The Weather Underground

Fallout

starring Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, Aaron Moten, Frances Turner, Kyle MacLachlan, Leslie Uggams, Michael Emerson, Moises Arias and Sarita Choudhury

created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner (first time showrunner-ing, as far as I can tell, way to go, you two!)

---

Spoilers for this show. Spoilers for Fallout games. These are subjects I know WAY too much about. Warning ends here. If you're mad after this, I don't really know how else to help you.

---

This is going to surprise some of you, but I wasn't always the exact age I am now and I didn't always know all the stuff I already currently know. You see me in person or read what I write here, whatever, your first impression might legitimately be: a being out of time, preserved in amber, spontaneously generated fully formed by a world in need at the exact moment he was needed. To that I'd say: do better, World In Need. If you're going to manifest a savior in the form of a single conscious human, you should have aimed higher than one whose primary skills lie in an above-average typing speed and the ability to keep the rind in a single piece when peeling a citrus fruit. I know you're thinking "that's actually legitimately impressive if we're including limes, their skin is so thin..." and you're right of course, but it's not going to do a lot for the problems of, like, microplastics in the drinking water, that's my point.

No, my history as a human--and I apologize if this comes as a shock--includes previous years where I was younger than I am now, up to and inclusive of 1997, when there were probably already microplastics but nobody knew to freak out appropriately about them yet because we were all too busy playing a top-down 3D isometric post-apocalyptic computer role-playing game called Fallout. I don't want to assume everyone had the exact same experience of being 23 years old that I did that year, but here we are 27 years later talking about a television series based on that exact game (and its postcedent iterations) so I can confidently at least say I was far from the only one. And these were the days before the mainstreaming of gamer culture, so this is for the naysayers (mainly my wife at the time) who were certain the hours locked in a dark room in front of a humming CRT monitor would amount to nothing. But now look at me, in 2024, a testament to my own relentless self-belief and commitment and DEFINITELY NOT any kind of clinical psycho-chemical imbalance, qualifying me to over-write a blithely anonymous review piece in a cramped, unlit corner of the internet for you today. I'd like to thank my mom once again for never looking into Ritalin.

Since this is about the TV show, I won't break down for you the entire history of the intellectual property, the hands its gone through since the first iteration, the state of the franchise or the dispositions of the studios involved in developing, maintaining and releasing further games and their success/failure rates as stewards of the story. You can find loads of those all over the internet already and nearly 100% of them all end more or less the same way, with some version of "...and Todd Howard is a fussy little bitch." Boring!

There has also been plenty written about the now-out-of-favor binge-drop version of the show's release, with Amazon dropping all 8 episodes at once, something they haven't done in ages. Apparently a complicated state-of-the-human-condition expressionist long-form word-poem piece like Reacher needs an IV-drip weekly scheduled doling out, presumably so we can savor the minimalist character work of Alan Ritchson and whoever paints him that shade of bronze every shooting day. As luck would have it, however, I found myself severed from my (already minimal) sources of motivation or ambition by an invasive gut virus as Fallout came out, so I was in perfect position* to take the whole thing in.

I find myself in a similar state to where I was when Rings of Power debuted, Amazon's last high-budget crack at something very near and dear to the root geekness of my wee, misshapen heart. I was able to be somewhat sanguine about RoP in the moment (though I've become less charitable over time), but Tolkien and Fallout fandoms are two different things. For Tolkien, the books (literally) are closed. There's a finite amount to know since Tolkien died before I was born, so the keeping of the info feels precious, meticulous, lawyerly; there's a default pedantry to it constantly bristling against incoming offenses like mild inaccuracy or, worse, any indication of a level of interest below this type of grammarian's fanaticism.

With Fallout, it's a thing that has already passed through the hands of several studios, in several forms, with a lore and structure that necessarily grows, without a single source like Tolkien to devote one's imaginary and unasked-for service to. As a result, going into the show, I was ready for it to be what it was going to be: just another version of a many-versioned thing. As long as it wasn't, you know, shitty.

