THE HIGH-PITCHED WHINE OF DAN O’BANNON’S COFFIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Yes, that high-pitched whine you hear is Dan O’Bannon’s coffin spinning out of the grave and into low orbit. I watched the second half of the ALIEN: EARTH TV show. (From episode five on, I wrote escape capsule hit-pieces as episodes aired, just so you know.)
   In my earlier blog post on the first four episodes, I wrote that the key feature of any story featuring the ALIEN franchise is this: at some point, smart people in space must do dumb things for the story to move forward.
   Damn it. Episode five acknowledges this in the script itself. Proof of how stupid smart people can be. It’s built into the story. Too close to the alien bone?
   Now…I glossed over a whole bunch of things from the first four episodes. Take episode four, for example. In which Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling becomes an alien snake-charmer. Or something. She can talk to the animals.
   But it is time to return to those earlier episodes in talking about smart people in space doing dumb things. In episode one, you get the idea that something goes horribly wrong on the spaceship that looks awfully like Ridley Scott’s idea of a spaceship on the inside.
   But we aren’t shown that story.
   We see glimpses of the set.
   A load of viewers believed…if you build a whole set and don’t show the story in full, then there’ll be a flashback episode later. Explaining all of that nasty stuff in gory detail. As sure as chest-bursting follows a meal, that’s what we got in episode five. Must use the set. Built it for something. Use it.
   There were hints in earlier episodes of what went down. But we really must see the whole thing. And this is the point at which Dan O’Bannon’s coffin achieves escape velocity.
   Here’s the flashback set-up. Two aliens escape their containment pods. They hug faces. One member of the crew dies in an ill-advised surgical procedure. Acid, baby. The other is placed in a cryogenic suspension pod.
   Oopsie.
   The alien bursts out of that chest and flees the pod. Glass breaks when the plot demands. Hiding in the vast ship, somewhere, the alien creates the perfect set-up for an alien jailbreak. This li’l alien can sneak through vents and ignore holes in the plot or some shit, and reaches the other aliens in their safe glass containers. Mm.
   That would be okay. Believable, if you squint hard enough. One alien slithers in, fucks shit up, and slithers out again. I’d buy that. But I’m not purchasing what actually happens. The aliens in the lab stage a jailbreak by opening their prisons from the inside.
   They’re smarter than the average bear, see.
   This is dumber than a box of moon rocks. Use the alien that already fucking escaped. Let it wreak havoc in the lab. It’s the alien, for fuck’s sake. But…no. When these other aliens aren’t solving the Times crossword or Mr Rubik’s fiendish cube, they are staging a jailbreak. By…
   Now this bit is the worst bit in the episode. Breaks all the rules. It is drummed into anyone who ever sat in a science class. And it applies to the lab. NO FOOD AND DRINK IN THE LAB. Ever. True, this is an ALIEN gig…so smart people must do dumb things in space for the story to move forward over a cliff.
   There’s a lot in earlier episodes set up to pay off in this flashback, and then advance the story by switching to the here and now. But the golden opporchancity was there, and they blew it. Let the alien, from ALIEN, do its alien thing in fucking shit up. Then the new aliens can cut loose and do their alien thing. Don’t keep sidelining the original monster.
   Instead, we see the Skullfucker Octoball try to take on the adult alien. But there aren’t any eyes to pluck out. As fucking expected. At the end of the episode, we dip back into BLADE RUNNER territory with the appearance of Lady Yutani…and, for once, she isn’t on the phone to Mr Morrow the cyborg. She’s there, in person, with a bunch of mad-looking corporate samurai dudes. Send in the clones. Don’t worry. They’re here.
   The ALIEN movie gave us an alien horror with a dose of corporate evil thrown in. Here, the corporate comedy hijinks take the main BLADE RUNNER stage. In flashback land, there’s a saboteur on board, ooh, blasting bits of the spaceship into the cosmos.
   I’m surprised the alien didn’t just turn to the camera and ask the audience what the fuck it was doing here. In Michael Caine’s accent.
   You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
   It’s one of those TV shows. If you can’t work out which of these characters we are meant to care for, root for the alien.
   Am I meant to care for Mark Musk Elon Zuckerberg and his obsession with Battle Angel Alita Wendy Darling? I’d have preferred a woman in the role of the trillionaire. Blonde. With a roll-neck sweater and a fixation over Steve Jobs.
   Her company, being in the ALIEN universe, has to be called Theranos Thanatos. I still wouldn’t care about the character, but there’d be far more scope for comedy. Yes, it’s true. I’ve watched these episodes, and…I only care about the original alien. Neglected. Ignored. Forgotten. Sliced up. Missing in action. And then lit brightly in a fucking fish tank.
   When we reach episode five and a flashback containing some xenomorph action, we are treated to microwaved leftovers from an earlier cinematic experience. A flurry of half-hearted positive reviews out there in the dark all mutter out of the side of the mouth when declaring…
   You know, we’ve had worse out of this franchise.
   And so on. This is, at heartless heart, The Emperor’s New Skinsuit. The only thing connecting ALIEN to BLADE RUNNER is the director who used similar production techniques and items in both films.
   So why turn this ALIEN TV show into BLADE RUNNER by another name? Yes, it has been strangely watchable. I could be at the top of a skyscraper, on the corner, looking down on a police chase on Fucked Up Street…while a petrol tanker’s brakes fail over on Beyond All Recognition Avenue.
   Strangely watchable. And there’s nothing I can do about it except look away. But I look. Would this show reach physical media? Disney releases are patchy and unpredictable, that way. Would I buy a 4K set? No. This is one…and very done.
   There are loads of ALIEN and PREDATOR films out there that I didn’t buy. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even watch a bunch of the PREDATOR ones. ALIEN should never have been a franchise. Luckily, HIGHLANDER was never a franchise. Fortunately, THE MATRIX was a one-off. And INDIANA JONES. A trilogy, thank fuck.
   BACK TO THE FUTURE stuck to the plan. No more movies after the third one. Sadly, over my dead body might apply here once Zemeckis hangs up his director’s hat for the very last time. No one is going to remake that story with the main character as Marsha McFly. The crush sub-plot was icky enough with Marty.
   (Also, technically, the main character in BACK TO THE FUTURE is the most important time traveller – the dog.)
   What of ALIEN: THE WILDERNESS YEARS as a franchise? Battle Angel Wendy. FAUX RUNNER. Do Androids Dream of Monsters Under the Bed? I should go on, but you get the point. Oh, very well. ASLAN VERSUS ALIEN VERSUS PREDATOR VERSUS CALVIN AND HOBBES: MA’AM, THIS IS A WENDY’S. Now I’m done.
   We have Wendy the snake-charmer or The Alien Whisperer. I suspect a lot of the show is going nowhere. And no more is this evident than in episode six. The Fluff. It’s an episode about padding and nothing much going on. If that.
   Once more, we question basic lab techniques. No one should be alone in the lab. And the aliens should all really have a lab each. Think the show missed a trick, there. Each alien needs its own unique lab.
   Yes, give each lab a sense of character and an alien in it. At least then the show would have some character. But no, we’ll keep these lions in one room and in glass cases. Yes, if you were paying attention in the previous episodes that didn’t lull you to sleep, then you’d know there’s this other alien. Awaiting a slow tease of an appearance.
   And we get to the goods in this episode. Not worth the wait. The central plank of creating your superhero team, those lost boys and girls, is giving the audience synthetic characters who aren’t affected by the aliens. Creating synthetic characters. There’s an idea that’s a hostage to fortune.
   Superheroes aren’t affected by the aliens. Except…this is an ALIEN franchise offshoot, and so we’ll be fucking around with that expectation more than once. Battle Angel Wendy got into a tussle with an alien and lived to tell the tale. She’s all better now.
   In this episode, we see feeding time at the zoo go horribly wrong for a synthetic character we don’t have energy to care for. Dolly the sheep just sheeps in, fucks shit up, and sheeps some more.
   The Skullfucker Octoball in charge of the sheep is biding its time, playing tenth-dimensional chess, and shit. Oh no. The CGI fly eats wobots for bweakfast. For a top secret research facility, I notice the cameras on Fantasy Island become quite useless and unwatched when the plot demands this.
