Film Review: Captain America: Brave New World

Neither brave enough nor new enough

There has always been a tension in how a particular sort of liberal-leaning-leftist viewer has perceived the character of Captain America (and I absolutely include myself in that qualification). As an American, particularly a Filipino-American, there is a part of me that has been seduced by America’s self-flattering myths, and perhaps worse, wants to be seduced. As stirring old Red Army marching songs make you want to believe in the worker’s utopia of the Soviet Union and forget about the Holodomor and the Rape of Berlin (I’m reminded of what Joseph Goebbels said about Battleship Potemkin: “anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film”), the best Captain America media makes you want to believe in the old pablum about the land of the free and the home of the brave, and forget about the carnage in Gaza. Chris Evans as Steve Rogers certainly made you want to salute Old Glory, to believe in white America’s view of itself. He (Evans and Rogers both) is what the twentieth century would have called “All-American”—white, blonde, and wholesome. In the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney made Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie, the new Captain America, which attracted aplomb and controversy as he is Black. Mackie and Wilson get their first spin at the role on the big screen in 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World.

This is a movie that, for better or worse, has a very defined place within the broader mythos of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have seen people frustrated that it is in some ways a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, the only time Edward Norton ever played that role. It is a film I confess to have enjoyed. The ties to that film are made very clear by virtue of the very important role of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, now played by Harrison Ford in his gruff twenty-first-century demeanor. The thematic thread that connects this film and the Hulk film is that they are focused more than other MCU entries on the interaction between superheroes and the United States government. The film uses some of these connections in smart ways, but those who wanted a broader political statement will see any such statement hampered by the politics of the plot, and the politics of The Walt Disney Company.

It is Ford’s President Ross around which so much of the film’s themes rotate. He has served in a number of incidents involving superheroes and their adversaries, and he has parlayed that into a successful presidential run. As you would expect, he has skeletons in his closet that come into play over the course of the story, all running through high-level politics. He is a geopolitical hawk and a loud personality, reminiscent of a certain current occupant of the Oval Office, but compared to that one, Ross is so lucid I would pick him in a heartbeat. The film portrays him as a deeply flawed, ambitious man, obviously a climber. But it also gives him a moral core, a certain sense of decency, that he can act on when prompted enough, especially by Sam Wilson. It is there that the film becomes divisive.

Walking out of the theater and later discussing it with a friend as I drove him to a board game night, I concluded that Captain America: Brave New World is an enjoyable enough supervillain film whose politics I disagree with; my friend said that is what he expects of MCU movies, and I can’t really disagree with him. I like Sam Wilson in this role as a patriotic hero, and Ford is good as Ross. The action is well done, with appropriate weight given to punches, and there is a very good scene involving fighter jets. None of those are really the issues I have with this film. The issues come from the fact that I studied international relations in college with plans to join the US Foreign Service, until I read about the Nixon Administration’s support of the Bangladeshi Genocide so that it could keep Pakistan as an intermediary during the leadup to Nixon’s visit to China, was terrified at the prospect of becoming another Archer Blood, and then decided I couldn’t morally accept such employment.

I think this is a good time to note the presence of Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by Shira Haas, who has been the subject of some internet controversy. The character Ruth Bat-Seraph is a form of the comic character Sabra, who in-universe is Israeli, as is her actress. The name ‘Sabra’ refers to a prickly pear native to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, often used as an affectionately jocular autonym referring to how Israelis are said to be prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside. Certain groups on the internet find her name deeply offensive, as Sabra is also the name of one of the refugee camps (along with Shatila, which is commonly mentioned in tandem) in Lebanon, where Israeli-backed Maronite militias slaughtered innocent Palestinians and Lebanese Shias (a fact that directly preceded the founding of Hezbollah) during the Israeli invasion of that country in the ’80s. The character was created two years before the massacre, so I am confident that the name is a coincidence. Its actual portrayal in the film is rather bland, frankly; anything of real interest, including the name ‘Sabra,’ is hacked off in an attempt to dodge controversy in light of the Palestinian Genocide; she is mentioned to have been born in Israel in a way that perhaps vaguely refers to the Mossad’s reputation, but I can’t really detect any commentary beyond that. I don’t view the presence of an Israeli character in itself to be offensive (much as I don’t find the presence of a Russian character, vis-à-vis the invasion of Ukraine, to be offensive in itself), but I have seen her presence brought up in broader (legitimate) critiques of how Disney relates to the Israeli government. All told, the whole thing has amounted to a tempest in a teapot.

The case of Ruth Bat-Seraph is emblematic of a broader problem with the film, going right down to its foundations. The whole plot is framed as a single bad actor within the US government exploiting the weakness of a flawed politician who nevertheless has some decency. There is never, at any point, an attempt to interrogate the structures of the American government that could make any of this story, any of these deceptions and deaths, possible. The film comes closest through the abandoned super soldier Isaiah Bradley, played by Carl Lumby and imported from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it never goes as far as it really ought to have. Such a critique would have been extremely relevant given the American-backed razing of Gaza, but there is absolutely no engagement as to why this country, founded on slavery and genocide, feels entitled to bestride the world as a colossus, murdering tens of millions without accountability. There is no attempt to see how this corrodes a nation’s morality. The first sequence of the movie is set in Mexico, and another is set in the Indian Ocean. The film is just close enough to realizing that corrosion, as Aimé Césaire so boldly put it in 1950’s Discourse on Colonialism, but the film is simply not brave enough.

That is really the core issue with the film: it is not brave enough (ironic, given its literal title), and it really doesn’t bother being new enough either. By the end of watching it, you will have spent roughly a hundred minutes with a reasonably entertaining superhero movie, which is about what I expected. The problem, ultimately, is that this movie was exactly what we expected it to be, and nothing more.

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Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

A secondary science fictional world whose protagonist, and her world, turns on matters of justice and law

Nila is an ambitious student of law in the city of Peruma. And it is an exciting time to be a student on a track to be a full-fledged Guardian, which you might usefully think of as a neutral lawyer and advocate. Nila’s hope, given her high standing in the community of students, is to be selected for the case of the century, to be one of the twelve students chosen to argue one of the two sides of a question that could decide the future of the city. Nila is not selected for that case, but is instead asked to argue to overturn the sentence of a murder... a murder which changed the course of history a century ago.

This is the story of Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence.

The novel takes place in a rather unique setting. It is a completely mundane alternate world that nonetheless appears to be the only world. It’s not a colonized planet. It’s not the far past or far future of Earth. And yet it is a world that has no magic or even the hint or trappings of a fantasy setting, either. It’s just an alternate cradle of humanity, from all the textual evidence.

That said, the history of this world reflects, refracts and rhymes with our own. It takes place on a subcontinent with a number of city states besides Peruma, where all the action takes place. Peruma, once upon a time, was an imperial power and dominated the entire subcontinent before a world with technology slightly ahead of ours. A revolution in the imperial capital, freedom for the other cities, and war left them with a subcontinent of competing and jockeying city states, high in technology. Given the names of the other cities (Chemur, Monara, Lubini, Jharna and Sampi), and other worldbuilding we get, this all gives the subcontinent that Peruma sits on a very Indian flavor. However, this appears to have been a homegrown empire rather than one imposed from without—much more like the Chola empire, rather than the Mughals or the British.

The empire, however, is four centuries in the past (this is the kind of novel that has a timeline up front). After the fall of the empire, the city of Peruma turned into a mercantile republic (republic in theory, anyway) wracked by revolts from the lower classes. Finally, a hundred years ago, Purul, the head of the republic, the Director, had a lethal confrontation with a worker, Jagat R., leading to a revolution within the city and its division into two halves. Jagat R. was found guilty, but in a world where the death penalty had been abandoned, he was instead put into cryosleep.

A hundred years later, it is Jagat R.’s sentence of murder that our protagonist, Nila, is asked to reopen and overturn, rather than what she really wanted: joining the “case of the century”, which is an examination of the treaty signed at the end of that same revolution.

And thus our plot is up and running.

So, while the ostensible plot is Nila trying to work on what is seemingly an open and shut murder case from a century ago, and one that literally is seen to have changed history, the novel is really about the sociological and legal questions that the author poses in the narrative. The Sentence itself, the cryosleep that in a real sense is almost always just a slow-motion death penalty (after about 100 years, someone put into cryosleep cannot be revived) is just one of the base questions. Questions of justice, due process, and equity in sentencing and representation (the Guardians are a fascinating legal idea) are part of the pie.

Even bigger are the sociological and political questions that the novel raises. I didn’t mention that when half of the city broke away from the other after the assassination, that lower city’s revolution took its form of government in a radical direction that went all the way to an anarchic commune. A century later, it is mostly following the precepts of its own revolution, but the upper city still holds a strong hand, and would definitely want to reintegrate it back into its political control. What is more, the commune’s future is already at stake. Someone upsetting the applecart of the fact of a lower city martyr, Jagat R., assassinating the Director could be at best a destabilizing force on its very existence.

