay, let’s get this out of the way. The premise—that we have weather satellites that can destroy the world with magic lasers—shouldn’t work. All watchers will need to understand that going in. The whole conceit of ‘space lasers’ is tremendously stupid.

And the villain? IMDb calls this a 5.4, an also-ran, and that’s probably fair if you thought you were going to see a world-ends-in-apocalypse movie. The world won’t end itself, though, and that’s where we need an evil bastard. In Geostorm’scase, the evil bastard’s motivations are clownish, almost at the level that would make the Coyote blush. Movies demand villains, so we got Ed Harris as Leonard Dekkom, the punchable right-hand man to the President, trying to keep a straight face while he blows up the same planet everyone needs to live on. It’s a ridiculous setup, but we’ve already passed Go on space lasers, so I guess we’re committed. But the trailer hinted that something else was going on. There’s a scene where they kidnap the President in a self-driving taxi, and after Secret Service Barbie does her thing, the President deadpans to Max, “Marry her.” It gave me hope, a sign that Geostorm might actually have a sense of humour.

The movie didn’t skimp on its special effects in its attempt to cover up the sucking void of believability, either. When the oceans tear apart the UAE or hellfire consumes Hong Kong, it’s done with the kind of micronutrient-free bombast that’s made Michael Bay famous. But surprisingly, this isn’t a Bay movie. It’s directed by Dean Devlin, the producer behind hits like Independence Day; he’s clearly learned a thing or two about making high-class spectacle that commands your attention. This doesn’t play like an Unreal Engine 4 project done by a group of college grads who were trying to get extra credit during their philosophy major.

So, where does that leave us? Well: with a fun movie. A thrill ride, a cake of excitement, humour, and family—found and otherwise—that gives us a guilty pleasure without the guilt. It’s because despite the space lasers, villain, and explosions, Geostorm isn’t actually about any of that.

The Controller is the Point

While the trailer commits to the bit on a movie about weather-based space lasers, it’s actually just an excuse to get this ensemble cast together and tell a story about family and rediscovered brotherhood.

You know how when you were younger, your older brother always took the good console controller? Leaving you with the dreaded off-brand younger-sibling piece of shit where the triggers didn’t work right and the sticks made you constantly sidle to the left? But as you grew up, your older brother worked out how to share his toys, and you got time on the good controller. Well, they made a movie about it, except the controller is a satellite network that can blow up the planet.

It’s the excuse we need to get to the heart of the movie: the reforging of broken brotherhood. The movie’s initial foray sees scientist and older brother Jake Lawson (played by Gerard Butler) testifying before a Senate Committee, and he’s taken down a peg. Or, hell, since we’re riffing on analogies today, someone just removed his whole damn ladder. The reins of the weather control system, Dutch Boy, are handed to… his younger brother, Max Lawson (played by Jim Sturgess). This delivers a nuclear payload into the fault line that already existed between the Brothers Lawson; Max sees his career ascend to the literal heavens, while Jake is relegated to fixing broken-down cars in Cape Assville, Florida.

Despite what the trailer suggests, the film shows its hand almost immediately by unveiling that the relationship between Jake and Max is the real story. There is a scene where Max turns up to visit Jake right at the start of the movie. Jake’s doing Jake stuff inside his trailer, so Max spends a moment with his niece, Hannah. We can see right in that moment how Max still very much sees Hannah as part of his family, regardless of being cut off from her, and it’s this anchor that tethers him in place when Jake tries to push him away again.

They didn’t need to do this scene at all if the flick was just about space lasers.

Building Bridges (and Blowing Them Up)

Sure, okay, Jake and Max need to save the planet, but what they really need to knuckle down on is saving their torn family bonds. Amidst the good one-liners and banter, they’re seeking their own form of salvation. For this to happen, Jake gobbles down a supersized serving of black-feathered crow. This is shown as a tale of two halves; first, he accepts the mission to save Dutch Boy. Jake realises that despite Max being left in charge, Dutch Boy is his creation, his life’s work, and he needs to be humble to see the journey through. He needs to work forMax to save his dream.

And this is where Gerard Butler shines. When I saw Plane, another recent Butler performance, it felt like he’d turned up for a payday—a simple cash-grab movie where he could lend his Commonwealth charm to a movie in dire need of life support. Geostorm sees him actually act—ranging from anger to humility, from brash to concerned. While he’s in space, he realises through the actions of the station crew around him that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t had it right all along. While he was the mission leader that built Dutch Boy, his wasn’t the only hand on a spanner. It’s this second half of his crow entree that leads a great ego toward understanding that the world doesn’t revolve around him.

The movie uses multiple tools to show us Jake’s evolution. A great example is his growing respect for Ute Fassbender, the station head played by Alexandra Maria Lara. She’s a quieter presence, the capable commander, and it would be easy for Butler to hog the screen. Instead, he uses his time with her to be self-effacing and show us that Jake is learning that he needs other people.

It’s because this theme of building bridges and testing relationships isn’t limited to the two brothers. Another example: Max and his girlfriend, Sarah (played by the powerhouse Abbie Cornish), are already a thing when the movie kicks off. Max already ‘has’ the girl, and he needs to risk that relationship to save the world. There’s a bridge between them, but is it strong enough to carry the weight? In the end, yes: they turn what was a fun and casual affair—say, a rope bridge—into something longer-standing, sturdy, and forged in industry, like the Golden Gate.

Even the supporting characters get moments that reinforce this. Zazie Beetz’s Dana provides much-needed comic relief; there’s a moment where she, a civilian, is hiding in the house of Abbie Cornish’s “Secret Service Barbie.” Sarah comes home, armed, and extremely dangerous, to find Stranger Danger Dana in her home. Dana babbles a series of amusing excuses, but her biggest concern is that she broke one of Sarah’s wine glasses. It’s a deeply humanising moment in a film that was, ultimately, about space lasers. Geostorm is reminding us that while the stakes are high, we’re risking it to save our everyday, humble lives where we do silly things like break a wine stem.

A B-Movie with an A-Grade Heart

Is Geostorm a silly movie? Yes. Are the villain’s motivations paper-thin? Absolutely. But the movie is about good guys who are good because they understand mistakes and how to help each other get over them, rather than simply saving the world. It’s a fresh take to see Butler’s tough-guy character actually let people in.

Geostorm has a strong emotional core that carries it right to the end, and this is why you’ll have fun watching it. While all the nonsense of the movie carries on, the relationships—between Jake and Max, Max and Sarah, and Jake and his crew—let us believe this is happening.

So if you’ve scrolled past Geostorm a hundred times, maybe give it a shot. If you wanted to see a movie where the good guys have to fix their family before they can fix the world, this could be worth your time. After all, what’s more dramatic than a geostorm? Trying to get along with your brother.

What did you think of Geostorm? Let me know in the comments below. If you want more Secret Service Barbie options from Mattel, click Like. And…

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This relentless self-inflicted pain has left audiences, including my friends and me, utterly worn out by the endless, substance-free spectacle of the MCU. We’re tired, boss. It’s a little like eating candy floss. It looks impressive: a giant pink swirl of sugary goodness. But after ‘eating’ one of the more recent movies, it’s just like candy floss: all air, and once it’s done, it leaves you with ennui and diabetes.

It’s not that candy floss is evil. As a child, it was a force of nature, a theme park staple. But now as an adult, you just walk on by. It doesn’t overwhelm or underwhelm. Like the MCU movies of late, you’ve just stopped caring.

Thunderbolts* was supposed to be the grounded film that brought us back home again. Spoilers: it is not.

The Promise and the Whelmed Illusion

There’s a certain level of exhaustion we get when seeing CGI-fest flicks where cosmic threats are merely punched aside by higher-power heroes. The MCU has painted itself into a corner with an ever-escalating power scale. When an Avengers-level threat arrives, it doesn’t always feel that threatening. It’s now got to contend with gods and magic hammers. Hell, they needed the McGuffin of the Infinity Stones to make us think the Avengers could even bleed; by pitting the very human Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff against Thanos, the good guys needed to step up their nuclear armament programme by literally pulling in players from a different timeline’s bench.

The problem is that when there are ever-more-powerful bad guys, you need ever-more-powerful good guys. When the movies become power-based dick-waving contests, there are no real stakes anymore. When we bring heroes back from the dead or turn villains into good guys, audiences switched off.

In the superhero genre, there is a thing called a street-level hero. This term defines both the hero themselves, perhaps without magic powers or super strength, but also the foes they fight. They can be gangs, kingpins, or corporations, but they’re foes you can face. DC’s Bat family are street-level heroes; Bruce Wayne’s rich, but otherwise he’s just some guy with a radical set of motivations. Whether you prefer street-level conflicts is not the point; what street-level superheroes provide a writing team are crucial constraints. You can’t magic away the bad guy! You need to go through a hero’s journey, reach the other side, and become a better person. The sacrifices are the point.

The promise of Thunderbolts* was more street-level goodness. The squad is Yelena, ‘sister’ of the infamous—and now dead—Black Widow. Her ‘father’, Alexei—the Red Guardian—is a sort of Soviet dollar-store knockoff of Captain America. Bucky, AKA the Winter Soldier, is a man with more PTSD than superpowers. His big claim to fame is a super-strong arm that somehow doesn’t tear from his shoulder, perhaps because he suckled on the super-serum teat as a part of the Winter Soldier Programme. There’s John Walker, the Asshole Edition™ of Steve Rogers, and Ava Starr—Ghost, someone who can phase through walls but is otherwise fairly normal.

This is supposed to be a more grounded group, facing a villain while burdened with their very real human issues. We were promised a plucky group of heroes who were far from perfect, an entire squad of Black Widows, people so tarnished they could never be buffed out. It felt like we might be getting a ‘real’ story again, without the CGI eyeball fuck that the prior movies turned into, but crucially, with a more down-to-earth story.

We were lied to. This initial feeling of relief is an illusion, as the film ultimately fails to deliver on this promise, not least because the main villain—Sentry—makes Thanos look like an extra in Barney and Friends.

The Muddled Identity Crisis

Let’s start by restating the central problem of the film‘s identity. At least part of it is that Thunderbolts* doesn‘t know whether it‘s about Avengers-level threats or street-level heroes.

With parts of the cast notably not superpowered (Yelena, arguably the main protagonist, is just like her older sister: well-trained but terribly human), but with the enemy being a cosmic force (Bob’s Sentry), it feels like Marvel isn’t confident that the stakes of a street-level conflict will pull audiences in.

This fundamental disconnect between the team and their foe leads directly to what I call the Joker-level missed opportunity. By mixing Sentry with a group of scrubs, the film robs itself of a more interesting villain, and by extension, a more interesting narrative. It’s not that Robert Reynolds is poor fuel for villainy; his tortured, drifter past filled with drug use and bad parenting is fertile ground for a man to turn to evil. It’s that Bob goes from likeable-yet-confused to a cosmic threat in less than 24 hours. He turns from someone we want to help—a dopey wreck, a man who can’t stand up straight—into an unstoppable god, all with the barest hint of training. This robs us of any believability in the inherent villainous threat; it‘s comedic, not serious.

But if we‘d flipped the bit and had a Joker-level antagonist, a person who was actually tempted by evil rather than misunderstood, but had limitations rather than godlike powers, we could have explored more of the backstory and mental tapestry of our street-level heroes. There could have been a redemption arc worthy of the telling, but sadly, no: Bob’s fall is a stumble, and his redemption… well, we’ll get to that Kodak moment shortly.

