As a matter of fact, every problem DOES look like a nail.

Marvel seems to have hit its stride when it comes to comic book movies. While DC is busy rebooting Superman and wrapping up the Dark Knight trilogy, Marvel has been gleefully churning out one superhero flick after another, gradually building a connected narrative between the films that seemed like a pipe dream only ten years ago. Best of all, they seemed to have learned their lessons from the pretentious failure that was Ang Lee’s Hulk and the plodding introspection of DC’s aimless, self-indulgent Superman Returns. Witness Thor, a movie devoid of political commentary or heavy thematic ambitions: it’s a movie about a Norse God who has a hammer, flies, and hits people. Really hard.

The movie opens with some Anthony Hopkins narration, detailing the war between the mythical realm of Asgard and the frozen plane of Jotunheim. Jotunheim is inhabited by the frost giants, an evil race of craggy blue guys who just won’t turn off the air conditioning. A fragile peace exists between Asgard and the frost giants, until impetuous heir to the Asgardian throne Thor (Chris Hemsworth), being something of a nitwit, gets hoodwinked by his clever-ambitious-and-therefore-a-villain brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) into jaunting over to Jotunheim and slaughtering frost giants until they change their minds about the whole peace thing. Odin (Hopkins) gets irritated and so banishes Thor to Earth, where he will become a mortal man and learn of this thing humans call love, and also boilermakers. That dastardly Loki takes the throne of Asgard, and we’re off to a good old-fashioned comic book adventure.

When this scene came up, my wife said "Oh, MY, hello!" Five minutes later, she said "We should really own this movie."

Most of Thor‘s appeal comes straight from the casting, most notably Chris Hemsworth, who charms the socks right off this movie. Hemsworth briefly played George Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek reboot (“we’ll call our baby James T. Kirk-AAAARGH!”), and he plays his role with an infectious, affable glee. The always-winsome Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster, an astrophysicist who cautiously falls for the Norse god, and miraculously manages to go the entire runtime of the film without being captured or even meaningfully threatened. Hopkins does a decent job of roaring, mumbling, then falling dutifully into a coma for the last half of the film. (And his performance isn’t bad either! Rimshot!) Bonus points for including Ray Stevenson (Rome’s Titus Pullo) and Idris Elba as Heimdall, whose basso profundo voice is rivaled only by that of Laufey (Colm Feore).

Natalie Portman as Jane Foster. Still mostly a love interest, but at least she's not screaming non-stop for the last thirty minutes of the movie.

Like its Marvel movie cousins, the plot of Thor is refreshingly straightforward. Loki’s jealous of Thor, and so orchestrates Thor’s banning from Asgard. Thor falls to earth, learns the delight of diner coffee, and Stellan Skarsgård teaches him baseball and how to laugh. Jane is warned not to fall for Thor, and so does precisely that. Stinky old Loki wants to make sure he doesn’t lose his grip on the throne, and so sends a town-stomping monster to take care of business and mash Thor into paste. Meanwhile, there’s an Excalibur-esque subplot with Thor coming to grips with his own flaws and learning to be worthy of his own weapon. It’s pretty obvious how that will turn out, but it’s fun to watch anyway.

By the way, if you want to make a drinking game out of Thor, it’s easy. Just take a drink every time you see a Dutch angle. Branagh apparently loves the Dutch angle. Loves it.

Thor is not a complicated film. The title character’s transformation from brash, reckless warrior to brash, reckless warrior with a slightly more coherent moral center isn’t profound or revelatory, but it’s enough to get by while Thor whales on some frost giants and hops between dimensions. There’s no heavy-handed political satire or shoegazing meditation on the nature of heroism — just a guy in a cape and his hammer. Much as its predecessors, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, traded in thematic resonance for high-octane action, Thor makes do with being a brightly-colored blast of adventure — and that’s enough.

"My son, we've really got to work on your impulse control issues."

Hey, this looks awesome! Is this in the movie? No. No, it isn't.

Let me start off by saying that I am not an impartial audience. I went into Conan 2011 with the feeling that it would not hold a candle to the 1982 Milius film. I felt the same way coming out of it. Conan 2011 would have worked better if they’d just called it The Scorpion King III.

The story will be very familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a no-budget sword-and-sandal movie from the Eighties. A mystical gewgaw (the Mask of Acheron) has the power to raise the dead and make the user totally invincible and stuff — only not really, and we’ll get to that in a little while. The mask was split up into several fragments, and now the evil necromancer Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) is searching for the final pieces to bring his wife back from the dead and conquer the world, in that order.

