Bad Art is Still Art

It’s “Spicy Takes Week” over at Polygon, and one of the bits they’re kicking off with is: Roger Ebert saying video games are not art is still haunting games.

For everyone that made better choices about how to spend the early 00s than I did, almost two decades ago film critic Roger Ebert claimed that video games were not and could not be art, which was an opinion that the video game–playing denizens of the web took in good humor and weren’t weird about at all. HAHA, of course I am kidding, and instead it turned into a whole thing which still has occasional outbreaks, and the vitrol of the response was in retrospect was an early-warning sign of the forces that would congeal into gamergate and then keep going.

At the time, I thought it was terribly funny, mostly because of the irony of a critic of a new-ish artform that was only recently regarded as art kicking down the ladder behind him, but also because the movie that inspired him to share this view was the 2005 adaptation of DOOM, and look, if that movie was my only data point I’d deny that games were art too.

Whenever the videogames-as-art topic pops back up, I’m always briefly hopeful, because there are actually a lot of interesting topics here—what does it mean for authorship and art if the audience is also invited to be part of that authorship? If video games are art, are tabletop games? Can collaborative art made exclusively for the participants be art? (For the record, yes, yes, and yes.) There’s also fun potential side-order of “games may not be art but can contain art, and even better can be used to create art,” which is where the real juice is.

But no, that’s never what anyone wants to talk about, instead it’s always, as polygon says, about people wanting to sit at what they see as the big kids table without having to think through the implications, with a side-order of the most tedious “is it still art it you make money” arguments you’ve ever seen, surrounded by the toxic sheen of teenagers who don’t think they’re being taken seriously enough.

I think one of the reason’s that the “Ebert thing” specifically has stuck around long past his death is that of all the mainstream critics, he seemed the most likely to be “one of us.” He was always more sympathetic to genre stuff than most of his colleagues. He loved Star Wars! He called out Pauline Kael by name to argue that no, Raiders of the Lost Ark is great, actually. He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for heavensakes. It sure seems like he’s be the kind of guy that would be all “heck yeah, I love video games!” and instead he said that not only they weren’t at the adults table, but that they could never get there.

Kind of a surprise, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. And look, whatever argument that there might have existed to change Ebert’s mind, a bunch of 16-year olds telling him that Halo of all things was the greatest piece of art ever created was the exact opposite.

Mostly, I’m “yes, and-ing” polygon’s article so I finally have an excise link to this interview with George Lucas at Cannes from a few months ago, which apparently only exists on the wreckage formerly known as twitter?.

The whole interview is great, a classic sharp-and-cranky Lucas interview. It’s all worth watching, but the bit I’m quoting here starts at about 7:40. The interviewer asks him about Martin Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren’t cinema, and Lucas manages to look even grouchier and with a sort of sigh says "Look. Cinema is the art of a moving image. So if the image moves, then it’s… cinema.” (Seriously, the look on his face, a sort of patronizing exhaustion, is great.)

And I think that really cuts to the core of these weird semantic gatekeeping debates: Cinema you don’t enjoy is still Cinema. Bad Art is Still Art.

There’s so much to enjoy here. It’s not clear from the way he asks the question if the interviewer knows how much backstory there is to that question. Does he know that George and Marty have been friends for half a century? Does he know that Marcia Lucas edited a bunch of Marty’s movies. Does he know Marty has been talking shit about Star Wars since before it was released, in exactly the same way he talks about Marvel movies? Lucas’ demeanor in this is as if that Franco “First Time?” meme came to life, an air that he’s been having this exact conversation since before the guy asking the question was born, and is resigned to continuing to do so for the rest of his life.

But it’s the same set of arguments. It’s not art because it’s fun, or made money, or has spaceships, or because I just didn’t like it very much. I have a list of qualities I associate with art, and I can’t or wont recognize their presence here.

All these arguments, with video games, or superhero movies, or Star Wars or whatever, always centers around the animus of the word “art”, and the desire to make that word into a synonym for “quality”, or more importantly “quality that I, personally, value.”

It always seems to boil down to “I have a lot of emotional investment in this word meaning this exact list of things and I find it threatening whenever someone suggests the tent should be wider,” which semantically is just “TRUKK NOT MUNKY” with extra steps.

