A portion of Los Angeles’ Mulholland Drive has reopened after it was damaged during a monster storm that unleashed mud and debris flows nearly four months ago.
The section of Mulholland between Skyline and Bowmont drives had been shut down since early February, when much of the state was drenched with epic rainfall and hundreds of debris flows were reported in Los Angeles alone.
The city undertook an emergency project to install two new bulkheads to repair washouts from the storm, with construction costs totaling nearly $4.9 million, according to a report from the Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering. A contractor completed the work Friday afternoon, and the stretch was reopened, said Mary Nemick, the bureau’s director of communications.
The twisting road that snakes through the Hollywood Hills is famous for its hairpin turns and sweeping views. It has appeared in many films, including the David Lynch mystery of the same name. Portions of the road are notoriously vulnerable to storms, with closures tending to follow heavy rains.
A lifetime of scarfing down sci-fi, video games, and comic books brought director Brad Peyton to the job of said lifetime: directing Jennifer Lopez in a frickin’ mech-suit movie. Signing on for Atlas, now streaming on Netflix, was an easy yes: With two big-budget Dwayne Johnson vehicles under his belt, Rampage and San Andreas, Peyton was no stranger to A-list-driven spectacle. Still, the film was an intimidating prospect for someone with a deep appreciation for mech suits, mech tanks, oversized mecha, and all the made-up classifications in between.
“I was very aware of what had come out ahead of me,” Peyton tells Polygon. The director cites James Cameron’s Aliens and Avatar as obvious but undeniable milestones in the art of on-screen mechs. He knew that the Titanfall games put pressure on any new live-action attempt, having created full immersion into the experience of mech fighting. But when he started imagining how to rethink mechs, he returned to the first piece of mecha media that really blew him away: Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox.
Peyton can’t quite explain why Robot Jox was his holy grail, but in talking to him, it’s obvious: Like Gordon’s whiz-bang vision of the future, where Earth’s conflicts are settled by colorful mech duels, Atlas needed clear, well-defined logic that would ground the world-building, but also let him rip in the action department in a way that would delight his inner child. And at the end of the day, he needed to be original.
“My biggest thing was: I knew I had to separate from everything,” Peyton says. “I had no interest in repeating. I said, Pac Rim’s [mechs] are this big. In Avatar, they’re this big. In Titanfall, they’re this big. So mine is gonna be this big. This one might be square and blocky, so mine is gonna be circular. I come from animation. So a lot of it started with me sketching the silhouette and figuring how to make it unique and different.”
Atlas takes place in a relatively sunny future that still exists in the shadow of an impending apocalypse. Decades earlier, a rogue artificial intelligence named Harlan (Shang-Chi’s Simu Liu) fled Earth for an alien planet with the intent of one day returning to lay waste to humanity. When scientists discover Harlan’s whereabouts, Terran forces launch a mission to take the fight to the robot army’s doorstep. Leading the charge: Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), a data analyst recruited to go full Jack Ryan on Harlan’s ass. Of course, the attack doesn’t go as smoothly as the Earthlings would hope, and Atlas has to begrudgingly click into an AI-powered mech suit in order to survive an alien planet populated with androids who want her dead.
The grounded futurism of Atlas’ Earth led Peyton and his creative team to extrapolate from current military tech for the mech design. Rounded edges and exhaust pipes are lifted from F-18 planes. The interior control panels were built for theoretical functionality.
“I had to understand all the tech from the inside out,” Peyton says. “Because of my experience on San Andreas, where I had to understand how a helicopter worked intimately to tell Dwayne what buttons to press and not to press — at least when he would listen to me! — I took that experience and wanted to make a similar experience for [Lopez]. I laid it out with the art department of why there are screens in certain places, why there are holograms in other places. And then on the day, I’m giving her little wires to be like, ‘That’s what this screen is. That’s where the screen is.’ So after going through the blocking, I pulled those away, and she had to memorize where they were.”
Image: Netflix
Drawings and schematics were only half of the equation. After drafting a design, Peyton set out to make his vision come to life. Coming at it from an animation background, that meant animating various walk cycles to see if the bipedal machine could move the right way.
“The first couple of designs we had when we animated them to see how they would work — very basic animation, walk, run, walk, jog, run cycles — looked so clunky and terrible,” Peyton says. The animation team found a groove when they clarified the dynamic between man and machine. “[The mechs] are intuitive devices. The concept that I came up with was, the soldier is the brain. He doesn’t have to be super strong. He’s not like a grunt — the machine is the grunt. He is the emotional cognitive device that syncs with this thing. So it has to be able to be as fluid as a person who’s been trained in it.”
As Atlas traverses the biomes of Harlan’s base planet — from snowy tundras to swamps inspired by Peyton’s love for Return of the Jedi — the film’s hero loosens up on her “no AI” stance and forms a cognitive link with her mech’s digital interface. Like a twist on the buddy-cop movie, the two bond for survival, which presents itself as more fluid mech motions. Early on, Atlas might be bumbling around a rocky cliff. By the end, she’s running, rolling, and slapping the hell out of robot assailants with mech-fu. The early walk cycle tests came in handy for the dramatic evolution, which Peyton was able to program into an enormous soundstage gimbal rig that stood in for the mech suit. Lopez was surprisingly well suited for the demands of the mech choreography.
“Her background as a dancer is what allowed her to really gauge that quickly,” Peyton says. “As much as she looks like she’s walking, [the mech] is walking her, and she has to react like she’s walking. So that training as a dancer allowed her to step right into it.”
Image: Netflix
It also helps that Lopez routinely performs for thousands all by her lonesome on a stadium stage. Peyton says Atlas turned out to be one of the most demanding shoots of his career, simply because for six to seven weeks, it was just Lopez performing solo on a gimbal rig that would be completely painted over with plate shots, VFX environments, and bursts of other action sequences shot elsewhere. Occasionally, voice actor Gregory James Cohan would dial in to perform the dialogue of Smith, her AI companion.
