You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

Warning: Contains spoilers

A man wakes up, alone, aboard a spaceship near a strange star. The man does not remember who he is, how he got here, or most crucially, what has happened to him. He soon discovers however, that the survival of mankind rests on his shoulders. Project Hail Mary is the story of how he responds.

Project Hail Mary the movie is based on the eponymous book by Andy Weir, known from previous novel-made-movie The Martian, which similarly tells the story of a lone man surviving against the odds. It continues a venerable tradition of movies about cosmic calamities that require a brave few to boldly go where no man has gone before to blow up an asteroid (Armageddon, Deep Impact), rekindle the sun (Sunshine), or find a new home for humanity (Interstellar). This time, our reluctant hero is Dr Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), disgraced microbiologist, who is sent to Tau Ceti to find a cure for an interstellar infection that is dimming the Sun. At Tau Ceti he joins forces with an alien astronaut, baptised ‘Rocky’, from 40 Eridani, who was sent to Tau Ceti on a similar rescue mission.

Project Hail Mary works on two levels, the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the personal. And despite its stunning visuals evoking the vastness of space, it is decidedly stronger at its smaller scales, in no small part to strong acting by Ryan Gosling, who must carry much of the movie on his own. As I noted in my previous review, good sci-fi doesn’t predict the future, but holds up a mirror to the present day. Project Hail Mary works convincingly as a story about hope, friendship, and collaboration, but it does require a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief to get there.

The unavoidable question confronting both audience and Dr Grace himself is why he finds himself alone on a mission to save humanity. A series of flashbacks gradually reveals a backstory that withstands critical scrutiny about as well as a human withstands the vacuum of space. It takes an unreasonable number of accidental and unexplained deaths, combined with an astonishing lack of redundancy planning, to result in our lonely spacefarer, who then by a stroke of luck the size of Jupiter finds himself in Tau Ceti at the exact same time and place as Rocky. It is probably more plausible than the universe making me a cheese sandwich out of quantum fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, but not by much.

All of this is set in motion by an existentially threatening reduction in the output of the Sun, caused by the presence of a cosmic bacterium labelled the Astrophage. The Astrophage absorbs radiation at all wavelengths apart from infrared (not unlike chlorophyll, then) and is breeding on CO2 rich Venus while presumably covering the entire Sun in a shell of radiation eating bacteria. It is rather like that alien goo in Prometheus in possessing precisely the properties the plot demands: seeming faster-than-light spread, consuming the energy output of a star which is 1.5 million times larger than the planet on which it procreates, and then biochemically storing the output of a small fusion reaction in a petridish so that it can be easily harnessed as a stardrive to send our hero on his mission in the titular ‘Hail Mary’.

After Grace’s arrival at Tau Ceti the physics are fortunately grounded back in reality, enabling Project Hail Mary to elegantly interweave it with its narrative. The relativistic speeds attained by the Hail Mary have resulted in measurable time dilation, which means Ryland Grace is over 10 lightyears from Earth, yet has only aged 4 years since departure. Gravity on board is only available when under thrust or through an ingenious centrifuge mode, and the movie cleverly uses the presence or absence of gravity to telegraph what is going on. Orbital manoeuvres and the interior of the spaceship also feel authentic and produce some spectacular visuals, making it easy to see why the movie was filmed with IMAX in mind.

Dr Grace’s alien counterpart Rocky is also intriguingly and profoundly alien. Here we do not have some humanoid with pointy ears or purple skin, but a five-legged rock-based species (splendidly operated and voiced by James Ortiz), that has mastered the atomic level manipulation of xenon to construct vast structures, including the spaceship on which they traveled to Tau Ceti. It makes for a brilliant contrast between the messy complexity of humanity and the monolithic elegance of the Eridians, but it leaves the viewer with a lot of questions that the movie doesn’t so much not answer, as never even ask. I’m not an eminent exobiologist, but am nonetheless curious how Rocky’s species nervous system and metabolism function. Or how technology based seemingly on the manipulation of a single element produces the complex artefacts necessary for manned spaceflight. It is therefore somewhat of a shame that despite his putative past interest in alien life, Ryland Grace is astonishingly uninterested in Rocky and the world he hails from. We get an excessive number of scenes where Rocky and Grace bond over footage of Earth on the Hail Mary’s rudimentary holodeck, but there is barely any reciprocal interest in Rocky’s planet, culture or technology, and it takes until the end of the movie before Grace even visits Rocky’s spaceship.