I didn't know the names Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner going in to the show, but I did know executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan from Westworld, which had the right spiritual vibe (especially in the final season) for a Fallout adaptation, so I was confident enough. Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten I didn't really know, but Walton Goggins always delivers, usually as bad guys, even when the role is generic and underwritten like in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Under a shit-ton of (mostly) practical make-up, he cuts a jagged and rough figure, forgiven for having sometimes inscrutable or overlapping motivations encounter to encounter because he's playing a literal survivor, (as everyone is to some degree) uncompromised by any code past "not being the one who dies" in any exchange. There's a freedom to the character and the performance that he only trades in at the very close of the last episode when he finds a main-story quest of his very own.

As far as faithfulness to the game series, there's a lot the series really gets right. The games all have basically two settings, the protagonist's present and the echo of the alt-history past that birthed it. It's always a retro-futurist atomic age America locked in resource wars with China some time post-World War II, with all the implied and amplified features therein like anti-communist paranoia and an unchecked capitalism completely untethered from scruples or ethics, where there is no line between product and consumer. Everything is fuel for the engine of wealth generation for a select few (selected for worthiness, of course, by their wealth in an uncomfortably prescient and present tautology), where even they realize too late (always too late) that there was always another dividing line between them and the corporations (like Vault-Tec, correctly centered here) reaping profit out of misery and inventing streams of revenue above even their heads. The difference between the show and real life, then, is basically null.

There's always been a dark symmetry between the hyper-gore of exploding heads and limbs of Fallout combat for entertainment and the in-game universe's rendering of human life as fodder for either immolation or needlessly cruel experimentation, the latter of which is the truth of literally every vault in every game, no matter how peaceful or idyllic it might seem. The show understands and translates this with utter fidelity.

It's what the show gets most right: the lies exist as rot under everything that seems foundational. The transactional nature of human life is exaggerated and extorted to extreme degrees, where humans are traded as slaves or food by other humans (or mutated versions thereof) in exchange for literally bottle caps (the in-game currency) from the long-dead Coca-Cola analogue and every single community, however large or small, trying to build some version of a civil society on an scale is constantly under threat, one stiff, slightly radioactive breeze away from disappearing from the featureless, sandblasted map.

These are the stories the show tries to tell, with Ella Purnell coming from her literally sheltered existence learning the grim realities of the struggling surface world and Aaron Moten's Maximus, no less naive for having lived in a different bubble, his made of brain-poisoning lead-lined steel topside.

The stories felt true to the spirit of the games, with a main trunk-quest for Purnell's Lucy deflected into tangents by side-quests and companion actions. The grand ending suffered for making itself kind of static and expository, largely wasting a hugely charismatic Surita Choudhury as the ultimately overhyped Moldaver and reducing Lucy to like four lingering close-ups of her tear-stained face while an airborne invasion and running firefight was supposedly going on all around.

The production design was gorgeous and nearly perfect. Plus as a SoCal person, I'm always biased towards stories set here. A Fallout story with zero super mutants or forced evolutionary virus (if you don't know what any of that means, just think of bits of the the Vault 4 storyline with the lab on Level 12, except with even more body horror and more exploding heads), but I guess that's what the potential season two is for: literally everything else I want and/or don't know I need yet. No pressure.

--

*couch-mounted, supine, almost inaudibly moaning

A Bad Fit

There are landmarks, events, milestones, passings that force you to take stock. Intense in the moment, they then become anchors in time and recollection that allow for comparison, for measuring things like change, growth, progress or escape. Collectively and individually, they give life context and texture, meaning really, the kind of thing we recognize as tragedy when they fade with the onset of dementia or when a sitcom character in the 1970s would lose their memory after getting hit on the head with a coconut. Both upsetting in their own ways, conceding of course that dementia is slightly darker for not likely being resolved within a 22-minute running time.

