There are precious few cinematic romances that can hold a candle to Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund in 1942's "Casablanca." It's a relationship that rekindles after heartbreak and is filled to the brim with complications far beyond the usual romantic drama scope. When Ilsa re-enters Rick's life, he's a bit bitter after being left flat with little more than a Dear John letter. He resents being hurt and has lived his life determined to wall off his emotions so that never happens again.
To further complicate things, Ilsa happens to be traveling with her husband, a resistance leader named Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid), who was believed to have been killed by the Nazis but is very much alive and still fighting the good fight. But Rick and Ilsa's love is deep and real and the two can't help but fall back to their old emotions around each other, even as the noose slowly tightens and they find themselves more and more likely never to make it out of "Casablanca" alive.
Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were the personifications of lovestruck individuals, their characters madly and deeply intoxicated with each other and willing to do just about anything to keep that feeling going. The funny thing is, though, that Bogart and Bergman's chemistry only ever existed in front of the camera. The second "cut" was called, all pretense was dropped and none of their character's feelings ever infiltrated their real lives. Like, at all.
Of All The Gin Joints In All The Towns In All The World, She Walks Into Mine
Sure, they're actors pretending to be in love and that's kind of their job, but movie history is filled with co-stars legitimately falling in love. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, and Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are all examples of how that on-screen chemistry can translate into real life.
According to Stefan Kanfer's 2010 book "Tough Without a Gun: Humphrey Bogart, Men In Movies, and Why It Matters," Bogart was going through a lot of private life drama during the making of "Casablanca," including a tumultuous relationship with his then-wife Mayo Methot, who, it should be noted, he met while they were making a movie together in 1938. Methot was drinking heavily at the time and would accuse Bogart of having an affair with Bergman, which didn't do much to help Bogart's feelings for his costar knowing that her mere presence in his work life was making his personal life a living hell.
Bogart was no angel, though. He'd go on to cheat on Methot with Lauren Bacall just a couple of years after "Casablanca" (another legendary Hollywood example of co-stars falling in love). Methot would later divorce Bogart in 1945 after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and because, you know, Bogart actually was messing around on her. Tragically, her depression and alcoholism would spiral and she died in 1951 at the age of 47.
Ingrid Bergman might have had more to do with nothing happening between her and her leading man than Bogart, truth be told. She reportedly never found herself attracted to Bogart off-screen, having said "I kissed him, but I never knew him."
Here's Looking At You, Kid
She also had no spark with her onscreen husband, Paul Henreid, who played Victor Laszlo, the resistance hero and concentration camp escapee who was a vital figure in Europe's fight against the Nazis. That one is a little easier to believe from a cinephile perspective. They're both great actors perfectly cast in their roles, but I never bought them as being madly in love. Ilsa respects her husband, but the fire that the character has is for Rick, which is what makes that love triangle so intriguing.
It should be noted that Bergman was also married (to Petter Lindstrom) when she made "Casablanca," so even if she did feel a spark with either of her on-screen romantic partners she likely wouldn't have acted on it.
Also, despite being thought of as one of the best movies of all time now, most involved with making "Casablanca" thought it was going to be a disaster. None of the actors liked the script and according to actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, the only time Bogart and Bergman really talked off-camera was when they were going over plans to try to get out of their contracts and walk off the movie.
But that's the magic of the movies, is it not? Everybody gets together and for a small sliver of time as film rolls through that camera, they get to pretend to be other people with other passions and life goals. Sometimes actors not getting along can't help but show through in their performances, but sometimes you get one of the most touching on-screen romances ever captured between two people who could barely stand to be in the same room with each other.
The Resident Evil 4 remake cast included Asian-Canadian actor Lily Gao as the horror game's fan-favourite character, Ada Wong, but she has faced backlash post-launch. After deleting the contents of her Instagram account, Gao has returned to discuss the "racist, sexist harassment" she received as part of Resident Evil 4 Remake's launch.
This post contains spoilers from the latest episode of "Yellowjackets."
From Natalie's chicken-killing tips to Jeff's hatred of strawberry lube to Misty's "I want my lawyer" cake, season 2 of "Yellowjackets" has already delivered dozens of delightful little moments -- which is especially impressive considering it's a horror story about cannibal teens. The show has so far managed to strike a rare tonal balance, often delivering dark humor, endearing character-driven moments, and disturbing new developments over the course of a single scene.
This week's episode was no exception, as a wilderness baby shower for Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) took a turn when Lottie's (Courtney Eaton) occult symbol-emblazoned blanket seemingly caused a flock of birds to slam into the cabin and die. A strangely sweet scene turned sinister, but before "Yellowjackets" dipped its toes back into the (possibly) supernatural, it let the teammates have a moment of genuine celebration. In addition to Lottie's blanket and Van's (Liv Hewson) changing teepee, chronic weird girl Misty Quigley (Samantha Hanratty, with Christina Ricci playing the character in the present day) delivered an unorthodox gift: the dramatic delivery of a tearful monologue from "Steel Magnolias."
'I Didn't Want To Be Too Exact'
The 1989 film starring Sally Field, Shirley McClaine, and Dolly Parton was a pop culture staple for many upon its release, and apparently Misty is one of its superfans. "I wanna know WHY!" Misty declares, giving the performance of a lifetime while embodying the role of M'lynn. It's a rare moment of acceptance for the outsider; the group starts off snickering over her earnest theater kid antics but ends up engrossed in her speech about the (perhaps not-so-baby shower-friendly) topic of a child's death.
In an interview with Variety, Hanratty admitted that she hasn't actually seen "Steel Magnolias," a conscious choice she made while preparing for the monologue. Instead, she watched the scene in question about six times on YouTube. "I didn't want to be too exact, because I didn't want to be like she knew too much," Hanratty told the outlet. "But at the same time when you think of your favorite movies, I feel like a lot of us are able to recite really big parts. We all have our things we remember, and this just happens to be Misty's cup of tea."
The actress explains that she found the monologue "very intimidating," so she opted not to watch the entire film because she figured it would just make her more nervous to step into Field's shoes. She also delivered the scene partly without her castmates present, which speaks to Misty's knack for retreating inside her own mind. "For the most part it was just me in there," she explained. "They all got to hang out in the trailers, and I just had fake markers that I looked at every now and then. She's not really looking at them, she's so into her own world when she's doing the monologue."
Misty Quigley, Acting Legend
Hanratty says when she did shoot with the rest of the ensemble, their scripted laughter "helped fuel the emotions" as she really had to tell herself, "All right, I'm not gonna let this get to me." The end result is a great performance that's both sincerely emotional and, given the ridiculous nature of Misty as a character, a little bit camp. Hanratty is clearly aware of those elements of Misty as well. "She's the kind of person that everybody can kind of chuckle at, and have a good laugh at," she tells Variety, "But she doesn't view herself as that, so I have to take her as seriously as possible." When filming, the actor explains, she tries to portray Misty as 100% serious, even if others are having a laugh at her expense.
The actress definitely pulls that tightrope walk off, and Misty remains one of the most enjoyably batty (and sometimes legitimately dangerous) characters in the show. As unforgivable as Misty may be (remember when she smashed the plane's black box?!), it's hard to see her put down all the time, especially when so much of her shunning is more related to her obvious eccentricity than her actual actions. After seeing her ostracized so much, it's great to watch Misty have this big, theatrical moment that unites the Yellowjackets during a time of tremendous stress. Judging by the whole dead bird storm situation, though, it might be the last time the team experiences a lighthearted moment for a while.
"Yellowjackets" airs Sundays on Showtime, with new episodes available in the Showtime streaming app on Fridays.
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from NBC News:
The Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration's efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official. China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time, the three officials said.
The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images, the officials said. The three officials said China could have gathered much more intelligence from sensitive sites if not for the administration's efforts to move around potential targets and obscure the balloon's ability to pick up their electronic signals by stopping them from broadcasting or emitting signals.
America's Department of Defense "directed NBC News to comments senior officials made in February that the balloon had 'limited additive value' for intelligence collection by the Chinese government 'over and above what [China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low earth orbit.'"
Today he may be best known for setting up the multiverse threads of the MCU, but before (and after) taking on the role of Dr. Stephen Strange, British actor Benedict Cumberbatch put together an impressive resume of performances, ranging from the stage to television to the silver screen. After graduating from the University of Manchester's Drama program and earning a master's from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in 2000, Cumberbatch found steady work in the U.K., eventually answering Steven Spielberg's call in 2011's "War Horse."
Since then, he's been a mainstay in Hollywood, with an ardent fan base ready to fight for him online and show up to (most) of his films. Throughout his 20-plus years as a working actor, Cumberbatch has had his share of missteps (I'm looking at you, "Star Trek Into Darkness"), but for the most part, his movie choices have typically been sound and his performances solid, even on the rare occasion when the material fails him. Without further ado, and Doctor Strange aside, here are Benedict Cumberbatch's 12 best roles across film, television, and theatre.
Lieutenant-Colonel Mackenzie, 1917
While effectively amounting to a cameo, Benedict Cumberbatch's role as Col. Mackenzie in Sam Mendes' WWI drama "1917" edges its way onto this list due to the character's importance throughout the film. "1917", known for its long-take aesthetic, follows two lance corporals, Will Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), tasked with delivering a message across the Western Front to the colonel to prevent the British Army from falling into a trap set by the Germans.
With Cumberbatch's Mackenzie as the end goal of their journey, we watch the two young soldiers face tremendous danger and overcome (and succumb to) numerous challenges. There's a sense of relief Schofield finally reaches Mackenzie, and when he turns around to face the camera, Cumberbatch's reveal feels like an applause break. And not just because he's a familiar face but because the excruciating mission we've found ourselves on is at last complete.
Major Jamie Stewart, War Horse
An old-fashioned Spielbergian film, "War Horse" tells the story of Joey, a bay Irish Hunter who develops a close friendship with the son of an English farmer. As WWI breaks out across Europe, Joey is sold to the British Army and deployed to Flanders under Capt. James Nicholls and Maj. Jamie Stewart, who lead the cavalry through a German encampment.
In his first major Hollywood picture, Benedict Cumberbatch plays the small but important role of steely Maj. Stewart, alongside Tom Hiddelston's Capt. Nicholls and Patrick Kennedy's Lt. Charlie Waverly. Collectively, the three soldiers show the varying attitudes of young men sent to war. While Waverly is the subservient soldier who falls in line, and Nicholls has the most realistic understanding of war, Stewart represents the prototypical soldier. As a tough disciplinarian whose fears are deeply suppressed, Cumberbatch gives a glimpse into his abilities to tackle multi-faceted characters in this early role.
Prince Hamlet, Hamlet
As of writing, 2015's "Hamlet" at London's Barbican Theatre was Benedict Cumberbatch's last stage performance. Like most British actors, Cumberbatch began his career in the theatre, and at the ripe age of 39, it was high time he tackled one of the Bard's most storied characters and plays.
Unfortunately for Cumberbatch, Lyndsey Turner's adaptation of "Hamlet" became an exercise in trying too hard to create a unique vision of one of the most well-known and frequently produced stories. Altering the structure and introducing kitschy elements, Turner's "Hamlet" left much to be desired. However, the brightest spot was Cumberbatch (naturally). Unsurprisingly, his delivery of the legendary "To be or not to be" soliloquy brought the house down, and his stoicism lent gravity to Hamlet's final moments, emphasizing the weight of the events we watched unfold. While his performance deserved a much better show around him, Cumberbatch's Prince Hamlet remains a solid outing by the actor.
William Ford, 12 Years A Slave
Given the recent news of Benedict Cumberbatch's ancestral ties to slavery, his role as William Ford, a benevolent slave owner (the greatest oxymoron to ever exist), is steeped in irony the actor would likely rather not exist. "12 Years a Slave" is the story of Solomon Northup (played with a tremendous amount of depth and heart by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Cumberbatch's Ford, the Baptist preacher who buys Solomon, is described in the latter's memoirs as kind and noble, despite the nature of their relationship.
The role of Ford in a film like "12 Years a Slave" is tricky. The idea of showing a slave owner as anything other than a villain is inconceivable. Yet, through Steve McQueen's direction, John Ridley's script, and Cumberbatch's performance, Ford becomes a compelling character. Cumberbatch offers a carefully sympathetic portrayal, almost befriending Solomon. In contrast to Solomon's next owner, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), Ford seems generous. All of this, though, is belied by Ford's very appearance in the film: He's a man who buys humans when they're convenient and sells them when they're not.
Peter Guillam, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
A classic of the spy genre and a staple in John le Carré's storied bibliography, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is an espionage tale set during the height of the Cold War that has been adapted multiple times, including into a 2011 film by Tomas Alfredson. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Peter Guillam, a recurring character in le Carré novels and right-hand man to George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a lead character in many of the author's books.
Cumberbatch's turn as Guillam is decidedly vulnerable. When we first meet Guillam, he is a staunch follower of Smiley and slightly naive concerning his job as an intelligence officer. Throughout "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," we come to understand the human cost associated with this line of work. In a heartbreaking scene in which Guillam breaks up with his boyfriend to protect him from harm, Cumberbatch brings to light the loneliness and personal sacrifice through loud emotional moments as well as quiet subtle nods across the film.
Julian Assange, The Fifth Estate
Benedict Cumberbatch has a reputation for many things among his fans, his abilities as an impressionist primary among them. And while he entertains on programs like "The Graham Norton Show" with his Alan Rickman, Michael Caine, and Chewbacca impressions, his ability to take on real-life individuals with pronounced and distinguishable quirks without becoming a mimic is truly impressive. Throughout his career, Cumberbatch has employed this talent when portraying real-life figures, but perhaps none posed more of a challenge than portraying Julian Assange in Bill Condon's "The Fifth Estate."
When the film was released, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were heavily featured in the news cycle and satirized by comedians and sketch shows. Although "The Fifth Estate" didn't end up being the topical, dramatic thriller it had hoped, Cumberbatch succeeds in creating a well-rounded portrait of a much-maligned public figure. Cumberbatch finds the humanity in Assange that tabloids and other news outlets chose to ignore.
Phil Burbank, The Power Of The Dog
Jane Campion's "The Power of the Dog" is a tour de force of filmmaking that explores masculinity, societal pressures, and familial bonds. Her deft direction and storytelling make poignant observations that transcend time and space, while her ensemble offers strong performances.
As the unrefined and quick-tempered Phil Burbank, Benedict Cumberbatch leads the film with Jesse Plemons, who plays George, Phil's kind-hearted brother. Surly and cruel, Phil is the textbook overcompensating cowboy, especially unkind to Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the son of Rose (Kirsten Dunst), George's love interest. The reason for Phil's malice and general hostile disposition is revealed in pieces through Cumberbatch's nuanced performance.
In many ways, "The Power of the Dog" is a classic Western, but the characterizations seem very modern, allowing for a complexity not traditionally offered to the staunch alphas of the Wild West. With Cumberbatch's stirring performance at the film's fore, it's no wonder the movie and his performance have been so heavily lauded and awarded.
Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
"Stuart: A Life Backwards" is the television adaptation of Stuart Clive Shorter's biography written by his best friend Alexander Masters (Benedict Cumberbatch). Shorter (played in the film by Tom Hardy) led a difficult life, suffering sexual abuse as a child, having mental health issues, and being homeless at multiple points in his life. In adulthood, he became an activist, and his advocacy would bring to light many of the issues facing unhoused people in the U.K.
Naturally, the meatier and showier role of the two leads belongs to Hardy (who is fantastic), but Cumberbatch's Masters, acting as a conduit for the audience, anchors the film against the intensity of Shorter. Beginning as a jaded and indifferent charity worker, Masters develops a friendship with Shorter that instills sympathy and compassion where there initially was none. Cumberbatch and Hardy work exceptionally well together, with Cumberbatch taking the quieter approach. It's a subtle role that is arresting in all the right ways.
Alan Turing, The Imitation Game
Alan Turing's contributions to technology (and, in turn, society, culture, and politics) cannot be overstated. His work is the basis for the modern-day computer and artificial intelligence. As a codebreaker for the British government during World War II, he cracked the Enigma machine, a complex Nazi device for generating coded messages. The latter is the focus of "The Imitation Game," as well as the appalling treatment of Turing by the British government due to his sexual orientation.
