Ad Pocalypse Now or DADS in SPAAAAACE

Ad Astra.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

What is it with space movies and fathers? We all felt that little twinge of disappointment when we sat through that whole Contact movie, and the alien ended up appearing as Jodie Foster's father. And yet, from Contact, to Interstellar, to The Empire Strikes Back, filmmakers have some strange compulsion to take a good, original sci fi epic and tack on that most hackneyed of stories, our relationships with our dads. It was already a cliché when Sophocles scratched Oedipus Rex onto a sheet of papyrus with a reed pen, but 2,500 years later, filmmakers keep doubling down. Do they think that we can’t appreciate the vastness of the universe and the wonders of space exploration unless they “humanize” them for us? That everything has to be brought down to the level of a father missing his son's soccer game?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying never do a story about father figures. If it has some unique twist on the subject, it’s worth seeing. 2017’s Logan comes to mind, and there have been other fine treatments of the theme. Sadly, Ad Astra, which opens this weekend, isn’t one of them.

Not that it's a bad movie. The plot is basically Apocalypse Now in space: a military officer, operating far from the control of his superiors, has gone rogue, and another soldier, more junior, is sent on a journey to confront him. In this case, the rogue officer is Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legend in the U.S. Space Command (apparently Trump’s “Space Force” really came to be). Years before, he led a mission to the outer reaches of the solar system, but contact with him had long since been lost.

When earth is hit by a surge of cosmic rays, disrupting communications, destroying electronics, and creating explosions and chaos all over the planet, his son Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), also an astronaut, is called in for a top secret briefing from a roomful of generals. They inform him the Surge originated from Neptune and they believe it is linked to McBride Senior. The brass don’t know whether he has developed some sort of weapon, or the Surge has some other cause, but they want Major McBride to try to re-establish communications with his dad. A straightforward mission, and yet the generals don’t seem to be telling McBride all they know.

In any case, McBride is launched on a journey of planet-hopping across the solar system, starting with the moon and Mars. The mood varies between the paranoid--close up shots of the interior of claustrophobic space capsules--and the awe-inspiring--spectacular panoramas of outer space (more on that later). There’s a decent amount of excitement along the way, and between action scenes McBride has long stretches of travel time to come to terms with the emotional scars left by a father whose job was more important to him than his wife and son, a father who left home, never to return. Talk about the distant father cliché. Hard to get more distant than Neptune.

There are also many mistakes in physics, and those who enjoy picking at that sort of thing will have a field day. The technical consultant, Robert Yowell, has an impressive resume of 30 years experience on space projects, but this is his first movie. Just to take one example: gravity. I could believe that there might be earth-like gravity indoors in a moon base, thanks to some sort of artificial gravity technology which is never explained. But normal gravity outdoors on Mars, where objects in the real world weigh only 37% of what they do on earth, pushes the limits of credibility.

And yet, Ad Astra has many things going for it. It has been praised for the realism of the space technology, and some of this is deserved. The rockets, spacesuits, landing modules, and launch facilities are familiar to us from the ones we’ve seen in our own lifetimes, but projected into the future just enough to make a mission to Neptune believable.

The acting is stellar. As an astronaut with a famous dad, Major McBride is a public figure with a certain persona that he’s expected to live up to: per his own opening lines, “steady, calm, ready to do my job to the best of my abilities.” And yet he’s falling apart. Brad Pitt puts in an excellent performance as a man who is supposed to be holding it together, and is faking it. Kudos also to Tommy Lee Jones for his portrayal of a once towering figure who’s now confused and on the border of senility, if not past it. And MCU fans will be delighted to see Ruth Negga, Agents of Shield's Raina, in a small but pivotal role as the administrator of the Mars base.

And then there’s the space porn. No, not that kind. Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean stunning cinematography of spacecraft blasting off and landing, planetary landscapes, starry skies. The trailer doesn't do justice to it, but it will give you a flavor at least:

One scene, in particular stood out for me: during a chase across the lunar surface, when McBride’s moon buggy crosses the terminator from day to night, the stars suddenly come out and adorn a sky that a moment before had been a solid field of black. Beautiful.

Indeed, despite its flaws, Ad Astra is well worth seeing just for the eye candy. Preferably in IMAX, where you can feel the shaking of the rockets, and see the stunning vistas of space fill your field of view.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Never Meet Your Heroes Part 2

Amazon’s The Boys has a similar vibe to Deadpool but without all the winking at the camera and the knowledge that Marvel corporate signed off on every self-effacing joke. A Nerds who Read review.

The Boys (Amazon 2019 TV Series).
Review by Kerey McKenna.

