Review: Dune - Part 2 (2024)
(image is fan poster made by Beenum Editz on Reddit)
Dune: Part 2 is visually impressive but is nearly derailed by script and casting choices.

TL;DR review - This is more teen romance than epic science fiction, it looks good but the writers tossed out much of the book and seems to have forgotten most of what happened in Part 1.  Zendaya’s portrayal of Chani nearly ruins the movie.

Once again, I am going to try to review this movie as a movie and not as a book adaptation. I may need to address one or two things but this isn’t going to be a side by side comparison of book vs movie. I’m also not going to go overmuch into comparing Dune Part 2 by Denis Villeneuve to the 1984 Dune film by David Lynch. I feel I demonstrated in my Dune Part 1 review that the 1984 version is better, more interesting and truer to the spirit of the novel.  I didn’t see anything in Dune 2 to make me change my mind.  This time, I’m going to just focus on the new version and see what worked, what didn’t and see if Denis stuck the landing.

That said, famously, Dune (1984) and the novel both begin with a discussion about how important beginnings are.  That said, endings are perhaps even more important. A story’s ending is what lingers, it is the last impression you take away from a movie.  Endings matter.  And Dune Part 2 has one of the worst endings I’ve seen.  Is it enough to destroy the movie altogether?  Not…quite.  If a audience member merely dismisses Chani and Zendaya’s portrayal of her as irrelevant (which it effectively is), then Dune 2 does indeed complete the story begin so leisurely in Dune Part 1.  Let’s talk about the movie in general and then I’ll get into specifics of what worked, what didn’t, what was left out and what should have been left out.

Plot
Dune Part 2 picks up immediately after the end of Dune Part 2, in fact I would not be shocked if the footage from the opening actually was filmed at the time.  Paul and Jessica’s behavior dovetails nicely with last scene of Part 1 and Jamis’ corpse still lies in its shroud as a reminder to the audience.  (Jamis and the consequences of killing him are handled…oddly in Part 2 but I’ll talk about how Dune Part 2 works as a sequel later).

A squad of Harkonnens arrive, looking for…someone. There’s debate about if they’re looking for Paul and Jessica or if they’re just hunting Fremen. At this point in the story, it seems far more likely the former is true but the movie seems to want to side with the Fremen’s interpretation. Which doesn’t make sense as the Harkonnens would still be in the consolidation phase of their invasion, they wouldn’t bother hunting desert rats yet.  But the opening scene is quite wonderful.  The ships and suits and the killing of the Harkonnens is evocative and interesting (if bloodless, this is a PG-13 story, indeed almost a children’s story).  After the Harkonnens are killed, Paul and Jessica are taken to the seitch of Stilgar.  

Stilgar seems less of a leader, indeed his role is greatly reduced in power and prestige for some reason compared to the first film.  Paul and Jessica are largely rejected by the Fremen although there doesn’t seem to be any real threat or danger to them. Its odd.  The death of Jamis is mourned but critically, Paul does not take responsibility for Jamis’ wife and child, which in the novel was yet another way Paul was forced to ‘grow up’ at speed.  The early part of the film is filled with religious debate over Paul. Stilgar, in this film, is immediately and completely convinced of Paul’s destiny. It is not a conviction he develops, he doesn’t start out as a leader and ersatz father figure to Paul and then later falls to worshiping him. No, Stilgar is all in on worshiping Paul as a messianic figure. It’s a change both from the book and from Part 1.

The first half of the movie is very much a boy’s adventure tale. Indeed Paul seems to be having the time of his life, running around the desert (We’re told how dangerous and hard life is but we never see it. Denis seems more interested in showing how beautiful it is instead), trying to flirt with the girl of his dreams.  This is also the only part of the movie where Zendaya acts believably or appealingly. I am prepared to believe Zendata knows all about boys and dating and her early scenes with Paul where she’s taking him under her wing and speaking up for him are her best scenes.  Paul seems to have forgotten revenge or the death of his father (though we do see a prophetic dream of Leto’s skull being enshrined and worshiped. As a fan of the book, I appreciated that but…it’s never brought up again or paid off). We do have fights against the Harkonnens but it’s all played as a lark, not as part of a war. It isn’t even a Fremen desire to drive the Harkonnens off world but seems to be more of the tit-for-tat fighting the Fremen have always done.  This is not a war movie (yet) it is just an extended Boy Scout camping expedition.

Jessica, in fact, is the driving force to push Paul into a position of power. Which is odd because she explicitly rejects revenge (which ought to be Paul’s motivation) in a scene that feels like it was filmed during Part 1.  But when Jessica is forced to take the Water of Life and become a Reverend Mother (while pregnant), she transforms as well into a bitter, scheming, manipulator. She will MAKE Paul the Lisan Al-Gaib, immediately babbling to Paul that HE must take the Water of Life too….which again feels odd as every other male who has tried the same procedure has died.  But then this version of Jessica is not very motherly and Paul treats her more like a friend and companion than as a mother himself.

This meandering first 2/3rds of the movie is actually my favorite part. The depictions of Fremen life is interesting to me and its clear a lot of time and effort went into making and filming it.  But very little of plot significance happens. We have a few scenes of the Harkonnens, with Rabban being a terrible leader and the Baron Harkonnen…not doing much of anything.  (He is not the master plotter and schemer of the book. He’s not even enjoying his victory over the hereditary enemy of his family)  We DO get Feyd-Rautha introduced.  I do need to pause a moment here to remark that the screenwriter of Dune Part 2 (Jon Spaihts) is the same screenwriter for Prometheus. Which explains why there are so many bald, waxy, pale people in Dune Part 2. It appears to be a fetish with Jon Spaihts.  We also get to see the Emperor, Shaddam IV and his daughter, Princess Irulan. They don’t do much or anything either.  We do get Lady Fenring but significantly, not her loving husband Count Fenring, who was a critical wild card in the book and nearly derailed all of Paul’s plans. But here, all we get is a pretty girl seducing Feyd (in a very PG-13 manner) and getting his seed in her belly.

There is no plot happening at this point. Spice production is being curtailed as Paul’s raids go on. And the Baron is quite upset at that and he makes threats to Rabban (which he doesn’t follow up on) but critically, we never see the Spacing Guild. This is a far bigger omission in the story as the Spacing Guild has an absolute monopoly on space travel. Indeed it is the Spacing Guild that pushed around the Emperor, it was the Spacing Guild that the Harkonnens had to bribe to invade Arrakis in the first place. It’s an alteration in the story that guts the plot and the conflicts that should be driving it.

We do have one last character who returns to Part 2, late in the film. Gurney Halleck is acting as a spice pirate and is captured by Paul and his Fremen raiders.  Gurney is the last link to the Atredies life that Paul seems to have abandoned. It would have been good to see them talking but we mostly hear about them talking, which is an odd choice.  Gurney also has the location of the House Atredies atomics, which he shows to Paul. We do not however get any of the emotional weight that atomic weapons has, how forbidden they are. Instead its treated as ‘cool, I have nukes now’. Baffling writing choices abound in Dune 2.

However the pace picks up at last when Feyd is declared ruler of Arrakis and he…magically seems to know where all the secret Fremen hideouts are. Despite us being shown just how secretive, elusive and mistrustful the Fremen are.  Anyway, Feyd bombs the northern Fremen to near destruction and they all flee to the Southern Hemisphere.  This is important to Paul as he has had precognitive dreams of a future where war sweeps the galaxy IF he goes south.  (the visuals of his visions are strangely lackluster and vague, a rare miss by the director, visually)  We are also now entering the portion of the story where Chani goes from supporting Paul to nagging him, opposing him, and scowling at him. Oh, so much scowling. It’s damn near the only facial expression Zendaya seems to have, it certainly is the one she uses the most.  However, Paul is basically forced into traveling South in the end, unable or unwilling to fight his fate.

It is only when Paul decides to embrace his destiny that the movie and Paul start to have agency and direction.  Paul takes the Water of Life (unlike the 1984 movie, not a lot is made of the failure of the precogniton he’d been relying on in his battle with the Harkonnens. It’s mentioned but in a blink and you’ll miss it manner rather than the dramatic apotheosis of Lynch’s version).  After drinking the forbidden liquid, he lies in suspended animation.  He appears dead, in fact, which ties into the myths and legends around him.  It takes Chani who, sulking and raging, revives Paul with poor grace or gratitude. In fact, Chani shows no concern for Paul, rather raging at Jessica and even after he revives, she doesn’t seem happy about it.  (Chani is a sulky teenager and those are always fun to see on screen and real life.)  However the Water of Life did in fact change Paul. It not only unlocked vast mental power (which we don’t see in use but we see the effects of it.) but it motivates Paul to take control of the Fremen and use them to attack the Harkonnens and the Emperor himself.

Paul sends a missive off world, declaring himself to the Emperor, setting in motion the final plot movements.  A massive attack by the Fremen (apparently without bothering to recapture the North) is put in motion as an assault by sandworms in the middle of a sandstorm (sandstorm not pictured) cripples the Emperor’s troops and the Harkonnens.  Paul kills the Baron Harkonnen, then has a duel with Feyd…not on personal grounds but as the Emperor’s proxy. Because apparently Wakanda rules are in effect here? Again, poor writing but the fight ends the way it was always going to, despite bad camera work and Feyd dies. The Emperor kneels to Paul and kisses his ring and Paul marries Princess Irulan and Chani pouts and storms out and that’s the last image of the movie…Chani scowling at the camera.

What worked
Before I go into the problems and mistakes, I want to take some time to give credit where credit is due.

Denis Villeneuve and Greig Fraser (the Cinematographer), The art, set and costume design team have created masterpieces.  This is a sumptuous movie to look at, full of interesting, functional technological gadgets, wild designs, and natural beauty in abundance.  I’m sure the look of the film will distract and delight many.

I also have to give credit to Timothee Chalamet, he caries this movie on his shoulders. And he proved to me that he can act. He is charming and gentle, pouring out love unconditionally to ungrateful, scowling child, a feat of true acting prowess.  I thought his version of Paul was greatly inferior to the 1984 version but he won me over in Part 2 here.

Javier Bardem’s Stilgar is derailed badly but the actor is very good with what he is given. Josh Brolin is also the only other actor with any charisma and his few scenes have real spark. I particularly liked him manhandling Chani as he seems to be the only person not willing to put up with her sulky bullshit.

The scene where Paul addresses the Southern Fremen and claims the role of Lisan Al Gaib is wonderfully well done.  Probably the best performance I’ve seen in the whole film duology. 

I think that’s it for good stuff but for once, the quantity of what worked does not equal the quality and impact. Visually this is going to win a lot of fans, as will Timothee Chalamet.

What didn’t work
I’m going to be careful as I can to not just go into a constant whining fit here and try to make my objections factual and not just emotional. I don’t ever want to be Chani.

But let’s start with her: Chani doesn’t work. Zendaya doesn’t work as Chani.  She is a turd in the punchbowl. Her scowling and petulant behavior makes it impossible to feel any sympathy for her. Her lack of overt affection or concern for Paul as a man makes the romance impossible to be believed in.  When Paul announces he will marry Princess Irulan, the reaction of the audience is going to be ‘oh no’, it’s going to be ‘well, he dodged a bullet’.  The movie tries very, very hard to make the story about Chani, not about Paul.  I know why they did this (as does The Critical Drinker, I suspect) but it doesn’t work.  For all the liberties taken with the story of Dune, Chani actually has very little to do.  Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve do their best to take the focus off Paul and put it on Chani but they can’t make up enough for her to do. She doesn’t matter except as far as she matters to Paul. In a way, that’s the salvation of the film. If you ignore Chani, she can’t ruin anything.

Next has to be the writing. It appears that Jon Spaihts tossed out most of the latter half of the book in an effort to write his own story with his own scenes. And it mostly doesn’t work. Jon Spaihts is a hack fraud screenwriter. He is not Frank Herbert.  He creates no quotable dialog. His story changes remove the motivations and drama that was there. He took one element from Dune (the false messiah) and made that his focus rather than power and revenge, love and family.

How it works as a Sequel. This is one of the strangest parts of Dune Part 2. Because it feels more like a standalone movie. We have very few characters returning from the first film and apart from Paul and Jessica, none of the returning characters DO much. This movie is very much in the hands of the new cast and they drive the action and provide the motivations.  You never get the feeling of Paul being motivated by revenge or grief of his father’s death, you never feel the weight of the death of his friends and mentors. It’s never a personal film, for anyone. It’s just…stuff that happens.

Removing the Spacing Guild.  The true powers behind the throne, one of them at least along with the Bene Gesserit, they are utterly dependant on the Spice.  And so is all of galactic civilization. No spice, no space travel.  Threats to spice production should have brought about immediate pressure. The Guild in fact is a secret ally to the Fremen. Another missed opportunity.

Removing the Mentats and Thufur Hawat in particular. Mentats are a critical part of the plot and story as well. Paul received mentat training, which along with Jessica’s training is what allowed him to be the Quizach Haderach at all.  Mentats may appear in the film, in the background, but they are removed from the plot and universe.  As Thfur’s abduction by the Harkonnens was a major source of drama, literally removing this character from the story cuts out much of the drama that drove the second half of the story. I guess all that was cut so we could get more desert Boy Scouts camping.

Altering the motivation for the Atreides destruction. Previously, the Harkonnens and the Atredies were hereditary enemies.  The Emperor allowed and aided the Harkonnens because he feared Duke Leto’s popularity and because he feared the army he had created.  He didn’t think Leto was weak. Neither did the Bene Gesserit. In fact the statement in the movie that the Atreides bloodline was to be wiped out is so anathema to the whole purpose of the Bene Gesserit, I can only think that the screenwriters didn’t read or drastically perverted the book to provide their own motivations.  

Casting Christopher Walken as the Emperor and then wasting him. I think Walken has 3 paragraphs of dialog in the whole movie. In the last scene, rather than any regal dress, he seems to be wearing a dressing gown. This has to be a deliberate choice but I’m baffled by it.  This Emperor does nothing, moves nothing.

Stilgar’s derailment.  This is a waste of a good actor and a wasted opportunity to show how worship twists a healthy relationship into something lesser.  By starting the movie with Stilgar believing in Paul to be the fulfillment of prophesy, it leaves him with nowhere to go. Further, the movie mocks him for his faith, which diminishes him as a character and makes him more of a joke than a strong leader. And it ties into my next complaint…

Dislike of religion and prophesy. This is hammered home over and over again about how faith in Paul is false faith, that the prophecies he is fulfilling were planted by the Bene Gesserits. Which is all true…until it’s not. Because Paul IS fulfilling prophesies without trying to.  The movie seems to hate people having faith. And yet…the people who have faith in Paul are the ones who are rewarded.  Their faith is justified because Paul is in fact the fulfillment of prophesy, regardless of who created it and why. He may have stumbled into it, but too much happens that lines up for it to have been pure fiction, just taking the movie at its own word here and not adding any extra metaphysics.  This isn’t just a rich noble boy falling into a role and taking it on like an actor. This is a mentat-trained, Bene Gesserit trained, Quidditch Haderach candidate who comes to them. That was no one’s plot or ploy.

But the biggest failure I think is in how they treated Paul. Paul is unique in the universe. He actually IS the destined chosen one…only he arrived a generation too early, uncontrolled. He has the ability to see the future even before he takes the water of life. After, he has access to the memories of a thousand generations of his male ancestors. He also (supposedly) has access to all the Bene Gesserit powers, including truthtelling, telepathy, and of course The Voice.  But we don’t get to see he use these powers except for once brief moment in the big moment where he claims the title of Lisan Al Gaib.  I guess he does use The Voice once afterwards too.  But by putting the focus on others, Chani in particular, rather than on Paul…we are robbed of the opportunity to see what makes Paul special.  Instead as the film goes on, we see Paul increasingly from the outside rather than staying with him and seeing Dune and his destiny from his point of view.

Summary

I won’t go into what I would have done differently too much. I think different casting and choosing different drama threads would go a long way.  The editing is also too leisurely. I actually happened to like the Boy Scout Camping adventure but it can’t be denied that focusing on that means that screen time isn’t dedicated to plot and drama.

It also feels very much like a standalone movie, which is odd for something that literally has ‘Part 2’ in its title but this feels very disconnected from Dune Part 1.

So many characters are short changed or altered to be unrecognizable. Lady Jessica in particularly isn’t the book character but she does serve her purpose and serves the movie’s needs.  

So, the movie was wrapped up, and there are plot threads to tie into a sequel.  It did not end as epically as the 1984 film, it isn’t as memorable in characters, antagonists, or dialog.  My only hope is that it will motivate people to seek out the book and dive into the riches there.

​TL;DR review - Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 is good and should be enjoyed by everyone who liked the first two movies.  Go see it.

Prologue:

I approached this movie with no small amount of what I can only describe as dread.  There is a power in expectations, for good and for ill. For Guardians of the Galaxy vol 1 is one of my top 3 movies, considering my top 100 movies contains films like Casablanca, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Usual Suspect, it's in heady company.  And it is up there for purely personal reasons. I'm not blind to its faults, but GotG instilled a sense of wonder in me, a joy of adventure leavened with heavier emotional weight that few movies have equaled.  The sequel was inferior but still very entertaining. In fact, I've seen vol 2 with people who had never seen the first movie and they enjoyed it as much, if not more, than I did.  Then there was the near perfection that was Avengers: Infinity War, that movie was about 1/3rd a GotG movie and really is required viewing prior to seeing GotG vol 3. (Thor: Love and Thunder also features the Guardians but should be avoided, or if it cannot be, then it should be burned)  So, volume 3, coming at the end of the incomprehensibly bad 'Phase Four' of Disney's Marvel "content", carried with it the taint of the wasted opportunity of Avengers: Endgame as well all the other figurative sewage that Marvel has shoveled out since killing Tony Stark.


My fears were unfounded. Let this be a lesson. Do not take counsel in your fears.

The Review:

l think the less you know about the movie, the more you'll enjoy it. So see the Too Long; Didn't Read review at the top if you have plans to see it. For the rest of you, I'm going to go in depth and will discuss the plot and characters, which may 'spoil' the movie for you. Fair warning. Seriously, just go see it.

Story:

We start off in Knowhere, the hollowed out head of a dead Celestial deity where the Guardians had first encountered The Collector.  The inhabitants view the Guardians as protectors, heroes and celebrities...which, they actually are.  No subversion here, the Guardians really are heroes.  Nebula has taken on something of a leadership role, though still rough and abrasive, as Peter Quill has taken to drinking, still grieving over the death of Gamora in Avengers: Endgame. It is worth noting that Gamora has not just slide into the Guardians team as she is from a different time and has not had the revelation of her foster father, Thanos, as a genocidal maniac.

Rocket is the heart and framing story of the movie, and we see him wandering around, singing along to American pop music playing over the loudspeakers, singing off key but singing.  One of the joys of this movie is that the characters have changed as a result of their experiences, their interactions are not the same as in the first or even second movie.  Drunken Peter is put to bed by Nebula, where he sleepily calls her 'Gamora' and tells her that he loves her.  The group expresses concern for Peter but we don't wallow in his self pity too long, because just when things are getting mopey, a guy walks in with a gun.

Or rather, a golden superbeing flies into Knowhere from outer space, blasts into Rocket's apartment and tries to steal him.  This is Adam Warlock, who's cocoon is seen briefly at the end of GotG vol 2, he is newly birthed, full sized and nearly full powered. He is extremely powerful and durable, with strength and firepower and speed greater than any of the Guardians. They fight, Peter snapping out of his drunken pity party immediately...which is nice. However, Rocket is badly injured in the fight with Adam Warlock. Attempts to use a medkit on him fail as we are informed that there is a 'kill switch' inside him to prevent anyone from tinkering with him or even using com"mon magic technology" like medkits. (slight flaw)  Nebula, now equipped with a shapechanging arm, backstabs Adam Warlock while he is beating another Guardian.  This stops him but doesn't kill him. (Adam Warlock is very very hard to kill in this movie, consistently so, however)

The Guardians basically abandon the Adam Warlock fight to rush to Rocket's aid.  The plot kicks off as the Guardians need to find the code to reverse or unlock the kill switch which will allow the medkits to fix the internal injuries Rocket suffered from Adam Warlock's attack.  They Guardians begin by heading to the intergalactic megacorp who holds the patent on Rocket.

This intergalactic megacorp is owned by and controlled by the movie antagonist, The High Evolutionary...who makes a very effective villain and antagonist. The High Evolutionary is a genetic engineer and inventor on a colossal scale. He is also obsessed, on the edge of madness, with creating a perfect race and society. And Rocket is a key to his next version of a perfect race. He wants Rocket and he'd sent Adam Warlock to get him.  However, Warlock is very inexperienced, he's eager to please his mother, the golden Ayesha from GotG vol 2.  The High Evolutionary threatens to exterminate their entire race, which is is revealed to have created, unless they fetch Rocket for him.

This is the main set of conflicts: The Guardians need the kill switch code to heal Rocket. The High Evolutionary wants Rocket to dissect his brain and copy his gadgeteering and technologically prodigy for his newest perfect race. Adam Warlock needs Rocket so he can deliver him to the High Evolutionary to appease him and spare his race.

Enter Gamora, at last. Gamora has hooked up with the Ravagers, where her cold blooded murdering talents are highly appreciated and reinforced. Gamora and the Ravager help the Guardians break into the Intergalactic Megacorp in exchange for a lot of money.  Gamora has no memory of her 'future' self's evolution or her relationship with Peter Quill.  She is the hard, cold assassin Thanos raised her to be.  She has no interest in Peter and reacts contemptuously and even violently at his puppyish attempts to connect with her.

However, Peter Quill is given focus and drive by Rocket's problem. He's not weak, moping or passive. He's active, even charming, keeping the Guardians focused, moving forward towards goals and over coming obstacles. It was a pleasant surprise to see Peter still being portrayed as a quick thinking, adaptive planner, while still being a fairly moral man. Just...don't piss him off or try to kill his friends. More on that later as it will come up.

The Guardians go through their heist, finding the data they need, discovering that the kill switch has been removed by one of The High Evolutionary's flunkies.  Meanwhile, we get little flashbacks scattered throughout the movie of Rocket's creation, his education, his manipulation and the endless vivisectional tortures he and other animals endured as The High Evolutionary attempts to turn animals into people. These scenes are both heartwarming and horrific and there are elements of body horror here that can be hard to take. It's a good movie to go home from and hug your dog.