Apparently, no sword-and-sorcery movie is complete without a good village-wiping-outing, and Conan makes no exception. The Milius film did the same thing. The only difference is, the 2011 film takes its own sweet time getting there.

After the requisite opening narration (“between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis,” performed by the now-cliched Morgan Freeman), we are treated to the opening shot of a sword slicing through a woman’s womb from the inside. I would love to say this is something I’m irresponsibly making up, but I’m not. Conan was “born into battle,” therefore someone thought it was a good idea to show an unborn baby nearly getting impaled. Then his father Corin (Ron Perlman) cuts the young Conan out of his mother’s stomach while she’s still alive and holds up his bloody, flailing infant body. Cue opening credits. Far be it for me to wax squeamish about blood & guts in a Conan film, I guess, but I wish the screenwriters had put down the bong long enough to realize how ridiculous that would look on film.

We move on to the Cimmerian equivalent of an egg-and-spoon race, wherein all the young Cimmerians must run through the woods holding quail eggs in their mouths without breaking them. Conan, of course, is way more badass than the other kids, so he beats up ten Picts and still wins the race, spitting his egg out unbroken. (Still sounds like I’m making it up, doesn’t it?) We then move on to a tepid, lifeless, mostly incoherent re-hash of the “riddle of steel” sequence cribbed straight from the Milius film. Whenever I see something like this, I always think of Tom Servo’s quote from the MST3K episode Overdrawn at the Memory Bank: “Never show a good film in the middle of your crappy one.”

If the movie had been 90 minutes of this guy threatening people, I'd probably have been happy.

So anyway, Khalar Zym shows up and wipes out Conan’s village. If you’ve seen Beastmaster (1982), you know exactly what happens here. All that’s missing is a heroic dog. The scale of the assault is ramped way up, because it’s 2011 and CG armies are cheap. (Zym’s armies spend a lot of time firing arrows into their own ranks, because apparently necromancers aren’t picky about the intelligence of their recruits.) There’s a long, turgid battle scene, one in a series of long, turgid battle scenes, all of which are clumsily choreographed and shot in unwatchable shaky-cam. If you’re thinking of watching Conan for the awesome fight scenes, brace for disappointment.

Back to the massacre. Zym is looking for the last piece of the Mask of Acheron (the movie mercifully spares us from the collection of the plot coupons), which Corin just happens to have. Zym kills Conan’s father and rides off to await the second act. Thankfully, there is no Wheel of Pain or montage; L’il Conan, having survived the slaughter, simply holds up his sword and yells, and then in the next scene he’s all grown up and slaying people, freeing slaves and throwing half-naked slave girls over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, like ya do.

It barely needs to be mentioned that the Conan movie has little or nothing to do with Howard’s stories. This is nothing new. Even the villain of the Milius film, Thulsa Doom, was actually a villain from a Kull the Conqueror story. However, the 2011 Conan throws in extra irritation by making several references to the Howard stories, while showing none of it on-screen. Hey, Conan, remember when we got in this awesome adventure at the Tower of the Elephant? Good times. Well, nevermind, we’ve got other stuff going on.

Tamara is a strong female character, if by "strong" you are actually referring to the ropes binding her through most of the movie.

The revenge plot unfolds apace. Khalar Zym needs a “woman of pure blood” to complete his spooky ritual, and so travels around with his Gothed-out airhead of a daughter Marique (the ever-bland Rose McGowan), killing people to prove various point and generally being menacing. The pure-blooded woman in question, a monk named Tamara (Rachel Nichols) flees from the bad guys, straight into Conan’s arms, and the game is afoot.

Rather than cover the galumphing middle act of the film, I’ll just hit the highlights. First of all, it should come as no surprise that being a woman in the Conan universe sucks. Marique is a creepy psychopath with the hots for her dad. Tamara gets to put on some armor and kick some ass for about five minutes, and then is strapped to a big wagon wheel to scream helplessly for the last third of the film. Every other female exists only to take their tops off or to be violently killed. Possibly both. I’m not arguing that this is out of character for the genre, I’m just saying the movie desperately needed a Valeria, and we didn’t get one.

