I ignored this when it first came out. The reviews looked mixed, at best. I hate the less grounded Marvel comics, early Fantastic Four excepted for reasons that don't really matter here. Point is most cosmic Marvel stuff is boring. It removes half the formula that makes Marvel comics actually good (epic powers with grounded and relatable stakes) and chucks it out the window... thus making it DC-Lite. There is nothing wrong with DC. But it is not Marvel, it is something different, and Marvel's constant attempts to do something bigger usually falls flat. Marvel doing cosmic stuff means the stakes have to be really grounded in human emotion, really based in something that's easy to figure out and understand. Guardians of the Galaxy works because the emotions are big, easy to read, and sympathetic. Going big epic mythic heroes doesn't work for Marvel normally.
Had they cut the first forty-five minutes off of Eternals they would have proven me wrong.
After the first forty-five or so minutes this movie is awesome. Yeah, sure, there's a lot of standing around and talking but I like movies like that. Sorry, but I do. I like that most of this movie is just fancy suits and people sitting around and talking about how to handle a problem so freaking that large that nobody can adequately address it. I like that. I like that the issue is a truly no-win. It's about time for Marvel to actually do one of these. I love the ending conflict and its complexity. I love that it's not really a fight, not really. It's family trying to figure things out. For the first time in a Marvel movie since Civil War I actually really like the third act of the movie! I actually felt like it built well!
Okay, maybe Infinity War, but you get my point. It's been awhile.
But you know what wasn't necessary? About 90% of the flashbacks. Kit Harrington is totally wasted. The very worst of the MCU's tendencies in not making self-sufficient stories are indulged here. The bad habit of putting the actual ending of the movie post-credits continues. It frankly ruins the very end of the movie. I was actually happy with everything up until those last ten minutes.
I just...
Look.
Can we finally just agree that what we want is a collective mythology? A real, actual, collective mythology? A summation of collective experiences, organically grown and checked against each other? Can we finally admit that these corporations are trying to control a very real collective need, and that they can't fulfill this need? Can we please, please, please admit that pluralism just doesn't really work? People have never been able to find meaning without others, and that "finding your own truth" is only possible with base assumptions that are given to you. It' a need that Disney has tried to control, over and over again. I think this gaping hole of a need and Disney's attempts to control it is far more cringe than this movie.
And the first forty-five minutes is almost unbearable.
As of recently I've reviewed stuff that will hit you for a hundred plus bucks. It fit with my usual MO, but it still felt really weird to tell people that it was okay to sink two hundred plus bucks for two boxes.
This one is easy.
Kiri-Ai is 15 bucks. It's about two samurai dueling on a cliff. You have to get into a proper stance, judge your ranges, and read your opponent better than your opponent can read you. It's fast, intense, and psychological.
And it's amazing.
First off, the cards. They're really high quality and felt great in my hands. They're quite sturdy. I can't imagine needing (or wanting) to sleeve them. Yes, I think they're that good.
Second off, look at this carrying case:
This is so much more impressive in my hands than it is as a picture. It feels so freaking good. Someone really did their homework here. When Blake originally handed me the whole thing I actually gasped, coz normally something this small feels cheap. This don't feel cheap. At all.
Okay, so the production's nice. What about the rules? The rules are just as good as the presentation. They are clearly laid out and it didn't take much to figure them out. Look at the picture at the top of the post: there are range "diamonds". You start at opposite sides of the "battleground" card. You have two sets of five functionally identical cards, in red and blue varieties. These five cards are combined with a simple "stance" system, telling you when and how you can use the cards. You put down two cards, face-down, at the same time as your opponent, and then flip them up in order, simultaneously. The second card you played is left out on the table, and the other cards are brought back to your hand. This means that you don't always have all the resources that you used and puts you into all sorts of sticky situations. That card you had to leave on the table? Your opponent can see it. And you can see what they can't play either. Since you both have the same cards, you have a general idea of what they're capable of now and can figure out more or less what your opponent might do. I've played enough of this game to tell you that what your opponent is like as a person becomes very important. The options are just open enough to where reading your opponent becomes paramount.
"But Nathan," the astute will say. "Rock paper scissors only allows for a limited number of combinations. This is rock paper scissors with more combinations, sure, but that means that you've got a closed system. It's possible to figure that kind of system out. Even with leaving that card on the table, face-up." And you're right! And the game agrees with you! There's three special cards. They're very powerful, but they always have consequences in the game and they're gone when you use them. So not only do you have to be careful when trying to read your opponent, you have to be mindful of these two super-powerful cards, one of which you have no knowledge of, and the other one is yours but when you spend it is gone.
I cannot begin to tell you how much this screws things up.