Speaking of dogs, there are two more Guardians who are not yet on this mission. Kraglin, the sidekick of Yondu who has inherited the deadly arrow...even if he hasn't mastered it yet. And an intelligent Russian retriever, Cosmo, who has telekinetic powers and a mechanical translator so she can speak and be understood.  Cosmo was seen briefly among The Collector's trophies and is one of the joys of this movie.

The Guardians flee the intergalactic megacorporation headquarters, now pursing The High Evolutionary's flunky, leading to 'Counter Earth', a perfect duplication of Earth, only populated by the evolved animals The High Evolutionary had been trying to perfect during Rocket's flashbacks.  This leads to some 'first contact' humor and eventually to the location of the High Evolutionary on this 'Counter Earth'.  The trail of breadcrumbs is perhaps too obvious and too easy and yes, it is a trap and Peter Quill knows it's a trap.  He is, after all, a proven instinctive planner.  Peter and Groot go to see the High Evolutionary, but really they're looking for the flunky who has the kill switch code downloaded in a brain computer.

There is a confrontation and then a shootout and Peter and Groot actually manage to capture and...'extract' the computer they need. With a knife.  Seriously, do not piss of Peter fucking Quill or threaten his friends.

The High Evolutionary had previously expressed dissatisfaction, again, with his creations here on Counter-Earth and basically....he destroys the whole planet. He has another set of 'perfect' creatures he plans to create yet another new world for them to live on and create his Utopia. Now his headquarters on Counter Earth is revealed to be a moon-sized spaceship, which rips itself free from the planet's crust.

The other Guardians, not realizing Peter has escaped with Groot and the data, board the departing space ship.  Inside Nebula, Drax and Mantis discover the children The High Evolutionary plans to populate his new world with. There is a whole lot of mix ups and chaos but eventually all the Guardians, including an un-kill-switched and healed Rocket plus Gamora end up back on the High Evolutionary's ship.

Also mixed in here is another appearance by Adam Warlock, who attempts and fails to steal Rocket. He survives the Guardian's spaceship being blown up around him, if barely.


Peter's escape has not gone unnoticed, of course, by the High Evolutionary, but he is distracted as his obsessive madness finally turns his command staff against him. This does not end well for the command staff, the High Evolutionary is indeed powerful.  After killing his subordinates, he unleashes his cybernetic monsters on them, everyone demanding the capture of Rocket.  We have some more epic super hero combat which is quite brutal in comparison to most Marvel fights.

Peter calls for aid, in the form of Kraglin and Cosmo who pilot the head of the dead Celestial like it was a space ship, bringing it and a gigantic space cannon to bear on the High Evolutionary's moon-sized ship.  This is just silly and awesome all at once.

In the end, the High Evolutionary is defeated, but not killed, perhaps surprisingly. The Children are rescued and taken to Knowhere as well as many of the animal who were still being held for experiments.  The High Evolutionary has a thing for turning animals into people, still.  Adam Warlock saves Peter when he gets stuck on the High Evolutionary's ship, having been given a second chance as well. Then the Guardians...break up.  Peter is going to go home finally. Mantis is going to do something other than what she's told to do for the first time in her existence, Gamora heads back to a welcoming Ravager host. Nebula and Drax are more or less retired and settle into running Knowhere instead of adventuring. The others stick together, now under the leadership of Rocket, who has come from being VERY skeptical of doing anything to benefit others, to being far more protective of others.

There's some post credit sequences, but they can be skipped, I think, with little lost apart from confirmation that the Guardians are still around and that The Legendary Star Lord will return. Supposedly.

What worked:
1. Visually, this is still Marvel-class spectacle and the SFX are world class and flawless.
2. The characters are the strongest part of the movie. They act like real people who've had real things impact them from their past. Unlike lesser superhero movies, the GotG characters grow, adapt, grow closer, and remember what they've gone through. The contrast between lesser Marvel and DC movies is stark and that comes down to the writing James Gunn has done and the care that he and his actors have put into their characters.  Gunn and the actor care and that shows so clearly in this movie.  We are shown how the Guardians care for each other, how they drop everything, face any risk to help their friends...and how they will risk their lives to save the lives of the innocent.  When they can.  This is an unfair galaxy and they can't save everyone. But...they do what they can.  These are no longer self-centered assholes, they are a team, a family, a band of heroes.
3. The antagonist, the High Evolutionary, portrayed by Chukwudi Iwuji is a villain done right. He is terrifying, powerful, intelligent, his motivations are clear yet he is easy to root against and want to see defeated, if not destroyed.  This is what Kang the Conquerer should have been. 
4. Relatedly, the performances of the main characters are good.  These are (mostly) professional actors who inhabit their characters. They are funny, charming, powerful, lovable oddballs.
5. Powers and abilities of each of the Guardians, even the side characters, is put on display in the movie. Drax's strength and durability saves the day as does an unexpected skill in languages. Nebula's near invulnerability and her upgraded weapons/machine interface is also vital. Mantis, who is often the short straw of the team, gets to show off both her powers and her insight. (She's like the mirror universe version of Counselor Troi, an empath that actually feels and shows emotion) Gamora is ruthless and lethal, as she always should have been. Rocket's technological mastery is displayed in past and present. Groot gets to show off his shapeshifting and lethality. Kraglin gets to use the arrow successfully and Cosmo is a VERY good dog. But Peter Quill gets to repeatedly show his competence, which is a delightful surprise in a Marvel movie in Current Year. He's charming, cunning, quick witted, focused, compassionate, able to wrangle the Guardians and keep them directed, a talented marksman in a fight, and comes up with really effective plans on the fly.
6. The ending. It's very hard to stick the landing on a trilogy. This movie manages to have a solid, if bittersweet, ending that doesn't write anyone off but makes it clear that there are changes coming for the Guardians cast.

What didn't:
1. Though some of the music worked very well (the ending 'Dog Days are Over' by Florence and the Machine was joyus), other pop song soundtracks didn't do much for me. I'm not sure if the Beastie Boys 'No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn' works for a fight scene and there are other mismatches. It didn't jar me but the matching of song to scene isn't as good as in the previous entries.
2. The voice work done for 'Teef', the poor wheelchaired walrus, didn't work for me. The almost caricature British accent kinda bugged me compared to the other animals.
3. Ayesha's activity and her fate (did she die or not?) is too much of an afterthought. She (no joke intended) has one good scene but is afterwards given little or nothing to do.  Ultimately she and Adam Warlock are a distraction.
4. Adam Warlock's portrayal in general. I have nothing against the actor, Will Poulter, who has the size and physique for the role. But the writing has him acting like an idiot more than an innocent.  As mentioned, he could have been cut with no impact on the plot as long as Star Lord had his boots and mask. Speaking of...
5. Where are Star Lords iconic mask and jet boots?  For a movie that has done a good job of maintaining continuity, the absence of these tools is bizarre.  The Guardians go into space all the time, Quills should always have them, it's not like they are large or bulky. Or, for that matter, where are the jet packs from GotG?  Wouldn't there be packs on the ship at least?  Quill managed to remember his guns...and then some...but not his face mask or flying gear?

What's inbetween:
1. Gamora and Nebula are almost antagonists instead of allies.  Honestly, I appreciate this. Nebula only joined the team recently and she has been even more agressive and confrontational, yet she clearly values Peter and Rocket very highly. Likewise Gamora is not who she had been and doesn't act like she did.  Yet....yet...both characters are hard to like because of the way they abuse the other characters.
2. The extras and background characters. You can really see a difference in quality between some of the extras and others. I don't know if James Gunn just cast a bunch of friends or fans in some scenes but it stands out.
3. Nathan Fillion, casting his brother and other friends. It doesn't bother me so much, but you do notice some characters given more screen time than they deserve. It's his movie, but it's a little indulgent.
4. Some of the comedy didn't land, though most of it did and I laughed out loud more than a few times.
5. Dave Bautista seems to be a bit chunky, don't expect any more shirtless scenes from Drax in this one. I understand, all that makeup is probably a pain as is maintaining a ripped physique at his age.
6. Rocket seems to have lost his fascination with stealing body parts. I kinda liked that running joke, but Rocket has very little time in this movie while he's conscious and active.

What would I change?:
1. The biggest flaw is probably Adam Warlock. He should be played more innocent and more seriously. He should be tied more tightly to The High Evolutionary, which would fit his comic origins better...though sadly it's too late to tie him into the Soul Stone, as he should be. Poor planning on Marvel's side again.  If we can't tie him tightly to the High Evolutionary, he and Ayesha should be cut, they add very little to the story apart from a minor redemption arc.

2. Though Peter snaps out of his mope pretty quick, I think playing Peter more mature and less 'puppy dog' would make sense. Though Peter is a great example of arrested adolescence and him deciding to 'grow up' is good, I think the execution of that could be done more gracefully.  Star Lord is competent, let him be mature too.

That's about it, the story is solid and simple and straightforward overall. Those are good qualities in a film. Not everyone is Chris McQuarrie.

Summary:

This is a pretty good ending for most of the characters. It's not final and it's clear the Guardians will go on, in some iterations but it's an ending for the main cast, letting the actors move on with their lives.

It really is a good movie, creative and not like the rest of the MCU. For that reason alone, it deserves praise and attention.  Go see it, if you liked the first two. Or even if you didn't, it might win you over and probably will entertain you.

Dune (2021) Review

Dune: Part One is a failure, but an honest one I think.

TL:DR review - Visually interesting with some good performance, this movie wastes the audience’s time and only dedicated fans of the book or previous movies will be able to follow what is happening and why.

The first real challenge in reviewing this adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune is to decide if I compare it to the novel or if I compare it to the previous movie and mini-series adaptations.  I may reference the novel here and there but I think we can get a more useful review if I compare this film version verses the 1984 David Lynch adaptation. A novel is not a movie, books and movies have different needs, and a mini-series like the 2000 has more time (nearly 5 hours) to tell its story (*1).  So the best comparison I think is to go head to head: 2021 vs 1984.

A quick word on my background with Dune, since it might be relevant. I have read the full series...once. And I’ve read Dune and Children of Dune repeatedly. I think Dune might be one of the best science fiction (though it’s almost more fantasy) novels ever written. In addition, I went very, very carefully through Dune on two occasions: one, in college for a research paper for one of my English classes, the second time with an eye towards writing a paper and pen role playing game for myself and my friends to play..as there never really has been a good Dune role playing game.  I have literally gone line by line through Dune looking for information as well as for the sheer pleasure of it, though admittedly, that was a few years ago.  I’m also a big fan of the 1984 version, I find it endlessly quotable and it was a frequent group watch for me and my circle of friends (hence me drafting a role playing game for it). I’ve also seen the 2000 mini series and found it to be very good for what it is (lower budgeted for one and awkwardly acted for another) that actually manages to handle the book plot better than the 1984 version. Heck, at least they tried to put Count Fenring and his wife into the story.

Denis Villeneuve clearly cares about visuals and it seems like he is familiar with the novel, he just cares more about the visuals and about Paul’s story than about the story as a whole. The majority of the runtime is focused on Paul Atredies (played here with angsty teenager energy by Timothee Chalamet), other characters are given much less time and development, to the point where Pieter De Vries isn’t even named on screen, let alone given motivation and character. 

Other names and words you won’t hear are: Mentat, Master of Assassins, Imperial Conditioning, you have a traitor among you, Feyd(...yes, that’s right...Denis didn’t introduce or reference Feyd Rautha, the Baron Harkonen’s heir, let alone Count Fenring), folding space, travel without moving, Princess Irulan, witch, dinner party, twisted mentat, Muad'dib (*2), Jihad.

This movie has been slashed to the bone narratively and it still feels bloated and boring because the director spent their time filming landscapes instead of people. Character motivations, like the betrayal by Doctor Yueh, are either announced just before their death or sometimes not mentioned at all. The director has made a creative choice on what he wants to focus on. I think it means he failed as a storyteller but did so as a result of conscious choice as opposed to incompetence or malicious intent.

Let’s go over the plot, then we can discuss what worked, what didn’t work, a comparison verses the 1984 David Lynch version and then final thoughts or how I would have fixed the failures.

Plot:
The year is 10,191. Humanity has spread to the stars and is ruled by an Imperium balanced by an association of rival Great Houses that rule various planets as feifs. These planetary grants can be given or taken away by the Emperor. The most important planet in the universe is Arrakis, also known as Dune, which is the sole source of the Spice. Spice is required for space travel, it has mind altering effects and also brings long life to its users.

Two rival houses, House Harkonen and House Atreides, are trading control over Arrakis. The Harkonen, cruel and debauched, have become very wealthy by it’s control over spice production. The Atreides are popular with the other houses for their honesty and nobility. The Emperor is jealous and fearful of this popularity and has decided to aid the Harkonen in destroying the Atreides by laying a trap for them in giving them Arrakis.

The Atreides are aware of the trap but think they might be able to survive it or even reverse it and reveal the truth of the Emperor’s treachery. Duke Leto Atreides is wise, moral and brave, he’s aided by competent subordiances include Thufir Hawat, Duncan Idaho, Gurney Hallack and the treacherous Doctor Yueh.

At the same time, Duke Atreides’ son, Paul, is growing to be a man and attracts the attention of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Paul is the result of a very long breeding experiment, though he was not supposed to be born to the Duke, a daughter was commanded of the Duke’s concubine, Jessica. Her disobedience has resulted in a potentially powerful psychic of sorts.

On Arrakis, Paul’s family and house is destroyed and he is forced to flee into the desert to take shelter among the natives, called the Fremen, who have long held a prophesy that a man would come from the ‘outer world’ to lead them to paradise. Paul is fitting into those prophecies, in part due to his unpredictable ability to dream of the future accurately. 

And that’s as far as this movie goes, stopping with Paul arriving among the Fremen, fighting to keep him and his mother there, and leaving with them.

What worked

I think even the worst enemy of the movie would concede that the movie looks great, visually. The desert landscapes, interior sets, costumes and props all look great.  It gives a great illusion of being sci-fi.

I particularly love watching the Ornithopters...though with their dragonfly design perhaps they should be called Odonata-thopters, the glow spheres and miscellaneous tech trinkets.

Some of the cast does very well, I couldn’t ask for a better Duke Leto Atreides than Oscar Isaac. Josh Brolin has the one memorable line of the whole movie as Gurney Hallack. Jason Momoa plays Duncan Idaho as a bit of a dude bro but he has genuine charisma and is the only actor Timmy Chalmet shows any spark or life around. Stellan Skarsgard plays Baron Harkonen as a more subdued plotter and schemer. Javier Bardem plays a perfect Stilgar.

The Fremen feel true to life and the book.  The Sardaukar depiction might be the best yet.

I liked the sign language used by the Atreides. 

The final fight verses Jamis is fairly well done, though it has some more awkward cuts and the framing of the fight as usual doesn’t show the actor’s full bodies.

There is, overall, a great deal of craft and skill in this. Dune is a movie and it plays well on a big screen. There are some scenes taken from the book that are adapted well: Duncan Idaho’s departure and his mission, Lady Jessica’s discussion with the Shadout Mapes, the date trees, the spice mining, discussing how Duncan and Gurney have trained the Atredies army to be a very serious skill level, the sandworms themselves look less like giant penises.
However, despite being a real movie, it isn’t a successful movie and not a better movie than David Lynch’s version. This next section might go long, fair warning.

What didn’t work
First and most worrisome, I’m honestly not sure any audience member who isn’t very familiar with Dune (in novel or movie form) will be able to follow what’s happening and why. We are not shown very much and sometimes only a single line of dialog will cover what should be critical plot points. It’s like Denis has forgotten all about setup and payoff or he’s just cut so much of the film out in favor of dream sequences and stupid teenage longing ala the Last Jedi. I’m almost tempted just to do a bullet point list, so let’s try that out!

• We never see the Emperor
• We never see any of the Spacing Guild
• We never get told what a Mentat is
• We gloss over Spice being used for life extension by all the nobility
• We never even get Piter named, let alone his role in the plot
• We never see Harkonen terrorist attacks and sabotage
• The Shadout Mapes never warns of a traitor among the Atreides
• We see no tension around Lady Jessica and her role
• No mention of computers being banned
• No mention of atomics being banned
• No mentions of technology in general
• We get no information about the Bene Gesserit, their role and goals
• We get no insight into how the attempt on Paul’s life derails Leto’s ability to focus and plan
• We have few scenes seeing Leto and his staff interacting and showing their mutual loyalty and devotion
• Nothing discussed or shown about the local nobility and social activities, of course including the excellent dinner party scene (also left out of the 1984 version, to be fair)
• Paul’s unusual skill and perception is not shown much or commented upon
• The Imperial Conditioning for Suk doctors, and why it's important is never mentioned
• We never see the Guild’s flexing its political muscles
• We have no mention of Feyd at all, let alone the Baron’s plan for using Rabban as the stick and Feyd as the ‘savior’ of the people of Dune
• We actually see very little of the Harkonen plots and schemes or desires even
• Paul’s piloting ability is never mentioned or shown...until he's suddenly able to pilot through a Coriolis storm with 600km/hr winds
• No mention of the dangers of lasers and shields interacting
• Lady Jessica’s Bene Gesserit talents and her overall competence are shown only once or twice, most of the time she’s crying or shaking or just standing around with a dumb look on her face

That’s a good list of what was left out, verses the David Lynch version, let alone the book but let’s talk about what was in the movie but still didn’t work and let’s start with Chani.

Zendaya has been the latest actress forced on us in an attempt to make us like her. It’s not working, at least for me. She was terrible in Spiderman and she’s not great here. She does look like a teenaged girl, that’s fine, but she also talks like one. Specifically, she talks like a California teenager of modern times.  And despite having, maybe 4 lines of dialog in the movie, which again she does a pretty lousy job delivering, Chani is all over this film. She appears in more slow motion dream sequences than ten 80’s music videos. She might appear in more dreams that Freddy Kruger does.

Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica is another miss. This might be bad writing and direction though, as she spends important scenes being weepy and shaking instead of showing the iron control of a Bene Gesserit. Her attempts to say the Litany Against Fear is almost impossible to understand because she persists in weeping and shaking, but that might be the performance she was asked for. Either way, it’s a mistake. Likewise, she doesn’t feel like a mother to Paul, they have no signs of affection for each other and she does not come off as either a courtesan, or, again, a Bene Gesserit. At best, she’s more like a big sister to Paul and a little sister to Duke Leto.

The fight scenes mostly don’t work. The shields are arguably worse than the 1984 CGI blocky shields, the blue and red color coding is nice but they still make it hard to see the fighting. The camera swings around and we can’t see strikes and defends for most of the fights, the shields making everything blurry. This might be to avoid an R rating, which is another mistake I feel if another honest one, or it might be because the actors aren’t up for good fight choreography physically. And when you do have one...they have Dave Bautista in this movie as Beast Rabban and they have no fight scenes with him. Where is the thinking there?

The Testing of Paul by the Reverend Mother is also flawed. Not only are we missing the sadistic dialog in the 1984 version, Paul comes off as defiant and ‘sassy’ in his confrontation during the Gob Jabbar test.  The 1984 edition has Paul showing resistance and suffering while still enduring pain. The 1984 edition has better acting and interaction between the two in their duel, and after it.  Not a large scene, I admit, but it really didn’t work for me.

Too many dream sequences.  I hope someone out there is actually going to tote up the actual minutes of screen time wasted on images of Chani wandering around and smiling at Paul. Because that is wasted time that could have been spent on the plot or character development. Seriously, what character development is even PAUL having with these dreams? None.  And they eat up so much time and they’re almost all the same, every time. 

The dream sequences also don’t work as dreams. They are not shot in a way to make you think they are dreams or visions, apart from being in slow motion. But so many other scenes are also in slow motion elsewhere in the film that slow-mo alone isn’t a good tip off. Some of the ‘visions’ are shot flatly, like normal scenes that are just being shown out of sequence.  Somehow this visually-oriented director couldn’t think of a good way of making a dream sequence look like a dream.

We also have no sense of space here, for a sci-fi movie where space travel and the Spacing Guild are the critical reason for Spice, and Dune’s importance, we have very little in the way of space travel. We have no scenes in space or of the travel process. We have space ships that basically act like weird airplanes or flying boats almost. Odd omission.

I’m starting to get into nit picks so I’ll take a step back and talk a bit more generally. The biggest flaw of the movie is not giving us characters to care about or remember. There just isn’t enough time on screen, it’s all been spent on watching Zendaya walk around in dreams or on pictures of landscapes.

But I do want to call out one more thing before I go on to actually compare Dune 2021 to Dune 1984, and that’s Timmy’s performance as Paul. It isn’t a bad performance, he’s not terrible, he’s not incompetent, he’s not a bad casting choice. However, he’s hard to like.  This version of Paul comes off as a snotty rich kid who has a book full of the correct answers.  Pride is to be expected, all versions of Paul start out with him being proud to one extent or another. But Timmy is arrogant, he comes off as cold and disinterested in everything. The only sparks we see on screen are his scenes with Jason Momoa, he shows more affection for Duncan than for his Father or his Mother. He mocks Gurney by calling him ‘Old Man’ repeatedly. It’s fine for playing a teenager, I suppose, but it’s not great for getting an audience invested in the character.  It’s another failure and, again, I think it’s an honest one. The director and actor chose this performance, it just doesn’t work well.

Battle of the Dunes

David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune is a long story, one that David Lynch himself dislikes. He’s free to be disgruntled and free to be wrong.  The 1984 adaptation diverges from the book in one key area, the much-maligned ‘Weirding Modules’ (*3) and it omits Count Fenring and wife, but is nonetheless more faithful to the novel than Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation.  I do realize that the 2021 adaptation is just half the story, so I’ll just limit my critique and comparison to the first half of Lynch’s Dune. Let’s start with the visuals and special effects.

The 2021 movie visually looks very nice. The CGI is largely seamless and hard to pick out from ‘reality’. Architecturally, it’s bland with Gedi Prime missing the bizarre and baroque building and ship designs, likewise the Shield Wall is less interesting than the mountain wall of the 1984 edition. The body shields are a partial improvement, showing more of the actor’s body and the red vs blue light indicating a shield penetration.  However, the CGI of the 1984 edition doesn’t look that bad in comparison. The shields are blocky polygons that do block vision but that seems to fit and be appropriate somehow. The 1984 special effects include puppets and physical props, even with the more crude animation and visuals, it may not look ‘real’ but it doesn’t break my immersion or interfere with my enjoyment.  Most may find the SFX here an upgrade over the original, I agree to a point but don’t find the differences to be a deficit to my enjoyment of the 1984 version.
     The other visuals of landscapes, ships, costumes and props, I’m likewise going to call it a tie. The visuals in 2021 are ‘cleaner’ and better lit, however. Props and costumes are a little better in the 1984 edition.  They didn't manage to improve on the blue on blue eyes, strangely enough. I guess 1984 tech was fine.