While the storyline is predictable and seems to drag on forever, there are a few highlights. First, Stephen Lang as Khalar Zym is intensely fun as a villain. He growls, he stalks around, he bares his teeth, and looks really good doing it. Second, the set design is ambitious and frequently beautiful, and the one thing in the film that’s genuinely evocative of Howard’s stories. Sprawling caves, brooding monasteries, and gloomy ruins abound. It’s a shame they feel wasted, but they’re fun to look at all the same.

Rose McGowan IS Jackie Earl Haley as Freddy Kreuger.

Unfortunately, the low points are far more numerous. My favorite moment in the movie had to be the battle in the middle act featuring a horde of sand-people. I don’t mean Tusken Raiders wearing goggles and bandages, I mean guys actually made of sand, summoned up by eldritch magic. The thing is, they looked and acted perfectly human, only they were made of sand. They weren’t particularly durable. They didn’t have any special powers. They were just like any other disposable henchman. Except they’re sand. So, Conan wins big bonus points for the the most comically underwhelming dark sorcery ever.

There’s also the matter of the climax. Did you ever see Blade? Remember when Deacon Frost talks about La Magra, the Blood Good, and how when La Magra comes to town everyone in his path will instantly be turned into a vampire? Only what actually happens is that Deacon Frost turns sort of invincible for a few minutes, but not really, because Blade still kills him inside of five minutes? The Mask of Acheron is just like that. The dark necromantic artifact from the surly empire of Acheron doesn’t actually do anything. The only difference I noticed was that the villain’s IQ seemed to drop sharply near the end, as he falls for one of the oldest chestnuts in the book.

Conan 2011 is not a terrible film. In truth, it’s just another mediocre fantasy movie that would have been right at home in 1982. To a well-heeled fan of the genre, it offers nothing you haven’t seen before, save perhaps several objects floating awkwardly in the foreground, a by-product of the risible 3D revolution. Fans of Robert E. Howard looking for a fitting adaptation will likely come away with their hopes unfulfilled. But, if you’re just going in for the blood and mayhem, that much the film can and does deliver.

The reasons for this seem clear: the protagonist backs away from the vengeful abyss because, on some level, the audience wants to cheer for that revenge, not recoil in horror from it. We want to believe that the avenger remains fundamentally human and redeemable; that after vigilante justice is served up, he or she can go on with life, secure in the knowledge that even they answered murder with murder, they did so in the service of a greater good. And so many revenge films end up being curiously squeamish, backing cautiously away from their own subject matter.

Two recent horror remakes fly into the face of this cinematic norm: The Last House on the Left and, more recently, I Spit on Your Grave, both remakes of 70s shock-horror classics of the same name. Now, whether or not said films should have been remade is not something I’m going to debate here. I will say that I’ve seen both versions of each film, and both remakes succeed in bringing something new to the table — and not just in terms of ramped-up gore, although that’s certainly true. (Last House, in particular, has a slightly more robust story and removes Wes Craven’s absurdist predilections.) I won’t make the case that they’re necessarily great, good, or even enjoyable films — but they do present a raw, unblinking look at revenge and challenge the way the subject matters is dealt with in film.

The plot of I Spit on Your Grave is stark and simple: Jennifer Hills, a young writer, travels alone to a cabin in the woods to work on her new book. A group of idle thugs, resenting her snobbish “big city” behavior (which occurs almost solely in their imagination), stalk her and photograph her without her knowledge. Finally, driven by machismo and insecurity, the men eventually coax themselves into a frenzy, break into Jennifer’s cabin, and verbally and physically abuse her.

Jennifer escapes long enough to encounter the sheriff, who returns her to the cabin and, in a depressingly rote example of victim-blaming, proceeds to cast doubt on her story, citing the presence of alcohol and marijuana in the house. He then reveals his utter complicity as the thugs return and the whole group — sheriff included — gang-rape her at length. They take Jennifer into the woods, intending to kill her, but she swan-dives off a bridge into a river and disappears from sight.

Months pass, and there is no sign of Jennifer. The rapists, tired of scouring the woods daily for signs of her (or her corpse), grow lax and assume she’s dead. Of course, that’s when Jennifer resurfaces, and proceeds to exact her calculated and protracted revenge.

Like the Last House on the Left remake, the revenge sequences in I Spit On Your Grave are where the film betrays its intense desire to shock. The assault on Jennifer is brutal, cruel, and prolonged; her revenge, even more so. The torture sequences pander to the darkest part of the revenge-fantasy psyche; every punishment fits the crime, and Jennifer throws her victimizer’s own words back in their faces as they suffer and die.

