Raised By Wolves S1: Ep1

from AV Club.com

https://tv.avclub.com/in-the-raised-by-wolves-premiere-mother-is-optimistic-1844886464

RAISED BY WOLVES, S1: Ep 1

Image: Warner Media

In the Raised By Wolves premiere, Mother is optimistic—and so are we
by

Arielle Bernstein



In the thrilling and foreboding first episode of Raised By Wolves, we learn that Earth has been destroyed and that humanity, which has divided itself into different religious factions, is in search of a new planet to call home. When we first meet the human-like androids who call themselves Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim), they have just begun to survey Kepler-22b, a sepia-toned world that, to human eyes at least, seems lonely and frightening—filled with clouds of dust, impossibly large craters, and trees that appear to be fighting for life. Despite this, Mother and Father don’t even seem to notice the ways that the planet seems dangerous and inhospitable. Even though the minute they land on the planet they narrowly escape falling into a crater, Mother declares that she is optimistic and the two eagerly embark on their mission to raise human children, Father telling corny jokes all the way.





Though they look like real people in sleek futuristic bodysuits, Mother and Father’s awkward attempts at humor and care only serve only to highlight the ways that they are not human. Their banter is stilted, their movements often a tad jerky and robotic. When Father helps Mother prepare for pregnancy, we see how the six embryos they carry are externally attached to mother through plastic wires that are meant to resemble umbilical cords. It takes nine months for the little ones to grow into human babies. In Mother’s first act of rebellion from her programming, she saves the life of a baby that doesn’t seem like it is going to survive, holding it close to her own skin as she hums a song and allows her tears to fall down on her child, rather than giving the limp body to Father to break down and feed to the others.


RAISED BY WOLVESSEASON 1
"Raised by Wolves"
A-

EPISODE

1

It’s striking that the youngest baby, named Campion after Mother and Father’s creator (whoever that is), is the only one who actually manages to survive, proving that Mother’s instincts in how she cares for her young may very well be more insightful than her partner, who was very willing to sacrifice the little one immediately in the name of the mission. Indeed, when we first see Mother interacting with her children, she seems warm and caring, eager to provide a stable home in a lonely, unstable universe. Together, Mother and Father both provide their young ones with basic needs like food and shelter, as well as education and emotional care. They work hard to instill their children with the values that they were programmed with, especially a devout atheism, and they warn their children about the dangers of religion.


Still, despite their care, the children die one by one, and Father makes the unilateral decision to contact the Mithraic Ark, the same surviving group of humans who believe in religion and who don’t believe that children should be raised by androids. Father’s reasoning seems logical. He believes that he and Mother have failed in their mission and that Campion’s (Winta McGrath), their last remaining child, only chance at survival is with other people. Meanwhile, Mother has an entirely different interpretation of her primary directive. She believes her role is to be Campion’s protector and that means making sure that she keeps him away from dangerous influences like the Mithraic.

Throughout its first episode, Raised By Wolves creates a binary where Father is depicted as logical and slightly removed, while Mother is depicted as emotional and potentially unhinged. The way we see these two parents operate is shaped by gender expectations, but it’s unclear at this juncture whether these differences are deliberate. In some ways, Mother’s compassion and rage make her less robotic than Father. When her baby seems like he is stillborn, she starts to cry. When her first child goes missing, she howls like a wolf. When she feels that Father has betrayed the mission by contacting the enemy, she violently kills him. Mother’s increasingly deranged emotional responses are depicted as a potential flaw in programming. She often feels ill and also seems to be leaking some sort of strange milky fluid from her nose and mouth. Still, it isn’t clear to me that Mother’s increasingly emotional responses to the world around her mean that she is broken exactly. Her first encounters with the Mithraic confirm her worst suspicions as the group of humans attempt to steal food and take away her only remaining child.

Still, the narrative certainly wants us to question not just Mother’s choices but her sanity. From the first moments of Raised By Wolves, we see the world through the eyes of Campion, who provides several voiceovers and becomes increasingly skeptical of Mother’s ability to function. He loves her, but has also become deeply afraid of her strange mood swings and outbursts, not to mention her obvious dodging of questions when she explains how Father died. When a member of the Mithraic tries to convince him to leave with them, Campion admits that she is an android (which she begged him not to do) but also refuses to leave without her coming with them. Like Father, he hopes the Mithraic will try and help him. In fact, they do the opposite when they attempt to kidnap Campion, arguing they have to do so in order to protect him.

