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Tag: breakout

  • House of the Dragon star Kieran Bew wanted to look like his dragon

    House of the Dragon star Kieran Bew wanted to look like his dragon

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    Kieran Bew knows the power of good facial hair. He credits the look for Hugh Hammer’s success taming the massive Vermithor in House of the Dragon’s seventh episode of the season, “The Red Sowing.”

    “I had a big beard, and everybody was discussing whether I should shave it off or not,” Bew says. “And I just said: I love Vermithor’s design of his teeth, sort of looking like they’re going in all different directions; like if he bit you, it would be the most painful thing, almost like being trapped in an Iron Maiden or something. And I felt like it was a slightly funny joke about people who have dogs, end up looking like their dogs.”

    Bew was aware that Hugh’s whole season arc was leading up to his showdown with Vermithor, and aware of how many aesthetic choices were there to set up the depth of the decision to go to Dragonstone: He kept the beard, and his hair the same color as Daemon’s (if not Viserys’), with a bit of Bew’s own natural hue mixed own. And as he watched Hugh’s agitation with the ruling class of King’s Landing grow, Bew found the role in little beats, like being so desperate for food that he punches a fellow commoner to get a bag.

    To him, the scenes were “always like a skeleton” for the larger character arc. But like any good actor (or, as is the case with interpreting a lot of Fire & Blood’s textbook-like account, historian), it was his job to piece together the lived humanity between that.

    “To get given a scene where my character is revealing to his wife something enormous […] and he’s arguing to go on a suicide mission,” Bew marvels. “That’s how much he’s decided to keep that a secret. Because of shame, because of how [his mom] behaved, because of his upbringing, because of how painful it was.

    “He’s been trying to do something else. And now he’s saying: Actually this is the only thing I can do. I’m in so much pain; I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to do this.”

    And so, Bew took all that energy into that final scene of episode 7, where Rhaenyra’s plans to find Vermithor a rider go awry. To him, Hugh’s desperation — to do something, to matter — was near suicidal, even if he’s still afraid in the moment. “He’s come all this way, the stakes are so high, he thinks the dice is slightly loaded in his favor. But it’s still fucking terrifying,” Bew says. “How do you strategize against something that can move so quickly and squash you and drop people on your head on fire?”

    Of course, his delay had some upside. “The one thing about [it] going to shit is: the odds improve.”

    For inspiration for what the ultimate moment of connection should feel like for Hugh and the Bronze Fury, Bew drew from his time on set — specifically, approaching a crew member’s little Yorkshire terrier on set, who kept trying to go for the tennis ball eyes of pre-CG Vermithor.

    “At the moment of claiming, it has to be this, where this dog likes me, this dog is connecting to me,” Bew says, acknowledging there is a difference between a tiny terrier and a dragon the size of four houses. “It’s a connection that’s, like, that delicate. But before we get there, it’s overwhelming. And it’s terrifying. And it requires throwing everything in.”

    And in Bew’s mind, everything about the way Hugh claims Vermithor comes from that desperation. Unlike other dragons, Vermithor is looking for a rider who can, as the saying goes, match his freak. So it’s no surprise that Hugh’s aggressive approach spoke to the mighty dragon, given that nothing about the way Hugh claims Vermithor is selfless, in that regard — even stepping in as the dragon targets another Targaryen bastard. After all, there’s nothing like the fear of failure to turn something impossible into a race.

    “He’s been pushed to this. Something about growing up underneath the shadow of the aristocracy, the family that he has been rejected from that he’s not part of — he’s not only not part of it, he’s connected to it in a way that is full of shame, that he’s angry about,” Bew says. “If Vermithor chooses her, then what happens to me?”

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    Zosha Millman

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  • There’s a secret reason Nicolas Cage’s face looks so weird in Longlegs

    There’s a secret reason Nicolas Cage’s face looks so weird in Longlegs

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    Oz Perkins’ oddball movie Longlegs does a lot of genre-hopping: It’s part police procedural, part serial-killer thriller, part supernatural horror movie, with a lot of little detours down lanes that shuffle it further into various subgenres. And it raises a lot of questions it never answers. In particular, the killer — an isolated oddball who styles himself as “Longlegs” in cryptic messages he leaves for law enforcement — has such an odd appearance that it raises the question of whether there’s a supernatural element to that, as well.

    Image: Neon

    Longlegs’ look isn’t addressed during the movie, apart from a scene where a hardware-store employee (played by Perkins’ daughter Bea) calls Longlegs a weirdo. People don’t even seem to acknowledge that he looks like someone slapped wet, greasy, white modeling clay all over his face, then walked away. While the prosthetics job could be seen as just a way to hide Nicolas Cage’s face out of a fear that the iconic actor is too familiar and his presence might be distracting, the press notes for the movie have a different explanation that the movie doesn’t even hint at.

    [Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Longlegs.]

    As viewers eventually learn, Longlegs, as he styles himself, is a Satanist who’s been busily gathering souls for the devil by making evil dolls and sending them to families under the guise that they’ve won some sort of contest. Once the doll enters each household, the father of the family succumbs to a form of possession and murders everyone in the house, then kills himself. When Longlegs is caught, he makes it clear to protagonist Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) that he expects Satan to lavishly reward him for these deeds — he isn’t afraid of his impending death, because (something like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope), he expects to be “everywhere” after he dies.

    This fervent dedication to Satan, as it turns out, actually explains his pale, lumpy, plasticky appearance. According to the movie’s press notes, Longlegs’ face is a result of repeated plastic surgeries gone wrong:

    When Perkins initially approached special makeup effects artist Harlow MacFarlane about creating the face of Longlegs, MacFarlane says, “From the beginning, Oz always had this glam rock vibe in his head.” The big hair, the garish makeup, the superficial aesthetic fixation that might lead a person to go under the knife so they could remain forever young. But more than being driven by style, Longlegs would be a man driven by obsessive devotion.

    “His jam is really that he’s trying to make himself beautiful for the Devil,” explains MacFarlane. “He’s in love with the Devil, and he’s trying to impress the Devil, so he’s gone through all these plastic surgery botch jobs to make himself look as pretty as he can for the Devil. Every thing he does is for this evil force that he’s trying to impress.” […]

    Getting the faded glam sadist look just right meant researching the state of elective surgery in the late 70s and early 80s — with characters living in semi-rural Oregon, no less — and then building from a foundation of bad work marked by overfilling and visible scarring. There would be layers of pain atop layers of pain. “You can just imagine it’s some hack job of a doctor in a strip mall somewhere,” says MacFarlane, who worked closely with Perkins and Cage to hone the final product.

    According to the same notes, MacFarlane looked at Gary Oldman’s makeup as Mason Verger in the movie Hannibal as one potential source of inspiration. In the 2001 sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, Mason was a rapist and pedophile who Hannibal Lecter drugged and convinced to slice off his own face, resulting in tremendous mutilation that could only be partially repaired with surgery.

    Cage also suggested an approach similar to Lon Chaney’s makeup in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera. Both inspirations were ultimately considered over-the-top for Perkins’ movie, but both are somewhat reflected in the final results. A note at the end of that section also reveals something Cage was hoping to see on screen that never happened: He wanted Longlegs to “fully pull his nose off at one point during the movie.”

    Lon Chaney as the Phantom in 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera — a monstrous figure with a piglike, turned-up nose, withdrawn lips exposing bare teeth, huge swollen bags under recessed eyes, and a small cap of hair on top of a very high forehead

    Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
    Image: Universal/Everett Collection

    There is no word in the movie or the press notes about how Satan feels about Longlegs’ current face.

    Another interesting piece of trivia does come up in the notes: Perkins concealed the character’s final appearance from Monroe until he shot the scene where they first come face-to-face in an FBI interrogation room, because he wanted her unnerved response to be authentic in the moment.

    “On horror sets, so many people ask if it’s scary or is it spooky. And it really isn’t! You see all the gags. You see the fake blood,” Monroe says in the press notes. “But for the first time, I was really able to experience this genuine feeling of being very uncomfortable and nervous and scared and fearful of opening that door, of what I was going to see. […] Oz didn’t let me see any photos or anything. I knew [Cage] was sitting in the hair and makeup chair for several hours, but I had no idea! It was a pretty surreal experience that I will definitely never forget.”

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    Tasha Robinson

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  • You’ve probably been saying “scadutree” wrong

    You’ve probably been saying “scadutree” wrong

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    Was anyone going to tell me I’ve been pronouncing “scadutree” wrong, or did I have to find out from a TikTok comment?

    Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC introduces consumables called Scadutree fragments. These are found at Sites of Grace in the Land of Shadow, and they’re used to power up your character.

    “That’s a silly-looking word,” I thought when I first read about them, mentally pronouncing it as “skad-oo-tree.”

    But the word “scadu” is derived from the Old English “sceadu,” and should be pronounced more like “shadu,” or, you know, “shadow.” Shadow-tree. This information comes from distressed linguistics majors and history enthusiasts all over the internet, including Reddit, X, and the comments of our own TiKTok page.

