In DEVS, a young software engineer at a quantum computing company becomes entangled with its enigmatic billionaire owner after her boyfriend mysteriously dies on his first day on the job with the company’s secretive Devs team. This is one of the most emotionally powerful and thought-provoking sci-fi stories to come to TV in recent years.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, the show has a distinctive style. Slow burn, character-focused, provocative visuals and music, and progressively mind-blowing ideas that aren’t just thrown at you because they’re cool but viscerally confront you with their full meaning and implications for humanity.

At first, I enjoyed the aesthetic and smart dialogue but wasn’t sure if I wanted to sit through another mystery about a young woman fighting a sinister tech billionaire and company, with all the usual low-hanging fruit. I have to endure toxic levels of Elon Musk on a day to day basis purely through social media osmosis, I don’t need to see another version of him pilloried or lionized. And we all know tech companies very profitably sell control, rage farming, and dumbing-down as some kind of Utopian vision.

The murder, however, is simply a catalyst for fates to become entwined. The real mystery is the machine at the heart of Devs, what it does, and what that means. At first, the billionaire and the Devs team appear to be villainous, but we get to know them as well as we do our protagonist Lily Chan, and it’s honestly the best part of the show. The result is like a Ted Chiang short story, where a sci-fi concept is presented that is easy to digest, but then he says, okay, next course, and goes on digging into the topic until it becomes so thought out and real as to become mind blowing.

The result is just fantastic sci-fi. I recently praised THREE-BODY PROBLEM for its excellent adaptation of the novel’s fantastic ideas while improving on its weaker elements, notably the characters and plotting. DEVS goes far beyond that show, simpler in ideas but making them far more powerful and gut-punching.

Highly recommended if you like smart TV.

SASQUATCH SUNSET is a crazy, creatively ambitious, charming, and ultimately not that exciting movie.

The movie follows a family of four creatures–mythical or merely obscure, depending on where you stand on Bigfoot–as they roam around a Pacific Northwest rain forest. We see them eating, experimenting, amusing themselves, copulating.

And that’s kind of it, aside from a few tragedies. If slow and absurd with plenty of anatomical and frequently gross humor is your thing, stop reading this right now and go watch the movie, you’ll dig it.

The habits of the Sasquatch are based on popular lore–their strange calls, stink, tree whacking, and so on–and portrayed in a loving and sometimes charming way, set among natural beauty. It’s almost like Wes Anderson decided to make a nature documentary about apes. The prosthetics and makeup are pretty good–it’s hard to believe that’s Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough under there–and with a little willing suspension of disbelief, you’re inside the Sasquatch world, sometimes seeing the human through their eyes.

The problem is that it’s not terribly interesting. There aren’t so much characters we can relate to as creatures we’re simply observing. With no real central conflict or story, it gets old fast, and it’s hard to tell what point the film is making except maybe producer Ari Aster and Zellner and Jesse Eisenberg got super high one night and decided on a dare to make the movie.

The result is an experience that is just that. I don’t regret seeing it, and I didn’t think it was bad. I just didn’t get it, and it felt like its creative ambition way exceeded what they were able to accomplish.

Seeing it made me think of CHIMP EMPIRE, which actually culled a compelling and dramatic story from the lives of African chimpanzees, and made me want to watch it again.

In TRIPLE FRONTIER (2019), a group of retired American soldiers reunite for a heist in South America that will put their warfighting skills, friendship, and moral compasses to the extreme test. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. Not everything worked for me, but I liked the overall result and loved the effort.

Santiago “Pope” Garcia works as an adviser for a government in South America that is fighting the drug cartels. He learns that a kingpin is keeping all his cash at a remote house in the jungle that he turned into a fortress. Tired of mercenary work, Pope hatches a plan to steal the money for himself, but he’ll need help. So he goes home to get the gang back together in typical heist movie fashion. Only, in this case, when the gang was together, they fought in the War on Terror and racked up a haunting body count.

Director J.C. Chandor is known for making morally gray movies, and TRIPLE FRONTIER is no exception. I went into this expecting a typical heist movie with an American soldier twist and got a lot more. Though it doesn’t explore any big issues related to the War on Terror or War on Drugs, the ones closer to home are articulated pretty well. These are men who served their country with distinction, only to be left with little or nothing at the end of it except moral injury and the constant struggle to get by. This time, they are doing it for themselves, but to succeed, they may have to compromise the one thing a soldier truly owns, which is their story and sense of honor.

From Oscar Isaac as Pope to Ben Affleck and Pedro Pascal, the cast is terrific. The action is surprisingly realistic; the soldiers are supremely badass, but they look like they are earning it. The setting is beautiful and frightening in its brutality. The harrowing trek through the jungle to escape is fraught with ethical dilemmas and physical challenge.

On the downside, the characters are not supremely well drawn, which creates a weird situation in that since this isn’t just another mindless heist movie, we expect much deeper characters. I didn’t hold the movie to a higher standard, but I have to agree that when the conflict shifts to interpersonal conflict, it doesn’t feel organic nor does it have any real impact. This is a plot-driven movie, that’s just how it is. Though I didn’t particularly care if most of them made it or not.

In all, I really liked it. A total worthwhile watch and a pleasant surprise to discover as I’d never heard of it. I was particularly interested to watch it as–sorry for a small plug here–I’d written QRF, a novel in a similar vein where a group of retired soldiers comes together to do a “heist,” only their heist is to rescue a kidnapped comrade in Mosul during the Iraqi civil war of 2016. If you like TRIPLE FRONTIER, you might check it out.

In DUNE: PART TWO, Paul Atreides struggles both to find his place among the Fremen fighters resisting the Harkonnen occupation of Dune and his own apparent destiny as both Dune’s messiah and the Kwisatz Haderach, a super-being. This is pure spectacle, beautiful world-building, and a model for how to adapt a complex classic novel.

The end result is Denis Villeneueve gave me a reason to go back to the movie theater.

DUNE has a complex story, but it’s not terribly difficult to follow. The galaxy is ruled by great houses that in turn serve the emperor. A strategically vital planet is Dune, where a spice is harvested that enables faster-than-light space travel. The Atreides family is given control, though it’s a trap set by the Harkonnen family that results in a wipe-out. Paul is a major target, as a mystical order has been manipulating bloodlines to produce a super-being that can access his ancestral memories and see the future, and his mother disobeyed orders by bearing Duke Atreides a son instead of a daughter, risking a dangerous aberration. After the massacre, only Paul is left along with his mother, now living among the Fremen natives who dream of a messiah to lead them to holy war and independence–a myth the mystical order themselves created and that Paul’s mother now manipulates to benefit her son.

The second movie begins with Paul trying to find his place among the Fremen, some of whom worship him while others don’t trust him as a foreigner. He doesn’t want to be the messiah, as he believes it will lead to mass death across the galaxy. But events keep pushing him to realize his inevitable destiny.

Pretty much everything worked for me with this movie, from the gorgeous aesthetics, scenery, and costumes to the strange cultures to the solid acting performances to the breathtaking action. The movie feels epic, something I haven’t seen in a movie in quite a while. It feels even bigger than the first movie. The only blemish might be the human drama element feels a bit trim and distant, though this didn’t really bother me. Overall, I consider DUNE: PART TWO a masterpiece and highly recommend it. Fingers crossed Villeneueve gets funded to make it a trilogy.