Anyway, if people make something for other people to enjoy, it’s art. Even if it’s bad.

Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25

Star Wars absolutely peaked just a hint after midnight, the morning of May 19, 1999.

It’s almost impossible to remember now how excited everyone was. And by “everyone” I don’t mean “nerds” or “fans” or whatever, I mean everyone. The monoculture hadn’t splintered yet, and “new Star Wars” was an event. Everyone talked about it, Natalie Portman’s kabuki-makeup face was everywhere, they ran that Darth Maul Duel of the Fates music video on MTV constantly.

The other thing that’s hard to remember is that “Star Wars” meant something totally different there in the spring of 1999. “Star Wars” was three good movies, and… some books and video games, maybe? But as far as the mainstream was concerned, it was just three movies that mostly everyone liked. For a certain kind of blockbuster filmmaking, Star Wars was still the gold standard, it was still the second highest grossing movie of all time, having only just been beat out by Titanic two years earlier. There was a tremendous amount of cultural good-will there—you don’t stay the highest grossing movie of all time by being outside of the mainstream. There were plenty of people who didn’t like it, but there were very few people who hated it. It was like the Super Bowl, or the World Series; the default cultural response was “yeah, those were pretty good!”

“Star Wars” was also a shorthand for quality. “Star Wars” movies were good movies, full stop, and “like Star Wars!” was about the highest compliment you could pay any live action action-adventure special effects anything.

And suddenly there was New Star Wars? That’s going to be amazing, by definiton!

And that trailer! We spent ages waiting for that trailer to download off the old Quicktime Trailers webpage over dialup. It was worth it.

It just genuinely didn’t occur to anyone that a new Star Wars might be bad. That just wasn’t a thing that happened.

Of course we all went to see it.

There was a big group of us that all went opening night, or rather the 12:01 am show the night before opening night. There was a bunch of us Star Wars fans, for sure, but half our group were casual at best. But it was a Thing! Everyone wanted to go.

This was before you could do this on the web, so we had to stand in line all day to get tickets. We worked out a rotation so no one had to stay there more than half an hour or so. The line outside the theature was basically a block party; everyone was in good spirits, the weather was gorgeous, someone brought a barbecue.

The little northern California town I was living in had the one Good Theatre—it was a remodeled vaudeville theature, single huge screen, lots of seats. Still had the old-style auditorium seating. The current owners had upgraded it with one of the best surround-sound systems I’ve ever heard.

The screening itself was a party. Everyone was there early, it was being “hosted” by the local radio station, and one of the DJs was MC-ing the scene, doing trivia, giving away prizes. Some people came in costume, but not a lot. This was’t a comic book convention thing, this was a bunch of regular people in a college town ready to watch a new movie that everyone knew was going to be great.

I swear this is a true story: I remember one of my friends, one of the not-so-much-a-fan ones, leaning over and asking me “what are all these nerds gonna do if the movie is bad?” She nodded her head towards the group of fans that did come in costume. Someone had a full Boba Fett outfit, which was not common in those days.

I wish I could remember what I said back. I think I made a crack along the lines of “I think they could just run that trailer a dozen times and everyone would be happy.” But it wasn’t a scenario worth thinking about. A bad Star War? No.

There had been rumblings of course. The reactions on what passed for the web in those days were… not an enthusiastic as one would have expected.

At midnight, the lights went out, and the audience roared. 12:01. Logos, then STAR WARS with that theme music. The audience made a sound I have never heard before or since, just an absolute roar of delight.

Then, that sound cut itself off very quickly, because suddenly everyone had to read a bunch of text we had never seen before.

I had another friend who was convinced that “Phantom Menace” was a fake title, and the real movie would have a “better one”. I remember side-eying him as THE PHANTOM MENACE scrolled into view in those chunky yellow letters.

The audience never got that loud again. There was a weird vibe in the room as the movie kept not… being… good. I distinctly remember the moment where the old guy with the pointy beard on Naboo says “This can only mean one thing, invasion!” which was such a cool line in the trailer, but in the context of the business meeting it actually happened in, just kind of flopped onto the ground and bled out.

“Oh shit,” I remember thinking. “That lady on AICN was right.”

My other clear memory of that night was walking out into the street afterwards. It was 2-something in the morning. It was a warm northern valley night, so it was shorts and short-sleeves weather.