All the prep work required to realize a mech with the capacity for real action, and clicking in a star who was up to control it, was in service of jolting the audience, says Peyton. The first time we see the mechs in action isn’t in an act of valor; they’re caught in an ambush, mid-flight. The carrier ship goes down — and so does Atlas, in her rig. Peyton’s imagination swirled at the possibilities, as evidenced in the finished sequence. “[The mech] would be tumbling, it would be spinning, it would be hit by debris. What would it be like to be trapped in that tin can? What would it sound like? What would it feel like? And once I get through that experience, well then, how can I up the ante? Well, what if I fall through black clouds, and I’m falling into basically a World War II dogfight, but with mechs and drones? […] That’s just the first, I don’t know, 20 seconds of a two-minute sequence.
“That’s how I design,” he says. “I want to surprise you. I want to give you something you can’t see anywhere else.”
You don’t even have to watch Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist to consider it a conversation-starter: The debate begins with that title, a bold, unlikely statement that may feel at odds with most experiences of the world. Watching the movie complicates that response even further, given some of the choices its characters make, and the harm they bring to others. And then there’s that abrupt, surprising ending, the kind that will leave viewers arguing over what they actually saw on screen almost as much as they’re arguing about what it means.
Hamaguchi is no stranger to elliptical, unpackable, or discussable endings: His Best Picture Oscar nominee Drive My Car wraps with a long sequence where the audience is just watching the protagonist perform onstage in a multilingual production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, followed by a wordless sequence of another character going about mundane tasks. There’s a great deal of meaning there, but it takes thought, time, and attention to the film’s 179-minute length to access. Evil Does Not Exist is shorter and tighter, but it still centers on a 20-minute scene where residents of a small community politely raise objections about a planned luxury development in the area.
What is Hamaguchi getting at with Evil Does Not Exist? From its title to its mysterious opening tracking shot to that what’s-going-on-here? ending, Polygon had a lot of questions about the movie. Speaking through a translator, we sat down with Hamaguchi to unpack the film.
[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for Evil Does Not Exist.]
First: on the ending Evil Does Not Exist
Evil Does Not Exist centers on a small rural village, Mizubiki, that’s about to be disrupted by developers building a site for luxury camping, or “glamping.” At a town-hall meeting, the locals object, and their thoughtful, thorough analysis of the project’s flaws impresses the presenters, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani). But when they share the objections with their boss, they learn he doesn’t actually care about making the project sustainable or even profitable. He just cares about the pandemic-era development grants he’ll earn if he gets the proposal in ahead of a deadline.
Takahashi and Mayuzumi connect with Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower and odd-job man in Mizubiki, who’s raising a young daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), on his own. Takumi is a quiet man who’s closely connected with nature, and Takahashi envies him and wants to move out to Mizubiki and live in nature himself. But then Hana goes missing, and the town rallies to find her. Takahashi and Takumi are together when they find her lying in a field, where she’s been attacked by a wounded deer. Takumi suddenly turns on Takahashi and brutally strangles him, then grabs Hana’s body and runs. Takahashi gets up and stumbles across the field, then falls again and lies still.
Is Takahashi dead? Is Hana dead? Hamaguchi says he wants to leave those things up to interpretation, to invite people to discuss the ending and what it means. “In order to be able to make this happen, I think two things are necessary,” he told Polygon. “The first part is to end in this abrupt manner, almost leaving the audience behind. But that in itself, I don’t think is enough to create conversations and create different interpretations. It really relies on what the characters do up until that point.”
Why does Takumi attack Takahashi in Evil Does Not Exist?
Image: Sideshow and Janus Films
To some degree, the end of the film is foreshadowed in something Takumi tells his city visitors during the film: Deer aren’t ordinarily dangerous to humans, but a gutshot deer will lash out violently, particularly to protect its young. This is what happened to Hana: In what appears to be either a flashback or Takumi’s quick mental reconstruction when he sees her lying in the field, we see that she encountered a pair of deer, one of which had been shot. She attempted to approach them, and the wounded deer attacked her.
In the same way, Takumi is symbolically a “gutshot deer.” He’s metaphorically wounded, both by the imminent destruction of his community and the natural world around him by predatory outsiders, and by the hurt done to his daughter, in part because of his own neglect. As we learn early in the movie, Takumi was sometimes a unreliable father: Hana is only out in the woods alone because she’s taken to walking home from school by herself, since he didn’t always remember to pick her up from school. Like the deer, Takumi lashes out irrationally, not at the source of his pain, but at the nearest available target.
“I do think he’s acting out of desperation,” Hamaguchi says. “In that moment, I think he does realize in [seeing Hana’s body] that he’s not able to be the kind of father he maybe wanted to be. And I think there are certain clues within the film where we see that.”
While Takumi’s behavior may seem extreme and difficult to understand, Hamaguchi hopes viewers will go back and watch the movie again, and see how his response fits in with other behavior we’ve seen from him.
“What I hope I’m achieving is that people feel that each character that appears in the film all have their own individual lives,” he says. “The way they act and what we see in the film are just moments that the cameras happened to capture, of life they each live outside of the film. And once people can feel that these characters actually do exist, then when we see them do something that is not quite understandable, the audience can still feel it’s still possible that they could do these things.”
He considers the movie’s ending an invitation to analyze and sit with the story: “When this kind of ending happens, I feel it causes the audience to reflect back on what they experienced before that, to rethink what they just watched, and to reflect upon whether their worldview of what they just saw is in was in fact correct,” he says. “That effect to me is a very interesting way to experience a film, and can result in a lot of interpretations. And so if that’s what it is doing, then I’m very grateful.”
Why would Takumi respond to grief by trying to murder a near-stranger?
Image: Sideshow and Janus Films
In terms of understanding Takumi’s attack, Hamaguchi suggests looking back at his 2018 movie Asako I & II, about a woman who falls for two physically identical men (played by the same actor) with radically different personas, and has to decide which one to stay with. “In that, a protagonist also makes choices,” Hamaguchi says. “And I think from the perspective of the wider society in which she lives, perhaps the choice she makes can be viewed as a bad choice. But I think from her perspective, it was the only choice she could make.”
He says the decision helps Asako see herself more clearly, and learn more about what she values. “It’s my perspective of living and the worldview that I have in some ways,” he says. “I think there are moments in our lives where we suddenly understand something about ourselves through the choices we just made.”
Similarly, Hamaguchi says that when Takumi sees Hana lying in the field, he understands where his own choices have led. “I think in that moment, he realizes through the failures he has had,” he says. “That leads him to try to figure out desperately about what to do. That action might be read as absurd from the surroundings, or from people around him. But I think to me, this choice that he makes is something that for this particular character, could happen.”