Cumberbatch's universally applauded performance was nominated for every major acting award of 2015, garnering the actor his first Academy Award nomination. The emotional beats Cumberbatch hits across the film are affecting and earned, but it's his ability to melt into Turing's physicality that impresses the most. Cumberbatch actualizes Turing's known eccentricities and physical ticks without becoming a caricature, instead using them to drive the narrative and create a complete picture of the complex man. In years to come, "The Imitation Game" will stand as one of the crown jewels of Cumberbatch's career, and deservedly so.
Smaug, The Hobbit Trilogy
The behind-the-scenes footage of Benedict Cumberbatch's motion-capture performance as Smaug is what initially grabbed my attention and made me want to watch "The Hobbit." Filmed entirely on a sound stage, Cumberbatch, in grey pajamas, a scattering of dots on his face, crawls and leaps around with abandon. Smaug's strength and vanity are apparent in each of Cumberbatch's neck contortions, eye narrowings, and sizzling hisses.
Typically, dragons, as portrayed in film and television, are feared for their gargantuan size and firey breath. However, what makes Smaug unique in J.R.R. Tolkien's literary world is the deliciously devious personality he gave the wicked creature, which Cumberbatch superbly brings to life. He doesn't just act out Smaug; He embodies the smug dragon in every sense of the word. While Cumberbatch's performance alone couldn't save the trilogy, it remains an incredible piece of work and one of his more unique roles.
Victor Frankenstein/The Creature, Frankenstein
I saw Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller's 2011 production of "Frankenstein" via the Royal National Theatre's "NT at Home" series in April 2020. I was blown away. The story of "Frankenstein" is well-known and has captivated audiences for centuries with its themes of obsession, grief, and power.
In a departure from tradition, Nick Dear's adaptation of the tale of the monster and doctor is told from the Creature's point of view rather than Victor Frankenstein's. Cumberbatch and Miller alternated between the two main roles every night, providing a creative spin on the stage production and giving audiences a reason to go more than once. Both men were incredible in the roles (they shared the 2012 Laurence Olivier Award for best actor), bringing an animalistic quality to the Creature that felt raw and visceral while lending an insidious narcissism to Victor. Similar to his turn as Smaug, Cumberbatch's acting continues to impress beyond impressions, accents, and facial ticks. He uses physicality in a way few of his peers can.
Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock
Of course, we had to include "Sherlock" on this list. It's the role that made Benedict Cumberbatch an international superstar and earned him legions of fans. He's bloody brilliant as Sherlock Holmes.
"Sherlock" brings Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective into the modern era by letting him loose in the streets of London with smartphones and GPS apps in tow. Cumberbatch's Sherlock continues the tradition of the great master of deduction by being too logical for his own good. With the help of Martin Freeman's John Watson, we see the stark contrast between polite society and Sherlock's cold demeanor. Cumberbatch imbues a sense of 21st-century bumbling quirkiness into his Sherlock that is balanced with an old-world charm and formality. Although many actors have played Sherlock Holmes on the radio, stage, television, and film, Cumberbatch made the British detective entirely his own. We can only hope that one day Cumberbatch again dons the tweed overcoat and floppy hair because the game is always afoot.
"Star Trek: Picard" season 3 has promised to be a grand finale for the "Next Generation" cast. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) has finally reunited his whole bridge crew from Enterprise-D -- also appearing are Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) from "Star Trek: Voyager" and the Changelings, the antagonists of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."
Despite running headfirst down nostalgia lane, the final season has some new characters too. One is Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick), captain of the USS Titan-A. Shaw is no fan of Picard or Seven because he has a grudge against the Borg. Why? He was at the Battle of Wolf 359, depicted in the classic "Next Generation" episode, "The Best of Both Worlds." A Borg Cube, led by tactical info gleaned from the assimilated Picard (aka Locutus), decimated the Starfleet forces. Shaw was part of the engineering crew on the USS Constance and one of the few Starfleet officers to survive that battle.
Trekkies might think the inspiration for Shaw's backstory was Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), the lead of "Deep Space Nine." Sisko survived Wolf 359 but lost his wife Jennifer (Felecia M. Bell). The "DS9" pilot, "Emissary," is about Sisko finally coming to terms with what happened, spurred by a face-to-face meeting with Picard.
However, Stashwick confirmed in an interview with Collider that the real inspiration was "Jaws." The name of his character is a tribute to Robert Shaw, who played Quint in "Jaws." Like Shaw with the Borg, Quint had a traumatic past with sharks and this pushed him into becoming a 20th-century Captain Ahab.
Anyway, We Delivered The Bomb
In "Jaws," Quint, Brody (Roy Scheider), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) are enjoying some late-night downtime in their hunt for the shark. Sitting around the dinner table on Quint's boat the Orca, they start swapping stories about scars. When Hooper notices a removed tattoo on Quint's arm, the old fisherman reveals it's from the Navy ship he served on: the USS Indianapolis.
True to history, Indianapolis delivered parts of the bomb that would level Hiroshima before it was sunk by a Japanese submarine. The surviving crew was left stranded in the ocean for four days and five nights, suffering what's been called "the deadliest shark attack in history."
Quint's recounting of this might be my favorite ever scene in a film — it's certainly my favorite monologue. Robert Shaw delivers the lines like a man who's seen every image he describes in his nightmares, every night, for 30 years. He sometimes flashes a smirk or a chuckle but you can tell how uneasy he is. After he recounts how he and his surviving friends were rescued, he declares, "I'll never put on a life jacket again," and you understand why.
Shaw, not only an actor but a playwright and novelist too, even wrote the monologue himself. (There is some disagreement about this, but "Jaws" screenwriter Carl Gottlieb backs up Shaw as the author in his behind-the-scenes book, "The Jaws Log.") He performed the scene over two days: the first he was drunk, and the second he was sober. Footage from both days is in the final film.
Remembering Wolf 359
In "Picard," Shaw's big moment, which he discussed with /Film, begins on the Titan's holodeck. Picard and Jack Crusher (Ed Speelers) are enjoying some belated father-son bonding time. Shaw interjects, asking if Jack has heard about Wolf 359, and calls it "the first time [Picard and I] met."
This has the same visual language as the "Jaws" scene. Most of the time, the camera is focused on Shaw, but there are occasional cuts to reaction shots from Picard and Jack, much like there are to Brody and Hooper in "Jaws." There are no flashbacks, but in a major difference from the Indianapolis monologue, we hear sounds from Shaw's memories. Shaw self-deprecatingly calls his younger self, "Some dips*** from Chicago" -- saying he's from Indianapolis would've been tipping the hat too far -- and then reveals it's survivor's guilt that is haunting him. He was one of only ten crew members who got to board the escape pod.
Unlike Quint, Shaw is directing his words at one of his scene partners. Picard doesn't argue back and quietly leaves the Holodeck. This underlines another similarity between Shaw and Quint -- their hate is understandable but irrational. Picard literally wasn't himself at Wolf 359, he was as much the Borg's victim as the 11,000 people killed in battle.
Meanwhile, sharks are just animals driven by nothing but base instincts. Quint, however, makes them sound like demons, "The thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white." Quint couldn't let go of his hate and it killed him. It remains to be seen how Shaw's story will end.
New episodes of "Star Trek: Picard" stream Thursdays on Paramount+.
Five years before her breakout role in the ultimate breakup movie, Ari Aster's "Midsommar," Florence Pugh made her feature-film debut in an indie British drama called "The Falling," written and directed by Carol Morley. At the time, Pugh's costar, Maisie Williams, was much more famous for her role as Arya Stark on HBO's "Game of Thrones." In "The Falling," Pugh and Williams play Abbie and Lydia, two best friends at a girls' school of the strict, "sit down, stand up" variety. Judging from the way the trailer positions its young stars with the words "starring Maisie Williams and introducing Florence Pugh," someone at BBC Films seems to have recognized that they had a significant new talent on their hands with Pugh.
Casting agents apparently felt the same way. A 2023 cover story in Vogue revealed that Pugh was just 16 when she tried out for "The Falling" in an open audition, but even then, she made an impression. Morley told the magazine that after Pugh departed from her audition, a hush came over the room, leading the director to ask her casting agents, "What's the matter? Did you not think she was amazing?"
"They said to me: 'We've got goosebumps. That was like discovering a young Kate Winslet,'" Morley explained.
A Girls' School, 'Not A Mental Institution'
The official synopsis of "The Falling" (per the BBC) details how a "fainting outbreak" occurs at the aforementioned girls' school. Vogue describes it as "collective hysteria," and the trailer also contains references to "crazy witches" and secrets rising to the surface. "This is a school," someone says. "It's not a mental institution."
It's as if the folk-horror hysteria of "Midsommar" were already bubbling under the surface. Compare the scene in that movie where Florence Pugh suffers self-inflicted abuse as the May Queen, Dani, kneeling on the floor and crying her eyes out, surrounded by empathetic women who fall in synch with her grief, after she spies her boyfriend cheating on her.
If her audition for "The Falling" had half as much emotion as that scene, it's easy to see why the film's casting agents might have been rendered speechless. Of course, "Midsommar" wasn't Pugh's only breakout film role in 2019. She also received her first Academy Award nomination for her performance that year as Amy March in Greta Gerwig's adaptation of "Little Women."
From there, Pugh was off to the races, donning a Russian accent and trading barbs and blows with Scarlett Johansson in Marvel's "Black Widow," for starters. It just goes to show that Pugh has done some of her best work when surrounded by women, and that's a trend that dates back to when she first appeared onscreen in "The Falling."
Why do so many child actors struggle? To be a good actor, you need self-awareness and empathy, and those are traits many children don't have. This makes Isabelle Fuhrman's performance in Jaume Collet-Serra's "Orphan" all the more exceptional.
In "Orphan," a Connecticut couple -- Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John (Peter Sarsgaard) -- is still reeling from the miscarriage of their third child. So, they decide to adopt. They're instantly charmed by a young Estonian girl named Esther (Fuhrman) and welcome her into their home. But Esther shows increasing sadism, culminating in the horrible truth: she's actually a 33-year-old serial killer, afflicted with hypopituitarism that prevented her body from aging with her mind.
"Orphan" -- released in 2009 -- was shot in late 2007 when Fuhrman was only 10 years old. In what was her second film appearance, she was a child playing the part of an adult who is playing the part of a child. A performance that layered would be demanding even for an adult actor, but the nature of the role precluded one from playing Esther.
Somehow, Fuhrman did the seemingly impossible and pulled it off. She was scary, but not so chilling that it diluted the film's inherent camp value. She also understood the black comedy camp of her role -- take her faux-innocent, s***-eating grin whenever Esther lets the mask slip and gets under Kate's skin.
Many child actors quit the business once they come of age. Almost 15 years on from "Orphan" though, Fuhrman remains an actress. What has she been up to since?
The Hunger Games
Isabelle Fuhrman's highest-profile project remains "The Hunger Games," released in 2012. In a dystopian future, the nation of Panem holds an annual tradition where two children are selected from each of the nation's 12 Districts and forced to fight televised gladiatorial combat.
Fuhrman auditioned to play the lead, Katniss Everdeen, but she was deemed too young at 14. The part went to then-22-year-old Jennifer Lawrence. As a consolation, she got the part of Clove, one of the "career" tributes who've spent their whole lives training for the Hunger Games. Part of a pack of four, Clove stands out from her friends in two ways. The other three are all tall blonds, far from the short, freckled, and raven-haired Fuhrman. She's also particularly vicious.
Fuhrman uses the same sinister smile for Clove that she did for Esther. But while Esther had to conceal her true self, Clove always gets to be who she is and it's terrifying. In her scant screentime, she's often eying the other tributes like a lioness on the hunt. During a TV interview, Clove brags about her lethal knife-throwing skills -- unfortunately, the film's shaky-cam action direction doesn't do them justice.
However, a scene where she tussles with Katniss while trying to stab her brings to mind the horror of "Orphan." Thanks to Fuhrman's young age, Clove actually looks like a child — unlike most of the other tributes — so her sadism is all the scarier and underlines the horror of the Hunger Games themselves. As Clove met her end in the first film, Fuhrman couldn't return for "The Hunger Games" sequels.
Career Lull
"The Hunger Games" was the highlight of Isabelle Fuhrman's 2012, but it wasn't her only project that year. Before it, Fuhrman had done the occasional voice acting role, such as in the children's films "Sammy's Adventures: The Secret Passage" in 2010 or the English dub of "From Up on Poppy Hill" in 2011. In 2012, she gave video games a try with "Hitman: Absolution." She voiced Victoria, the Mathilda to Agent 47's Léon. However, she remains a primarily live-action actor.
In 2012, Fuhrman was announced to star in a remake of Dario Agento's Giallo classic "Suspiria," to be directed by David Gordon Green. Fuhrman had broke out as a slasher villain, so turning her into a final girl would've been a flex of her talents. However, the project ultimately fell through. Luca Guadagnino's eventual "Suspiria" remake is a good film, but the potential of the unmade Green/Fuhrman "Suspiria" is still fascinating.
Most of Fuhrman's films during the 2010s weren't widely seen or received well. She had an uncredited role in "After Earth" and a supporting one in the direct-to-video Stephen King adaptation "Cell." Her most notable role was on television -- a recurring part in "Masters of Sex" as Tessa Johnson, daughter of the lead Virginia (Lizzy Caplan).
While Fuhrman wasn't getting big parts, she at least kept trying different ones. She starred in more horror movies ("The Last Thing Mary Saw" and "Down a Dark Hall") but also comedies ("Dear, Eleanor" and "Good Girls Get High") and romantic films ("1 Night").
The Novice
In 2021, Isabelle Fuhrman finally got a star vehicle with "The Novice," an actor-anchored character study written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Lauren Hadaway. Fuhrman plays Alex, a college freshman who is always pushing herself. Even if she gets no enjoyment from something, she has to be the best at it. That's why she's majoring in physics, even though it's her worst subject. She cites JFK's quote about going to the moon to explain her ethos: "We [do things] not because they are easy but because they are hard." One of Fuhrman's greatest acting assets is her intense glare, the perfect body language for a single-minded overachiever like Alex.
Looking for an extracurricular, Alex discovers her university's rowing team. Rowing is a physically intensive sport but one that mandates teamwork — it's all about moving in synchrony with the other rowers. However, the individualistic Alex only sees her teammates as competition to get the highest score and winds up alienating them all. Tellingly, once she does get the highest score, she quits.
"The Novice" is akin to films like "Raging Bull" or "Whiplash," other movies about a person driven to be the best in their field and who takes ambition to self-destructive levels. The physicality of their profession — whether boxing, drumming, or rowing — underscores the lead's drive with a cinematic punch. Speaking to /Film about "The Novice," Fuhrman called her part "a role that any actress would die to play." She continued:
"To really dive into something, not just mentally, but physically, and to really transform yourself and to be able to be on set every single day and be not only, I guess the lead of the movie, but to be a creative collaborator with Lauren, who is probably my favorite director I've ever worked with."
Orphan: First Kill
Why didn't "Orphan" become the next big slasher franchise? The first film was more of a cult classic than an instant hit. It made decent money — earning $78 million worldwide — but got middling reviews. It has a 58% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 42 'mixed' score on Metacritic.
Secondly, Esther's death in the film is definitive. Kate snaps her neck with a forceful kick and then her body sinks into a frozen lake. Even Michael Meyers would have a tough time coming back from that one. If "Orphan" were to continue, it would have to be a prequel. And that's what happened with "Orphan: First Kill" in 2022. To account for Isabelle Fuhrman being in her 20s, "First Kill" used a multitude of practical effects to make Fuhrman look younger (and shorter).
Since the audience already knows the truth about Esther, she's more unhinged than in the original. And Fuhrman relishes that. The opening shows how she escaped a psychiatric facility and became Esther. Seventy-five minutes into the film, there's a scene where Esther drives a stolen car, smokes a cigarette, and listens to Michael Sembello's "Maniac." This pushes the envelope on camp even further than the original "Orphan" did -- and it's glorious.
"First Kill" also flipped the formula of the first film. It turns out that Esther's first "mother" Tricia (Julia Stiles) is hiding a secret about her real daughter's disappearance. Esther is now at a disadvantage in her battle of wits — and when she starts killing the family in the climax, you're actually rooting for her.
Fuhrman has indicated a third "Orphan" film is coming. Fingers crossed that "Orphan" prequels don't remain the only films she's starring in.
NZXT specializes in the mid-tower and small form factor PC case segments and the new NZXT H9 Flow is one of the company's mid-tower dual-chamber cases with a focus on airflow. This dual-chamber design has been used by a few case makers, including Lian Li and Hyte, and now we're starting to see more fan-friendly versions pop up. Available in black and white, the NZXT H9 Flow promises the usual stunning NZXT aesthetic with solid thermal performance and excellent cable management.