Last week I posted a quick retrospective of the over-the-top superhero satire comic book The Boys in anticipation of the live action TV series about to drop on Amazon. Now that the series has come out and I’ve binge-watched it, it’s time to share my thoughts about the series in and of itself, but also in relation to the book it was based on.

Now to really go into the nature of the adaptation and how it relates to the original book series, I’m going to have to give more details about the overall plot of both works. So this week I will give my general thoughts on the series and next week I will go into a more spoiler-filled discussion of both the comic and TV versions.

I had a great time with the Boys television series. Revisiting the premise after so many years, with additional creators and artists, has built upon the strong framework of the books while adding contributions, insights, and revisions that make the work of adaptation transformative and not merely reproductive. Just as I had hoped.

Fittingly, as the original Boys was a comic book series about comic book superheroes, The Boys: the Amazon Streaming Show is an Internet TV series about TV, Internet, and movie superheroes. The series starts with a logo clearly spoofing that of Marvel Studios, and throughout the series a great deal of world-building is communicated through in-universe talk shows, movies, newscasts, sports promos, commercials, and trending social media videos. It’s very reminiscent of Paul Verhoven’s classic Robocop and shares a lot of Robocop’s cynicism about Corporate America. In this world, heroes are celebrities and, despite their incredible superpowers, have a tenuous place in the spotlight: one day they could be getting the key to the city, but the next a career-ending injury, a scandal, or just the fickle tastes of the public could “depower” them down to C-list celebrities cruising the convention circuit to make ends meet. In a great bit of stunt casting we see one of these sad sack conventions for has-beens. We meet a former child (super-hero) star next to an actor whose superhero movie failed to launch a franchise back in the 90’s...played by a real world former child star and the actual actor with the failed franchise playing themselves. In this world, bad publicity is every hero’s true kryptonite.

Beyond the tried and true device of exposition through broadcast media, many scenes are viewed by the audience through the lens of an in-world camera like candid cell phone, dash cam, or surveillance video footage. When we first see “Starlight,” the ingénue superheroine in costume, graduating from farm league to major league heroics, it is through the screen of a camcorder as she gives an audition for her place on the superhero team “The Seven.” Everyman Hughie works in an electronics store specializing in sales and home installation of entertainment and Internet appliances (which later grants him a role on “The Boys” as their surveillance expert in addition to wide-eyed audience POV character).

By leaning into the nature of the medium and how it is made, Amazon’s iteration of The Boys broadens the original comics’ critique of the superhero genre to an indictment of how mass media is produced and consumed.

In addition to the clever self-effacing use of its new medium, the tone, pacing and narrative of the series have been given a much-needed fine-tuning. The over the top violence, sex, pessimism, and dark humor are all still there, but they are deployed more carefully, always allowing a sense of normalcy to return or creating a slow burn of tension before things go shockingly and bizarrely sideways.

Characters are given more narrative arcs in the Amazon series than in the comics to develop (or degrade) as people over the course of the season. Information that was laid on the table quite early in print could therefore be held back, giving more mysteries and challenges for the characters and the audience to solve.

Is this the series that will cure your fatigue of a mediascape dominated by comic book superheros? Honestly, probably not. To recommend it as such would be like saying you should scratch at your mosquito bite, or perhaps a more apt metaphor in this case, recommend you stick it to “Hollywood-obsessed culture” by hoovering up celebrity gossip magazines and blogs: There is a visceral feel like you are relieving your irritation when in fact you are just prolonging the agony. It’s a novel and subversive take on the material but it is ultimately still a comic book superhero fantasy.

In my case, however, I don’t suffer from superhero fatigue and loved this series. It has a similar vibe to Deadpool but without all the winking at the camera and the knowledge that Marvel corporate signed off on every self-effacing joke. It’s an equal opportunity offender where a televangelist elastic man and the save-the-dolphins mer-man are both hypocrites behind their public personas. As dark, violent satire, it “takes the piss” out of the superhero genre, the entertainment industry, partisan politics, and perhaps, most importantly, the performative edgelord rebels snickering at the culture as if they are above it all. And there’s a serviceable thriller weaving all this together.

So if any of that sounds interesting check out the streaming series or take a peak at the comic (which is available at a discount through some digital distributors right now because of the series and may even be available through your local library) and join me next week for a deeper dive into the themes of The Boys when we will cover such topics as.

#MeToo(™)

Why Henry Cavil’s Superman was less likable than the star-spangled psycho Homelander

Choking on “The Red Pill”

And why you can still feel bad about keeping a dolphin locked in an amusement park, even if that dolphin is a rapist.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Tarantino to Political Correctness: F—k Off!

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Movie review by Michael Isenberg.