Put another way: Takumi has been a passive, quiet character throughout the process of the development plan, to the point where Takahashi and Mayuzumi try to hire him as a liaison with the community, a manager for the site who could also quell local tensions. In attacking Takahashi, he’s violently pushing back against the idea that he could be drawn to take their side against his community’s. He’s also defending his territory from outsiders, as a wild animal might. And like a wild animal, he’s acting without thinking about the consequences, or even about whether that action might plausibly achieve his goals. But that’s just one interpretation.
What does the title of Evil Does Not Exist mean?
Image: Sideshow and Janus Films
Evil Does Not Exist was originally planned as a wordless 30-minute short film, a visual accompaniment for new music by Eiko Ishibashi, who also composed the score for Drive My Car. But Hamaguchi says her music and his location scouting inspired the story of the film — and the title came before that story was locked down.
“Before writing the script, when I was thinking about what I could shoot, I went out to where Eiko Ishibashi makes her music,” he says. “She makes her music amongst this very rich natural landscape. It was winter when I was there, and when I looked out into the winter landscape, these words popped up. I thought, OK, it’s very cold right now. Standing here, I feel like I’m going to freeze to death. And yet it’s not that I feel any evil intentions here.”
Hamaguchi says part of that insightcame from living in an urban environment, where it’s rare to be far away from other people. The isolated community in Evil Does Not Exist lives far away from that kind of constant engagement, and the people in that community are often alone in nature — which can be a dangerous environment, but not a purposefully or consciously inimical one. As the film’s story developed, Hamaguchi added characters that do live in urban environments, and do act in deliberately harmful ways, but he kept the title throughout. “Looking back at the film that we had made,” he says, “it made me think that watching this particular film against this title is probably an interesting experience together.”
But doesn’t the developer bringing chaos to a community for profit act in an evil way? “I think it’s actually a very difficult question to answer properly,” Hamaguchi says. “Say for now, we say that there is no evil in nature. Then the question becomes, Is human society not natural? I think we can say humans are a part of nature. But I think what’s also true about humans is that there might be more choices available.
“We can reflect back on our choices and say, I should have chosen this way or I should have chosen this or that, and sometimes make these decisions of whether those are good or bad choices. As human beings, when we’re living our lives, sometimes we think something is bad, or something was a bad choice. But when you interpret this as desire, I think you can also see that was part of nature as well. This is just how I honestly feel at the current moment.”
Why Evil Does Not Exist opens on a four-minute tracking shot of a camera looking up at trees
Image: Sideshow and Janus Films
While the opening of Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t seem like it’d offer much inside on the ending, it actually ties directly into Hamaguchi’s point about perspective, understanding, and the natural world.
“That particular perspective that we see at the beginning is a perspective that only a camera can manage to capture,” he says. “Because as human beings, even if you look up and keep looking, it’s not possible to have your point of axis not moving, the way it does within that tracking shot. To be seeing that, with [the camera moving at] a very steady speed […] this vision is not necessarily a vision humans can have.
“And I think through watching through this perspective, this vision for four minutes, my hope was that the people who are looking can acquire a slightly different way of perceiving, or a different way of thinking. Perhaps it’s closer to how a machine sees, or perhaps how nature sees. This is something that I wouldn’t know. But I think the fact that we, the audience, can acquire a different way of looking, perhaps, can lead the audience into understanding the rest of the film in a deeper level. And that’s why I wanted to start the film in that way.”
Scores of emaciated brown pelicans, too weak to fly, have been found on Southern California beaches in the last month and taken to an Orange County rescue center, according to its director.
“We’re getting dozens of calls,” Debbie McGuire, executive director of the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, said on Saturday. “People are finding them in parking lots and their backyards.”
The rescued pelicans, she said, “are coming in at half their body weight. They are also very anemic.”
So far, she said, it’s unclear why the pelicans, which feed on anchovies, sardines and mackerel, are suffering from malnutrition.
McGuire said that she contacted scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week, who told her that there was “plenty of bait out there” for the birds to feed on.
“We don’t know the cause,” she said. “They are just all starving.”
Overwhelmed by the number of ailing birds, the wildlife center has been erecting pup tents to use as pens, she said.
In the last month, the center has taken in 89 brown pelicans, many of them quickly dying, McGuire said. More than 30 have survived, she said, as the center warmed them under heat lamps and gave them fluids.
She said the center sent tissue samples from the birds to labs for testing.
A similar spike in the stranding of brown pelicans up and down the California coast occurred in the spring of 2022. The cause has not been found.
The California brown pelican was listed as an endangered species decades ago after the spread of the chemical DDT caused the shells of their eggs to thin. The eggs became so fragile that nesting mothers crushed them.
After DDT was banned, the pelicans increased in number. The birds were removed from the endangered species list in 2009.
Wildlife officials say that anyone finding an ailing pelican should not touch or try to feed them. They urge people to instead call their local wildlife rehabilitation facilities. The Orange County center can be reached at (714) 374-5587.
Binance has appointed a board of directors for the first time as regulatory crackdown intensifies.
The newly formed board will be chaired by Gabriel Abed, previously Barbados’ ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. The board comprises seven members, including Binance CEO Richard Teng and other key executives such as Heina Chen, Jinkai He, and Lilai Wang, who were among the platform’s founding members.
Additionally, two external members, Arnaud Ventura, a managing partner at Gojo & Co., and Xin Wang, CEO of Bayview Acquisition Corp., will join the board. The development was officially confirmed on March 7, as reported by Bloomberg.
This strategic move marks one of the initial significant changes under the leadership of Teng, who took the role in November. The exchange, yet to declare a fixed location for its global headquarters, views the formation of this board as a critical step in its ongoing transformation and compliance efforts.
The largest crypto exchange has been under significant regulatory scrutiny lately. Following its criminal charges and $4 billion settlement in the U.S., the exchange has been under a microscope in other regions like Nigeria and the Philippines. Most recently, the Philippines SEC has made efforts to block the exchange, citing non-compliance with licensing requirements.
Jason Hehir joins to discuss the medium of sports documentaries, as well as his films, like ‘The Fab Five,’ the lost Sacramento Kings documentary, ‘Down in the Valley,’ ‘Andre the Giant,’ and ‘The Last Dance’
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The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth director Marla Price is retiring after 30 years at the museum.