For example, during the rape sequence, one of the antagonists — a vain, well-coiffed type — pushes Jennifer’s face in a puddle, giggling as she struggles to breathe. Later, she does the same to him — only his face goes into a bathtub full of lye, and we are treated to a graphic show of his tongue melting into pink goo. Each of the rapists beg pathetically for their lives, and Jennifer shows them as much leniency and mercy as they showed her — which is to say, none at all.

Unlike more mainstream and accessible revenge films, I Spit on Your Grave offers no redemption for Jennifer — the final shot lingers on her bloody, muddy face, showing a broken person whose life, and psyche, are shattered, perhaps forever. We never get a good sense of who she is as a person — even the villains, who are by every measure squalid and cowardly, are more well-rounded as characters. Jennifer exists first as victim, then as killer.

A lot of revenge films like to bring up the hoary old quip, “before seeking revenge, first dig two graves,” implying that the avenger will become the thing they hate most, and this film bears out that theory. Jennifer begins the film as a sympathetic character, but ends as a cold-blooded murderer. She will not, for instance, go on to hug her child and placidly resume her life after murdering her tormentor, like Jennifer Lopez did in Enough. She doesn’t saunter heroically away, satisfied with a job well-done — she has become something unrecognizable, perhaps even to herself.

To me, this depicts a more honest treatment of revenge than most films bother with — which made Roger Ebert’s reaction to the film all the more interesting to me. (Not that I expected him to like it, of course.) These days, Ebert’s reviews seem less like reviews and more like an opportunity to moralize — I’ve always respected his opinion and insight, but time has not been kind. He points out that “if I rape you, I have committed a crime. If you kill me, you have committed another one. The ideal outcome would be two people unharmed in the first place.”

It seems curious and a little bizarre to grouse about “ideal outcomes,” which are hardly a staple of movies in general, much less horror films. A cinematic landscape made up entirely of ideal outcomes would probably resemble a never-ending episode of Veggie Tales, and I’m pretty sure he has to know that. Ebert then goes on to talk about the audience, crafting suppositions about their motivations and advising couples who saw the film to question each other’s moral turpitude. To be fair, this isn’t much different than Ebert’s reaction to the original film, which was also less about the film than Ebert’s moral horror at the audience around him.

Personally, I think Ebert’s assumption that I Spit on Your Grave endorses a moral equivalence (rape justifying torture and murder) is inaccurate. Jennifer’s torment and revenge do not transform her into a hero. The audience is not meant to admire her bravery. The entire story appeals to a much darker, less pleasant instinct in the human psyche; the raw, bloodthirsty desire to see someone pay. Most mainstream movies like to have it both ways; they indulge a little bit of bloodlust, but not enough to leave the experience tainted. Like the protagonist herself, I Spit On Your Grave spreads its arms and drops willingly into that abyss, heedless of how far it is to the murky bottom.

I Spit On Your Grave, to no one’s surprise, took a thorough critical drubbing. I myself admit to watching it mostly out of morbid curiosity. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it, unless you have a high tolerance for explicit gore. However, if you want a revenge film that pulls absolutely no punches, this film would be it.

It's like The Matrix without all that Chosen One crap! Wait... no, it's not like The Matrix at all.

Inception does what any good science fiction movie that isn’t focused on the “science” should do — it gets the central conceit out of the way with a minimum of explanation and moves on. Thanks to a futuristic chemical concoction, human beings can now enter one another’s dreams, experiencing them as a shared reality and manipulating it to their own ends. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief for hire, tasked with the nearly-impossible task of “inception” — planting an idea in another person’s subconscious without them realizing it’s been planted.

One of the greatest pitfalls of any movie like this is the descent into pseudo-scientific technoblather, a pitfall Inception dodges by creating a very simple internal mythology and sticking to it. There’s the “architect” who creates the dream setting within the subconscious mind; the “dreamer,” who populates it with subconscious projections, and a set of simple rules: pain hurts in a dream, but killing someone will wake them up — unless, of course, they’re sedated, in which case they can fall into a limbo where dream and reality can no longer be distinguished.

If you die in a dream, you die in real life! Wait... no you don't.