Casting and performances:

• Paul Atredies - Timmy was 25ish when filming but looks younger, Kyle MacLachlan was 24ish but looked like an adult man. The performances are markedly different. Timmy is arrogant and aloof, cold and chilly.  Kyle is proud but also curious and is allowed to show insight, he’s also better at showing emotion. No question in my mind that Kyle makes a better Paul.
• Duke Leto Atreides - Jurgen Prochnow was wonderful, warm and wise. So was Oscar Isaacs. Both are amazingly good performances, Jurgen was more fortunate in his writing and dialog, though his accent does interfere in some scenes. Not enough to make a real difference for me. Tie in all the best ways.
• Lady Jessica - Rebecca Ferguson fails to act either aristocratic, as a courtesan or as a Bene Gesserit. Francesca Annis is alluring, calm and displays more emotion. Neither is prefect, frankly, but in comparison, Francesca is the better Royal Lady.
• Chani - Sean Young verses Zendaya...lol. Easy win for Sean Young.  Sean is a little too mature for the part but there's no question that she's a better actress.
• Gurney Hallack - Patrick Stewart is droll, bombastic and dangerous.  Josh Brolin is tough, grizzled, and competent.  Patrick gives a better performance overall but Josh does nothing wrong.
• Duncan Idaho - Jason Momoa is charismatic as all get out. He plays Duncan as the older brother you always wished you had. In fight scenes, he’s believable, as an actor...he’s still playing a DudeBro but it fits his character fine, good casting. Richard Jordan is honestly a better actor but his casting isn’t a perfect fit and he lacks the physicality Duncan needs. Jason is the immortal hero of the saga.
• Thufir Hawat - Freddie Jones is the definition of a yeoman performer and it shows in his acting. His way with words and presence personifies the old warhorse who is maybe missing a step but has a mind like a steel trap.  Stephen Henderson is let down by the script in his version of Dune, having little to say, little to do. He is more avuncular than a master of assassins. Neither man is physically imposing, but neither is an embarrassing. Freddie Jones’s line deliver wins it for me.
• Doctor Liet Kynes - Race and gender swapped for the 2021 movie to make her the mother of Zendaya, Sharon Duncan-Brewster is ok. Just ok. She comes off as slight and in critical moments is merely passive as opposed to commanding. Putting her in comparison to the might Max Von Sydow is unfair. But that’s what Denis did. We’re comparing movie to movie so I won’t go too far into how this is bad casting verses the book depiction though. Sharon is also not helped by changes in the dialog. In the end, Max does a better job as a grizzled ecologist in the service of the Emperor who also commands the respect of the Fremen.
• Stilgar - Everett McGill did a great job in the 1984 edition. Likewise I have nothing but praise for Jarvier Bardem, who avoids overacting this time on screen. Solid tie, no one was let down in either version.
• Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam - Charlotte Rampling is capable of more, once again the writing let her down. Her scenes are dialog are lesser compared to the 1984 edition. Sian Phillips however is uniquely creepy, imposing and powerful. I have to give the win to Sian, even with the understanding that her role was better developed by David Lynch.
• Shadout Mapes - Linda Hunt is great casting. Her unusual physicality gives her a creepy vibe perfect for the strange environment of Arrakis. She’s also given more dialog, but only slightly. Golda Rosheuvel actually might give a better performance but isn’t given enough more to work with to really compare, thanks Denis. I will give their performances a tie, each good in their own way.
• Doctor Wellington Yueh - Chen Chang is physically appropriate and his performance in early scenes are ok but he fails in his final performance verses the Baron in comparison. He is also brutally let down by his reduced role and screen time compared to Dean Stockwell.  However, Dean not only gets more time and development, his performance is simply better. With few words, he shows his feelings for his wife early on, and his breakdown in tears after betraying his Duke for the sake of his wife...or for the sake of vengeance...is heart-rending. Dean Stockwell for the easy win.
• The Beast Rabban - Paul Smith plays Rabban like a stupid, cruel thug. Which is perfect. Dave Bautista is given little to do except deliver exposition and shout a little.  A shame, Bautista can do more, he’s proven it in Spectre and The Guardians of the Galaxy series. Paul is simply given more to do in his screen time and wins nearly by default.
• Jamis - A small role that only exists to try and fail to kill Paul, for once Denis gives MORE time to a character instead of less. Babs Olusanmokun does more with his scenes than Judd Omen was given in 1984. Babs wins, at least this time.
• Piter De Vries - Fucking Dennis didn’t even NAME Baron Harkonen’s twisted mentat in his version, what a waste.  Brad Dourif gives one of his best performances ever as Piter. David Dastmalchian was never given a chance. Shame on you, Denis.
• Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV - Jose Ferrer is wonderful, aristocratic, harried but in control...even when he’s not.  Fucking Denis strikes again, mentioning the Emperor constantly but never once giving him a second of screen time, instead giving us yet another Zendaya walking dream sequence. Shame on you again, Denis.
• Feyd Rautha - Once again, Denis the Penis cuts one hell of a major character. Sting’s performance is really good, space diaper aside, even if he’s given little in 1984 to do apart from be pretty and have a great knife fight in the end. Fuck you, Denis.
• After that, we’re pretty much down to more characters Denis didn’t give names or dialog to. I will add that the 1984 edition did have un-named roles as well, of course, but there were several given useful or important dialog to further the scene or plot. Most memorably was the Third Stage Guild navigator and his main microphone lackey.

Inner dialog and narration:

Dennis chose to not use the inner dialog used controversially in 1984. Even among my friends, opinions are mixed about the usefulness of it. I did not find the inner dialog distracting and enjoyed getting inner thoughts of characters who otherwise would not be conveying information (like between Jessica and the Reverend Mother).  But I can see how it could get old after a while and it does lend itself to ‘telling’ rather than showing.

However, you DO need to show if you aren’t going to tell. Dennis fails to do that. Frequently we see actions and reactions that we as the audience cannot interpret. This is again a place where it requires knowledge of either the book or the previous movie adaptations to understand what characters are thinking or worried about.

Both films use narration, especially in the opening.  In fact the 1984 edition had two narrators, William Phipps giving an awkward performance and mis-pronouncing several words, while Virginia Madsen gives a glowing performance as Princess Irulan...who otherwise barely appears in the film.  The difference is in tone and purpose.  Madsen’s narration gives us worldbuilding and setting in an ‘information dump’, getting important background information out of the way and up front. It also sets a tone of wonder, prophesy and very high stakes.
     Zendaya’s narration is...frankly whiny. Complaining about oppression and wondering who her next oppressor will be. The information given is minimal, leaving future dialog to do information dumps for better or for worse.  A Freman woman should not be complaining about oppressors. The 1984 movie had a saying that God made Arrakis to train the faithful, meaning it is a hard place that produces hard people. The Zendaya version sounds like someone in their freshman year in college majoring in Grievance Studies.  My personal dislike aside, the narration in the 2021 edition doesn’t DO anything...except give more screen time to Zendaya...which is probably its real purpose, sadly.

Soundtrack:
Hans Zimmer has done some very impressive scores, like in Gladiator. But he’s also become something of a joke for his ‘French Horn Farting’ in his movie work.  Sadly again, the French Horns are still blaring and farting away jarringly, but there are quiter moments and work that reminds you that Hans is a professional composer….when he cares to e.

The 1984 edition had a soundtrack by Toto with some additions by Brian Eno. Without exaggeration, I can say it’s one of my favorite soundtracks and one worth listening to on its own.  It’s simply better. I acknowledge that I am biased but there is more care and craft and epic scope and sweep in the 1984 soundtrack.

Final thoughts or how to fix it:

Although I think it’s inferior to BOTH versions of Dune that came before, I don’t hate this movie. It’s worth seeing in theaters, maybe not worth watching on a smaller home screen. I can’t imagine it would hold anyone’s attention on a phone or laptop. It’s an honest attempt to adapt the book but it focuses too much on Zendaya and her character who have little to nothing to do with the event of this first half of the story.

That drift in focus hurts everyone else. Every minute of screen time you give one of her endless dream sequence appearance is a minute you don’t have with Baron Harkonnen, or the absent Emperor, or the other Fremen, or Duke Leto and his men or Lady Jessica or any of a dozen other characters that existed and were better developed and used by David Lynch.

This was a wasted opportunity. I suspect it will be forgotten sooner rather than later. I hope it does well enough to get a sequel made, so we can see if Dennis can end this cut down version of a great story.

To me, this is like someone doing an adaptation of Lord of the Rings but most of the screen time is spent with Arwen dream sequences, and the cast has been cut down to Sam, Frodo, Aragorn and Galadriel.

How would I fix it? Made different choices. Stop trying to make Zendaya a thing. She’s not going to be a fan favorite of anyone. Give your supporting characters meaningful things to do, there’s no shortages there in the source material. Bring the Emperor back on stage. Pick up the pace, quit trying to turn this into Lawrence of Arabia (even though Dune was basically an attempt to cash in on that and on the life of T. E. Lawrence).  

The movie simply fails in its goals to do more than be pretty.

*1 - Ironically, I think if director Denis Villeneuve had been forced to make 3 80 minute movies, he’d have done a better job with plot and characters
*2 - This, bafflingly, despite the fact that the little desert mouse is featured repeatedly in in the movie as are both moons...in fact the larger moon IS named, but no one thinks to mention the little mouse shadow on the second moon??? Baffling.
*3 - I really don’t mind the weirding modules. It is a nice shorthand way of showing why the Emperor might be afraid of and jealous of Duke Leto: new technology. It also results in very memorable visuals and dialog. I’ll take memorable and cool technology over slavish devotion, especially if the alternative is...bland filmmaking.

​

TL;DR - An entertaining R rated popcorn flick that is quietly subversive but mostly entertaining

The Suicide Squad

Written and directed by James Gunn


I actually got to see this in an actual theater with literally...um, 10 people present. Granted in a small town but that was bittersweet. While the prices for tickets and concessions were just bitter. I realize theaters are really struggling and you gotta pay these kids way more money than you used to but I think getting a large drink and a ticket set me back $22.  Still..it felt good seeing a big screen superhero movie on a big screen.

So what did I see?  Basically this is a mashup of the Marvel formula with fairly constant jokes, a fast pace and mostly impressive CGI with a sprinkling of influences from Sony and DC movies. In fact, this is almost a direct response to, or almost rebuke of the first, terrible Suicide Squad movie. I don't think I've seen a sequel disparage the original movie quite like this since Gremlins 2. It also borrows elements from the Deadpool movies and Venom, though somewhat less. It does not feel like a Zach Synder film, both due to its pace and color palette (and because it's fun), even if he does get an Executive Producer credit for some reason.

Was it any good?  Hmm, well, it was an entertaining movie. If you want gore, tits, dicks, death heroic and ignoble and rats, this is your huckleberry. It was also somewhat quietly liberal despite the guns and explosions. And it was also the most openly feminist movie I've seen in a long time, even more surprising is that it manages to be feminist without being misandranist, which is even more rare. But I want talk about that element later, as it may have flown under the radar for a lot of people. 

But that does bring up something else, this movie both leans into its source material (in book and movie form) and tries to distance itself from it. For example it goes out of its way to disparage the 'Suicide Squad' name, rebranding the team as 'Task Force X' (which is from the comic as well) but at the same time, it also goes way out of its way to demonstrate that everyone being sent on these missions is very disposable. 

Then there's the children.  Famously, or maybe infamously, James Gunn was fired from Disney, briefly, for a bunch of social media comments that included some pro-pedophilia 'jokes'. They in fact were so disgusting that nearly everyone who read them spoke out against them..which might be why the media didn't actually report on what he literally said. He also had his laptop confiscated which reportedly had a whole lotta child pornography on it. The LAPD and LA DA being what they are when it comes to connected directors, they did not file charges. But that IS how Gunn came to direct The Suicide Squad before returning to Disney's foetid tentacles. In any case, there are several moments in the movie where characters exclaim in overwrought tones, 'they're killing CHILDREN' or words very nearly identical.  And, in fact, the movie does in indeed have kids being hung and murdered on-camera and off.  It's almost blatant but I can't tell if this is a subtle 'fuck you' to his critics or not.  Much like the strong feminist themes, it seems to have slipped by just about every critic I've read.  But it's time to talk about the plot and get to themes later.

Plot

The story is fairly straightforward. A disposable group of criminals is sent into a Latin/Caribbean island to destroy a research facility. The survivors will get time off their sentence, the dead will get eaten. If the criminals try to escape or disobey, they are killed via remote-detonation implants in their head, in theory. Also in theory the disgusting Amanda Waller is watching every move they make from her base back in America. There are backstabs and hidden agends and giant monsters and a whole lotta killing.  James Gunn described this as a war movie and I think that's apt. It's not 'Where Eagles Dare' or 'The Dirty Dozen' but it's in that vein. I won't go beat by beat but I will try to summarize the story a bit and there will be spoilers to follow.

First we get a head fake, as we are introduced first to James Gunn's lucky charm, the underrated Michael Rooker, who is playing a criminal named 'Savant'. He is attached to a group of crooks including survivors of the first Suicide Squad: Captain Boomarang, Harley Quinn and Col. Flag. Viola Davis reprises her role as Amanda Waller who offers Savant and the rest of the criminals a chance to reduce their sentence, etc as listed above. However, due to betrayal by one of the team, a very annoying Pete Davidson...who gets a his annoying face blown off, they invasion is compromised and there are army units lined up waiting for them to come ashore. Despite the loss of surprise, Waller orders them to attack anyway and most everyone is killed or captured, except for Harley and Flag, who are captured.

THEN, the real protagonists are introduced, who come ashore while the other squad is being massacred.  The movie then jumps back in time, it will do this a lot so strap in, and we see how the 'real' squad was recuited, with Amanda Waller threatening deadbeat dad (or unwanted dad as it sounds like he had no relationship with either mother or daughter, just an advertisement of the importance of wearing a condom) Bloodsport...who is basically a knockoff or deconstructed Deadshot from the first Suicide Squad movie.  After his daughter is threatened with jail, abuse and death, he agrees to join Waller*1. We are then introduced to the rest of the squad:   
     Peacemaker is is John Cena (JOHN....CENA!), a flag-waving hero who does everything Bloodsport does and has an almost identical background (this is both a joke and a serious problem, plot-wise).He also gets most of the good lines.
     King Shark is a CGI anthropomorphic shark that likes to eat people and is very strong and nearly invulnerable, voiced by Sylvester Stallone.  
     Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) is the daughter of a petty junkie and thief carrying on the family business of commanding rats to do her bidding. She's played as an idealistic idiot who is inexplicably rewarded for everything she does.
     Polka-Dot Man, an entertaining  David Dastmalchian constantly spawns highly destructive polkadots and has severe mental issues regarding his hated mother. 
     Though they're later joined by Harley and Flag, Gunn wisely keeps the cast down compared to the first film. However Harley gets a lion's share of the runtime.

After coming ashore the group of commandos...goes to sleep...This makes no sense but it gives the director time to have some character interactions and jokes. They are supposed to infiltrate the city, grab an evil scientist, Thinker' who has electrodes in his brain (the excellent Peter Capaldi) , infiltrate the secret-ish base and blow it up. But Waller notices that Flag is alive and tells the squad to rescue him and 'kill everyone you see' on the way in. It is unclear if Waller is aware that Flag was rescued by freedom fighters or if she's just an asshole. But the Squad kills nearly every rebel, an amusing sequence with rare male frontal nudity, and rejoins with Flag. 

They go into the city and discover Harley is a captive too. Only Harley is apparently a celebrity there and in one of the most over the top romantic montages, is given a fantasy date, treated like a princess, gets laid (without any icky nude scenes by the chaste and demure Margot Robbie), gets proposed to by the new island dictator...and murders him in cold blood because of relationship 'red flags'. This is as 'evil' and 'insane' as this diluted version of Harley Quinn gets and yeah, it's a clear lesson in not sticking your dick in crazy.  Harley is then put back in prison.

The squad discovers Harley is in prison and goes to break her out....but Harley puts on her magic plot armor and kills everyone without getting breaking a sweat, while retrieving the magic javelin of one of the dead first squad members. There apparently NOW is some sort of jamming preventing Waller from presumably seeing what they're doing and preventing communication. Allegedly it does not prevent the explosives from working but there's no proof of that.

NOW the squad is ready to get the Thinker. They go to a strip club, where we get some topless females, apprehend them. However soldiers appear, looking for hated Americans, who take Bloodsport, Peacemaker and Flag into custody. Polka-Dot Man, Ratcatcher 2 extract Thinker, while King Shark hangs out in the van (It IS hard to disguise a large sharkman).  The imprisoned guys escape, killing all the soldiers and surviving a car crash in the process.

They go to the secret-ish research base, with the Thinker, where it is revealed that the base is where experiments have been taking place on Starro, an alien starfish that can control the minds of people and make them into extensions of itself, while growing larger and more powerful.  It is also revealed that the science base is an AMERICAN facility where they have been letting Thinker run wild with Day of the Living Dead levels of insane medical experiments. The real mission is apparently to cover up US involvement. Which flag refuses to do.  However Peacemaker is revealed to be Waller's secret agent and he is forced to kill Flag when fighting over the data.  Ratcatcher sees the killing, steals the data and is about to be killed when Bloodshot magically appears and shoots Peacemaker.

The explosives go off prematurely but it damages the building enough to free Star-o. That also removes the jammers allowing Waller, who thinks the data has been destroyed instead of retrieved by Ratcatcher 2 and Bloodsport. She orders them to leave, on pain of death. But the Squad decides to destroy Star-o for...reasons.  When Waller tries to kill them, her staff attacks her and knocks her unconscious.

The Squad, in a scene gleefully stolen from The Avengers, comes together to fight Starro, and finally kill him through means best seen to be believed, costing the life of Polka-Dot Man in the process. In the end the four survivors: King Shark, Harley, Bloodsport, Ratcatcher 2 barter their freedom in return for not revealing US involvement in the Star-o incident. 

What worked

As a war movie, this more or less works. I appreciate that the protagonist don't succeed for 'free', people die in this movie. Some of them die hard and painfully, some die quick and never feel it. Innocents get killed, both as a result of mis-communication (charitably, I suspect Waller just enjoys the power of killing people via orders) and as collateral damage from big monsters walking around.

Everyone gets a chance to show their competence, sometimes too much so, like Harley in her escape sequence. The main core characters get a chance to discuss motivations, fears, desires. Just about everyone has a backstory and motivation. From a writing viewpoint, that ain't nothing.

The violence is real and has impact. There's no superheros throwing their weight around without actually hurting anyone here. If anything, weapons are too lethal (much as I loved watching Pete Davidson getting his face blown off, that's not what happens when you get shot from the front).

Visually, this is rather spectacular. You get to see things I've never seen in a mainstream movie, like Starro, or John Cena showing emotion. The movie is colorful and is well-shot. The locations feel real and not like movie sets or fantasy depictions of buildings or vehicles, no floating fortresses.

Performances are mostly good.I can't call out any particularly bad acting, no one is 'phoning it in' like ScarJo in Black Widow. In face, Rick Flag comes off as decent and likeable in this version of Suicide Squad.  Sylvester Stallone does a fine job as King Shark's voice. Harley's torture and escape from her cell is great (not so much what follows) And we see some reactions from Waller's staff over her murderous and manipulative intentions...too much so which is a good transtion to...

What Didn't Work

Jumping forward and backwards in time is always jarring. It takes a deft hand to pull it off. And though the visual 'six hours earlier' designs are creative and cool, narratively it gives the movie a herky jerky quality that is needlessly taking us out of the moment and killing narrative momentum. The pacing is ruined and this is mostly a fast-paced film, not a lot of wasted screen time, but the jumps defeat that efficiency. I think that also helps cause the fragmented feeling of the films where it doesn't feel like a natural flow of events but instead it's like distinct scenes smashed together.

Harley Quinn is improved over her Birds of Prey performance. But on the whole, she still doesn't work.  She is neither the insane nihilist of the animated source material, nor is she the sexpot naughty girl of the video game and first film. She's played as too stupid to be her 'psychiatrist' backstory and too nice to be the villian who hung around with Joker because she loved him and liked his sense of humor. Her solo scenes bring the narrative to a screeching halt and kill the story momentum, but she works fine in group scenes but....she's still too nice. I won't say she's flawless, she does murder a guy after he proposes to her, but she just doesn't work the way she's used and depicted here.

Harley's gunfight didn't work for me, either. In a movie that has been fairly grounded, for what it is, seeing Harley one shot a prison full of guards without getting a scratch is video game cheat mode at its worse. Yes, worse than god mode in Goldeneye. I own Beretta 92's and AR-15's, they don't do what she does. It's better than the last James Bond movie, I suppose but it bumped me at the time.

I also didn't quite buy Waller's support staff. I can see some of her employees being shocked by her ruthlessness, but they shouldn't all be new to this job. In fact, this should be a highly classified job and the employees should be carefully selected and tested.  It feels like a reaction to Waller in the first movie and her sense of morality or lack thereof. They came off as liberal idealists, not people who work for an intelligence agency that murders people frequently. I really enjoyed watching Waller get hit in the head though, if anything if they'd killed her, I'd have had more respect for the film. But knocking her out and letting her wake up and not getting their asses killed? That's out of character for a woman we saw massacure a whole office full of her employees in the first Suicide Squad movie...which sucked worse than this one, to be clear.

Having both Peacemaker and Bloodsport in the same team. Waller makes a big deal out of why they HAD to have Bloodsport, when in reality, she already had a more loyal and motivated guy who does everything Bloodsport can do, only better, in Peacemaker. Which goes back again to WHY did Waller need Bloodsport?

Waller is also too quick to sacrifice the first team, which includes her best asset, Colonel Rick Flag. If anything as a """Colonel""" (which I don't buy, knowing several senior officers in my extended family and friend network), Flag should have called off the first invasion or been informed that it was to act as a diversion, or at least moved to attack from the flank or call in fire support.  Waller is killing off one of the few people she can trust and for what? To prevent Starro from being used against the US? Don't forget, the real reason for the Suicide Squad, acoording to the movie, is just to cover up US involvement in Starro's capture and torture.  If that's all she wanted to do, why not just parachute in Peacemaker with a nuke? I don't feel the movie sold us on the story of WHY this had to happen in just that way.