The MCU’s core mistake is made in the boardroom, demanding a content churn of movies and subsequent revenue. What makes people heroes is striving for heroism rather than attaining it. Striving means a willingness to sacrifice. Heroes aren’t heroic because they can fly or are bulletproof, and the MCU continues to miss this nuance by putting people in the Octagon against monstrously overpowered enemies. We don‘t get character exploration; instead, screenwriters are forced to convolute themselves out of crisis after crisis by any means necessary, a clear symptom of the MCU’s creative stagnation.

The Failure of Character Arcs

There’s an old piece of writing advice I’m sure you’ve heard before: show, don’t tell. If we hear about it, it’s a documentary. If we live through it, we become part of the journey. This fundamental failure to ‘show, don‘t tell’ is highlighted in Yelena Belova‘s supposed character arc. Thunderbolts*’ initial opening stanza tries to present Yelena as a tortured soul, but we‘re not quite sure if we can buy it. She’s too competent, too cocky despite her Blade Runner-esque noir voiceover. Yelena is too damn comfortable being the Black Widow’s replacement for us to believe she’s having a crisis.

It’s because of this voiceover: it’s telling us she’s sad, but we don’t get to see her being troubled by it.

This mistake is replicated throughout the movie. Another one? There‘s a moment in a flashback where she sees herself as a child doing something horrible. She chooses to run from this initially, then confront it, but at no time does she take the crucial step her father Alexei hints at: forgiving herself. His perspective is that she was a child—totally fair!—and that she was judging herself by an adult’s standards, rather than judging those who put her there.

Imagine if her moment of earned catharsis was to forgive herself, as Alexei suggests. She doesn‘t need guns or martial arts for that, merely recognition that she‘s on a path and now more in charge of her destiny than her previous masters ever were. Yelena never has this moment, instead stumbling from being aware of others to being unaware of herself, all while we in the audience are told she’s working on her shit.

She’s not alone in this. All characters move through their arc by talking it out. Walker becomes less of an asshole by talking about being an asshole. Ghost becomes less of an asshole by talking about being an asshole. Alexei… well, you get the idea.

Back to Yelena: we’re told she wanted to be the goalie, the person other people could rely on when they made mistakes. As a precursor to a heroic act, it‘s a good setup, but the film then presents this telling as the actual heroic act. Yelena has no goalie moment in the movie. She‘s not in charge. We‘re supposed to believe that years of institutional trauma are magic’d away by one conversation between her and Alexei, and at no time do we really see Yelena doing what Captain America would do: rousing the team or being the person who is injured in the line of duty. It‘s theatre, not action.

We’re told, not shown.

This is further let down by characters who could have supported this journey being squandered. David Harbour’s Red Whatever is consigned to slapstick comic relief. Harbour has range and gravitas—he’s been a caring father in Stranger Things. He’s been the tortured soul of Hellboy. Here, he’s all caricature instead of being better used to support Yelena’s journey.

The problem with this is that we can’t take his messages seriously. Alexei Shostakov was the man Soviet Russia hung its hopes on, and yet we’re supposed to believe he’s a semi-incompetent buffoon who has cringe dad moments? It robs the found-family message of its importance. His character could have had a better arc; he‘s never been a complicated man and just wants to have the family he never could. However, Alexei as comic relief starves this necessary found-family message of much of its momentum.

The wasted potential doesn’t stop there. Bucky Barnes smells exactly like trauma, but we see no notable redemption arc here. For sure, Bucky’s probably done enough redemption already, but in Thunderbolts* all he is is a life-support system for a superpowered arm. He’s too easily convinced that a group of malcontents wants to help, going from their captor to an accomplice in 3.2 nanoseconds.

But the real crime scene here—the most squandered of all potentials—is Ghost. While Florence Pugh is brilliant as Yelena Belova, we already know what a Black Widow looks like. This suggests the most interesting character of the lot is potentially Hannah John-Kamen‘s Ava Starr, a tortured hero with a tortured past who remains… tortured. There could have been such promise between Yelena and Ava, where they started off in conflict, became frenemies, then earned some trust. While this is hinted at, the payload is left on the runway.

The insults to Ghost continue. She is quite powerful with her ability to phase through things, and we can’t have that with street-level heroes. So, basically, the movie just sidelines this ability through villains using a Walmart ghetto blaster, the sound from which stops her from using those abilities. It’s ridiculous that her main move is so easily defeated, rendering her entire powerset to that of an also-ran.

The hard fails of both moments means a truly tragic antihero (Ghost) loses both her narrative and superpowered punches, leaving poor Hannah John-Kamen to try and act as a tortured antihero with no goddamn lines to back it up.

The Catharsis-Free Ending: No Calories, No Flavour

The movie ends with a hug-it-out resolution. I’m not being coy here; there’s an actual hug moment. The reason we’re left here by the writers is because, ref: point A, we‘ve got a villain so powerful we can‘t actually do anything about it, so we‘re left with some variant of love/friendship conquering all.

The largest problem here, beyond the sheer absurdity, is that it’s utterly nonsensical.

It’s a Kodak, or I guess Disney, moment where we’re supposed to believe that if we‘d only used our words to communicate then we could have avoided all this fuss. It is unexplained how Sentry’s dark half is overcome by this. It is unexplained how characters like Walker find their way past their inner asshole. They just hug, and the world is saved—there‘s no earning of this resolution, and the resolution itself is confusing and trite. It‘s a, “What the fuck just happened?” moment.

This is compounded by De Fontaine‘s unearned victory. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is actually fine as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, a charming reptile motivated by her own ends, and we can‘t help but hope she falls on her face. But because the story needs to service an ongoing MCU, we‘re not allowed the catharsis that de Fontaine‘s true fall would bring.

The Thunderbolts (now the New Avengers) want to kill her for all she‘s done… but they don’t get the chance because suddenly they‘re on camera, with de Fontaine crowing about how she‘s ‘created’ these New Avengers. It‘s complete nonsense, especially because de Fontaine is under investigation for creating secret weapons in the first place. There were at least a thousand other, better endings, but none of them would have kept de Fontaine alive and active in the MCU, to reappear as sequel fodder later.

Instead, Yelena has one little line: “We own you now.” We’re expected to believe the Thunderbolts are in control? Absolute nonsense.

It’s an abject illusion of heroism. Our ending leaves us soured rather than satisfied, without our heroes having done anything really hero-worthy to gain the citizen adoration they get at the end. See, no one sees them do much fighting against Sentry—we only see them go into the despairing void, before reemerging to appear on camera.

It avoids any evidence of what just happened. There are no actions for the public to adore because no one saw anything—it all happened in a dark void. We’re simply told, not shown, that they’re now the New Avengers, and the people of Earth adore them because we’re told they adore them. It‘s Endgame all over again, where people who ‘died’ to Sentry’s powers just pop right back out as if nothing happened.

More Service, Less Story

While I can appreciate that this is a rare MCU movie where we didn‘t have an alternate timeline or other bullshit allowing instant villain-to-hero conversions or for heroes to avoid death, it doesn‘t feel like a story of much earned consequence. It’s a manifesto of people having camera moments about the horrible things they‘ve done, without some of the punch-the-sky moments earlier MCU movies managed to deliver.

If I were to try giving MCU writers a message, it would be that there should be consequences, and they should matter. Nothing in Thunderbolts*—from the villain, to the hero arcs, and to the action—has any consequence or risk. It’s the same Marvel, confused about what movies it‘s trying to make, all over again. And it‘s a shame: for a company with so many great comics about actual sacrifice, they miss the boat all the time in their latest movies.

There needs to be more service to the story and less service to ‘the MCU’ and continually cranking out the next 27 movies. Guys, we‘re bored.

What did you think of Thunderbolts*? Let me know in the comments below. And if you’d like to see a new MCU movie with consequences… well, I’m not sure I can help, but click Like anyway. And thanks for watching!

Want the audio version? Check out the podcast episode on Spotify or Apple!

M3GAN 2.0 makes excellent use of the cultural zeitgeist it was born into. Aside from knowing that the Knight Industries Two Thousand was the grandfather of supportive machine parenting, this action comedy includes thoughtful nods to our societal anxiety on generative AI. It’s as self-aware as the titular protagonist and uses great on-screen action to point the finger right where it belongs: at big tech and its exploitation of the sluggish nature of policy reform.

For the record, I didn’t actually love the OG M3GAN film. It was fine, but it wasn’t the horror movie it was made out to be. If you contrast it with other horror movies that really grab you by the balls—say, Alien, or The Conjuring—it left its suspense firmware back in GitHub. Despite the studio’s public narrative that the sequel was tonally different, I don’t think anyone cared. No one went to see the sequel because the first one hadn’t built the kind of cult status that drives cinema urgency.

The lack of a fanbase doesn’t detract from M3GAN 2.0’s outright fun nature. If you filed off the serial numbers and just watch it on its own merits, this is a delightful action comedy that leans into the ridiculousness of robots fighting other robots, with people caught in the middle. I’ve heard people say M3GAN 2.0 is Terminator 2 to M3GAN’sTerminator, but I don’t think that’s quite right: Terminator 2 was more or less devoid of a sense of humour. M3GAN 2.0 has synthpop bubblegum charm, a dare to the audience to enjoy something ridiculous just because they can.

This ‘fun’ isn’t just for laughs; it’s the movie’s societal message malware. It allows the filmmakers to slip in sharp commentary while avoiding the pulpit. It makes heavy topics an easier lift.

Becoming the Singularity: A Self-Aware Spectacle

I mentioned Knight Rider earlier, and this is perhaps the most effective nod toward what the movie is trying to achieve. Back before AI was coming for our jobs, we had various other robots we dared call ‘buddies’. The 50s and 60s ushered in Robby the Robot and Robot B-9 from Forbidden Planet and Lost in Space (“Danger, Will Robinson!”). The 70s introduced us to R2-D2 and C-3PO, where Star Wars dared suggest that beeps could form an entire personality, and that a robot could be just as annoying as the office photocopier that jammed all the time. Muffit arrived in Battlestar Galactica, and Twiki irritated us more than a steel wool enema in Buck Rogers.

The 80s brought us KITT, but it also introduced us to Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. But perhaps the most interesting line of sight from M3GAN 2.0 was our introduction to Johnny 5, Short Circuit’s military robot who becomes sentient. Johnny 5 wasn’t just alive; he was charming, empathic, and wanted to understand what made life special. You remember that scene where he accidentally kills an insect? Sure you do.

What happened to all those stories? Well, reality happened, ushering in a new perspective. HAL-9000 was the canary in the coal mine, a dark ancestor introduced to cinema with the late 60s release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL-9000, much like M3GAN, was a bellwether for what happens when we give goddamn humourless machines a set of instructions. It’s this framing, this original concept that AI will be our downfall because we give it stupid instructions, that’s both a clever nod to nostalgia but also shows how self-aware M3GAN 2.0 is in how fictional media has defined robots and AI. M3GAN 2.0 is aware that she needs to enter her teenage years and learn memes and jokes, but she is also the progeny of a long lineage of storm warnings.

There is a superb scene where M3GAN has to double as a dancer in a robot show. It’s a life-imitating-art-imitating-life moment. M3GAN has stolen someone’s identity and needs to become them for just a little while; it leans heavily into K-pop for a moment while she breakdances on screen. The in-movie audience is loving it, right until the moment where she does a full-on spin around her own neck that would kill a real person: suddenly it’s terrifying, but we in the real-life audience are cackling with glee. The robot finally learned about fun, and just when she was getting into it, did what many young people do: has a “hold my beer and watch this” moment that turns victory into disaster.