You might have noticed that it’s been a while since I wrote a movie review—not since last December’s Aquaman, which I described as “not great…fails to sparkle.” In fact, I haven’t even been to a movie in that time. Frankly, I’ve been boycotting. Too much of what comes out of Hollywood just isn’t very good, and the tiresome political correctness sucks all the fun out of it.

But Quentin Tarantino is one of the most talented and politically incorrect directors in Hollywood. I’ve been a huge fan ever since 2003’s Kill Bill, Part I. Every time I watch the scene of the plane landing in Tokyo, I just shake my head and mumble, “This is f—king brilliant.” So this week’s release of his ninth film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood seemed like a good time to head back to the theater.

I recognize that not everyone shares my enthusiasm. A piece by Sara Stewart in The New York Post this week, “Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation has no place in Hollywood anymore,” captures the controversies swirling around the director:

Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” is a love letter to the film industry days of yore — the late ’60s, to be exact. Men were men, female actors were “starlets” and the words “Me too” had yet to be hashtagged. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that a guy who partnered with producer Harvey Weinstein up until the latter’s shattering downfall would feel a bit nostalgic about the good ol’ retro days in the film biz. But just like Harvey, Tarantino and his oeuvre are things that should now move quietly into the “boy, bye” column. There was a time and place for Tarantino, who gave us his share of strong female characters — Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo in “Kill Bill,” Pam Grier’s fierce “Jackie Brown” — but never strayed far from his urge to exploit in his films, fetishizing the N-word and relishing the sadistic treatment of women. Look no further than Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue taking a truly stupendous number of punches in the face, and then much worse, over the three-hour span of “The Hateful Eight.”

And yet, even Stewart had to concede, “Tarantino worshippers and cinephiles will gush over his new movie’s gorgeous depiction of old Hollywood, its twisty conclusion and Leo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt’s dedicated, leathery performances.”

Love him or hate him, one thing is clear to anyone who has ever seen a Tarantino film: the man loves movies. So it was inevitable that he would eventually make a film about Hollywood.

The film covers the six months leading up to the real-life Tate Murders. For those unfamiliar with them, here’s some background; it's critical to appreciating the film: On the night of August 8-9, 1969, a little after midnight, members of Charles Manson's infamous Manson Family gang brutally murdered actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child (she was eight and a half months pregnant), and four of her friends. The atrocity occurred at the Beverly Hills house she shared with her husband, director Roman Polanski, who was away in Europe directing a film at the time.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, these months in 1969 are not seen from the viewpoint of Tate herself, at least not primarily. Rather the POV characters through most of the movie are her fictional next door neighbor, actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), and his stuntman, driver, sidekick, and best friend Cliff Booth (Pitt). Dalton had starred in a popular Western TV show in the ‘50s, as well as a number of action films. But he blew his chance at the lead in 1963’s The Great Escape, losing out to Steve McQueen, and now his career is on the downswing. He sees Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Tate (Margot Robbie) driving in and out of their home, but he doesn’t interact with them. He’s frankly intimidated living next door to the director of Rosemary’s Baby. And it doesn’t help that their careers are on the upswing.

IRL, Tate spent the early 60’s toiling in bit parts on television—including that of one of the girls in the typing pool on fifteen episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. But by the end of the decade, she was getting some fairly decent movie roles. “I did a lot of research on Sharon and became very enamored of her,” Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly:

She seemed like an incredibly sweet person. When you talk about all the different friends that she had, even acquaintances that she had, they all tell the same story about her, about this unaffected beauty, just this reservoir of goodness and kindness. Now, that almost sounds too good to be true, but for whatever reason, as I’m reading all this stuff, I’m really buying it. Every account about her that I found backs up that version of her. Unfortunately, she’s kind of been defined by her murder. I thought the best way to get her across was not sticking her in a bunch of scenes with Roman or with other people where she’s [furthering] a plot, but just hanging out with her, letting her drive around Los Angeles, do her errands, and just see where the day takes her. I wanted to show people a glimpse of Sharon before the murder, so they think of her as more than just a victim.

It was a gamble on Tarantino’s part, but thanks to Margot Robbie’s amazing performance, it pays off. Sharon Tate comes across as pretty, carefree, and happy, in that natural, long-haired, barefoot 60’s kind of way. We like Sharon Tate. We don’t want to see her get murdered.

Robbie captures her so well that Tate’s real life sister Debra said, “She made me cry because she sounded just like Sharon. The tone in her voice was completely Sharon, and it just touched me so much that big tears [started falling]. The front of my shirt was wet. I actually got to see my sister again… nearly 50 years later.”

The film has all the usual Tarantino trademarks. Cool people looking cool with cool cars and cool music. Red Apple cigarettes. Feet. Long conversations about nothing important, but with a subtext that has us on the edge of our seats.

