Tron: Ares

Scientists at Disney generate a sequel to Tron and Tron: Legacy

I was one of the handful of people who saw Tron: Ares in theatres last fall. I love and enjoy Tron: Legacy beyond its merits and have shared it with my kids, who revere it, and if Tron: Ares had turned out to be good I planned to take them. I never did—not because it wasn’t good but because it was neither good nor bad enough for me to make up my mind about. I decided to give it another look at home when it came out on Blu-ray. That finally happened this month.

The plot, in brief: Tron: Legacy ended with the escape of a purely digital person into flesh-and-blood reality, and the new film’s very loose connection to that one is in the vast potential latent in the ability to transfer digital assets to reality. Kevin and Sam Flynn’s old company Encom is trying to develop this power to solve all the problems in the world. Old Encom rival Dillinger Systems wants to 3D-print weapons, vehicles, and expendable soldiers to sell to the military. Both are headed by Wunderkind CEOS: Encom by Eve Kim, who struggles to keep her idealistic sister’s dream of ending scarcity alive, and Dillinger by the ruthless Julian Dillinger, under the watchful but impotent eye of his mother Elisabeth.

Into this computer arms race steps the Ares of the title. Ares is a combat program created by Dillinger and trained on countless cycles of simulated combat, death, and regeneration. Dillinger shows him off to investors as the crowning achievement of his project. The problem is that Ares—and everything else generated from the system—only lasts twenty-nine minutes in the real world before disintegrating. This fact drives both Kim and Dillinger’s pursuit of “the permanence code.”

Through a little friendly corporate espionage, including the use of Ares to penetrate and exploit Encom’s servers in search of the code, Dillinger learns that Kim may have recovered it from old files hidden away by her sister. From this point forward it’s a race for Kim to bring the code safely back to Encom, for Dillinger to stop her and take it—through increasingly desperate means—and for Ares, who has begun questioning his programming, to decide what action to take.

Tron: Ares has a number of weaknesses, the chief of which is that the villain is much, much more interesting than either of the heroes. Eve Kim and friends are annoying do-gooders whom the screenwriters have worked too hard to make plucky and likeable, and Ares, as played by Jared Leto, is too convincingly robotic. Evan Peters’s Julian Dillinger, on the other hand, shows cunning and intelligence from his first scene and an amoral pragmatism barely restrained by the influence of his mother, played with chilly and ambiguous control by Gillian Anderson. The moment Julian has an opportunity to take decisive but irreversible action against his greatest rival, he struggles, but only so much. His lifetime of seizing every opportunity that will benefit himself has led to this, and even though he knows it’s wrong and we know that he’ll choose it, we see and feel the weight of the temptation crush him. Peters is likely the best thing in the movie.

This imbalance affects the entire film. It may be a cliche to point out how bad Jared Leto is since everyone online has been dogpiling him for months, but some cliches become cliches because they’re true. (My kids also insist I point out that he has weird hair. In a more artistic vein, my daughter noted that Ares, as a character, is more interesting in the first few minutes when he wears a mask. The moment Jared Leto’s vapid face is revealed, the mystery dissipates. A sharp observation, I’m proud to say.)

That said, the plot, which is simple but effective despite the banality of the movie’s heroes and escalates nicely heading into the final act, the production design and look of the film, the music, the special effects, and the action scenes make up for a lot. Despite the complexity of some of what the movie is offering, it’s intuitively presented—my kids had no trouble following it. I’ve seen director Joachim Rønning take some flak for Tron: Ares as an unimaginative hired gun, but I think the visual storytelling and style of the film serve the story well. I don’t find Nine Inch Nails’ electronic score as enjoyable by itself as I still do Daft Punk’s incredible Tron: Legacy score, but it works well within the movie.

No one should go into a Tron movie looking for deep ideas. As much as I love Tron: Legacy, its Kevin Flynn is given to some silly opining about how much his video game world will challenge the foundational thought of all of civilization. Spoken like a true techbro. Kim and Dillinger, at least, are less prone to philosophizing. (There is an irony in how this movie asks us to root for the good AI overlords against the bad ones; I found myself wishing both could fail. A touch of tonedeafness on the part of the producers.)

But Tron: Legacy and now Tron: Ares do deliver some great action. My kids found the buildup to the climactic sequence, in which Dillinger, having lost control of his own programs, sees his facility print and dispatch lethal weapons tech into the city in pursuit of Kim and Ares, unbearably suspenseful. It’s well-set up and well-executed, and the Terminator-like indestructabilty of Dillinger’s chief henchman posed an intense added threat.