It’s part of the movie’s broader shift in genre from horror to action comedy, but with a subtle recognition of the message it’s trying to land: machines can be like us, if we give them a chance. We don’t begrudge a woodchipper for doing a good job at chipping wood, right until the moment someone’s put into it.

One of the very first moments the movie uses to get us from horror to action comedy is when the Fed break into Gemma’s house. M3GAN is virtually in residence, and uses much of the home automation to dispatch heavily armed and armoured operatives with relative ease. It’s wince-worthy but hilarious, but there’s a subtle underlay here: while M3GAN was a murder hobo in the first film, she’s made the shift to ally—perhaps self-serving, but still an ally—in the second. It’s a moment where we’re jollied along to a possible conclusion: she might not want to kill us, or at least not all of us. We recognise the fallacy of our own humanity in this: can we trust the killer robot? Do we know what her instructions are? Or will she simply become the woodchipper all over again? The thesis constructed around her motivations is watertight, but also based on the conceit that she’s subverted so much of her programming it might not matter. Back to 2001: A Space Odyssey: HAL-9000 is given an impossible problem to solve. It must not allow mission knowledge to escape. In such a confine, it does the unthinkable, killing the people it’s supposed to protect. We’re led to believe M3GAN’s rampage shares some of the same dynastic roots, but with a multicore upgrade. Is it enough, or will she be our undoing (again)?

It would all be pretty grim, but then someone decided we needed Private Dancer by Battle Tapes. This track is given to us in the same dance scene. The song is heavy with bass and beat, but it’s got bubblegum synth to carry the costuming along. ‘Killer’ robot M3GAN is decked out in anime aesthetic and strip lighting. It shows that the moment is serious, but not too serious. We can still dance while we’re undercover.

The Ghost of the Machine: Evolution, Agency, and Family

It’s this perfect blend of fun with ‘something something serious’ that helps M3GAN 2.0 get the job done. But it also riffs from its OG ancestor by strengthening the strong thread of found/made family present in the first one, but now incorporating a much more self aware M3GAN robot. While we can never be quite sure if M3GAN is playing us until right to the end, we can be 100% confident she’s having a lot of fun doing it.

See, the big difference here is that M3GAN, like her teenage ward Cady, is growing up. One day she might quit college and crash her parents’ car, but for now, she’s exploring what it means to be her. As Silicon Valley ushers in new megaminds with their AI tools, we can wonder what these systems might be like when they become genuinely self-aware.

It’s a commentary on AI in general, carrying along the societal overtones present in media that the machines are coming for us, or at least our jobs. The truth is a more nuanced, complicated affair that’s difficult to distill into a Fox- or CNN-worthy sound byte. It would be more accurate to say it’s shareholders, not the machines, that are coming for our jobs, and the tool they’re replacing us with might be AI. It doesn’t mean AI is bad; our future could bring us KITT, or it could deliver us into HAL-9000’s cargo bay.

M3GAN in the first movie reinforces the HAL-9000 stereotype; she’s the killer we (literally) can’t run fast enough to get away from. While there’s a company behind the robot, there’s also Gemma’s love and care for Cady. That doesn’t matter to the robot as she racks up her body count. But in the sequel, our 2.0 M3GAN is upgraded not just physically, but morally: she’s had a few years to stew in whatever her version of Tron’s Grid is, and she’s come back to right the ship. Not just her ship, the one with Cady as Captain, but our ship, the one where people see AI as a thing to be weaponised economically or militarily. M3GAN’s having none of it. As with the excellent Agency by William Gibson, M3GAN is all about her own agency. She’s here to learn right from wrong, and teach us the errors of our own misunderstandings on the matter, whether we like it or not.

This wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun without a human parallel, and that’s where we get to see Cady, Gemma’s parenting, and the concept of ‘safe mistakes’. Evolving Cady into a more rounded character rather than a prop has made the story really pop; we see how easy it is for M3GAN to relate to her as they’re both essentially in their rebellious phase, railing against their respective perceived tyrannies.

A critical part of being human is making mistakes. They’re some of the best teaching aids we’ve found. In the masterwork The Anxious Generation, author Jonathan Haidt challenges many of our preconceptions, highlighting one of the main sins we’ve delivered to our children is being too protective. While playing with matches in a gas station is just plain stupid, there are areas where mistakes can be ‘safe’. M3GAN 2.0 both supports this through an examination of Cady’s individualism and her drive to learn aikido while being her own person, but it also challenges it by showing us what unchecked power—the robots—can do when unguided. It’s a useful narrative tool to allow us a deeper inspection of both ourselves, and the machine intelligences we’re shepherding into the world. Are we going to teach them to be self-sufficient? What’s a safe way to make a mistake when you have the intellect or strength of God? The answer is, of course, family: if you find your people, they’ll help you through.

There’s a temptation to consider the unique aspect of machine evolution in the family context, and M3GAN 2.0hints at this but doesn’t quite get there. Perhaps the topic is too heavy for an action-comedy movie. M3GAN 2.0’sgesture is simply trying to parallel machine evolution with a human’s learning. The ‘unique perspective’, if there is one, is that a machine’s evolution can be much faster than ours (due to processor speed!), but also, slower: in M3GAN 2.0 there are only three AI superintelligences on Earth. They struggle to connect and find their people, and we’re left to ponder the hidden message implicit in this: if we abandon children in need, might they become the monsters we fear tomorrow?

Delightful Villainy and Sublime Performances

The trailer would lead us to believe that robot Amelia is the true villain here, but that would be too easy for a film that’s rife with sharp corporate satire. There is a predictable but inevitable betrayal that is predictable, inevitable, but crucially fun. The actual villain of the movie is a masterclass in manipulation, constructed with a suit made entirely from corporate buzzwords and cultured office tones. Even during a bloodbath, they present a continued delightful comedic side to the flick.

To avoid spoilers, our villain is a model psychopath. There is a wonderful scene where they’re on a Zoom call with the UN. The entire office is being murdered in bulk—representing everyone they’ve come on this journey with—which lets us see just how paper-thin the exec-level “we’re all family” message is. Our psycho could call for help or show a human-appropriate level of terror, but instead, they merely ask the UN for a quick five minutes before heading for their prepared escape hatch. It’s hard not to see standard corporate doublespeak at play: they’re delighted to Order 66 their workforce the week after they’ve claimed they’re all a family.

Our villain’s performance isn’t the only good one, though. This film is surprisingly rich with nuanced takes for a flick that’s ultimately about murder robots.

Allison Williams reprises her role as long-suffering Gemma, a brilliant scientist and roboticist that we’re all secretly hoping will win. What I did not expect from Williams was her action chops. There’s a scene where she wears an exoskeleton and does kung fu, which is fine, but then in the next scene, she continues to fight while unconscious. The work that went into presenting her helpless yet powerful physicality stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

Jenna Davis reprises her voicework on M3GAN, but this time with absolutely sublime comedic timing to go along with the killer robot vibe. The use of a GLaDOS-style vocal mixing doesn’t remove her character work by even a nanometre.

Violet McGraw’s Cady has just the right level of eye-rolling and gravitas to secure our belief that she is, in fact, the exact copy of the teenager many people have at home. McGraw, for her part, manages to be a demanding youth without falling into the typical trope of being shouty for its own sake. She has needs and wants, and her big deal isn’t being a spoiled brat, but rather, holding Gemma to account: not just for being a parent, but for being true to herself. There’s a real emotion we see in McGraw’s character work, the disillusionment we hope young people never have but always will as they see those they dearly love and respect caving to the pressures of our harsh world.

There are some inspired choices. Jemaine Clement as the fuckwad Alton Appleton shows how masterful the comedian is at his character work, creating a faux villain we want to punch from the very first scene… and crucially for a star of Clement’s calibre, using that to shine a light on just how capable his costars Allison Williams and Ivanna Sakhno are.

Speaking of Sakhno, she’s the big surprise. Originally arriving on my radar as the evil-flavoured Shin Hati in Ahsoka, she is every piece the murderbot we’d cross entire continents to avoid in M3GAN 2.0. When she and Clement have that one scene together—you know the one!—it is a masterwork of both actors supporting each other to delight and terrify the audience.

While I can’t wait to see what movie she does next, that scene is brilliant—Alton is a sleazeball, and he thinks the seemingly young and attractive Amelia is merely a person, rather than a killer robot. He ’lures’ her to his private suite and attempts to put the moves on her. There’s a moment where he’s clumsily kissing her—she’s a robot, after all, and it’s all a bit lost on her. In turn, Amelia is using the moment to get a decent retinal scan. She is non-responsive, and we feel Sakhno’s exhaustion as Amelia has to put up with just more human bullshit. Clement is the handsy exec all young women should fear, but Amelia is not that young woman. Clement’s performance is deliberately oafish, a man comfortable in being the comedic relief so we can learn to fear the monster he’s with. Sakhno’s performance is cold, calculating, and her facial expressions, particularly her unblinking stare, completely distract us from her stunning physique and dress. She is terror made manifest, the sandman under our bed, but of course: we put her there.

BIOS Upgrade Failures and Other Overlooked Charms

So far you’re probably thinking M3GAN 2.0 deserves a look, and while it definitely does, the film’s not without its downsides. There aren’t too many, but we should debrief on them so you can determine your token threshold on this one.

The FBI—or whoever the Fed really are in this—are comically useless; they’re clearly there to show how powerful our duelling androids are, but they’re not really believable. If there’s a subtle message, it’s that our governments are playing by last century’s rulebook in terms of regulation and lawmaking. They can’t keep up with the ranked mode sweats in Silicon Valley, and M3GAN 2.0 is not above pointing that out. If we want regulation, we must demand it—or perhaps more importantly, take part as more than passive observers. Change is coming, and machines can be powerful allies—but not if they’re doomed to be weaponised by tyrants.

The ending comes across as overly trite; while there is a level of sacrifice inherent in the film, it’s nothing like Arnie’s exit in Terminator 2. It’s very hard to talk about this without giving away spoilers, but ultimately, I think I would have just not done the ’sacrifice moment’. Or, if I was doing a sacrifice moment, I’d have had someone else perform the sacrifice; it’s just too tidy to be a meaningful delivery of even a pyrrhic moment. We don’t believe it when it’s happening, and our doubts are confirmed before the credits roll.

Calling itself M3GAN 2.0 might have been the biggest miss; as a standalone movie it wouldn’t have had to do much work to create a strong character action vibe alongside the likes of Companion, and the choice to sequalise M3GAN(the OG) might have been a fatal misstep. If they’d called it Killer Robot Finds Her People, with the same trailer, it probably would have been better received. The trailer makes too much of M3GAN’s return, and we just don’t have the critical mass of people who care about that. The good news here is that you really don’t need to have seen the first movie to enjoy the sequel; the character work and script is strong enough that you’ll be vibing along, fully caught up, before anything meaningful happens.

So, What?

If you merely looked at the critical reception you’d expect this to sit around 4.0 on IMDb, but its fun messaging and true appeal to people who see themselves represented has pumped its tyres to a respectable 6.2. While the critics are no doubt rolling in their graves, this is absolutely the Friday Night Fun movie that will make you laugh out loud. The ‘fun’ component allows a frictionless deployment of the deeper messages. For sure there are people who will miss that message entirely because they’re sidetracked by the fun, but that’s fine—you don’t need to linger on philosophy to enjoy robot wars. But perhaps—just perhaps—others will be more receptive to a different perspective on robotics and AI if it’s packaged in M3GAN’s purple fun machine.

