Stop me if you've heard this before: A director who is the master of his medium, suddenly devotes all of his attention to an original scifi IP of his own making, with woefully lacking plot and characters, but it gets defended as one of the most beautiful things to grace the screen, and ends up getting #1 in ratings for its niche.
This tortured analogy compares James Cameron's Avatar, and Vince Gilligan's Plur1bus (or Pluribus), both of which are peaking in attention this month. Avatar 3 Fire and Ash just came out, and Pluribus has the most viewers Apple+ TV has ever gotten.
Most importantly, both of them have gotten the epithet "pretty" but in entirely different ways.
Did I like the Matrix Resurrections? No, not really, but that is mostly a matter of craft. It wasn't elegant in any way - plot, action, characters, shots - but more a lump-sided mix of ham-handed explanations and confusing scene changes. Nothing was done in a way to make someone say "wow, I want to learn how to do that."
But it turned out everyone wanted to argue about ideology anyway.
This is a review of Diablo 4, which has the best writing of any Diablo game (low bar) that is actually up to the category of "somewhat good" when judged absolutely[1]. Experiencing it directly is definitely better, so if you haven't played it but you intended to, I recommend to play it first before reading that. But sliver of the population that hasn't played it but plans to must be very, very small at this point. So most of you should read ahead:
In the Diablo-verse cosmology, the human world (Sanctuary) was made when an angel and a demon had blasphemous sex together (they also birthed a son who became the first necromancer.) The angel, Inarius, was cast out of Heaven for this, and exiled to the human world. At some point he comes to hate his demon lover, Lilith, and convinces himself that he can only return to Heaven once he has killed their son. So he spends a thousand years hunting them until he can finally face her in bloody confrontation. His armies had to invade Hell to get him to this point, and the cut scene of this battle is one of the best cut scenes Blizzard has made. It's worth watching.
INARIUS: I made it right to satisfy the Heavens.
LILITH: Tell me, did they rejoice?
LILITH: They do not want you. We made a choice, and that they can never forgive, no matter what you tell yourself or who you sacrifice. Silence is their judgment.
The voice actress's delivery is silky and chilling, I love it so much. When you killed your son, did the Heavens rejoice? No, Heaven remains silent. It's amazingly existential. Heaven does not care, even when - especially when - you try to placate them.
Then he skewers Lilith, and then she kills him.
Sometimes we want to be returned so much, that we convince ourself that there is a way back into Heaven. Our hope finds its focus in an object that disturbs us. Something - more often, someone - is wrong with the world. They represent everything we hate about the world, and the sins we feel guilt for So, unsurprisingly, we come to believe that if only we rid the world of that objet petit, they would let us back in.
And so we kill this pharmakon. And do the Heavens rejoice? They remain silent. The blood letting was for nothing, just a delusion that we believed in. One that consumed us. And once we culminate this dream of removing the defiler -- Heaven has nothing to say. We are not welcomed home into paradise, there are no trumpets and light, nothing is changed -- except one person is gone, or a corpse is lying on the floor.
Diablo 4, good writing, as I was saying.
What does this have to do with our world? You don't believe in Heaven. You don't even know someone who really believes in Heaven.
We believe in paradise only by its absence.
Our world is a wreck of hatred and buffoonery. We come to believe it is some person's fault: I don't mean the president or some systemically powerful person, but someone normal and connected to us. Maybe our son the necromancer, but always someone we know like our foot knows the pebble in our shoe. Reasonably then, we want to get rid of it. Them. And if we can't, then they keep rubbing against us like that metaphorical pebble, gradually wearing us away. We obsess about them.
But when we remove a pebble, at least there is some physical relief. When we remove a person - the Heavens are silent. The world and our problems with it are not actually fixed. Heaven does not suddenly welcome us back with open arms. It doesn't even care.
Fortunately for our conscience, soon enough we forget the silence. A new pebble bothers us and we find a new person to blame for the Fall. Inarius is not welcomed after the death of his son, so he chases down Lilith and tries to kill her. Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
The algorithms that are trained to capture your attention by showing you negative news and rage bait are not going to stop because you removed the pebble. Revelation will not come as a loud rebuke, but in silence.
A dream is when you know where you are, but not how you got there.
[1] But don't play the expansion pack, Vessel of Hatred. That's just dogshit.
