Moon Knight (2022) s01e06 – Gods and Monsters

So, “Moon Knight” finishes considerably worse than expected. It’s got a bad ending, but the ending isn’t anywhere near the biggest problem. It’s got some—well, a—a missed opportunity. They underuse Antonia Salib’s character, who only appears in a couple scenes, one in long shot, but talks to May Calamawy through corpses and then her body, never appearing. It’d have been cool if Salib’s hippo goddess had appeared and Calamawy had gotten to interact with her.

Instead, Calamawy mugs her way through a superhero origin scene, and, wow, is she terrible. Calamawy’s superhero arc in this episode is easily the most successful thing, even though it’s absolutely pointless because director Mohamed Diab is even worse at directing two good guys fighting a bad guy than he is one-to-one. He’s so bad. So, so bad.

And if Diab’s direction weren’t terrible, the episode might squeak by, even with the execrable writing (credited to Jeremy Slater, Peter Cameron, and Sabir Pirzada). Diab manages to make a kaiju fight boring, which is never a good sign. Admittedly, he’s got talking kaiju—F. Murray Abraham’s bird god and his nemesis, a crocodile god, voiced by Saba Mubarak—and the performances are ghastly. Abraham’s not good in “Moon Knight,” he’s particularly bad in this episode, but he’s at least got some personality. Mubarak’s just as bad, with absolutely none. She does get some of the worst writing I’ve sat through in a while; I do need to be fair on that point. It would take one hell of a performance to get through that dialogue. Not even Ethan Hawke can rise above the material like usual this time. He ends up covered in Slater, Cameron, and Pirzada’s excrement, too, dripping off of him, line by line.

But he’s not atrocious. Abraham and Mubarak are atrocious, and, frankly, whoever directed their performances is incompetent. Diab or whoever. They’re voice performances. Have them do it again until it’s not terrible. Hell, hire a random person off the street. Hell, use Siri. Like, anything would be better.

Actually, given Mubarak implies she at least likes Abraham enough for them to be co-rulers of the world, do it funny. Get a couple to do it. Make it a bit. Something. Anything. Anything with some personality. But no. Because it’s “Moon Knight,” and the only personality they want is Oscar Isaac talking to himself in different voices. And even then, not too much, in case he’s accidentally good, and someone wakes up long enough to realize what they’re watching.

The writing’s also incredibly lazy. It’s like they heard the “Indiana Jones doesn’t matter to Raiders’s plot” thing and thought they should ape it. How does the episode resolve the Gordian cliffhanger from last time? It’s fine; Calamawy hangs around Harrow, who takes her through the level.

In a different superhero show or movie, Calamawy might work out with her new superhero thing. She goes from zero to hero immediately; there’s no onboarding process. Less bad writing, mildly competent direction, she might work out. Not here. No, not here.

Isaac and Hawke, who have spent the series posturing like they’re developing characters, eschew such ambitions for the finale. Maybe passively; the writing eschews any acting ambitions for them. It’s worse for Hawke; Isaac’s in the franchise now, so there are limits; Hawke could’ve done something, and instead, he gets a terrible fight scene—there’s no superhero fight like Moon Knight, Hawkgirl (oops, sorry, Isis, oops, sorry, Wing Lady), and Cane Guy. It doesn’t have to be terrible because the characters are silly-looking together. Diab’s just maladroit at directing action scenes.

There are a lot of experienced actors in this show—Abraham, Hawke, Isaac; lots of years, lots of nominations (only one Oscar, but still), lots of experience. Salib acts circles them, and everyone else. With a voice performance, with maybe twenty lines. Hopefully, Hawke got a new swimming pool or something. And Isaac will get to be in New Avengers: Endgame Part II or whatever (not the A-tier, but the backup plan). But, wow, “Moon Knight” sucked.

It’s a shitty show. Like , Moon Knight’s a dull, pointless comic. But it’s a shitty TV show.

Egads, it’s a shitty TV show.

Moon Knight (2022) s01e05 – Asylum

Some of this episode of “Moon Knight” is the best written the series has been. There’s also an all CGI Egyptian goddess of childbirth and fertility who’s an anthropomorphic hippopotamus and is absolutely adorable and should have her own show. Voiced by Antonia Salib, the character should’ve narrated “Moon Knight” or something. It’d have made the show a lot more entertaining.