The weight of some moments are obvious as they happen: a marriage, a death, the birth of a child, the time a waiter forgot to charge you for the appetizers at a Chili's; these are what I call the Big Four. But as often as not, it's the small choices that feel either inevitable (obvious, so therefore not notable) or routine that can sometimes make their presences known only in retrospect as they gain density and gravity as the ramifications only reveal themselves cumulatively, over time. These inflection points are revealed rather than achieved. Harder to take credit for as they necessarily defy foresight, as seemingly harmless in the moment as the flap of a butterfly wing that one day results in the movie career of Ashton Kutcher.

Of course not all effects are that obviously damaging to society at large. For the most part, the impact is entirely internal, requiring contemplation, ideally leading to the right amount of reflection to either inspire positive change or provide some kind of relief. That's not always the case, of course, as memory can be torment, at the extreme end of fixating on one's failures or to a lesser extent just blithely whizzing past a series of potential inflection points like they were approaching rest stops along a highway when you didn't really have to pee.

What I'm saying is you can't make something out of something unless you have the awareness, the clarity and the tenacity to recognize the opportunity, even years later.

For example, I got not just one but two degrees in history. The thinking at the time (this was the mid-to-late 1990s) was as sophisticated as "well, I like olde timey stuff..." Not a single practical consideration. In fact, that's how most people end up in history graduate programs: you get yourself a history BA but you have too much self-respect to go to law school, so that's basically the last option left. No one goes into a humanities graduate program with anything as hard-formed as ambition in place. The only thing those courses teach you, ironically, is critical thinking, meaning all you can really do while you're there is become more and more adept at recognizing you're walking along a path with no real destination, just a steadily increasing incline, and at the end of which is a pit you have to dig yourself and whose only function is to burn money. And that, readers, is how some of us become stay-at-home dads for like eight years.

But sometimes, weirdly, your wife moves out and you have to get a job and somehow, in ways that would be too existentially terrifying to meaningfully analyze, you get a job that at least tangentially honors your history degrees, which you then parlay (17 years later) into an even better job that explicitly rewards it. I was going to say "pays it off," but that won't be literally true for another few years unless Biden finally comes through for me.

There was no way to know any of that decision-making, conjured out of a total failure of practical thinking, would ever amount to anything, and yet, somehow, here I am starting a new job I wouldn't have had without my totally stupid education.

I guess if there's a lesson, it's just that: persist, and you never know, you just might end up getting what you wanted. There are other examples. OJ Simpson got away with murdering his ex-wife and a friend of hers, but still found a way to do some measurable jail time for some other petty-ass shit about a decade and a half later. He could have let it go, but no, he just did what came naturally to him, stayed true to what he was, and got exactly what he deserved. Well, he got nine years of what he deserved, which is way less than it should have been. But you know what I mean. He was basically Ted Lasso before Ted Lasso, except American football instead of soccer and violent crime instead of Midwestern earnestness.

Get Your Own Back

There are a lot of things people will tell you are the keys to a successful or happy life. A lot of them have to do with a bunch of woo-woo self-help-ese like "loving yourself" or "practicing gratitude" or "consistently taking your prescribed mood stabilizers in the correct dosage," but no! We're not all smelly hippies, there, Moonbeam. Some of us have bootstraps to pull on, and no, I don't need the history of the idiom here, thank you very much!

I'm not going to make a lot of money with this kind of directive, because it has the frustrating quality of being absolutely bleedin' obvious: you have to absolutely decimate your own expectations. I know the usual phrase is "manage your expectations," but I already told you, we're not hippies. We're talking about rates of return on an emotional investment here. If you can get a little psycho-social relief from expectation management, what kind of result are you going to get from battering them over and over, watching little pieces fly off, until they're almost unrecognizable as expectations at all? Returns on investment as percentages? That's some 1990s shit. Returns as multipliers? Now we're in the 2020s, baby. Even if the end result is the ultimate destruction of everything you touch, aiming for less is some boomer shit. Why want a BMW and some shit McMansion when you can want a private country of your own on an ocean oil platform you can retreat to when the world-ending event you're engineering finally kicks off? History will show we really invented ambition in this millennium.