No effort is made in justifying these mechanics to the audience; they’re set up, accepted, and get out of the way of the story. The lack of emphasis on the sci-fi conceits gives Inception room to explore its real themes: information as a virus, the nature of reality, and the meaning of choices. The central plot revolves around a single, binary choice by Fischer (Cillian Murphy), a corporate heir whose rivals want to break up his empire. Cobb and his associates invade his dreams, Ocean’s Eleven-style, and take him on an emotional journey that, in testament to Nolan’s directorial skills, manages to be compelling despite the cynical motivations behind it.

Along the way, Inception runs into the kind of story problems that any movie of this sort runs into: how to raise the stakes in a world where nothing is real, how to immerse the characters (and audience) in an imaginary reality without confusing the viewer, and how to play on the question of “but is it only a dream?” without falling into hoary old cliche.

Inception somehow manages to leap deftly over these obstacles — replacing the “if you die in a dream, you die in real life” cheat used in similar but far inferior films with a more plausible alternative, and unapologetically leaving the “real” world behind for the majority of the film.

Though Inception contains plenty of spectacle — freight trains appearing out of nowhere, entire cityscapes bending like rubber or disintegrating like sand castles at high tide — the real meat of the movie is in the characters: Cobb; who’s pursued by a past that literally comes back to haunt him; Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose understated humor and competence keep the film from sinking into angst; Eames (Tom Hardy), who nearly runs away the entire show, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), whom the viewer will probably come to think of as “the sensible one.”

Perhaps the biggest strength of Inception is that it is, ultimately, not about the dizzying, flexible landscapes of the dream world that the characters inhabit, nor the inevitable questions about whether or not the characters are really experiencing the events of the film or dreaming (perhaps second only to “what’s in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?” as one of the most overused movie questions of all time). Inception is a movie about the choices we make, the regrets we carry with us, and how even the smallest idea can grow to define a person’s entire life. Cobb is a character haunted by regrets that are worth regretting, and dwells in a place where even happy dreams of bygone times provide pain instead of comfort.

Like the medium of film itself; Inception is about artifice that can provide genuine emotion and even self-realization, even if those moments have been carefully crafted from without. Inception seems to ask not whether its characters are experiencing dream or reality, but rather what they choose to do with the reality they experience.  “You keep telling yourself what you know,” says a character from Cobb’s dark past.  “But what do you believe?” In the end, Inception seems to tell us, it’s the second question that matters most.

You will believe an angel can suck.

Legion is the movie that dares to ask the question, “What if we remade The Prophecy without all that troublesome plot and characterization?” Loud, incoherent, and notably lacking in Viggo Mortensen taking a turn as Satan, Legion could be used as promotional material in the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement! Ha! Internet hyperbole! Seriously, though, it isn’t very good.

Ostensibly, the plot of Legion has something to do with God getting sick of humanity’s bullshit. That isn’t me being crass, that’s cribbed directly from the opening monololgue by the female lead, whose bored delivery sets the tone for the entire film.  God has grown weary of our shenanigans, what with genocide and famine and Jersey Shore, and dispatches a buttload of angels down to destroy humanity, apparently by turning everyone into zombies with melting faces and limbs like Stretch Armstrong. Keeping to his covenant, God will never again destroy the earth by water, opting instead to bore us to death.

Chances are, in the last year or so, you’ve been subjected to the commercials for Legion, featuring the killer demon grandma and her amazing follow-up, killer demon ice cream guy. In the interest of saving everyone a little time, I’m going to bust out a hoary old chestnut from the bottom of the IMdB comments drawer: if you’ve seen the commercials, don’t bother with the movie. Those two moments are basically the highlights of the film. Legion has nothing else going for it.

In truth, we all should have seen this coming. When a bottom-drawer movie like Legion keeps playing the same two notes over and over again in its previews, you have to know something’s up. Yes, a little old lady gets possessed by a demon, swears a lot, crawls up the wall like Spidey on six cans of Red Bull, then gets blown away by a shotgun. Later, an ice cream man travels to the middle of the desert, shrieks like a dentist’s drill, then gets blown away by a shotgun.

Let me be clear… that’s the good stuff. If you really want to experience the novelty of watching an old lady say “fuck,” you could just rent any movie from the last fifteen years with Betty White in it. (Or, if you’re one of the lucky ones and your own grandma happens to like the profanity, just go wind her up instead.) On the other hand, if you want to see a mutant ice cream man, you could always just watch George Kennedy’s thirty-second bit in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot where he tells a little kid to go fuck a duck. Okay, so he’s neither a mutant nor technically an ice cream man, but there’s an ice cream truck in the shot, and frankly I think that should be enough for you. All hyperbole aside, I will bet you a real American dollar that those thirty seconds will probably yield more entertainment than the entirey of Legion.