So, even though there’s the adorable CGI hippo lady and some compelling writing, it’s also definitionally the least exciting episode of the show so far. As Ethan Hawke brings about the end of the world in the real world, Oscar Isaac—both versions, the angry mercenary, and the hapless Brit—are on Salib’s sail barge in the Egyptian underworld. They’re dead and on their way to the afterlife, which will be Hell if angry Isaac doesn’t tell hapless Isaac all their life secrets via interactive flashbacks. At some point in the episode, everyone decides it’d be better if Salib helps resurrect Isaac so he can save the world—“Moon Knight”’s best punchline at this point would be Isaac being too late but Thanos’s snap foiling Hawke’s plan.

How will Isaac get back to life? Unclear because he’s still got to go through his flashbacks. Instead, hippo goddess Salib is going to get a message to May Calamawy (who does not appear in this episode) in the real world and tell her to free F. Murray Abraham from his statue prison, which would require her to break into the Great Pyramid of Giza and defeat the Egyptian gods in doing so. Abraham will then be able to resurrect Isaac or something. This part of the episode is not the better-written part of the episode. Quite the opposite. Especially since they rush through it because they know it’s hurried nonsense.

“Moon Knight”’s also only got one episode left, which means… whatever happens when Isaac saves the Marvel Cinematic Universe next time isn’t going to be elaborate. There’s just not time for it. The only thing it’s guaranteed to be is disappointing. Because even the hippo lady ends up being disappointing. She’s not in the episode anywhere near enough, and the opening suggests she’s a bait and switch, something to get you back for yet another tedious entry. Because while Isaac and Isaac are journeying through flashbacks to reveal the truth, one or the other Isaac is also “leaping” to the delusion where Hawke’s a psychiatrist trying to help Isaac with his problems and not a C-tier Marvel villain.

Now, Hawke’s still great, and his getup this episode, which hapless Isaac describes as “Ned Flanders,” also reminds of Stan Lee. Hawke should do a Stan Lee biopic. And Isaac’s also great. At times. That “series best” writing is just giving Isaac enough to act off, especially since he Parent Traps it through most of the episode; sometimes, there are two great Isaac performances at once. Not often; usually, it’s one or the other (for some reason, hapless Isaac’s a little taller than angry Isaac), but sometimes.

The flashbacks focus on Isaac’s abusive mother, Fernanda Andrade (sort of), and she’s a one-note movie harpy mom. Dad Rey Lucas makes more of an impression, but only because he’s costumed to look like Rick Moranis, which would’ve been an excellent casting get. Pointless, but at least amusing.

Abraham, who sat out last episode, has one scene this time, and he’s terrible as always. His casting is another one of “Moon Knight”’s bewildering questions, along with how’d such a boring show get greenlighted and why’d they hire Mohamed Diab to direct any of it. At least there aren’t any fight scenes for Diab to screw up, but still. It’s a profoundly pointless production.

Moon Knight (2022) s01e04 – The Tomb

The Tomb opens with a surprisingly well-directed suspense sequence as May Calamawy tries to escape the bad guys. It’s even more surprising because Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are directing this episode, and they were terrible on the last one they did. Eventually, the direction becomes a lot more middling—eventually being about five minutes—but for a while, at least “Moon Knight”’s disappointing in one fewer quadrant.

And this episode might be the best. There aren’t any lousy fight sequences, mainly because Oscar Isaac no longer has F. Murray Abraham possessing him, so he can’t do costume stuff. The moments where Calamawy and Isaac moon at each other (no pun) are more effective than I was expecting, especially since Calamawy’s got the hots for hapless Isaac’s personality, even though she married badass Isaac. We get some backstory on their courtship and badass Isaac’s motivations for seeking her out. It’s pat, forced material, whereas hapless Isaac infatuated with his literal alter ego’s wife is at least quirky.

Albeit boring, because it’s still “Moon Knight,” after all.

The episode’s about Isaac and Calamawy getting to the—you guessed it–Tomb level in this video game of a television show. There are actually not a lot of video game action sequences, except the one where Calamawy’s got to hop across ledges. There’s actually a lot of great Egyptian tomb production detail. The NPCs in this episode are zombies? We don’t get to see them, but they’re zombie Egyptian priests set to turn anyone living into a mummy, except Ethan Hawke and his mercenaries. It’s unclear if Hawke knows about the zombies and why they don’t bother him and his gang.

Hawke’s got a great villain monologue. The performance anyway. The content’s not good at all and leads to a pointless (“Moon Knight”’s keyword) scene between Calamawy and Isaac. But at the very least, Hawke’s reliable. Is he enough to make “Moon Knight” worth watching? Heck, no. But he’s excellent.