In terms of scale, fine, I'm not exactly there yet. I don't have the money to be that luxuriously apocalyptic. But I can practice what I preach way down here in my plebeian way. Like my vacation this week, for example, as I outlined last week. What was the expectation for that? Psychological equilibrium? No. A checklist of locally achievable tasks, domestically, personally or professionally? Stop it, still too much. Accomplishment of anything measurable? WHY AREN'T YOU PAYING ATTENTION, of course not!

The stated goal was: sit in a chair in relative proximity to a sleeping cat. Reader, that is happening right now! Anything else past this? Gravy. And speaking of gravy, that's mostly what I have gotten done this week: eating things (not all of them congealed like gravy, but a higher percentage than I'm comfortable saying). And spending money unnecessarily. I now own, at age 49, the first pair of Air Jordans I've ever owned, for example, so that's something I definitely don't already regret. But other than shoes, I'm basically taking the opportunities to really work in my nutritional edging, meaning eating things right up to the limits of what my doctor-prescribed low-fat diet will allow. And filling in those gaps where the cholesterol should go with sweaty fistfuls of carbohydrates typically the form of baked goods or varying potato preparations. I'm still like six months from my annual blood panel for my physical, that should be plenty of time to make it look good for the medical records. I'm pretty sure that's what's important when it comes to long-term medical self-care: you only have to count what makes it on the report.

So I'm doing OK this week. The people at the new job I'm going to have told me essentially nothing, which is increasingly stressful day to day. Luckily there's some overlap with the job I'm leaving so I can reach out to people on the side and fill in whatever I need to know. But as daunting as that seems (or genuinely is), it's another opportunity to apply my foolproof system of expectation evisceration. All I have to do is envisage an absolutely horrendous outcome. Not like a comet hitting the building; the envisage-ing can't be so unrealistic that you can't actually integrate it into your current expectational imagination. Just other major things like, say, a government shutdown that interrupts funding to the point that they start eliminating jobs ON THAT DAY starting with those with the least amount of seniority. That is something that could actually happen! Now, no matter how bureaucratically fubar the whole thing ends up being, if I get to the end of Day 1 (or even Week 1, dare I dream?) without being fired in that specific scenario, well, we're laughing, ain't we?

Time On

OK, here are the parameters:

New job starts the second week of April.

I had pushed out the start date so I could take leave, for a full week, starting tomorrow.

I got several thousand dollars in state and federal tax returns this year (already done and deposited).

I am due roughly a full month's pay in cashed-out leave time once I quit my current job.

I will have to start from zero with my leave once I start the new job, so this is my last opportunity for a real vacation for a while.

I've kind of had a rough go of it lately with some personal stuff, so I could really use the break and re-set.

I'm also feeling the anxiety of a massive life shift changing jobs, so running away is always a solid mental health solution option.

I'm single, I'm oddly flush with cash, I have free time and essentially no restrictions. I could go anywhere or do anything. Let's consider all the options!

Well, last-minute direct flights to London are about $1,000 nonstop. I could go to New York for less than $400 if I left on a Tuesday. I've never been to the Grand Canyon. Las Vegas is always a fairly close option, or would be if it weren't entirely repulsive not just as a place but as an idea. There are weed dispensaries all over now and I've already cleared by pre-employment drug screening, so I could experiment with a new hobby of being absolutely baked out of my mind, for like nine days in a row.

Let's be honest, though: if any of that were going to happen, I'd likely have started making plans way ahead of the Thursday before the Friday. Right now, what I'm doing is sitting in a raggedy-ass blue recliner in my bedroom, working on this while the cat sleeps on the corner of my bed, about four feet away and I have to say... this feels kind of like the dials are all tuned to exactly the kind of vibe I'm going to be looking for.