And did I mention that Nila’s mother is an important member of the commune?

So The Sentence is The Paper Chase by way of the Paris Commune, set in a secondary science fiction world loosely based on the Indian subcontinent, with aircars, cryosleep, and a few other twenty-minutes-into-the-future-level technologies. It’s a legal thriller, certainly, but even more it is a sociological and societal thriller that poses some not-easily-answered questions about justice, society, government, and the role of personal responsibility to all three.

It makes the book hard to judge with its peers in the SFF community because it takes several uncommon subgenres (a legal thriller, a sociological piece, and a de novo secondary world unconnected even by hint to our own) and alloys them all together. There is definitely DNA of LeGuin here, but the deep study and appreciation and concern over the ideas and use of anarchism are far rarer in science fiction outside of LeGuin, and perhaps Doctorow and to an extent MacLeod, and given the author’s setup here, The Sentence is much more in dialogue with things like The Dispossessed than anything else in terms of the anarchism (which does really feel like the beating heart of the book) but combined with the legal aspects and the sociology of the entire world), and it really is boldly striding into uncharted territory.

How it gets into that territory is, of course, the proof in the pudding. The book is written cleanly, strongly and crisply, but with a lot of overt worldbuilding, necessary because of the nature of the setting (I mentioned the timeline before as just one example). The writing is thus rich with details of all kinds. One particular highlight is Unclean Hands, which is a fictional play that turns into a touchstone for Nila and other characters. It might be inspired by the real Dirty Hands by Sartre, but the two are clearly different.

Another interesting highlight is the historical attitude and viewpoint of this society and it frames itself within it. The society has a theory of history that works on points of potential divergence, where the course of history was shaped, called Inflection Points. The entire society agrees that this is the standard model of how history is currently interpreted, looked at, discussed and debated. The assassination of the Director a century ago is seen as the Fourth Inflection Point in the post-imperial era, and everyone seems convinced that the 100th anniversary of that assassination and the debate between the halves of the city is destined to naturally be the Fifth Inflection Point. And that is even before it is revealed that Nila is going to try and reopen the case of the murder of the Director by Jagat R.

Although the politics are extremely different, the only other recent work that really compares to The Sentence is The Broken Trust (Mazes of Power) series by Juliette Wade. That too takes place in a society that is not our own, and explores some thorny questions about sociology and anthropology as well.

While there is intrigue, and some action sequences intended to dissuade Nila from handling the case get more and more overt and dangerous, the real heart of the book is, in fact, Nila’s heart. She is faced with some very difficult decisions, morally, ethically and personally in the course of her legal investigation, with implications for the city, for society, and most importantly, the author points out, her own soul. It makes The Sentence fascinating reading, and as of the writing of this review, frustratingly only published in India. This seems to be a wasted opportunity by UK and US publishers. The Sentence is the type of science fiction that demands a much wider audience.

Highlights:

• A world not our own, with thorny and interesting sociological questions
• Strong legal framework and centrality to society and main character
• A book that will remain with you long after you read it

Reference: Bhatia, Gautam. The Sentence [Westland IF, 2025].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Wherein I struggle to express how I feel about Silo

This story hit me with a gut punch. This is my attempt to find my breath

I was very skeptical when I first heard news of the show Silo. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are not my thing, and in my experience, most stories about a small fraction of humankind sheltered in a self-contained city are destined to reveal that (a) the shelter is a trap, (b) the ones who rule the shelter aren't benevolent, and (c) there's a way to survive outside. This has been proven true countless times from Logan's Run to Snowpiercer to WALL-E to Attack on Titan to Æon Flux to Divergent to Ergo Proxy. Even the unfairly underrated The Matrix Reloaded ended up revealing that letting the last human city exist was part of an elaborate system of control. So my suspicion was that Silo would go through the same motions while pretending that they were a big surprise.

But then I started finding comments in my timelines from everyone who was watching the series, and the high praise was unanimous. Silo was definitely doing something special. Some time later, when I learned that it had started streaming a second season, I knew for sure that there was more story to it than the usual reveals I had predicted. Plus I'd already seen Rebecca Ferguson do a stellar job in both parts of Dune, so I finally decided I'd try watching Silo.

Still, I pressed play without shedding my reservations. I've written before that I'm not impressed by science fiction that allegorizes class inequality; it achieves little more than preach to the choir and bore the rest, wasting any impact its message may carry. When I noticed that the titular Silo had a stratified division of labor, with manual workers all but forgotten in the lower levels and white collars ruling from the top, I feared I was in for another simplistic fable. I needn't have worried. As the plot unfolded, I forgot what I was so apprehensive about, and instead was captivated by the cultural distinctiveness of a society that has been molded by centuries of self-sufficient isolation. These are people who make a heroic effort every day to stave off extinction, and are educated and skilled enough to succeed at it, yet have never heard of seas or birds or elephants or stars. Their ignorance of the natural world, as deliberately induced as it is, doesn't hinder their hyperspecialized technical expertise. The Silo harbors exceptionally competent doctors and mechanics and waste treatment engineers and computer programmers who lack any clue of biology or geography or philosophy or sociology. In other words, their only available preoccupation is keeping themselves alive, without the time, inspiration or even permission to cultivate the uniquely human interests that make life worth living.

As often happens in stories about societies so radically different from ours that a full explanation is indispensable, this series begins as a police procedural. And the first characters we meet in that investigation, who will soon die by the rules of the system, experience one of the stains in the administration of the Silo: they have too much innate curiosity to be allowed to raise children. Those with the inclination to question the status quo are discreetly prevented from influencing the generations that will follow. And that realization pulls a thread that will irreversibly unravel the entire fabric of their society. It turns out the Silo can only operate if the general population doesn't know their own past and doesn't even figure out that governments can be replaced. Life must go on in a perpetual state of frozen present. Whereas the Big Brother in 1984 kept control by rewriting the past, the IT department in Silo has abolished the past, as well as the future: no one can learn how things were different before, or suggest how they may be different someday. The Silo is designed to ensure peace by bringing about a contradiction: a human population for which history doesn't move.

Except there's no such thing as a society free from history: memory and aspiration are inseparable from human nature. And it is by memory and aspiration that the inhabitants of the Silo eventually prevail against their totalitarian rulers.

Which leads me to talk about the fascinatingly complex people we follow in this story. There's the honest-to-a-fault Paul Billings, a legal expert turned cop, who believes so sincerely in the rigid laws of the Silo that he ends up working against the government he serves when its corruption becomes too blatant to ignore; there's the Lady-Macbeth-esque Camille Sims, a former armed enforcer who has grown disillusioned with the system and now hides her ambitions behind a bureaucrat's desk; there's the no-nonsense Martha Walker, an aged tinkerer who never leaves her apartment yet sees the events in the Silo with more clarity than anyone; there's the world-weary, tragically idealistic Mary Meadows, the Silo's maximum authority in name only; there's the self-blaming survivor Jimmy Conroy, single-handedly keeping hope alive while surrounded by thousands of corpses.

And in the eye of the storm, of course, is the irresistibly compelling Juliette Nichols, played by Rebecca Ferguson with a carefully balanced blend of jaded fury and vulnerable abnegation. As the moral center of the series, this character snatched my interest from her first appearance. I didn't find myself caring much about the fate of the Silo until she came into scene and suddenly made the story make sense. I want the Silo to survive because of what she represents.

Juliette isn't a woman of action; she is shown many times to be a lousy fighter and not particularly athletic. Her strength is in her resourcefulness, tied to an engineer's conviction that problems are solvable. She's frank, sometimes bluntly so; she's reliable, pragmatical, and an optimist at heart. It may sound strange to speak of optimism in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but you don't embark on a life-threatening quest to uncover the truth unless you believe that the truth makes a difference and that it's there to be found. I was touched by her deep thirst for justice, not only for the inhabitants of the Silo, but for the dead loved ones she carries with her. She wouldn't have risked taking the first steps toward rocking the boat of her fragile social order if she didn't have promises to keep to dead people; that's a type of loyalty I find inspiring. And the more I watched her ask forbidden questions, dig into uncomfortable parts of her past, plead with the violent to consider other choices, and stubbornly refuse to just leave well enough alone, the more I wished I could live by the same virtues.

