Tag: Star Wars

#REVIEW: Superman (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews3 Comments

I’m just gonna say it: James Gunn’s Superman is the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen. Please take that with whatever amount of salt you like; my opinions are subject to change and enthusiasm can take me on a ride from time to time, so it’s possible that in six months I’ll have cooled down a bit for whatever reason. The only movies, though, that are even close to this one are the original Christopher Reeve Superman, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Avengers movie. And if I’m being honest, Superman ’78 hasn’t aged as well as I might have wanted it to, and I think this version is much better as a movie although I’m not quite willing to put David Corenswet above Christopher Reeve just yet. It doesn’t have the emotional baggage those movies have; I’d been waiting for Iron Man and Avengers for decades when they finally came out, and I grew up watching Superman ’78 over and over and over again.

It’s difficult to overstate how shocked I am to be saying this. In retrospect, I should have put more stock in the tagline they chose for this movie: Look up. It’s fucking brilliant on a whole bunch of levels, but the most important thing about it is that it speaks directly to this movie’s sense of aspiration, the idea that Superman is, first and foremost, a hero, someone who wants nothing more than to do good and to leave the world better than he found it. Superman has not been an aspirational figure for some time, and I’m not even willing to admit he was in the last three movies that had a dude with an S on his chest in them. Hell, two of Reeve’s movies weren’t great, and one of those two was genuinely hot garbage. I’ve really only genuinely liked two movies with this character in them before last Saturday. I am immensely, irrationally protective of Superman, and this movie simply gets him right. Finally. Finally.

I have been waiting for a very long time to watch another Superman movie that understands the character. Going in, I figured that at best I wouldn’t be trying to get the sun to explode on the way out of the theater, and I might have just decided to lay down in traffic if it had been genuinely bad. 2025 has been a terrible enough year without Superman getting fucked over again.

But let’s get into some details. Buckle in; I’ve got a lot to say about this movie, although I don’t think this is going to reach the epic length of some of my Star Wars reviews. Then again, there have been a couple of those that I didn’t think were going to end up being very long that ended up over 10K words, so …

(This won’t be completely spoiler-free, by the way, but I’ll try not to mention anything that wasn’t made obvious by the trailers.)

Let’s start with the casting. There’s not a single weak spot in the main cast. Not one. David Corenswet is amazing, although I’d have liked to see more of his Clark– even during one of his “Clark scenes,” the interview with Lois in her apartment, he’s actually playing Superman wearing Clark’s clothes. We never get anything approaching the epic Reeve transformation scene I linked the other day, but the characters are differentiated enough that it works. Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult are both phenomenal, and Hoult’s Lex in particular manages to make scene-chewing monologuing scary. Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy Olsen is the most useful Jimmy Olsen I’ve ever seen on screen. I liked the Justice Gang enough that I want a movie just for the three of them– Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific are both outstanding, and I’m gonna have to be careful that I’m not overusing my superlatives, but they take a character I’ve never liked and a character I know nothing about and make me want to see movies about them. Isabela Merced doesn’t have as much to do as Hawkgirl, but I enjoyed her nonetheless. Pruitt Taylor Vance and Neva Howell as Jon and Martha Kent are flawless. And María Gabriela de Faría brings a twitchy vulnerability to her Engineer, another character that I don’t know much about and want to see more of.

My wife commented that this did sort of feel like a sequel to a movie that they hadn’t made, which I can see, and there are a handful of characters who feel like they’re there just to be there– you need Perry White, of course, and I liked Wendell Pierce’s casting even though I’m not a hundred percent certain they ever actually said Perry’s name. Mikaela Hoover and Beck Bennett as Cat Grant and Steve Lombard are just sorta there. Anthony Carrigan’s Metamorpho is scary and sad and creepy, which … again, I don’t know a ton about Metamorpho, but from what I do, that’s about right. The worst thing I can say about the casting– and, hell, one of the worst things I can say about the movie— is that I don’t quite get Eve Teschmacher as a character, but that’s not Sara Sampaio’s fault.