I've been to London, I've been to New York... and truthfully, there's nothing like the feeling of your feet first hitting the sidewalk outside the hotel of a city that isn't yours, especially a walkable one with exotic features like public transit and neighborhoods. The entertainment on the ground is pretty cost-effective with the right proclivities. For me, it's enough to have a journal with some blank pages, a reliable pen and a spot in a public place to park yourself and let the current of human endeavor zip past you in its natural state of inexplicable hurry. Some people find mountain streams or cabins in the woods calming or centering, but I'm never more Xanax-ed than when I'm sitting still amongst waves of people trying to get places when I don't have to. While I was newly separated/divorced and I still had a valid Disneyland annual pass, I'd show up for a few hours and very specifically not ride a single ride or even walk around. The right bench in the right spot, watch all the families trundle and flow past, with those smiles that said "I'm definitely having a good time!" and simultaneously "If we don't squeeze the maximum amount of efficient fun out of this experience, I will never forgive myself or my useless spouse, whom I now situationally hate," while I sat there enveloped in a state of full observational passivity my therapist would call "dangerously detached" or "borderline sociopathic." But we already established I don't do THC, so you get yours, I'll get mine.

Yes, the honest answer is that I'm not planning anything. Part of is indecision paralysis. Nothing is pulling at me so strongly that the impulse to do is overriding the default compulsion to cocoon. And yeah, there's some money at hand, but I'm still paying for car repairs, setting some cash aside for future ones (who even fucking knows) and considering finally taking one or two steps toward turning my backyard into a non-fire-hazard of overgrowth and human apathy.

These options aren't sexy. And they make terrible postcards. They do not feature any of the feelings of whisking or enrapturing or transcendence. I suppose I could try to replicate my pebble-in-a-human-stream feeling of urban invisibility during my staycation, but it's not as easy to accomplish in a far-flung exurb, even if it is a city of 300,000+. An early spring afternoon around the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park is difficult to replicate in a Stater Brothers parking lot, and not just because the volume of passers by is notably smaller.

I'm Just a Victim of Changing Planets

I handled the isolation of the pandemic lockdowns and distancing provisions in a very normal way, I think; in a way that a regular person would look at it and say "huh, that reminds me of me and my reactions to the same set of circumstances, all well within obvious and objective societal norms." You know, the way normals talk.

Long stretches of being alone has historically, for me, been a good time. This would normally be a point to insert a predictable, purely reflexive reference to masturbation, but I can do that later when you're not around.

There are a couple of ways my anxiety specifically works: all change is inherently threatening. Also the antidote for all threats is isolation, to a degree proportional to the threat. Time to put new registration stickers on the car license plate for the year? Maybe just stay in the car for an extra song off the radio-phone here or there after I park it anywhere for the next week. Winter giving way to spring? Spend a full afternoon binge-catching-up on something you heard was good that might also scratch a FOMO itch. Get offered a new job after 17 years (essentially your entire adult professional life after a late start due to child-rearing)? Bury yourself under 80 feet of earth and consider never coming out again.

Unfortunately I do not have 80 feet of earth handy, so unless some of the weird random pop-up-event thunderstorms we've gotten in the past few weeks result in a fortuitous landslide along the hills my house is positioned on, I'm stuck trying to reckon with looming actual, measurable alteration in my schedule, the people I have to see, my finances... I'm practically dog-panting just typing it out. That also might be the result of my second large cold brew of the day, bookending a few strategically interspersed Coke Zeroes, but I don't drink, so I'm stuck with this kind of over-the-counter decidedly-non-barbituate form of self-medication. I'd like to say I was actively hoping that mainlining stimulants was an active plan to cultivate an inversely calming Ritalin effect, but it's just that I'm too lazy, scared or cheap to try anything I'd have to work to procure. It's this or pure sugar. Except now that I think about it, that's an incorrect use of the word "or." The day is young.