The mood as we walked out into the night was strange—not sad, or angry, or even disappointed, but confused. Like leaving the stadium after your team blew what should have been an easy game. What the hell happened?

Someone I knew but hadn’t come with waved to me across the street. “That was amazing!” he yelled. We both knew he was lying, but we both let it slide. My friend that had asked what the nerds were going to do had slept through the second half.

No one would ever use “it’s like Star Wars!” as a compliment ever again.

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The Phantom Menace has aged strangely, and mostly to its benefit. It’s still a bad movie, but not a terrible one. The passage of time—and the way “blockbuster” summer genre movies have evolved past it—have made it easier to see what it did well.

For starters, having the Queen of a planet arrive at the Galactice Senate to deliver eyewitness testimony about an illegal invasion only to be shut down by the senator for the invaders saying, basically, “why would we let this evidence get in the way of our desire to do nothing lets form a committee”, hits in 2024 in a way it didn’t in 1999.

And that podrace still slaps. And not just the lightsaber fight, but the whole final 4-location battle is a pretty spectacular piece of action movie-making, the occasional “let’s try spinning” non-withstanding. Lucas is at his best when he’s throwing weird images on the screen: that shot of the gungans coming out the swamp contrasted with the robots unfolding, Darth Maul pacing behind the laser fence while Darkman meditates, the fighters swirling around the command ship. The old Star War sense of humor occasionally shines through: for example, the music swells, the big door opens revealing Darth Maul and his double-bladed sword; and then Natalie Portman side-eyes Liam Neeson and deadpans “we’ll take the long way.”

I haven’t become a Prequel Apologist, exactly, but the curve I grade it on has certainly changed over the last two-and-a-half decades.

There’s a class of “big noise” movies that have become the dominant form of blockbuster action—obviously fake environments, too much CG, PG-13 without being sexy or scary, filled with beautiful-but-bored actors visibly thinking about how they’re going to spend their paychecks as they spout what’s not really dialogue but just sort of shout quips past each other. Part of what we talk about when we talk about “superhero fatigue” are these enormously expensive live-action Saturday morning toy cartoons with nothing to say.

Part of why Phantom Menace got such a nuclear negative reaction was that it was such a surprise. Before, if a huge expensive AAA movie was bad, it was because it was a colossal screwup—your David Lynch’s Dune, Dick Tracy, Waterworld, Batman & Robin. Those happened every few years or so, and would be followed by years of axe-grinding, blame-shifting, and explainers about “what went wrong.” And sure, bad sequels happened all the time—mid-tier Roger Moore Bond movies, or Jaws 3, Superman IV, Star Trek V: the low budget, low effort cash-in sequel.

Instead, here was a huge expensive AAA movie, advertised to hell and back, and by all accounts the exact movie the people making it wanted to make, and it was still bad. That just wasn’t a category in 1999. Now, it’s the dominant form. In a world where they actually honest-to-god expected me to pay full price to see Thor: The Dark World, I can’t generate the energy to be too mad about the movie with the good lightsaber fight.

To demonstrate what I mean, and without getting drawn into a epistemological debate about what I might mean by “worse”, here is a list of big-budget AAA blockbusters that have been released since 1999 that, if I had to choose, I would choose to watch Phantom Menace instead of:

• Any live action Transformers
• Any of the three Hobbit movies
• Prometheus
• Any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels
• About half of the Fast and the Furious sequels
• That insane Lone Ranger movie with Johnny Depp as Tonto
• John Carter
• Honestly, about a third of the Marvel Movies. Well, maybe half?
• Any of the live action DC movies other than Wonder Woman
• The third Matrix
• Any of the reboot “Kelvin Universe” Star Treks
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, which still makes me angrier than TPM ever did

Compared to all that, Darth Maul is high art.

On the one hand, saying a bad movie doesn’t seem so bad because other movies got worse is damning with the faintest of praise, but on the other hand, go look at that list again. Yeah, we’re grading on a curve here, and yes, Jar-Jar is terrible, but did you see Star Trek Into Darkness?

