I’m a huge fan of THE EXPANSE and looked forward to Season 6 with great excitement. Aside from the relatively rough Season 4, which was okay but not mind-blowing in my opinion, every season was incredibly strong, drawing on terrific source material while beautifully adapting it as a screen series. Season 6 was okay but overall disappointing for me, not quite Season 8 GAME OF THRONES but with some familiar feelings.

In this season, James Holden and his crew are exhausted after months fighting Marcos Inaros and his Free Navy, which seeks to control the Rings and therefore all the resources of the worlds beyond. If they can stop asteroids from being hurled at Earth, the UN and Mars can go on the offensive. When they do, it leads to a climactic battle that may forever redefine the final relations between Earth, Mars, and the Belt. While all this is happening, each episode starts with a scene on a planet on the other side of the Ring, where colonists are conducting some type of research and a young girl makes a startling discovery about its indigenous life.

The season has its strengths and powerful moments, but overall it feels rushed and clumsy, and while it catches up to the books and offers nothing more to happen–the show has been canceled, and the next book in the series from what I hear is set 30 years later, requiring a reboot–it leaves a lot on the table. Notably, the subplot on the planet that for me didn’t really go anywhere and wasn’t needed. Besides that, the characters don’t feel like themselves. Gone is the cracking dialogue, the human moments that made the sci-fi come alive and feel lived in. Everybody feels like they’re economically checking scenes so they can get it over with in a short season of six episodes, while oddly some subplots, such as the relationship between Inaros and his son Philip, have falling out and reconciliations that repeat again and again. A power play at the very end, which apparently wasn’t in the book, is a TV trope we didn’t need to see again.

Overall, it didn’t crash and burn and tick me off the way GAME OF THRONES did, but I was hardly wowed. In all, THE EXPANSE was one of the best things in my opinion to happen to sci-fi on TV, brilliant and exciting and filled with strong characters. I wish it had ended on a stronger note, but I’m grateful for what I was able to get, and I’ll continue reading the books to flesh out my fix.

By Denis Villeneuve, one of my favorite directors, DUNE (2021) delivers a visually stunning adaptation of the Frank Herbert classic, though it struggles with its massive source material.

Confession: I liked the David Lynch adaptation a lot, at least until the last act turned into a rushed, jumbled, sometimes laugh out loud mess. I tried to watch the TV series adaptation but couldn’t sit through it. When I heard Villeneuve was bringing it to the big screen, my first thought was, does the world need this? Then I caught the trailer and thought, it just might. The new DUNE is like a love letter to science fiction film making as much as it a compelling and artistically made film, and it captures its own identity even as it feels familiar.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it follows Paul Atreides, a young man born into a powerful noble house that rules a planet in a galactic empire that is not unlike the Holy Roman Empire or maybe Westeros from GAME OF THRONES. When his house is called by the Emperor to rule Arrakis, a desert planet where spice is mined that is used by navigators for interstellar travel, it feels like a trap they have no choice but to enter. As things go bad, Paul, the product of centuries of specially woven bloodlines, is thrust toward a destiny he does not yet fully understand.

Visually, the film is stunning. It’s brooding, beautiful, and strange; I wish I’d seen it in a theater. The world these character inhabit is high-tech in some things but not in others, giving it an exotic mix of archaic and future that is compelling and doesn’t allow an easy technological fix to problems. Compared to the Lynch version, the story is far less psychedelic and appears stripped down to a level where it all feels Shakespearean. The characters are terrifically rendered, in no small part due to the incredible cast. Timothée Chalamet is like a male Kristen Stewart in that he’s rarely cast in roles demanding a lot of range, but he’s so awesome to watch brood in this that he pulls it off the way he did in THE KING. I liked how the Emperor doesn’t appear on screen, creating a sense of mystery; a lot of the film is like that, allowing my imagination to fill in missing details. The Harkonens aren’t clownish in this version but extremely menacing and brutal, making them perfect villains.

It wasn’t perfect for me, however. Some of the dialogue feels like a placeholder. I actually think Lynch handled the big attack in a more exciting and compelling way. After Villeneuve got past the attack, he ran into the same struggle Lynch did with connecting Paul with the local people. In the new DUNE, the last act sags and struggles and appears more focused on setting up the next film. Some old-fashioned tropes, such as the boy prophesied to the be “the one,” the natives leaning toward noble savage stereotypes, and so on haven’t particularly aged well.

But okay, that aside, I absolutely loved it, and I’m looking forward to the next film. More, please.

