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Tag: longform

  • Was Ben Affleck Really Da Bomb in ‘Phantoms?’

    Was Ben Affleck Really Da Bomb in ‘Phantoms?’

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    25 years ago, a bomb was unleashed on Hollywood.

    Or, depending on your perspective, da bomb was unleashed on Hollywood.

    January 23, 1998. That was the day Phantoms was released to theaters. Based on the horror novel by author Dean Koontz, Phantoms followed a pair of sisters — played by Joanna Going and Rose McGowan — who wander into a Colorado ski town, only to find it mysteriously empty. Eventually, a few police officers show up to investigate; collectively, they discover that some sort of “Ancient Enemy” — one that was maybe responsible for similar mass historical disappearances in places like Roanoke — has wiped out the town’s entire population.

    Phantoms had all the makings of a horror hit. It had brand-name source material from Koontz (who even adapted his own novel) and it came from Dimension, a subsidiary of Miramax, which was then the hottest brand in genre films thanks the success of films like From Dusk Till Dawn and the Scream franchise. Phantoms actually starred several veterans of the Scream franchise, including McGowan and Liev Schreiber, along with Peter O’Toole as an eccentric historian (and writer for a thinly fictionalized Weekly World News) who is the only one who has solved the mystery of the Colorado disappearance.

    But the movie had an additional ace in the hole, another handsome young actor named Ben Affleck, who played Phantoms’ key role of the sheriff called in to investigate the missing town. Phantoms arrived in theaters just a few weeks after another Miramax release called Good Will Hunting, which Affleck had co-written and co-starred in with his friend and collaborator, Matt Damon. Less than a month after Phantoms premiered, Affleck would be nominated for an Academy Award for Good Will Hunting’s script. Six weeks after that, he won his first Oscar.

    None of the attention on Affleck and Good Will Hunting helped Phantoms. The same weekend Phantoms debuted, Good Will Hunting grossed $8.5 million. Phantoms wound up grossing just $5.6 million during its entire run in theaters. And while Good Will Hunting became one of the decade’s most celebrated films, Phantoms was quickly forgotten.

    Or maybe it would have been — if not for Affleck’s frequent collaborator Kevin Smith mocking Phantoms in his next movie. That was 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where Phantoms became one of the running jokes. It pops up the first time when the title characters visit Affleck’s Holden McNeil, a comic book artist who created characters based on Jay and Silent Bob. (Affleck had first played the role in Smith’s Chasing Amy in 1997.)

    In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Miramax is producing a movie based on Holden’s comic Bluntman and Chronic — essentially Jay and Bob as stoner superheroes. When Jay (Jason Mewes) and Bob (Smith) ask who is playing them in the film, Affleck quips “It’s Miramax, so I’m sure it’ll be Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.” Jay claims not to know who Affleck and Damon are; Holden explains that they made Good Will Hunting, which Jay dismisses as “that f—ing movie with Mork from Ork in it.”

    “Yeah I wasn’t a big fan either,” Affleck (as Holden) says, “but Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.”

    “Word, b—! Phantoms like a mother f—er!” Jay replies.

    Then Phantoms comes up again later, after Jay and Silent Bob have made their way to Hollywood, snuck onto the Miramax backlot, and found the set of Good Will Hunting 2, starring Damon and Affleck as fictionalized versions of themselves. When security guards come to take Jay and Bob away, Jay yells “Affleck, you da bomb in Phantoms, yo!”

    This throwaway line has had surprising staying power — to the point that when Affleck spoke at Mewes and Smith’s hands-in-cement ceremony at the Chinese Theater in 2019, Affleck mentioned it. A case could be made that the only context that Phantoms is remembered 25 years after its release is via that line.

    But was Affleck da bomb in Phantoms? In honor of the movie’s 25th anniversary, I decided to perform an extremely scientific study — i.e. I watched the film for the first time — and find out. And in my professional opinion, Affleck is not da bomb in Phantoms.

    But someone else is.

    First, while Affleck does not necessarily rise to the level of being da bomb in Phantoms (yo), he’s not necessarily bad in the film. He does precisely what is asked of him by this slightly silly and not very scary movie. He plays Bryce Hammond, the no-nonsense sheriff who winds up trapped in the abandoned Colorado town by an ancient evil.

    Over the course of the film, viewers learn Hammond’s tragic backstory: years earlier, he had accidentally shot a young boy. His feelings of guilt over the incident have essentially taken over his life and ruined his career. Yes, if only this poor police officer could stop feeling bad about killing an innocent child, he would be so much better at his job! (This same tragic backstory, which would never fly today, was also used to motivate Reginald VelJohnson’s cop in Die Hard, who must finally conquer his guilt and shame by, uh, shooting another person.)

    Affleck’s main issue in Phantoms: At just 25 years old at the time of the film’s release, he seems way too young and babyfaced to play this hardened lawman. Good Will Hunting was about guys who were still college-aged. All the other action heroes Affleck played in this late ’90s and early 2000s period were youthful, inexperienced, or in over their heads. (Think of his “younger” version of Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, which was made three years after this.) Affleck would be the perfect age to play Sheriff Bryce Hammond today. In 1998, he looks miscast.

    The person who is perfectly cast in the film is Peter O’Toole. As the evocatively named Dr. Timothy Flyte, the 65-year-old O’Toole strikes just the right note; Deadly serious. How else should an actor supposed play the role of a kook who works for the Weekly World News who, under interrogation by the FBI, defiantly declares that an unholy immortal hellbeast is hanging out in the sewers beneath a ski resort? The FBI recruits O’Toole to come with them to Colorado, whereupon he delivers more expository dialogue while stumbling around in an ill-fitting hazmat suit.

    O’Toole commits fully to the character. Which of course makes it all the more hysterical…

    If you’re going to watch Phantoms — something I do not necessarily recommend — Peter O’Toole is the reason to do it. His role is so far beneath him it might as well be hanging out in the sewers with the Ancient Enemy. Ben Affleck’s best days were yet to come; Peter O’Toole’s were already behind him. But he was still da bomb in Phantoms.

    The Most Ridiculous Character Posters of 2022

    Maybe we just don’t need to make posters for every character in every big movie? You decide for yourself.

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    Matt Singer

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  • Is ‘The Last Of Us’ Fungus Real?

    Is ‘The Last Of Us’ Fungus Real?

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    The Last of Us begins decades ago, on a television talk show in the 1960s. A panel of experts discusses the threat posed by novel viruses that could cause a global pandemic. (The parallels to our own world and time are hard to miss.) One of the experts says he is not worried about a pandemic, at least from a virus. Such viruses, he explains, have been around since the dawn of time and new ones appear on occasion. And why they may result in significant illness and death, mankind’s natural immunity eventually adapts, and the pandemic ends.

    What keeps this particular expert awake at night are fungi.

    Although they seem harmless to mankind — and some fungi are quite beneficial to humanity — some strains of fungus can be quite dangerous and even parasitic. They latch on to a host and can replace its tissue and even assume control of the host organism. Such fungi do not attack people because they cannot survive in temperatures as high as the human body. But, the talk-show guest warns, if the planet were to warm slightly, and these fungi evolved to match a warmer planet, that could change. And if that happened, there would be no treatment for such a fungal infection, or even a chance of a cure.

    In 2003 (at least within the fictional world of The Last of Us) that is exactly what happens. A mutated Cordyceps fungi begins infecting people around the world. Once infected, the sufferers basically turn into bloodthirsty zombies, hungering for human flesh and chasing after anyone who isn’t infected to satisfy their monstrous appetites. 20 years after that, the main story of the HBO series, based on the popular PlayStation video games, begins.