Given how many good movies from 2025 there are to see, I'm behind on the Marvel slop and only got around to watching Fantastic Four - First Steps today. (Okay I found out it had Jennifer Garner and I was very impressed with her in Weapons. Plus Natasha Lyonne and Ralph Ineson's voice[1].)
Even with my lowered expectations, I was disappointed. But to my surprise, I was also delighted.
Competition is stiff, but after much reflection I am confident that this is the worst written script of any MCU movie. The comedy is very broad, the plot is paint by numbers and each step spelled directly out by the characters several times, and the emotions are always told instead of shown. I can see where the comic lines are trying to go, but they fall far short. Which gives us the worst line of the film:
"I don't tell you how to pilot, you don't tell me how to kill sexy aliens," by the bad boy Johnny Storm. Or explaining Archimedes lever to "three of the most brilliant scientists in the world" three times.
(The exceptions are the Silver Surfer and Mole-Man. Julia Garner and Paul Walter Hauser[2] get lines suited to the tragedy or comedy of the story respectively, and deliver them like actual Hollywood actors, with nuance and inner thoughts unsaid.)
The scene-changing twists - Silver Surfer rescue and baby Jesus - are *painfully* telegraphed and cliche, making the drawn out processes before those moments equally boring and agonizing.
Maybe some will disagree with me. I only know I wanted to like this. Pedro Pascal can make bad Disney writing leap off the page. The central theme of the plot - Galactus is tired of living and wants to pass his curse on - has a lot of potential. And I don't like being annoyed, but the dialogue of the movie is fighting me the whole way.
Normally, I'd have dropped out of this movie by the first 30 minutes. But just as I could not ignore the painful dialogue, I can't deny my eyes:
This is the best looking movie Marvel has given us.
Seriously, the cinematography is gorgeous. Look at any scene - there's excellent color matching, the blocking is dynamic enough to keep your attention, there's always something going on the screen. There are some amazing "money shots" like these:
You just know they were planning on this shot from day 1.
Alexa, show me how these demigods see normal humans?
Okay maybe the lesson is Johnny Storm should have been seen and not heard. They even make effective use of the "Human Torch" as a light source in dark scenes. And this makes the decision to gender swap the Silver Surfer more aesthetically reasonable. Johnny and Shala-Bal are set as counterparts, opposites but connected.
Making Galactus - a giant humanoid who also eats planets - into not a joke in a live action movie is very hard. And... well they did their best with ugly machine-factory style planet eater ship, reminiscent of Man of Steel and Omnicron. Nothing could be helped for the bad boy and his purple helmet itself though.
I love how much of the setting is simply shown from the fashion the people are wearing - you don't need technology benchmarks or exposition about the Cold War and the Beatles. Real attention was paid to every extra's outfit.
I couldn't find any shot where I felt it was just "point the camera at the plot." It makes me wish the movie had been silent. (Sadly the score did not add a whole lot either, which I only note because I was spoiled by One Battle After Another and No Other Choice.)
But there is one omnipresent visual technique that had me nodding in approval and cackling with laughter. But let me use an example from a beloved movie we know well:
More posts to come soon, even a radical new directions. I've had a lot of thoughts about the movies I have seen in the back half of the year.
In the meantime...
If you are a fan of the writing on this blog, I recommend you check out this upcoming book about practicing sorcery.
The Goetist is a wisdom book, a manual of living the good life, in the shape of a sorcerous rite. A despairing man's devil-conjuring invocation turns into a meditative, unsentimental education in the most important subjects of all: how to build up a soul from nothing, make art without apology, and find purpose in the face of a hostile universe.
Structured as a series of poetic essays,in the tradition of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, The Goetist moves topic-by-topic through the driving concerns of a lonely introspective aspirant: desire, necessity, joy, morality, myth, constraint, legacy, and more.
(I don't know why the A in After is capitalized. I was taught that propositions aren't capitalized in titles. But my education was wrong about many things.)
No Spoilers for once.
***
In the year of our lord 2025, a famous auteur, the type who comes out with one brilliant masterpiece every few years, made a comedy movie satirizing the foibles of the modern political moment.
And then it happened again.