It’s tough to put a neat label on Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. On the one hand, it was a colossally ambitious and expensive project — in fact, the first computer game in history with a budget exceeding $10 million. On the other, it was a somewhat rushed, workmanlike game, developed in half the time of Wing Commander III using the same engine and tools. That these two things can simultaneously be true is down to the strange economics of mid-1990s interactive movies.
Origin Systems and Chris Roberts, the Wing Commander franchise’s development studio and mastermind respectively, wasted very little time embarking on the fourth numbered game in the series after finishing up the third one in the fall of 1994. Within two weeks, Roberts was hard at work on his next story outline. Not long after the holiday season was over and it was clear that Wing Commander III had done very well indeed for itself, his managers gave him the green light to start production in earnest, on a scale of which even a dreamer like him could hardly have imagined a few years earlier.
Like its predecessor, Wing Commander IV was destined to be an oddly bifurcated project. The “game” part of the game — the missions you actually fly from the cockpit of a spaceborne fighter — was to be created in Origin’s Austin, Texas, offices by a self-contained and largely self-sufficient team of programmers and mission designers, using the existing flight engine with only modest tweaks, without a great deal of day-to-day communication with Roberts himself. Meanwhile the latter would spend the bulk of 1995 in Southern California, continuing his career as Hollywood’s most unlikely and under-qualified movie director, shooting a script created by Frank DePalma and Terry Borst from his own story outline. It was this endeavor that absorbed the vast majority of a vastly increased budget.
For there were two big, expensive changes on this side of the house. One was a shift away from the green-screen approach of filming real actors on empty sound stages, with the scenery painted in during post-production by pixel artists; instead Origin had its Hollywood partners Crocodille Productions build traditional sets, no fewer than 37 of them in all. The other was the decision to abandon videotape in favor of 35-millimeter stock, the same medium on which feature films were shot. This was a dubiously defensible decision on practical grounds, what with the sharply limited size and resolution of the computer-monitor screens on which Roberts’s movie would be seen, but it says much about where the young would-be auteur’s inspirations and aspirations lay. “My goal is to bring the superior production values of Hollywood movies to the interactive realm,” he said in an interview. Origin would wind up paying Crocodile $7.7 million in all in the pursuit of that lofty goal.
The hall of the Terran Assembly was one of the more elaborate of the Wing Commander IV sets, showing how far the series had come but also in a way how far it still had to go, what with its distinctly plastic, stage-like appearance. It will be seen on film in a clip later on in this article.
These changes served only to distance the movie part of Wing Commander from the game part that much more; now the folks in Austin didn’t even have to paint backgrounds for Roberts’s film shoot. More than ever, the two halves of the whole were water and oil rather than water and wine. All told, it’s doubtful whether the flying-and-shooting part of Wing Commander IV absorbed much more than 10 percent of the total budget.
Origin was able to hire most of the featured actors from last time out to return for Wing Commander IV. Once again, Mark Hamill, one of the most sensible people in Hollywood, agreed to head up the cast as Colonel Blair, the protagonist and the player’s avatar, for a salary of $419,100 for the 43-day shoot. (“A lot of actors spend their whole lives wanting to be known as anything,” he said when delicately asked if he ever dwelt upon his gradual, decade-long slide down through the ranks of the acting profession, from starring as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars blockbusters to starring in videogames. “I always thought I should be happy for what I have instead of being unhappy for what I don’t have. So, you know, if things are going alright with your family… I don’t know, not really. I think it’s good.”) Likewise, Tom Wilson ($117,300) returned to play Blair’s fellow pilot and frenemy Maniac; Malcolm McDowell ($285,500) again played the stiffly starched Admiral Tolwyn; and John Rhys-Davies ($52,100) came back as the fighter jock turned statesman Paladin. After the rest of the cast and incidental expenses were factored in, the total bill for the actors came to just under $1.4 million.
Far from being taken aback by the numbers involved, Origin made them a point of pride. If anything, it inflated them; the total development cost of $12 million which was given to magazines like Computer Gaming World over the course of one of the most extensive pre-release hype campaigns the industry had ever seen would appear to be a million or two over the real figure, based on what I’ve been able to glean from the company’s internal budgeting documents. Intentionally or not, the new game’s subtitle made the journalists’ headlines almost too easy to write: clearly, the true “price of freedom” was $12 million. The award for the most impassioned preview must go to the British edition of PC Gamer, which proclaimed that the game’s eventual release would be “one of the most important events of the twentieth century.” On an only slightly more subdued note, Computer Gaming World noted that “if Wing Commander III was like Hollywood, this game is Hollywood.” The mainstream media got in on the excitement as well: CNN ran a segment on the work in progress, Newsweek wrote it up, and Daily Variety was correct in calling it “the most expensive CD-ROM production ever” — never mind a million or two here or there. Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell earned some more money by traveling the morning-radio and local-television circuit in the final weeks before the big release.
Wing Commander IV was advertised on television at a time when that was still a rarity for computer games. The advertisements blatantly spoiled what was intended to be a major revelation about the real villain of the story. (You have been warned!)
The game was launched on February 8, 1996, in a gala affair at the Beverly Hills Planet Hollywood, with most of the important cast members in attendance to donate their costumes — “the first memorabilia from a CD-ROM game to be donated to the internationally famous restaurant,” as Origin announced proudly. (The restaurant itself appears to have been less enthused; the costumes were never put on display after the party, and seem to be lost now.) The assembled press included representatives of CNN, The Today Show, HBO, Delta Airlines’s in-flight magazine, and the Associated Press among others. In the weeks that followed, Chris Roberts and Mark Hamill did a box-signing tour in conjunction with Incredible Universe, a major big-box electronics chain of the time.
Tom Wilson, Malcolm McDowell, and Mark Hamill at the launch party.
The early reviews were positive, and not just those in the nerdy media. “The game skillfully integrates live-action video with computer-generated graphics and sophisticated gameplay. Has saving the universe ever been this much fun?” asked Newsweek, presumably rhetorically. Entertainment Weekly called Wing Commander IV “a movie game that takes CD-ROM warfare into the next generation,” giving it an A- on its final report card. The Salt Lake City Tribune said that it had “a cast that would make any TV-movie director jealous — and more than a few feature-film directors as well. While many games tout themselves as interactive movies, Wing Commander IV is truly deserving of the title — a pure joy to watch and play.” The Detroit Free Press said that “at times, it was like watching an episode of a science-fiction show.”
The organs of hardcore gaming were equally fulsome. Australia’s Hyper magazine lived up to its name (Hyperventilate? Hyperbole?) with the epistemologically questionable assertion that “if you don’t play this then you really don’t own a computer.” Computer Gaming World, still the United States’s journal of record, was almost as effusive, writing that “as good as the previous installment was, it served only as a rough prototype for the polished chrome that adorns Wing Commander IV. This truly is the vanguard of the next generation of electronic entertainment.”
Surprisingly, it was left to PC Gamer, the number-two periodical in the American market, normally more rather than less hype-prone than its older and somewhat stodgier competitor, to inject a note of caution into the critical discourse, by acknowledging how borderline absurd it was on the face of it to release a game in which 90 percent of the budget had gone into the cut scenes.
How you feel about Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is going to depend a lot on how you felt about Wing Commander III and the direction the series seems to be headed in.
When the original Wing Commander came out, it was a series of incredible, state-of-the-art space-combat sequences, tied together with occasional animated cut scenes. Today, Wing Commander IV seems more like a series of incredible, full-motion-video cut scenes tied together with occasional space-combat sequences. You can see the shift away from gameplay and toward multimedia flash in one of the ads for Wing Commander IV; seven of the eight little “bullet points” that list the game’s impressive new features are devoted to improvements in the quality of the video. Only the last point says anything about actual gameplay. If the tail’s not wagging the dog yet, it’s getting close.
For all its cosmetic improvements, Wing Commander IV feels just a little hollow. I can’t help thinking about what the fourth Wing Commander game might be like if the series had moved in the opposite direction, making huge improvements in the actual gameplay, rather than spending more and more time and effort on the stuff in between.
Still, these concerns were only raised parenthetically; even PC Gamer‘s reviewer saw fit to give the game a rating of 90 percent after unfurrowing his brow.
Today, however, the imbalance described above has become even more difficult to overlook, and seems even more absurd. As my regular readers know, narrative-oriented games are the ones I tend to be most passionate about; I’m the farthest thing from a Chris Crawford, insisting that the inclusion of any set-piece story line is a betrayal of interactive entertainment’s potential. My academic background is largely in literary studies, which perhaps explains why I tend to want to read games like others do books. And yet, with all that said, I also recognize that a game needs to give its player something interesting to do.
I’m reminded of an anecdote from Steve Diggle, a guitarist for the 1970s punk band Buzzcocks. He tells of seeing the keyboardist for the progressive-rock band Yes performing with “a telephone exchange of electronic things that nobody could afford or relate to. At the end, he brought an alpine horn out — because he was Swiss. It was a long way from Little Richard. I thought, ‘Something’s got to change.'” There’s some of the same quality to Wing Commander IV. Matters have gone so far out on a limb that one begins to suspect the only thing left to be done is just to burn it all down and start over.
But we do strive to be fair around here, so let’s try to evaluate the movie and the game of Wing Commander IV on their own merits before we address their imperfect union.
Chris Roberts is not a subtle storyteller; his influences are always close to the surface. The first three Wing Commander games were essentially a retelling of World War II in the Pacific, with the Terran Confederation for which Blair flies in the role of the United States and its allies and the evil feline Kilrathi in that of Japan. Now, with the alien space cats defeated once and for all, Roberts has moved on to the murkier ethical terrain of the Cold War, where battles are fought in the shadows and friend and foe are not so easy to distinguish. Instead of being lauded like the returning Greatest Generation were in the United States after World War II, Blair and his comrades who fought the good fight against the Kilrathi are treated more like the soldiers who came back from Vietnam. We learn that we’ve gone from rah-rah patriotism to something else the very first time we see Blair, when he meets a down-on-his-luck fellow veteran in a bar and can, at you the player’s discretion, give him a few coins to help him out. Shades of gray are not really Roberts’s forte; earnest guy that he is, he prefers the primary-color emotions. Still, he’s staked out his dramatic territory and now we have to go with it.
Having been relegated to the reserves after the end of the war with the Kilrathi, Blair has lately been running a planetside farm, but he’s called back to active duty to deal with a new problem on the frontiers of the Terran Confederation: a series of pirate raids in the region of the Border Worlds, a group of planets that is allied with the Confederation but has always preferred not to join it formally. Because the attacks are all against Confederation vessels rather than those of the Border Worlds, it is assumed that the free-spirited inhabitants of the latter are behind them. I trust that it won’t be too much a spoiler if I reveal here that the reality is far more sinister.
By all means, we should give props to Roberts for not just finding some way to bring the Kilrathi back as humanity’s existential threat. They are still around, and even make an appearance in Wing Commander IV, but they’ve seen the error of their ways with Confederation guidance and are busily rebuilding their society on more peaceful lines. (The parallels with World War II-era — and now postwar — Japan, in other words, still hold true.)
For all the improved production values, the Kilrathi in Wing Commander IV still look as ridiculous as ever, more cuddly than threatening.
The returns from Origin’s $9 million investment in the movie are front and center. An advantage of working with real sets instead of green screens is the way that the camera is suddenly allowed to move, making the end result look less like something filmed during the very earliest days of cinema and more like a product of the post-Citizen Kane era. One of the very first scenes is arguably the most impressive of them all. The camera starts on the ceiling of a meeting hall, looking directly down at the assembled dignitaries, then slowly sweeps to ground level, shifting as it moves from a vertical to a horizontal orientation. I’d set this scene up beside the opening of Activision’s Spycraft — released at almost the same time as Wing Commander IV, as it happens — as the most sophisticated that this generation of interactive movies ever got by the purely technical standards of film-making. (I do suspect that Wing Commander IV‘s relative adroitness is not so much down to Chris Roberts as to its cinematographer, a 21-year Hollywood veteran named Eric Goldstein.)
The acting, by contrast, is on about the same level as Wing Commander III: professional if not quite passionate. Mark Hamill’s dour performance is actually among the least engaging. (This is made doubly odd by the fact that he had recently been reinventing himself as a voice actor, through a series of portrayals — including a memorable one in the game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers — that are as giddy and uninhibited as his Colonel Blair isn’t.) On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to hear Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies deploy their dulcet Shakespearian-trained voices on even pedestrian (at best) dialog like this. But the happiest member of the cast must be Tom Wilson, whose agent’s phone hadn’t exactly been ringing off the hook in recent years; his traditional-cinema career had peaked with his role as the cretinous villain Biff in the Back to the Future films. Here he takes on the similarly over-the-top role of Maniac, a character who had become a surprise hit with the fans in Wing Commander III, and sees his screen time increased considerably in the fourth game as a result. As comic-relief sidekicks go, he’s no Sancho Panza, but he does provide a welcome respite from Blair’s always prattling on, a little listlessly and sleepy-eyed at times, about duty and honor and what hell war is (such hell that Chris Roberts can’t stop making games about it).
That said, the best humor in Wing Commander IV is of the unintentional kind. There’s a sort of Uncanny Valley in the midst of this business of interactive movies, as there is in so many creative fields. When the term was applied to games that merely took some inspiration from cinema, perhaps with a few (bad) actors mouthing some lines in front of green screens, it was easier to accept fairly uncritically. But the closer games like this one come to being real movies, the more their remaining shortcomings seem to stand out, and, paradoxically, the farther from their goal they seem to be. The reality is that 37 sets isn’t many by Hollywood standards — and most of these are cheap, sparse, painfully plastic-looking sets at that. Like in those old 1960s episodes of Star Trek, everybody onscreen visibly jumps — not in any particular unison, mind you — when the camera shakes to indicate an explosion and the party-supply-store smoke machines start up. The ray guns they shoot each other with look like gaudy plastic toys that Wal Mart would be ashamed to stock, while the accompanying sound effects would have been rejected as too cheesy by half by the producers of Battlestar Galactica.
All of this is understandable, even forgivable. A shooting budget of $9 million may have been enormous in game terms, but it was nothing by the standards of a Hollywood popcorn flick. (The 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact, for example, had five times the budget of Wing Commander IV, and it was not even an especially expensive example of its breed.) In the long run, interactive movies would find their Uncanny Valley impossible to bridge. Those who made them believed that they were uniquely capable of attracting a wider, more diverse audience than the people who typically played games in the mid-1990s. That proposition may have been debatable, but we’ll take it at face value. The problem was that, in order to attract these folks, they had to look like more than C-movies with aspirations of reaching B status. And the games industry’s current revenues simply didn’t give them any way to get from here to there. Wing Commander IV is a prime case in point: the most expensive game ever made still looked like a cheap joke by Hollywood standards.
The spaceships of the far future are controlled by a plastic steering wheel that looks like something you’d find hanging off of a Nintendo console. Pity the poor crew member whose only purpose in life seems to be to standing there holding on to it and fending off the advances of Major Todd “Maniac” “Sexual Harassment is Hilarious!” Marshall.
Other failings of Wing Commander IV, however, are less understandable and perchance less forgivable. It’s sometimes hard to believe that this script was the product of professional screenwriters, given the quantity of dialog which seems lifted from a Saturday Night Live sketch, which often had my wife and I rolling on the floor when we played the game together recently. (Or rather, when I played and she watched and laughed.) “Just because we operate in the void of space, is loyalty equally weightless?” Malcolm McDowell somehow manages to intone in that gorgeously honed accent of his without smirking. A young woman mourning the loss of her beau — as soon as you saw that these two had a thing going, you knew he was doomed, by the timeless logic of war movies — chooses the wrong horse as her metaphor and then just keeps on riding it out into the rhetorical sagebrush: “He’s out there along with my heart. Both no more than space dust. People fly through him every day and don’t even know it.”
Then there’s the way that everyone, excepting only Blair, is constantly referred to only by his or her call sign. This doesn’t do much to enhance the stateliness of a formal military funeral: “Some may think that Catscratch will be forgotten. They’re wrong. He’ll stay in our hearts always.” There’s the way that all of the men are constantly saluting each other at random moments, as if they’re channeling all of the feelings they don’t know how to express into that act — saluting to keep from crying, saluting as a way to avoid saying, “I love you, man!,” saluting whenever the screenwriters don’t know what the hell else to have them do. (Of course, they all do it so sloppily that anyone who really was in the military will be itching to jump through the monitor and smack them into shape.) And then there’s the ranks and titles, which sound like something children on a playground — or perhaps (ahem!) someone else? — came up with: Admiral Tolwyn gets promoted to “Space Marshal,” for Pete’s sake.