I did say "anxiety" before so it may not surprise you to learn: it's possible I"m being slightly dramatic. I'm literally about to move exactly one (1) cubicle to the north of where I currently sit, for the same agency doing largely the same thing, but for a different proprietor. The people with whom I work will be the same people, I'll just be part of the Other Half, interacting with the group I soon-to-be-formerly led in an entirely different context. But in the same building, with the same commute, the same security and IT departments... I'll still know where the good bathrooms are and which fundraiser lunch events are good and which are an attempt to poison the entire building. You learn fast not to trust the people in charge of the summer outdoor sushi buffet.

It'll be manageable, but I'll still squirm through it. I begrudgingly admit I probably won't actually die. I'll just have to make an effort to be philosophical about it between the eruptions of panic that push to me to a point of such self-consciousness, I temporarily forget how to operate my own lungs. But as usual, all my autonomic systems will kick back in once I black out and maybe, as I'm laying there, staring up at the sky from the Circle K parking lot, I'll remember what I heard some French person say once: ploo sasshonj, ploo saylaam emshoze. It sounded something like that, anyway. Such wisdom. And in such a beautiful language.

Dirtball, Parte Deux

 

Dune: Part II

starring Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Stellan Skarsgard, Josh Brolin, Charlotte Rampling, Austin Butler, Dave Bautista and Javier Bardem and also Christopher goddamned Walken

directed by Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, Sicario, Arrival, the other Dune [not the 1980s one])

---

It's been a few weeks since I saw this one, in a big ole IMAX theater with a bunch of strangers and my children, on a Thursday of its opening weekend. I don't know that it was the first time post-pandemic that we'd all rushed out together to see something in a crowd like this at the first opportunity, but I haven't spent a lot of time doing the math on it either. Even at the time, I was too wrapped up in the earnest, eager present-ness of the moment to realize I could have invested some money in the viral sandworm-themed popcorn bucket, that has now emerged as a force on the collectibles market. The joke is that it has an orifice you can take in any manner and by any angle you prefer, which is a nice change of pace as usually if you're spending $24.99 on what amounts to about eight cents' worth of popcorn, the only one being fisted is you.

We saw it in IMAX, as I said, so we paid the premium price for tickets, over $100 total for the four of us just to get in, before we'd even have considered the horny commemorative popcorn bucket. Sure, we got the pleasure of experiencing a film projected on essentially the wall of a blimp hangar, but as premium-price experiences go, IMAX is by far second choice to the "Dolby" theater at our local AMC. That's the one with the leather reclining seats that take up so much space, they impact capacity, which is probably 1/3 of the IMAX one. Sure, the seats are aging and kinda sticky, but still mostly function as designed. But the perception of scarcity and the fact that I'd waited too long (four days in advance! still already gone!) really put a damper on my viewing experience as I rocked my IMAX seat as far as it would deign, yielding about the same experience as an economy flight to Salt Lake City. Well, like that I guess if the airplane seat in front of you had a viewing screen embedded in the back of it large enough to defeat the aerodynamic properties of the aircraft, imperiling all on board. I haven't read up on the issue yet, but I guess there's a non-zero chance that's one of the problems with Boeing 737 MAX?

Movie hype in our culture in general is really at an all-time post-Avengers low. All the social and economic momentum of the Marvel/Star Wars compulsion phase of our collective being has waned to the point of being spent. People want to look to the abject failure of Madame Web as evidence, but none of the spinoff Sony Spider-Man-adjacent projects are a good indicator. Outside of the Venom ones, rescued by the inalienability of Tom Hardy, who demands to be reckoned with, they've all been memes factories. I haven't seen a frame of Kraven the Hunter, but we already know its entire life in the zeitgeist will be, like, two seconds of Russell Crowe from a trailer screaming "I've got a CRAVIN'!" in some half-Australian accent (as all his accents are) or something equally stupid. The half-life of these things are getting increasingly halved. You already forgot about the Jared Leto vampire one, don't lie.

