It is revealed in World of Warcraft: Illidan, that Argus [home of the peaceful Draenei] is in fact intact, and is the "beating heart" of the Legion's forces with all its greatest commanders and Kil'jaeden using it as his seat of power. The entire world has been corrupted into a shadowy version of what it once was. The machines that originally were used to send out peaceful and healing waves of magic over the surface, have been inverted to spread fear, depression, and panic. The capital city of the planet which is unnamed is the current seat of Kil'jaeden and is perhaps one of the most magically protected locations in the universe, with Kil'jaeden himself presiding over the Burning Legion from the palace throne.
I drove through the West last week, and realized I love the feeling of inhumanity in it.
I mean, I like great mountains for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that liking nature is an Approved Interest that you can make small talk about and no one will analyze for its problematic undertones.
But I love mountains in particular; there’s something intoxicating about their sheer scale, something that pictures and video fail to capture (though I still took plenty of pictures, poke me if you want to see them). The scale is… wrong. These things are just too big, and dwarf our perspective. One of the best shots from the trailer for The Force Awakens really captures this scale.
There is a tiny human in this picture.
In cities and suburbia, the buildings all feel the size built for humans. And on flat plains your car is the only thing of interest. It’s easy to get solipsistic there.
Driving through canyons and rockfaces, you instead get the message “the universe was here long before you, it will be here long after you, and it doesn’t even notice you now.” It’s all so epicly big.
It’s also broken.
***
In the constant cultural wars between “you should not let your ideology become an excuse to hurt people” and “niceness is a way to prevent the underclass from expressing their frustration at how hurt they are”, I think the dividing line is smoothness.
We cherish smoothness as a sign of utopian harmony, from the interior curves of the Galaxy-class Enterprise D, to the latest Apple product, to images of youthful attractiveness, to a well run committee meeting. Smoothness is a sign of having your act together, and a way of avoiding aversive experience. It’s no wonder we associate it with the signs of capitalist success, while the outsourced factories are depicted as rough and angular and grimy (when they show up in media at all.)
The first post of this blog talked about how much Anakin hates roughness, and values smooth things. Anakin is a satire.
A satire fit for this series. It’s impossible not to notice the aesthetic differences between the OT and the PT. Everything in the prequels is CGI smooth - the ships, naboo, the gungans, the Senate, there isn’t a sharp angle among them. In terms of design, this is the idealized world for people who want to smooth out all the pain and disagreements of the world. Anakin lusts after this ideal.
Another perspective for smooth, is fake. The violence is always exported elsewhere (to the droid factories, to Darth Maul, or to Tatooine. To Klingon battlecruisers and Foxxconn factories.) Smooth never lasts. People instead miss the “used future” aesthetic of the original movies, where everything is jangled and boxy and half broken. They stand for authenticity.
A political dialogue that expects smooth operating is just one that is exporting its violence elsewhere. The problems remain repressed, and will continue erupting.
(The Death Star is a uniform sphere, but it can not stamp out a hole of vulnerability in its smooth exterior.)
Whereas inflicting harm on others is a violation of your first principles (or should be.) Finding the difference between “Am I maintaining smoothness” or “Am I trying not to hurt others” can be intuitively difficult, but is at least a goal to aim for. A dividing line to keep us both on the right side of truth, while compassionate to those who need it. (This political perspective is more directly stated in the infamous editorial Cupcake Fascism . I feel towards it that distinct anxiety you feel about something you agree with, that is presented ineptly and with arrogance. Hence a reason to prefer billion dollar works of art by dedicated craftspeople for expressing your political preferences, than newspaper columns.)
*** The rocky mountains are huge and broken and anything but smooth. We cannot tame these lands, and there are 150 mile stretches of interstate where no one lives or buys or sells anything, even in a nation that complains of overcrowding. Even when humanity has attempted to master them, building their line of asphalt through a pass and even blasting a tunnel through their heart, you only look up and see how small this presence is to the foreboding entities stretching for miles in every direction. They do not care.
They are jagged and breaking through “our land” into these obscene interjections. I love the sharp roughness of these objects that are beyond my scale of comprehension. It’s not that they can not be denied, but if you deny them, they and the universe simply are not bothered.
I think I could live happily amongst these eldritch monstrosities. Or perhaps waking up every day in view of Mt Fuji. They are a quiet but not tranquil reminder of the world which is much bigger, and harsher, and more beautiful than human beings can ever imagine.
Since no one else is talking about X-Men: Apocalypse, I guess I have to?
I actually liked it. After the plot-centric time-travel/crossover/political thriller/70’s pastiche that was “Days of Future Past”, I had very low expectations. And I had never had any appreciation for Apocalypse as a villain at all, as he seemed to be nothing but “very powerful” and “mind controlling good guys”. The reviews were mixed-to-bad, so hey, why bother.