I do feel just a little bad to make fun of all this so much because Chris Roberts’s heart is clearly in the right place. As a time when an increasing number of games were appealing only to the worst sides of their players, Wing Commander IV at least gave lip service to the ties that bind, the thing things we owe to one another. It’s not precisely wrong in anything it says, even if it does become a bit one-note in that tedious John Wayne kind of way. Deep into the game, you discover that the sinister conspiracy you’ve been pursuing involves a new spin on the loathsome old arguments of eugenics, those beliefs that some of us have better genes than others and are thus more useful, valuable human beings, entitled to things that their inferior counterparts are not. Wing Commander IV knows precisely where it stands on this issue — on the right side. But boy, can its delivery be clumsy. And its handling of a more complex social issue like the plight of war veterans trying to integrate back into civilian society is about as nuanced as the old episodes of Magnum, P.I. that probably inspired it.
But betwixt and between all of the speechifying and saluting, there is still a game to play, consisting of about 25 to 30 missions worth of space-combat action, depending on the choices you make from the interactive movie’s occasional menus and how well you fly the missions themselves. The unsung hero of Wing Commander IV must surely be one Anthony Morone, who bore the thankless title of “Game Director,” meaning that he was the one who oversaw the creation of the far less glamorous game part of the game back in Austin while Chris Roberts was off in Hollywood shooting his movie. He did what he could with the limited time and resources at his disposal.
I noted above how the very way that this fourth game was made tended to pull the two halves of its personality even farther apart. That’s true on one level, but it’s also true that Morone made some not entirely unsuccessful efforts to push back against that centrifugal drift. Some of the storytelling now happens inside the missions themselves — something Wing Commander II, the first heavily plot-based entry in the series, did notably well, only to have Wing Commander III forget about it almost completely. Now, though, it’s back, such that your actions during the missions have a much greater impact on the direction of the movie. For example, at one point you’re sent to intercept some Confederation personnel who have apparently turned traitor. In the course of this mission, you learn what their real motivations are, and, if you think they’re good ones, you can change sides and become their escort rather than their attacker.
Indeed, there are quite a few possible paths through the story line and a handful of different endings, based on both the choices you take from those menus that pop up from time to time during the movie portions and your actions in the heat of battle. In this respect too, Wing Commander IV is more ambitious and more sophisticated than Wing Commander III.
A change in Wing Commander IV that feels very symbolic is the removal of any cockpit graphics. In the first game, seeing your pilot avatar manipulate the controls and seeing evidence of damage in your physical surroundings was extraordinarily verisimilitudious. Now, all that has been discarded without a second thought by a game with other priorities.
But it is enough? It’s hard to escape a creeping sense of ennui as you play this game. The flight engine and mission design still lag well behind LucasArts’s 1994 release TIE Fighter, a game that has aged much better than this one in all of its particulars. Roughly two out of every three missions here still don’t have much to do with the plot and aren’t much more than the usual “fly between these way points and shoot whatever you find there” — a product of the need to turn Roberts’s movie into a game that lasts longer than a few hours, in order to be sure that players feel like they have gotten their $50 worth. Worse, the missions are poorly balanced, being much more difficult than those in the previous game; enemy missiles are brutally overpowered, being now virtually guaranteed to kill you with one hit. The sharply increased difficulty feels more accidental than intentional, a product of the compressed development schedule and a resultant lack of play-testing. However it came about, it pulls directly against Origin’s urgent need to attract more — read, more casual — gamers to the series in order to justify its escalating budgets. Here as in so many other places in this game, the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, to the detriment of both.
In the end, then, neither the movie nor the game of Wing Commander IV can fully stand up on its own, and in combination they tend to clash more than they create any scintillating synergy. One senses when playing through the complete package that Origin’s explorations in this direction have indeed reached a sort of natural limit akin to that alpine-horn-playing keyboard player, that the only thing left to do now is to back up and try something else.
The magazines may have been carried away by the hype around Wing Commander IV, but not all ordinary gamers were. For example, one by the name of Robert Fletcher sent Origin the following letter:
I have noticed that the game design used by Origin has stayed basically the same. Wing Commander IV is a good example of a game design that has shown little growth. If one were to strip away the film clips, there would be a bare-bones game. The game would look and play like a game from the early 1980s. A very simple branching story line, with a little arcade action.
With all the muscle and talent at Origin’s command, it makes me wonder if Origin is really trying to push the frontier of game design. I know a little of what it takes to develop a game, from all the articles I have read (and I have read many). Many writers and developers are calling for their peers to get back to pushing the frontier of game design, over the development of better graphics.
Wing Commander IV has the best graphics I have seen, and it will be a while before anyone will match this work of art. But as a game, Wing Commander IV makes a better movie.
In its April 1996 issue — notice that date! — Computer Gaming World published an alleged preview of Origin’s plans for Wing Commander V. Silly though the article is, it says something about the reputation that Chris Roberts and his franchise were garnering among gamers like our Mr. Fletcher for pushing the envelope of money and technology past the boundaries of common sense, traveling far out on a limb that was in serious danger of being cut off behind them.
With Wing Commander IV barely a month old, Origin has already announced incredible plans for the next game in the highly successful series. In another first for a computer-game company, Origin says it will design small working models of highly maneuverable drones which can be launched into space, piloted remotely, and filmed. The craft will enable Wing V to have “unprecedented spaceflight realism and true ‘star appeal,'” said a company spokesman.
Although the next game in the science-fiction series sounds more like fiction than science, Origin’s Chris Roberts says it’s the next logical step for his six-year-old creation. “If you think about it,” he says, “Wing Commander [I] was the game where we learned the mechanics of space fighting. We made lots of changes and improvements in Wing II. With Wing III, we raised the bar considerably with better graphics, more realistic action, full-motion video, and big-name stars in video segments. In Wing IV, we upped the ante again with real sets, more video, and, in my opinion, a much better story. We’ve reached the point of using real stars and real sets — now it’s time to take our act on location: real space.”
Analysts say it’s nearly impossible to estimate the cost of such an undertaking. Some put figures at between $100 million and $10 billion, just to deploy a small number of remotely pilotable vehicles beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Despite this, Origin’s Lord British (Richard Garriott) claims that he has much of the necessary financial support from investors. Says Garriott, “When we told [investors] what we wanted to do for Wing Commander V, they were amazed. We’re talking about one of man’s deepest desires — to break free of the bonds of Earth. We know it seems costly in comparison with other games, but this is unlike anything that’s ever been done. I don’t see any problem getting the financial backing for this project, and we expect to recoup the investment in the first week. You’re going to see a worldwide release on eight platforms in 36 countries. It’s going to be a huge event. It’ll dwarf even Windows 95.”
Tellingly, some fans believed the announcement was real, writing Origin concerned letters about whether this was really such a good use of its resources.
Still, the sense of unease about Origin’s direction was far from universal. In a sidebar that accompanied its glowing review of Wing Commander IV in that same April 1996 issue, Computer Gaming World asked on a less satirical note, “Is it time to take interactive movies seriously?” The answer according to the magazine was yes: “Some will continue to mock the concept of ‘Siliwood,’ but the marriage of Hollywood and Silicon Valley is definitely real and here to stay. In this regard, no current game charts a more optimistic path to the future of multimedia entertainment than Wing Commander IV.” Alas, the magazine’s satire would prove more prescient than this straightforward opinion piece. Rather than the end of the beginning of the era of interactive movies, Wing Commander IV would go down in history as the beginning of the end, a limit of grandiosity beyond which further progress was impossible.
The reason came down to the cold, hard logic of dollars and cents, working off of a single data point: Wing Commander IV sold less than half as many copies as Wing Commander III. Despite the increased budget and improved production values, despite all the mainstream press coverage, despite the gala premiere at Planet Hollywood, it just barely managed to break even, long after its initial release. I believe the reason why had everything to with that Uncanny Valley I described for you. Those excited enough by the potential of the medium to give these interactive movies the benefit of the doubt had already done so, and even many of these folks were now losing interest. Meanwhile the rest of the world was, at best, waiting for such productions to mature enough that they could sit comfortably beside real movies, or even television. But this was a leap that even Origin Systems, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, the biggest game publisher in the country, was financially incapable of making. And as things currently stood, the return on investment on productions even the size of Wing Commander IV — much less still larger — simply wasn’t there.
During this period, a group of enterprising Netizens took it upon themselves to compile a weekly “Internet PC Games Chart” by polling thousands of their fellow gamers on what they were playing just at that moment. Wing Commander IV is present on the lists they published during the spring of 1996, rising as high as number four for a couple of weeks. But the list of games that consistently place above it is telling: Command & Conquer, Warcraft II, DOOM II, Descent, Civilization II. Although some of them do have some elements of story to bind their campaigns together and deliver a long-form single-player experience, none of them aspires to full-blown interactive movie-dom (not even Command & Conquer, which does feature real human actors onscreen giving its mission briefings). In fact, no games meeting that description are ever to be found anywhere in the top ten at the same time as Wing Commander IV.
Thanks to data like this, it was slowly beginning to dawn on the industry’s movers and shakers that the existing hardcore gamers — the people actually buying games today, and thereby sustaining their companies — were less interested in a merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood than they were. “I don’t think it’s necessary to spend that much money to suspend disbelief and entertain the gamer,” said Jim Namestka of Dreamforge Intertainment by way of articulating the emerging new conventional wisdom. “It’s alright to spend a lot of money on enhancing the game experience, but a large portion spent instead on huge salaries for big-name actors… I question whether that’s really necessary.”
I’ve written quite a lot in recent articles about 1996 as the year that essentially erased the point-and-click adventure game as one of the industry’s marquee genres. Wing Commander IV isn’t one of those, of course, even if it does look a bit like one at times, when you’re wandering around a ship talking to your crew mates. Still, the Venn diagram of the interactive movie does encompass games like Wing Commander IV, just as it does games like, say, Phantasmagoria, the biggest adventure hit of 1995, which sold even more copies than Wing Commander III. In 1996, however, no game inside that Venn diagram became a million-selling breakout hit. The best any could manage was a middling performance relative to expectations, as was the case for Wing Commander IV. And so the retrenchment began.
It would have been financially foolish to do anything else. The titles that accompanied and often bested Wing Commander IV on those Internet PC Games Charts had all cost vastly less money to make and yet sold as well or better. id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, the games that had started the shift away from overblown storytelling and extended multimedia cut scenes and back to the nuts and bolts of gameplay, had been built by a tiny team of scruffy outsiders working on a shoestring; call this the games industry’s own version of Buzzcocks versus Yes.
The shift away from interactive movies didn’t happen overnight. At Origin, the process of bargaining with financial realities would lead to one more Wing Commander game before the franchise was put out to pasture, still incorporating real actors in live-action cut scenes, but on a less lavish, more sustainable — read, cheaper — scale. The proof was right there in the box: Wing Commander: Prophecy, which but for a last-minute decision by marketing would have been known as Wing Commander V, shipped on three CDs in early 1997 rather than the six of Wing Commander IV. By that time, the whole franchise was looking hopelessly passé in a sea of real-time strategy and first-person shooters whose ethic was to get you into the action fast and keep you there, without any clichéd meditations about the hell that is war. Wing Commander IV had proved to be the peak of the interactive-movie mountain rather than the next base camp which Chris Roberts had imagined it to be.
This is not to say that digital interactive storytelling as a whole died in 1996. It just needed to find other, more practical and ultimately more satisfying ways to move forward. Some of those would take shape in the long-moribund CRPG genre, which enjoyed an unexpected revival close to the decade’s end. Adventure games too would soldier on, but on a smaller scale more appropriate to their reduced commercial circumstances, driven now by passion for the medium rather than hype, painted once again in lovely pixel art instead of grainy digitized video. For that matter, even space simulators would enjoy a golden twilight before falling out of fashion for good, thanks to several titles that kicked against what Wing Commander had become by returning the focus to what happened in the cockpit.
All of these development have left Wing Commander IV standing alone and exposed, its obvious faults only magnified that much more by its splendid isolation. It isn’t a great game, nor even all that good a game, but it isn’t a cynical or unlikable one either. Call it a true child of Chris Roberts: a gawky chip off the old block, with too much money and talent and yet not quite enough.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
(Sources: the book Origin’s Official Guide to Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom by Melissa Tyler; Computer Gaming World of February 1995, May 1995, December 1995, April 1996, and July 1997; Strategy Plus of December 1995; the American PC Gamer of September 1995 and May 1996; Origin’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of September 8 1995, January 12 1996, February 12 1996, April 5 1996, and May 17 1996; Retro Gamer 59. Online sources include the various other internal Origin documents, video clips, pictures, and more hosted at Wing Commander News and Mark Asher’s CNET GameCenter columns from March 24 1999 and October 29 1999. And, for something completely different, Buzzcocks being interview at the British Library in 2016. RIP Pete Shelley.
A post called End of the Adventure on Patreon has word from American McGee that he is retiring from the game development business. He does not say this is permanent, but that he has no "interest in...
Let's be real: Dragons are awesome! Since ancient Mesopotamians whispered about Tiamat and Marduk's red serpent servant, the legend of dragons thrived. For generations, these scaly creatures have induced fear and delight. Tolkien drew from these myths to bring the creature into the modern fantasy canon, with his childhood love of Fafnir, Siegfried's legendary foe, transformed into the prideful Smaug. Now the fantasy genre is almost synonymous with dragons. Of course, the '70s introduction of Dungeons & Dragons helped, too! Today, there's a resurgence of love for these big fellas -- starring in movies like "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Raya and the Last Dragon."
Putting dragons on the big screen is a huge technical challenge. Not every movie's budget can commit to that feat. For decades, animation came to the rescue -- pitching price-conscious versions to younger and more accepting viewers. But after the release of "Jurassic Park," CGI and animatronics offered new ways to bring the creature to life.
But which films showcase a true dance of dragons? Here are 13 movies to honor our titanic kings and queens of fantasy. Each entry on this list has something special to offer viewers. More importantly, every adventure encountered in these movies would fail without a dragon leading the way.
13. Pete's Dragon
There's nothing wrong about loving David Lowery's 2016 remake of "Pete's Dragon." But to get there, we need to honor the original. The 1977 film is a mixture of musical animation and live-action storytelling, borrowing a few tricks from "Mary Poppins" to nail its particular charms. Surprisingly, the movie is fairly melancholy. Pete (Sean Marshall) is an orphan child stuck with the kind of foster family that makes horrifying headlines. His invisible friend, Elliott (Charlie Callas), is dismissed as exactly that: unreal. But Elliott is as real as it gets! Throughout the film, he guides Pete to safety -- despite the interventions of a greedy caravan huckster and Pete's controlling foster parents.
Legendary animators Don Bluth and Ken Anderson based Elliott on the idea of the Chinese Long, not our familiar Smauggy drakes. Long are visually more serpentine than Western dragons, which comes out in Elliott's long tail. They have furry furnishings along their heads and back. Also, they're meant to bring good luck, not act as harbingers of terror. Elliott embodies his Eastern ancestors. "Pete's Dragon" is a sweet and charming movie that earns its happy ending. But if you don't care for musicals, the remake is just as sweet-natured without the singing fanfare. It's a great intro movie for kids, but as dragons go, Elliott is too sweet to fly higher up this ranking.
12. The Flight Of Dragons
"The Last Unicorn" isn't the only great oddity that Rankin-Bass debuted during their decades of stop-motion and animation fame. "The Flight of Dragons" is another classic entry. Partially based on the non-fiction style speculative book by Peter Dickinson of the same name, "The Flight of Dragons" also borrows the storyline of Gordon R. Dickson's "The Dragon and the George." Animated by "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind" studio Topcraft, "The Flight of Dragons" explores the possibility of dragons, their magical necessity in a world changed by science, and our fears of change.
With James Earl Jones voicing the evil wizard Ommadon, the plot may be too tangly for most kids. But the ones that stick with it are going to love it to pieces. The book's author, Peter Dickinson, becomes our fictional protagonist. However, the dragons steal the show. The lovingly rendered animation blends cartoonish faces with coiling and threatening bodies. The result? Creatures here look like little else in animation, with their personalities visible in their behavior. Don't be put off by the wonky DVD cover. The film is far more beautiful movie than its cover art suggests. A fine example of classic and curious dragons, it's still too obscure to be higher ranked than this.
