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 Russell 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 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 II 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 as a rug-pull. 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 Duellists (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 indignation 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 few 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—at the helm.

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

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 Maximus, 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 it is an adaptation of Bethesda’s Fallout. It uses the same tired tropes of family drama—deftly avoided by Obsidian—and borrows what is mostly Fallout 4’s aesthetic, in some places very strongly, to construct its world. Ultimately, this means that it’s 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 to 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 to clearly evoke 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. 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, thus coexisting beside 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.” 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 setpieces, 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. Missing conflict is the fundamental flaw of Craig Mazin’s utterly failed adaptation of TLoU. In Fallout, the world is vast and largely empty, but it is still deadly.

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.

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. He is 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.

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 through half of Lucy and Maximus’ 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 decent series. Its highs are high enough to compensate for its lows, and it would probably have attracted a cult following, even without the franchise attached. I give it a 5/10.

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. On that level, I give it a 9/10.

It could have been better. But it’s good enough, given the circumstances. You might as well check it out.

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 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 showrunners 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 always, 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. 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.

The only praise I can offer Season 2 is that its opening fight scene is actually a relative improvement over the confusing nonsense seen in the first episode of the last season, wherein a hyperadvanced space navy decides to land its soldiers outside the walls of an open-air fortress bailey.

But the rest of the series is unchanged. The sets are cheaper, uglier, and 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 a family of six 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 set pieces. 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 pesters the new director of the Spartan program, but their discussions 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 exchanging 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) of 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 medias res. What’s going on in their stories? I have no idea; it’s never explained. There is no recap. Kwan is now an expert in Tae-Kwan-Do and fights some dudes on a space station for some reason; why is she there? 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 whoever 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 otherwise was a grave error.

Halo Season 2 is the most boring thing I have ever watched. 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. There was an infrequent 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 drop pods, and the fan servicey first-person sequences.

So far, Season 2 has nothing like this. It has nothing from the games except a few pieces of art direction. There is 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 that 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.

Halo isn’t even bad. It is 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. His novel Before the Fall is excellent. His work on Bones is much better than the rest of the series’ staff. I once awaited everything he did eagerly.

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 was wrong.

Fargo is a Farce

Season 4 was doomed due to 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 also 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.

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 lose 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 others’ 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.

The story could have made up for it. But it doesn’t. Vapid monologues on race have been replaced with vapid 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. The series has been pointlessly politicized and now seems to exist more to instruct than entertain.

It is conceivable that the political subject matter could have been done well, if the characters had been written with a touch 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, 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 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. 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.

If Season 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 get 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 bored and sedated. The location does not make sense. The scale is much too small. This scene is not convincing.

4. The year is supposedly 1793. 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 lack of interest 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 somulence.

I do not recommend it.

Some Elucidation

Ridley Scott’s first feature film was The Duellists (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 Duellists is not a good movie. It demonstrates all of Scott’s characteristic indifference to 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 required immensity. 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 and the British did fire-by-rank.

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

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

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

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, high on laudanum, and was an artillerist by trade—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 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 story revolves around Napoleon’s romantic relationship with Josephine, but in no actual 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 Hundred 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 so 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 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 that 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.)

Thus the film Scott wanted to make had to be smashed 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 were 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 24 to 51, 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 never witness the character’s intelligence or receive 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 24-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 24 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, and too awkward 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 engaging with a narrative. Exhibits, vaguely interesting on their own, are scattered 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). Also, the lights are all off.

We deserved much better.

Avoid

Contrast Napoleon’s arrest scene during the Hundred Days as depicted 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 a 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. I’m not a Ridley Scott fan, but I would say this is his worst movie. It’s vastly inferior to The Duellists, 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.”

Etc.

I haven't checked. I don't intend to. My mental health isn't fortitudinous enough to bear all that right now. 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 the 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 tonight’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 is phoned-in and cliche-riddled, 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 lazy and boring. It isn’t worth the time.

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 about 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 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: someone who kills an entire hospital full of armed guards and tortures 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.

The themes, like stray ears in the abattoir, have been butchered to pieces. In the final, iconic scene, Mazin strenuously avoids 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 additions to the source material are boring, pointless flashbacks that do nothing but detract from the time we might spend with Joel and Ellie.

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 mention how 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-esque over-the-top action that it's farcical. I won't identify the reasons why the ending doesn't work if the vaccine is definitely real, why removing almost all of the game’s 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 slight optimism). The writers and directors and actors had no understanding of the subject matter at hand and could manage nothing more than to parody it. Pedro and Bella are puppets on strings acting out a script loosely defined for them by the game, then poorly and very quickly adapted for the screen by Mazin. At no point did anyone care. At no point was any analysis offered for what makes the game work. No one did any hard work at all.

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.

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 didn't understand the thematic core of the source material. I spent thousands of words articulating my criticism into coherent theses, to make clear why I thought the first two episodes were bad, and why I thought the series wouldn't work going forward.

Now 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, but an excellent 60-90 minute long episode of a TV horror-action thriller could have been adapted directly from the source material.

Instead, the source material was not used at all. Bill and Joel never even meet. In this version of the story, we receive nothing except flashbacks of Bill with his lover Frank. It seems that 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, and meat with every meal. 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. Then they kill themselves. The end.

That's the episode.

Conveniently, Joel and Ellie encounter their 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!

I was told that The Last of Us was the most faithful video game adaptation ever. That was a lie. Clearly Craig Mazin wanted to tell his own version of the story. That makes cataloguing the countless ways in which his version is inferior pointless. I spent my last two reviews complaining about how things were different for no reason, and there is clearly no point anymore. 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 good. There is more to like in this episode than in either of the previous two, because at least Offerman can act (unlike Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey). There is the seed of an interesting idea on display.

But Mazin utterly and completely fucked it up by having the violent zombie apocalypse be nothing more than a peaceful suburban neighborhood. There is no sense of danger anywhere in this episode. The one brief fight scene makes no sense and comes to nothing. The video game that this is based on is clearly part of Mad Max’s lineage. You would never, ever have guessed that from what Mazin wrote. You could take this plot out of its context and smack it down in the middle of modern America and nothing would change. No thought whatsoever has gone into the setting of this series. Where do the supplies come from? How do they keep everything repaired? How could two people do all of this?

Mazin does not care.

This isn't The Last of Us. It's also not a post-apocalypse. It's certainly not a zombie show. In tone this episode feels like a romantic comedy; it has so little to do with the bizarre psychic fungus of last week that it's almost impossible to comprehend that someone thought that they should go together. I can’t believe anyone is okay with this.

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. There is no conflict at all. The dialogue is cliched, and the characters are models of functionality. Bill is tough, right-wing, and closeted: he is the husband. Frank is the girly one who likes clothes and interior design: he's the wife. Mazin even went so far as to have the women, Tess and Frank, get along in a flashback, while the men, Joel and Bill, make snide remarks on the side. This is the caliber of writing that wins critical acclaim?

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 men develop a physical relationship.

Instead, we got Queer Eye.

Then, of course, they commit suicide together, because gay love is extra pure, and it’s more tragic when they die compared to someone like Tess. This is, of course, another cliche, and the perpetuation of the "bury your gays" trope.

The bottom line is that Episode 3 is a cop-out. Mazin needed Joel to get his car, and he didn’t want to film or write the complicated action from the game. He decided that the protagonists could just inherit the car instead. An entire episode, eleven percent of the whole series, is devoted to flashbacks that our protagonists get literally no insight into whatsoever, just to explain how they got their free car.

Let me restate this: ELEVEN PERCENT of this series is wasted on flashbacks that come to nothing, because Bill and Frank NEVER MEET JOEL AND ELLIE ANYWAY.

Once more:

THE ENTIRE POINT OF THIS HOUR-LONG DIVERSION WAS JUST TO EXPLAIN AWAY HOW JOEL GOT HIS CAR.

I see through you, Craig. You aren’t fooling me.

Anyway, my reviews end here. I may write up a review on the final episode, if I make it that far, but there’s nothing more to say on HBO’s The Last of Us. It is phoned-in and cliche-riddled, 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 lazy and boring. It isn't worth the time.

Everything about tonight’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.

Outright parody. Almost like a practical joke. Except this joke isn't funny.

The Flashbacks & The World

Like last week, the first five minutes of this episode are wasted on a flashback to 2003, when the cordyceps outbreak began. This change to the setting of the game is utterly pointless and does nothing but annoy fans of the game, 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 the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Nothing else matters.

Which is why taking time away from Joel and Ellie with pointless flashbacks is such a gigantic mistake.

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 civilization in ruins. 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.

These things don’t matter. The setting is not Joel and Ellie.

Last week I argued that it was pointless to take a video game into a non-interactive medium, because what was lost outweighed what was gained. It could be said that the TV show is justifying its existence by expanding the world. The changes to the lore explain things away that didn’t quite make sense in the game. That explains the change in focus.

There are two problems with this idea:

1. 15+ hours of relationship development between Joel and Ellie in the game have to be condensed down to a mere eleven episodes in TV format. We have no time to waste.

2. You can’t expand The Last of Us’ world, because it makes no sense anyway.

In the game, the cordyceps infection spreads through bites or spores. That's all we need to know. The infected thus become their own organisms, with their own lifecycles, 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’s answer is humanity. The infected become cannibals. But then how do they spread their disease? You can’t eat the thing you’re trying to infect. A parasite cannot turn you into a cannibal.

This is a massive flaw in The Last of Us' world. The cordyceps infection is meant to be a realistic take on a zombie outbreak, but it actually makes no sense. Why hasn't the pandemic wiped itself out after 20 years? How are these clickers surviving in a random basement for decades?

I’ll tell you how: it doesn’t matter. The game isn’t about that. Just don’t think about it.

The game is about Joel and Ellie.

Yet the TV series wants us to dwell on these details. Mazin and Druckmann have invented reams of lore to explain how and why the infected behave 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 is that more attention is drawn to how little sense everything makes.

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 kiss each other on the lips. Now, rather than the infected being a marginal threat dealt with effectively by FEDRA (at the cost of all liberty), cordyceps grows under the earth, connecting different hordes of infected together, who can communicate with far-off hordes 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.

I’m sorry to report that this is really in the 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.

This utter nonsense squanders 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. The only explanation I can think of is that Mazin thought it would seem more “fungal,” but he clearly didn’t think through what it would look like once it was filmed. This insane bit of lore is so stupid and out of place that it seems like something from a video game. Then you realize that it wasn't in the game at all!

I know why spores are no longer spread through the air, though. I figured it out. I know why the characters couldn’t 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 was changed.

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 Civilization 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 rifle 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 he 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 uses an AR-15.

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 Tess and Joel’s relationship? 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. There’s 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 seven hours. I timed it on my phone.

The clickers are eventually defeated, despite Joel being armed with a fully automatic assault rifle. At this point Tess is infected, like the game; like the game, her infection occurs in a museum of the Revolutionary War.

Recall the game. Recall 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 bitten, 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 before. They are survivors of the apocalypse. This isn't their first rodeo. Unfortunately for Tess, it ends up being her last.

But we are still well aware of how cool she is by the time she makes her exit.

Nothing of the sort is present in the TV show. Here 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 beaten 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? Looking at the show as a self-contained story, my only deduction is that these characters are fucking terrible at what they do.

Presumably because Mazin hates writing action, the very first time we see our lead characters fight, they come across as massively inept. Joel cannot kill two clickers with a fully loaded, fully automatic, military-grade AR-15? Who is this loser? How did he survive twenty years of this?