Maybe Ryland Grace’s lack of interest is explained by how surprisingly human Rocky is, despite being an animated rock with a sensory apparatus based on echolocation. Although Grace has to construct his own universal translator to interpret Rocky’s vocalisations, it transpires that Rocky’s language is surprisingly amenable to English grammar and syntax, not to mention implausibly compatible with a human conceptual framework. Excepting a few recurring mistranslations that serve to remind the audience of the underlying language barrier, as well as for comic effect, Rocky passes seamlessly as American. Contrast this with Arrival, where the attempt to understand aliens who have a fundamentally different conception of reality is the point of the entire movie, rather than the work of a five minute montage.

Most of this can be forgiven because without the rapid establishment of common ground, the relationship between Rocky and Grace would never lift off, and it is here where the movie really shines. Ryan Gosling puts in an excellent performance, managing to strike the precarious balance between comedy and pathos in both the Hail Mary scenes and the pre-launch flashbacks. Gosling easily persuades us to emotionally connect with Rocky, an animated object with even fewer humanoid features than WALL-E, but who nonetheless evokes endearment and sympathy. This investment pays off across several moving moments when our heroes have to overcome the inevitable challenges and risks imposed by the harsh nature of space and the demands of the plot. In the scenes on Earth, Gosling plays the more familiar ‘outsider turned insider’ scientist, but without falling back too strongly onto one-dimensional stereotypes.

The flashback scenes back on Earth are also the ones infused with an almost surreal optimism, presenting us with a world where in the face of an existential threat, humanity does actually manage to band together to try and face it off. The international nature of the Hail Mary project is reinforced at every turn, showing us a global scientific community, Chinese cosmonauts, German administrators and Russian ground control all working together. The prominent shots of an American aircraft carrier are maybe a tad unfortunate at this particular point in time, but it would be unfair to hold that against the movie.

Drawing both strands together, Project Hail Mary is suffused with a profound optimism that acts as a welcome antidote to our present times. It wholeheartedly affirms that forging connections across boundaries, whether cultural, linguistic or technological, is possible, and that people will make the right decisions when it comes down to it, even if they sometimes need a little push to do so. The multinational cooperation to remove the Astrophage threat draws from a poorer cinematic tradition than the disaster movie elements of Project Hail Mary, but nonetheless recalls movies like Arrival or Pacific Rim, series like Stargate Atlantis, or videogames like X-COM and Mass Effect, all keeping a hope alive that we can work together across boundaries and borders to further the common good. At a time when a declining US empire seems intent on disrupting any attempt at global cooperation, reminders that another approach is possible are an unalloyed positive.

On the whole, Project Hail Mary is an eminently enjoyable movie with stunning visuals, a potent mix of comedy and scientific seriousness, and a heartfelt relationship at its core. Given its committed message of hope, it feels unkind to hold its basic premise of the sole, vaguely antiheroic man saving the world, against it. Nonetheless, it remained a discordant note for me throughout, diminishing the effectiveness of its emotional appeal through the sheer amount of contrivance deployed to fabricate a situation where this man – and as always it is a white, American man – must single-handedly save the world. If I was qualified to psychoanalyse, I might speculate that the movie is indicative of a profound anxiety afflicting affluent white American men who fear that even they no longer have any agency in our increasingly out-of-control world. The message of hope is thus tinged with a hint of frightened wish-fulfillment, complete with the stern Germanic mutti figure to take command and tell us that everything will be fine.

In the real world neither Germanic mutti’s nor metrosexual American men will come and save us. It will be a shared struggle, and insofar as Project Hail Mary inspires us to believe that humans can work together to overcome insurmountable odds and that every everyman will find it in them to do the right thing, while giving us some good laughs and cries along the way, it is a movie made for its time.