Tron: Ares does not measure up to Tron: Legacy, but it tries to develop one small element of the latter in interesting ways and has satisfying, enjoyable Tron-flavored action. One can’t help but wonder how much better it might have been with a few tweaks, including someone in the title role with more visible depth than Jared Leto (which wouldn’t have happened, as he produced the movie). Having waited several months to rewatch it with my kids, I found myself liking it much more the second time around, not least since they responded so strongly to it.

Impressing kids is not everything, but it’s not nothing, and—following on from The Fantastic Four: First Steps—I’m pleased to have shared it with them. If there are more flawed but enjoyable and workmanlike adventures out there, we’ll take them.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby as Reed Richards and Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps

I recently watched The Fantastic Four: First Steps with the kids. It was okay—enjoyable without thrills, funny without big laughs, suspenseful without surprises. But it was also inoffensive, had a creative retro-futuristic look that took me back to The Incredibles, and had one compelling subplot that held the entire movie together and made it just a bit more than the sum of its parts. This won’t be a proper review of the entire movie, but a recommendation on the basis of its straight-down-the-middle quality and this one surprising aspect of the story.

The movie begins with husband and wife Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic and Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman discovering that, after two years of trying without success, they are finally expecting a baby. This might seem an odd place for a superhero movie to start, but the pregnancy and baby subplot—which I heard a lot about when the movie came out—turns out to be central to the story. The film’s villain, Galactus, who means to devour the Earth, offers to spare the planet in exchange for the Richards’s unborn child. They refuse. The public turns on the Fantastic Four.

This was a refreshing surprise for two reasons:

First, the baby, even before birth, is presented unquestioningly as living and important. The most moving scene in the film comes when Reed wants to scan the baby in utero and Sue, in an attempt to show that his science is distracting him from the truth of the situation, uses her powers of invisibility to reveal their son in her stomach. He squirms, kicks, and responds to them—all stuff I’ve seen on ultrasound monitors many times, that my wife has felt many more. In a culture that persists in dehumanizing the unborn—for pernicious, devouring reasons of its own—this lingering meditation on their life and value stunned me.

Second, the film explicitly positions the Richards’s refusal to give up their baby against a utilitarian, consequentialist ethic. Saying no to Galactus means he will eat the Earth. The fickle public, who adore the Four one moment and revile them the next, want to know why the fate of one baby should doom the entire planet. This is the Caiaphas argument: it is more expedient for one to die than the whole nation.

Reed and Sue steadfastly refuse to give in. It is wrong for parents to sacrifice the life of the child gifted to them. They won’t give up on saving the world, but that route—the path of least resistance, of giving in to the pressure of numbers and a short-term vision of salvation—is closed to them. I can’t think of the last time a film made such a deontological move, presenting something as morally wrong under any circumstances. Their refusal in the face of public pressure and the threat of Galactus makes them more heroic.

The latter aspect of the film not only drives the events of the climax, it reinforces the message of the former. If Sue and Reed, in their joy at the news, their preparation for the baby’s arrival, and their refusal to give him up show that life is too precious to bargain, the climactic action, in which all four demonstrate their willingness to die for the innocent, shows us that they mean it. Life is valuable. How valuable? This valuable!

Again, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is not an earth-shattering movie. It’s enjoyable entertainment with a unique aesthetic and more thought put into it than the last several Marvel movies combined—a low bar. What sets it apart is its wholehearted commitment to a vision of the value of human life—even in the womb—and its courage in allowing the characters to live that out without compromise. This was a great surprise, and I hope we can see more like this.

No aristocracy worth its salt

This week Before They Were Live dropped a new episode on Moana 2, which I haven’t seen, but Michial and Josh’s discussion of the film’s manifold weaknesses got me thinking about one of the biggest flaws in Frozen.

A few years ago I ranted about the dam in Frozen II—a badly imagined piece of infrastructure that has no use beyond serving as a cack-handed metaphor for the film’s political message. But that dam is not the first useless thing affecting the plot of a Frozen movie. I want to look at the first film’s villain, Prince Hans, and more specifically Arendelle’s useless aristocracy.

Here’s the rub: Prince Hans arrives early in the film and he and Anna, Queen Elsa’s younger sister, fall instantly in love. He swans around in a secondary role for a while until the climactic twist: Hans does not love Anna and, as the youngest son of another kingdom’s dynasty, as deliberately insinuated himself into Arendelle’s royal family to await an opportunity to take over. With Elsa feared and effectively outlawed and Anna mortally wounded by Elsa’s ice powers, Hans refuses Anna the kiss that will save her life, tells the handful of nobles hanging around the court that she’s dead, seizes control of Arendelle, and leads the attempt to eliminate Elsa. Boo, hiss.