And then I watched it, and wow, there’s some interesting things going on here.
For one, Apocalypse for the first two-thirds of the movie is really compelling. Not in acting - Oscar Isaacs is indeed wasted - and not in costume, which is only barely on this side of comical - but in *action*. Update: Also a good review of Walter Chaw http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2016/05/x-men-apocalypse.html
Okay, so spoilers and plot summary below. Like anyone cares about spoilers at this point.
He doesn't look megalomaniacal. He looks sad. Okay he looks sad and megalomaniacal.
Apocalypse really acts like someone who thinks he is a god, and has woken up after the past 3000 years of human history. And he reacts as if human history has been a goddamn travesty. His first scene in modern times is a Jesus-in-the-temple moment where he sees where his temple used to be, replaced only by merchants and signs of capitalist excess (cash, gold, a “cash for gold” sign). He sees a street rat using her wind powers to steal some cash, follows her, and saves her from the men who will chop off her hand for thievery. His best scene follows that, where he bemoans all the systems that now rule the world, while individuals struggle and are degraded.
Really, he says systems like a dozen times in the movie. Even I thought his Marxist critique was repetitive.
He calls the girl (who turns out to be Storm) a goddess, whom he promises to remake the world for. He calls every mutant he meets one of his children, whom he feels responsibility for. And I really believed he meant it.
At one point he apologizes for being asleep while Auschwitz happened! And then he helps a Holocaust survivor destroy the remains of that hell camp from the ground up.
It’s become a plotpoint of these mutant-minorities-are-like-civil-rights movies that the “bad guy” tries to trick the world’s superpowers into launching nuclear weapons at each other, as his great ultimate plot so mutants can rule over the remains of the planet. Halfway through the movie, Apocalypse seems to be doing this, when he hacks through Xavier’s Cerebro back to him, and uses it to take over the mind of every nuclear-weapon artilleryman on the planet, making them fire every missile at once.
This is part of the best 15 minutes of the movie, where we see all these weapons going off, and Apocalypse monologuing about how much he hates tools: No more stones, no more swords, no more arrows, no more spears…
And he fires all these missiles into space where no one can get them back.
This is an 80’s pastiche where instead of heightening the Cold War paranoia that we all may be nuked, the bad guy just unilaterally disarmed every military in the world (of nukes at least). At this point I was thoroughly on Apocalypse’s side.
(It’s also interesting that instead of being the umpteenth villain to destroy Xavier’s Mansion for Gifted Youngsters, he just takes what he wants and leaves, and the place is blown up only because a good guy was trying to shoot at them.)
A lot of reviews complain that none of these acts or the plot makes sense, but it sounds like they wanted to be text-fed the plot. Apocalypse’s actions are all entirely in theme for a “guy who thinks he is a god and hates the modern world for the many valid reasons an outsider would hate the modern world.”
So we get another villain of the type we’ve seen lately like Bane and Ultron, where they want to revolutionize the entire world for the sake of the most oppressed. This communist revolutionary villain seems pretty useful in movies where the superhero protagonist is deeply invested in the existing system (be it CEO Stark or liberal pacifist Xavier.) Of course this villain always ends up being so goddamn crazy they want to destroy the whole world, which is a disappointing let down for an initially sympathetic character - but it makes sense as a story told from the protagonist’s point of view, since a liberal capitalist hero thinks communists can only be secretly seeking worldwide destruction.
(Which is why the last third of the movie was more disappointing, as Apocalypse goes into full on wreck-the-world mode. It at least could have benefitted from a speech like Ultron gives in the middle of Avengers, when he transitions into full destruction mode.)
Seriously, the core of the movie is from when Storm is introduced, to the Quicksilver scene where he shows off his powers. It’s an hour of the middle, and definitely the strongest all around.
Yeah, they have another Quicksilver scene. Viewers who saw Days of Future Past will remember that that movie is redeemed only by a scene showing the fastest mutant using his powers, set to “Time in a Bottle”.
This movie repeats that, using Eurythmic’s “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This”, fairly effectively (both songs capturing their respective decades, and giving a good mood for how this mutant feels out of sync with the world around him). Which gets to a difference between the X-verse, and the MCU, and the DC universe as well.
MCU just treats superpowers as an effortless extension of the smooth and confident heroes. There a lot of casually raising your hand to blast a mook across the screen, but nothing of how it *feels* for a beam of light to come out of your hand, or flying across the air. (Hulk and Antman try to do this a little more, depending on the movie.) Since versions of Quicksilver appear in both MCU and Xverse, he’s the easiest comparison, and Quicksilver in the MCU does nothing but appear out of nowhere, say or do something witty, and then disappear to another place.
Another good contrast is beams. Iron Man, Thor, and Vision can all shoot energy beams of some sort. (The shared trait is hardly a coincidence, of course.) These beams always do exactly what the wielder wants (unless they’re distracted by love, of course), for as much power as is appropriate to the situation, with no depiction of how hard it is to use this sort of weapon. There’s no feel to it.