Notes & suggestions

• My unwillingness to accept the '‘single white male hero” trope has been sharpened recently by Ada Palmer’s writing on agency and protagonists in fiction, especially science fiction. This in itself draws on older writings, including Ursula K. le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. I have gone into this in more detail in my reviews of Mass Effect 3 and Andor.
• The theme of connection is also key to Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, and despite its more goofy superhero plot and self-referential B-movie vibes, I actually think it made the point better.
• Knowledge is power, which is why those in power so often hate science. US readers in particular may be worried about the attacks on science and scientific institutions in the US. Organisations like the Union of Concerned Scientists recognise the independence of science to democracy, and are fighting to keep scientific endeavours alive.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

Hamnet is a Shakespeare movie, except it is not actually about Shakespeare. Sure, William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) features, but a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another, he is neither its central character nor commands the majority of screentime. According to my local cinema’s blurb, Hamnet concerns ‘the healing power of art and creativity’. That is not untrue insofar as the movie culminates in a performance of Hamlet, which the movie portrays as Shakespeare’s means of processing his son’s death. Yet to interpret the movie by its finale alone seems to me to deny the centrality of Anne ‘Agnes’ Hathaway (played by Jessie Buckley), and her embodiment of the universal grief over the loss of those who die before their time.

Hamnet’s unflinching portrayal of visceral sorrow has ignited a debate among critics on whether the movie emotionally manipulates its audience to the extent that it could be considered ‘grief porn’. This is a surprising argument to me. Objecting that a movie about the death of a child centres grief feels like objecting that a Marvel movie contains superheroes and mediocre CGI. Rather than fault a movie for our discomfort, it is worth considering if it is not our cultural inhibitions around emotions that is to blame.

None of this matters yet at the beginning of Hamnet, when Agnes and William are just falling in love. Each in their own way, they are both outsiders. Like her hawk, Agnes is a forest creature, representative of a fading medieval tradition of herbalism and (witch)craft. Will is an aspiring poet by night, impoverished Latin teacher by day, who, as the audience knows, will become one of the foremost incarnations of the early modern period that is set to eclipse medieval norms and customers. We are witness to a transition where the rooted magic of plants and place will give way to the illusory magic of show and spectacle. And a transition that, it should be noted, was often carried out by violence against people like Agnes who stood accused of witchcraft.

Agnes’ second pregnancy symbolises this traumatic rupture with the Old Ways when she is forcefully denied giving birth in the forest and instead made to deliver at home – though a birthing stool is still more sensible than the methods 'modern’ science would inflict on future generations of women. Compounding Agnes’ distress is the sudden realisation that she is giving birth to twins, despite premonitions that she will be survived by only two children. From that moment, she is quietly convinced that her unexpected second daughter will pass before her time.

For a time though, things are go well for the Shakespeares, although Will is mostly absent from both his family and the screen, building his career as a playwright in faraway London, leaving it to Agnes and William’s extended family to care for their children. Their domestic life is beautifully captured by director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal, conveying a moderate yet not impoverished existence that feels plausible, which reminded me of similar scenes in 2023’s Znachor – despite the latter being set four centuries later.

Yet in the end, misfortune strikes as plague sweeps the land, afflicting first Judith but ultimately killing Hamnet instead. Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes’ grief over Hamnet’s death is raw and visceral, as is her depiction of Agnes’ subsequent bitterness at the absence of her husband, whose sorrow is more restrained and distant. This is where the debate over Hamnet’s emotional interaction with its audience, and its reliance on tropes of feminine and masculine ways of expressing grief comes most to the fore.

It is undeniably true that Hamnet seeks an emotional response from its audience, and that the death of a child is not exactly a subtle way to extract this. Some critics contend that this in and of itself invalidates any appeal the movie might make to our emotions. Viz. the BBC:

But as most of us already know that the death of a child is devastating, they seem more exploitative than insightful.

This is an odd line of argument. Most of us also already know that guns kill people, yet there is no shortage of movies containing copious amounts of gun violence. An entire franchise has been built on the premise that a man going on an intercontinental murderous rampage is a reasonable response to him losing his dog.