    This shouldn’t exactly have come as a surprise. Elden Ring has long used Old and Middle English, as well as Welsh and Irish words that Americans never learned to pronounce. I certainly breathed a sigh of relief when certified Irishman Cian Maher did us yanks a service by tweeting the correct pronunciation of the Lands Between’s Siofra River before I ever had to say the word out loud.

    The devotion to including Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish in translations of FromSoft games is genuinely cool. Over decades of English colonization these languages were repressed, often banned, and are still considered endangered.

    Old and Middle English words like “scadu” and “gaol” are from a different linguistic family, but it’s always exciting to learn how not to embarrass myself when I talk.

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    Simone de Rochefort

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  • There’s a phantom menace lurking in The Acolyte

    There’s a phantom menace lurking in The Acolyte

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    Lucasfilm’s new Star Wars series The Acolyte has earned praise for simply existing outside of the Skywalker Saga — after 47 years of stories set in the same stretch of timeline, a jump back “100 years before the rise of the Empire” to the shinier High Republic era is enough for aching Star Wars fans. But even with a prohibitively old setting and a cast of characters divorced from Anakin and Luke, The Acolyte creator Leslye Headland is still finding ways to pepper the drama with Easter eggs. Episode 4 gave those in the know a whopper: Plo Koon.

    Plo Koon, the Kel Dor Jedi known for his chic oxygen mask, first appeared in scenes of the Jedi council in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and grew into a fan favorite when he took on an action role in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Plo’s biggest fan might be The Clone Wars creator Dave Filoni, who has made his passion for the B-tier Jedi extremely clear to the Star Wars fandom over the last 20 years, having cosplayed at conventions as the Jedi, snapped photos with fellow cosplayers, and showed off his Plo Koon toy collection on social media. His “personal life” section on Wookieepedia is entirely facts about his Plo Koon collectibles. Despite him being one or two levels removed from a Glup Shitto, Dave Filoni is all in on Plo Koon.

    I believe Filoni when he says he has talked extensively about Plo Koon with George Lucas. Reportedly, when the animator was pushing to beef up Plo’s part in the The Clone Wars, there were plans to cast an actor who sounded like Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai to give the Jedi a samurai feel. But Lucas thought the character was goofier than that and wanted a Jim Carrey type. Filoni landed on actor James Arnold Taylor because of his Gandalf vibes. The Lucas-versus-Filoni Plo-off doesn’t end there; at Star Wars Celebration 2023, Filoni admitted that he made the case to his boss that Plo Koon, due to #skillz, obviously would have survived Order 66. Lucas shot down the canon alteration request, but Filoni stands by his defense.

    None of this was relevant to The Acolyte… until now. For a split second, standing in a drop shop with Osha on their way to meet the Wookiee Jedi Kelnacca, is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance by Plo Koon, who has not actually appeared in live action since Revenge of the Sith. How could Plo be alive during the High Republic era? That’s very human of you to ask, but just like Yoda, he is technically old enough to be around kicking; nerd number-crunching based on decanonized Legends materials puts him around 382 years old during the time of The Clone Wars, which should make him already a seasoned veteran of the Jedi in The Acolyte.

    For a hot second, it sounded like Filoni may have snuck his guy into The Mandalorian. Leaks hinted at a potential reveal in the season 2 finale, but as it turned out, early storyboards and VFX footage were all an elaborate scheme to hide the return of a de-aged Luke Skywalker. “All it takes is one person treating the film in color correction, one person who goes on social media and says, ‘Guess what I saw today?’” Mark Hamill said in the Disney Gallery making-of doc centered on the episode. What no one seemed to care about at the time was how mad Filoni’s fellow Plo Koonheads must have felt!

    Technically, The Acolyte is one of the few Star Wars projects that Dave Filoni does not seem directly involved with; he doesn’t share any writing or directing credits on the series, nor does he hold a general producer credit. (By all accounts, his attention is fully on Ahsoka season 2.) And maybe it’s THE Plo Koon. In theory this unnamed Jedi is just another Force-sensitive Kel Dor.

    But c’mon, it’s Plo Koon. And it makes sense why Headland would want the cameo. As the showrunner has said, she purposefully set up her writers room to represent a broad spectrum of Star Wars fandoms and surrounded herself with people who could bring their own Easter egg wishlists to the table. So while longtime fans may have prayed at the altar of George Lucas, others involved were weaned on The Clone Wars — and Filoni’s pro-Plo brand of fandom. So it’s no surprise that The Acolyte would find ways to nod to the OT, the prequels, and even the cartoons that have little in common with its world: If you are on the right side of Star Wars history, you make room for Plo Koon.

    Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Plo Koon last appeared in live-action in The Phantom Menace, but his final live-action appearance was in Revenge of the Sith. We’ve edited the article to reflect this.

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    Matt Patches

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  • House of the Dragon season 2’s premiere lets side characters take the spotlight in a way the book never could

    House of the Dragon season 2’s premiere lets side characters take the spotlight in a way the book never could

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    House of the Dragon has always been about how the smallest decisions can have unforeseen consequences, but rarely has that theme been as clear as it was in the season 2 premiere. In the show’s first episode back from break, Daemon Targaryen decides to take matters into his own hands with a plot that probably could have used a little more planning (classic Daemon). But while the book’s version of these events is fittingly brutal, the show’s approach is quieter, more human, and arguably a little more horrifying.

    [Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 2 episode 1.]

    In the book version of the story, the assassins at the center of this episode’s action are named Blood and Cheese. And while they don’t get these silly names in the show, they do get a level of horror and humanity that the book doesn’t have time to afford them. The book versions are boogeymen, terrifying lowlifes who kill a handmaiden and a handful of guards, and seem gleefully cruel in the way they slay Prince Jaehaerys — tricking Queen Helaena into first naming her younger son for death before killing her firstborn instead.

    Image: HBO

    And while those versions of the characters are significantly more stomach-churning, the show’s approach feels much more appropriate thematically. Rather than the murderous wraiths of the book, who slip into the queen mother’s chambers, leaving a pile of bodies behind them, House of the Dragon’s assassins simply move through the castle unnoticed, a pair of hired hands of low status and low intelligence, functionally invisible to the royalty who own the halls. When they reach difficult junctures in the castle’s tunnels, or difficult choices, they panic and bicker and bumble. The Blood and Cheese of the show aren’t gifted killers, they’re just amoral men sent to do something too disgusting for anyone to have imagined possible.

    Adding to all of this is the sense of desperation that the pair’s meeting with Daemon seems to have instilled in them. According to showrunner Ryan Condal, the team wanted the set-piece to play out like a “heist gone wrong,” and as the scene stretches on, we can feel their worry set in, making them more reckless, cruel, and hurried in the process. While the show cleverly leaves Daemon’s final words a mystery, the pair’s fear over what Daemon will do to them if they fail is palpable.

    “We know who Daemon is; I don’t think he necessarily directly ordered the death of a child,” Condal said in a roundtable. “But he clearly said, If it’s not Aemond, don’t leave the castle empty-handed.”

    So when they can’t find their initial target, it makes sense that these two decide to settle for the first royal son they can find. It’s the kind of hurried decision that only these two brutes could make. And, in a scene that’s both grotesque and funny, the two assassins realize that they can’t even tell the two children asleep in their beds apart, and have to riddle their way through Helaena’s answer. The whole thing is a ridiculous farce from two people barely competent enough to pull any of this off.

    Aemond, flying among blue skies and clouds, looks stunned after his dragon bit the head off another dragon in House of the Dragon

    Image: HBO

    All of this builds into the show’s fantastic slippery slope of assumptions. While the audience may know that Aemond’s slaying of Lucerys Velaryon in the skies over Storm’s End was an accidental consequence of not understanding his own dragon’s power, for Daemon, it seems like an act of clear and predetermined aggression. He probably didn’t expect the assassins to come away with the head of a toddler prince, but he thinks letting two assassins loose in the Red Keep with less-than-clear orders is nothing more than a slight escalation.

    These are the kind of spiraling, misinformed decisions that House of the Dragon builds its beautiful, flawed, and deeply human history out of. Sure, the show is elevated to the heights of fantasy, but it’s still fundamentally a story of broken, furious, and faulty characters making rash decisions and then dealing with the consequences — those consequences just often happen to involve dragons and war.

    All of this is true to Martin’s vision, of course. It’s the same kind of storytelling he employs constantly in A Song of Ice and Fire, but while the original Game of Thrones series frequently had to cut down on the humanness of its story simply by virtue of its massive scale, it’s constantly thrilling to see how effectively House of the Dragon goes the opposite direction, expanding on Martin’s written history in Fire & Blood and turning these quasi-mythical historical figures into flesh-and-blood people and incredible characters, up to and including the lowlife assassins who don’t even need their silly little names.

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    Austen Goslin

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  • The Sympathizer’s best dual identity trick was its last one

    The Sympathizer’s best dual identity trick was its last one

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    The Sympathizer is full of twists and turns — and why wouldn’t it be? It’s a show (based on a book of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen) that follows a Viet Cong double agent from the end of the Vietnam War to life as a refugee in America as he works to secure the Viet Cong’s victory. All the while, the show wrestles with themes of self and identity, as filtered through The Captain (Hoa Xuande), said double agent; his Vietnamese community in 1970s Los Angeles; and the variety of white men he works for (all played by Robert Downey Jr.).