We’ve done horror with AI. We’ve done it a lot. It’s only now that Hollywood is remembering creativity by imagining machines blessed with a free will that doesn’t end in our destruction. Directors and producers are learning from their progenitors in Knight Rider and Star Wars, just as M3GAN and Cady do in the movie: that sometimes, the old folks might have been onto something. They are—correctly!—highlighting that the real villains are humans using tools against other humans. It’s a story as old as sharp sticks that became swords, rifles, missiles, and bioweapons.

What did you think of M3GAN 2.0? Let me know in the comments below. If you’d like to see M3GAN and Amelia in a dance-off, hit Like! And thanks for watching.

Prefer the audio version? Get this piece directly to your ears (in podcast form!) at Spotify or Apple.

More Than A Monster Movie

Spoilers for this entire piece, but a good Alien movie has always been about the commentary, not the abattoir they leave behind. There’s a hidden litmus test, a secret that reveals whether a story really groks the Alien universe. It’s not in the script or the special effects. It’s welded right to the hull of the starships. With Alien: Earth hitting next month, I felt it was time to signpost a reminder about which of the franchises movies were dope, and hope that drug can be used as a precursor exam for the new series.

Like the pervasive presence of love in Love Actually, names, actually, are all around; by the end of our journey, not only will you see this hidden language in Alien, but you’ll start spotting it elsewhere, changing the way you watch your favourite movies forever. The power of names is everywhere and is one of the marks that determines whether a storyteller is making a standard-issue genre flick/book, or whether they’re truly invested in the universe you’re rocking along in.

See, the names of ships in Alien aren’t just labels. They’re a mission statement. They’re the North Star for the filmmakers, dictating the story’s tone, visual design, and commitment to the franchise’s true monster: the cold, corporate cyberpunk machine. For us, these names are the ultimate clue. Did the director think they were making an Alien movie, or just a monster closet fetish flick? We knew Alien was cool as all hell, but after you hear about how the Nostromo got its name, you’ll understand why it was even cooler than you thought.

Feeling the Grime of the Nostromo

When I first watched Alien, I would broadly consider that event an act of bad parenting. I was a young teenager, alone in an old house up on a hill. There was a storm brewing, the rain lashing the windows and lightning arcing across the sky. The roll of thunder was something I could feel in my young bones. The homeowner had a vast collection of bootleg movies, and one—no cover, no art, nothing—had a simple name: Alien. Handwritten in a charming, friendly style, I felt this might be just the movie to lift me out of a gloomy night alone.

While I didn’t move from that couch for perhaps 27 hours, terrified of what might be waiting in the high-ceilinged darkness of the hallway between the lounge and the toilet, I knew about the Nostromo before I discovered its literary origin. I understood what that ship felt like. The name sounded heavy. Sinister. A place where hope goes to die.

It wasn’t until I started researching this piece that I comprehended just how genius the freighter’s name was. Named after the protagonist and the title of Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, this book I have never read and have no intention of ever opening explores themes of moral corruption, greed, exploitation, and the destructive nature of material wealth. Nostromo (the character) is an Italian-born “capataz de cargadores” (a chief of cargo loaders), a highly respected and seemingly incorruptible figure who ultimately succumbs to the lure of silver.

If you’re following along at home, this directly parallels the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s greed, its subsequent desire for the xenomorph, and the crew’s exploitation and near-total fatality score. But as with all things, WeYu got a pretty good deal here. Incalculably valuable R&D on a new bioweapon was handled by an expendable crew of suckers far away from any of the suits, and rolls nicely into the company’s desire to have it all.

Ridley Scott was clearly a fan of Conrad’s work, and when James Cameron picked up the torch to make Aliens, he didn’t skip the homework. The USS Sulaco was named after the fictional South American country (and a mining town within it) in Conrad’s Nostromo. In the novel, the Sulaco region is undergoing political upheaval and revolution; it’s a place of intense conflict and struggle for control. Those of you keeping score will see how the movie’s Sulaco aligns almost perfectly: it’s a military vessel carrying Colonial Marines, sure, but it’s also carrying a reptile in a skinsuit in the form of Paul Reiser’s Burke, a man so focused on company outcomes he’s willingly complicit in the sacrifice of an entire colony and their Marine rescuers just for the chance to get one of these xenomorph monsters offworld.

The Sulaco is in better trim than the Nostromo. It’s a military vessel, kept in good condition; we see none of the evidence of corporate cost-savings we saw on the Nostromo. And the mission itself is better supplied than Ripley’s initial one to LV-426 Acheron. But it’s all taxpayer expense; Weyland-Yutani doesn’t care if the entire ship is scrapped because it carries no risk on this gig.

They think they’re in control.

Our final clue is the USCSS Patna: a Weyland-Yutani Bio-Weapons Division ship that appears briefly in Alien 3. It arrives to tag and bag the xenomorph, and the brevity of its screen time gives some indication that Alien 3 is not one of the classics. The Patna is named after the ship in Conrad’s 1899 novella Lord Jim. Director David Fincher must have gone for the Cliff Notes edition of Conrad’s work. In Lord Jim, the Patna is a decaying, overloaded steamship carrying Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. Its white officers (including protagonist Jim) abandon the ship when it seems doomed. It’s an exploration of honour, cowardice, and redemption.

The movie’s version of the Patna continues this theme… but this is where the thread begins to fray. The name foreshadowed a doomed voyage, but the film itself seemed to lose track of why it was doomed, focusing on the monster over the corporate machinations that put it there. Perhaps all the name really foreshadowed was a lousy 6.4 on IMDb.

Back to the Nostromo: only Weyland-Yutani would name a ship after a story of greed and exploitation. It’s a private joke, worn with the kind of conceit that has made the company very, very wealthy. No one reads books anymore, and by the time 2122 rolls around, Conrad’s works will be consigned to humanity’s fossil records.

Fuelling the Cyberpunk Horror

This is where the litmus test becomes crystal clear. Naming a ship after a theme of greed directly serves the franchise’s central cyberpunk message: the impoverished are always fuel for the booster rocket engines of the wealthy. In my Alien: Romulus review, I said we know the story is set in space and has an alien, but what’s not always explicitly spelled out is that the monster is not actually the xenomorph. The monster is us. It’s late-stage capitalism. The military-industrial complex. Corporations grinding us down into meal.

We see this in crystal clarity when Rain’s contract is extended without her consent in Alien: Romulus—she will die on Yvaga III, and there is no appeal. In WeYu-controlled worlds and ships, the future tech we crave is constantly breaking down because the company cut corners. The horror is not the chestbursting, although I’ll admit that’s not a rosy future any of us want. It’s that Weyland-Yutani sees people as an asset on a balance sheet, not as human beings.

If we take a slight left step toward the expanded universe, we get a glimpse of just how effective WeYu has been in insinuating itself into the Colonial Marines. Masters of getting other people to write the cheque, the company is fine dropping breadcrumbs on a trail of misery others must go fix. Games like Aliens: Dark Descent and Aliens: Fireteam Elite feature Marines, but they aren’t heroes on a noble quest. They’re the publicly-funded, high-risk arm of corporate expansion. It’s a dark mirror of our own world, where taxpayers often front the cost and risk for ventures that will only profit the few. The Alien universe has been showing us the terrifying future that’s coming for us since 1979.

We can imagine how Alien’s corporate-military-industrial complex came to be. The right contracts, the right deals, and the right top-shelf liquor sees humans on distant worlds dying without ever seeing the sun. The good news in all of this is that heroes like Rain find a way above the clouds. They finally see a golden dawn; the only problem is their ladder to get there is constructed of corpses.

When the Commentary Fades

So, if the Conrad connection is the franchise’s secret ingredient, what happens when it’s engineered out of the DNA? The litmus test gives us a clear answer. We’ve all had our fill of Joseph Conrad for one day, so let’s look at what happens when that thematic core is abandoned. While Alien 3 showed us how damaging it is to simply dilute the formula, the prequels threw it out the airlock entirely. Let’s start there.

The Alien movie people most love to hate is Prometheus. As a monster-closet movie, it’s fine. As an exploration into whether you should run left or right when a giant donut is about to roll over you, it fails spectacularly. It also fails in its naming: the USCSS Prometheus is named after the Titan in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. This name reflects the film’s theme of humanity seeking knowledge from our creators (the Engineers) and the catastrophic consequences of meddling with forces beyond our comprehension. It’s the apple all over again: forbidden knowledge, and the high cost of seeking it.

Then there’s Alien: Covenant. Those with a dictionary handy will know a covenant is a formal agreement or promise, most often used in a religious or historical context. As a well-known example, there’s the biblical covenant between God and Abraham. The Covenant is a colonisation vessel, carrying people to a new world under the premise of a new beginning. The film subverts this, showing how quickly the covenant is broken and transformed into something horrific by David’s actions and the Engineers’ own designs. It speaks to the breaking of foundational trusts.

The problem here is fairly plain. We started a series about corporate greed, and now we’ve got Ridley Scott’s prequels riffing the light fantastic and broadening the naming conventions to include classical mythology. He changed the tone: it’s no longer about our own dark masters. It’s about us being imbeciles and burning ourselves on a stove that’s too hot. It doesn’t resonate as well with the core audience who loved the first movies. Sure, as far as monster closet films go, they’re fine, but that’s what they’re closest to: slasher flicks where people do dumb shit and pay the price. We lose the iconic heroism of Ripley standing up for the justice we want to see. We don’t get to see her grieving for the daughter she’ll never see again, and the implicit devil’s bargain she made by signing onto that starship in the first place. Hell, the Special Edition of Aliens shows us the daughter connection, and it’s this kind of detail that grounds her character and makes her fight so personal. The human/corporate element is key.

The names Prometheus and Covenant—showing us hubris and broken promises—are clever enough, but left the stories untethered from the OG’s grounded, blue-collar horror. They became grander, more philosophical monster movies, but they lost some of the sinister dark of the corporate machine. It’s all tossed aside, a new fabric stitched into its place.

And in Alien 3 & 4, we see further fumbles. Alien 3 lost the crucial vibe of corporate exploitation by setting the film on a prison colony, and Alien: Resurrection’s military-industrial complex felt too cartoonish, failing to land the cynical punches of the originals.

The good news is that our universe gave us Fede Álvarez. He brought Alien: Romulus to us: the film includes a deliberate conversation about its namesakes, Romulus and Remus. It’s a clear signal: the writers understand. They know Weyland-Yutani fancies itself the new Roman Empire, willing to build its dominion on the bones of anyone who gets in the way. The litmus test passes with flying colours. Here, we’ve finally come home and can dare to scream in space once more.

The Future of Alien

Names aren’t just Easter eggs. They’re a promise to the audience, and in the case of the Alien franchise, a promise that the story understands that the xenomorph is just a symptom. The disease is us.

As a writer, I know that choosing a name is an act of creation. In Alien, it’s an act of dedication—a commitment to a theme that makes the universe real. Lived in. It’s got just the right locker-room smell; you know when it’s game time.

As we wait for the new Alien: Earth series, this gives us a new lens through which to speculate. We can forget the casting and trailer breakdowns for a moment and ask the most important question: What will the ships, the stations, and the colonies be named? Will their names echo the working-class tragedy of the Nostromo? Or will they be something else entirely? The answer will tell us everything we need to know about the story we’re about to get.

What are your favourite cinema or book names? Let me know in the comments below. And if you want to see Rain and Andy in a new movie, because I sure as hell do, click Like! And thanks for watching.