On a regular day, I think of myself as a reasonably decent person, but Silo's Juliette is a paragon of decency. I'm an easy target for the appeal of a character motivated by a sincere set of principles. Raised by a doctor and later by a mechanic, she has a drive toward fixing things; and in the middle of the dangerous machinery that keeps the Silo running, she learned the importance of cooperation. When (you believe that) there's only a few thousands left of you on the planet, you rely on each other or you die. Those experiences are the fuel of her capability to defy the secretive authorities that share the same precarious existence as her but not her sense of interdependency. She lives in an unnaturally tiny world built to teach her docility, and her response is to cling to her own instinct for what is right. She starts her self-imposed mission with all forces aligned against her, and even while aware that she has no visible path to winning, her small example lays bare the dishonorable actions of the Silo's upper levels.

Silo boasts excellent writing, set design, music, pacing, and direction, but it's the fortitude of a fundamentally moral character like Juliette Nichols that makes the series shine. I'm glad I gave this powerful story a chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Creature Commandos

A raunchy, visceral, uncompromising statement of intention

The new iteration of DC-derived stories has a curious choice of opening chapter. With narrative threads vaguely connecting to The Suicide Squad (the good one) and its spinoff series Peacemaker, the HBO Max series Creature Commandos reanimates a discussion that should have been declared resolved decades ago, but that the current era of superheroes seems to have forgotten: What if you could fix the world with just one little murder? Never mind that the first half of the series is about trying to prevent that murder; if you've met self-appointed protector of humankind Amanda Waller, you know that her extensive skill set doesn't include moral consistency. So throwing away money and lives to defend the princess-heiress of Pokolistan from sorceress Circe and her army of easily duped incels, only to change her mind and throw away more money and lives to have said princess-heiress murdered anyway, is exactly on brand for her.

Writer/producer/director James Gunn surely knew that starting this new DC saga with a team story would prompt parallels with the Justice League. Namely, how is this team different from its more heroic counterpart? What is it that makes the Commandos a dark mirror of the League? That kind of comparison isn't new. If you want answers about why Superman doesn't kill (and, therefore, why Zack Snyder doesn't have the faintest idea how to handle the Justice League), all you need to read is the 2001 story What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way? by Joe Kelly. Much like the Snyderverse drew from the gray worldview of The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman, it seems the... Gunnverse? is drawing from the genre's own reaction to that excess of cynicism.

So let's return to our initial question, which can be rephrased like this: Can the value of one life be purely instrumental? In such Kantian terms, the question touches the core of why Amanda Waller operates the way she does. Her extreme brand of pragmatism bypasses any consideration of principle, and the same logic that makes her stage a clandestine operation to protect a foreign head of state can as easily move her to favor the opposite strategic objective. How does this make sense to her? Easy: a high-profile political assassination with unknown cascading repercussions isn't any more problematic to her than forcing inmates to risk ther necks for uncertain gain. The life of a princess-heiress or the life of an unjustly incarcerated metahuman are just assets to her, usable or disposable according to whatever arcane moral calculation is going on in her head.

And this is why Gunn chose Creature Commandos as the first entry in the new DC-verse: to establish a clear demarcation over against the messy position the Snyderverse started with. The version of Superman that Snyder presented in his 2013 film Man of Steel is a semidivine figure whom puny mortals should look at in awe, but not look up to; one with no ties of loyalty to humankind beyond his personal attachments: he fights to defend his adoptive mother, but he couldn't care less about innocent bystanders. That's how he was raised: Jonathan Kent taught him that he should let people die if helping them would expose his secret. Martha Kent taught him that his immeasurable power came with no responsibility. With the worst role models in the history of the character, the result couldn't be other than what we got: a Superman who is no hero. The absurdly contrived scene where we're expected to agree he had no other choice available but to kill General Zod set a dour tone that persisted for the rest of the Snyderverse. A Superman who kills was joined by a Batman who tortures and brands people and a Wonder Woman who has lost her faith in humans. That is not how you build a team of heroes.

Creature Commandos exposes what happens when your idea of saving the world doesn't contain an iron clause on the absolute value of every life: you lose sight of what you were trying to fight for. Waller's ill-fated adventure in Pokolistan ends with the death of the victim she was supposed to protect, as well as the deaths of members of her own team who shouldn't even have been in prison. The reason why they were available for her to exploit in the first place is the same broken logic that ranks lives in order of importance. You can't call yourself a defender of the world if you don't equally care for every single life in it. The numerous flashbacks that reveal the origin of each member of the Commandos go back to the same theme of according life an instrumental as opposed to absolute value. Waller believes she's using a team of monsters, creatures whose past misdeeds render them only worthy of being used, but the truth is they're all innocent. She's the real monster, and the unstated implication of the show's message is that Snyder's Superman is a monster on the same scale as Waller. Gunn needed to make that clear before introducing his own take on Superman.

There's nothing naïve about a Superman who doesn't kill. Via reductio ab absurdum, Creature Commandos shows the natural result of abandoning that basic principle, and helps set the tone for a renewed view of superheroism that doesn't fetishize power for its own sake or treat conflict as a utilitarian calculation. The superhero genre is in crisis because it's embarrassed of itself, averse to sincerity, willingly corrupted by cynicism. However tonally voluble and structurally disjointed, Creature Commandos was a necessary laxative for all the rotten beliefs that have clogged up the genre. With the slate clear, it's time for Superman to once again show the way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Dune Prophecy

We travel back in time 10,000 years before the Kwisatz Haderach to learn about the origins of what would become the Bene Gesserit—and get Game of Thrones-level chicanery and angling. (Spoiler-free)

In both Denis Villeneuve's and David Lynch's film versions of Dune, we get fleeting glimpses of the witchlike Bene Gesserit. We can see that these dark-clad, mysterious women are controlling the puppet strings of emperors and the great houses, but we don't real insight into their machinations.

An origin story focusing on why, and how, they came to be is the focus of Max's new series Dune Prophecy, which is set about a century after the Butlerian Jihad in which humans defeated thinking machines and banned AI technology. The planet Wallach IX is home to the Sisterhood's school, where women are trained in truthsayers to serve the great houses of the Imperium.

The show centers on Valya Harkonnen, the Reverend Mother of the Sisterhood. Played immaculately by Emily Wilson, she is ambitious, conniving, and Machiavellian in her approach to not only extending the influence of the Sisterhood but also in taking personal revenge against House Atreides, whom she blames for her family's fall from grace and exile.

When a Sisterhood-arranged marriage between the emperor and a great house falls apart due to treachery, chaos threatens the order, resulting in a series of plots, subplots, and flashbacks concerning Valya and Tula. It all gets very confusing—not unlike watching Game of Thrones for the first time—and Max very clearly is trying to launch this as the next Game of Thrones (despite already having one in the form of House of the Dragon).

What I love most about this show is how the Sisterhood is portrayed like the Jedi Order in the prequel Star Wars movies, and it's made me think more critically about both. This description, for example, can literally apply to either: "A quasi-religious organization with no external oversight that puts members of its order in positions of great power throughout the galaxy."

To be clear, I still think that the both the Jedi and Bene Gesserit are awesome, but it'd be naive to think that they're unproblematic. Modern storytelling has gotten really good about morally gray characters—the days of Pure Good Guy (Batman) vs. Pure Bad Guy (Joker) are long gone, and in their stead are the Jamie Lannisters, Walter Whites, and Omar Littles of the world.

As we learn more about the Sisterhood, we see that they are engaged in galaxy-ranging eugenics (I'm calling it as I see with their breeding program), covert political manipulation, and, sometimes even murder. This, of course, doesn't mean I won't root for these space witches, but it is something to think about. Truly good characters are boring, as we have learned from prestige TV over the years.

In terms of look and feel, it's no Villeneuve Dune—but the sets and product design feel futuristic enough that it's not a distraction. There's a scene in episode 6 where we finally see space folding around a heighliner for the first time and it's absolutely incredible. The only scenes where I'm taken out of the universe are the ones set in the bar/nightclub. It feels chintzy and like something out a Syfy original movie from the '90s.

The pacing is a bit hit-or-miss (I had to rewatch the first episode twice to really get into it because it's so exposition-heavy), but each successive episode picks up steam and gets you more invested. Overall, though, it's an enjoyable watch and a different take on Dune for those who, like me, have read one Dune book and really enjoyed the movies, but aren't as well versed in all the lore from Frank Herbert's other books. Hell, I'm now inspired to pick up Dune Messiah.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Film Review: Rumours

The world is burning. Now pass the canapés

Each time the world's top leaders get together at one of those secretive meetings to discuss the road ahead for humankind, it's inevitable to sense a certain air of Dan Brown-esque conspiracy. A handful of the über-privileged talking in private about the future prospects of eight billion? What could they possibly understand about the struggles of the commonfolk? Whatever it is they're deciding at that exclusive hotel or remote island or private yacht or inaccessible ski resort must be something absurdly removed from the real lives of real people. They may as well inhabit a realm of existence apart from the rest of us.