    In the final episode, we finally catch up with The Captain’s present-day story in a reeducation camp in Vietnam, led by the shadowy Commissar, who’s been demanding the Captain’s story be written out in exacting detail. It’s no surprise that the true name of the Commissar — another figure defined by his title more than himself — would be another surprise in the plot. But, like any unveiling of true identity in The Sympathizer, it’s more a twist of the knife than anything else.

    [Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for the end of The Sympathizer. This post also has some mentions of sexual assault.]

    Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO

    In the final episode, the Captain finds out the Commissar is in fact his friend Mẫn, now scarred from napalm strikes during the fall of Saigon. Worse yet, this old friend/prison camp supervisor is still going to torture him for information.

    It’s a tough way for the Captain to find out that his visions of Mẫn — alone in an office and highly decorated, leading the bright future for Vietnam — weren’t accurate. Throughout the show, the Captain’s reflections were a neat framing device and something he saw as mostly a formality, the one thing standing between him and the bright future of Communist Vietnam he had fought so hard for. Now, staring him in the face, is the cold reality of what his struggle has culminated in. It’s all in keeping with the way The Sympathizer has been using the Captain’s imaginative visions as specters of his subjective (and warped) point of view.

    “The ghosts really pertain to his consciousness, his conscience about his actions,” Xuande told Polygon. “The Captain’s journey is really about trying to survive, trying to weave his way out, and trying to never be found out, and, obviously, toeing the line between his allegiances.”

    In that light, his vision with Mẫn isn’t all that different from his visions of Sonny or the Major; they’re all, as Xuande puts it, an expression of “the trauma that he’s been hiding from.” They’re a startling way for the Captain to realize that his actions have been more about finding any means to survive than about following his communist ideals, or fighting for a better Vietnam.

    “When they come back to haunt and remind him about the very things he’s been neglecting in his memory, it’s a reminder for him that everything that he believes and thought he was doing for the cause might not actually be right.”

    This is an idea that The Sympathizer underlines again and again with the Captain’s character: Nothing about his life is straightforward or neat, and none of it went the way he planned. Even as he seems to confess to Sonny or carry out the general’s orders to kill him, the Captain is acting for his own reasons, rather than purely “the cause.”

    Mẫn (Duy Nguyễn) answering a phone and checking around him in a still from The Sympathizer

    Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO

    Such corruption of idealistic impulses is something Mẫn also knows all too well, seemingly disillusioned with the state of the country at the same time he does his job. He is, as his dual character names speak to, a different person now, much harder than he was as a spy under American imperialism. But (much like Downey Jr.’s parade of white authority figures) Duy Nguyễn wanted to make sure you could see the connective tissue between every version of Mẫn.

    “To develop this character, I had to really dig deep: What is Mẫn? How does he talk? How does he move? How does he act around his friend, or does he act alone with just the Captain?” Nguyễn says. “He’s the dentist, so he’s very still; he has to be precise. And he’s intellectual, so he has to stay upright. The way he talks is clear — so those are the parts I keep.

    “[In episode 7], he is so damaged, but he still wants to keep the presence in front of his friends. He just wants to try to be the same person his friend saw the last time.”

    Which is crucial; all of episode 7 — and the crux of The Sympathizer’s final turn — comes down to how Mẫn’s turn plays. He is the single person, the crucial vector point, around which the Captain’s story gets suddenly jerked back, calling his bluffs and calling out all his perspective gaps. Like the Captain, he is a study of dualities: a person and a rank; loyal to the cause, yet wary; a ghost from the past and a vision of the brave new fractured and corrupted world. After filtering so much of the narrative — and, with it, the war, its aftershocks, and all the complexities contained within those — through the Captain’s identity, Mẫn is the only one who can match and cut through the noise of the story the Captain has been telling himself.

    And the truth is at once infinitely more complex and far simpler than he was prepared to believe. Through his torture, the Captain finally reconciles with some of the worst things he did for the war, going all the way back to one of the earliest scenes of the show (that we now know was actually the rape of a fellow Communist agent). He has to accept who he is and where he comes from. And he has to accept that nothing about his trauma and suffering has necessarily fixed his nation. All that hardship might’ve just borne more pain — or, worse, indifference to pain. As the sexually assaulted Communist agent tells him, after all her years in the war and the camp, “nothing can disappoint” her now.

    In the end, it’s Mẫn who gets the Captain (and Bon) free of the camp, back on a boat headed for the ol’ U.S. of A. It once again makes him a study in conflict; after so many years of loving (and trying to hate) that place, it might be his salvation after all. As the Captain looks back on Vietnam, he now sees a nation of ghosts — more clearly than ever.

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    Zosha Millman

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  • Mercedes Varnado picks which Sailor Scout would make the best professional wrestler

    Mercedes Varnado picks which Sailor Scout would make the best professional wrestler

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    Wrestling is a huge part of Mercedes Varnado’s career, having gained notoriety as Sasha Banks for the WWE before crossing over as Mercedes Moné for the AEW. But her fans may not realize she is also a huge Sailor Moon fan. The professional wrestler, who recently jumped to acting for The Mandalorian, has a deep appreciation of the classic magical girl fantasy anime based on Naoko Takeuchi’s 1992 manga. Fans of both wrestling and anime know she donned a Sailor Moon-inspired outfit during the 2022 Royal Rumble. So it’s no surprise that she’s openly campaigned to play Sailor Jupiter in a live-action adaptation of Sailor Moon, if that ever happens.

    Polygon caught up with Varnado during this year’s Crunchyroll Anime Awards, so naturally we had to ask: Given her love of the anime, which sailor scout does she think would make the best professional wrestler?

    “I would say Sailor Mercury,” Varnado told Polygon. “She’s such a badass; she has such a good attitude. I feel like Usagi would always be a little late to the ring, she would probably slip during her matches a little bit.”

    Image: Toei Animation

    Introduced in the eighth episode of Sailor Moon season 1, Sailor Mercury is the first Sailor Guardian that Usagi discovers and the first to join her cause fighting the forces of the nefarious Queen Beryl. Mercury’s true identity is Ami Mizuno, a shy bookworm with an abnormally high I.Q. who is known for her talent for mathematics and computers. Though initially timid, Ami goes on to become the chief strategist of the Sailor Scouts and has a positive, resilient attitude whenever faced with a challenge.

    The 1992 Sailor Moon anime would go on to run for a total of five seasons. The series’ combination of tokusatsu-inspired action and romantic melodrama is credited with revolutionizing the genre of Magical Girl anime, with the combined popularity of the anime’s assorted home releases and films contributing to the comic’s status as one of the best-selling Japanese manga of its time. In 2014, Sailor Moon was later adapted into another anime series called Sailor Moon Crystal, in commemoration of the series’ 20th anniversary. Sailor Moon Crystal is a reboot of the original anime that more closely follows the story of Usagi Tsukino and co. as it was told in Naoko Takeuchi’s original manga.

    Aside from the series’ popularity, however, Sailor Moon has had a major impact on fans (particularly girls) who grew up watching the anime, and that includes Varnado herself. “I still go back and watch Sailor Moon to get my life lessons, to get my energy,” Varnado told Polygon. “So she still inspires me to this day.”

    Sailor Moon is available to stream on Hulu. Sailor Moon Crystal is available to stream on Crunchyroll.

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    Toussaint Egan

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  • Fallout’s violence and gore are part of its charm

    Fallout’s violence and gore are part of its charm

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    Fans of the Fallout games won’t be shocked to learn that Amazon’s new TV show based on the franchise is gruesomely violent. This is a franchise known for its Bloody Mess perk, and for the VATS system, which lets players target and blow off heads and limbs. But the violence of the Fallout TV series still has the power to shock; viewers can expect multiple severed heads and lopped-off extremities in this post-apocalyptic world where mutated monsters feed on human flesh.

    While the gore of Fallout may be uncomfortable to watch, it’s rarely (if ever) gratuitous. Instead, it’s done in the service of world-building. In many cases, it’s played for comedy and surprise, in the style of Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino films.

    The first few minutes of Fallout may give viewers the incorrect impression that the show treats violence only with deadly seriousness. The first episode of the series starts with the nuclear destruction of Los Angeles. It’s a chilling scene, and since young children are involved, it sets a grim tone.

    And yes, in later episodes, there are scenes that are difficult to watch. Puppies are incinerated at a research facility. Innocent Vault Dwellers are casually murdered. Body parts are sliced, crushed, and made into human jerky. In the show’s above-ground post-apocalyptic society, extreme violence is presented as a daily occurrence, and that society has the means to address it. Medicines that can instantly heal wounds are as commonplace as off-the-shelf replacement body parts.

    Some of the show’s instances of violence are nods to the games. One big shootout plays like a VATS-powered killing spree, in which viewers watch in slo-mo as a bullet rips through multiple poor wastelanders. The show’s creators highlight that bodies are squishy and life is cheap in this world, but that its residents have adapted accordingly. Death and violence don’t seem to bother anyone all that much. Hell, becoming a brainless zombie is treated as something of an inconvenience in Fallout’s world.