    Obviously, the Cordyceps infection zombies are fabricated, but the fungus itself is real, and it can infect insects in a way not entirely dissimilar to the way it infects people on the show. In fact a specific variety of Cordyceps called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has the ability to create what are known as “zombie ants”:

    In carpenter ants, the fungus snakes its way through the body, taking control of their muscles. Then, shortly before its demise, the ant will leave the colony at sunset, find a high-hanging leaf or branch, and clutch it in its jaws. There, the ant hangs motionless until it dies and the fungus emits spores that rain down upon unsuspecting victims. That process has earned it the nickname “zombie fungus.”

    But what about zombie humans? It’s highly unlikely, but not entirely out of the realm of scientific possibility.

    David Hughes, an entomologist and biologist (and an advisor on The Last of Us games), has said “people get fungal diseases all the time” particularly if they are immunocompromised. The question, he argued, is not whether a fungus might infect someone, it’s whether a fungus might have the ability to control someone’s behavior. And he pointed to historical examples where people have been given “convulsive deliriums” by eating rye tainted by fungus. (Mr. Hughes seems like a really fun guy.)

    Hughes added:

    The last case was in 1954, thereabouts, in France when somebody intentionally sold a load of grain to a small French town containing the fungus. Everybody went mad and some 12-year-old girl tried to kill her mother with a kitchen knife… so yes, consuming the fungus will drive you crazy, and getting infected is possible. But it jumping from ants to humans and then onward [to other people] … that probably requires too many [improbable] circumstances to happen.

    In other words, it’s not 100 percent impossible, but it’s not particularly likely.

    That said, Cordyceps zombies are not exclusive to The Last of Us. One year after the original Last of Us game was released, the novel The Girl With all the Gifts used a nearly identical premise to explain its zombie infection: Someone became infected with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, and it sparked a global infection and the breakdown of society. Like The Last of Us, The Girl With All the Gifts — which was adapted to a little-seen but very effective film in 2016 — is largely set decades later, when humanity’s few survivors are trying to find a cure for the fungal infection within a little girl who is infected but immune to its mind-controlling side effects.

    Essentially, Cordyceps zombies are good science-fiction: They’re not real, but they’re built on enough real scientific principles and phenomena to make them plausible — and thus scary.

    New episodes of The Last of Us premiere weekly on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

    10 TV Actors Who Were Replaced For Controversial Reasons

    These actors were replaced from hit shows under clouds of controversy.

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    Matt Singer

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  • ‘Glass Onion’ Cut A Post-Credits Scene That Changes Everything

    ‘Glass Onion’ Cut A Post-Credits Scene That Changes Everything

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    The following post contains spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. 

    Glass Onion, technically known as Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, originally featured a post-credits scene that recontextualizes the rest of the film. The movie sees Daniel Craig reprising his role from Knives Out, the detective Benoit Blanc. He’s met with a new mystery involving an eccentric billionaire named Miles Bron. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that each of Bron’s party guests have hidden motives for appearing at the murder mystery party he is hosting. As the threads begin to unravel, Blanc dives deeper into a grand conspiracy surrounding Miles.

    In an interview with Empire’s Spoiler Special podcast, Rian Johnson, the film’s director, revealed a bit of information that could have changed the outcome of the film. In the version fo the film streaming on Netflix, a fire destroys the Mona Lisa, which Miles Bron had on loan from the Louvre. Its destruction ensures that Miles’ new alternative energy source, Klear, will be exposed as a dangerous failure.

    But Johnson originally had a different plan. As he explained, “we also shot a little coda which we decided not to use, with Blanc on the phone speaking French and getting a little affirmation of ‘Ah, oui, oui, merci’ and cutting to an office in the Louvre where the real Mona Lisa is, with the security guards saying ‘Well, back to work.’ But that pulls a punch, I like that the real painting gets destroyed in the movie.”

    “We got a very talented, local Belgrade artist to do a recreation of the Mona Lisa and it was kind of extraordinary having it on set. I didn’t realize this, but if you get a recreation like this, you have to destroy them when you’re done filming, if it’s a famous work of art. You actually have to document yourself burning the canvas because of the counterfeit market. Daniel was a bit worried that we were ‘killing the puppy’ by upsetting people as we destroyed the Mona Lisa, but the scene in Bean where he destroys ‘Whistler’s Mother’ is one of the funniest scenes in cinematic history, so I figured we’d get away with this. That scene is so good.”

    Not only would the exclusion of this scene remove a symbolic indictment of the uber-wealthy, but it would also completely change the implications the destruction of the Mona Lisa had from a plot perspective.

    Glass Onion is now streaming on Netflix. It’s already the fifth-most-popular title in the streaming service’s history.

    The Best Movies of 2022

    Here are ScreenCrush’s picks for the top films of the year.

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    Cody Mcintosh

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  • Forgotten ’90s Movies You Need to See

    Forgotten ’90s Movies You Need to See

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    The 1990s: A time of prosperity, promise, highly questionable fashion, and, above all, movies.

    So many movies.

    So many, in fact, that a lot of the better ones have fallen by the wayside in the intervening decades. Sure, everyone has seen Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and Fight Club, but the ’90s movies that have become classics represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the thousands of films that came out during that halcyon decade. And yet thanks to streaming and digital rentals, many of these titles have never been easier to watch — even if so few people actually do.

    Let’s try to change that. Below are 12 movies from the 1990s. Some were critical hits in their day, a few even had decent runs at the box office. All of them have largely been forgotten — or at least have never been seen — by all but the most dedicated and nerdy of ’90s cinephiles. If you’ve seen the decade’s big titles like The Matrix or Titanic or Jurassic Park and you’re ready to dig a little deeper, any of these titles will fit the bill.

    The picks include comedies, dramas, teen films, thrillers, action movies, and sequels. If they weren’t on your radar before, now they are.

    Forgotten ’90s Movies You Need to See

    These movies weren’t hits. They’re not considered ’90s classics. But more people should watch them.

    10 VHS Tapes You Totally Owned As A ’90s Kid

    These movies were part of every ’90s kid’s VHS collection.

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    Matt Singer

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  • 15 Movies That Are Secretly About Moviemaking

    15 Movies That Are Secretly About Moviemaking

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    Many movies — including some of the greatest in history — are about the world of movies and moviemaking: 8 1/2, Day For Night, Singin’ in the Rain, The Stunt Man, Sullivan’s Travels, The Player, Barton Fink, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Hooper, Sunset Boulevard, Contempt, and Hail, Caesar! to name just a few. These films are set in Hollywood or at international film studios; their characters are directors, writers, and actors. There is no mystery around their subjects. They’re about The Movies™, in all their rich and glorious splendor.

    But there are other movies that are nominally about other things — cooking, or fashion, or genetic engineering, or high-stakes sports betting — whose deeper ideas and themes all reflect back on their own creation. These films allow their creators to express their feelings about cinema in more subtle (and sometimes invisible) ways.

    These movies are not quite a genre unto themselves, or even a subgenre — and in fact these types of allegorical tales can appear in almost any other genre, from horror to comedy to action to sci-fi to biopic. But collectively, they represent a really interesting corner of cinema, and one of my favorite types of films to watch — if only because the degree of distance and abstraction seems to free directors up to speak honestly about their work, even if (or perhaps because) a lot of people will never quite recognize what they’re doing.

    Here are a few of the more interesting examples of movies that are thinly-veiled metaphors for movies.