11. The NeverEnding Story
Falkor (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer) might not be present for chunks of "The NeverEnding Story," but he's the heart of the beloved fantasy film. After losing his companion horse, Artax, Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), is emotionally distraught. Luckily for him, he's soon rescued by the deus ex machina of the film that both he and his reader, Bastian, need to keep going. Falkor is a luck dragon, so letting others give up on their quest is not his nature.
Falkor's winding body has pearly white scales -- like the Long dragon he's inspired by -- and he's adorably furry. He's got a face like a Labrador Retriever puppy, with squeezable cheeks and floppy ears. His kindness and irrepressible hope kick the story back into gear: He even gives Bastian a silly but wonderful wish-fulfillment fantasy in the movie's final minutes. While the movie may show its age in a few places — and the novel's author, Michael Ende, was no fan of the result — Falkor's puppetry and sheer aura of kindness remain immortal. We'd still scratch that fuzzy chin! But nostalgia aside, Falkor is too strange of a dragon to carve out a bigger place for himself in these ranks.
10. Reign Of Fire
Though it was far from a critical or financial success, there's something worth discovering in "Reign of Fire." With a shockingly strong cast that includes Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey, and Alexander Siddig, this post-apocalyptic thriller has a fascinating ecological take on dragons. (Let's not talk about that shoddy finale reveal.) Still, the rest of the film contains more than enough cheesy action and hammy drama to soften the landing.
Until then, the dragons are as they should be: terrifying threats of teeth and claw, with armored hides so thick they survive nuclear attacks. The CGI is top-notch for the time, making these bad boys feel like the human cast has a real reason to hunker down in old castles, turning classic movies into pantomimes for their children. The only hitch is a bizarre take on the trope of the load-bearing boss. These dragons — well, physically they're more like wyverns — have one male at the top of their world-sprawling empire. Kill it, and the world will be free from this napalm threat. The weakness of this plot device keeps these apex predators from climbing into the top six spot.
9. Monster Hunter: Legends Of The Guild
Don't bother to acknowledge the live-action movie. Fans of the game franchise — including me — have a better suggestion. Netflix has an animated CGI short film that canonically takes place before the "Monster Hunter World events." In "Monster Hunter: Legends of the Guild," Aiden, a future Ace Hunter, uses the time aboard a ship to retell the story of his first big hunt in his youth.
"Monster Hunter" beasts are frequently subspecies of wyverns, with the biggest and deadliest threats taxonomically categorized as Elder Dragons. "Legends of the Guild" showcases both kinds, introducing neophytes to the dinosaur-style ice wyvern Velocidrome and the terror of the raging pickle-like wyvern Deviljho. Game fans know this giant-chinned green bastard will ruin any hunter's day -- though it's not too bad for our heroes here. But the centerpiece of the film is the Lunastra: This feminine Elder Dragon has some physical elements of the manticore, but it also wields some of a typical dragon's tools like fire breath. Beautiful and deadly, you'll wonder why gamers dare hunt these bad girls. Her partner, the Teostra, is much easier to deal with, though! A great introduction to the franchise, "Monster Hunter" still remains pretty niche -- giving them a lower place here.
8. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings
The Great Protector is only seen during the final act of "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings." Still, her presence and power set the climax into motion. This majestic Long is the final guardian against the invasion of the eldritch Dweller-in-Darkness. She's also been keeping the village of Ta Lo a secret from the world for ages. Capable of using and granting the gifts of wind and water, her abilities are foreshadowed earlier when Shang-Chi's mother (Fala Chen) defends the village from Wenwu (Tony Leung) in those beautiful wuxia fights.
Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) rides along The Great Protector's back amidst the film's final battle. Her design is beautiful. The dragon's pearly-white scales and red fur highlight her supernatural role as a bringer of good fortune. She coils through sky and sea without effort. Designed by Weta, the Protector brings to life a sacred and stunning creature to the big screen. "Shang-Chi" is already one of the best Marvel movies to date, and its heroic dragon is a large reason why. Give her a spin-off anime movie, and we'll take her into the top four. There's just too little of her to rank her higher.
7. Sleeping Beauty & Maleficent
"Sleeping Beauty" and "Maleficent" diverge on how their iconic dragon takes flight. This green-fire terror is a landmark for kids looking to discover their first scary-but-awesome legend brought to life. In "Sleeping Beauty," the Black Dragon is Maleficent herself, shapeshifting in order to torment Prince Phillip as he's trying to rescue Aurora. The dragon's unique aesthetic came from the stylized work of artist Eyvind Earle. In "Maleficent," Angelina Jolie's beautiful and rightfully furious fae queen delegates the ability to her raven companion, Diaval (Sam Riley). While not as stylized as his predecessor, the impact is still a fiery treat.
The Black Dragon is one of Disney's best villainous designs — even if it is treated more heroically in the live-action version. Its evil comes through in its secondary color palette, with eerie neon greens and purple highlights. Maleficent's crown of horns inspires its head shape. In "Sleeping Beauty," its angular form is incredibly intimidating for small children. All this makes the Black Dragon one of the species' best and most classic representatives, worthy of appearing in spin-off media like "Kingdom Hearts" and inspiring the look of one of the houses in "Twisted Wonderland." But with a small role on-screen comes a lower ranking. Sorry, Maleficent!
6. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Despite the moniker, a "Dungeons & Dragons" scenario doesn't require either to count as a great campaign. But a movie meant to attract a wide audience has to weigh the dice in its favor. "Honor Among Thieves" highlights both tabletop icons. Alongside an arena game that looks exactly like a classic dungeon grid, there's one obligatory dragon earlier in the film. Themberchaud is the chonkiest big boy a party of adventurers could encounter — but he's not just a joke to them, either.
Themberchaud, for all his squishy, murdery cuteness, is a Red Dragon. That's top-shelf bad news in a D&D campaign, and it's a hint of his true power that not even the Paladin Xenk leaves a mark on him. His appearance, capability, and name are all long-time D&D canon. He first appeared in a Drizzt-themed Underdark supplement in 1999. His CGI animation succeeds in giving him real presence, and his chaotic grace makes it easy for us to laugh as our heroes realize the big fella is as fast and deadly as his leaner kin. Not just a fat joke — thank goodness — Themberchaud is a great ambassador for his kind. Maybe not every campaign needs to be serious, but you still have to work together as a team to survive its dangers. Unfortunately, for the race to be Top Drake, Themberchaud is the only featured member of his species here. We need dragons, plural, from a "Dungeons & Dragons" movie.
5. The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
Whether you're a fan of "The Hobbit" trilogy or not, the effort Weta Digital and actor Benedict Cumberbatch put into bringing Tolkien's homage to the myths of his youth to life deserves recognition. Smaug embodies desolation; his greed leads him to overtake a Dwarven kingdom. His wrath savages nearby settlements. While the movies lose some of Tolkien's nuance — the "dragon-sickness" isn't just greed, but hoarding of the past, too — his cruelties highlight the grim changes Thorin goes through in the third film.
Our first glimpse of Smaug is at the end of the first film, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey." This choice sets the tone for the creature we meet in the second film. Smaug is vain and prideful, but he's also cunning and tuned into defending his horde. He may be one of the most intelligent adversaries in Middle-Earth, short of Sauron. His flaws, and a single loose belly scale, are the only ways to overcome him. He's as dragony as dragons can get, too -- though Cumberbatch's crawling performance earned him winged wyvern forearms instead of the "classic" four legs and separate wing design. Cumberbatch's Smaug is the best thing about the "Hobbit" trilogy, and his longtime co-actor Martin Freeman as Bilbo is the second. Humbled by an unnecessary stretch into a trilogy, Smaug is hobbled to fifth -- despite being one of fantasy's biggest lizards.
4. Dragonheart
Maybe it's the nostalgia talking, but it's hard to surpass "Dragonheart" as an example of what fantasy-addled kids want in a movie. Draco (Sean Connery) is as pure a dragon as you can imagine: four-legged, winged, clawed, bedecked with horns, and adorably charming. His human companion, Bowen (Dennis Quaid), is a proper Arthurian knight: Both are tied up in the fate of the requisite evil king, Einon (David Thewlis).
Yes, the plot of "Dragonheart" is messy. In places, character motivations are downright nonsensical. But none of this is what we're here for, anyway. Post-"Jurassic Park" CGI and cutting-edge animatronics from ILM made Draco into something '90s kids could happily stare at for hours. Unfortunately, there is a slew of crappy straight-to-DVD sequels that are still trying to recapture his magic. Forget about them. Grab a can of cheese balls and your favorite afghan. Draco is so lovable that an over-the-top film can't stop him from soaring into our hearts. A weak plot and too many spin-offs keep him in fourth place, but it's a solid fourth!
3. How To Train Your Dragon
Today, Toothless is the soulmate of black cats everywhere. That nigh-untamable but companionable felid charm is partially why he still has our imaginations in a death grip. A type of rare dragon called a Night Fury, the theme of his story is that dragons aren't "trained" so much as befriended. Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) has to learn this the hard way at first. But what he gains from his goofy new companion reshapes his life and his Viking village for the better.
"How to Train Your Dragon" offers a cornucopia of delightful designs. Most of these dragon looks are far beyond the cute sketches from Cressida Cowell's original book series. From the puppyish rock dragon Gronckles to the venomous Deadly Nadders, there's a dragon type for almost everyone to love. However, the adorable Night Fury ranks above them all. Toothless is the franchise's mascot, with his silly smile and lightning-quick zoom through the skies. His first flight with Hiccup is pure magic, an experience we wish we could share. Dreams will have to be close enough. Why only third place? If you've seen the final movie, you know why. Hiccup has good reasoning, but we still want dragons in our world, dammit.
2. Spirited Away
The amnesiac Haku is the deuteragonist in Chihiro's story. His redemption as a river dragon is tied to her fate. "Spirited Away" is about a lot of things, including Chihiro's growth, a parent's fears, and, Haku's identity. The answer isn't just that he's a dragon god. Part of his journey is letting go of his desire to usurp Yubaba's power.
For much of the movie, Haku is a thief in service to the witchy mistress of a yokai bathhouse. She's locked away his true name, as she did to Chihiro, but that doesn't stop him from feeling instinctually protective towards the new human arrival. Deep inside of him is a memory of her. Chihiro's sudden realization of what he is frees him to take his true self. He's beautiful with his white scales and seafoam green fur -- gleaming as pure as his river once was. There's a lot of melancholy in his freedom — Haku now knows who he is, but his river, that piece of his self, is long gone. That lament to a damaged environment is classic Ghibli. It's only fitting that this gorgeous dragon reminds us of the importance of keeping nature preserved. Haku takes a coveted second place because Hayao Miyazaki imbued so much meaning into who this river god is.
1. Dragonslayer
Hands down, Vermithrax Pejorative is one of the most badass and evil-sounding names outside of the Sith Lords of "Star Wars." She's the antagonist of "Dragonslayer," a cult movie currently earning its rightful redemption with a remastered rerelease that features commentary by one of the film's biggest long-time defenders, Guillermo Del Toro. No, its title doesn't leave much to question: There's a big bad dragon on the loose, and it's gotta go.
Vermithrax is a Phil Tippett special, designed with the help of David Bunnett. The team realized the dragon by using a variety of animatronics and stop-motion puppetry. Her biggest puppet has wings nine meters wide, and there's a separate head full of intricate tricks to give this dragon queen a slew of active emotions. She even has smaller models to replicate running. The final job of compositing these actions into the movie holds up as well — or better — than Superman's first flights in 1978. There's no question about the threat she poses to would-be slayer Galen (Peter MacNicol). There's also no question about the threat she poses to our nightmares. All hail the Queen of Dragons!
We need to talk about Ben Solo, once again. Starting with "The Force Awakens," Kylo Ren has been a controversial adversary in the sequel trilogy of "Star Wars." A servant of the First Order, Ben Solo (Adam Driver) was the brooding, patricidal son of Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and a fanboy of his grandpa Darth Vader. Depending on certain points of view, he was either a sad boy deserving of redemption or a brat who never received any grace. But even at his worst, Kylo Ren had an allure that couldn't be denied.
However you feel about Kylo Ren, things are about to get more controversial. The 2023 Star Wars Celebration announced an upcoming untitled "Star Wars" movie directed by "Ms. Marvel" Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy. It's set 15 years after "Rise of Skywalker," with Daisy Ridley returning as Rey Skywalker to train the new Jedi generation. Whether or not Ben will explicitly be brought up, he's sure to haunt those events.
Under his Kylo persona, Ben grappled with a torrent of guilt. "The Force Awakens" depicts him as torn up about killing his own father. In "The Last Jedi," he refuses to turn over a new leaf. By the much-maligned "Rise of Skywalker" trilogy conclusion (essentially "Return of the Jedi" remixed), he re-embraced the Light for good, saved Rey from a zombified Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid), and died. Just as Rey's legacy is up to question, how can the new movie handle the colossal mess that Ben left behind?
Embrace The Ambivalence
Like in the case of Anakin Skywalker, there's no glossing over the galactic damage and incalculable body count left behind by Ben Solo. When you think of Darth Vader's legacy, you might think about how he chose to end his story with a redemptive act, overthrowing the tyrannical Emperor, and reconciling with his son Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Since "Star Wars" is based on myth and fantasy, the romanticized framing of forgiveness is justified for the personal drama, but it was tiresome when it was replicated for "Rise of Skywalker."
Over time and through supplemental franchise materials, many fan perspectives have shifted. In Claudia Gray's "Bloodline" novel, we find out that reconciliation could not extend to his daughter Leia Organa, who recalls the coldness of Darth Vader's hand on her shoulder during captivity. That's how she remembers her father. Leia hasn't forgiven him and has to grapple with her late father's complexities, both his monstrosities and original intentions. Around her, the galaxy remembers him as a horrific memory. No doubt, Kylo Ren will always be that memory for millions.
Rae Carson's "Rise of Skywalker" novelization also deals with the controversial Ben-Rey kiss with more internal ambivalence than the onscreen romantic framing. These two novelists are onto something: ambivalence may be the best approach considering the aftermath. The galaxy is not inclined to forgive Kylo Ren nor Ben Solo. Even Rey's thoughts about the late Ben may shift over the years.
What A Force-Ghost Ben Solo Might Owe Us
When Ben passed, his vanishing body suggested that he was spirited away much like his namesake Obi-Wan Kenobi, his mother, his grandfather, and his Uncle Skywalker. So a Force-ghost Ben can't be discounted. He probably had the most awkward family reunion in the spirit realm. As of now, he might be chilling in the Cosmic Force and getting scolded by his Force-ghost mom.
I'm honestly mixed about this. A Force-ghost Ben Solo would probably be too distracting in what should be a Rey movie. But this is the "Star Wars" franchise, so it would act on the profitable impulse to bring him back in some form to steal the spotlight (and Rey's thunder). That said, narratively, a Force-ghost Ben could open an interesting atonement arc — the screenplay would have a chance to deal with the gravity of his misdeeds. If his ghost is involved in the creation of Rey's new Jedi Order (beyond just a fleeting cameo), just imagine him feeding the Younglings and Padawan's PSAs on the temptations of the Dark Side. But it would take a lot more than a teaching position to address his wrongs.
As more information comes out about the new film, Ben's legacy is going to linger in discussions.
There's no one like Natasha Lyonne. With her distinctive, raspy New York accent, fiery red curls, and penchant for playing disheveled characters with a heart of gold, Lyonne has carved out a unique place in Hollywood. Who else could conceivably be described as a cross between Mae West and Joe Pesci? In the 1990s, Lyonne emerged on the scene, starring in offbeat comedies like "Slums of Beverly Hills," American Pie," and "Detroit Rock City." Her career languished somewhat in the 2000s until she starred as Nicky Nichols in Netflix's breakout hit "Orange Is The New Black."
Recently, Lyonne has stepped into what you might call the auteur phase of her career, writing and starring in "Russian Doll" and starring and producing "Poker Face" with director Rian Johnson. Though Lyonne has become a fixture on our TV screens as of late, she still doesn't get enough credit for her work in the industry and the unmatched quality of her work. With the success of her recent projects, now is the perfect time to conduct a Natasha Lyonne retrospective! Join us as we look back at the best films and TV shows in Lyonne's decades-long career.