The former associate curator of 20th century art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and well-known scholar of contemporary art came to Texas in 1986 to serve as the museum’s chief curator, presenting shows like 1989’s renowned touring show “10 + 10: Contemporary Soviet and American Painters.”
Price became acting director after E.A. Carmean left for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 1991. She took the job in 1992, coinciding with the state’s oldest art museum’s centennial. She oversaw an aggressive expansion of the permanent collection with acquisitions of works by Francis Bacon, the world’s largest collections of Robert Motherwell, Wangechi Mutu of Kenya and the Nigerian American Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
When its growing collection required a new home, she oversaw the construction of a new building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando and opened in 2002. Peter Plagens wrote in Artforum that “If everything goes according to design [it] will have turned itself into the most elegant museum in the entire country.” (Plagens was a huge fan of the neighboring Kimbell as well.)
A larger building allowed for more ambitious exhibits like “KAWS: WHERE THE END STARTS,” “Mark Bradford: End Papers” and “Lucian Freud: Portraits,” and dedicated space for the collection. An expanded lobby, auditorium and large café created more opportunities to engage the community.
Board Chair Marsland Moncrief and Board President Rafael Garza praised her leadership.
“The Modern has become an outstanding star on a national and international scale, while the mission has grown to be an inclusive community space for people to engage on different levels with the art of our time,” Moncrief said.
Garza commended “her artistic vision and commitment to scholarly excellence have cultivated a robust organization with devoted, longstanding supporters and staff.”
A Tesla Cybertruck crashed into the sign marking the entrance to the fabled Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunday night, prompting Elon Musk to post about the incident on X, formerly Twitter.
The massive, stainless steel behemoth bonked into the sign around 11:45 p.m. Sunday after it was involved in a collision with another vehicle, according to the Beverly Hills Police Department.
“Cyberbeast is faster than a Porsche 911, but looks like a truck, so perhaps the valet wasn’t expecting so much acceleration,” Tesla founder Musk joked on X, the social media site he owns.
Musk was responding to a claim that went viral, suggesting that a Beverly Hills Hotel valet crashed the truck, which later turned out to be a joke by an X user.
The Beverly Hills Police Department did not have information Monday afternoon about injuries or damage resulting from the accident.
Video posted online showed the truck sustained significant damage to its front left wheel. The truck also damaged the poles holding up the sign as well as the pink sidewalk wall in front of it, according to images from the scene.
“There was not an employee or member of our valet team involved in the accident,” said Brittany Williams, the director of communications for the Dorchester Collection, which operates the hotel.
On Friday, prolific filmmaker Edward Zwick will be at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe to discuss and sign his new memoir, “Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.” The 71-year-old writer, producer and director looks back on over 40 years in the business filling close to 300 pages with anecdotes, behind-the-scenes surprises, photos, and personal stories about his time served in Tinseltown.
In those four decades, Zwick has directed and produced some of the most recognized movies and television shows in entertainment history. His most notable titles include “My So-Called Life,” “About Last Night,” “Glory,” “Legends of the Fall,” “Blood Diamond,” and “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.” He has worked with Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio. His interactions with some of these celebrities are included in his memoir, a book he wasn’t expecting to write until the pandemic halted production of “Thirtysomethingelse,” a reboot of his popular late-80s TV drama “Thirtysomething.”
“Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood”
Simon & Schuster
The unexpected downtime was filled with remembering his life in Hollywood and gathering the gumption to write about it. The hardest part wasn’t the details, it was developing the protagonist who, in this case, just happened to be himself.
“In some sense, you are trying to be as personal as you can be,” Zwick says, “and yet you are also creating a character, which is to say, how do I wanna present myself to the world? How do I see myself? Am I trying to be more flattering? Am I trying to be more self-deprecating? Those are choices that I’d like to think we’re just intuitive rather than calculating. Nonetheless, they are confrontational because a lot of things you’re talking about are painful, some are personal, some are very joyous.”
Zwick was determined to be authentic in the book. He figured doing so would give him the license to tell stories about his relationships, both those that have ended and those that remain. It was a self-discipline he usually asked of his actors.
“Directing oneself is an interesting notion because I’ve always written for other people and put my words in their mouths and they were over there and I was safely behind a kind of firewall,” he says. “And now I was in the first person and there’s a vulnerability to that, that’s akin to being an actor. And so I had to take a deep breath and at times finish a paragraph and say, ‘OK, that’s just not totally true or maybe that’s not totally entertaining. … On the other hand, I just as often said, ‘You know, that’s not enough. I haven’t gone far enough.’”
Putting words down on paper is one thing. Whether readers will connect with them is another. Zwick’s wife, Liberty, would read chapters as he finished them. Even though her feedback was appreciated (after all, they’ve been together since 1982), Zwick needed objectivity.
“I’ve got some very, very serious, talented writer friends who I count on to tell me when I’m full of shit,” he says.
The book shouldn’t be a tough sell. Hollywood memoirs are very popular right now. Last year, three high-profile celebrities laid out their lives on paper. There were books by Barbra Streisand, John Stamos and a particularly juicy tell-all by Britney Spears. Her book read like an anthology of hit pieces against those who negatively affected her life.
When asked if Zwick’s book contains some of the same vitriol, he was quick to dryly respond, “I suspect that Britney Spears and I are interested in different things.”
That’s a fair statement, but then what exactly does he write about Hollywood in his book? Is it all good? “I would say that it’s a more gimlet-eyed view of it,” Zwick says, adding that he loves L.A. because it’s a place full of stories just waiting to be told.
He’s also aware of Hollywood’s paradox of value. Stars and executives are disproportionately compensated relative to police officers, firemen, nurses, and even librarians.
“And yet somehow society has chosen to value us — to overvalue us,” he adds. “So there’s a privilege in that, and even some responsibility that I feel. But I also say that the joy of it is just being surrounded by creative people. It’s creative, fun camp. The writers that I’m working with, the actors, the cinematographers, the designers, I mean, what a privilege to be able to be considered a peer to these hugely talented people.”
Zwick directed “Legends of the Fall” in the mid-’90s.