Rather than attributing our discomfort to Hamnet’s portrayal of tragedy, I wonder if it does not instead originate with our societal and cultural inhibitions on grief and mourning. The welcome triumphs of modern medicine over a host of lethal ailments are undeniable, but also seem to have engendered a collective need to disavow infirmity, illness and death altogether. Our desire to believe that science now holds the cure for any ailment, possibly driven by capitalist imperatives to forever be productive, means we must banish from sight any signs to the contrary. Hamnet is a timely reminder of our not-so-distant past when death was a more familiar companion.

For while Hamnet’s lure is that we are witnessing a grief that is special, its power lies in showing that it is universal. In the end, I’m not particularly invested in whether Hamlet really was Shakespeare’s way of processing his grief over Hamnet’s death. The movie posits rather than demonstrates the connection, and it makes for a satisfying and moving finale, but the story leading up to that point does not require it. Instead, the most poignant scene for me is a rather understated exchange between Susanna and Shakespeare’s mother Mary (played by Emily Watson), where we learn that she, too, has lost some of her children.

Here is universal, intergenerational sorrow. The silent pain, both individual and collective, over the loss of children taken before their time. Of generations of women dying in childbirth. Of brothers and sisters succumbing to mysterious plagues and diseases, chance infections or simple misfortune. Of family and friends taken by and natural calamity.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin persuasively argues there is an alternative mode of telling our stories and histories: the story of life, of the bag that carries home the food or medicine, the shelter that is home or community. Despite the centrality of death, Hamnet is what Le Guin would call a ‘life story’. A story about grief, and how we heal from it through community (as we saw in Small Acts of Love).

And it is a story about rage. Le Guin’s carrier bag is also a medicine bundle, representing human efforts throughout the ages to heal, to prevent suffering, or to ease pain where no cure was available. Grieving loss can transform into fury against uncaring gods or the vast universe for whom the death of our loved ones pales beyond insignificance, fueling resolve to spare future generations the same fate. Where these efforts are frustrated not by the impersonal obstacles of nature, but by human forces who seek to prevent or even negate our collective capabilities to prevent suffering, rage is surely the justified response.

At its best, Hamnet reminds us that while grief over the passing of those we love is an inseparable part of what it means to be alive, so is the ability to overcome it through connection, community and love. Rather than denying our mortality and its attendant sorrows by hiding its manifold expressions from our view, we must learn how collectively give them space and process them. Yet where our pain results not from blind, impersonal chance, but the choices of those who hold power over us, we must also resolve to do what we can to spare others from the same fate. To adapt the famous last words of Joe Hill: first mourn, but then organise.

Notes & Suggestions

• To contribute to efforts to provide care and minimise suffering right now, consider supporting Medecins Sans Frontieres, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or similar organisations.
• Joe Hill’s original, oft-quoted exhortation is of course “Don’t mourn – organise!”. However, as we saw in Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, refusing to mourn our losses impairs our ability to organise over the long run.
• Collective action through a union, tenants or neighbourhood organisation, political party, or other campaigning organisation can be a powerful antidote to grief or anxiety.

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About halfway through One Battle After Another, soldiers wearing combat fatigues and brandishing guns break into a convenience store, looking for Willa Ferguson, the movie’s fugitive protagonist, as well as for evidence of illegal immigrants. This is a scene we are all familiar with: the armed entry of infantry into an enemy building. The military hand gestures and codes. The careful scouting of rooms for hostiles. Except, this isn’t Black Hawk Down or the Hurt Locker. We are not in Iraq or Afghanistan. And these soldiers have ‘police’ stitched to their uniform.

We are in ‘Baktan Cross’, USA. The war has come home.

One Battle After Another is a magnificent movie in many ways, most of which are much better expressed by professional critics. The excellent pacing means that despite coming in at 2:40hrs the movie doesn’t feel long. The story is gripping. The characters flawed but interesting, with Leonardo diCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro and in particular Sean Penn all putting in stellar performances. The cinematography is beautiful, from vertiginous car chases to the carefully curated details in a family home. The minor garnish of magical realism provides for effective symbolism without ever really stretching the bounds of plausibility. The soundtrack is frenetic and of a kind with the movie’s feverish momentum. Watching One Battle After Another is like stepping onto a frantic and relentless rollercoaster. When you finally grind to a halt, you feel exhilarated, confused about what just happened, and wondering if you have to go on the ride again to fully appreciate it.