In the final 10 minutes of the episode, we see Mother unleash her full power as she seeks revenge against the men who tried to steal her only living child away from her. Mother is a monster in these scenes, covered in milky white bodily fluids and blood, as her screams explode every member of the Mithraic crew she comes in contact with, except for the children, who are in a wondrous nursery that looks like a serene and snowy forest. She returns to Kepler-22b with five new human children to rear and is clearly surprised when Campion doesn’t embrace her after she reveals the new friends he now has to play with. The episode ends with Campion’s fearful recognition that Mother is untrustworthy, as well as the unsettling question of what it means that the woman who brought him into this world is an unreliable monster.

Stray observations

Mother tells the Mithraic men that her name is “Lamia” which is a Greek mythological creature who becomes a child eating monster after her children are destroyed. Mother has a dark sense of humor in her less than subtle threats.

I do think that Campion would enjoy having a mouse he could teach to do tricks rather than a sad little doll made of sticks to play with. Mother needs to up the entertainment now that she has more children to take care of.

I want to learn more about why having two gendered parents was so important to the atheists who reject religion but embrace…heteronormative android parenting?

The violence at the end of this episode was thrilling and shocking, but there were moments in where I worried that Mother’s “hysteria” was being played simply for shock value. I really hope this series explores more about Mother’s creators and why they made her so differently than Father. The female bodied robot holds such a compelling space in our cultural imagination and I would love to see the show investigate the Mother archetype more fully.

Motherless Brooklyn

from Roger Ebert.com

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/motherless-brooklyn-2019

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

"3 Stars"
Matt Zoller Seitz 

November 01, 2019








The most surprising thing about director/writer/star Edward Norton’s “Motherless Brooklyn” is how drastically it departs from its source. Jonathan Lethem’s National Book award-winning novel focused on a Lionel Essrog (Norton), a detective with Tourette’s Syndrome posing as a reporter to investigate the murder of his boss and surrogate father (Bruce Willis’ Frank Minna), who plucked him and several other boys from a Catholic orphanage and trained them to be hard-boiled gumshoes. Along the way, Lionel uncovers a conspiracy that criticizes the gentrification of New York City during the last part of the 20th century. Lethem’s book was set in the 1980s, but Norton has transposed the tale to 1959, which makes Lethem’s playful, retro-tough-guy, Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler affectations seem more organic, while unfortunately making the film’s feel conceptually less odd and special. Daringly—or misguidedly, depending on how you feel about staying faithful to source material—Norton has also fused Lethem’s novel with material from Robert Caro’s classic biography The Power Broker. Alec Baldwin plays the Big Bad, Moses Randolph, a master builder modeled on Robert Moses, the un-elected autocrat who ripped apart the neighborhoods of New York City, making it more hospitable to cars and displacing hundreds of thousands of working-class and poor residents, many of them nonwhite.

The end product is another modern noir in the vein of “Chinatown,” “The Two Jakes,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Mulholland Falls,” and so many period TV dramas focusing on tough guys in hats, where the investigation of a seemingly straightforward crime leads the stalwart hero up the social ladder until he finally confronts the person responsible for every other character’s misfortune, an embodiment of wealth, power and venality so connected that he probably can’t be taken down, only bruised a bit. (Lionel’s guide and ward is Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Laurie Rose, a political activist helping African-Americans resist displacement; they turn out to have more in common than they initially thought, and Norton resists the urge to turn the character into a combination love interest and information delivery device, letting Mbatha-Raw create a real person with a believable connection to her community.)

The second most surprising thing about “Motherless Brooklyn” is what a crowd-pleaser it is, despite its determination to be both a stylish period detective story and a tutorial on how institutionalized racism, civic corruption, and gentrification are braided together in American life. The storytelling leans too hard on verbal exposition, particularly during the second half, but it’s remarkable how cleanly the film lays out its conspiracy and defines every character in its large cast, from Minna’s wife Julia (Leslie Mann) to Norton’s colleagues and former orphanage-mates (Dallas Roberts, Ethan Suplee and Bobby Cannavale, 100% credible as a sleazy alpha) to Laurie’s supervisor, neighborhood activist Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones), to the inhabitants of Brooklyn’s working class and poor Black community (standouts include a Miles Davis-like trumpeter played by Michael K. Williams, and a club owner and World War II combat veteran played by Robert Wisdom). There’s also a brutal henchman (Radu Spinghel) so gigantic that Norton might as well have pulled a “Police Squad!” and cut the top of his head off at the frame line.

Norton, his editor Joe Klotz, and the movie’s diverse and skilled cast inject lots of humor and clever bits of character business into the story. Even the darkest or most upsetting scenes are leavened with the sort of deadpan wit that we used to associate with old detective and film noir pictures—the kind where characters entered rooms preceded by their own shadows, had a cutting remark for every situation, and carried lighters even if they didn’t smoke.