    Movies That Are Metaphors For Moviemaking

    These films aren’t about the world of film — but each can be read as massive allegories for various aspects of moviemaking.

    80s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today

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    Matt Singer

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  • 2022 Movies That Got a 0 on Rotten Tomatoes

    2022 Movies That Got a 0 on Rotten Tomatoes

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    The Bubble had a 21 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Firestarter earned a 10 percent. Even Morbius — angry Jared Leto Morbin’ it up out in international waters — got a 15 percent.

    Some combination of those three movies appear on almost every published list of the worst films of 2022. And in fact, all three show up on ScreenCrush’s own worst of 2022 list. Yet despite widespread consensus around this trio of cinematic turkeys, all three found at least a few critics who could find enough positive things to say about them to give them a mildly positive review.

    In other words: It is very hard to get a zero on Rotten Tomatoes. A Rotten Tomatoes zero score goes beyond consensus to total and universal agreement. That level of comprehensive critical revulsion is extremely rare. But it does happen — and in fact it happened at least ten times in 2022.

    It should be stated that for the most part relatively few critics reviewed these titles. It’s a lot easier to get a zero score out of ten reviews than out of 273 reviews — which is the number of notices that Morbius currently has on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s simple mathematical probability; the odds of only ten critics agreeing are a lot higher than 273 critics doing the same.

    Still, it’s very unusual for a movie to get absolutely no positive reviews, even out of just ten or 20 articles. In a twisted sort of way, it’s kind of an incredible achievement. And these ten movies all pulled off that incredible achievement in 2022…

    2022 Movies That Got a 0 on Rotten Tomatoes

    It might be an understatement to say these 2022 releases were not popular with critics…

    The Worst Movies of 2022

    ScreenCrush’s picks for the 10 worst films released in 2022. Watch them at your own risk.

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    Matt Singer

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  • ‘Glass Onion’ Spoils Itself In Its First Scene

    ‘Glass Onion’ Spoils Itself In Its First Scene

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    The following post contains SPOILERS for Glass Onion.

    A good murder mystery can be watched twice: Once to be surprised, and once to see how the movie surprised you. There are clues you missed, red herrings that tricked you, and plot threads you didn’t fully understand until the final solution was revealed. In the case of Glass Onion, it’s only on second viewing that you realize that Rian Johnson essentially spoiled his big structural twist within the movie’s first minutes.

    The scene in question involves the arrival of several elaborate boxes at the homes or offices of a group of friends. The boxes turn out to be invitations, sent to a quartet of longtime pals — Kathryn Hahn’s Claire, Leslie Odom Jr.’s Lionel, Kate Hudson’s Birdie, and Dave Bautista’s Duke — by their mutual friend Miles Bron (Edward Norton), an eccentric billionaire. To get to the actual invitation inside, the friends must solve a series of puzzles contained in the box; they start a conference call to decode them all together.

    The key moment that foreshadows the rest of the movie comes when cellist Yo-Yo Ma (playing himself!) appears at Birdie’s house. She’s solving her box in the midst of a raging party; Ma just happens to be one of the guests. He wanders over as the box begins playing Bach’s “Little Fugue in G Minor.” While Birdie attempts to Shazam the song, Yo-Yo Ma identifies it from memory, because he’s Yo-Yo Ma.

    Ma himself delivers the crucial line of dialogue, when he explains a fugue:

    A fugue is a beautiful musical puzzle based on just one tune. And when you layer this tune on top of itself, it starts to change and turns into a beautiful new structure.

    When Ma says that, Lionel realizes the clue means they are supposed to lift a handle out of the box, which then spins around, revealing a new “layer” of puzzles beneath.

    The friends push forward, solve the rest of the clues, unlock their boxes, and get their invitations from Miles to a vacation on his private island. But Ma’s contribution has a much larger and more meta meaning that is easy to miss on first viewing — because he essentially reveals that Glass Onion is structured like a fugue. Most of the story is told twice: The narrative progresses in a linear fashion until a key moment, then doubles back to the start. After a new scene that reveals a major bit of information we didn’t know the first time, the entire story plays again, now with the new details layered on top, revealing, as Yo-Yo Ma put it, a “beautiful new structure.”

    The critical information involves the character of Andi, played by Janelle Monae. Through most of Glass Onion she seems like an embittered former friend of Miles and the rest. She doesn’t open her invitation box with the rest of the group; she smashes it with a hammer. It turns out that a few months prior to the events of the film, she had a falling out with Miles over the direction of his company, which she used run with him.

    Miles invites his friends to his private island in Greece for a murder mystery weekend; he will be “killed” on the first night, and it will be up to the guests to solve his “death“ for the rest of their vacation. But master sleuth Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shows up at Miles’ party as well, and he suspects a real murder is going to take place. Indeed, on the first night of the trip, Duke winds up dead, seemingly poisoned, and Andi goes missing. The lights in Miles’ house go out and in the ensuing chaos, an unseen assailant shoots Andi in the chest with Duke’s gun. The remaining party guests demand Blanc explain what has happened.

    That’s the point where the second part of the “fugue” begins. (The soundtrack even reprises Bach’s Little Fugue at this exact moment.) Johnson jumps back in time to the scene when Benoit Blanc was “invited” to Miles’ island — by Andi’s twin sister, Helen. It turns out that the real Andi was dead before the film began. The police believe she committed suicide; Helen suspects it was murder. She and Blanc hatch a scheme to crash Miles’ party with Helen disguised as her sister in the hopes that they can uncover the evidence that proves one of the Miles’ friends murdered Andi.

    Then Glass Onion replays crucial moments from its first half again with additional dialogue and more context. For example, the first time through the story we watched Blanc spy on Duke as he spied on Miles in bed with Duke’s girlfriend Whisky. At that point in the story, it seemed like Duke had caught his girlfriend cheating on him with his best friend — a potential motive for murder. The second time we see the scene, we realize what’s really happening: Duke put Whisky up to sleeping with Miles in the hopes it would help him get a job at Miles’ news channel. So the person with motive for murder would actually be Whisky, who might have killed Duke because she was sick of being treated like a piece of meat.

    It could be a coincidence, and it might be a stretch, but even the fact that the musical piece that lends Glass Onion its structure is a fugue could be a clue. In psychiatry, a fugue state is one where a person discards their true identity, assumes a new one, and wanders off. When they wake from their fugue, they have no idea how they got there, nor remember the events that happened while they were in that state. Helen doesn’t lose her memory, but she does assume a new identity and travels about as far from her home as possible. To some extent, Glass Onion is a fugue about a fugue.

    Yo-Yo Ma is not the only celebrity cameo in Glass Onion; there are also appearances from Serena Williams, Jake Tapper, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Natasha Lyonne, and the late Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury. I think some might chalk them up to Rian Johnson calling in favors with some famous friends for easy laughs, but in a lot of these cases — and definitely in the case of Yo-Yo Ma — their purpose is much more important than that.

    Johnson uses these familiar faces the way a magician uses misdirection: To distract the audience while he drops his plan right in front of their faces. If one of the main characters had said “Oh this is a fugue” and then explained it, viewers might have been more inclined to listen more attentively, and perhaps to catch on to Johnson’s plan. By making it an unexpected celebrity, the audience is less likely to focus on the content of what he’s saying — and realize that Johnson has just showed you his entire hand before the poker game had even gotten underway.

    The Most Ridiculous Character Posters of 2022

    Maybe we just don’t need to make posters for every character in every big movie? You decide for yourself.