Unanswered anti-Americanism. This is almost an ironic one, in the light of how the Intelligence Community has been revealed to be corrupt, politicized and ready / able to compromise their oaths and allegancies, but everyone in Corto Maltese badmouths America but only Peacemaker ever speaks up for it. And even then, it's in vague terms of 'Liberty'. The insults are allowed to stand over and over. I suppose it helps Oliver Stone return James Gunn's phone calls.

And, this is more 'Meh' than 'Didn't Work' but Ratcatcher 2, and most of the second Suicide Squad are too 'nice'. They only act villainous in specific moments, mostly for comedy. Ratcatcher 2 is particularly so innocent and optimistic and loving that it almost feels like a joke...but, no, she turns out to be everything John Lennon and the Beatles promised. Meh.

Themes: or the Most Feminist Movie in America

I'm not joking, this might be the most feminist movie any major studio has made, especially from Marvel or DC. And I don't mean 'fake feminism' that makes women into 'men with tits', I mean the other feminism where women are just people who can do most things men can do. The movie manages to do that without making all the male characters useless, helpless or stupid as well, which is almost a miracle.  Almost.
     Women are uniformly seen in roles not normally well represented: They are Corto Maltese soldiers, they lead the resistance movement against the generals (who are all depicted as sexist males, the movie isn't perfect), most of Amanda Waller's staff are women, the staffer who takes Waller out and takes over is a woman, Starro is defeated by two women (Harley and Ratcatcher 2....no word on the gender of the gnawing rats); Harley Quinn gets the ultimate romantic fantasy date where she is dressed pretty and made up, meets a stunningly handsome fit latin lover, who flatters her, asks her to marry him even. 
  But women are not protected, sacred, flawless creatures. They get killed too, Corto Maltese female soldiers get squished, MonGal gets burned to death, female rebels get killed by the Squad, even Harley gets tortured.
  And the nudity is not just targeted towards men. There are naked tits in here, but also naked penises, and John Cena and Juan Diego Botto in tiny underwear.
  Women are the villains as much as the men, Amanda Waller is twice the monster any of the Corto Maltese Generals are. Even Ratcatcher 2 is a thief and bank robber.
  I don't know if anyone was paying attention, but James Gunn wrote a movie that once upon a time, every Feminist in the West would dream of...only with more explosions and gun fights, gore and alien starfish.

How to Fix It

Most of the problems in the film are really writing and editing problems, which are cheaper to fix than most.

I wouldn't have the first, head fake Suicide Squad. It wastes time and begins the 'jumping around' continuity problems, wasting screen time and ruining pacing. Have Harley integrated into the team from the beginning. That will give her the screen time her 'fame' apparently demands but without slowing things down to have private time. Besides, the real gold here is having these characters interact and bounce off each other.

Only one of Waller's staff should have the wide eyed innocent look about them.  THAT person, whoever it is should be the one to knock Waller out and take over (I think 6' 6" Steve Agee would fit the bill and have the size and strength to be believable but...that's wishing for too much reality). Having all of her staff be surprised and shocked by Waller doesn't work.

No jumping back and forth in time. A flashback for backstory is one thing, it's not great, but if it's short even Ratcatcher 2's little scenes don't take up too much time and they're mostly narrated by her in the presence. The same should be done for any mandatory breaks in continuity if you do have to jump around.

You either don't need Flag, Bloodshot and Peacemaker or make even more of a point of the redundancy. Make them wonder, be paranoid even. None of these people, except Flag and Harley, know each other, let along should trust each other.

More group conflict. Again, these are all villains, all we get is Bloodsport and Peacemaker comparing dick size. (Surprisingly, John Cena might win that one) Inter-group conflict is gold for drama and plot complications.

Summary

I know I take movies too seriously. I know I demand a lot from films. But I do think there is a place for semi-mindless entertainment. I think The Suicide Squad works for that. I can see throwing it on for laughs and spectacle (and nudity or gore, whichever flips your switch). Movies are rarely perfect. This isn't but it's not a bad movie and it's much less offensive than anything Marvel has done since Infinity War.

Superhero movies are dying off, for better or for worse, but if you want a different spin on them, this is worth your time if you're willing to accept the R rating.  And the rats.

We had a terrier growing up once. Racer, his name was. Dog loved to run. I didn’t raise him very well, I didn’t know how and he wasn’t allowed in the house. Which is a big mistake. But my parents are or were farmers. And animals weren’t loved ones there. You didn’t bring the dog in the house to make a mess of the place. And dogs are messy. Boy, did Logan go through a destructo-dog phase!  But he aged out of it, once he was no longer a puppy, he never broke anything on purpose...except tennis balls. He never peed in the house, more than once, unless he was sick. He was SO good about that, that at the end, when he couldn’t get into the peeing position, couldn’t stand at all, he still wouldn’t pee on the rug.

Racer wasn’t with us long, sadly. We didn’t raise and train him and he was wild and loved to run. He wasn’t a bad dog, with us, he loved me I think. But he needed to be around humans and needed discipline. And my parents and I didn’t give him that. So he went to a farm where he stayed too wild and finally had to be put down. I wasn’t there for it. I remember Racer, but his loss mostly leaves me with regrets for my failures with him.

​

As it turns out, that worked out as well as it could. Logan never had accidents in the house, despite being left alone many hours and he was VERY happy to see me and to go for walks when I got home.

Walking your dog is sometimes an uncomfortable duty, but I’m utterly grateful for every Dog Patrol me and Logan went on. Even the rainy dog walks, which he didn’t mind even if I did, I’m glad I did. We got exercise and he got to see things besides me, my wife and the cats. Good for doggy morale. Two walks a day is a good standard and I wish I’d done more, honestly.

​

As he got older and bigger, he still got all the praise and attention from all who saw him. But he also got very scary. Some people were very afraid of Logan. And...I’m kinda ok with that. I never worried about my wife being home without me if Logan was there. He did NOT like people coming up to the house, and the only barking he did in the house was when some person knocked or rang the doorbell. Then Logan would give them hell. He scared off many, many door to door grifters….er...salesmen and solicitors. Mind you, holding back a 130lb rottweiler is NOT easy. I am a large mammal and I struggled to control him at times. Honestly, I controlled him more with my touch than with main strength. Good thing, he was strong as a bull and had four paw drive. 
He avoided major health problems for much of his life. He was prone to developing fatty tumors. And when he was 6, he had a very large one removed from his abdomen.  The thing was the size of child’s football!  Sadly, the first vet botched the surgery and his incision festered and began to rot. He had to go back in to have more flesh removed. It wasn’t easy, the healing process was hard and he was laid up a while. I think this is when the loss of muscle mass in his back legs really began to accelerate. 

He grew weaker and unsteady on his legs. He may have had undiagnosed neurological issues, it’s hard to be sure. Vet bills are expensive and I spent many, many thousands of dollars on Logan and usually without clear results. Not all vets are equal, we learned that.  But he still loved his life, loved Dog Patrol, loved being with me. He was still having a pretty good time, overall, after he recovered from the operation finally.

We had a few more good years left. Fireplace days, summer walks, lots of belly rubs. Logan loved rolling on his back and making silly sounds. When he did that, I knew he was feeling all right. His last good belly rub was January 7th, Thursday before his final slip and fall.

He loved barking at dogs, but at random. Some dogs, he’d ignore, others always got barked at. You could never tell what he’d bark at or whom. But he was never aggressive. He was a herding dog, very territorial and protective of me, but never a bad dog. Never mean or savage. He was mostly patient with littler dogs, which were most dogs for Logan, but with bigger dogs, he’d be more assertive. But still, never biting or causing serious trouble.

He loved being petted by me. He’d lower his head to me submissively and beg for petting silently. Which touched me.  He’d lean against me, in a doggy hug. His nub of a tail would wiggle like crazy when he saw me.  But he didn’t like being petted by strangers.  Mostly. Oddly, he would sometimes allow it and sometimes not. I could never quite figure him out, that dog of mine.

Logan definitely liked girls more than boys or men. He liked adults more than running, yelling children. Though on several, memorable occasions, he let little girls gently and slowly pet him. It was very sweet. If he didn’t like being touched, he’d snap at you. But he never was a biter. He was just shy of being handled. Though, partly it may have been my presence. According to many vets and groomers, when I wasn’t around, Logan was perfect. Obedient, gentle, eager to please. It was around me that he’d get muley. 

Oh, he was stubborn.  Rottweilers are a stubborn breed and Edwards are a stubborn family. He fit right in. Making him do anything was almost impossible. When Logan didn’t want to do something, he’d defy anyone to try and force him. But if you asked nicely and encouraged and led...often he’d come around. He was a good dog.

No, he was a great dog.  A really great dog.  And I’m going to miss him forever.

​

TL;DR review - Boring and predictable in general, the only reason to watch this is to see who lives and dies at the end. However, it does provide a very clear ending to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that began with Iron Man.

Introduction

Endings are important. Endings provide the last emotions and impressions your audience and readers will have. A satisfying and appropriate ending is also hard, even more so are endings to multi-film stories. There are a lot of details to keep straight, lots of plot threads to wrap up, continuity and character drift (as opposed to development) is a danger. In fact, there are very few multi-part movies that 'stick the ending'.  Perhaps the Lord of the Rings trilogy is the only one to get it right, partly  due to it being one story, told in three parts.  

I mention the Lord of the Rings because the last movie installment, The Return of the King, was criticized for the prolonged endings, especially in the Director's Cut version. Avengers: Endgame is basically the ending of the Return of the King stretched out over 3 hours and made with less skill.  Tearjerking? Maybe but dull, and uninteresting except as a monument.

But to Marvel's credit, this IS an ending. An ending to over a decade's worth of superior superhero movies, an end to iconic characters who, despite limited pre-movie fame, have become beloved. That's not nothing.  But I'm not here to review the MCU series as a whole, but rather to discuss the anticlimax that is Endgame.

Anti-climax is the 'falling action' and it covers everything that happens in a story after the climactic final conflict.  And make no mistake, the Climax of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not here, it was in the superior Infinity War. What we have now is more aftermath and not so much avenging.  The drop off in quality and the bobbling of so many characters and plots, handled so deftly in Infinity War is baffling as the same two writers, Markus and McFeely are credited on both movies. I cannot believe that. Some other hands must have gotten into the broth, that or lightning struck in Infinity War and it could not be brought back here, at the end.

But let me go on and give my reasons. I'll discuss the plot overview, yes with spoilers, then what worked, what didn't and how I would have fixed it, if possible. Without using time travel. Hey, someone has to try it without stupid mode turned on.

Plot

The movie opens with a great 'showing' scene with Hawkeye losing his family to Thanos' snap.  We then spend a good hour watching a world trying to deal with the sudden loss of half of every living thing. It's misery porn.  None of Thanos's 'better world' where there is less drain on resources and none of the resilience and adaptability that has been a very human and very American hallmark through past tragedies. But perhaps this current generation is more fragile, as delicate as a snowflake...but let's keep moving. 

There's a little action as the Avengers somehow are able to find where Thanos has retreated to through some hand-waved technomagic by Rocket. (seriously, it might as well be magic. The technology involved in scanning so many light years is mind-boggling) The Avengers + a charming and not at all robotic and lifeless Captain Marvel find a crippled and ruined Thanos and murder him.  Thanos, it seems, has used the Infinity Stones one last time to destroy the stones to make his act permanent and irreversible. So the Avenger's big plan of gathering the stones and 'snapping' everyone back into existence is blocked. For a few hours.  This IS the big solution they've settled on to the problem they have: just to gather and use the stones again.

Sigh.

Ant-man reappears out of the quantum realm via rat ex machina. He returns to an almost post-apocalyptic world full of grief and grieving but brings to the Avengers news that 'time flows differently in the quantum realm'. Thus bringing into play that worst and laziest of all plot devices: Time travel to fix everything. It sucked in Star Trek, it sucked in Deadpool 2 and it sucks in any drama as plot resolution. And I need to spend a paragraph explaining why.

The essence of drama is conflict over important stakes. The goals for comedies are different but we're talking about The Avengers movies as a dramatic series, despite all the jokes.  Time travel removes both conflict and stakes. Since any conflict can be resolved by simply going in back in time to before the conflict existed and any stakes or consequences are lost by that same expedient.  Death means less when you can undo it with time travel. So is defeat.  When you inject time travel into your story, you cannot help but make the story all about the time travel, the rules and complications of it, rather than the plot or the problem that time travel is supposed to solve. It's like injecting a long discussion about watchmaking into someone asking your the time so they don't miss your flight home. And, sadly, you have to spend that time doing info dumps about how time travel works in this story: what you can and can't do, and that all eats up time, ironically, runtime in your movie. Runtime that should have been spent developing your plot and your antagonist.  Worse, they already had the TIME stone before this and didn't use it, then, to stop Thanos. So now, without the Time Stone - which is at least set up to control time- were still going with a Time Travel plot.  What horrible thinking and writing. Digression over, for now.

The Avengers now hit upon the idea of going back in time and stealing all 5 Infinity Stones and using them to undo everything Thanos did.  To do this, they use Ant-Man technology to shrink and we get an hour of redoing the Back to the Future 2 plot as they sneak around their past selves and try to steal things and get away.  This goes a little wrong when the future version of Nebula apparently uses the same wifi network and password as past Nebula. This tips Thanos to the Avenger's presence and by capturing future Nebula and replacing her with past Nebula, it allows Thanos to come into the future to try to steal the Infinity Stones the Avengers have gathered.  Now mind you, this version of Thanos does not treat Nebula or anyone else with the same care and concern as the real, Infinity War Thanos...but we'll get to that later.

The first Avenger deaths, out of two, happen during the retrieval of the Soul stone as the writers break their own rules set up just one movie ago as Black Widow sacrifices herself (not IS sacrificed, as is required) instead of Hawkeye (neither of whom is 'what they most love', as is required as well).  And past Loki gets ahold of the Tesseract and escapes...only for this plot hole to be ignored. Or maybe it's here to set up a terrible, terrible tv series or some crap.

The Hulk, now permanently big and green but with Banner's brain only (I'll get to him, too), uses the Infinity Stones, which are mounted on an Iron Man gauntlet, not magic giant dwarfs required, it seems.  Everyone is brought back to life who died from the snap and all of earth's heroes fight Thanos and his children and his army in a CGI mess that was never in doubt that the heroes will win.  Iron Man uses the 5 stones a second time to 'snap' Thanos and all his allies to dust and he dies after using it.  Thence commences a very long series of moping and funeral scenes as everyone grieves the loss of Tony Stark...and apparently only Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch bother remembering that, oh yeah, Vision and Black Widow are dead too.

Captain America uses the time machine to return the Infinity Stones back to where they belong...off-camera...without a spaceship to return the Power stone...and without the ability to sneak into Asgard and avoid the all-seeing eye of Heimdall...and without explaining how he's putting the Soul stone back...but never mind that, apparently. Cap decides to STAY in the past and live a normal life with Peggy Carter and age and show up to pass on a shield to a very not-supersoldier Falcon.

The end.

What worked
 
1. The tech. It almost goes without saying, but the special effects for the Marvel movies have been nothing short of magical. From motion-capture and animation to constructing beautiful vistas in space or on planets, to digitally aging and weathering actors, this is a triumph of applied technology. And a lot of the miscellaneous, non-nanotech bullshit, science in the movie seems very plausible, which makes for good sci fi.

2. Character development. The strength of having these characters in so many movies over the years means there's a body of work that you can trace the character development. (I have a related complaint below)  Iron Man changed from being a footloose playboy who was Libertarian in views into a obsessive/compulsive family man who believed that The State knows best. Whether you find that a GOOD arc or not, is debatable (it's not good) but it's a real character development driven by his experiences. Likewise Captain America developed, not always in good ways, but he also adapted to his circumstances and came to understand his own compromises of his ideals. Thor turned into a punchline, which at least gave his character something to do. Black Widow turned from spy and temptress into a leader and lonely cat lady.  Again, not all arcs are good or satisfying but the people feel real and react to the events of previous movies. Compared to most superhero movies, that's not nothing.

3. The End.  It takes guts and vision to put a period to a money making monster like The Avengers. Sure, there will probably be new Avengers but this is the end for the characters we've known and loved. I doubt any serious affection will attach to what comes after.  This gives an arc and ending to both Captain America and Iron Man, which I approve of. Though the biggest sadness for a character comes from Black Widow, who dies unloved, childless, almost forgotten.  Damn sad, far more so than the guy who dies using the Infinity Stones and has a wife and child preserved by his sacrifice. But hey, at least she'll finally get her own movie, years after when it would have been relevant.

What Didn't Work

1. The Antagonist. This is also related to character drift, below, but Avengers: Endgame has a problem with its antagonist. They kill Thanos off early, and then it's a struggle against...time? Against their own own plot?  By the time Thanos comes back into the story, it is not the nuanced, interesting character that was shown so brightly in Infinity War. Instead we have a cardboard cutout who has no chance to actually defeat anyone.  But I'll talk more about Thanos' problem in the Character Drift section.

2. Lack of focus. Infinity War was fast-paced, no fat and no time wasted yet it managed to do a lot of character work and put in best-ever superhero action. But it's real strength was its focus. The whole plot plays out in one day of movie time.  Avenger Anti-Climax, in contrast, is mostly padding.  We first have to 'wrap up' the last movie by finding and murdering Thanos. (Our Heroes!) Then we have to wallow in misery porn as the movie shows a world that cannot get past this tragedy. Earth should be a beehive of activity as we have not only proof of alien life but proof of alien enemies, but no..everyone is just mopey and sad. We have a drawn out sequence of showing an Earth adrift with no purpose or leadership. Ant Man shows up to try to kick off the plot but again, the pacing is slow, the solution is pokey and, again, preposterous. We don't get a tight focus on the discovery of how to time travel, it's just 'poof invented'. And we get a long series of scenes showing how useless and unfocused most of the Avengers are now. That's fun. We don't get a tense debate about how to fix this problem, how time travel is going to work, the rules and complications, all that is rushed past so we can get to the fan service. The heist, or heists, themselves are given a couple of good set pieces in 2012 New York but again, there isn't a tight focus or good pacing. We just dawdle over most scenes and handwave the rest.  

A good heist movie has: problem setup, character recruitment and persuasion, solution setup, rehearsal, reversals, and final success.  Oceans 11 with George Clooney does it right. So does The original Italian Job with Michael Caine.  This is where the lack of focus comes in. This movie should be a heist movie, but it's not. It's: an epilogue of Infinity War, it's post-apocalypse misery porn, it's cameo fanservice, it's a heist, and finally its a big martial arts/super power action set piece. This is two, maybe three movies of content here and jamming it all into one makes it impossible to succeed at any one story.  Endgame needed to be 10% of its runtime dedicated to setup, then recruitment and persuasion, and so on and so forth. Basically, it needs to be revised and re-edited.

3. Character drift. If you don't like or care about your characters, it makes it a lot harder to care about your story.  Avengers Anti-Climax is the character arc ending of all of the Avengers, not to mention all the secondary characters. You CAN'T screw up your characters now in the last segment. Yet that's what happens here.  All the backstory and development of the previous movies are discarded in favor of jokes and plot convenience, utterly ruining the opportunity they had and tarnishing the work of the previous movies.  Only Cap and Iron Man are given good writing focus, the rest of the characters must have been handed off to someone else, someone who wasn't talking to the Continuity co-ordinators and who hadn't watched the previous movies very closely. This is going to be a big section but I have things to say, so let me get specific, starting with the Avengers themselves.

The Hulk has always been depicted as being a separate person from Bruce Banner. He speaks, he thinks, he IS his own person. He's not some 'side' of Bruce Banner, like Mister Hyde is for Doctor Jekyll. Bruce and Hulk coming to terms with sharing a body has been a very, very long running conflict throughout the Hulk comics. Here, that huge conflict is resolved OFF CAMERA. Last we saw, Hulk would not come out at all after Thanos whipped him. Now, Bruce Banner's mind is in charge of a smaller, weaker Hulk body. (Hulk is powered by Rage and Banner doesn't have enough of that himself) He smiles, he laughs, he dabs, he signs autographs. THIS is not the Hulk. It's not Bruce Banner, either. It's terrible and it's terrible that they wasted this chance for character drama and character resolution for the Hulk.

Black Widow is now the leader of the Avengers. But she'd always been sneaky, shady, the person who gets things done under the table. She was never the spandex clad front-and-center. She's a spy. The attempts to make her a leader fall flat. I can't even say it's due to the...specialized acting range of Scarlett Johansson.  She's given nothing to do and no way to do it. She's not even given a resolution for her emotional and romantic plots, despite the fact that her story ending pivots on that. She's not around Bruce Banner, who she was attracted to. She's not romantically or emotionally involved with Hawkeye. Her screen time is wasted making her 'the leader of the Avengers' because of the fallout of Civil War's flawed storyline.

Thor is now Fat Thor, punchline to every joke. He's also a murderer. A sniveler. A coward. A weak man abdicating his responsibilities. This is a HUGE character derailment in the service of comedy.  I get that folks liked Thor: Ragnarok. And that movie did break open a lot of character opportunities for Thor. But it didn't JUST make him a comedian. In Infinity War, Thor was driven and in pain as well as funny. Here, we are given a character that we have no respect for. A man who murders a prisoner and then never is called to account for that, who abandons his people and his title without motivation apart to empower a new female character apparently. He refuses to see his 'love' Jane Foster. He steals his own hammer back, breaking time and continuity without consequence. He has no plot-related work to do, everything he 'does' to get the reality stone happens off camera. He's a joke character now and that's a shame. And it's a shame the writers couldn't figure out what to do with him besides put Chris Hemsworth in a fat suit and make jokes.

Hawkeye isn't derailed, his character is changed by the death of his family and that's actually fine. But the movie again wastes opportunities to have him bond with Black Widow, so that stupid sequence with the Soul Stone makes sense.

Iron Man and Cap both are given good treatment so let me move onto the derailment of the non-Avengers characters.

Gamora is dead. What we have in this movie is, supposedly, pre-crisis of faith Gamora who is supposed to be an assassin and on good terms with her father and not good terms with Nebula.  So they rush to make her be on the hero's side and it doesn't really work. I give the movie half credit for keeping Gamora dead. But only half, because it doesn't capitalize on her child scene with Thanos in Infinity War and, if you have time travel, why isn't there any attempt to save Gamora? I realize there are story reasons why she maybe had to die, but no one even tries. But more on that in the Time Travel section below. As she is, she's aggressive and abrasive and we lose all her character development from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Infinity War. As a result, we cram in too much development, too fast and not believably. Like most of the Guardians of the Galaxy characters, except Rocket, she's wasted in this movie. She's also incredibly unlikeable, though not to Captain Marvel levels.