You get to the point where you expect the characters to do things they always do, even when it might jeopardize the success of whatever mission they’re on: character-based suspense, rooted in personality. Will Lionel blurt something out during an interview with a witness that will ruin his shaky cover story? Will Laurie’s zeal for justice jeopardize Gabby’s activist campaign, which has to be cognizant of racial resentment by the whites who run the city? Will Randolph’s desire to immediately break and humiliate any public officials who stand in his way torpedo his plan to remake New York? These are the kinds of questions that settled in moviegoers’ minds more often during earlier eras, when films like “Motherless Brooklyn”—genre exercises about realistic characters doing things that could actually happen—were a more common sight on big screens.

Although pans of this film have accused Norton of optioning the book twenty years ago cynically hoping to win an Oscar for playing a character with a disability, his performance as Lionel largely avoids showboating and self-aggrandizement. He embraces the unavoidable humor of Lionel’s verbal explosions during delicate conversations without turning the character into, as another character describes him, a “freak show.” We get to know Lionel and his distinctive traits as the story unfurls, laughing with him rather than at him, and appreciating how deftly he manages a series of life-or-death tasks despite the burdens imposed by his condition. He’s too old to play the character described in Lethem’s book, but this doesn’t hurt the movie. In fact, watching a fortysomething man who’s still coping (like Raw’s character) with the wounds of childhood as well as societal marginalization makes Lionel a sadder, more delicate creation.

The movie suffers a bit from having such an unrelentingly one-note bully as its villain. It’s clear that Donald Trump, whom Baldwin has often played on “Saturday Night Live,” was an inspiration for this fictionalized Moses-like monster, particularly the way he talks about women and people of color, but the way Norton, er, integrates the two strands—racism/sexism and lust for power—diminishes the political by rooting it too simplistically in the personal. And at nearly two-and-a-half hours, “Motherless Brooklyn” is arguably too long for its own good. It’s easy to imagine the film taxing the patience of audiences who can’t sit through a story like this without checking their phones; it’s the kind of story where, if you look away for a minute, you might get lost. But the period details, humor, strong characterizations, and mostly graceful articulation of complex material make “Motherless Brooklyn” mostly a pleasure to watch.

Most striking of all is the unabashedly political nature of the project. It’s rare to see a big-budget American film that deals so bluntly with complex issues that affect moviegoers every day, albeit couched in the atmosphere and language of anther time. For the most part, Norton’s “Chinatown” fetish pays off in subtle as well as obvious ways. The script weds its sociopolitical elements to characterization and plot so deftly that it never feels as if the filmmaker is awkwardly pausing one kind of movie and swapping in bits of another.

“Motherless Brooklyn” is strongest when diving into the heart of what clearly sparked the filmmaker’s imagination in the first place, as when Norton gives the film over to a public meeting about urban planning and racism. The film puts Lionel at the back of the room and has him watch and listen while Jones’ Gabby and various citizens confront the officials who represent money rather than democracy. The sequence feels as if it were guest-directed by a muckraking dramatist like Ken Loach or Spike Lee (who cast Norton as the lead in “The 25th Hour”), and there are many more like it. This is far from a perfect movie, but it’s passionate, controlled and smart—a throwback to another era of American cinema, not just American life..

Class Action Park

from The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/movies/class-action-park-review.html

‘Class Action Park’ Review: Thanks for the Injuries

The HBO Max documentary details the joys and horrors of New Jersey’s Action Park, a no-rules bacchanal of water slides and broken bones.




The Cannonball Loop water slide, one of the former attractions of a water park highlighted in the documentary “Class Action Park.”Credit...HBO Max


By Jason Bailey
Sept. 1, 2020

For New Jersey youth in the ’70s and ’80s, visiting (and surviving) Action Park was a rite of passage. The sprawling combination of water park, motor park and general bacchanal was the brainchild of Gene Mulvihill, a disgraced former penny-stock pusher who counted the cash as his park became a rule-free stew of dangerous rides, teen guests, teen employees, raging hormones, ’80s-style machismo and booze.

The HBO Max original documentary “Class Action Park” (one of the park’s winking nicknames; Traction Park was another) attempts a tricky balancing act, reveling in the hedonism of the attraction while treating the consequences of that hedonism with appropriate gravitas. The directors Chris Charles Scott and Seth Porges sneak the viewer behind the turnstiles by deploying John Hodgman’s wry narration, giddily kitschy archival materials and interviews with park employees, celebrity patrons and journalists. Scott and Porges spend a fair amount of their running time on a detailed walk-through of the rides (many of them designed by “people on the fringes” of the industry) and their various corresponding dangers and injuries — as well as the shamelessly shady business practices of its owner.