Slums Of Beverly Hills
1998's "Slums of Beverly Hills" was Natasha Lyonne's first lead role. With it, she announced to the world that she was a rising talent. Set in 1976, the film follows the Abromowitzes, a family that moves from apartment to apartment every few months. They eventually decide to settle in Beverly Hills, so 14-year-old Vivian (Lyonne) and her brothers can attend good schools. Soon their lives are shaken up by the arrival of Vivian's older cousin, Rita (Marisa Tomei), who escaped from rehab and has been placed under the care of the family by Vivian's uncle, Mikey (Carl Reiner).
The film had moderately positive reviews at the time of its premiere. Since its release, it has become a cult classic. Audiences appreciate the film's naturalistic, earnest sense of humor. Lyonne is wonderful in her breakout role, and her organic performance is even more impressive when you consider she was acting opposite legends like Alan Arkin, Tomei, and Reiner. There's a beautiful openness to teenaged Lyonne's performance here, which makes the film's awkward and hilarious moments -- many involve sex and puberty -- affecting. Of course, this film launched Lyonne's career, as it perfectly showcases her uncanny ability to bring heart to the most absurd circumstances and characters.
American Pie
Following the relative success of "Slums of Beverly Hills," Lyonne landed a role in "American Pie." One of the most beloved teen comedies of the 1990s, "American Pie" follows a group of teenage boys who make a pact to lose their virginity before their high school graduation. Lyonne plays one of their classmates, Jessica, a sexually experienced young woman. She offers advice to her less knowledgeable peers. Lyonne doesn't have a huge part in the film, but she makes the most of her limited screen time. She delivers every one-liner with perfect timing and an air of unaffected maturity that makes her one of the most likable characters in the film.
Speaking with EW, Lyonne revealed that she was "very confused by this movie" because it represented a suburban and "fratty" high school experience that she didn't have. She turned the role down several times before accepting it, telling Drew Barrymore, "Then they gave me money, and I began to understand." That confusion doesn't show up in Lyonne's performance, as she easily inhabits the role of a promiscuous teenager. Lyonne noted that she's ultimately grateful for the film because it allowed her to have a successful career in indie films in the following years.
But I'm A Cheerleader
Lyonne had a pretty amazing run in the late 1990s, starring in three comedy films that would become iconic cult classics. The last of these films was 1999's "But I'm a Cheerleader," which remains Lyonne's greatest film to date. Directed by Jamie Babbit, the film follows a teenage girl, Megan (Lyonne), who is sent to a conversion therapy camp when her parents suspect she's gay. The catch? Megan doesn't think she's gay, leading to the film's incredulous title, "But I'm a cheerleader!"
Upon arriving at True Directions, Megan meets a cast of colorful characters, including cool-girl lesbian Graham (played by frequent Lyonne collaborator Clea DuVall), and Mike (played by the one-and-only RuPaul). The film's incredible supporting cast also includes indie darling Melanie Lynskey, Cathay Moriarty, Eddie Cibrian, and Julie Delpy. Megan soon realizes her parents were right -- she is a lesbian. Her burgeoning romance with Graham is adorable, and the cheer she performs near the end of the film to win Graham's heart is pure joy.
A comedy set at a conversion therapy camp might seem like a hard sell, but its snappy script and wonderfully heartfelt performances result in a delightful, timeless classic. Yes, Lyonne's endearing naivete in the film might seem like a far cry from the more cynical roles she would play later in her career. But Lyonne's performances consistently commit to honesty and vulnerability.
Scary Movie 2
Even Lyonne's biggest fans might have forgotten she was once featured in the most popular horror satire series ever. We're here to remind you about her role in "Scary Movie 2." Lyonne only has a small part in the film, but her character is the central figure in the movie's opening scene. In a parody of "The Exorcist," Lyonne plays a teenager named Megan Voorhees who becomes possessed by a malevolent spirit. Her mother (Veronica Cartwright) hires two priests, Father McFeely (James Woods) and Father Harris (Andy Richter), to perform an exorcism on her daughter.
Lyonne is almost unrecognizable in the role due to her exaggerated hair and makeup. She goes all in playing the out-of-her-mind teenager. As in "The Exorcist," possessed Megan acts completely feral -- though Lyonne's version of the character lets loose a series of obscenities that were certainly not said in the original film.
The final product is an amusing and well-executed gag -- due in no small part to Lyonne's dedication. However, the opening vignette could have been even more absurd. As Lyonne told EW, Marlon Brando was cast in the role of Father McFeely but dropped out due to health reasons. Lyonne still has the dailies of their scenes together. Unsurprisingly, Lyonne describes the encounter as one of the most surreal moments in her career.
The Immaculate Conception Of Little Dizzle
"The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle" may be the strangest project Lyonne has starred in throughout her career. That's saying a lot for an actor known for being eccentric. David Russo's low-budget oddity follows a devoutly religious man, Dory (Marshall Allman), who is fired from his IT job. Dory then works as a janitor and encounters some strange happenings at his workplace.
While cleaning a marketing research firm, Dory and his coworkers ingest a batch of cookies that causes a bizarre kind of male pregnancy. Dory soon learns that they are being experimented on by the company, and the conspiracy is led by one of the firm's employees, Tracy (Lyonne).
Despite its small budget, the film gets an impressive amount done and is a totally outlandish ride. Lyonne fits seamlessly into this offbeat world, and her eerily menacing character is a delicious villain. No, it's definitely not the kind of film that is going to please everyone. Still, Lyonne and her collaborators have never been ones to play it safe.
All About Evil
Lyonne has a talent for playing slightly unhinged characters, which is why 2010's "All About Evil" is the perfect role for her. Lyonne plays Deborah, a passive young woman who runs her family's movie theater. To save the theater from financial ruin, Deborah shows a series of violent exploitation films, much to the delight of her audience. But the moviegoers don't know that these films depict murders that Deborah and her projectionist committed. The film also features the Mistress of the Dark herself, Cassandra Peterson, as the mother of one of Deborah's devoted fans.
"All About Evil" is a campy take on the '80s slasher film, and its low-budget approach to horror is best described as "scrappy." The film's campy style is an absolute hoot, and Lyonne's delightfully over-the-top performance is fantastic. As critic Michael Talbot-Haynes writes, the performances in the film feels like drag, which makes sense given its filmmaker is none other than the legendary drag queen Peaches Christ. Though her career certainly wasn't at its peak in 2010, Lyonne's performance in the film proves she is a star in any decade.
Orange Is The New Black
Though Lyonne continued working as an actor throughout the 2000s, her addictions to drugs temporarily derailed her career. She returned to acting in the late 2000s, appearing in off-broadway shows -- thanks to the encouragement of her friend and actor Chloë Sevigny. In 2013, Lyonne had her "comeback," playing Nicky Nichols in the critically-acclaimed "Orange Is The New Black."
While our entry point into "Orange Is The New Black" is from the privileged, ignorant Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), its other inmates, like Nicky, are the heart of the show. Nicky is a sardonic, foul-mouthed lesbian lothario addicted to drugs. Despite her many flaws, Nicky is eminently lovable. Nicky allows Lyonne to do what she does best, balancing the wisecracking, devil-may-care side of her character with an underlining desire to be loved and understood. Lyonne plays Nicky with an earnestness that goes right for the jugular while providing plenty of comedic fodder.
Despite her initial appearance as a sidekick, Nicky is one of the most tragic figures on the show. Her dynamic with her maternal figure, Red (Kate Mulgrew), and her love interest, Lorna (Yael Stone), are some of the most moving relationships in the series. It's impossible to single out any one actor's contributions to the show because the ensemble is so great, but Lyonne's performance here is absolutely one of the series' high points.
Lyonne is probably best known for her work in comedy, so it's not a surprise that she was featured on one of TV's most sought-out sketch comedy shows, "Portlandia." Created by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, "Portlandia" is set in Portland, Oregon, and features a recurring group of characters. Brownstein and Armisen portray many of these characters.
Throughout the series, Lyonne appears in five different episodes -- playing different characters in each sketch. You can find Lyonne attending a music festival, patronizing Seaworld, or exploring the wild world of dating apps. Despite Lyonne's distinctive style, her stint on "Portlandia" illustrated the fact that she can pull off any type of role you throw at her. The series remains one of the most beloved sketch comedy series in recent memory. "Portlandia" ran for an impressive eight seasons and its guest stars -- like Lyonne -- made it a memorable piece of pop culture.
The Intervention
Along with her good friend Chloë Sevigny, one of Lyonne's frequent collaborators is Clea DuVall. Considering their long-standing relationship, it's fitting that Lyonne starred in DuVall's directorial debut, 2016's "Intervention." The film follows a group of four couples who take a weekend getaway together. The trip becomes increasingly fraught when it's revealed that the entire vacation was planned as an intervention for one of the couples, Peter (Vincent Piazza) and Ruby (Cobie Smulders).
The film's cast is composed of many of DuVall's close friends, including Melanie Lynskey, Jason Ritter, Lyonne, and Alia Shawkat. These pre-existing relationships likely account for the easy chemistry the actors have with one another -- despite the film's tense situations and setup.
No stranger to playing romantic partners, DuVall and Lyonne are perfectly believable as a couple. Both actors shine as the cracks in their relationship emerge. What the film lacks in innovation it makes up for with well-drawn characters and compelling emotional excavation. Indeed, "The Intervention" plays to all of the actor's strengths. Lyonne and DuVall's collaboration is, as always, an offbeat pleasure to behold.
Russian Doll
Though Lyonne has long proven herself to be an inimitable figure in Hollywood, it wasn't until 2019's "Russian Doll" that she showed us just how far her creative capabilities go. Lyonne served as a writer, director, producer, and actor in the series. "Russian Doll" follows Nadia (Lyonne), a woman stuck in a time loop on the evening of her 36th birthday. Nadia meets Alan (Charlie Barnett), who is experiencing the same phenomenon, and together they try to figure out how to escape the loop.
Season 1 absolutely stuck the landing, which makes it even more impressive that Lyonne came back with a second season that is just as interesting as the first. Season 2 of "Russian Doll" follows Lyonne as she approaches her 40th birthday: She's sent back in time to 1982 where she finds herself inhabiting the body of her mother (Chloë Sevigny).
"Russian Doll" is a remarkable piece of television. First, the writing and directing are brilliant, and it manages to take an outlandish -- and seemingly repetitive -- story and make it nothing short of gripping. Lyonne's performance is deeply heartfelt, searching, and, of course, hilarious. It's an incredibly moving portrait of generational trauma that is unlike anything in television.
Big Mouth
Being that she has one of the most distinctive voices of any actor working today, it makes perfect sense that Lyonne would be cast in an animated series. Starting in 2016, Lyonne appeared in four episodes of "The Simpsons." But her most glorious voice acting role is in Nick Kroll's critically acclaimed series, "Big Mouth." Lyonne was featured in seven episodes of the series, usually playing Suzette, a motel pillow who is in a relationship with Jay (Jason Mantzoukas), or Nancy, Jessi's (Jessie Klein) therapist.
There was also a "Big Mouth" and "Russian Doll" crossover sequence in season 4 that delighted fans. Nick (Nick Kroll) gets stuck in a time loop, a sequence that is soundtracked by Harry Nilsson's "Gotta Get Up," the same song featured in "Russian Doll." At the end of the scene, Nick finds himself in an episode with an animated Natasha Lyonne, who enchants us with her wonderfully protracted pronunciation of the word cockroach (pronounced cock-a-roach by Lyonne). As Nadia so eloquently puts it in "Russian Doll," "What a concept!"
Poker Face
In many ways, the Peacock series "Poker Face" feels like the culmination of Lyonne's entire career. Created by Rian Johnson and with Lyonne serving as an executive producer, the show follows Charlie Cale (Lyonne), a casino worker with the uncanny ability to tell when people are lying. When Charlie gets involved with some unsavory sorts at the casino, she has to escape. She travels the United States in her vintage car -- running from an accidental incident.
While traveling the country, Charlie encounters all kinds of interesting people. Each episode sees her working to solve a murder using her unique skill. Since it's stylized and case-of-the-week detective mystery, "Poker Face" feels like a modern-day "Columbo." Peter Falk and Lyonne bring a disheveled ingenuity to their respective leading roles in their series. But Lyonne makes "Poker Face" her own creation. Considering her throwback style, it's no surprise that Johnson wrote the part specifically for her.
"Poker Face" features an astounding lineup of guest stars, including Adrien Brody, Hong Chau, Judith Light, Cherry Jones, Nick Nolte, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. While all of these guest stars are incredible, Lyonne is the show's emotional and moral center. Her performance therein is in a league of its own. At its core, "Poker Face" is a show about the power of empathy. In addition to her perfect comedic timing, she hits the show's poignant moments with deadly, heartbreaking accuracy -- proving (once again) that there's just no one like Natasha Lyonne.
There's been a swirl of info on social media recently about Microsoft cracking down on emulators. Frustration soon gave way to rumor, but Microsoft is clearing the air and saying this has nothing to do with other companies, but its own platform policies.
Xbox Series X|S consoles had become popular tools for retro enthusiasts to run emulators. Users found it relatively easy to download, install, and run emulators that could play both retro and homebrew games. While that functionality seemingly persists in the pay-to-access developer mode, the standard retail mode recently lost access to these features.
As the above user "gamer13" tells Kotaku, the Xbox Series consoles used to allow installs of various emulator frontends like RetroArch. Emulation apps would eventually attract notice and receive takedowns, leading to increasingly restricted measures. Enthusiasts would put apps on private and "whitelist" users, for example. As long as you downloaded the emulators, they ran, until now; even those who had access already seem to have lost this functionality on April 6.
Speculation surfaced that other companies may be demanding action over copyrighted games being playable without permission on Xbox consoles. This, however, doesn't seem to be the case. In statements to both Kotaku and IGN, Microsoft clarifies that this simply reflects a "long standing policy."
"The information currently circulating on Twitter is not accurate," reads a Microsoft statement to IGN. "Our actions are based on a long standing policy on content distributed to the Store to ensure alignment with our Microsoft Store Polices. Per 10.13.10, Products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family."
The stipulation, found here, does state that: "Products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family."
"Star Wars" Celebration is happening right now in London, England, and we're getting a lot of information on upcoming developments in a galaxy far, far away. So far, fans have learned about some new films set in the "Star Wars" universe (including one with Rey), gotten a look at the "Ahsoka" series, learned more about "The Acolyte," and met the young cast of the upcoming "Mandalorian"-era series "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew."
The latter show stars Jude Law as a Jedi who is trying to help a group of kids lost in the galaxy to find their way home. /Film's own Debopriyaa Dutta wrote about the footage shown at the event. She revealed it was inspired by Amblin films like "The Goonies" and that it was described as "a story about a group of kids [...] in the 'Star Wars' galaxy, who have a sense of wonder [...] [and] go on an adventure." In addition to Law, who appeared at the event with some of the show's kid actors, the cast includes Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Tunde Adebimpe, and Kerry Condon, with Jon Watts and Christopher Ford serving as showrunners and executive producers.
After Lucasfilm's Studio Showcase panel, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy spoke to IGN about the show and how "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew" is a good entry point for young "Star Wars" fans.
A New Entry Point Into Star Wars
Among other things, Kathleen Kennedy was asked about her hopes for the "Star Wars" shows highlighted at Celebration and what they could bring to the franchise, "Skeleton Crew" included. She described the shows as an "opportunity for fans to find where their entry point is in 'Star Wars'" and admitted it can be intimidating, coming into the franchise nearly 50 years after "A New Hope" hit theaters. "You don't want people to feel like they have to see everything in order to step into 'Star Wars,'" she explained.
Huh. That's a great thought, but, then again, "Star Wars" is also the franchise that devoted almost three whole episodes of "The Book of Boba Fett" to progressing the story in "The Mandalorian." Then, when the latter show returned for its third season, there was nary an explanation for those who hadn't watched "Boba Fett" as to how Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal, et al) and Grogu had reunited in-between seasons. It seems to me like you do, in fact, want people to feel they have to see everything in order to step into "Star Wars," ma'am.
That wasn't all she said, however, and it sounds as though "Skeleton Crew" might be a genuinely good place for newcomers to board the "Star Wars" train (kids especially).
A Show For Both Kids And Adults
Another thing Kathleen Kennedy mentioned is that they're looking "at the generational aspect of 'Star Wars'" with a show like "Skeleton Crew." She explained:
"So something like 'Skeleton Crew' we're really excited about because it's aimed at younger kids, but will still bring in the fans, still bring in adults. But that's an opportunity for a kid that — you know, so many of us can relate to a kid that can step into 'Star Wars' and make it their own. And I think that's the beauty of the storytelling that's going on now, is that everybody can kind of find where their entry point is."