Nebula is treated well enough in Anti-Climax as is Ant-Man and Rhodey. Despite the fact the Ant Man drives this plot, he barely has any character development or moments. Captain Marvel also is just as wooden and maintains her record as most unlikable MCU character as well as most overpowered and useless. So let's address the big, purple giant in the room:

Thanos.  How you go from one of the best written and realized villainous protagonists in cinema history to being a cardboard cutout deserves novel-level treatment.  And McFeely and Markus deserve to be beaten, along with Producer Trinh Tran. Trinh's personal character arc from production assistant to Producer is a monument to the Peter Principle and a damning indictment possibly of gender and racial quotas. I'll move on but let me give you the basics of why this happened and then I'll discuss what happened.  Basically, McFeely and Markus wrote themselves into a corner. Thanos has won. He had no more goals and ambitions. And they lacked the skill and creativity to address this. So, instead of a story that involved persuading or confronting a fully-powered Thanos, they decided to kill him off. To have Thor murder him.  What we get instead is cardboard Thanos.

Cardboard Thanos is the past version of Thanos who, apparently, had not gotten to the point in his emotional development to go after the Infinity Stones. He was still killing people and enjoying it, instead of viewing it as a grim duty or a penance even.  He exists because Markus and McFeely couldn't come up with a new antagonist and couldn't write the same character who was in Infinity War into Anti-climax. Cardboard Thanos is arrogant, bloodthirsty, ruthless and a little dumb. The perfect punching bag, physically formidable but nothing more. This is not the Thanos who is testing everyone he encounters as in Infinity War. This is not a man who has sacrificed to get what he needed to perform what he saw as his duty. This is not the man to speak gently and lovingly to his daughter Gamora, who repaired his daughter Nebula, who wept over Gamora's death, who liked Peter Quinn. This is basically a Wakandan war rhino, only purple and biped.

Cardboard undoes all the character work from Infinity War. The only reason it's not worse, is that this isn't the 'real' Thanos. It literally is some other idiot and nothing Cardboard Thanos does affects the real character we saw in Infinity War.  It reminds me of the way Atticus Finch is treated in 'Go Set A Watchman'...there's a reason Harper Lee didn't release that book while she was alive and in her right mind. I have nothing but hatred and spite for what Mcfeely, Markus and Tran did here.

4. Time Travel.  Unless your story is about time travel (Back to the Future, Somewhere in Time, etc), adding it into your story is a terrible idea. It ruins basic fundamental storytelling rules, in that actions have consequences. With time travel, why there are no consequences, you can do anything.  It's stupid and lazy. Harry Potter is worse with time travel in it, Star Trek is worse with time travel in it.  It also creates a metric fuck ton of plot holes.

Worse, there already IS a time reversal tool, the Time Stone. But they don't use that, instead they use the, sigh, Quantum Realm from Ant Man vs The Wasp. Seriously, when Dr. Strange is searching all the millions of possible futures, THIS is the timeline he saw working? This explains so much about 2020. So we have to invent a whole new method of time travel, with its own set of McGuffins, the Pym Particles, have to explain it all to the audience. Wasted time, wasted imagination, wasted opportunities. If you didn't want to use the Time Stone, you could use this stupid time travel plot to introduce a whole new character or villain even, so we aren't' stuck with fucking Cardboard Thanos. You could introduce Doctor Doom, Kang the Conqueror, Morgan Le Fey...fucking Bishop or Cable even!

When I say Time Travel is lazy, Avengers Anti-climax provides a perfect example itself: returning all the infinity stones.  After all the crap the heroes went through to get the stones, returning the stones is all done off camera and by Captain America, alone. That's right, the pervious missions were so complicated that it took more than a half dozen heroes but Cap does it all by himself. How?  Well...that would take too much time to show...

So why do it?  Again, Mcfeely and Markus wrote themselves into a corner and lacked the skill and confidence to get out of it gracefully. So they used time travel. It's lazy and it doesn't work.  The only grace note to all of this, is it gives Captain America a good ending....by creating a huge new plot hole and continuity break by having Cap live his life all the way up to the present, with knowledge of the future and super powers.  But if Marvel doesn't care, why do I?  I guess because I care about good stories. And I hate bad writing. And Infinity War was so good that getting THIS as our last taste of the classic MCU is like pouring motor oil down my throat after a prime porterhouse steak.

How do you fix it?

Let me run through my list of what didn't work, briefly and suggest some changes that would have made Avengers Anti-climax into a proper Endgame. Some of this might require re-shoots. Some might require setup in a previous Marvel movie, which Feige is capable of...but that also requires this script being completed before filming begins on Infinity War and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case here, regardless of release dates.

The antagonist. Thanos as antagonist again is a tough sell. I think it COULD work, Brolin and the Russos have shown they have a good touch and vision for Thanos.  But you'd have to have your heroes try force to 'Avenge' the universe...and have that fail.  Then try guile...and have that fail. And then have it come down to REASONING with Thanos.  Having your movie climax come down to a conversation is risky but it worked well in Doctor Strange and it's a reasonable approach when dealing with a god.  Or you could use the Quantum Realm crap to provide a 'back door' into the Soul stone and all the dead perhaps stored there. Have them work with the Avengers to torment or persuade Thanos into reversing his snap. The alternative?

  You need another big bad. Or big good.  The Guardians of the Galaxy have already brought the Celestials into continuity.  The Heroes could go to find them and the struggle to find allies and prove to them that they need to intervene could be your story.  Or you could have someone ELSE get involved, making this the introduction of Kang or Doctor Doom. Have him steal the infinity gauntlet before Thanos can destroy it. You can even have THANOS forced to ask the Avengers for help in getting it back.  Then you have some outstanding tension and drama of having to team up with the universe's greatest mass murderer.

  See, there are options that don't involve time travel or derailing the character development from Infinity War.

Lack of focus. This is a 100% writing issue and is thus solvable with minimal money spent. It means removing elements rather than adding them. Endgame has to restore the status quo of life before The Snap. It has to deal with the consequences of The Snap. It has to deal with Thanos.  I think I've suggested several good options above to do that. The rest is just writing and execution. First of all, you have people dealing with The Snap while doing other story-related things. And, for myself, I'd rather you showed an active and determined Avengers and human race rather than the weepy, mopes we got in Anti-climax. Honestly, I would not use Pym particles and time travel. The Quantum Realm could still work, if we use my 'backdoor' into the Soul gem idea, but if the intention is more action and less acting, then dropping the Quantum Realm entirely is wise.   You still have cosmic forces and powers, they can provide guidance and advice. Earth becoming part of the larger universe, building starships maybe. Sure it means changing the status quo, but so did killing half of the human race off.  

  But you decide early what kind of movie it is going to be and you focus like a laser on just those elements. The emotion and closure can happen along the way. Other Marvel movies have handled that to more or less success in the past. But you keep it moving, the way Infinity War did.

Character Drift.  The easy answer is just 'don't change your characters' but let me offer specifics for everyone I said was adrift.

  Starting with the big one first, you DON'T derail Thanos. If anything, his character development can continue, he can evolve. He can have regret, torment, second thoughts, even - as a wild idea- uniting with the Avengers verses a greater threat.  You have great work in Infinity War, don't undo it.

  Gamora is still dead and unless time travel comes back, which I maintain is stupid AF, she stays dead. But not uninvolved. She and Peter Quill could both be inside the Soul Gem, based on the little cameo at the end with Young Gamora.  She can still be the whole, developed character. She can even drive the change for him. It's a drama role, not an action role, but let's be honest, Gamora has not been an action star since her introductory scene. But show me an actress who doesn't want a pivotal role where she gets to act and not just look good in leather and I'll show you a hack fraud.

  Hawkeye can ditch the 'Ronin' stuff as that doesn't actually go anywhere interesting in this story....unless...his Ronin activities reveals Doctor Doom or the like before he steals the Infinity Gauntlet from Thanos.  I WOULD have him bond with Black Widow, emotionally or romantically. It would be nice to have someone getting laid in this series besides Peter Quill and Wanda.
  Thor is not Fat Thor. He is not a murderer because we're not writing a stupid plot. He is badly shaken by the death of his brother and the rest of his family. He should throw himself, perhaps recklessly, into danger trying to save people.  Valkyrie's role can be expanded or she can remain the non-entity she is by staying in the background until she reminds Thor that he's a king as well as a god, making Thor responsible by the end of Endgame and not a wild man, completing his character arc instead of derailing it.

  Black Widow is another good candidate for finding out information about Thanos' weaknesses. Or about Doctor Doom/Kang or whoever we have as antagonist. She'd be a natural teammate for Nebula and that gets her off world as well. Alternatively, she and Hawkeye can, as I mentioned, bond again. This time she 'saves' him, giving a small arc to a character who barely has any.

  The Hulk has his character resolution ON CAMERA. Giving Ruffalo, who is a dumbass in so many ways, an irresistible chance to actually act, which he ought to jump at. (see above). Resolving this provides drama, a character arc and returns a physical powerhouse to the Earth. Not to mention, if Thanos and the Avengers team up, it's a chance to have someone slap the Hulk around instead of vice versa, which echoes the way Hulk treated Thor and Loki. You can even have the Synthesis Hulk, where Banner is in charge of the Hulk's body. I wouldn't but if you want to, you can spell out the risks and weaknesses of this hybrid, even demonstrate a new vulnerability in what has been an unstoppable rage monster before Thanos neutered him.

  Cap's story arc may have to change. So might Iron Man's. This isn't a problem, it's a chance to tell a different ending. One that doesn't break it's own universe's rules or further strain the audience's disbelief. If you feel you NEED to have Cap become an old man, then Time Travel needs to be either one-way trip, as a reward perhaps, or by going into an alternate universe for Cap to 'fix' all the mistakes we made. I'd rather live in that timeline, I think.

  Iron Man NOT dying leaves Robert Downey Junior around for future cameos, with some financial costs sure, but it gives you a solid anchor or advisor for future Avengers. Iron Man 3 made the point that Iron Man is not the suit and that Tony doesn't need it to be a hero. Maybe this time that lesson sticks, especially as The Snap has shown him how fragile life is and how much he needs to dedicate himself to being a father and not just a superhero. A new adventure for him, completing his arc without the funeral.

  Need more sacrifice and character death to end the Avengers? Can do, but not in the way Anti-climax did it. All of the flaws of Anti-Climax are fixable.  
  Without time travel.

Conclusion
To fall from the heights of Infinity War to Anti-climax was disappointing and  frustrating. Frustrating, because all of the problems are, I believe, fixable. And most are fixable just by telling a different, better story.


In an odd and melancholy way, I feel that the Marvel Cinematic Universe ended already. What we have left now are lesser gods, gods of identity politics, representation, politics over storytelling.  The Wuhan Flu of 2019 and ongoing has basically killed movies. Will they ever come back? I don't know. 

Everything ends. Everyone dies. That's life. That's why stories have power, because they HAVE endings, just like we all do. Your parents, your pets, your friends, your children, and you are going to die some day. What story will your life tell?

I hope it's better than what we were given in Avengers: Endgame.

TL;DR. Bad Times at the El Royale could alternatively be titled: Drew Goddard can't write well.  This is not a bad movie. A bad movie can be fun. This is not a good movie. A good movie makes you want to see it again. This is lukewarm, a 'C', passing grade, well-executed in ways, with good moments and performances. But it isn't constructed well and won't stand the test of time.


I went into this movie really rooting for it. My final thoughts before the movie started was a prayer or wish: please be good.  This was the first movie I'd seen trailers for that made me want to see it. By the way, whoever edited the first trailer for this movie did an awesome job. If only the movie that was teased in that trailer had show up here.  There are good things here. I want to specifically call out the work of Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, who knocked it out of the park. Jeff Bridges did yeoman work, giving his character more depth than was on the page. Chris Hemsworth has a shot at career outside of Thor and John Hamm is very solid in what he was given to work with.

What they were given to work with...sigh. That's the problem.

First a quick plot summary:
Four strangers meet at a cool 60's throwback hotel...sometime in the early 70's. (problem #1)  The hotel is wired for eavesdropping and there are two way mirrors for filming the guests, all set up by the mysterious 'Management' (problem #2).  One of the four is a singer, one is a priest, one is a salesman, one is a mouthy hippie chick.  Most of them are not what they seem: the priest is actually an ex-con looking for money hidden by his brother here, the salesman is an FBI agent here to retrieve Bureau listening devices, the hippie chick has kidnapped her younger sister and the singer is a holy and blameless paragon of all that is good and righteous (problem #3).  Add in a drug-addicted supposed ex-military desk clerk desperate to confess to a priest and then add a cult leader and his followers, come to retrieve the kidnapped girl and shake, but not well.

The specifics of the plot barely matter but here goes: the FBI agent discovers more surveillance stuff in his room than what he was set here to retrieve. This leads him to investigate, and he discovers the secret passages that show the two-way mirrors. It also shows the kidnapped girl tied up. He reports his findings to the FBI who, for plot reasons, tell him to disable all the cars and not to interfere with the kidnapping. He does the former, but doesn't do the latter. Breaking in and trying, incompetently, to rescue the kidnapped girl. The hippie chick kills him with a shotgun and the shot spray wounds the desk clerk who was behind the two way glass.  The fake priest and the singer talk some, he has memory problems, and the room he picked did not have the money hidden in it. It is instead in the singer's room.  He tries to drug the singer so he can search her room but she hits him in the head with a bottle (problem #4) and tries to run away. But can't, so she and the fake priest agree to split the money.  They get the money but before they can get away, the cult leader shows up, ties everybody up, there is speechifying, and death and the movie ends with the priest and the singer getting away to Reno.

The movie jumps around in time and space (problem #5) and the plot is not told in linear fashion. If it had, it might have been a tight 90 minutes and not a bloated 2 hours, 20 minutes (problem #6). There is a lot of potential here, a lot of teasing ideas. But this is Drew Goddard's whole career in a nutshell: good ideas poorly executed.  The guy just does not understand setup and payoff. He's half the creative staff of Cabin in the Woods, which has one of the worst endings I've ever seen in a movie. But I think what made Cabin in the Woods work was, and I hate to say this as a Joss Whedon hater, was Joss Whedon. For all my dislike of him as a person, Whedon at least understands character and setup and payoff. Drew Goddard does not.

But let's look at what worked, what didn't and how this movie COULD have been great.

What worked:

1. The support staff. Drew Goddard has writing, directing and a producing credit here.  And the production side worked well. Art direction by Michael Diner and Lisa Van Velden is wonderful, sets and costumes are great and professionally done. I want to call out Seamus McGarvey's camera work again because he almost saves this movie. Rob Fournier as the Armorer, along with James Dever and  the stunt crew, nailed the little gunplay there at the end. Take a bow, one and all, you were pros.

2. Key performances.  Jeff Bridges deserves special praise. The script didn't always support him, particularly at the end, but he gives his character humanity and depth. Jon Hamm was solid, he needs to get more lead work. Chris Hemsworth can act in addition to just being hot, good news for him.  Cynthia Erivo did very well for a first movie role. Cailee Spaeny as 'Boots' is believable as a child sexualized way too young and devoted wholeheartedly to Chris Hemsworth's Billy Lee. The rest of the cast are pretty much ok, though they aren't given much to work with, script-wise. Dakota Johnson is...pretty. Maybe she could have been better than that but she just isn't given a chance to be a good actress here. Or maybe she isn't one.

3. The tease.  This is what we can give Drew Goddard credit for. Him and whoever cut that first trailer.  There are promising ideas here: Who is recording the guests? Why? What does the cult leader want? (problem #7) Who is on the film? Who was the money stolen from and is anyone else looking for it? Why is the FBI interested in this hotel? You've got the hooks to tell many interesting stories here. Sadly, most of them are unexplored or answered badly. (problem #8)

4. The music. If you like soul music, this is your movie. And if Cynthia Erivo is actually singing in this movie, she's a good singer. (not good enough to be magic, though. Problem #9)  I like Deep Purple quite a bit so 'Hush' showing up with it's guitar work was quite a contrast to the harmony and vocals of the rest of the soundtrack. It's all very much like a Quentin Tarantino movie.  But here's the problem there: Drew Goddard wants to be Quentin Tarantino in this movie. But he doesn't have the chops and doesn't understand what QT does well: scenes and character and doesn't understand what QT doesn't do well, namely tying scenes together to tell a complete story.  So let's talk about what didn't work and we'll start with the problems one by one.

What didn't work:
Problem #1: This isn't grounded in a specific time. This is a problem because the movie jumps around in time a lot and because it's unwilling to put a specific day and year on it, the audience is confused and adrift. The El Royale used to be a big spot back in the 60's. So we apparently AREN'T still in the 60's, but everyone dresses like they are. J.Edgar Hoover is alive, Nixon is President, Vietnam is still going on but Watergate isn't in the news, so it has to be 1969-1972. There's some live TV with Nixon talking about how cease-fires doesn't work vs insurgencies (which is accurate, by the way), so if someone is really up on their game, maybe they can pinpoint the date from there. But the audience shouldn't have to work this hard. And, yes, the date matters. You can't just set stories in 'the past', if you want the audience to buy into it. Without that grounding, you are stacking the deck against yourself.

Problem #2: The Management is handled badly.  Here we have a mysterious 'management' that has all the rooms wired for eavesdropping (11 pieces of equipment alone in one visually-memorable early scene), it has two way mirrors, secret passageways. Who are they? What do they want? Why was the hotel set up this way? What are the consequences of discovery of the Management's actions?  NONE of this is answered or paid off. What we get is a handwave of 'What is this, a pervert hotel? Yeah, pretty much.'  That's it. Nothing deeper. Just some P.O. Box where the desk clerk mails film. How does Management know who to film?  No idea. It's a cool idea that Drew Goddard fucked up. (See Lost, which Goddard worked on)

Problem #3: Darlene Sweet has no dark secret and thus doesn't make sense.  I'm putting aside the actress and her performance, which was fine, and I just want to talk about the character. Everyone else in here, from the kidnapped girl to the priest to the desk clerk is not what they appear. All except Darlene. She is just what she appears to be: a singer down on her luck.    She also clocks the fake priest with a wine bottle, before she could reasonably know or before she's shown to be suspicious of him. She steals the FBI agent's gun. She doesn't try to call the cops from the pay phone. She does demand half the stolen money.  She, in short, does not act like a normal woman. It seems like she, too, might have a secret dark side. But no. She is the holy and blameless paragon, bordering on the 'Magical Negro' trope. But that's not all, she's also the mouthpiece for Drew Goddard, who decides to have his #MeToo moment in a speech that brings the movie to a screeching halt. She gets to lecture all the men in the world and then gets to use some weird reverse psychology on the desk clerk to get him to shoot the bad guys. And in the end, she gets her money, gets her job in Reno and everything is happy even though she's not wearing her fake hair anymore. (By the way, she looked better with the wig on and with the long dress.) This is another missed opportunity to either treat her as a true innocent or to give her the same dark motivation everyone else seems to have. This leads into the next problem.

Problem #4: Darlene somehow figures out the priest isn't on the up and up and clocks him with a wine bottle.  First and least, having seen people hit with beer bottles, which are smaller, a full bottle of wine doesn't shatter hitting someone in the head. It makes a dent. A big dent. It can cause concussions easily and death. It doesn't make pretty, tiny head scratches. This is just Hollywood bullshit though and can be ignored I suppose. More relevant is there there is no way she would have suspected the priest character. He hasn't given himself away. If anything, he's been kind, generous and open with her...more than anyone else in the movie and maybe her life. There is another handwave line by her that 'you've been used enough, you learn to recognize a user'. But that's just bad writing and directing. If that's true, then you should set that up. Setup and pay off, remember?  You need to give her something to make her suspect him. Some slip up. Some reason to suspect that he is not just dishonest, but actually means her harm. Because she doesn't just avoid him, she fucking clocks him with a bottle and goes running out into the rainy night without taking her coat or even her shoes. NOTHING we've seen or she's seen would justify any of that.  
Problem #5: The movie jumps around in space and time.  One thing that's common for me in first drafts is that I'll write a lot of exposition, a lot of backstory. On second drafts, I'll cut almost all of that out and instead I'll weave that into the plot or reveal it through actions, or as a last resort, character dialog.  Drew didn't do that cutting. As you can tell from the 2:20 run time. So we get the 'back story' of each character, jumping back in time for each character, sometimes repeatedly.  When are we when we jump? No idea. the Priest's robbery takes place 'ten years ago' but that's the best we get. Each jump causes the audience to 'reset'. Suddenly the audience needs to figure out again, where we are, when we are, who's here, what's happening, etc. Tarantino did this a lot in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But he did it well and it always tied right back into the moment we left the main thread of the story. Drew doesn't do it smoothly and we instead are jarred time and again. And often, we don't need it. We don't need to see Darlene's backstory of being sexually harassed, it's enough for us to know she's a down-on-her-luck singer. We don't need to see the cult leader meeting and seducing the kidnapped 'Boots', we don't need to see half-abuse, half-murder implied scene with the sisters, we don't need to see the priest in jail getting his diagnosis.  Pull all of those out and the movie still works. The problem is that the author is too close to his own words and loves them too much. I get it. But Drew clearly needs a collaborator that tells him what to cut and what to keep. He didn't get enough of that here. And that ties into the next problem directly.

Problem #6: The run time of this movie is two hours, twenty minutes. Unnecessarily complex, that's this movie in a nutshell.  This could have been a tight, interesting 90 film. You can add a few minutes here or there as needed but there is no reason this movie should be this long. The flashbacks and the need to 'tell' rather than 'reveal' is part of the problem. But the unneeded complexity is the other part.  For example, as a metaphor for the movie: the FBI Agent is masquerading as a vacuum salesman. Inside his huge, bloat, oversized sample box is...a fake vacuum. And under the fake vacuum is a secret panel. And in the secret panel is a briefcase. And in the briefcase is...lock picking tools. Just...normal snips and probes and tension bars that fit inside a normal leather pouch. You could just hide these tools in your luggage. Or why bother hiding it? Who's going to search his stuff? He might be undercover but he's not going undercover anywhere that Russian agents are after him. It's needlessly complicated. And the revelation is underwhelming. Much like the revelation of the spying windows, the movie camera, it happens either too early or too late, depending on the kind of story you're trying to tell.  Know when to cut. Know when to trust your actors. Know what needs to be in your dialog and stage direction. Less is almost always more.  Next time, Drew: start with a 60 minute cut, then see what you absolutely need to get to 90 minutes. This is a suspense movie, keep it tight, keep the audience in suspense. Flashbacks kill suspense, by the way.