This Dune sequel carried a little bit of juice, at least it felt like it did. Even adjusted for unflation,* $82.5 million for an opening weekend is a sad pittance, but in this economy and the fact that it's a three hour movie about being sad on/near/under sand, it sure feels like a hit!

Is it good? Reader, I thought it was. I walked out and the first thing I said when we breached the glass doors onto the Plaza of Retail in front of our mall cinema was "well, that was some confident film making." It is one thing this version shares with the David Lynch Dune from the 80s, something anyone adapting these wacko-ass stories has to bring to the table or risk getting straight-up sandwormed: unregulated chutzpah. If you aren't willing to get weird, this isn't the project for you. Nobody wants to see Zack Snyder's Dune. We already saw Zack Snyder's Star Wars and it somehow made George Lucas seem like Yorgos Lanthimos.

Villeneuve likes his sci-fi and has made a name with knotty, conceptual ideas and long stretches of pictures over dialogue in things like his Blade Runner sequel. There's room for feeling and experience, senses and sensation over exposition, leaning heavily on sound and production design to convey where words would just be in the dang way. Is there too much of that in a movie that nearly three hours long? Maybe. But while it feels heavy, it never feels burdened, even when it does hand-wave its way through some plot points at the end.

The cast continues to do what it does, centered mostly by two of the most gifted charisma merchants out there selling in Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem. Ferguson has less to do in this one than in the first, a bit more trapped by the circumstances of the means of survival for herself, her son (the Chalamet boy) and her very chatty unborn daughter, but is still the best thing to watch when the camera is watching her. Bardem is kind of doing something else while everyone is busy acting all around him: inhabiting, being, making the landscape and culture exist through him as a totem, a vessel, a thing all stories reliant on world-building require. He is, as my GenZ gamer kids say, carrying.

He sort of as to as it couldn't be Chalamet, the de facto lead of the thing, as his arc requires him to be stifled out of being by wading through the act of becoming for the entire thing. It works in the sense that you buy it in the end when this slight waif of a boy, who will never be physically anything other than he is, but still cuts a creditable figure as a war-leader and physical threat.

Austin Butler gets the showiest, weirdest part and leans in to make it showier and weirder, for which I will always be grateful. I was surprised and delighted by his doofy-ass choice to basically do a Stellan Skarsgard impersonation as a speaking voice (even more impactful since he rarely is asked to use it). It's not easy to make psychopathic alopecia with a knife into something worth watching, but he lands it.

The star, more than the first one, is the filmmaking itself. The sense of strangeness, isolation, grief are conveyed as much by the scope and scale of the way everything is presented (the landscape most of all) than by the actors. And then for some reason, right in the middle, an absolute batshit pre-war German expressionist film breaks out, an overwhelming audience pummeling in the form of public bloodletting, fascist-adjacent crowd hysteria and a stark alien-ness, all in an almost entirely monochrome palette that hasn't been tried in mainstream cinema really since Sin City. It's the primary task of good science fiction to insist to the audience "You are somewhere else," which this movie achieves here, both for the viewers and as a crucial dividing line for the plot. These Harkonnens are a different breed of cat; the kind you know will eat you if you die alone in your house. 

It's possible my positive response to the film is a reaction to a general restlessness in pop culture, where there doesn't seem to be anything coming to really lust after, in the healthy way people eager to be parted from their money can experience the experiences offered. Maybe it was the writer and actor strikes that we're paying for now, with a lull in new high-level offerings, making something this polished feel more satisfying than it is. It is, after all, the middle part of a trilogy, which is often something of an unfinished thought. And yes, I'd say it feels that way too. But given the absolute insanity of what is to come in the Dune story, maybe the instinct to keep the plot stuff as an afterthought is to give us a chance to breathe before we have to try to get our minds around the what-the-fuck-ness of what's to come.

Or maybe I'm just being too generous. Empire Strikes Back and Two Towers brought the thunder and they were middle movies. Literally zero trees in this one, let alone talking trees. Try harder, Frenchman.