I’m heartened to learn that I’m not the first person to criticize Hans as a villain. Others have pointed out the thin to nonexistent foreshadowing of his ulterior motives and the fact that his actions earlier in the film are counterproductive to his plot. (He’s also, in keeping with the political valence of the dam in Frozen II, more of a feminist device than a character, but more on that later.) These are legitimate complaints but not my chief problem with him.

The biggest problem with Hans, his plot, and Frozen’s climax is Arendelle’s useless aristocracy. I actually use this as a negative example when lecturing on the medieval nobility in Western Civ. Imagine: the youngest son of a foreign royal family shows up in a kingdom just emerging from a regency and ingratiates himself with the princess who is second in line to the throne. And consider the climax, when Hans, the only person allowed to talk to the severely ill princess, appears and tells the leading men that Anna is dead. Somewhere else. Trust me, bros. And they do.

A real aristocracy would have sniffed out Hans’s intentions in about ten seconds. No aristocracy worth its salt would have missed this, or failed to act against it. They would have sworn oaths to Elsa and her family and had roles to play under her rule and with respect to each other, roles they would fiercely protect. They would have duties and prerogatives. If they had somehow let things get to the point of Hans announcing Anna’s death, they would have demanded evidence. Immediately. He would have been an object of suspicion from beginning to end. A Bismarck, a John of Gaunt, a William Marshal, an Eorl Godwin, or your pick of the Percys, Hohenzollerns, or Carolingians would have eaten Hans alive.

But Arendelle does not have an aristocracy worth its salt. There are only four other men in the room when Hans makes his bid for control and one of them is a foreign diplomat. The rest are nameless drones in uniforms and sashes. This curiously empty kingdom must be either an absolute monarchy, with Elsa at the top and no mediating ranks between her and the people, or have an unseen, unmentioned parliament that has reduced the monarch to a figurehead—which I strongly doubt, if Elsa’s throne is as desirable as Hans thinks it is.

You could try to excuse this as the necessary simplicity of a children’s film, but children’s films don’t have to be simple. It’s more a cliche born of a typical American incuriosity regarding nobility, Americans being incapable of imagining aristocrats as having functions and not just being privileged people who are excusable as targets of scorn and envy. Frozen’s feminist underpinnings are also a factor, feminist ideology—whatever the movement’s other merits—being a universal machine for making complex reality stupidly oversimplified. Google Prince Hans and see how often the cliche “toxic” comes up. He’s a powerful man and other powerful men are just going to trust him and follow him.

Again, study history, even a little bit.

Hans and the Arendelle nobility aren’t just unrealistic—though it’s fun to nitpick and, when I point this out in class, to see students recognize it as a flaw based on what we’ve learned about the past. The real problem is that the combined lack of imagination and ideological cliche evidenced in Hans weaken the story. Like the dam in Frozen II, he’s there to make a point and reinforce a message, not to live and breathe.

A real aristocracy—the kind that patronized the courtly love poets and commissioned altarpieces and cathedrals—wouldn’t have made this mistake.

Does it matter if the movie is faithful to the book?

Over the weekend Substack, in its mysterious way, showed me a month-old note by a literary critic I follow and respect. Since this is a month old and there was already some debate along these lines in the comments, I’ll share and gloss it anonymously:

It doesn’t matter if the film is faithful to the book.
It’s a film! Judge it as a film.
And anyway, you cannot faithfully turn prose into film.
It’s an affront to literary genius to think otherwise.

I’m not actually sure what the last line is supposed to mean. How does holding a filmmaker to a high standard when adapting a writer’s work degrade the writer? But I strenuously object to the rest of it.

To work backwards, the critic here is asserting that the difficulty of adaptation from one medium into another actually makes it impossible—“you cannot faithfully” adapt from book to film, he says. An appalling oversimplification. What does he mean by “prose,” here? When we talk about how a book is adapted into a film and the film isn’t faithful, we might mean it fails with regard to one or more of the following:

• The literal events of the book

• The overall story arc of the book

• Particular details of the settings and/or characters

• The narrative structure of the book

• The meaning or thematic import of the book

• The tone of the book

I’ve tried to arrange that list from simplest to most complex. The events narrated in a story are the easiest to get on screen. The meaning, what the author is apparently both getting out of the story and trying to share through it, and the tone of his storytelling are much harder. We’ve probably all seen movies that more or less adapted a book’s events without capturing the immaterial elements that give the book personality. A Handful of Dust, a quite literal adaptation of the great Waugh novel, comes to mind, as does the John Wayne True Grit. But other films might deviate here and there from the original while nailing its tone and moral register. The Coens’ No Country for Old Men and True Grit, both of which capture most of the events of their respective novels while, much more importantly, faithfully adapting their tones, are masterpieces in this regard.