However, the show finally figures out a way to connect with the audience. It just has to pretend it’s something it hasn’t been in four and a half episodes, shucking everything it’s done until now to do a Twelve Monkeys rip-off. Even if the episode didn’t end on two strong points, one because of Parent Trap-like twins’ banter, one because of a sight gag, the Twelve Monkeys stuff would be the best the show’s ever been.

When the best you’ve ever been is the least you’ve ever been like yourself….

Also, there’s a really brief sequence of F. Murray Abraham’s statue being put in the prison with the other Egyptian gods turned into statues, and there are a whole lot of them. The Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Ancient Egypt looks very packed. Maybe they can do a Thor crossover, after all.

At this point, I’m guessing the only actual MCU connection will come in the last episode’s end credits, some giant shoehorn.

The next episode should at least be more engaging than usual. Unless they don’t deliver on their promises, which seems more likely the more I think about it, so I’ll stop.

Moon Knight (2022) s01e03 – The Friendly Type

For about five minutes, this episode’s the best episode of “Moon Knight.” It immediately goes downhill and even when it’s the best “Moon Knight,” it’s still rocky, but for a moment it clicks. The episode with May Calamawy getting a fake passport so she can go to Egypt—Oscar Isaac went without her last episode—and Calamawy's got a huge exposition dump with the forger, a “how did you not stunt cast this part” Barbara Rosenblat. Turns out Calamawy's dad was an Indiana Jones-type and now she steals artifacts away from European thieves and returns them to their original owners.

Maybe. It gets shockingly more specific about Western museums robbing other countries of their physical heritage than I thought the Disney Channel would allow. Though there’s also a dead kid joke in the episode so maybe no one’s paying attention, which also would explain how this series got put into production. Clearly no one cares, otherwise they wouldn’t have hired F. Murray Abraham (who, this episode reveals, isn’t miscast, just giving a lousy performance), and they would’ve gotten directors who didn’t make Calamawy and Isaac such a charisma vacuum.

Also someone might have noticed this episode’s entirely pointless. In a show about a pointless character—unless you want some cool art, which doesn’t even translate to live action—doing pointless things, they somehow managed to waste an entire hour. The episode’s all about Isaac not being able to find Ethan Hawke’s dig site. He tries interrogating local toughs, which gets problematic whenever he sees himself in a mirror and the hapless, nice guy version of Isaac tells the mean guy, mercenary version to stop.

Director Mohamed Diab did the first episode of the series, which had Isaac entirely in hapless mode, so he’s had some experience directing it but apparently he forgot and now it’s just terrible. Hapless Isaac is simultaneously suicidally naive, unintentionally irresistible (to Calamawy, at least), and an expert movie Egyptologist. Movie Egyptologist meaning whenever they get to one of the puzzles in the level, hapless Isaac knows exactly how to solve it, while hard-living professional mercenary mean Isaac can’t do a single thing right.

The episode’s got three writers—Beau DeMayo, Peter Cameron, Sabir Pirzada (all new to the series)—and somehow none of them are any good. At least not on “Moon Knight,” because no one writes good Moon Knight. Well-written Moon Knight is not a thing in comics and now, obviously, not in TV either.

The episode also reveals the Egyptian gods are hanging around Earth watching human events unfold without interfering—kind of Eternal of them–and have world-wide teleportation powers. They do not, however, have access to satellites or drones. The whole episode’s about trying to find Hawke’s hundred person dig site, remember. And there’s no way to find it without someone sharing the pin in Google Maps.

It’s insipid.

There’s finally mention of the MCU, but not about Thanos, superheroes, Thor (do the Asgardian alien gods hang out with the presumably alien Egyptian gods). No, instead they mention a location from “Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” giving Calamawy a bunch of incongruous backstory.

The episode also introduces Gaspard Ulliel as a Egypto-phile Bond villain who doesn’t know Ancient Egypt stuff is magic, actually, but finally finds out. Ulliel does as well as can be expected with bad writing and bad direction.

Sadly, this episode doesn’t have any great Hawke “rising above the material” scenes. It has him not drowning in it, but nothing more.

At least it’s only six episodes.

Moon Knight (2022) s01e02 – Summon the Suit

For what felt like an eternity–Summon the Suit is forty-five boring but not poorly paced minutes—it seemed like someone making “Moon Knight” was doing it as a satire. A satire would cover Oscar Isaac’s silly (but not bad) lead performance; it would cover F. Murray Abraham’s comically obnoxious Egyptian god ghost, who Isaac finds out is basically possessing him. Villain Ethan Hawke, who’s stunningly good, is playing the part like it’s a satire; maybe it just seems like if they were trying for it, they could keep up with Hawke.