    Fallout also delves into body horror. One of the show’s more disturbing creatures, as seen in trailers, is a giant mutant axolotl covered in hundreds of human fingers. Adding an extra layer of grossness, we see one of those creatures vomit up the rotting contents of its massive stomach before it dies. It is extremely unpleasant! We see horrifying examples of human-mutant experiments. Giant mutant cockroaches run rampant, and they burst open with green gooey guts when stomped on.

    All of this is to say that violence in the Fallout show is fast, frequent, and unrepentant. But it isn’t dreary or humorless in the way other post-apocalyptic worlds, like The Walking Dead or The Last of Us can be. Instead, it borrows a page from the Mad Max movies. Like the Fallout games, Fallout the TV series isn’t for the queasy. But for fans of black comedy and copious amounts of fake blood, it’s a hoot.

    All eight episodes of Fallout season 1 are now streaming on Prime Video.

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    Michael McWhertor

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  • Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has no right being this funny

    Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has no right being this funny

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    As many people have said on dating profiles (or mothers on their wall art), I love a video game that makes me laugh, and I am delighted Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has been so goddamn good at it.

    In my time with the game, it has asked me to do absurd things like play a card game against a regular-ass dog. It has featured Cloud Strife, the badass protagonist with a giant sword, carrying a little cushion around for him to use on benches. It’s got dudes who play acoustic guitar at you like the Kens in Barbie, the franchise’s second homoerotic biker duel, and a lot of other things I want to talk about but would probably be spoilers. I mean, Chadley???

    But if you’ll allow me the indulgence, I need to talk about one in particular.

    Consider this a spoiler warning. I’m serious. I’m going to embed a photo of Cloud Strife playing the piano (also funny) to try and spare casual scrollers, but right underneath it, there will be a YouTube video of one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in video games, one that I recommend seeing for yourself if you’re interested in playing through Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. (You can’t miss it, it’s part of the story.)

    Okay, ready?

    Image: Square Enix

    Here it is:

    There are a lot of incredible things about this scene, which takes place in Chapter 5 aboard the Shinra-8 cruise to Costa del Sol. First, like a lot of things in Rebirth, it’s a gag lifted directly from the original Final Fantasy 7, but it’s been given such a lavish reinterpretation that it becomes an entirely different kind of funny, a throwaway gag made into a comedic centerpiece for no reason at all.

    As previously established in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the characters are more than happy to break out into dance, but that still doesn’t prepare you for seeing Red XIII do a Michael Jackson impression, or the (smaller but funnier) sight gag of the canine warrior trying to cross his legs across the table from Cloud. (Also the kid crying at the sight of him kills me every time.)

    I don’t think you get any of this in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth without Square Enix’s crucial development decision to never shy away from or soften the oddity of the original game’s polygonal abstraction. Under the older game’s art constraints, the unrealities of, say, riding a dolphin or meeting a talking cat are much easier to roll with, and not particularly unusual.

    Recreating these moments with such a high degree of realism is in itself funny, an endearing commitment to a bit I can’t believe a massive studio signed up for. It’s also both a necessary counterbalance to an otherwise dire and melodramatic story — yes, the heroes of Rebirth must also fight for a world that has room for fun and levity — and a bit of a eulogy for this kind of goofballery in modern big-budget games.

    Sure, every once in a while we get something like Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the latest in a long line of games that always show players a tremendously goofy time — but Final Fantasy 7’s comedy is something different. It’s a relic from a time when games were a little more mysterious, a little more challenging to interpret, with a little more room to surprise. Maybe publishers will see people eagerly sharing photos of Red XIII riding a chocobo and think, hey, this stuff would be good to have in video games again.

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    Joshua Rivera

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  • Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is basically a Chadley simulator

    Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is basically a Chadley simulator

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    Final Fantasy 7 and its compilation media have introduced some of my favorite video game characters. There’s Cloud Strife, the emotionally cagey but endlessly awkward dude who just wants to be cool. His childhood friend, a sullen-eyed Tifa, brings a sense of kindness and warmth to the most dire of situations. Hell, even the villains are charming in their own ways. I wouldn’t want to be a generic Shinra lapdog, but maybe I’d go and be one for Rufus, whose cutting-edge sense of style somehow makes me forget he’s the CEO of an evil company.

    Then there’s Chadley, an unfortunate character whose design looks like if you combined 9S from Nier: Automata with a Boy Scout.

    Chadley made his series debut in Final Fantasy 7 Remake when he recruited Cloud to collect battle intel by undertaking virtual fighting challenges. As we learned in Remake, Chadley is a humanoid robot created by Shinra’s Professor Hojo. Although he worked for that evil and cruel scientist, Chadley seemed harmless enough and Cloud could actually help free him from Hojo’s programming toward the end of Remake, turning him into a fully independent being. Now, he’s back in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and ready to help Cloud and Avalanche’s cause.

    In Remake, Chadley served as a perfectly adequate character to talk to every now and again. Cloud could talk to him when he needed to, but he now plays a pretty big role in the larger world and gameplay in Rebirth. Toward the beginning of the game, he tasks Cloud with surveying each region by visiting different geographic locations — like a special spring or a cave dedicated to a summon — and scanning them with a device to collect data. Given that exploring each region and all the points forms a major part of the game, this forces players to interact with Chadley and hear his boring chatter frequently.

    Image: Square Enix via Polygon

    The scanning device Chadley gives Cloud doubles as a communications device that he can call Cloud up on at any moment. Chadley doesn’t talk every single time Cloud scans a new location, but he jabbers on about all kinds of random knowledge. If Cloud slashes a rock to find a Summon Sanctuary, he will give you background information on a god’s mythology. If Cloud scans a Lifespring or a tower, he might talk about any local regional phenomena. He frequently pops in with basic facts about the region, and then dips out. And his excited, pubescent voice doesn’t hold up well over long stretches.

    Chadley functions as a living encyclopedia, but his prattling isn’t all that helpful. Something that I appreciated about Remake was how the developers showed us the way of the world. Little tasks, like going to another neighborhood, took additional quests to secure documents like ID cards and helped give a sense of Shrina’s tight grip on the city. We learned about the city by how it felt to play and the stories of characters. Now, Chadley is just used as a way to dump a bunch of decontextualized lore into a giant world. Sure, It’ll make great fodder for fan-run wiki pages down the line, but it doesn’t make for a compelling way to show us the larger world.

    Luckily, there is at least one thing you can do to lower the overall Chadley levels in the game. The young savant largely talks through the built-in speaker on the PlayStation 5 controller, and you can mute it in the game settings. Unfortunately, this just means he’ll talk through the screen, but it at least minimizes any potential Chadley jump scares through the controller.

    Overall, Chadley comes across as the annoying familiar that was never needed in the first place. The game has plenty of other, more interesting characters. Personally, I’d be more interested in learning more about what Red XIII has to say about a given desert landscape, or hearing what Barret thinks about the gods, rather than getting an encyclopedia-like entry on each topic via Chadley. So while I appreciate learning more about the larger world, I think I’d be better off without him.

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    Ana Diaz

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  • With the Automaton invasion, Helldivers 2 proved failure is part of the point

    With the Automaton invasion, Helldivers 2 proved failure is part of the point

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    Helldivers 2 was compared to Starship Troopers when it was first released, but since then, the squad-based third-person shooter has become closer to the post-Judgment Day future in Terminator. While the first mission order, to retake territory from bugs called Terminids, was a success, things went downhill once the game introduced the Automatons, the much harder-to-kill robots that attack Super Earth planets.

    Just this week, players lost the planet Malevelon Creek to the Automatons while just barely liberating Mort after around 10 million Helldiver deaths, according to a post in the official Helldivers 2 Discord (via Gamesradar). Despite some gains, the Automatons have pushed back Super Earth’s forces for now. Starting Thursday, players will see a message stating the major order to liberate planets under Automaton control has been a failure, and players should change course:

    Despite the valorous efforts of the Helldivers, Automaton marauders have invaded Super Earth territory. Patriotic citizens mourn as their sufficiently-sized homes burn to the ground. Super Earth citizens demand justice, and they will receive it. But for now, the Terminid Control System is ready for activation.

    While players can still fight on Automaton worlds, most will likely shift their priorities to Terminid territory, starting with Veld, which features a hive that “eluded detection and has been gestating un-Democratic vermin for weeks.”

    Helldivers 2 launched with the Terminids, and while they proved to be a challenge, players banded together and were able to complete the first major order and reap the rewards. That was not the case with the Automatons, which proved to be way tougher than their organic bug brethren. Besides the fact that even the smallest units are covered in tough-to-pierce armor, the game introduced missions that required way more strategy and teamwork than previous ones. Along with some surprise real-time work from Arrowhead Game Studios devs, the failure was inevitable.

    Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

    The mission type that specifically threw players for a loop was escort missions, which required Helldivers to help researchers and other citizens trapped on planets being invaded by Automaton fleets escape into an extraction point. Sounds easy enough on its face: Follow some unarmed civilians as they run from one side of a relatively small area to another. It was a common objective with the Terminids as well. However, anybody who’s played one of these Automaton missions through will tell you that after the first 10 or so get rescued, you’ll get bombarded with Automatons of all kinds. And because these missions take place in one small space with a lot of chokepoints, and the NPCs aren’t the best at self-preservation, it’s easy for players and civilians to die over and over… and over.