   Characters stumble around in and out of various situations. The Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character was damaged but she’s all better now. They gave her a mind-wipe, but didn’t warn anyone else on the island about not telling her that. So now she knows she had a mind-wipe after being told. Would have been better off with a facecloth and some mild soap.
   Inevitably, after much padding, and more fan service out of focus in the background, we reach the hugging of a face. And when this face was hugged, I found it hard not to laugh out loud. I half-expected the actor to start moonwalking, and I just couldn’t take it seriously.
   What’s that? The guy who was fired in this episode didn’t make it off the island? Instead he was dragged into one of those standard air vents large enough to fit several plot holes through? Explain why the secure lab needs a massive ALIEN AIR VENT™ at floor level. Or, indeed, at any level. Explain. Show your working.
   There were so many other ways to build up to SOME CHARACTER WE DON’T CARE ABOUT™ being hugged in the face by an alien. I say we take off and nuke the entire show from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
   Damn.
   It’s sad seeing the alien in a well-lit glass cage doing sweet fuck-all. Not an ALIEN moment. The same is true of the actress playing Lady Yutani. She finally gets her teeth into a scene. Regrettably, it’s a scene from a BLADE RUNNER show no one asked for.
   All the padding, all the waffle, questioning what it is to be human…the fluff belongs in another type of story. Is there a place for it here? There is. In small doses. But not as padding. So much for episode six, which, in the closing seconds, attempts to make the Skullfucker Octoball the star of this show.
   IT ISN’T.
   What stays with me in this episode? Pointlessness. There’s a talk about what Wendy will do. She could be family to her brother. But there are loftier goals. She should develop travel faster than the speed of light, and explore the universe. Wendy must make the right choice.
   Except…there’s nothing to stop her eternal self being family to her brother until he dies of old age. Then she can explore the universe after. She can have it all. It isn’t EITHER/OR. The show flounders arse-deep in too many moments like that.
   And then there was episode seven.
   Two of the Very Lost Boys lead their pal the scientist dude into the jungle. Basically, Lennie is being taken to see the rabbits. (Spoiler for another story.) The Peter Pan framework should have been referenced with a light touch. Too late for that. The whole show lumbers along, top-heavy with enforced symbolism.
   You’d be better off watching The Lost Boys. That’s a movie about rebellious Kiefer Sutherland being all rebellious and shit.
   The different spaghetti strands of storytelling veer off and converge just about as messily as you’d expect. Those behind the show have certainly seen the movie Predator. So it is time to throw in a bit of that in the jungle. But not too much, lest the show be accused of turning into Predator.
   Normally I’d say Wendy’s plan comes across as one of the worst plans in the history of science fiction television. But I can’t stop there. Wendy’s plan is one of the worst plans in the history of plans.
   I’ll release my tame alien as a distraction, so we can escape Fantasy Island.
   Again, we come back to this thing of the alien in a glass cage, sidelined by the shenanigans elsewhere. Characters queue up in slow motion, waiting for death. When death comes, it arrives with CGI rapidity.
   They know, making this show, that scenes of the alien escaping and killing lab techs in bright light…well, those scenes are just not going to cut it. So we’ll switch to the security cameras, for a more obscured look at the CGI tomfoolery.
   And so it goes, again, when in the jungle. An instant problem arrives. Soldiers. An instant fix arrives. Predator. The alien. This time the fight is in broad daylight, so we have to obscure our alien by using the bushes.
   Perhaps more than any other episode, this episode feels like it is about to (chest) burst into being a musical. Soldiers with bad timing turn up to miss the main event. Characters with no planning flit in and out of sight.
   It takes a very long forty minutes for Wendy, Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright, and Communist Manifesto Guy from ANDOR to reach the boat, the boat, and we don’t even have Mr Roarke or Tattoo standing by to wave them farewell.
   There’s one episode to watch. Before it airs, I wonder what it sets up. This whole show is about a mission to bring alien samples back for study. But even that mission was off the back of an earlier unseen sequence in which a whole bunch of people died. We were told this.
   So we may yet see another prequel. Where are we, by episode seven? Number of deaths so far? Don’t care. Number of characters worth caring about? Don’t care. Trillionaire-ism is bad. Corporations are bad. People are no better. Just bet on the alien for the win.
   What else didn’t I care about on the show? Screens. They flashed up with information on the aliens. We live in a TV age of visuals that are clear enough. You can pause the data dumps and read snippets of what the aliens are all about.
   And I just didn’t care. We’re told about the Skullfucker Octoball. And we’re told about the really fucking boring plant thing. I’m waiting on the base being overrun by plants when the inevitable fire/explosion sequence kicks in. And then the killer plant can really go to work. Presuming it crawls into a handy ventilation shaft where it can survive the fire/explosion.
   No, I didn’t care about the text screens. They could have flashed Surprised in the Butt by Ripley’s Xenomorph Lover: a Chuck Tingle Dinosaur Romance on one of those screens for all the difference those screens made.
   And so. To episode ate eight. The scenewy’s pwetty. Be vewy vewy quiet. I’m hunting humans wabbits humans wabbits for a story. We go a li’l bit Predator, a li’l bit country, a li’l bit rock ’n’ roll, and a bit Terminator 2.
   Two Terminator machines go at it in a lab, in a rather inconsequential fight…in an inconsequential episode. This is the last episode in the show, and I expected the deaths to mount up. Instead, we had a whole lot of nothing.
   Okay. There were deaths. Soldiers, on the island, dying under the alien’s teeth and claws. Don’t forget the tail. There’s a good story here, stumbling through the ruins of other stories. I can see what they were trying to go for. Alas…
   The entire episode does, indeed, act as set-up for the next series. I expected a whole bunch of characters to die. You have practically the whole bunch in a room. One bomb and it is done. But no.
   Yutani doesn’t even get to phone in her performance here. She’s flashed up on the screen as a reminder of her existence. There was so much noodling around, too much padding, for the late arrival of her army to make a difference.
   That army should have arrived earlier in the story, full force, with chaos the result. Chaos in which the monsters get to feed. Here’s an idea. In the future, just have jail cells that are locked the old-fashioned way. With a physical key. Don’t operate the cages by electricity.
   It’s the dumbest thing. All the creatures, and the other prisoners in this narrative, are locked in electrically-powered jails. What if the power goes? There’s a back-up. What if the back-up goes? NOTHING. The fucking doors stay locked, you cunts!
   Wait. Let me tell you how I really feel.
   Welcome to Fantasy Island. What’s the plot? THE BLACK HOLE. That’s the hole the story fell into. At least the robots on that Disney production were amusing. Welcome to Fantasy Island. But, hey. The scenewy is pwetty.
   Everyone is in a rush to be the next model, rendering the last model obsolete. That notion does a few handstands and backflips as characters manoeuvre around each other…to no great effect.
   The Peter Pan stuff sputtered out episodes ago. Boy Genius isn’t Peter Pan. He’s a symbolic coded fictional watercolour painting of Elon Musk refusing to accept an autistic trans daughter. Misunderstood. He’s misunderstood. And irritating. We don’t even get his plan out of his lips.
   He sends the minds of children into artificial bodies. They’ll have access to the whole of human learning. And they can then improve the process so that adult minds can transfer into human bodies. That’s when Elon Zuckerberg makes his move. But that isn’t even a plot here.
   There’s a movie worth watching to reach a conclusion about the handling of the Boy Genius in this show…
   The Dirty Dozen. In that film, one of the dozen is the character you love to hate. You cannot wait for Archer Maggott to die. When’s he getting shot? That’s Archer Maggot’s story right there.
   And so it should be with the Boy Genius. He serves no purpose beyond being set up as an evil doll-figure who is bitch-slapped by an alien at just the right time. Boy Genius deserves to be on the way out by episode three.
   Even that Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character, who appeared to die in episode seven, made it back for episode eight. The two mad scientists assisting the Boy Genius are still in play by the end of this show. And, spoiler, one of them is dead.
   Adrian Edmondson, as some sort of cybernetic Odd Job henchman, minus the bowler hat, is still ticking along merrily by the end as well.