At the end of the day, The Phantom Menace was one reclusive billionaire’s deranged vision, unimpeded. Say what you will about Lucas, he basically paid for this movie out of his checking account, and it’s clear it was the exact movie he wanted to make. After decades of warmed-over lowest common denominator films by committees that have been sandblasted into nothing, one guy’s singular artistic vision starts to sound pretty good, no matter how unhinged it might have been. We need more movies where someone just gets a giant pile of money to make whatever the hell movie they want, not less. Even if they don’t always work out.

And, TPM kicked off a cycle of directors going back and revisiting their older work, which has been a mixed bag, but we got Fury Road and Twin Peaks: The Return out of it, which was more than worth it.

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What does The Phantom Menace mean, two and a half decades later?

“Episode I bad” is still shorthand for “absolute trash fire of a movie”. And that night in 1999 was certainly the point where “Star Wars” stopped meaning “the only series with no bad movies” and started to mean “increasingly mid movies with breathtakingly diminished returns surrounded by the most toxic fans you can possibly imagine.”

But it has a strange staying power. There have been plenty of worse followups, sequels, and remakes, but those slide out of mind in a way that this hasn’t. No one still makes jokes about fighting Giant Spiders or “Nuking the Fridge”, but this movie has remained the Totemic example for “Terrible Followup”. To put that another way: No one liked Jar-Jar Binks, but a quarter-century later, everyone on earth still knows who that is.

Why does this movie linger in the collective consciousness like—if you’ll forgive the expression—a splinter in the mind’s eye? I think it’s because unlike most bad movies, you can squint and almost see the good movie this wanted to be. And the passing of time, and the wreckage of those other bad movies, have made it clearer what this one did right, how close it almost got. This isn’t a Blade Runner situation, there’s no clever edit that could fix this one, it’s too fundamentally misconceived in too many ways. But you can nearly feel there was a version of this movie made from almost the same parts that would have worked. You can imagine what a good movie with this cast and with these beats would look like. You can almost reach out and touch it.

And yet, the movie itself remains this terrible, beautifuly-made, stodgy thing. The sort of movie where you say to yourself, “it can’t possibly have been that bad, could it? We just didn’t like it.” And maybe you end up watching it with friends, or with your kids, or late at night on Disney+, and as it starts you think “no, this wasn’t that bad,” but sooner or later someone says “this can only mean one thing—invasion”, or Jar-Jar has a big idea, or someone asks The Junior Professional if she’s an angel, and you say “no, actually, it really was exactly that bad.”

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There’s a scene towards the end of the first act that has ended up as my most-quoted line from all of Star Wars.

The heroes are escaping from Naboo on the Queen’s chromed-out starship. The Jedi are in the cockpit delivering stilted dialogue. At a loss for anything better to do, Jar-Jar wanders into the droid break room. As he enters, the R2-D2 and the other R2 units all wake up, and turn towards him, beeping.

“Hey boyos!” he exclaims.

I have five cats in my house, and whenever I walk into a room with more then one of them, they always pop their heads up and look at me.

“Hey boyos!” I exclaim.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously.

At the end of the day, it’s a movie about the atomic bomb that doesn’t have a single Japanese person in it, and that thinks the most compelling thing about the bombing is that a well-dressed, comfortable white guy was slightly uncomfortable.

This is the point where I should probably neatly set my bias out on the table. There’s a genre of “Man Cinema” that has always left me cold. “Man”, both in the sense that they’re about Men, but also that they’re beloved by a certain kind of male film-buff audience. Those movies where a Man is forced by Circumstances to do Things He Is Not Proud Of, and the central conflict is his terrible Man Pain, as he glowers into the middle distance, an Island that No One Can Understand. What few women there are tend to either be tools to use, prizes to be won, or The Secret Behind Every Man’s Success, but never really a character in their own right. Basically, the default mode of the 70s New Hollywood; essentially every movie Coppola, Scorcese, or DePalma ever made.¹ Or the kinds of movies that one scene in Barbie was making fun of.

Chris Nolan’s movies have always slid right into that tradition. And look, I’m not going to say these movies are bad, or invalid, they’re just not my jam. If Oppenheimer hadn’t been the other half of Barbenheimer, there was basically no chance I would have watched it.

One of the delightful things about Barbenheimer as an event was that it was clear, like Elvis vs The Beatles, it was possible to like both, but everyone was going to have a preference. Long before they came out, I knew I was going to be Team Barbie.