But we were talking about the plot. Well, more’s the pity, because Legion is basically every zombie movie ever made, with angels instead of zombies. Or demons. Or something. Don’t look at me, I didn’t write this shit. The best bits are openly cribbed from The Prophecy, with angels having facedowns and talking about how super-cool humanity really is when you get right down to it. Unfortunately, instead of Christopher Walken being awesome, we get Kevin Durand as Gabriel, who has a motorized mace and metal wings so that when he pirouettes around like a ballet dancer, he cuts people to shreds. I am not making that up. Paul Bettany mumbles and stares his way through his role as the Archangel Michael, looking like he’d rather be just about anywhere else.

Like any good zombie movie (minus the “good” part), Legion features the usual gang of unsympathetic characters ready to turn on each other at a moment’s notice. Suburban Mom character unleashes a torrent of verbal abuse on Whorish Daughter character — is it because she’s a demon, or just a total bitch? We don’t really know. It’s one of the movie’s little mysteries. Meanwhile, Hook-Hand Veteran Guy relates a series of stultifying anecdotes about faith, or Vietnam, or land mines or something, establishing himself as the only character in the movie who could remotely be called two-dimensional. Later, when an accountant is crucified on  a cross and blows up and turns out to be filled with acid (I am not making any of this up), Veteran Guy is liquified and dies a horrifying death. Now, if one of your oldest friends was hit with acid and turned to cottage cheese in front of your very eyes, which of the following would you do?

• Scream, wail, and have a panic attack
• Try to save him somehow
• Call 911
• Don’t react and then wander out of the scene as if nothing happened

I’ll let you guess which of these is correct. There’s also a bit where a guy tries to save a kid, but then the kid turns out to be evil. I guarantee you won’t see that one coming. It is a real shockeroo.

Legion ramps up the body count in the last few minutes, throwing people violently out of the movie after ninety minutes of lumbering exposition and barely acknowledging their loss. For a movie that’s supposedly about faith in humanity, Legion shows very little of that faith — it’s one biblical apocalypse that just might put you on the side of the vengeful god.

Cloverfield is an excellent horror movie.

It really works on a number of levels. The acting and dialogue are intelligent and believable; the pacing is gripping and speedy, without overdoing it; the camerawork, with its Blair Witch-like conceit, is very nicely done. Moreover, it is scary, and uses a wide variety of methods to achieve this scariness; indeed, virtually every method in the book, apart, thank Christ, from the something-jumps-out-suddenly method. There’s a scene in the darkness that is viscerally frightening, that hits you in the reptile brain. Then there’s the much-vaunted Statue of Liberty head, which really is marvelously effective, absolutely horrifying in a broad, conceptual sort of way. It is a very enjoyable movie, which succeeds in virtually everything it hopes to accomplish, and it is highly recommended.

What it is not is an especially good giant-monster movie.

Our nation’s gorgeous twentysomethings – imperiled!

I once read the excellent movie Reign of Fire described as something like “the best ever dragon movie without any dragons in it.” An apt description, really, even if it does exaggerate just a bit. But Reign of Fire had easily two or three times as much good footage of its dragons as Cloverfield does of its monster. In fact, you never do get a really good look at the whole creature; you get enough good looks at its various parts to piece it together, but only barely. Moreover, it is an entity without origin or motivation.

Now, there is a reason for all this, and it’s quite a good one: It’s scarier that way. Explanations, and chances to study things, these provide reassurance, and reassurance should be rare to absent in a movie designed to terrify. Cloverfield is a movie about human reaction to disaster, and the unspeakable feelings of hopeless confusion that disaster engenders. That the disaster in the movie happens to be a monster is nearly irrelevant. Only nearly, though – that it is a monster, an unknown quantity, makes it scarier than, say, an earthquake might be. We know what an earthquake is, and that removes just a hair of the threat, at least to the comfortable viewer. That it is a monster of unknown origin does help to take a bit of that comfort away.

Most giant monster movies are, to some degree, about human reaction to disaster. But they also have other themes. Godzilla, as we know, represents the atomic bomb, among other things; King Kong is, again among other things, primordial man. Any monster with an origin, or even an appearance with recognizable features, has a subtext based on those things. By having none of these things, the Cloverfield monster has no real subtext of its own; it is a monster with no theme. One could, were one charitable, say that it has the theme of ‘disaster itself,’ but this is little more specific than ‘fear itself,’ bringing us back to the horror genre, rather than the more allegorical, sci-fi giant monster genre.