   Yes, the killer plant finally makes its move, and this is as underwhelming as you’d expect. That played out like a random encounter with a Dungeons & Dragons monster in a killer dungeon.
   All dungeons are killer dungeons, whether science fiction or fantasy. In this killer dungeon, though, the usual suspects make it through. It’s almost as though there’s some evil hidden agenda. An evil corporate agenda. To produce another series.
   You had one job, television. One job. To make sure the alien would kill a whole lotta people (and synthetics) in a show that sidelined the alien in favour of letting a whole lotta people (and synthetics) live. The final episode could’ve done with being a bit more final.
   This TV show sounds a bit like an earlier spin-off. ALIEN: EARTH isn’t a comic book series. ALIENS: EARTH WAR is. I enjoyed the raw energy of those comic book stories. This TV blip has a hard task, true…
   There shouldn’t be a franchise, yet there is. So what’s the problem? Trade on the original story. Add something new. Avoid fan service. Remember when? We fucking do. Stop reminding us.
   We want the familiar, but it must be different. Advance on it. But not too different. So you won’t satisfy any audience. There are people out there in deep space, declaring there is only one ALIEN movie. There certainly shouldn’t be two television shows.
   We don’t need to see Ian Holm’s acting dug up from the vaults in some nonsensical scene. (I know I’ve seen that travesty, but I refused to believe it.) If you must give us something, give us something of substance. Evil Trillionaire Boy Genius could have experimented on the alien and realised that – if you solve the acid problem – then the alien blood might cure cancer.
   That would be a better twist than anything, everything, on this show. Was there a scrap of merit? Discovering the lost boys and girls had their own graveyard on Fantasy Island. Aaaaaand…that was about it.
   Imagine watching a TV show and then turning to Mark Verhieden’s comic books for something bright, fiery, and with its own peculiar atmosphere. Those comics had the same hard task. Give us more of the same, but not too samey. Verhieden was allowed to use the characters of Newt and Hicks…
   Until a shitty movie sequel came along and killed them off. Then the names were changed to protect the indifferent. They were changed back for the collected editions.
   So, yes, there was a bit of fan service in the comic books. But Verhieden tried to give us the atmosphere of an ALIEN story. Not a BLADE RUNNER one or a TERMINATOR one. Or Peter Pan with robots thrown in.
   The television show feels sterile. Airless. Unloved. It feels unwatched even as you watch it, and that’s no good. My view, after watching? I turned to the comic books for a better experience.
   What surprised me? That I watched every episode. Please. For fuck’s sake. Don’t make a second show.

ON EARTH, THE ALIEN CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Is the eight-episode TV format a millstone around storytelling? ALIEN: EARTH. I am four episodes in, with four to go. At that point, always ask two questions. One. Is the final episode going to fuck this up and taint anything of value that came before? Two. Is the final episode a trailer for another series?
   Don’t know. Is there anything of value that came before? The series I’ve been watching, ALIEN: EARTH, is really BLADE RUNNER: THE SERIES. You can hear the corporate blood curling, curdling, as executives tell you, through gritted alien teeth, that we tried to do something new with the franchise.
   Rule one. ALIEN should never have been a franchise.
   And rule two. See rule one.
   So they gave us something different. Didn’t they? A spaceship that has the interior of the spaceship from ALIEN. This one has a crash-cupboard for one lucky character to occupy. Didn’t see that in Ridley’s movie. But then, Ridley’s spaceship didn’t crash. So we’ll retroactively say it was kitted out with a safety cubicle all along.
   Same spaceship interior. But the guy in the crash-cubicle is a cyborg. That’s new. Is it new? Or is that a fusion of other elements? If you crossed Yaphet Kotto with Ian Holm from the original movie, and threw in some cyborg gadgets, you’d have the cyborg. Morrow.
   Perhaps he represents tomorrow, despite the character’s history being deep in the cryogenic past. We are told, in a BLADE RUNNER opening text, all about cyborgs and synths and hybrids, oh my. All represent different quests for immortality.
   The cyborg idea is new to the TV show, if not to the American superhero comic book.
   Synthetic characters are mechanicals, along the lines of Ian Holm’s performance in ALIEN or Lance Henriksen’s turn in ALIENS. The characters of Ash and Bishop are machines with artificially intelligent brains.
   So the idea of immortality there is one step removed. Humanity creates these synthetic beings, artificial persons, in humanity’s image: leaving them to travel the universe as reminders of humans when humans are no more.
   We shall say nothing of digging Ian Holm’s performance up from the grave to appear in a spot of tenth-rate fan fiction as Rook – the rubbish one.
   One step beyond the synth is the hybrid. Take a human mind and load it into an artificial body. Create something that is more human than human, to borrow liberally from another Ridley movie.
   So far, so BLADE RUNNER.
   The key point of any story featuring the ALIEN franchise is this: at some point, smart people in space must do dumb things for the story to move forward. And so it goes, here. Morrow is returning from deep space with a contraband cargo of alien creatures.
   Something goes horribly wrong on that ship. The ship crashes on Earth™. An alien transfers from the ship to a skyscraper, and hijinks ensue. Yes, the alien literally crashes into the BLADE RUNNER story that’s front and centre in this production.
   But we have to put something new in here. How about new aliens? New to the franchise, perhaps. Or maybe not. Let us pause to consider the Skullfucker Octoball. Spiders are passé. I blame Stupid Sexy Shelob™ over in the strip-mined franchise of J.R.R. Tolkien for that.
   Give us an octopus. The octopus is intelligent. Give us more. An eyeball. And if this creature skullfucks your eyeball, it will dig down into the brain and take over the body. We see this in the zombie cat creature.
   Oh, spoiler alert. Am I spoiling anything?
   But we’ve seen this. It’s a cat. And it is sick. Wait. It’s been possessed by the Skullfucker Octoball. And this was in Ridley’s movie, originally. How? Symbolically. They took a thing from Ridley’s film and they made it fucking literal.
   Characters in ALIEN tend to have two syllables. There are exceptions. Brett and Kane spring to mind. But there’s also Jones. The cat. As part of the suspense, you think the alien is going to be there. It’s the cat. Then you are left wondering. Well, is it just the cat? No, it’s the alien.
   And so. Here, we have both at the same time. Is it just the cat? No, it’s the cat and the alien, all rolled into one. Is anything truly new, here? Bugs that drain you of blood. Those are all across the movies. Nothing new to see here. And the plant that might not be a plant? If it camouflages itself against a backdrop of plants, it ain’t blending in on a spaceship.
   I didn’t have much time for triffids in The Day of the Triffids. This maybe-plant or possible-animal needs a jungle to hide in. Oh dear.
   Welcome to Fantasy Island. Or Jurassic Park. I misremember which. The alien is simply acting on instinct to survive. Evil corporations are the true monsters, and ALIEN is a comedy about corporate greed.
   The alien crashes into a skyscraper owned by Elon Zuckerberg. He’s a young quirky trillionaire who runs his own cult on Fantasy Island. A dash of Jurassic Park. Throw in a hint of Doctor Moreau. Add a splash of so much money that you never really need to count it up. Microwave until the cheese melts. Elon Zuckerberg funds the hybrid special project.
   And there’s your villain. Except. There’s another villain. She phones in her performance. Nothing against the actress. It’s that kind of show – if you want hologram communications, go and watch STAR WARS.
   As sure as night meets day, these separate plot elements collide. One corporation brings the aliens to our world. Another corporation sends the hybrid team to salvage goodies from the spaceship. Aliens are bagged, tagged, and dangerous to know. They all go back to Fantasy Island for illegal experiments, milk, and choc chip treats.
   What of these hybrids? They are children, destined to die from disease. And only children’s minds can survive the transfer to artificial bodies.
   This means they already tried the procedure with adults dying from disease. Elon Zuckerberg is young. But not young enough for the transfer. So he must have trawled the elderly wards in the hospitals, looking for disposable candidates.
   Let’s gloss over this the same way the TV show does. There are science fiction products that dip heavily and lumberingly into other areas. Resident Evil gives you a movie experience based around Alice and the Red Queen. So far, so Wonderland.