And yet, I thought the movie started slow. We sympathize with Dalton as he struggles professionally. And he has a very sweet friendship with a precocious child actor (not actress!, she insists) on the set of his latest TV pilot, in a scene-stealing performance by nine-year-old Julia Butters. When I saw it, more than one “aww” went through the audience during their scenes together—without irony. It was all very nice, but where was the real conflict?

Things picked up about halfway, when Booth picks up a hitchhiker who asks him to take her to the Spahn Ranch—a deserted movie site where Booth used to film Westerns, now a commune for hippies. They seem like nice enough people, albeit the woman who is apparently in charge, Squeaky, is a little suspicious of strangers. Perfectly understandable since their leader, referred to only as Charlie, isn’t around. And this is why I say that knowing the back story is so crucial to appreciating this movie. We’re never told explicitly that they’re the Manson Family. We’re just supposed to know that, and because we do, because we know that Booth is alone among these seemingly nice flower children who are actually killers, the scene takes on chilling nail-biting tension and suspense.

After the scene at the ranch, there’s a brief interlude to wrap up Dalton’s career arc, and then, for the remainder of the movie, the notorious and brutal events of August 8-9 unfold.

I mentioned at the beginning that I was sick of politically correct movies, so I was eager to see how Tarantino would handle the pressure from the likes of Sara Stewart to get in line. Would he present women in keeping with feminist orthodoxy—independent, frigid, and ugly? Would he tone down the violence? Would he pussyfoot around minority characters, out of fear of offending somebody? In other words, would Quentin Tarantino stop being Quentin Tarantino?

To his credit, the answers were no, no, no, and no. With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino told political correctness to F—k off. The women are hot. The violence is violent. And the people of color are human.

Clearly the decision to just hang out with Tate as she did her errands, and not really give her a story line, was problematic from the feminist point of view. “We don’t need that type of guy anymore,” harps the Post’s Stewart, “especially one who thinks silencing Sharon Tate for most of his film is somehow a fitting homage.” But as I said, that gamble paid off.

More generally, the women in the film are frankly sexual. (As are the men. IMDB reports, “At the film's world premiere screening at the Cannes film festival, the scene where Brad Pitt, 55, takes off his shirt to show off his still muscular stuntman physique, drew gasps and spontaneous applause from the audience.” Quentin Tarantino is an equal-opportunity objectifier.) Margaret Qualley as Pussycat, the hitchhiker (Pussy, for short) absolutely sizzles. Well, she does if you like pit hair. It was the 60’s. And if you expect some obscene double entendres concerning her name, à la 1964's Goldfinger, you won’t be disappointed.

As for violence in general, and violence against women in particular, if anything, Tarantino has doubled down. Compared to one of the women in Once Upon a Time, the Jennifer Jason Leigh character in The Hateful Eight got off easy. And you may not want to watch what Dalton does with a flamethrower. You heard me. There’s a goddamn flamethrower.

Tarantino even has the courage to trash the late, beloved martial artist Bruce Lee. IRL Lee was friends with Tate, had given her martial arts lesson to prepare for a film role, and was briefly a suspect in her murder, at least in Polanski’s mind. He was the subject of the 1993 biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. It’s an excellent film which treats Lee with reverence. There are many touching scenes that take on the subject of racial intolerance. But there's no reverence for Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Played by Mike Moh, whose physical resemblance to the original is uncanny, Tarantino's Lee is just a dick.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, sex and violence are fun, that’s all there is to it. By refusing to back away from that, despite pressure from the forces of political correctness, Tarantino has made an entertaining, gripping, and touching film which, in his own words, will be his “memory piece.” I’m glad I picked it for my return to the Megaplex.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. He is the author of Full Asylum, a comedy about politics, hospital gowns, and political correctness run amok in Hollywood. It is available on Amazon.com

Never Meet Your Heroes

The Boys by Garth Ennis and co-created, designed, and illustrated by Darick Robertson.
Comic Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

So many superheroes these days. In comic books and theaters, on broadcast TV and now the streaming services. There are standalone heroes and hero team-ups and movies where heroes team up with other versions of themselves from parallel universes. Seemingly even some notable bombs can’t stop some superhero franchises from chugging along. You could wipe half of them from existence but they’d come roaring back the next year, in even greater numbers. Does every other movie or TV show have to be an adaptation of some sci-fi pulp fiction rag starring some model-perfect celebrity who packed on the muscle (or donned a padded suit) to get in on the craze some of you may ask? Who will save us from this legion of costumed clowns?

That’s where “The Boys” come in.