They don’t, obviously, because it’s not a satire. Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead aren’t thoughtful enough to even hint at it. Eventually, the script, credited to Michael Kastelein, clarifies we’re supposed to be taking it seriously.

Too bad.

This episode has Isaac finding out about his other personality. They talk to each other through mirrors. Isaac also meets his alter ego’s estranged wife, May Calamawy, who is not a girlfriend’s head in a refrigerator (yet). However, I still doubt she will have a conversation with another woman, much less pass Bechdel. Calamawy is okay. As an actress, she’s sympathetic because she’s got a terrible part. It doesn’t make her performance any better, but she’s not a glaring misfire like Abraham.

Seriously, they should’ve just gotten Tom Hardy to Venom voice him. It’d be funnier (and Abraham’s played for jokes anyway). The CGI on the Egyptian god ghost is also wanting. This episode has him talking to Isaac, and it looks underdeveloped. They needed another pitch.

So Isaac Prime is the hapless British museum employee who thinks he has a mom who loves him. Mirror Isaac is an American mercenary turned costumed adventurer. Very much not Egyptian Abraham can grant them superpowers and the neat suit. There’s an action scene with Moon Knight fighting a demonic jackal (and he’s the only one who can see it), and it basically looks like a white-suited Batman movie, which was always the point. Bully for them.

Unfortunately, outside the middling Moon Knight action sequence, Benson and Moorhead’s action direction is less exciting than watching someone else watch someone else play a video game. Hapless Isaac doesn’t get to do action, so he just watches Calamawy do it. And since the show really doesn’t care at all about Calamawy’s experience of events, it’s all dramatically inert.

The way they contrive her into the episode isn’t even sixteenth-assed.

There are also zero Marvel Cinematic Universe connections, with Hapless Isaac seemingly unaware of superheroes. When he talks about something being exciting, he says it’s like MI-6 or Area 51, not, you know, a Marvel Earth where a bunch of space aliens invaded and temporarily zapped half the population. Or maybe it’s set in the past. Who cares.

Hawke nearly makes the show worth watching, and Isaac does have some fine acting moments (often opposite Hawke, which helps things). But “Moon Knight” is an exceptionally pointless, entirely pedestrian vehicle.

Moon Knight (2022) s01e01 – The Goldfish Problem

There are no Marvel Cinematic Universe references in the first episode of “Moon Knight.” No mention of the Snap, no Steve Rogers musicals, no explanation why the Eternals wouldn’t have mentioned the Egyptian Gods being real, actually, and it’s kind of okay. Except there are so many good comics-related jabs to take, I’ve got to get them out of my system. First and foremost, it turns out “Moon Knight: The TV Show” is even less compelling than a Moon Knight comic book, which is incredible. Despite often having great artists, Moon Knight comics are infamously stinkers.

Second… well, second isn’t bad. On the show, one of Moon Knight’s alter egos is named Steven Grant. The main one. So, “Moon Knight” is a multiple personality black action-comedy. The character’s from the seventies and eighties when multiple personality disorder was still a thing, so whether or not it’s actually ableist is a whole other question and not the point of the Steven Grant thing. Steven Grant is the name of a comic writer. Not sure if he did Moon Knight, not sure if the name’s coincidental, but it’s potentially neat.

Third comics-related thing… the passive misogyny. There are no positive female characters in the episode; there is either dismissive like love interest gone wrong, Saffron Hocking, or winged harpy boss, Lucy Thackeray. It’s a big swing from a Marvel show like they’re promising to hit that audience who really hates having strong female characters or even female characters around. I don’t just bet “Moon Knight” never passes Bechdel; I’ll bet they never even have two women together onscreen talking. One of the bits involves lead Oscar Isaac leaving voice messages for never seen Mom, who also never answers his calls. It’s a cruel joke since it turns out Isaac’s just the dope who the Egyptian god lets drive the body when they don’t need it. But it’s also possible Mom’s head’s in a fridge somewhere.

Finally, the Egyptian god. Apparently, it’s F. Murray Abraham, who’s not very distinctive. He incorporeally speaks to Isaac, which makes it feel like a desperate Venom riff.

So is there anything good about it?

I mean, Isaac’s okay. Outside the setup—he’s a chronic sleepwalker who has to tie himself up at night (only he’s not, he just doesn’t remember he’s also a super anti-hero or whatever), and so he’s late to work where people are all shitty to him—and the one action sequence, which is a James Bond car chase thing but with lousy CGI, most of Isaac’s scenes are with himself. And Isaac’s compelling. He does panic and fear well. The sequence where a monster mummy dog is chasing him through a museum and Isaac gets more and more scared is… better than a lot of the episode.