   Tron owes a debt to The Wizard of Oz.
   No one watched that Winnie-the-Killer-Bear film.
   Here, as this is streamed on the Disney+ channel, there’s Disney property to strip-mine. And so the belaboured imagery revolves around animated clips from Peter Pan. But Wendy Battle Angel Alita Darling is the star.
   She faces a problem or two. Sometimes the effects aren’t that great. Jumping off a cliff to show she has superpowers…could have been done better. If you have the choice between an effect and a stunt, go with the stunt.
   Lifting the children looked better as a sketch than as the scene itself. We get it. She’s a superhero. And she can battle Angel Alita the alien threat.
   Wendy faces other things plundered from Neverland. Neverland is the first episode. Doesn’t get much more on the nose than that. Morrow has handy gadgets in his fist, so that makes him Captain Hook.
   We are fucking told that the alien is the crocodile. Wendy can hear a clock ticking inside the alien. Or something like that. Her friends, the dying children, transfer to robot bodies and become the lost boys and girls.
   In that grouping, we have Space Ginger from the SOLO STAR WARS HEIST movie. (Admittedly, she’s dark blue in her scene at the start of the film. Everything is dark and blue in her scene from the SOLO film.)
   Space Ginger is playing the Veronica Cartwright Veronica Cartwright character from ALIEN. You know. The one who loses her shit. And we have a few other boys and girls in the mix. But one character steals from C.S. Lewis. We’ll call him Edmund Pevensie. Morrow, the Captain Hook character, offers Edmund a piece of Turkish Delight.
   This sticks to Edmund’s neck and creates a chat room for the two of them. Morrow is left behind at the crash. But he wants to see the mission through for his boss on the phone. So he befriends Edmund with tales of friendship online. Edmund lives in Narnia Neverland.
   All Edmund has to do is this: wander around Fantasy Island until he can find a smart human dumb enough to go near an alien egg, and Edmund will watch the alien impregnate the human. For his online friend.
   Okay, groomer.
   The synthetics are child minds inside adult bodies. You got that bit, right? All of these plotlines swirl together at the island. Wendy Darling wants to investigate the alien ship so that she can be reunited with her long-lost brother who thinks she died.
   Fighting the alien, Wendy is bwoken. And so is her brother. His lung is donated to a corporate think-tank, which is an actual tank full of lung and fluid. And then a transparent alien sperm creature comes along, and, damn, this is a short hop, skip, and a jump from being a musical.
   Wendy recovers from being bwoken, as she is Battle Angel Wendy. Her brother recovers from being bwoken as he’s fixed up and bought body and soul by the company. For a show with ALIEN in the title, there’s 10% ALIEN and 90% BLADE RUNNER tomfoolery featuring evil corporations.
   The original alien creature is by turns noticed, ignored, forgotten, killed off, cut up, and then froths in its own acidic blood. If there’s any hatred for Elon Bezos Zuckerberg, it’s reserved for the moment when Dolly the Sheep skullfucks his brain and declares a new project to fly everyone to Mars in the final episode which I’ve not seen yet.
   Yes, there’s illegal experimentation on a sheep. This plunders the original movie. How? The door into the chamber with the sheep is a metal iris door. That’s from Ridley’s movie. Here, it’s smaller. Skullfucker Octoball size.
   With four episodes to go, it’s hard to say who the Skullfucker Octoball will go after. Not the alien. It doesn’t have eyes with notable sockets. Also, I think it will be hard for the Octoball’s CGI skullfuckery tentacles to cope with alien blood.
   The dumb money is on taking over Elon Zuckertrillionaire. And then being slightly less evil than Elon Zuckervillain. That’s bound to be a bit of a letdown. Will the killer plant/animal escape into the jungle to start a new life? What about those alien eggs? They gonna hatch?
   I left out a few characters. Instead of Ash, or Bishop, or Rook, or any of the rest of the android photocopies over-populating the franchise, there’s Kirsh. He’s excessively blond. If you call that an Easter Egg, it’s an Easter Egg that opened its outer hatch and face-hugged the audience with all the subtlety of no subtlety.
   Not an ALIEN reference. A BLADE RUNNER one. I’ve seen ALIEN movies you people wouldn’t believe. (Run, Charlize, run!) So what is new here? I’m struggling with that one. Maybe in the final episode there won’t be an ominous trailer for what could only be a much-diluted sequel. Also running eight episodes.
   There’s a lot rehashed in this show, and I don’t feel like rehashing episodes to let you know every single detail that was rehashed from a franchise. Yes, there is some plot engineering. Morrow scrubs the spaceship of all records. This will force the company to send another spaceship to the general location to pick up fresh samples.
   And that is where the movie comes in. In space, no one can hear you scream. I imagine there’s a section of the audience on this planet, screaming away with hatred. For reasons unknown to me, I find the show strangely watchable on an episode-by-episode basis.
   With half the show to go, I’m expecting it to crash and burn like the spaceship that hit the skyscraper. I can’t lie to you about the show’s chances of satisfying fans of the movie. (Whether ALIEN or BLADE RUNNER.) But you have my sympathies.

I WALK PAST THESE BOOKS EVERY SINGLE DAY: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

On the way out of this office, I go by a bookcase every single day. I don’t know how many books are on there. And I don’t know how many I have read. At a wild guess, I’d say I also don’t know how many are unread.
   The bookcase hasn’t been there long. But there it is, and it is practically full. It contains a mix of books moved from elsewhere and books bought in recently. And now, as I blog, I am going to take a break and count the number of books I walk by.
   By the magic of typing, I have returned. There are 198 books, with one I know is misplaced for now. If it isn’t in this room, it is on this floor. I have space on one shelf for more volumes. How many more, only the floorboards can tell. If there’s a crack and a yell, you’ll know I’ve moved my collection downstairs in a hurry.
   How many of the 198 books have I read? Not all. I can’t read them all. After reading The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, I resolved never to fully read a reference book again – not even a joke of a reference book like his. I also resolved never to read Ambrose Bierce again, and the world is a better place for that.
   You don’t read reference books. They are for skimming. Diving into. Jumping out of. But they are not cover-to-cover experiences. I shall return, by the magic of typing, to eliminate the reference works there.
   I spy three reference books. That leaves 195 books on the shelves. Of those, how many are duplicates? Oh, duplicates don’t infest my stacks. Sometimes, inheriting a library, I gain a duplicate. By typing arcane and most sorcerous, I shall reappear…
   Ten books have duplicates. Some of these are different editions with slightly varied collections of short stories. If I wanted all the stories, I had to pick up two cheap editions when no overall compilation existed, for example.
   All duplicates were cheap. And I’ve read all the material there. So we’re down to 185 books that landed in that part of the room. Now to the question. How many of those 185 books have I read? I know this one is tricky.
   There are two books in a loose series. I know for a fact I’ve read one of them. Which one, I can’t recall. I suspect I’ll have to read both to be certain. And now, a fiddly counting process that should be straightforward. It never is.
   I’ve read 140 of them. And I’d like to read a whole bunch of those again. We reached the point of the exercise. Every single day, I walk by 45 books I haven’t read. And I leave them there, unread, as I tackle other things.
   Maybe if I blog about that, I’ll stop and pick up a book to read. It’s an idea. Clear the reading list by bookcase. There are nine bookcases here. Some are used for other storage purposes and only have a few books on them.
   I could polish off a whole case very quickly, highly selectively, if I chose to. But I don’t choose to. Now I want to tackle the books I ignore every single day. They run the whole range. Fictional. Factual. In a series. Stand-alone.
   Chunky volumes. Weighty biographies. Historical pieces. Slim movie books. Frivolous works. Fairy stories. A book on cocktails. From the Weimar Republic to the underbelly of Los Angeles, and all points in-between. There they stand. Waiting for the pages to turn.
   I find there’s nothing so heavy in life as a pile of books you are moving cautiously from one place to another. Consolidated stacks weigh plenty, and have slippery covers. Steady as you go. I’m staring at omnibus editions of crime writers and also of comic books.