A "Goonies"-style adventure would definitely have lured me in as a kid. To be fair, the adventure story of "A New Hope" did that just fine, going by the number of lightsabers that are currently in my house. Still, I think that's something we haven't seen much of in the main live-action "Star Wars" universe. We've seen younglings there before (RIP), but now we have Grogu from "The Mandalorian" and young Leia from "Obi-Wan Kenobi," with the kids from "Skeleton Crew" soon to join their ranks.
My own entry point may have been long ago, but I love the idea of being able to see this galaxy from the perspective of a kid.
"Star Wars: Skeleton Crew" is currently in post-production and is expected to premiere on Disney+ sometime in 2023.
It is safe to say that AI is everywhere. It is powering our devices one way or another, it is giving us answers to some bizarre questions, and it is helping people write their essays, articles, and whatnot. However, for something so vast, it is also safe to say that AI can be used for malicious intents and purposes, and that might become a case in the future. AI can be used for cracking passwords, and well, there already is a study revolving around that, and the results are scary.
AI can easily crack your passwords if you are still limiting yourself to just numbers or digits
Home Security Heroes, a cybersecurity firm published a study showcasing just how powerful and fast AI is when it comes to cracking passwords. The researchers took a new AI-driven tool called PassGAN as an example to showcase how one needs to be concerned about passwords.
The study shows the researchers using PassGAN to go through over 15,680,000 passwords. The results are rather concerning, as the tool managed to crack 51% of common passwords in less than a minute. 65% in less than an hour. 71% in less than a day and 81% in less than a month.
Thankfully, you do not have to be in despair just yet, as the firm shared a table showing which passwords are the most complicated or will take the longest to crack. if you are using a 12-digit password that is comprised of upper and lowercase letters, it could take the tool 289 years to crack the password. Add numbers to the mix, and you are looking at 2,000 years, and add symbols to the same, and you are looking at 30,000 years. You can have a look at the table below:
The firm suggests that you should keep passwords that have at least 12 or more characters, and it would always be advised that you don't just go for simple numbers because doing so is going to make it incredibly simple. For instance, the website even has a tool where you can add a random password, and it will tell you just how long it is going to take. I added a password that's just an 11-digit number, and it said "Instantly," however, upon entering the same password with a word, it changed it to "2 trillion years," so if you are looking to keep your password safe, it is an excellent way of making sure.
Remember, AI is going to get even more powerful, and there is a chance that there will be more tools like PassGAN in the future that are even more powerful. So, we would advise that you keep your passwords as secure as possible.
Outdoor pizza ovens are having a moment. The compact, portable models have become popular for both novice and pro cooks alike, allowing them to host casual pizza parties or cater events as part of a restaurant business. While the wood- and gas-burning ovens can be fun to use for all skill levels, they have to remain outdoors, and using wood or charcoal requires more attention.
After making some of the best outdoor pizza ovens, Ooni introduced its first electric model designed for indoor use in March. The Volt 12 ($999) encompasses everything from the company’s existing product line, from high-heat cooking to consistent results, and adds ease of use and baking versatility to the mix. This beast is big and expensive, but it also makes some damn good pizza.
Design
Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget
The Volt 12 looks like what I’d expect an electric pizza oven from Ooni to look like. It bears the most resemblance to the Karu 16, one of the largest models the company offers. The gray and black color scheme is on every current Ooni model, except for the all-silver multi-fuel Karu 12. Rather than a rectangle, the Volt 12 has angled corners, making it more of a flat octagon than a boring box. Ooni says the exterior is powder-coated and weather resistant so you can take it outdoors – not that you would want it to get too wet. Since this model is more of a countertop appliance than its open-flame predecessors, the Volt 12 has short, stubby legs rather than the longer, folding ones on the wood- and gas- burning units.
Only three Ooni models have glass doors that allow you to watch the entire cooking process. As an electric, indoor oven, the Volt 12 is one of those. Unlike the Karu 16 and Karu 12G, this panel is gloss black instead of metal. The door has a robust black handle that remains cool to the touch, even at 850 degrees, and a row of three control dials sit beneath the glass window. The only other button is an on/off switch on the left side of the front. This turns off the power completely. When this is switched on, the oven sits in standby mode until you hit the power button on the front that actually gets the Volt 12 ready to use.
On the left is the time dial with the power button above it. The center control is for temperature, which ranges from 350 to 850 degrees Fahrenheit. Lastly, the far right dial is for “balance,” allowing you to shift how much power is given to the top and bottom heating elements. In other words, you can put more emphasis on the stone for a crisper crust or more on the top for a bit more browning/char. The balance control also activates a boost feature that can be used to get the stone to return to target temp quickly between pizzas (it takes about 45 seconds). All three controls are flanked by white lights for precise level indications. During pre-heating, for example, the temperature dial starts at 350 and slowly moves around to your target, blinking along the way at the current status.
The bottom heating element sits underneath the stone – a 13-inch square cooking surface that can accommodate a variety of pans in addition to 12-inch pizza. There’s also an interior light that stays on the whole time, making it very easy to see how things are progressing without having to open the door.
Setup and use
Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget
Before the first use, you’ll need to season Volt 12. This requires you to run the oven at full blast (850) for 20 minutes and then allow it to cool before preheating to launch your first pizza. The cooldown takes quite a bit longer than the preheating or 20-minute burnoff, so you’ll want to do thing well before you need to actually cook. The cool down time on the Volt 12 takes a while. While the exterior will be back to room temp sooner, it takes a while for the inside to do the same since the Volt 12 is so well-insulated. This means you’ll have to wait at least an hour to safely store it or put the cover on.
Ooni says the 1,600-watt Volt 12 can hit 850 degrees in 20 minutes where it can cook a pizza in 90 seconds. This makes it slightly slower to achieve max temperature than its wood- or gas-burning counterparts. The Karu 16, for example, can reach 950 degrees Fahrenheit in 15 minutes. Still, 20 minutes is remarkably quick, and in my experience, the Volt 12 actually hit 850 faster than that.
The key advantage the Volt 12 has over its wood-burning siblings is convenience. Those models make great pizza with the subtle flavor of wood fire, but the flames require supervision whereas the Volt 12 is very much set it and forget it. You don’t have to worry about maintaining the fire in between stretching dough, topping pizzas and launching them into the oven. The Volt 12 also sets the balance dial based on your cooking temperature, but you can adjust it if you need to. Most outdoor Ooni ovens have an optional gas burner (propane and natural gas models), which would also remedy some of the headaches with temperature regulation.
Making the pizza
Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget
All of this sounds great on paper, but it would be for naught if the thing didn’t make good pizza. Thankfully, Ooni has translated its formula for excellent outdoor cooking to its electric oven. The Volt 12 produces comparable results to any of the company’s other models, right down to the char and leoparding on Neapolitan pies. Since the temperature dial gives you more precise control, it’s easier to achieve the desired cook on everything from New York style to thin-and-crispy. With the extra space inside, you can also make Detroit pan pizza, as well as roast and bake other items with ease. The Volt 12 did well with any type of crust I threw at it, churning out tasty pies consistently in just a few minutes.
Running wide open at 850 degrees, the Volt 12 makes excellent Neapolitan-style pizza. You’ll need to make sure you have a proper dough recipe (Scott Deley’s The Ooni Pizza Project is a great guide), but assuming you're starting with a good base, the oven will do its thing well. I found that the Volt 12 is a little more forgiving with rotating the pies than the open-flame outdoor models, so you don’t need to babysit it quite as much. These pizzas were light and airy with a slight crispness to the bottom and the requisite leoparding. New York-style pizzas baked at 650 were also great, with crisp edges and bottom, with a pleasant chewiness to the crust.
Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget
There are some downsides to the Volt 12, the big one being the price. It’s $999, and I’ll be the first to tell you that excellent pizza is achievable with your main oven and a baking stone or steel that costs a fraction as much. The second thing is it’s huge. The Volt 12 takes up the entire depth of the counter and is 20 inches wide. It also weighs just under 40 pounds. That’s not too heavy, relatively speaking, and the Volt 12 can easily be chucked in the backseat for a nearby party. Ooni did design it with built-in handles on the sides though, which makes the task of moving it slightly easier.
The competition
In the US, Ooni’s main competition for the Volt 12 is the Breville Pizzaiolo. This oven has been on the market for a few years at this point, with a design that looks more like one of the company’s toaster ovens. It’s an all-stainless steel aesthetic, with a glass door for viewing and easy-to-use controls up front. Out of the box, the Pizzaiolo runs on a variety of presets for different styles, but Breville also equipped it with a manual mode to give you full control over the top and bottom heating elements.
The three strikes against this alternative are cost, a confining cooking surface and the lack of interior lighting. The Pizzaiolo is $999.95, so unless you find one on sale, you won’t save any money over the Volt 12. The stone on the Pizzaiolo is circular instead of square, so you’ll only be able to use 12-inch round pans in addition to your pizza. And lastly, there’s no light inside, so it can be a challenge to keep tabs on the cooking process. You’ll almost certainly have to open the door at some point for a closer inspection.
Wrap-up
With the Volt 12, Ooni enters new territory by bringing its formula for stone-baked pizza indoors. While the results are consistently great across a range of styles, this is the company’s most expensive product to date, and I can see that being prohibitive for some – no matter how good the pizza is. A Karu 16 with the additional purchase of a gas burner is $920 or $950 (propane vs. natural gas), which would give you the convenience of a control dial with option of cooking with wood. Still not cheap, but that oven is big enough to do more than just pizza, so it’s also quite versatile. What it really comes down to is where you’ll be cooking most often – inside or out – or if you’re just fine upgrading your pizza game with accessories for your kitchen oven. And there’s absolutely no shame in doing that.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ooni-volt-12-review-180019262.html?src=rss
This post containsspoilersfor "The Mandalorian" season 3
"The Mandalorian" season 3 has been a pretty big departure from previous seasons in a variety of ways. One of the biggest changes has been shifting the focus heavily to Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff), who has been a part of the larger story for a long time, with the character first appearing in "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," as well as "Star Wars Rebels." Once the heir apparent to the throne of Mandalore, Bo-Katan starts out this season as a bit of a broken woman. When we first see her, she's sitting on a throne in a way not typically befitting royalty. Turns out, that was by design.
As fans may recall, in the season 3 premiere, Mando goes to visit Bo-Katan on her home planet of Kalevala. When we first see her, she's sitting on the throne in a relaxed, no f***s given manner. Speaking with StarWars.com, the actress explained that she actually worked with writer/executive producer Jon Favreau for some time to get that right.
"That was a really big thing for Jon and I. He kept having me sit, and then walk back, and sit, and walk back. He wanted it to seem...slightly disrespectful [laughs]. It's not the way that you would normally see royalty sit on a throne. I think that may be a sort of metaphor for part of her issues."
"The Mandalorian" season 2 finale saw Din Djarin take control of the Darksaber, which cut Bo-Katan to her core as she had aimed to get the weapon back from Moff Gideon. It was an important step on her quest to take back Mandalore. With that not working out, it clearly hit her hard, and that pose on the throne tells us a lot about where her head was at the time.
Bo-Katan, The Rightful Leader Of Mandalore
For a long time, Bo-Katan has been positioned as the rightful heir to the throne of Mandalore. While "The Mandalorian" season 2 upended that, what we've seen unfold in the third season has been a shift within the Mandalorians and their culture. With the Mandalorians looking to band their various clans together, Bo-Katan has once again been put in a position to unite her people and take back their planet. In that same interview, Sackhoff discussed a bit of her character's arc thus far leading up to this season.
"She's always done what she thought was right for the Mandalorian people...And she's made a lot of mistakes in the process. I think that she wears all of that and there's so much guilt and so much turmoil. That plays itself out a little bit this season. For her to not take the Darksaber [in Season 2 is] such a huge moment. Something's different, you know? There's a reason why she didn't, and I think it lends itself to who she has become and where she's going."
If all goes well for Bo-Katan, she'll have more to sit on than her throne on Kalevala, and she'll probably have reason to sit a little more proudly.
Secret documents that reportedly provide details of US and NATO plans to help prepare Ukraine for a spring offensive against Russia have spilled onto social media platforms.
There's a good bit of open reporting available online these days, including (but not limited to) the annual reports that tend to be published around this time of year. All of this open reporting amounts to a veritable treasure trove of information, either directly or indirectly, that can be leveraged by SOC and DFIR analysts, as well as detection engineers, to extend protections, as well as detection and response capabilities.
Sometimes, open reporting will reference incident response activities, and then focus solely on malware reverse engineering. In these cases, information about what would be observed on the endpoint needs to be discerned through indirect means. However, other open reporting, particularly what's available from TheDFIRReport, is much more comprehensive and provides much clearer information regarding the impact of the incident and the threat actor's activities on the endpoint, making it much easier on SOC and DFIR analysts to pursue investigations.
Let's take a look at some of what's shared in a recent write-up of a ransomware incident that started with a "malicious" ISO file. Right away, we get the initial access vector from the title of the write-up!
Before we jump in, though, we're not going to run through the entire article; the folks at TheDFIRReport have done a fantastic job of documenting what they saw six ways to Sunday, and there's really no need to run through everything in the article! Also, this is not a criticism, nor a critique, and should not be taken as such. Instead, what I'm going to do here is simply expand a bit on a couple of points of the article, nothing more. What I hope you take away from this is that there's a good bit of value within write-ups such as this one, value beyond just the words on paper.
The incident described in the article started with a phishing email, delivering a ZIP archive that contained an ISO file, which in turn contained an LNK file. There's a lot to unravel, just at this point. First off, the email attachment (by default) will have the MOTW attached to it, and MOTW propagation to the ISO file within the archive will depend up on the archival tool used to open it.
Once the archive is opened, the user is presented with the ISO file, and by default, Windows systems allow the user to automatically mount the disk image file by double-clicking it. However, this behavior can be easily modified, for free, while still allowing users to access disk image files programmatically, particularly as part of legitimate business processes. In the referenced Huntress blog post, Dray/@Purp1eW0lf provided Powershell code that you can just copy out of the blog post and execute on your system(s), and users will be prevented from automatically mounting disk image files by double-clicking on them, while still allowing users to access the files programmatically, such as mounting VHD files via the Disk Manager.
Next, Microsoft issued a patch in Nov 2022 that enables MOTW propagation inside mounted disk images files; had the system in this incident been patched, the user would have been presented with a warning regarding launching the LNK file. The section of the article that addresses defense evasion states, "These packages are designed to evade controls such as Mark-of-the-Web restrictions." This is exactly right, and it works...if the archival tool used to open the zip file does not propagate MOTW to the ISO file, then there's nothing to be propagated to from the ISO file to the embedded LNK file, even if the patch is installed.
Let's take a breather here for a second...take a knee. We're still at the initial access point of an incident that resulted in the domain-wide deployment of ransomware; we're at the desk of that one user who received the phishing email, and the malicious actions haven't been launched yet...and we've identified three points at which we could have inhibited (archiver tool, patched system) or obviated (enable programmatic disk image file access only) the rest of the attack chain. I bring this up because many times we hear how much security "costs", and yet, there's a free bit of Powershell that can be copied out of a blog post, that could have been applied to all systems and literally stopped this attack cycle that, according to the timeline spanned 5 days, in its tracks. The "cost" of running Dray's free Powershell code versus the "cost" of an infrastructure being encrypted and ransomed...what do those scales look like to you?
Referencing the malicious ISO file, the article demonstrates how the user mounting the disk image file can be detected via the Windows Event Log, stating that the "activity can be tracked with Event 12 from Microsoft-Windows-VHDMP/Operational" Event Log. Later, in the "Execution" section of the article, they state that "Application crashes are recorded in the Windows Application event log under Event ID 1000 and 1001", as a result of...well...the application crashing. Not only can both of these events be extracted as analysis pivot points using Events Ripper, but the application crashes observed in this incident serve to make my point regarding validation, specifically with respect to analysts validating findings.
The article continues illustrating the impact of the attack chain on the endpoint, referencing several other Windows Event Log records, several of which (i.e., "Service Control Manager/7045" events) are also covered/addressed by Events Ripper.