The matches are fast, psychological, and intuitive, with consequences every time you act. The longest I've ever seen a match go is twenty minutes, and that is as long as you will ever get. Most of the matches are five minutes long and they play out like a samurai film. The tension just builds and builds and then washes over you as a blow gets through and everyone goes "OOH MAN!" coz you got hit once...
There are a lot of ways to interpret Dune. It is an expansive and complex work, requiring (what I imagine to be) an honest reader to say “This is what I got out of it”, rather than “Here’s what Dune is about!” Should that consideration be given all books? No. Works of fiction are special in this regard. You may genuinely be your own Pope, even if you are encouraged to change your mind later, although you can say "While I may sometimes not be right, I am never wrong" with a lot less consequences, can't you? And the thing is that unlike Wolfe, who intentionally tells you he's showing you a puzzle and winks and chuckles at your guesses, Herbert is very deliberately not telling you the thing he's showing you is a puzzle. This leads to people attempting to moralize a thing that is not intended to be moralized. Dune leans into the older style, where something simply is, without telling you exactly what it is.
But the fact that Frank Herbert ended Dune thusly:
"... that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine-never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives."
That really jumped out at me. The last words in the book are always important, and in them I found a cypher to understand one aspect of what Herbert may have been trying to say: what is is far more important than what you call it.
Paul Atreides is a boy turned man by this knowledge. Sent to Arrakis, his father Duke Leto is betrayed by the one man everyone thought would be loyal to him: a doctor who (in theory) has been deemed unturnable. But turned he was. And nobody suspected it, declaring positively it could not be so. Leto's cold corpse and the doctor's written confession disagree. Nobody double-checked and so Duke Leto dies. So one must be in the present.
The problem that Herbert presents is that the present is not static, but a flowing from past to any number of futures. To accept what is means to understand that everything has consequences… and since you can’t track all the present variables you can’t predict what’s coming. Paul can't control what's given to him, he can't control what he has to work with. And, as it turns out, the people who created the situation Paul has to work with are evil fucks. The Bene Gesserit spent hundreds of years cooking a place and time that Paul can't not blow up, just by existing. The popular reception of this book seems to miss that literally nothing Paul does can go well. It is obvious why such a thing is missed: to admit that Paul, no matter what he does, is going to fuck something up is to think that you are similarly fucked.
And, to be clear, that's true of everyone.
We are all but inheritors of a situation previously fucked up by others.
And admitting that would give us empathy for Paul. And it is not fun to admit empathy for Paul.
So Paul recognizing this, realizing that he cannot make decisions that ultimately go right, no matter what he tries, is a realization that most of us cannot handle. So to recognize reality is to realize that you have no control over the circumstances you are in, coz not only do you not control your circumstances, but it is impossible for you to fully ascertain them. Nor do you really control the consequences. At all.
Paul's realization, his idea, is that if he cannot control the consequences of his actions he will at the very least come out on top. And he does this by recognizing that others do not like to look reality: they prefer nominal power (what everyone else says is power, even when it's not) to real power. So he hatches his plan, taking advantage of everyone else's willing blindness to reality. So therefore he wins.
But is that a good thing? The death of Stilgar's friendship, as he cannot understand what Paul is doing and therefore worships it, throws some serious doubts on what Paul has done.
I'm going to end this blog post by asking a question that is seemingly unrelated: have you read the more detailed accounts of Christian martyrdom? I have, and they're not what you expect them to be. The people doing the killing are actually shown rather sympathetically. They recognize that the saint is a saint. They recognize the goodness of the person they're about to kill. They know it's wrong.
And in more than a few of the accounts they beg the martyr to apostatize, coz they realize they're in the service of a monstrous regime. But they don't think they can get free. So they beg the martyr to back down on his belief. The martyr usually winds up patiently explaining that they cannot back down on the very belief that makes them so good to begin with. The martyr is what he is, and if others must kill him for it that's on them. Not him. What most people do not get out of these scenes is that the martyr, by dying, wins. But he doesn't win coz of some idiotic "cause" or "belief in a God". He wins because he has called out the system for what it is and is willing to let it kill him. He can't win. He knows it. So he dies in the only way that he has true control: by insisting on his own worth, his own experiences, to a degree that is actually divine. And in so doing he points out the absurdity that is going on around him, forces everyone to acknowledge that they are monsters, and renders all their lies apparent. There is a very good reason why Christianity beat the Roman Empire, and it is in the stories of the martyrs.
Paul fails to fulfill that most powerful of actions in this volume.
As I finished watching this movie, I felt something in my soul crack. Unhinge. Look, folks, regardless of your belief in God or whatever, real art is sacred. Absolutely sacred. You don't get to fuck with real art. That moment when some idiot put a crucifix in a jar? Yeah, fuck that guy. It wasn't deep or edgy, it was desecration.
