Part I

Season 2 of The Last of Us on HBO has been proceeding apace, with its fifth episode airing last night. Having relinquished the hobby of blogging and hating both the first season of the show and, now, its source material, I saw no reason to watch Neil Druckmann’s latest venture into critical acclamation. It would only agitate me.

But I have been following it from a distance, because I was curious on several points. The Last of Us: Part II is a disastrously written game that would have no choice but to be altered in major ways if it were to be adapted successfully into a non-interactive medium. Bella Ramsey is a calamitously cast heroine, who had no chance of playing a sole lead in the series without Pedro Pascal’s companionship. And Abby is an incredulous character, whose presentation would have to be changed if audiences were going to feel anything but hatred toward her.

It still isn’t beyond salvaging. The basic structure of Part II could be saved by a talented writer willing to throw out everything but the characters and the gist of the plot.

Yet doing so would require admitting that the “critical acclaim” that Part II received was, at its core, a lie. It would have taken an acknowledgment that, maybe, the critics had some points after all, and were not simply racists, Nazis, bigots, homophobes, Russian bots (etc.) because they did not like the latest Sony product.

We all could see this already. Neil Druckmann could see it, too. But could his ego take the hit?

The answer is in. Though the critics had their checks clear, the audience is less thrilled:

The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes has been disabled at the time of writing because it dropped too low (shows you who these websites are for, huh?):

Rumors are spreading that viewership has declined steeply. I don’t know what the citations for this are from, but how couldn’t it be true? Killing your lead actor in the first episode usually gets people to tune out.

Though I will forever maintain that Season 1 was a disaster on every level, it’s telling that its audience score, somehow, remains intact. Season 2 must be really bad.

But of course it is. Did you seriously think you could kill off Pedro Pascal and turn Bella Ramsey into a leading woman? Did you think audiences would accept her as the Ellie we see in Part II, which, despite all of its faults, is still carried by a phenomenal performance from Ashley Johnson? Did you think the game that was reviled by at least half of its players and undersold its predecessor by twenty million copies (this link compares only the remaster to Part II, not the original on PS3) would fly on television, because HBO’s audience is so much wiser and more mature than lowly gamers?

Answering yes to any of the above is not rational. Which brings me to the end of my gloating, the point of this essay, and a quote from the cyberneticist Stafford Beer:

[T]he purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

For example if the showrunners were to cast Kaitlyn Dever to represent Abby:

…and Bella Ramsey to represent Ellie:

Then it would be irrational to look for insight into their intentions anywhere other than in the effect that such casting creates. Because the effects are manifold, and the purpose of a show is what it airs.

The Last of Us on HBO is not being made by a few errant writers and actors whose creative intentions might become muddled beneath layers of difficulties working on scripts, on sets, and in an editing room. It is a carefully produced, multi-million dollar television series on one of the world’s largest streaming platforms, wherein no part was created without the review and approval of hundreds of independent minds. Nothing about this series is accidental. Unlike The Last of Us: Part II, which I still believe to be the badly conceived work of an ego-tripping director to whom no one could say no, there is no accidental explanation for this outcome. The Last of Us on HBO was stylistically designed to be this way. The audience reaction is the intended purpose.

The purpose of a system is its what it does. The system created this show.

So what is its purpose?

What It Airs

How might it be possible that the pretty, petite brunette from the game ends up being played by someone with visible Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in the TV show, while the ogrish hulk-woman is cast not only by a pretty, petite brunette—but one with a striking resemblance to the character she opposes in the story?

This was no accident. Neil Druckmann (& friends) chose Bella Ramsey for the role of Ellie because she is not suited for it. She is extraordinarily, distractingly unphotogenic and, more vitally, a bad actress. This is not her fault; this is the fault of the people who put her in the role.

So why did they put her in the role?

The purpose of a series is what it airs.

I can’t speak as to the quality of Kaitlyn Dever’s acting. But she is very photogenic. She looks like a leading woman. Using an actress like her in place of Abby, a character universally derided for her unappealing appearance in the game, suggests that the showrunners are aware of this. It is the live action equivalent of drawing a character with big eyes. Audiences are more disposed to like attractive characters, and predisposed to dislike unattractive ones. Nothing is more fundamental to storytelling than this truism.

What can be inferred about Neil Druckmann’s intentions, that he thus cast one of the ugliest women he could find to play Ellie, and an extremely attractive one to play Abby?

The purpose of a series is what it airs. And what has aired tells us that Druckmann and Mazin wanted to put down and humiliate the first game and its fans, while elevating the second—as much as possible. They want you to hate Ellie and side with Abby. Why else would the adaptation of the first game be so rushed and awkward, trimmed down to ten abridged and actionless episodes, while the second gets expanded into three seasons? The whole entertainment industry is being subjected to one man’s psychodrama over the mixed reception of his supposed masterpiece.

But I think there’s more to it than that. Failing to change Part II’s terrible story and forcing Bella Ramsey into a lead role that she cannot fill was not an accident. If the purpose of a series is what it airs, then we must draw the conclusion that The Last of Us Season 2 on HBO is intentionally designed to destroy The Last of Us as a franchise. It isn’t just “bad,” in the lazy and poorly done way that the first season was bad: it is calculated to be bad, in bizarre, pointless, and easily preventable ways.

And if your goal was to eradicate the first game from memory, would there be any better way to do it than this? If censorship wasn’t an option, if the game had to remain on sale: you would have to resort to the complete demolition of that game’s legacy. Right?

I’m not suggesting that this was Neil’s only way of taking the first game away from you. But the purpose of a series is what it airs.

We all know the cliche that those who do not die heroes will live to become villains. No man is infallible enough to endure the long test of time. He will falter eventually. Yet all men do die, and so some lucky ones are spared the indignity of indignity before they might have a chance to blunder away their reputations. Mortality could be a blessing in disguise, from the rearward gaze of future generations.

But what if a man never died? What if he lived forever, his putrefying cadaver still standing upright and making new blockbuster films year after year, decade after decade, century after century? He would surely become a villain; but then, if he survived long enough, if he lived forever, what else might happen to his legacy? His reputation?

Could he be a hero again? Could he salvage glory from the ruins of humiliation?

Ridley Scott intends to find out.

Exactly one year ago, Scott’s last film, the calamitous Napoleon (2023), was released. Napoleon speaks for itself. It is meritless and best left entombed beneath the Flavian Amphitheater. Now comes Gladiator II, a direct sequel to his legendary pseudo-historical epic Gladiator (2000) starring Russel Crowe.

That Scott can follow Napoleon up so quickly with yet another historical epic, at his advanced age, speaks to either remarkable industriousness or a shameless ability to slap his name on the directorial work of other filmmakers.

In either case, the trademarks of his filmmaking hold fast through the eons. The story of Gladiator II begins in Numidia with a young man, an out-of-place Roman wed to a young native. In this version of history, Numidia is a single city, rather than a large geographical area, and it is being invaded by the Romans via sea, even though it should have been an important province for about the last two centuries by the time this story takes place.

You can guess what follows. The young man’s bride is slammed into a refrigerator (thankfully) while he is taken captive and made into a gladiator in Rome. Thus ensues a confusing, sinuous, and vaguely coherent plot, surprisingly intertwined with the first Gladiator film, in which stupid and nonsensical fanfiction about Ancient Rome takes place.

In the wake of Napoleon my expectations could not have been lower. I’m not certain why I went to see this film at all. I anticipated a complete disinterest in historical authenticity, very bad cinematography, poor performances, awful CGI, and casting so bad that the film was unwatchable.

Gladiator II is not that bad. Its first half is not so far off from the Ridley Scott we remember from the year 2000. Though utterly lacking in factual accuracy in terms of events and characters, the film’s the production design is mostly good. Costuming includes several replicas of real armors; among these I spotted this Attic helmet, which is among the only surviving examples from Antiquity:

There are several gorgeous aerial shots of Rome that look stupendous, truly like an empire at its height. Here, more than in any other film or series, I felt like I was gazing into a past that really existed. No doubt the reconstructions were full of errors that I’m too sophomoric to identify—but the atmosphere seemed right. The same effect exists during scenes in the Colosseum, and occasionally elsewhere.

Often, though, the design stumbles in what should be luxurious interiors, with buildings appearing half-ruined, as though no repairs have taken place in millennia. People do not actually like to live in fancy houses with crumbling brick walls. Several shooting locations appear to be ruined, despite the fact that they should be new when the film takes place. If this is an attempt to capture the title scroll’s post-Aurelian decay of Rome, I received no sense of this anywhere else in the city that we saw.

But what bothered me more than anything in the design was that all of the busts and statues we see were left unpainted. It’s now widely accepted that ancient marble was usually painted in Antiquity; the paint has simply worn off over time. Like so much else about Ridley Scott’s filmmaking, the lack of paint on the film’s many statues simply makes me think that no one really cared.

One of my biggest complaints with Napoleon was that it was very badly shot. A horrible filter was applied to everything. The camera was always placed in the wrong position. It is the absolute lowest bar for a film that a viewer must be able to see what is happening; Napoleon does not meet it.

Gladiator 2 does not suffer from this affliction. The cinematography is unobtrusive and effective, with occasional memorable visuals. There is no livid tint over the lens during the fight sequences. There was no point in its 150-minute runtime where I could not see what was unfolding on the screen. This means that it is at least watchable.

Unfortunately I can offer no more praise than this. Everything else is as you would expect from Ridley Scott. As is entirely characteristic, the performances are dry and bad throughout. Pedro Pascal is unsurprisingly terrible; I expected nothing better from him, but it truly takes Ridley to make Denzel Washington seem like a bad actor. Yet he does.

As for the story, the action-packed first half of the film is thin but entertaining, for the viewer without any standards, but when we delve deeply into the characters’ motivations, we glimpse into the mind of a man with a child-like view of storytelling. In the film, the protagonist, identified generally as Hanno, rejects his true Roman identity so thoroughly that one would think he could not remember his origin at all. We are shown flashbacks of him leaving home as a young child. It is later revealed, though, that he was TWELVE when he left home, he does remember his past, and yet, despite this, he energetically shouts down his own mother’s loving embrace when they are finally reunited.

Yet when his mortal enemy, the man who slew his wife, says that he knows who Hanno truly is to his face… he then immediately accepts his old identity back again, and his character changes instantaneously.

For no reason.

Whenever I thought I had begun to understand Hanno’s motivation, the writers seemed to deliberately change everything about his character to pull out the rug beneath my toes. This happens at least three times. It is never justified.

It is ultimately pointless to articulate how poorly written the characters are in this film. They are not really written at all, but almost improvised from scene-to-scene based on the needs of each set piece. It is exactly like it was in Napoleon. Scott has no interest at all in screenwriting, and almost seems to actively detest it as an art form. He rejects its conventions and rebels against them whenever possible. The results are predictably laughable.

And we laughed. The last hour of Gladiator II is driven by bizarre, manic behavior from all characters, and ends with an elderly man being butchered preposterously while his army of six thousand heavily armed guards stands by for no reason. The theater was cacophonous with uproarious cachinnation with every line of dialogue. The man beside me flailed his arms in utter bafflement as no one behaved in any kind of logical or reasonable manner at any point. I have to admit that I was doing the same. There is one scene in which the Praetorian guards, who are actively hunting Hanno at that very moment, actually clear an aisle for him within a deadly mob just so he can give chase to Denzel Washington and arrive at the plot’s conclusion. Earlier he somehow manages to unlock every door within the slave pens of the Colosseum and none of the guards notice, not even as they stand by and stare at the obviously unlocked doors.

It’s all preposterous. I have a low tolerance for this sort of thing in general, but given how much laughter gripped our theater, I’m willing to guess that Scott crossed over the line for most people. There was no attempt at all to tell a well-crafted, logical story within a coherent and consistent world.

Why not? I really can’t say. Millions of dollars were spent on this film; you would think a few extra hours on a good screenplay would be the least to ask. But Ridley has never cared about writing. I’m not surprised.

Gladiator II does not have no plot. There are characters with goals and there is some kind of story. That is more than Napoleon had. But beyond calling off “present” at roll-call, it is earning no participation points today.

As for the film’s spectacle, there are a few moments, such as the naval battle spoiled in the trailers, but it’s mostly let down by the director’s same lack of regard for any kind of real-world logic. In one important scene, the main character is saved by his breastplate; this is cool to see. Armor is always treated as costume by Hollywood! Unfortunately, everywhere else in the film we see armor treated exactly as costume, with lorica segmentata effortlessly pierced by shortbows, cuirasses sliced in half by gladii, and bronze penetrated by the thrusts of spears as though made of cloth. Single characters often take on multiple opponents at once, in ways that are unrealistic and make no sense. The days of The Duelists (1977) are long gone; the fight choreography is dreadful throughout. There are no formations in battle. Characters almost never make use of shields. Soldiers who outnumber their foes stand by and do nothing, waiting their turn to be killed.

I have seen worse fight scenes. Napoleon had much worse fight choreography. But compared to the first movie, and compared to Scott in his first and best historical film, Gladiator II is a D+ at its best.

But I feel like I already have written too much. I could exhaustively sit down and pick this movie apart, as I did for Napoleon, and complain about its countless deficiencies. I could be indignant at anachronisms and rage against the ludicrously stupid video game logic that brings about the film’s conclusion. But there isn’t much of a point.

Gladiator II is bad, but at least it’s shot well enough, and it can be entertaining here and there. It does not inspire indignance like Napoleon did. While Napoleon had no merit whatsoever beyond its budget, Gladiator II does have a few moments of impressive spectacle and amusing Ridley Scott dementia-like charm, like the magical armor holding out just when it needed to (but no other armor ever doing anything in the entire movie).

Ultimately, it is a forgettable Thanksgiving blockbuster. I left the theater three hours ago and it has already almost entirely left my memory. If Napoleon is Scott’s worst movie and a 1/10 moviegoing experience, I would give Gladiator II a 3. You shouldn’t see it, but if you really like Roman history, really like Denzel Washington, and really don’t care about historical inaccuracy, you might not regret watching it.

Maybe. But I doubt it.

As for Scott—I pray that this is his last movie.

If I had been asked to list my favorite video games as a young man, my response would have invariably started with Halo: Combat Evolved, The Last of Us, and Fallout: New Vegas, in that order.

Halo. The Last of Us. Fallout. My three favorite franchises. The games I grew up playing.

The last years should have been cause for celebration, then, as these are the first three serious games, in the same order, that have been adapted to television by major Hollywood studios.

Halo on Paramount+ in 2022. The Last of Us on HBO in 2023. And now Fallout on Prime Video in 2024.

It probably goes without restating that I thought both Halo and The Last of Us were without any merit whatsoever. As adaptations they failed thematically, tonally, and spiritually. As standalone television series they failed in dialogue, character, production design, and narrative totality. They were, in other words, utter shit, not least because they appeared to display active contempt toward the games they supposedly adapted (as well as the players who enjoyed them.)

I expected differently from Fallout. Its first trailer captured something about the franchise’s soul that demonstrated its showrunners had at least some modicum of regard for the source material. It also had a real writing team attached to it, with Jonathan Nolan—brother to Christopher, of Westworld fame—at the helm.

These were good signs. I withheld judgment, but I expected something at least better than The Last of Us. A low bar, but a bar nonetheless.

For once, I was right.

It is April 11, 2024, and I have watched all eight episodes of Fallout. While I think the series is flawed, for the first time in my life I can report that, at least, this series actually is an adaptation of the video roleplaying game franchise of the same name.

In Fallout, Ella Purnell stars as Lucy, a plucky vault dweller who leaves her isolated home in search of her kidnapped father. Walton Goggins and Aaron Moten appear in supporting (and occasionally antagonistic) roles, with the former playing “The Ghoul,” a gunslinging cowboy bounty hunter, and the latter portraying Maximums, a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel. Lucy soon finds herself embroiled in wasteland-wide intrigue, with no choice but to transport the severed head of a scientist across California if she wishes to see her father returned home.

This is as absurd as it sounds.

Fallout, like its source material, is a dark comedy/action apocalypse thriller. The choice to embrace the weird wasteland and maintain the tone of the games helps hugely in making it feel like Fallout and not a cheap rip-off, which is one of countless major problems shared by Halo and TLoU. In essence, its story looks like what another Bethesda Fallout game likely would look like: a cliched main story about finding a lost parent (a la Fallout 3) mixed with a dumb McGuffin to keep up the pressure on the protagonists and keep the story going forward, all within an original and compelling retrofuture sci-fi setting.

This should not be taken as a criticism. Many of my problems with this series rest upon the fact that, as an adaptation, it is an adaptation of Bethesda’s Fallout. It uses the same tired tropes of family drama—deftly avoided by Obsidian—and utilizes what is mostly Fallout 4’s aesthetic, in some places very strongly, to construct its world. Ultimately, this means that it’s a hamstrung by its source material, and could never have hoped to be more than good enough as a result.

But as an adaptation of Fallout 4, Fallout on Prime is truly excellent. It is without any question the best video game adaptation ever put to film. Allow me to elucidate:

In the first episode, Lucy is cornered by a raider. She receives what would undoubtedly be a mortal wound from a knife to her ribs. She gazes downward, eyes wide, and the audience is left to believe that she could not possibly survive.

At this moment, I literally wrote in my notes: It would be hilarious if she makes an effortless recovery after giving herself a single stimpack.

Immediately, she retrieves a stimpack, uses it, and the wound is barely mentioned again.

Later on she receives radiation poisoning, just like in the games. In real life this would mean certain death.

But in Fallout, she can take some RadAway and be fine.

So she does. And she is.

In Halo, the showrunners changed everything about the world, setting, and characters, and could barely be bothered give the Master Chief’s iconic armor its energy shields. In The Last of Us, Joel is immediately given the wrong gun at the series’ start, and there is literally not so much as a token reference to a brick or bottle anywhere to be seen (because Mazin clearly never played the games).

But Fallout is oozing Fallout’s things. The guns. The armor. The medicines. The fights. One sequence is shot in such a way to be clearly evocative of VATS from the modern games, with bullets following in on critical hits as they blow apart limbs. The power armor has the UI from Fallout 4. There’s even a brief scene of a character playing Fallout 3’s stupid hacking minigame!

These things bring me immense joy. Nolan could have made a Fallout series that, like The Last of Us, relied solely upon recognizable aesthetic details, but otherwise deviated in every meaningful way from its source material. He could have phoned it in. He could have been lazy.

But he wasn’t. He sat down to adapt Fallout into television, and he asked himself: what is Fallout?

The answer is the world. It’s the tone. It’s the aesthetic. But above all else, it’s the gameplay. Fallout is its gameplay. VATS, stimpacks, grotesque violence, power armor, and stupid minigames: that’s Fallout, and that’s what we see in this television series.

For all of its flaws, Fallout deserves monumental recognition for this accomplishment. The Last of Us (the game) is about beating people to death with bricks and bottles; this is what its show should have been about, if it wanted to adapt the source material. Halo: Combat Evolved is about shooting aliens to death on a hula-hoop in space; the TV show should have replicated this.

Fallout is a choices-matter open world sandbox RPG series about going on quests and exacting horrific violence on Mad Max rejects. That’s what all of the games are fundamentally about.

And that’s what Fallout on Prime is about, too. That is why I am happy to call it an excellent adaptation.

As for the show itself….

Fallout has the most rabid and devoted fans of any game on the Internet. Gamers love Fallout, especially the Black Isle/Obsidian titles, with vitriol that is not matched in any other community that I can think of.

These people are going to be very upset at some of the creative decisions taken in this series. While it deserves praise for setting its story in the same world and timeline as the games, and thus coexists with them without major retcons (something neither Halo nor The Last of Us even attempted), its new additions to the lore are extremely suspect. I won’t spoil them here, but a major faction from the original games is effectively wiped out offscreen, for a dumb reason, and the context of the War itself is altered significantly.

I’m not a member of any deranged Fallout fan community. But I do really like the games. I’m probably one of the few people who has played, finished, and enjoyed every single title in the series nearly equally, including the Black Isle games. I like Bethesda’s Fallout much more than the average Obsidian-enjoyer.

But I have to admit that I find these changes to the world very upsetting. I enjoyed the first four episodes of Fallout, but as more was revealed, I found it harder to overlook the direction things were going in.

This is not Nolan’s fault. I am 100% convinced that the timeline comes from Todd Howard and the rest of Bethesda’s “““writers,””” if they can be called that. In this way the fact that the setting has been taken in such a stupid and obnoxious direction via this show is almost a testament to the writers’ devotion to the games, because they obeyed Todd even when they, presumably, didn’t need to.

So I want to make it clear that I don’t think it’s fair to blame these disappointing changes on the show itself. They’ve manifested because this is an adaptation of Bethesda’s Fallout, and, unfortunately, Bethesda’s Fallout is what Fallout is in 2024. There’s no getting around that. We’re never going back to Chris Avellone’s New Vegas. That’s something we have to accept. Complaining will do no good.

The Good & Bad

But how is Fallout on its own merits? Ultimately, I suppose the answer is “good enough.” I would recommend it to anyone tolerant of graphic violence and post-apocalypses. As a series, it features several excellent action set pieces, good cinematography, and some truly fantastic production design. It only occasionally feels like a fanfilm.

The contrast with Halo and TLoU is stronger nowhere than in action. Both of these series had convoluted and nonsensical action sequences, lazily shot and confusingly edited together. Considering both were adaptations of action games, this was an enormous failing. Neither had any real setpieces, and the best moments from the games were mysteriously absent, despite potentially being awesome for TV (upside down shootout sequence? Warthog run? I guess not; too hard to film).

