From the start, Skeleton Crew has run like an R2 unit whose motivator is a bit on the wonky side: In large part, it still works just fine. Its theme-park-ride sense of forward motion and energy alone makes it the most entertaining — okay, make that the only watchable — new Disney Star Wars show since Andor. That’s before you get to its deployment of oodles of fun creatures and droids and space pirates, the kind of good clean fun you want in a Star Wars show for kids. The key ingredient is the lead performance of Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood; his transformation from bad guy with a heart of gold to a real rat bastard is the kind of genuine, character-based surprise that a shocking twist or secret identity can only hope to deliver. 

But there were always signs that the machine wasn’t running as smoothly as it could be. The premise and the show’s initial suburban setting amount to crass Gooniesploitation. The core kids started out as stock characters reciting dialogue straight out of kids’ adventure movies; Wim, the worst offender, never grew out of it. Key action sequences felt thrown together. Most tragically, Kelly MacDonald, who by rights should be the co-lead in a whole Star Wars show of her and Jude Law’s own, gets like two minutes of screen time. 

Like the pirate frigate that makes a fiery but stately descent into the surface of At Attin after being blown out of the sky by X-wings, this is the episode where it feels like the whole thing just kinda stalls out and comes in for a crash landing. It’s the kind of finale that feels like it wasn’t so much written as translated from a series of shoulder shrugs in the writers’ room. After all of this adventuring, the good guys flip the special good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win. 

I reviewed the season finale of Skeleton Crew for Decider.

As I write this review, wildfires brought on by climate change are ravaging Los Angeles. The climate change denier whom a plurality of voters selected to be their president, and who as best I can tell is completely insane, is threatening to bring back American expansionism by conquering Canada and Mexico and Greenland as his conservative Christian backers cheer him on. In this final episode of American Primeval, a fanatical Brigham Young rants about his God purifying the world from wickedness as his Mormons, fresh off a genocidal attack on the Shoshone, solidify their claim on Utah by burning Fort Bridger to the ground. You hear Young’s words over the flames. It feels familiar, is what I’m saying. People will always use fires they themselves started as a smokescreen for their murderous ambition, I guess. 

I reviewed the finale of American Primeval for Decider.

It’s preposterous how good Shea Whigham is at delivering dialogue. Boardwalk Empire, Perry Mason, American Primeval — whatever the assignment, he makes every line sound like he’d never heard a word of it before thinking it up right then and there. When Whigham’s Jim Bridger verbally spars with Kim Coates’s appropriately bloviating Brigham Young, he makes the great evangelist sound like a high school freshman at his first debate club event. Sure, Bridger has likely just brought the murderous wrath of the Mormon nation down on his head with his backtalk and intransigence — not to mention his heavily armed squad of employees, mountain men, and Native Americans with nothing left to lose. But Young attacking Bridger now after failing to verbally fluster the grizzled frontiersman in the slightest is a bit like Drake suing after Kendrick Lamar beat the brakes off him in their beef. Even if he wins, he’s a sore loser. 

I reviewed episode five of American Primeval for Decider.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m thinking about this line from 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke a lot while watching Silo these days.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

One of my favorite film microgenres is the Ordeal. In Ordeal movies, characters embark on a perilous journey across some wild territory, and endure a grueling struggle for survival along the way, marked with repeated instances of terror and pain. Think Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Descent, Gravity, and most relevantly The Revenant, written by American Primeval creator Mark L. Smith. Go ahead and throw Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in there if you’re feeling generous, and Homer’s The Odyssey if you want to be complete about it. These narratives are compelling because of how they join the viewer and the protagonist at the hip: You’re not going anywhere until this guy or girl gets out alive, or dies trying. The only way out is through.

American Primeval is an attempt to create an Ordeal TV Show, which in this age of spiffy limited series is now a possibility. There are pros and cons to this approach. In the former column is the obvious point that on  television show, your Ordeal can last a whole lot longer. You can drag out that primal struggle, allowing for more moments of bloody horror and stark beauty. And to fill up that extra real estate, you can create multiple protagonists, each on a different path, each undergoing an Ordeal of their own, each with their own appeal.

[…]

But on the big screen, the Ordeal is a uniquely focused form of storytelling. The pleasure of the Ordeal is its ability to burrow deep into the mindset of its main character as they’re put through their paces over the course of an entire film. By the end, ideally, you feel what she feels in your gut. That’s just not going to be the case when you’re bouncing around between stories and characters on a regular basis, episode after episode. It can even start to feel a bit, well, episodic: This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and the next thing you know a grizzled mountain man is snapping a screaming child’s splintered bone back into place and it’s cut to black, roll credits.