But the more impressive performance is Ethan Hawke as the bad guy. He’s trying to bring back some Egyptian goddess, and Isaac’s fouled up the plan. Only he doesn’t remember because it’s his other selves who did it.

Hawke’s really good with a nothing villain part. He oddly makes the show seem more legit than Isaac.

Mohamed Diab’s direction is middling, even for a middling Marvel outing. Credited to Jeremy Slater, the script seems like it was written either for Ryan Reynolds or, I don’t know, Dana Carvey back in the nineties as a pure comedy vehicle.

Nice cinematography from Gregory Middleton is the only technical standout.

If there’s a way to crack Moon Knight, the show indeed hasn’t found it. Thank goodness it’s only six episodes. Though, based on this first one, it’s going to be a slog.

Annihilation (2018, Alex Garland)

The two most bewildering things about Annihilation are director Garland’s inability to frame for Panavision aspect ratio—did cinematographer Rob Hardy just not want to tell him he was reusing the same three close-up shots, with his subject on one side of the frame, looking off, the other three-quarters empty, or did Hardy not see a problem with it (given the amount of post-production filtering and CG enhancing, it’s hard to guess what they actually shot)—and Jennifer Jason Leigh being a supporting player and not the lead.

Natalie Portman is the lead of Annihilation. She’s a Johns Hopkins professor, married to a special forces guy (Oscar Isaac), who has been dead for a year. We know he’s been dead for a year because Garland (as screenwriter, adapting a novel) has a whole bunch of exposition dumps in the film. We’ve already seen a meteor (or something) crash into the planet Earth, targeting a lighthouse because… V’Ger had a series of romance novel covers on it too and then Portman in an isolation room, with a fantastic Benedict Wong interrogating her, then we flashback to before the isolation room, after the meteor. Isaac’s been dead a year, Portman’s friend at work, David Gyasi, invites her to a barbecue but she can’t because it’s finally time to paint she and Isaac’s bedroom.

Cue flashbacks of Portman and Isaac’s idyllic, playful sex life.

We’ll soon find out—because Isaac interrupts her painting the bedroom—he hasn’t been dead, he’s just been missing. In fact, the Army hasn’t even officially classified him M.I.A.—though Annihilation plays real loose with what one might consider military protocol, there are Chuck Norris movies with a heck of a lot more reasonable verisimilitude as far as military operations go. But something’s obviously wrong with Isaac, even before he starts bleeding uncontrollably. When Portman tries to take him to the hospital, a bunch of stormtroopers intercept the ambulance and kidnap them.

She wakes up in what seems like a hospital room, talking to a psychiatrist (Leigh), and quickly learns Isaac had been missing because he went inside the strange, growing zone of something or other around the lighthouse where the meteor (or whatever) hit in the opening. It’s been three years, this zone, called the Shimmer, has increased exponentially in size and overtaken the towns, military bases, shacks, and who knows what else. No one has ever come back from the Shimmer, except Isaac (and Portman, as the frequent flash forwards to the interrogation remind—it’s not a bookend device, but a narration one)—and, well, Leigh’s putting the next team together.

Leigh, secretly dying of cancer, is sick of sending men to their apparent deaths and is going to go in now. It’s going to be an all-female team; her, paramedic Gina Rodriguez, scientist Tuva Novotny, other scientist Tessa Thompson. And wouldn’t Portman make a great fifth, being a not just a Johns Hopkins biologist, but also a former soldier. There’s a (bewildering) scene where Novotny asks Portman about her CV and Portman says she was in the military so Novotny can ask which branch so Garland can kill another fifteen or thirty seconds of the runtime, which is supposedly okay because the mise en scène of life in the Shimmer—a Florida swamp with lots of colorful plant mutations–not to mention Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s emotive score, is so compelling.

Is the Shimmer visually compelling? Sure? Garland’s not great at establishing shots. Annihilation feels very much like someone aping Terrence Malick aping 2001 but without the commitment to either. Mark Digby’s production design is good enough it’s too bad Garland’s not patient enough to explore it. Whether Digby is a Vertigo Swamp Thing fan or it just happens to always looks like panels (or covers) from that series aside… it’s a great proof of concept for an adaptation of the comic because a bunch of it is straight from those comics. But Garland avoids visualizing too much, instead sticking close to Portman’s perception of things unless he’s got to manipulate the audience to make the next narrative twist work.