During Fallout’s action, you understand where the characters are. You’re rooted to individual PoVs. The camera moves realistically. NPCs do have a bad habit of not shooting at the heroes for no reason, or missing comically with huge volleys of bullets, but I can endure this if the overall effect is compelling.

It is. Fallout nails its action and violence. Its gore is straight out of the games. It’s really good stuff.

Most importantly, it isn’t lazy.

The apocalypse looks much better than The Last of Us. It’s also full of mutants and threats, and it teems with conflict. A lack of conflict is the most fundamental flaw of Craig Mazin’s utterly failed adaptation of TLoU. You never receive the same sense that things are just easy in Fallout. The world is vast and largely empty, but it’ll still kill you. Don’t fuck around.

But something doesn’t quite work. Most obvious is that it appears as though the Chinese dropped sand on America instead of nukes. We’re supposedly in California, but there are now vast dried lakes and salt flats between jungle-like oases? What’s with all the sand? Did nuclear bombs do that? And where are the other settlements? What happened to the Hub? Is the Boneyard now Shady Sands? Where are the super mutants? We see radroaches, a yao-gui, some ghouls, and a fishthing; but where are the geckos? No deathclaws, really? And why aren’t there more factions?

The production design is spot-on, but the worldbuilding doesn’t live up to the games. The setting feels empty and confusing. It rarely comes across as a real place. I never managed to construct an internal map of the world in my head upon which I might have followed the characters’ courses. If I had, I doubt it would have made sense.

The story and characters are more and less successful. Walton Goggins’ Ghoul is the standout from the series so far. A great deal of runtime is dedicated to flashbacks of his past in the Old World, and I found these sections to be some of the most engaging in the show’s totality. But he’s in far too little of each episode, being altogether absent from one, and his ultimate contributions to the plot are minimal at best.

Lucy is the series’ real core. I like Purnell’s performance, but her writing misses the mark. Nolan and his team decided to run with the idea that people from the Vaults are Fargo characters: good-natured Midwesterners who are too naive to understand that not everyone is as kind as they are. This is essentially her “thing” throughout the eight episodes, and they even go so far as to have her say things like “okay den,” in case you didn’t get what they were going for.

Survivors from the Vaults should be normal pre-war people. They are how we introduce the audience to the fucked up world of the wasteland. They don’t need to be comically nice Midwesterners; they just need to be normal, while everyone else is batshit insane. She herself becomes the joke.

But I guess they follow through on her silly kindness, and it isn’t that much of a complaint. Lucy is fine.

The story sags significantly as we get to Maximus and the Brotherhood of Steel. I found Maximus’ performance to be very poor, bordering on amateur, and to such an extent that I expected it to be revealed that he was a synth or mutant or something. Between a weak characterization and a plasticky face, he’s never convincing.

He isn’t helped by the writing. His character has been raised by the BoS—a religious cult—but he has apparently metabolized none of its teachings. He betrays his master in their literal first scene together. He doesn’t seem to believe in anything, unlike Lucy who at least believes in being nice. He has no personality, and he doesn’t seem to take himself seriously.

This is a problem for everyone. Much of the comedy originates from the fact that the characters don’t take their own situations seriously enough. They don’t seem to actually believe that the world around them is real.

But of course it should be real, for them. They should treat it with all of the respect that we would treat our own reality. The fact that the setting is so zany and absurd is what creates humor—not the characters themselves. This is ironically why the Ghoul works so well; he is the only character in the show who takes himself seriously. That role needed to be played by Lucy instead, in my opinion. She shouldn’t have been so silly. She should have been played straight.

Liberty Prime isn’t funny because Elder Lyons cracks jokes about how silly Liberty Prime is. Liberty Prime is funny because everyone takes something so ridiculous with a straight face.

I hope they recognize and correct this deficiency for Season 2.

The story massively overrelies on coincidences to drive the plot forward. The characters stumble into each other constantly, even when hugely improbable, and then proceed to act in ways that barely make sense. There are several fight sequences that conclude awkwardly and in contrived ways. In the end, the twist is so predictable—it’s the same twist as Fallout 4, basically—that I thought it surely was impossible that they’d go with it. But they did anyway.

I’m not thrilled about these decisions, but they don’t infuriate me. My biggest criticism on the whole is the dialogue. It’s far too vulgar in places, in a way that feels like tryharding grit. Some of it is legitimately Reddit-tier, with one character unironically referring to another as, “a gentleman and a scholar.” This is worse early on than later, and seems to be the purview of several of the writing team’s least talented members.

There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments throughout the episodes and several excellent visual gags. But the dialogue’s attempts at humor are weak. I found myself cringing in about half of Lucy and Maximus’s conversations. The attempts at zaniness fall totally flat.

But despite these quibbles, the series possesses a strong sense of narrative progress, and has an actual plot with an actual impetus. Flashbacks to the Ghoul’s life feel like an instrumental piece of the overall puzzle—not padding to extract more runtime in an easy conflict-free way. Cutaways to various characters actually matter in building the story toward the conclusion. Stuff mostly makes sense on the whole, at least so far as motivations are concerned.

Contrast this to The Last of Us, with its countless pointless flashbacks and diversions to meaningless NPCs who do not contribute anything, and Fallout begins to look like Shakespeare in comparison.

In Summary

I have to confess that I found Fallout pretty boring, despite decent pacing in the abstract. But I don’t think it’s Nolan’s fault. I’m at a point where my video game-addled Zoomer brain simply cannot endure television without the help of Twitter. It’s not a medium that’s for me anymore. I vastly prefer games and books. TV is just too slow.

As a show of its own merits, Fallout is a mediocre but occasionally excellent series. Its highs are high enough to compensate for its lows, and it would probably be renewed for a second season and attract a cult following, even without the franchise attached. I give it a 6/10.

As an adaptation of the video game franchise of the same name, Fallout is phenomenal. It demonstrates immense care for the source material from Nolan and the others. It is truly an adaptation, not just of the world but also of the mechanics, into a different medium. There is one incredible moment where Lucy discovers an NCR flag and the New Vegas title theme begins to play. It might be fanservice, but it demonstrates the care for the source material taken by every department involved, from writing to music to production design. Except working in more of an “open world” structure to the story, I do not think they could have done a better job (excepting dumb lore developments). I give it a 10/10.

For reference, I’ve come to think of Halo as 1/10, and The Last of Us as a 1.4/10. I actively loathe both.

But I don’t loathe Fallout. I’m glad to have watched it, and I intend to watch more. It’s even made me excited for a possible Fallout 5—formerly thought to be impossible after the shitshow that is Starfield.

If you have Prime, I recommend you give it a try.

All eight episodes of the series are available now on Amazon Prime.

Two years ago, I reviewed the first five episodes of Halo on Paramount+ with righteous indignation. I would have kept going, except for that at this point I gave up. Whatever Halo was, it wasn’t the Halo I grew up with. It had no relation whatsoever to the video game franchise of the same name. I thought it was very lazy, very poorly scripted, and very boring. And also very bad.

But when I heard that the two hacks responsible for Season 1 had been canned, a small flicker of hope wheezed beneath my breast. I read that the new writers wanted to make it “[feel] more Halo.” And I thought, maybe, given the strength of the source material, there was a chance things could be turned around. Perhaps Season 2 would be good, action-focused, and capture some of the majesty of the original two games. Or maybe just the shitty expanded universe books. Even that much would have been acceptable.

As it always seems to be, my optimism was misplaced.

The first thing to notice about Season 2 is the collapse in production value. I was critical of S1’s visual design (and what I felt to be laziness in action scenes especially), but it never looked cheap in the raw sense that Season 2 does.

The beginning of the first episode of S2 is a protracted and confusing action sequence. Nothing has changed from last time in that respect. But I don’t recall the MJOLNIR suits worn by the Spartans looking quite so cheap. As the camera descends on Silver team, every close-up looks like nothing more than a fan film. There is no sense that the Spartans are wearing powered armor relative to the humans around them. Their suits have no lights, nothing that glows, there’s no sound to their movement; if you didn’t know it was powered, you wouldn’t know.

The lighting is flat, and not a single shadow is anywhere to be found. John Halo can’t even stand to turn a flashlight on and breathe some life into the set. Everything is gray and, for some reason, foggy, perhaps to hide the ridiculousness of John Halo’s costume. He looks more like an idiot in a Halloween costume than a supersoldier in the pinnacle of human technology. His armor plating moves like foam.

Energy shields have been nixed. Apparently inflation is hitting ONI as hard as it is the rest of us. I do recall some shield flickering when a Spartan was shot in S1, but no longer. Elites do appear to have some kind of minor shielding, but it looks nothing like it does in the games, and is severely underwhelming. Elites also have invested in energy swords, at the expense of any and all ranged weaponry. It’s one or the other apparently.

The only praise I can offer Season 2 is that the opening fight scene isn’t too bad. It’s much improved over the confusing nonsense seen in the first episode of the last season, wherein a hyperadvanced space navy decided to land its soldiers outside the walls of an open-air fortress bailey. The camera work in S2 shake-heavy but strong, and John Halo does feel relatively super. This one sequence is a vast improvement over any and everything seen in Season 1.

But the rest of the series is unchanged. The sets look cheaper, uglier, and are re-used more often, but the style of writing and structure of the story remain indistinguishable.

That is to say, there still isn’t a structure to the story, and the style of the writing is still terrible.

I gave up on the last season at the episode wherein John Halo digs for buried treasure in the woods with a spade. Yes, that actually happened, although it’s hard to believe.

This season, John Halo eats dinner with Mexicans in space.

These scenes serve the same purpose:

Question: “How do we get to ten episodes in our Halo TV show?”
Answer: “Let’s have John Halo eat dinner with the family of some random soldier he rescued. That’ll use some time up.”

You will be surprised to learn that nothing like this ever appears in the video games.

The entire series is nothing but poorly done padding strung between a few action setpieces. After the initial fight scene in Season 2, Chief and Co. waste the next two episodes hanging out in the locker room on Reach. Occasionally John Halo will go pester the new director of the Spartan program, which is apparently a thing, but their discussions will elucidate nothing. We’re supposed to believe that the Spartans are integral cogs in the UNSC’s war machinery—we are told as much several times—yet one wonders why such valuable assets spend all day doing each other sexual favors in the showers and not, you know, fighting aliens. Occasionally John Halo leads his Spartans out on training exercises; why he does this while aliens are conquering the galaxy, I really can’t say.

There is never any impression that humanity is actually in a war.

Halo is a model of incoherence. It should be studied in laboratories like rare mutant bacteria, because this degree of terribleness can surely only be attained intentionally. At no point in the two hours I watched tonight did there appear anything resembling a plot. Mostly, characters I did not know or care about engaged each other in conversations that had no purpose except to inflate runtime.

I had hoped that the new writers would do a “soft reboot” (as they claimed they would) over the previous season and disregard the countless bad decisions that ruined Season 1. Characters like Soren and Kwan would be ditched. More time would be spent with Cortana and Chief, and they would be more like Cortana and Chief. This was going to be instrumental in my enjoyment of a new season, because there was no way I was going to endure the rest of Season 1 to find out what happened. I find it hard to believe anyone finished it.

But this is not what we received. Kwan and Soren are back, and we find them in media res. What’s going on in their stories? I have no idea; it’s never explained. There is no recap. Apparently Kwan is now an expert in Tai-Kwan-Do and fights some dudes on a space station for some reason; why is she there? I can’t say. No explanation is proffered at any point.

Something happened to John Halo at the end of the last season, apparently, and Cortana is now gone. I don’t know why. No one has told me. I did read online that John and Makee fucked on a Halo ring or something, but this also hasn’t been explained, except that Ritz or Keoai or someone mentioned that she killed Makee—except then Makee shows up again.

This is a continuation of Season 1. The same characters. The same terrible story. The same bad writing.

It’s not usually unreasonable for a show to assume that its audience has caught up on the previous episodes. But given the circumstances, I think assuming anything other than that we hadn’t was lunacy.

It is with some horror that I correspond that Halo Season 2 is the most boring thing I have ever watched. I mean this literally. I’m not exaggerating. It’s mostly discussions between characters I don’t care about, strenuously avoiding any plot progression, without any semblance of story, and without any worldbuilding at all. I have no sense of what this setting is like, no clue how the war is going, and no idea of what the aliens are like or want.

Season 1 was terrible, but it wasn’t all boring. I did infrequently have some sense that things were building toward a resolution, although they never did. There were also occasional glimmers of love for the games sneaked into various places: door opening effects from Halo: CE, recognizable Covenant droppods, and the fan servicey first-person sequences.

So far, Season 2 has nothing like this. It has literally nothing from the games except a few pieces of art direction. The second episode does end with a bizarre Reach reference, but that is the only thing you’ll find from Halo in Halo. There is otherwise no sense at all that we have embarked on a journey that will one day conclude with any kind of climax.

This series serves no purpose except to be jeered at and mocked. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is interesting. It’s like the creative writing homework of a bored jock looking for an easy A in his senior year of high school. While I suspect the action will prove superior overall to Season 1’s—I do think the fight scene we saw was actually written into the screenplay, whereas I’m positive in Season 1 they were all just assembled in post—everything else is as bad or worse, and the production value restrictions make watching this show for the spectacle a much more tenuous prospect.

There also is no spectacle. We’re two episodes deep and there’s been one brief fight scene. The immense boredom you will endure to get to John Halo’s next fencing match with the Arbiter will not be worth if. Even if you intend to read your phone until the energy swords come out, Halo is so unfathomably dull that, like an entertainment vampire, you will still find it impossible to keep on.

I don’t intend to watch any more of this, and you shouldn’t bother trying it. It isn’t even bad. It’s just nothing. It has no substance. Watching Halo Season 2 is no different from staring at your black TV screen. There are more productive ways to waste your free time.

There was a time when I would have called Noah Hawley my favorite writer. The first three seasons of Fargo remain the best television ever produced. They are unrelentingly funny, compelling, and awesome. His novel After the Fall is a very different but similarly excellent exploration of grief and humanity, and his work on other TV series such as Bones is standout among its peers. I eagerly awaited everything he did in college.

Then Fargo Season 4 came out. Fargo Season 4 was not excellent. It was protracted, dull, and pointless. I chalked it up to COVID misfortunes and ridiculous union health rules, and thus was not deterred from my love for the series as a whole. I fully expected Fargo’s next, fifth season to be back up to at least Season 3’s quality.

I have now finished watching the eighth episode of Season 5. I think it’s time I enter my stage of acceptance and say my peace on the series.

Fargo is a Farce

Season 4 was terminally fated because of obvious production limitations and a plot that could charitably be described as moralistic. It was full of monologues and fury, but signified nothing.

Season 5 is much worse. It is still moralistic, but additionally seems to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the world on the part of its writers. It feels like a hallucination by AI. The characters embody political archetypes that Hawley seems to have never met or have any intimate knowledge of. The children act the wrong age and say the wrong things. The year is supposedly 2019, but the technological level seems more indicative of the 1980s. There is no Internet. There is no social media. There are no dashcams or bodycams or security cameras. The battered women characters do not act like real battered women. The cops do not behave anything like cops. The guns and injuries are completely wrong. The institutions depicted behave nothing like they would in real life. The story would be somewhat plausible in 1912, but in 2019, it’s a joke. No one acts like he really would if in the characters’ shoes.

Yet all is presented confidently, as though Hawley had no clue about the real world, no knowledge of how to write any of these places or characters or things outside of his Hollywood bubble, yet thought he could anyway.

Fargo is a farce. Its implausibility is part of its charm. It is filled with magic realism and coincidences that bring about the conclusion. That’s fine; it’s a comedy. It isn’t meant to be realistic.

But it still takes place in the real world. It isn’t a fantasy series. Its violence and drama loses all meaning if the rules of physics are disregarded by the writers at every opportunity. Lorne Malvo in Season 1 doesn’t get away with so many murders because no one cared to check CCTV footage or check for fingerprints; he gets away with it because he’s a ruthless and unflinching liar, and the Midwestern small-town cops are not prepared to face someone like him.

Lorne would not be scary if his success as a hitman were down only to other’s incompetence. The same can be said for the antagonists in Seasons 2 and 3.

Season 5 is not as poorly paced or awkwardly edited as Season 4. But it’s traded feeling rushed for the complete abandonment of any sense that this story takes place in the real world. There may be some merit buried deep within its story for those viewers capable of suppressing all need for verisimilitude, who won’t notice the complete absence of any security cameras or iPhones, or how the characters behave in the most insane ways at every turn in order to delay the climax, but even if you are capable of overlooking any basic consideration of modern technology or human behavior, what are you left with?

Season 5’s story is unsalvageable. Vapid #currentyear monologues on race have been replaced with vapid #currentyear monologues on domestic violence. The political themes are comically underwritten; the characters do not reflect their stated ideologies in any meaningful sense, because Noah Hawley has no idea what a rogue sheriff libertarian militiaman actually believes. Instead he writes what Hollywood thinks that person would believe. You would be surprised to learn the two are quite different.

Season 4 wasn’t woke for a number of reasons, despite its racial focus, but there’s no question that Season 5 is: it’s pointlessly politicized while being from an obvious left-wing viewpoint and being loaded with #MeToo themes. It’s moralistic and shallow, existing more to instruct than entertain.

Why is Fargo political now? I think we all know, but it’s a shame that it’s shaken out this way. Neither the film nor the first three seasons have any remotely political theming. (Except for random Ronald Reagan, but that had more to do with the 1980s setting than political commentary.)

It still might have been done well, if the characters had been written with a tinge more empathy and intelligence. Maybe there could be a crazed right-wing militiaman antagonist in Fargo. Maybe he could be compelling, quoting the Constitution and somehow using Milton Friedman to justify homicide. But turning him into a generic “Christian man bad” cliche is not what this series needed. I’ve said it before and will happily say it again: the South-talking villain who quotes the Bible while doing evil is one of the stalest cliches in the modern writer’s repertoire. I never want to see it again, and I certainly did not want to see it in Fargo.

But even had the characters been written correctly, the plot of Season 5 beyond its themes is non-existent. There are countless diversions to minor side characters who don’t matter. There is no sense of build-up. There are no personalities to care about. No one behaves in truthful ways, and nothing ever makes any sense. Things happen because they’ve been contrived to happen in a certain way, but not because these characters in this situation would actually lead to that outcome.

Whatever this show is—bad, boring, not funny—it certainly isn’t Fargo. Fargo is a series about decent Midwesterners who get caught up in criminal conspiracies, encounter horrific violence, and find themselves facing down Evil itself. That is what Lorne Malvo represents. When Lester Nygaard’s life is touched by Evil, his life changes forever.

All three good seasons follow this basic pattern. The archvillain is Evil incarnate. The characters are normal, decent people who make one mistake and find their lives in the balance. Mistakes pile on top of each other, until finally they all fall down.

Neither Season 4 nor 5 replicates this. They don’t even try. Season 4 is about racism and gang dynamics, and Season 5 is about religion and domestic violence. The characters are not normal people. No one grounds us to reality. There is no Evil force that sets the plot in motion.

Season 5 of Fargo is lazy. Intellectually it has skipped arm day. No care has gone into working out the story so as to mesh with the setting. Locations haven’t been carefully picked. Scenes have not been constructed to drag us further down the plotline. The whole thing comes across like no one writing it cared.

Season 5 of Fargo feels like it was written by AI. If 4 was a tale told by an idiot, full of monologues and fury, signifying nothing, then I suppose Season 5 is a tale told by a coma patient. It’s about as exciting as you would expect.

It pains me to say it, but Hawley, I think we need to break up—and I hope Fargo doesn’t another season.

Napoleon (2023) begins on the note that will define the rest of the film. In a strange and overly confined arena, uncrowded by an apathetic mob, an unconvincing actress stumbles toward a guillotine in a crude and gratuitous reenactment of Marie Antoinette’s famous execution. When the blade falls, the camera does not cut away; we witness every gory detail—animated digitally, of course—as her head falls from her body and blood sprays in all directions. An executioner holds her head aloft. “Long live the Republic!” we hear him cry, or something to that effect. As we wonder what the purpose, the significance, of this moment is to the plot as a whole, the camera withdraws, and there we see in the audience our leading man: Napoleon himself, played by Joaquin Phoenix at age 50.

Several things stand out:

1. Napoleon was not at Marie Antoinette’s execution. He was at Toulon. This scene is historically erroneous.

2. As a character, Marie Antoinette is barely introduced and immediately done away with. Her relevance to the story of Napoleon and Josephine is not clear. Taken holistically, this scene adds nothing.

3. Her performance is as convincing as a high school play, and the extras around her seem disinterested and sedated. The location does not make sense. The scale is much too small. This scene is not convincing.

4. The year is supposedly 1794. For some reason, Napoleon is a 50-year-old man. This makes the scene comical.

These same four problems will plague the rest of the film. A disinterest in historical accuracy; a lack of exposition or story structure; nonsensical characterization and unconvincing acting; and the horrible miscasting of the leading man.

I love Napoleonic history. Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) is my favorite film, ever. I have watched it dozens of times.

I do not love Ridley Scott. He is pretentious and geriatric, and Alien (1979) is his only truly good movie. But The Last Duel (2021) was a surprisingly decent historical drama, and I had some hope that Scott might have been able to pull it off again with my favorite historical character. Perhaps, in the twilight of his career, in his 80s, he had pulled himself together.

My hope lasted about fifteen seconds into the film. Napoleon is a badly written, badly acted, and very badly directed blunder of an attempt at a historical epic. It is bereft of plot and does not compensate with character or spectacle. As a work of visual art, it is lacking in every respect: dull, ugly, and confusingly shot in every scene. As a piece of entertainment, it is good only for sedation.

