I’m spelling all this stuff out in detail because the details are there, and the material is designed to withstand this kind of scrutiny. The Terror could be coasting on survival-horror staples and period-prestige clichés. Instead, it’s using these extraordinary circumstances as a crucible for revealing character, not melting it away for cheap thrills and meaningless misery. It’s a miracle on the ice.

My review of this week’s episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club focuses on a worried-wife scene and a torture scene that the show elevates from rote to vital.

SPOILER WARNING

Many, and perhaps most, prestige television shows traffic in death. Name your top five dramas right now and chances are good the majority are about people who kill other people for a living, or at the very least on a pro-am basis. Yet for all their fixation on mortality, violent or otherwise, few shows bother attempting to answer the unanswerable question of what death feels like. The one that (maybe) gave it a serious try wound up doing something so strange by the standards of its peers that we’re still talking about it eleven years later.

Which makes “The Ladder,” The Terror’s horrific third episode, one of the year’s most impressive hours of television. Climaxing with the surprise death of a major character—a shock tactic you’ve almost come to expect from high-profile dramas—it takes the opportunity to root the viewer in the experience of dying, and dying horribly. Using dizzying camerawork, surreal editing, brutal gore, and a simple but staggering performance by Ciarán Hinds, the episode makes the killing of Sir John Franklin a real voyage into the unknown: the mind of a man who suddenly finds himself in the grips of panic and pain from which there will be no return.

Episode three of The Terror featured one of the best death scenes I’ve ever seen on television; I wrote about why in my review for the A.V. Club.

You don’t need to get clocked on the head by a hailstone the size of a grapefruit to think that there was something playful about The Terror this week. For one thing you wouldn’t have much of a head left, but it’s more than that. Titled “Gore,” the episode creates a sense of anticipation that something terrible, or at least disgusting, is going to happen from the start. This isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t the whole picture. In shades of the series title’s double meaning, Gore is the surname of the lieutenant to whom the horrible thing happens. What’s more, his death and disappearance at the claws of a huge, elusive bear takes place after eight months of nothing happening, apparently: Between the final shot of the premiere and the first shot of this installment, eight months have elapsed. A series with the confidence to take such a huge narrative leap this early in its run, and to make gallows-humor puns about the inexorable doom approaching all its characters, is a series worth watching.

I reviewed episode two of The Terror for the A.V. Club. It’s an impressive show.

“Past hope. Past kindness or consideration. Past justice. Past warmth or cold or comfort. Past love. But past surprise? What an endlessly unfolding tedium life would then become!” —Francis Wolcott, Deadwood

The men of the Royal Navy about whose lives and deaths The Terror concerns itself have set out on an expedition into the unknown, but the show itself is not. Carefully researched, meticulously art-directed dramas about the evil that heavily accented, infrequently bathed men did back in the olden days are as common across the TV landscape as ice in the Arctic. (At least, as common as ice in the Arctic used to be.) In too many of these cases, hitting that one note of grim, grimy gloom seems to have been viewed as sufficient by the filmmakers involved.

What The Terror gets right, and so many other works of period miserabalism—including executive producer Ridley Scott’s own Taboo, starring a soot-encrusted Tom Hardy—get wrong, is that you have to feel bad that the characters are so miserable in the first place. If you start them all at the same glowering, fundamentally mean-spirited place and just make things worse from there, that empathy can’t be generated; you’re left with the “endlessly unfolding tedium” that the granddaddy of the genre once described. Deadwood never fell into that trap, and neither, based on this opening hour, does The Terror.

I reviewed the crackerjack premiere of The Terror for The A.V. Club, where I’ll be covering the show all season. Most people I know who read Dan Simmons’s source novel enjoyed a lot of it a whole lot but have major problems that kept them from declaring it a truly great book, and I’m in that camp myself. When I heard they were making a show of it, I got excited not because the book is perfect, but because it isn’t, and a good show might be able to excise those imperfections. I’m happy to report that The Terror is, indeed, a good show. Remember that spark I said The Alienist doesn’t have? The Terror does. It’s got the magic.

It’s in those final steps of the hunt for the killer that the problems really begin. Kreizler bamboozles Roosevelt and his men so that Kreizler and Moore, already under close watch by Byrnes, could sneak away to the child-killer’s new lair unnoticed. How do they know that this lair is in the Croton Reservoir? How does Sara, whom Kreizler also dupes (reasons unclear), figure out that same thing in turn, arriving at the reservoir just in time to save their lives? There’s some hand-waving about interpreting the killer’s map of the water and sewer systems, a change in his modus operandi, and his apparent obsession with John the Baptist. But that’s all wild guess work, and New York was a really big city — on an island, no less — even during the Gilded Age. Water, water everywhere, yet they know exactly where to go.

