Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 48

Now an antiquities scholar, Wonder Woman must deal with a greedy businessman and a jealous coworker when the effects of an artifact, the Dreamstone, get out of control.

I had left the TV on and this streamed on Tubi for free (I don’t pay for streaming unless it’s something specific), automatically, and I only caught the ending, which honestly seemed really endearing to me. So I wanted to watch the rest to know what happened with the one guy Diana recognized but who didn’t recognize her, and what lead up to her having that moment. I knew the movie didn’t do well in the theaters, but my curiosity about how stories conclude the way they do is often overpowering. And it’s not like I’m indulging in anything bad like eating a whole box of Cinnabon, or voting, so by comparison watching a possibly worthless movie would be an act of charity. I did watch it, but I was distracted with other things, so my views here are suspect.

There’s not much to say except I was ambivalent about it—no love or hate on my end. The choice of “1984” in the title gave me a little squirm of hope that it was a Orwell reference, and that there would be something from the book reiterated in the plot somehow, but I didn’t see anything of the sort, and there’s nothing in the production notes. A missed opportunity. I don’t know if this would have made the plot better, but something about rewriting history could’ve easily been massaged in. Instead of the Totally Not Donald Trump character (Max Lord) granting wishes in return for more money and power (boring!), you could’ve made him get more specific about his intentions. What if he was a media mogul type, and he was going to reveal the existence of Themyscira via his various media channels&mdashland here he can still be Totally Not Donald Trump and his main outlet could easily be Totally Not Fox News, because that’s what audience expectations are. He uses the Dreamstone in some way to put the Themyscira reveal into motion, and Diana of course feels obligated to stop him. That would give her something different to struggle with: should she bury the truth by manipulating with people’s memories or consciousness to protect her homeland, or sacrifice her people to save the rest of the world?

Back to that ending: it kinda bothered me that the guy Diana talked to didn’t shoot his shot. Wonder Woman, physically and with her social skills, is a 10 or very close to one, and it’s not as though the guy wasn’t confident enough to think he had a chance. When a ~10 woman shows plausible indicators of interest it makes sense to to take advantage. It wouldn’t have ended well for obvious reasons, but he didn’t know she’s Wonder Woman and if he got into a relationship with her, he would’ve become a weak point in her life for a future enemy to exploit.

She also outright used this guy’s body when the guy was inhabited by the soul/spirit/likeness of her dead love interest from World War 2. That’s an absolutely insane violation of one-on-one “consent,” a word and concept that gets invoked a lot but only in certain approved contexts. But as we learned with WandaVision, a woman’s broken heart must take moral precedence uber alles in a story. If mentally enslaving an entire town full of people will mitigate the heartbreak, “consent” can take a seat way in the back, pal; as an ethical dynamic, consent barely enters the picture except as an issue of criminality to move the plot forward. Still, we should still clamor to Teach Wonder Woman Not To Rape.

Four short films about mysterious ferromagnetic doors that appeared suddenly worldwide and have caused the disappearance of half the Earth’s population.

2001: A Space Odyssey meets Arrival, maybe? Nowhere near as good as those two movies. This was rated as an 8.5 on the movie streaming service through which I watched it, and I wondered how it was rated so high without me hearing a peep about it before then. After watching, I wonder what exactly I had missed, because I couldn’t find anything memorable or insightful. The protagonist in the last story had a really nice beard, I suppose, and he seemed the straightest, most relatable character out of the entire film’s stories. I liked that in between the stories, they played segments of a broadcast (probably a podcast) of an Art Bell-type commentator, accompanied by some nice shots of different abandoned environments around the world. The standard exposition technique for worldview-upending global events in movies is to play a montage of news broadcasts with frantic footage, some amateur and some professional, of the unfolding disaster. Choosing something more contemplative and—I suppose, quiet?—sets a different tone for everything.

That’s about all the good I can say about it. I checked IMDB’s rating, which was 3.5, which felt more reassuring to my sanity. Understand, I have a little formal training in media critique, but nothing rigorous enough to have a professional foundation for it, but if I watch a piece of fictional media I can clearly recognize when there’s something in the story for me to “get” that I’m not understanding completely, or understanding at all. After watching Doors and not only not understanding why others thought it was so good, but also not understanding why I never picked up on any clues about some arcane, grand statement, had me uncomfortably doubting myself. I felt vindicated but also a little annoyed that I allowed myself to be deceived like that.

Three outcast kids build a spaceship out of junk, based on technology communicated to them in dreams.

The Goonies meets Contact. This came out in theaters about a month after Goonies did, in the summer of 1985, and maybe the zeitgeist of teen adventurism from that movie helped this one. Or it hurt it, because this didn’t did stick the landing as good as Goonies did. Spielberg has a great knack for throwing a ton of characters at the plot and making it all work, allowing them enough quirks to make them interesting without being annoying, and giving enough screen time to each of them for proper development. Explorers’ (Joe Dante directing) main trio of dudes played off each other well enough but there were scenes where the interactions felt too stretched out and you end up wondering if you’re actually watching the director’s cut.

The climax scenes where they meet the aliens was goofy fun but something about them felt too much, like a costume designer left a few dials jammed up to 10 and forgot to pull them back a bit. For me, at least, this was probably my first encounter with the Humans Are Bastards trope, so it made a bit of sense to me. The aliens were too comical for me to really apply the logic of how intelligent non-human creatures would really think about encountering media from another world, so I let it slide.

Insurgent, Allegiant

Tris and her allies escape Chicago and discover how the world ended up as it did, and the current plans of those in power concerning the Divergents.

Alright, I said I wouldn’t watch the other two Divergent movies, but I lied. It’s a bit of a letdown, too, because Allegiant was only part one of a two-part finale, but the second half was canned after part one performed poorly in the theaters,

It went more or less how I expected, with some decent parts strewn in among the predictable ones. I couldn’t buy into the idea of re-capturing kids from abusive parents. Those raids into the family encampments had been going on for a while, and none of the soldiers ever wondered why both the kids and the parents were resisting so much? If there was so much abuse, you would think the kids would want to escape and the soldiers would really be fighting the parents. Then again, I don’t really know how Stockholm Syndrome works, so maybe those kids suffered from it and preferred the abusive yet familiar circumstances over a maybe safe but alien one.

I also couldn’t really grasp one part of the grand experiment with the cloistered cities producing Divergents. The Bureau of Genetic Welfare had total surveillance of the cities and would notice that Divergent people lived alongside Damaged/normal people fairly closely, with little conflict. Why the desire to separate them? If anything, the Bureau would just remove people like Jeanine: folks in power that made a stink of Divergents simply because she felt threatened by them. Either that, or you’d have to rewrite Divergents to actually be a threat to the social order, instead of just having special abilities. As it stands in the story, other than being able to pass those serum-induced mental tests easily, Divergents just give off a particular brainwave pattern; their day-to-day behavior is ordinary. Tris could have easily made that argument to David: “Look, with all due respect, you should know that Divergents and Damaged can live together. It’s Jeanine and her allies screwing everything up. It’s the system, man.” She could go on to offer a solution about what to do with the Factionless, the Chicago society’s version of the homeless. It’s baffling that David wouldn’t know this, much less exercise his power and do something about it, but adults in YA fiction are almost always the dumbest or most useless characters in the story.