All of this, according to our critic, is just “prose,” which “cannot faithfully” be made into a film. Cannot. This is not only oversimplified but wrong. Adaptation is difficult, but that we want to judge faithfulness at all indicates that it can be done, and can be done well.

Our critic is on firmer ground in asserting that films and books should be judged by different artistic standards, but this is common sense. Novels and movies tell stories in different ways and may or may not do so well, of course. But—still moving backwards—to assert a novel and its film adaptation are so separate that “it doesn’t matter” whether the adaptation is true to the book is foolishness.

Of course it matters. It matters because if a film adaptation of a book exists it exists because of the book. If a movie presumes to share a title with an author’s book, if it is meant to please readers of the book at all and not to be purely parasitic on the writer’s work and readership—we’re all familiar with the term cash-grab by now—the filmmakers owe it to the book to be faithful in at least some of the areas listed above. And having established that faithfulness is not, in fact, impossible, they owe it to the original to try.

I think it also matters because this kind of talk about the difficulty or impossibility of faithful adaptation has far too often served as an excuse for vandalism. Some vandalism originates with filmmakers contemptuous of their literary source material and wanting to drag it down to their level. Some comes from filmmakers who hubristically think they can improve on great literature. But perhaps the most common problem is the filmmaker with neither contempt nor reverence for the original, who sees it only as raw material to be reworked according to his preferences. It’s all content, after all.

This was my problem with two of the worst film adaptations I’ve seen in the last few years, The Green Knight and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which—if you look at my reviews—I tried to judge on their merits as films while also noting their utter failure as adaptations. They don’t adapt the events, characters, meaning, or tone of the originals even a little bit faithfully. Are we to give them a pass because they have nice cinematography? Because they try to flatter our present assumptions?

There are other reasons to demand faithfulness of a film adaptation—the movie may be the one and only time many viewers, especially students, encounter any version of an author’s story—but these, I think, are the strongest. There is room for debate, of course. Arguments about whether and how Peter Jackson succeeded in adapting The Lord of the Rings, for example, have been fruitful for an appreciation of both the film trilogy and the novel. But handwaving even the possibility of faithfully adapting a book is bad for both.

A film might be just a film, but a film based on a book exists in relation to that book. If an author cared enough to write it and readers cared enough to read it, filmmakers owe them something more than apathy, hubris, or contempt. So do critics.

Back in ’82

Our first glimpse of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) in Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Just about this time a couple years ago, I reflected on the pain and melancholy running through some old kids’ films like Angels in the Outfield and The Land Before Time. I’ve been pondering that again thanks to an unlikely film: Napoleon Dynamite, which I introduced to my kids over the weekend.

Napoleon Dynamite, like I noted about those other movies, is not Shakespeare or serious drama, but it’s well enough made and true enough to life to suggest more upon repeat viewings—especially when those viewings are separated by a decade or so. It’s been at least fifteen years since I watched it. When I last saw it in my twenties, it was pure quirky goofiness, like Mormon Wes Anderson costumed by a rural thrift store. Watching it with my kids in my early forties, I was not surprised to laugh again—especially since my kids thought it was a such a hoot—but I was surprised at how sweet, poignant, and melancholy I found it.

There’s a lot of unremarked upon pain in Napoleon Dynamite. Why do Napoleon and Kip live with their grandma? Where are their parents? How long has it been like this? Years, to judge by Napoleon’s behavior. His diaphragm-deep sighs are both hilarious and suggestive of repeated disappointment and frustration. Pedro, too, as comically stoic as he is, panics at least twice in the movie and develops psychosomatic fevers. They’re both holding a lot in. One sympathizes.

But there is also the case of Uncle Rico. He’s one of the movie’s sort-of villains, but is perhaps more fully developed than almost all of the other characters and actually talks about his melancholy several times. We learn that he is separated from Tammy, who is presumably his wife. His bluff, cocky way of dismissing Kip’s concern is funny when you’re in your twenties and suggests he’s hiding something—his own misbehavior, or simply how much it hurts—in your forties. He approaches his pitiful door-to-door Tupperware sales job with a confidence that smacks of desperation. He’s trying, but trying to do what?

The movie backs all this up visually. It introduces Uncle Rico utterly alone, in a beautiful and desolate landscape shot. His weird behavior only underlines what we grasp intuitively. And his first substantial scene, eating steak on the steps with Kip, gives us his “Back in ’82” monologue, which is hilariously pathetic, recognizable (the guy who peaked in high school is such a well known type he would be a cliche if he weren’t real), and sad. Uncle Rico is lonely and filled with regret—the football memories are just the way he can safely handle it.

It helps immensely that Jon Gries is a good actor. Watch him in that scene and look at the emotions that pass over his face. As with so much else in the movie, it’s both funny and poignantly done.