This is one of the best-shot action films I’ve seen in a long time, and even scenes in relative darkness are clear. You can actually tell what’s going on during the fights, and it’s amazing that a movie that features a kaiju the size of a skyscraper never manages to disappear into smearing CGI all over everything. Every punch that gets thrown has weight. I’ve seen a few people say that Mr. Terrific’s solo fight about halfway through the film is the best scene in the entire movie, and … I don’t quite agree (the best scene in the movie is between Clark and his dad, at the farm) but it’s up there with Yondu and his arrow as far as Gunn’s action scenes go.

The score uses John Williams’ iconic original music to its benefit without feeling enslaved to it, and while I can’t hum any of the other themes without seeing the movie again, it definitely puts its own spin on things. They could have copy-and-pasted half of Williams’ score and been just fine, so the idea that they added to it and changed it and it worked is an impressive achievement.

Let’s talk about the Star Wars movies for a minute, though. I’ve completely turned on two of three of the new trilogy movies, and while I loved The Last Jedi I will probably never watch it again. The Force Awakens was made retroactively worse by Rise of Skywalker in a way that I’m not going to explain right now. But part of what annoyed me about the discourse around Rise is the people who were insisting that it was a repudiation of The Last Jedi. This was mostly people who didn’t like Last Jedi saying this, and those folks are, in general, not to be trusted– but it went from simple shit like he smashed his helmet in the second movie, and has a new helmet in the third! to slightly more serious if still wrong critiques like insisting that Kylo Ren telling Rey that her parents were nobodies who left her to die in a ditch was absolutely 100% meant to be canonical truth and not Ren deliberately making shit up to fuck with her, which was obviously the case to anyone with a smidge of media literacy. I didn’t like the idea that she was a Palpatine, but it wasn’t a repudiation of anything at all.

James Gunn’s Superman, on the other hand, is a direct thumb in the eye of the Angry Murder Alien movies, and I couldn’t be any happier about it.

Over and over again during this movie, you see Superman stop fighting in order to save people. The kaiju wrecks a floor of a skyscraper and he stops to make sure everyone is OK before rejoining the fight. He protects people, throwing his body in between civilians and danger over and over again. He literally saves a squirrel at one point. And while the climactic fight in Metropolis at the end of the movie probably did as much property damage as the climax to Angry Murder Alien 1, the movie takes it time to make sure everyone understands that they are evacuating Metropolis while the fight is going on. Is it completely logical and reasonable to believe they knocked over a couple dozen huge skyscrapers and no one got killed? Eh, probably not. But you don’t care, because by this point in the movie it’s been made clear over and over again that Superman is there to save people, that people believe that Superman’s job is to protect them, and you’re willing to believe that if Superman says Metropolis has been evacuated, then it’s damn well been evacuated.

I never understood why any of the Murderverse characters wanted to be heroes. Calling their little group the Justice League made no damn sense– can you name any time in any of the main DC movies that anyone other than Wonder Woman cared about justice? That’s a real question! And you can’t do it! Lex Luthor would still be an evil, murderous bastard if Superman had never shown up. Nothing in Angry Murder Alien 1 or Angry Murder Alien Vs. Bat-Themed Ninja Killer would have happened if Superman had never come to earth!

Corenswet’s Superman wants, before anything else, to do good and to save people. His desire to keep people from getting hurt sets the entire story of the film in motion. When he’s fighting the two physical villains of the film, Ultraman and the Engineer, he tries to talk them out of fighting.

Superman’s greatest power as a character isn’t his heat vision, or his strength, or his ability to fly. It’s that he refuses to accept that there’s ever nothing he can do. That if put in an impossible situation where the only way out is to kill or to let someone die, he does the impossible thing anyway. They effectively put him in that exact situation in this film, where there’s a dimensional anomaly eating Metropolis at the exact same time as a nation on the other side of the world is being invaded by a technologically superior force and the citizens are literally crying out his name to come and save them. The movie wants you to think that he’s going to have to choose, that he’ll either have to let people die in Metropolis or let people die in Jarhanpur.