And so? In short, my feelings about the movie are as ambivalent as the movie’s feelings about it’s subject. It is, of course, well made, and I find myself with more to say about it than I was expecting. I also suspect that every criticism I have of the film is also something somebody who really likes these kinds of movies would say, just with different emphasis.²

And with the preliminaries out of the way…

This is a movie about Great Men, who recognize and respect each other, and the Small Men who surround and resent them, biting at their ankles. Greatness, in this movie, is an fundamental condition, recognized by other Great Men, sometimes even long before anything Great has taken place.³

The cast is uniformly excellent. The standout performance is Robert Downey Jr., who is so good in this they finally gave him his Oscar for Chaplin. He continually finds new ways to look Small, playing Lewis Strauss as a bundle of grievance and bruised feelings, starting every interaction with an air of desperation, and ending it with the look of a man who has formed a new permanent grudge.

Cillian Murphy, on the other hand, plays Oppenheimer as a man almost supernaturally serene, exuding confidence with a side-order of mostly-justified arrogance, but with an increasingly haunted look in his eyes.

Both Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh make the most of their reduced screen times to show why Oppenheimer couldn’t resist either (although the opposite is less obvious.) It does put Emily Blunt in the unusual-for-her position of playing the second choice, which she seems to relish, and she conveys Kitty Oppenheimer’s blossoming alcoholism as a sort of general aura of decay rather than any specific action.

My favorite character was Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves, who was the only person who seemed to be playing a character, rather than a sketch of one. Not only that, he plays Groves as someone both unimpressed but also unintimidated by Greatness; or rather, someone from a completely different Great-to-Small axis as everyone else.

But, there’s not a single weak link in the movie, even the actors that show up for just a scene or two. Most everyone else is are reduced to shadows, because the pacing is, to use a technical term, a little weird. The movie hurtles along at a breakneck page, skipping along the top of the waves from scene to scene, at times seeming more like sketches of scenes that actual drama—the characters arrive, strike a pose, deliver a series of one-line monologues, and then the movie moves on.

This is exacerbated by the movie’s nested-flashback structure, which I liked quite a bit. Three stories plays out across the movie—the period around and including the Los Alamos project, Oppenheimer’s security hearing after the war, and Strauss’ (failed) senate confirmation hearing. The movie slides from one time to another, additionally using color (or the lack of it) to indicate which parts are from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and which are not.

The result is a movie that seems to abbreviate everything and never manges to give anything room to breathe, despite being three hours long. My standard belief stands that no movie should be over 2 hours; I’m quite confident that there are better versions of this movie at both 110 minutes and at 4 hourlong episodes.

As such you don’t need to know anything about these people or events to watch the movie, but it certainly helps to know who the guy with the bongos is, because the movie won’t tell you.

Actually, let’s hang on Feynman for a second. One of the funnier aspects of the movie is that basically every character is a real person who was famous in their own right, and they pop in for a scene or two and then vanish. Occasionally, one can’t help but feel like the movie has focused on the least interesting person that was present for the Manhattan Project?

Feynman gets, basically, two scenes. He’s one of the few scientists who we see Oppenheimer personally recruit, and the scene is shot from below, causing Oppenheimer, Groves, and Feynman to loom like statues, as dramatic music plays. We don’t find out this character’s name, or what he does, but the cinematography of the scene makes it clear he’s one of the Great Men. From that point on he’s in the background of nearly all the Los Alamos scenes, although I can’t remember him having an actual line of dialogue other than occasionally playing those bongos.

Then, he pops back in again for the Trinity test for the really-happened-but-heavily-mythologized moment where he realizes he doesn’t need the special filter, he can just watch the explosion through his car windshield. And then he vanishes for the rest of the movie, because unlike, say, Fermi or Teller, he has nothing to do with the later political machinations. But still, you’re left pointing at the TV like DiCaprio in the meme, thinking “that’s Feynman! Show him picking some locks!” And the same with Fermi, and the Chicago Pile being reduced to mere minutes of screen time, or hoping he’d ask “Where is everybody?”

(And, Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, most known in these parts as the voice of Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and so presumably the reason he’s not in the later parts of the movie is that Mainer finally rescued him.)