Problem #7: The ultimate antagonist is confused in his motivation and his purpose in the plot. This is a problem with almost all the characters: they aren't real people. They don't act like real people, they don't want real people things. They are two dimension cutouts that mouth dialog, that's it. Billy Lee, played as well as could be by Chris Hemsworth, seems to be a cult leader who believes...well we don't know what his cult is based on, except that maybe it's based on the desire of everyone to fuck him. Which it might be. There are weirder cults out there. And his sexuality, not his threat of violence, seems to be what ties people to him.  But what does his cult believe and how does it tie into the plot?  We don't know. Chris makes a vague statement about how much he hates being forced to choose between two things, like right and wrong. And yet...he makes the tied up guests choose red or black in the end. It doesn't make sense for his theology, for lack of a better term, because his character and his worldview isn't developed. He's given too much screen time or not enough depth in what he is on camera for. Why is he asking for 'the truth' about who everyone is and where the money came from? Why does he care? His theology isn't about truth or hatred of lies or deception, though it easily could have been.  He demands answers because the author put those words in his mouth, not because they would come from them naturally.  
    In contrast, take the Usual Suspects, written by Chris McQuarrie and directed by gay pedophile Bryan Singer. This is my favorite movie of all time, so I'm biased, but everyone in that movie feels real. They way they talk, what they talk about, what they care about or who...it all feels natural. That's good writing. Even the bad guy in the Usual Suspects is clear enough in his motivations to be the antagonist for the main characters.
Your protagonists are only as good as their obstacles. The struggle to get a nickel out of sewer grate so you can buy some candy isn't much of a story. A bad guy who gets defeated by shoving him down, isn't much of an antagonist. A cult leader who gets cut off and verbally shut down by a tied up prisoner...isn't much of a threat.  I know it made Drew feel good to broadcast his Virtue Signal but it gutted his already thinly-motivated bad guy, Billy Lee.  And a bad guy who is emasculated isn't a threat and your victory over him means little. If Princess Leia had snapped her fingers at Dark Vader or slapped him and survived, then it makes Vader look weak and not terribly interesting as an opponent.

Problem #8: Unanswered story hooks and wasted opportunities. Some of this I'll touch back on in the 'how it could have been great' section below. And I already mentioned how The Management was mis-handled. But there's more than that here that isn't explored or answered satisfactorily. One is the film. A big deal is made over this film of someone having sex, but we're not told who it is. All we're told is that it's a guy and he's now dead in today's time...whenever that is. He's important and famous, easily recognizable. And the line is said by Billy Lee that 'sometimes the legend of the man lives on after he dies' or something like that. Who is it? The movie doesn't say. I suppose it should be left to our imagination but...it's not really an interesting revelation, is it? It could be. What if it's JFK? Well, everyone today knows that JFK would and did fuck everything that moved. So that's not much of a revelation, maybe not even much of one back then.  So who is it? Well, it's vague for no good reason and it's a missed opportunity. 
  Who was the money stolen from and is anyone else looking for it? This is another handwave. The Priest said 'it doesn't matter, no one's looking for it' and 'everyone else is dead'. Which is such a missed opportunity it's laughable. It's basically removing a plot thread and a possible antagonist right off the table. Now I get that we're already running long (in the movie and in this review :) ) and you need to manage your characters and plot. But the money is the prime motivation for one, maybe two characters. It should be given more respect, be higher stakes, more valuable and more interesting. It should be what people are fighting over. Again, I have a suggestion that would be an easy twist to tie it all together. But we get no one and nothing about who backstabbed the thieves in the first place. And, keep in mind, that is the inciting incident of this whole movie. And it's tossed away and never exploited.
  Why is the FBI here? Seriously, this pervy hotel has been around and spying on people for year. Did the FBI know about that? Is the FBI 'The Management'? (What an easy fix that would make.) If the FBI doesn't know about it, does it care? Why or why not? What does the FBI intend to do about any of it? Why is the FBI, which has direct jurisdiction over kidnapping, not interested in a kidnapping? No idea, any of it. Once Jon Hamm is dead, he means nothing to the plot. Stupid and a waste, again.

Problem #9: Characters in this movie are not believable. This mostly isn't a dig on the actors performances, again, with few exceptions, I believe they acted the way the script and plot demanded. This is a failure of writing and directing.  For example, despite a very strong performance by Jeff Daniels, I don't believe that his thief character is SO entranced by Darlene's singing that it's some legendary gift, worth surrendering half of 'his' money and worth defying wacko cultists over. I just don't buy it. 
  The kidnapper, Dakota Johnson's Emily character starts out sassy and defiant. She flat out murders the FBI agent when he tries to rescue the sister she kidnapped, no hesitation, no remorse.  But then she dithers and dawdles and turns into 'blindly loving older sister'. She does nothing else, the whole movie. She takes no actions after tying up the desk clerk. Nothing. She isn't even sassy and defiant anymore. It's like the director forgot what her character had been in the opening scenes.Which might be what literally happened, for all I know. Drew had a lot on his plate, too much maybe.
  The desk clerk is revealed at the end to be some kind of super soldier marksman. But he doesn't act like a war vet earlier. This feels like a plot and character twist Drew made to finish up his story. He didn't go back and add in elements to make the person at the end feel like the person at the beginning. Fixable problem, fix wasn't attempted.
  The FBI agent first follows orders, then doesn't. And he doesn't act like an Agent. Again, plot contrivance and unneeded complexity. I talked about the vacuum cleaner box, which draws more attention to himself than is needed but then he draws even more attention to himself by 'playing' a loud and demanding salesman who somehow seems to know more about the El Royale than the desk clerk does. Why would someone do this if they're trying to keep a low profile? If he's going to go rescue a girl, against orders, why wouldn't he secure and tie up the kidnapper before untying the girl? Why wouldn't he secure the pistol and dagger that he DID see through the two way glass? (I give him a pass on not seeing the shotgun) Why didn't he go back to the payphone and call the State Police and say 'I'm an FBI Agent, badge number 1234, I need ten state police here to help me with a kidnapper.'? It's all plot contrivance, actions taken by a puppet and not a real person.
  The final confession of the dying desk clerk is another missed opportunity. The last line of the rite of confession for Catholics is something like this: "May the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of all the saints, whatever good you do and suffering you endure heal your sins, help you to grow in holiness, and reward you with eternal life. Go in peace."  Go in peace. What a beautiful way to send someone off who is dying. I've also heard this as 'Go now and sin no more'. I'm guessing Drew isn't Catholic. I'm also guessing he didn't spend the five seconds it takes to Google the Rite of Confession and work it into the final scene with the priest and the desk clerk.

Problem ultimate: Drew Goddard isn't willing to fuck the dog all the way. There's a great quote the magnificent writer Shanon Peavey brought to my critique group, back when it was still around: If you're going to fuck the dog, stick your dick all the way in.  Gross as that is, it's ironically relevant to this movie, almost literally.  
  In a scene where the desk clerk is talking about 'all the awful stuff I've seen', he mentions a man 'lying with a wolf'. Now, what are you visualizing, in this internet age were furries and bestiality is all out there online?  Pretty terrible, isn't it. Only Drew can't quite bring himself to stick his dick in there. He backtracks in the movie and says 'it wasn't sexual, but it wasn't NOT sexual'. Wishy washy bullshit.  And seriously, the worst he's seen is a Senator (because of course it was a senator) beating a whore, fornication and that guy sleeping with a tied and chained wolf. That's it. No rape, no murder, no drug use, no cannibalism.
  Everything is implied, he won't come out and show us or tell us anything definitive.
  Boots is shown as irredeemable, but we don't see the killing the cult performed. No murders. Did Boots do all the killing herself? Did Billy Lee order it?
  Was Boots molested by her father? If so, why is she so clearly fixated on him? Is Billy Lee both father and sexual figure for her?
  Did Emily murder her father? Does Boots know this? How many other people have Emily killed to murder the FBI agent without hesitation or remorse?
  Drew isn't willing to let all of his characters be complex. The singer has to be completely perfect and a perfect victim who can redeem fake priest and use reverse psychology to get the addled desk clerk to 'snap out of it' and save them all.  He isn't willing to make the cult's ideology real, isn't willing to make Billy Lee a full psycho.
 He goes half way, letting 'Boots' be a very bad, feral child/woman. He kills off her older sister. I legit did not expect that.  And that's just it. It's not all bad. It's got good stuff in there. Drew had assembled all the pieces needed to make a great suspense/mystery. But he fumbled the assembly. So let's look at how this could have been a great movie.

How could we it be fixed? Let me run through each problem and offer very, very simple ways to fix Bad Times at the El Royale. Most of these would not be extensive re-shoots or require much expense. Much can be done just at the script/dialog level. I'll go through each problem and suggest a brief solution.
Fix for Problem #1: Simply tell us the date. It can be as simple as a calendar in the opening scene. Done. We know when we are.  For flashbacks, the few we keep, we can stick with the '10 years ago' or 'six months ago', etc.
Fix for Problem #2: The Management needs to be a lurking threat. Something to fear, something to deal with, even if just by getting away. The Solution is to just pick who Management is.  Make it the Russians, fits the time period and reality. Or make it the FBI, which helps place our agent there and explains some of the weird orders he gets. It should be about more than just 'perverts', just decide what and go with it. I lean towards FBI with the plot as written.  The discovery and revelation raises the stakes for everyone there.

Fix for Problem #3: Darlene has no tie to the location, the plot, the characters. She alone has no dark secret but she doesn't act like a normal innocent woman: stealing the FBI agent's gun after following him, seeing him take stuff out of car engines and seeing him get murdered. She clocks the priest without reason given in the movie. So the fix is simple enough: the third robber we see in the opening scene and in the flashback (if we keep it) is BLACK. She gets a line of revelation about that money being 'half hers', saying 'my daddy said there was money here but he never found it'. Or something like that.

Fix for Problem #4: Tying Darlene's father into the robber fixes half of her problem. The other half is her recognizing the priest. He needs to say something that resonates with her or slip up in some way. Or she sees the bottle of drugs in a mirror. Again, a simple dialog/script fix, combined with Darlene's backstory fix and this sudden attack doesn't come out of nowhere. We lose some of the 'shock' but we gain justification. We can even have the revelation come later, in the car or when tied up at the end, if we need that shock attack scene.

Fix for Problem #5 and 6: Runtime and jumping around. This is a complex fix. The biggest savings is to cut the flashbacks.  We need the opening scene with the money being hidden. We can link that to the 'earliest' scene of the robbery, the accident, the priest's brother driving to the El Royale.  We may need the flashback with Boots and her sister, her father and her father's murder. We can even keep the shooting and Vietnam flashbacks, as they are brief and true flashbacks and not whole new scenes. Cut all the rest.  That gets us about 20 min of screen time back and it gives us a clean forward narrative: 10 years ago the robber, 10 years later we are back at the El Royale. 
  The rest of it is small snips and narrative choices as far as pacing.  We have long, lovely camera shots. Those mostly have to go. Long scenes of Darlene singing and clapping, those need to go. We go from introductions, to discovery of the secret passage, to the kidnapping, to the murder, to the interrogation, to Billy Lee arriving. No more hard POV jumps between characters, the set up and introductions will have to happen real time and characters will be doing things simultaneously, cutting between characters but not changing scenes.  That means Billy Lee is already on their trail, unknown to Boot's sister. Boot's betrayal will have to happen later, via dialog or we can just cut it. Boot's actions tell us enough without needing the phone call. It would be work but it would be doable and worth doing.

Fix for problem #7: Billy Lee. I actually like the idea of a cult leader who leads entirely on sex and charisma. The power and danger are baked in, because Hemsworth is not small or weak. But he needs a consistent ideology that ties into the script.  So this is one flashback we, sadly, need to keep. Instead of him blathering about changing sides, we have him talking about how much e 'loves truth' and 'hates lies and liars'. He can even talk about the 'fairness' of chance in determining outcomes. How 'anything can happen in a fight', which ties into the fight over who gets to fuck him, which reveals about Boots' character and it ties into the final fight where the tables are literally overturned. You can even stick in something about how much he hates religion as 'full of lies', if you want. Honestly the priest not being 'real' would be enough to trigger Billy Lee.  And if Darlene knows the priest is fake, she can even be the one to reveal that, under duress.  And duress needs to be there.  Threat needs to be there. Which means Drew needs to swallow his desire to deconstruct and preach his political religion and if he needs to give Darlene her 'powerful men who love to talk' speech...and I really, really would cut it...then you have to see that such a speech has no effect on Billy Lee.  Have him shoot her, in the gut or the leg. And let him answer her defiance by raising the stakes, not undercut. 
  We also need to get Billy Lee into the story earlier. So we need to show the cultists arriving well before they bust in. Show them walking through fields or down hills, all pretty, then show the guns, then show the El Royale from above or in the distance. Keep the threat imminent. Remember, we're going for suspense and tight run time.

Fix for Problem #8: Unused plot hooks. Most of these we are tying up and using above. The FBI is the Management. That's why the conflicted FBI orders. 
  Who is on the tape? Here's a subtle way to tell without telling.  Everyone but Darlene looks at the film. She's not interested. But every time the film is looked at or mentioned, have them glance at Darlene. Just a look, not a big look.  The dialog in the movie is 'he's famous' 'he's dead' and it would be a big deal, be very valuable and...of interest to the FBI, at least at one point.  So who is dead in, say 1970, who is already a legend, who's legacy would be tarnished by sexual indiscretions being discovered?  Well...Martin Luther King comes to mind. You wanna talk bombshells.  He fits the dialog in the movie and in a subtle way, it ties Darlene back into the plot some more, even if only by her race.
  Who's the money stolen from and who's looking. Again, that's Darlene's father who backstabbed the other two thieves. If we want to use the FBI again, they investigate bank robberies. Switch it from an Armored Car heist to a bank robbery and add the money hunt to the FBI agents tasks there. Done.
  
Fix for Problem #9: Characters don't behave like real people. This is mostly just direction.  Keep Dakota Johnson's character sassy and defiant and a cold eyed killer. Make her active, even if that means she's subverted in her intention to kill the desk clerk by her sister.  The priest isn't enraptured by the singer's singing, or not only that, maybe there's some conflict between them instead of a hugbox. Let Darlene be conflicted, desperate, needing that money but maybe repulsed by what she has to do to get it. If the desk clerk is a war hero, let him act like it. Don't have him freak out about a tied up girl. If you need him to be passive, and I don't know why, then play up the drug addiction. Make it hard on him. Maybe Darlene's father died of a drug overdose, tying her to him. Have Darlene motivate him at the end by either their shared drug talk (which I'm making up, they never have any moments until the very, very end of the movie with her 'reverse psychology' moment) or by pleading with him to fight or save them or something other than 'you don't have to kill anymore' turning instantly into 'ok, I'll kill some more'. Give the FBI agent a reason to act so squirrel and impulsively due to the conflicts in his orders. Or have the little sister be the one to kill him or something like that. Not free and easy but easily fixable

Fix for Problem Ultimate: Fuck the dog. Go ahead and show the cult murdering the family in LA. Go ahead and describe actual fucked up shit that happens in hotels. When the desk clerk says he's killed '124 people', don't show us a Vietnam montage...show us the clerk killing 124 people at the hotel at the orders of The Management. This ties him into the FBI Agent as well.  Show the red phone ringing, then him shooting a guest. Phone rings, another shooting. Phone rings, another shooting. Give him something to REALLY regret, not normal wartime killing, that can be traumatic for most people, but it's nothing he should feel religious guilt over. Make the incest (very slightly) more explicit, make the murder of his father more explicit. Or kill the desk clerk and have Emily kill Billy Lee only to have her little sister boots murder Emily in a rage.  Don't pussyfoot around implying stuff, tell us and let us deal with it as a audience. Or if Drew isn't willing, or the studio more like, then cut and make changes. But this is a small picture, let it be honest and bolt.

So, if anyone actually read all this, thanks.  I really wanted to love this movie. But I didn't. Sadly, I think it has all the ingredients for greatness, but they were not assembled to create that.

Not recommended.

TL;DR - A very good action-packed movie with plenty of emotion as well. This movie leans on the previous films for character establishment and development but works well even as a stand alone film. Highly recommended.


Long version:

This needs to be two reviews, really. One about the movie itself. And one about the culmination of the past 18 Marvel films that have been leading to this two-parter finale.  Let's start with the film itself.

Avengers Infinity War -

One of the rarest movies out there is one starring a villainous protagonist. And make no mistake, this is Thantos' movie. He is the driver of the action, he pays the heaviest emotional price to accomplish his goals.  The heroes, the Avengers and others, act as antagonists to his goals. Sure, that's the case in just about every fantasy, where the heroes stand between the big bad guy and his goals.  But in other stories, the focus is usually on the hero protagonist.  But the focus here is mostly on Thanos, even when he's not on camera, the rapid cuts between different settings and characters rarely keeps him off stage for long in Infinity War.

Even more rare is for a story to have a villain protagonist that is sympathetic while still staying monstrous. Mark Lawrence has his Prince of Thorn book series but he fails to make a sympathetic character. Glen Cook's Black Company series doesn't keep the main characters truly villainous.  This movie is balanced, to borrow a theme expressed in the film.  Thanos is powerful, intelligent, motivated and driven by a belief that he is right.  This isn't someone going after power for it's own sake or to aggrandize his ego. He is going to right a wrong, as he sees it, in the universe.

And he's going to do it by killing half of the universe's population.  

What worked:

Pretty much everything.  The pacing of this movie is fast. The character are put into new small groups and are all following their own plots. The film cuts between these groups so you never have time to get bored or for the story to be dragged down by too much exposition or over-long fight scenes.
There are high emotional stakes as well as high 'plot' stakes. The heroes are trying to save half the universe and to save or to avenge the lives of their loved ones.

But Thanos is gaining power, not for it's own sake and not for a love of killing (and not to impress his girlfriend, thank God), but to allow the survivors to flourish in a galaxy of limited resources.  Thanos has his own high emotional and plot stakes.

At the same time, the good guys and bad guys here are not ambiguous. Thanos has depth, more so than expected, but he IS bad/evil and 'must' be stopped.  This is not a grey movie. We do not have 'gray' heroes who snap necks or kill random, faceless thugs.

Everyone or almost everyone is given moments to shine, to save the day in little ways if not big always.  With a cast of this size, this is also a near miracle.

Most of the humor is character-based, we don't have jokes undercutting too many big emotional moments. It happens once but it actually works there. Plus Drax is just hilarious.

Perhaps needless to say, the special effects in this movie are flawless.  There is no 'bad' CGI in here. Everyone and everything looks real. We live in an age of visual marvels. What is even more 'marvelous' is that the technology has been tied to a good story.

What didn't work:

This is a very good movie. But it's not perfect.  There are a few flaws. Most of them don't take away from the film but one or two of them do bump me a little.

The biggest one is the basic assumption at the core of Thanos' reasoning. That there are limited resources in a limited universe and the only way to avoid over-population and destruction of all society is mass murder on a cosmic scale. This is what Thanos calls 'balance'.  And this monstrous belief is not a fictional one and is not shared only by big, purple supervillains. It's called Malthusianism, after the 18th century theorist, Thomas Malthus. He believed that population would increase exponentially while food supplies would increase linearly. At some point, overpopulation would cause mass starvation, war, disease and death.  Even today, there are radicals who call for enforced sterilization, mandatory birth control and even call for mass murder of the kind Thanos uses fictionally here.
  The problem here isn't just the monstrousness of the philosophy. It's that it is false. Or has been proven so, so far.  As population has indeed increased, so too has our food production. Even today, our challenge is food distribution, not availability or even cost.  Technology, from agriculture to birth control, has resolved the Malthusian dilemma. 
  And no one in the movie ever makes the case that Thanos is wrong on factual, not just on moral grounds. On moral grounds, Thanos is willing to pay the price of being hated and 'misunderstood' and even willing to sacrifice those he cares about. He is not accessible to moral arguments. He views his position as fact. But no one attempts to refute his facts. 

Second, some of the scenes are edited too quickly. It is hard to follow the action, which can be literally dizzying in places.  This is not true everywhere. The choreography of the fight on Titan is clean and easy to follow. So is the fight with Dr. Strange and Iron Man with the first two Black Order henchmen. Likewise the final fight against Thanos is clearly, mostly because it is in slow motion.  But the Wakandan battle and the early fight with Scarlett Witch and the other Avengers verses the other two Black Order henchmen is unclear.  I'm wondering if two different crews and fight choreographers were used or two different editors. We have two of each working on Infinity War. There were similar problems with Black Panther, but different editors and different fight choreographers were used here.

Third, we don't see Thanos obtaining the Power stone and the destruction on Xandar. It MAY be that they're planning to save that for a movie perhaps featuring Nova, as written by Dan Abnett.  But no such announcement has been made. And it may appear in flashback in the second part of Infinity War. I don't know but it stands out and feels odd, since we spend time watching Thanos acquire the other five.

The rest are nit picks. Like how Pepper Potts is a terrible character and a nag and a terrible match for Tony Stark or any other man with self respect. Or how everyone can just talk to everyone else at any time, seemingly. Or how sometimes Thanos uses his power stones well and sometimes he doesn't. Or how only girls fight girls and boys fight boys in most of the movie, which is odd.

Or, most of all nits, how the Black Order is established and used. Only one really stands out, Ebony Maw. And he's killed without being able to 'Mary Poppins' himself to safety when, of all characters, he should and could have survived his defeat.


Plot (with spoilers):

Picking up some time after the events of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Black Panther, we see Thanos finally in motion to collect all 6 infinity stones. He has taken the Power stone from Xandar (off camera) and we see him butchering the survivors of Asgard. Thor is beaten and defeated. Quickly, Thanos defeats the Hulk decisively, receives the Space stone from Loki and strangles Loki to death when he attempts to kill Thanos. Heimdall manages to send Hulk away summoning Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, but is killed for this.  Thanos and his Black Order henchmen/children depart, leaving a crippled Thor on a burning starship that explodes.

Hulk arrives on earth, crashing into Dr. Strange's home and transforming permanently (for this film at least) into Bruce Banner.  Banner warns Strange and Tony Stark about Thanos but almost immediately, two members of the Black Order attack them in an attempt to seize the Time stone from Dr. Strange.  Spiderman helps in the fight but Dr. Strange is abducted. Iron Man and Spiderman stow away onboard the starship and manage to rescue Dr. Strange however they are unable or unwilling ultimately to change the starship's course and they decide to attempt to attack Thanos on his homeworld, Titan when they arrive.