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    Matt Singer

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  • ‘Babylon’: The Real-Life Figures Who Inspired the Movie

    ‘Babylon’: The Real-Life Figures Who Inspired the Movie

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    None of the key characters in Damien Chazelle’s early Hollywood drama Babylon are historical figures. Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt, did not dominate 1920s Los Angeles with his charm and good looks. Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie, didn’t scandalize the silent film world with her “Wild Child” persona. And neither one interacted with an ambitious young studio executive named Manny Torres (Diego Calva), who overcame enormous obstacles to become one of the most powerful men in the industry.

    But to various extents, every character and sequence in the film is based on real historical events. The war film that’s being shot in a crucial early scene, for example, appears to be inspired by Intolerance, D.W. Griffith’s landmark silent epic — although in Babylon it’s being directed by a German filmmaker who seems to vaguely resemble Erik von Stroheim. And the fictional leads occasionally interact with real people — like MGM mogul Irving Thalberg, who’s played in Babylon by actor Max Minghella.

    Here are all the key fictional players from the movie Babylon, along with the person (or people) who helped shaped their fictional lives and backstories according to press notes, and interviews with Chazelle and the cast.

    The Real-Life Inspirations For the Characters in Babylon

    Here are the historical figures who inspired the fictional characters in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.

    20 Famous Actors Who Used To Live Together

    These actors were roommates before they became big stars.

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    Matt Singer

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  • ‘The Fabelmans’ Makes Bad Spielberg Movies More Interesting

    ‘The Fabelmans’ Makes Bad Spielberg Movies More Interesting

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    A lot was made of the very last moment in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where Indy’s long-lost son, Mutt Williams, picks up his father’s hat and nearly tries it on. Just as Mutt is about to place the hat on his head, his dad snatches it and walks away with a wry grin on his face. The implication: While the film had seemingly groomed Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt as a potential inheritor of the Indiana Jones franchise, Harrison Ford had no intention of retiring. (Sure enough, 15 years later we’re going to get a fifth film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, starring Ford in the title role.)

    Almost no one noticed the moment right before that bit of business with Mutt and Indy’s hat. The penultimate moment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull follows Mutt at his parents’ wedding. While Indiana and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) kiss, Mutt walks through the church, finds a camera, and begins to document the happy occasion.

    This simple act — Mutt filming Indy and Marion’s wedding — did not stand out when Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was first released in 2008. But it takes on new meaning when viewed in conjunction with director Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, The Fabelmans, a deeply autobiographical tale about Spielberg’s own childhood and the evolution of his relationship with his parents. Time and again in The Fabelmans, Spielberg casts his stand-in, Sammy Fabelman (played by Gabriel LaBelle), as his family’s official historian. In family meetings or on vacations, Sammy is often seen standing apart from his parents and three siblings — typically while holding a camera.

    The Fabelmans does not necessarily make Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of a Crystal Skull a more entertaining movie. It can’t improve the quality of the CGI in the big jungle chase scene, or make the … whatever exactly happens in the ancient ruins of Akator any more clear or satisfying. But it does make the film more interesting, by adding new context and meaning to its characters and relationships, which are revealed to be a lot more personal than they appeared 15 years ago.

    Certainly, the father issues in the film were obvious from the start, as they are in many of Spielberg’s movies throughout his long career. Following the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, Spielberg was estranged for his father for a period of about 15 years, and his early work often focused on absentee fathers (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), broken families (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial), orphans (Empire of the Sun), or some combination of all three. The third Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, introduced Indy’s own father, played by Sean Connery, as an aloof, somewhat cold, and work-obsessed disciplinarian — essentially a handsome Scottish clone of Sammy Fabelman’s father Burt (played by Paul Dano).

    Kingdom of the Crystal Skull flips that dynamic on its head by casting the 64-year-old Ford as the elder figure in the relationship with his new sidekick, Mutt Williams. As Indy and Mutt get to know one another while traveling through South America, Mutt reveals that he has dropped out of one prep school after another because he has very little interest in academics and wants to pursue his real dream of fixing motorcycles. At that point in the story, Indy encourages Mutt to follow his reams. Later, when Indy discovers Mutt is actually his son, he reverses course, and demands Mutt return to school after their quest is over.

    This family squabble is one of the stronger moments in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but it resonates even more deeply after The Fabelmans, which makes it clear that these tensions played out repeatedly in the Fabelman (or Spielberg) household. That film often shows the future director begging his father to let him quit school to pursue his Hollywood dreams, while his scholarly, practical, taskmaster of a dad insists he continue his studies.

    This Crystal Skull sequence in the back of the Russian truck also reveals that after Indy left Marion, she married a man named Colin Williams. Supposedly, Colin was Indiana’s friend, and Indy was the one who introduced him to Marion. This strange three-way relationship sounds remarkably similar to the one in The Fabelmans between Burt and Sammy’s mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), and Burt’s best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen). In The Fabelmans, after years of growing apart, Burt leaves Mitzi and she marries Bennie.

    The parallels don’t stop there. Later, after Indy and Mutt manage to escape the collapsing ruins of the lost city of Akator, Indy quips “Why don’t you stick around, Junior?” to which Mutt replies “I don’t know; why didn’t you, Dad?” Even as they grow closer, Indy doesn’t really understand his greaser son Mutt, in much the same way Burt loves Sammy but finds himself incapable of communicating with him because of their divergent interests.

    The Fabelmans suggests that Spielberg’s success as a director (once his father relented about staying in college) was due to ability to blend his father’s work ethic and mechanical dexterity with his mother’s imagination and adventurous spirit. Without his mom’s influence, Spielberg’s movies would be cold and dry. Without his father’s gifts, he wouldn’t possess the technical know-how to bring his whimsical ideas to life. He’s the child of both his parents.

    Indiana Jones is a similar synthesis of Spielberg’s mother and father. His life is neatly split in half; he spends part of his time as a tweedy professor of archaeology at Marshall College — the picture of a bookish intellectual like Spielberg’s dad. (Dano‘s costume in The Fabelmans’ first scene, shown above, looks exactly like something Indy would wear to his office hours at Marshall College.) When duty calls, Indy dashes off around the world in search of treasure and adventures, channeling Spielberg’s mother’s devil-may-care attitude when she scoops up her kids, piles them into the family car, and chases after a tornado that touches down near their house in suburban New Jersey. Indiana Jones can give a history lesson about the life of a Spanish conquistador and fend off an attack by warriors protecting an ancient graveyard in the span of a single scene. Indy may have been original created by George Lucas, but Spielberg made him a combination of his mom and dad’s dissonant abilities.

    In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indy and Marion’s reunite after 20 years of separation. While Spielberg’s parents never got remarried, they did remain friends and grew closer in their final years; the 2017 documentary Spielberg shows them spending time together, and even holding hands. (At one point, Arnold Spielberg confesses he still loves his ex-wife.) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s wedding scene plays like a fantasy version of that reconciliation — with another Spielberg stand-in filming it all from a front-row seat.

    The Fabelmans is a work of fiction. But in interviews, Spielberg insists that many of its scenes play exactly as he remembers them happening. I have a feeling that the film will come to be seen as a kind of Rosetta Stone for the subtextual ideas in many Steven Spielberg movies. If it brings this much additional depth to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, how will it enhance his masterpieces?

    Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may still be the worst Indiana Jones movie, but it’s a far more personal effort from Spielberg than most audiences noticed in 2008. The fact that its escapist portions are less compelling than its character interplay were probably a clue that Spielberg was nearly ready to make The Fabelmans and tackle these ideas head-on, rather than obfuscate them yet again in the guise of a frivolous blockbuster. In hindsight, it is not at all surprising that he decided to pass on directing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny — and make The Fabelmans instead.