I reviewed episode four of American Primeval for Decider.

American Primeval is taking an open-world video game approach to its brand of revisionist Western. As our characters wander around, they encounter all kinds: friendly Mormons and murderous ones, friendly indigenous people and murderous ones, friendly settlers and murderous ones. You just never quite know which one is which when you stumble into them, until the shooting starts. 

This approach can be a little, well, video-gamey. As a horror guy, I was certainly tickled when a blind cackling hillbilly witch showed up to lure our heroes into Consanguinity Corner, but you can only take a show that otherwise self-evidently prides itself on gritty realism when Leatherface and Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre show up. 

Yet at the end of the episode, Captain Dellinger writes a lovely and heartfelt letter or journal entry in which he laments the way he feels he’s losing his essential character in the ceaselessly violent world he’s entered. “Hatred” and “brutality” are everywhere, driving out “compassion and basic tenderness.” 

“I am overcome at this time by a deep pain from a tremendous and always present lack of love,” he writes. “So few in these lands know of grace. There is only brutality here.” He’s painting things with an awfully broad brush, as the concurrent shots of Abish being treated with care and kindness by the Shoshone women demonstrate. But he’s not wrong overall. American Primeval may have a kind of shopworn way of showing it, but it really is exhausting to think about how many people in this land of ours like it better when they know others are suffering.  

I reviewed episode three of American Primeval for Decider.

Director Peter Berg has a knack for depicting the inherent sternness of all this. The determined faces of actors Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch and Saura Lightfoot Leon as Sara and Isaac and Abish. The leaders of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, gathered around a campfire, silhouetted agains the big sky. Our four heroes captured with a low angle that makes them look like the Fellowship of the Ring. Rolling vistas and billowing mists. Forests and scrubland. Hard people in a hard land. It’s solid stuff.

What it isn’t is unique, special, or even particularly provocative beyond the in-your-face violence. If that sounds harsh, I don’t mean it to be — it’s just the way it is. American Primeval is a bloody modern Western, and that’s about the extent of it. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. But unlike Brigham Young, this show isn’t making any converts just yet.

I reviewed episode two of American Primeval for Decider.

American Primeval isn’t going to be reinventing the Western genre anytime soon, if that wasn’t already apparent. Revisionist Westerns — in which there are no black and white hats, no noble cowboys against uniformly savage Indians, just a continent full of broken people trying to live another day — have been around for so long they’re now just, you know, Westerns. This is a project that will rise and fall on the strength of its action, adventure, thriller, suspense, and survival sequences, and on whether the actors can make you care enough about the characters to worry about what happens to them. Westward the wagons, folks, and let’s find out.

I’m covering Mark L. Smith and Peter Berg’s new survival-horror Western on Netflix American Primeval for Decider.

Jod Na Nawood is not a nice person. Considering his occupation, the outer-space equivalent of De Niro and Pesci hijacking trucks in GoodFellas, maybe that should have been obvious. But this is the Star Wars Galaxy, where you can personally slaughter younglings and blow up entire planets but still get a cozy fireside ghost appearance once you die. We’ve been taught to forgive much worse. We’ve also been taught, via Han Solo, that preposterously handsome and charming lawbreakers are heroes at heart more often than not. 

Well, Jod appears to fall firmly in the “not” category. Though his charisma and fast-talking power him through the beginning of the episode, as he repeatedly avoids being airlocked while Captain Brutus and his men try to penetrate At Attin’s Barrier, that’s not what actually gets him to his destination. To do that, he shoots the helpless Brutus to death at point blank range, beheads SM-33 with a lightsaber, bullies and mocks four frightened children, and threatens to kill their parents if they talk. That last bit is textbook child abuser stuff, and Skeleton Crew is having Jude Law say it to a little blue elephant boy. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

Skeleton Crew is good clean fun. That may sound like faint praise, and in the context of, like, Mad Men and I, Claudius (and Andor, for that matter), it is. But in the context of The Acolyte and Ahsoka, the Disney Star Wars Universe’s last two TV outings? This show is an enjoyable, zesty enterprise, with big ugly creatures, cool little droids, frequently inventive action sequences, and Jude Law as a scoundrel who my even turn out to be a real scoundrel this time. It has a pulse and a purpose. It justifies its own existence by being entertaining. 