   The rule of the comic book omnibus is simple. Thou shalt place thine heaviest of books upon the bottom shelf, or suffer indeed. Better that the heaviest works break my ankle. That’s a grand alternative to having them snap my neck from on high.
   What do they all weigh? I’d rather not find out. If a bookcase fails, the spillage won’t affect me directly. Unless I am passing by at the time. In that event, I suspect it’ll be the act of passing by that triggers the avalanche.
   How to tackle the unread books? From the top to the bottom? Left to right? Certainly not alphabetically. Writers store books where they fit in. Not in wasteful alphabetical order. That serves no one. Oh, the crowd can rail against my view…
   But my fucking library is not here to serve the fucking crowd. It’s here to squeeze into the barely-available space.
   A few books are linked thematically. Tackle those together. Read what I want to. Most likely, the best approach. Maybe keep an eye on the number of unread books per shelf. Is there a shelf with one unread book on it?
   Everything on the top of the bookcase? I’ve read those tomes. Yes, they are wedged between bookends. Then we journey to the shelf below. One unread book, there, it’s true. And a recent acquisition, stashed where it will just barely fit and no more…
   That’s to keep it with the others in the series. And then, shelf by shelf, there are more unread books per section. No, I don’t think there’s a pattern to this. (Other than light paperbacks at the top and bullet-stoppers at the bottom.) A method? Just pick a book up and start reading.
   Question. By the time I tackle these books, how many more books will I have brought into the house? I’m not sure. There are books on pre-order. They’ll turn up when they turn up. Doesn’t mean they’ll fit on that bookcase. I still have some space elsewhere.
   Books on the way. I’ll try them for size, naturally. If they fit on this particular bookcase, there’s no way to dodge. Oh, all the books there are read…no more will squeeze in. Well. I guess we’ll just have to go with that, then, won’t we?
   We won’t. Books that arrive are unread, and still count. No matter where they end up. You can’t fool the relentless stacks. The rising booktide. Even buying in books I once read and no longer have…those are bought to enjoy again.
   Oh, I’ve read it. There’s no rush to read it once more.
   Bullshit. If a book comes into the house, it should be read the same day. Whether I’ve read it before or not. Unfortunately, I’m at the mercy of the delivery driver. If the parcel arrives late in the day, early evening, I lose my shot at a great chunk of reading time.
   And that, trivial as it may sound, puts me in the thankless position of stashing the book somewhere. Next day is full of petty distractions, and the book goes unread. And that, dear non-reader, is how we build up entire sections of shelves that are unread and go unread and remain unread until we are dead.
   They aren’t books at that point. Just an extra layer of wall insulation.
   And so. Read. Chip at the iceberg of books. Enthusiasm on purchase versus lethargy on acquisition. Followed by enthusiasm again, on turning the page. Unless you detest the book. It’s been a long time since I tackled a book like that.
   The rule is to finish the damned thing. Read it all the way through and be done with it. The Devil’s Dictionary springs to mind. What of this bookcase I walk by every day? Is a suspect lurking on the shelves? Could there be a book there that I just won’t care for?
   Purchasing is irrelevant. Most of those books were purchases. A few were gifts. There should always be at least one book in your library that you never set down on a shelf. It walked into the stacks under its own steam, and you aren’t sure where it came from.
   No. Purchasing doesn’t matter. If you bought it and didn’t like it, you dodged a twelve-book epic. And if it was gifted to you…just be fucking honest and say it wasn’t for you. Even though it was for you, obviously.
   And the book that appeared out of nowhere? Might as well give it a shot. There’s a reverse mode to that one. A book that should definitely be on your shelves, but isn’t. You moved it from its usual spot, and now you can’t find it.
   Where the fuck did that go? And why? Why? That’s easy. You bought more books that will fit here, as part of a series. If you take out that one lone book and move it elsewhere. I am still looking for one book. It’s hiding. Or resting. Not sleeping. Resting its eyes.
   To go back to one of the duplicates. I’d bought a cheap paperback. It disappeared WHILE I WAS READING IT. Yes, that’s quite a skill I have. Can’t recommend developing that ability. In the end, I bought a cheaper duplicate copy and read it.
   Only when you’ve done that, as usual, do you then find the missing book. It was trapped down against the wall, by a series of coincidental moves and unhappy accidents. Only found that when I rearranged furniture, much later.
   I had to sit a stack of heavier books on top of the recovered volume, to bend it back into shape. It is rare that I damage books. That one wasn’t damaged. Fixable. I fixed. So where do I stand, concerning these books?
   In front of them. Instead of walking by them. It’s the only way to get them read.

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

More. What is it good for? Thanks to the internet there’s more of everything, and it is also readily available. Deadly combination. This means there’s more crap readily available, in terms of content out there and way out there.
   That doesn’t mean the crap is evenly distributed. Crap is determined, nay, destined, to go after you. The consumer-seeking missile is piled high with crap, and is knocking on your door, hiding under your bed, and raiding your fucking fridge all in the same electronic breath.
   Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to seek out new forms of entertainment, be entertained by some of it, and filter out the rest. Filter. Burn. Filter out the rest, in a fire. Boldly go where a shit-load of people have gone before, and shit a load of movies and TV shows out of your system. Save time. Sidestep. Swerve. Avoid.
   Once, in the before-times, there was a view: you had to watch something to determine whether or not it was of any use to you as a form of entertainment. Not so much, now. When there’s so much, now. The solid construction of a decent movie trailer is a long-lost art. (Ignoring all the shitty trailers that were made down through movie history. Fuck it, let’s be severely selective here. That is, after all, the point of the exercise. Limit your intake of intake.)
   Movie trailers developed a mutated purpose. They no longer sell movies. Instead, they signal all the shit to avoid. This is how they are built.
   Once upon a film, the trailer sold you on the idea of a fantastic piece of entertainment.
   Twice upon a film, we started to sense the idea that we wanted the people who made the movie trailers to be the same people who’d made the movies. Sadly, the trailer people were not the movie people, after all, and we were sold lies.
   Then, thrice upon a film, we reached NOW. And NOW, the shoddy construction of the movie trailer makes it electronically easy for us to walk away. We don’t need to be in a movie theatre or in front of a television showing adverts to experience the trailer. YouTube saves a lot of effort.
   It’s caustically easy to be dismissive.
   For those wondering about the difficulty of making trailers, there are a few problems.
   One. Showing footage from the movie that never ends up in the finished film. The joke here is that you’ll see a trailer for a comedy and there’ll be five jokes in the trailer but only three jokes in the film. Not one joke a funny jab, either.
   Two. Giving away the plot twist in the trailer. Obviously, I can’t spoil any plots in this text here. Except to say showing the fucking iceberg in that Titanic trailer is poor form. But wait a bit. Why is that guy starting a gunfight on board the ship during these icy shenanigans?
   That addition to the trailer made me realise I wouldn’t be foaming at the mouth to watch a load of old bollocks. Let’s bolt an action movie onto a film about a ship sinking, to, you know, make the story more dramatic. Or something.
   The less said about Avatar the better.
   Hey, Vasquez. Ever been mistaken for a character in another movie?
   Yes. Have you?
   Three. Trying to sell enough of an idea of the movie…without giving away all the jokes in a comedy or twists in the plot of any kind of thriller. Yes, that’s tricky.
   What was my most disappointing experience, after staggering away from a movie trailer? GHOSTBUSTERS. I must add…the 2016 version of the film. The trailer sets up an idea in text. What did we know? New movie. Four women team up to be ghostbusters.
   30 YEARS AGO…FOUR SCIENTISTS SAVED NEW YORK…THIS SUMMER…A NEW TEAM WILL ANSWER THE CALL.
   Stick a knife in the last three words, there. We’ll conduct an autopsy later.
   I instantly thought we were getting the daughters of the original ghostbusters in some kind of continuation sequel. That felt like the set-up, right there in the text.
   It’s a very basic idea for a movie continuation, but it is good enough for government work. If the original actors appear, getting on in years, then they are passing the torch to the next generation of characters. Tired. Worn-out. As plain an idea is it gets. But. Workable.
   Well the text fucking lied to us.