The episode ratchets up the tension by including Byrnes and Connor as factors in the final showdown, from a poorly explained scene in which Byrnes monitors our men at the opera house to Connor’s almost comically dogged pursuit of the alienist’s team. But while their acute interest in the case made sense while one of their high-society patrons was under suspicion, it made considerably less sense once that patron was killed by Connor. His involvement in the murder of Laszlo’s beloved Mary seems to be an open secret as well, although this, too, is poorly explained. Now Connor goes to all this trouble just because the police object to the doctor’s newfangled methodology? It simply doesn’t hold up as a motive.

Put it all together, and it feels rushed and forced, as if the filmmakers looked at the clock, realized they were running out of time and did a speed run through the final hour of what until now had been a very meticulous, patient detective story.

I reviewed the finale of The Alienist, a show I never really liked but also kind of enjoyed (??), for the New York Times. Charming performances by Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning, and a slightly harder-to-swallow but still endearing turn from Daniel Brühl, buoyed the proceedings considerably. Still, it never had that spark, you know? That magic. Some shows do and some shows don’t.

Starship Troopers and Rambo

Come one, you apes! You wanna live forever? We sure hope not, because when you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing. And so is listening to Sean and Stefan discus two of the most violent — and morally complex — action movies of the modern era, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. Made in 1997 and 2008 respectively, these films use satire (in the former case) and spectacle (in the latter) to probe the gaping wounds of fascism, war, war movies, and the act of killing. If, like us, you’re an admirer of how A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones use epic-battle tropes to interrogate the horrors of war, this discussion of two strange films that do the same is for you. Enjoy…?

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Sean’s essay on Rambo.

Stefan’s essay on Starship Troopers (Patreon subscribers only).

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You don’t want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those people’s way by homophobia. Even at Versace’s funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partner’s hand in comfort.

Yeah. All of that is real. We’ve got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. That’s not an inference — we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldn’t control his hatred. He still felt no need to control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrew’s personality was that he wanted to impress people, and he’s born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox — How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth? — that’s the conundrum of Andrew.

I think it’s tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. It’s like he’s soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. He’s like, “I’m going to shame you. You’ve achieved success and I’m going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you.”

Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. That’s a stark contrast.

You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say he’s Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He can’t deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didn’t have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom.

There’s this moment we never managed to get into the show which I’ve always thought captured something about Andrew. He was at a party when his descent was really accelerating, and no one was paying attention to him; in fact, someone had already reprimanded him for being really annoying. He just went over to this table and set fire to a napkin. He needed people to run over and notice him.

I interviewed Tom Rob Smith, the writer of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, for the New York Times. Again, ACS Versace is a great show.

Andrew Cunanan walks through Miami Beach toward death as “Vienna” by Ultravox plays on the soundtrack. That New Wave masterpiece is both a celebration and rejection of glamour. Sequentially so, in that vocalist Midge Ure sings of “a man in the dark in a picture frame, so mystic and soulful” and “haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling,” only to follow up by proclaiming “the image is gone…the feeling is gone…this means nothing to me.” Simultaneously so, in that when he sings “this means nothing to me” the song soars as if nothing has ever meant more to him. Inextricably so, in that it wedges “only you and I” between each declaration of faded emotion and emphatic meaninglessness; in that the title comes from the chorus’s climactic phrase “Ah, Vienna,” a cry of joy and a sigh of loss all at once. The first time that chorus hits in the ninth and final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Andrew Cunanan assassinates Gianni Versace. The second time, he’s standing in a stranger’s kitchen, rummaging through a fridge in a house he’s burglarized, pulling out a bottle of champagne and fiddling with the foil around the cork. His lonesome toast to himself is not timed to the music. The feeling is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

[…]

Andrew Cunanan is dead and gone when The Assassination of Gianni Versace, one of the best dramas of the decade, concludes. Its final scenes focus on the family of the title character, not his killer; even this choice is a deliberate disconnection from what’s come before. Estranged though they are, both his sister Donatella and his partner Antonio struggle to connect what they had with what they have now. Donatella, who has coolly presided over Antonio’s excision from his late partner’s estate, sobs, because her brother annoyed her on the day of his murder to the point where she refused to pick up the phone when he called. Antonio has been rejected not only by Donatella but by the priest at Gianni’s funeral mass — where rich and famous friends from Princess Diana to Elton John to Naomi Campbell to Sting were present, but where Antonio himself did not merit a mention as a part of the family, nor a kiss from the cleric, whose institution spent the decade denying the humanity of homosexuals while systematically destroying the humanity of so many children in its charge. Like Andrew, he attempts suicide; unlike Andrew, he is unsuccessful.