So what if they really did?

In the acerbic satire film Rumours, what begins as your usual tediously uneventful G7 summit turns into a survival horror adventure where the most powerful decision-makers of the free world are revealed to be pathetically useless when faced with an actual crisis. Our leaders sit for a business lunch in a luxurious castle estate somewhere in the German forest, and after banal pleasantries are exchanged between heads of state, the next item on the agenda is even more banal pleasantries addressed to the media. In a manner that brings to mind sociologist Bruno Latour's 1979 ethnographic study of the practice of science at a molecular biology lab, which concluded with the hilarious pronouncement that the purpose of science was to publish articles, Rumours presents us with a G7 whose sole task, after rounds of vigorous discussion, is to compose a joint press release.

Even when the world outside seems to have vanished, and the forest is suddenly haunted by shambling figures, and a fog descends over the night. Where did everyone go? Did nuclear war break out and destroy civilization? Maybe. They were honestly not paying attention. But damn it, they will write that press release.

The script of Rumours is impressive in its ability to make hollow platitudes sound gravely significant. Diplomatic lingo ends up being the only tool available to these clueless leaders while reality crumbles down around them. The movie doesn't even bother pretending to be subtle; the president of France openly tells us to interpret these events as an allegory of their respective countries' behavior. So we have a Canada that doesn't know who they are without Britain; a Britain that feel embarrassed to be seen next to Canada; an Italy that parrots every nonsensical word that comes out of the United States and whose role is reduced to offering its food to the world; a United States that keeps an eye on everything from afar and likes to talk a big talk about decisive action but falls asleep when it's needed; a France that drops flat on its face when it tries to venture alone and thereafter has to be dragged everywhere by the rest; a Germany that reminisces wistfully about its violent past; a Japan that suspects it's starting to grow old and is just along for the ride. Plus a special cameo from a Scandinavia that is so fascinated by big brains (yes, literally) that it self-destructs in devotion.

While watching Rumours, I was reminded of Don't Look Up: the whole gimmick of this plot is basic and obvious, but the movie comes up with ways to keep milking it for merciless commentary for two hours. The leaders' incongruous fixation on finding the right empty words to describe their present situation in the vaguest, most noncommittal terms is only surpassed in topicality by their extended handwringing over whether they really should risk their public image to run to rescue a child that is crying for help.

Rumours is a cathartic spit in the face of performative caring, a vicarious comeuppance for those in charge of preventing the mess they've thrown us into. Like the statement released by its protagonists, it's just talk, not something meant to change things. But oh boy does it feel good to watch the powerful be the ones trembling in utter horror for once.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Contact: Brazil

A Kafkaesque fever dream in neon and gray

An unnamed country has been taken over by the Ministry of Information. Now every citizen must be known, catalogued, identifiable. There must be a paper trail for every little thing that happens. Under such a regime, there's no place for a romantic who dreams of flying.

I found it bone-chilling to watch Brazil in 2024. The capabilities of the surveillance state have only grown since 1985, and the resulting paranoia has degraded public debate to the point of making it utterly ineffectual. The digital revolution has made paperwork even more intrusive and frustrating. Brazil presents an all-knowing, all-reaching state as a humorous exaggeration, but that's exactly what we see developing around us. I had a little moment of nervous embarrassment whenever a scene depicted a form of government control that clearly sounded outlandish to the scriptwriters but in my time had become a normal part of life.

As I took note of the resemblances with reality, I also appreciated the art design. Brazil looks much like other famous 1980s dystopias: it shares its urban decay with Robocop, its hostile architecture with Blade Runner, its carceral aesthetic with Escape from New York. But you can immediately recognize Brazil by director Terry Gilliam's signature camera angles and strikingly composed close-ups. Characters seem cornered by our gaze, constrained in their world even as it extends far behind them. Likewise, in some scenes we see a character's attention intentionally turned away from a calamity happening in the background. This is one of many indications that the society of Brazil has replaced empathy with adherence to procedure. The system can't make mistakes (can't even bother to look at them); any wrongful action has to be attributed to hidden enemies of the state.

The influence from 1984 is obvious (one of the film's working titles was 1984 ½). But Orwell didn't live to witness the degree to which the KGB and the Stasi would turn totalitarian control into a sadistic art form. For us, it's hard to imagine an extreme of state intrusion that isn't already happening somewhere and that isn't defended by someone's twisted logic. Consider how discussion of Brazil treats it as comical hyperbole, but after the abuses brought by the Patriot Act and the endless threats to online privacy, we tend to speak of Black Mirror as raw testimony from tomorrow's headlines. Brazil's cartoonish hell has become our normal.

Brazil doesn't even provide the comfort of a hero worth rooting for. Archivist Sam Lowry likes to imagine himself as a knight in shining armor, but he's a willing cog in the machine. When he has to notify a housewife that the government has mistakenly tortured her husband to death, he's more interested in filling the requisite paperwork than in acknowledging her emotional distress. When he becomes infatuated with a woman he's only seen at a distance, he changes jobs for the sole purpose of stalking her. He has never lifted a finger to spare anyone from the government's brutal interrogation methods—until they come for the woman he's obsessed with. That he ultimately fails to escape the government's iron grasp isn't the real tragedy; the tragedy is that this is the kind of hero that this society is capable of producing.

While watching Brazil, I found myself constantly thinking back to the Star Wars series Andor, which seems to have taken inspiration from Sam Lowry when designing the villain Syril Karn, a paper-pusher of no importance with a controlling, overambitious mother and a nearly pathological fixation on a woman he perceives as strong-willed. One could read Andor as criticizing Brazil for choosing the wrong point of view, for inviting us to empathize with the wrong character. In Brazil, we don't get to meet the average inhabitants of this society, those who don't enjoy the perks of a government job and an influential mother. Whoever is detonating all those bombs in public places would have made a more compelling character to follow.

Like with Black Mirror, your experience with Brazil will depend largely on how much cynicism you bring to the table. You'll get massive amounts of validation if you already believe that human beings are horrible and that sufficiently complex social systems naturally tend toward tyranny. As comedy relies on surprise, you may find Brazil less funny, though perhaps scarier, if your view of real society matches what Gilliam imagined. I saw the same effect when I showed Idiocracy to some friends and they declared it not comedy but horror. I, too, felt a wave of horror come over me when I watched Brazil—just not horror at the fiction, but at the reality.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Contact: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

A smug exploration of a rather silly idea that misses an opportunity to convince.

I’d like to start this First Contact with a bit of positioning. I’m not a huge consumer of so-called Golden Era SFF, in large part because my tastes have been formed on more modern books. Modern SFF tends to be written with the understanding that elements such as character arcs, relationships, and perhaps even (stay with me here, I know this is wacky) women have a role in stories. So I am approaching this First Contact project with a bit of pre-judgment in heart. And in my view, that’s fine. These books have been around for a while, and they’ve gotten on just fine without any kind of ostensibly unbiased journalist evaluation from me. No, my goal is to stay sitting exactly where I sit right now, with my modern tastes and 21st-century outlook and expectations of SFF as a field, and report how that background reacts to Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

Please note that I am not taking pain to avoid spoilers the way I would with a review of a more recent book. Y’alls have had 70 years to read it. But in case it’s been sixty years since you refreshed your memory, we’ll start with a brief summary:

Summary

An enormous, Galaxy-spanning empire with a population in the quadrillions is on the edge of collapse. But only one man, Hari Seldon, can see it. Seldon has invented a form of probabilistic modeling of historical events and likely future outcomes that he calls psychohistory, and on the strength of this modeling he predicts that the Galactic Empire will fall. He is arrested for his doomsaying, but manages to persuade the government to give him a planet all his own to create an Encyclopedia of all galactic knowledge, which he claims will shorten the catastrophic disruption that will probabilistically-but-also-inevitably ensue when the Empire falls. The book follows the events on this Encyclopedia-creating planetary project, called Foundation, through the next several generations, in a series of vignettes. Each vignette has roughly the same structure:

1. Some challenge or conflict or hardship arises.
2. Hari Seldon has predicted that it would arise.
3. Some very clever people bravely do nothing, resisting the urge of lesser minds to take proactive measures, because they are confident that the correct course of action predicted by Seldon will reveal itself.
4. The clever people are vindicated. Seldon was right, the problem is now solved.

I understand the appeal of this sort of plot structure. Competence porn is attractive, and this book is only competence porn. However, the fact remains that psychohistory strikes me as fundamentally silly, and the one way it could have been turned into something brilliant is underexplored, or else entirely overlooked (I can't figure out which).