    Players on the Helldivers subreddit have been trying to plan out strategies for this specific mission type since the campaign started. The consensus has been to have a full four-person team, with three people luring enemies into the outskirts of the mission area and one person focusing on stealth tactics to escort civilians (that means using smoke stratagems or specialty scouting armor sets). However, this only works if people are willing to constantly communicate in voice chat. Depending on your difficulty level, you still might run into some extremely heavy spawn rates that will decimate your team regardless of how coordinated you are. And with its 40-minute clock, there is a lot of time for things to go horribly wrong. Plus, players have reported bugs, like NPCs standing in front of the extraction point without entering.

    I spoke with a player who identified himself to Polygon as Alessio, aka Zarrusso on Reddit, who posted a clear, comprehensive visual guide on how to tackle these missions this week, basically putting all the disparate Reddit threads and YouTube videos on the topic together. The guide suggests landing as far away from the objective as possible, along with a set of stratagems to equip.

    A Helldiver shooting at an Automaton drop ship that’s exploding in flames.

    Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment

    “On difficulty 6 [Extreme] and all of the above, the difficulty spikes greatly and we couldn’t kill the enemies fast enough and the civilians kept dying after taking one step outside,” he wrote. “So after getting some advice from YouTube and Reddit and just playing the missions, I put together that little strategy. And now I play those missions on difficulty 7, 8, and 9, and I have completed like 90 percent of my escort missions.”

    These escort missions require way more strategy than others. Some Automaton objectives are nearly identical to Terminid ones (kill a certain number of enemies; launch an ICBM), so they didn’t have a large barrier to entry and therefore didn’t need nearly as much coordination between players, especially on lower difficulties. “The other missions don’t require this much strategy. On lower difficulties, you can pretty much do them without thinking but still need to bring the right weapons,” Zarrusso explained.

    The Automaton escort missions, though, have been a completely different challenge for players, despite being similar to previous ones. This led to many people spamming easier 15-minute objectives instead. With this many failures on the board, it’s no wonder the community didn’t succeed in their collective fight.

    But also, failure might’ve been the point all along. In a pre-release video, deputy game director Sagar Beroshi revealed Helldivers 2 would have a game master who would introduce twists and story moments, watching players as they complete missions and responding in real time. Players still have a degree of control over how mission orders go, but like in a tabletop RPG, the GM will move players in a specific direction, sometimes with a little improv. This might include something small like giving players an extra stratagem mid-round, or something much more globally impactful.

    “The enemies have goals, right? They will look at what you’ve done, respond to the ways in which you have — you as the community, that is — has behaved, and react in a way that changes the face of the galaxy thereafter,” Beroshi said.

    A recent PC Gamer article features a quick interview with CEO Johan Pilestedt, who explained this dev’s name is Joel and he apparently “takes his job very seriously.”

    “Joel, in his infinite wisdom decided, ‘What happens when a faction wins a portion of a war? Well, they mine everything.’ That’s where the incendiary mine segment came from,” Pilestedt gave as an example, referring to the period where players got access to the incendiary mine stratagem for free.

    Helldivers 2 will continue to surprise players with these tactics. “We have a lot of systems built into the game where the Game Master has a lot of control over the play experience. It’s something that we’re continuously evolving based on what’s happening in the game,” Pilestedt said. “And as part of the roadmap, there are things that we want to keep secret because we want to surprise and delight.” This will likely be with mechs, which have been teased and have been the subject of leaks, along with other new enemies and stories. It’s all a good reminder that your best efforts might be in vain, but you can turn the tides of war, and that makes for a more complex play experience.

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    Carli Velocci

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  • The Halo TV series bailed on its best chance yet to actually take us to a Halo ring

    The Halo TV series bailed on its best chance yet to actually take us to a Halo ring

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    Reach has fallen in the Halo TV universe. If you know anything about the lore of the Halo games, you know that the next thing that’s supposed to happen is Master Chief escaping from Covenant forces above Reach, his ship getting attacked, and then promptly crashing onto the series’ first Halo ring. In other words, this is basically the moment where the action starts. That is not what happened in the Halo TV series. Instead, Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and his friends took a reflective excursion to a backwater planet that felt a lot more like a detour than character development.

    After escaping Reach, Chief and everyone else on the escape ship with him (which is basically all of the still-living series regulars except for Kate Kennedy’s Kai), visit Aleria, a small dirt farming planet with plenty of land to spare and nearly toxic soil. After an episode as big and exciting as the Fall of Reach, this feels like a very HBO-style respite: the kind of episode dedicated to taking stock of the characters we lost and examining the new shape of the world after a big shake-up. But those shows earn those reflective episodes with consistent quality before them, and they tend to make those quiet episodes feel ever bigger and more important than the loud ones. That was certainly not the case in Halo season 2’s fifth episode.

    Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

    In defense of the Halo series’ entire premise, it has no obligation to follow the events of the games directly. Since the show’s announcement, the creative team behind it has been careful to specify that this series takes place in the “Silver Timeline,” which is completely separate from the canon of the games. So going somewhere other than Halo after the Fall of Reach isn’t really a problem. The problem is that the show once again fails the most basic and important test of doing interesting things with those changes.

    The series seems convinced that the audience loves and cares about its side characters. But they’re just not interesting. During this episode the most coherent plotline we spend time with involves Soren (the wonderful Bokeem Woodbine, trying his best as always) and his wife searching for their child. We see them question various people around the village, and even find someone they think is keeping their kid from them. But by the end of the episode, they discover that he was actually kidnapped by the UNSC — an organization we almost exclusively know at this point as the military that loves kidnapping children. It’s a bland, “no shit” reveal that feels both too obvious and totally meaningless at the same time. Another of the episode’s plotlines involves Riz, a Spartan who was introduced just a few episodes ago, deciding that she wants to be a farmer now that she is too injured to be a Spartan.

    With plotlines this boring, about characters that the show never really does a good job of convincing us to care about, it’s getting awfully hard not to long for the circular perfection and alien weirdness of the Halo rings that give this franchise its name. So why aren’t we there yet?

    The answer seems to lie in the Halo show’s approach to the rings in general. The series clearly recognizes one of the great strengths of the first game was that Halo was profoundly mysterious. But the show is approaching that mystery in a very different way than the original game did.

    Fiona O’Shaughnessy as Laera in Halo season 2 stands wrapped in a blanket with two people talking behind her on a porch

    Photo: Adrienn Szabo/Paramount Plus

    For the game, the mystery of Halo was in how little information you had about both the alien ring and the video game’s world. Aside from the basic premise of humanity being on the back foot in a war against aliens, almost everything else was a black box. So when you crash-land on Halo in the game’s second level (a level also called “Halo”), the path is clear for the game to slowly reveal its secrets about Forerunners, the Covenant religion, the Flood, 343 Guilty Spark, and everything else that feels commonplace in the series today. The TV series, on the other hand, decided to make Halo a destination. Instead of giving us no lore, it’s been stacking up piles and piles of lore through its first two seasons and dangling the Halo ring in front of his via characters’ prophetic visions. This path to Halo isn’t inherently bad; a well-done buildup and reveal can make for a fantastic moment in a TV show. But like the Hatch in Lost, the key is that you have to show the audience why the thing is mysterious and important — you have to really prove it to us, not just have characters bombard us with insistent dialogue that it matters. And more importantly, the characters actually have to get into it eventually.

    None of this is to say that the show has run out of time to make it to Halo, or even that it can’t be good once it gets there. But it is to say that the journey there so far has felt profoundly misjudged and way too slow, and it’s starting to feel like it might not happen at all. In this episode, Makee (Charlie Murphy) tries to convince the Arbiter to go to the Halo rings because she insists that the Prophets are lying about the Great Journey, telling the rest of the Covenant fanciful stories about its importance and transcending the physical realm, but never actually planning to take them along on their trip to divinity. Now, I’m not saying that the Halo series is the Prophets and we’re the rest of the Covenant, but I am saying that our lack of a journey to a Halo ring is starting to feel a little suspicious, and they’re running out of time to convince me we’re really going.

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    Austen Goslin

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  • Music has always been a huge part of Dune adaptations

    Music has always been a huge part of Dune adaptations

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    The world of Dune is a wild one. On any given day you’ve got clairvoyant sisterhoods poking your neck, giant spicy worms, and Javier Bardem spitting on your floor — and I haven’t even started on the really weird stuff. Capturing the tone and flavor of this eccentric setting isn’t easy, and while I’m not opposed to getting a lengthy monologue from Virginia Madsen, the right audio direction can do a better job of laying the groundwork for a sci-fi epic. And music has always played an important role in the various adaptations of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe across movies, TV, and games.

    The soundtrack to David Lynch’s 1984 Dune adaptation features a sweeping orchestral soundtrack by Toto. A special appearance was also made by Brian Eno, who recorded the more moody and haunting stuff. Dune is the only soundtrack Toto has ever worked on, and how they came to be involved with the movie is a much longer story that you can read more about in A Masterpiece in Disarray (David Lynch’s Dune — An Oral History).