Tri-Star Pictures
Some of those talented people just got over a four-month-long hiatus. The strike was another event that left Hollywood at a standstill, but the outcome was undeniably historic. Along with asking for a fair living wage, the actors’ and writer’s strike drew a line in the sand for streaming services who wanted to exploit their archaic contracts. It also gave talent better control of their likeness regarding A.I., something Zwick is not a fan of.
“Listen, I’m a big admirer of Harrison Ford, but I don’t think that we should make a movie where he is now 30. Because what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna have the rights to certain people and then those people will be eternal, where they’ll never die and they no longer become actors. They become these kinds of avatars and that’s the danger. The danger is the rights to people’s likenesses and the rights to their voices.”
One technology that he doesn’t seem opposed to is digital remastering. With a lot of his films shot on film, converting some of them into this modern format isn’t off the table. “It’s funny there was some conversation very recently about wanting to do a 4K version of ‘Glory.’ I don’t know if that’s happening or not happening.” He does have his preferences though. “Seventy-millimeter is the most beautiful presentation of a film that you could possibly have. And I have seen a 70-millimeter print of (Glory)and a couple others. And that’s really, that’s the gold standard, at least now.”
The Academy Award winner may have written a book about his life, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have more to do. Zwick is well aware of how Hollywood has changed since he stepped behind a camera in 1976. So when asked if he will ever make another sweeping, epic Hollywood film, his answer is promising.
“Don’t know, hope so,” he says. “The world is different. I may be different but not I’m not ready to give it up.”
The “Ed Zwick: Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions” book event moderated by Cheryl Boone Isaacs, director of the Sidney Poitier New American Film School at Arizona State University, will be held at 7 p.m. Friday at Changing Hands Bookstore, 6428 S. McClintock Drive, Tempe. Tickets are $31.34 and include the book.
Ninja Kamui doesn’t waste any time getting from zero to 100. Within five minutes of its first episode, a bespectacled salaryman is ambushed by a flurry of projectile needles and attacks thrown by a dozen or so armored assailants, bobbing and weaving with uncanny precision as he counters each of their strikes before being viciously beheaded by a sneering brute with dreadlocks. It’s a strong first impression for the first original series from director Sunghoo Park following his work on Jujutsu Kaisen, one that boldly spells out Ninja Kamui’s declaration of intent with bloody and balletic finesse. In an anime season packed with strong premieres, Ninja Kamui positions itself as an action anime worth keeping an eye on.
Image: E&H production/Adult Swim
[Ed. note: Minor spoilers for Ninja Kamui episodes 1 through 2.]
Produced in collaboration with Sola Entertainment, the first original anime production from Park’s studio E&H Production follows the story of Higan, a former ninja who flees with his wife and infant child to build a new life in America after escaping from his clan on threat of death. Assuming new identities and making their living as farmers, Joe and his family live an idyllic and quiet life — that is, until Higan’s clan finally catches up to him, massacring his wife and child and leaving him a hair’s breadth from death himself. Surviving the attack on his home, Higan embarks on a single-minded quest for revenge as he attempts to hunt down his former masters and avenge his family’s murder.
There isn’t a whole lot in the way of subtlety in these initial episodes, though there are some cool minor details that convey the scrupulous lengths Higan was willing to go to protect his family, such as covertly wiping their fingerprints after leaving a supermarket or setting up an elaborate multi-camera surveillance system to spot potential threats. While the primary focus of the series is on Higan bashing and slashing anonymous baddies, there are still notable supporting characters, such as FBI agent Mike Morris and his partner Emma Samanda, an eccentric cat-loving doctor who previously worked with Higan before defecting from his clan, and the as-of-yet unnamed CEO of Auza, a ubiquitous mega corporation heavily implied to be in league with Higan’s former employers.
Image: E&H production/Adult Swim
Not much time is spent focusing on these characters though in these first two episodes, but that’s fine, because those details are all in service of the real draw of Ninja Kamui: the action. Park earned significant acclaim for his work on the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen and its 2021 feature-length prequel Jujutsu Kaisen 0, both of which featured fast-paced and creative fight sequences with memorable choreography and editing. Fans of Jujutsu Kaisen won’t be disappointed here, as the action in Ninja Kamui is easily on par with JJK’s, albeit far more gratuitous in the amount of blood and viscera. Character designs by Takashi Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai, also add to the appeal of the Ninja Kamui, as fans of 2007 anime and its 2009 sequel film Afro Samurai: Resurrection will also feel right at home with the level of violence and action choreography on display here.
There’s no especially grandiose or bold ambitions on display when it comes to Ninja Kamui’s opening episodes. The series knows what it is: A hyper violent revenge thriller with expertly calibrated action sequences and uniformly dark and somber tone. With that in mind, Ninja Kamui thoroughly succeeds as an engaging and entertaining action anime. With a confirmed total of 12 episodes, only time will tell how this initial premise will evolve and change over the course of the season. But what I know something for certain, which is that Ninja Kamui is a stunning addition to Adult Swim’s catalog of anime programming, and no matter where this story goes, one thing is certain: There will be blood.
Ninja Kamui airs Saturdays on Adult Swim and is available to stream on Max.
In 2021, One Shot blasted into action fans’ hearts, making full use of Scott Adkins’ varied skill set. It’s a high-octane tactical action movie with a fun gimmick: The whole movie is designed to look like one continuous take.
The newly released sequel, One More Shot, now available everywhere you rent or purchase movies digitally,is a more confident, polished effort than the original, adding a compelling and familiar action-movie setting (an airport), more action legends (Tom Berenger and Michael Jai White), and a string of exciting fight sequences that make the most of the location, the conceit, and the talent.
One More Shot also reunites director James Nunn with Adkins and fight choreographer Tim Man, who’ve each worked with Nunn four times. But this movie is Nunn and Adkins’ most accomplished collaboration yet. Polygon spoke with Nunn about the difficulties of shooting an action movie in one take, following in the wake of Sam Mendes’ Oscar winner 1917, hiding the cuts, what he learned from the first movie, and his hopes for the future of the series.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Polygon: As someone who’s filmed more conventional action movies, like Eliminators, what do you think is different for the audience when a movie is portrayed as one continuous take?