Not that Uncle Rico should be viewed more sympathetically. He’s a manipulative con man and liar who turns into a creep as the movie goes on. If this were his story rather than Napoleon’s, it’d be about hitting rock bottom. But at my age Uncle Rico is less of a joke than he used to be. He’s a there but for the grace of God caricature who proves both poignant and cathartic to laugh at.

I don’t want to get too far up the movie’s own tail end, because Napoleon Dynamite is a comedy. But part of what makes it funny is how identifiable it is—at least for those of us who were awkward and frustrated in high school. And, like all great comedies, that seam of melancholy only makes the humor deeper and richer and its little notes of redemption, as for Uncle Rico, to whom Tammy returns in the final seconds, more moving.

Kubrick, conspiracism, and what happens when we assume

Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson on set. The miniature hedgemaze in the foreground is an accidental metaphor for the subject of this post.

YouTuber Man Carrying Thing posted a funny and thought-provoking video yesterday concerning a strange emergent pop culture conspiracy theory. Apparently some disappointed fans of “Stranger Things” decided that secret new episodes are on their way, a fact signaled through elaborate visual codes in the final season. (I have no dog in this fight. I saw the first season when it first appeared and have not bothered with any of it since.) These fans have compiled huge numbers of minor details as “evidence” but the date of the supposed release of these surprise episodes has already come and gone. Undeterred, they continue with the predictions.

Jake (Man Carrying Thing) has some thoughtful things to say about this weird story, the most important of which, I think, is the role of bad storytelling in creating false assumptions and the way those assumptions fuel the mad conclusions these fans have come to. In the process he makes a brief comparison to Stanley Kubrick and The Shining, which is what I really want to write about here.

The Shining is the subject of several bizarre but elaborately worked out theories, the two most prominent of which are that the film functions as a hidden-in-plain-sight confession by Kubrick that he faked the moon landings for NASA and that the film has something to say about the fate of American Indians.

The latter is more easily disposed with along the lines Jake uses for some of the “evidence” of the “Stranger Things” theory. Why does the Overlook Hotel have so many Native American decorations? Because that’s what a Western hotel in that era would decorate with. Next question.

The NASA stuff goes deeper, though, and this is where Jake’s comments on the assumptions behind such theories are pertinent. The conspiracy theory interpretations of The Shining lean heavily on several assumptions, the most important of which is that Stanley Kubrick meticulously planned everything about his films down to the last item in every frame. Every detail, the argument goes, is intentional and meaningful, and so the film can and has, as Jake notes, been analyzed frame by frame for “evidence” of these theories. But is this assumption correct?

No. Kubrick was meticulous, yes, but not that meticulous. Or not that kind of meticulous. He was, in fact, too good an artist for that.

I encourage everyone to watch “The Making of The Shining,” a documentary shot by Kubrick’s 17-year old daughter Vivian and included as a special feature on the DVD and Blu-ray. (You can also watch it online here.) While the myth of Kubrick is of the chilly visionary with a perfect movie in his head that he brutally forces into reality, Vivian Kubrick captures her father changing and adapting on the fly, picking the ballroom music at the last minute, discussing the different versions—plural—of the script, and even coming up with the iconic floor-level angle of Jack Nicholson in the storage locker as they’re shooting the scene. She presents us the collaborative mess of filmmaking.

Kubrick knew what he wanted, but he had to work his way there, improvising and improving. This both rubbishes the conspiracist assumption about Kubrick, that The Shining presents some utterly controlled pre-planned message, and also functions as broadly applicable insight into creative work and human nature.

Any good artist in whatever medium will have a clear goal and an idea of how to accomplish it but will also adapt as they go, even the meticulous ones. That’s because every plan is subject to the combined friction of creative work and reality, which test the artist. The later illusion of coherence and completeness is part of the art. A great artist like Kubrick can disguise it well, because thanks to his gifts the final product is better than what he set out to make. But the Duffer brothers? Jake—and audience reaction to the conclusion of “Stranger Things”—suggests otherwise.

As for human nature, conspiracy theories, whose protagonists are often hypercompetent if not omnipotent, fail to take account of the messy, improvisatory quality of reality, especially when they presume to encompass a larger slice of it than that available on a film set. They are, as German scholar Michael Butter puts it in The Nature of Conspiracy Theories, “based on the assumption that human beings can direct the course of history according to their own intentions . . . that history is plannable.” Or in Jake’s words, “So many conspiracy theories would lose their convincing quality if those who believed them acknowledged human fallibility.”

Recognizing this can make us less susceptible to falsehood—because we all know what happens when we assume—and better creators. A strange but heartening intersection.

Sehnsucht and flying

This week while running Christmas errands—including a couple trips to urgent care—I listened to the latest episode of The Rewatchables, a 100-minute conversation about F1, which was great entertainment both in the theatre and at home.