There is no shortage of excellent scenes in One Battle After Another, but one that stood out most starkly for me is the ‘police’ arriving in the fictional town of Baktan Cross for their womanhunt for Willa Ferguson (Infiniti). In its reminiscence of countless war movies, it shows us a country at war with itself, its military an occupying force on its own soil. This is a movie about the imperial boomerang having fully circled back.

One Battle After Another follows Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) as he desperately tries to save his daughter Willa from being disappeared by Colonel Lockjaw (Penn). For Lockjaw, Willa is a potentially fatal embarrassment that could prevent his inclusion in the ranks of the ‘Christmas Adventurers Club’ – a Ku Klux Klan for posh people – because she may be his mixed-race daughter born of an intense but brief reciprocal sexual obsession with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), the de facto leader of the ‘French 75’, an American insurrectionary group along the lines of the Weather Underground or the Baader-Meinhof Group. The activities of the French 75 form the start of the movie, but are cut short after a botched bank robbery leads to Perfidia’s capture and her partner and newborn daughter going into hiding as Willa and Bob Ferguson, until the latter are tracked down by Lockjaw sixteen years later.

Bob is however singularly ineffectual at rescuing his daughter. Even in the heyday of the French 75, he was more of a hanger-on than a disciplined revolutionary, and sixteen years of smoking weed and watching The Battle of Algiers on repeat haven’t exactly improved things. For the protagonist of a putative action movie, Bob is neither very capable nor very central to the unfolding story. Instead, his incidentality to events helps One Battle After Another to foreground what Bob is caught up in: a world of detention centres and disappearances. Of militarized policing, razzias and summary executions. This foregrounding is most effective for the part of the movie where Bob pairs up with Willa’s karatedo teacher sensei Sergio (del Toro), who is a highly capable agent, providing an excellent contrast with the hapless Bob. For me, this was definitely the strongest part of the movie.

There is a lot going on in One Battle After Another, but the one thing it brilliantly demonstrates is the merciless logic of the imperial boomerang: how techniques used by an imperial power against enemies without ultimately rebound on the nation itself, to be used against the enemies within. Originating with anti-colonial writers Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon during the Algerian War of Independence, it was first used to describe how European fascism and Nazism were the logical return home of tools of oppression and extermination that imperial powers had refined in their colonies abroad. It was the Spanish, British, and Americans who invented concentration camps for their colonial ventures after all. These days we see it in police departments being trained in counter-insurgency techniques and stockpiling armoured personnel carriers. A state apparatus that becomes habituated to the regular use of violence against foreign populations it deems less human, will inevitably discover that such violence can be equally useful on its own soil. All it needs to justify this is to define some groups of people as undeserving of rights and protections. One Battle After Another reminds us of this again through the contrast of Bob and sensei Sergio. Bob may have opted into the struggle through moral conviction, or his love for Perfidia (or both). But Sergio and his community never had a choice. The struggle was brought to bear on them, by a state that decided that people like them did not have the right to exist.

Yet as Carl Schmitt realised all the way back in the 1940s, once you set this logic in motion it gains a momentum all of its own. Once you start rounding up immigrants, it is a small step to also round up the protestors against your immigration raids. Then you realise that it is even more effective to restrict the right to protest further and further, while making it easier and easier to exact harsh penalties on those you have detained. Once the aim of the state becomes the preservation of a ‘pure’ people and the unrestrained expression of its will, any opposition to that aim will be illegitimate and any means to remove that opposition will be justified. It doesn’t even require all the participants to be actively racist, though that does help. We see in One Battle After Another that for a lot of the soldiers and police, this is just work, and once they have started on immigrants, they will readily extend their oppressive violence to white teenagers. They are simply following the orders of a system that dehumanizes their victims for them, turning them into an occupying force against their own population.