The silliness of psychohistory

I’m going to leave aside things like my disbelief in the ability to model so far in the future, because chaos theory and the butterfly effect were not known in 1951. It's not fair to criticize Asimov for being ignorant about sensitive dependence on initials conditions. (Although I will maintain that, even from the perspective of the 1950s, it's hard to get behind a mathematical modeling algorithm that can condense the complexity of a quadrillions-strong Galactic Empire into a mathematical representation that can be evaluated and confirmed or disconfirmed by one guy looking at a pocket calculator.) No, I’ll accept the fictional component of this science fictional concept for now.

But within the domain of its fictional function, psychohistory still doesn’t work. In part, I think Asimov couldn’t decide how difficult he wanted it to be. Quite early on, Seldon explains its principles in the span of a single conversation with a young protege of his, so it’s not like you need to devote your life to it to understand it. And there are quadrillions of people in this galaxy. If only one in a million people are mathematically astute enough to grasp it, that still means we have billions of mathematicians who, in the course of a single conversation, can understand how psychohistory works, confirm that Seldon’s calculations are correct, and buy into his predictions and recommendations not out of blind faith, but out of a firm grounding in the principles of this new discipline.

I’m going to go with that, because the alternative is that psychohistory is so mind-bogglingly complex and hard that only Hari Seldon and a very select few of his proteges can do it. And if that’s the case, then the Galactic Empire went all the way from getting ready to execute Seldon for disloyal speech to giving him a whole-ass planet on only his word, uncorroborated by no one except his own people. And that’s just silly, right? Seldon says he can demonstrate the validity of his predictions ‘only to another mathematician,’ so I'll assume he does, in fact, do so, to the satisfaction of the government. (And, in our era of climate change, major props to the government for believing him and taking his recommended actions!)

So: psychohistory is hard and novel, and Hari Seldon developed it, but it’s not that hard.

Why, then, in later generations on the Foundation, after Seldon’s death, does it become a lost science? We’re told that it’s because records of psychohistory are not included in the Encyclopedia project, and “psychologists” are not included in the starting staff of the project. (That seems a bit rough to the 50 or so staff members who worked with Seldon on his doomsaying predictions. Do they all get left behind? Do they get new jobs? Did Seldon write them a reference before heading off?) This is clearly an intentional decision, and also not one that is ever explained.

But the thing is, once something has been discovered, it’s not hard to rediscover it. And remember, psychohistory is not that hard to understand. You can confirm its correctness over the course of a single conversation if you have the right mathematical background. What’s more, the entire existence of the Foundation, along with its tradition of rigorous education and preservation of knowledge, is founded (hah) upon the validity of psychohistory. And not one of these brilliant knowledge-workers has ever thought, ‘Hmmm, I wonder how our founding discipline actually worked?’ No one has managed to rediscover its principles and rederive its formulae? That seems a bit off.

The missed opportunity of the psychohistorical religion

Of course, one reason no one tries to redevelop psychohistory is because it has taken on some sort of religious status, such that questioning it is taboo. Certainly in later generations of the Foundation, people start saying things like, ‘By Seldon!’ and showing a wildly blind faith in following ‘Seldon’s Plan,’ exactly like it is some religious creed. That’s actually rather a neat idea. And, in fact, it has a fascinating resonance with the relations between the Foundation and its surrounding, declining planetary neighbours. Consider, for example, the planet Anacreon. They start showing signs of wanting to do some conquering on the Foundation as the fall of galactic civilization proceeds, until the Foundation manages to placate them with their more advanced technology. But because the Foundation is badly outnumbered by Anacreon, they don’t want to let the Anacreon people become technological equals. To forestall this, they share their technology by couching it as religious miracle. The Foundation educates the young people of Anacreon, but only ‘empirically’—i.e., they teach them to work the technology by rote memorization, rather than proper understanding of nuclear physics. Anacreon technicians can press the buttons, but they don’t get to learn the principles behind the machines, and cannot repair them if they get damaged. Indeed, the Foundation explicitly teaches them that this is a divine power, that the machines work by miracles.

(I will skip over, once again, the fact that an ENTIRE PLANET full of well-maintained, working machines, with a population of smart young people being brought TO THE FOUNDATION ITSELF to learn how to work them, is probably not going to take too long to rediscover the principles of nuclear physics, no matter how sequestered the Anacreon youth are. I will simply accept that, in this world of Asimov’s, large populations of people do not rediscover fundamental principles of science, no matter how much opportunity, education, resources, and motivation they have at their disposal.)

So, the poor benighted people do not know the principles of the scientific discipline that governs their existence, and must lead their lives unquestioningly according to the rote instructions of their religious leaders. Do you see it? Do you see the parallels between nuclear theory, a religious miracle bestowed by the almighty Foundation upon unquestioning Anacreons; and psychohistory, a religious miracle bestowed by almighty Hari Seldon upon the unquestioning Foundation? Is that not very neat and cool? I think so!

However, I do not think that Asimov thought so. In fact, I find myself wondering if he saw the parallels at all. When I write them down, it seems far too obvious not to notice, but when I was actually reading the book, all I could feel was an overwhelming sense of smugness: ‘Psychohistory and Seldon smart and good! Religious belief dumb and bad!’ Over and over again, the plot offers us examples of how Seldon’s predictions are absolutely correct, and how the people in the Foundation are correct to follow the Seldon Plan and have faith and stay the course, and they will come out on top. (I have heard rumours that this falls apart in later books, which is fine, but since I did not read those books, I cannot comment further on them.)

There’s more I could say. I could discuss the low-hanging fruit of women, and how a quick Ctrl+F for the word ‘she’ returned exactly one hit between pages 1 and 131, and that one is referring to a planetary government, rather than to a person. I could mention the repeated claims that Seldon can predict only general tendencies rather than specific events—except for when he correctly predicts that a particular person will be arrested on a particular day. I could question how useful psychohistory actually is, if the people who govern a planet according to Seldon’s plan must argue amongst themselves about what action to take or not to take in order to preserve the outcomes of his plan. Since the plan operates on broad tendencies rather than individual actions, shouldn't it not matter? If his plan breaks every time a particular governmental official does or does not do something, how robust is it, actually, across centuries and millennia?

So that brings us back to faith again. I have difficulty believing that Seldon can predict 100 years in the future regarding the fate of the Foundation, let alone 1000 for the entire galaxy. But he sure can make Foundationers think he can, and so they act (or don’t act) according to their faith in his pseudoscience. And to the extent that the plot bears out the decisions of these believers of this book, it might just as well be religious miracle as scientific ‘psychohistory.’ If the former —if it is a true supernatural miracle— then Asimov is being really rather brilliant. But if the latter, if we're supposed to accept that psychohistory is real, then Asimov just thinks he’s being clever while actually spinning a very silly story about a very silly pseudoscience. And I fear it’s the latter we’ve got on our hands.

--

Highlights:

• Very clever men being clever
• No women
• Competence porn

Nerd coefficient: 4/10, not very good.

Reference: Asimov, Isaac. Foundation [Harper Collins, 1995/first published Gnome Press, 1951].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

First Contact: Metropolis

A dazzling window through which a century of science fiction can be glimpsed

Economic inequality is bad. It's unfair, cruel, bad, unfair, cruel, bad, unfair, cruel—there aren't many ways to say this basic fact. This is why it's so difficult to make a science fiction allegory of inequality with anything interesting to say beyond: bad, unfair, cruel. I've become very skeptical of this century's dystopias because, almost every time, the setting turns out to be yet another allegory of inequality that's going to parrot what I already know. As a topic for storytelling, greed doesn't lend itself to much complexity or depth; it's just a bad thing, and it ought to end, and that's pretty much all there is to say on the matter. Call it The Hunger Games or Altered Carbon or Elysium or the Black Mirror episodes "Fifteen Million Merits" and "Nosedive," they tend to replay the same arguments and impassioned pleas and end up sounding like they harbor the alarming suspicion that we need convincing that the sky is blue. Time after time, we're treated to the same fables of decadent leisure for the few and soul-draining toil for the rest like it's some world-shattering discovery. You have to look for the topmost of top-caliber stories, like the Doctor Who episodes "Oxygen" and "Boom," to find fresh creative angles on the age-old problem of human greed.

Despite the difficulty of saying anything new about inequality, science fiction has tried its hand at saying it many times, mainly because our genre is an heir of the Industrial Revolution, which made it a natural vehicle of expression for the dystopian living conditions of factory workers since the earliest science fiction. So it's no surprise that class conflict is the core conflict in Viennese director Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Set in a city divided between luxury and drudgery, it tells the story of a workers' rebellion sparked by an undercover robot with dubious loyalties. Even if you don't follow science fiction, anyone interested in cinema is aware of Metropolis as one of the absolute biggest classics of all time.