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 fuck-up. When this is all we know about these people, we can only draw the conclusion that they themselves are fuck-ups.

We had to see these characters be badass before we saw them die. But we didn't. Early in this episode, Joel tells Ellie that he's killed dozens of infected. That was obviously a lie. How could he have killed anyone before if this is what he’s like? He and Tess must make up the worst smuggler team in human history. 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 its 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 there’s no development of Joel, Ellie, or Tess. They stay strangers to the audience.

One last point: the word 'survivor' hasn't been used once in these first two episodes. The theme of The Last of Us on PS3 is what it means to survive. It is a very important word that recurs throughout the game. Joel uses it every time he justifies something horrible that he’s done. You cannot tell this story without that word.

They never use it in this series.

Everything so far is bad for fans of the game. It’s also incredibly bad from the perspective of a writer. Unless Joel is going to continue being a bumbling idiot through the series, the showrunners have utterly failed to establish his character. The rest of the season, especially the ending, won’t make any sense as a result.

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

Last week I wrote about my disappointment with Bella Ramsey’s performance as Ellie. 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. Ellie never comes across as afraid, or nervous, or anything but heroically brave. When Joel points his rifle at her, she snarks. When danger lurks and the way is blocked, she volunteers to go first. When the party is attacked by clickers in the museum and Tess asks if she’s okay, in the game, she replies, "Other than shitting my pants? Yeah. I'm fine."

In the TV show? Ellie is so brave that she says, “I'm fine. It's not like I shit my pants!”

Mazin has gone out of his way to invert a line that shows weakness and wit from Ellie, thus removing both from her character. The new version doesn’t even make sense. Why would you mention shitting your pants if you hadn’t shat your pants?

This character is not Ellie. She's endlessly snarky like a generic Marvel superhero. She deadpans like a blind chef in a morgue. Ellie is snarky and incredibly witty in the game, but her sense of humor isn't raw sarcasm. When she quips, it’s usually to herself. 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 strangers. Craig Mazin's dialogue is utterly awful and seems to intentionally sabotage the character at every opportunity. He, like Ramsey, like Halley Gross and even Neil Druckmann himself, has no understanding of this character or what it is that makes her charismatic.

Ramsey is dreadful. I never believe her on screen. She seems like a kid in an Ellie Halloween costume. 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. 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. You cannot learn to be a survivor if survival is easy from the start.

Joel and Tess are generic, boring, and inept. But that's still not as bad as Ellie. She's unbearable. My skin peels off when she's on screen. My thumbs start digging into my eyes. She makes me physically agitated with every line she speaks. I feel personally mocked by this travesty of an adaptation of her character.

A few lines of dialogue have been worked in from the game. Many others have been pointlessly changed and thereby ruined or made nonsensical. But it's actually more jarring when lines haven't been changed, because these characters seem nothing at all like the people they are pretending to be. When Ellie and Joel look out toward the capitol and have their brief exchange, the effect is bizarre. It’s like being bludgeoned while having deja-vu.

So you'd think that 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. When she does speak, she carefully avoids using the words she used in the game, even though those words are the only thing that makes any sense. Clearly Mazin wanted to make that scene "his own,” but he utterly failed.

A TV show should have better dialogue than a video game. The Last of Us on HBO does not have good dialogue. Its writing is significantly worse than the source material. It's the worst I've ever encountered in any big-budget TV show.

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.

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

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.

.

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, though you’ve never met them before. 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 appears in your mind. You will never be able to show it to others as you could with a film.

This is why novels are adapted into cinema. Everything about the presentation of the story changes with the medium. The story remains, but the form is transformed into something different: into something that can be seen.

It probably won’t ever live up to what you saw in your head. But it can still be interesting. You can still witness, in realized detail, what you were not able to before, and you will get to experience what others did when they read that same book.

This is what it means to take prose into a visual medium.

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, which aired its first episode tonight. 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

When prose is taken into film, the form is completely transformed. But what transformation occurs when a video game is made into a television series?

There is no transformation. The formal elements are the same. But one vital element is lost:

Gameplay.

A Naughty Dog adventure game and an HBO TV series use the 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 to effectively build empathy and develop character in a way no other medium can.

A television show has no gameplay, but adds nothing of its own to compensate. In fact I have often argued in the past 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 the actors can be motion captured and do not need to perform their roles in live-action.

Ashley Johnson would have been too old to play Ellie in a live-action TV show. Can you imagine what a loss that would have been?

There is no point in taking a game and making it into a TV show, except that it makes the story accessible to people who do not play games. For those of us who do, the transition is pointless. A novelization would have been more interesting. TV adds nothing.

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

Utterly Boring

A pointless show could still be entertaining. So far, The Last of Us on HBO is not. This confused and badly scripted apocalyptic blunder appears to misunderstand its source material and its own genre, and the result is predictably disastrous.

I love The Last of Us on PS3. I do not love the rest of this franchise. It is likely that there was nothing showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann could have done that would have made me completely happy. It is nevertheless shocking that what they have actually done is so far off the mark. I will explain why.

The World

While the first game started in 2013, this TV adaptation starts in 2003. This is a minor change to the setting overall, likely done for no reason but to make the series set in the current year, but it raises questions about the characters and their histories that were not necessary.

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

You know, like a zombie.

Undeterred 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 into the street after Joel and his family.

“Zombies” in The Last of Us are not zombies. They are human beings infected with cordyceps fungus. They do not rise 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, like any crazed, weak, osteoporotic, wheelchair-bound grandmother.

Yet 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 that appear in The Walking Dead.

That the infected are a biological and not necromantic form of life is one of the most important thematic elements of the original game. That Part II got this wrong was but one reason among countless others why it was total shit.

This was a very bad start for this new TV series.

The production design is 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 from The Last of Us (the game).

But something about it is rotten. The sets do not look real. The reason why has something to do with the depth-of-field and eye-melting color saturation. Every room is too small. The rain is not like real rain. The people we meet act like Hunger Games extras, not like the survivors of a zombie dystopia. Why does everything seem 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. It is full of plot holes, because all that matters is getting Joel and Ellie together.

These are flaws. But they are small flaws, and we can forgive them in a video game.

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

Some small changes to the 2003 portion of the story are improvements. I had never understood why Tommy drove down a crowded street or how they were hit by another car when everything was so cramped. These things are adequately rectified.

But the new version of "20 Years Later," as the chapter is called in the game, is a boring plane crash of a TV pilot. While it successfully paves over some of the more obvious issues from the game, it introduces new ones while hideously prolonging the runtime.

The most notable thing about this version of The Last of Us 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, especially Joel. The lack of a primary narrator is a complete disruption of the game’s narrative structure. 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 injuries. She takes Joel to Ellie and the two are introduced. The game starts.

Contrived, yes. Full of coincidences, yes. Still good enough for a TV show? Maybe. I would have tried to clean this up, were I in Druckmann’s position.

But this is what he had us watch instead (take a deep breath):

• Robert steals a car battery from Joel, which 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." That line is not present.).

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

• One: What did Robert actually take 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 justifying the coincidence of Marlene's presence at Robert's at 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.

They’re boring, and they DO NOT MATTER.

This first episode is incredibly dull. 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 information. It all gets in the way of the plot, and it’s all so fucking boring. Some changes could have been good, but focus is put in the wrong places. The characters are not adequately developed.

The Characters

The most surprising thing about The Last of Us on HBO is that the dialogue is cliched and 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.

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 reason among many 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.

To begin with: Sarah. When Outbreak Day comes, contrast the performance of this new actress with the girl we see in the first game:

The original Sarah is permanently paralyzed by fear. She has no agency, and that lack of agency is transferred onto you as a player through gameplay. 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 is helpless. She is a twelve-year-old girl in the apocalypse. The point is that she is powerless. She cries and withdraws and dies violently.

The new version of Sarah is a complete repudiation of her original depiction. When she hears explosions, she bravely goes out searching for Joel. When she turns on the TV and sees the message to “STAY INDOORS,” she steps outside to explore the neighborhood. She wanders into her neighbor’s house and steps in a pool of blood and still is not deterred. She literally does not stop until a zombie is trying to eat her.

Does this seem like the same person to you?

Transforming Sarah into a brave adventuress ruins her. When grown men watch her death scene after playing through the prologue, they are reduced to tears. It is an incredibly effective use of gameplay and cutscenes to tell a tragic story.

No one will ever cry when this new girl wearing Sarah’s name dies.

I have similar criticisms of “Ellie.” Bella Ramsey is dreadful as this character. This was inevitable; Ellie is Ashley Johnson. There is no way to adapt that character into a different medium. It was impossible. But some things could have carried over regardless of who was in the role.

I like that she can be angry and confrontational. This is a side of the character that was completely lost in Part II. I also like that she isn’t utterly humorless. But I don’t like anything else. “Ellie,” like the character from the first game, needed to be introduced from Joel’s PoV. The journey of the audience should mirror Joel's, as we're first apprehensive about escorting an annoying little kid across the country. Over time we grow to care about her. This is the engine of the story.

Contrast Ramsey and Johnson’s performances in the scene where Ellie’s infection is revealed to Tess and Joel. In the game, Ellie is utterly terrified. She crawls to a concrete pillar and feebly protests, “I’m not infected!” when shown the scanner’s results. She looks like she’s about to have a heart attack. She seems like a little girl, facing down two vicious criminals, who she just watched brutally murder two soldiers. In this scene, Ellie is certain she is about to be killed. She has no idea what to do. This is exactly how anyone would act in her position.

Ellie has not lived through being a video game character yet. She is terrified throughout Boston. She doesn’t know what the apocalypse is like. Joel and Tess terrify her.

“Ellie” is instantly confrontational. After watching Joel punch a soldier to death, she has no concern at all that he might turn on her. She stands up for herself. She yells at Tess! It doesn’t matter that she’s unarmed, or that these two criminals have no reason to keep her alive. She’s going to get mad!!

The dialogue in this episode is dreadful. That isn’t her fault. But the total flatness of her performance is. No little girl in her shoes would be confrontational. No human being would be at all. She is performing something that is totally unbelievable.

If this is how she acts in Episode 1, where does she have to go?

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 forces Joel 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 physically intimate with each other. The scenes where she takes the lead, like where they interrogate Robert, have been cut.

Tess is a very memorable character in the game. Her death creates Joel’s ultimate motivation to take Ellie on this quest, which he never would have done otherwise. If she’s never developed before her death, the whole story implodes.

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

It isn't his fault, really. It's 100% the dialogue and direction. He has no resemblance at all to the character from the game. Where the real Joel is laconic, this character is snarky and chatty. He isn’t closed-off and takes the lead when he should defer to Tess. He isn’t awkward or weird, which is what should define his stasis; the only way Joel knows how to survive after two decades of vicious banditry is by becoming emotionally stunted.

Joel is meant to be a survivor. He will do whatever it takes to survive. In the world of The Last of Us, that means really bad stuff. In the game, after seeing him lose his daughter, we witness him brutally murdering countless people for money, then torturing their boss—also for money. He is not a nice man. That is why he is alive.

This version of Joel is a great guy, though. He doesn’t torture Robert, and he can only bring himself to maybe-kill one soldier after having a comical First Blood-esque 'Nam flashback. This character is so nice that he can only inflict violence when his PTSD is triggered!

This is supposed to be the same character from the game? Did Neil Druckmann play The Last of Us?

Things will inevitably be different in a new medium. But what does this new direction for Joel tell us about the world? The game draws attention to its violence by having Ellie react in horror when she watches Joel blow out brains and smash skulls. She says, “Jesus Christ!” and “Holy shit!” when you claim scalps. Her dialogue draws a parallel between normal people and survivors in the post-apocalypse.