[…]

But even in Star Wars, you’re asking a lot of your audience’s suspension of disbelief in this sequence, when you probably could have just crafted an escape that didn’t depend on four little children all acting like a cross between R2-D2 repairing Luke’s hyperdrive while flying through space and Captain America keeping that helicopter from flying away with his bare hands. I enjoy space werewolves and space kaiju and space Urkel and space Kelly MacDonald as much as anyone, but they can’t compensate for underbaked writing, which is what keeps Skeleton Crew from making the jump from fun to special.

I reviewed last week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

The Pact is what has kept things in line all these decades. It may well stop a catastrophe even now. But it led to this catastrophe too, with its lies and deceptions and bias toward the Up-Toppers. Does such a document deserve to govern a people who have outgrown it? Do its handmaidens in power deserve to rule us? I mean, them? 

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

One last thing: Wim. Sure, it’s funny to see him mean-mug Jod with a lightsaber in hand as if this is his moment of destiny, then promptly switch it on upside-down and drive it into the ground, knocking himself ass over teakettle. But “I wanted to have an adventure, and now I regret it because adventures are scary” is a movie motivation, not a real-person motivation. Luke Skywalker was a bored teenager wanted to see the universe, not have adventures in it. Indiana Jones wanted fortune, glory, and presumably tenure. The Goonies wanted to save their parents’ homes from foreclosure, for crying out loud. None of them was like “Oh boy, I hope I get into all kinds of danger so I can show how kickass I am!” It’s both unrealistic as a motivator and unlikeable as a personality trait. 

I reviewed this week’s Skeleton Crew for Decider.

In the end, it’s both beautiful and brutal. All-out mass murder in a blue-and-red darkness. Muzzle flashes erupting from dozens of crevices in a vast pastel cavern. Desperate men and women fighting to the last bullet. Lovable characters cracking under pressure. A final betrayal in the royal purple corridors of power. The season finale of Squid Game is everything you’d want from a season finale of Squid Game…except for the “finale” bit. There’s nothing final about this episode at all. 

I reviewed the season finale of Squid Game for Decider.

By the time you finish this season of Squid Game, you will have witnessed hundreds of murders. Hundreds! It’s baked right into the premise. Other than shows that involve actual war, this kind of body count is just unprecedented. It’s certainly unique in that in virtually every case the murder victims are unarmed and helpless, and are getting killed because they messed up while playing a children’s game. 

The question I ask myself when I watch things like this is simply, Why? Why am I watching something in which human lives are discarded like garbage, in graphic on-screen deaths so numerous you need the show to keep track of them for you? Is this some high-octane action-movie thing that’s using murder the way roller-coasters use downward slopes — to shock your system and give you a thrill? Does the violence have weight, does it cause emotional pain, does it speak to something broader than “look out for armed men in pink jumpsuits”? In short, what does the violence communicate, and is it a message worth hearing?

I’m wrestling with this question, I’ll admit. That’s because I think it’s very obvious Squid Game does, indeed, have something to say. The cartoonish bluntness with which its premise is stated — poor and indebted people are pitted against one another in sadistic games for a chance to win enough money to become solvent again, in a sham quasi-democracy overseen by the world’s richest men — tricks the mind into thinking it’s simplistic. 

But read that premise again, and tell me how it differs from conditions on the ground right here and now. Friends, the real world is simplistic at this point. Just as the lethal games are designed to evoke fun childhood pastimes, Squid Game just renders the real world’s cruel absurdity in caricature form. 

There is, however, such a thing as diminishing returns. With only one episode remaining in this short season, and a longer one behind us already, it’s fair to wonder what this heap of several hundred green-tracksuited corpses tells us that we didn’t learn from the previous pile. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Recapping this episode of Squid Game is a daunting prospect. Not because it’s complicated — on the contrary, it’s a simple as these things get. The players play a game, the survivors take a vote and then a break, they bond with each other, they start a new game, there are brief detours for the No-eul and Jun-ho side plots, the end. 

No, the problem stems from how much of the energy of Squid Game is lost if you summarize it. I mean, the show really is as simple as it sounds above. The characters sound equally sketched out when you break them down in text form: the kindly old woman, the genial jarhead, the arrogant celebrity, the gentle trans woman, the surprisingly human villain, and so on. I found all their interactions compelling, but if I were to sum up their conversations without the benefit of the performances conveying them, they’d seem gossamer thin.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Squid Game‘s second season for Decider.