In our world of increasing authoritarianism, state violence and repression, One Battle After Another reminds us that when it comes down to it, there are just two main flavours in politics: Either we start from the position that all humans deserve the same rights to dignity and humanity and that we should work towards a world where we can live in harmony. Or we start from the position that there is a boundary between one group of humans who are deserving and another group who are undeserving, downstream of which is the entire apparatus of dehunanization to legitimise ever increasing levels of violence against the undeserving group. And once that boundary is drawn, you are locked into a trajectory where there is always a pressure for the deserving group to be made smaller, and smaller and smaller, as the definition of who is racially pure, or a contributing member of society, or has the correct politics, or isn’t a ‘public nuisance’, is going to get narrower and narrower.

The only recourse for those of us who believe that every human deserves life and dignity, that nobody is illegal, is to push the other way. To expand the circle until all of us are inside it, and who knows, maybe even large parts of the non-human natural world as well. There is no space for a ‘Third Way’, prevaricating, ‘moderate’, centrism that insists that much can be said on both sides, that there are ‘legitimate concerns’ and that we should trust the law to dispense justice. Viz. Wilhoit’s Law, by the time people are being thrown out of helicopters, the law will not protect you. There is, after all, a famous poem about this:

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

It certainly seems daunting now. But as Tony Benn told us “every generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. There is no final victory. And there is no final defeat.” We see this towards the end of the movie, as Willa takes up the mantle of her parents to go off and protest against immigration raids. Willa, Bob, Perfidia, and all the others, all links in the intergenerational chain for justice. As Ursula K. le Guin taught us in The Dispossessed, even after the Revolution the work will not be done. For all of us, it will forever be one battle after another.

Notes & Suggestions

• One Battle After Another reminded me of Civil War, which also plays with the theme of military occupation on US soil. However, Civil War’s complete absence of any political context to its conflict makes it by far the inferior movie.
• One Battle After Another also shows how the neverending struggle takes its toll on those engaged in it. Hannah Proctor’s Burnout is an excellent meditation the emotional and psychological toll the struggle takes, and how from one generation to the next we can take steps to mitigate this.
• If you haven’t already, join a workplace or tenants’ union, and consider supporting organisations like Amnesty International.

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Every now and then a movie surprises you. That’s not unusual, but I hadn’t expected that movie to be Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. I too am no stranger to ‘Marvel Fatigue’ and have not really been invested in anything after Endgame with the exception of Loki and WandaVision*. When enjoying a movie requires an advanced degree in Marvelology you have lost me. Thunderbolts* only got its viewing as a sort of last hurrah before our Disney+ subscription goes the way of the OG Avengers. So it was a pleasant surprise when it wasn’t just a half-decent superhero movie, but offered an radically interesting perspective on mental health and redemption.

Warning, contains spoilers

Several elements make Thunderbolts* stand out from the recent Marvel fare. For one, it manages to take itself lightly without getting zany. While in the opening scenes we see Yelena Belova (Black Widow’s adopted sister, played by Florence Pugh) at work ‘cleaning up’ some off-the-books lab run by the movies baddie, we simultaneously hear her narrating how even her work cannot fill the emptiness she feels inside. The contrast is poignant, but ends in a lighthearted flourish when visuals and narration synchronize to show us Belova has been talking to a tied-up goon all this time. A goon who clearly has more important things on his mind than an assassin’s existential angst.

The self-aware humour remains present throughout the movie. It knows that it is working with the B-team, it knows that its protagonists (who are neither ‘super’ nor ‘heroes’) know, and it knows the audience knows. Early on in the movie, an exasperated Belova literally complains that it would be nice if someone in their reluctant team had a marginally useful superpower, beyond simply being able to shoot things. Luckily for our nascent heroes, neither superpowers nor marksmanship are required to defeat this movie’s villain.