No. He’s fucking Superman. That’s not how it works. He’s going to save everybody. That’s what makes him Superman. And he does.

(There is also a brilliant, if maybe a little overly snarky, scene where Lex Luthor reveals that he has a literal army of genetically enhanced monkeys manipulating the internet into hating Superman. It’s … maybe a little too on the nose. But I loved it anyway.)

Little spoiler coming. It’s not going to be anything that surprises you if you’ve thought much about the movie and it’s absolutely not going to ruin anything, but still.

This actually ties into the only thing I can think of that I really didn’t like about this movie. The film has three bad guys: Luthor, Ultraman, who is a black-suited Strong Silent Guy for 90% of the movie, and the Engineer, whose bloodstream Lex has filled with nanites so that she can create weapons out of her body and interface with computers. You’re meant to believe (although this is a comic book movie) that Ultraman doesn’t survive the movie, and while the Engineer’s fate isn’t quite as clear, she gets knocked unconscious in a really dangerous place late in the movie and you never see her again after that. She could very well still be alive; her status is more ambiguous than Ultraman’s.

I’m not going to get into why, but I would really have liked to see Superman work harder to save both of these characters. He’s kind of got his hands full with other shit when Ultraman goes down, but he tries to talk both of them off of the ledge and away from Luthor during their final battle, and you get the feeling that the Engineer, at least, is listening. Again, she’s kind of fascinating– she’s twitchy and broken and walks with a limp when she isn’t doing metahuman shit and, while I might change my mind after a second viewing, you get the feeling that her enhancement wasn’t entirely her decision. I can do without more Ultraman, and Superman doesn’t directly kill him, but I feel like he should have shown more concern for him, for reasons I’m not going to talk about– this is a guy who lectures Guy Gardner when the kaiju dies, for crying out loud– but I want to see María Gabriela de Faría again. I’ll be paying the closest attention to the last parts of this fight when I inevitably see this movie again.

Okay, that’s it for the spoilers.

You should see this movie. You should see this movie if you love superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you’re tired of superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you don’t usually see movies at all. This movie deserves to be extraordinarily successful. 2025 has been a miserable fucking year for anyone with a trace of a human soul, and it’s probably going to get much, much worse before it gets better. This movie foregrounds hope, and truth, and justice, and a better tomorrow, better than anything I’ve seen in years. It’s a movie that I really feel like America needs right now. And it’s really hard to imagine how I could have loved it any more than I did.

Look up.

On my inner child

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I know I talk about this every single time I put a Lego set together, but holy shit, the people who design these things are the smartest motherfuckers on Earth. I’m building the TIE Interceptor right now, which has been sitting on the floor in my office waiting for the right mood to strike me for probably several months now, and the cockpit and interior structure of this thing is just nuts. You can’t really see how detailed the cockpit is at this angle, and I couldn’t get any good pictures of it one way or another, but there are multiple screens in there for the minifigure to look at, along with two control sticks and a little radar screen with a picture of an X-Wing on it. My favorite little detail– see the two tiny gray dots at the top of the cockpit, underneath the two pale yellow studs? They wanted those two triangle pieces attached to them to be at an angle, and the pieces holding them at that angle are clearly guns. They took gun pieces from some other minifigure and reused them to hold the “screens” at the right angle.

It’s so creative it makes me sick. I could never be smart enough to design one of these damn things, and I’m in awe the whole time I’m building them. The model you get at the end isn’t even the point anymore. It’s all about marveling at the ingenuity it took to create these damn things, and wondering what these motherfuckers could do if they applied their skills to curing cancer instead of making toys.

(Oh, shit, I think I have the red pegs backwards on one of the wings. I’m gonna have to check that, before it’s too late to fix.)