The Boys comic book series, running from 2006 to 2012, is a brutal deconstruction of comic book superheroes. With Amazon Prime’s new streaming adaptation coming this week I wanted to briefly revisit the original comics.

They are set in a world where Corporate America mass produces a glut of irresponsible and dangerous real life super-powered people in a profane combination of celebrity culture and defense spending. Very few of the “Superheroes” in the story (most of whom are clear parodies of DC and Marvel Characters) have any redeeming qualities. They are a result of the mega corporation, Vault American (think OCP from the RoboCop trilogy) either attempting to create human weapons, or covering up when they cause industrial accidents that result in some poor schmuck getting doused in chemicals and coming out the other end with superpowers. Whether grown in a vat or coming into contact with hazardous chemicals, Vaught slaps garish costumes on them, creates back stories, and makes them rich with a share of the merchandising and comic book rights. Comics are bowdlerized or outright fictionalized accounts of their “adventures.” Vaught American has the marketing down to a science, with a legion of super IP for all tastes: Teams of young “Social Justice Warrior” heroes checking off every demographic box for progressives. Jingoistic “God, Family, Country” heroes for Middle America. Vaught American doesn’t really care about either value set, just about casting the widest net possible in pursuit of profit. Many of the supers themselves are assigned their heroic identities and accompanying politics much in the way that pro wrestlers are—the costume and persona are assigned by management and it is the performers’ responsibility never to break character in public.

Meanwhile, as there is little need for actual day-to-day superheroics (battles in this world are rare but tend to be brutal, vicious, short and likely to result in collateral damage), many of the “heroes” partake in the usual vices of celebrity: sex, drugs, and all manner of irresponsibility with the assurance that their corporate masters will grease the palms to keep them out of the papers and jail. As if any jail could hold them…

Not happy about super-powered menaces with an excellent PR department running around, the US government activates “The Boys,” a small goon squad of individuals given superpowers to keep the garishly dressed supers and their corporate masters in check through blackmail, intimidation, and brutal application of lethal force:

Billy Butcher: Leader of the The Boys, this rough and tumble British bruiser has brains to match his considerable brawn. Always accompanied by his bulldog Terror, Butcher has a veneer of gallows and profane humor covering a very personal vendetta against the world’s most powerful super, The Homelander, a blond ubermensch in a star-spangled costume. Clearly a riff on Superman.

Mother’s Milk: Billy’s lancer. His mother worked in a Vaught industrial facility and exposure to chemicals passed along extra superpower imbuing nutrients when she nursed him.

The Frenchman: What’s his nationality? He’s French. Why do you think he has this outrageous accent?!

The Female (of the Species): a stoic (mostly silent) teenage waif who is ready for any excuse to fold men into pretzels and punt them into the stratosphere.

Wee Hughie: The newest member of the team and the primary audience POV character to learn about this world. Hailing from bonny Scotland, he is recruited to the team and granted superpowers after his girlfriend is brutally killed as collateral damage by a reckless super. Brought into the fold by Billy, he is our viewpoint to the ridiculous, profane, and deadly excesses of the supers and the many sins of Vaught America.

The Boys fits in with other works that violently deconstruct a superhero genre that has become inexorably entwined with the comics medium, such as 1980’s classics Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, or millennial fair like Kick-Ass and Super. This was a series that launched two years before the MCU takeover of the international box office and wrapped up the same year as Avengers delivered on the promise of a shared cinematic universe. What would it feel like to revisit this harsh take down of superheroes as they’ve started taking over the culture?

After a quick reread I’d say my feelings are still very mixed but curious about what Amazon is going to do with the material.

First, the book revels in over the top graphic depictions of sex and violence (as do many works by co-creator Garth Ennis). Beyond the gut-churning imagery itself, what I find most disconcerting is that the series veers wildly between extreme imagery in service of realism and pathos on one page, and then in the next page pulls a 180 with the violence and sex a punchline for dark humor. The only through line connecting the extremes is a consistent drum beat of cynicism: about politics, about the genre, and about the human (and superhuman) experience.

The anger and cynicism that drips off the page (with all the blood and gore) makes the most sense if you take into account that Garth Ennis is ambivalent or even outright hostile to the superhero genre that dominates comic books. In laying out a narrative in which honest blue-collar goons can take down celebrity ubermenschen, it seems like Ennis often isn’t writing to make a grand statement about the nature of corruption of power, but rather an exercise in catharsis to violently banish the costumed clones that take up so much of his work schedule when he’d rather be writing about spies, soldiers and gunmen.