James Nunn: Well, it’s funny, because it started as an exercise in How can I push something? How can I be different? How can I be unique? How can I use Scott’s raw, amazing ability to the best? And how can I use my technical knowhow? So it actually started as more of an experiment in just proving to people, I’m really good technically, he’s really good physically and on camera — merge them skills, make a movie. That was where the initial pitch came from. But as time went on, and as we started filming it, honestly, I’ve kind of fallen in love with doing it this way. You realize that you’re pushing this immersion on your audience.
All movies have a ticking clock. That’s the premise of a lot of stories: You’re going from A to B, or A to Z, but it’s not about the letters, it’s about the journey between. There’s always a ticking-clock narrative, especially in action movies. Whether it’s a bomb going off or saving your loved one because she’s about to fall into acid, there’s always a timer. And I think what happens when you don’t manipulate time with cuts is, you’re actually forcing people to, almost on a subconscious level, just feel that timer a bit more, feel the urgency, and be a bit more present in it.
Now look, a lot of problems come with the style, because you can’t film Scott as the best martial artist in the world, necessarily, because you can’t do the angles that really show off what he can do. Equally, he can’t be like, spinning around doing amazing butterfly pirouette kicks, because it would just be of a different world. So the format comes with restrictions. And we know what we’re doing. We try to hold back on the flashiness and go for, like, this grounded CQC [close-quarters combat] military vibe, which fits really well. I think the elongated take of it, whether you like it or not, you’re just being sucked in.
Certain actors will really rise to the occasion and be the best you’ve ever seen, because they’re like, I don’t want to be the one in this 10-minute take who messes it up. So they switch on to this level of authenticity and focus, and you can feel that as well. But then equally, if you’ve got a slightly weaker performance, it’s harder to hide away from that.
I’ve fallen in love with it. I won’t do it forever. I will return to normal, conventional moviemaking soon, I’m sure. But I’m having a lot of fun. And I am so pleased with the reception that we’ve had.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
What did you learn from One Shot that you applied to One More Shot? The movie feels more confident — did it feel that way to you while shooting?
For sure, we did. And I say “we” because I’ve got a very solid core team who I love working with, and they’re all on the same train with me. I think the first movie, although I was confident… Look, I tried to keep it a bit of a secret in the first one, but we all know there’s hidden cuts in the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I will run a take as long as I can. There’s three reasons to break: safety, geography, or actor availability, if you have to shoot out of sequence. Those are really the reasons I cut. If not, I’ll go for as long as I can within that time frame. So you’re really looking at, like, eight- to 10-minute takes.
On the first movie, I knew we could do it, but we hadn’t done it, in that we hadn’t actually hidden cuts before. So I put a lot of the focus in the first movie on making sure that we could hide the cuts. The difference with the second movie was that weight had been lifted. We’d done it. I knew we could do it. I knew how to do it. I knew how to get myself out of a bind, even if something wasn’t working on the day and I needed to get out of it. Because we’d tried and tested it before.
So that weight had been lifted off my shoulders. So it’s like, OK, well, now I’ve actually got the time to think a bit more about being more elaborate with the camera. And also, we had a tiny bit more money on this one. So we could do stuff like hand the camera out of the car and throw the camera down a stairwell on a rig and know it would be OK. We were able to be a little bit more tricksy.
How did you manage filming at London Stansted Airport?
That was the most difficult part of this whole process, filming in the working environment of an international airport. We knew we wanted to go bigger. The fan response to the first one was overwhelmingly positive, and much more than we’d anticipated. Obviously when you set out on these ventures you believe in the movie — you have to, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. But I really wanted it to land. And it didn’t necessarily get the big push I hoped for, because of COVID at the time, but it did enough to really find an audience.
We listened to the feedback of the fans. Not necessarily the big paper reviews, but the fans. And we tried to respond to that in this movie and give them more fights, give them more hand-to-hand, give them more plot, but also make it not feel as low-budget of a location, which was something we bumped into a lot in the comments.
So once we found out we were given the lucky opportunity to go down the road for number two, we embarked on what we’re going to do, and we were like, We’re never gonna get an airport. We’re just imagining we’re gonna get, like, some private little runway. It’s gonna be rubber, it’s gonna feel low-budget anyway. So the producer, Ben Jacques, was tasked with Can you get an airport? And as if by some sort of miracle, the fourth-largest airport in England, Stansted Airport, showed an interest. They were like, Oh, we love the sound of this. Yeah, come on down. And so we did.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
So we went down and we looked, and we thought it’d be perfect. And then we wrote the script around it. But this is where it became tricky. The first movie, we had a derelict location, which we could film for 11 hours a day, no questions asked, easy-peasy. But going to Stansted came with a huge amount of restrictions, the same restrictions you face as a traveler flying internationally. You’re going through the metal detector, you’re going through the screening thing. Getting a hundred crew in with guns, with knives, with fake explosives takes an hour off your day easily.
Equally, you’ve got tourists running around waiting to catch their flights and stuff. In the U.K., you can’t fly between midnight and 4 a.m. They basically close it down so that people can sleep. And that was when we shot the movie. So we’d get in the airport at like 7 or 8 at night, do some rehearsals, have a bit of food. And then we really started kicking off between midnight and 4. It was a hard stop at 4, because the planes were coming in, or people getting on planes.
One particular night, we were in the baggage claim area, and we had a long take and an hour to go. And we’ve had months and months of meetings about this. But you know, there’s always one guy who’s never at the meetings who shows up and is like, Oh, you’ve got to wrap in 20 minutes. We managed to get two takes that were nine minutes each. The second one’s in the movie.
Everyone knows the layout of an airport, so it becomes a lot easier for the audience to ground themselves in where things are, what access-restricted locations look like, that kind of stuff. But it lets you interact more with the environment in terms of the action. What else did the airport location add to the film?
It’s kind of like how I feel about 1917. One thing we faced coming out after 1917, even though [One Shot] had originally been written before 1917, was that people struggled a little bit with the backstory. There wasn’t a huge amount of backstory being told. And the problem with doing things in real time as a one-shot thing is, you can’t stop in the middle of a fight and start calling your mom or your wife, because the audience knows what you’re doing. You’re crowbarring in a backstory, but it just starts to feel hokey and not real.