At a certain point, Annihilation peaks and then plateaus. The thirty minutes (it runs just under two hours) before they get into the Shimmer isn’t great, especially since Portman’s protagonist is flat. We keep learning more and more about her and Isaac throughout and all of it’s boring. Same goes for the rest of the team (save Leigh, who gets so little onscreen character development it does gin up curiosity). But Novotny, Rodriguez, and Thompson? They’re shadows of caricatures, Rodriguez and Thompson the most. Maybe Garland couldn’t figure out how to write them in a reality where no one in the world noticed a whole section of Florida disappear, which would be visible from space. Maybe he really thought Portman was somehow the most compelling.

Doesn’t matter. Like his framing, like his downgrading of Leigh’s character, like his choice of composers… he was just wrong and it doesn’t work.

Kind of like Oscar Issac doing a Southern accent. No matter how much CGI you throw at it, no matter how much scary gross you make it, somethings just aren’t going to work.

Annihilation desperately wants to be heady, lush, hard sci-fi and is willing to sacrifice everything else to get there.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019, J.J. Abrams)

It is a dark time for the Star Wars franchise. Although the second highest grossing film franchise of all time, white men really weren’t okay with Kelly Marie Tran getting a lot to do in the last “trilogy” movie, not to mention women telling ostensible alpha Oscar Isaac what to do, and nobody wanted to go see the Harrison Ford spin-off not starring Harrison Ford, so there was a lot of damage control on Rise of Skywalker. Not to mention Carrie Fisher died and instead of letting her rest, the Rise filmmakers instead decided to resurrect her with unused footage and CGI compositing. Suffice to say, none of it works—with Daisy Ridley not believable acting “opposite” the artificial Fisher—seriously, they couldn’t keep doing takes until they got a better one; despite costing a fifth of a billion dollars, Rise often feels like they went way too cheap on things… especially with the rebel base stuff (meaning “Fisher,” Ridley, Tran—who’s demoted to cameo level support staff because Disney, at least the Lucasfilm division, are cowards—Isaac, and John Boyega). There’s one sequence where they really need to make the base shine and the movie can’t gin up any enthusiasm for it. Partly because it can’t gin up any enthusiasm for anything, partly because the sets appear to be way too small.

Rise of Skywalker, despite being really long, feels really reductive. Director Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio would really rather not get too far into anything in the script, which has one actual big reveal but ought to have two. It turns out Ian McDiarmid’s back (hey, wasn’t Luke originally supposed to defeat the Emperor in Episode IX in Gary Kurtz’s Empire-era series outline), but Abrams and Terrio stick that reveal in the opening crawl. Rise’s opening crawl is so bad, so defeated—where’d all of Abrams’s enthusiasm for this franchise go—it makes you wish they’d brought back George Lucas to cameo write it; he couldn’t do worse. Speaking of cameos, let’s just get the John Williams thing out of the way now.

There’s barely any original music and it’s at best mediocre. But it’s barely there. On one hand, John Williams is 87 years old and he gets some slack. On the other hand, Rise of Skywalker is supposed to be the end of a storied, beloved franchise. You’d think they’d want the best score possible. But they don’t. They want a John Williams score. They want a Carrie Fisher credit. It’s not a question of Abrams and company playing it safe; it’s not like Disney Star Wars has ever taken any real chances because it’s Disney, but Rise is like a capitulation. Even when Abrams is able to hit some good nostalgia moments, it’s because old John Williams music really does work well, it’s because his actors are still taking their jobs seriously, even with the crap script. Ridley’s big reveal, teased since the first Disney Star Wars, somehow manages to result in negative character development. It’s incredible how good Abrams and Terrio are at coping out of narrative decisions. They’re not just inert with it, they actually manage to toggle the tide in reverse. The wind in Rise of Skywalker doesn’t blow, it sucks.

Very low okay direction from Abrams. He’s in way too much of a hurry, especially for almost two and a half hours, though he doesn’t get much help from editors Maryann Brandon and Stefan Grube. Everyone seems to have a different pace for the film—Abrams, both as director and screenwriter, the actors, the editors, the music. Rise of Skywalker feels slapped together, like the bad opening crawl is to compensate for the addition of McDiarmid after they started shooting but didn’t have enough time to get any real scenes with him and Adam Driver, who ping pong balls around the film, showing up whenever needed to give Ridley some conflict, sometimes with lightsabers.