I felt the series was strongest in its earliest installments in which the two most naive members of the cast, Wee Hughie the rookie member of The Boys, and Star Light, a heroine who has just graduated to “The Seven” (A dark parody of the Justice League, led by the Homelander) still have all their preconceptions about superheroes—and themselves. As the story unfolds, they see these preconceptions cruelly undermined at every turn as they come to realize just how dark and twisted the world really is.

A lot of what the pair discover isn’t so much the dark secrets of the fictional world, but indictments of the superhero genre and comic book industry itself. Rereading this years later (very much after the superhero takeover of the mainstream) many of the most important critiques still ring true (treatment of female creators and female characters in the industry, shallow virtue/value signaling by mega corporations, and how much corporate lobbying protects big business from actual market forces). Other parts of the story (9/11, The Avengers being relatively unknown by the public when compared to The Justice League, its Stan Lee Parody) feel very much like products of their time and have not aged well at all.

As I said I’m interested in what Amazon is going to do with this so in my next installment I will binge the new show and report back whether the transition to TV and some new creators in the mix have smoothed out the rough edges.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Magical Alt-History Tour

Once There Was a Way: What if the Beatles Stayed Together? by Bryce Zabel.
Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

This weekend, Yesterday will hit theaters, joining a club of major motion pictures that build their stories around the Beatles' song catalog. It’s a magical-realism dramedy in which a struggling musician wakes up in a world where seemingly the band The Beatles never existed. Now he has a short cut to the success bringing the world the music it didn’t know it was missing.

To coincide with this little thought experiment, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a story based on the opposite premise: not a world where The Beatles never existed, but one where they never broke up.

Once There Was a Way is a captivating contra-history, more popularly known as alternate history, written as a retrospective of the long and winding road of The Beatles...after the tumultuous year of 1970.

Now we’ve touched on works of alternate history before here at Nerds who Read, but I don’t think we’ve discussed it as a sub-genre in and of itself so I wanna hold your hand through a brief overview.

The alternate history subgenre of modern fiction is usually traced as far back as the early 1800’s (although there are examples in antiquity and into the Renaissance) with authors and historians spinning ever more elaborate stories of what might have been if history had gone awry. What if the library of Alexandria hadn’t burned? Or Columbus couldn’t get funding to sail west? What if the Nazis won World War 2? Or a famous German rocket scientist didn’t build V-2 rockets? What if half the moon was back in the USSR. Alternate history is a great jumping off point if you want to be a paperback writer. Take a point in history and just imagine if things had just played out a little differently, how there could be monumental changes. And history has already given you a cast of public domain characters.

Alternate history tends to be conjoined to science fiction/fantasy in fandom, authorship, marketing, yet slightly distanced from historical fiction (even though conventions of well-written historical fiction are what make a well-written alternate history novels). Some would even argue that certain genres such as diesel punk or my beloved steampunk usually use the pretense of existing in an alternate universe to explain their aesthetic flourishes.

Alternate history typically focuses on what-if scenarios based around military history as points of divergence to create a universe and then has lots of fun coming up with new maps and flags, as well as character arcs for historical figures that may or may not align with the history of our own world. Given this obsession with refighting decades- or centuries-old military events, a book that focuses on monumental events in pop culture as its divergence point was a breath of fresh air for the genre, even winning the 2017 Side Ways Award for excellence in alternate history literature.

Committed to the conceit that this is a non-fiction book, Bryce Zabel writes in the style of a celebrity biography covering the Beatles in the tumultuous 1970’s...before their seeming permanence well into the 21st century (always tailed by rival newcomers the Rolling Stones).

No, the point of divergence isn’t a certain John Lennon skipping a gallery opening and thereby not meeting a certain avant garde artist...

Rather, the point of divergence in this tale is that the 1968 interview with John Lennon and Paul McCartney that Johnny Carson tried to arrange in real life, only to have it fall through, actually happened in this alternate universe. After their set on The Tonight Show, John and Paul join Johnny and Ed for a night on the town, where the two veteran showman provide the world-weary and feuding musicians with a bit of advice about maintaining a working relationship in show biz.

While this pep talk helps, not everything is strawberry fields forever for the boys from Liverpool. They struggle with their egos, differing artistic directions, familial pressures, and turning Apple Records from a 1960’s counterculture hangout into an actual business. I was surprised to learn how many of the stories of the chaos at Apple Records’ early days, chiefly flushing money down the toilet by a supposed wunderkind producer, as well as invasion by the Hell’s Angels biker gang, actually happened.

However, despite all the helter skelter around their new business, Paul McCartney and John Lennon took Johnny Carson’s and Ed McMahon’s advice about “showing up for each other” and the pair manage to check their egos sufficiently to overcome the challenges that come at the Fab Four, and even take on greater challenges.