The clock is ticking on Squid Game, and I don’t just mean for the contestants. In a short season of just seven episodes, we’ve just completed Episode 4 and haven’t even finished our second game out of six. Will the remaining games get rushed through via montage or some other means? Will the competition get cut short, perhaps by Gi-hun and Jun-ho’s mercenary team? Will the season finale end with a big TO BE CONTINUED? No matter the outcome, the result is going to be paced quite differently from the previous season. In other words, we’re guaranteed something novel.

I reviewed episode 4 of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

So much of what makes this episode good is also what makes it familiar: the giant doll, the X and O voting, the “Greta Gerwig’s Barbie remixed by M.C. Escher” staircase set by production designer by Chae Kyoung-sun, But what sells the drama of it all, what makes it feel like more than just a rehash, is what has changed: Gi-hun. When we see flashes of the initial season, he looks like a different person, floppy-haired and fresh-faced. Actor Lee Jung-jae’s transformation is subtle, but it’s like an optical illusion or a Magic Eye poster: Once you train yourself to see it, it’s kind of mind-blowing.

I reviewed Squid Game Season 2’s third episode for Decider.

For a director whose signature achievement is capturing claustrophobically cheery sets, Squid Games‘ Hwang Dong-hyuk has a hell of an eye for exterior shots. An amusement park, a hospital, a bridge underpass, even Gi-hun’s run-down Pink Motel: They’re all given a real sense of scale, color, drama by Hwang’s camera. Even given how gorgeously creepy all the interiors are once we get to the island and its game complex, I’ll still miss the view.

I reviewed the second episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Maybe it goes without saying, but like most episodes of Squid Game, this is a nasty bit of work. The episode stays fairly light until the end, characterized by joking banter between the loan sharks on one hand and Jun-ho and the fisherman (Oh Dal-su) who plucked him out of the sea after the Season 1 finale and now helps him search for the island. Then, all of a sudden, you have a protracted scene of queasy brutality and emotional torture straight out of The Deer Hunter, set to opera. This is followed almost immediately by a very similar scene in which the sociopathic Recruiter positively beams with joy over being a sociopath before shooting himself to death on camera. It’s a lot, but it’s supposed to be. If individual viewers find it’s too much to justify what is at root not all that different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man in conceptual terms, I get it.

But it sure looks good. We haven’t yet immersed ourselves in the pink pastel hellscape of the Game’s HQ yet, but the red and green lighting that falls on Gi-hun and the Recruiter during their face off, along with a sudden cut that jumps the 180-degree line so we suddenly see the bright red window against which they’re seated, had me thinking favorably of Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn’s own beautifully colored foreign-language Netflix thriller, Copenhagen Cowboy. (Go watch it, it rules.)

The most important contrast in this scene isn’t one of color, however, but of character, or more accurately of performance. Gong Yoo is positively demonic as the Recruiter here — eyes gleaming with the joy of cruelty, voice not skipping a beat when he reveals he killed his own father, mouth agape and grinning as he almost lewdly inserts the barrel of his gun into it before pulling the trigger. Lee Jung-jae, meanwhile, retains the sad-sack lovability that endeared him to audiences in the original, but it’s now tempered by trauma, grief, guilt, and the horror of knowledge. You still want this dear man to win, or at least to survive. Under the rules they make us play by, that’s usually the closest to winning you can get.

I’m covering the second season of Squid Game for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

Many of these missteps could be forgiven if the character work were particularly compelling. Unfortunately its core cast — Watson, Olivia Williams, Travis Fimmel and, until this episode at least, Mark Strong — swamp the rest of the show with their relative intensity. It is simply very hard to care about, say, Sister Lila walking around with glowing blue eyes and issuing commands in Dortea’s voice when we’ve seen how much more interesting this sort of behavior is when the twitchy, shuffling, humorous, kind of cracked Desmond Hart does it. Same with Empress Natalya, who lacks the in-over-his-head melancholy granted to Javicco by Strong, or the mettle brought to Valya and Tula by Watson and Williams. Simply put, the show is lopsided.

But there’s every possibility it will right the ship. Sophomore surprises, in which flawed but promising first seasons are succeeded by second runs that exceed them in every way are fairly common in Sci-fi-fantasy TV. “Foundation,” “The Wheel of Time” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” all took off during Season 2 in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible having watched their first seasons. “Dune: Prophecy” is most notable right now for where it goes wrong. But you have to believe that when things fall apart, they can be put back together.

I reviewed the season finale of Dune: Prophecy for the New York Times. (gift link!)