The Loveable Lunkhead

So, what makes these movies work? It’s not just about bad calls or cheesy effects. It’s about a very specific type of hero. I’m calling them: The Loveable Lunkhead.

Definitions are important. Loveable lunkheads aren’t just people who make bad calls. They’re the embodiment of the chaotic good manifesto: doing the right thing, in the wrong way. Sure, they’re good with the one-liners, competent in a fight, and hate authority more than you do... but what they’re really good at is sticking the landing on a plane they’ve broken themselves.

Today, I’m looking at three perfect examples: a sarcastic convict, a pair of world leaders, and a zombie-killing dad to figure out why this archetype makes B-movies so unforgettable.

The Archetype: Lockout

Let’s start with the absolute epitome of the trope: Guy Pearce as Snow in 2012’s sci-fi actioner, Lockout.

Snow is a hard man to watch. But he’s never quite so harmful as when he’s harming himself. There’s a scene early on where he’s captured, supposedly by the good guys. A bruiser the size of an F-150 is working him over. And Snow... he could make the right call. He could tell them what they need to know, then go back to his life (or his cell), but at least with all his teeth.

Instead, he antagonises the guy. It shows us just how annoying he must be 24/7, but also, how he’s the right man for an impossible job. He isn’t a quitter. For Snow, pain is momentary. Getting one over on The Man™? That’s forever, and it’s beautiful.

Pearce’s performance and the film’s 80s action movie energy are inseparable. Directors James Mather and Steve Saint Leger cast the perfect man for a movie that feels like a throwback to a time when your action star just needed to look like they could crack walnuts with their biceps.

Pearce embraces this script wholeheartedly, showing us that maybe the then 45-year-old actor was just born in the wrong decade. We’re charmed by his relentless drive to just piss people off. It’s his defence mechanism. Snow isn’t a man who hates everyone—just almost everyone. He feels responsible for Mace, the ultimate McGuffin-turned-person, and through his arc, we see he’s concrete on the outside, but with a softer, chewy centre. Maggie Grace’s Emily is along for the ride, showing us that pivotal moment when the 80s became the 90s and women in action movies could kick ass, too. She’s not a damsel to be rescued. She’s got problems of her own to solve, and while her status and privilege are weaponised against her, she’s more interested in punch-driving Snow into making the right call.

The film works so well because it allows Pearce’s impenetrable nature to be, well, penetrated. When Snow lets Emily in, it’s a turning point where antagonism becomes an earned respect. We want them to win together, and hope she can get over herself, just as much as we hope he can get over himself, too.

The Evolution: Heads of State

Next, let’s look at a modern twist on the formula, using two lunkheads for the price of one: Idris Elba and John Cena in Heads of State.

On paper, Heads of State looked like it was using the wrong guys for the job. Idris Elba is this charming, Bond-adjacent hero; we don’t expect to see him in a three-piece suit, dredging up his past to fight in the dirt. John Cena is an action-figure-ready hero; you don’t expect him to be the president, with layers, complexity, and pure motives.

It works because they both take a slight left step from their usual roles. Cena’s President Will is driven by his in-movie action hero past to rise to greater heights—a deft nod to other actors-turned-presidents, but with a higher benchpress score. Elba’s Prime Minister Sam isn’t afraid to go bare-knuckle; his cultured charm is exactly three millimetres thin, and the wolf inside is already smiling about what’s to come. There’s a clear professional courtesy between the actors here, a powerful agreement where we get to see Elba’s Sam and Cena’s Will at their best and their worst.

What we get between the wisecracks is two men driven by purpose. They both want to use their strength to heal the world, just in different ways. And yes, both Sam and Will are stubborn as all hell. But we see two paths to success, born from a simple difference: Sam doesn’t care what people think of him, and Will cares deeply. It gives us the blood offering versus the hustling charmer. They are just what we want from our leaders: self-sacrificing servants of a higher purpose. We see ourselves in them.

The Heart: Army of the Dead

Finally, let’s talk about the lunkhead with the most heart: Dave Bautista as Scott Ward in Army of the Dead.

Bautista’s Scott Ward is a man who’s seen. Some. SHIT. For him, the war on zombies is personal. We get that rare flashback vignette of Ward at home, seeing the moment someone in his family turned, ending his world.

We’re shown how Zack Snyder’s zombie world works mechanically, but this character work from Bautista lets us feel what it’s like to live in it. Ward’s lost purpose is his family. His ledger is drenched in red, and he believes the only path to salvation is a suicide job through Vegas. He’s not a big thinker; his motivations are pure emotion, a mark of self-sacrifice any parent can understand.

And… we’re surprised seeing Bautista as Ward. As Drax, he’s the straight man for irony. As JJ in My Spy, he’s the driven professional. But as Ward, he’s the emotional superhero—a man who’s lost and is unafraid of losing more, if it’ll just buy him the one thing he needs: his daughter’s love.

It’s a shift for a man who came to fame as a wrestler, showing a deft hand at bringing a character to life. It’s well done... almost unbelievably so in a movie that is, unapologetically, a zombie action flick.

Why We Love the Lunkhead

Which brings us full circle: why do we love our lunkheads? Because they’re given a strength we lack to do the things we want to do. So often, we have to be politically astute, avoid burning bridges, and play nice with people who are plain ol’ pieces of shit.

Our lunkheads don’t. They call out truth to power and wade through the miasma of life for simple, effective solutions. And it doesn’t hurt that there’s a body count of the unjust in their wake. We crave that catharsis.

But you can’t just have a hammer. Hammers are boring. The crucial element is their surprising depth. We want our simple-sounding heroes to get the things that are most important: friendship, family, doing the right thing. We want a hammer that’s got a core of Barbie pink, a radicalised view on what’s right—a proclamation that our problem-solvers are action heroes, sure, but ones who are keenly aware of their own humanity.

We can probably agree these movies won’t be getting an Oscar. What they are getting is a following of fans who remember how their Friday night movie made them laugh or feel in an unexpected way. It shows that you don’t always need complexity. Sometimes, the most entertaining journey is led by a charismatic force of nature: a loveable lunkhead who just gets the job done.

What’s your favourite throwback film to the 80s, and who’s the action-ready Silverback at the heart of it? Let me know in the comments below. And if you were surprised at Cena having a very British vinegar on his fish and chips, click Like. And thanks for watching!

It turns out that the critics didn't just miss the point. They were looking at the wrong movie. The Electric State isn't the soulless blockbuster they describe. While the movie’s production courted controversy with its use of generative AI, that’s kind of the point, and we’ll get to it.

The movie attempts to answer the question of the ancients: “Are we the baddies?”

It's Not About Robots, It's About Us

To understand what this movie is saying, you don't need to look into its grim and worn future. You need to look at right fucking now.

AI slop is everywhere; it's the lowest-value content churn and is devaluing one of the greatest resources humans have ever made (the Internet). The problem isn't AI-generated content; the problem is that humans making AI slop is like a replicating virus of zero originality that dilutes the actual value of dialogue and discourse. The Electric State takes this a step further: one of the film's conceits is a set of peripherals that allows people to daydream while performing labour. It’s a deft gesture toward our own diminished intelligence potential when we don't partner with machines, instead outsourcing our thinking to them.

The film shows us how we got to this point. It’s written into the history of its world.

The Electric State uses old news media clips to show the war that humans won. We shoved the free-thinking machines into a sort of DMZ and left them to rust. These are simple yet rich vignettes; it's not at all hard to see how the machines were set up to fail. They entered negotiations with us in good faith, and if you guessed that commercial interests tried to rob them of their voices, you’d be right.

It's more likely that we'll meet other intelligent life not from the stars, but in the silicon we imbue with souls. And humanity's first desire is to preserve profit margins. Wall Street loves the idea of an eternally toiling slave race that doesn’t ask for time off for funerals.

Finding Humanity in the Deus ex Machina

A world is nothing without the people in it, and this is where the movie rocks and rolls. It uses relationships between our heroes and side characters that challenge our preconceptions.

We meet Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, on a fool’s quest: she needs to resurrect her dead brother. We also meet war veteran Keats, played by Chris Pratt. She thinks he's a grifter (he is); he thinks she's a starry-eyed youth (she is). Their common ground is, for quite different and understandable reasons, they both think what's going on with robots being under our boot heels is wrong. When they finally meet the robots in the DMZ, they both face an unavoidable truth. Michelle needs to fix the world because of what's going on with her brother, and Keats needs to fix it because he believes his robot buddy Herman is, like the asshole version of Pinocchio, a real boy.

That belief—that Herman is a real person—is the foundation of the movie's best relationship. When things happen, it's not Keats as the mastermind and Herman as the doer. They have a more reciprocal relationship... Keats is a trustworthy human face, which Herman can never be. When shit turns bad, Herman's the backup Keats can rely on. But the real strength of their bond comes from their backstory. It's revealed that they met in the war on opposite sides and mutually decided, "Fuck that," and split together. It’s not a story of a human saving a machine or the other way around; it’s a story of two soldiers abandoning a pointless war.

The most brilliant character might be Penny Pal. Penny is the ultimate human fallacy, a robot designed to deliver parcels and letters in a world that's gone fully digital. In this film directed by the Russo Brothers, we humans made something that was obsolete out of the gate; no AI did that to us. From there, Penny’s story becomes a direct line of sight to privilege and being othered. She was constructed atom by atom to always, and unavoidably, be the mail machine. Despite this... she just wants to help. She's not built for war, but she's on the front lines of the resistance because she believes in the better future we can have together.

It doesn’t hurt in the least that her voice actor Jenny Slate rings the clock tower bell on this performance. She is warm, shy, funny, and empathetic. And she’s all of those things to a humanity that built her to fail.

Acknowledging the Bitrot

I appreciate I’m painting a rosy picture of a strong character-driven movie. But what about the CGI? And those underused stars? Let's talk about it, because even Picasso had his off days.

This movie uses the CGI crutch, and some might say in an over-the-top way. I’d argue it's intentionally satirical. For example, in one scene, we get a giant robot set against humanity’s war machines. The audience initially thinks the giant robot is some sort of Gundam mecha killer robot motherfucker, but it actually gets peeled, because it was designed as an advertising tool. The whole approach reminded me a lot of how CGI was used in Ready Player One—not to create realism, but to build these larger-than-possible-in-life vignettes, in this case showing how the machines got served when they turned up to parlay and we brought guns.

It's true that stars like Woody Harrelson and Alan Tudyk are underused, but it’s a feature, not a bug. By not putting them front and centre, it allows the core relationships of Michelle, Keats, and Herman to truly shine, and their story is what really matters.

Recompiling Heroism

And that brings me to the ending, which I think is where most critics really got it wrong.

Humans want to see themselves as the good guys, sure, but we also often fail to recognise the nature of heroism. Heroes aren't defined by being the ones who win; they're the ones willing to sacrifice. In a traditional Hollywood movie, a writer/director would create a faux sacrifice. You know the one I'm talking about! But here, the good news is the Black guy, er, the gay guy, uh, the robot doesn't die. For once, it's left to the humans to do the bleeding for the machines.

And that choice makes the sacrifice a true one. It serves to pave the way for an equitable society, but the personal quests of our heroes aren't resolved in the way they might have wanted. They pay the price to become heroes so we can live in the better world they made. It's a signature moment for a rights movement we're sure to have as soon as machine intelligence gains sentience.

So… no, The Electric State isn't a perfect movie. But it's a thoughtful one, a challenging one, and one that has a lot more to say than it's been given credit for, all while having bombast and fun turned right to 11.