And the advantage that 1917 had over us is that the nation and the world’s collective understanding of a soldier in World War I — everybody’s studied it in school. You immediately have some idea or backstory knowledge of that soldier. So it’s not necessarily that 1917 even has more backstory than we do. But what makes a difference is that there’s this unwritten understanding of World War I that you just understand. It’s in your subconscious, generally speaking, as a Western audience.
And that’s the same, probably, with the airport. Not everybody’s seen a Guantanamo-style base [the setting of One Shot] outside of a movie. Whereas everybody knows an airport. And I think that’s where [One More Shot] heightens as well, is that we’ve gone to somewhere that you all kind of understand: Oh, there’s gonna be an escalator, there’s gonna be this, there’s gonna be that. So I think to harp on your point, I agree with you totally. And then you just start enjoying the fruits of what you can find, you’re walking around and you design the [fall] going over the rails, or fighting on the metro.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
By the way, that’s my favorite fight in the movie.
Me too. We don’t cut during the fights. That’s part of the reason that Scott loves doing it as well, is that we really make him do it for two, three minutes. And what I love about the metro fight is because of all of the foreground, poles, beams, and glass, it’s actually impossible to have even put a cut in there. So that is just two physically amazing on-screen fighters [Adkins and Aaron Toney] really going for it. And I’m privileged that they did that for us on a moving train at about 30 miles per hour.
What strikes me as one of the hardest storytelling challenges of the format are the transition sequences. How did you approach getting from scene to scene within this structure?
[That’s where] the advantage of going to the location [came in]. Having a 10-page outline, finding the location, then writing the script around the location, and then doing set visits backward and forward. And also it being a [real] location, not being something we were building that people had to try and understand.
Because there’s a lot of One Shot that is actually a set. Like, we use the exterior terrain, but actually all the interiors are generally fudged together in a gym on the location. And that was much easier for [screenwriter] Jamie [Russell] to write those passages of time. And then I had a couple of actor friends come down about three months before we shot the movie, and on a GoPro, we walked every scene just for script timings.
You want to do another one of these? One Last Shot, perhaps?
Yeah, I do want to do another one. I’ve got no spoilers for you. There’s no green light yet. I’m gonna try my best and knock on every door to hopefully get us there. But there’s no news, other than the title. And it seems like the internet has found the title itself.
I mean, you set us up for it.
[Laughs] Me and the producers have talked about it in the past, but it’s sort of organically been like this little bit of a roller coaster online, which is fun and exciting. So I desperately would love to do that movie, but we’re not there yet. Let’s see.
One More Shot is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.
Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson’s performances as Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark defined the original Hunger Games movies. But the prequel movie, set 64 years before Katniss and Peeta’s story, needed a new set of actors who could hold their own.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is an origin story for Panem’s dictator, President Coriolanus Snow. It takes fans back to a time when Coriolanus was just an ambitious young student who had not yet become the cutthroat politician we see in the main books and movies. His story is entwined with that of Lucy Gray Baird, the District 12 Tribute he’s assigned to mentor, whose natural flair for showmanship and captivating songs inspire him to turn the brutal Hunger Games into more of a flashy spectacle.
Director Francis Lawrence tells Polygon the filmmakers were looking for fresh faces when it came to the lead roles. A lot of actors auditioned for the role of Snow, specifically, but Lawrence says Billy the Kid star Tom Blyth immediately “blew everybody out of the water.”
“Part of it is physical,” he admits. “He has those great blue eyes — [you] could see in his face, Okay, I could buy that maybe 65 years later, he could turn into Donald Sutherland.”
Image: Lionsgate Films
Image: Lionsgate
But it wasn’t just about how feasibly Blyth could look like a younger Donald Sutherland. Whoever landed the role had to walk a line between being charming and conniving, someone you want to root for, yet aren’t surprised when they end up turning into a villain. Blyth brought his acting chops to the role, and Lawrence was continually impressed throughout filming.
“Telling a story about a young man’s descent into darkness, you have to have somebody that can earn the audience’s empathy, but then believably also descend into that darkness,” Lawrence says. “[Blyth] is really, really good. This sort of charisma continued to astound me. His sense of control in his performance and nuance also astounded me. That really caught me off guard and surprised me in a fantastic way.”
Blyth stood out in auditions, but when it came to casting District 12 songstress Lucy Gray, Lawrence had a first choice in mind from the get-go. Rachel Zegler’s acting and singing in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story made her Lawrence’s top contender for the role.
“So she and I met, I think, for four hours or something the first time, and had a great chat about the book and about the character and about the music,” Lawrence says. “I just knew she was the one right away.”
Photo: Murray Close/Lionsgate
A big part of Lucy Gray’s character involves music. She’s a member of the Covey, a traveling band of musicians inspired by similar performing groups from turn-of-the-century America. Her passionate outburst of song at her Reaping immediately sparks something in Snow, who recognizes that her performing talent is key to getting her to survive the games. So Lucy Gray’s singing had to be life-savingly good and fit in a specific genre.
“I had high expectations, because I think she’s a great actor and a great singer, but the singing blew me away,” Lawrence gushes. “The fact that she could shift right from theatrical kind of singing — something you would do in West Side Story or on stage — into the exact genre of country bluegrass that we were doing in this movie that feels like it’s from the turn of the century to the [19]20s-30s Appalachia. To be able to hit that style and do it so effortlessly, and sing live every day, that was pretty mind-blowing.”
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is out in theaters now.
Demián Rugna’s terrifying possession movie When Evil Lurks — now available for streaming on Shudder — breaks the rules of the subgenre in all sorts of startling ways. For one thing, it isn’t a religious movie at all, even though most exorcism movies are. For another, the victims facing down a demon in his film aren’t struggling with faith, or with something they don’t understand. They all know the rules for dealing with the hideous, bloated creatures that result from demon possession — the encarnado, or as the English subtitles put it, “the rotten.” There’s even a little teaching song about the rotten, presented in the film as something akin to a children’s lullaby.
So if everyone knows how to safely deal with demons, why is the movie so frightening? Because the rules — including “stay away from electricity and electrical appliances, demons can travel through them” and “only kill the possessed in certain specific ways” — take effort and self-control, and people are often greedy, lazy, or impulsive. “It’s too hard,” Rugna told Polygon at the 2023 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. “You need to comply with the rules because the demon wants to be with you, but it’s too hard for us to run away from cities, trying to avoid electricity, to avoid even thinking about the devil.”