    The soundtrack for the ’84 film is just as epic as Hans Zimmer’s score for the 2021 movie, but takes a different approach. At the time, the work of James Horner and John Williams was dominating sci-fi at the box office, and the theme for the original Dune movie follows a similarly bombastic approach but avoids some of the more uplifting melodies (an explicit request from Lynch).

    Much like the movie’s vibe itself, the score for the original is far groovier than the later adaptations, with a heavy reliance on synths punctuated with guitar riffs. The main title suite sounds like a rock opera version of “Ride of the Valkyries,” while the theme for Baron Harkonnen immediately evokes Mike Oldfield’s haunting “Tubular Bells.” However, if you just need the CliffsNotes, the score is best summarized with the sci-fi rock ballad “Take My Hand,” which plays over the movie’s closing credits and runs through the key movements in the score in under three minutes.

    While Zimmer’s score for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies is certainly a drastic departure from Lynch’s film, you can still hear echoes of the ’84 soundtrack in it. In particular, the track “Stillsuits” pays direct homage to the opening measures of the main title of the original movie. The score isn’t a massive departure from Zimmer’s work on a myriad of other blockbusters, but makes a greater effort to feel unique.

    I’m a pretty big Hans Zimmer fan, and while much of his work is guilty of sounding a bit same-y, I’d argue his score for the 2021 movie Dune: Part One is some of his best work. Zimmer’s identity is still very present in Dune, with aggressive instruments and percussion, but the score places a greater emphasis on vocals and unconventional instruments that sound otherworldly when layered together.

    The score for Dune: Part One is best described as very dry and very old, thanks to its intentional use of woodwinds and hollow percussion to convey not only the arid environment of Dune, but its enigmatic atmosphere as well. Those words often sound like a bad thing, but here, it really works. The deep, heavy rhythms from tracks like “Armada” and “Leaving Caladan” are the most reminiscent of Zimmer’s previous work. However, it’s with tracks like “Sanctuary” and “Ripples in the Sand” where those feelings of mystery and wonder really manifest.

    The soundtracks for the Dune video games are a whole other can of sandworms, but it’s important to discuss them because they not only occupy a critical place in video game history, but have been handled by some of the most prolific composers in the gaming industry.

    1992’s Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty, by the now-defunct Westwood Studios, is perhaps the most famous game based on the Dune franchise, and is frequently cited as the game that popularized the real-time strategy genre. The soundtracks for Dune 2 and its 1998 remake Dune 2000 were handled by Frank Klepacki, who was also responsible for scoring every entry in the legendary Command & Conquer franchise.

    Klepacki’s work on Dune 2 was intended to emulate the soundtrack for the original Dune adventure game by Cryo Interactive. And while solid, the soundtrack definitely bumps up against the technical limitations of producing music for a game with a file size of under 5 MB. However, when Klepacki revisited the classic score, he had the freedom to not only remake higher fidelity versions of his original Dune 2 soundtrack, but inject them with homages to Toto’s work on the ‘84 Dune movie. This is most apparent when listening to the Dune 2000 track “Rise of Harkonnen,” which is a remastered version of Dune 2’s “Rulers of Arrakis,” with an opening that’s an effective tribute to Toto’s Baron Harkonnen theme.

    The most recent Dune game title, Dune: Spice Wars, featured a soundtrack composed by Jesper Kyd, whose credits include work on franchises like Hitman, Assassin’s Creed, and Borderlands, to name a few. While Kyd hasn’t cited any specific inspirations for his Spice Wars soundtrack, the score mirrors the style of the game, borrowing concepts and themes from across the existing franchise without sounding derivative. The two hours of music features ambient, dreamlike tracks that echo the work of Brian Eno on the ‘84 Dune film, while also including rhythmic synth beats that will feel familiar to fans of the classic Westwood titles.

    Frank Herbert’s Dune was originally published in 1965, and it’s remarkable that almost 60 years later — and across its spectrum of adaptations — every composition manages to evoke similar feelings in its audience. Whether it’s the appropriately epic work from Toto, the more primal version produced by Hans Zimmer, or the stellar video game soundtracks, Dune has inspired a wealth of composers and musicians to provide a cohesive sense of identity to Frank Herbert’s strange and enigmatic universe.

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    Alice Jovanée

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  • Alan Cumming plays a character on Traitors, but season 2’s surprises snapped him back to reality

    Alan Cumming plays a character on Traitors, but season 2’s surprises snapped him back to reality

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    If you think Alan Cumming, host of the U.S. version of The Traitors, gives off “guy who killed someone” vibes, he’ll laugh — you’re picking up what he’s putting down. It’s why, in episode 8 of season 2, when he sent the contestants off on their mission, he gleefully turned to the camera and said, “And they were never seen again.”

    “I said that many times, on every task,” Cumming admits. “I wanted that to be my new catchphrase, but they only used it a couple times.”

    This is exactly why the team behind Peacock’s hit reality game show wanted Cummings in the first place, even if he didn’t understand it at first. He met with producers, initially, out of confusion and curiosity.

    “I couldn’t understand why they would want me to do it. Then I realized they wanted a sort of character. And I said, ‘Do you mean you want it to be sort of like a James Bond villain?’”

    The answer was an enthusiastic yes. And suddenly Cumming could see the whole persona: “He’s the sort of Scottish Laird, and he’s kind of Machiavellian, [and] brings all these people here,” Cumming says. The look would be a sort of “dandy” Scottish tartan. Cumming’s dog could even come with, so the actor could menacingly pet her while staring down contestants.

    “I really love this character. And it’s funny, life just flings these things at you that you never would have seen coming. I never thought I would be hosting a big, successful competition reality show in Scotland and a castle with a bunch of reality stars. I mean — you couldn’t make it up. But I obviously go out going through life open to certain things. I’ve always been quite eclectic. And these things come to me and actually, this one I really, really enjoy.”

    And it’s a role he takes really seriously. As he gets ready in the morning he listens in on the players’ breakfast discussion, watching on a big screen so he can “really feel a part of it” as he gets ready to make his big entrance. “It’s good for me to understand, when I walk into the room, the mood of the room and the atmosphere,” Cumming says.

    Cumming is often around the castle, but not with the contestants — after his breakfast entrance he usually has a little break when he can look over scripts for the next day, then he and the players go to film the mission. After that, the contestants hang out and Cumming has another break (he says he’s usually eating or walking Lala the dog), but stays briefed on what’s happening. “When the roundtable comes it really does feel like this big theatrical moment because they all go in and they play this scary music in real life,” Cumming says. “It’s like these little performative spurts. And in between I’m trying to keep an eye on what’s happening and trying to get an understanding of how the wind is blowing.”

    Even still, he’s just as on the edge of his seat as the rest of us. He likes to maintain a distance between himself and the cast (he feels his character should always have “quite a stern, daddy demeanor” that leaves the contestants scared), and Cumming has been surprised by how things went once he got into the room. “That’s what’s great about the games — there was a person I thought was doing really well, a faithful, and was going to help tear the whole thing apart. And people turned on them. It was like hyenas going for a baby elephant, it really was. I was gobsmacked.”

    While he wouldn’t say who that was about, he would say some of the contestants he’s most surprised by: Bergie (when he became the MVP of the graveyard challenge), Phaedra (he appreciates her showmanship and the way it provides her cover), and Parvati (he hadn’t watched Survivor, and she seemed like a “sweet little thing with a hairband”).

    But even with a closer view, he’s just as eager to let it all play out as the rest of us. Well, sort of — at least the rest of us don’t live in fear about bumping the wrong shoulder when selecting traitors at the roundtable.

    The Traitors season 2 (the U.S. version) airs new episodes on Peacock every Thursday at 6 p.m. PST/9 p.m. EST.

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    Zosha Millman

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  • Frank Herbert always thought Star Wars was a Dune ripoff

    Frank Herbert always thought Star Wars was a Dune ripoff

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    Much like the mystical religions spread by its Bene Gesserit, the influences of Dune spread to every corner of the universe of science fiction. In some stories, the inspirations are woven so tightly into the fabric of the story they’re nearly impossible to pick up, maybe even for the author themself. In others, the homages to Dune are unmissable, occasionally to the point of being distracting. And then there’s Star Wars, the most blatant ripoff of all — at least, according to Frank Herbert.

    The Dune author didn’t talk much about George Lucas’ landmark science fiction film before his death in 1986, but he answered a few questions about it over the years, and he always seemed at least a little annoyed at the similarities between the two stories.

    The first public comments he seems to have made about the movie come from an interview with the Associated Press from 1977, the year A New Hope was released. The article is pretty straightforward shit-stirring, but it’s clear that while Herbert hadn’t yet seen the movie, he did have some thoughts about its similarities to his seminal series, which was already three books in.

    Herbert starts by saying an editor for the Village Voice had called him and asked if he had seen Star Wars, and whether or not he was going to sue. It’s a strong lead-in, but apparently that’s what was top of mind of Herbert.

    “I will try hard not to sue,” Herbert told the Associated Press. “I have no idea what book of mine it fits, but I suspect it may be Dune since in that I had a Princess Alia and the movie has a Princess Leia. And I hear there is a sandworm carcass and hood dwellers in the desert, just like in Dune.”