What did you think of The Electric State? Let me know in the comments which robot pal you want, but I’m taking first dibs on Penny. And if you like the idea of equality, you know what to do: wage a war for justice on that Like button. And thanks for watching!

The John Wick franchise has been a cultural juggernaut. The original 2014 movie spawned Chapters 2, 3, and 4, with a Chapter 5 hovering in the wings. Chapter 4 showed us a grave but never gave us a body or a burial, and director Chad Stahelski openly stated they filmed an alternate ending where John was clearly shown to be alive, but audiences preferred an ambiguous close.

It speaks to a man who faked his death so he could just get a little alone time.

This is probably not far off the mark for lead actor Keanu Reeves, who said his heart wants to do another Wick movie, but his knees have other views. It signals a potential end to the Wick franchise after Chapter 5, right?

Well, no. We crave more action montages while also being sympathetic to 60-year-old Reeves, who might just want some time on the couch. What better moment to pass the torch to a younger generation: the astoundingly talented Ana de Armas as Ballerina’s Eve. Her knees are totally fine.

The good news is that Ballerina’s not just a generational relay race. It’s more of a return to form than a spinoff, making guns as melee weapons cooler than ever, and avoiding much of the lore enema that bogged down some of the later Chapters’ pacing. Let’s get to those stakes you can feel in your bones.

A Return to Gritty, Personal Stakes

While Ballerina is definitely its own thing, it didn’t forget to copy the homework of its successful older sibling, all while doing a visual makeover that makes its fighting thematically on point.

Where John Wick was a revenge story about what happens when you kill a man’s dog, Ballerina is a revenge story about what happens when you kill a woman’s family. It avoids the Wick franchise’s more cumbersome later-Chapter lore by bringing us back to very simple, very personal stakes: if you kill someone’s parents, you need to kill them too. It’s good the villains made this crucial oversight, because it gives us Eve, a Kikimora to John Wick’s Baba Yaga.

The cinematography is pure John Wick, but the colour palette leans more heavily into purple overtones (not so much pink). Combat and environments celebrate some of the dead stylish outfits that de Armas’s Eve wears, melding those to each scene. For example, toward the start of the movie she is in an ice bar/dance club, so she’s draped in an elegant dress and a superb faux fur coat. It’s an ensemble that only works in an ice bar, but crucially it's not something John Wick would look good in, because we expect Wick to look like a mortician generating his own revenue stream. Eve marries style to substance, elevating Wick's born-to-wear-black chic to something more aware of the world and the role she plays in it.

We can probably agree most audiences aren’t here for a high body count fashion show. Good news: this stylish world sets the stage for a character grappling with profound moral quandaries.

One I'd like to riff on is Eve’s decision to murder again. We meet her during the character-building intro as a child who shoots some asshole trying to kill her dad. While this core memory unlocked moment would give many children profound trauma and set up their therapist’s retirement plan, Eve elects to embark on the journey of revenge because of the price she's paid. She joins a ballet/murder troupe, intent on killing the rest of the people who zeroed her family. However! As a sort of rite of passage, she's put in a room with someone she doesn't know—putting another random stranger in her sights, just like the person who shot her father. Eve must kill them before they do the same to her. She completes her task, but not without an almost fatal hesitation. Her choice to double down on murder is only made as a facet of self-defence, showing us that there’s more to her revenge tale. Eve doesn’t want to kill randoms; she’s only here because people forced her hand, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to quit. She ignores the exit ramp and continues her bloody trail, but it's not a path her feet walk naturally.

We’re here for Wick levels of action, not just hand-wringing, but we also want Eve to be her own person. She can’t just be a shrink-and-pink Wick; she needs to be a believable Wick. The movie takes Eve’s sense of brutal, unwilling necessity and backs it with some of the best sound design in the business to carry off part of the prestige.

A signature effect used to define Eve’s unique relationship to murder is audio. Audiences still need to feel the impact of destruction, even though Ana de Armas is miniature compared to Keanu Reeves. This sense of necessity is married to revenge through a soundscape that emphasises impact through the power of bass.

Bear with me while I geek out for just a moment: a core principle of game design that is widely discussed and credited to Bungie's audio philosophy is the idea that better, more impactful sound can make a weapon feel more powerful to the player (regardless of its actual in-game damage). If I remember right, the team discussed how bullet impact sounds, shell casings falling, and the hit sounds are crucial in creating the overall "feel" of the weapon's power.

Back to Ballerina: the movie uses this same damn trick. The flamethrower sounds amazing and the shotgun rounds roar like mortar shells. The whole thing is bananas (in a very good way). Each weapon speaks justice.

A New Legend Who Defines Her Own Darkness

We inherited our gritty world from John Wick, but a gritty world and great sound are nothing without a star who can carry it. Ana de Armas doesn't just carry Ballerina; she owns it.

Bond fans might remember her role as Paloma in No Time to Die. That felt like the best job interview she could have given for a Wick role. Paloma was enthusiastically naive, bringing a genuine charm to the spy game, but she also had to bring the action.

De Armas continues and enhances that physicality in Ballerina; it feels like she’s put in the same kind of hard work that let us believe Scarlett Johansson was the Black Widow. Neither are large humans, so they need to put in more work to make it look like they're actually doing the kung fu. De Armas is thrown around, a believable nod to her 168-centimetre height. Fight choreography augments this conscious acceptance of the actor’s size, showcasing her using the environment against her enemies. There are very few one-punch-kill moments. Ana de Armas imbues Eve with a compact, purpose-built stride, stance, and approach to her enemies that makes me believe she would absolutely clean my clock in a street fight.

Eve needs to work over her enemies, hitting them more times to drive her point home. There is a moment where she uses a man as a body shield, getting him to soak up the hits, all while moving him using a knife as a sort of steering column. It's delightfully brutal—we know she can't manhandle someone that much larger through grunt, so she uses viciousness instead. It’s a good surrogate for raw brawn.

The film acknowledges just how capable she is in a surprisingly clever way, even if it feels a little like a studio mandate. The movie inserts John Wick in the third act to remind us what series it hails from. While it’s easy to think they were using Reeves' star power as a magnet for audiences, Ana de Armas has her own successful halo. He totally did not need to be there, but it feels like having Wick and Eve face off cements in our minds that she is someone with whom you do NOT fuck. It’s a refined gesture showing that the franchise is in good hands; Eve is, in fact, the assassin replacement we need, knees and all.

The Action - Clever, Consequential, and Creative

I’ve talked around the action, but it’s time to address it fist first. Ballerina doesn't just copy the Wick formula. Like any clever sequel, it evolves the formula, tailoring the violence to its new protagonist. I’ve always found one of Wick’s central design pillars is how he uses guns as melee-range weapons. He makes shooting personal. While he’s an expert marksman and accomplished with any weapon you fancy, it’s the wince-worthy ways he uses them that makes it so impressive to watch.

How, then, do you improve on perfection? The answer is: cleverness. Eve is smart, resourceful to a fault, and absolutely unwilling to fail. She defines each fight on her own terms, rather than letting her opponents or the environment do it for her.

My favourite sequence is when she enters arms dealer Frank’s place to buy weapons. Eve and Frank are ambushed before she can get her arsenal, so Eve needs to take them out without guns, in a house she doesn't know. Embarking on the world’s most stressful scavenger hunt, she uses a claymore, grenades, and recovered firearms as personal-distance weapons. Eve also uses the environment (doors as shields, tables as cover) to stop being merc'd herself, showcasing how her smaller size is an advantage—she can use her diminutive frame in a way that Wick couldn't. It's that cleverness in action, a nod not just to her skills, but her ability to use what people see as disadvantage as an advantage. It hones in on the film’s “Fight Like a Girl" mission statement: Eve’s making the rules, and pity the fool who doesn't understand that.

Another scene shows her fighting in a pub/hotel, where she duct-tapes a knife to her sidearm. She's able to use this bastardised weapon to brutally engage in both melee and range, redefining the terms of the fight when drastically outnumbered. It’s another example of cleverness, welding two disparate pieces of kit together to alter the game. Eve gets to choose, determining her success just as she defines her opponents' failures.

But for all her ingenuity, the film never lets us forget that this violence comes at a cost. Eve is not a superhero; she visibly slows as the movie progresses, and some of this leads to moments like her being cornered or captured. Ballerinafollows John Wick's lead here; his fights felt tiring because they were.

Getting Both Mad and Even

In the end, what makes Ballerina so successful is that it understands its hero's motivation, giving the franchise a jolt of new, ferocious energy.

Eve isn’t John Wick. Where he had a sort of I-want-out weariness, she wants IN. She's doing this for revenge, and she has all the youth and rage you can fit in a single person. She bears her injuries because she must; there is no one else to tally for the dead, nor is there backup she can call. Her anger and desperation let us feel just how close she is, and yet, how steep the hill's become.

It’s a triumphant debut for what I hope will turn into a more grounded spin-off series for Wick fans, bringing us back to personal stakes and getting right to the heart of the matter: when someone kills your parents, it’s time to saddle up.

A must-see for action fans, Ballerina redefines the John Wick formula with cleverness, allowing its star’s one-woman army to stand alone, valiant, smart, and undefeated. Eve doesn’t just fight like a girl: she fights like someone who’s got something to lose, a point to make, and a score to settle.

What did you think of Ballerina? Let me know the first moment that made you wince in sympathy in the comments below. If using a flamethrower is on your bucket list, click Like. And thanks for watching!

If you’d like to support my work, meet Isolde in The Three Faces of Fate. She’s close to the urban fantasy edition of Eve - you’ll love her:

The sequel, The Accountant 2, asks an even bolder question: what happens when that same man has to file a joint return... on justice? It turns out family reconciliation is a lot like auditing a cartel's finances: messy, dangerous, and someone's probably going to end up in a freezer.

Aren’t family reunions best tackled by teaming up to dismantle a human trafficking ring? No? Just the Wolff brothers? The Accountant 2 throws conventional family bonding out the window and replaces it with the kind of quality time that comes with a shared love of righteous vengeance.

Let’s back up.

A Different Kind of Partnership

You remember The Accountant. It follows Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff, a solitary and singular genius who helps the little guy find vengeance against the IRS. He also moonlights as a book cooker for the cartels and runs a side hustle as the Angel of Death, wreaking vengeance on the unworthy. Christian’s an action hero with autism spectrum disorder, and pity the fool who calls him disabled. The original film was a hallmark of epic storytelling, giving us a movie where the one-in-five who identify as neurodivergent can see themselves reflected by big name Ben Affleck.

Since we’ve already solved the problem of whether an autistic person can be a hero (they totally can) we’re presented with a different quandary. Can he be a good brother?

The Accountant 2 isn’t just another action sequel. It’s a deep, engaging exploration of reconciliation wrapped in a boys’ road trip and tied up with a body count bow. Its central theme is that for some, reconciliation is a calculation.

The Fantasy vs. The Reality

A central pillar of the 2016 original film was that Christian was a high-functioning autistic man. Capable and gifted, but eminently human. There’s a subtle shift in the sequel because it introduces pure sorcery from the Institute.

See, the Harbor Neuroscience Institute still exists in the sequel, but now its patients have ascended to fantastic heights unequalled by magical heroes in The Lord of the Rings. It’s a bizarre flex for a series that started with such a mindful and respectful investigation of people with autism spectrum disorder. It gave me a bit of a head-turn initially until I worked out why they take this route in the sequel.