My first impression is that this film's revered status is more due to its unparalleled visual inventiveness than to any insight gleanable from its script. The moral stance of Metropolis lands like a blow to the face, with all the shallow preachiness of the average Black Mirror and a textbook case of Madonna-whore complex that I'm sure made Freud yawn. Of course, I say this from the position of a 21st-century viewer who has had his fill of science fiction about rich, overemotional manchildren with mommy issues. By which I mean Ferengi. Surely these themes must have felt audacious and thought-provoking back then. But is it really possible that 1920s Weimar moviegoers didn't know that factory workers had harsh lives, and needed two hours of delirious psychosexual melodrama to open their eyes to the evils of class stratification? The question may sound silly in our hyperliterate 2020s, but let's not forget that there are still pockets of regressive ideology where it's asserted with a straight face that slaves didn't have it so bad. Even such a prominent literary figure (and prominent Fabian socialist) as H. G. Wells called Metropolis implausibly pessimistic in its depiction of the suffering of workers, although it must be noted that his analysis of the movie was so literal that he mistook its striking art design for a genuine attempt at predicting coming trends in industrial engineering.

To be fair to Mr. Wells, there are details in his essay that hint at the possibility that the version of Metropolis he watched must have been Channing Pollock's studio-mandated, intentionally mistranslated recut. But even so, to make such misjudged remarks about the look of the film, Wells must have been unfamiliar with the conventions of German Expressionism, the artistic tradition most in line with the key moviemaking principle that the function of images on a screen is not to be, but to represent.

German Expressionism works so well for the silent black-and-white format that I'm surprised it wasn't independently developed in other countries. When you can't record sound or color, the only tools you have for communicating a character's emotions are lighting and gesture. And when your only tools are lighting and gesture, overdramatic chiaroscuro is your friend.

While watching Metropolis, I was in awe of how few dialogue cards were really needed to tell the story. With the exaggerated way the actors waved their arms and performed their facial reactions, following the plot was effortless. As regards Freder, the young male protagonist, this style of acting hurts the reading of his character. He comes off as too mercurial, too easily influenceable. Actor Gustav Fröhlich was 24 when he worked in Metropolis, and I kept having the impression that his role would have felt more natural if it had been given to a teenager.

On the other hand, Brigitte Helm proved here that she was ONE HELL of an actress. As typical for this era of cinema, she also resorted to big, expressive movements for playing the two characters she had in the movie, but the result never feels like too much. She was in perfect control of exactly how much she needed to twist her neck or contort her face to nail a scene. With the spell she casts on the viewer, she singlehandedly saves Metropolis from the absurdities of its script.

The main antagonists of Metropolis are a businessman and an inventor. Their suitability as villains in a fable of industrial dystopia is clear; their motivations are anything but. The inventor claims to want revenge against the businessman over a decades-old romantic rivalry, but the rebellion his robot incites among the workers is exactly what the businessman wants, to the point that one middle manager is explicitly ordered to let rioting workers destroy the most important machine that keeps the city functioning. The disaster that ensues only lands for the businessman when he's told that his son is in the factory. And yet, somehow, the boss and the workers end up spontaneously willing to listen to each other, in a painfully saccharine scene that lingers for too long.

It is a testament to the movie's artistry that it became a must in any film studies curriculum despite being known primarily in mistranslation. It's hard for a shamelessly sanitized script to detract from the power of these images—the miniature sets depicting the shining city of the future; the iconic accident scene where a wall of machinery is transmuted into a demonic face that devours people; the no less iconic dance scene where the robotic impostor in womanly guise demonstrates its ability to enchant men; the frantic choreography of workers attached to buttons and levers; the secret tunnels buried beneath the city; the imposing architecture that feels oppressive just by looking at it. Even when depicting actions that on paper sound banal and boring, there is no scene that doesn't have a superabundance of emotion. Watching these actors shake and jump all over the screen has an oddly mesmerizing effect that took me by surprise. It's a happy marriage of medium and style.

And then there's the bonus satisfaction of identifying the elements of Metropolis that begat prosperous descendants across the 20th century: the robot design that looks like a great-grandmother to C3PO; the inventor's laboratory that helped codify the aesthetic conventions of mad science; the urban geometry that haunts the night in Batman: The Animated Series; the impostor wearing a human skin like one of Skynet's creations. I felt like I was participating in a reverential pilgrimage to the birthplace of my idols.

Only in one regard will I agree with Mr. Wells's otherwise narrow-minded criticism of Metropolis:

The film’s air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Civil War

An absolutely brutal depiction of photojournalism in the midst of an underexplored conflict

I met up with some friends to see Alex Garland's Civil War in IMAX on the Thursday evening before its wide release in the U.S. As a fan of Annihilation, The Beach, and Ex Machina, I thought I was in for a timely tale of American democracy gone wrong. Seeing Nick Offerman in the previews as a Trumpian presidential figure only piqued my interest even more—as a devout lover of all things dystopian, I was ready.

What I got, however, was not what I expected. This isn't to say that the film is lacking; it's just 100% focusing on things other than the reasons behind our country's fictional split.

It focuses on a team of war correspondents inching their way through to Washington D.C. in what may perhaps? be the closing days of said civil war. We never find out how long the civil war has been going on, nor who are the good guys.

Kirsten Dunst portrays a seasoned war photojournalist who is depressed, burnt out, and a war-battered shell of herself. She's joined by a young aspiring photographer who wants desperately in on this life, despite the absolutely traumatic nature of the job. Also along for the ride is the always excellent Stephen McKinley Henderson, most recently known for his role as House Atreides mentat Thufir Hawat.

They travel hundreds of miles through a ravaged American landscape—something that is in itself shocking as there hasn't been a full-scale war on mainland American soil in scores of years. At each stop they shadow armed combatants and bravely capture gut-wrenching photos of corpses, men writhing in pain, and other hideous atrocities.

The conceit of the film is summed up when Kirsten Dunst is asked a question about how photographers like her can document all this horror without taking sides or asking questions—she responds simply with "We record so other people ask."

By not giving the audience any insight into which is the right side of history (if there even is such a thing, in some conflicts) and following in the literal footsteps of these photographers, the film provides you with the full experience—you're not there to fight; you're there to record what is happening every step of the way.

If you judge the film by that metric, it succeeds. And maybe it would have by any other metric, had the film marketed itself as an Oscar-baity War Journalism Think Piece. But I was expecting a deep dive into cultural differences in America that led to a division and a war, which isn't terribly farfetched as I could rattle off three or four such catalysts right now that the U.S. is currently experiencing. Instead, we find out nothing of any substance. The scene with Jesse Plemons interrogating the journalists as to "What kind of American are you?" is as close to world-building as Alex Garland gets, though throughout the scene we have no idea which side Plemons pledges allegiance to.

I didn't realize until I got to the theatre that Civil War is an A24 production, and then things started to click. My experience with A24 movies is that they're nearly always about the horrors of trauma and what they do to humans. This film is no different, and you're brutally pummeled left and right through its relatively short runtime with ear-splitting assault weapon deaths, unspeakable violence, mass graves of U.S. citizens, and characters having literal (and multiple) on-screen panic attacks.

Among the reviews I've read, there seems to be a split. There are those who feel like I do, that it seemed like the previews made it out to be something else entirely, and that by refusing to take a stance about a political civil war, Garland didn't accomplish anything.

Then there are those who think it genius, and a much-needed depiction of the horrors of war and how no side is ever really right. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, like most things.

I'm glad I saw Civil War, and it definitely made me think—but I'll never watch it again. 

--

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: Kirsten Dunst's performance is fantastic; there are moments of cinematic artistry scattered throughout; if you've ever wanted to learn about the cold, hard reality of war photojournalism, you're in for a treat.

Penalties: No real worldbuilding; extremely traumatic and violent; some viewers may feel as if they were bait-and-switched when they learn nearly nothing about the war.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Review [TV]: The Regime

Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what your country can do to you

Every tyranny encounters opposition. But there are also, under every tyranny, a number from among the population who mold themselves to match what the tyrant demands of them. That raises a valuable question: what type of citizen does authoritarianism want? The typology of dictators has been catalogued extensively in political philosophy, but what about those on the receiving end of absolute power? If we could envision a nightmare scenario, where the common human being gladly consented to being controlled, what would be the traits of such an aberrant political subject?

The HBO Max series The Regime shows the mutual cycle of enablement and abuse that would emerge if the archetypal wielder of total domination crossed paths with the archetypal wielder of total submission. We know what happens when an oppressive ruler meets resistance, but The Regime suggests that the reaction can be equally explosive when the oppressive half of the equation is paired to an obedient follower who understands that they're living under tyranny and willingly accepts it.