XM:A introduces the reviled character of Scott Summers aka Cyclops, who can’t control the lasers coming out of his eyes. The movie does a very faithful effort depicting Cyclops as the incredibly derpy X-men he’s always been, so good job there. And it also sympathetically shows what it’s like having a finger of god coming out of your head! His eye beam is wild and uncontrolled, burning large amounts of property and generally embarrassing Cyclops. It flares violently and lasts for far too long, not a single clean shot. This one character gets across how these mutants are cursed as much as gifted, and how it feels to be cursed with uncontrollable power. I liked that. (Jubiliee, a character with very similar problems, was sadly underused.)
Xavier promises to help him control his power, and amplify it. In fact, Xavier spends a lot of the movie helping mutants increase their power, which culminates in the climax with him screaming at Jean Grey to unleash her full power (a very questionable idea for anyone who knows anything about the inevitable Dark Phoenix storylines.)
This is interesting, because it sets Xavier up as parallel to Apocalypse, who is seducing mutants by increasing their powers as well. In fact, parallels between the hero and the villain are obvious in most movies, so what’s more notable here is the lack of difference. Apocalypse’s main violation of morality is how he feels brute power is justified to attain his goals… and Xavier doesn’t really have a problem with that.
Apocalypse orders a captured Xavier to broadcast a message to every mind on Earth about how he is going to take over the world, and the powerful should be exalted. Instead of refusing, Xavier sends this message into everyone’s brains, but a) also uses the opportunity to send a secret message to Jean Grey, and b) ends it with saying the powerful should protect the weak. Okay Charles, this really isn’t better. You still felt mass-mind-invasion was an acceptable medium for your propaganda. In fact, because it was your voice, most people of the world still think you are trying to take over the world.
(Ethics of mind-control are another theme of the movie, with Xavier being unable to talk smoothly with someone he feels guilty about mind-wiping, his students giving him side-eye for mind-wiping, and eventually reversing the mind-wipe (though again, without asking permission or anything.))
[Insert comparison of Apocalypse’s four horsemen, and Xavier giving in and creating a standing army for the first time, as the last note of the film. Also another comparison of Apocalypse and mutants constructing his temple with their powers, and the film ending with various telekinetic mutants reassembling the Xavier mansion.]
Symbolically this is most highlighted by Apocalypse’s grand plan to merge with Xavier, transferring his consciousness to Xavier’s body. The process begins enough to even start to change Charles’ appearance, which is their explanation for his trademark baldness at the end. It’s hard not to read this movie as two “will to power” narratives merging in the end. Sadly, the only sign that Xavier will do anything with this new militarism is that Mystique is back leading the team.
(Jennifer Lawrence gives no great performance, but the writing around her character continues to be as top notch as ever. Now she is hiding from her role as a superhero role model, which is symbolized by her blue skin appearance, so she’s back to looking “normal”, a position she has always wrestled with. The most touching moment of the movie is probably a shot of Storm’s Mystique calendar (who Storm idolizes), as Apocalypse turns her into a more powerful-but-enthralled mutant soldier. I really like how Mystique is the one always wrestling with the core of “what does it mean to be a mutant/hero/symbol”, especially given her power set and default appearance.)
Otherwise a lot of the arcs were very… short. Quicksilver, Jean Grey, Magneto, Moira all get their story, but in each case it’s a very one dimensional story where not much character progress happens. For them it felt more like a TV show, maybe a season finale, then a full on movie. The lengthy military-prison/Stryker/Weapon X act was all entirely pointless, or more symbolic than I can interpret here. This is the part of the movie you could probably turn off.
But overall? Still good and interesting. Still a lot of stuff to engage with. It’s funny given the call out to Star Wars rankings, that the quality ranking of this trilogy seems to be very different from Star Wars, with the first movie as obviously the best, the second as obviously the worst, and this movie firmly in the middle.
Clocking in at 2 hr 26 min, there’s a lot to Captain America 3: Civil War. And I don’t just mean “a lot of superpowered characters” or “a lot of witty dialogue”, but kind of everything all over the place. There’s a great deal many threads that could be cut and leave the plot intact, so it’s fascinating to think about what those mean. At some point I’ll talk about some of these threads, but here’s just a list of *stuff* in this movie that deserves reflection.
Most of the reviews of this movie seem to completely miss the point of it, so as an antidote to those I am writing a review of this movie that is a) pretty good, b) incredibly successful, but c) not amazing. It’s no Mad Max. But still, it’s pretty good and deserves its success and deserves some defense.
Don’t read beyond if a) you haven’t seen Deadpool and b) you don’t want to be spoiled for it.
(Hint: It’s Deadpool. There is no reason to avoid spoilers.)