Meanwhile, the other two members of the Black Order attack Scarlet Witch and Vision as the two lovers are debating going off on their own. Vision is crippled in the ambush and never truly recovers or is able to use his full powers. Scarlet Witch fights tremendously well but just when she is about to be cornered and killed, Captain America, Falcon and Black Widow show up to rescue them both.  They decide to see if they can remove the Mind stone from Vision without killing him and then destroy the Mind stone rather than letting it fall into Thanos' hands.  To do this, they must go to Wakanda.

Meanwhile, out in space, the Guardians of the Galaxy are responding to a distress signal sent by the Asgardians. They arrive to find a nearly dead (mostly dead?) Thor, who they rescue and whom rapidly recovers.  Rocket Raccoon and Thor, with Groot, go off to have a new weapon forged to replace his broken hammer, a weapon that can actually defeat Thanos.  The other Guardians decide to go to Knowhere, where The Collector has the Reality stone. They intend to steal the stone before Thanos can get it.  However they arrive too late.  Gamora attacks her foster father and seemingly kills him. However it is revealed that Thanos has already acquired the Reality stone and the ambush was merely a test to see how Gamora felt towards Thanos. He handily defeats the Guardians and forces Gamora to reveal the location of the Soul stone by torturing her 'sister' Nebula.  She is unable to tolerate Nebula's torture and reveals the Soul stones location. Thanos takes Gamora to the location of the Soul stone.  There is his forced to sacrifice the one person he truly loves, his daughter Gamora, to receive the soul stone.  Thanos does so with regret and having paid for the stone with her life, he departs for Titan.

Meanwhile, Thor and Rocket find that the forge world where they intended to find a weapon is cold and abandoned.  Thanos has been here, too. And his Infinity gauntlet was created by the last surviving 'dwarf' blacksmith.  Thor and Rocket manage to re-start the forge and obtain a mighty axe, using part of Groot as the haft.

On Titan, the Guardians meet and confront Iron Man, Spider Man and Dr. Strange. They unite and ready an ambush on Thanos, the plan being to separate Thanos from the Gauntlet that holds the Infinity stones. There is an epic battle but Thanos defeats the combined heroes, despite near success when Star Lord learns of Gamora's death and attacks a stunned Thanos before the Gauntlet can be removed.  Dr. Strange, having looked into the future and finding only ONE scenario where the heroes succeed, 'strangely' gives Thanos the Time stone in return for Thanos sparing Iron Man's life. Thanos takes the Time stone and heads to Earth for the final Infinity stone, in Vision.

The heroes arrive in Wakanda and are greeted and aided by Black Panther and his sister. They attempt to remove the Mind stone so it can be destroyed without killing Vision, however the surviving Black Order members have come back to earth with an army of ravening four armed beasts.  They attack immediately and manage to circumvent the protective shield around Wakanda.  Bruce Banner is unable to summon the Hulk and fights in borrowed 'hulkbuster' armor. In the vast attack, the Avengers are put in great jeopardy but the return of Thor turns the tide of battle and the members of the Black Order are killed.  However, Thanos himself arrives, with 5 Infinity stones. And single-handedly, he defeats all the heroes as they try to keep him from Vision.  Scarlet Witch manages to destroy the stone but doing so while the stone is still in Vision, killing him.  Thanos uses the Time stone to rewind time to before the stone is destroyed and pulls it out of Vision's skull, killing him a second time and giving him all 6 stones.

Just then, Thor attacks Thanos with his new axe and inflicts a terrible wound to Thanos' chest. However he is not able to prevent Thanos from using all 6 stones at once. And half the heroes and people in the universe die and turn to ash.

Wounded, with the Infinity Gauntlet twisted and seemingly broken, Thanos escapes. And, having accomplished his goal, he rests and smiles wistfully at an alien sunrise.

***

And yeah, that's it. Thanos wins. Heroes fail. Many, many heroes die and turn to ash before their friends and loved one's eyes.  

Now this IS part 1 of a two part movie.  But....the BALLS on Kevin Feige and the Russo brothers are immense. Not since the Empire Strikes Back have we seen this kind of dark, down ending in a series.

For one of the rare times in my life, I have NO idea where they could go with this. And no idea how to 'fix' this situation.  This isn't just a cliffhanger. This is an avalanche that leaves the few survivors stunned, broken and disorganized.


What would I change?:

Not a lot, honestly. This movie does everything pretty damn right.
I'd have shown the Xandar massacre. I could probably write a scene that would take less than 3 minutes of screen time but would have given us even more spectacle. But honestly, the movie serves up plenty of spectacle and shows us Thanos power in other ways.

The set up for the Soul stone should have come before this film but it is the emotional core of Thanos' journey here, so it does work.

It would be nice to find a use for Falcon, War Machine and Black Widow.  They aren't helpless, but they don't do much and have no plot impact.

Valkerie and the characters from Thor 3 are not here at all. But I sorta hate all of them, so good riddance.

Likewise, Bruce Banner went from scientist in Avengers 1 and 2 to scared little boy in this movie. That's not great characterization, though it does set up character development for him and Hulk and that's not nothing.

The Black Order should have had a bit more interaction and 'named' each other more. They did their job here, but they felt like red shirts.

Summary:

This is a nearly miraculous movie in how much it got right, in the choices made and in paying off setups from previous films and leaning on the characterization done in previous films. It is an action movie with a lot of emotion and high stakes.

Even if you haven't seen all the other Marvel movies, it works well enough and is worth study as well as mere entertainment.

Highly Recommended

***

Part 2 - Avengers Infinity War and what it means as a series:

Ok, let's talk EVEN MORE about this movie because it IS more than just a one-off or two-off entertainment event.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it started with Iron Man in 2008. However the McGuffin 'powerful artifact' plot line really begins with Captain America 1. In that film, the Nazi's gain what we know as the Tesseract and they/Hydra develop sci-fi super weapons with it.  Then in The Avengers, we have Loki coming to earth at the head of an army lent to him by Thanos and bearing a spear/scepter that contained another infinity stone, the Mind stone, though it was not called by that name then. Thor 2 featured yet another stone, the 'Aether', a confusing low point for the series. This is the Reality stone and it was taken to The Collector.
It wasn't until the Guardians of the Galaxy 1 that we got the full back story on the Infinity Stones and got to see Thanos demanding the Power stone from Ronan the Accuser.  After Guardians of the Galaxy, the overall plot, featuring the Infinity stones, gets pushed more front and center, though not to the extent you might think.  Only Dr. Strange and Avengers 2 really feature the stones as plot points and neither are the main plot device of either film.  Marvel really had hit its stride by then, in writing and tying the movies together gracefully.

We can also be grateful for good casting, mostly, and multi-picture contracts.  Infinity War works so well because these characters were introduced and developed over many previous movies.  They don't just feel like a costume and a power set. They feel like real people. Part of that credit goes to the writing and performances and direction, but also the structure of the Marvel Cinematic Universe where they have been no ret-cons (long may that last, knock wood) or recastings, re-imaginings or what have you that have plagued the X-men, the Fantastic Four, Spider Man and Batman/Superman.

We don't need to learn Captain America's backstory in Infinity War. When he shows up and snatches the spear thrown at him, the audience literally cheered. Because we knew him and we knew what he was going to do: save the day, be a hero.  Likewise, Bruce Banner's character in this movie is tolerable because we've seen him in the Avengers 1 and 2 and in Thor 3.  This early character development is pretty essential to Infinity War working at a high level. I still think it works even if you don't know everyone and everything, they do a good job dropping in mild exposition here and there.
So talking about characters, lets go even deeper. I'm going to list all the heroes in Infinity War, what they did and their ultimate fate. Some did more and were more important to the plot here than others.  Some may be even more important in part 2, after the vast die-off at the end of Infinity war. Keep one more thing in mind: each of these characters are unique in look AND 'voice'. As a writer, I can tell you making characters 'sound' unique is not easy and is worthy of praise.

Thor - Is defeated by Thanos, off-camera, is tortured to get Loki to reveal the Space stone's location. Survives the destruction of his ship and is rescued by the Guardians. Goes to have a new weapon forged, powerful enough to defeat Thanos. Restarts the forgeworld sun and holds a mechanism open long enough to melt the metal in the forge. Transports to the final battle in Wakanda, turning the tide of battle. Destroys several drop ships of the invaders and inflicts a terrible wound on Thanos. Charms the pants off everyone but Star Lord.

Loki - Surrenders the Space stone after first defying Thanos to kill Thor.  Attempts to ambush Thanos while swearing fealty. Is strangled to death, possibly for good, by Thanos.

Heimdall - Transports Hulk to Earth to give warning and is killed as a result.

Hulk - Gets his ass handed to him decisively by Thanos and then refuses to come out again, apparently out of fear. As Bruce Banner, he brings the message of Thanos' coming and threat. Calls Captain America after Tony Stark is unable to. He fights in the final Wakanda battle wearing a borrowed Hulkbuster suit of armor.

Iron Man - Fights two of the Black Order to attempt to protect Dr. Strange and the Time stone.  Boards the alien spaceship and rescues Dr. Strange. Fights the Guardians of the Galaxy on Titan before teaming up with them. Fights Thanos on Titan and is badly wounded. His life is traded for the Time stone by Dr. Strange.

Pepper Potts - Is apparently getting married to Tony Stark. Because Nemesis is a real force and Stark has had too much success and happiness in his life. Nags at him and attempt to browbeat him into NOT saving the world. Is a scrunt. Survival uncertain but probably since we live in a fallen, unjust universe.

Dr. Strange - Receives the warning about Thanos and collects Tony Stark. Fights against the Black Order. Is captured before he can use the Time Stone. Stand up to Tony Stark, snark for snark. Suggest they not fly to Titan and avoid Thanos instead. Is overruled for plot and Tony Stark ego reasons. Fights against the Guardians before combining with them against Thanos on Titan. Looks into the future with the Time stone to try to find a scenario where the heroes can win. Seemingly finds a single possibility. However, gives the Time stone to Thanos in return for Tony Stark's life. Dies at the end saying 'this was the only way', seemingly not having explained to Tony Stark what he needs to do.

Wong - Wants a tuna melt. Fights against the Black order to protect Dr. Strange. Managed to strand the most physically powerful Black Order member via teleportation. Returns to guard Dr. Strange's home and items. Probably survives or not seen to die at the end.

Spider Man - Spider Sense warns him of the alien ship arrival bearing the Black Order. Fights the Black Order. Loses Dr. Strange to the Black Order. Gets new 'superior' Spider man suit. Stows away on starship against instructions. Helps blow Ebon Maw out into space. Fights against the Guardians on Titan. Becomes an Avenger for real. Fights against Thanos on Titan. Dies and is turned to ash while begging for his life.

Star Lord - Rescues Thor, much to his annoyance.  Has gained a little weight. Promises Gamora, very reluctantly, that he will kill her if Thanos tries to take her away. Leads the Guardians to Knowhere in an attempt to steal the Reality Stone before Thanos can. Fights Thanos or tries to on Knowhere. Tries to keep his word to Gamora and shoot her. Is liked by Thanos. Travels to Titan after being told by Nebula that Thanos is going there. Fights Dr. Strange, Iron Man and Spider Man before uniting. Comes up with the plan to ambush, hold and remove the gauntlet from Thanos. But breaks his 'stun' by attacking him when he learns of Gamora's death. Fights Thanos on Titan but loses. Dies at the end when Thanos uses the Infinity Gauntlet.  Is pretty damn bad ass for a goofball.

Gamora -  Has comfortably settled into her relationship with Peter Quill, apparently. Knows what Thanos' ultimate, genocidal goal is. Knows where the Soul stone is. Assassinates her father, Thanos, in Knowhere but is defeated by the Reality stone. Is captured by Thanos and pressured into revealing the Soul stone's location by Thanos' torture of Nebula. Has a flashback to Thanos discovering and adopting her. Is loved by and sacrificed by Thanos to gain the soul stone. Appears, as a child, in the 'soul zone' to speak to Thanos after he kills half the universe.

Drax - Has most of the good lines/jokes. Knows a man when he sees one. Also knows a pirate angel when he sees one. Can hold so still and move so slowly, he can become invisible. Or not. Attacks Thanos in Knowhere, unsuccessfully.  Fights Dr. Strange, Iron Man and Spider Man on Titan before uniting against Thanos. Manages some good hits in against Thanos. Does not get his vengeance. Dies at the end.

Mantis - Is very cute and cuddly. Has 'mean face' down. Awakens Thor after his rescue. Knows Drax when she sees him. Tries to confront Thanos on Knowhere but is defeated by the Reality stone.  Scares Spider Man. Fights Thanos and her ability to put Celestials to sleep is used to good affect during the ambush. But is defeated by Thanos and dies at the end of the movie, turning to dust.

Groot - Is a brat. Plays handheld version of Defender and is surly the whole movie.  Uses part of his body to form the handle for Thor's new Thanos-killing axe. Fights in the final battle at Wakanda. Dies at the end when Thanos uses the Infinity stones.

Rocket - Gets promotion to 'Captain' and actually acts like it, surprisingly. Shows empathy. Takes Thor to forge world to get new Thanos-killing axe for Thor. Give Thor a cybernetic eye, brown in color. Helps re-start star forge. Fights in the final battle and helps turn the tide against the invading aliens in Wakanda. Knows a good gun, and good arm, when he sees it. Survives the great culling at the end, the only Guardian of the Galaxy to do so.

Nebula - Attempts to kill Thanos after the events of Guardians 2 and 'very nearly succeeded'. Is captured and tortured. Thanos learns Gamora knows about the Soul stone from her. Breaks free after being healed by minions of Thanos and tells the Guardians Thanos is going to Titan. Fights Thanos on Titan but is defeated. Survives the great culling at the end.

The Collector - Gives up the Reality stone to Thanos. Likely dead, only seen 'alive' during the Reality stone trap.

Captain America - Shows up to rescue Vision and Scarlet Witch. Leads them to the Avengers HQ where he confronts Sec. of State Ross and gains the allegiance and help of War Machine. Leads the Avengers to Wakanda and gains the aid of Black Panther to attempt to remove the Mind stone without killing Vision. Fights in the final battle in Wakanda. Attempts to stop Thanos but is defeated. Survives the final culling at the end of the movie.

Bucky Barnes - Is called back into service by Black Panther. Gets new arm. Is reunited with Captain America. Fights in the final battle in Wakanda. Dies at end in the great culling at the end of the film.

Black Panther - Allows the Avengers into the country. Offers aid in removing the Mind stone from Rallies his people to fight the invading army of Thanos. Fights in the final battle in Wakanda. Gives the order to open the shield to the invaders to avoid becoming flanked. Dies at the end in the great culling.

Main Bald Black chick warrior (yeah, go ahead and hate me; her name and look don't stand out) - Fights in the last battle in Wakanda. Survives the great culling.

Shuri - Is so smart. Somehow. Despite apparently limited contact with the outside world and zero experience with Infinity stones and creating new life forms. But is so smart.  Attempts to remove the Mind stone from Vision and would have likely have succeed if not interrupted by the Black Order and then Thanos. Survival uncertain, not shown to die in the great culling.

Baku? Gorilla-themed guy - Fights in the final battle in Wakanda. Is using a wooden club, which somehow works despite not having any powers or vibranium. Survives the great culling.

Falcon - Helps rescue Scarlet Witch and Vision. Travels to Avenger HQ to reunite with War Machine. Fights in the final battle in Wakanda. Dies at the end in the great culling.

Scarlet Witch - Is in a romance with Vision. Fights the Black Order. Is very, very powerful. But has little defense. Refuses to destroy Mind stone before Thanos' arrival because of love for Vision. Agrees to destroy it if removed. Fights decisively in the final battle in Wakanda. Destroys the Mind stone while holding back or slowing down Thanos. Is very, very powerful. Dies at the end in the great culling.

Vision - Is in a romance with Scarlet Witch. Has developed a very British stammer dealing with emotions like love. Apparently tolerates being in Scotland. Gets badly wounded in his first fight and basically does next to nothing apart from being rescued a lot. Gets rescued a lot.  Attempts to sacrifice his life for the sake of untold numbers of people. Gets turned down about the idea until the very end. Fights to protect Shuri when the Black Order comes for him. Dies twice. 

Black Widow - Rescues Scarlett Witch, twice. Fights the girl black order member. Fights in the final battle in Wakanda. Survives, somehow, despite not having super powers. Has blonde hair. Has great voice. Survives the great culling.

War Machine - Joins Captain America at risk of court martial. Trolls Bruce Banner in Wakanda. Fights in the final battle in Wakanda. Fights against Thanos and loses. Survives the great culling.

Nick Fury - Calls Captain Marvel for help when he sees the great culling happening. However dies before he can issue some trademark profanity.

...that's 29 distinct characters who have some plot-related actions or responsibility!  I'm a little dizzy just from writing that up, let alone doing it in screenplay form and making ti work.  Damn.

What Marvel movies has done here is unlike anything anyone else has ever tried. And they pull it off with style and grace.  18 movies building up, in small ways and in big, to this moment. When half the universe is killed off.

Warner Brothers/DC tried to follow in Marvel's footsteps but failed. Why it failed is likely a source for a good, long article in and of itself. But most of the reason is due to: vision, casting, pacing.  DC wanted to get to where Marvel is in a hurry.  It wanted to do so by making dark, gritty stories that don't fit the DC characters. Instead of spending time creating, developing and using their characters, they tried to jump ahead in line.  Casting and direction have also hampered them, as have cost cutting measures in their special effects.

Like Marvel movies or hate them, you have to respect the effort and the balancing act at work here.  Kevin Feige had a vision AND Marvel/Disney gave him the freedom to pursue it, even to the point of removing personnel who were tainting his vision.

Along the way to Infinity War, they mastered the art of character development (of heroes and villains), of action that serves to develop the plot and reveal character, the art of casting. It survived turbulent relationship failures with talented directors who would not accept the production direction Feige was laying down and found even more talented directors who could be trusted to match the Marvel vision while expressing their own voice.

The Russo Brothers, Kevin Feige, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely....all the techs, cast and crew....you did it. You made a miracle.

So what does Infinity War mean?  It means an ending. It means, I hope, that hard work and boldness is rewarded. It means having a well-developed villain is no less important than a likeable hero. It means the old stories still work, the old ideas of entertainment first, still work.

It means...I'm going to watch Infinity War a few more times. And I'm going to enjoy myself each time I go. 

Thanks, sincerely.

TL;DR - It's ok. Good performances anchored by a charismatic Chadwick Boseman and good worldbuilding for Wakanda are undercut by terrible fight coreography, sub-par CGI and a racial marketing buzz.

Marvel just knows how to make good movies.  Kevin Feige has a deft touch at knowing what will appeal to a broad audience. The Black Panther is neither as bad as you might fear nor as good as you might hope.  Like most movies it has flaws but it also has good stuff in it.  If you can suspend your disbelief, like you need to for most Superhero movies, you'll have a good time watching it.  You won't get preached at too much and you get to see the bad guys lose.
That is no small feat.

I won't go into the history of Black Panther, some time spent on Wikipedia can do that better than I can, but I will point out that there is a strong desire on the part of some of the writers of the comic to make the character a polemic on the evils of white people.  Every time the comic does that, sales tank the the writer has to find other work.  But the movie manages to avoid that. Mostly*.  The message of the movie is one that preaches the merits of being inclusive and open, of helping other people rather than painting them with a wide brush as 'the enemy'. If there ever was a time for that message, it's the post-Obama age. This is an inclusive movie, regardless of how it is being marketed and portrayed on social media.

Plot - 

Chadwick Boseman is T'Challa, the new King of Wakanda, following the death of his father in Civil War.  He is also the Black Panther, the protector of the fictional African nation that enjoys a sci-fi standard of living thanks to being the sole source of the magical mystery metal 'Vibranium'.  

However there are a few loose ends to tie up for the new king. One is Ulysses Klaue (NOT the Living Laser in the comic continuity, thanks David), a thief last seen in Age of Ultron who managed to actually steal a great deal of vibranium from Wakanda. The king and most of his advisors want Klaue captured and brought to justice. And they also feel that they should control all the vibranium out there in the world.  To that latter end, Wakanda apparently has a vast international network of spies and agents, hidden among the nations of the Earth.

Which brings us to the second loose end, the villainous Black Lives Matter radical/murderer/terrorist/CIA agent (?) Killmonger.  Killmonger is part of Klaue's crew but also is of noble blood, being the son of a Wakandan Prince. Killmonger was abandoned to live alone in Oakland California after the previous Black Panther (T'Challa's father) killed him.  This lost cousin grows up very, very bad. And he wants revenge and the crown of Wakanda.

One of the interesting quirks of Wakanda is that their isolation and cultural homogeneity has preserved some very old traditions. Including one where those of royal blood may challenge for the throne via single combat.  This sort of monomacy was a valid form of succession in a few ancient cultures and the survival of it into superhightech Wakanda is odd and unique.

Killmonger challenges T'Challa, wins the fight and takes the throne.  After that, he commits to use Wakanda's technology and spy network to foment a world-wide revolution that will supposedly result in Wakanda ruling the world.**

T'Challa however survived the fight and reappears at the end of the movie to defeat Killmonger and prevent the spread of high tech weapons to revolutionaries.  

However, having secured his throne, he is more convinced than ever that Wakanda should reach out to the world, not to rule it but to lead by example and by trying to improve the lives of people outside their hidden nation.

What worked?

The two strongest elements I thought were the characters and the setting.  Black Panther's family and friends all interact as if they truly knew each other and liked each other. They seemed to be real people, which is a good and an important trick in making a movie.  (A trick the DC movies have not mastered)  When you have characters that care about each other, we care about them too.
Wakanda is...well, it's a daydream, frankly. But one that has its roots in other literature as well. From King Solomon's mines, to Tarzan to The Phantom (the Ghost Who Walks), we have an image of an African nation that was both able to maintain it's archaic traditions without sinking into tribal barbarism and dictatorship. All of them, Wakanda included, ruled or protected by a powerful guardian with abilities beyond those of normal men. In this case, The Black Panther.  

But if you accept the premise - that this semi-magical material, 'vibranium', has allowed Wakanda to not just forge powerful weapons and armor but to also somehow create a high degree of education and science*** - the details that go into this setting are amazing. I wish Asgard had gotten one tenth the amount of thought and detail Wakanda gets.  Then maybe we'd have cared when it was destroyed in Thor 3...

Andy Serkis's performance as Klaue also stands out. He's just having so much fun and seems to be a real threat with his new laser-shooting artificial arm. A quality bad guy is so important and while he lasts, Klaue is a wily and amusing antagonist.