The movie is bookended with scenes in which the main character, skilled “never-was” driver Sonny Hayes, is asked about the money involved in racing. Both times he says, “It’s not about the money.” Both times he’s asked in response, “So what is it about?” The answer comes just past the midpoint of the movie, when Sonny opens up to Kate, his romantic interest. After explaining his past—early promise, a near-fatal crash, anger, resentment—he describes realizing that what he’d lost in his youth was his “love for racing.” That’s what it’s really about. And that love is both rooted, sustained, and occasionally manifested in a specific experience. Sonny:

“It’s rare, but sometimes there’s a moment in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful, and I can see everything. And no one, no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to. I want to. Because in that moment—I’m flying.”

Kudos to Brad Pitt for selling this speech. I felt it.

What the discussion on The Rewatchables made me realize, in reflecting on this expression of longing and its fulfillment at the climax of the movie for the nth time since watching F1, is that Sonny is describing a sensation for which we actually have a word: Sehnsucht.

Sehnsucht is a loanword from German meaning “longing” or “yearning” or, in the prosaic translation possible, “desire,” but implies much more than these. Far from a rational want or need or a simple appetite which can be gratified materially, Sehnsucht is sharp, long-lasting, oriented toward something far-off, rare, but obtainable, and is as sweet to endure as it is to fulfil. It was an important concept to the German Romantics and—the point of this post—CS Lewis.

Lewis wrote about Sehnsucht explicitly in a few places (and there’s an academic journal dedicated to Lewis’s work by this name), but his most memorable and poignant descriptions of it some from his memoir Surprised by Joy, in which Sehnsucht plays the title role. In the first chapter, Lewis describes three childhood incidents that awakened in him a sense of and permanent desire for “joy.” This aching desire proved yet more poignant by breaking in unexpectedly—while peering into his brother’s toy garden, when reading Squirrel Nutkin, when reading an English translation of skaldic poetry—and unpredictably. Lewis:

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to all three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is the kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

As Sonny Hayes might put it, “It’s not about the money.”

F1 is satisfying because it makes us feel Sonny’s Sehnsucht, a source and object of desire worth orienting one’s entire life around, and the joy, too deep for words, that comes with its satisfaction. This speaks to people—look at the climactic scene on YouTube and browse the comments. I’m not going to pretend that F1 is high drama, but it’s exquisitely crafted entertainment and, in the person of Sonny and his sweet, unsatisfied desire to “fly,” dramatizes beautifully an aspect of the human heart that is all too easy to ignore or, in our age, simply smother.

But of course Lewis would remind us that even Sehnsucht is not desire itself, but a pointer beyond: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. . . . Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

Tellingly, despite getting the girl, saving his friend’s team, raising a younger driver to maturity, and winning the big race, F1 ends with Sonny back on the road, chasing that feeling of flying.

The Odyssey trailer reaction

Matt Damon as Odysseus in the teaser trailer for The Odyssey (2026)

To say that Christopher Nolan’s treatment of Homer is highly anticipated would be an understatement. By the time I discovered the first teaser for The Odyssey this evening while doing some last-minute Christmas shopping for my kids, the official trailer on the Universal YouTube channel had been up twelve hours and already had 9.8 million views. (Addendum: In the time it’s taken me to dash off these thoughts and observations, the trailer has cleared ten million views.)

So, in a very real sense, what I think doesn’t matter. Here are my thoughts anyway.

I’ve mentioned recently that, while I like Nolan generally and love a couple of his movies, I think his success and the leeway studios have given him since he wrapped up his Batman trilogy have led him further and further into self-indulgence. This peaked with Tenet, which was entertaining because Nolan is a spectacular showman and completely incomprehensible because, with its involuted story, he leaned hard into all of his own worst instincts. Part of what kept it from being a pure disaster was that its slick near-future world was fitting for his style: Inception and Interstellar both fit the bill, as does the futuristic Wayne Enterprises tech of his Batman movies, especially The Dark Knight Rises.

But imagine that recognizable Nolan aesthetic—matte black tactical gear, brushed steel and brutalist concrete, affectless acting, and obsessive rejection of linear time—transferred to… the Bronze Age.

I follow a number of gifted historical and archaeological artists on social media and the scuttlebutt is that Nolan’s crew reached out to some experts in Mycenaean material culture and then ghosted them. It shows. Homer’s world was a world of elaborate courtesy and protocol, gold, jewels, and precious metals, and suits of burnished bronze armor that thundered when their warriors leapt from their chariots to do battle. Matt Damon’s crew from Ithaca look like someone asked an LLM to blend 1950s sword-and-sandal Romans with a SWAT team.