Conclusion Articles like this one, and others from TheDFIRReport, are extremely valuable to the community. Where a good bit of open reporting articles will include things like, "...hey, we had 41 Sobinokibi ransomware response engagements in the first half of the year..." but then do an in-depth RE of one sample, with NO host-based impact or artifacts mentioned, articles such as this one do a great job of laying the foundation for artifact constellations, so that analysts can validate findings, and then use that information to help develop protections, detections, and response procedures for future engagements. Sharing this kind of information means that it's much easier for detect incidents like these much earlier in the attack cycle, with the goal of obviating file encryption.
This piece contains spoilers for season two of "Yellowjackets."
Remember last year when we all began to realize that, yeah, "Yellowjackets" is legitimate prestige television with the awards recognition to back it up? I certainly do — I remember being shocked during last year's Emmys and finding the show secured several nominations, including Best Drama. One of the people most recognized for their impact on the show was Melanie Lynskey, who rightfully received tons of praise for her performance as Shauna.
If the latest episode of the show's second season has anything to prove, it's that these accolades were more than well deserved. In fact, her performance in "Digestif" proves that Lynskey should be getting even more praise as the adult Shauna (Sophie Nélisse portrays the character in flashbacks). After getting carjacked by a petty criminal, Shauna tracks her trusty minivan down to a repair shop, where she gives arguably the best monologue this show has provided us so far. And yes, it is all about how she has killed before and will kill again.
It's Not As Easy As You Might Think
If you recall, Shauna monologues to some poor guy about how difficult it is to pull a piece of flesh off of someone. Considering what we saw at the end of its second episode, you know she's telling the truth. The way she delivers the monologue as well as the empty stare she gives her hostage has him believing her 100%. The dude is scared, and he absolutely should be. As we recently saw in her guest stint on "The Last of Us," Lynskey is arguably at her best when combining her naturally kind demeanor and a sinister darkness.
This monologue, where she describes the effort one needs to exert in order to actually pull the skin off of a dead body, needed a specific type of person to deliver it, and it's clear that very person had to be Lynskey. Nélisse could have probably delivered it well, but her version of Shauna is currently stuck in perpetual childhood, still unaware of just how bad things are going to get for her and the team. Speaking of the team, these lines wouldn't fit the other survivors either, as Shauna specifically embodies a simmering rage underneath her mask of normalcy. That's what makes her such a compelling character, even if in both the flashbacks and the present day, we're in pain over the decisions that she makes. These moments of her true self emerging really are some of the best this show has to offer, and Lynskey deserves even more credit than she already gets. That's saying a lot.
Hell Is More Than A Teenage Girl
Even if no other character could deliver Lynskey's monologue, it's hard to argue that its sentiment isn't an important part of "Yellowjackets" as a whole. What Shauna describes in this scene is something the core cast actually did, an act that nobody would associate with promising young women. Cannibalism is barbaric, yes, but the sort of primal desperation that comes with it inherently feels gendered. You would expect that out of men in the same situation, but it feels strange to think of women and girls having to resort to it.
That, however, is the beauty of "Yellowjackets." The concept of female rage might seem like just a social media buzzword associated with a very basic and broad meaning, but it's more complex than just women being mad at society. It's about the complicated emotions and actions women have to take in extreme circumstances. Sometimes, this manifests in holding a car thief hostage with a gun or eating the corpse of your best friend. If anyone ends up saying that they don't understand the point of "Yellowjackets," just show them the monologue from Lynskey in all its glory. There's nothing that sums it up better than that.
Microsoft said it teamed up with Fortra and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) to tackle the abuse of Cobalt Strike by cybercriminals to distribute malware, including ransomware.
To that end, the tech giant's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) revealed that it secured a court order in the U.S. to "remove illegal, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike so they can no longer be used by
Critical infrastructure attacks are a preferred target for cyber criminals. Here's why and what's being done to protect them.
What is Critical Infrastructure and Why is It Attacked?
Critical infrastructure is the physical and digital assets, systems and networks that are vital to national security, the economy, public health, or safety. It can be government- or privately-owned.
According to Etay
The 90s were essential for discovering horror gems on home video. Video stores carried unheard-of international movies and sometimes we just had to rely on the artwork to sell us the movie. CUBE was one of those movies for me and, according to the internet, it was for a lot of horror fans. The concept of a group of strangers waking up in a room full of traps ended up being popularized by the Saw franchise and real-life escape rooms, but CUBE gave us a lot to think about without relying on shock value. I had not seen anything like it at that age so it holds a special place for me. The latest Japanese remake, also titled CUBE, however, gives us nothing to hold onto.
A group of people of different backgrounds and age groups wakes up in a cube-sized room. They don’t know each other or how they got there. They quickly learn that there are connecting rooms of the same size and shape, but some have built-in traps that will kill them. Each of them carries a talent or knowledge that helps determine their survival. There are patterns of serial numbers in each room that could hold the key to safety and possibly a way out.
The ambiguity of the original is what kept us revisiting the film, developing theories of who these people were, the significance of their names, and that open ending that drove us crazy. A more juiced-up sequel followed with not much praise, trying to impress fans with elaborate cubes and dated special effects, but it lost all the wonder. A prequel came out shortly after that decided to explain it all but in a much less interesting fashion.
Director Yasuhiko Shimizu gives us a CUBE remake that doesn’t add much to the original. The traps are similar, lacking a creative arc that could drive fans to revisit. The characters are very frustrating to watch as they spend most of the film arguing with each other. It doesn’t help that CUBE flows at a glacial pace and is about 15 minutes too long. There are attempts of handling themes of generational trauma, but it feels so out of place and doesn’t connect at all with their predicament.
There’s a lot that could have been done with a CUBE remake. There could be more provocative traps, unique interior designs of the cubes, and a different class of characters, but this iteration is by the numbers. It’s been several years since I’ve seen the original, but this followed so closely to it, I almost turned it off and just put on the first film. The CUBE remake definitely lacks the spirit of the original with hopes to capitalize on a familiar property. On the bright side, maybe we’ll finally get high-definition releases of the original trilogy (mainly the first movie) due to possible renewed interest.
A Japanese remake of CUBE sounded like a promising concept but fails to deliver anything new and traps us in the same old room.
SCREAMBOX will stream CUBE, a Japanese remake of the 1997 Canadian cult classic, on April 11 as a SCREAMBOX Original.
In this blog, we discuss threats we face in our DevOps environment, introducing our new threat matrix for DevOps. Using this matrix, we show the different techniques an adversary might use to attack an organization from the initial access phase and forward.
This post contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Picard" season 3 episode 8.
Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) is straight-up not having a good time. The long-lost son of Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) has gone full post-Upside-Down Will Byers in the latest episodes of "Star Trek: Picard." He's haunted by visions of branch-like tendrils and a red door, plagued by nightmares, and in possession of some strange energy that turns his eyes red. He also seems to be developing superpowers; Jack took down a whole crew worth of Changelings as if on autopilot, and he can talk to Sidney La Forge (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut) with his mind.
With Deanna (Marina Sirtis) finally on the case, it looks like we'll find out about Jack's mysterious past next week, and if "Star Trek: Picard" keeps up the trend its established in its first two seasons, a major Trek-verse reveal is sure to follow by the finale. At the end of episode eight, Deanna proclaims: "there's a darkness with that boy." She clarifies that he's not to blame, saying that the voice is "not in him but around him, passing through him, and a voice inside him, ancient and weak, but a voice that isn't his own." Then she sits with Jack in hopes of figuring out once and for all what's behind the red door.
Theories about Jack's true nature abound among "Star Trek" fans, ranging from the likely to the outlandish. While we'll have to wait at least a week to get to the bottom of Jack's backstory once and for all, that just gives us even more time to parse through every possible option. Here's every theory we can think of about what the heck is up with Jack Crusher.
Jack Has Borg Genetic Material
Back in 2366, Picard was forcibly assimilated into the Borg Collective, the powerful, dangerous cyborg hive mind that is constantly in world domination mode. There, Picard's body was taken over and renamed Locutus, and while he has long-since shed his Borg status, the Starfleet officer has been haunted by his experiences with the Borg ever since. While the Borg got a positive PR makeover at the end of last season after Alison Pill's Jurati took over as Borg Queen, season 2 co-showrunner Terry Matalas has since confirmed on Twitter at the time that hers was an alternate timeline offshoot, meaning the real Borg is still a real threat.
One of the most popular and evidence-backed theories about Jack Crusher is that Picard's biological material was altered by his Borg experience, leading to his conceiving a baby with latent Borg-like abilities. We've seen before that Borg are capable of assimilation on a microscopic level via nanoprobes, and it's possible that a bit of Borg remained in Picard even after he left the collective behind.
This would explain a lot of things about Jack, including his ability to have a hive mind-like experience with Sidney, his ability to take over a crew member's motor functions, and Vadic's (Amanda Plummer) comment in response: "Look at you, finally living up to all your potential." There's also the quickly-glossed-over fact that Data (Brent Spiner) tells the crew that Altan Soong (also Spiner) found an "anomalous form" in Picard's body that makes his initial Irumodic Syndrome diagnosis questionable. Could the form be residual Borg material?
Jack Is Related To Project Khan
There's also the possibility that Jack's origin could herald back to another great "Star Trek" character; Khan. While Khan Noonien-Singh has been dead for a long time when "Star Trek: Picard" picks up, the villain's name appeared on a paper file that Soong appeared interested in during the show's season 2 finale. It was labeled "Project Kahn," and we haven't heard anything about it since. Is it possible that Soong or someone who worked under him purposely created a genetically modified human with special abilities?
While season 3 hasn't mentioned Khan at all, "Star Trek: Picard" co-creator Alex Kurtzman did compare this season's villain to Khan at Comic Con last year. While he appears to have been referencing the mind games unfolding between Vadic and Picard, it's possible the reference was more literal than Kurtzman was willing to let on. If Jack did have these shadowy origins, it would make sense for him to lead a planet-hopping life, for Vadic to have a vested interest in finding him, and for him to end up with a unique, still-mysterious medical diagnosis like Irumodic Syndrome.
In this theory, as with several others, the red door in Jack's head is simply a mental block keeping his repressed memories in check. This type of mental visualization is commonly used in regression therapy and other methods used to dive deep into past traumas.
Jack Is A Changeling (In Either Sense Of The Word)
With all the talk of Changelings this season, it would be weird to not explore the possibility that they may have something to do with Jack Crusher. After all, they went to great lengths to hunt the man down, and Vadic said she wants to bring Jack to "where he most belongs." If he somehow has Changeling-related genetic material, that would be in the Great Link, the place where all Changelings live in their liquid form.
If Jack were somehow part-Changeling, his ability to control others' bodies would make sense, as would the voices that seem to urge him to come to them. In this case, the red door that haunts his subconscious mind could be the entryway to the Great Link, a place that some part of him knows he needs to return to even as he remains in human form. This isn't the tidiest theory (how would Jack have become part-Changeling in the first place?) and it's also not the most interesting, but it's nonetheless a slight possibility.
Pretty much every theory on this list could also be supplemented by the idea that Jack is the traditional type of Changeling -- a baby who was swapped at birth for an imposter. If the real Jack Crusher was switched out for a genetically modified baby (whether he's part-Changling or part something else entirely), it would make sense that the people who put him there long ago would come looking for him years later.
Jack Is The Key To Picard's Future Evolution
It would also make sense for "Star Trek: Picard" to bow out with something huge, giving the beloved captain a send-off that rocks the world of "Star Trek" forever. So why not ascension? Often portrayed as a sort of evolutionary leveling-up into pure energy, ascension is a beautiful transformation that also looks like a death of sorts. It's appeared a few times throughout "Star Trek," though it's sometimes called transcendence, too.
In one of many Reddit posts in which fans have theorized about Jack's true nature, user Lokan posited that Picard might be experiencing Irumodic Syndrome because his synthetic body is unable to ascend. If any main character in "Star Trek" history seems wise enough to unlock the secrets to the next step of evolution, it might be Picard.
As another Reddit user points out, Q (John de Lancie) may have hinted at some grand purpose for Picard in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" series finale, when he told Picard that his future entails "charting the unknowable possibilities of existence." Could Picard be on track to join the Q continuum? And while Picard 2.0 might not be able to evolve, perhaps Jack can -- or his genetics can help his father figure out what's stopping the process.
Does this explain Jack's powers? Not in the slightest. Is it still a cool idea that gets to the heart of the compassion, curiosity, and limitless horizons that "Star Trek" is often all about? Definitely!
Jack Is A Human With A Powerful Genetic Mutation
There's also a decent chance that Jack is actually fully human, but simply possesses a unique mutation that the Changelings have deemed important. We haven't heard about examples of Irumodic Syndrome outside of the Picard family, so there's a chance the disorder could actually be something genetic and unique that allows Jack to experience the world on a higher level than those around him. When Picard and Beverly point out Vadic's "advanced physiology," she shoots back, "What about your son? Do you know all about his physiology?"
Picard's own working theory around the time of Vadic's death was that the Changelings had a plan for him and Jack that involved his body (as in, the stolen one) and Jack's blood. This combination would be used to do something dastardly and potentially world-changing on Frontier Day. Is it possible that Picard has recessive traits that appeared in Jack, allowing him to either save or destroy humanity depending on who unlocks them first? It's a huge guess, but the fallout of another attack on Frontier Day could also be huge.
Jack Is Being Controlled By The Pah-Wraiths
One of the most fun answers to Jack's mysterious visions would be one that doubles as a deep-cut reference to a totally different "Star Trek" show, and one that "Star Trek: Picard" has been paying homage to all season: "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." In that series, a rather metaphysical presence called the Pah-Wraiths often took to possessing people, giving them dark visions and dreams not unlike the ones Jack has been experiencing all season.
The Pah-Wraiths first appeared in "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" as a sinister offshoot of the Bajoran Prophets. Those mystical beings live outside of time and have the god-like ability to see the future. Their enemies, the Pah-Wraiths, have similar powers but seem to have become corrupted along the way.
The only problem with the potential inclusion of the Pah-Wraiths in "Star Trek: Picard" is that the show hasn't dropped hints about them at all, unless Commander Ro Laren's Bajoran earring -- in which she hid a chip including secret research on the Changelings -- counts. Eight episodes into the season, a Pah-Wraith appearance in a show that's never acknowledged their existence might feel a bit like a deus ex machina.
Jack Is Related To Species 8472
Physical mimickry has been a hot topic in "Star Trek: Picard" this year thanks to the Changelings, so it only makes sense that other species capable of impersonating their enemies have come up frequently in chatter around the show. Since the season's mysteries began to unfold, several Reddit users have name-dropped Species 8472, a powerful, Borg-killing alien race that appeared in "Star Trek: Voyager." Though members of Species 8472 look a lot more like a classic sci-fi movie alien than a humanoid being, they're also capable of communicating telepathically and disguising themselves as other life forms through advanced technologies.
The going theory among fans doesn't seem to be that Jack is actually part of Species 8472, but that he's perhaps been modified or infected by the ruthless and highly evolved species as a pawn in some larger conflict. This would align with Deanna's assertion that there's darkness "with" him but "not in him." However, this theory doesn't seem likely for the same reason that the Pah-Wraith theory seems doomed to fail; "Star Trek: Picard" hasn't re-introduced us to Species 8472, and it would be weird to drop them in at the last minute.
Jack Is The Dawn Summers Of It All
This whole season of "Star Trek: Picard" has hinged on our instant acceptance of Jack Crusher as Picard's long-lost son, but his appearance felt sudden. In fact, it was so sudden that it got me wondering: what if the series is taking a page not out of the "Star Trek" rulebook, but the "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" one?
In the fifth season of "Buffy," our hero suddenly gained a little sister, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), whose inexplicable appearance remained unexplained for several episodes. While most "Trek" fans agree that it's likely that Jack's physiology was altered at some point, the common consensus seems to be that it was when he was a baby or before his birth. But what if Jack still is technically a baby? Is it possible that he blipped into existence a few years before we met him, just long enough ago to earn his reputation as a Federation criminal?
I'll be honest; there's really very little to support this theory besides my own distrust of main characters who appear way late in the game claiming to have a long history. If Jack were created as a teen or young adult, be it by a mad scientist or enemy of Picard, he and Beverly's actions would only make sense if they were lying or had their memories wiped (the latter of which might explain Beverly's voice in Jack's dreams).
Still, with so much timeline fiddling in the show's second season, not to mention both the vision whispers and Vadic referencing Jack's return to a place he's seemingly meant to be, it's possible Picard's offspring could have an inorganic origin story that doesn't line up with what we've heard so far.