    Every Steven Spielberg Movie, Ranked

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  • ‘Avatar’ Primer: What You Need to Know Before ‘The Way of Water’

    ‘Avatar’ Primer: What You Need to Know Before ‘The Way of Water’

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    The rap on the first Avatar — even though it is the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema — is that no one remembers it. Supposedly, James Cameron’s magnum opus left behind no cultural footprint whatsoever. I tend to disagree; nobody who saw Avatar forgot the characters’ distinctive look, or the awesome 3D aerial sequences. I certainly didn’t.

    Still, it has been 13 years since Avatar first opened in theaters. That’s a long time. (Marvel has released 28 movies in the intervening years. 28! Plus television shows!) So even if you did see Avatar and do remember its broad strokes, you might be a little fuzzy on the details. And with the sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, finally coming to theaters, you definitely might want to brush up on some of the specifics. Plus, the new movie features a lot of returning actors, but some are playing the same characters, and others are playing new characters. At least one or two are playing a character who died in the first movie! So it can get a little confusing.

    To that end, I prepared this primer on all the crucial characters and plot points from the first Avatar. This is the essential stuff you need to know before the you head back to Pandora.

    What to Know Before Avatar: The Way of Water

    Get ready for Avatar: The Way of Water with this refresher on the first film.

    That’s where Avatar left things for The Way of Water, which opens in theaters on December 16. And if you want to revisit Avatar for yourself, it is currently streaming on Disney+. Whether you remember it or not, you might be surprised to see how well it holds up 13 years later.

    The Best Movies of 2022

    Here are ScreenCrush’s picks for the top films of the year.

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  • The Best Movies of 2022

    The Best Movies of 2022

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    Time flies at the movies. It feels like it’s only been a month or two since I made a list of the best movies of the year. But it’s already December once again. The arbitrary period when we stop everything we’re doing and compare all the movies released since the last arbitrary period when compared all the movies released since the last arbitrary period has begun!

    The typical format for such lists is 10 films, and I have adhered to that rule for most of my professional career. But this year I realized: No one but me and my weird self-inflicted neuroses are forcing me to pick only 10 best movies — and I saw a hell of a lot more than 10 good movies in 2022. So this year, my list contains 20 excellent films. If you want to pay attention to just the top 10, go for it! But then you will miss out on a lot of outstanding titles, some of which are already available to stream at home right now.

    Critics will often use these lists as an occasion to pontificate at length on the state of cinema; whether it was a “good year” or a “bad year,” whether cinema is “healthy” or “dying,” whether criticism is thriving or under attack. This year I feel like the fact that I couldn’t settle on just 10 films and willingly doubled the size of the list pretty much says it all.

    In ascending order of preference, here are my picks.

    The Best Movies of 2022

    Here are ScreenCrush’s picks for the top films of the year.

    The Best Movie Posters of 2022

    The coolest movie art of the year.

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  • The Greatest Films of All Time

    The Greatest Films of All Time

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    Every ten years, the British film magazine Sight & Sound polls hundreds of film critics and directors in order to create near-definitive lists of the best movies ever made. In 2012, critics named Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the finest motion picture of all time. Directors chose Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story as their top pick.

    The 2022 list is officially here — and the winners are Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles for the critics and 2001: A Space Odyssey for the directors. This time, the magazine (which is affiliated with the venerated British Film Institute) arrived at their answers by polling 1639 “film critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics” and 480 filmmakers.

    I wasn’t among them. And I’m not going to lie: Being confronted with the fact that I’m not considered to be among the 1600 most knowledgable film critics in the world sent me into an existential crisis from which I have not fully recovered. I didn’t necessarily expect to be invited (at least until I heard how many people participated) but as a film dork who obsessed over the Sight & Sound film list every decade since 1992, I had already put years of thought into who I would vote for if I received a ballot.

    So while it counts for absolutely nothing, I thought I would share what I would have picked had I been invited to participate. Below, is my hypothetical ballot, along with a little of the methodology behind my choices. Again, I have nothing to do with Sight & Sound or their poll. But if I had been asked, here’s how I would have responded.

    My Sight & Sound Poll Ballot (If I’d Had One)

    Every ten years, Sight & Sound polls film critics and directors around the world to determine the greatest movies in history. Yours truly wasn’t invited (an oversight, I’m sure!) but here’s how I would have voted.

    You can read Sight & Sound’s full 2022 film critic and director polls here.

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  • The Worst Marvel Moments of 2022

    The Worst Marvel Moments of 2022

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    Marvel, we love you. We already made a list of the best Marvel Cinematic Universe moments of 2022. It’s got great stuff on it! This is not personal.

    But 2022 was not a Hall of Fame year for Marvel. There were some highlights that reminded us why we love these wild superhero stories in the first place. There were also a couple of moments that made us wonder whether the comic book industrial complex had gotten just a bit too massive and unwieldy. This year alone, Marvel released three big-screen movies — Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — three Disney+ series — Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law — and two Disney+ one-off specials — Werewolf By Night and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. With that much stuff coming out all at once, is it any wonder the studio’s quality control might have dipped a little?

    Case in point: These ten moments of disappointment and frustration from Marvel’s 2022 output, ranked from the least upsetting to the most aggravating. Keep in mind, some of these moments do involve spoilers for these MCU films and shows. If you’ve seen them all and you’re looking for a full and fair assessment of Marvel’s year in review, you’re ready to begin our list…

    The Worst Marvel Moments of 2022

    We picked the low points of a year of Marvel Cinematic Universe films and series.

    Sign up for Disney+ here.

    The Best Marvel Moments of 2022

    We picked the highlights from all of Marvel’s films, shows, and Disney+ specials.

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    Matt Singer

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  • The Best Marvel Moments of 2022

    The Best Marvel Moments of 2022

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    2022 was the busiest year in the 15-year history of Marvel Studios. All told, the company released three big-screen movies — Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — three Disney+ shows — Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law — and two Disney+ one-off specials — Werewolf By Night and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. All told that’s about 18 hours of Marvel Cinematic Universe content in a single year. That‘s a lot! It wasn’t that long ago that Marvel sometimes released nothing in a year, and more than one new movie over the course of 12 months was considered a glut of product that was going to lead to audience fatigue.

    They weren’t all perfect (or great), but Marvel’s collective output in 2022 delivered a lot of definite highlights along the way. There were some very memorable action scenes, a couple of really wonderful surprises, and one of the most emotional sequences the company has ever produced. As we get ready for 2023 — Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania! Secret Invasion! Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3! — let’s take a look back at the best Marvel moments of the year… (Note that there will be a couple spoilers on our list…)

    The Best Marvel Moments of 2022

    We picked the highlights from all of Marvel’s films, shows, and Disney+ specials.

    Sign up for Disney+ here.

    Every Marvel Phase Four Movie and TV Show Ranked

    After eight TV shows and seven movies, Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is complete. What were the highlights and lowlights? We ranked them all.

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  • How Does T’Challa Die in ‘Wakanda Forever’?

    How Does T’Challa Die in ‘Wakanda Forever’?

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    The following post contains SPOILERS for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. (Duh.)