When Evil Lurks is a tremendously frightening movie, in part because it’s as much about the power we give our personal demons as it is about any sort of supernatural force. Unlike in films like The Exorcist and its many sequels and reboots, Rugna’s characters can’t expect any help from organized religion or from God. “I have no religion,” the director said. “And I hate religion as a business. I love religion as faith, or for helping people. But not as a business.” Instead, the characters in When Evil Lurks have to rely on each other, and on their own courage and discipline. That goes poorly, to put it mildly.
They’re also meant to rely on institutions put in place to help them. At the beginning of the film, it becomes clear that the government has systems in place to handle the encarnado, and those systems have failed entirely because of bureaucratic indifference and laziness. Rugna’s inspiration for the movie explains a lot about where that theme came from: As he told the Fantastic Fest audience in a Q&A after the movie’s premiere, he got the idea for When Evil Lurks from a series of news stories about farm pesticides in his native Argentina causing widespread health issues.
“The owners of those lands contaminate those fields with glyphosate to kill bugs — pesticide,” he said at the Q&A. “There’s a lot of people who work in those fields, and they get cancer. You’d probably see a little kid with cancer, because they are workers. They didn’t say anything — or if they say something, nobody knows.” He suggests that corporate apathy about the workers’ health, and the way the issue occured “out in the middle of nothing,” where it’s easy for profiteers and city-dwellers to ignore the impact of their choices, started him thinking about the idea of lurking evils given free rein to spread.
“The pesticide infected them,” Rugna told Polygon. “Kids were born with cancer. Sometimes you see something in the news, but then there’s nothing more to say, and you forget the image. They’re in the middle of nothing, the middle of poverty. They must do work for less than a couple dollars, and they’re all ill. After you turn off the television, you forget, but they are still there, they are still probably gonna die.”
He said it happens too often, that “people who work the land” get “abandoned” by the system. “When I decided to make a movie with some kind of exorcism, I thought, OK, but what happens if the people cannot reach a priest? All the Exorcist movies happen in the city, in a big house. But what if we’re in the middle of nothing, in a poor house, with poor people who nobody cares for? Even the owner of the land wants to get rid of them, to burn their houses. It happens in my own country all the time — not the demons, [but the rest].”
All that said, while Rugna emphasizes how important realism in the acting, relationships, and setting was to him in making the movie, he laughs off the idea that realism in terms of reflecting the real world is important in horror. “You can see a movie just for fun,” he said. “Being entertaining is most important for me. If you have the chance to have reflection, that’s a double goal. But for me, it’s not fully necessary.”
He said the social inspirations just worked their way naturally into the writing because they’re part of his background. He didn’t set out to make a message movie, just one that would scare audiences. “I’ve noticed for myself in my movies, for a greater horror story, I want to make you suffer,” he said. “And the social element just comes along with my culture.”
Photo: Shudder/IFC Films
Ironically for a movie inspired by bureaucratic indifference to the suffering of children, though, one of the biggest limits on his film was bureaucratic regulations about how he could handle his child cast. When Evil Lurks is unusually brutal to its kid characters, with graphic scenes of child distress, mutilation, and death. In response to an audience question at the Q&A about how he protected the child actors, Rugna grinned and explained how his production walked the actors’ parents through their safety plans.
“I’d need two hours to tell about the process of working with the parents,” he said. “It’s too funny, because we did take care with the parents — we thought, OK, we want to share the entire script. We were scared about the reaction of the parents. […] The parents were too excited to put their kids in our movie. You can’t imagine. […] When the parents read the script, and we’re like, The kid’s gonna be bit by a dog and crushed with a car — ‘Oh, I love the script! Got it!’”
But the government was much more limiting, Rugna said. Among other things, in spite of the violence of the scenes involving children, they weren’t allowed to have artificial blood on the kids’ skin at any time. In another scene, a teenager wasn’t allowed to hold a gun during an emotional monologue. “All the time, it was horrible to work with the kids,” he said, laughing. “Not for the kids, for the rules.”
Blue Beetle is all set to hit theaters nationwide on August 18. The film not only introduces a fresh face to the DC universe but also brings with it a wave of praise from none other than Susan Sarandon. The seasoned actress, who takes on a captivating role in the movie, couldn’t help but heap praise on the film’s director, Angel Manuel Soto, for his remarkable passion and playful demeanor.
Susan Sarandon opens up about working with Angel Manuel Soto
Amid the buzz surrounding Blue Beetle, Susan Sarandon spoke about the film’s behind-the-scenes magic. The accomplished actress expressed an admiration for Angel Manuel Soto’s direction that is unmistakable. Susan remarked, “The ensemble he curated, encompassing not only the actors but also the crew, such as the costume designer and others, was truly remarkable.”
She elaborated, saying, “What captivated me about the script and the entire experience was its strong focus on human connections. Ultimately, the prevailing force is love and the concept of family. The protagonist’s evolution from resisting responsibility to ultimately embracing it offers a captivating narrative. As a mother of two boys, I see them venturing into a world traditionally molded for men, where the expectation of dominance clashes with the reality of survival as they mature. The crux of their journey lies in acknowledging their own capabilities, understanding that true empowerment comes from within, and recognizing the necessity of self-driven determination. This evolution resonates with the character’s transformative path.”
The actress underlined the distinctive characteristics of Soto’s personality by saying, “He was passionate and playful at the same time, and you won’t find such a combination very often.”
As the DC enthusiasts eagerly await the arrival of Blue Beetle, the film’s foundation rests on the captivating journey of Jaime Reyes, portrayed by the talented Xolo Maridueña. The storyline, deeply rooted in the themes of love, responsibility, and self-discovery, resonates with audiences far and wide. Susan Sarandon reflected on Blue Beetle and said, “The superpower is love and the family… understanding that nothing’s gonna come from the top, that they have to be their own hero.”
Blue Beetle features an ensemble cast, including Adriana Barraza, Damían Alcázar, Raoul Max Trujillo, and the illustrious Susan Sarandon. This eclectic mix of talent promises to bring depth and authenticity to the characters that audiences will soon come to love. Adding to the film’s charm, Blue Beetle will be released in multiple languages, making it accessible to a wider audience. With its release in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu, the movie ensures that its message and excitement cross linguistic barriers.
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