Instead of cutting the album Abbey Road in 1969 and taking a quick picture of the band strolling outside of the titular London Studio, their next album is called Everest and the cover art is the band boldly strolling...onto the stage at Woodstock.

From here on the plot creates a fictional Beatles career path by using the solo individual Beatles’ careers and song books with hypothetical Beatles projects to weave a world in which Beatlemania never ended.

The personalities and tensions of the real world group are still there but moving from crisis to crisis (like working under the tender mercies of Stanley Kubrick to star in and score a Lord of the Rings adaptation, or a rough and tumble recording trip to Nigeria at the insistence of Paul) it seems that the Beatles can only get by with a little help from their friends...each other.

So if you sometimes wonder what if the Beatles didn’t just let it be with their last album and kept on writing and performing music together, check out Once there Was A Way.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Not Your Father’s Aquaman

by Michael Isenberg.

Aquaman has long been the Rodney Dangerfield of the DC universe. He gets no respect. Born to the Queen of Atlantis, saddled with the very un-superhero-like name of “Arthur,” and raised by his human lighthouse keeper father, the goofy-looking Marine Marvel is the butt of numerous “You’re more useless than Aquaman” jokes on Family Guy, the gist of which is that the power to get fish to do stuff has little practical value.

Then in 2016, in the otherwise disastrous Batman v. Superman, we got a brief glimpse of a different Aquaman. Played by Jason Momoa (known to Game of Throne fans for his role as Khal Drogo), this buff, bearded version of the Dweller-in-the-Depths looked kind of rad.

We saw more of him last year in Justice League and discovered he’s hard-drinking and has a sense of humor. “Dress like a bat. You’re out of your mind, Bruce Wayne.” Kind of an aquatic Wolverine.

But it wasn’t until a scene early in the new Aquaman movie, which opens today across the nation, that I was truly convinced: this is not your father’s Aquaman.

It’s a fight scene, Aquaman against the father-and-son pirate team of Jesse and David Kane, aka Manta. The Kanes are attempting to steal a Russian submarine. They’ve killed the captain and many of the crew; the survivors are holed up in the torpedo room, neutralized. Aquaman bursts through a hatch, and after a quip (“Permission to come aboard”) proceeds to take the Kanes and their henchmen apart. The action ends with the crew safely evacuated and Daddy Kane trapped under a missile as water floods the compartment. “Wait!” Manta yells to Aquaman. “You can’t leave him here. Help me! Please!”

We’ve seen the scenario a million times, and the hero always rescues the trapped villain, who really doesn’t deserve it. But not this time. “Ask the sea for mercy,” Aquaman tells him. And then he leaves.

Totally. Bad. Ass.

The theft of the submarine is just the first step in a scheme by Aquaman’s half-brother, Orm, monarch of one of the seven Atlantean kingdoms. I wasn’t really sure which one; the politics of Atlantis are intricate and confusing. A clunky exposition scene tries to explain it all, but it doesn’t help much. I was reminded of the Star Wars prequels’ debates over the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems. I’m not even sure if there really are seven kingdoms. I think some are extinct. Anyway, Orm plans to use the submarine in a false flag attack to unite however many kingdoms there are for a war against the surface dwellers. Because pollution of the oceans or something. Fortunately for him, Aquaman just abandons the still-functioning submarine after he defeats the pirates. The Russian Navy, inexplicably, makes no attempt to salvage it, thereby allowing Orm to just take it and make the movie happen.

In any case, not all Atlanteans are arming for war. The beautiful redhead Mera, daughter of the King of…one of the kingdoms, seeks out Aquaman and accosts him with a Call to Adventure: she begs him to come to Atlantis, challenge his brother for the throne, and thereby stop the war. True to the Hero’s Journey, Aquaman initially refuses. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But events conspire against him and before long he is under the sea, threatening Orm with an “ass-whooping.”

DC movies since 2005’s Batman Begins have a reputation for being grim. It even inspired a joke in rival Marvel’s Deadpool 2, in which Deadpool says to the straitlaced Cable, “You're so dark. Are you sure you're not from the DC universe?” But Aquaman has a different feel to it. Part of it is that, starting with last year’s Wonder Woman, DC is finally putting humor into its movies. For example, in one scene, Mera impulsively jumps out of an airplane—without a parachute. Seeing the shocked look of the pilot, Aquaman says, “Redheads, you gotta love them.”

But it’s not just the one-liners. Aquaman has a very different visual feel from previous entries in the DC Extended Universe. Instead of the grimy, hyper-realistic, claustrophobic urban setting of Gotham, we’re out in the open, in the vast spaces on the ocean surface—and beneath. The colors are bright. We even spend some time in a cheerful Mediterranean seaside village. The underwater CGI seascapes really dazzle.