    Every single person reading this knows what happened to Chadwick Boseman. The beloved actor died on August 28, 2020 after a private battle with colon cancer. Boseman had appeared in films like Draft Day, 42, and Get On Up, but he was best known as T’Challa, the superhero known as Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

    Boseman had made four appearances as T’Challa prior to his death, in Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. He was scheduled to reprise the role again in a Black Panther sequel, but obviously that was not to be. Marvel could have chosen to carry one as if Boseman’s death hadn’t happened; they could have recast the role of T’Challa and stuck to whatever their original plan for Wakanda Forever had been. Instead, writer/director Ryan Coogler decided to incorporate Boseman’s real-life death into the MCU, by making T’Challa’s death the inciting incident of the sequel.

    There too, there were many paths Marvel and Coogler could have taken. They could have had T’Challa die in battle. They could have found some other way to remove him from the story for the short-term, while leaving the door open to recast the role down the line. Instead, they hewed about as closely to reality as this sort of superhero fantasy would allow. In the film’s opening minutes, T’Challa is dying of some incurable but unspecified illness. His sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) desperately tries to save his life.

    Although the movie never gives any details about what illness killed T’Challa, it does explain how a superhero with enhanced strength and invulnerability could be felled by something as mundane as a disease. Under normal circumstances the Black Panther could be saved by ingesting the “Heart-Shaped Herb,” the magical Wakandan substance that gives the Panther his powers. But all of Wakanda’s Heart-Shaped Herbs were destroyed by Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger in Black Panther. Shuri attempts to recreate it synethically but fails.

    Sprinkled throughout the film are other allusions to Boseman’s real-life battle with cancer, which he kept private until his death. Characters in Wakanda Forever��imply that T’Challa approached his illness similarly, hiding it from many others around him until the very end of his life. That choice again allows Coogler to make Wakanda Forever even more personal; to explore how the film’s cast and crew were affected by this loss.

    Marvel

    The movie does eventually push some of these emotions to the background in order to focus on the storyline involving a brewing war between Wakanda and Talokan, an ancient underwater civilization led by Namor. But the characters’ feelings about T’Challa are constantly alluded to, and they become very important to the climax of the movie. These also happen to be the most powerful scenes in the entire film. That is not a coincidence.

    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is in theaters now.

    Every Marvel Cinematic Universe Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best

    It started with Iron Man and it’s continued and expanded ever since. It’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with 30 movies and counting. But what’s the best and the worst? We ranked them all.

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  • Could ‘Psycho’ Get Made Today?

    Could ‘Psycho’ Get Made Today?

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    Could It Get Made Today? is an occasional column where we look at a classic film and consider how changes in technology and tastes would impact it if it was shot today. This week’s subject: The 1960 classic — and 1998 remake — of Psycho. 

    Movie: Psycho
    Director: Alfred Hitchcock / Gus Van Sant
    Stars: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles / Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore
    Release Date: June 16, 1960 / December 4, 1998
    Synopsis: An employee at a realtor in Phoenix named Marion Crane (Leigh/Heche) makes a rash decision to steal a huge pile of cash from one of her boss’ wealthy clients. She intends to use to it start a new life with her boyfriend Sam (John Gavin/Viggo Mortensen) but along the drive from Phoenix to his home in California, she gets lost in the rain. She winds up at the Bates Motel, run by a nervous but welcoming young man named Norman Bates (Perkins/Vaughn), who lives in a house behind the hotel with his aging, invalid mother. When Marion goes missing, her sister Lila (Miles/Moore) and Sam turn up at the Bates Motel looking for her, only to discover that there is more to Norman Bates’ mother than anyone realizes.

    Could It Get Made Today?

    Technically yes — but only with major changes. Someone did just that a few years ago, with the television series Bates Motel. But that show, which was set in modern times, was mostly a prequel to the events of the Psycho story. When it did turn to adapting the original Psycho novel (by Robert Bloch) and movie in its final season, it had to make some really major changes to the storyline.

    Of course, Psycho was already remade once, by Gus Van Sant in 1998. His Psycho remains a fascinating, if mostly failed, experiment. Though not quite a shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock’s film, it is an extremely faithful update of it — even in places where certain creative choices make the film extremely anachronistic, even in 1998. (Like costuming Vince Vaughn’s Norman Bates in a corduroy blazer and slacks, something no one that age wore in the late ’90s.) Van Sant’s Psycho also features nearly identical dialogue to Hitchcock’s, all of the same characters (and no additional characters), along with a new recording of Bernard Herrmann’s classic score.

    While Van Sant’s Psycho was designed as a “modern” update — the opening title cards establish the date as December 11, 1998 — it is now 24 years old. When It was released, Hitchcock’s Psycho was 38 years old. In those 38 years, society had changed, but not so much that you couldn’t reenact the same story in roughly the same place with only a few cosmetic changes. (Marion Crane steals $400,000 in the remake, instead of the $40,000 of the original.) 24 years after that, it seems almost impossible that you could remake Psycho again — at least not the way Van Sant did it.

    Most of the plot’s complications could not exist in a world of cellular telephones —  much less smartphones. Marion goes missing, and then the private detective Arbogast does as well; in each case, Norman has the time he needs to hide his Mother’s crimes because it takes hours or days for their friends or loved ones to notice they’ve gone missing. (Arbogast even has to find a pay phone to check in with Lila and Sam.) In a world of text messages and email, Marion and Arbogast’s absences would have been detected a lot sooner — to say nothing of the fact that Norman would need to dispose of their phones if he didn’t want the cops to immediately find their bodies at the bottom of the swamp behind the Bates Motel.

    But many other details of the story would crumble in a world of computers and internet and modern commerce. Would Marion be able to rent a room under a fake name and with no credit card? Maybe at a backwoods dump like the Bates Motel, but it’s unlikely. Would a cop so quickly let her go if he could check her license in a central computer database? Again, it’s possible, but a lot less plausible. Hell, the Bates Motel would probably get such bad Yelp ratings (“The pressure in the shower head was great, but the staff was beyond terrible!”) that Norman would run out of potential victims in a hurry.

    All the psychological underpinnings of Marion and Sam’s relationship would have to be changed too. In the previous movies, they must meet in secret because of Sam’s divorce. In 2022, nobody would care; Sam and Marion wouldn’t have to sneak around on lunch hours. The reception to Norman Bates dressing as his mother would certainly be taken very differently (and perhaps more controversially) than it was in 1960 and 1998 as well.

    Then there’s the more practical matter of the film’s reception. Much of Psycho’s impact, at least in 1960, hinged on the shock value of Marion Crane’s surprising fate, and the way the the film upended audience’s expectations. This archival press reel shows the lengths Hitchcock and Paramount went to in order to keep Marion’s storyline from getting out too soon.

    In a social media age, it would almost impossible to the film’s surprises a secret beyond Thursday night before its Friday release. No amount of jolly pleading from its director would change that.

    10 Famous Movies That Led To Major Lawsuits

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    Matt Singer

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  • Who Is King at the End of ‘Wakanda Forever’?

    Who Is King at the End of ‘Wakanda Forever’?

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    It should be quite clear from the headline but if not: This post contains SPOILERS for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

    It’s early, but here is the #1 Wakanda Forever question we’re hearing at ScreenCrush:

    Who exactly is in charge of Wakanda at the end of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever?

    Shuri (Letitia Wright) is clearly the new Black Panther. But in the film’s final moments, when the time comes for her to be crowned queen she skips the ceremony — and M’Baku (Winston Duke) shows up instead, saying he wants to challenge for the throne. So where does that leave things?

    Basically, it’s what it looks like: M’Baku is going to become the King of Wakanda, while Shuri will serve as the new Black Panther. This is sort of a confusing scenario — and Marvel in general could be a little clearer about the ins and outs of the rules and traditions of the Wakandan monarchy. But from what we do know, this all makes sense.