I do not recommend it.

Some Elucidation

Ridley Scott’s first feature film was The Duelists (1977), a historical epic about two cavalrymen in Napoleon’s army who fight a series of duels over the course of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Duelists is not a good movie. It demonstrates all of Scott’s characteristic disinterest in people and storytelling, and is mostly just boring. But it is beautifully shot, with fantastic set pieces and glorious fight sequences. In terms of raw aesthetics, there are few films that could be considered its superior. There is a reason why it launched a 50-year directorial career.

Napoleon is not beautifully shot. It is very ugly. The CGI stands out constantly, and everywhere it’s obvious where actors are digital. The scale of the battles is never large enough, likely because animators sitting behind screens have no idea what 60,000 men engaged in combat actually look like. They never capture the enormity of scale required by the setting. While the dialogue sequences are clear and visible, whenever a battle comes around, a dull gray-blue filter falls over the lens, which makes it impossible to distinguish between uniform colors or get a clear sense of what is happening. It’s applied without any sense for the scenes at hand: day or night, light or dark, down comes the filter.

It might be just as well. If we could see the battle sequences clearly, we would be better able to tell how absurd and poorly reenacted they are.

I did not expect much from Scott in this regard. But I had expected some bare minimum of care for basic historic details. For example, the French—very famously—fought battles in columns rather than lines. This defined their tactics in the Napoleonic period.

In Napoleon, the French fight in lines. Exactly as the British do.

At the Battle of Waterloo, trenches were not dug in pitched battles and lines did not utilize fire-by-rank tactics.

In Napoleon, the British dig trenches and use fire-by-rank tactics at Waterloo.

Historically, Talleyrand retired as Napoleon’s foreign minister in 1807.

In Napoleon, Talleyrand is the one who demands Napoleon abdicates in 1815.

Napoleon Bonaparte did not shoot cannons at the pyramids of Gaza.

In Napoleon, Napoleon shoots cannons at the pyramids of Gaza.

Et cetera. The details of the battles themselves are recreated in only the broadest of strokes; here, Napoleon finishes Waterloo by personally leading a cavalry charge and slaying no fewer than two enemies with his own saber. Quite an impressive feat for a man enduring terrible GI pain, who was also, at the time, out of his mind on opium, and was an artillery captain—not a knight.

These inaccuracies could maybe be forgiven if made in the pursuit of some kind of poignant message, or to create a leaner and cleaner dramatic narrative. But there is no leanness or cleanness to Napoleon’s narrative. There may not even be narrative at all. The film suffers immensely from the inevitability that 21 years of complex political and military history cannot be condensed into a single 158-minute long film. The Battle of Waterloo alone takes more than two hours to tell in its entirety, if one is concerned with making it visually and dramatically engaging.

Ridley Scott had no such concerns. We skip from one scene to the next with no logic whatsoever. The core of the story around all which revolves is Napoleon’s romantic relationship with Josephine, but in no actual practical way has this been created through screenwriting. If this is a story about how a great man was created by a great woman, then the battle sequences are totally gratuitous: like Marie Antoinette’s execution, they have been included only for name recognition. The story should have focused solely on Napoleon and Josephine’s relationship and forgotten about irrelevant details, no matter how historically famous. The climax should have been Josephine’s death during the 100 Days.

Napoleon no longer has his driving force. He knows a battle is coming, and he knows that without Josephine, he will not be able to win it. His career as a general is over. The rest is history.

CUT TO CREDITS.

That could have worked, maybe. But it’s not what Scott does. In fact Josephine’s death is barely the start of the third act, and it passes like a drop of blood in an iced-over lake. We still have to endure all of the Waterloo Campaign, despite the fact that the story has no through-line and no plot whatsoever to speak of without Josephine. It doesn’t have one with her either, mind you, but there’s literally nothing after she’s dead. Napoleon after this point is the cinematic equivalent of a putrescent zombie shambling down the street.

It’s written as to make no sense. Apparently Napoleon is happy in exile on Elba, until he realizes that he misses Josephine too much to bear. Thus it is for her, and for her alone, that he travels back to France. It is purely for Josephine that he reclaims his title as Emperor. It is only for her that he ever fought any battles. He would have been nothing without her!

Except if Napoleon is motivated entirely by Josephine, if he is otherwise apathetic and abdicates without argument when Talleyrand (of all people) tells him to, then why does he fight the Battle of Waterloo? Why doesn’t he give up? Why does the movie keep going?

Because it has to, because Napoleon did fight Waterloo. The reason is because he wasn’t driven by Josephine, and his story didn’t end when she died: she was not the animating force in his life. Ambition was. (Or perhaps vanity, or whatever you choose—but certainly not his one-time wife. It’s worth noting that IRL Josephine died before Napoleon’s first exile anyway, which makes this entire contortion of his character erroneous in both literal and metaphorical terms. Scott was not deterred.)

Thus the film Scott wanted to make had to be pigeon-holed into the historical circumstances, despite the fact that his story and history do not align. The result is a film that has no idea at all what it is or what it wants to be, with no story and no message and no plot. No wonder it’s so boring.

Napoleon still might have been decent despite the above issues if his relationship with Josephine was compelling to watch. But it is fumbled in every way. For the first half of the film, Napoleon admits to fucking whores, while Josephine openly has a lover. They fight endlessly. When he touches her, she cringes away in disgust. We never once see any chemistry or adoration between the two, beyond (perhaps) physical attraction.

But after the midpoint, we are apparently to believe that these characters are madly in love—that they are true soulmates. If so, we never see it. I was left wondering until the very end whether or not Josephine cared at all for Napoleon, or if it was all feigned; I thought the latter based on her performance, until she sappily narrates a love letter over slides of the retreat from Moscow. I still have no idea what impression Scott meant for me to receive.

The performances are largely to blame, and it’s ultimately performance that makes Napoleon irredeemable.

Phoenix as Napoleon is utterly miscast. Although he occasionally performs wit, there is no semblance of the historical character of Napoleon Bonaparte in him. He speaks like an awkward spoiled teenager, throwing temper tantrums and knocking holes in walls, but no attempt has been made to de-age him: throughout the entire film, which spans Napoleon’s life from age 26 to 47, Phoenix plays him as 50. He is socially inept and has no charisma; it is impossible to see why anyone ever loved him, or trusted him as a leader. We see no semblance of the character’s intelligence and never are given insight into why he is a good leader. He comes across as medicated and apathetic in every scene, as well as generally incompetent. His only driving force from beginning to end is that he is a cuckolded simp for Josephine.

This is not the impression the real Napoleon has ever given to me.

The choice to make him so old, without any digital de-aging, is simply baffling. A 26-year-old man cannot be played by a 50-year-old. It is comical. But I suppose to Ridley Scott, who is now 85, the difference between 26 and 50 looks rather small. He probably never noticed that anything was amiss.

I never once believed Phoenix on screen, not even for a moment. He is too old, too angry, too awkward, and too stupid to play this part. He was not right for it. Even if he had intended to embody an alternate history version of the character, he fails to ever be convincing as the supposed Emperor of France. What we see in Napoleon is not a great statesman or general. He is not a monarch. He is mostly an obnoxious and awkward simp with anger issues, whose impotent displays of childish rage are nothing like the righteous, quick-witted, scalding fury of Rod Steiger’s Napoleon in Waterloo. There is no way this person we’re watching could be who the characters keep saying he is. It does not compute.

In the end, the story is hopelessly rushed. It comes across more like walking through a museum than as an engaging narrative of itself. Exhibits, vaguely interesting on their own, are smattered here and there—but the connections between them are left entirely for you to determine, and never shown clearly. Far worse, this is a museum where the exhibits are completely wrong in their details, only correct in the abstract portrait they paint as a whole (if even that).

We deserved much better.

Avoid

Contrast Napoleon’s confrontation of the vast army sent to arrest him in Napoleon versus Waterloo. The difference in the time and effort taken to replicate that event, one of the most incredible in history, is stunning.

In Waterloo, thousands of real soldiers point their muskets at Napoleon. Everything is slow. Bondarchuk takes his time. There is tension in the air. Rod Steiger flinches. He isn’t certain his bet will pay off. He takes a deep breath… and the ranks break.

In Napoleon, Napoleon steps in front of an army of about fifteen guys. They immediately start to cheer for him. There is no tension, no uncertainty, and no anxiety. It is, in other words, lazy and rushed, without any sense of vision. Just like the rest of the movie.

The difference between these two is the difference between a genuine historical adaptation of real-life events and a theatrical production put on by twelfth graders. I’ll let you work out which is which.

I do not recommend Napoleon. Those who know their Napoleonic history will be infuriated by endless and pointless historical inaccuracies, of the sort that suggest lack of care and competence rather than any kind of vision. Those who don’t know their Napoleonic history will be hopelessly lost, without any hint of what’s happening at any given time. The plot has no exposition and offers almost no context whatsoever to events or characters. The years avalanche by; in one scene Moscow is burning, and in the next, Napoleon has teleported back to Paris and is abdicating. The characters are wrong in every respect, and the relationships are much too unconvincing to ever be emotionally engaging.

The result is a tedious and unbearably dull film. You will feel every second of those two-and-a-half hours. What we get for spectacle is so inept and historically inaccurate that it does not make up for it. I’m not a Ridley Scott fan, but I would say this is his worst movie. It’s vastly inferior to The Duelists, anyway.

If you like Napoleonic history, go watch Waterloo. It looks better, has a better story, and is far better acted than Napoleon. Bondarchuk even remembered to have the French march in columns! And if you don’t like Napoleonic history, why are you even reading this?

I wonder what the paid-off TV critics and YouTube media commentariat are saying about The Last of Us on HBO now that the final episode has aired. It isn't hard to guess. It "REIMAGINES THE ZENITHS OF GREATNESS." It "PAVES THE WAY FOR ALL FUTURE VIDEO GAME ADAPTATIONS." It "OOZES ORIGINALITY AND CREATIVITY WHILE BRINGING MUCH NEEDED DIVERISTY TO THE WASTELAND."

Etc.

I haven't checked. I don't intend to. My mental health isn't fortitudinous enough to bear all that right now. Having no dignity and IQs approximating the average fungal spore colony, it seems unlikely that there's anything this series could have done that wouldn't have been met with critical effulgence. One needn't look further than Part II for a clear demonstration of that. These media commentators are so vapid that one pictures their filet mignon returning from the kitchen as instead a pile of dog feces; but the waitress is pretty, and causing a scene might lead to being kicked out, and the chef isn't supposed to serve waste matter--so they eat it, good patrons that they are, and report how delicious it was to all their friends the next day, and upon returning at some later date, make sure to ask, "Can I have more of what you served last time?"

The real question isn't why they do it. It's whether or not they've convinced themselves to like it. I truly hope they haven't.

The Puppetshow

Two months ago I wrote this about this series' pilot episode:

I’ve heard from critics who have watched the whole series that Episode 1 is merely “the really bad one.” They assure the audience that this episode is slow, but the others pick up the pace, get into plot, and carry things in the right direction.

I sincerely hope they’re right. But after this snooze pandemic, I’m not optimistic. At best the rest of the series will be fine–worse than the game on every level, but at least more portable and easier to show off to strangers. 

This optimistic prognosis devolved immediately the next week:

Everything about this night’s episode is wrong. It has the tone wrong; it has the setting wrong; it has the story wrong; and worst of all, worst by far, it has the characters so, so wrong. For fans of the first game, its bizarrely-delivered dialogue and non-existent characterizations will be so maddening, so infuriating and dick-twisting, that it will seem like nothing more than parody.

The trilogy concluded thus:

...there’s nothing more to say on the series. It’s dull, it’s cliched, it’s lazy, and it’s not The Last of Us. And while it might be fun to analyze something that’s really bad, it isn’t that much fun to analyze something really lazy and boring. It just isn’t worth the time. No one will remember this garbage by next year.

I've forced myself to watch every episode since (and I do mean forced). And every week I've come home, stared at my keyboard, and wondered what there might possibly be to say that I haven't said already.

The answer is nothing.

Episode 1 was not just "the really bad one." Every prediction I made came true. The Last of Us on HBO is a boring, poorly scripted, poorly acted rip-off of the video game of the same name. While its plot is basically recreated, nothing that actually makes the game work--its characters, its themes, its setting--has been replicated. Yet these things are not independent of the plot; they are what inform it. As such the series is utterly incoherent. It makes no sense. By the time you reach the end, you won't understand Ellie and Joel's relationship. You won't feel invested. You won't care. You won't understand anyone's motivations. You'll be wondering why Joel feels the need to commit any murder at all to save Ellie after she's spent nine episodes acting like a tremendous asshole to him, relentlessly, while also having no charisma or style that might make her endearing to be around.

There will be paeans sung on how amazing this series is. I know it. They're probably out already. And I could spend tens of thousands of words explaining why these people are braindead, why you shouldn't listen to them, why they're probably on HBO's payroll--but let's face it: I've done that already. Go read my last three reviews. In them I saw clearly, right away, why the show wouldn't work. I divined that the character Joel was set up to be was not compatible with the character he would need to be by the end of the series, killing an entire hospital full of armed guards, torturing two random cannibals to death.

I was right. The plot demanded Pedro become Video Game Joel at the end, but it makes no sense in the context of the series. They did it anyway.

The same is true for Ellie. They've cut out every bit of characterization. She's left with nothing but a shovel face and bad acting.

The themes, like stray ears in the abattoir, have been butchered to pieces. In the final scene, one of the most famous in all fiction for gamers of a certain age, Mazin has strenuously avoided using the word "survivor," as he has all series.

Why? I don't know. But the end result is that, like Ellie, the thematic core of The Last of Us is left with nothing. The actors might as well be puppets on strings, performing out a stage play adaptation of the game. Its only addition to the source material is boring, pointless flashbacks that add nothing but to detract from the time we might spend with Joel and Ellie--that, and a bunch of very, very poorly scripted dialogue. I'm serious when I say that The Last of Us on HBO has some of the worst dialogue I've ever encountered in a professional TV program. Scenes are dramatically overwritten; silence is never used to progress the story; everyone blabbers endlessly, in lazy, subtext-free speech that always communicates what's happening.

To be fair, everything is so poorly done that we should be grateful. No one would have any fucking clue what was going on if the characters didn't talk constantly.

So I won't waste any more time on this series. I won't point out how lazy the confrontation with David is. I won't draw out what's different. I won't point out that everyone has spent the last two months defending the utter lack of action in this series by saying, "It wouldn't be realistic!" only for the final episode to have such absurd, Tarantino-esq over-the-top action that it's farcical. I won't identify the reasons why the ending doesn't work if the vaccine is "100% real guys," why removing all infected has basically made the need for the cure nonexistent, and I definitely won't complain about how fucked up the pacing is.

You know why? Because I've done it all already. Everything in my first three reviews holds true (except the minimal optimism and praise offered; those should be considered revoked). This series is without merit. It's a worse-written, worse-performed, worse-realized version of the game. The writers and directors and actors had no understanding of the subject matter at hand and could manage nothing more than to parody it, like high schoolers who turn an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer into a stage play. Pedro and Bella are puppets on strings acting out a script loosely defined for them by the game, then poorly adapted in a handful of hours to the screen by Mazin. At no point did anyone care. At no point was any analysis offered of what makes the game work. At no point was any effort expended.

The Last of Us is lazy, pointless, and unbelievably boring. Its dialogue is excruciating. It has none of the magic of the game. It has some of the least interesting characters ever put to television. And if you disagree, my dog produced a meal this morning that I'm certain you'll find delicious.

It's in this little black bag. Here, try a bite.

Appeal Ad Astroturfum

One of my least favorite things in online discourse is when one side begins accusing the other of being "paid bots." Or "Russian shills." Or "homophobic trolls." This is Sony's favorite tactic for explaining away why their terrible games and movies are shit on all across the internet. It's very easy, and flattering, to imagine that anyone who disagrees with you is a troll or a bot or an FSB agent. Alas it's almost never true. It's almost exclusively an excuse used by idiots to justify not engaging with someone's arguments.

But I can't explain The Last of Us' acclaim any other way. I'm fully convinced that this series is the subject of an enormous astroturfing campaign. HBO and Sony have spread their tendrils throughout entertainment far and wide, like a neural fungal network that'll be introduced in Episode 2 and never mentioned again, and somehow convinced more or less every media commentator to praise what's in the doggy bag non-stop.

It's certainly laid bare the gangrenous rot of media criticism in 2023.

Only braindead idiots become critics, though, so it's easy to explain why they might be easily swayed toward exaggerating their praise for something so terribly constructed as this series. What makes less sense is that here, unlike for TLoU2, audiences seem to like the series also.

Or maybe they don't. I suspect most people who watch this show want some way to dull the pain of their miserable, pointless lives, and for that it serves the purpose adequately. They will forget about it on the morrow. They spend most of their viewing time on their phone, as a brave Atlantic correspondent boasted as one of the series' virtues. (No, I'm not joking. No, I won't link it. Don't read The Atlantic.) A few might like it more, a few might like it less; for the most part, they don't care.

But to go and give it 9.1/10 on IMDB? To sperg about it across every online forum, and social media? I don't believe it. I can't.

The scales tipped for me when I saw a Reddit thread after Episode 7 came out. The original posters were complaining that it followed the story of the game, but didn't capture what made it work. And to each and every one, one after another, was the same comment (downvoted, mercifully): "So you like it now, because it follows the game more closely?"

Every comment was left by a different user.

What are the odds, I ask, that eight different people will leave the same stupid comment on a single forum, for no purpose but to rehabilitate what is clearly a completely meritless television program? Slim enough for me to reach this conclusion:

Sony (and apparently HBO) learned its lesson after the online hammering Part II received. Total control of the narrative is required. You therefore do two things: astroturf the discourse to gaslight audiences into thinking the product is brilliant, and pay off every critic imaginable.

Your Facebook feed is probably similar to mine now. Every single thing in my feed, and I'm not joking, is an ad for The Last of Us. It isn't just saying when and where to watch it; it's demanding that I recognize it as THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION. There are literally hundreds of these ads, and each is filled to the brim with comments from supposedly real people saying "oNlY rIgHt WiNg CuLtUrE wArRiOrS dOnT lIkE tHiS sHoW bEcAuSe RaCiSm!!!"

It's an effective strategy. Poison the well. Create the Matrix-like illusion. Gaslight audiences into liking your piece of shit The Last of Us adaptation. It seems to have worked.

It would explain the production budget, too. This series supposedly had a budget of $15 million per episode. That makes it one of the most expensive TV shows ever produced. Where did that money go? There's no action. There are no special effects. There are hardly even sets. There's nothing to this that should cost more than a few hundred thousand dollars an episode. Marble Hornets had higher production value.

Well. I know where the money went. $15 million dollars per episode for ads, fluff pieces, bots, Colombians who will comment on articles about how brilliant the series is...yes, I think that could vacuum up all that money rather quickly.

The Last of Us on HBO is not anything close to what it's been made out to be. It's close to Velma in quality. It could hardly be worse. I found it literally unwatchable; I was clawing at my eyes whenever anyone tried delivering the horrible dialogue, and laughing whenever the story took absurd twists--like Joel and Ellie casually walking out of the village, on high alert, full of cannibals, without any conflict at all.

This is how companies do things now. They would rather gaslight you into watching their shows than actually make something good. You'd better get used to it; if it works here, it'll only get more common.

Please do not watch this series. It is a completely failed adaptation. It has nothing going for it at all. I cannot name a single thing that I liked, except that it was only nine episodes instead of ten. If you want bad apocalyptic fiction, just go watch The Walking Dead instead. It's also shit, but it's not quite as boring, and at least there are a few characters worth caring about.

That's really what makes me the most infuriated over The Last of Us on HBO. Not that they shat all over one of my favorite stories, that means so much to me, but that it actually made me nostalgic for TWD. I'll never be able to forgive Mazin for that.

Over the last two weeks I've explained why The Last of Us on HBO has failed to capture the characters from The Last of Us on PlayStation 3. I criticized the presentation of the world, writing that Mazin seemingly didn't understand the thematic core of the source material. I spent thousands of words and at least a dozen hours articulating these into coherent theses, to make it clear why I thought the first two episodes were bad, and why I thought the series wouldn't work going forward.

We're done with that shit now. The train is off the rails. It's time to get to the fucking point.

What is this shit?

Episode 3 is supposed to be an adaptation of Bill's Town from the game. Bill's Town is one of the most memorable levels in The Last of Us, with an extraordinarily well-realized supporting character, tons of great locations, and two of the franchise's most iconic set pieces--the upside-down trap sequence, and the attack of the bloater. Some changes would need to be made to mitigate the video gamey structure, to be sure, but for the most part an excellent 60-90 minute long episode of a TV horror-action thriller could be made as a direct adaptation of the source material.

Instead, Bill and Joel never meet. Instead, the entire episode is devoted to flashbacks between Bill and his lover Frank. After hiding away while his town was evacuated, the prepper Bill secured a suburban neighborhood from all threats. He has everything there: infinite electricity, hot water, plentiful gardens, meat with every meal, etc. A few years into this affair he meets a man, and the two develop a pure, flawless, perfect relationship in this idyllic utopia. They eat strawberries together and drink wine! There's no conflict whatsoever, except for one brief encounter with syphilitic raiders who kill themselves by--literally--running head-first into flamethrowers, and one random infected who walks into a trap.

Frank and Bill grow old together. Frank then starts dying of AIDS, or something. So they both kill themselves. The end.

That's the episode.