What’s maybe strangest about Rise of Skywalker is how well Driver and Ridley make out, performance-wise. Ridley’s got a shit part. Like, she plays second fiddle to Driver even when she’s running a scene—and, ostensibly, the entire plot (buds Isaac and Boyega accompany her on her mission because they’re a family and she needs boys to make sure she’s all right)—but she still manages to turn in an okay performance. She acts better than the script gives ever, implying some kind of character development… within reason. Abrams, as writer and as director, works against her. He doesn’t work against Driver, however, who ends up with a great part. I mean, as great a part as you can have in Rise of Skywalker, but a good showcase anyway. Lots of range. And some of the character development Ridley should’ve gotten.

Though Ridley does get friends. Driver doesn’t not just get friends, the movie sets him up having sidekicks and then he never interacts with them. And he’s barely got any time with fellow Imperial baddies Domhnall Gleeson and Richard E. Grant. Grant has the closest thing to fun in Rise. Gleeson’s got what should be a fun part (finally) and he manages to screw it up. Whatever. At least he’s not an E.T. or something.

Isaac and Boyega get to continue their bromance, albeit neutered and straight-coded thanks to romantic interests (name cameo Keri Russell who might only actually be in one shot and the rest a voice performance for Isaac and more… mainstream appropriate Naomi Ackie for Boyega). Now, funny thing about Boyega—who gets no time with previous movie love interest Tran—and Ackie… while the script plays it like they have chemistry, they don’t have any chemistry. And they don’t play for it either. Boyega’s interested in Ackie as a comrade with shared history, but there’s no attempt at sparking. Isaac and Russell’s disembodied voice are at least cute together.

Isaac’s effortlessly charming and not much else. Boyega’s a lot of forced smiles and enthusiasm. Though even his enthusiasm runs out.

What else….

Billy Dee Williams is back for a glorified cameo—seriously, if Carrie Fisher hadn’t died he wasn’t going to be in the movie, was he—and it’s nice to have him around. He’s really not in it enough.

Anthony Daniels has a story arc, but it gets dropped in the third act. So much for the droids being the Saga constants.

All production problems aside, the film relies way too heavily on the scale CGI can provide. Rise of Skywalker tries to supersize its threats and just makes them more and more absurd, which isn’t a bad thing because it covers a lot of what would otherwise just be plain stupid.

Rise of Skywalker is a disappointing conclusion to a forty-two year-old story. But it’s a far less disappointing conclusion to that story than the one Disney Star Wars started for Ridley, Driver, Boyega, and Isaac four years ago. Though it still manages to be a more disappointing sequel to the previous entry two years ago. Abrams succeeded faster at failing Star Wars than even George Lucas. It took Lucas sixteen years to chooch the franchise with the first prequel. Abrams did it in two.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017, Rian Johnson)

The Last Jedi is a long two and a half hours. It’s an uneven split between Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, and John Boyega. Ridley’s off with Mark Hamill–but really having a FaceTime via the Force arc with Adam River–while Isaac is doing his damndest to get everyone killed because he doesn’t want to listen to women. Boyega starts with Isaac, then has a quest with Kelly Marie Tran. Boyega and Tran have the closest thing to character arcs. Isaac learns his lesson way too late and only because Carrie Fisher is so patient with him.

At the center of the film is not Ridley learning the ways of the Force from Hamill. Director Johnson avoids tackling that relationship, giving Hamill all his character development away from Ridley. It’s a waste of Hamill. There’s some effective homage with him, but nothing particularly sincere. Johnson–who wrote the script–seems to want nothing to do with the character.

As a result, most of Ridley’s time in the film is utterly wasted. Most meaning more than ninety-five percent. Her subplot with Driver doesn’t add up to anything. Especially since it gets resolved somewhere in the first of the film’s third acts. It basically has three of them.

Unlike the previous entry in Disney Star Wars, which repurposed the original Star Wars’s story beats, Last Jedi is a mix of Empire and Return of the Jedi, just reorganized. There’s enough content they could’ve split the movie in two and gotten more dramatic oompf out of it.

The stuff with Boyega and Tran completely lacks any subtlety and still ends up being the most effective of the film’s plot lines. Even though Johnson has a really hard time establishing Boyega at the start of the film, eventually the chemistry between the actors overcomes the rocky opening. Benicio Del Toro is the name cameo in that plot line and he’s fun. He’s painfully obvious, but he’s fun.

Meanwhile Isaac goes from ignoring Fisher’s orders to ignoring Laura Dern’s. The movie shafts Dern, redeeming her in a reveal and then it’s pretty much time for her to go. Fisher’s back. Johnson sidelines Fisher after giving her the film’s best “Force” sequence. There’s some visually interesting Dark Side stuff with Ridley–a throwback to Empire–but it ends up narratively inert like everything else Johnson does with Ridley. For all the film’s talk of heroes and legends, Johnson’s incredibly uncomfortable spending any time with them. You can only deconstruct Star Wars so much. In Last Jedi, Johnson wastes a bunch of time trying to do so.