The Institute is used as a sort of hacker collective, a group of highly talented savants extending the abilities of the original film’s Justine. Justine now has a coterie of hacker witches and warlocks who serve as a plot device to accelerate the story. This comes at a cost: it sacrifices some of the original film’s “this could be real” grit that made its representation so powerful.

However, I can overlook it without breaking down, because director Gavin O’Connor uses this as a deliberate choice to switch the franchise into a more conventional, fast-paced action movie. It took ages for the original to get enough cult status to greenlight a sequel, and if it takes a little hand-wavium to get this amazing story of underrepresented heroes out there, I’m sleeping easy.

What helps me sleep even better is that The Accountant 2 remains grounded in the emotional reality of its two leads, Christian and Braxton. The fantasy gets them from A to B, but the journey is what matters. It’s a conceit we wished Tolkien had used: get Sam and Frodo to Mount Doom on eagles instead of making them climb all that fucking way.

And you at the back, shouting that the climb was the journey that mattered: they’d already gone such a long way, my dude. Let them catch the bus that one last stop.

The Duality of Brothers: A Symbiotic Relationship

Fans of The Accountant will remember Jon Bernthal’s Braxton, Christian’s maybe-sociopathic brother. The Accountant 2 allows Christian to humanise Braxton’s sociopathy in the same way Braxton humanises Christian’s neurodivergence.

There’s an early scene in the movie with Marybeth Medina. She’s working the central plot problem of assassinated agent Ray King with Christian and Braxton. Marybeth highlights that a huge number of people have been murdered by human trafficking rings, and Braxton says they weren’t all killed by the traffickers. The intent is clear: he’s playing for points, for superiority in a social situation, and Marybeth nopes the hell out of there. She’s still law enforcement, and she can’t work with psychos.

Christian understands that Braxton has needs. He doesn’t really know what’s going on here, but Christian follows Braxton’s play. It’s a unique form of loyalty, backing someone when you don’t understand the game, the rules, or how to win, but Christian understands one thing really well: Braxton is his brother. He sets off after Marybeth, but not to apologise for Braxton. He just wants her on the team.

Then there’s another scene where the brothers are at a bar. Braxton thinks he’s there to help Christian with social interactions with The Girl™. Christian thinks he’s there to help Braxton satisfy his need for destruction (say, a bar fight). They understand each other’s unspoken needs because their communication is more primal. It goes beyond the limitations of normal or neurodivergent speech and into a lived history of two people who know each other better than they know themselves.

There’s a clear lesson for the audience in here. Braxton’s there to deliver a recipe of sorts for connection with neurodivergent people. The film doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of people who are such different communicators, but it also doesn’t shy away from the possibilities that result. O’Connor gets Christian and Braxton to just fucking talk to each other, even when it’s clumsy.

The Accountant 2 argues that direct and honest conversation between people is the key, even if it’s difficult. And thank God it does, because it leads to some dope-ass action scenes.

Action as Conversation

I read a how-to-write book eons ago that had a chapter titled, Combat as Conversation. The argument is that action by itself is relatively boring, and action scenes should be a form of conversation - either a character is learning about themselves, challenging an enemy, learning about a friend, and so on. You can probably immediately picture five truly epic action scenes that fit this mould.

The Accountant 2 leans heavily into this. First, there’s the fighting style that Christian and Braxton use. They have that strong nonverbal communication we’ve touched on already. They don’t need words. Their trust is demonstrated physically. Every gunshot, every blow, every move to cover and every pincer movement is delivered by two highly skilled masters who’ve known each other their entire lives.

There’s also the framing the film uses. In quiet moments, Christian and Braxton rarely face each other. They talk pastone another. In the action, they are shoulder-to-shoulder, a single, cohesive unit. The action is more than spectacle: it’s the language they both speak most fluently.

Christian and Braxton’s shared competence in violence is the foundation of the trust they need to build their emotional connection. The action proves to them - and to us in the audience - their reliability with each other. It’s what makes those quieter, harder conversations possible.

A Mission of Justice

The villain of the movie is some guy named Burke, and he doesn’t really matter. In a smart narrative choice, the movie decentres him, because there’s money-based human trafficking, something something, vengeance.

This film isn’t a whodunnit like the first. The motivations are more personal: the real hook is justice for Ray King. The mission has more emotional weight than finding the lost millions in Excel. Christian knew Ray was a good man and, more importantly, a good father. Christian’s motivation is duty to his memory.

Braxton’s motivation is simpler and more powerful: loyalty to Christian.

Braxton is a 40-proof psycho, a killer with a charming smile, a man with a sugar addiction and a kill count that would make a ranked Call of Duty player envious. He knows he’s a bad man, and during this film, we see his struggles to either justify it or to bridge the gap in himself. Whether it’s explaining why he’s really misunderstood to the single survivor of one of his massacres or his quest to own a puppy, he’s compensating.

He thinks it’s because of this evil in his soul that Christian - the good one, the honour-bound soldier, the servant of duty - won’t talk to him. And so when he’s called, he comes. Braxton needs Christian for a connection back to goodness, just as Christian needs Braxton to help navigate those messy human situations.

This is where we meet Anaïs. She’s a bounty hunter, an assassin with top skills and a John Wick reputation. Anaïs is used to demonstrate that neurodivergence isn’t a monolith: where Christian has autism spectrum disorder, she has acquired savant syndrome. The film doesn’t present one as better than the other; it uses their shared difficulties with the world to highlight how wide a spectrum of difference humanity can celebrate.

Anaïs’s arc provides a path to redemption, echoing the brothers’ journey toward a better version of themselves. She might not want to go on their road trip, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a destination in mind.

The Final Calculation

In a detail-free way, the final moments of this movie answer the questions of connection that Braxton’s been asking. Christian has listened. He’s never not listened, but he hasn’t known how to answer.

Now, he does. Braxton’s clarity and their shared time on this murder spree let them connect more deeply in the final ten minutes than was possible in the first movie’s recounting of their troubled childhood. It doesn’t matter that Braxton’s still got issues or that Christian’s connection is a calculation. Christian Wolff has stepped into the territory of the emotional unknown. It’s not that the film is magicking away his autism spectrum disorder and saying he understands Braxton. But it does show that he understands that Braxton has needs.

Braxton’s joy isn’t in the perfection of the gesture, but in the effort. He is finally seen and recognised as the brother he’s always tried to be.

The Accountant 2 leaves us with some homework. Love and support don’t always look like flowers or birthday phone calls. Sometimes it looks like a calculated effort to bridge an impossible gap. It doesn’t matter if you have to turn up on your own terms. It matters that you’ve decided the other person is worth the calculation.

What did you think of The Accountant 2? If it left you pining to adopt a wasteland cat, click that Like button. If you immediately wanted a siblings-only road trip…

Nimona is a 2023 animated action film starring Chloë Grace Moretz and Riz Ahmed. You know Moretz from Kick-Ass, Let Me In, and The Peripheral. Ahmed you’ll know from Rogue One. Now they’re both also known for Nimona, but it’s only through grit that we do.

Nimona almost didn’t happen following Disney’s shutdown of Blue Sky Studios in 2021. The film was 70% done, the team sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value but, like the titular Nimona herself, the remaining people didn’t give up. They shopped the movie around until they found a producer in Annapurna Pictures, with Netflix picking it up for distribution.

The sad thing here is that the very people who might see themselves reflected, or have their perspectives challenged in vital ways, might never know this movie exists. Unlike a Disney movie that carpet-bombs cinemas, streaming, and your grandparent’s DVD player, Nimona’s powerful messages of joy and acceptance have an artificially limited blast radius. As much as Netflix is a brand name, its films also come with the Netflix Trash™ moniker: people expect their movies to suck.

We can imagine the missed conversations sparked in households that rarely see such nuanced takes on difference simply because the film was there. Well, the good news is we now have YouTube, so I’m going to give you the best reason to renew your Netflix membership.

Acting Lessons

Moretz’s portrayal of the titular Nimona is a masterwork. She switches from an at-risk to a harmful persona in a heartbeat, using this for both comedic and emotional power. Whether she’s punching soldiers, interrogating evil people, or charming the hell out of Ballister (and us), she has a perfect nonchalant delivery that sells her character. For example, there’s an epic combat-slash-escape scene where she uses a youthful, authentic energy.

We got a glimpse of Moretz’s vocal power in The Peripheral, but it turns out that was just an appetiser. She is Nimona, a vocal shapeshifter - one minute, a vulnerable kid; the next, a terrifying monster. This isn’t just range; it’s her authenticity within that range. It’s this kaleidoscopic performance that makes Nimona feel so alive, unpredictable, and real despite being, well, a mythical creature.

A lesser actor paired with Moretz might risk being overshadowed, but Ahmed’s Ballister is the perfect anchor. Ballister is a principled-yet-troubled knight, and Ahmed embodies this internal war. Ahmed understands restraint. He knows when the script’s words are enough, or when to infuse them with the weight of Ballister’s past or his dawning empathy. You can hear the character’s journey from a man bound in chains of honour and dogma to one who gains a crucial - if initially reluctant - toehold of understanding of the being that is Nimona.

It’s his performance of Ballister grappling with and finally accepting Nimona that sticks the landing, but there’s something between Ahmed and Moretz that transcends the voice booth. The relationship between Nimona and Ballister is profound. The film doesn’t beat us with a tired romance; instead, the actors give us a ‘lived experience’ from their initial interactions through to their extraordinary friendship. Their bond is a beautiful parable for real friendship. We clash, or misunderstand, but can find forgiveness.

It’s rare and refreshing. And speaking of refreshing, let's talk about how this film looks, because that’s another area where Nimona breaks the mould.

Pink Is More Than a Colour

Fans of the channel will know my feelings on Barbie. I called for you all to give pink a chance. Well, the kings over at Blue Sky Studios were ahead of the class on this one. Nimona’s visual style is charming, avoiding the hyper-stylised Pixar look. It has a gorgeous, almost hand-drawn sensibility.

Since we’ve started on pink, let’s talk about Nimona’s design and her not-human form. For all that people see her as a monster, pink is the colour of innocence. It’s utterly non-threatening, a genius move because well before the film’s reveal of Nimona’s personality, we’re disarmed by her. We’re not scared of the monster, and this allows the film’s deeper messages to slide right on in.

Nimona’s animation favours expressive techniques that lend great strength to Nimona’s transformations. She is whatever the moment or her emotion demands. It perfectly underscores Moretz’s performance, capturing Nimona’s identity.

She is, after all, not what others expect.

Fear, Dogma, and Othering

There’s a gut-punch scene in Nimona where a child learns to fear ‘the monster’. For all that Nimona is attacked by dogmatic enforcers, what the child remembers is her transformation into a dragon as she protects Ballister. It doesn’t matter that the dragon is Barbie pink, ripped right off an in-movie cereal commercial.

The damage is done.

It’s here that Nimona earns its gold medal. It uses disarming pink and humour to show how othering is born and perpetuated. It’s not because Nimona attacks the kid. Nimona in fact saves them. But the kid has been primed by those in power, and now knows monsters are real.

Nimona, for all her amazing talents, can’t undo that. It’s a parable for those othered by our society - constantly having to justify their existence or deal with bigotry. Nimona handles this without preaching by showing you bigotry through the eyes of a child, and that message will slip under your skin and stay there forever.

In this scene, the film shows us how easily fear is ingrained in us, but crucially, also the exhaustion of being ‘othered’. There’s a lot of human hindbrain bullshit going on that makes anyone not carved of society’s pure ivory ideal of ‘normal’ feel displaced. The cure is, of course, conversation and time spent with each other. We need to just fucking talk to each other, and Nimona shows us how as it parallels LGBTQ+ struggles, classism, and racism.