But that’s not the point of the movie, and fair enough. Because the central concern of the film isn’t really the atomic bomb, it’s the vicious grievances of the small and petty, and to illustrate there’s no service great enough that can overcome failing to be The Right Kind of American.

There’s a quote from Werner Von Braun (not appearing in this film) about Oppenheimer that “in England, he’d have been knighted,” but instead he was hounded from any formal government post due to the constellation of long-standing grudges from Strauss and others being allowed to fester in the paranoid excesses of the 1950s. Although, speaking of England choosing who to knight, knowing what happened to Turing at about the same time makes it look like Oppenheimer got off light.

The scenes in the security hearing are excruciating. While the formal subject—the renewal of his security clearance—is technical and seemingly inconsequential, the subtext is that this is determining who gets rewarded for their work, who gets the credit, and most importantly, who gets to decide how to use what they all built. Everyone, and there are many, who ever felt slighted by Oppenheimer’s greatness gets to show up and slide a knife in, a cavalcade of trivialities and paranoia. Even Groves, nearly omnipotent a decade before, proves powerless before the unchained animus of the thin-skinned.

After Oppenheimer’s loss, the movie does its most fascinating and distinctive move, and instead of following the title character into exile, it watches the consequences play out years later for his nemesis. While the focus is on Oppenheimer, the man himself makes no appearance in this phase of the film, as Strauss runs headlong into the bill coming due for a lifetime of treating everyone the way he treated Oppenheimer.

I spent the whole first part of the movie with the nagging feeling that this was all very familiar. That kind of vague, near–deja vu feeling. What is this reminding me of? A Great Man, a Genius, taken down by the petty grievances of Small Men, told mostly in flashback?

About an hour in, it hit me: this is all just Amadeus.

Which illustrates what I think is the core flaw in the movie. It knows Oppenheimer is a genius, but a genius in something neither the audience nor the filmmakers know very much about. There’s no good way for him to Be A Genius on screen in a way the audience will recognize, instead we have lots and lots of scenes where other people talk about what a genius he is, and then Oppenheimer stands dramatically filmed from below, looking off into the middle distance, while dramatic music plays, not entirely unlike the Disney Pocahontas.

Recall, if you will, the opening scene of Amadeus. Salieri, Mozart’s colleague, Nemesis, and possible murderer, is in a sanatorium nearing the end of his life. A young priest, who acts as the audience’s surrogate, arrives to take his confession, and by extension, have the movie narrated to him. The priest has no idea who Salieri is, or was, or that he was once one of the most famous composers of Europe, just that he’s an old man with a piano.

Oppenheimer never mangages the simple directness of Salieri playing his own compositions, which neither the audience or the priest recognize, and then painfully playing the opening notes of Serenade №13: A Little Night Music and have the audience and their surrogate instantly recognize it. Just playing Mozart’s actual music covers the majority of what Amadeus is trying to do, and Oppenheimer has nothing like that to fall back on.

Similarly, RDJ is genuinely extraordinary in this, constantly finding new ways to be small, and petty, and fragile, but the script never gives him a scene with the clarity and focus of Salieri leaning back into his chair and hissing with a mixture of exhaustion and defeat, “That was Mozart.”

It is funny that for both Amadeus and Oppenheimer, it’s the actor playing the nemesis who won the Oscar.

The other biggest problem with this movie is it’s lack of an actual point of view. It’s not apolitical so much as anti-political, there’s a big hole in the middle where an opinion should go.

This is par for the course of Nolan movies—this is the man who made the definite “Fascism is good, actually” movie with The Dark Knight, but with the sense that he made it by accident, just by taking Batman more seriously than anyone else, and then failing to notice or care where he landed. There’s an almost pathological refusal to comment on what’s happening, to have an opinion. Part of this is the fact that the majority of this movie is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and his point of view is, to put it mildly, ambiguous.

The movie knows there’s something interesting about the fact that Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists are Jewish, building the bomb to stop the Nazis. It knows there’s something interesting about the fact he can speak multiple languages but not Yiddish. It knows theres something about the way many of these Great Men were leftist/socialist/communists types in their youth, then put that away to work on the bomb, and then have that come back to haunt them later. But the movie can’t quite figure out what to do with that, so it toys with it and then puts it back on the shelf.