That’s harsh, I guess. I’m not particularly hopeful. As much as I like Nolan, he has to be one of the filmmakers least suited to this kind of story. (Let me second what some of those historical artists have wished for: a Homer adaptation from Robert Eggers.) If I hope anything, I hope I’m wrong.

With (most of) the negativity out of the way, here are a few things that impressed me in this teaser:

• The IMAX cinematography looks atmospheric as Hades, so to speak. Hoyte van Hoytema is working with Nolan again and a number of the brief glimpses we get of major episodes from the Odyssey look good in strict filmmaking terms.

• Anne Hathaway as Penelope looks pretty woebegone in her brief appearance. I like Hathaway but wonder if she has the requisite cunning for the woman who was so perfectly matched to Odysseus. (My ideal casting: Rebecca Ferguson, who combines regal beauty with obvious, potentially terrifying intelligence.)

• I like the shots in Polyphemus’s cave, but am puzzled that we actually get a brief glimpse of a giant, shadowy form entering behind Odysseus’s men. Word was that Nolan’s Odyssey would be demythologized to some degree. Perhaps not? Or will the adventure scenes be Odysseus’s exaggerated retelling? If Nolan indulges in his nonlinear storytelling it will surely be when Odysseus is rescued and hosted by the Phaiakians and tells them his story—a portion of the poem that, to be fair, lends itself to Nolan’s thing.

• We get a glimpse of Benny Safdie as Agamemnon near the beginning. Ridiculous Greek fantasy armor. Perhaps an artifact of Odysseus telling an embellished version of his story?

• We don’t see him in the trailer, but Jon Bernthal is listed as playing Menelaus. I’d like to have seen him—or someone like him—in the lead. Bernthal looks tough and has unbelievable charisma. Somehow he keeps getting slotted into second-fiddle roles behind flat, awkward leads (e.g. “The Pacific,” in which he by all rights should have played John Basilone, and “The Walking Dead”). Robert Pattinson is also slated to play Antinous, one of Penelope’s suitors, which should give him plenty of opportunities to steal the scene.

• Back to the trailer. We get brief glimpses of the Trojan Horse. No idea what the Achaians are doing hoisting it out of the sea, but the shots of the warriors crammed inside look great.

• Near the end we get some eerie shots of what appear to be Odysseus’s journey to the underworld. Not at all what I imagine when reading the story, but exceptionally atmospheric and spooky. Rightly so. Curious to know if we’ll see a bored, disillusioned Achilles.

• Devotees of ancient Greek shipbuilding are upset about behind-the-scenes images of the ships here. I know just enough to identify them as clinker-built, which is right for the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings but obviously wrong for Mycenaean Greece. That may or may not bother you.

• We end with an Odysseus and Penelope before the war, who seem much weepier and worrisome than the figures from Homer. Homer’s Odysseus cries, to be sure, but only after twenty years of bloodshed and captivity. Maybe it’s just that I have a hard time taking Matt Damon seriously when he channels high emotion. (His outburst as General Groves in Oppenheimer came across to me as impotent rather than righteous rage.)

So—we’ll see. This is a teaser trailer with perhaps a minute of footage, after all, and much of the film’s staggeringly large cast doesn’t appear at all. (Keeping Zendaya—as Athena!?—offscreen might have been a smart move.) It will certainly trade in spectacle, and maybe that will be enough. I’ve loved plenty of other atrocious historical films on that level (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), but something else those movies had going for them was strong performances and surehanded storytelling. Again—we’ll see.

I’m with those who were hoping for something a bit more meticulous in its reconstruction of Homer’s world, something we still haven’t really seen onscreen before. But that, for better or worse, is not Nolan’s forte. Even from this teaser it’s clear that he’s put his unmistakable stamp on the story. My hope is that, even without material fidelity to the original’s world, Homer himself will once again prove so strong that his power will shine through despite the filmmakers.

Against director’s cuts

Here’s a very good Substack essay that dares to say something I’ve thought for a long, long time: the theatrical cuts of The Lord of the Rings are better than the extended editions.

The author, Ryan Kunz, offers several good arguments in support of this unpopular opinion, not the least of which are the pacing problems introduced with the extra footage but largely absent from the theatrical cuts. This is what initially disappointed me about the extended editions twenty-odd years ago. In The Fellowship of the Ring’s climactic battle against the Uruk-hai, Howard Shore’s excellent music is chopped and stretched to accommodate additional action and orc blood, leaving seams in the soundtrack that I was never able to ignore. I actually resented the changes for breaking up the music. Fellowship, which is still my favorite and, I think, the best-crafted of the three movies, does not benefit much simply from being longer.

Few movies do. The movies that have actually been improved by a director’s cut are few and far between. Das Boot and Kingdom of Heaven come to mind.