Thunderbolts* offers us with two villains. There is the unavoidably nefarious CIA director. And there is her pet new ersatz Avenger, known as ‘The Sentry’. The Sentry easily ranks as one of the most implausible heroes/villains, because not only did someone think it was a great idea to inject some superserum into a test subject with extremely poor mental health only to then misplace them in a warehouse and forget about them, but the superserum now grants flight, telekinesis, superstrength and a bunch of other powers. I’m old enough to remember the 1930s when all it did was make Captain America a bit stronger, but clearly in the 21st century some advanced biochemistry can give you powers that previously you had to eat an Infinity Stone for.

Inevitably, the latent bipolar disorder of The Sentry’s past self (Bob) results in a Jekyll and Hyde situation where the would-be saviour of humanity flips into his severely depressed counterpart: The Void. Unfortunately for New York, The Void quickly extends a depressive cloud around him that displaces anyone it envelops into a pocket dimension where they are forced to forever relive their most shameful or traumatic memory. (Incidentally, why anyone in the MCU would still choose to live in New York is beyond me, given the frequency with which it is ground zero for supernatural disasters).

This is where Thunderbolts* makes its most interesting move. Because you cannot actually fight depression. You cannot shoot it. You cannot punch it. You cannot pummel it into submission, or blast it out of yourself. Violence is not the road to catharsis. Our heroes cannot defeat The Void by fighting it, nor by attacking it from the inside, having been absorbed to try, locate and extract good old Bob.

What overcomes depression is empathy and compassion. It is connection with other people and their ability to understand, forgive, and comfort. The radical idea at the heart of Thunderbolts* is that healing is a social process. You cannot CBT yourself out of your depression in isolation. This is not a new insight, but it is profoundly at odds with our pervasive culture that posits mental health as an extremely individualised responsibility, requiring constant ‘investment’ by way of mindfulness, exercise, and other forms of ‘self-care’ in order to attain happiness. Or if not happiness, at least the ability to perform effectively as a worker. In short, I had not expected echoes of Mark Fisher’s critique of neoliberalism in a Marvel movie.

All this is represented in a pivotal and excellent scene during Thunderbolts* finale where after Bob has been ineffectually battering away at The Void, it is the compassion and affirmation of our group of misfit heroes that allows him to overcome it. As Laozi says in Chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching**:

Compassion wins the battle

and holds the fort

it is the bulwark set

around those heaven helps.

In doing so, Thunderbolts* avoids the obvious pitfall of suggesting that a hug can cure depression, by showing that Bob is not healed, but healing. As in Burnout, healing is portrayed as a process rather than a state, a journey rather than a destination.

The other theme woven through Thunderbolts* is redemption, playing the minor key to compassion’s major one. Each of our heroes has done wrongs in the past, but avoid being defined by these by redeeming themselves through their actions. As a form of social rather than individual forgiveness, redemption is a natural companion to the movie’s use of compassion. Yet the almost unconditional way in which it is deployed is possibly so far removed from daily reality as to test our willing suspension of disbelief. At a time when anyone can be dogpiled for a social media post from decades past, deported or arrested for protesting genocide, or imprisoned for possessing minor narcotics, the suggestion that we would be allowed to move beyond a past with as many actual skeletons as some of our heroes’ seems more fanciful than spacetime bending powers from a bottle. Nonetheless, proclaiming that redemption is possible remains worthwhile.

Whether Thunderbolts* can redeem the MCU remains to be seen, but as a surprising combination of carefully choreographed action spectacle and meditation on trauma and mental health, it is certainly worth watching.

Notes & Suggestions

• *I still haven’t forgiven Marvel for how it spectacularly botched Wanda’s story arc in Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. What. A. Waste.
• **This is the fifth verse in Chapter 67 from the excellent version of the Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Halfway through Civil War, the protagonists are confronted by an unidentified militia who asks them who they are. He has just casually shot one of their friends, so it is a rather pointed question. “Americans”, answer our reporters. “What kind of Americans”, is the retort, followed by a version of Russian Roulette where hailing from the wrong state means death.

This scene also featured in the movie’s trailer, for obvious reasons. Its visceral depiction of how the unifying signifier ‘American’ has fractured invites the audience to believe this disintegration is not only possible, but plausible. As a trailer this is effective, prompting the viewer to wonder how we got here, with the intent that they go and see the movie to find out. Which makes encoutering this scene again in the movie itself all the more disappointing, because by then, we are still looking for the answer.