(Actually the top row of pegs was backwards on both wings. Fixed!)

Anyway, I spent the day in Michigan visiting my wife’s family, and continuing to be vaguely weirded out by the fact that while her cousins are all perfectly nice people, I have never particularly clicked with all of them, but every time I see them lately one of their kids suddenly becomes interesting. I swear I have talked about this before, although I can’t find the post now; my favorite member of her extended family is her closest cousin’s younger daughter, which is weird, and I’m at the point where when we go to these things I just assume I’m going to spend most of my time talking to the generation underneath us more than I’m actually going to talk to her cousins.(*) It’s less weird than it could be; everybody’s in or out of college now and my son is the youngest person at these things by a mile, which is too bad for him. We were at this particular cousin’s house for the first time today, and one of her daughters, who I have known since she was ten and is now 26, finally actually started talking today? And she combines being a horse girl and an emo kid somehow, and I find that combination kind of hilariously endearing.

Jesus. I’ve known these people for sixteen years? I really should learn everyone’s names.

(*) Her uncle Bill is super cool too, for what it’s worth. So I spend my time talking to the youngest and the oldest people there.

On details

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Spent the last couple of days putting this little thing together:

I took the picture from a couple of different angles and then realized if I was going to give you a picture of the Tantive IV, it really ought to let you see the engines, which are the most iconic part of the ship. And once again, while putting a Lego set together, I found myself musing on why the designers make the decisions they do on certain things, and just how dedicated these crazy bastards are to including Easter eggs. To wit, an earlier, in-progress photo of the front of the ship:

What you don’t see there is a third two-stud stack behind the white and blue one. That one has a white base and a brown top, to go with the one that is gold-on-gold and the one that is blue-on-white. Note where this is in the picture above; it’s completely invisible and covered up by the pieces that attach to those clamps on the side.

Why are those there?

Well, it’s C-3PO, R2-D2 and Princess Leia, of course. Each rendered as two single studs in the right color. And it’s just there to put a little smile on your face as you’re putting the set together, and as a little secret that you know about once the build is finished. The Tantive IV, of course, is the ship that Leia is trying to escape Darth Vader in during the opening moments of A New Hope, and so of course she has to pass the Death Star plans on to the droids.

In other news, as of last night I thought I’d fixed my computer again, only to spend forty fucking minutes trying to get the damn thing to launch Chrome this afternoon so that I could work on writing practice finals for my classes this week. The following all happened:

  • Apple Music crashed, repeatedly;
  • Chrome crashed, repeatedly;
  • One hard restart;
  • After the restart, my desktop images on my extra monitors were on the wrong monitors (?!?)
  • My touchpad lost connectivity three times, and had to be turned off and turned back on again;
  • Audio was coming through the wrong monitor at one point;
  • Every so often I could move the mouse around but couldn’t click and the haptics on my touchpad were disabled, and every so often I could click on things but not move the mouse;
  • Attempting to open the systems settings crashed every other open app, then the system settings opened as if nothing had gone wrong;
  • Probably a few other things.

At this point, I have officially caved and ordered a new screaming fucking beast of a computer that is so much more computer than I need that it’s actually kind of sad. Like, I’ll need to develop a new hobby or go back to gaming on YouTube or something to justify this purchase. Naturally, after dinner, the computer had mysteriously reverted to working just fine, and I’ve been sitting here for just over an hour, writing the two initial practice exams and this blog post with no issues of any kind. I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’ve had enough of dealing with it.

SPOILER #REVIEW: Obi-Wan Kenobi

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, TelevisionLeave a comment

I’m going to be honest, here: if I had written this post a couple of days ago, closer to when I actually watched the show, it would have been much longer and, frankly, more interesting. All of my brain space for the last couple of days has been taken up by working my way through my To Do list and trying to rewrite the Constitution, which I wish was a fucking joke and isn’t.