   That expectation was on me, and it’s my fault. No, fuck off. That expectation was mine as I read the text in the trailer. After I’d done so, the rest of the trailer dropped. That text deliberately drove us to the edge of a cliff seconds before an earthquake. And then. The rest of the trailer, sadly. That is what happened, then.
   It’s not as if the trailer gave me an expectation that died when going to the movies. No. The trailer gave me an expectation that died seconds into the trailer. Daughters of the original squad. Cool. We’ll see cameo roles. It’ll be the least-forced cameo run in the history of cinema. Parental ghostbusters. But no. The rest of the trailer dropped off that cliff I mentioned.
   Oh, it’s a…reboot/remake with elements of things we’ve seen before and…frankly, from that trailer, effects that didn’t really come across as all that good. With the passage of 30 years, you’d think the effects would look better and not…
   Smoothed over, to cater to a 3D version of the film no one asked for. Ultimately, contrary to expectation, the 2016 movie’s artificial gloss can’t compete with the charm of earlier effects. I expect a 1980s movie to have effects like a 1980s movie. Some movies come across as better when they age.
   For example: THE THING. Its effects are way better than the reboot/prequel/side-by-side movie that landed later. A crying shame that the practical effects in the reboot didn’t have the backing from those higher up in the movie process…leading to everyone getting fucked over on that gig. Watch John Carpenter’s version instead. Not every effect is great. But almost all of those effects add atmosphere.
   You get that in abundance from the effects in the original GHOSTBUSTERS. Sure, it’s a quirky atmosphere, but it is a ghost comedy. Then we jump to 2016. When a trailer pisses on an already patchy movie franchise and shits on its own release, you go with the vibe of that trailer. The vibe ain’t good. Five jokes in the trailer but only three jokes in the film. That kind of deal. Not that it’s a deal.
   I frowned at the trailer instead of smiling or laughing. This is a comedy, and I am not laughing. Well. Damn. And it’s not the four daughters of…fuck’s sake. It isn’t difficult to write the obvious script.
   Unless it’s for 2016 GHOSTBUSTERS, apparently. For once, in the name of cinema, just go with the fucking obvious, take the unoriginality hit, and plough heavily into a well-worked field. Play to the nostalgia, if there’s any nostalgia left. The daughters of.
   But no. Instead. That mess. It’s not a sequel…hell, it’s nowhere near an equal. While I’m briefly on that non-topic, marketing terms of that stripe need to die in a fucking fire.
   When the director spouts nonsense about showing you a film you haven’t seen before but maybe it is a film you have seen before, you know he’s the wrong director. For anything. A lot of people involved in that film patted each other on the back through gritted contractual teeth at the time, or so it felt to me.
   After the original film came out, the basic idea of more films in a series…filtered itself through its own anus, it’s true. It was very difficult to face the concept of a sequel. And after the second film, it was even harder to wade through the notion of GHOSTBUSTERS 3.
   Often discussed. Never materialised. Hoped for. Then not hoped for. Maybe it is for the best that the spectre of GHOSTBUSTERS 3 was exorcised. And yet, somewhere in a musty tomb, there were plans for a continuation of a retread of a rethink of a ghostly return.
   What do we get from GHOSTBUSTERS (2016) as a movie prospect? Cameos from original cast members, sadly. Pointless cameos from original cast members. Also. Never set your movie up for a sequel that isn’t going to happen. That’s another point against it.
   Have faith in the title of your movie. It is GHOSTBUSTERS: ANSWER THE CALL. Apparently. Who you gonna call? Not this director. If you, as the director, object to the movie’s full title and need to have it buried in the movie’s closing credit sequence, you are the wrong director for anything. Including traffic.
   I’ve mentioned the trailer for GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE before. There’s a thing in that trailer that should not be there. Won’t say here. It’s a cool moment that should be part of the movie experience. Not the trailer experience.
   If you plan to watch the movie and you haven’t seen the trailer…just watch the movie. There never was a GHOSTBUSTERS 3. (Which we, now, all suspect would’ve been ghastly.) Instead, we faced a second reboot…
   Someone has to save this cash-cow. Reboot with AFTERLIFE.
   Was AFTERLIFE any better than the 2016 reboot? The 2016 reboot mess just barely wallpapered over the original movie. Then the wallpaper fell off. The misguided attempt to reference the original, while breaking free into “new” characters and cameos one-step-removed…tried and failed to tap into an audience for a much-loved earlier film.
   And then AFTERLIFE…strip-mined the ever-living fuck out of the nostalgia train at an industrial scale, harvesting the feel-good factor all the way down to the nostalgia train’s rails. It was a basic-bitch move. Take relatives of an original ghostbuster and pass the torch on.
   Either you’ll hate that more than the 2016 reboot…or…you’ll embrace the barbed wire of nostalgia in the hope that the distraction allows you to ignore the pain. I recommend swallowing two pills beforehand – the first two movies in the series. Then you’ll be as fresh as possible when it comes to the assault on the nostalgia front.
   And it is a barrage. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a corporate entity dipping into the audience’s pockets looking for those nostalgia coins. And, damn it. I hopped on that nostalgia train knowing the audience was in for a corporate mugging.
   There were a few giant missteps in AFTERLIFE and also in its immediate nostalgia-steeped sequel, FROZEN EMPIRE. As ever, there are rumblings about what happens next. It’s getting harder to care when yet another movie bod is thrown on the pile of people talking up what’s next. Nostalgia is next.
   When does it end? More. What is it good for? GHOSTBUSTERS II is okay. And it did enough money at the time to hold out the promise of closing the movie franchise on a third film. Alas, it was not to be. The second film’s legacy was, at a considerable distance, the revival of Vigo the Carpathian as an internet meme connected to the very red portrait of a man named Chaaalz.
   There is no Chaaalz. Only Zuul.
   Ruh-roh. There’s that word. Legacy. Don’t concern yourself too much with the legacy of a movie that was great on its own and patchy as a franchise. You always have the original. It’s right there. That’s your golden ticket to nostalgia. A crap sequel does not ruin a great film. Even if the people you liked from the first production took the money and ran after filming the later one.
   A bad movie adaptation of a good book doesn’t destroy the book. And a good movie adaptation of a good book…is a movie. What works on the page may have to be condensed on the big screen.
   GHOSTBUSTERS isn’t ruined by GHOSTBUSTERS 2016. Of course, I must add…maybe you don’t care for the first film at all. Or any other films in the intermittent series. This blog post isn’t about your tastes, though. It was about my allergic reaction to a movie trailer, welded to recent movie people talk of where the franchise goes next.
   As movie trailers devolve instead of evolve, I feel there will be more allergic reactions that spare me from experiencing entire franchises. Movie trailers are tailored to phone screens. When movies are filmed on phones, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that movies are set up, in terms of cinematography, to be viewed on phones in a Covid-tainted environment.
   Covid just speeded up the inevitable tumble into the abyss technology periodically provides. They don’t make ’em like they used to. That’s because you used to see movies on the big screen or on TV years after the cinema release.
   The trip from movie to streaming is a short one, now.
   One day, they’ll beam the movie into your brain. And you’ll have a fast-forward function for an extra fee. By fuck, you’ll pay it. You say you won’t, today. Bless your wee cotton socks. You’ll go from sweet summer child to sour winter adult in one swift move.
   GHOSTBUSTERS from 2016 was pre-Covid. It’s difficult to compare box office results for what followed. AFTERLIFE boasted post-Covid box office numbers. The box office returns weren’t too far off each other. Tellingly, AFTERLIFE had a slashed budget. Made it more of a winning proposition for the sorcerers being employed down in accounts.
   We shouldn’t concern ourselves with budgets, box office receipts, or movie companies and their creative accounting. When creators talk to you through gritted teeth for contractual reasons, you tend to tune out the noise.
   What’s really telling, here? Time. With the two movies from the initial run, there’s a gap of five years between releases. Then nothing in cinemas until 2016. I’m aware of the cartoons and the video game that’s the spiritual version of GHOSTBUSTERS 3.
   After the failed reboot, Covid stepped in and changed the landscape. Technically, AFTERLIFE is just barely a pre-Covid film, having finished shooting in late 2019. But Covid dogged the movie’s release. So you had a reboot followed by the release of a reboot five years later.