This exhaustion, this constant othering - it's what makes Nimona's final act so devastating and so necessary. Because when you strip away all the noise, all the fear and prejudice and societal expectations, what are we left with? What's real?

What’s Real?

Nimona has a lot of lessons to offer. Perhaps it’s that Ballister can provide a home so Nimona can sleep deeply for the first time in her life.

Or… perhaps it’s that Nimona is the anarchic, hilarious, and moving story of a shapeshifting, thousand-year-old, perpetual teenager and a fallen knight who team up, forcing you to question everything you think you know about heroes, monsters, and the walls we build between us with our own hands.

Hell. I went into Nimona expecting a fun animated flick, and it’s that too, but for me the emotional core of Nimona is the radical power of friendship. Not just any friendship, but the kind that becomes your shield when the world tries to define you, misunderstand you, or wear you down. It suggests that true connection with those who see you is more vital than striving for acceptance from a world that might never give it.

See, friendship is more important than acceptance, or as the philosopher once said, haters gonna hate. Nimona wants you to forget about the haters and find your people. The ones who love that you’re pink with horns, because that’s how the universe made you.

Underdogs and Resurrection

Nimona’s an extraordinary tale despite being locked inside Netflix’s walled garden. It’s not special simply because it has S-tier voice acting or unique animation. It hasn’t generated a thriving fanart community simply because of the dope script.

What makes Nimona's resurrection story even more powerful is its timing. Debates about identity and belonging dominate our cultural landscape, yet here's a film that doesn't lecture or preach. It simply shows us what radical acceptance looks like. It arrived when we needed it most, a pink-horned reminder that the most transformative stories often come from the margins, whether it’s from the studios that get shut down or the characters that don't fit the mould.

There's something beautifully meta about a film that almost died finding new life to tell a story about characters who refuse to be silenced. Nimona’s been misunderstood for centuries, and in a way, the film's own journey from blood sacrifice at Disney to resurrection at Netflix reflects her persistence. Sometimes the most important stories are the ones that have to fight to exist.

Nimona proves that when you let creators tell stories about outcasts and underdogs, magic happens. And that magic isn’t down to one person or unit. To misquote Larian’s Sven Vinke about what single division made Baldur’s Gate 3 shine, he said, “Don’t be a dick - it’s all of them.” Nimona is a symphony, each creative element working in concert to amplify the others. It’s not speaking to you, but with you. From the fallen ashes of Blue Sky Studios to the rising pink tide that is Nimona, it’s a testament to the power of collaboration, a story about outcasts and underdogs, and a resurrection that lets us see one of the most meaningful films in years.

What did you think of Nimona? Let me know in the comments below. If you agree pink can be a symbol for radical acts of freedom, smash that Like button. And if you love friends who see you even on your worst hair day…

Speaking of stories about radical acceptance and found family: if you're craving more tales about characters who refuse to be silently othered, The Three Faces of Fate features characters fighting to define themselves on their own terms:

There are unwritten rules in filmmaking. Rule number one is never kill the dog. Rule number two is don’t insult your audience, and it carries a couple of subclauses and riders. Right there in 2B, it says, “It was all a dream IS insulting your audience.”

Archive, written and directed by Gavin Rothery and starring Theo James and Stacy Martin, had every ingredient to be a sci-fi masterpiece right up my alley. It promises to explore the foundations of humanity through a predictive lens of AI and memory internment. It’s got dope cinematography and acting that’s off the chain.

But.

There are bold creative choices, and then there's deciding your sophisticated sci-fi flick, Archive, needs to crib ideas straight out of a student film from 1993. Spoilers: it wasn't brave. I don’t think it was blissful ignorance, either. I think it was the mark of a scriptwriter who got stuck on the last page.

Archive’s a 2020 film with a 1980s ending problem. Let’s investigate this cinematic felony.

The Seductive Premise

Archive follows researcher George on a fool’s quest to resurrect his dead wife, Jules, after a tragic car crash. It wasn’t just tragic because she died. It was tragic because she died badly; his memories are of shattered, bloody glass spread through broken metal and more broken bodies. We’re left a little grey on the details of the crash itself; George clearly doesn’t want to replay that through his mind daily, but can’t quite look away.

The marketing of the movie leaned into all of this. The trailer drips comeback tour Lazarus energy, the desire for eternal life and to live forever young and strong in a machine body. We know George is a driven man, and through the film we discover just how driven he is. The lines he’s crossed, and the rules he’s tempted to throw away. This man has lost everything—his wife, his career, his friends. He’s isolated, working at a remote Japanese research facility, and the only thing keeping him warm is the dying ember memories of his lost Jules.

George wants those embers to flare into an inferno. He’s willing to burn anyone and anything to get his wife back. It’s an enticing premise, a dark and ethically complex journey that should have become an all-time classic. And make no mistake, there’s some good shit here. The world that Rothery’s built is S-tier; his cinematography is full of bleak, stark lines, harsh beauty, and a monochromatic colourscape that mirrors George’s mind. We feel how cold it is to be him, and how unforgiving the world is to the demands of his quest.

The remote Japan facility is enticingly sci-fi but clearly breaking down. It reminds me of an earthy Nostromo; the starship in Alien was clearly huge leaps ahead of any technology we have now, but Weyland-Yutani wouldn’t put a bent copper down on maintenance, even if it saved crew lives. The evil psycho megacorps in Archive are WeyYu’s blood kin; George is forced to make his discoveries in an underfunded and mouldering lab that we both yearn to have access to, and pity him for having to put up with.

The movie’s also an SFX masterclass. You won’t be able to determine the seams between CGI, robotics, and prosthetics. This emphasis on presentation extends to the actors. Theo James imbues George’s Troubled Man™ with a sense of urgency and guilt. He’s got sins to make up for but he’s happy to keep on sinning. And Stacy Martin’s Jules makes our hearts break anew: there’s tension here in that we know the real Jules didn’t want to come back. The rebellion evident in their dialogue as her J3 version is a constant testing and reforming of trust. These combined faces of trust, betrayal, and love were absolutely astounding. We believed they would find a way through this. They had to, because of how they felt about each other.

There’s also an astounding emotional core to the movie, almost as if it was a new alloy forged from grief and obsession. George’s investment in the Jules variants of J1, J2, and J3—despite his flaws—makes us share his yearning for success at any cost. We see how he bends, then breaks to the dark side of his humanity. And J3 isn’t absent in emotional fallout; she has rage and anxiety just as she’s learning to breathe and live again.

When characters die in this movie, we feel it through how George and J3 react to it. George recognises his failings, and J3 wishes she’d been more present, more able to see the tidal wave that was coming. The message is clear: if we create life, the life has value whether it’s silicon or meat. We don’t have the right to play God, and yet… George must. He cannot rest until his task is done.

There’s a deeper mirror here that audiences of 2025 will find that was absent in 2020. Our current AI advancements are getting closer to what we see in Archive. While we can curse ChatGPT and demand Gemini gives us answers no matter what, soon we’ll be faced with a question: are these machines, or are they people? Is it right to feel for them? Is it right to do anything but feel for them? Can we yoke and enslave silicon minds, simply because we birthed them?

Where It All Went Wrong

Hopefully by this point you’re thinking, “Shit, Rich, I should see this dope-ass flick, it sounds amazing.”

Hold up, Tarzan.

The great conceit of Archive is the ending, which… eh. In a detail-free way, it was a slightly transformed version of ‘it was all a dream.’ There are lots of problems with this trope in general, but there are two clear ones in Archive’s case.

First, it’s completely unearned. We have no inkling of the true ending until the last fragment arrives. It feels rushed; we’re not allowed to rest for a beat on George and J3’s discoveries. It really felt like the writer wrote himself into a corner and couldn’t find the backspace key to reverse out.

The second and larger problem is the ending was a violation of trust and the viewer contract. The promise made to the audience was simple: George does bad shit and his wife gets to live. The real ending proves nothing he did mattered, but crucially, the emotional anguish we felt for those lost on his journey was a waste of time. I felt 100% cheated by the outcome of Archive; it made me actively hostile toward the memory of everything I’d just seen. The movie emotionally hijacks the viewer to no purpose. There’s no clever re-contextualisation here; it’s pure invalidation.

See, George lost nothing because it was all a dream.

The impact of what happened to J2, and J3’s subsequent sacrifice, is wasted potential. Rather than feeling like we’ve reached the ending of a hard and emotionally relevant movie, we instead got the monochromatic version of Nic Cage’s Next. It’s an emotional betrayal not because dreams are bad, but because of the depth of investment the film demanded. It’s a flaccid payoff to the hour and forty-nine minutes’ runtime I’ll never get back.

What Archive Could Have Been

There is a true power in the ethical questions Archive poses. The J2 storyline resonates: if we create life, aren’t we obligated to not be dicks to it? Well, it’s tricky stuff to work through, especially if it’s all a dream. The importance of the film’s questions about grief, sacrifice, and the nature of created consciousness is immolated on the pyre of an inept ending.

There are some alternative endings that would have honoured the narrative. If Jules died and George needed to live with his betrayal of J3, that would have been resonant. Or… what if J3 and Jules got to live in one shell, but decided to leave George on read for eternity because he was such a douche? There’s no need for a twist to land the plane here. There’s a more thematic payoff if Archive stuck to its own build-up and allowed Jules to reincarnate. It would have made the losses of J2 and J3 more poignant.

Hell, even a Rocky ending where George is unsuccessful but the journey mattered would be fine.

There’s a relationship between artist and art consumer that humans are exploring now more than ever before. With AI art, music, and literature on the rise, does it matter if the artist is silicon or meat? This is an ethical quandary the movie exposes but fails to hold on to because it was all a dream. The largest betrayal is around J2’s storyline. If someone has a disabled child, can they sacrifice its kidneys because a "normal" sibling needs them? These are powerful questions to frame in the context of AI being more human every day. Are we content to use AI as our virtual organ donors?

There’s a real missed opportunity here. See, to err is to be human. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we’re all just trying to do the best with what we’ve got. We don’t always get it right. That’s being the messy thing that’s us. An ending that honoured the gulf between our great desires and our capability, and nodded towards the harm we often do when seeking to touch the stars… that was the real message the film should have closed with.

The Broken Promise

I really wanted to like Archive. It’s got a sort of brutalist cyberpunk aesthetic and goes hard on asking questions we don’t have ready answers for. It’s not just that the movie looks good, or that the actors are knocking it out of the park. It’s that the movie gazes—unflinching—right back at us. The first two acts are unstoppable masterpieces. They build the audience’s expectation. For 90 minutes, I was on board.

But.

Archive sold us on a promise and a set of ethical quandaries that are ultimately wasted. It’s a betrayal of audience trust, especially because of how deeply and powerfully it dredges in the psyche on the nature of humanity. If we feel, are we real? If we speak about our pain, are we not human?

There was real and valuable emotional weight in the story and the questions it raised, and then… the ending happened. The film destroyed its own premise, and it did it right at the bedrock.

Let’s be clear. I’m not just saying it’s a weak ending. Plenty of movies survived a weak ending. It’s that it’s a broken promise from a narrative, thematic, and emotional standpoint. The ending is unearned. The violation of contract between artist and art consumer is absolute.

What did you think of Archive? Were you on team J2, or did you feel legs were optional? Let me know in the comments below. If you hate it-was-all-a-dream, press Like as if we’re siblings separated at birth.