Here’s the non-spoiler review of this show: It was pretty good until the final episode, but only pretty good, and the final episode was fucking stellar. Lemme toss a little separation line here, so that those of you who don’t want to read the spoilery parts have adequate time to dip out and come back later:

In some ways, the show’s most amazing trick happened in the first episode. I wasn’t exactly digging around for spoilers on this show, but I wouldn’t have bothered avoiding them, and the fact that I’d not even seen a rumor that Lil’ Leia was going to be a major character? Is fucking unbelievable. I have been a frequent and noisy proponent of casting Millie Bobby Brown as Leia and giving her a movie or two (and there are rumors flying recently about that finally happening) but she’s too old to have been in this show and, my God, Vivien Lyra Blair was amazing. I was entertained at the idea that people were complaining about her looking too young, as the actress is the exact same age that Leia was supposed to be; I can only assume that these people haven’t seen children in a while. Sometimes they are small! It happens. I promise.

And this gets right to the crux of the weirdness of the show: at first glance, everything about it seems to utterly screw up the continuity that A New Hope set up, or at least screws up all the assumptions that absolutely everyone made, but are never actually specifically stated in the film.

Because Leia never says she and Obi-Wan have never met.(***) And Vader’s line about “when I left you, I was but the learner” does not actually mean that the last time they met was the battle on Mustafar. In fact, and I’m literally just realizing this right now as I’m typing this sentence, it’s really hard to reconcile the words “when I left you” with what happened there, since Obi-Wan left him for dead. And knowing that Obi-Wan already knew Leia adds a nice resonance to his last moments during the fight in ANH with Vader; just before he dies he looks to his left and sees both of them, at which point he recognizes that his job is done and sacrifices himself. I’d always assumed before that he was just looking at Luke, y’know?

So this show is, in a lot of ways, the best kind of retcon: never (that I’ve noticed, at least) does it explicitly contradict anything that came before, but it recontextualizes some moments in ways that are really interesting. The whole “from a certain point of view” conversation with Luke, where Obi-Wan says that Darth Vader betrayed and murdered Anakin? Vader literally told him that, and it’s interesting to think about that (outstanding) sequence in the final episode where Vader’s voice synthesizer is flipping back and forth between Anakin’s voice and Vader’s, because I genuinely don’t know if that’s Anakin talking and he’s trying to assuage Obi-Wan’s guilt or if it’s Vader talking and he’s bragging.(*) And what happens next? Obi-Wan calls him “Darth” for the first time.

Again: we all know that the real reason that Obi-Wan Kenobi called Darth Vader “Darth” on the Death Star is because at the time George Lucas hadn’t really decided that “Darth” was a title and not Vader’s first name. But from within the story? It’s kind of awesome, because to my recollection Obi-Wan never once uses the word “Vader.” Once whoever that is tells him that Vader is responsible for Anakin Skywalker’s death, Obi-Wan reverts to calling him “Darth,” because as far as he’s concerned there’s no person there anymore. There’s just the Sith. And in context, it makes perfect sense. Frankly, it’s disrespectful, and in a way I really enjoy.

You could probably criticize the show for setting up yet another situation where Kenobi leaves Vader for dead. At this point, he’s absolutely convinced his friend is gone, and they don’t give him any kind of out for not killing him; Vader’s incapacitated and he’s right there. I get why Obi-Wan leaves him on Mustafar. I don’t get why he doesn’t end Vader here, on whatever (very cool, by the way) planet that was.

(Oh, one criticism, just for the hell of it: the show leans a bit too hard into the idea that every Star Wars planet is two or three square kilometers in size and exactly the same climate everywhere. I generally liked Reva as a character but that bit where she just shows up to some random-ass spot on Tatooine and asks the first random-ass moisture farmer she meets where to find “Owen?” Come the fuck on. Also, I absolutely hate the post-sequels decision that anyone can get from anywhere in the galaxy to anywhere in the galaxy in seconds. It’s lightspeed, Goddammit, not, like, Warp Ninety.)(**)

Anyway. This is another place where the overarching story constrains what Kenobi was able to do. Obviously he can’t kill Darth Vader nine years before A New Hope, because Vader’s got three movies left. But they should have given us a reason Vader survived, and they didn’t. Obi-Wan just didn’t kill him, because reasons.