In The Regime we meet Elena, the head of state of a fictional Central European country. She is a psychopathic narcissist who barely cares to perform empathy before the public eye. She never leaves the obscenely luxurious government palace, detests meeting in person with citizens, holds in the highest reverence the embalmed corpse of her father, routinely borrows a child to be seen with at public events, and fosters a cult of personality where she plays the role of loving partner to everyone. To fill the smoking crater where accountability and rule of law should be, she love-bombs her people in florid speeches calculated to simultaneously seduce and infantilize. She weaponizes her sex appeal like a gender-swapped Vladimir Putin while pummeling dissidents with an iron fist clothed in raunchy lace. Adept at terrorizing the nation with a gentle, motherly smile, she's an Isabel Perón convinced that she's really Evita.

And then we meet Herbert, a soldier hated across the nation for his brutal role in suppressing a protest. The depths of his self-loathing make him a danger to himself and to everyone around him. He follows obsessive rituals of self-punishment that worsen after he's hired in a minor position at the government palace, accidentally finds himself at the right place and the right time to save Elena's life. She promptly starts giving him bigger and bigger roles in her administration until he ends up being her personal enforcer, bodyguard, advisor, confidant, propagandist, policymaker, medic, and dietitian, despite his dangerously multidisciplinary ignorance. He's happy to serve as a pawn to his queen in all but name, but the dynamic of their relationship is too volatile to remain one-sided. His encroaching influence over her turns him into a hulky Rasputin in jackboots and a high-and-tight cut. But he's no crafty schemer: he's a cauldron of bubbling emotions desperate to be told in which direction to let them boil over. An incurious simpleton, fluent only in violence both given and received, he's the perfect match for Elena, the burning, furious yang to her cold, dark yin. He's someone who yearns to become just something. He's what remains of a human being once all self-respect has been extirpated with a bear trap. He's the ideal citizen of totalitarianism.

It's with morbid fascination that one watches Elena and Herbert bolster each other and injure each other and inspire each other and destroy each other. Their damaging codependence becomes indissoluble in the way that addicts feel compelled to seek more poison. And here the relationship between oppressor and oppressed grows a few symbolic layers with disturbing significance. Ever since modern democracies emerged within the still prevailing economic system, politicians have known that campaigning is advertising is persuading is seducing is cajoling is beguiling is captivating is enchanting is exploiting is controlling is conquering is possessing. The emotional tropes that apply between lover and beloved can also apply between ruler and ruled. There's an unmissable erotic dimension to the act of delegating power onto a representative, a dynamic of submission and trust that requires vulnerability and expects exclusiveness. Elena and Herbert jump into bed with the mutual sadism of one who unabashedly seizes and one who dejectedly gives up, both aware of their alternating roles as user and used.

The result of this mix is necessarily misery for everyone else. A tyrant alone can still cause harm by reiterated acts of combustion; a tyrant with a follower is a harmoniously rolling engine of predatory impetus.

And yet, the final episode of The Regime reveals that the components of this self-sustaining despotic machine are three: alongside the head of state and the common citizen, you also need the businessman. You need the complicity of private power in order to return to a semblance of stability each time a crisis blows up. It has been said that money is the mechanism that allows two parties that dislike each other to deal peacefully instead of bringing about mutual annihilation. However, the businessman is no less a giver and receiver of violence than the other members of the triumvirate of dystopia. The Regime seems to be saying that, even if one of the three gets eliminated, the system can still function with few mishaps until the next cycle of abuse and enablement can get going. Tyranny is a monster that feeds on itself, incapable of telling apart appreciation and absorption. The warped eroticism of complete control doesn't cease to be, even then, a force of creation.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

In Dune: Part Two, the Hero's Journey takes a very dark turn

There's nothing more dangerous than a savior

Consider the above photo for a moment. It's one of many, many great shots to be found in Dune: Part Two. But to me, this one summarizes the core message of the film, and of the entire Dune series of novels. This shot happens when Paul Atreides has secured the fervent support of the Fremen, who see in him the fulfillment of their messianic prophecies. He will soon lead them in battle against the Emperor of the known universe, and then against all the noble houses, and then... If you've read past the first book, you know the ugliness that follows. War will spread from world to world and consume billions of lives.

And all that horror is (literally) foreshadowed in that photo. It shows Paul standing atop a rocky shelf, giving a speech before his gathered followers. But if you focus your gaze on the multitude, Paul's barely lit silhouette transforms into a gigantic shadow that falls over a good portion of his own army. His raised arm holding a dagger resembles the shape of a scythe. That is who Paul is destined to become: a bringer of death on an interstellar scale.

When Dune: Part One arrived in theaters, I was concerned about the sequel's ability to give equal attention to the numerous mass fights and the heavy philosophical themes that occupy the latter half of the first Dune book. Fortunately, after watching in Part One a movie basically made of setup, we get in Part Two dramatic rewards galore: Baron Harkonnen starts the story believing himself to be a cunning mastermind, only to end up losing everything; local warlord Stilgar becomes a religious fanatic who eagerly enables Paul's ambition; and Lady Jessica evolves from a minor operative in the Church of Painstakingly Slow Eugenics to a ruthless manipulator, a twisted blend of John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary, an unholy messenger that prepares the way for the Dark Messiah.

The film makes good use of its runtime to discuss the corrosive effects of proselytism on subjugated communities. Much like the Slave Bible in the US, the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit have spent centuries spreading doctrines calculated to facilitate their control over the native populations of several planets. Paul's rise to complete military and political power is viewed by the Fremen as the key to their freedom, but it's actually part of an immensely complex scheme of domination that not even Paul agrees with. The character of Paul Atreides is portrayed here with deep psychological awareness of the competing loyalties and urges that inundate his mind. It doesn't hurt that Timothée Chalamet is a fantastically talented actor who makes the expression of multiple simultaneous emotions seem effortless.

The rest of the cast performs impeccably as well. Zendaya serves as the audience's surrogate as she first becomes fascinated by Paul's rapidly growing skills as a fighter and leader, and later becomes alarmed and finally disillusioned as Paul learns to enjoy power a bit too much. Austin Butler makes a surprising impression as Feyd-Rautha, bringing into each of his scenes an uncanny mixture of ethereal beauty and deadly brutality. And I must again praise the character of Lady Jessica, who in the hands of actress Rebecca Ferguson displays a fascinating breadth of personality between the loving domestic figure she is in Part One and the poisoner of entire cultures she becomes in Part Two.

This film's most striking change to the novel's plot, the handling of Paul's little sister Alia, is in consonance with the larger themes. Alia awakens as a Reverend Mother when Lady Jessica passes the test of the Water of Life. This ritual opens access to the memories of all previous Reverend Mothers; however, since Alia is still an embryo with no identity of her own, she becomes a living repository of a continuous heritage that influences events through her. In a way, this is also true of Paul: his existence  and his trajectory are the product of converging political machinations that steer him toward his inescapable tragic fate. Dune as a whole is very skeptical of the Great Man theory, which can be seen in the way Paul at first appears to be the promised hero who will fix everything, but instantly morphs into yet another blunt instrument of forces beyond human control.

Much of the plot of Dune is a curious multiplication of the standard tragic structure: the narrative beats result from the snowballing disaster that is everyone failing in turn to execute their respective plans. The Emperor fails to exterminate the Atreides family; Leto fails to humanize the living conditions in Arrakis; Doctor Yueh fails to avenge his wife; the Fremen fail to bring security and prosperity to their world; and the Bene Gesserit fail to give birth to the perfect man who will save the universe. From these successive failures come new, escalating crises that no one had made preparations for. This refusal of events to submit to human will feels much like the way history proceeds in the real world, and therein lies the secret to the continuing appeal of Dune.

The cherry on this cake of great storytelling is director Denis Villeneuve's eye for perfect composition. The landscapes of Arrakis appear as endless expanses of all the shades of brown and yellow; the sky can look inviting, dotted with millions of stars; or darkened by the unpredictable ferocity of Arrakis's sandstorms; or oppressively hot under the reign of a blinding sun.

Dune exists in a universe where not only political events, but also nature escapes any attempt at human control. You cannot tame the mighty sandworm, only ride it for a time. Humans will be lost as long as they keep trying to control the enigmatic spice that makes both physical and spiritual journey possible. This theme is reflected in the narrative device of having all major players fail in their schemes: merely having an Emperor is already a manifestation of the desire for absolute control, and therefore the precipitating cause of unending catastrophe. This has been a fundamental flaw of human history, as true in the year 10191 as in 2024.