It almost makes contact with the world view that only a WASP can be a real loyal American and that Oppenheimer is questionable from two directions—being both Jewish and a possible communist—but never makes the connection. It gestures at the fact that the jews were being put into camps, but then never addresses that the bomb was only used on the people the americans were putting into camps.

It utterly fails to put the security clearance hearing in any sort of context of the McCarthyism panic of the time, and the fact that a small people were using an atmosphere of paranoia to act on an old grudge and air out their personal animosity. It’s there, buried deep in the mix, but you have to have done the homework first to see it.

Some of this is down to the film’s structure and pace. For example, the fact that Strauss resented Oppenheimer’s seeming rejection of their shared Jewish heritage is actually in the movie, albeit expressed in two single lines of dialogue, 90 minutes apart. The root of their animus is left vague. In reality, wikipedia will give you screen after screen dissecting their mutual dislike; the movie more-or-less summarizes it with the look on RDJ’s face when he realizes that Oppenheimer already knows Albert Einstein.

Mostly though, the movie refuses to comment, Were Oppenheimer and the others going to communist meetings because they were believers, or because that’s where all the hot babes were? It’s ambiguous.

The whole movie is weird and ambiguous and ambivalent, because the real guy was weird and ambiguous and ambivalent. What did Oppenheimer really think about, you know, all that atomic bomb stuff? It’s not clear! And this is where the movie fundamentally makes a decision that I understand, but disagree with. Nolan and company make the call to just lean in to the ambiguity all the way, so not only do we never get a handle on Oppenheimer, we never really get a handle on what anyone else thinks, either.

So we get a scene where Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan project scientists are looking at pictures of the wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the camera zooms on in on Cillian Murphy’s face filled with an ambiguous expression. No only does the movie not show the final result of their work, we don’t really see anyone else reacting to it either. And, that’s it, huh? That’s our take on the atomic bombing, the Scarecrow looking a little perturbed?

In fairness, the last scene lands on “this was probably bad, actually,” and Gary Oldman shows up (like he did in The Dark Knight) to deliver the closest thing to a point of view that the movie has, which is that Oppenheimer needs to get over himself, a whole lor of people had to work together to unleash what they did.

One gets the feeling that the movie ends on Strauss’ failure mostly because that’s the only storyline that has actual closure, everything else just kinda floats away.

And look, I don’t need every piece of art I consume to share my politics, I don’t need every movie to end with Doctor Who materializing and reciting the Communist Manifesto. I mean, that would be bad ass, but I get it. What bugs me is not when people have opinions I disagree with, it’s when they fail to have one at all. Because this is a movie deeply uninterested in having a broader opinion. There’s a point where a desire for ambiguity stops being an artistic statement in it’s own right, and starts looking like cowardice.

At the end of the day, this is a movie that thinks the atomic bomb was probably bad, but on the other hand, the guy who didn’t like Oppenheimer didn’t get his cabinet post so maybe that’s okay? It feels like nothing so much as a three hour version of that dril tweet about drunk driving.

If you want to spend three hours watching the way Greatness is torn down by Small Men, and about the way horrors of war beget further horrors made by haunted men, I’d advise against this movie and instead a double feature of Amadeus and Godzilla. If nothing else, in both cases the music is better.

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1. One of the the things I love about Star Wars so much, especially in the context of the late 70s, is that Luke spends the first act being this kind of character, and then moves past it. One of the reasons Anakin never really works is that he is that kind of character—he’s clearly supposed to function like Michael Corleone, but they failed to hire Al Pacino to play him.

2. The all-time champion of this kind of review, of course, is Mad Max: Fury Road where the most positive and the most negative reviews were both “It’s just one big car chase!”

3. There’s a couple of scenes where you half-expect then to start comparing midichlorian counts.

Hot Takes on Lightsabers

This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon¹ and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte² over the weekend.

I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.

Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers

I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”

Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less

A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only³ came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.

This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.

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1. Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!

2. The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?

3. Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…

   1. This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
   2. Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
   3. It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide

Rebel Moon (2023)

This is as close to a review-proof movie as has ever been made: at this point, everyone on earth knows what to expect from “Zack Snyder does a sci-fi remake of Seven Samurai” and if they’re in the target audience. And yeah, it’s exactly the movie you imagined when you read that sentence.