No such effort has been made so far by Druckmann and Mazin.

What is ultimately worse is that his apprehension toward Ellie has been eradicated. The real version of Joel is vehemently against smuggling Ellie from Boston. The reason is obvious: he doesn't get close to little girls anymore, as anyone would expect knowing his backstory. This sets up his arc.

Nothing approximating this happens with Pedro Pascal. He has no particular aversion to Ellie. He gives her an angry look, once, as she's trying to stab him, and then never protests her presence. The masterful scene where Joel and Ellie are alone together for the first time is replicated here, but Joel seems entirely comfortable and at-ease, rather than cagey and awkward.

Presenting Joel this way makes Sarah's death pointless and entirely flattens his arc. There will be no pay-off when he learns to love her if he doesn’t hate her at the start. Could there be anything more basic in storytelling?

And Just In General

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

I think pacing is the main reason why. The tempo of the 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 have 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 Joel is playing on New Game +. He shouldn't get an AR-15 until the final level!

These are small details. They matter much less than character and plot. But they are so small 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? These things suggest a lack of care for the source material.

But then, as the pointlessness would suggest, this adaptation isn’t for me. It’s for my mom.

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. If so, I probably won't make it to the end.

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 a 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 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 would be for the crime of staging an enormous hoax to ruin a man's life and career, rather than mere speechcrimes like so many others.

Yet the movie has been made. Heard has shot her scenes. Warner Bros. cannot change the fact that she was meant to be in the film. We might think that she is monstrous, but Depp v. Heard ultimately had nothing to do with Aquaman 2.

The vindictive impulse to remove Heard from the Aquaman franchise is no different from the spite that underlies any other cancellation attempt. She has been identified as a “bad” person, and thus she must be punished extrajudicially for her wrongdoing.

But a price will be paid: about eight million dollars, as decided by a jury of her peers. That is Heard’s punishment. The rest of us have our own personal decision to make. We can skip her movies. We can ignore her (like we used to before this trial started). What purpose does plucking her from an extant film serve, except vengeance?

I don’t think I would like to befriend anyone who is still on Amber Heard’s side after the outcome of this trial. These people nevertheless exist. It is not your or my place to rob them of their power to support Heard or see her in this film or any other. The market will end her career. We don’t need to help.

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

Apparently my Paramount+ subscription, which cost me $0.99, had two days left before expiring on Saturday. I made up my mind after last week that I wasn't going to renew, but since Episode 5 of Halo was allegedly the one with the series’ major action set piece, I decided to give the show one last try.

It is no coincidence that second battle is in the fifth episode, right as the resubscription window arrives. This show is not paced according to artistic needs or the demands of story structure; it is built to scam you out of your money, because they know that action is all anyone ever wanted from Halo.

So How About That Fight Sequence?

This episode is only ~35 minutes long. The writers couldn't even stretch it out to a full hour. Yet at 35 minutes, it was still so boring that I could not get through the whole thing. I had to turn it off before the end.

This review is not about the episode. It is about how lazy the action in this series is.

In the first episode, I stated that the battle felt like it had not been written into the teleplay, but assembled by editors and VFX artists in post.

This second battle gives the same impression, but much more strongly.

For the first time in this series we see the “covenant” that forms the Covenant. There are Jackals, Grunts, and Brutes. There are also Banshees in the sky, and ships over the battlefield. This is an improvement over Episode 1.

But I have no more praise to offer.

When Cortana says that a Slipspace rupture has been detected, Banshees are swarming the air literally instantaneously. They apparently needed no time to deploy. A Corvette, or something that looks like one, appears in the sky. It doesn’t warp into place but appears like magic, as though it loaded in after an asset error. It then starts deploying drop pods into a single quarry.

Like before, the location of this battle makes no sense. Why are we fighting over a quarry? Why is everything neatly contained inside the quarry? There are no Jackal snipers on the ridges, because that would be out-of-bounds. Both sides must deploy into the quarry and charge at each other suicidally. No cover!

This is the first time we have ever seen Grunts or Jackals. We have had no indication of their existence at all until now. How are they introduced?

They drop in, and the fighting starts. There is no introduction. We get no reveal, no exciting moment where smoke clears and we witness the might of the Covenant. The aliens are simply thrown at us without any sense of cinema, in the blandest way possible.

No effort was put into this sequence. Someone wrote in a teleplay:

EXT. QUARRY

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

CUT TO:

There is no narrative in this sequence. From whose Point of View are we experiencing the action? In whose perspective are we grounded?

The answer is 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 John Halo, then Kai, then random Marines, then Grunts, then back to Marines, then over to John Halo, then to Halsey again: there is no logic to the editing.

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 in the course of a single scene. We need to finish with John Halo, then go to Halsey; finish with Halsey, then go to Keyes. Each transition should follow some kind of logical dramatic arc.

This cutting is utterly incoherent. It's information thrown at us without being digested. There is no way to understand what you are seeing. You cannot comprehend why any outcome occurs the way it does.

I want you to compare Halo’s action with this sequence from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, where The Interceptor and The Black Pearl come broadside-to-broadside. In this sequence, we see establishing shots of the ships loosing their cannons. Then we cut to individual characters that we know and care about, and we watch their reactions to the fighting. We see both sides, one at a time. We know what each side wants. We know everyone's objectives.

Crucially, in Pirates, we know what is being fought over. The area of contest is the ships. Everything makes sense. When Will dives into The Interceptor’s hold, we know it’s to look for the medallion that Elizabeth lost. We only need to see seconds of his searching to understand the action.

When we cut to Halsey in Episode 5, what is going on? What does she want? What is happening?

The bad guys are fighting the good guys, because the bad guys are bad, and the good guys are good.

It isn’t fair to compare Pirates of the Caribbean to Halo. One is the best adventure movie ever made; the other is diarrhea. The score alone is utterly transformative. But my point is that the real reason Halo sucks is that it is badly written. It is, in fact, not written at all. I would guess that this episode’s teleplay is fewer than twenty pages long.

I am really done now. I will not watch this show again.

There is a song on the Halo: Combat Evolved 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 one of CE's distinctively soothing synthetic tracks, perfect for blasting aliens in the surreal environs of a long-lost doomsday device. It isn’t actually for walking around in the woods. The walk is a metaphor.

With Episode 4 ("Homecoming") of Halo on Paramount+, it is now clear that the showrunners took the walk in the woods all too 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 of a YouTube fan video, wanders among the trees until he happens upon a spade. He then uses this spade to dig a hole. 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.

I'm Done

There is nothing left to say on Halo. I was wrong about last week’s episode. This show is utterly without merit. But this episode is noteworthy, because it’s the first that has bored me to tears. Kwan's plotline has no driving impulse: why do we care about Madrigal? Who is she related to? 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?

Back on Reach, Miranda informs us , “You Spartans have spent more time with the Covenant than anyone else.”

This is apparently true. We haven’t seen anyone fight the Covenant at all except Chief in the opening sequence. Nevertheless this seems rather strange, considering the fact that Silver Team hasn’t done anything but sit around in a locker room since the show started. They’re the ones who have fought the Covenant the most? Shouldn’t we have been shown that?

The world we are told about and the world we are shown do not match. But then all we are shown in this episode is the Master Chief digging for buried treasure in the woods with a spade.

I am not making that up.

I Said It

I took two pages of notes on this episode. I was going to perform some kind of analytical takedown. But by the end, I was so bored that I realized I didn’t care. There is nothing interesting about Halo. It is cheap, shitty, and lazy. I was right in week 2: it is a scam. The few glimmers of love for the franchise that appeared early on are absent now, and in their place is 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 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.

Just then, a Phantom dropship swoops down from the sky. Two Elites descend on 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 stride directly to their objective, led there by a magic stick.

The little girl stares back at them. This is a flashback, we realize. This girl is the Covenant 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 somebody 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 silent. This is like a video game where 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 it wants at no apparent cost, as they do 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.

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

#3: Terrible acting

We've finally found an actor more wooden than Kwan: these two child actors.

Enter Cortana

We finally meet Cortana in this episode. Halsey kills her clone, scanning her brain into a computer, thus creating a human-sized Cortana--a sort-of hologram, played sort-of by Jen Taylor. This sequence is recognizably stolen from The Fall of Reach, yet the character of Cortana bears no resemblance to the AI we know from the original Halo games.

This doesn’t bother me that much. I mean, it bothers me, just not like hornets in my underwear or tarantulas in my mouth. For the first time in the show I feel like the writers are going for something. I feel like Cortana and Chief are working toward some sort of objective.

But I can’t 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 the awful redesign. Cortana's sleek data silhouette is iconic. It's one of those things that can't be changed. But they changed it. Now she looks like a normal human.

She’s also human-sized, like in Halo 4.

These departures are relatively minor compared to changing the character’s personality, but they stand out badly when Jen Taylor is the one in the role. She is the only returning actor from the games. When I hear her voice issue from the mouth of whoever this character is, it's seriously jarring.

The words she says are even more jarring. This Cortana is nothing like the character from the games but quite a lot like the Windows 10 virtual assistant. She sounds like Siri: stilted, dignified, technical, and typical AI. There is no sass or wit to her.

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.

I am still curious where the writers take this. There might be something interesting down the line. I love Jen Taylor, so that helps.

It probably won’t be good. But for the first time, I do want to keep watching.

RoboChief

As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the writers want the Master Chief to have Robocop’s arc. In this episode he uses a knife to cut out a 'pellet' in his back that turns him into a Real Boy. He then wanders the streets of Reach, taking in his humanity for the first time.

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 in the pilot. He saved Kwan in the pilot. 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, there's no growth. We see Chief, but what's different? What's changed? He says this is like “the first time.” How?

They could have done a lot with that sequence. Instead, they did nothing. This is Halo in essence.

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

+ Drop pods 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.

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 weren’t for Kwan, I would 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.

But Kwan is incredibly boring. Her sections ravage the pacing, and she might yet ruin the show. We will have to see.

Halo Season 1, Episode 2 ("Unbound") 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. The Master Chief turns himself in to the UNSC for no clear external reason. 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. Bokeem Woodbine runs the Halo version of Omega from Mass Effect 2.

The cast is devoid of any characterization. What is there to the 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 has no art or style. Visuals of Reach and High Charity lack their personality 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. The use of the score from the games is pitiful. It is astonishing that such great music could be used so badly.

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

This series is about a man in green armor who escorts a girl through space. It has no relation to the Halo franchise whatsoever but merely uses its name for brand recognition. I therefore conclude that Halo on Paramount+ is literally a scam. It is a con to trick you out of your money. If you slap a recognizable name on a product without following through on your promise, you're trying to cheat your customers. You aren't selling what you're selling. I've bought a Coke, and 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. Why do apologists exist for TV?

JJ Abrams' Star Trek is bad, 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 is this if not piss in a Coke can?

I can smell the urine at my lips. But some people are beginning to legitimately praise this show, and I feel obligated to inject negativity into the discourse every week. So I can’t put the can down yet.

Halo is very important to me. Growing up in the early 2000s, it was all my friends and I ever talked about. We all wanted Halo action figures for our birthdays. When we were old enough we read Halo books. We always wanted a Halo movie. We loved Halo.

"Landfall" was our first taste of what Halo in cinema might look like. What proved to be a marketing video for Halo 3 was, we felt certain 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 awesome. We needed more.

Nothing ever came of it.