This is the final ingredient that explains why Villeneuve's Dune produces such an alluring effect: even as it employs the trappings of ancient epic, the truths it communicates have never ceased to be relevant. We're still susceptible to the rousing speeches of a supposed savior. We're still collectively addicted to a toxic source of energy. We're still treating less powerful societies as pawns in the political chessboard. Volatility has somehow remained a constant of our time. However, if we manage to remember that fear is the mind-killer, we'll be able to identify the true intentions of anyone who shows up selling fear. Too many aspire to become a God-Emperor. We need stories like Dune to keep our eyes open.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview: The Mars House, by Natasha Pulley

 A political thriller that suffers from the strictures of science fiction as a genre

Natasha Pulley’s work tends to run to type: Delicately drawn queer relationships, exquisite images evoking the unknowability of (super)natural forces, an unmoored approach to time, and plots focusing on conquest and colonialism that usually involve Britain at one end or the other. The Mars House, a science fiction political thriller set on Mars, would seem like a striking departure from this mold, and yet, at its core, nearly all of Pulley’s key interests are represented. The problem is that what works beautifully in historical fiction tinged with the fantastic does not translate well to science fiction.

The book centers around January Stirling, a ballet dancer from England who must flee a flooded London as a climate refugee. The city of Tharsis, a Martian colony, is always looking for new people, and make a practice of taking in climate refugees like January. But people who have grown up on Earth are three times stronger than natural Martian citizens, due to the gravity differential, and because they do not know how to moderate their strength, they are deadly additions to society. One in 267 Earthborn people kills a Martian by accident every year, on account of their strength—a statistic that takes familiar arguments about immigration and gives them a decidedly fresh twist. It’s one thing to insist that taking in refugees is a humane and decent thing to do, or to show how immigration results in a net positive economic impact. It’s quite another when the cost of such policies is measurable in lives.

Tharsis has coped with this uneasy balance by creating a two-tiered society. At the top are natural or naturalized Martians: those who were born on the planet, or have undergone a grueling and not-entirely-safe medical procedure to render their physiology comparable to more fragile Martian norms. The underclass are the ‘Earthstrong’, people like January, whose comparative robustness makes them valuable workers in jobs like manufacturing, where manual labour and brute strength are valuable, but who are still seen as a peril in shops or on public transit. They are legally required to wear resistance cages, a metal mechanism that resists their movement in a manner evocative of Harrison Bergeron, reducing their strength to Mars-normal. Regulations restrict their movement: they can remove their cages only in certain places, under clearly defined circumstances. Public service messaging reinforces these regulations in dehumanizing language.

This strength-related division between Earthstrong and Tharses is bolstered by a gender-related divide. The Tharsese have done away with social gender entirely. Everyone is ‘they’. To a Martian, gendered language is rude, uncouth. It evoke back-alley thuggery, because on Mars gendered pronouns are only used by Earthstrongers, for Earthstrongers. Oh—and for animals. A Martian cannot be ‘he’ or ‘she’, but a dog or an Earthstronger can be. Again, immigrants are dehumanized.

Within this society, January Stirling makes a home for himself. He wears his cage obediently, works diligently in a factory to manufactor water from biowaste at a molecular level, and struggles to support himself in a grey market economy that runs on energy credits, since unnaturalized Martians are shut out of the currency economy. Then, in an unfortunate example of politics staining everything it touches, he catches the attention of Aubrey Gale, a militantly anti-refugee Tharsese politician on the rise. As a political stunt, Gale invites January to enter into a temporary political marriage, and January—now out of work and unable to support himself---has no other option but to agree. (This is rather typical of Pulley, whose queer relationships almost always feature a decidedly unhealthy imbalance of power.) From there, plottery ensues: explosions and dinner parties, talking mammoths and almost-ghosts, mysteriously missing persons and maybe-murdered marital predecessors, and a great deal of immigration policy and political intrigue in all directions.

The real strength of this book is, I think, the politics of immigration in this Tharsese context. Pulley has always been quite interested in culture clash and colonization, and the interplanetary setting here allows her the freedom to explore familiar ideas in novel ways. By making Earthstrongers genuinely dangerous to indigenous Martians, Pulley neatly balances the two sides of an argument that most left-leaning readers of SFF would see as laughably unbalanced in its real-world incarnation. The world presented here has no good solutions: Earth’s climate crisis is catastrophically bad, and Mars has room. Yet Earthstrong people are genuinely dangerous, and the more of them arrive on Mars, the more they will threaten the Tharsese. Yet on Mars itself, they are an underclass, forced either to physically hamper themselves, or else undergo debilitating, irreversable medical procedures for the sake of reaping the benefits of Tharses citizenship. Integrating the two populations cannot be made safe or equitable. Segregating them into separate settlements would only create two groups who must share limited resources, one of which is vastly stronger than the other—an imbalance that will not end well.

On top of this quite sophisticated political world-building, there are also beautiful references to her earlier books. A reference to the Peruvian Andes is, I think, an Easter egg for readers who read The Bedlam Stacks (the finest of Pulley’s books, in my opinion). At one point a character pulls out a cell phone that is a family heirloom, a Mori cell phone. Mori is the name of the titular character from The Watchmaker of Filligree Street, and the idea that his craft would have evolved from 19th century watchmaking to 21st century cell phone manufacturing is a lovely connector between the very different worlds in Pulley’s books. (It’s also rather a nice touch that a key mark of the quality of Mori craftsmanship is that the cell phones can be easily taken apart so that damaged parts can be swapped out to effect repairs. *coughcoughApplecoughcough*)

Other characteristically Pulleyan touches abound, but with less delicacy or success than in her previous books. The growing intimacy between January and Gale is the core of their character arcs, but it feels a bit forced. Part of that might be the quite tropey marriage-of-convenience plot device. Part of it might be the fact that January has internalized the anti-Earthstrong sentiment to a distressing degree of self-loathing, which makes his growing feelings for Gale—a rabid anti-Earthstronger, remember—seem less like affection and more like another representation of that self-loathing. 

The evocation of the ineffable power of natural forces, too, is present, but less satisfying. For example, water is a scarce commodity on Mars—hence January’s job at the factory manufacturing it—but Gale’s family has made its fortune extracting it from the atmosphere. Several scenes take place among a plantation of solar mirrors, which power Tharsis, while also warming the surrounding air and nurturing a pine forest. The microclimate generates mist, and nearby is a herd of genetically reconstituted mammoths, who can communicate with humans. Some veery evocative imagery, to be sure, but also a little bit silly.

I think that the problem with this book lies almost entirely its use of science fictional devices, rather than fantasy, to generate these otherworldly touches. Because with science fiction things must be explained, and explained in a way that makes sense. And these explanations simply don’t. Take, for example, the misty forest: It’s misty, we’re told, because the air is warmer around the solar collectors. But how can that work? Mist precipitates when the amount of water vapor grows too high for the air to hold. But warm air can hold more water than cold air. This is why dew collects at night: the air cools down, and water precipates out. This is also why winter air is dry: even if the outside air is fully saturated with water, once we warm it up indoors we increase its capacity to hold water, and so its relative humidity will plummet. Now consider Mars: It’s so dry that water must be created at a molecular level in massive solar-powered factories. Warming up the air is going to make the problem worse. So where does the water come from, to saturate this warmed air so completely that mist appears?

Consider, too, the cages that Earthstrongers must wear. Their mechanism, we are told, is to resist muscular movement, which prevents an overly enthusiastic gesture from taking off a Martian’s head. (While we’re at it, I’m a little perplexed at the frequency of limb-removal being attributed to Earthstrongers. Certainly bones and muscles will be weaker, but I have difficulty seeing how life in low-gravity weakens tendons and ligaments enough that someone of typical Earth stature can rip off a Martian’s leg. If you'll forgive a gruesome comparison, I do not believe it is the case that one in 267 preschool teachers accidentally dismembers a toddler every year.) The cages counteract movement; they do not change anything about the internal density or composition of an Earthstronger’s body. So how is it that a fall in Martian gravity is harmless to an Earthstronger who is not wearing a cage, but deadly to an Earthstronger who is wearing a cage? How is it that a crowd-repelling water hose can be shrugged off by an Earthstronger who is not wearing a cage, but will sweep away an Earthstronger who is wearing a cage?  The Earthstrong muscle and bone density are not going anywhere. The narrative purpose of the cages is clear: make Earthstrongers like Martians. But the mechanism that we are given simply doesn’t match the effect that they are intended to generate.

There are lots of examples of this: ideas that are evocative and useful for plotting and pacing and tension and stakes, but which simply don't work if you're trying to come up with a science-fictional type solution for them. With Pulley's approach to fantasy, she can leave it in the misty background, generating spectacular stories that aren’t dragged down by mechanics or unconvincing science. With SF, she can't. 

So, in sum, this is not Pulley's best work. Nevertheless, I devoured it in a day, and will devour her next, because even Pulley's not-best work is still pretty good stuff.

—

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Mars
  

• Politics of immigration and gender
  

• Queer-normal society
  

• Unconvincing SF mechanics
  

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

References: 

Pulley, Natasha. The Mars House. [Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024].