    Remember: While the Black Panther is often also the King of Wakanda, he doesn’t have to be. In Captain America: Civil War, we are introduced to T’Chaka (John Kani), Wakanda’s aging king, and his son, Prince T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman). Although T’Chaka is still alive, and was Wakanda’s Black Panther in the past, he passed the mantle on to T‘Challa at some point before the events of Civil War. Because when T’Chaka is murdered, T’Challa springs into action as Black Panther to catch his killer.

    T’Challa doesn’t technically become King of Wakanda until the opening scenes of Black Panther, where we see that the Wakandan coronation ceremony for a new monarch is also a place where any of the five tribes that make up Wakanda can challenge the current ruler for the throne in ritual combat. When one warrior is killed or yields, the other becomes king. In Black Panther, M’Baku, leader of the Jabari Tribe, challenges T’Challa for the throne — and loses.

    Later in the film, this same tradition is what allows Killmonger to seize control of Wakanda. He challenges T’Challa, beats him in a fight, and becomes the King. But because T’Challa never submits and didn’t die — he is tossed off a waterfall but survives long enough to be revived by Wakanda’s magical Heart-Shaped Herb — he is able to fight Killmonger again at Black Panther’s climax. This time he emerges victorious and reclaims the throne.

    So while none of this is spelled out explicitly, here is how we interpret the end of Wakanda Forever. As the princess of Wakanda, and daughter of the previous ruler (Queen Ramonda) Shuri is technically next in line for the throne. But for reasons that she does not express in the film, she chooses not to become Queen. Instead, she skips out on the coronation ceremony and heads to Haiti, where her close friend and ally (and sorta sister-in-law) Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) lives.

    Based on the way the coronation scene plays out, with M’Baku arriving on the ship that the rest of the Wakandan elders and royalty believe is carrying Shuri, that they had all this planned out. M’Baku says he is there to challenge for the throne, but we don’t see whether anyone accepts his challenge or not. Either way, it’s probably safe to assume he becomes the King — at least until Winston Duke’s Marvel contract expires or the young Prince T’Challa gets a little older.

    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: All the Coolest Marvel Easter Eggs

    Here are all the best callbacks to Black Panther (and to decades of Marvel Comics) in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

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  • Why Isn’t Daniel Kaluuya In ‘Wakanda Forever’?

    Why Isn’t Daniel Kaluuya In ‘Wakanda Forever’?

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    The following post contains very minor spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

    Almost the entire supporting cast of Black Panther returns in the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, to continue Wakanda’s story, and to pay tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman. Other than Boseman’s T’Challa, almost every key character (who wasn’t killed) from the first movie is back for Wakanda Forever, including Letitia Wright’s Shuri, Angela Bassett’s Ramonda, Winston Duke’s M’Baku, Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia, and Danai Gurira’s Okoye. But one key name is not among those back in this sequel, and the only reference to him is brief and easily missed.

    That would be Daniel Kaluuya, who played W’Kabi. In Black Panther, W’Kabi was the leader of the Wakandan Border Tribe. He is a trusted friend and adviser to T’Challa, and the lover of Okoye, the head of the all-female military unit the Dora Milaje.

    Although W’Kabi is initially close to T’Challa he grows disillusioned with his leadership after he fails to capture Ulysses Klaue, a mercenary who stole vibranium from Wakanda years earlier, killing many Wakandans — including W‘Kabi’s parents — in the process. When T’Challa tries to apprehend Klaue and returns to Wakanda empty handed, W’Kabi is furious. When Killmonger shows up with a dead Klaue, W’Kabi welcomes him into Wakanda with open arms. And when Killmonger defeats T’Challa for control of Wakanda, he supports Killmonger’s claim to the throne.

    When T’Challa returns at the climax of the film, W’Kabi remains loyal to Killmonger and leads the charge of Border Tribe soldiers against the former (and future) king. When Okoye and the Dora Milaje wind up backing T’Challa, she and W’Kabi wind up on opposite sides of the battle — until W’Kabi decides he would rather surrender than kill his beloved.

    That’s the last time we see W’Kabi in Black Panther. As Wakanda Forever begins, T’Challa has just died and his loved ones lead Wakanda in a massive funeral procession. W’Kabi is nowhere to be seen, and he never appears in the rest of the film — but he is briefly mentioned later, in the scene where Queen Ramonda confronts Okoye over her failure on an important assignment.

    Ramonda chastizes Okoye for screwing up her mission and in her anger she observes that while her husband is dead (that would be King T‘Chaka, T’Challa’s father, who was killed by Zemo in Captain America: Civil War), Okoye’s husband remains alive in prison, where she can visit him. (This is the first we’ve heard that Okoye and W’Kabi are husband and wife; the previous film didn’t detail the specifics of their relationship.) So we never see W’Kabi in the film because he’s in a Wakandan jail the entire time — which does make a certain amount of sense. He backed Killmonger against T‘Challa, who then became king once again. By most measures, those are treasonous acts.

    That’s a reasonable explanation for W’Kabi’s absence from the story but in truth, there were off-screen reasons behind Kaluuya’s departure. He was busy shooting Jordan Peele’s Nope (a lead role, versus being a relatively minor supporting player) while Wakanda Forever was in production. He couldn’t do both, and thus does not appear in the Black Panther sequel. (One also wonders whether Kaluuya winning the Academy Award for Best Actor in between the two films had anything to do with his leaving.)

    But Wakanda Forever does make it clear that W’Kabi is not dead. He’s out there somewhere in a Wakandan jail, just waiting for a sequel that doesn’t conflict with his actor’s busy shooting schedule. Maybe he’ll be back for Black Panther 3, or the rumored Wakanda Disney+ series.

    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is in theaters now.

    Marvel’s Upcoming Phase Four, Five, and Six Movie and TV Lineup

    Here’s every movie and show Marvel currently has scheduled for release in Phase Four, Five, and Six of their cinematic universe.

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  • If You Gave Up on ‘Andor,’ It’s Time To Give It Another Shot

    If You Gave Up on ‘Andor,’ It’s Time To Give It Another Shot

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    If I did not help run a website that covers Star Wars, I would have given up on Andor after two episodes. That was likely clear if you read what I wrote the week of Andor’s debut, “If You Like Watching Diego Luna Walk Around, You’ll Love Andor.” Reader, I do not like watching Diego Luna walk around, at least not at that length or with that much frequency. I thought big chunks of the three-episode premiere were flat-out boring.

    Six episodes later, I think Andor, created by Tony Gilroy, has evolved into one of the best Star Wars shows on Disney+. It’s certainly the most interesting.

    Admittedly, it’s still not the most thrillingly paced. For the second straight week, the show’s title character has spent the entire episode locked up as a prison laborer for the Empire. His main adversary, an Imperial Security Bureau officer named Dedra Meero (Denish Gough), made very little progress in her investigation into Rebel activity — and she still does not know that Andor has already been imprisoned (under an alias) for a minor crime. (Andor, meanwhile, does not even know Meero exists.) Several key characters, including Stellan Skarsgard’s Luthen Rael, do not play a role on this week’s Andor. This is not a Star Wars TV series for people who want non-stop action. (Or, for that matter, intermittent action.)