I also really liked Vader’s final conversation with Palpatine. The last thing he does before (he thinks) leaving Kenobi buried and dead is call him “Master,” and while I don’t remember the precise line of dialogue in the conversation, he has to tell Palpatine that he is his only Master who matters during that last conversation. Nicely done, and again, gives Vader a reason not to spend the next nine years constantly chasing Obi-Wan like we all felt like he ought to be doing.

So yeah, this is in Definitely Watch territory for me. Better than either season of The Mandalorian, and infinitely better than Book of Boba Fett. I’ll watch Andor, I suppose, but I don’t have especially high hopes for it, as Cassian Andor was one of the few characters in Rogue One that I didn’t feel like I wanted to know more about. Give me the Goddamn Baze Malbus/Chirrut Imwe show that I want! Give it to me now!

(*) It’s not clear at all how much actual work Hayden Christensen had to do in this show. Obviously Young Anakin shows up a few times, and guys, if there was ever a time to use your creepy de-aging magic, this was it, because Hayden’s got some serious crow’s feet– but a robot imitating James Earl Jones does the voice, there’s someone else in the suit doing the fighting, and I think there was even another person involved in the costume somewhere– but I’m pretty sure that’s him under all that makeup during this scene, and for what it’s worth, for a guy who’s trying to convey a whole lot of complex emotions with, effectively, one eye, and that eye covered by a contact lens nonetheless, it’s a really impressive little bit of acting.

(**) Last gripe: way too many people survive getting stabbed with lightsabers in this movie show. Okay, granted, it’s a self-cauterizing wound, so I suspect getting stabbed with a lightsaber is actually a little better than getting stabbed with a blade, but in general lightsabers are surprisingly nonlethal in this series– Reva survives getting stabbed twice!– and the bit with the Grand Inquisitor felt especially unnecessary.

(***) This is the third postscript because I didn’t realize it until after hitting publish, so this is a late edit: this also recontextualizes Han and Leia’s otherwise completely inexplicable decision to name their son Ben, which you might now was the name of Luke’s son in the pre-Disney Expanded Universe books. Han thought Kenobi was nuts, and Leia, as far as anyone knew, barely even laid eyes on him. It even makes “Ben” a better name choice than “Obi-Wan” might have been, because Ben Kenobi was the guy who Leia was saved by. I don’t know if they even thought about this when they were writing the show, but it fixes one of the more nitpicky problems I had with the sequel trilogy in a way I really like.

Looking for a fandom that doesn’t suck

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy2 Comments

I think if I encounter one more video or Tweet of someone explaining a complicated “theory” involving either the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars, I’m going to curb-stomp my phone. Visual media in general is dead to me outside of video games; if it’s not a cooking show I can’t motivate myself to watch it any longer, and The Book of Boba Fett is terrible. I thought for an hour or so that we might be watching Eternals tonight now that it’s streaming and I can watch it without paying extra for it, but my wife has decided she’s healthy enough to make an appearance at work tomorrow (I have the day off, of course) so she doesn’t want to stay up for it.

I need a new fandom I can dig my teeth into, something that isn’t personally exhausting and whose fans aren’t spectacularly toxic.

What’s good out there? What should I be paying attention to?

On small victories

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I promised myself some time ago that, once my credit cards were all paid off, I would reward myself with a lightsaber. Well, I’ve held a $0 credit card balance for a few months now, minus a couple of reasonable things (I paid for the hotel last weekend on one of my cards, then came home and immediately paid it off) and … well, I haven’t ordered a saber yet, because I’ve managed to convince myself I’m still in the “research” stage, thus preventing me from dropping $500 on something that is the absolute pinnacle of “meaningless nerd cruft I don’t need.” Shit, I don’t even know if I like Star Wars any longer; one of the many ways the last several years have sucked is watching a number of things I used to love turn into even more entries into the “shit that makes me tired” category.