Gianni Versace ends the series as a photo in a shrine where his sister goes to grieve and lament what could have been had she picked up the phone. Donatella is a distorted reflection in glass embellished with the House of Versace’s Medusa head emblem, monstrous in her mourning. Antonio lies cradled in the hands of the help, who save him from his effort to die with the love of his life. Andrew is just a name on a wall in a mausoleum, one of countless others, nothing special. It’s all so unglamorous, so unceremonious, so blunt and short and ugly. The beauty Versace worked all his life to create, that Andrew tried all his life to recreate, has no place here at the end. The image is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

I reviewed the season finale of ACS Versace for Decider. This show is an all-timer.

Andrew Cunanan was cool.

Like, really cool.

Sincerely, legitimately awesome.

That’s the tragedy of “Creator/Destroyer,” the penultimate episode of this extraordinary season of television. By the time we see Andrew in his full glory as one of the wildest guys at his high school, we’ve also seen his father Modesto, who debuts in this episode, get his hooks deep into the kid. Andrew has seen his father harangue and assault his mother. He’s borne the weight of all his dad’s dreams, knowing this comes at the expense of his siblings, sensing on some level it’s not right to have this kind of pressure placed on him but, because the pressure is couched as praise, not knowing how to fight back. He’s been…well, the show is cagey on this, but saying he’s been molested by his father would not be out of bounds.

And even now, as an ebullient and confident teenager, he’s begun certain behavior patterns that will get him in trouble in the end: he has a sugar daddy, and he becomes fast friends with Lizzie, his future bestie, because she shows up at a high-school house party pretending to be a kid rather than the married adult she really is. (“I’m an impostor.” “All the best people are.”) He’s picking up little tidbits on how to deceive (including his go-to pseudonym, DeSilva, the name of the people who own the house where the party takes place) and why (because “when you feel special, success will follow” as his father teaches him).

But for a brief time, he’s just a cool, slightly weird, slightly obnoxious, slightly closeted teenager, and if you weren’t at least two of those things during your high school career I don’t wanna know you. He stands up to homophobes in a familiar way, by camping it up even further, going so far as to pose for his class photo with his shirt all the way unbuttoned to show off his (impressive!) torso. He’s prophetically chosen to be “Most Likely to Be Remembered,” and equally prophetically selects “Après moi, le déluge” as his yearbook quote. He rolls into the parking lot like a refugee from Less Than Zero (complete with that movie’s soundtrack staple, the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”; the film was his IRL fave) and shows up at the house party in an Eddie Murphy red-leather jumpsuit. (Finally it’s clear why so many of his music cues over the course of the ‘90s portion of the series were anachronistically ’80s: The ’80s were his time.) This Andrew could be loved. This Andrew could be saved.

I reviewed last week’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. What a show.

“We must be talked about, or we are nothing.” —Donatella Versace, to the Versace staff

“For me, being told ‘no’ is like being told I don’t exist. It’s like I disappeared or something.” —Andrew Cunanan, to Jeff Trail

“Is this normal? Is this normal enough?” —Gianni Versace to his sister Donatella, on creating a less unique ready-to-wear version of the haute couture dress they designed together for her

“It’s just a name they made up to sound special.” —Andrew Cunanan to his mother Mary Anne, on Häagen-Dazs ice cream

“It needs confidence.” “It gives confidence.” —Donatella and Gianni, on the dress

“So you can hold your own at a dinner table conversation.” “I am the dinner table conversation.” —an escort agency owner and Andrew Cunanan, on Andrew Cunanan

“I want the world to see you in a way that you have never been seen before.” —Gianni to Donatella

“Oh, if they could see me now.” “Who?” “Everyone.” —Andrew Cunanan to Norman Blachford

“This dress is not my legacy. You are.” —Gianni to Donatella

“He’s a good boy. He’s always been a good boy.” —Mary Anne on Andrew Cunanan

“Ascent,” the seventh episode of ACS Versace, is the one where my admiration for what writer Tom Rob Smith has accomplished with his scripts and structure for the series shifted into something approaching awe. Returning to the Versaces’ world of high fashion for the first time since Episode 2 (their appearance in Episode 5 centered on Gianni’s coming out, not their work as designers), it creates a series of parallels between the the artist and the man who would murder him that are all the more striking for how different they are in intention and affect.