Besides just being long and meandering because Johnson’s verbose, the film also severely lacks danger. Most of the film has the Rebel fleet running from the Empire–sorry, First Order, but damn do the interiors of the Star Destroyers look amazing just like in the seventies. The Rebels are almost out of fuel and can’t warp so the Empire is just shooting at them. The good guys’ shields can take it but not forever and they can’t actually escape.

If Johnson were able to direct for tension, it could be great. Instead, it’s just a way to winnow down the cast. Pointlessly so. Johnson does all right making the frequent death scenes momentarily tragic, but they don’t have any resonance. Last Jedi doesn’t want to have anything to do with resonating.

None of the acting is bad except Domhnall Gleeson. He and Driver bicker as they try to out-suck-up to their boss, the CGI “big bad” (voiced by Andy Serkis). Gleeson’s wholly incompetent at his job and whiny. Driver’s at least got the Dark Side and broody beats whiny. And Driver acts like Johnson’s giving him an actual character arc. Besides Ridley and Hamill, Johnson fails Driver most.

Great music from John Williams this outing. Excellent, entirely unexciting special effects. The battle scenes are similarly competent but uninspired; despite all his dawdling and dwelling, Johnson’s hasty with his action direction. Steve Yedlin’s photography is crisp but somehow bland. Editor Bob Ducsay and Johnson try to maintain the original trilogy’s wipes but without looking as dated. It’s not successful. The scenes are all a little too long, even if it’s by a few frames. Johnson is anti-brevity.

Making it’s even worse he shafts the entire cast on character arcs. The movie’s two and a half hours long. There ought to be more than enough time for the seven principal characters….

At least The Last Jedi isn’t a vanity project, though maybe it’d be better if it were. It’d mean Johnson had some personality. And he doesn’t.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel and Ethan Coen)

Just over half way into Inside Llewyn Davis, there’s a moment where lead Oscar Isaac looks into the face of responsibility–weighs it, weighs the consequences of not accepting it, makes his decision. Until that moment, the Coen Brothers hadn’t candidly identified the film as a character study. It happens in the middle of an epical sequence–the film splits into three (really, five) sections–and they don’t stop the existing momentum. It just changes, ever minutely, how Isaac is going to relate to the viewer. The film acknowledges the viewer wants to make a judgement of the protagonist–as one well should given the protagonist’s name is in the title and that title can easily be seen as an invitation–but refuses that judgement. There’s no need. After all, the film has up until that point warned the viewer and the training wheels are then off.

So with the rest of the film, the Coen Brothers do a lot of different things. They give Isaac some more excellent moments, they craft a really spectacular third act and denouement. They even acknowledge they’ve taken quite a journey–a bigger one than the viewer (or Isaac) realize–and they fit all their many pieces back into the box they so carefully unpacked in the first act.

The film concerns Isaac’s early sixties Greenwich Village folk singer and his callous behavior and interactions with other people, both in the folk music culture and out. Isaac’s performance is outstanding, as are many of the supporting performances. It’s a character study so Isaac’s is the most important and he hits every moment, ably assisted not just by the Coen Brothers’ script and direction, but the fine editing from Roderick Jaynes, who knows just how to cut a talking heads scene for emphasis.

Davis beautifully recreates the period–Jess Gonchor production designing–and Bruno Delbonnel’s crisp photography makes it all even more vivid. It’s a quiet, precise film. Many of the actors–Carey Mulligan and John Goodman in particular–speak in short monologues. The sound is phenomenal, not just because it’s about music, but because of the tone the Coen Brothers get out their cast’s deliveries amid such static, aching quiet.

Isaac’s great, Mulligan’s great. Excellent support from Justin Timberlake (no, really), F. Murray Abraham and Jeanine Serralles. Phenomenal composition and editing from the Coen Brothers (with Jaynes’s assistance, of course).

Inside Llewyn Davis is awesome–big when it needs to be, small when it needs to be. It’s a beautiful extinguishing of hope and, better, watching as Isaac experiences that extinguishing. It’s also phenomenally plotted; I don’t want to forget about that element. The script organically layers the revelations throughout the narrative, forcing the viewer to not just identify–willingly or not–with Isaac, but also with his protagonist’s particular point of view.

It’s a singular character study.