But I don’t want this to be another obnoxiously maudlin post; I want to focus on the fact that I am remaining (somewhat) financially disciplined by 1) not wantonly ordering a lightsaber today and further 2) determining that there must be at least twice the cost of said lightsaber in savings before said lightsaber is ordered. Which, okay, isn’t going to hold me for long, but kept me from spending money today.

The above, by the way, hasn’t yet achieved the status of “my lightsaber,” because 1) if it’s a fixed color, the blade is going to be yellow and 2) I’m serious about reading a ton of reviews and doing research here, because I am doing this once and I am not about to start a collection of these fucking things. It looks like the saber I had my eyes on when I first started thinking about this has been discontinued, as I foolishly didn’t bookmark it and now I can’t find the design anywhere, but I don’t want one that looks exactly like one of the official ones. It won’t be unique, of course, as these things are mass-produced, but I don’t want a fellow nerd to be able to look at it and recognize it as Plo Koon’s lightsaber or some shit like that.

I probably ought to put the whole thing off until after I know if there’s going to be a teacher strike later this year, shouldn’t I?

Three Trailers

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Television1 Comment

It has been … a day, and I find that I’m not in the chattiest mood tonight. So let’s talk about some stuff that’s coming out.

The Eternals

This trailer is the first thing I’ve seen from this movie that gave me even the vaguest interest in seeing it. I’m still not going near a theater– this and Shang-Chi are going to have to wait until they’re available on Disney+ for me to watch them– but this actually made me think for a few seconds that I might have some interest in seeing it. There was never any chance that I was actually going to skip the thing, and I still don’t know a damn thing about any of the characters, but at least it’s on my radar as a mild positive and not a thing that I have to put up with.

Star Wars: Visions

Given my lifelong disdain of anime and my utter inability to get into any of the Star Wars animated projects no matter how hard I’ve tried, you would think that this show would have no appeal for me, and I am as surprised as you are to announce that you would be completely wrong in thinking that. I am all in. I don’t know if this is in canon or not– I feel like lightsaber umbrella might be a concept best left out of the official SW universe– but I’m genuinely excited about this, for the novelty if nothing else.

Speaking of novelty …

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

I’m including this out of sheer schadenfreude. I liked the Kevin Smith Netflix thing well enough, although it didn’t change my life and I’m not chewing my nails over the second half of the season. But He-Man nerds got all bent out of shape about that, and then the next thing Netflix throws at us is this? As I’ve said many times, I have no real skin in this game, but even I was looking at this by the end and thinking maybe they’d gone a bit too far. Seriously make Battle Cat a dog who turns into a wolf and say it’s inspired by He-Man. Call him Boy-Dude or something.

I am seriously looking forward to the fanboy tears, though.

Hey, Disney, let’s make this happen

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Saw Gerrera needs a Disney+ TV series.

That’s it, that’s the post.

I mean, I can elaborate a little bit, mostly by riffing on the idea that Gerrera is enough of an anti-Empire extremist that he’s considered a terrorist by the people who blew up the Death Star, and I find that to be endlessly fascinating, and I also could watch Forest Whitaker read a phone book. That said, Gerrera is old by the time Rogue One happens, and if they wanted to cast someone else in the role and set it in between the Clone Wars and A New Hope that would be fine too.

I am spoiled by Marvel; they’re giving shows to everybody they can think of and a lot of them sound great. My favorite characters are showing up all over the place. Star Wars is … not so much, just yet. I’ve given up on ever getting official confirmation that Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus were a couple even if I’m willing to die on the hill that says they were, but … just give Saw a damn show.

The end.