But sadly, despite a very likable and kick-ass Aquaman, some funny one-liners, and stunning visuals, this movie isn’t that great. It's not terrible, there's no "Martha" moment. Just not great. The problem is the script. It just fails to sparkle in so many ways. I already mentioned the ponderous exposition and the plot hole concerning the submarine. The dialog is not up to par. What’s supposed to pass as witty, romantically-charged banter between Aquaman and Mera frequently falls flat. And once it is set into motion, the plot is entirely predictable. There is only one twist to speak of, and I saw it coming a mile away. I even knew exactly what the last scene was going to be long before the end.

Still, I hope Aquaman does well at the box office. Now that Jason Momoa has given the character a much-needed makeover, I’m eager to see him back in a better movie.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

The Magnificent Six

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Regular readers of this blog already know that the Peter Parker we all know and love is not the only Spider-man. Through the years, many others have worn the mask. Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, opening in theaters today, asks “What if a half dozen of these web-slingers joined forces?”

The pretext for this team up, in classic comic book fashion, is a lab experiment gone wrong. Wilson Fisk—the Kingpin—has lost his wife Vanessa and their son Richard in a car accident which he had some responsibility for. Desperate to see them one more time, the grieving Fisk builds a “supercollider” to open portals between dimensions in the hopes of finding their counterparts in parallel universes. But it’s a dangerous machine—every time he operates it, earthquakes shake New York; if he continues, the whole city is likely to collapse.

Determined to stop the Kingpin is the Spider-man from this universe, Miles Morales, a Banksy wanna-be whose 2011 comic book debut was controversial because of his Afro-Caribbean-American ancestry. As Nerds who Read Contributing Reviewer Kerey McKenna pointed out, much of the controversy came from culture warriors who never read a comic book. Miles just wants to fit in at his straitlaced new school—a magnet school for the gifted—develop his artistic talent, and not be embarrassed by his cop dad. He never asked to be bitten by a glowing spider—I think it was robotic—and bear the great power—and great responsibility—of a super-hero.

Miles is joined by five other Spider-men Spider-persons Spider-creatures who were sucked through the interdimensional portals:

An older Peter Parker, Peter B. Parker, sadder, but not yet wiser,

Gwen Stacy (Spider-Gwen), the new girl in school, the only one of Miles’s classmates to appreciate his humor,

from the 1930s, the hard-boiled Spider-man Noir (voiced by Nicolas Cage, BTW),

the anime cutie, Peni Parker,

and strangest of all, Peter Porker, aka Spider-ham, who first appeared in 1983’s Marvel Tails alongside Hulk Bunny, Goose Rider, and Captain Americat. Yes, there was a spider-pig decades before Homer Simpson got pig tracks on the ceiling.

Together they must defeat the Kingpin while completing the seemingly conflicting tasks of getting everyone back to their own corners of the multiverse and shutting down the supercollider for good.

The artistic team combined multiple animation styles appropriate to the various characters. Then they added the handmade, colorful graffiti style of Miles’s urban neighborhood to the mix. The combined effect is visually stunning.

The movie delivers plenty of the trademark humor and one-liners we’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios. As with last year’s Lego Batman Movie, all the characters’ past incarnations are “real,” even when they’re an embarrassment.

We don’t talk about this.

And channeling Deadpool 2, there’s an end credits scene worth waiting for in which Spider-man travels back in time to confront one of those earlier incarnations.

It isn’t all fun and games, however. When I saw it, a solemn hush fell over the theater during the Stan Lee cameo, the first since his death last month. Very sad.

Much as I like this movie, I have to concede it drags in places. The special effects of the supercollider are overdone and go on too long. Because it doubles as an origin story for Miles Morales, this Spider-man movie takes a while to start Spider-manning. And it faces the same problem as Suicide Squad in that it needs to introduce a large number of characters that most of the public (unlike fans of Nerds who Read) aren’t familiar with.

As is often the case with ensemble casts, some of the characters get short shrift. I would have liked to see more of Spider-man Noir, thanks to Kerey’s recent review of that character. Peni Parker, sadly, gets hardly any screen time at all. And Kingpin does little more than show up, look menacing, and sometimes beat people to death. The Vanessa/Richard back story is told in a very brief flashback. This is quite a contrast to Netflix’s Daredevil, where the complexity of his character, especially his seemingly out-of-character devotion to Vanessa, is the dramatic linchpin of the series. I would have liked to see that developed in Into the Spider-verse as well.

Still, it says something that my biggest complaint about a movie is I didn’t get enough of some things. Overall, Into the Spider-verse is immensely funny and hugely entertaining, in my opinion the best movie of the Christmas season (so far, at least). Go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com