    Herbert goes on to brag, rightfully, about the ubiquity of Dune, both in popular culture and even as a college textbook on subjects like “architecture, psychology, writing, English, human living, space analysis, and some I’ve forgotten.” Herbert doesn’t get too specific in this early article, but it’s clear the movie’s reported similarities to his own work didn’t sit quite right with him. And later it would be even clearer that they stuck in his craw, one way or another.

    Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

    Now, with decades of hindsight and years of interviews, it’s easy to see that Star Wars, particularly the first film, is an amalgamation of many genres and stories, including (but not limited to) science fiction, mythical fantasy, and the samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa. There’s also an entire expanded universe of history in the Star Wars galaxy that borrows from all over the sci-fi canon, and has helped inspire just as many future writers.

    But if you consider the time when Star Wars was just one tremendously successful summer blockbuster, it’s easy to understand why Herbert might have had a bone to pick. And as the years went by, it’s clear that he thought quite a bit about the subject, enough to count the similarities between the titles.

    “Lucas has never admitted that they copied a lot of Dune, and I’m not saying they did,” Herbert said in 1985, during a speaking engagement at UCLA. “I’m just saying there are 16 points of identity between the book Dune and Star Wars. Now you’ve had stat — what is it? It’s 16 times 16 times 16 times… over 1, the odds against that being coincidence? There aren’t that many stars in the universe.”

    Herbert’s frustrated quote stemmed from a question about whether or not Lucas ever bought Herbert dinner — a reference to a long-standing joke of Herbert’s that even if Lucas didn’t blatantly steal his ideas to make Star Wars, he at least owes Herbert dinner for the coincidence.

    But Frank Herbert was one to lose out on a war of pettiness. A year before that UCLA interview, he published Heretics of Dune, the fifth book in the series and the second to last written by him. Late in the book, which is mostly about the future of humanity after the death of The God Emperor, Herbert has a small, inconspicuous passage that certainly feels like a reference to Star Wars. He doesn’t seem to have ever said that officially, so we’ll let you judge:

    In the time of the Old Empire and even under the reign of Maud’Dib, the region around the Gammu Keep had been a forest reserve, high ground rising well above the oily residue that tended to cover Harkonnen land. On this ground, the Harkonnens had grown some of the finest pilingitam, a wood of steady currency, always valued by the supremely rich. From the most ancient times, the knowledgeable had preferred to surround themselves with fine woods rather than with the mass-produced artificial materials known then as polestine, polaz, and pormabat (latterly: tine, laz, and bat). As far back as the Old Empire there had been a pejorative label for the small rich and Families Minor arising from the knowledge of the rare wood’s value.
    “He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances.

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    Austen Goslin

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  • Palworld’s breeding system is my friend group’s new obsession

    Palworld’s breeding system is my friend group’s new obsession

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    A player can find tons of cute or capable Pals on a tour through Palworld’s Palpagos Islands, but in order to fill out their Paldeck, they’ll need to dabble with breeding. Breeding is a surprisingly deep part of Palworld, and it’s quickly become a rabbit hole — or a Caprity hole, if you will — for my group on our shared server.

    Once I got past the original hook of “What if survival game, but Pokémon?” in Palworld, I was surprised to find that I was still engaged. I’m on a server with my friends, and we all handle different roles. I pump up my carry weight and bring Pals who could help haul, and I’m constantly loading up with tons of ore to smelt into valuable ingots. My buddies Jake and Matt pitch in, too; Jake is a forward scout, whereas Matt runs what we politely call “Pal Resources.”

    Pal Resources is the name for our breeding camp. Now that we have the ability to build ranches and bake delicious cakes, Matt is off to the races. It’s entirely possible to just casually dabble in breeding, but we are now entirely engrossed by the process. There are three main reasons to breed. The first is that by combining two seemingly unrelated Pals, a third Pal can be born. If you want to fill out your Paldeck and be a proper collector, breeding is essentially mandatory.

    But while creating new Pals was a fun trick, what really snagged us was perfecting our existing roster. For instance, the Relaxaurus is an adorable dope of a dinosaur — but with the power of Pal Resources, we were able to create an electric variant who keeps our infrastructure running. Breeding can create new elemental types of existing Pals.

    Image: Pocketpair

    Sometimes, this offers utility. Sometimes, it’s just nice to have a little bit of variety in my life. Why roll around with one bouncy, cuddly Kingpaca like an absolute fool when I can have two Kingpacas, one of which is an Ice type?

    Matt also discovered that you can breed two of the same Pals together, and their traits will pass down to their offspring. This is the third, and arguably the most potent, reason to get into breeding. Sometimes, the process doesn’t work out — nobody needs a pyromaniac Pal running around endangering the whole base. But if you have a diet-loving, burly-bodied workaholic Pal — boy howdy, you don’t even need to get on the platform and cruelly command your Pals to get to work.

    Our bases are now staffed by a set of Pals, all several generations deep into breeding, who tend to our every need. Have a large work order to complete? Don’t even bother; Anubis will run over and finish that for you in seconds. Hungry? Why not go into the fridge, chilled by a tiny hedgehog, and grab yourself 500 omelets? Such a bounty is nothing to us.

    Pal breeding reminds me of the Chao Gardens from Sonic Adventure 2, which served as a place to bring and hatch eggs, and then raise the ensuing Chao. What is meant to be a side thing has now become a full game in and of itself, where we dutifully bake cakes and cart massive eggs to and fro, all in the service of building our empire on the Palpagos Islands. As for the Pals that don’t make the cut — don’t worry about it. We’ve found a big, open field where they can run, and play, and definitely don’t get put into the Goodbye Tube to get turned into meat sluice to strengthen our A-team. That simply doesn’t happen! It’s fine.

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    Cass Marshall

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  • Finally, Palworld lets me catch ’em all

    Finally, Palworld lets me catch ’em all

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    Catching Pokémon can be exhausting these days. At time of publication, there are more than 1,000 different species of the fictional monsters. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet don’t contain the full National Pokédex, but the base game has 400 Pokémon and hundreds more when you count additional monsters added in the DLC. Even when trying to complete the reduced Pokédex, the process of collecting creatures can be a slog. Now, playing Palworld, I can breathe a sigh of relief. For the first time in a long time, it feels I can finally “catch ’em all,” with under 150 Pals in the game.

    Palworld is a hit game from Japanese indie studio Pocketpair. Before it came out, many described it as “Pokémon with guns.” Now that the developer has released it in early access, it’s clear that the game goes well beyond just Pokémon influences. It has climbing and exploration reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and mechanics common to survival games. However, one way that it is like Pokémon is its incorporation of creatures called Pals. As you explore its world, you can catch the cartoony monsters and register them to a digital encyclopedia called a Paldeck, similar to the Pokédex.

    My Paldeck contains 111 Pals (although there are alternate forms and might be more). Just from a numerical standpoint, that’s way fewer than Pokémon. There’s no need to robotically cycle through hundreds of battles to fill up the Pokédex like in a modern Pokémon game. On top of that, there are no “version exclusives” in Palworld. Every copy of the game contains every Pal, so it’s actually possible to find and catch every single monster without needing another player or setting up trades outside the game.

    If you do have friends who are playing, well, that’s helpful to the collecting process, too. While Pokémon does have multiplayer functionality, the online co-op in Palworld better supports playing the entirely of the game with friends from start to finish. Features like guilds allow you to group up with friends and share Pals easily on your settlement. These Pals won’t be registered as “caught” in your Paldeck, but it allows you to see more Pals and get an idea of which Pals you need to catch.

    Image: Pocketpair

    Catching all the Pokémon obviously isn’t impossible — loads of people do it — and I get why it appeals to certain players. The repetitive nature of catching Pokémon after Pokémon can almost be relaxing, but it’s a massive time commitment. You have to fight and catch each and every one of them, and some require unique rituals to evolve them. For others, you might need to trade to get version exclusives and train Pokémon to prepare for challenging fights to catch stronger monsters. In the recent Scarlet and Violet DLC, you even have to grind in-game points to unlock the appearances of certain Pokémon in the wild.

    Don’t get me wrong — Palworld still contains its fair share of monster-catching grind. Depending on how common each creature is, you might catch up to 10 copies of each just to grind out the needed experience points to unlock items. You likely won’t just speed through collecting the Paldeck in a sitting or two. Barriers to exploration like your level or what kinds of Pal spheres you use will guide your overall journey. But so far, I have enjoyed the slow, meandering process of gradually exploring and discovering the Pals one by one to fill up my Paldeck in its entirety. At this rate, I might just catch ’em all.

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    Ana Diaz

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  • The final scene in the DCEU dares you to think of it as a metaphor for the whole franchise

    The final scene in the DCEU dares you to think of it as a metaphor for the whole franchise

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    Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom flows into theaters this weekend with the dubious honor of being the final film in the DC Extended Universe. And that means its final scene — its credits scene — is the final shot of Warner Bros. great attempt to equal the Marvel Cinematic Universe with its own pet superhero setting.

    But it also means that the typical use of a superhero movie credits scene doesn’t apply here. There aren’t any future franchise events for Lost Kingdom to point to. What’s a blockbuster to do?