While bedridden with COVID, one of the things that made the hours pass with the medicine of laughter was a binge through all five seasons of RICK AND MORTY. This cartoon series is packed with interesting ideas, though its later seasons packed a far weaker punch for me.

The show started with a short film by Justin Roiland that parodied BACK TO THE FUTURE and became a show for Adult Swim with partner Dan Harmon. It follows Rick Sanchez, the smartest man in the universe who has invented interdimensional travel, who lives his estranged daughter Beth and her husband Jerry and teen kids Morty and Summer. For various reasons, Rick needs Morty to help him on his adventures across planets and dimensions, and drags him, sometimes unwillingly, into situations that are usually comedic and sometimes, for Morty, dangerous and horrifying.

The show’s creators called it an extended fart joke wrapped in a study of nihilism, and that is certainly a good summation, though the humor deserves credit as often being far more sophisticated than Roiland and Harmon claim. As far as the nihilism goes, however, their claim is pretty spot on, making the whole morally ambiguous at best, unpredictable to an extent, and tinged with a little sadness. Rick is aware of death’s permanence and that existence is therefore essentially meaningless; the typical human answer is either nihilism or humanism. Unfortunately for Rick, because there are an infinite number of dimensions where things turn out differently, he can simply hop to another if things get too dicey, a wonderful thing though it robs him of having to deal with consequences or enjoying the value of real human relationships that might save him from nihilism. Morty suffers along, becoming more self-sufficient as he learns Rick is right about existence, while also occasionally teaching Rick about the saving value of love.

These themes come to life in the early seasons through conflict between Rick being a mad scientist and espousing a nihilistic point of view, and the family obsessing on something important to them but ultimately shown to be unimportant. In each episode, Rick and Morty find themselves in a wacky, life-threatening situation Morty confronts with angst and trying to do the moral thing and Rick confronts with alcohol and a callous disregard for everything aside from his own immediate interest. This is where the show really shines, this conflict but mostly through the crazy adventures and ideas where anything can happen because nothing matters. Examples include a planet where men and women formed separate societies, a galactic spa where the toxic aspects of your personality are extracted to form a separate purged entity, a microverse built to serve as a spaceship’s battery, parasites that take the form of lovable cartoon characters, and so on, usually packaged as a spoof of popular movies such as INCEPTION, etc. Celebrity guests playing the part of an episode’s characters and a post-credit scene add to the fun.

The first three seasons shine with pretty much every episode being a standout for its humor and ideas. By seasons 4 and 5, however, things get a little soft as the family stops caring about its old values and simply go along with Rick’s worldview, the writers get meta about the toxic core of the show’s fan base and seemingly their own struggle with the show’s identity as either fun and light episodes versus an overall arc, and none of the characters seemingly have anywhere healthy to grow to offer a counterpoint to Rick’s cynicism. The last episode of season 5 was pretty smart and seemed to offer a hard reset, and I’m curious about what they’ll do next with subsequent seasons.

Overall, I really enjoyed the ride and recommend it. It’s smart, funny, rewatchable, and filled with interesting ideas.

As I get older and more jaded, I am always on the lookout for something original and provocative, but I still find joy in a very simple story that is well told, which brings me to THOR: RAGNAROK. Like most other Marvel fare, it is fairly predictable and leans hard into the campy humor to defuse any drama, but it’s just good fun, the best kind of comfort food.

In this third film in the THOR franchise, Odin is missing from Asgard, which results in his firstborn, Hela, the goddess of death, returning to claim the throne. This unites Thor and Loki to fight her, but first they have to free themselves from a planet ruled by the Grandmaster, where they find the Hulk and the last of the Valkyries to enlist as allies. The story throws away or puts aside a lot of stuff in preceding movies, notably the Warriors Three and Thor’s relationship with Jane Foster, but I was fine with it.

As with other Marvel films, RAGNAROK boasts some stellar actors, notably Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Tessa Thompson, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, and Jeff Goldblum. Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston as always perfectly bring the iconic main characters alive, though this Thor is a little sillier than in previous films built around the character (as is The Hulk, honestly). There’s a pretty funny cameo with Matt Damon and Sam Neill. I’m usually not a fan of Tessa Thompson, but she’s great in this. Taika Waititi directs, keeping things buoyant and energetic with fairly quick pacing and some terrific action sequences, particularly when Thor gets his mojo going for some god-level violence.

And that’s it, that’s the review. A true popcorn flick.