---

*After Rebel Moon and now that Jennifer Lopez one where she fights robots with another robot, the stay-at-home-ification of event movie watching is upon us. We're not adjusting for quality here (you heard me say Rebel Moon, right?), just budget and intent. $357 million worldwide in four days, we may never see your like again.

Plug and Play

We all know a deal isn't actually a deal. Every time any of us thought we were getting something for essentially cost, we always find out later there was a markup or a bait-and-switch or a guy you heard about one town over somehow got the same thing for like 15% less. If we really thought about it, we'd realize that the trap is capitalism as a system and the chase isn't about the money, it's about the sensation of finally being the one who is getting over. We've moved past the child-like cultural fascination with fairies and leprechauns and minotaurs and instead everyone has a story about Sharon who knows how to buy pineapples wholesale. It's the same bullshit fantasy that Costco and every store with "Dollar" in its name is built on.

The thing about systems, once established, they're essentially unbeatable. A system in place sets the rules, the parameters of "success" and the expectation/reward/punishment cycles associated with effort of any kind, in any direction. That sensation you're chasing in pursuit of that last 5%? Opiate of the masses, bitches. Way more heroin-y than Jesus, in this country at least, since at least about 1920. If you want to see me loll out into a dopey stupor, ask me about the equity in my house I bought in 2003. In this economy?! That's enough cultural fentanyl to knock out an unsuspecting police officer. And like any good fiend, you fairly openly drive your kids to it too. You get to be the model and the pusher all at once! The real tragedy of the moment is that none of these GenZ kids can afford the good shit.

The only real way to resist anyway is to lean all the way in to the system. What if you're the guy not trying to get what is going to end up being a bullshit "deal" anyway? What if you're such a in-your-own-bones rebel, you're going to stick your thumb in the system's eye by trying to pay way more than necessary for simple goods or services?

That's real courage, I say to you objectively and in no way a setup for the next sentence. This is how I managed to pay over $800 for a new car battery. Well, they told me it was new and I've decided to believe them. I told you, I was all the way in.

See, my car is old. It started doing a bunch of frankly out-of-pocket shit explicitly against my wishes, like not working correctly. Total breach of the deal: I give it a home, feed it world-poison fuel and pay a man to rub it with a cloth every 2-3 months, in return it takes me down the street spending like a whole gallon of gas just to pick up one Starbucks cold brew reliably and when I want it. But no, this bitch decides to go out on its own and get car COVID or whatever. Three repair places later, it turned out it just needed spark plugs, not a whole new transmission (as feared by the first two repair places, who I knew were wrong). Then like two weeks later, I get a warning light. I check the manual and it says it could be (and this is true): a brake light, the fuel system or the drive train. Cool, super edifying. The place that figured out the spark plug thing, they were very nice and patient and tried their best, but a non-constant light with a German sense of humor is hard to pin down. So that meant defeat and everyone knows if you have a car, defeat means taking it to the dealership for repairs. It could also mean "taking public transit" but I live in far-exurban Southern California, so: lolno.

After three days, what they determined is that the light meant none of those things listed, it was just a low battery. Performance issues might be tangentially related, but either way, we'll also update your onboard computer system, and that will be $800, thank you so much.

In the interim, dealerships will sometimes give you a loaner car. In this case, Mini gave me an electric Mini Cooper which was... incredible to drive. Really life-changing in the way it altered my thinking about what the experience of driving could be. But also had a hilariously low designed-to-murder-the-anxiety-plagued 100 mile limit per charge. Oh, and a minimum 12 hour recharge time while plugged into a wall outlet. In practical terms, a golf cart but capable of highway speeds. And with a moon roof. 

So I was OK giving the very zippy electric loaner back. But if I was really committed to this bit, a new electric Mini would be the zenith of its expression. Over $30K for something I couldn't reliably do more than three errands in within the course of a day. Or drive to Disneyland and back. That would really stick it to The Man.