The first is Eddington, by Ari Aster of Hereditary and Midsummer. The second got wide release just yesterday. One Battle After Another (OBAA) by Paul Thomas Anderson, of There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights. Maybe Robert Eggers will do the third one.
Eddington was... a disappointment. I actually kinda liked it, but that opinion is not universal and I can see why. It is "about" politics writ large and COVID times in particular. It shows the right-wing characters - a gun nut sheriff, youtube addled conspiracy theorists - and left wing protesters to moderate establishment politicians as bumbling buffoons at the mercy of corporate puppeteers. It's pretty funny and there's nothing to fault in the performances of Paul Pascal, Joaquin, and Emma Stone. You should have a fun time seeing it.
Reviewers claim that it "both sides" the national debate, given that it's a movie for progressive audiences but most of the lines from left-wingers are parodies of privilege, dilettantism, and virtue signalling. I did not feel the same way. The protesters in the street are kind of dumb, but nowhere near as criminal as the conservative sheriff, and in the end the "true villain" is implied to be a corporation that doesn't care which side is in charge so long as they get what they want. I feel this message is more leftist than not.
But I can understand why people would think the movie is apolitical. It is close enough.
This is NOT the deal with OBAA.
OBAA is an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon psychedelic novel originally about the 60's, but updated for the omnipresent Now. (There's a 15 year gap between the backstory and the main action of the movie, but both of them feel ambiguously current.) The all-consuming issue is immigration, or rather the rounding up and imprisoning of immigrant populations who otherwise do all the work needed in factories.
The resistance left in this movie is fool of bumbling pot-heads who forget all the rules of spycraft, overly officious bureaucrats, and hyper-individualist traitors. They also without doubt are the heroes of the movie. They are actively trying to do good against the machine of the fascist state. There are also some competent good guys among them. Their enemies are storm troopers and rich Christians obsessed with racial mixing. (They think it is a deadly sin. Presumably they aren't fans of Thomas Jefferson.) And one roided out racial fetishist, played brilliantly by Sean Penn. That Supporting Actor Oscar is his.
I believe in the Left cause enough to be often frustrated at the actions of actual leftists, who sometimes seem to think being self-defeating is evidence of purity to the cause. I laughed at Eddington, and can even say it somewhat accurately reflected politics before 2025.
It's a lot harder to say that now. Now, one of those sides is running a regime that seeks to disenfranchise millions of citizens, rewrite the constitution, invade major American cities with the National Guard, fire comedians who make jokes they don't like, declare emergency powers at the drop of a hat, and to use the power of the government to force companies to bend the knee to them. Oh, and have turned ICE into a black-masked Gestapo who grab anyone who looks vaguely foreign off the streets and send them to prisons with names like "Alligator Alcatraz" and "the Hellhole No One Returns From."
In contrast, I guess the current left is... doofishly hostile to their own allies. It's annoying, but there's no longer any equivalency between the two.
Eddington is a holdover of the era of Trump's first term and Biden's term (and the end of Obama's.) Politics is a joke where both sides are behaving oafishly but nothing is really happening in government anyway. I can't blame Aster, as that is the environment when he was filming it.
OBAA (besides superior acting, writing, and that AMAZING score) is about the more recent current moment. Trump's second term really does seem a threat to free society. I don't know how to productively fight the state, but if you could do so it would be genuine freedom fighting. It fits our actual mood.
Yeahhh! Look at that badass Mads Mikkelsen, with a beard and a gun on his back. He's probably riding a motorcycle while slaughtering Evil Bikers.
And I want to assure you viewer, that yes, this is a movie about:
Mads getting some revenge on some gangsters who killed his wife. It's satisfying, violent righteousness.
It is *also*:
A geek comedy using offensive stereotypes, but also plenty of jokes that come from within the nerd community, accurately making fun of themselves. They are bumbling, rude, gold-hearted, and eclectic dorks.
A heartfelt emotional drama between a stoic father and his teenage daughter as they cope with the grief of their mother's violent death.
And, weaving all these threads together, a found family tearjerker centered around a gay twink.
Each of those aspects of the movie are executed well and entertaining. If these tropes even remotely interest you, you should watch this movie and you will enjoy it.
But that's not what is important about "Riders of Justice." Spoilers beyond the fold, but really, what spoilers can there be in "Mads will shoot a bunch of bikers?"