Conveniently, Joel and Ellie encounter their two festering corpses, pick everything over, and get a car, a bunch of new guns, and a complete resupply, all after no conflict whatsoever.

In the game, you had to fight countless infected AND a bloater for that car. Here? The keys are just lying on the ground! They're right there! Storytelling!

I have no idea what to make of this episode. I was told that this was the most faithful video game adaptation ever. That was a lie. At this point, after Episode 3, I can say with confidence that The Last of Us on HBO has nothing more to do with The Last of Us than Halo had to do with Halo: Combat Evolved. But, of course, if I point this out, I'm going to be hounded because, "The writers just want to do their own thing! Enjoy it for what it is!"

So what is it? Is this an adaptation, or is it "its own thing?"

Clearly the answer is the latter. This series is the PS3 game in the same sense that Total Recall is the Philip K. Dick story: it isn't. For that reason I won't bother exhaustively analyzing the original game, comparing thematic points, making notes about the performances, discussing what Bill means as a warning for Joel in the story--it's just not worth it. There's no point. Instead I'll say this:

Nick Offerman played an interesting Bill. An episode like this, focusing on love in the post-apocalypse, could have been done well. Overall there is more to like in this episode than in either of the previous two, mostly re: performances. I think there is a seed of an interesting idea here. But Mazin utterly and completely fucked it up by having the violent zombie apocalypse be instead nothing more than a peaceful suburban neighborhood. There is no sense of danger, there are no Max Max-like undertones, the one brief fight scene makes no sense and ultimately comes to nothing--you can take this plot out of its context and smack it down in the middle of modern America and nothing would change. Even The Walking Dead, which I fucking hated at the time, did a better job of capturing the apocalypse. No effort whatsoever has gone into the setting of this series. No thought, no time, no care.

This isn't The Last of Us. It's also not a post-apocalypse. It's certainly not a zombie show. Tonally this episode felt like a romantic comedy; it had so little to do with the bizarre Dead Space-esq psychic fungus of last week that it's almost impossible to comprehend that someone thought they should go together.

While I didn't hate Episode 3 like I hated Episode 2, I was still bored out of my mind. It's colossally drawn out; every scene could cut away minutes before it eventually does. To make this work there needed to be a lot more violence and a lot more strife between the main characters. Instead it's sappy romance through-and-through, and it's not even good. The dialogue is cliched and the characters are models of functionality, to the point of triteness; one, Bill, is the tough, closeted homosexual--he is the husband. The other, Frank, is the girly one who likes clothes and interior design; he's the wife. They even go so far as to have Tess and Frank get along in a flashback, while the men--Joel and Bill--make snide remarks on the side.

It's just absurd. I can envision this episode in my head. It actually takes place in an apocalypse. There are infected everywhere. Survival is exhausting. They put in long hours. It looks less like Queer Eye and more like Little House on the Prairie. Eventually the two characters develop a relationship.

Instead, we got Queer Eye.

As for them killing themselves at the end, it's such trite bullshit. Gay love is pure, you see, so it's extra sad when homosexuals commit suicide. The ironic thing is that by killing Bill off, Neil and Craig are perpetuating the "bury your gays" trope. All the gay people AND all the black people die in The Last of Us! Shit, when Reilly dies--that's two for one! Is someone keeping score here?

But the bottom line is that Episode 3 is really just a cop-out. Mazin didn't want to splurge on complicated action and, for some reason, doesn't understand that violence is the entire point of a post-apocalypse. He needed Joel to get a car, so he had him inherit one. Rather than work these new story elements in through conflict and character development--as the game does--the writers wasted an hour on a set of pointless, conflict free flashbacks, all of which eventually come to nothing, BECAUSE BILL AND FRANK NEVER MEET JOEL ANYWAY.

Once more:

THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE GAY LOVE STORY WAS JUST TO EXPLAIN AWAY HOW JOEL GOT HIS CAR. THAT'S IT. I SEE THROUGH YOU, NEIL AND CRAIG. YOU AREN'T FOOLING ME.

Anyway, Episode 3, like the rest of the series, is full-blown AIDS. No wonder it killed Frank, that shit is infecting everything. My reviews end here. I'll probably continue through and write up a final recap on the last episode, if I make it that far, but there's nothing more to say on the series. It's dull, it's cliched, it's lazy, and it's not The Last of Us. And while it might be fun to analyze something that's really bad, it isn't that much fun to analyze something really lazy and boring. It just isn't worth the time. No one will remember this garbage by next year.

The aggravation I felt while watching the 59-minute long second episode of The Last of US on HBO will be hard to convey in text. In my review last week, I departed on a positive note, writing that, at worst, the series will merely be mediocre. Not offensive and maybe not even boring (going forward); just mediocre. I didn't think it would get any worse than that.

How naïve I was. Everything about this night's episode is wrong. It has the tone wrong; it has the setting wrong; it has the story wrong; and worst of all, worst by far, it has the characters so, so wrong. For fans of the first game, its bizarrely-delivered dialogue and non-existent characterizations will be so maddening, so infuriating and dick-twisting, that it will seem like nothing more than parody.

Not a high school stage play, as I suggested last week. Outright parody. Almost like a practical joke. Except this joke isn't funny.

The Flashbacks & The World

Anyone with any understanding of the first game's narrative structure will be screaming at his TV during this episode's introduction. Like last week, the first five or so minutes are a flashback--this time to the world of 2003, when an Indonesian fungal scientist first was made aware of Cordyceps' leap to humanity.

The change from 2013 to 2003 was irritating last week. But it's a minor detail, in the abstract, to modify the date of the apocalypse. Thus I didn't complain about it too much.

Returning to 2003 is going way too far. It feels like a slap in the face of the fans. That outbreak day was in 2013 was of massive importance in the first and even the second games. You'll notice, if you go play The Last of Us: Part II again, that many of the houses have PlayStations in them--PlayStation 3s. Time has been taken to replicate the world as it was in that year. It's one of those small things that makes me smile whenever I play either game.

Getting this so wrong feels like an intentional deviation to frustrate fans. A good adaptation would not make these pointless changes.

But it shouldn't really matter. Whether the story is set in 2023 or 2033, the core of The Last of Us (the game) is its lead characters: Joel and Ellie. Everything else, even the rest of the cast, serves only to aid their journey. Joel and Ellie are what the game is about.

What The Last of Us (the game) is not about is the setting. I love Cordyceps zombies as a thematic plot device. I love the aesthetic of our ruined civilization. I love the design of clickers and the lore of the infected. But the game is not about these things. There is a reason why there are no lengthy scenes explaining how the infection was discovered or what scientific principles the writers adapted to justify the presence of zombies.

It doesn't matter. What matters is Joel and Ellie.

Perhaps, one might say in response to my criticisms last week on adaptational purpose, what the TV show is doing to justify its existence is expanding the world. Making changes. Explaining things away that didn't quite make sense in the game. That's why there's a shift in focus.

Except it's pointless, because when you really get down into it, nothing about the setting of The Last of Us makes sense anyway.

In the game, the Cordyceps infection spreads either through bite or spores that linger in the air. That's all we need to know. The infected thus become their own organisms, with their own lifecycle, all designed to prolong their existences...like any other animal.

Astute players might notice something incongruous in this lifecycle. Something that doesn't quite work.

What do the infected eat?

The game provides the answer--humans. They're cannibals. But how exactly is it that hordes of infected grow, when any interaction between humans and infected leaves one or the other dead? Cannibalism and parasitism are mutually exclusive systems of proliferation.

This is a massive flaw in The Last of Us' world. The Cordyceps infection as a take on zombies that are living and realistic is actually nonsensical. How hasn't the pandemic wiped itself out after 20 years? How are these clickers surviving in a random basement for decades?

It makes no sense. But it doesn't matter, because the game isn't about that--it's about Joel and Ellie. All else is a backdrop.

But the TV series wants to dwell on these details. Mazin and Druckmann have invented an entire new lore to explain how and why the infected operate as they do. They want to smooth over gaps in the setting's logic.

Guess what? It still doesn't make any sense. The only thing we gain through shifting the focus from the characters to the world, with pointless flashbacks that eat into runtime that could instead be spent developing relationships, is that more attention is drawn to how little sense everything makes.

Can you see the problem?

Now, there are no spores. The main method of transmission is bite. Now tendrils grow out of someone's mouth after he's infected, and zombies give each other kisses on the lips when they're feeling lonely. Now, rather than the infected being a marginal threat dealt with fairly effectively by FEDRA (at the cost of all liberty), Cordyceps grows under the earth, connecting different hordes of infected together, who can commune with far-off places by sticking their tongue tendrils into the ground.

I'm sorry, what? Did you guys hear that? I must be making that up, right? There's no way that's real.

No. That's really in this second episode. I'm not kidding. The zombies are psychically connected to each other through fungal sprouts. Like in a sci-fi B movie. Like in cheap supernatural horror. They're no longer human beings infected with a disease; they are pure Hollywood monstrosity.

I hope I don't need to explain--for the third time--why this is completely wrong for The Last of Us. It's too close to supernaturality. It dispels the great advantage of Cordyceps in the first place, which is that it could, conceivably, really happen, and is otherwise a scientific, rather than supernatural, explanation for the apocalypse.

Why did Druckmann and Mazin decide to change the infected in this way? What were they thinking? Did they play the game? It's incomprehensible. This insane bit of lore is so stupid and out of place that it seems like something from a video game--until you realize, wait, that wasn't in the game at all!

I know why spores are no longer spread through the air, though. I figured it out. I don't know why they thought fungal psychic powers were a good idea, but I do know why the characters couldn't (briefly) wear gasmasks.

Are you ready? Hold on...

That's right. Pedro Pascal didn't want to do another show where he had to cover his face. For that reason, and that reason alone, the entire lifecycle of the infected in The Last of Us was changed.

I hope you're happy this prick is playing Joel. He's the one to blame.

The Last of Us is a Western

The Last of Us is a Western. Joel is a south-talking, six-gun slinging, horse-riding cowboy. He's a laconic Man With No Name archetype (perhaps better called The Man With No Last Name). Infected are equivalent to the hostile and unexplored wilderness. Hunters are Apaches and all other types of bandits and banditos. FEDRA is the corrupt Yankee government moving in from the East, and the Fireflies are a band of rebels, outlaws with a code of principles, fighting to keep Law away.

The Last of Us is a Western.

One thematic element of Westerns is that the characters don't use assault rifles. Usually you'll see shotguns, revolvers, lever-guns and bolt-actions, and sometimes an automatic pistol like in The Wild Bunch and the Red Dead Redemptions. But even in a modern-day Western like No Country For Old Men you aren't likely to spot an AK-47 or AR-15, and certainly not in the hands of the protagonist.

This is why, even though the AR-15 is the most common firearm in America and would be the weapon of choice for literally everyone in the post-apocalypse, Joel does not personally pick one up until the very end of the first game. It would be thematically confounding if he had a Gamer AR with a laser sight and a red dot, and his sidearm was a GucciGlock, and his revolver was a Mateba instead of a shitty old Colt.

Obviously these things do exist in the world of The Last of Us. But Joel is a cowboy, so Joel doesn't use them--not until the very end of the game.

Throughout all of Episode 2 of The Last of Us on HBO, Joel waves around an AR-15.

If you needed more proof that Mazin and Druckmann have no understanding of the first game, there it is. On the most foundational thematic level they have this story completely wrong. They did not know what they were doing. Not only are the characters ten lightyears off-base, they've lost track of every single theme.

The Characters

As predicted last week, nothing about any of the characters has been clearly established in this series. The relationships are inscrutable and vague. No one has any traits except Ellie, who has been defaced beyond recognition. I have no understanding of what these people want or why they're acting the way they are, unlike in the game, in which such information is conveyed effortlessly through dialogue and performance.

What is there to Tess and Joel? I don't know. They've had one scene alone together and no meaningful interaction. What is there between them and Ellie? It's a business relationship, or it should be--that's how it is in the game. But you'll get no sense of that here. Who even is Tess? What has Joel been doing these last 20 years? Who are the characters? Aren't they supposed to be smugglers? Why are they so bad at everything?

Let's start with Tess and Joel. The structure of Episode 2 sees all of the minor fights with infected removed, in favor of one longer, stupider confrontation between Tess and Joel and two clickers. Joel, despite now having an AR-15, decides not to use it; instead he ushers Ellie along, who is then detected, and a fight ensues.

This fight goes on for twenty-seven minutes. I timed it on my phone.

The clickers are eventually defeated after an hour of floundering, despite Joel being armed with a fully automatic assault rifle. Herein Tess is infected, like the game; as in the game, her infection occurs in a museum of the Revolutionary War.

Remember back to the game. Remember that, when Tess is finally infected, so much has gone wrong. The party is split by bad luck. FEDRA on the streets is forcing them to move quickly. Their usual smuggling routes are full of infected soldiers. It's only at the end of this series of unfortunate events that Tess is finally bit, right as the finish line is in sight.

Oops. Her luck had to run out sometime.

We've seen how badass Tess and Joel are by this point. Tess is smart and brutal in combat. Joel is a killing machine. The two are smugglers who have done this thing before. They are survivors. This isn't their first rodeo. Unfortunately, for Tess, it ends up being her last.

But still. We're well aware of how cool she is by the time she makes her exit.

Nothing of the sort is present in the TV show. In the HBO series, we see Tess and Joel do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Joel has maybe-murdered one soldier, and it was in an awkward, decidedly non-badass way. Tess? What has Tess done by the time her infection comes?

Nothing. She gets beat-up by Robert, arrested by soldiers, then wanders around for a few hours before killing herself.

Maybe we're supposed to presume Tess is tough. I imagine we're supposed to presume Joel is, too. But why should we? To me, looking at the show as a self-contained story, my only deduction is that these characters are fucking terrible at what they do.

Because Mazin is a fucking idiot who didn't want his M-rated game adaption to be violent, the very first time we see our lead characters in action, they come off as massively inept. The fight scene in the museum is horribly done. Who is Joel? He should be a survivor. Actually, he's a fucking idiot who can't even kill two clickers with a FULLY AUTOMATIC, FULLY LOADED AR-15 IN HIS HANDS.

It's fine to have Joel and Tess make a mistake that sees Tess killed. That's what happens in the game. It's believable, after a night of intense violence, that they might make a small slip-up with vast consequences. But what isn't fine is to have the only fight the characters get into in the entire series so far be a complete clusterfuck, where they do everything wrong and get killed. How a character is introduced is very important, and this introduction is 100% wrong.

We had to see these characters be badass before we saw them die. But we didn't. Thus Tess deserves what she gets; she's a fucking idiot. Same for Joel. He tells Ellie early in the episode that he's killed dozens of infected, but that was a fucking lie. He, like Tess, is actually incompetent. Together they form the shittiest team of smugglers in human history. God knows I don't have any reason to be invested in them, because they're clearly not anything special.

The game uses its first two chapters to develop the characters. The series instead wastes time with bad attempts at witty dialogue, that feel jarring and fake in what should be a miserable world, and shows us flashbacks to 2003, and dumps exposition on how the infected work--but never is there any development of Joel and Ellie and Tess.

One more point here: the word 'survivor' hasn't been used once in these first two episodes. The entire thematic basis for The Last of Us on PS3 is that Joel is a survivor. The grounding principle of Ellie's character is that she's struggling with her identity as a survivor. This is the fundamental question behind the entire story: what does it mean to survive?

It isn't present in the TV series. They don't even use the word. That is the worst travesty of all (so far).

All this is grossly offensive in the context of the game. It's also bad storytelling; no effort has been made to set up the characters and explain their motivations, abilities, and capacities for agency within the plot. I couldn't begin to tell you what themes are being explored. And unless Joel is going to continue being a bumbling idiot through the series--unlikely--then the showrunners have utterly failed to establish his character, and this episode receives an F- on the "TV writing quality scale."

But the ruining of Joel and Tess is nothing compared to what they've done to Ellie.

Last week I wrote about how bad Bella Ramsey is as Ugly Ellie. My main problem was that she never, at any point, seemed remotely scared about the position she found herself in. She was effortlessly brave, and therefore had nowhere to go as a character.

All this has carried through to the second episode. Ugly Ellie never comes off as afraid, or nervous, or anything but ultra-brave. When Joel points his rifle at her, she snarks. When danger lurks and the way is blocked, she volunteers. Attacked by clickers? In the game, when asked if she's okay, she says, "Other than shitting my pants? Yeah. I'm fine." But in the TV show--well, she's so brave, she says, "I'm fine. It's not like I shit my pants. LOL!"

Is that a normal thing for a person to say? Does that line even make sense?

Ugly Ellie isn't Ellie. She's endlessly snarky like a generic Marvel superhero. She deadpans like a blind chef in a morgue. It's true that Ellie has wit in the game, but her sense of humor isn't raw sarcasm. She rarely quips, and when she does, it's to herself ("Stay right on my ass" "Can't miss it"). Ellie will stick up for herself when she feels she's being mistreated, but she's conscientious and obedient in danger. She respects that Joel is more experienced than her. She doesn't want to stir shit for no reason. She isn't an asshole.

Here, like Fake Ellie in Part II, she is pointlessly aggressive and endlessly disobedient. She argues over nothing. She talks back to people she believes might kill her. She talks way too much, in fact, and never demonstrates any nervousness or apprehension around these strangers. Craig Mazin's dialogue is truly awful and utterly cringe-inducing; it is nothing like Ellie from the game. He, like Ramsey, like Halley Gross and even Neil himself, has no understanding whatsoever of this character or what it is that makes her charismatic. I truly believe that no one involved in this franchise gets the magic of Ellie except Ashley Johnson (and maybe Bruce Straley). The rest have no clue what it is that makes her work, and have suicide vest-levels of determination to see to it that she's misrepresented in whatever she appears in.

Ramsey is dreadful. I never believe her on screen. She seems like a kid in an Ellie Halloween costume, but certainly nothing like Ashley Johnson--and not her own character, either. There is no truth to her performance. She is legitimately hard to watch. But even worse, by making her so courageous so early on, the parabola of her character arc has been demolished. It's now more like a graph of the 2023 stock market.

Ellie has nowhere to go and nowhere to grow if she isn't afraid. This was the exact same criticism I had of Joel last week: these characters cannot have arcs when their introductions are so terribly flubbed.

Joel and Tess come across as generic, uninteresting, and inept. But that's still not as bad as Ugly Ellie. She's fucking unbearable. My skin peels off when she's on screen. My thumbs start digging into my eyes. Her performance (and dialogue, too, to spread some blame around) is what makes me say that Episode 2 of this series is parody. Ellie feels like a parody of herself. She makes me physically agitated with every line. I feel personally mocked at this travesty of an adaptation of her character.

And on the dialogue, a few lines have been worked in from the game. Many others have been pointlessly changed--see above. But it's actually more jarring when lines haven't been changed, because these characters seem nothing at all like the people from the game. When Ellie and Joel look out toward the capitol and have their brief exchange, the effect is bizarre. It's some strange concoction of deja-vu and being roofied.

So you'd think I wouldn't mind the new dialogue. Actually, it's even worse. Take Tess' death scene. You'll find other people online complaining about how shitty this version is, but that aside, Mazin--who has the sole writing credit on this episode--has opted to remove Tess' lines. She says nothing, then something unnaturalistic, and carefully avoids using the words she used in the game. Clearly Mazin wanted to make that scene "his own" somehow, but he failed on every level.

A TV show should have better dialogue than a video game. The Last of Us on HBO does not have good dialogue. In fact its character writing is stilted and surreal and almost always poorly-delivered. It is significantly worse than the source material. It's the worst I've ever encountered in any big-budget TV show.

Don't just take my word for it. Like last week I watched this episode with my parents, and when I showed them the original cutscenes they both agreed that the dialogue in the game is better. More naturalistic, snappier, less idiotic, and doing far more to convey the needed information in a truthful way. This is to say nothing of performance, which is also universally better in the original; the small detail of Joel looking at his watch before crossing the plank toward the capitol? Pascal didn't think to work that one in.

There is one detail from the game I noticed this time: Ellie's backpack. They've gone through and, presumably at immense effort, replicated it 1:1.

Her backpack. Not her shirt. Not Tess' hair. Not Joel's guns. But at least Ellie has her backpack, right?

I thought this episode would have Joel distract a clicker with a brick or a bottle. I thought he would use Listen Mode to evade infected. I thought they would place the plank themselves to climb over the gap between those two buildings. I thought something from the game would be worked in.

Nope. We aren't even granted that much. The plank they walk over is, mysteriously, already there. The only thing is Ellie's backpack. That's all.

My guess as to why? Craig Mazin didn't bother to play the game. He just watched the cutscenes on YouTube.

I Hate This Show

I hate it already. I'm not having fun writing about it in the slightest, which is quite to the contrary of Part II. Even Halo was more enjoyable, to a certain point. The Last of Us on HBO is shit. It has no redeeming qualities. I would rather have fungus tendrils in my mouth than endure the next episode.

But I'll give it one more week anyway. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll develop symptoms of infection by then and I won't have to write another review. But I'm not hopeful.

There are countless more nits to pick. I have pages of notes on my phone. But it's pointless. This series isn't interesting enough to dissect, which Part II certainly was; it's just bad and poorly done. The arcs for the characters have been completely misrepresented. The tone is erroneous. The acting is painful. The changes to the world are insulting. It feels like a parody of The Last of Us, not like an adaptation. Any respect for the subject matter is superficial and fleeting. As a TV series it will be forgotten within months, because without good characters there's nothing for audiences to remember.

Of course, then, it's no surprise that it has a 10/10 on IMDB.

Those people are retarded. This show is shit. Don't watch it.

By the way, now is probably a good time to mention that I've been posting my old TLoU fanfic on Royal Road this month. It started as an attempt to capture the voice of Ellie, after the end of the first game, in first person. At this I think I've done a good job, but it's not easy, and I don't have enough time to waste it on such utterly pointless projects. But I definitely do a better job at depicting Ellie than Mazin and Gross have; thus you can find it here. I hope this does something to prove that I actually understand who these characters are.

In the two weeks since I posted my review of The Last of Us' PS5 remake, a particular fear has overcome me. What if, as USA Today claims, The Last of Us on HBO turns out to be "the best video game adaptation ever?" Would I look a fool? Would my dire predictions for the show come to naught? Would I be summarily humiliated for doubting what can only be described as a masterpiece of television?

"Best video game adaptation ever" is a low bar, it must be said. But all the same it became increasingly possible--even probable--that this new adaptation, headed by Neil Druckmann himself, would not only be decent...but maybe, even, good.

Don't take this to mean that I wanted to dislike The Last of Us on HBO. Indeed as positive reviews flooded the internet I began to think: if only I could feel the same way as a corporate journalist does while watching this show! I have had few aspirations in my life beyond this. The original game on PS3 is one of those few unifiers in media: a beacon of quality universally beloved by almost everyone who plays it. Even Yahtzee had to admit it was okay. It's one of the few properties that enjoys ultra-mainstream levels of critical acclaim and also entirely deserves every ounce of its success. Even I adore it, and I don't like anything.

Is this TV adaptation the same? Does it live up to the hype? Will it unify audiences from The Federalist to Kotaku, from gamers to grandparents, from fans to strangers alike?

It's too early to tell. Unlike the critics I am not privileged to watch all nine episodes before writing my reviews. But what I can report is that its first episode is over-long, poorly paced, and utterly pointless.

Utterly Pointless

Consider your favorite novel. In it bullets fly left and right. The protagonist traverses epic set pieces. There's drama and psychological strain at every turn. You feel as though you know the main characters. You can hear their voices in your head. You can almost see the events as they're described.

But forever will you be relegated to almost. A novel might be as good as a film, as compelling and engaging, but you will never, truly see what's in your mind, and you will never be able to show it to others--as you could with a film.

This is the justification for adaptations from prose to screen. Everything about the presentation of the story changes with the alteration of medium. The story remains while the content is transformed into something different--something awesome--something you can see. And while it probably won't ever be as amazing as the original book, it'll at least be interesting. At least you'll see clearly, in realized detail, what you weren't able to see before. At least you'll be able to put a face to the characters and a color palette to the world. At least you'll get a sense of what others experience when they read that same book.

Now consider the various formal qualities of The Last of Us on PS3. I'll list them for convenience. It has:

• A story

• Dramatically blocked cutscenes, complete with cinematography and lighting design

• Voice acting

• A strong visual component and thoroughly realized world

• Sound design

• Music

• 15-20 hour playtime

• All the elements of gameplay

Contrast this with the various formal qualities of The Last of Us on HBO. It has:

• A story

• Dramatically blocked scenes, complete with cinematography and lighting design

• Voice acting

• A strong visual component and thoroughly realized world

• Sound design

• Music

• 10-15 hour runtime

The adaptation of a novel into cinema changes the form entirely. There are no visuals in prose except those alive in your mind. It is a completely different medium. But from video game to TV show?

I hope the above does something to bring my point across, before I need say it: what is the difference between TV and gaming? Gameplay. Everything else is the same. They use the exact same tools to tell a story, save one.

Gameplay is a very powerful storytelling device. It is a huge boon to games like The Last of Us, which wield it so effectively to build empathy, develop character, and pace story.

A TV show on HBO lacks gameplay. Yet it adds nothing of its own to compensate. Visuals? Character? Acting? Music? No, those elements were already present. In fact I would and often have argued that even from scene-to-scene the TV show is at a disadvantage, because it's much easier to cast the exact right people and get the exact right performances when no concern need be paid to the physical demands of locations, lighting, set design, etc.

This above all other reasons is why the acting in Naughty Dog games is so spectacular. It wouldn't ever be as good in live action.

So what's the point? What reason is there to adapt this game into that TV show? What's added?

Nothing. Nothing, except the removal of gameplay. That might sound great to you if you don't play video games; for those of us who do, the transition between PlayStation and streaming is completely without any purpose. A novelization might have been interesting, but TV adds nothing to the formula--at least in a game as strongly narratively-driven as those developed by Naughty Dog.

That's why I say The Last of Us on HBO is pointless.

Utterly Boring

Be all that as it may, pointlessness does not connote any lack of quality. It may yet be the case that, however ill-conceived the adaptation in the first place, The Last of Us starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey will be excellent. And if it is, then it's some way to show the story I love so much to my family, or any other friends, who don't and won't play games.

Worse for me. Better for them. Right?

It should be noted that, as someone who beats the first game two or three times every year, I cannot reasonably be expected to give this show a fair shake. I have preconceptions about the story, the world, and the characters that I expect to be affirmed. I tried at first to set this aside and enjoy the show for what it is, but I can't. It's not possible.

If it's any counterpoint to what follows, I watched this first episode with my elderly, non-gamer parents; they both thought it was adequate, if slow. Consider that my disclaimer as I continue.

The World

Basically everyone will notice the change in timeframe. While the first game started in 2013, this TV adaptation starts in 2003. Why? Maybe to make Joel closer in age to Pedro Pascal; maybe for the 'gotcha' factor of having the far-future apocalypse take place in 2023; or maybe because the Fireflies are supposed to be the good guys, FEDRA the bad guys, and the Neanderthals at HBO found it easier to justify this dynamic if 'the government' was headed by George W. Bush instead of Barrack Hussein Obama.

This is a minor change to the setting overall. But it raises questions about the characters and their histories that were not necessary.

Other changes are equally confounding but more offensive. The first infected we meet is an old lady in a wheelchair. Upon 'turning,' the cordyceps in her brain apparently imbues her with such strength that she maims and nearly kills both of her caretakers.

You know, like a zombie.

Not being deterred by having their throats ripped out, these two caretakers, at first seen alive and bleeding to death, soon return from the dead themselves. They then stumble out into the street after Joel and his family.

I hope I don't need to spend time explaining why this is so fucking wrong. I've done it once already. 'Zombies' in The Last of Us are not zombies. They are human beings infected with cordyceps fungus. They do not raise from the dead. They do not come back to life. They needn't be shot in the head. If an old lady with brittle bones is infected with cordyceps and comes after you, she should be trivially defeated. As if you were fighting any normal crazy, weak, osteoperosized, wheelchair-bound grandmother. (Trust me, I've encountered a few in my time; they're never hard to overcome.)

Not so in this new TV adaptation. Not only are the infected now imbued with zombie strength, they twitch and fidget, blood pouring from their mouths, eating flesh, while waiting for hapless survivors to stumble by their charnel pits.

Those unfamiliar with the games could be forgiven if they thought these were the same zombies as in any other cheap Walking Dead knock-off.

That the infected are simply another lifeform, with their own right to exist, who are biological and not necromantic, is one of the most important thematic points of the original game. The molestation of this theme in Part II is one among many, many, many reasons why that game is utter shit.

This does not bode well for this TV series.

As for the production design more broadly, it's certainly recognizable as The Last of Us (as a franchise). The Boston QZ looks more or less like it does in the first game. The city beyond the walls is bombed out, as should be expected. At night especially, at the episode's end, it looks just like the first real gameplay environment in The Last of Us.

Yet something is rotten. I don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it. It has to do with depth-of-field and eye-melting color saturation. The world looks wrong. It looks fake. The houses don't look like the houses in the game, but like knocked-together sets merely dressed to be apocalyptic. The rooms are too small. The rain too anemic. The people we meet on the street seem more like Hunger Games extras than survivors of a zombie dystopia. The world of the game is effortlessly engrossing; here, I spent the 85-minute runtime wondering why the apocalypse looks so cheap.

The Story

Any adaptation of The Last of Us was going to be forced to grapple with the fact that the game's first act is very messy. There are Swiss cheese-levels of plot holes and conveniences involved in getting Joel and Ellie together. Yet these issues are minor in and of themselves. In a game they hardly matter.

But a TV show isn't a game. It has nothing but story. Therefore its story must be changed.

I don't have much to say on the 2003 portion of the episode, beyond what will be discussed below re: characters. Beyond the change of timeline, I thought the small things that don't make sense--why does Tommy drive into a crowded street? Why do they get hit by another car in such a weird way?--were adequately rectified.

The same cannot be said of the rest of the episode. "20 Years Later," as the chapter is called in the game, is a boring plane crash, like being diverted to three different airports, forced to wait on the ground for five hours, then spontaneously combusting during disembarkment. While it successfully paves over some of the more obvious conveniences, it introduces new ones--and hideously prolongs the runtime.

The most notable thing about this version of The Last of Us relative to the game is that the story is no longer told from Joel's point of view. We see Ellie multiple times before her introduction. We meet Marlene. We watch Tess' adventures.

The primary effect of disregarding subjectivity is that we aren't given enough time to know, learn, or care about any of the characters in detail--most importantly Joel. The lack of a singular narrator is a complete disruption of the structure of the narrative from the game. But that aside, familiar as I am with The Last of Us, I saw nothing over the course of this episode's second act except changes made to close minor plot holes

In the first game, this is what we play through:

• Tess and Joel hunt Robert down because he's stolen their guns, or something. It doesn't matter, makes minimal sense, and serves no purpose except to get Joel and Marlene together as quickly as possible. Marlene has been injured during the recent crackdown on Fireflies; she bumps into Joel somewhat coincidentally at Robert's, but realizes soon enough that Joel is just the person she needs to help her smuggle Ellie out of the city--she can no longer do it herself due to her injures. She takes Joel to Ellie and the two are introduced. The game starts in earnest.

Contrived, yes. Full of coincidences, yes. Still good enough for a TV show? Maybe. I honestly don't know.

In the series, this is what we watch (take a deep breath...):

• Robert steals a car battery from Joel, that Joel has been trying to get into his truck, because he wants to head to Wyoming in search of Tommy (for a heretofore unexplained reason). Tess is jumped by Robert's men and captured, but actually he only wants to tell her that he doesn't want to fuck with them, because he's afraid of Joel--even though he's clearly already fucked majorly with Joel by stealing his battery. The Fireflies engage in combat with FEDRA soldiers and Tess is taken prisoner, again, but she's then let free without any further conflict. She and Joel then hunt for Robert, looking to get their battery back, but when they get there they find that Robert and all of his men have been slaughtered brutally by Marlene--there were no prisoners taken. Meanwhile, while all of this has been happening, Ellie, a girl we know nothing about, has been chained up in a room at the Firefly HQ. Back at Robert's, it turns out this same girl Ellie is also there. For completely confounding reasons Marlene decides that this random smuggler, with whom she has no established relationship, should actually take Ellie from the QZ instead. Any references to Tommy being a Firefly are subtle, passing, and not nearly as pronounced as in the game ("His brother was a Firefly; told me I could rely on him if I were ever in trouble." Yeah, that line? It's not in the show.).

This massive expansion of the time spent in Boston beyond Joel's PoV resolves two problems:

• One: What the fuck is it Robert actually took from Joel and Tess? Why is it important?

• Two: How does Joel find Tommy later on in the story? In the game it's a coincidence (although not an especially improbable one). Here, time is spent in the first episode setting up where he'll later find his brother.

I would say the third was explaining and justifying the coincidence of Marlene's presence at Robert's at just exactly the same time Joel and Tess get there, but in fact this is still a coincidence.

I can tell these small issues with the first game were things that always bothered Druckmann. They bothered him, so he set out to fix them. But there's a reason why these details aren't dwelled on extensively in the game...

Because THEY'RE BORING AND DON'T MATTER.

This first episode is duller than Ellie's switchblade after twenty years in the rain. It's contrived and full of characters we have no reason to care about. The introduction of multiple PoVs muddies the narrative and makes the audience's brains hurt. We didn't need any of this new shit; it gets in the way of the plot. It's all so fucking boring. Some changes could have been good, but focus is put in the wrong places. The characters, which are all that really matter, are not adequately developed.

The Characters

The most surprising thing about The Last of Us on HBO is that the quality of the dialogue is poor. Early on, while Sarah is at school, hear a teacher say, "I swear you will need this later in life!" with all sincerity. While waiting for Joel and Tess to decide whether or not to agree to transporting Ellie, Marlene says something to the effect of, "Please take your time, I'm only bleeding to death over here!" The interactions with various 'NPCs' feel like nothing more than just that. What is there to that random guy Joel gives narcotics to? His dialogue sounds like any of the contextual characters you might interact with in the game; shallow, without personality, mostly uninteresting.

In a game we accept this. We understand, intuitively, the PC vs. NPC distinction. One would hope such small storytelling flaws would be resolved during the transition to a medium of pure visual storytelling.

Alas not.

Across the board the dialogue is less naturalistic than in the game. Countless lines have been changed to be more on the nose and less realistic. Joel has cannibalized Tess' dialogue word-for-word, bizarrely, probably because Tess isn't in enough of this episode for us to care about her.

This is one among many reasons why Joel no longer feels like Joel. And neither does Tess, nor Ellie, nor, surprisingly, Marlene, who looks and sounds exactly like Marlene...because she is Marlene. But she doesn't feel like the same character, because the style and content of the dialogue has been substantively changed, and the performances no longer feel like the same characters.

To begin with: Sarah. She's now a black teenager, definitely older than 12, strong and independent. I'm so over this tokenization bullshit, but whatever. It doesn't really matter if the actress is right.

And she's fine. But when Outbreak Day comes, contrast these two performances in your memory.

Sarah spends the entirety of her time in the first game paralyzed in fear: she has no agency, and that lack of agency is transferred onto you as a player through the process of gameplay mechanization. When she wakes up and can't find Joel, she's scared. When she finds his phone buzzing with messages from Tommy, she's terrified. When her father kills the next-door neighbor, she's catatonic. She gets thrown into the back seat of a car and can do nothing. She cries and withdraws, then dies violently. She is a twelve-year-old girl in the apocalypse.

Black Sarah couldn't be more different. When she wakes up to explosions beyond her door, she looks for Joel--and can't find him. Does she hide in bed? Does she cower in fear? No, she turns on the TV and hears a message to STAY IN DOORS AT ALL COSTS.

Naturally, she then goes outside. She decides to explore the neighborhood. She wanders into her neighbor's house. She steps in a pool of blood, yet even then isn't deterred--she goes all the way until a zombie jumps out and tries to eat her.

Does this seem like the same person to you?

I understand that there will be differences in the characters, but turning Sarah from a disempowered victim of the horrific apocalypse and into a brave adventuress ruins her. It changes the story for the worst. Why do it this way?

I have similar criticisms of Ugly Ellie. Ignore the paeans from spergs across the internet; Bella Ramsey is dreadful as this character. Of course that was inevitable, because Ellie is Ashley Johnson--it was never going to be possible to adapt this character. No one could have pulled it off. But there are still a number of elements to her performance that should have carried over regardless of who was in the role.

There are some things I like. I like that she's angry and confrontational in the show, as she should be (unlike mopey and boring Fake Ellie from Part II). I like that she isn't totally humorless. But I don't like much else.

Ugly Ellie, like Real Ellie, needed to be introduced from Joel's PoV. The journey of the audience should mirror that of Joel's, as we're first apprehensive about escorting an annoying little kid, but over time grow to care about her. But there's so much more to it than that.

In the scene where Ellie is scanned and revealed to be infected, contrast the performances as given by Ramsey and Johnson. In the game, Ellie is fucking terrified. She crawls to a concrete pillar and feebly protests, "I'm not infected!" She looks like she's about to have a heart attack. She feels really, truly, like a little girl in the proximity of two vicious criminals, who she's just witnessed commit murder, who's afraid for her life, who doesn't know what to do.

This is a recurring theme for Ellie all throughout Boston. She's terrified. She doesn't know what the apocalypse is like. She's out of her depth.

But Ugly Ellie? Ugly Ellie is confrontational. She fights Robert and doesn't afraid of anything! She doesn't care that she just watched Joel punch a soldier to death; she's not worried that Tess will blow her head off; she's going to stand up for herself! She'll yell at Tess!

I can't blame Ramsey for the poorly written dialogue she delivers throughout the episode. She could definitely do a better job ("Your watch is broken" stands out), but really, that's on Druckmann. But I can and will blame her for utterly failing to capture the truth of how Ellie would behave in these circumstances, as so effortlessly embodied by Ashley Johnson.

I will also blame her for looking like she has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

Ramsey isn't different from Johnson. She isn't a new twist or interpretation on the same character. She's just worse. She's simply less convincing, to the point where I never once believed her on screen.

She isn't as bad as Fake Ellie from Part II. She's much closer to Real Ellie than that. But Ugly Ellie still isn't Ellie, and she still isn't good.

And Tess? We barely spend any time with her. What's there to say? In the game she's the brains. Joel is muscle, but Tess does business. Her death sends a shock through Joel--now he has to take the lead. But here we barely see her. We get no hint of her personality through dialogue; she doesn't feel like the same person. I have no idea who she is and no understanding of her relationship with Joel, other than that they seem to be directly intimate with each other. Multiple scenes wherein she takes the lead, such as the interrogation of Robert, have been cut.

This isn't an improvement. Tess is a very strong character in the game. She's vitally important in leading to Joel's reluctant acceptance of taking Ellie on this quest. She might be developed better in the second episode before her brutal death, I don't know, but for now--not a good adaptation.

That brings us to Joel. I thought Pedro Pascal would be decent as Mexican Joel, but I was wrong: his performance is the worst of the show (so far).

It isn't his fault, really. It's 100% the dialogue and direction. Whoever Mexican Joel is in this series, he isn't the character from the first game. He sounds different. He has a totally different voice. I should be content to leave it at that; no doubt the mindless praise this series is receiving will require no such explication on why it's so a m a z i n g. I don't want to be so vague, but on some level--what can I say, other than to ask you to play the game, then watch this episode?

Why is Joel so snarky? Why is he talking so much? Why is he so confidently taking the lead when Tess is around? Why isn't he awkward and weird?

But there are far deeper problems with Joel's characterization so far. In the game he is a SURVIVOR. He will do whatever it takes to SURVIVE. In the world of The Last of Us, that is seriously bad shit.

Within an hour of meeting Joel we watch him murder countless people, then brutally torture Robert. He shoots first and asks questions later. He doesn't hesitate to pull the trigger. He's a bad man--that's why he's alive.

Mexican Joel, though? Mexican Joel isn't a bad guy at all! He doesn't torture Robert, and he only maybe-kills one soldier after having a comical First Blood-esq 'Nam flashback. Apparently Mexican Joel is so nice that he can only do violence when his PTSD is triggered!

What? This is supposed to be the same person as from the game, right? Did Neil play The Last of Us?

What does this tell us about the world? The game draws attention to its violence by having Ellie react in horror when she first watches Joel blow out brains and smash skulls. That draws a parallel between normal people and survivors in the post-apocalypse. No such effort has been made so far by Druckmann and Mazin.

Even worse, his apprehension toward Ellie has been eradicated. This is the real kiss of death. Real Joel is militantly against taking the job smuggling Ellie from Boston. The reason is obvious: he doesn't get close to little girls anymore, as anyone would expect knowing his backstory.

Nothing approximating this happens with Mexican Joel. Mexican Joel has no particular aversion to Ellie. He gives her an angry look, once, as she's trying to stab him, and then has no protestations about bringing her along. The masterfully done scene where Joel and Ellie are alone together for the first time is replicated here, but instead of being cagey and awkward, Mexican Joel has no problem having an extensive conversation with Ugly Ellie.

Did you play The Last of Us, Neil? This isn't right.

Presenting Joel in this way basically makes Sarah's death pointless--you could've just not included it--and completely spoils his arc. He should loathe Ellie at the start of the series. The pay-off is in how he learns to love her. We haven't seen that in Boston, and we couldn't--the story was too busy setting up other shit. It didn't do what it had to do, what the game does so well: establish the characters, their arcs, and the plot's conflict. Making Joel's antipathy toward Ellie clear is so much more important than watching Tess talk to Robert or seeing that Marlene had Ellie chained up in case she turned.

What growth is there to have here? If Mexican Joel doesn't already like Ugly Ellie, they sure as shit haven't shown us.

And Just In General

The scenes throughout this TV show feel less cinematic to me than the game's cutscenes. The pace of editing is significantly faster; the blocking is less interesting; the performances aren't as good; everything is off. Compare "Your Watch is Broken" and the encounter with the soldier beyond the walls, both of which, as mentioned, are translated 1:1 into live action. The game versions are infinitely preferable. They're more dramatic. They feel so much realer, and more brutal, and more truthful.

I can't express why--not yet. Pacing is a likely reason. Despite being slightly more boring than a silent film, the tempo of these cutscenes in the game is much slower than their TV counterparts. View "Your Watch is Broken" back-to-back with the same scene from the show to see what I mean. Why do the most important moments feel rushed, when everything else is so drawn out?

Finally I want to comment that I'm disappointed no nods to gameplay were included in this episode. They may be coming yet, and there are scenes shot to look eerily like a video game (over the shoulder), but there are no bricks, no bottles, and Joel has his revolver--instead of the Colt Defender or Browning Hi-Power that he should at the start of the game. Ellie is in the wrong shirt, and Joel takes the beaten soldier's AR-15 right away.

I guess Mexican Joel is playing on New Game +. He shouldn't get an AR-15 until the final level!

These are microscopic details. They don't matter. But they're so microscopic that one wonders why they were changed. Would it really have been too much if Joel used a brick to beat that soldier to death? Really? Could you not put Ellie in her iconic shirt? Would it have cost too much? Just--why?

I don't get the impression with The Last of Us, as I did with Halo, that Druckmann and Mazin actively loathe the people who love the game. But I don't get the impression that they much care about us, either.

For that reason I say, as I had in the lead-up to the series' debut, that this show isn't for fans of the games. It isn't against you, but it isn't for you. It's for your mom.

I don't think it's unreasonable for someone like me to find that slightly aggravating.

Eight to Go

I've heard from critics who have watched the whole series that Episode 1 is merely "the really bad one." They assure the audience that this episode is slow, but the others pick up the pace, get into plot, and carry things in the right direction.

I sincerely hope they're right. But after this snooze pandemic, I'm not optimistic. At best the rest of the series will be fine--worse than the game on every level, but at least more portable and easier to show off to strangers. At worst, it will continue to be even more boring than Halo; and if so, I probably won't make it to the end.

That's my biggest frustration with The Last of Us on HBO. It isn't good. But it isn't horrible, either. The bad dialogue will make you cringe, but it won't pull you out from the story. The pointless changes and general flubbing of the character arcs will make you frustrated, but they're not deal-breaking. As a fan of the game, this first episode felt like little more than a high school stage play adaptation of The Last of Us. Cardboard sets, plastic acting, censored of all its delicious brutal violence because the principal wouldn't let the drama teacher buy squibs--almost more rip-off than adaptation.

But it isn't torture. It isn't offensive. It's just dull and mediocre.

I would've preferred offensive.

I'll be back next Sunday to review the next episode. I have a lot more to say, especially about what it really means to adapt video game into TV show. But that's all for the future. For now, I'll leave you by saying: you should go play The Last of Us. It's a great game--and it's a lot better than whatever this is.

I remember the first time I watched Aliens. The year was 2010 and Netflix had recently introduced a feature called streaming, so that anyone, at any time, could freely watch a limited selection of licensed movies. On the frontpage was Aliens, which I had wanted to see my entire life; so I sat down in front of my family's Dell desktop PC around 8pm and I…

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In Prey, it’s hunt or be hunted for a young Comanche woman on the American plains of 1719. She must conjure all her wits to evade French trappers, mountain lions, grizzly bears, and ultimately overcome an extraterrestrial predator if she wants to secure the safety of her people—and prove that even a woman can be a hunter.

This film has nothing to do with…

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The spectacle of Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard came to a close on June 1 with a jury awarding Depp a total of $8.35 million in damages for defamation. For those who watched the trial in its entirety--as I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit I did--this is undoubtedly a just verdict. Heard failed to present any substantive evidence for her claims of abuse. Depp, however, provided more than enough evidence to paint Heard as both liar and abuser, including multiple recordings of deranged audio in which she dares Johnny to, "tell the world [that he is a victim of abuse]" and cackles maniacally.

In the wake of these revelations that Heard is no victim, and almost certainly chopped off Depp’s finger, it comes as no surprise that calls for her cancellation have swept across the internet. A petition to remove her character from the upcoming Aquaman 2 has garnered over four million signatures. Whether or not Warner Bros. has buckled to this pressure or doubled down remains unclear.

The popular support for Johnny Depp has certainly made Heard toxic to large corporations. Film is a business of star power and the studio is worried about the bottom line.

But is it right to remove her from Aquaman 2, over a trial about Johnny Depp?

It is true that Heard has already been paid her two million dollars for her work on the film. It’s also true that this cancellation is for actions--monstrous actions, it must be said: defamation, physical and verbal abuse, and staging an enormous hoax to ruin a man's life and career--rather than mere speech, as for so many others. She is no Gina Carano. In this way her extirpation from Aquaman is no real cancellation.

Yet the movie has been made. Heard has shot her scenes. The fact remains that she is in the film, and however terrible we might think her to be as a person, Depp v. Heard had nothing to do with Aquaman 2.

Make no mistake: the vindictive impulse behind the desire to remove Heard from the Aquaman franchise is just the same as that which underlies all cancellation attempts. A ‘bad’ person must be punished extrajudicially for their wrongdoings. For her transgressions, a price must be paid.

But a price will be paid, to the tune of eight million dollars. That is Heard’s punishment as decided democratically by a jury of her peers. For the rest of us who dislike her, we can skip her movies. We can ignore her (as we did before this trial began). What purpose is there in having her plucked from an extant film, except as an act of revenge? Why should we want to rob those who don’t care, who still like her acting, of the ability to see her in a film? Need we go beyond the market to end her career, too? Where does this end?

Cancel Culture is wrong no matter who it comes for. It’s a fate no one deserves--not even a villainess like Amber Heard.

Recall when Gina Carano was cancelled for her completely innocuous political tweets c. early 2021. After five years of endless comparisons of Donald Trump to the big A with the mustache, one statement that it might not be good to demonize people for their political views and she was summarily vaporized from her role as Carasynthia in The Mandalorian.

I found Carano's beefy action-girl Star Wars character to be about what one might expect from an MMA-fighter-turned-actress. Good at punching people, not much for the acting. All the same she became very popular very quickly, and so to see her dropped so unceremoniously for statements so milquetoast--not just representative of beliefs held by the entirety of conservative America, but many Democrats too--was frankly appalling. Tell me again that Cancel Culture isn't real. Please.

Despite the fact that The Mandalorian is a boring piece of shit and Gina Carano's performance therein is among the worst within a series full of bad actors, this illegal act of wrongful termination and political discrimination in the state of California soured me forever on Disney. I immediately canceled my Plus subscription. I never intend to give money to the Mouse again, so long as I live. These companies cannot keep getting away with this.

Enter Shapiro

Thus despite not caring about Carano per se I was interested when I heard that The Daily Wire had un-canceled her and given her a star vehicle called Terror on the Prairie, a Western about a tough-as-nails frontierswoman fighting off a gang of bandits, as a piece of premium content for their video streaming service. "Witness her return," they said.

"Anything to stick it to Disney," I replied, and the more filmmaking decentralizes from Hollywood the better. So I spent five hours and $14 figuring out how to get The Daily Wire+ working on my TV, then sat down to give the film a try.

My concerns going into Terror on the Prairie were twofold:

1. The Daily Wire is an explicitly conservative political entity. I have no strong feelings for or against Ben Shapiro, but it's undeniable that a film like this is being made with the intention of being anti-woke. Un-woke is desirous; anti-woke carries with it the dangers of being too reactionary, especially in a period piece like this. I wasn't sure if I could trust The Daily Wire to make a film that was more than a soapbox--particularly given the circumstances of Carano's cancelation.

2. Gina Carano is an MMA fighter. Her acting was dreadful in The Mandalorian. Getting a compelling performance out of her was going to take considerable directorial talent.

My first fear was unfounded. Terror doesn't feel especially reactionary or political. It feels like a movie, like Hollywood used to make back when they still appreciated money.

My second fear was, alas, spot-on. Indeed I had underestimated the extent of the problem. Not only is Carano's performance as Hattie McAlister utterly inadequate for what her role demands, but the acting in general is poor. Her husband Jeb, played by UFC champion Donald Cerrone, is similarly wooden. Their son is even worse.

One wonders if it might be best to hire professional actors, rather than kickboxers, to lead dramatic films.

Yet worse than the acting is the writing. What I had not anticipated was for the quality of the screenplay to be so poor. Despite being free from the corrupt perversions of the studio system, The Daily Wire was unable to produce a film with a plot of any higher quality than might be found in Screenwriting 301 class at the University of Arizona.

You can take it from me right now that I don't recommend this film, so presume that anything in the plot that follows is fair game for discussion and analysis.

Disaster on the Prairie

In Terror on the Prairie, a band of savage ex-Confederates besiege a house along the frontier. They trap inside the McAlister family while the husband is away: the wife Hattie, her nine-year-old son, and her infant daughter. (Yes, this film about an unlikely heroine defending her home from outlaws does, in fact, star a family named the McAllisters.) This siege lasts more or less the whole movie, until Hattie decides to leave, at which point she does so effortlessly. There's a lot of shooting back and forth--often at close range--but no one is capable of making any hits, except for when the plot demands them to.

It doesn't matter anyway, because gunshot wounds are just makeup (until they aren't). One unlucky Reb has his bicep blown away Gaige Grosskreutz-style with 12-gauge but after a cauterizing he's right back to normal, good as new. A fellow with his eye gouged out is similarly undeterred by the severity of his injuries right up until the moment he's disemboweled.

Despite Hattie's propensity for brandishing weapons at strangers in ways that will inevitably lead to her family being slaughtered--the inciting incident--she has a heavy trigger finger. Personally, were I a mother defending my children from bloodthirsty killers, and had I their evil ringleader five feet in front of me, unarmed, clearly in the sights of my shotgun, I would follow Korben Dallas' advice from The Fifth Element and consider killing the leader to disperse the rest.

Instead what Hattie does, as she realizes that she's being tricked and that outlaws are flanking around the back door, coming to kidnap her children and rape her to death, is let the evil ringleader go for no reason. This happens ten or fifteen more times before the end of the movie.

Like in any bad screenplay the characters behave as pawns in a larger plot, with little consideration given to the nuances of the scenes at hand. Nothing Hattie does in the ninety-minute siege of her frontier home makes any sense. During one stand-still she takes takes the time to exposit her husband's past to their son; they do this while standing up, making coffee, and neither seem remotely traumatized or concerned about the unbelievably horrific situation they find themselves in. Although the moment-to-moment action feels more visceral and more plausible than what's on display in a film like The Northman, like perhaps the choreographers put in a bit more effort than none at all, the actions of the characters are no more truthful.

As the story progresses we learn that the Reb leader known only as the Captain (Nick Searcy) has come in search of Hattie's husband. He's seeking revenge for a deed done back during the War Between the States. It's fortunate that Hattie didn't shoot him while he explained this to her, like any sensible person would have, because otherwise we never would have known. Similarly it's fortunate that he regularly explains his tragic past to his men between exchanges of gunfire with the McAlisters, even though they would all know what he's telling them already.

In the business, we call that "exposition." Terror on the Prairie has a lot of it.

Searcy gives the film's only standout performance. The Captain is a fire-and-brimstone outlaw who outsources the worst of his evil deeds to his men, who quotes the Holy Book right before he kills you. I can hardly think of a more trite cliche for a Western villain. This would be more forgivable were it not for the unfortunate fact that any real actor alongside Carano and Cerrone serves only to remind us that Carano and Cerrone are not actors at all. That he is so good in the role reminds us how bad our leads are.

I anticipated the siege to last half the second act and no longer before the film's scope broadened, but it persists until the beginning of the third. This single location lends a sense to the plot that nothing in particular is happening and we, much like Hattie, are simply waiting for something to walk by and end our suffering.

That 'something' is clearly the return of Jeb McAlister. So he does return, after the outlaws are so incompetent that all their sentries but one fail to notice Hattie and her son preparing their escape. The boy gets away but Hattie is captured, taken to a camp in the distant wilderness, yet just as the worst is about to happen, Jeb randomly stumbles into her.

This escape from the farmstead makes next to no sense. It's contrived and confusing. As a sequence it is nothing but an excuse to remove the McAlister children from the equation of the plot, because the sequences that follow are too disturbing to include a baby and a boy and the writers thought of nothing more interesting to do with them. They are never seen again.

How it is Jeb finds this camp remains a mystery. Apparently he stumbles upon it on his way home. Mind you he has no idea what's happening, although he suspects trouble, and he hasn't been alerted to the situation by his son (which is what would have made sense).

What isn't a mystery is the identity of the Captain and these goons. Jeb knows who they are. He recognizes them. He knows they're after him. Therefore one might expect him to use his revolver to snipe them off, catching them by surprise, ambushing them and thereby saving his wife. After all it was established early on that Jeb is an EXPERT SHARPSHOOTER--might this be a good opportunity to use those skills?

Alas it seems what attracted Jeb to Hattie was that they both share an utter lack of common sense. Rather than save his wife then and there, he decides to holster his revolver and jump like Batman twelve feet into the middle of the outlaws where he will then be defenseless and get captured.

This might be the most ridiculous scene ever put to film. Once on the ground he points his revolver at the Captain, but it doesn't do much good considering he's now surrounded.

I recognize what's happening in this scene because I've been here before as a writer. This is the first draft of a college student's screenplay. He wasn't sure what needed to happen, but he had some general idea of the plot and he wrote the first thing that came to mind--even though it made no sense and, when filmed, is nonsensical. Jeb could have killed the entire Reb gang then and there. But he didn't, because if he had, the film would have ended, and we still needed to shoe-horn in a rape scene to finish off the third act.

Except no one told the screenwriter that this wasn't good enough. They took this first draft and decided to film it, even though it's complete shit.

And in the end, as the Rebs stand defeated and we've forgotten about the annoying little kids and the McAlisters rebuild their farmstead, their love for each other rekindled, we ask ourselves: what was the point? What have we learned? In what ways have the characters grown?

I couldn't tell you. Hattie started off wanting to leave the frontier, to return to St. Louis, but apparently this horrific experience with homicidal maniacs has rekindled her desire to stay in a bitterly cold, miserably desolate place like Montana. Let's make a brief list of the hardships she endures in the single week over which this film takes place:

• She's nearly raped

• She gets shot

• Her husband is partially scalped

• Her son comes within seconds of murder countless times

• She's dragooned into providing medical care to a group of Indians

• She endures a brutal winter

• Her neighbor's throat is slit before her eyes

• Her dairy cow is stolen and slaughtered

• Her baby is almost bitten by a rattlesnake

• She stabs someone's eye out

• She disembowels a person whose eye she stabbed out

• She blows some guy's arm off

• She executes a dude point-blank with a revolver

• She almost kills herself and her children via smoke inhalation during a harebrained attempt to send smoke signals

• She finds out that her husband killed a girl and never told her

• Her house is burned down

With this final bullet point she has the perfect justification for leaving and never returning. Instead she decides Montana is her home after all!

Yet I'm not sure why anyone would stay after the events depicted in this film. Even a hardened veteran would be so traumatized by the silhouettes of those mountains and the shapes of the 'prairies' that he'd feel compelled to leave and never return. Moreover, presumably, they're now rich off the bounties on the Captain and his gang, so why not move someplace nice for a change? You know, like she's been talking about doing all film?

The screenwriter forgot to include the character development. There is no reason for Hattie to stay. No one would stay. Her arc is utterly disconnected from the plot. Nothing that would make anyone ever want to stay happens. Nothing occurs in the story that assures her this is the place she needs to be; just the opposite, in fact, time and time and time again.

But the story needed a different outcome, so she stays.

Bust for Daily Wire

Terror on the Prairie is the worst movie I've seen in quite some time. Were I a scoring man, I'd give it somewhere around three stars out of ten. Competent filmmaking is on display, particularly in special effects, but as I've said many times elsewhere on this blog it's storytelling that's the lifeblood of good cinema. Bad acting, nonsensical sequencing to enforce illogical plot outcomes, poorly done character arcs, ineptly handled exposition, cliched antagonists--well, let's say there's a reason why I disclaimed all spoilers. I do not recommend this film to anyone, not even Western lovers like me.

Robert Eggers became the darling of independent cinema with the 2015 release of The VVitch. I saw The VVitch in theaters with my father due to copious recommendation from all corners of the internet and found it approximately as instructive as the average high school production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. My opinion was that Eggers rather spoiled the thematic purpose of Miller's seminal work by plagiarizing most of the dialogue and the entire story, while also presenting a world where witches and magic were real.

It rather changes the calculus of false accusations of witchcraft when witchcraft, in fact, exists, don't you think?

The VVitch is a beautiful movie, but like so many arthouse films it has serious storytelling deficiencies. Its attempts to recreate archaic dialogue are sophomoric and ineffective; the story is meandering and non-existent; the thematic purpose is hilariously inept; and the viewer will mostly be bored. He learns nothing from it. He feels nothing. It exists as little more than an exercise is visual scintillation, and therefore has more in common with pornography than William Shakespeare.

I've avoided Eggers ever since. I know his type. They make movies that Jay Bauman likes, but they can't write screenplays to save their lives. When I want to jerk off I'll go to PornHub; I don't need Eggers' help, thank you.

So I Saw The Northman

But then Hollywood goes and does something insane: they give Robert Eggers $90,000,000 to make a film starring Alexander Skarsgard, based on the original legend of Hamlet, about an exiled Viking prince seeking his revenge.

A movie like this is guaranteed to flop. There was no chance it made its money back. I cannot believe it was made. So I felt like I had to see it, even though I knew I wouldn't like it, because I knew Eggers would fuck it up.

How bad is it?

A common defense of films from pretentious pricks like Eggers will be about how, "actually, they're just much smarter than you, and you don't get it." If someone says this to you, you should make fun of them. This, and all other combinations of similar kinds of thinking, form no kind of defense for the substance of a film. Indeed they are a deflection: they presume guilt for the viewer, rather than the filmmaker.

Not something we do for most movies, yet a common procedure in the A24 realm.

Let me say now that The Northman is stupid. It's an enormously stupid movie. It borders on braindead. The screenplay is hooked up to life support and Nurse Eggers is deploying endless visual smokescreens in the hope that you don't notice the beeping of the heart monitor. I'll go into further detail presently, but allow me to say now that the distractions almost work.

The Northman is terminally stupid. But it's also beautiful. It's atmospheric. It's straightforward. It isn't confusing. The performances are good. It also isn't boring, which is more than I can say of The VVitch.

The Northman

In this historical epic, Alexander Skarsgard plays the exiled prince of a Viking kingdom forced to grow up as a furry in the wilds of Eastern Europe after his uncle killed his father and usurped his inheritance. His name is Amleth, and he is sworn to vengeance.

Sound familiar yet?

It turns out once little Amleth has grown, however, that this uncle wasn't able to hold onto his usurped crown. He's also been exiled, all the way to Iceland. In discovering this, Amleth sells himself to slavers along the Dnieper, ultimately finding himself as one of many slaves on his uncle's Icelandic estate.

Those of us with a knowledge of European geography will have raised an eyebrow at this point. It is true that the Vikings brought many slaves with them to Iceland, but most were Irish. You can understand why, given that Ireland and Iceland are neighbors. What seems much less likely is that anyone would ever bother transporting a galley full of slaves from Eastern Europe to Iceland.

Huh? There was no particular story reason for them to go to Iceland, by the way. They simply did it in the normal course of business.

I would bet money that this never happened in real life. Eggers could have ameliorated all this by simply saying that Amleth had been exiled to Ireland instead of Rus. The story would make much more sense. But he didn't. Why not? I would postulate it's because he didn't care. Story is beneath his consideration. Historicity is not much worth it, either.

On this journey Amleth meets his future love interest, a Slavic woman who is apparently a witch. Presently after landing he is assaulted by psychedelic visions of dubious supernaturality, one of which leads him to an ancient Viking burial mound, whereupon he finds Draugr, the magical sword with which he slays his future enemies.

I quite like the psychedelic aspect of this film. I've read often that Viking berserkers--and Amleth is one--took psychedelics before wading into battle, and I find it interesting that we're never quite sure whether or not the magic is real or imaginary from his point of view. He fights the undead king holding Draugr in his attempt to claim it, before we realize it's all a hallucination--most likely. It's a bit of a cliche, but it's a fun scene.

But then it turns out that Draugr is literally a magical sword which can only be drawn at night. The magic must therefore be real. This isn't psychedelics playing tricks on the mind; this is actual supernatural intervention.

I'm fine with that, though. As Amleth stalks his uncle's estate with the nightblade, waiting for the rooster to signal the time where his sword can no longer be used, The Northman feels more like a ninja film than one about Vikings. But it's an interesting concept. There's something to work with there, and the film's second act is its strongest showing.

But the story is so weak. The screenwriters were on vacation. For example, the crypt where Draugr is found? Oh, well, Amleth stumbles into it. It was just right there! How convenient! How does our hero get his magical sword? He just finds it laying around on the ground, fifteen inches from his evil uncle!

Then he goes on his purges through his uncle's estate. He strikes at night, killing guards, mutilating their bodies, displaying them for all to see. "He is a spirit," one says. "How does he do it so quickly? How does he do it without being seen?"

It's an interesting question. The estate is full of people. There are guards everywhere. Dogs on watch. Amleth might have a magical sword, but he's still just one man. How exactly DOES he do it without being seen? How did he mutilate those people and hang up their bodies on the barn without anyone noticing? That must have taken a while. I would've loved to see how he pulled it off!

But it would've been impossible to pull off. The scene makes no sense. There's no way Amleth could have done it. But Eggers wanted it to happen, so rather than grappling with this fact--he just did it off screen. How to have the characters do something undoable?

Cut around it! Storytelling!

Or how about when Amleth and his girlfriend meet up after the assassination of his uncle's oldest son? When it's clear that there will be hell to pay, that the slaves will be killed for this, that playing nice is over? The two of them have a chance to escape. They're in the clear. They can both leave. It's obvious what's going to happen next.

"No!" Amleth says. "You must stay here!"

"Okay!" says Girlfriend. "I agree. I'll stay here to get killed, so you will have to come and save me, so you can get captured!"

"That's a good idea," replies Amleth. "Let's do that!"

So when Girlfriend is about to get killed in the obvious way that was obviously going to happen, Amleth has to come and save her, and thus Amleth is captured; and so we see the characters behaving in ways that aren't only stupid, but that literally make no sense. Amleth and Girlfriend were IN THE CLEAR. They had DONE IT. They were FREE. They WANTED TO ESCAPE TOGETHER; they had NO REASON TO STAY.

WHY DID SHE STAY BEHIND?

Oh, I know. Because Amleth had to get captured, because that's the plot, and Eggers doesn't care about storytelling.

It's all right, though, because Amleth's uncle decides to leave his magical sword in the same room with him, so once he escapes with Girlfriend's help it's no harm, no foul. The two of them then conveniently encounter a friendly ship that happened to be waiting off the shore for them. Completely coincidental, but thank Odin he was there!

Dear Christ.

This is the whole movie

What I can say at least in The Northman's favor is that the main revenge thrust of the plot is easy to follow. But the narrative value of the story is low. The endless coincidences and the constant disregard for common sense among all characters represents a complete disinterest on the part of the writers in not just storytelling, but also humanity in general. There is no humanity in this movie.

I would be able to forgive everything were the fight scenes good. But they aren't. Every time the sword comes out, the foemen let themselves die. They refuse to use the pointy end of their weapons, or they conspicuously toss aside their shields so they might be stabbed. The duel at the end isn't bad but it's the exception to the rule. The siege at the beginning in particular is absolutely dreadful: a naked berserker takes on five guys in armor, with shields. Not because he savagely overcomes their defenses, not because he's skillful, not because he's brave, but really just because they let themselves be killed (oh, and their armor is costume that does nothing).

The combat scenes are well-shot. The framing looks good. But the choreography? It's bad.

Then we come to the characters. They could be worse, I suppose--the acting is okay, but the dialogue isn't. Every line is faux-Medieval, attempting to feel significant and mythological but mostly coming off like a fraud. Writing good dialogue that feels historical is always a challenge, but much like The VVitch, this attempt feels forced and unnatural, and quite often is so absurdly melodramatic that it becomes comedic.

And what is there to root for in character? In the historical tale of Amleth, the lead is a trickster: he overcomes his foes with wit. He embodies Loki, not Odin. Of course Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet is the wittiest character in all literature. But who is Amleth as played by Alexander Skarsgard? He's an angry, shirtless man who's spent decades in a fursuit, ravaging villages up and down the Dneipr. He has no other interesting qualities and no likable characteristics. He's just boring.

A Viking berserker doesn't need to be boring, you know. He could have a personality. He could make jokes and have wit, like Hamlet does. The opportunity was right in front of them. Instead he grumbles and yells and howls and wears his fursuit, and he seeks his vengeance like a good like Norseman, and there's nothing else there.

But Eggers doesn't care about character. Character is for soap operas. What matters is framing. What matters is the light. That's what the audiences really need! Only idiots care about people! What are we, in the theatre? Don't make me laugh.

That's the End

Like The VVitch, The Northman offers a plentitude of visual stimulus. Every frame is a photograph. And much like The VVitch, The Northman offers little else. No story, no catharsis, no lesson, no history, no emotion, and certainly no humanity. As the frames flicker past his eyes the viewer feels like he's in a gallery of paintings; amazed, even, by the artistry, but mostly just disinterested, because there's nothing but artistry on display--and one even wonders if the painter knew first hand the subjects he was trying to depict.

When it comes to Eggers, I doubt he did.

Apparently my Paramount+ subscription, which cost me $0.99, had two days left before expiration this coming Saturday. I made up my mind after last week's boring assfest that I wasn't going to renew for the outrageous price of $14.99 when I could instead spend that money on a fund toward my next colonoscopy. But since Episode 5 of Halo was allegedly the one in which the super cool new ultra-Halo-like battle scene that was the best bit of action Halo action ever since "Landfall" in 2007 would be featured, I decided to give the show one last try.

It should be noted that it's no surprise the series' second action scene takes place on the fifth episode, right as the time for resubscription arrives. Not because the writers need to create a dramatic story, not because they're adhering to strict plot structure, but because they wanted to con you out of your subscription money and knew well that action was the only thing anyone cared about in a Halo series.

What a Boring Turd

I stepped in puppy fecal matter this morning with my bare feet and it was still more enjoyable than watching this episode. This week, Kwan is handcuffed to a motorcycle and does random boring shit. John Halo (otherwise known as Master Cheeks, but definitely not Master Chief), explores his past that no one cares about. I explored my FireTV's fastforward function and skipped most of everything leading up to the action sequence, and I was still so bored that I wanted to be blown to pieces by a needler.

This episode is only ~35 minutes long. The writers couldn't even stretch it out to an hour. And it was still so boring I couldn't finish it; I turned it off before the end.

So How About That Fight Sequence?

The real reason I felt compelled to make this post, though, is because I'm annoyed at how completely, totally, utterly terrible the action in this series is.

In the first episode, I complained that the fight sequence was lazily done. Nothing made sense. Where was the air support? Why were there only Elites? Where were the other marines? Why did the Covenant barge in through the front door? Why do weapons wielded by Spartans kill Elites instantly while the exact same weapons wielded by insurrections do nothing at all?

The filmmaking is lazy. All the work has been done in post. It feels like the crew showed up, got a bunch of coverage, then an editor assembled something that more or less makes sense in post. I'm not even convinced this--and now the next fight sequence--were written into a teleplay. They do not feel like they were. They come off as completely improvised.

This second 'battle' is even worse.

Yes, so now we have Grunts and Jackals and even a Brute, plus our first Banshees. Unfortunately this all happens just like the first episode.

I'm glad there are ships in the atmosphere now and planes (or Banshees) in the sky.

That's where my praise ends.

Just like last time, this battle, in this grand sci-fi setting, takes place in...a quarry? Everything is conveniently contained within this...quarry. No one puts Jackal snipers along the ridge of the quarry; that would be out-of-bounds.

Cortana tells us, "Slipspace rupture, near Io!" (or something). Then literally one quarter of a second later, Banshees are everywhere. These Banshees apparently scrambled instantaneously. Then a Corvette, or something that looks like a Corvette, appears in the sky. There's no warp effect, it just appears like magic, like it popped in due to an error in asset loading. It immediately drops pods (see above) full of Grunts and Jackals, and a big dumb battle, all conveniently within the same quarry, takes place.

No one takes any cover. No one does anything interesting. The two sides shoot at each other. A Jackal with an energy sword kills some guys, which is sort of cool.

Note that this is our first time in this series EVER seeing Grunts or Jackals. EVER. We've never had any hint of their existences until now. So how are they introduced?

They aren't. They drop in, the fighting starts. There is no introduction. No reveal of Grunts. No exciting moment where the smoke clears and we see the true might of the Covenant. These other aliens are thrown at us with no sense of cinematic excitement, in the blandest way possible. No thought or effort was put into this. Someone wrote in a screenplay:

EXT. QUARRY

The TRUTH AND RECONCILLIATION warps into the atmosphere. It drops pods. The pods land. GRUNTS and JACKALS come out. They fight the MARINES.

CUT TO:

This problem, and the fundamental problem of this sequence, is that there is no narrative. From whose Point of View are we experiencing the action? In whose perspective are we grounded?

The answer is literally no one. The camera flies around and cuts with abandon. We go back and forth seemingly at random. We see things from Halsey's PoV, then Dr. Miranda's, then Captain Keyes, then Chief, then Kai, then random Marines, then Grunts, then back to Marines, then over to John Halo, then to Halsey again...

We can, if the writers so choose, swap between the perspectives of the various characters within a given action sequence. Our grounding PoV doesn't even need to be a person; it can be a place. But we cannot change perspective within the course of a single scene. We need to finish with John Halo, then go to Halsey; finish with Halsey, then go to Keyes; etc. Instead, the cutting has no sense at all. There is nothing concrete about the world we're placed in. It's information thrown at us without being decoded. It's just shit. Random bullshit happens with no explanation. When we finally dig into a fight between Tartarus and John Halo, Tartarus wins because he has to, then the UNSC ship explodes because it has to, and we never have any real understanding of why things are happening the way they are.

Fight sequences are complicated. We need relatable goals and directed action. The best they come up with here is...defend the thing, which I guess we care about because it's a thing, and help Kai, who's terminally retarded.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl has been on my mind as I watch the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard trial. I want you to compare what we saw this week with this action sequence, where The Interceptor and The Black Pearl come broadside-to-broadside. In this sequence, we receive establishing shots of the broadside action. Then we cut to individual characters that we know and care about and watch their reactions to that fight as a whole. We see both sides--but one at a time. We know what each side wants. We know everyone's objectives. The rhythm is up and down: the music roars one second, falls the next.

But the biggest difference between these two sequences is that in Pirates we know what we're fighting over. We know the play area: the two ships. It makes perfect sense. It's diegetically justified. In Halo, what even is happening? No one takes cover. I don't know where people are relative to each other. I don't know why the sides are where they are. When we cut to a different perspective, I don't know why, and I don't know what this person is trying to accomplish, and I don't know where we are.

I understand that Orlando Bloom is going into the hold of The Interceptor looking for the medallion which Elizabeth lost. We only see seconds of his searching, but I know what he wants. What the fuck does Halsey want in this action scene in Episode 5? What's Keyes doing? It's just, at best, fighting, because bad guys bad, good guys good.

It isn't fair to compare these two scenes. One is the best adventure movie ever made; the other is diarrhea. The score alone changes everything. But the point I want to make is that the real reason Halo's action sucks is a problem of screenwriting. These action scenes were not written. Just like the first episode--more so, in fact--this entire sequence watches not like a battle from a film, but like a film crew went out to a quarry, got some shots, then the post team figured it all out. There is no writing here. I'd be fascinated to read the teleplay for this episode, because it might not even be thirty pages long.

So Anyway

I hate Halo. I turned it off when they sent town the blonde lesbian with the alien kink to pretend to be a refugee, even though she looked perfectly manicured. This is just too stupid to endure. I won't turn it back on. For real this time.

But I might go watch all the Pirates movies. Even the really bad ones.

Fans of Halo: Combat Evolved will be familiar with the song off the OST called "A Walk in the Woods." It is an ironic title, considering the pace of the game's action. "A Walk in the Woods" is a great song and a personal favorite--one of CE's distinctive synthetic tracks: a soothing, rhythmic piece, perfect for blasting aliens in the 26th Century throughout Halo's surreal, majestic, captivating environments. Not actually for walking around in the woods. The walk is a metaphor.

With Episode 3 ("Homecoming") of Halo on Paramount+, it is now clear that the showrunners took the walk in the woods all to literally for their new sci-fi TV series.

In "Homecoming," the Master Chief goes for a walk in the woods. He takes off his helmet and, like a bored cosplayer between takes on a YouTube fan video, wanders about the trees, until he happens upon a spade. He then uses this spade to dig a hole. Then he stumbles around a ruined house for an hour. Meanwhile Kwan and Bokeem Woodbine work hard to rescue Dune rejects from fascist oppression and the Spartans whose names sound like elves from an R.A. Salvatore novel chill out in a laboratory.

There are no aliens. There is no sci-fi. There is no action, until the very end of Kwan's section, which was so boring that I didn't bother looking up from my phone.

I'm Done

At this point I've voiced every criticism there is to make about Halo. It's lazy, poorly written, and bears nothing in relation with its source material except names and a few elements of production design. But this episode is notable as the first which has bored me to tears. Kwan's plotline has no driving impulse: why do we care about Madrigal? Who are her relationships? Why haven't we seen any of these people for three episodes if they're so important to her and the plot? How does this relate to the Covenant? By the way, where are the Covenant? And aren't all her friends and family dead? Why is she so freaked out about this dump anyway?

Evil villain Vinsher somehow locates Kwan and Sorren instantly after they arrive--he tells us, thankfully, via V.O.--and the only action sequence since the first few minutes of the entire series take place. By that I mean a few dudes fire guns at a few other dudes for a few seconds, then everyone drives away on motorcycles.

Meanwhile, back at Reach or something, we're told that, "You Spartans have spent more time with the Covenant than anyone else," by Miranda Keyes. Incidentally this is true, because we haven't seen anyone fight the Covenant at all except the Chief in that opening sequence. Still this seems an interesting plot point, considering the fact that Silver Team doesn't actually do anything but hang around and give each other handies in the bathroom. Are they REALLY the ones who've fought the Covenant more than anyone else? If so, why aren't we being showed that fighting, and why are they doing nothing but lounging around in the actual TV show

This is a fundamental problem with the series that's starting to drive me toward the asylum. Nothing is shown: everything is told. When something does happen it generally makes no sense and is presented in a rushed or confusing way, or takes the form of maximized laziness (re: Master Chief literally digs for buried treasure in the woods with a spade. That actually happens.)

As ever nothing makes any sense. One of the Three Elves removes her mood regulation pellet, taking Master Chief's lead, and thus becomes a Real Girl. She then uses her menstrual blood to dye her hair. In general I think this character's transition between ultra elite Spartan and Real Girl was done better than with the Master Chief, because at least here we see a clear difference in behavior between pre and post- pellet. but the whole thing is so stupid. It kind of made sense that maybe Master Chief would be able to remove this thing with Cortana's help, but Riz--excuse me while I barf--can take hers out, too? Just like that? It's not even hard? The UNSC needs to invest in some more firmware security for their hyper-valuable killing machines. .

There could have been something cool and creative for de-neutering the Spartans. It could've been a thing in the plot. In my own sci-fi setting, a similar device (that was actually cybernetic and not just a random ass 'pellet') was implanted into the testicles of the super soldiers to suppress their libidos and regulate hormones. Try taking that out with a combat knife! But instead the writers go for the laziest, most easily resolved, boringest, least imaginative, worst, stupidest thing they can think of.

Most likely due to the boring-ass subject matter this episode exemplifies the series' problem with dull cinematography and sterile lighting. The MJOLNIR suits look fake and plastic when contrasted not against a fantastic world of spaceships and aliens, but...a forest, and some guy's house, and he's digging a hole with a spade.

I Said It

I took two pages of notes in Word this week with the intent to analyze this episode seriously, but by the end I was so bored that I could find no appetite for the work. There's nothing interesting here. Halo is a shitty, cheap, lazy scam. The small glimmers of care I saw in the earlier episodes--the glimmers of love for the franchise--were almost entirely absent here, and in their place was only Kwan.

This is where I jump off the gondola.

Halo Episode 3 ("Emergence") begins on a 'waste reclamation planet.' Amidst a sea of metal and plastic, two young child slaves are harangued by human guards for their inadequate performances. They slack off and read a book; for this crime, the punishment is death.

But wait. Just then, a phantom dropship swoops down from the sky! Two Elites lower down a gravlift. The guards run! Everyone flees! The Elites saunter casually toward the one surviving child slave, a girl. She is their only target.

Meanwhile, nothing happens. No gunfire or screams are heard. No fighting takes place. The Elites do nothing at all except walk, like invulnerable Saurons, straight toward their objective, led their by a magic stick.

The little girl stares back at them. This is a flashback, we realize. This girl is human-alien princess.

CUT TO: TITLE SCREEN

Was Anyone Even Trying?

This opening sequence exemplifies this show's three worst qualities.

#1: I've never seen a lazier sequence in my life

The aliens show up. Some people are afraid for a few seconds, then no one cares. Aren't these guards defending their facility? Aren't there planetary defenses? Doesn't someone, somewhere have a gun? Aren't the Elites interested in blowing some people up to clear a path? There isn't even a soundscape for this environment; it's completely stale. This is like a video game where all the enemies around the player freeze during a cutscene.

#2: Bad Science Fiction is an understatement

An entire planet dedicated to recycling...plastic. One might imagine that any spacefaring civilization with sophisticated enough technology to instantly and effortlessly traverse the stars whenever they want at no apparent cost, as they do freely in Halo, would also have the technology to automate recycling. They produce so much energy that one wonders why they bother with recycling at all: space isn't like Earth, we don't need to worry about pollution. Just dump that shit like they do in Star Wars.

This whole concept involved no thought whatsoever. It makes no sense in any science fiction context.

#3: Terrible shitty acting

We've finally found an actor more wooden than Kwan: kid version of human-alien princess. Dear lord.

Enter Cortana

We finally meet Cortana in this episode. Halsey kills her clone, scanning her brain into a computer, causing human-sized Cortana--a sort-of hologram, played sort-of by Jen Taylor--to materialize. The entire sequence is a molestation of The Fall of Reach, but it is recognizable in part. I won't go through and itemize a list of the ways in which this is different from the books and games: the bottom line is that Cortana, in both purpose and presentation, bears no relationship whatsoever to the character from Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, and the departures are all for the worse.

But to be honest, that doesn't bother me that much. (So we're clear: it does still bother me, just not as much as hornets in my underwear or tarantulas in my mouth.) For the first time in the show I feel like the writers are at least going for something. I feel like Cortana and Chief are working toward some sort of objective in the narrative.

This is why I'm unhappily reporting that I liked "Emergence" more than either of the previous two episodes, even though I still think it's terrible. In fact I think every constituent component of Halo is bad; I can't name any element that I like intellectually, in the abstract, on paper. But I can't bring myself to hate it like I did the first episode.

There are a few things about Cortana in particular that bothered me a lot, though. I can't help but escape the impression that the writers set out to do research on the character, only instead of playing the games, they installed Windows 10 and used that as their baseline.

Notice first the awful redesign. She looked more blue to me in the episode tonight and I didn't notice her heterochromatic eyes, but it hardly matters; the choice to depart from Cortana's classic look is mystifying and infuriating. Cortana's sleek data silhouette is iconic. It's one of those things that can't be changed.

Not only does she look completely different, she's human sized. She walks around at Master Chief height--Halo 4 style.

These departures are relatively minor relative to the character's personality, but they stick out more due to Jen Taylor's appearance in the role. Taylor is the only reprising actor from the games. So when I hear Jen Taylor's voice issue out of the mouth of whoever this character is, it's seriously jarring.

The words she says are even more jarring. As I said, this Cortana is nothing like the character from the games--and quite a lot like the Windows 10 virtual assistant. It sounds identical to Siri or Alexa too: stilted, dignified, technical, fairly typical AI. Nothing sarcastic or witty. No Cortanacisms. No jokes. She doesn't sound like Cortana.

I would like to remind you that the first thing Cortana says to Chief in Combat Evolved is a joke. Because she's funny. She makes lots of jokes.

Maybe she's just learning or whatever. Maybe she'll flesh out over time. I don't know. It was bizarre to me that she was so completely developed right after being scanned from Halsey's clone's brain; no period needed to learn English, no time required to master mathematics--not even a few seconds to demonstrate her IQ. She just knew everything right away! But it's not the same brain as the clone's, because her accent and personality are completely different...

With all said and done, I'm still curious where they go with this, and not just morbidly. There might be something decent in here. I really like Jen Taylor, so that helps. That doesn't mean it's good. But I do want to keep watching. Sort of.

RoboChief

As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the writers are clearly--for some reason--going for a RoboCop arc with the Master Chief. In this episode he uses a knife to cut out a 'pellet' in his back which turns him into a Real Boy. He then wanders the streets of Reach, taking in his humanity for the first time.

This isn't far-off from the arc I'd imagined for the protagonist of a sci-fi novel I outlined last year. It's simple, it's RoboCop, but it could work. You could do this with the Master Chief, if you really wanted to. But it doesn't work here at all. For one, the notion that the Master Chief's humanity was somehow subdued because of this magical pellet in his back was never established. Bokeem Woodbine told us about it, yeah, but we never saw it. Chief seemed perfectly human to me. He saved Kwan, even though she's fucking annoying as shit. He's hyper-compassionate. We never saw him savagely murder innocents; we never saw him ignore art and music in favor of repairing a gun; we never saw him work hard when play was an option, or stay focused even when no one was watching.

So when he meanders around Reach, which definitely looks just like a planet involved in an existential war for humanity's existence as people hang out and play music and run around in parks and eat at French restaurants, there's no growth. We see Chief--but what's different? What's changed? He says this is like the 'first time' but--why?

They could have done a lot with that sequence. Instead, they did the laziest thing possible, and then it's over. Could there be a more perfect summary of the show?

Halo Stuff

I recognize almost nothing from the games in Halo. I don't see the characters. This isn't the conflict I know. The problems we're facing in the plot aren't Halo's problems. But this third episode had a lot more of Halo's 'stuff' than the previous two, perhaps even combined. This at least makes the series feel more like a big piece of shit, less like a scam. That's a step in the right direction.

Here are the few I noticed:

+ Covenant Corvettes

+ Stalwart frigates

+ Droppods from Combat Evolved

+ Hunter worms

+ Cortana, sort of

+ Multiple spaceships!!

Finally we're seeing spaceships, after three hours in this setting. I don't care if the encounter between the frigate and the Corvette makes no sense whatsoever and leads to nothing: at least we're finally seeing ships in space. It almost felt like Halo, even if it was marred in a stupid plot about some dumb human-alien princess girl.

This is a big improvement over the pilot especially.

Kwan is the Worst Character Ever

Why is this character in the show? Whose idea was it to put a teenage girl in Halo? Does anyone like her? What's wrong with the writers? Were they dropped on their heads as children?

If it wasn't for Kwan, who is nothing but a time-filler and a waste of space, I wouldn't even mind Halo that much. It would annoy me for all the reasons cited above and it would still be mediocre sci-fi, but it would be watchably entertaining. But Kwan ruins the show. She's so fucking boring. Her sections annihilate the pacing. There's nothing to her. She doesn't fit into the plot. She has nothing to do with the story.

Please Jesus, someone kill her already.