Also, let’s not mince words: If you’re going to make a giant monster movie, let’s see some God damned giant monster. Let’s see it. We want to. Come on. Why we want to – well, that is a question too broad for our scope here. Suffice it to say, though, that the creation and examination of monsters has a pedigree that extends to every culture everywhere forever. It’s scarier if we don’t see it, yes. But we’re still allowed to want to see it. And if Cloverfield were a proper giant-monster movie, we would.

Oh my God, did you see that? Ehhh, it probably wouldn’t interest you.

Remember the original Alien? Great film. But not really a science fiction movie; more of a horror movie that makes use of science fiction tropes – quite effectively, in fact. It’s the same with Cloverfield; a horror movie in another genre’s clothing.

Now, it should be reiterated that Cloverfield is an excellent film, regardless of genre. And some may find all this genre-dividing unpalatable, as is their right to do. But part of the purpose of genre in the first place is to indicate what we ought expect. And it is ill-advised that you expect a giant monster movie out of this film. It is, quite simply, not about its monster at all. And it would need to be, to fit in that genre. It has been reported that J. J. Abrams has said he wanted to make this movie because “America doesn’t have a Godzilla.” It still doesn’t.

By the way, they’re already talking about a sequel, and apparently under consideration is the idea of said sequel being the same imaginary event, only filmed by another person or group. If so, could we have the next group be obsessed with following the monster around? Figuring out about it? It probably still won’t be our Godzilla, but we can get a giant monster movie out of this idea yet.

Perhaps the funniest moment in Resident Evil: Extinction appears in the extras, where Paul W.S. Anderson, a true god among hacks, claims that he single-handedly reinvented the zombie film . “No one made a zombie film for fifteen years before Resident Evil,” he boasts, a claim which even a cursory glance at any list of zombie films will quickly debunk. Bold pioneer that he is Anderson claims goes on to brag about his daring choice to shoot a zombie in the daylight… ground well-tread not only in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead twenty-nine years previous, but also in the 2004 Zack Snyder remake. Yeah, Paul. You’re a real ground-breaker.

For such a purportedly brave adventure into uncharted cinematic territory, Extinction offers much that will be readily familiar to both zombie buffs and fans of the previous Resident Evil films. Taking heavy cues from The Road Warrior (or at least Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome), Extinction takes place several years after the equally preposterous (but far funnier) Resident Evil: Apocalypse. To make a long story short: zombies have taken over the world, as the evil Umbrella Corporation’s runaway T-Virus wipes out “plants, lakes and oceans,” leaving only a handful of meager survivors. Said survivors, as they must in movies like these, now trek across the country in convoys of giant semi trucks and all-terrain vehicles, shooting zombies with high-powered weapons and smoking lots of cigarettes… basically, a thirteen-year-old boy’s dream come true.

Blazing across the desert on her badass motorcycle comes Alice (Milla Jovovich, sporting one of the worst movie haircuts in recent memory), now a psychokinetic wunderkind who can leap thirty feet into the air, blow up orbiting satellites with her mind, and dispatch zombies with her double kukri knives in thigh-high stockings and a low-cut top. (Basically, another thirteen-year-old boy’s dream come true.) Alice teams up with battle-hardened survivalists Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr), and the convoy then meanders from one overblown action sequence to another as the characters make vague noises about heading up to “Alaska” while being menaced by legions of hyperactive, sprinting undead. There is a group of hapless extras (including a black guy whose tag line is “Aw, hell naw!”), but they’re all violently killed long before you can be bothered to learn their names.

Extinction is directed by Russell Mulcahy, whom genre fans will recognize as being the genius behind Highlander II. In all fairness, Mulcahy knows how to shoot an action sequence, and Extinction is a decent-looking film, full of gritty sepia tones and the kind of hot, overexposed look that’s been increasingly de rigeur since Pitch Black. Because it’s penned by Paul W.S. Anderson, of course, Extinction‘s ridiculous story plays much like the cheesy post-apocalyptic B-movies of the Eighties, and will probably hold a lot of appeal (as Anderson himself admits) to teenaged kids who have never seen it done better in The Road Warrior. The film’s only inventive moment comes in the first act, as the convoy is attacked by a crazed horde of infected birds (the idea for which, Anderson will probably claim, Hitchcock totally ripped off from him.) The rest is so predictable that you could easily make a drinking game out of it — which character will get bitten and turn into a zombie at an extremely inconvenient moment? Which character will get bitten and heroically sacrifice him (or her) self to save the others? Does the black guy die first? Does he wryly comment on it? You get the idea.

Extinction is not entirely without ambition, however. The greater plot (such as it is) rears its ugly head in the final act, as the predictably psychotic Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) devises a plan to bring Alice into Umbrella’s underground Hive for his outlandish and wildly improbable genetic experiments. In between the zombie attacks, Isaacs delivers foreboding, cliched speeches to an anonymous Umbrella Corporation board of directors, who wear sunglasses indoors and mutter dark imprecations about “liquidation” and “deadlines” straight out of the corporate-bad-guy playbook. (It’s worth mentioning that Extinction teaches many valuable lessons about what life on post-apocalyptic Earth will be like; for example, despite there being very few survivors left on the planet, there is apparently such an abundance of high-level genetic scientists still lurking around that the villains can still afford to kill them in droves just to prove a dramatic point.) Eventually, of course, the Umbrella Corporation lures Alice into the Hive, where the requisite “boss fight” ensues, followed by the setup for the inevitable sequel.

Fans have apparently complained that this third installment in the Resident Evil series departs too dramatically from the video games; this seems a tad uncharitable, given that not only does Extinction revisit several elements from the other two movies (the Hive, the fake house, the spooky little-girl A.I.), but repeats the central gag of the first film on two separate occasions. (Hint: it’s the corridor with a sense of humor.)

Overall, Extinction provides the same improbable scenarios, over-the-top fan service, and gratuitous violence that characterized the previous installments, with a bit more gore and a whole lot more zombies. If anything, it’s significantly less goofy than Apocalypse, as certain tropes become a lot easier to swallow once you enter post-apocalyptic territory. Extinction isn’t good by any objective measure — but it is loud, stupid, and more fun than it has any real right to be.

Final Grade: C-

So it was that about a year ago I decided to buy up all three of the boxsets of The Original Series (TOS). I waited only as long as it took them to drop the price from an outrageous $99 to the slightly more reasonable $70 level. Yep, $210 worth of episodes. But little did you know, dear readers, that my little financial indiscretions would also ensnare your kind selves, for now I embark upon a critical journey of every episode of the original series.

Now let’s meet our companion for the next few weeks and months, Season 1 box set:

Note the clever “tri-corderesque” packaging. Here’s the same lady with all of her bits showing:

Included are a set of 8 disks, an episode guide featuring brief descriptions and artwork from all versions of Star Trek and that handy dandy plastic case which doesn’t stand up too well without its cardboard base. All-in-all the production design is almost excellent.

Finally, here’s a close-up of Disc 1, which will bring us our first four episodes:

As you can see, each episode is labeled with its original air date (which determines the order by which they are presented in these sets) and the in-story-world star date. I almost would have preferred that they went with the star date as their key, but oh well.

My one big criticism is the sheer lack of features on these disks. About one episode a disk has “Pop Up Video” style comments by Michael and Denise Okuda, set designers from The Next Generation. Disc 7 and an additional (unpictured) 8th disc in a paper sleeve have a handful of some somewhat interesting interviews and documentaries, but for the prices above I had expected a lot more. But let’s put all that behind us and proceed.

The first aired episode is “The Man Trap”, which we will visit in detail next week! I hope you’re as interested in reading my episode commentaries as I am in writing them!

From Cinemablend:

Sad news from the world of fantasy literature. Robert Jordan, known best as the author of the “Wheel of Time” series of books, died on the afternoon of Sunday September 16th after more than a year battling cardiac amyloidosis. The news comes from a message left on the author’s blog.

The site says, “It is with great sadness that I tell you that the Dragon is gone. RJ left us today at 2:45 PM. He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain.” Funeral arrangements will be posted later on the blog, and for fans interesting in sending his family their best wishes, the comments section on Jordan’s there seems to be the place to do it.

While I never got past the first chapter of the first Wheel of Time book, I know he was beloved by many, and having such a lengthy series left unfinished has to be quite a blow to his many fans. No doubt another author or a family member will step up to round off the series, but it’s still a sad day for fantasy literature. RIP.