I reviewed episode seven of ACS Versace for Decider a couple weeks back. (I apologize for all the catch-up linkblogging tonight.) I remember going through my notes on this one and thinking “Christ, this is a well-written show.”

It all leads to the grimmest discovery of the season, coupled with its goriest onscreen moments. While John’s young friend Joseph listens in horror, the murderer butchers one of his friends in the public baths, dragging his bloody corpse down the hall and off to whatever urban aerie will become this latest victim’s chosen resting place. At the same time, in the killer’s bedroom, Sara opens a heart-shaped box and discovers an actual human heart, while Marcus Isaacson uncovers a jar filled with human eyeballs — many more, it’s clear, than the known victims could have provided.

It’s an awesome, awful image, one that easily transcends its B-movie-prop connotations because of what it enables both the investigators and the audience to truly see. Each of these gross little chunks of nerve and tissue, floating in a jar stuffed away under bed, represents the life of a child, plucked out at the root. What’s more, each of the victims came from the immigrant underclass; the killer groomed them all by commiserating over their abusive, hated fathers. (In the victims’ cases, many of their dads were also neglectful gambling addicts, which Beecham was in a position to know through his gig as a debt collector.) In a grotesque sense, the murderer values them more than anyone else ever has.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It’s not a particularly good show, but Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning are very watchable in it, and in moments like the one described above it proves gore can still be communicative.

To its credit, “The Alienist” always treats the deaths of the children upon whom its serial killer preys as a series of tragedies. It is equally respectful, and properly outraged, about the grotesque class inequities that help enable the murderer to operate with impunity, or even under outright protection. The conditions to which the mentally ill are subjected by the institutional options of the day, the routine dismissal and degradation of women by men, the barbarity of white America’s genocidal war on the indigenous population, the cycle of sexual abuse that turns victims into victimizers ad infinitum: This episode alone exhibits fist-on-the-table fury about all of it. The PG-13 “Perils of Pauline” routine can only cloud this moral clarity.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It can be hard to make a crime show about how murder is tragic when the threat of murder is also supposed to be exciting.

When it comes to horror movies I’m the opposite of Morrissey’s “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.” I enjoyed Get Out, though I’d have enjoyed it more (and, in a directly related phenomenon, paid less attention to its plot holes) had the whole goddamn story and vibe and theme and specific bits not been spoiled for me prior to seeing it. I’ve never enjoyed a Guillermo del Toro film before so I don’t anticipate enjoying, or frankly even watching, The Shape of Water. But I love horror, I’m a horror person, del Toro and Jordan Peele are horror people (also Mexican and Black respectively, and not doing corporate franchise work to boot), and the fucked-up movies they made won Best Screenplay and Best Director and Best Picture. Normie World doesn’t matter, but my favorite genre just stole some awards from Normie World, and I’m delighted.

John Rambo spent the 1980s knifing, booby-trapping, and exploding his way into the American consciousness. But to resurrect this killer of a character for the 2000s, Sylvester Stallone dug deep into the heart of his hero… and dear God, that heart was dark.

Released in early 2008 to solid box-office success and minimal critical favor, Rambo promised a back-to-basics approach to Stallone’s hit action franchise, just as 2006’s acclaimed, heartwarming Rocky Balboa had done for The Italian Stallion. Stallone even planned to title the movie John Rambo to make the comparison even more direct, and wound up using that title for the film’s longer, more character-driven extended cut. But while the fourth and final film in the Rambo franchise gave Sly’s troubled Vietnam veteran a happy ending at last — its closing shot shows the 60-year-old killing machine returning to his family farm in Arizona for the first time in decades — it also gives us a character to fear, not root for. This evolution of Rambo as a character and mainstream action franchise, in turn, reveals uncomfortable, disturbing truths about the United States, and after a recent revisit, suggests that our own violent history should be treated with far more nuance than unquestioned cheerleading.

Set in the killing fields of Burma, Rambo is a brutal and bracing revisionist take on a hero whose name is synonymous with mindless action-movie excess, from the man who helped craft that excess in the first place. Yet it’s precisely because of its unprecedented savagery that the film feels truer to John Rambo’s roots than either of the sequels that preceded it: the movie, this time directed by Stallone, takes the philosophical tensions and fear of warfare present in the franchise since its politically fraught initial installment, loads them into a machine gun, and fires them directly at our collective face. Using all the tools at an old Hollywood hand’s disposal, it reflects the national mood by depicting its angry American as both suffering and inflicting trauma, in as traumatizing a manner as big-budget action movies have ever attempted.

Three thousand words on Rambo for Thrillist? Don’t mind as I do. I’m proud of this piece on one of the most viscerally disturbing and structurally odd mainstream action movies ever made.