    But there are plenty of Star Wars movies and shows that provide that sort of stuff. Andor, like its title character, has taken a different path. It focuses on the nuts and bolts of life in the Star Wars galaxy, showing the step-by-step process by which the Rebel Alliance grew — and the step-by-step process by which the Empire controlled its citizens through fear and overwhelming power. Although the show does not treat the Rebels and Empire as moral equivalents — the Rebels are fighting for freedom while the Imperials torture their enemies and imprison them in perpetuity after sham trials — it does empathize with the mindset of the individuals within the Empire, who must navigate the personal and professional pitfalls of life within a corrupt and sadistic organization. While Andor remains in a literal prison, all of its main characters are trapped in one way or another.

    While Andor’s time in prison hasn’t been especially eventful from a story standpoint, it’s been a tonally effective chapter of the series’ overall story. His work on an assembly line building pieces of Imperial technology (likely for use in the Death Star) serves as a metaphor for the entire show: How repressive governments create a system of control, and how they make their subjects accessories to their own oppression as cogs in an enormous machine designed only to enrich the few at the very top of the chain of command.

    In hindsight, these prison scenes also add interesting context to those early episodes where Andor wandered endlessly on the planet Ferrix. Now Andor’s freedom has been stripped away; one wrong step in any direction can get him fried by the Imperial prison’s deadly, electrified floor. The way Andor’s existence has been upended serves as a microcosm of the way the Empire is tightening its grip over the entire galaxy. It’s bleak stuff — like the final act of The Empire Strikes Back stretched across multiple hours.

    Another pleasant aspect of Andor: It is a prequel that is almost impossible to anticipate from a story perspective. Sure, Cassian Andor himself can’t die; he’s got to escape that space jail eventually and show up at the start of Rogue One to steal the Death Star plans. But from episode to episode, his journey, along with the evolution of many of the supporting characters, has defied prognostication. (Did you think Andor would spend two episodes in prison hanging out with Andy Serkis? I sure didn’t!)

    The season’s final three episodes (and Andor’s upcoming second season) will wrestle with many enticing questions. Will Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), the obsessive former “corpo” who first recognized Cassian Andor’s illicit activities, convince Meero to help him? Will Syril rise through the Imperial ranks, or will he grow so frustrated with his inability to navigate its bureaucracy that he eventually joins the Rebels? Will Serkis’ character aid Andor’s budding escape attempt or expose it? We just don’t know — a refreshing change of pace from just about everything else in Star Wars in the last few years, which has been occasionally fun and exciting, but rarely this unpredictable.

    I’m still not sure Andor couldn’t have worked just as well at, say, nine episodes instead of 12. But I will admit I have gone from dreading having to watch this series every Wednesday to actively looking forward to it. And suddenly I find myself thinking the plan for the rest of the series — which will supposedly compress the next four years of Andor’s pre-Rogue One life into a quartet of three-episode arcs — does not seem like an expansive enough palette to conclude this story in satisfying fashion. Then again, if Season 2 features this caliber of writing with a lot less aimless walking, it could be the perfect Star Wars TV show.

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    10 Actors Who Turned Down Star Wars Roles

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    Matt Singer

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  • Marvel Phase Four Is a Giant Story About One Idea

    Marvel Phase Four Is a Giant Story About One Idea

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    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the final film in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, following six other movies and eight television shows on Disney+, plus a couple holiday specials. At Wakanda Forever’s premiere in Hollywood, Marvel’s Kevin Feige summed up Phase Four thusly: “The reason [Wakanda Forever] anchors Phase Four … is because the phases are all about introductions. And Phase Four — think of all of the characters we’ve met here. And now, finally, in the finale here of Phase Four, looking at it by phases, we meet an entire new kingdom and an entire character who is the very foundation of what we do at Marvel.”

    Certainly each new phase of the MCU adds new characters to the mix. Phase Two introduced the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ant-Man. Phase Three had Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and Black Panther. And Phase Four has had more than its share of new Marvel heroes and villains, including Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, the Eternals, plus a new Black Widow, a new Hawkeye, a new Captain America, and (in Wakanda Forever) a new Black Panther.

    So Kevin Feige is certainly not wrong that Phase Four included a lot of introductions. (He’s the guy overseeing all of these movies and shows, he should have a pretty good idea what they’re about.) But another theme has dominated every single Phase Four movie and show, even the ones that weren’t necessarily about introducing “new” heroes and villains. This theme cropped up in the first couple of Marvel series on Disney+. When the pandemic eased, and Marvel began releasing movies in theaters, it continued there, and in every single thing that the company has produced in the last three years for both the large and small screen. Marvel has dubbed Phases Four, Five, and Six of their ongoing universe “The Multiverse Saga.” Unofficially, this first phase of that saga has been all about one thing: Defining one’s identity.

    Over and over, Phase Four heroes (and even a few villains) have wrestled with existential questions like “Who am I? Who do I want to be? Am I bound to continue the choices I’ve made thus far in my story? Or can I change my path?” These questions go hand-in-hand with the notion of a “multiverse,” where there exists an infinite number of variations of every single person: A good Doctor Strange, an evil Doctor Strange, a zombie Doctor Strange, a Doctor Strange who is lactose intolerant, a Doctor Strange who harbors an irrational hatred of the Minnesota Timberwolves, and so on. These “variants,” as Marvel calls them, allows the studio to turn allegorical identity crises into literal battles for the future of the MCU.

    The malleable nature of identity has been one of the most important and pervasive themes in Marvel Comics since the company’s earliest days. Spider-Man hid his secret identity to protect Aunt May, and often found himself struggling to decide which of his two roles — hero or humble science nerd — was his real and authentic self. The mutants of the Marvel Universe were constantly called upon to define themselves — as X-Men or members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants — and to grapple with how those allegiances placed them inside or outside the boundaries of the rest of modern society.

    Marvel’s early movies, in contrast, rarely explored this idea. Tony Stark ended the first Iron Man defiantly revealing his armored alter ego. From that moment on, the MCU largely abandoned the concept of secret identities as a source of tension and suspense. Everyone knew Tony Stark was Iron Man and that Steve Rogers was Captain America, and that Doctor Strange was a doctor turned sorcerer who lived in an impossibly posh mansion in the middle of Greenwich Village. (Seriously, who is his realtor? Can you imagine how many Infinity Stones you could buy with the proceeds from selling the Sanctum?) With very few exceptions, Marvel’s early movie heroes rarely questioned their superheroic destinies or struggled to juggle the needs of their public and private lives.

    That changed dramatically with Phase Four of the MCU. Here is a movie by movie and show by show breakdown of how it happened.

    How Every MCU Phase Four Movie and Show Is Connected

    Seven movies. Eight shows. One theme unites them all — and here is how.

    If superhero stories are power fantasies, then Phase Four of the MCU has been a fantasy of reinvention. Its heroes shed personas the way snakes shed their skin, discarding previous identities and allegiances for new (and occasionally contradictory) ones. Whether that fantasy is resonating with audiences is up for debate; while Phase Four has featured one of Marvel’s biggest hits (Spider-Man: No Way Home) it’s also included one of its biggest critical and commercial flops (Eternals). Perhaps it is Marvel itself, which has already churned through 30 films, many classic story concepts, and dozens upon dozens of its best characters, for whom the idea of reinvention seems particularly appealing.

    It will be interesting to see whether this idea continues into Phases Five and Six of the MCU, or whether it will eased into the background for other thematic concerns. The first movie in MCU Phase Five is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which co-stars Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, a variant of a character who previously debuted in the Loki TV series — so these concepts won’t vanish completely from the MCU in the near future. It could very well be that we eventually look back on all of the Multiverse Saga as Marvel’s unofficial Identity Saga as well.

    The Best Marvel Heroes Who Haven’t Joined the MCU Yet

    These great Marvel characters have yet to make the jump to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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    Matt Singer

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