But these are rare exceptions. Most often a director’s cut is a sign of bloat, of creative restlessness, or a studio cash grab. Sometimes a director in the grip of an obsessive spirit of experimentation simply won’t leave a movie alone, as in the multiple competing cuts of Blade Runner and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Much more commonly, a director’s cut simply offers more movie without actually integrating the extra footage well—quantity over quality, the whole problem with the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. Apocalypse Now: Redux and the director’s cut of Gettysburg, which has many of the same pacing faults I complained about in Fellowship, also fit the bill. The cheap, vulgar version of this is the spate of unrated DVDs from the early 2000s—especially in the horror genre—which were excuses for a volume of gore and nudity that would have precluded theatrical release.

And yet that spirit is not entirely absent from the Lord of the Rings extended editions. I remember when each came out, year after year, the first two were announced with a breathless promise that they would be not only longer but R-rated. This suggested a prurient interest in gore for its own sake that bothered me at the time. (Remember Peter Jackson’s background.) One almost sensed the disappointment as each extended edition, year after year, was slapped with the same PG-13 as the theatrical cuts.

In addition to bloat and pacing problems, the footage included in director’s cuts often consists of already inferior material. Most of the additional footage in Gettysburg is clunky talk, as when Pickett’s Charge is stopped cold for a monologue from General Trimble, complete with awkwardly looped score. Kunz also notes the cringey, anachronistic humor in The Two Towers. Théoden’s line in the same film, improvised to Jackson’s delight by Bernard Hill, that “No parent should have to bury their child” is similarly cringeworthy. A parent burying their child, not a father burying his? And in what world before our own would this be a reasonable expectation? The filmmakers betray their sentimentalism here. This is a scene that undermines its own sense of the tragic and the tone of the movie.

The ready availability of the director’s cut or extended edition, especially when it becomes expected, can also be a crutch, as I noted regarding Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. This was a disaster of a movie that Scott—notice that he’s popped up three times now—was already asserting would be improved by a longer cut before it even hit theatres.

There is also a fanboy dimension to all of this. As Substacker and fantasy author Eric Falden noted in his restack of Kunz’s essay, there is a certain maximalist “mimetic” quality to some fans’ devotion to the extended editions that feels purely performative. The way this is communicated is usually the giveaway: “Watching The Lord of the Rings again—extended editions, of course.”

That’s off-putting and sets off my anti-joining reflexes, but the artistic considerations have always been most important to me. Jackson, like any good filmmaker, worked really, really hard to make Fellowship, the trial balloon, the best movie it could possibly be, taking the fullest possible advantage of the medium—tight structure, fast-pacing, telling exactly as much story as it needed to in a surprisingly light and economical three hours. Its runaway success led to perceptible slackness in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, a slackness that turned to bloat by piling on additional footage for the extended DVDs.

This may have proven good fanservice, but it is not good filmmaking—or, lest we forget, adaptation. The Lord of the Rings excels as a novel. The movies should excel as movies.

Food for thought. I’m not against director’s cuts per se, of course, and I don’t hate The Lord of the Rings extended editions, but I think director’s cuts have to do much more to justify their existence—and fans’ devotion to them—than simply be longer.

Jones on Scott on the Middle Ages

For the anniversary of Agincourt over the weekend I started reading Dan Jones’s Henry V, a biography released late last year. I’m enjoying it so far, though I am still skeptical of the stylistic decision to write the story in present tense. I may have thoughts about here if and when I review it.

I began reading with some wariness but I came around quickly when, in the introduction, Jones strongly, straightforwardly argued for Henry’s greatness, something he aims to prove in his book, and several chapters in, when Jones dropped this footnote about a high-profile incident of trial-by-combat in France just before Henry’s time:

This case was the basis for the 2021 film The Last Duel, which made the 1386 battle between Carrouges and Le Gris a vehicle for a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first-century sexual abuse.

The Last Duel was a Ridley Scott movie, of course, which means that it was only ostensibly, superficially historical. And “ponderous” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Don’t take my word for it.

I love many of Scott’s movies but this presentism afflicts every one of his historical stories except, perhaps, his first feature, The Duellists, where the point is very much the look and technical perfection of the visuals. Style over substance may be Scott’s other besetting sin, but when he caves into that temptation there at least he’s not indulging in middlebrow navelgazing. I first wrote about this here with regard to Kingdom of Heaven way back in 2019 and—more recently and specifically on Scott’s cavalier disregard for history—before the release of the disastrous Napoleon. And of course I wrote about The Last Duel here. In the years since I saw it, my positive impressions have faded a great deal but my misgivings remain.

It’s just nice to see such succinct confirmation of the problem. Jones knows how to use a footnote.