   If you want to wrap up a trilogy, don’t take more than a decade to release it. Yes, The Lord of the Rings spoiled moviegoers who were into Tolkien’s work. Year on year, Frodo Baggins turned up in winter with the frequency of a pantomime character in search of a fortune.
   Much-delayed sequels deserve our contempt. When you look at the inevitable exposé of what went on behind the non-scenes, there’s only one conclusion to draw.
   The scrip wasn’t right. That had nothing to do with the script. Movie development hell simply means someone in production wouldn’t pad out the pay packet of an actor.

GLADIATOR AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Can I say anything positive about the Gladiator sequel? What is the title? Gladiator 2. That’s not it. Gladiators. Far too obvious. On the cover, it’s a very Roman Gladiator II. Unfathomably, Sir Ridley Scott™ harks back to ALIEN with the title lettering appearing in a vaguely animated form. So, on screen, the movie is GLADIIATOR.
   But really, the movie is Gladiator Again. A film you’ve already seen as Gladiator. By the numbers. Tick off the story points from a checklist based on the first movie. This time around, there are far more computer effects on display. And almost everyone in the film is miscast. Except for those who returned for the sequel.
   Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi are cast perfectly as the same characters they played before. Jacobi was cast in Gladiator off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s TV role as Claudius. And Jacobi was cast in Gladiator II off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s role in Gladiator.
   It would be terribly awkward not to mention Russell Crowe. And also terribly awkward to mention Russell Crowe. He does indeed appear in this sequel, using footage from the first film in flashback. Can’t really fault the casting, there. But practically everyone else has wandered in from another film.
   Chief contender in the miscasting category is an actor who truly has wandered in from another film, and brought his own plotline with him to blur the thin story of this one. Denzel Washington is fucking great in this movie. It’s just…that he was cast off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of having worked with Denzel before.
   Every second on screen, Denzel fills the movie with crackling sparks…and a plot from somewhere else. If they’d stripped all the pesky Gladiator and Gladiator II stuff out of this film, then there’d be another film entirely. One starring Denzel Washington. And one we’d all be interested in.
   Okay. So what’s the thin plot, here? There’s a man lost in the turmoil of battle. Sad things happen. He is forced to become a gladiator. Quickly, he learns how to handle his new life in an arena out in the sticks. There, he meets Oliver Reed Denzel Washington. No one buys or sells any giraffes.
   There’s a shot at taking out the villain in the much larger arena in Rome. We do see a tiger. Villains must be overthrown. People scheme. These scheming people are, once again, Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi.
   It’s Gladiator Again.
   Our hero is the down-on-his-luck adult who was the kid from the first film. At least that’s a valid reason for waiting over two decades to make a fucking sequel. I’ll almost give them that. It might have worked, too, if they’d cast the child actor in the adult role. But they cast, miscast, someone else.
   Spoiler. Russell Crowe’s character is very dead. Most sincerely dead. He could’ve been alive and in the sequel. We’ll talk about Nick Cave later. No, really. It was a whole thing.
   Back to the secret kid. Not that the kid was a secret. Maybe his real daddy was a secret, in the first film. Vague hints. We couldn’t have anything more than vague hints. You see, Maximus Derivative Sequelus…
   Fuck it. The whole point of Russell Crowe’s character in the original film is that he’d have his vengeance in that film and not the next. Maximus had to avenge the death of his wife and son. And for that reunion at the end of the film to have an emotional impact, out in the filtered wheat fields, his character couldn’t have a secret son after banging Connie Nielsen’s character.
   But here, as too many movie and TV scripts utter, here we are. The secret son has grown up, turned his back on the Evil that is Rome, and is now living a peaceful life in…aw, fuck, here come those pesky Romans. Our hero, Haribo, goes up against our anti-hero General Stand-In, who felt all inspired by Russell Crowe back in the day.
   I’ll see you…on the beach! That opening bombast is partly Saving Private Ryan, partly Ridley Scott advertising something – we aren’t sure what – and partly snippets taken from Frank Miller’s 300. The gladiatorial movies share the same stunning levels of historical accuracy with 300, I am happy to report. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if a tyrannosaur turned up in that fancy arena, replacing the computerised rhino.
   Maybe look for that feisty reptilian action in the third glorious movie: Gladiators Three. An epic return to form as the two dead fuckmuppet Emperors from this movie are brought back to life by ALIEN™ technology to ride into battle aboard their steam-powered pet dinosaur Duke Daisy. It’s a musical comedy. I can hear the critics sing, singing a song of angry men. Starring the desecrated digital bones of Ian Holm…
   I’ll stop there. Just don’t get me fucking started on that fiasco.
   How often do I think about the Roman Empire? I never think about the Roman Empire. Even when I’m thinking about how often I don’t think of the Roman Empire, I’m not even thinking about the Roman Empire. I wasn’t even thinking about the Roman Empire when I watched two gladiator-themed moves directed by Ridley.
   Really should stop calling him Ridley. People will think Daisy Ridley directed Gladiator II. No, even when watching a Rome-themed movie, it appears that I never think of the Roman Empire.
   There is no homo-erotic subtext in one film or the other film. (It’s in both films.)
   Plot twist. Gladiator Haribo and General Stand-In are now at odds with each other. Oh no. One is the secret son of Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. The other secretly worship’s Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. Only in cinemas.
   The opening of this movie is full of blood, thunder, thud, blunder, bombast, bomb blasts, napalm, death, and one or two digital sequences. I counted one or two. Then lost interest in counting the rest.
   There’s a new score featuring reheated elements from the original score. Inspirational speeches abound, though they are served up late from the microwaved leftovers from the first film.
   Speaking of microwaved leftovers from a better movie, the Emperor was replaced by two of the most miscast actors in a Mediterranean Sea of miscast actors. Least said, soonest mended. I just don’t have the energy. Should have hired Statler and Waldorf – though they, too, would have been miscast.
   What we do in life echoes in the sequel. Are we not entertained? You’re damned fucking right we are not entertained. Ridley has one eye on another pointless ALIEN sequel, showing us what would happen if the alien infected a family of baboons.
   They could have spent a whole lot more money on the computerised baboons. Wouldn’t have mattered. Strangely, I found the rhino a hell of a lot easier to accept. There’s a sliding scale of acceptance in this movie…
   It runs…rhino, yes. Baboons, no. Rubber sharks…fuck off. All of the computer models for animals are miscast in this film. Even the rhino. But that hardly matters. Here, they are outshone by the miscast humans. Loads of ’em.
   Pedro Pascal, General Stand-In, is miscast as a man who is miscast in a film. Yes, even his miscasting in this movie feels a bit off, a bit extra, in the department of wrongness. In the final analysis, that’s nothing. Nothing. Compared to…
   Matt Lucas as a Roman game-show host. Yes. That bit of stunt casting. Miscasting. David Hemmings wasn’t available. Death will affect the casting process that way. Yes, we miss Oliver Reed as well.
   This farce of a gladiatorial movie almost had me nostalgic for Gor. That’s a lie. I will never have nostalgia for Gor. Not even for all of the Oliver Reed scenes in Gor. They should have called this Gladiator: the Rematch. This time it’s personal. Only in cinemas.
   Gladiator: the Rehash. Okay. I get it. If the role is also part of the title, then we’re going to see some gladiatorising at some point. Gladiator Rising might have been a far better bet as a title. Is there any director out there, way out there, more inconsistent, more fucking random, than Ridley?
   Advertising jobs saved him. Made him. He owed it all to Captain Birdseye. If you listened to Captain Birdseye, though, Ridley was an arsehole. Mucking around at the BBC, Ridley was almost in a position to design the Daleks for Doctor Who. Why didn’t he design the Daleks? Because they’d have fucking resembled him. And Ridley wouldn’t have fucking cared.
   Scrolling down the patchy Scott filmography…it’s definitely a thing. By fuck, he veers wildly from film project to film project. He’s still going as I type, so, luckily for him, GLADIIATOR won’t be his last film.