Chadwick Boseman's performance also stands out.  Like Captain American, Black Panther has a moral clarity and strength. He is strong, masculine and decisive. When faced with moral quandaries, he doesn't mope or wallow in pity, he acts. He is heroic in his character.

I also liked the James Bond riffs in the early part of the movie. If the whole film had been like that, I would have been okay with it. Or if the whole movie had been set in Wakanda only (which would have made for a stronger film), I'd have been okay with that too.

Finally, Michael B. Jordan's Killmonger was not a great character and not a great performance but I will give Jordan credit: he was in great shape and seemed physically and emotionally menacing. Not bad for the villain.

What didn't work?

The CGI in places, especially in the second half, was sub-standard. It stuck out and for the Black Panther vs Killmonger final fight, it detracted from the movie.  There were a lot of effects houses working on this film, the ones who focused on Wakanda did a fine job. But not all of them.

The fight scenes were also badly choreographed and edited. I've seen Creed, the previous directorial effort of Ryan Coogler, and that was well-choreographed. So I don't think it was strictly a problem of direction. I suspect Rachel Morrison, the Director of Photography, didn't know how to shoot fight scenes. They were hard to focus on, did not show the actors full bodies often, and some scenes had noticably been 'sped up' to seem to be faster and more powerful. Possibly one or more of the fight choreographers weren't up to scratch. Or maybe the problem was with the actors, though Boseman seemed fine in Civil War and Jordan was fine in Creed.  I'm putting this at the D of P's feet.  Fight scenes are important in action movies, you can't screw them up like was done here.

Michael B. Jordan's dialog and dialog/character did not work for me.  Again, I've seen Creed. He's not great in it. He was ok, more of a physical performance than an acting display.  And in this, he talks like a hood rat.  Which makes his introductory scene in the museum almost laughable, it's so bad.  Also, and this isn't on him precisely as an actor, his backstory is a problem. He's not only supposed to be a street punk from Oakland AND a secret Wakandan prince, he's also supposed to be a CIA agent who works to destabilize countries. *facepalm*  Now, I'm no virgin, I know the CIA and other TLA agencies do in fact perform dirty tricks like that. But I hope to God they wouldn't use someone as sloppy and unable to be low profile as this Killmonger. Spies are subtle. They aren't thugs, not if they want to live and avoid jail time in third world shitholes.  Maybe this was a fault of the director, maybe the co-writer Joe Cole, who is not very experienced.

Martin Freeman didn't really work for me. He's supposed to be a former Air Force pilot in this movie as well as a CIA agent.  *buzz* No. I have known many Air Force pilots. They are all cocky, arrogant, assured assholes. (And I say that in love)  They are not Bilbo Baggins here. He's in this story purely as a way to show how cool and advanced Wakanda is compared to 'white people'. He's here to be yelled at and belittled. Now the movie doesn't lather that on too much, but it does happen. Particularly in the 'barking' scene.  What would have worked better would be to have Bucky Barnes in his role. He was IN Wakanda at the end of Civil War, so I'm not sure why he wasn't here.  Failure of imagination, maybe. But the Winter Soldier would have worked better than Martin Freeman's Everett Ross.

Finally, there are a couple of tone problems.  Overall, the movie worked but without nitpicking it for hours, there were some parts that just bumped me.  
    Two are in the South Korea scene...by the way, I assume South Korea is in this movie for transparent pandering reasons and it is jarring...the first is when Klaue blasts a car Okoye (one of the bald bodyguards) is standing on. She uses her spear and the hood of the car to sorta...surf her way to a stop.  No. That's not how physics works.  She is not a superhero, so I can't cut her the same breaks I'd cut Black Panther.  It's dumb and breaks the movie moment.  
    Second is also related to Klaue blasting the shit out of car. We have his almost comical moment of the driver's seat and one of the other bald bodyguards skidding to a halt.  The rest of the car was blasted to oblivion but she's just...cartoon blackened. It doesn't work, the movie isn't a slapstick and considering the murder and throat cutting past and future in the film, it doesn't work.  If you want us to accept the jeopardy, you need to treat the danger as real.  See Captain America 2 for how to do this right.

    Another is, sigh, the guy with a lid in his lip. Yes, it's a real thing. And yes, it looks stupid. Everytime he talks, I get the giggles. I can't take him or his character seriously. And don't get me started on his green suit.
    Then there's the rhinos...just...no. No riding war rhinos. I can't take a fight seriously that has people riding war rhinos. It does not match the tone of the rest of the movie.

So how would I fix it?

The tone problems are easy to fix. Just treat the danger as real, not a cartoon.  Make the threats real, shoot some Wakandas who don't have magic body armor****. Don't give the guy with a lid in his lip any dialog. Don't have people riding war rhinos.

The fight choreography can be fixed by either spending more time with the actors, getting a new fight guy or by fixing the photography/editing.  Seriously, it's a superhero movie, you need to get the fights right.

I'd put the Winter Soldier into the story in place of the Martin Freeman CIA agent. He has the skills and maybe the contacts to help find and fight Klaue. And he has the kind of physicality that allows him to stare down hooting gorilla themed black guys.

Also, as much as I like monkeys, you shouldn't put gorilla themed black guys in your movie. Unless we're saying that is no longer racially offensive. Which I'm ok with, because I like monkeys.

Move the action to be either in Wakanda or on the borders. Michael B Jordan and Klaue can break back into Wakanda to steal vibranium to make up for what was stolen or lost in previous movies. Then Jordan can stab Klaue in the back as planned and make his play for the throne.  In fact, he should be making his play for the throne much earlier. Then we can have the real plot conflict happen in the setting they worked so hard on, rather than shoehorning in some Asian scenery porn to try to appeal to China.  Also China is not South Korea. I don't think you're fooling anyone, Marvel.

Also don't kill off Klaue, unless Andy Serkis said he didn't want to play the role anymore. Which I doubt.  He was/is a good villain and he's wasted here, literally.

Summary

This is a pretty good movie.  It is not a blacks vs whites movie, to its credit.  It has a message of hope, inclusion and heroism. It's a solid movie.

Recommended.

*There is habit of some of the characters to refer to all white people in the movie as 'Colonialist', which is funny considering it's said repeated to a supposed American character. America, of course, never had colonies in Africa and in fact was once a colony itself before rebelling. But I digress.

**Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics. But villains don't have to be smart or right.

***HOW exactly does some sort of metal make you better or even good at science?  It's not like the owners of wootz steel, the closest real-world analog to this super metal, founded famous universities or were renowned for its learning or created airplanes centuries early or anything.  If anything, the vibranium, by not acting like other metals, ought to retard the development of the scientific method. But now I'm just nit picking. Like I said, you have to suspend disbelief for superhero movies.

**** I know they want the PG rating and I give them credit for actually killing people in this movie.  But a little blood, a gunshot wound or two would go a long way to grounding this and making the bad guys more of a real threat.  Also those Black Panther claws are sharp and all but they're only about two inches long. In order to actually kill someone with them, you'd need to do more than just poke your claws into their chest, like when Killmonger's father is killed. You'd need to rip and claw, you know, like a real cat. But that would be hella gory and I get why they didn't do that.  I'm just saying, this could have been Deadpool levels of gore if you really wanted to use those claws they way you'd have to to kill someone with them.

​
TL;DR review - Good visuals and some good performances is all that save The Last Jedi from being an outright bad movie.

Ah Star Wars, why can't I quit you?  You keep abusing me and making me embarrassed to be a fan.  The next/last movie in the Kylo/Rey trilogy is going to have to work very hard not to get tossed into the same mental rubbish bin I store the Prequels.

What worked:

I like some of the performances quite a bit.  I don't like Luke's characterization and story turn, but Mark Hamill delivered the best performance in the film. He's become an actor in the past 30 years and it shows on the screen here, doing a part he clearly doesn't want to do.

I liked Kylo Ren, actually.  I felt his need and rage. Sure, he's emo but that's his character, he's playing it appropriately. Not every villain is a tower of self-regard.  He feels that he was forced to be evil, I think.  And he's trying to embrace that, even if he is...tempted by the light. And by Rey.  And what he wants is something that's easy to understand: he wants respect. And if he can't get that, fear.

Rey was...well, she's a superhero at this point. Overpowered as fuck.  But I watch a lot of superhero movies so for some reason, that didn't bother me. It should have. It did in The Force Awakens.  But in this one, I was more drawn to her temptation of Kylo. He's someone who won't comply with her demands.  And he's the first, only person, to try to reach out to her. To talk to HER, not her power or her destiny, but her as a person.  It helps that Daisy Ridley is charismatic. She can't act in a wide range, she has one or two 'moods' at most. But she draws the eye and after Rogue One, I can see how important that is.

I actually like the 'fake' codebreaker, DJ, played by Benicio Del Toro.  He had a very grounded and realistic view of the universe. I like him and I liked the advice he gave.

BB8 was fine as the cute toy/comic relief. Porgs were not/are not needed.

The Plot...and what didn't work (Spoilers...it's the plot):

Also Spoilers. The humor doesn't work. I laughed once, when Snoke hit Rey on the back of her head. That was it.  BB8 was as good as the 'humor' got and that just got a smile from me, no laughs.

Trying to sum up the plot is pretty simple because there's not a lot that actually happens from a story-viewpoint. You will spend two and a half hours watching a movie that should have been 100 minutes, tops.  But in the end, almost nothing has changed from the end of The Force Awakens.  Almost no characters change, grow or learn anything. We get awkward self-insert fan fic characters added, some new toys are introduced but the universe and the plot advance at a snail's crawl. And what changes do happen to the universe, do not favor the 'Resistance', although they do still have main character plot armor.

Ok, let me try again: Rey has found Luke Skywalker but he's not interested in training Rey or helping 'The Resistance'*. She begs and pleads and finally he gives her three lessons.  Then he refused to teach her anything more when she shows a blind excitement about diving into the Dark Side of the Force.** Meanwhile, Kylo Ren is being humiliated by Supreme Commander Snoke.   Kylo is filled with rage and need and at this time of profound isolation, he finds himself in frequent mental contact with Rey. The two of them seem to have a bond, more than that, they seem to have a connection, even an attraction for each other. Rey finally assaults Luke and when he kicks her off his island, she runs toward Kylo Ren, hoping to redeem him(?), it's unclear. But she does meet Kylo and confront Snoke with him.  And finally she rejoins the two dozen or so surviving Resistance members out of the thousands who were fleeing the first order.

Hm?

Oh right, there's actually two stories here, three really. But only Rey and Kylo's have any real story or plot significance.  But out of a sense of completeness...The First Order after blowing up three or four planets is seizing military control over the galaxy. We can only assume that they succeed, since they have all their incompetent people in one General Hux-shaped basket who is sent off to try to kill the Resistance before they can evacuate from their base.  Since Hux is terrible at everything, he can't quite manage this despite catching the Resistance in mid-evacuation and despite having some mysterious tracking device that allows him to follow them through hyperspace***.  What we get is a very slow motion stern chase where the First Order is picking off Resistance ships as they run out fuel.
  From here, we have two minor plots, one of which has some character development and one that has Finn and a huge waste of screentime.
  Minor plot #1 has us following Poe Dameron, who helps blow up a Dreadnaught (an even bigger big ship, not that we are given a sense of its scale ala Star Wars). However, surprising only idiots who run the Resistance, there are severe casualties among the fighter and 'bombers'.  Poe gets slapped, demoted, insulted...but he doesn't give up. He keeps trying to fight the First Order. However, his superiors refuse to tell them their plans. Partly due to 'none of your damn business' and partly because they barely have a plan.  And what plan they do have....wouldn't have been compromised by telling people what it is. Which makes minor plot #1 even more frustrating and confusing.  Poe finally leads a mutiny...which doesn't go well, of course. Leading him to be stunned as well as slapped, insulted, demoted, abused and kept in the dark.  However, Poe does learn one thing apart from women making lousy commanders, he learns that sometimes you do have to cut your losses and not attempt break-neck attacks that will get everyone EXCEPT you killed.  He learns some responsibility.  Congrats Poe, you're the only person who gets a character arc and learns anything.
  
  Minor plot #2 involve Finn and...sigh...a new fan fiction author self-insert named Rose Tico.  Finn wakes up from his injury and immediately tries to run away. He gets captured and stunned by Rose, a self-described tech who 'squats behind pipes all day'...so she may actually be a plumber. But we'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she has some useful maintenance role.  She has a case of Finn-Hero-Worship...for unknown reasons. Finn accomplished nothing but surviving, sorta, in the last movie. Which seems to be enough for Rose.  They decide that they have a plan to stop the First Order from tracking the Resistance.  And that plan is....big breath here....
  They are going to go to a casino planet and find this master code breaker that the learn about from a skype call with Maz Kanata. They then intend to fly to the flagship of the First Order, sneak in, find the tracking device and insert a short delay in the tracking system to allow the Resistance to jump to safety without the First Order knowing that their tracking has been compromised. And then, we assume, they intend to sneak off the flagship...which is shooting at Resistance fleet...and fly back to the Resistance fleet...without getting shot down or discovered...and jump out with them.

Savor the stupidity in that plan. It's almost a monument to bad ideas.  And, giving some credit to writer/director Rian Johnson, it doesn't work. Finn and Rose fuck up in nearly every way it is possible to fuck up without actually having to deal with the consequences of their bad ideas.  They fail and fail and fail. Yet, they survive. Shame.

Minor Plots 1 and 2 rejoin as the Resistance tries to take shelter in an old abandoned Rebel base only to get most of the refugees killed trying to leave the Resistance flagship. They are cornered by Kylo Ren and the First Order almost immediately on the surface. Most of the Resistance is apparently killed (off-camera, as most important or dramatic things are done in this movie) but a few dozen escape by following space foxes to a unmapped hole out, which by sheer luck has Rey waiting on the other side to magically lift the blocking boulders and to fly away with the survivors in the Millennium Falcon, which seems to be the very last starship left to the Resistance after losing all the rest in combat.

Oh and Kylo Ren faces an astral projection of Luke Skywalker, who's stalling for time to let the heroes follow the foxed. Oh and he dies from the effort.

Yea? The End?

That's the plot. And it's terrible. It has one core good story, dealing with Rey and Kylo who are both spurned by those they seek approval from. They reach out to each other, seem to need each other, even....balance?...each other.  But they are very different people with very different outlooks on what they want. Not that Rey knows what she wants. At all. About anything.

The rest of the run time is spent in space battles and running around and trying dumb things. Now the dumb things mostly don't work, to the movie's credit. Sorta. But that just means Rian Johnson really is just wasting our time.  Why not spend this story and run time and the millions of dollars on good characters, spending time together, trying good ideas that may or may not work when they confront a competent enemy???
Why this fuckery? This failure? These new, terrible characters?  What is so infuriating about all this is that it's all fixable. Preventable.  And even worse is that the decisions that are made in this movie, most of the interesting and heroic stuff happens OFF CAMERA.

How is the First Order tracking the Resistance? No idea, Snoke is told about it off camera.
How does Rey escape from Snoke's flagship? No idea, it happens off camera.
How does Finn and Rose survive a massive explosion that kills hundreds of other people all around them at the moment that they're about to be executed?  No idea, it happens off camera.
How do Finn and Rose escape from Snoke's flagship?  No idea, it happens off camera.
How do Finn and Rose know how to even pilot a starship? No idea, again, their ability to fly a starship is just glossed over.
How does Rose know how to undo the jamming signal when she's just a maintenance tech?
How does Finn know the layout of Snoke's flagship when he was a janitor (supposedly) on Starkiller base?
How does Finn know anything about high level encryption? 
Why is a Resistance Admiral wearing a ball gown the entire movie?
How many people died on the abandoned Rebel base?
How many survived?
What was that cool mosaic design in the cave? Can we get a look at it on camera?

This movie is almost aggressively flipping off the audience and the fans of the series. And I haven't even gotten really into the mass of fail that is Rose Tico.
So let's do that!

Rose Tico is a chubby Asian woman who has some of the most cringe-worthy dialog this side of Tumblr. She's been described as this series' Jar-Jar Binks. And, yes, she's that bad.  She is awkwardly made a main character out of nowhere, Finn comes across her as he's trying to run away. She's crying over her dead sister, which is supposed to make us feel sorry for her I guess. Her dead sister, Paige Tico, heroically died bombing the First Order Dreadnaught.****  She catches Finn trying to run away, while gushing all over him. Naturally, she gets the drop on him and stuns him unconscious.  But when she's taking him to the brig, sensibly for him trying to desert in the face of the enemy (a shooting offense, even today, in theory), he tells her about the First Order being able to track the Resistance. And she seems to immediately know how they are doing it and how to stop it.

Savor that stupidity too. It's like a fine cheese, stinky and soft and filled with mold.

So Rose and Finn decide they're going to go find a code breaker that can get them into the secure room where the tracking device is kept. Where ROSE apparently is going to disable/jinx the tracking system so the Resistance fleet can escape.  This code breaker is on a casino planet where we get the privilege of listening to her make assumptions about who the people there are, how they made their money, their moral inferiority to her, Rose Tico and how terrible this planet full of people enjoying themselves is.  It is every bit as shrill and unenjoyable as it sounds.  She continues to be a scowly, lecturing killjoy.  And at near the end of the movie, when Finn is about to sacrifice himself to protect the Resistance...the first time he actually would make a difference in any of these movies...Rose knocks his ship aside and prevents it. But not before heavily implying that she loves Finn, kissing him...and conveniently 'falling unconscious' so she doesn't have to see the result of her unasked for kiss.  (Isn't that sexual assault under the current rules? Finn sure didn't ask to be kissed and didn't offer affirmative consent. I think in California, that's a crime now)

Rose is also the bestower of such wisdom as 'We won't win by fighting those we hate, but by saving those we love'.  Which, in a movie called Star WARS, in the middle of a fight against people who have/are/will be killing your friends might be the stupidest thing said on film.

Rose is terrible. Her acting is bad, her tone is snarky and passive-agressive when she's not being actively aggressive against people who haven't done a damn thing to her but exist. She has vague, undefined abilities and skills that somehow are plot critical and she gets to kiss the handsome boy at the end, tee hee. She feels like someone from a BAD fan fiction and I have no idea how she ended up in this movie.

But, bad as Rose is, it's not the most damning thing about this movie.  What's damning is...all the missed opportunities.  Rian Johnson is credited as the writer and the director.  There MUST have been other writers or direction given to him from either Kathleen Kennedy or someone at Disney.  There are too many strange fingerprints on this movie for it to me one writer's vision. Too many storytelling failures that make no sense coming from the director of 'Brick', which is actually a good modern noir movie.
We get cheated.  We, the audience, don't get to see our heroes doing smart things. We don't get to see them being competent. They don't win by skill or by having a good plan, they don't even win by luck. They succeed because page 27 says that they are now in location X.  We don't see them try, we just see them fail AND not suffer the consequences of that failure. We don't see them grow and learn.  The one exception is Poe.  No one else is taking on any new responsibilities or showing new resolve or even regret.

We don't see the rest of Poe's squadron in action, we don't get to know who they are, just that they died. Off Camera.  We're told of the results of Poe's recklessness, but we don't feel it.  No one with a speaking role dies in the opening fight.  His demotion is meaningless, his mutiny is meaningless, he isn't left to suffer and wait in the brig while his friends fight and die.

I feel like I should write another thousand words about Luke and how he got cheated by this story too.  We see Luke ready to kill his apprentice Kylo/Ben.  Seriously, he goes that far ,but we don't see what he sees. We don't get a scene of what Luke saw inside Kylo's mind or in his future.  We're told, over and over again, about 'I've seen your parents' or 'I see your future'. But we don't. Film is a fucking visual medium and we don't SEE any of this stuff.

We don't see Rey deciding to leave Kylo alive. We don't see her escape a burning starship. We don't see her DOING much of anything except levitating some bad CGI rocks. Oh and beating three trained killers at once.

But, you know, I don't even care about her being OP AF.  Rey being a Mary Sue is a trope itself at this point.  In this movie, she's a superhero. She's a Marvel character, she might as well be one of the Guardians of the Galaxy and be paling around with Drax.  She's so broken from anything connected to reality that I'm done trying to make her fit in with anything realistic.

What we do see, hazily, is that Rey doesn't feel connected to anyone or anything. This is ironic since, being so strong in the Force, she should in theory BE connected to everything and everyone. But she isn't. She's...incomplete.

So is Kylo Ren.  He has a huge amount of power (The scene in the Force Awakens when he freezes a blaster bolt in mid-air might be the single coolest thing I've ever seen in a movie) but he isn't given respect. He isn't feared and we wants to be. He's missing someone to respect him and give him their regard. Someone like...Rey?

That attraction and tension is the one, thin thread that keeps the Force Awakens from being an out-and-out bad movie.

This is supposed to be the 'low point' in the trilogy, but we don't get that from the characters. Despite having lost all their ships, most of their people, their only Jedi, everyone...EVERYONE is all perky and smug and self-righteous. What low point? Nobody is low.

Oh there were other good things in the movie was well, as I mentioned above but the movie doesn't work, logically. If it works at all, it has to work emotionally. Unfortunately, we don't get a resolution there either. And if this movie is any guide, we won't get any in the next movie.

Summary:

I can't recommend The Last Jedi, honestly. If you CAN skip it, and some of us can't, you're better off watching a Marvel movie.  If you have to watch it, try to find some of the good things to focus on and don't think about the plot.

*I have to stop putting quotes around the 'Resistance' but the question remains: who are they resisting? The Republic seems to be in power at the beginning of the Force Awakens.  Are they a non-government organization waging war outside the law?  Are they resisting the Republic?  The Rebels won at the end of the Return of the Jedi, right? So why is Leia still flying around getting people killed?

** Not that she acts at all dark-sidey.  Daisy Ridley seems incapable of doing anything but playing spunky and sincere. So that undercuts the 'dark side' business, as does painless and danger-free interactions with the dark side.  Wasted opportunity, one of many, many.

*** Missed opportunity #2 of many, many...we never find out what this tracking device is or how it works.  It would seem logical that there is some physical device on the Resistance flagship. Or maybe the First Order's tech is so good that now any of their ships can 'lock on' and track ships even after they jump to hyperspace. This is never explained and is used only as a plot McGuffin to allow the First Order to keep following the Resistance.

****You know what? Paige Tico would have made a good, new character. We see her to something competent and heroic.  There's no reason she couldn't have survived or been rescued, especially considering the other crap that happens in these movies.  She could have been a main character working with or sparring with Poe Dameron. Or if the stupid side plots HAD to happen, we at least know that she knows her way around a starship and that she has some military training.