“He’s a house. He’s a home. He’s a yard and a family and picking kids up from school…he’s a future.”

“They say this man…this man has nothing left to give. And a man with nothing to give is a nothing man….This world has wasted me.”

Ominously directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton and featuring absolutely stunning dialogue from series writer Tom Rob Smith, “Descent,” the sixth episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, is the first and only episode so far to steer entirely clear of murder and its aftermath. Yet somewhere between those two statements above — the first is a description of his beloved David Madsen to his friend Lizzie, the second a description of himself to a meth-induced nightmare vision of Gianni Versace — Andrew Cunanan dies. The old Andrew, anyway, the Andrew capable of warmth and charm and moments of honesty amid the lies. It’s not hard to identify the specific spark of vitality that gets snuffed out to make his dark rebirth into the new, lethal Andrew happen, either. When his hope dies, the old Andrew dies with it.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Minneapolis to be born? I reviewed this week’s stunning episode of ACS Versace for Decider.

Indeed, from top to bottom, characters are coming into their own. In their off-duty moments, the chemistry sparks and sizzles between Moore and Sara, on the one hand, and between Kreizler and his mute maid, Mary, on the other. When Mary cuts her finger while preparing the doctor’s dinner, Kreizler notices the injury and slowly unwraps the bandage; the eroticism of the act is unmistakable even before he licks his own finger and applies his saliva to her wound as a “natural coagulant.”

Speaking of fingers, Sara’s later riff on why John would be a lousy typist is one big digit-based double entendre. “I think you lack dexterity — in your fingers, that is,” says. “All men do. That’s why they’ll never be any good at it.” I’m sorry, what were we talking about again?

Sex! Now that I have your attention, I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It was the best episode so far, by far.

Just when it seemed they’d cracked the case, it turns out the investigators on “The Alienist” don’t have a clue what’s really going on. Frankly, neither do I. Ain’t it grand?

With this week’s episode, “The Alienist” has reached the halfway mark of the season. It has also arrived at that most deliciously frustrating stage in any murder mystery: the point at which the detectives, fully armed with information and deductions, make their move, only to discover that they’re still several steps behind their quarry. For heroes and villains alike, this has the potential to be the most engaging and revealing moment in any such story. It can show us how the heroes deal with adversity and the villains with unexpected good fortune (if not so good for his hunters and victims). Lucky for us viewers, “The Alienist” is emerging from this stage of the race firing on all cylinders.

I reviewed this week’s fun episode of The Alienist for the New York Times.

Watching Jeff’s final confrontation with Andrew prior to the murder is painful, then, both because of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. “I don’t know what you stand for,” he shouts at Cunanan. “I don’t know who you are. You’re a liar. You have no honor.” Correct on all counts — possibly lethally, so if you figure this contrast in their outlook is a big part of what drove Andrew to kill. But when Andrew rightfully points out that he believed in and supported Jeff while his beloved Navy treated him like shit — “I saved you!” — Jeff bitterly retorts “You destroyed me. I wish I’d never walked into that bar. I wish I’d never met you.” He says he wants his life back, as if Andrew took it from him, instead of Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam. Andrew doestake his life away, eventually, mere hours from that moment in fact. But in a sense, he was just an accessory after the fact. Jeff signed his own death warrant the moment he decided, in the face of society’s hatred, that some principles are worth fighting for anyway.

I reviewed last night’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. This is a great show.

“You can’t do it, can you?” “I can’t what?” “Stop.”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is what Matt Zoller Seitz once described, by way of a subtitle to his blog, as “a long, strange journey toward a retrospectively inevitable destination” — the titular murder, seen in the cold open of the very first episode. We’ve already seen where we’re going; what’s left to the show is to depict how we got there. Even those swept along and killed by Andrew Cunanan during the journey seem to sense it. Hence the exchange above. Promising young architect David Madson is the love of Andrew’s life, to hear Andrew tell it. He’s a man to whom the murderer is so fanatically committed that he not only slaughters his rival for David’s affections, his own former love interest Jeff Trail, with a hammer, thus beginning his murder spree, but then manages to convince the shellshocked David that he has some how become an accomplice to the crime and must flee by his side. As time wears on and the shock wears off, David grows less pliable to Andrew’s nonsensical advice and admonishments, but also more honest with himself about where his journey as the Bonnie to Andrew’s would-be Clyde will end. He has no more hope of survival than Andrew has a chance of shutting the fuck up and telling the truth. He can’t do it, can he.

I reviewed last week’s episode of ACS Versace, another tremendous piece of work, for Decider.