    If you’ve seen Lost Kingdom, you know, and if you haven’t, maybe you’re just here to rubberneck. But here’s what it did.

    [Ed. Note: This piece contains spoilers for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.]

    Image: Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Comics

    Lost Kingdom’s credits scene isn’t about anything weighty, it’s just a call back to a gross-out gag from earlier in the film. Orm (Patrick Wilson), the redeemed bad guy from the first Aquaman, is enjoying his first surface-world hamburger when he spies a cockroach scurrying across the dock-side picnic table.

    Earlier in the movie, his brother Aquaman (Jason Momoa) tricked him into thinking that live cockroaches are an every day surface-world snack. So Orm grabs the roach, slaps it between the layers of his sandwich, and takes a big, happy bite. Good night, sweet DCEU, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

    But here I must implore my fellow human beings: We absolutely musn’t make this a metaphor. No matter how resonant, absurd, or funny the credits scene on Lost Kingdom, we must resist.

    Orm’s burger is, inevitably, a roachy Rorschach test. The insect can be whatever you didn’t like about the DCEU, and Orm happily eating it is the fans you don’t like lapping it up. Or, Orm is the executives whose meddling ruined the franchise happily choosing their comeuppance (the roach), which is the collapse of the whole thing (an honestly very appetizing burger). Or maybe, the burger is the Snyder Cut, somehow, and Orm is Joss Whedon? I’m sure somebody could flesh out that video essay.

    But we have to draw a line in the sand, like Topo the octopus scurrying away from the blood-drinking Deserters and back to the safety of deep water. We have to restrain ourselves, like Orm touching the Black Trident. We have to escape, like the fish in the sea, able to say that in the end, at the end of an era, we didn’t take the bait.

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    Susana Polo

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  • Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs on why we likely won’t get a Zelda Mario Maker game

    Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom devs on why we likely won’t get a Zelda Mario Maker game

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    In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, players didn’t just play through another story set in Hyrule. The sequel to Breath of the Wild took the previous game’s sandbox elements several steps further, allowing players to use a new set of powers to construct machines, weapons, and tools using items in the world. By introducing this, Tears of the Kingdom encouraged players to be truly creative and push the limits of building in the game.

    Fans responded to this new level of freedom by devising awe-inspiring creations and sharing them online. In the time since Nintendo released the game, fans have made nifty items like skateboards to intricate machines like a mechanized kaiju that looks like Godzilla. Given the game’s emphasis on creativity, Polygon asked Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi about the possibility that fans would ever get a Zelda game that purely focused on building their own creations, like Super Mario Maker. From the sounds of their answers, it seems unlikely Nintendo will release a Zelda game that’s purely about creating levels or dungeons.

    “When we’re creating games like Tears of the Kingdom, I think it’s important that we don’t make creativity a requirement. Instead, we put things into the game that encourage people to be creative, and give them the opportunity to be creative, without forcing them to,” Aonuma told Polygon through an interpreter in an in-person interview.

    Image: Nintendo/Nintendo EDP

    In Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, players can design their own Mario levels from scratch using an in-game editor. This has allowed players to create custom levels of all sorts in Mario. Players can make ultra-difficult levels that challenge the most seasoned Mario players or zany creations where a Mario level becomes an homage to Splatoon. No matter the approach, a huge aspect of the Super Mario Maker games is that they rely on player creativity.

    Now, it’s no secret that the developers of Tears of the Kingdom were inspired by fan responses to Breath of the Wild. Developers saw players stretch the creative limits of Breath of the Wild, and they later created a game that doubled down on these sandbox elements. Given this, Zelda fans have long wondered if a version of Zelda that works like Mario Maker — where players could create or design dungeons or worlds — could ever come out. But when asked directly about a Mario Maker-style game for Zelda, Aonuma had an interesting answer about the nature of Zelda games and what they offer to players.

    an image showing a goofy level created in mario maker 2

    Image: Nintendo

    “There are people who want the ability to create from scratch, but that’s not everyone,” Aonuma said. “I think everyone delights in the discovery of finding your own way through a game, and that is something we tried to make sure was included in Tears of the Kingdom; there isn’t one right way to play. If you are a creative person, you have the ability to go down that path. But that’s not what you have to do; you’re also able to proceed to the game in many other different ways. And so I don’t think that it would be a good fit for The Legend of Zelda to necessarily require people to build things from scratch and force them to be creative.”

    Given Aonuma’s response, it seems unlikely that Zelda will ever get its Mario Maker equivalent. If we did get more creative elements, it seems they would have to be nestled into a larger game where players could proceed in multiple ways. So those holding out hope for a Zelda builder might be better off finding other games that currently offer similar options — which, luckily for us, already exist.

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    Ana Diaz

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  • Why is Cyberpunk 2077’s metro so slow? An investigation

    Why is Cyberpunk 2077’s metro so slow? An investigation

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    CD Projekt Red fulfilled a five-year promise last week when it added a fully functional metro system to Cyberpunk 2077. While the feature does wonders to make Night City feel more alive, I was surprised to learn just how little California’s public transportation infrastructure has improved in the game’s alternate-reality future.

    Cyberpunk 2077 now includes five Night City Area Rapid Transit (NCART) rail lines servicing 19 stations. Every stop still functions as a fast travel point, but players can also use them to hop onto the subway and relocate, in real time, to other parts of the city. As movement is restricted while on the train, this is a mostly visual experience, providing folks with a new perspective on the sprawling mega-city as well as limited opportunities to chat with their fellow riders.

    During one trip, I noticed a screen indicating the train’s speed was consistently hovering around 43 mph, which felt awfully slow for futuristic transportation. The average speeds of modern-day heavy-rail systems in the United States range from the high teens to the mid-30s, but they’re capable of reaching much higher maximums. And that’s not even accounting for more developed public transportation in Japan and China, whose magnetic levitation (maglev) bullet trains zoom through major cities at hundreds of miles per hour.

    What the heck.
    Image: CD Projekt Red

    This fits with what the first Cyberpunk rulebook had to say about then-future transportation in 1988:

    Surprise, surprise. Contrary to expectations, the year 2000 has not yielded any staggering new developments in transportation. Years of economic strife and civil unrest have discouraged research into new ways to travel—in fact, the very act of travel has become very restricted. Expect the world of 2013 to be much like the 20th century—a network of crowded freeways, packed trains, and swarming airports.

    A subsequent expansion, Welcome to Night City, indicates light-rail maglev trains with ground speeds of 200 mph existed in the eponymous metropolis as far back as 2013, the year the first Cyberpunk adventures were set. Every book since makes some mention maglev trains as a staple of Night City travel, and 2005’s Cyberpunk V3.0 even noted an improvement in their top speed to 300 mph despite the apparent destruction of the intercontinental maglev line during the Fourth Corporate War (which took place from 2021 to 2025 in-universe) between the world’s ruling megacorps.

    (And just to cover my ass, 1990’s updated Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook makes it clear that NCART and the light-rail maglev trains are one and the same.)

    It’s here that Cyberpunk 2077 does something clever by expanding the consequences of this conflict. Rather than only putting rail travel between continents in flux, the game describes the Fourth Corporate War as debilitating the entire maglev system, as explained by the following database entry:

    Maglev trains cruised at high speeds via tunnels and on the surface thanks to the advent of electrodynamic suspension technology, allowing fast and comfortable travel from Night City to other cities, including Kansas City, St. Louis, Atlanta and Washington D.C. Unfortunately, this new era of transportation didn’t last long. The social unrest and armed conflict of the 4th Corporate War brought with it an economic crisis that soon crippled the entire system. Currently inoperational, the abandoned Maglev tunnels are used by the homeless and various gangs.

    The destruction of the maglev system and the slow NCART speeds exhibited in-game lead me to assume the local government was forced to revert to pre-2013 tech to ensure NCART remained operational, a massive downgrade from the bullet trains that once transported residents through Night City and beyond.

    Various futuristic passengers wait patiently in a subway train.

    Hurry up and wait.
    Image: CD Projekt Red

    While researching this situation, I couldn’t help but see darkly hilarious parallels between the difficulties facing the fictional California depicted in Cyberpunk 2077 and the actual state in which I live.

    Despite being one of the largest (both in terms of land and population) and richest states in the union, California has long struggled with plans to build public transportation on par with the bullet trains of eastern Asia. A lot of that is due to politics, as even ostensibly supportive legislators are wary of spending the billions of dollars necessary to complete the project. And let’s face it: Americans are just way too devoted to their cars.

    All that said, there’s one very simple explanation for Night City metro’s relatively low speed: The developers didn’t want NCART rides to happen in the blink of an eye. What good would the long-awaited subway experience be if players didn’t actually, you know, experience it?

    A trip taken at 300 mph wouldn’t provide any time to people watch Night City’s eccentric residents or take in the view of skyscrapers surrounding the bay outside the train’s windows. The entire point of the subway system — and a big part of why folks clamored for its inclusion all these years — is to give players new opportunities to role-play and experience the visual splendor of Cyberpunk 2077’s setting and its over-the-top aesthetics.

    I find it hard to fault CD Projekt Red for playing a little loose with established Cyberpunk history if it makes for a better game in the end.

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    Ian Walker

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