At this point, Snyder’s ticks and interests as a filmmaker are well established. They shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, and there’s a shot right towards the start where the main character is planting seeds and the seeds flying though the air go into slow motion, so it’s not like they’re a surprise to him either. This is solidly playing to the part of the crowd that’s already bought in.

There’s guns that shoot blobs of molten lead. There’s a prison robot that looks like one of the statues from Beetlejuice. There’s another robot that looks like Daft Punk’s forgotten third brother that’s voiced by Anthony Hopkins of all people. I’m pretty sure if this had come out when I was fourteen, I’d have loved it. Everyone seems like they’re having a good time, and I think the number people in this movie who also worked on Justice League says a lot.

It’s not a good movie, but it’s a hard movie to genuinely dislike. I feel like this is where I should work up some irritation that something this banal got this much money, but you know what? I just can’t summon the energy. Are there things to complain about? Sure. But criticizing it feels like walking into a Mexican restaurant and complaining that they won’t sell you a hamburger; the correct response is to ask “what part of the sign out front was confusing?” It’s exactly the movie it said it was going to be, it you watched it and didn’t like it, well, your media illiteracy is not the movie’s problem. If I was in charge of spending Netflix’s money, would I have bought this movie? Probably not. But in a world where Netflix also keeps throwing money at the Dave Chapelle transphobia carnival, it hardly seems worth being irked by.

So, a few stray observations:

Before the movie came out, Star Wars was always cited as the big influence, but I suspect the movie owes a much bigger debt to Warhammer 40k. The whole design style and look of the thing screams Games Workshop. Like Event Horizon this feels like this could cleanly slot in as an unofficial prequel. (Warhammer 15k?)

Speaking of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker's first outing is the mother of all “making hard things look easy” movies. Lucas does some very subtle, tricky things with tone, and pacing, and exposition (more about that in a second,) and at first glance it looks like anyone could do the same thing. A lot better filmmakers than Snyder have stepped on the rake of “well, how hard could it be to make a Star War?” to the point where there’s almost no shame in it. Hell, Lucas himself only has about a 50% hit rate for “like star wars, and good.”

Right after I saw it, my initial zinger was “So you know, if *I* was going to remake seven samurai in the style of star wars, I'd try to make I understood how at least one of those movies worked.” Mostly what I was talking about was the different approaches to exposition.

For a long time, one of the established rules for telling stories in a visual medium was Show Don’t Tell. But, this was always more of a rule than a guideline. Author & extensive sex-scandal-haver Warren Ellis has a great riff on this: Show Don’t Tell Is A Tool Not A Rule.

That said, the style over the last decade or two has swung the other way. To pick one example at semi-random, author & divorced-but-no-sex-scandals-as-far-as-we-know-haver Neil Gaiman basically built an entire career out of Tell Don’t Show. The 21st century Doctor Who has been a heavy Tell Don’t Show work (although that as much working around the budget as anything,)

What’s funny about this is that the two major sources for Rebel Moon, The Seven Samurai and Star Wars are as Show Don’t Tell as it gets. Kurosawa, especially in his historical samurai movies, would make movies that just dropped the audience into a fully operational world and let them catch up. Lucas, heavily inspired by Kurosawa, turned around and applied the same technique to fictional settings. In both cases, all the characters know how the world works, they talk casually and in slang, there’s no character whose job is to ask questions. Supposedly, Lucas wanted to be a documentarian originally, and he shot his science fantasty movies like it. Star Wars especially I describe as having a “vibes-over-lore” approach to worldbuilding; you learn how things work by how the characters react to them, not what they say about them.

Flashing forward fifty years, Rebel Moon is all the way on the other end of the spectrum. Everywhere Kurosawa would have cut to a wide shot and let the wind howl a little, or Lucas would have pointed the camera at the sunset and let John Williams take over for a little bit, here a character looks directly into the camera and dictates another entry for the Lore Wiki. It’s not actually that strange for a genre movie here in the early Twenties, but the contract between this and the style of the direct source material is vast.

I feel a little bad doing this in a review, but the best illustration of the difference is the Auralnaut’s Zack Snyder's STAR WARS: Part 1 - A New Hope which reworks the original Star Wars to work like Rebel Moon does.

Like Zack, I’m gonna save the wrapup and resolution for the second part.