If you disagree go fuck yourself.
Yes, I mean, it. I should. Here's why.
See, the problem is that people have this idea that all things should be rationally examined. Rationality, the process of making a thing make sense, is meant to ask whether or not a thing aligns with your principles, your assumptions. Your assumptions cannot, by definition, be rationally picked apart. They are based in your experiences and what you have reflexively learned to value. And that process is not actually a rational one. If your values are actually contradicted there should be disgust, revulsion, and anger. Because, as it turns out, the need for the sacred is higher than the rational process and actually should greatly supersede it.
I am not claiming that the following scene is on the same plane as sticking a crucifix in a piss jar. That would be silly. A crucifix is art that's so sacred that it is called sacred art as a redundancy. True art is always sacred, there's just some art that is so overloaded with the numinous that the communal response is to babble at it as the rational mind is forcefully reminded it is only a tool. I am making the distinction here coz this one scene really. Really. Really. Hit me hard. And I am angry at its desecration, and I think we should all be angry that such a thing was desecrated.
For those of you who have not seen this movie (and I do not recommend you see it at all), the lines "I love you more, I love you most, I loved you first" are the exchange between Barry and his mother from when he was a child. This monstrosity of a movie is about Barry trying to save his mother and accidentally breaking reality. The movie is very much about Barry coming to grips with the fact that he cannot track the variables that his mother living has on the universe, and by the end of his movie he can't justify saving her. The damage is too great, too complex, too unknowable. Barry cannot kill billions of people simply because he wants his mother to live. It goes against what his own mother taught him.
So the above scene is Barry undoing his mistake and saying goodbye. His mother, who clearly thinks he's just a crazy dude (and I mean, Ezra Miller, so) still reaches out in compassion to his pain. She's just being herself, and it turns out that Barry's memories of her don't actually do her justice. She is a legitimately good person, one who should have gotten better than being a random murder victim. And Barry has to let her die. She is being more than the person that Barry remembers, so much more! And Barry is realizing that heroism is a lot more than saving babies in a microwave.
Yes, that happens.
No, it is not funny.
There's two stories going on in this one objectively beautiful scene: one of the mother always being what she was, and one of the son finally growing up. The scene is so well done that I actually find myself crying as I'm writing this blog post. It is two people living two completely different stories, intersecting in their own subjectivity, and making something far greater than either of them. I live for this kinda stuff in a story. This is my jam. And I got quite a bit out of it. And I should have.
And the fact that this scene of pure love is buried in two and a half hours of some of the purest corporate excrement makes me very angry. The CGI is so bad. Laughably. Obviously. Horrifically. Bad. The acting is so wildly inconsistent. The music fails in every which way as a soundtrack, and frequently broke me out of the illusion. The rest of this movie is so horrible that I couldn't stop watching and when I had to stop I started watching it the next day coz I just wanted to see where the trainwreck would wind up.
Turns out I needed to stop, coz I didn't know it was going to shit over something I find sacred. It wasn't high art, sure, I'm not claiming this scene is the best thing ever made, but I am claiming that this one scene deserved a real movie. Actually deserved it. Everyone, even Ezra Miller, did too well in this one scene to deserve everything around it. It's not the first time I've seen WB desecrate one of their DC movies, as Batman vs Superman Ultimate Cut shows. But watching this scene? Get shoved in a jar of piss?
WB deserved to lose money on this one. I'm glad they did. I hope they lose more on it. A whole fuckton more. A very vengeful part of me hopes that WB legitimately dies for this kind of desecration. And it doesn't stop there, at least for me. I am so tired of this corporate interference. I am so tired of whatever process goes on behind the scenes that makes monsters like this movie. I'm tired of good movies becoming badly-paced streaming shows, of jokes blaspheming scenes, of jaded audiences who can't even tell what the real thing is anymore. It tires me. Wears me out. Fills me with spite.
I know art in this world requires money. I'm neck deep in developing three TTRPGs and am hitting the bottleneck of needing money for art and graphic design. I am not unsympathetic to "This isn't free to make", and if someone ran up to me and said "A big corporation is willing to drop buckets and buckets and buckets of money on you coz it likes what you're doing, just make a few small concessions for our bottom line" I'd fucking sign, and I have no moral qualms about saying it and doing it. In order to get things done you must make compromises, and I care too much about actually getting things done to pretend that my idealism would poison that. So I am not bemoaning Big Money. It has its uses.
But it is a means. Not... whatever the fuck I just saw.
And sometimes such acts of desecration should have consequences. Like the (un)fortunate passing of a gigantic corporation as it's abandoned. I very rarely actively wish for the death of a corporation as a moral necessity. But whatever desecrated this scene? It needs to die. It cannot die fast enough.