Half a decade later, "Forward Unto Dawn" came out in pieces on YouTube for free. Now this was a real Halo series. I loved "FUD" at the time. In retrospect, it’s a big ad for Halo 4, but it isn’t terrible for what it is.

It isn’t a real Halo movie.

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 is best forgotten.

For the next eight years, discussions of the next attempt to take Halo into cinema and TV have remained constant. At one point Steven Spielberg was involved. Who knows how many pilots and spec scripts have come and gone in that time.

This all leads to March 2022. Now, finally, Halo (properly italicized as a stand-alone series, rather than the franchise) has been properly adapted into television.

The first official trailer released in January. Every single thing looked wrong.

It later came out that the writers “didn't look at the game." They didn’t need to admit it. I could tell.

I told myself I wouldn’t watch the series. I don’t want to support people who hate the things I love.

Then I watched the first episode.

Let's Get This Over With

There are three levels to grade Halo on: as an adaptation of its source material; as a military sci-fi TV series; and as a piece of televisual narrative. It fails them all.

What I will say is that this episode could have been worse. There were a few hints that suggested somebody involved had played the games. For the most part, though, it seems like the content of the story has been changed for no reason except to irritate fans of the franchise.

Consider the name of Master Chief's team. In the books (and Halo 5: Guardians), the Chief leads 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 flaming coffee grinder.

These characters no longer form Blue Team, but Silver Team. Why Silver instead of Blue? There is no reason, except to aggravate fans of the franchise.

These writers want you to be annoyed. If you play Halo, you are the wrong kind of person.

Near the end of the first action sequence, an Elite has his head blown off. Halo fans who wasted their youths dumping magazines into dead Elites may notice something strange: the stump of his neck dumps gore out onto the ground, and it’s red.

Red blood. As in, normal, not-Elite blood.

Elites have bluish-purple blood. Not red.

Why give Elites red blood? Either no one knew better, or the showrunners intentionally wanted to spite the game’s players.

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 and 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 and appreciated 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 the feeling of Halo is present.

But this whole sequence has two minor problems: it’s terrible, and it makes no sense.

The Elites land outside of the open-air fortress. They then walk to town, knock down the gate, and storm inside on foot. Master Chief & Friends show up, drop down from a Pelican, 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. They're all missing. When someone wants to travel across the galaxy, they hop into dropships and fly there. What? There is no Forward Unto Dawn, no Pillar of Autumn, and 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 cutscene from any single one of the games, and you will see how phony this new series looks.

This is not science fiction. This may not be anything at all.

This opening action sequence is supremely lazy. The Elites barge through the front door. When normal humans shoot them, nothing happens. When the Master Chief shoots at them, they die instantly. I’m convinced that nothing about this fight was written into a teleplay; it was entirely created in post by a team of visual effects artists, desperately trying to tape something coherent together.

It isn’t their fault that they couldn’t do it. The screenwriters wanted them to do something literally impossible.

None of the writers knew anything about science fiction or Halo, it seems, and didn’t want to do any work. 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. 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 of the space ships?

I have already spent more time on this review than the writers did on their script. This is not a good use of my life.

The Master Chief is Legolas

After their opening battle, Chief and Silver Team walk into a "cave" and retrieve a Forerunner artifact. Touching this artifact does something to the Master Chief and makes him more human, in a weird recreation of the start of Mass Effect.

Fifteen seconds later, when a directive from not-ONI comes for him to execute some random woman he just met, he decides he can’t do it. He goes rogue instead.

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 are genetically engineered super soldiers, they wouldn't have known. Chief behaves like a normal dude in power armor. We know nothing about Chief when he makes this decision. The first thing we see from this version of the character is insubordination. Our baseline for the Master Chief, before we've seen him do anything else in this series, is rebellion.

So where is he going to go? What is his arc?

A competent writer would have followed this exact same story structure, and then had Chief blow that woman’s brains out. Because the Master Chief is fundamentally a child soldier slave. His character is that he has no agency. He is a piece of military hardware.

But, over time, he could learn to think for himself. Cortana could teach him to be more human. It would be like Robocop. In other words, it would be an arc.

It would still be stupid. That’s not the arc that the Master Chief should have. But it would let him be a dynamic protagonist for a TV series.

From here on out, though, there is nothing to do. There is no room for Chief to grow.

But disaster was inevitable for this series. The Master Chief cannot be a protagonist for a television show. That is because the Master Chief is Legolas.

Consider the above scene in Return of the King. Legolas, who rarely says anything, takes the spotlight for ninety seconds and slays a mûmak. 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 remains in the background, trailing after Aragorn. We know he's there, but he is not the lead.

This is how he has to be written. 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 great to have around. He can make for a memorable 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 is Legolas. He's awesome. He kills shit. Consider the sequence in Halo 2 as a parallel to when Legolas slays the mûmak: the badass SPARTAN-II has singlehandedly boarded a Scarab tank. He has blasted his way through the bridge, cleared out the control room, and destroyed its engines. He emerges onto its roof, smirking behind his visor, surrounded by flames. Everyone stares at him in awe. The other characters know, diegetically, that this is not someone to fuck with.

In Halo 2, the rest of the cutscene in this sequence follows the actual protagonists of the game. We snap to Miranda and Sergeant Johnson and Cortana. These are the main characters of a TV show. We don’t see Chief again until we’re about to deploy to Delta Halo. That is because the Master Chief is Legolas. He is neither the main driver of the plot nor its emotional core.

There could be ways to humanize him. We could even see him out of his armor. Maybe he’s amazing at math and far smarter than any of the other officers. He’s a chess master. While they travel between star systems, he lifts weights and matches wits with Cortana. This is no different from how Legolas and Gimli are contrasted with the Rohirrim in The Two Towers.

But while he can be a fun side character, the 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.

This is why the idea that we needed to see Chief’s face is so silly. I don’t care about knowing what he looks like, but the urge to turn him into a relatable character is incredibly misguided. You don’t need to show Chief’s face for the same reason that you don’t need to see Legolas without his bow.

Onward We March

This show will not get better. I suspect it will get worse. But I will be back next week anyway. Wish me luck.

Back to Raimi

Superhero fiction does not interest me. But Sam Raimi is my favorite filmmaker, and his three Spider-Man films from the early 2000s remain exemplars in their over-crowded genre. All three of these have aged incredibly well in the corporate post-apocalyptic filmscape that is the MCU, but none so well as his best film, and one of the best films ever made: Spider-Man 2 (2004).

Raimi’s Spider-Men are obviously full of character and life and personality that later superhero films lack. But what really makes them interesting is that they demonstrate a completely different philosophy about what superheroes should be compared to the MCU as it crystallized with The Avengers (2012). Rewatching these films today, Raimi’s philosophy stands in dramatic contrast with what would follow, and it primarily is rooted in the fact that Raimi grounds his films in a believable world.

In the original comics, Peter Parker is a tech genius. His web-slinging is technological rather than biological, even though he has other biological powers. The more recent Tom Holland films restore this aspect of the character, and in doing so ruin what makes him interesting in the Raimiverse.

Turning Peter Parker into Tony Stark steals what makes him interesting. This character should not be about his gadgets. This character is about his relationships. Peter Parker is nerdy and intelligent, but if this is a world where any random nerd can invent pieces of high technology in his bedroom, the relationships lose their grounding, and the concept is spread needlessly thin.

Spider-Man needs to exist in a grounded world. This is fundamental to why Raimi’s Spider-Men are interesting, while the MCU’s aren’t. Spider-Man is a soap opera for teen boys. This is a character whose core dilemma is how he can balance his work, school, and relationships while also having superpowers and a secret identity. It is a fantasy for young men.

Spider-Man should not be about worlds that are going to be destroyed. It shouldn’t matter if aliens are invading or a billion lives are at stake. High-stakes villains might make for more interesting action sequences, but they do not pull on the strings that make Spider-Man fundamentally interesting. Those strings are relationships and Peter’s own psychology. The rest does not matter.

Spider-Man only needs generic villains to fight. They can be anyone. They can even be generic criminals without powers. So long as fighting them strains Peter’s relationship with Mary Jane and his aunt, or tests his ability to stay enrolled in school, they are doing their job.

This is why Spider-Man must stay grounded. He should be the only superhero in the world, or one of very few. If everyone is super in Spider-Man’s Manhattan, no one is, and he is no longer interesting.

Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker is uncharismatic, weird, and kind of an asshole. He is rife with inner turmoil. Tom Holland is pretty and fun to be around, but his version of the character has no psychological depth. This is the difference between these series.

But what is most fundamentally important to Spider-Man is his “mask:” this character is about his secret identity and how he manages it. Peter Parker is an inhibited guy who doesn’t have many friends, who can’t break free from himself, who puts on a mask and reinvents himself. Becoming Spider-Man lets Peter realize his maximum potential—until becoming Peter again lets Spider-Man realize his.

I understand that some of the aspects I’ve emphasized here were elements that Raimi and his screenwriters invented or heavily emphasized over the original comics. It is nevertheless these elements that make their films so much better than what would follow them, particularly Spider-Man 2.

The fact that Spider-Man 2 is so much better than any other superhero film is what I actually want to discuss today.

Peter Parker Earns His Powers

Miles Morales does nothing to earn his powers in Insomniac’s new Spider-Man games. When a radioactive spider falls onto Mary Jane during one of her selfless acts of heroism, she is reduced to nothing but an arachnid taxi service. The spider stays on her for, presumably, several hours, at which point it decides to bite Miles for no reason instead.

This is morally outrageous. Mary Jane should have been Manhattan’s second Spider-Person, not Miles Morales. But I can accept the argument that superheroes are not really meant to earn their powers. They come from accident or natural genius. Peter certainly did not earn his powers in Raimi’s first Spider-Man (2002).

Spider-Man 2 is the exception. This film is a triumph of screenwriting, because over the course of its story, Peter Parker earns his powers and becomes worthy of his own heroism.

Who is Otto Octavius?

Doctor Octopus is the main antagonist of Spider-Man 2. He is memorable, and I had a Lego figure of him as a child. But he is also hardly in the film. The character we see instead is someone called Otto Octavius: not a supervillain, but a brilliant, over-ambitious scientist, doomed by his own dubious ethics. (An archetype that is startlingly common in Spider-Man comics.)

Peter’s relationship with Otto Octavius as he descends slowly into the madness caused by his invention forms the spine of the film’s plot. But the meat attached to the vertebrae is a story about Peter Parker losing his superpowers.

Peter loses his powers because he no longer deserves them. He has completely lost track of what heroism means. Fighting crime has become automatic. How could it not? Superheroes are not, actually, heroic at all. When nothing can harm you, when you are invulnerable and stronger than any human, what’s heroic about beating someone up? It is practically selfish not to fight crime with powers like these.

Thus to get his powers back, Peter has to remember what heroism costs. He has to become a hero, for real.

There is a scene in the first Raimi Spider-Man where Spider-Man rushes into a burning building to save a baby. This is certainly a selfless act. He could have been killed. But you could also be killed crossing the street. Why wouldn’t Spider-Man save a baby from a burning building? He’s practically immortal.

This scene is repeated in Spider-Man 2. This time, he does it as a normal, mortal human. He is not Spider-Man, but Peter Parker, and going into the billowing smoke genuinely risks his life. He does it without a costume. This moment is a true act of heroism. It is something you and I probably would or could not do.

In acting out this heroism, Peter becomes worthy of being super.

The best and most memorable scene of Spider-Man 2 appears near its end. Spider-Man must stop a speeding train using his own body as a brake. This almost kills him. It is not easy. It is something far beyond what even a superhero can be expected to do. It barely works, and it rips his mask away.

He is willing to do it anyway. And the scene that follows shows us what this heroism means. The people on the train recover his body and marvel at his youth, acknowledging his sacrifice, and show us what he saved: the lives of real civilians. For the first time, the people Spider-Man has saved can see his face. When his mask is returned to him, his identities begin to converge.

This scene shows us the humanity behind the carnage. This is what actually matters. There is more to heroism than simply having incredible powers; it costs something, and it gives something back.

You will never get the sense of this from a gigantic scene where space aliens blow up all of Manhattan and we never see a single human casualty. Because MCU films are too big, and too untethered from reality, and too busy focusing on cosmic threats to examine simple moments between one man and a crowd.

The Relationships

Spider-Man 2 is about Peter’s psychological journey toward recovering his powers. It’s also about relationships. What matters in the end is not who can fight the best, but how Peter can navigate the complexity of his relationship with his mentor. The ties to MJ and Aunt May and Harry are what bind the story together. This is what makes the film work.

Stories have to be about people. Stories are not about set pieces.

Thus when all is at stake, when the whole of Manhattan might be destroyed, the resolution in Spider-Man 2 is not some gigantic action sequence. It is a denial of action. Spider-Man defeats Doc Ock through persuading Otto that he can overcome the machines controlling his mind. Here the convergence completes. Peter Parker is wearing a costume that is now meaningless. There is no longer a separate Spider-Man that he needs a mask to conceal. And so the villain can be defeated without any powers at all.

Because Peter Parker is the one who defeats Doc Ock. He uses his relationship with the man who was once Otto Octavius, the man we have spent most of this film learning to know, to stop the disaster.

Peter does not need to be a superhero in the end. He needs to be a good man and a loyal student. That is all heroism ever requires.

This is slightly more thematically compelling than the Hulk smashing Loki a bunch of times.

Conclusion

There are some good MCU films. I have no doubt that there are many reasons why they have proved enduringly popular. I don’t care if you like The Avengers. I’ve never seen Endgame, and it’s entirely possible that it does exactly what Spider-Man 2 did.

What I do care about is that stories prefer people to set pieces. Very few films do this better than Spider-Man 2—even though it is a superhero blockbuster at its core. A superhero blockbuster can still tell a memorable, intimate story.

In 2004, Fox greenlit a television series called Wonderfalls about a chronically apathetic "over-educated under-achiever” who is bestowed the superpower of divination—but only through talking to the spirits (henceforth 'muses') that reside within toys, statues, and stuffed animals.¹ Every episode, these muses enigmatically coerce the heroine into performing acts of kindness, thus creating a fairly standard 'client' TV mystery-ish series format.

You probably hadn't heard of it until today. For this I forgive you.

It was created by Bryan Fuller, co-executive produced by Todd Holland and Tim Minear, and was not a financial success. A 13 episode season was produced, but only four of these ever aired. The rest were ultimately released via DVD some years later, but the series has never been licensed digitally and, as of 2020, appears totally orphaned.

In Wonderfalls, Caroline Dhavernas stars as Jaye Tyler, a misanthropic 24-year-old Brown University philosophy graduate now living in a trailer park and working at a Niagara Falls gift shop. Her father is a successful doctor, her mother an acclaimed writer, her elder sister a famous lawyer, and her elder brother an aspiring theologian; their names are Darrin, Karen, Sharon, and Aaron, respectively.

Each episode sees Jaye struggle with her newfound powers, grappling with her own sanity, courting her hot (but recently married!) love interest Eric (Tyrone Leitso), and generally making the world a better place--accidentally, despite her worst intentions.

The Search for Answers

The series aired more or less simultaneously with two eerily similar network shows—Joan of Arcadia (2003-2005, CBS) and Arrested Development (2003-2006, 2013, 2019, Fox and Netflix). Joan of Arcadia’s core premise is in fact the same as Wonderfalls’ on paper: a young woman receives the ability to communicate with “God” and is compelled to help those around her. Like Arrested Development, the series was a "complex comedy" about a zany, dysfunctional, upper class, and white family.

None of these three shows were resounding commercial successes, but it should be safe to say that Wonderfalls was by far the least long-lived, failing to broadcast more than half of its first season—much less find renewal for a second. This reality does not correspond with quality.

Arrested Development is a brilliant, if very silly, comedy farce. Joan of Arcadia is hardly worth remembering. But in objective terms, Wonderfalls is quite possibly the best television series ever aired, for what it is. It is brilliantly acted, written, edited, and directed.

So why did it flounder where others merely stumbled?

The answers are, tragically, not hard to identify. It was protagonist Jaye Tyler, combined with the series’ extreme edge and immense wit, that condemned the series to a paltry four-episode broadcast run. These are the things that I wish to examine here.

Context

Fuller, the brains behind the narrative components of the series, had only recently departed his debut series Dead Like Me (2003-2004) on Showtime when Wonderfalls was picked up by Fox. Tim Minear had worked extensively with Joss Whedon as a writer and sometimes-executive producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003, WB) spinoff Angel (1999-2004, WB) and sci-fi Western Firefly (2002, Fox). The pedigree of these two showrunners is worth dwelling on.

Whedon’s television trifecta remains popular to this day and is perhaps most notable for its snappy, post-modern, and witty dialogue; these are the sensibilities Minear brought to Wonderfalls.

Fuller himself was not enormously famous at the time—he departed Dead Like Me after only a handful of episodes—but has since developed a cult following with subsequent series such as Pushing Daisies (2007-2009, ABC) and Hannibal (2013-2015).

Stylistic parallels with both Minear and Fuller’s antecedent series are hard to miss. Fuller’s brand is distinctive. Dead Like Me is a dark supernatural comedy about a young woman who is killed and has the bad luck to become a “grim reaper.”

Protagonist Georgia (George) Lass is, in terms of personality, almost identical to Jaye Tyler—although their performances are miles apart—and both, in characteristic Fuller style, are heroines with unusually masculine first names. Like Angel and Firefly, the dialogue in Wonderfalls is fast-paced, witty, and charming; and like both Buffy and Dead Like Me, Jaye is a young woman who involuntarily receives supernatural powers and struggles to balance them with her social and professional obligations. Finally, like Buffy, Wonderfalls dwells significantly on lesbian characters.

There is one further series worth drawing attention to in this regard.

Joan of Arcadia utilized a traditional, broadcast televisual style and received positive reviews and an Emmy nomination.² This was Wonderfalls’ most obvious competitor, and similarities between the two series were noted by critics at the time.³ The immense success of Buffy provides the most likely explanation for how it came to be that these series, so similar in abstract, aired simultaneously.⁴ Another may be that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, America’s faith in the order of the world was severely disrupted.⁵ The spirituality of both Wonderfalls and Joan of Arcadia offers an antidote—reassurance in destiny.

But this does nothing to explain why Wonderfalls flopped so disastrously; every show mentioned here (except Firefly) made it to at least a second season. Clearly something about Fuller and Minear together in execution, rather than premise, doomed their series to cult status.

Jaye Tyler

Performance

The most notable component to Jaye is Dhavernas’ performance. It is distinctive. She epitomizes the “disaffected 20-something.”

Take the pilot episode:

Jaye receives her superpower and is accosted by the series’ first muse: a smoosh-faced Wax Lion. He commands her to ask “Poor Bitch,” her name for the local UPS driver, what happened to his wedding ring. Her face rests in a permanent bored nothingness. Every line is flat and uninterested and followed by an eye-roll, even during small-talk. To smile seems as though it pains her.

This is more or less how Jaye always acts—that is, until the Wax Lion starts to talk. Suddenly Dhavernas’ performance shifts entirely; from casual boredom to complete terror, eyes-wide, almost sweating.

Finally she gives in to the Wax Lion’s demands and asks Poor Bitch, but no effort at all is made to sound concerned or interested. Then, through a cutaway flashback we learn that Poor Bitch has already explained his divorce to Jaye. She’s simply forgotten.

Dhavernas holds an expression of disgust throughout this conversation. She couldn’t care less about Poor Bitch or his breakup. Her only interest is to see the Wax Lion shut up. It would not be a stretch to say that performance makes Jaye comes off abrasive and unsympathetic in this scene--and we're only fifteen minutes into the series.

Writing

The writers make no effort at all to redeem their protagonist. In the subsequent scene, she steals from a wishing well and sarcastically tells a well-meaning little girl to “piss off.”

When her wallet is returned to her after having been lost, she tells its impoverished bearer:

Wait, I can't let you give me your last eight dollars. Here's five back.

Jaye conspicuously uses judgmental nicknames like “Poor Bitch” throughout the entire series; several episodes later, she will refer to her reclusive neighbor Patrick first as the “Fatsquatch,” and then “Fat Pat;” and she only ever refers to series regular Alec, her manager at the Wonderfalls Gift Emporium, as “Mouthbreather”—to the extent that a casual viewer might think it his actual name.

In the second episode she mocks a disabled character’s stutter, to the horror of her best friends. Her time spent at the Wonderfalls gift shop casts her as a monument to lethargy. She's often rude to customers. A personal favorite moment sees Jaye (accidentally) save a baby. Her response is telling:

JAYE: It's humiliating. I don't save babies. This [photo] misrepresents me. 

ERIC: You saved that baby. 

JAYE: I didn't do anything. It fell on me. I could've been a pillow. That should say “Pillow Saves Baby.”

MAHANDRA: That baby looks like a human shield in your hands. 

JAYE: Thank you! See? This woman knows me. She knows [baby-saver] isn't who I am. 

MAHANDRA: That's not who she is. 

JAYE: She knows I'm not considerate of my fellow man.

Alas, Jaye’s characterization of herself is spot-on. Not only is she inconsiderate of her fellow man, her selfishness is a source of pride.

That’s why she’s so fun!

To those of us everywhere who are ourselves disaffected 20-somethings, Jaye’s irreverence, sarcasm, and general aura of malevolence create endearment, not alienation. She acts out all of our most inhibited desires: to have no ambition or stress or expectations in life, to say exactly what we think whenever we think it. As she herself articulates:

Take my family. They all work really hard and are still dissatisfied. I can be dissatisfied while hardly working at all.

I know I've felt this way in the past!

This makes Jaye an empathetic, rather than a sympathetic, character. She does little to earn audience sympathy, and in fact does quite a lot not to earn it. But she's relatable. She's full of personality. She's totally independent-minded. She's in a position that many young people are familiar with. She's catty and a little bit snide, yes, but she's also very funny:

DR. RON: Tell me about your sister.

JAYE: She hates me.

DR. RON: Hate is a strong word.

JAYE: Yeah. Well. What are you gonna do.

DR. RON: How does that make you feel?

JAYE: One less person to worry about?

To bring it back to empathy, they proceed:

DR. RON: When was the last time you told your sister you loved her?

JAYE: I don’t know how you did things in your family, but we weren’t raised that way.

If you're from a family like mine, the empathetic link with Jaye is immediately established by this single line. It sounds just like home. But if you can't relate to the sentiment she's expressing here, she will probably seem strange and uncaring to you and you will not like her.

Empathy requires work and viewer willingness, and this is to ask more than is realistic from network television audiences--at least with a lead. Wonderfalls was a new series, aired in January, that must have seemed derivative at the time, within a sea of network television, and its writers asked for the benefit of the doubt. Tragic though it may be, I don't think it's unreasonable that the benefit of the doubt was not given.

Here comparisons back to Buffy and Dead Like Me become vital. Despite numerous similarities to Jaye, George Lass is an immensely sympathetic character. We watch her die at age 18. That guarantees likability. George also comes across as more involuntarily flawed, whereas Jaye revels in her “trailer-park hillbilly lifestyle” (as her brother puts it). Finally, Ellen Muth is not Hollywood beautiful. She looks like a normal person. Dhavernas is Hollywood beautiful, and that changes how the audience perceives her--in this case, perhaps for the negative.

(Just as how Chris Pratt went to LA and couldn't land comedic roles until he gained weight and cultivated a less "macho" persona, appearances matter a lot to audiences and their expectations.)

For this point I would cite the success of Roseanne Barr. She was the unconventional comedic lead of her own series, but her brand was in actively not being a petite and perfectly sculpted French-Canadian TV actress. It's impossible to prove a negative, but I find it hard to imagine Roseanne working in the way it did if Barr had looked like this...

instead of this...

Yes, I'm saying that mainstream audiences would have tolerated Jaye's personality if she had been fat. Dhavernas is too pretty. On instinct, audiences don't feel like attractive people (especially those from idyllic upper middle-class white families in New York) have anything to be bitter over. There, I said it. Don't @ me.

Meanwhile Buffy, like Jaye, is often witty, but she is otherwise fairly conventional—and she takes her duty seriously. Buffy saves people. It's hard not to like a hero. Jaye is spiteful and takes active pain in helping other people with their problems, and she only ever does so for selfish reasons.

It will surprise no one, then, to learn that the series tested poorly in screenings.⁶ More damningly, critics unanimously condemned Jaye as unlikeable, and predicted imminent cancellation after just the first episode. No one knew what to make of a comedic anti-hero as played by a conventionally attractive actress.⁷

Cinematography

The inscrutable heroine could be workable for the unconvinced viewer given time, especially in a comedy, but the killing blow is yet to come. The muses are presented as a CGI character, with animated faces but otherwise static bodies. Already we’re bearing witness to a phenomenon that is ostensibly psychological—no one else can see or hear the muses talking—and this fact is reinforced by close-ups from Jaye’s perspective, all of which are filmed from a high angle so as to replicate the visual of a human gazing downward onto an inanimate object.

Throughout the entire series, this style of cinematography places us firmly within Jaye’s first-person perspective. We are inside her head. When this is combined with the character’s general ‘unlikability,’ the results are disastrous. If the viewer does not identify with Jaye, his response will be to abort—to get away from this place of subjectivity as quickly as possible. And because the series is so entirely about Jaye, this leaves nothing to stay engaged with, and results in yet another lost viewer.

This is the root of so much of the series’ trouble. Problematic characters abound in TV, but Jaye is the protagonist. Wonderfalls, as the above illustrated subjective focus shows, is about her specifically. She is in nearly every scene of every episode, with screentime only rarely cutting over to her elder sister—a closeted lesbian—and effectively no one else, ever.

Wit

Jaye serves as the perfect vessel for Minear and Fuller’s amazing wit. In Firefly and Buffy, which teeter on the edge of melodrama (and in later seasons of Buffy fall directly off), the snappy post-modern dialogue has always felt wrong to me. It doesn't fit the dark tone of Whedon's series.

But Wonderfalls is a comedy, and as a comedy it does not suffer from this problem. So when Minear is instead combined with Fuller, who I believe to be one of TV's finest character writers, for the purposes of a comedy, the results are spectacular. Their wit, along with the wits of their staff writers, is incredible in this series. There is no dissonance. The cultivated tone is unique, hilarious, and entrancing.

This undoubtedly increased Wonderfalls’ barrier to entry. It is not a series one can watch while doing the laundry. It is too complex as a comedy. It demands attention that casual audiences likely will not give it. Here are a few examples from throughout the series.

After the Tyler family has had a falling out...

KAREN: Sharon, go talk to your father. You're his favorite.

AARON: I thought I was his favorite.

KAREN: We don't have favorites.

At a family lunch...

AARON: There’s something out there and it’s laughing at us.

DARRIN: I don’t think your sister’s special lunch is an appropriate place for an existential crisis.

AARON: It’s not an existential crisis.

KAREN: You’re studying religion for God’s sake, you were bound to have one sooner or later.

AARON: I’m not in existential crisis! Just the opposite. I was fine when existence had no meaning. Meaninglessness in a universe that has no meaning—that I get. But meaninglessness in a universe that has meaning...what does it mean?

JAYE: It doesn't mean anything.

After Jaye's father has been in an accident...

JAYE: I can’t help you. My father’s in the hospital. I wouldn’t feel right having so much…fun.

MAHANDRA: Your father’s in the hospital?

JAYE: He got run over.

MAHANDRA: I’m sure you didn’t mean to.

Similarly, in Whedon's style, the dialogue is also full of pop-culture references—although not always ones which mainstream audiences will get:

JAYE: You’re like that girl in that movie who wanted to be that other girl so much that she KILLED FOR IT!

BIANCA: Grease?

JAYE: Single White Female!

When speaking to a Catholic priest, discussing a nun...

JAYE: Did you Agnes of God her? Yeah. I bet he Agnes of God-ed all over her! 

Extracting comedy, or even narrative value, from scenes written like this requires attention. Even the names of the Tyler family themselves—Aaron, Karen, Darrin, Sharon, and Jaye—are a joke that most viewers will probably miss.

As Minear himself has noted, TV with edge, quirk, and wit demands audience engagement.⁸ When a series only broadcasts four of its thirteen episodes, how on Earth will audiences become engaged?

Edge

Still, Buffy and Angel, and even Dead Like Me, are similarly witty, and all did well in terms of longevity relative to Wonderfalls. This is where the final factor comes into play, the key to understanding why audiences were so alienated by the series: edge.

To define the word for my purposes here, I mean "having the quality of pushing boundaries; genuine progressivism."

Leaving aside Jaye, who is herself quite edgy for a network heroine, the character of Sharon Tyler—Jaye’s eldest sibling—demands examination. Sharon is a woman of contradictions: she is a lesbian Republican immigration attorney, and she is one of the few characters we ever see outside of Jaye’s perspective. She is the closest thing the series has to a deuteragonist and her repressed sexuality is at the forefront of a number of episodes.

The notion of a lead lesbian character on network TV would (probably) not be considered edgy today, but, according to Fuller, it was a huge fiasco in 2004.⁹ Fox would only allow the writers to use the word “lesbian” a certain number of times per episode, and they were forbidden from doing anything more than imply that Sharon Tyler was having sex with another woman.

Most religious shows do not have this problem. Most religious shows are conservative, not progressive, and herein lies the most important point. Although both Wonderfalls and Joan of Arcadia are explicitly written as modern-day takes on Joan of Arc, one is ironic and the other is sincere.¹⁰

Wonderfalls explores religious themes extensively, featuring arcs with priests, nuns, and theologians, but it does so in a way that will not appeal to mainstream Christian audiences. It bears noting that the series was almost immediately re-aired off of Fox on niche channels, most conspicuously the religious Vision Network in Canada and the gay-and-lesbian channel Logo in the US.¹¹ With the proper context it seems natural that the series would develop a cult following in these spheres, but these are obviously unlikely companions in the championing of a television program.

I want to reiterate that it was not its focus on gay characters that doomed Wonderfalls, nor was it its use of religious styling. It was these two things taken together that created a particularly unstable niche. I believe the immense success of Buffy and the modest success of Joan of Arcadia demonstrate this point.

Buffy explicitly shows Willow’s lesbianism throughout its final seasons and its ratings did not suffer, and in a period even earlier than that of Wonderfalls. Meanwhile, Joan’s conventional religious themes were likely more appealing to an older, conservative audience, of precisely the type who might be put off by Sharon Tyler’s lesbian romances and the series’ general irony. God in Joan of Arcadia is, after all, explicit, with a capital G.¹³ Jaye Tyler’s god is far less angelic, undeniably spiritual but religiously skeptical, rooted in animism and not Christian monotheism.

Whatever words we want to use, it can be agreed that nothing about Wonderfalls is conservative, least of all its religious elements. That is the primary reason why the series failed to find its audience.

Finally, while Buffy, Angel, and Dead Like Me are, without a doubt, similarly edgy to Wonderfalls, I want to point out that they are series which focus extensively on violence. Even Dead Like Me, which is effectively a talking head comedy, sees at least two violent deaths per episode.

This is the sort of series that will appeal to an edgy young person. Edgy young people like to watch TV about death, violence, and tragedy, even if it's a comedy. What they are less interested in is the romantic and situational comedy.

Wonderfalls is a romantic, situational comedy.

Yes, it's in an hour-long format. But it is a pure romantic comedy at its core, in addition to having light supernatural mystery elements. Hardly anybody ever dies in Wonderfalls. It isn't dark.

Edginess and darkness tend to go together. A lack of darkness, full of edginess? An unusual combination, to say the least.

Conclusion

Wonderfalls is edgy, cultish, televisual, and narrowcasted. Although it conforms to a number of contemporary trends, it was built for re-watching and viewer dedication—the two things Fox could not afford to give it.¹³ That accounts for the disparity of success relative to Joan of Arcadia.

But, to bring it back to my introduction, what about Arrested Development? There was a show just as televisual and just as niche, that demanded just as much from the audience, and that performed almost immeasurably better on the same network—and during the same year!

Here it comes down to subject matter rather than style. Although the Tyler family is in many ways similar to the Bluths, and both series are witty and demanding of audience engagement, the barrier to entry in Arrested Development is much lower. Michael Bluth is a handsome, basically likable straight man who no one could find off-putting. His familial misadventures are relatable and have very little to do with contemporary politics or spirituality, and only superficially delve into subjects like sexuality.

Even if the viewer dislikes one of the characters, the sheer size of the cast guarantees something for everyone. The same can be said for most shows I’ve drawn comparisons to in this essay: Dead Like Me, Buffy, and Angel are all ensemble series, with each character sharing the burden of lead. If the viewer does not like the eponymous protagonist, he will find someone else.

Wonderfalls takes the opposite approach to TV. Jaye is in nearly every scene of every episode. She may be attractive, much as Michael is, but she is fundamentally not a straight woman; and as I’ve demonstrated in detail here, there are a huge number of qualities to her character that audiences might take issue with.

The series does develop its ensemble more thoroughly in later episodes, but its cancellation was too immediate. Audiences never reached the point where their contentions with Jaye may have been alleviated.

Meanwhile, in terms of subject matter, Wonderfalls balances religious themes with those of sexual identity, and is an extremely edgy and progressive show. But edgy young people, of the sort who like Buffy and Angel and who are willing to tolerate Jaye, are likely not interested in issues of spirituality and will not appreciate references to Agnes of God. They don't want romantic comedy; they want dark comedy--or even melodrama with comedic elements. But Wonderfalls is very restrained in its melodrama. Although often emotional, especially toward its conclusion, it isn't usually sappy in the way Buffy so constantly is. The writers didn't give in to that kind of pressure.

So who, besides me, was Wonderfalls for?

It’s impossible to point to any definite subset of the population. Like Arrested Development, it is a series that appeals to individuals for a whole slew of varied reasons, rather than sweeping demographics. Even fifteen years later, even after a successful campaign for resurrection on DVD, there has been no streaming renaissance for Wonderfalls, nor even a Blu-Ray rerelease.¹⁴ As of 2020 the series appears entirely orphaned: all of its 13 episodes are available for free on YouTube and have been for years.

Even despite this accessibility, its pilot only has two hundred thousand views, and subsequent episodes as few as twenty thousand. This hardly means anything anyway, since at least half of those twenty thousand are me.

And so it seems that Wonderfalls is simply too niche. It was a bad fit for Fox, but its low profile today suggests it wouldn’t have fared much better on cable or a streaming platform. It’s a shame. Then again, the series’ complete disregard of commerciality is what makes it so fantastic—and so unique. Maybe that makes up for its short broadcast run.

So Who Cares?

I know what you're thinking. Who cares about some mid-season replacement on Fox from 17 years ago that faceplanted after its fourth episode? Why is it worth studying? Who have I written this argument for? Does anyone in the entire galaxy remember this show beyond this blog? Why do the reasons for its cancellation matter at all today, when the landscape of entertainment is so entirely different?

I do not have answers to these questions. But Wonderfalls does tell us something about narrowcasting versus broadcasting. It tells us, I believe, about the role of subjectivity in passive entertainment. It teaches us about empathy and sympathy and the ways in which a brilliantly written series can fail simply because audiences cannot connect with its lead.

So, if you ever find yourself writing a television show for Fox, think not only of the hits of the network, but also of the Wonderfalls. Maybe you'll be able to make something as good that actually will last. Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it, as they say.

Then again, this is a bit of history I wouldn't mind seeing repeated--even if it is just for another four episodes.

Notes

1. “Wax Lion.” Wonderfalls. Written by Bryan Fuller, directed by Todd Holland. Fox, 2004. YouTube, https://youtu.be/nE_uvysLeIo?t=904. Commentary provided on DVD.

2. Beeler, Stan. "Wonderfalls." The Essential Cult TV Reader. Edited by David Lavery. 1st ed. UP of Kentucky, 2015. 322-327. Ebook. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/reader.action?docID=1915114.

2. Catlin, Roger. "`WONDERFALLS' RESCUED FROM OBLIVION: [STATEWIDE EDITION]." Hartford Courant, Feb 18, 2005. http://ezproxy.library.arizona.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/docview/256850112?accountid=8360; Lowry, Brian. "Wonderfalls." Daily Variety 282.54 (2004): 7. https://go-gale-com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=uarizona_main&id=GALE|A115077160&v=2.1&it=r; Garron, Barry. "Wonderfalls." Hollywood Reporter, vol. 382, no. 50, 12 Mar. 2004, p. 9. Gale In Context: Biography.

3. "Teen Girls' Spiritual Lives Hit Small Screen." Marketing to Women: Addressing Women and Women's Sensibilities, vol. 16, no. 11, Nov. 2003, p. 8.  https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A111016707/AONE?u=uarizona_main&sid=AONE&xid=fa92a68d.

4. Frutkin, A. J. "Where's Wonderfalls?" Mediaweek, vol. 14, no. 2, 2004, pp. 18-20. http://ezproxy.library.arizona.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/docview/213670521?accountid=8360.

5. Frutkin.

6. Lowry; Garron; Catlin.

7. Frutkin.

8. "Wax Lion" Commentary.

9. Beeler, Karin E. Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screen: An Analysis of Women Visionary Characters in Recent Television and Film. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008, p. 101-102. Ebook.

10. Stan Beeler, 324.

11. Stan Beeler, 323-325.

12. Wilcox, Rhonda. "God's Clothes, God's Bones: The Ethics of Representation on Joan of Arcadia." Studies in Popular Culture 28.1 (2005): p. 94; Levine, Stuart. "Joan of Arcadia: Hall monitors just the right balance between religion, ratings." Daily Variety, vol. 283, no. 52, 17 June 2004. Web.

13. Mittell, Jason. "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television." Velvet Light Trap, no. 58, 2006, pp. 29-40.

14. Snierson, Dan. “The Moment of Bluth.” Entertainment Weekly, April 2013; Stan Beeler, 322.

The bulk of this essay is sourced from one of two senior thesis papers I wrote in film school.

The "Video Game" Movie

In 1993, Buena Vista Pictures released Super Mario Bros.: The Movie to abysmal box office returns and (somehow) even worse reviews. This was the first collision of Hollywood and the burgeoning world of gaming, and was alas a grim portent for their future marriages. Although box office success has varied wildly, from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001, dir. Simon West) to Doom (2005, dir. Andrzej Bartkowiak) and the Resident Evil franchise (2002-present), Super Mario Bros.’s legacy of poor reception has proven unshakable.

Given this sampling, it would not be outrageous to claim these two media have a mixed history with one another. But video games have come a long way since Mario was on the NES, and while direct adaptations continue to prove unsuccessful, gaming has slowly seeped its way into the public consciousness, and an indirect kind of video game movie—one that alludes to interactive fiction but is not based on existing properties—has emerged.

Such a film is Hardcore Henry (2015, writ. & dir. by Ilya Naishuller).

Henry: The Film

Hardcore Henry was independently financed and filmed using consumer-grade GoPro cameras¹ in the Russian Federation. It is primarily noteworthy as one of only a few movies ever shot entirely from a first-person perspective—intentionally in the style of a First-Person Shooter (FPS) video game.

Yet despite this conspicuous style, what makes Hardcore Henry so remarkable is that it represents the first time the storytelling logic of gaming has entered into filmmaking; and it is this intense reliance on the logic of the FPS genre, combined with its immensely Russian setting, that makes Hardcore Henry such an interesting film—and accounts for its lackluster box office performance.

Video Game Exterior, Hollywood Interior

Upon Hardcore Henry’s release (henceforth “HH”), critics noticed the obvious parallels with gaming.² These parallels were intentional, as director Ilya Naishuller has specified multiple times since.³ The film is 90 minutes long and almost entirely action. Its first-person camerawork, in which eponymous protagonist Henry parkours across Moscow rooftops, leans around corners, reloads firearms, and wreaks havoc, is impossible not to compare to the experience of observing gameplay from a science fiction FPS such as Halo: Combat Evolved (2001).

On a superficial level HH eschews character development and overt thematic purpose in favor of mindless action, a quality no doubt attributable to most shooters. This is a film that revels in its violence. Although there is a story, most viewers will conclude that the spectacle of the carnage is itself the main purpose. Professional critics often criticized the narrative, and the characters especially, as shallow.⁴

This criticism is unfair.

Although it is undeniable that HH is more about action than story, and indeed as much an experiment in style as a work of art, it is neither the form of the narrative nor the unusualness of its first-person cinematography that makes the film unconventional.

Filmmaking

Analyze this film's screenplay and notice how well it conforms to classical three-act narrative structure:

Henry wakes up in a laboratory. Five minutes later, that lab is invaded by Akan, the primary antagonist. This is our inciting incident.

Henry ditches the laboratory and ends up on the streets of Moscow, left fleeing pursuers until the end of the first act. At this point, approximately thirty minutes into the film, the first imminent threat—that he is running out of power—is resolved, and the goal shifts to rescuing his captured wife Estelle.

Precisely at the film’s midpoint, 00:45:00, he finds his wife, only to run into Akan for the first time since the inciting incident. He loses the subsequent fight at the clear lowpoint of the narrative, and this lowpoint is precisely where Save the Cat (or any other Hollywood writers’ guide) would demand.

Here the action continues to climb until the beginning of the third act, which is demarked by Henry’s meeting up with the real body of Jimmy and his subsequent shift in goal: help Jimmy take down Akan before Akan activates his army of cyborg supersoldiers. This third act comes at precisely where it ‘should,’ with thirty minutes runtime remaining.

This is all standard procedure for narrative cinema.

What stands out most of all from HH’s story structure is that there is even a twist in the third act, which serves to recontextualize the entire film—Estelle’s betrayal, and the realization that she was always Akan’s tool.

It is true that this plot is more of a framework for the action than an important story to be told in and of itself. It is not an amazing drama. But crafting a film in which the classical Hollywood beats are hit as precisely as they are in Hardcore Henry is no small feat, and one that many large budget blockbusters fail to do as well as is accomplished here by Naishuller.

Throughout the film, too, bear witness to something very strange relative to video games: editing. Naishuller regularly edits out downtime, such as walking, in a way that video games cannot and do not ever do. These edits are concealed as ‘glitching’ in Henry’s optical servos, but we all know that eliding downtime without conflict is simply a convention of cinema. It is what must be done. And because HH is still a movie at its stylistic core—and not a game—it complies with these conventions, just as does its story.

Cinematic Form, Interactive Content

The true connections between HH and gaming are therefore much more complicated than visual style or plot structure. Any other action film could be shot in first-person, but it would not be a video game film in the way that HH so completely is. To explain this point, the content of the narrative needs to be carefully analyzed.

Consider the opening sequence. Henry wakes up with amnesia and receives his cybernetic augmentations. Seem familiar?

If it does, that might be because it's taken directly out of the original Halo. From darkness fades in a sci-fi laboratory, all from first-person, and a technician runs diagnostics to bring the character online. The audience gazes downward upon an unfamiliar body.

While this similarity may be ultimately coincidental, it shows one way in which Naishuller reaches video game solutions to narrative problems throughout Hardcore Henry—such as establishing the physical body of the Point of View character and reminding us that he is more than a floating GoPro.

Amnesia

What cannot be explained away as coincidence is the narrative’s deliberate use of amnesia. Amnesiac protagonists are not entirely foreign to cinema—Memento (2000, dir. Christopher Nolan) comes to mind—but are a particular staple of gaming.

Amnesia allows for a complete reset within the mind of the protagonist. It places the player and the character on the exact same level. More than permitting easy exposition, it alleviates dissonance that the player might feel while inhabiting someone else’s body. It creates cohesion between narrative and gameplay. Examples abound, most notably Planescape: Torment (1999), Disco Elysium (2019) and Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001). Amnesia is a staple of video game storytelling and it is also at the core of Hardcore Henry.

A Comparative Analysis with BioShock

Released in 2007, BioShock was and remains today critically acclaimed for its narrative. In many ways it and Hardcore Henry tell the same story: an amnesiac supersoldier, robbed of all agency, performs violent tasks in the pursuit of reuniting with a loved one. Ultimately, both stories see the protagonist’s puppetmaster revealed to be a manipulative villain, and both end with a “final boss” encounter that sees the puppetmaster brutally killed.

BioShock, as a game, tells us a great deal about personal agency; that is its thematic purpose, and it cultivates this lack of agency through its interactivity.

HH is a movie. It cannot utilize interactivity, or lack thereof, to make a point about agency. It can only utilize gaming’s narrative conventions to tell its story. This is exactly what the film does.

This is also why the film is so often criticized for its shallow characterization (of Henry in particular) by mainstream film critics,⁵ who themselves may not be familiar with conventions like amnesia which are so precisely and frequently deployed in gaming.

HH replicates this precision. It intentionally eschews establishing Henry as a character until the end, because Henry is not a character until he is free from Akan’s influence. He is a puppet for the other characters until his decision to kill Estelle in the last five seconds of the film. Had Henry been developed more thoroughly, the film’s third act twist, which is lifted directly out of BioShock (among other games--Metal Gear Solid 2 most obviously), would not be nearly so effective. It is deliberate that his development is backloaded.

But critics were right that this is unconventional. Films are not generally written this way, with protagonists that are so lacking in agency and so deliberately devoid of characterization. We are expected to understand the video game convention of amnesia and accept that Henry is a stand-in for the audience, rather than an inherently engaging dramatic character. Few without the context of having played BioShock or Half-Life will appreciate this technique.

The Silent Protagonist

As a final demonstration of HH’s narrative ties to gaming, I want to call attention to Henry’s silence. His vocal cord systems are never brought online, so his voice is never heard at any point in the film. He has no dialogue. This is one of the FPS’ most distinctive narrative conventions. BioShock, Halo, and most other shooters have ‘silent protagonists,’ characters who never speak in gameplay sequences.

This makes sense in a game. I, the player, am the protagonist. I exist within the lead character’s head. To hear another person’s voice issue from his mouth is jarring and distracting.

Movies do not have this problem.

Even in Hardcore Henry, while we might see Henry’s perspective, we do not drive the action, and so there is no obvious reason why Henry shouldn’t speak when spoken to. Naishuller goes further than he needs to in giving this a diegetic explanation in the story, but the real reason why Henry is silent is that the film’s content is modeled after gaming. It would be strange indeed if this monolithic convention of the FPS was disobeyed in a ‘video game’ movie.

This is perhaps the most important quality of HH in making the narrative feel like a game.

To understand why Henry is presented the way he is, to understand these filmmaking choices, one needs the context of gaming, and it is unsurprising that reception tended toward the negative where that context was missing. Those with proper context, such as the gaming website IGN, appreciated what HH was going for more than cinema-exclusive film critics.⁶

In a sense this is a failing on Naishuller’s part: perhaps HH takes its ‘gameyness’ too far and tells a story that cannot stand on its own.

From Russia Without Subtitles

To leave its ties to gaming momentarily aside, Hardcore Henry’s uniqueness, and the reason for its commercial failure, is demonstrated by one further factor: the film is Russian, and it shows.

HH may be the most Russian films ever given a wide release in the United States.

Ironically, most of the film is in English; it is only the antagonists who speak Russian (which is presented only sometimes in subtitles), but this is ultimately unimportant. Russian culture pervades nearly every scene of this film.

Naishuller was personally responsible for much of the camerawork and shot in a ‘guerrilla’ style,⁷ and this provides an unmitigated glimpse into real life in Moscow. The buildings are ugly and Soviet, the apartments dirty and cramped, and the cars aging and European.

We visit a club and brothel of a kind that pervades the Muscovite nightlife and romp through a desolate and crumbling Communist-era ‘hotel’ in the leadup to the film’s third act.⁸

But undoubtedly most alienating for Americans are the people themselves: every character and every extra is white, and huge percentages are blond. They make Russian jokes (“You know the problem with Mother Russia? Too goddamn hot.”), speak Russian, shave their heads, behave thuggishly, and wear tracksuits of a kind that only Eastern Europeans ever would. These sorts of distinctively Slavic characters, from whom Henry steals clothes in the first act, are prevalent enough to have their own subcultural name in Russia—“gopota,” or gopniks in English.

If you've ever seen a Slav squatting, that's a Gopnik.

But above all, the police are corrupt and the military always nearby. Toward the end of the film a soldier asks Henry for a lighter, then decides to keep it after his cigarette is lit. This in particular may seem like a strictly cinematic scene to Americans, but harassment, coercion, and the ever-present armed forces are unfortunately frequent experiences throughout the former USSR.

With this extreme Russianness oozing everywhere from Hardcore Henry, we can come to understand why Eastern European critics far, far preferred the film to Americans.⁹ In fact, they loved it.

Conclusory Remarks

Hardcore Henry applies gaming conventions of character and narrative onto a generally classical Hollywood format. Its greatest failing is its apparent inability to bridge the gap between the expectations of moviegoers and film aficionados with the narrative conventions of the video games it pays homage to.

But that, along with its supremely un-American setting, is what makes it so interesting and unique: most video game movies are simply video games turned into movies. It’s no surprise that their reputation is one of poor quality, because games have storytelling conventions dissimilar to those of film.

Hardcore Henry is different. Hardcore Henry is a movie that is a video game. And although that certainly guarantees a small audience, I believe the film Naishuller gave us to be far more interesting for those of us who love both interactive and non-interactive storytelling than any true, mainstream video game franchise cinematic adaptation could ever hope to be.

Notes

1. Bishop, Bryan. “The making of Hardcore Henry, the craziest first-person action movie you’ll ever see.” The Verge, 16 Mar. 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/16/11248318/hardcore-henry-gopro-movie-director-interview-sxsw-2016.

2. “Half in the Bag Episode 107: Hardcore Henry.” RedLetterMedia, ft. Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman. 14 Apr. 2016. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioit5DWsWsw.

3. “Hardcore Henry Interview with Sharlto Copley and Ilya Naishuller.” Dread Central, 20 Mar. 2016, Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD6MN4yRVpI; Bishop.

4. Pile, Jonathan. “Hardcore Henry Review.” Empire Online, 13 Apr. 2016. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/hardcore-henry-review/; RedLetterMedia.

5. Kenny, Glenn. “Review: In ‘Hardcore Henry,’ a Semi-Robotic Soldier Has a Personal Mission.” The New York Times, 7 Apr. 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/movies/review-in-hardcore-henry-a-semi-robotic-soldier-has-a-personal-mission.html; Abrams, Simon. “Hardcore Henry.” RogerEbert.com, 8 Apr. 2016. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hardcore-henry-2016; Pile.

6. Nicholson, Max. “Hardcore Henry – Review.” IGN, 14 Mar. 2016. https://in.ign.com/hardcore-henry/89440/review/hardcore-henry-review; Kamen, Matt. “How Hardcore Henry steals gaming's best tricks for film.” Wired Magazine, 5 Apr. 2016. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hardcore-henry-director-interview.

7. Kamen.

8. For an in-depth analysis of post-Soviet Russian culture, particularly police corruption and the military, I highly recommend Darkness at Dawn by David Satter. His portrait of the Russian Federation is one HH confirms, particularly the nightclub sequence.

9. “Hardcore Henry.” Kritikanstvo. https://kritikanstvo.ru/movies/hardcorehenry.

THIS IS A TRUE STORY

In college I took a course that discussed the difference between a history and a chronicle. A history is a causal, narrative telling of a certain sequence of events: a story of humans past.

Around 60 BC, Julius Caesar fled to Gaul to escape his Roman debtors. As proconsul he waged a war of conquest, primarily for the purpose of bringing home slaves with which to fill the general coffers, and he earned enthusiastic support from both the Roman people and his legions as a result--but he also earned the ire of the Optimates. When he finally returned ten years later, he illegally crossed the Rubicon with a legion in tow, and the Senate declared him a public enemy. Thus, essentially, ended the Roman Republic.

A chronicle is simply a list of historical facts. It tells us nothing of why or how, only of what.

Caesar went to Gaul. Caesar conquered Gaul. Caesar returned to Rome. Caesar was made a public enemy. Caesar became dictator-for-life. Caesar was assassinated. Marc Antony and Brutus fought. Augustus and Marc Antony fought. Augustus became Imperator.

Every episode of Fargo begins with the words THIS IS A TRUE STORY. With every passing season this increasingly stretches credulity. It's a lie, of course. Nothing about Fargo is true. That's why, in Season 3, this title card fades out with instead the words THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

Season 4 takes this lie one step further. Not only is the word "true" before each episode obviously untrue, but so too has become the word "story."

Season 4 is not a story. Season 4 is a chronicle. There is no narrative value. It is, at best, a list of scenes that happened, without any real causal link chaining them together.

What else is there to say?

I've been putting off writing this review for several weeks. I love Fargo. I think it's brilliant. I'm a huge fan of Noah Hawley. But Season 4 is terrible. It's a dull, pretentious, humorless slog, and although it ends with the kind of bloodbath that Fargo must end with, it doesn't even have the common decency to show us its climactic fight scenes--instead, they're all edited around, and we're left mostly with characters talking and talking and talking to each other. Generally about America, racism, capitalism, or whatever other profound subject is in the news these days.

You'll note that nearly every episode in Season 4 is credited with multiple writers. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as the credit is with an &. That signifies a writing team. If the credit is listed as and, on the other hand, you're in trouble. That means the episode has different writers who were not in contact with one another. Guess how many times you'll see "and Noah Hawley" at the end of each episode?

Constantly.

I can only imagine the utter mess of a story that we received, with a hundred too many characters, none of whom matter whatsoever, with no plot trajectory and nothing at all interesting to latch onto as a viewer, has something to do with COVID. I know the series' production was disrupted back in March. This explains the completely underwhelming finale, but unfortunately doesn't explain why the writing is so terrible.

Ultimately, the whole point of Season 4 seems to be that it's all pointless. If you've seen Season 3, you may recall that this--among other themes--was also the idea there. Unlike a lot of Fargo fans I love 3 almost as much as 1 and 2, but the profound pointlessness can be very frustrating. It works in 3 because the characters are so good, the action is so memorable, the dialogue so snappy, and the irony so amazingly funny.

But most importantly, 3 still has a story.

4 does not.

Season 4 has no trajectory. Its degree of pointlessness makes even Season 3 look like a rapier. It is nothing more than a chronicle of two gangs. Worse, it has an uninteresting cast of characters, none of whom are given the time they need to develop; it has no sense of humor, and nothing at all is funny; and when each character dies pointlessly, it's often in a way that makes no sense, isn't set up, and comes out of nowhere.

It's terrible. Watching this season was a tremendous slog. I almost gave up; there are only so many monologues about America and racism that one can take. Season 4 has at least one an episode. In fact most of Season 4 is monologuing. No conflict, just one character lecturing the other. It's like a Hideo Kojima game.

But the conclusion is always what makes Fargo. The conclusion is always what sells the season. So I stuck it out.

Was it worth it?

Do you remember the game of cat-and-mouse between Lorne and Lester at the end of Season 1? How tense and exciting it was? The catharsis when Lorne was finally killed?

Do you remember the shootout at the motel and the chase between Hanzee and Lou at the end of Season 2? How unbelievably high the stakes were and how glorious the violence, and how tragic it was when Meth Damon died just as his wife began to love him again?

Do you remember the brilliant dynamic between Mr. Wrench and Nikki Swango developed in the last three episodes of Season 3? Do you remember how awesome it was when the Wrench and Numbers theme started to play at the end of 3.7? Do you remember the scene where this new crime duo CUT OFF A GUY'S HEAD WITH A METAL CHAIN, and how exciting their dismantling of Varga's empire was?

In Fargo 4.8, we take an entire episode off from the main storyline, right before the climax, to develop a relationship between two characters who do not matter--one of whom will die at the episode’s conclusion through an awkwardly edited act of God that makes no sense and serves no purpose.

Over the three subsequent episodes, Chris Rock gives a few monologues, some Italian guy gives a few monologues, and a few characters die pointlessly without ever doing anything. A ghost shows up for some reason to avert a crisis that only arose because the characters were behaving like idiots, and the series' weakest villain to date--a villain who does nothing for ten episodes and whose only purpose in the “plot” is to provide an easy out for the conflict between the two gangs--dies following a painfully prolonged "trial" sequence.

The two attempts at exciting shootouts that we receive are more like storyboards than actual scenes, likely due to COVID. They are so bad that nothing would have been preferable, and certainly less embarrassing for FX.

Ultimately, in episodes 10 and 11, there is no cat-and-mouse, no big reveal, and no clever espionage. No one's head gets ripped off and no one steps in any bear traps. The most exciting thing to happen is that the leader of the Italian gang instantly fulfills all of his objectives that he has been working toward for the last year, off-screen, by himself, while wearing no pants, five minutes before his demise. Just like that! It was so easy, why didn't you just do it sooner? You would've saved us all a whole heap of trouble!

This season exists in the paradoxical limbo of being both rushed and drawn out. That is not a good place for TV to be.

If you can't tell, I don't think sticking this out was worth it. I would have gotten just as much out of Fargo 4 if I'd shut it off after the premiere. The entire 11-episode run is nothing but filler, and its conclusion is no different. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of characters and monologues, signifying nothing.

Don't watch it.