   At least no one made the GLADIATOR sequel about Russell Crowe returning from the dead as an immortal assassin hell-bent on killing Jesus. Yes, that was my response when I first heard about it. Either Nick Cave was smoking everything while writing…or he was smoking nothing.

SEQUEL OF GOR: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

In my last blog post I changed a bulb and watched the Gor film. At double speed. This was an improvement. In a stunning development, Jack Palance turned up at the end of that movie extravaganza and promised a sequel.
   Who in their right fucking mind was going to fund a sequel? Ah. Distributed by the Cannon people. Fired from a big gun, this movie missed. It’s certainly a skill, missing the planet you are on.
   But we are not on our planet. No. We’ve been transported to the world of Gor. This movie contains a montage of the previous film at the start. By fuck, if I’d known that I’d have skipped the first fucking film.
   Our hero, Carl. Whoops. Tarl Cabot. Damn it. I’d have saved time and effort by reading Almuric comic books instead. Ironhand Esau Cairn would wipe the floor with Carl. Whoops. Tarl Cabot. On with the story…
   The story is a two-word script. When characters aren’t shouting Cabot! they are yelling Guards! Our hero…he isn’t…our hero Cabot is summoned back to Gor by his flashing magic ring. It is most precious to him. That was a lie.
   Landing in the same dead stretch of desert as before, he arrives with a new sidekick: Sleazy. He and Sleazy retread the original movie. No, seriously. Practically fucking nothing happens across 90-odd minutes of sand.
   Insert STAR WARS quote about sand here. Thank me later.
   What’s new in town? Fucking nothing. There’s a warning flash. OZONE LAYER DEPLETED. This pops up every time we encounter the leading lady, here relegated to a supporting role, whose hairspray-drenched mane threatens to have a wholly separate career.
   Cabot has been summoned arbitrarily. There’s no real rush for him to be here, except as a sequel cash-in. Jack Palance looks as though he’s had teeth pulled to star in this movie. I’m sure he had better times before, and he’d have better times ahead.
   But in this film, he looks as though he’s as happy as a man having his teeth pulled one by one between takes. Maybe two by two. Who knows? The best thing to say about Palance’s performance is that he gets to wear a funny hat. No. Really. That’s all I’ve got here, and that’s pretty weak gravy as it stands.
   Gor is a free land. Except where people aren’t free. We see the same scenes again in this movie. No, I’m not talking about the flashback to original footage. After that, we pretty much retread the original God-awful production.
   Our hero meets people from the first film. Not Oliver Reed. He fell to his death. But a half-hearted script could have brought him back and no one would’ve cared. Certainly not Ollie. There’s a king. And his evil queen. Blah-de-blah. The end. Roll credits.
   The evil queen takes on the leading lady status here. She hams it up. That’s all you can do. Cabot’s buddy Sleazy makes moves on the queen and she uses Sleazy to prove she was elsewhere when the king was mysteriously stabbed.
   We have this side-action going on with Jack Palance doing chemistry lessons for pay. The drink he concocts is irrelevant. What’s important? The knife. This is what the queen stabs her husband with. Cue the rest of the script.
   Guards!
   The king is dead. Long live the queen, I guess. (It’s not that kind of movie. Spoiler for the end of the film. She’ll never play piano again.) Someone killed the king. Was it Sarge? Rosemary the telephone operator? Quick, get Scoob and the gang to investigate.
   Yes. Someone killed the king. We’re all very sad, here in movie land. But it wasn’t the queen. No. Sleazy stands up for her. She was with him. If you catch his drift.
   Right. So. The queen couldn’t be a murderer. She was too busy committing adultery. Got it. Checks out. Would stand up in court. Seems legit. I’d had enough of Sleazy when he and his atrocious dialogue entered the start of the film like a virus entering a bloodstream. Maybe even a human bloodstream.
   But. I’d really had enough of him by now. He’s the new thing in the story. And he shouldn’t be a thing. Have you seen the Lethal Weapon movies, with Leo Getz? Stop trying to make him a thing.
   What about MARVEL products featuring Martin Freeman and Julia Louise-Dreyfus? Stop trying to make them a thing. Joe Pesci and those two, in certain films. In other things, I have no problem with these people.
   We revisit the first Gor film, in spirit. (Must we?) There’s a dance number. And the leading lady from the first movie must get into a bitchy fight with a warrior woman, all over again. And then another fight, after that.
   Cabot, meanwhile, must go on the run. Into the beige wastelands. Our queen, evil as ever, wants Cabot brought back alive. She’s sent Sleazy off to the dungeon. Well, he is in leather. And the queen decides to send a minion to hunt Cabot down.
   All of this goes fucking nowhere. Cabot gets into the usual low-rent fights you’ve grown accustomed to in this vague update of a sword-and-sandal movie. The difference is the soundtrack. Needs more cowbell.
   Cabot almost dies of thirst and then almost dies of quenching his thirst. The assassin appears out of nowhere after zero dramatic build-up whatsoever, and Cabot is captured. I’ve no intention of relaying events in chronological order. If I did that, one of my kidneys would rebel, force itself up through my torso into my throat, and throttle my tongue.
   Jack Palance seems to have the same contract Oliver Reed had. Spread a few minutes of performing across the whole movie. The evil queen is having the most fun out of an entire cast not having terribly much fun.
   Cabot is captured. Oh no. He’s going to be taken before the queen and shouted at, I suppose, if she wants him alive for breeding purposes or as a contract bridge partner. What is the point of this film?
   Jack Palance – it doesn’t matter what his character’s name is – Jack, he offers Tarl Cabot a deal. Just go home. But that’s fucking rubbish. So is the end of this movie. It looks like Jack Palance is planning to poison the evil queen. But she stabs him first.
   And then. The queen dies. Slain by her own assassin, who throws his big spear at her. Carl Tabot does fuck-all except shout excitedly from the sidelines. Wait, that isn’t his fucking name. Fuck it. His pal Sleazy ends up back in the real world, and is taken away by the police for having the audacity to appear in this sewer of a sequel.
   I’m not judging you if you like the film – I simply don’t have the energy for that. Did I not mention the title of the movie? Outlaw of Gor. It’s the script that’s the real outlaw here. Film in sand. Check. Use costumes from the earlier production? Bring back the same faces. Can you cut the budget?
   That’s twice, now. I’ve watched two films in the same so-called setting. At double speed. Nothing happens. The same dance numbers and gladiator girl combat. Everyone in bikinis. Not Jack Palance. Wander, lost, in the landscape. You could have driven a bus behind the characters, and no one would have noticed the mistake. Audience would just go with the idea that the bus driver discovered another magic ring.
   Shame there wasn’t a third movie. No, I lied. What would a third movie be about? Let me take a wild guess. Going by production timelines, I’m guessing Gor III would have gone straight to video in 1991.
   So we’d have Liam Neeson as the villain for five minutes. Carl. Damn it to fuck. Tarl. This fucking guy. Tarl Cabot is hanging around Downtown Sand Dune Number Six and he encounters a mysterious sorcerer.
   It’s Wade Webley. A stockbroker who…yes, evil stockbroker. Is there any other kind? A stockbroker who has a glowing ring. You’re making your own jokes up, now. He has found his way to Gor, and likes what he sees.
   Lots of women in bikinis.
   He reveals that he’s not a sorcerer. Just a guy armed with the technology of another world. His evil plan is to sell shares in the planet Gor and then foreclose on the widow’s mortgage, taking control of the beige land.
   Carl Tabot™ stops him with a swift sword to the kidneys. This takes up the last ten minutes of the film. In the first half hour, there’ll be a dance-off, two bikini battles, and Jack Palance hiding behind the palace curtains.
   Palance gets the same amount of time as Oliver Reed had, but it’s a minute more than the span allotted to Liam Neeson – barely recognisable in a state-of-the-art prosthetic mask…made from a Hallowe’en mask. It’s Captain Kirk’s face, spray-painted gold.
   We witness oodles of hairspray. Characters are lost in the desert. They reach the sea, and find Charlton Heston laughing as he walks back along the beach. Liam remarks that the production reminds him of Krull, without the budget. Or Excalibur without the knights.
   My work here is, just like the franchise, mercifully done.