So There You Have It

I spent this week's episode yelling at my TV, but I have to say that I want to watch the next one now. I'm not entirely sure why. I don't like this show or think it's good, but I'm sufficiently invested that I want to see where it's going--hopefully, to the Flood, where there might be some cool special effects and/or action sequences. If it wasn't for Kwan, I would happily-unhappily watch the rest of the season, cringing whenever Master Chief said anything, rolling my eyes at how lazy everything is, but not especially bored.

With Kwan--we'll see how it goes.

In my review of last week's pilot, I said that Halo, "could probably be worse, [but is] still bad." Having now watched the second episode, I now know how the series "could be" worse--it "could be" boring in addition to being bad, which would make it truly unwatchable. That's what I was getting at earlier, I think, although I didn't have the words at the time. The pilot was bad, very bad, but it wasn't especially boring.

Halo Season 1, Episode 2 ("Unbounded") is 50 minutes of filler. Some exposition is dumped. Some characters are introduced. Nothing else happens that couldn't have happened at the end of the previous episode: Master Chief turns himself in to the UNSC, having come to this decision because of some internal process that involves no externalized conflict. There's no action. We're told multiple times of some existential war raging between humanity and the Covenant, but we never see any evidence of this; in fact humanity seems to be doing just fine. We do, finally, see our first spaceship, but only one. The guy from Season 2 of Fargo is there and apparently a Spartan--he runs a rip-off of Omega from Mass Effect 2. That's more or less it.

Despite the fact that "Unbounded" is all filler, though, I still didn't find it especially dull. I longed for it to be over so I could get back to playing Weird West, but as far as hours of purgation go, I've had far worse.

That's the best praise I have to offer.

What else is there to say? I have nothing to add. I have my usual list of complaints: Chief's Condor is apparently slipspace capable; there's FTL communication; the Spartans are written completely wrong; the cast is devoid of any interesting characterization whatsoever. What is there to Chief? What about Kwan? How would you describe them? What are their traits? Confused? Lost? I don't know; I don't know what they want. None of the characters are engaging or compel me to keep watching. None of the actors have any charisma.

The world feels weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. The cinematography is serviceable for a television ad, but carries with it no style or flash. Visuals of Reach and High Charity lack their personality and feeling of life from the actual Halo franchise and feel, ironically, more like empty, vapid video game open worlds than they do in any of the games. The only thing that stands out to me is that they used the Halo: Combat Evolved door opening sound, but it was for a human door, so what was even the point? It didn't even make sense in context, it was just a sound someone sneaked in. The use of the legendary score from the games is pitiful--honestly it's amazing they've done such a bad job with the music so far.

The writing is dreadful. Characters aside, they've revealed, in Episode 2, that the Halo rings are a thing and that they're super doomsday weapons. You know, the big twist from the midpoint of the first game? I guess the Flood will be the twist in this series, but it's basically all pointless. They've ruined the mystery of the first game. And as for Cortana, I suspect she's going to be a damsel in distress that Chief has to rescue, so she and him can bone or something. It's going to be stupid and terrible, and the only reason to keep watching is to hope they kill off all the annoying, shitty actors. Preferably in real life, but I'll settle for whatever I can get.

"You're Just Mad It's Not Like Halo"

I can't explain this line of apologia except appeal ad AstroTurfum. Throughout all corners of Halodom there have been significant numbers of supposed franchise fans who respond to criticisms of the series' lack of faithfulness to the established lore as being, somehow, stupid fanboys who are upset just because things are different.

To the absolute idiots who are peddling this Stockholm Syndrome degeneracy, I have a simple thought experiment for you: would you be watching this show if it were some random TV series on Paramount+ about a guy who escorts a Korean girl around space? Would you watch this if it were called anything other than Halo?

I wouldn't.

Yet this series isn't Halo. It isn't an adaptation of the source material. It is merely a use of the franchise name for brand recognition, with a few bones thrown in to distract morons into thinking that, at the end of the day, there might be something from the games in here after all. Thus, I conclude, Halo on Paramount+ is tantamount to a scam. In fact I will go so far as to say that it is literally a scam. It's a trick to con you out of your money. They've put a name you recognize and counted on your franchise loyalty in order to exploit you and make a buck out of you via subscription charges before you come to your senses and cancel. This marketing ploy is a con job. We didn't want this show. We wanted Halo. If you do not see how this is a scam, you are terminally stupid.

There might be a discussion to be had around adaptational license in media if this series were actually good. It isn't. It's a crock of shit and every departure is for the worse and/or completely gratuitous. But actually that doesn't matter, because the principle here is eternal: if you slap a recognizable name on a product without following through on your promise to the consumer in some meaningful way, you're trying to cheat him. You aren't selling what you're selling. I've bought a Coke but you've given me a can full of piss with a Coke label. I'm not obligated to drink it, and I'm not obligated to say, "I know it's labeled 'Coke,' but it's just doing its own thing!'" No one would disagree that mislabeling food is cheating--so why do they make apologies for the exact same trick in TV format?

JJ Abrams' Stark Trek is bad and a mockery of what Star Trek is supposed to be, but at least his movies go through the motions of being adaptations. The characters have the right names. The world looks sort of like it should. There's Star Trek stuff everywhere. The narrative is what's different. I can live with that, because at least that feels like you're getting what you paid for, sort of. It just happens to suck. But this? What even is this, if not piss in a Coke can?

So I wouldn't care even if Halo were good (again, it isn't); this idea that you should be okay with massive, pointless, transformational departures from the thing you like, which is the reason you paid money for this product, is fucking braindead. If you say this, you are supporting no one except soulless corporate executives who hate you and want nothing but your money. You are enabling your own fleecing. Stop saying this dumb shit.

Or, and this is more likely, you're actually on Paramount's payroll. I hope that's the case. I would prefer maliciousness to be the explanation, rather than sheer stupidity.

I Like Being Angry

I wasn't going to go past Episode 2 with my reviews, but if people are going to start saying good things about this show then it's my God-given duty to interject negativity into the discourse every week. So buckle up. I'm going to keep shitting on Halo until it does something interesting, introduces a character I like, or people come to their senses and call the cops on the abusive husband that is Paramount+ (AKA, start seeing through the terrible writing and go back to quality sci-fi, like Star Trek: Picard).

The Coke can is at my lips. I can smell the urine, but I'm not stopping yet.

"Halo is being turned into a movie and/or TV show" has been the refrain of my entire life. I cannot remember a time when that sentence did not lurk somewhere at the back of my mind. The knowledge that somewhere, at some point, the Master Chief would find his way onto the big screen has been like the shadow of the Xbox OG generation's basest entertainment desires. As a twenty-something male nerd I know I'm not alone in saying that Halo is very important to me as a franchise. It among all other franchises dominated the playground discussions at Hermosa Montessori Elementary. It was Halo action figures, not Star Wars, that we wanted for our birthdays. When when were old enough, it was Halo books we read. We loved Halo--and we wanted nothing more than a Halo movie.

"Landfall" was our first taste. What proved to only be a marketing video for Halo 3 we felt certain was, at the time, a pre-announcement for the forthcoming Halo film. Headlines assured us we were right. First Neil Blomkamp was involved, then Peter Jackson. "Landfall" was so awesome. We wanted to see more, so badly.

But nothing ever came of it. Silence reigned.

Half a decade later, for the release of Halo 4, the miniseries/movie "Forward Unto Dawn" came out in pieces over YouTube for free. Now this was a real Halo series. I loved "FUD" at the time, aged 14; in retrospect, it's slow, on the dull side, but decent for what it is.

But still. It wasn't really Halo. It was just a kick-ass ad campaign.

The next attempt came out along with The Master Chief Collection: it was called Halo: Nightfall. I stayed up until two in the morning watching it with my brother.

Nightfall did not give us what we wanted. Nightfall is best left forgotten.

And so for the last eight years murmurings of a true, full-scale adaptation of Halo into a movie, then a television series, have remained constant. At one point Steven Spielberg was involved. Gates only knows how many pilots have come and gone, how many millions wasted on series stuck in development hell.

All that leads to March 2022. March 2022, where finally Halo (properly italicized as a stand-alone series, rather than the franchise) is television. The Master Chief. The Covenant. War. An adaptation.

The first official trailer released on my birthday. I watched it, cautiously excited.

Every single thing looked wrong.

Later it came out that the writers--allegedly, by the showrunner's admission--"didn't look at the game." This came as no great surprise. Halo would be yet another franchise ruined by sneering Hollywood elites, who have nothing but loathing for the source material and the people who enjoy it.

So after that trailer, I told myself I wouldn't watch it. I'm done supporting shit like this. I won't give money to people who hate me anymore.

Then I watched the first episode.

Let's Get This Over With

I see three levels on which to evaluate Halo: as an adaptation of its source material; as a military sci-fi TV series; and as a piece of televisual narrative. Based on the first episode, I grade it at D-, F, and D, respectively.

The best thing I can say is that it could've been worse. I was expecting it to be worse. There were a few moments that surprised me, a few touches that suggested at least somebody involved had played the games. There were also a lot of things that pissed me off so much that I wanted to stop watching.

I'm sure the internet will be awash with disgusting nerds like me complaining about all the things that were changed from the games for no discernible reason. I'd like to touch on only a few of them that stand out to me. This isn't just to complain, although that's fun too, but more to illustrate my impression that the writers are intentionally deviating from the source material just to irritate fans.

Take, for example, the name of Master Chief's team. In the books (and Halo 5: Guardians), the Chief is in charge of Blue Team. His subordinate Spartans are Kelly, Fred, and Linda. Here, their names are Vannak, Riz, and Kai. You may notice that Kelly, Fred, and Linda are mundane names; that is intentional irony on the part of the writers, given how extraordinary the Spartans are. You may also notice that Vannak, Riz, and Kai are not real names at all, but sound like noises made by a coffee machine which has just burst into flames.

By the way, they're no longer Blue Team, but Silver Team. Why Silver instead of Blue? What do we gain from changing colors? Nothing, but if you know that's wrong, you'll be annoyed--which I can only imagine is the intention. They want you to be annoyed, because if you're the kind of person who knows these things, they don't like you. You are deplorable.

Near the end of the first action sequence, an Elite has his head blown off. I haven't seen anyone else reference this moment yet. Halo fans who wasted their youths dumping magazines of ammo into dead Elites may notice something strange: once this Elite is dead, the stump of his neck dumps gore out onto the ground.

Red gore. Human colored blood. As in, normal, not Elite blood.

Elites have bluish-purple blood. Not red. Why give Elites red blood? Either no one knew better, which seems unlikely given a few references to the games elsewhere in the script, or the showrunners intentionally wanted those of us who would know to be angry. Because they hate us, because we're bad people who like games like Halo.

One of the things I won't complain about too much, though, is the tokenization of the cast. Even as a kid, it always bothered me that everyone in the year 2552 was either Mexican, or a white dude from Southern California. Halo needed some diversity. If I were the showrunners, I would've done casting colorblind. That's fine. A realistic, live-action adaptation of this series needed Asians, Indians, and Africans; it needed not just racial diversity, but cultural and linguistic diversity. I think the series did a decent enough job of this in the pilot. Even when you're in Africa in Halo 3 you never meet anyone except Americans and Mexican-Americans--that needed to change.

What I will complain about is that they've blackwashed the main cast...and cut out the only black character, Sergeant Johnson. Is that progressivism? Put the white people in blackface and pretend the black people don't exist? What? Personally, I think keeping the white characters and cutting out the black ones is just a little bit racist!

That won't bother you, unless you like Halo. Then you know about Sergeant Johnson. You'll miss him, because he's awesome, because he kicks ass. But this series isn't for you if you've played the games. If you've played the games, this series is against you.

I don't know for certain, but Sergeant Johnson's cut is likely due to Aliens similarities. Johnson is, basically, just Apone. A real adaptation would have grappled with this fact and come to a satisfactory solution. Halo's showrunners decided not to try and cut the character altogether.

It also bothers me that while tokenizing half the cast, they've left Master Chief as some white guy (or maybe Hispanic). I don't know why, it feels so phony. Maybe Keyes will do something interesting in this series. Maybe. I doubt it, but maybe. But if you want to be actually progressive, why don't you make the lead a black guy? Why don't you do something actually controversial? At least that would make a statement. Besides, it never really mattered what Master Chief looked like. I always thought it was dumb they specified a race for him in the books and comics anyway. I'll discuss whether or not they should have revealed his face later on, but making the guy who gets turned into an alien goopmonster and dies black, and not the lead, seems like slacktivism to me.

There's plenty more to complain about. Maybe I'll get to that in subsequent episodes, if I endure past #2. For now, I want to move on to the series as it stands alone.

They're Not Even Trying

The first third of Halo's pilot takes place on the "water extraction planet" (????) Madrigal. Some aliens show up. Some kids get blown to pieces. Master Chief and Silver Team arrive, but do a shit job of saving the day, leaving only one survivor. The fight goes on for ten or fifteen minutes.

A lot of Halo fans online are praising this sequence. They say it's cheesy but fun enough, but with a handful of nice touches--like these first-person sequences.

The visual effects artists clearly knew the games. The weapons look right. Sound effects from the games are used. We hear the right active camo noise. The Elites are wrong, and I'm not a fan of the new Spartan designs, but there is a certain feeling of Halo here.

But this whole sequence has a big problem: it's fucking terrible and makes no sense.

The Elites land outside town. They then walk to town, knock down the gate, and storm inside...on foot. Master Chief & Friends show up, drop down from a pelican dropship, and fight the Elites on the ground. Nowhere, at any point in this sequence, do we see:

1. Any air support;

2. Any ships in atmosphere;

3. Any artillery;

4. Any reinforcements;

5. Any vehicles;

6. Any non-Elite Covenant infantry (Grunts, Jackals, etc.).

This is a firefight between two hyper-advanced space navies...and we never see a single plane, let alone a ship, in the air. In fact there are no ships ANYWHERE in this series. None. They're all missing. When anyone wants to travel across the galaxy, they hop into dropships and fly there...just like that. No Forward Unto Dawn, no Pillar of Autumn, no Truth and Reconciliation. We do see High Charity, but there are no Covenant Corvettes anywhere around it. Later on, when we visit Reach, there isn't any kind of orbital defense network: the atmosphere is completely barren. There are no flying cars or ships in the atmosphere. Everything is empty. Compare this even to the much cheaper "Forward Unto Dawn," released FOR FREE in 2012, or ANY SINGLE CUTSCENE FROM ANY OF THE GAMES, and you can see how fake and phony it all looks.

This problem I'm highlighting, which is a big fucking problem for a supposedly science fiction series, is exemplified in this opening action sequence. It just feels lazy. It reminds me of the Star Wars Prequels: the showrunners wrote, "Master Chief and the aliens fight, fin." Then some hack choreographer was brought in. The VFX artists had to figure the rest out in post.

Seriously. The Elites barge down the front door. Chief drops down from the sky. He shoots at them. They die. In fact it's even worse than that: when normal humans shoot at Elites, their weapons do nothing, deflected by energy shields. But when Spartans shoot at Elites, they die instantly and effortlessly.

The moment to moment action in and of itself isn't terrible, but as a whole, the sequence feels half-assed and phoned in. A single CGI phantom in the air, a handful of banshees, and a pelican performing a strafing run--that would have fixed everything. Instead, we have a stale, nonsensical, pointless battle, which serves no purpose but to establish the deaths of our female YA lead's family and friends.

I'm trying hard not to merely list things I dislike, but the extent to which none of the writers are trying must be further noted. FTL communication is, apparently, completely free in Halo. No constraints at all. Anyone can talk to anyone else anywhere in the galaxy whenever they want. This makes no sense whatsoever and would ruin the plot of the first two games if it were true, but okay. What about the dynamic between secessionists, the UNSC, and the Covenant? Well, you'd think an existential genocidal crisis might pull people together, but actually the insurrectionist at the beginning says, "Oh my god, I thought the UNSC made the aliens up!"

You know. The aliens who've been destroying planets left and right. Yeah, they were just made up.

And why does Master Chief show up on Madrigal just in time? What was he doing there? Why was he saving insurrectionists? Why did the insurrectionists think Spartans were going to show up and kill them? Was that just a coincidence? And WHERE ARE ALL THE SPACESHIPS?

I don't want to think about this trash anymore.

The Master Chief is Legolas

In my Halo 4 review, I talk extensively about the Master Chief's characterization in the first three games, and the ways in which all subsequent Halo titles have fucked him up. I had no expectations that they'd try to capture the "real" Chief in Halo, but I hoped they might do something with him.

They didn't.

After their opening battle, Chief and Silver Team walk into a "cave" (cutely quipped as "not a natural formation," which would have been far more charming if they'd let Cortana be the one to say it) with a Forerunner artifact. Chief retrieves it, then secures the limp body of YA Asian Girl on his condor dropship.

Touching this artifact does...something. Restores suppressed memories. Makes him more human. I guess. Then, fifteen seconds later, a directive comes from not-ONI (because fuck you fans) telling him to execute YA Asian Girl for some reason. But because Chief has such a good heart, he can't do it, and he goes rogue.

The Master Chief goes rogue, 40 minutes into the new Halo series.

I watched this with my parents, neither of whom know anything about Halo, and if I hadn't been there to tell them that Spartans were genetically engineered super soldiers, they wouldn't have known. Chief acts just like a normal friendly nice dude in power armor. He's such a swell guy! Nothing in specific is set up. Despite the fact that all canon is seemingly defenestrated, there's no exposition anywhere in this episode. We know nothing about Chief when he makes this decision.

Now let me be serious for a moment.

The first thing we see from this version of Master Chief is insubordination. This is despite the fact that his character is a child soldier slave who has no agency. Our baseline for the Master Chief, before we've seen him do anything else in this series, is rebellion. So where, I must ask, is the Master Chief going to go? What is his arc? Where can he progress from this point?

Any competent writer approaching this series would have set everything up as it's set up, then had Chief blow YA Asian Girl's brains out instantly as instructed. Because he's a slave with no agency. That's who he is. Then, over time, he'd learn to think for himself. Cortana would teach him to be more human. It would be like Robocop. It would be, in other words, something. That still wouldn't be great, but it would let you turn him into a character.

But from here-on out, I have legitimately no idea what they're going to do. I see only disaster in Halo's future. The writers have given themselves no space to grow.

But that was inevitable, because the Master Chief is not character material. The Master Chief is Legolas.

Consider the above scene. Legolas, who rarely says anything, takes the spotlight for ninety seconds. He does something unbelievably awesome: single-handedly slays a mumakil. Then, like the support character he is, he fades back into the ensemble. Occasionally we see him murder an orc, but for the most part, he's just in the background, trailing after Aragorn. We know he's there, but he is not the lead.

The reasons for this are obvious. Legolas is an elf who's 3,000 years old. He's hard for us to understand. He doesn't think like we do. He sees time differently. He's an interesting part of this world and, when the time is right, he's kickass to have around. He can make for a great action sequence. But he's not the lead character of The Lord of the Rings. He plays a supporting role.

There is a reason why Frodo is not a badass elf.

The Master Chief has much more in common with Legolas than Frodo. He's fucking awesome. He kills shit. Imagine, for example, this scene as a parallel for the one from The Return of the King:

The ultra-cool Spartan singlehandedly clears out the scarab tank. We see him blast the shit out of aliens. He then walks out into the open like a badass, smirking behind his visor, surrounded by flames. Everyone stares at him and goes, "Whoa." The other characters know, diegetically, that this isn't a guy to fuck with.

But after the smoke clears, the Master Chief isn't who we follow home. That's Captain Keyes. That's Cortana. That's Sergeant Johnson. That's even, God forbid, YA Asian Girl.

Like Legolas, Master Chief is always close at hand. Maybe we even see him out of his armor sometimes, back on the Pillar of Autumn. He has a wry sense of humor and can outdrink anyone. He's amazing at math and can run circles around all the officers intellectually. He's a chess master. There's tons of fun stuff I can think of to show a Spartan's character contrasted with that of a normal human's, just as how Legolas was contrasted with Gimli and the Rohirrim in The Two Towers.

But Master Chief is not your perspective character. Do you get it? He's not the lead, not until literally everyone else is dead and there's no one else to follow.

THE MASTER CHIEF IS LEGOLAS.

For this reason I reject the idiocy of Polygon and the showrunners as exemplified by this article. For what they're doing with Chief in this series I don't mind showing his face, but this whole impetus to turn him into the lead, into a relatable character, is misled from the start. They shouldn't have needed to show Chief's face, because we don't need to see Legolas without his bow--not more than once or twice, anyway.

STOP MAKING MASTER CHIEF WHAT HE ISN'T. HE IS LEGOLAS, NOT FRODO.

I Could Write a Better Halo TV Series

I prophesy terrible things in Halo's future. I suspect it gets worse, not better, from here. Regardless of what you think about the story taken on its own, it isn't Halo. There are a few surprising touches that suggest more care for the games than I expected--"this cave is not a natural formation," sound effects from the games, first person sequences--but, on the whole, the writing suggests active antipathy toward fans of the franchise. Much like The Last of Us: Part II, it is my belief that the showrunners not only have little interest in the games, but dislike the kind of people who make up its fans. I also think the pilot demonstrates phoned-in writing, half-assed action, mediocre, lazy VFX, and has nowhere to go long-term.

In short, while Halo could probably be worse, it's still bad. I don't recommend anyone watches it. I think it's so bad that I can easily write something better.

So I'm going to.

A pilot, anyway, or part of it. We'll see how far I get. Within the next few days I'm going to upload it to this blog, and you can see how awesome a direct adaptation of Halo: Combat Evolved could have been. Alas, that's not even close to what we received. But at this point, I don't think you need me to tell you that.

Update: I Did It

Told you so. Here it is:

Halo Pilot The Pillar Of Autumn 1

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