That lack of an answer results from Civil War being a tale of two stories, but never being sure which of the two has primacy. Both stories appeal to very different emotional registers on the part of the audience, interfering rather than reinforcing one another. The one story is about the morally ambigious role of war reporters, and the toll this vocation exacts of its adherents. The other is about the disintegration of the United States into full-blown civil war.

These two narratives are not fundamentally opposed, but the movie chooses to treat the conflict abstractedly to make the audience share the sense of detachment the movie also implies on the part of our reporters. So as the movie begins, the civil war isn’t merely in full swing already, it is entering its concluding phase. We are introduced to four reporters (three veterans, one rookie), who each for reasons of their own decide to embark on a road trip from New York to Washington D.C., where the US president is holed up as he is losing the war. There is only limited exposition, and while this certainly adds realism, it leaves the audience struggling to work out what is going on, and how we got here.

The movie then unfolds as a ghastly road trip marked by escalating levels of violence, including summary executions and civilian mass graves. But this violence remains unintelligible to the audience, because we do not know anything about the combatants, their motives, their politics, or their victims. Snippets of information confuse rather than elucidate. Is the insurgency in Florida Maoist? What brought about the exceedingly implausible ‘Western Forces’ alliance between secessionist Texas and California? Without a plausible path between the present and the potential future Civil War evokes, it fails to land as a cautionary tale, because it does not articulate what it is cautioning against, or how this future could be prevented. We get that ‘war is bad’, but we did not need this movie to make that point, and so we are left feeling like we simply stepped through the looking glass into an alternate reality where violent anarchy has erupted “for reasons.”

One interpretation of Civil War is that this is the point, that the lack of political or historical context forces our focus onto the morally ambiguous detachment of the war reporters, who record the atrocities they encounter but neither judge nor intervene. We experience this detachment through the mirroring personal journeys of Lee Smith, the veteran reporter, and Jessie Collin, the rookie Lee has taken under her wing. Early in the movie, Jessie evidently struggles with the horrors she records, and her proximity to violence, and is counselled by Lee to harden herself. Yet while Jessie does this as the movie progresses, we see Lee travelling in the opposite direction: losing her desensitisation to violence and ultimately losing her ability to detachedly stand by without intervening. The movie seems to suggest that this detachment from the cruelties of war is shared by us, the audience, not just in our watching of the movie, but in our consumption of reports from various conflict zones across the world in real life. It is almost as if it is gleefully saying “Look at how you don’t care what happens to people”, while simultaneously depriving us of the context we need to engage our empathy.

In the end, the degree of detachment does not just prevent the audience from engaging with the conflict, but even calls into question what the motive of our journalists is for even being here. Yes, it is their job, but nobody chooses to expose themselves to these levels of traumatizing horror simply for a pay check. Lee at one point remarks that she reported on other conflicts to ‘send home a warning’, but if her present actions are a form of bearing witness, it is unclear who she is bearing witness for. Who will see the gruesomely artistic photos shot by our protagonists, and with what purpose? Presumably not the warring parties themselves, who do not need reporters to know what is going on? Nor does the movie give us a sense of a wider community, either national or international, with either interest or involvement in the conflict. Like the violence it records, the reporting in Civil War happens without motivation, but simply because it must.

Ultimately, its abstracted treatment of its subject matter causes Civil War to fail as both a cautionary tale about the centrifugal politics of the United States, and as a musing on the role of war reporting. It fails in the first because it doesn’t explain why the audience should care about this conflict, and it fails in the second because it doesn’t explain this about its protagonists either. All we are left with is the banal observation that war is cruel to everyone and everything it touches, including those wearing a bulletproof vest with ‘Press’ printed on it. At a time when people around the world are responding to reporting on atrocities in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere, and reporters in conflict zones are being explicitly targeted, Civil War’s nihilistic introspection rings cynical and hollow.

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If you are about press freedom and reporting from conflict zones, rather than watching Civil War, you could support Reporters Without Borders or Amnesty International.

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A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

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How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

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Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism