Film & TV Reviews

Daredevil’s Season 3 on Netflix has a lot to offer, despite some early warning signs suggesting it might be overly political. The overall plotline involves the return of Wilson Fisk (now openly known as the Kingpin), and Daredevil’s attempts to keep him from regaining control of the city’s criminal underworld. We have an excellent guest villain from Daredevil’s rogues’ gallery, and there are many well-done and subtle callbacks to that character’s earlier appearances in all formats. We get a bit more backstory for Karen Page, which is interesting but awkwardly inserted. We get some significant revelations for Matt Murdock himself.

Season 2 represents a clear improvement over Season 1 of this show in every respect. The dynamic between Danny Rand and Christine (his girlfriend and sidekick) changes significantly for the better, with Christine’s (or rather, the actresses’) noticeably superior martial arts skills getting recognition. Danny’s own moral failings are pointed to and wrestled with. Some problems are recognized as unsolvable, at least by vigilante superheros. Like Season 2 of Luke Cage , there’s some significant moral ambiguity present, but it’s somewhat less drastic.

I don’t have much to say about this one. It was better than the first season, but had too much focus on the criminals. There was significant moral ambiguity, particularly towards the end, which could either be a bad thing or a deliberate storytelling choice that will be redeemed next season. This season, it left a bad taste in my mouth. The cameo appearance by Iron Fist was good, but did not mesh well with Iron Fist Season 2 as a whole. (I’m not sure of the chronology). An improvement over the first season, not least because it was shorter and thus had less time to waste. If they had cut it down to 6 episodes instead of ten, it might have worked.

Legion is a TV-form production licensed from Marvel, set in the X-Men side of the universe. Unless you are familiar with the character from the source material, it’s not going to feature any well known characters. The first season is very odd, as you might expect from a series revolving around a main character whose defining characteristic is his paranoid schizophrenia. Or, in other words, he hears voices. And occasionally sees things. And occasionally blows up his kitchen with his mind, and then forgets about it.

The one-line review is that Interstellar is the movie that 2001 should have been. It has a mysterious anomaly orbiting Saturn, a realistic depiction of a space mission to investigate and explore. But it also has so much more: incredible, moving performances from the leading actors and actresses, an emotional investment on both the personal and the species level, strange and wonderful and terrible things to find, and a powerful human drama that plays out across that background.

*The Edge of Tomorrow is a Tom Cruise military sci-fi vehicle, and it’s a bundle of contradictions that actually work out to a pretty good movie. Let me start by hitting you with what is obvious from the trailer: alien invasion, near-future powered armor. Those aspects are mostly handled well. The power armor is much more realistic than, say, Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor; it’s basically strength-enhancing and load-carrying with some token “armor” and a few mounted weapons. Cruise even gets a chance to lampshade the fact that he isn’t wearing a helmet. (The real reason is that he is getting paid millions for his face to be visible, of course). The aliens are alien aliens and not very comprehensible to humanity.

Gravity, with Sandra Bullock in the lead role and George Clooney supporting, is an excellent movie for fans of science fiction, but as SF author Rosemary Kirstein points out (and beware spoilers behind that link), it is more science fact than science fiction. Though the events are fictional, the technology underpinning them is not. We have multiple space stations in orbit. We have people who work in space on a regular basis, if not continually. We have taken science fiction, and made it real. We have Star Trek communicators, Star Trek tricorders. We are working on self-driving cars and invisibility cloaks. We’re doing all that with science, and this movie sticks reasonably close to what we know about science.

Yesterday, I went to see Fearless, Jet Li’s recent martial arts epic. It was pretty good, but also pretty much exactly what I expected. While there, I saw that the theater had allocated one of its screens to a flick called The Illusionist, a movie I had never heard of or seen previews or promos for. Based on the little title strip with showtimes, it looked interesting, and a few minutes wirelessly checking the reviews on Rotten Tomatos suggested it wasn’t awful.

So there’s a new vampire movie out, and I really need a few hours to sit and take in someone else’s vision of impossibility with the hope of seeing something cool. These factors combined to put me in a theater seat watching Ultraviolet, despite having nothing more than the posters and the previews to go on.

I’ll give you the short version: it’s bad. Really bad. So bad I’m surprised I sat through the whole thing (which probably had a lot to do with the fact that if I didn’t, I would have to start thinking again – something that I was trying to avoid in the few hours between work and more work that I had).

The original Underworld could best be described as a movie made according to the rules of the World of Darkness roleplaying universe from White Wolf, postulating a supernatural underside to our familiar world where vampires and werewolves battle endlessly, with a plot based on cliches filtered through the rules of Hollywood scriptwriting. Despite that, it actually worked pretty well. The key, as with many such movies, is to ignore the plot holes, physics errors, and lack of characterization, instead focusing on shiny things that go bang, fanged cool factor, and Kate Beckinsale in a shiny skintight corset-enabled piece of tactical eveningwear.