The grimness begins to creep in around the hour mark, as cheerful injuries and “battle scars” give way to horrifying stories of electrocution and drowning, as well as details behind the park’s first death, the 19-year-old George Larsson Jr., complete with wrenching testimonials by his surviving family. Shockingly, there were five more deaths in the next seven years; the filmmakers detail how Mulvihill used his increasing power, influence and checkbook to dodge responsibility for them.


“Class Action Park” loses its footing somewhat in the closing passages; Scott and Porges don’t seem to know quite how to wrap things up, and the film’s big tonal shift is a turning point that is all but impossible to come back from. (The incongruent feel-good vibe of the Holladay Brothers’ score does more harm than good.) But that shift is effective, and necessary, slyly replicating the experience of visiting Action Park itself: it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

Class Action Park

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.

Turn: Washington's Spies. Season 2 Review.

From the Chicago Tribune

https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/chi-amc-turn-review-20150413-story.html

Review: 'Turn: Washington's Spies,' season 2

BY BRIAN LOWRY
VARIETY |
APR 13, 2015





Jamie Bell, left, plays the reluctant spy in AMC's series about the first spy ring in America which took place during the
...MORE(Frank Ockenfels 3/Courtesy AMC)


At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, perhaps it's time to temporarily retire the Revolutionary War as a dramatic TV backdrop.


Following "Sons of Liberty," the miniseries that presented history in the style of a beer commercial, comes the second season of "Turn: Washington's Spies," an AMC series that certainly looks handsome and draws on literary material but remains dramatically limp, despite near misses, turning doorknobs and other tricks of the espionage-on-screen trade. George Washington and Benedict Arnold are among this season's historical supporting players, but barring the occasional flash, it's not just the teeth that are wooden.


It's 1777 as the second season begins, with the rebellious colonists under the leadership of Gen. Washington (Ian Kahn) reeling from the loss of Philadelphia to the British. As such, the efforts of spy Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell) and his co-conspirators become especially important, as he pretends to be a loyal Tory while seeking to ferret out information about the occupying force's plans.


The British, meanwhile, are engaged in their own counterespionage efforts, with intelligence chief John Andre (JJ Feild) seeing an opportunity to turn Arnold (Owain Yeoman), a bold officer who chafes against what he sees as a lack of recognition under Washington's command.


The season is set in motion by a sculpture of King George that contains a message for Washington. The quest for that contraband becomes one of several plots introduced and inched along through the first four hours.


There are some nice elements, such as the infatuation of British officer Maj. Hewlett (Burn Gorman) with Anna (Heather Lind), who is working with Woodhull as part of the spy ring. There's also the return of the venomous Simcoe (Samuel Roukin), so evil that he practically hisses out his dialogue.


The pieces, however, never quite add up to anything with enough cohesion or narrative flow. And despite unflinching bursts of violence -- a throat-slitting here, a scalping there -- the suspense is tempered by the setting and a realization how long the war will drag on, transforming some of the caper aspects into "Mission: Impossible" (the series, not the movies) in powered wigs and red coats.


AMC was wise to relaunch the show with a two-hour premiere, although the extra plot doesn't do much to reel anyone back who didn't stay loyal throughout the first season.


Give the network credit for gambling on a period series with obvious ambition, produced at considerable expense. Yet after the opening salvo of this second campaign, what kept coming to mind about "Turn" is that it also describes what somebody can readily do with a TV remote.

Ozark S3 Ep 6

from Vulture.com

https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/ozark-recap-season-3-episode-6-su-casa-es-mi-casa.html

Ozark Recap: Family Game Night
By Brian Tallerico


Photo: Steve Dietl/Netflix

A somber, even slow episode — outside of explosive moments in three key scenes — leads the third season of Ozark into its final stretch. While it first looks like Wendy and Marty Byrde may never speak again and are on a fast track to divorce, trauma and danger have forced them to stay together before. Will that happen again?

It sure looks like their marital days are numbered after the intense opening scene in therapy. Let’s just say that the new Marty Byrde, the one who became a Beast Slayer in Mexico, has come to play. When Sue lets drop that both Wendy and Marty have been bribing her, the couple take off the gloves and start fighting bare-fisted, at least emotionally. Marty is particularly brutal in ways he never really has been before, accusing Wendy of putting her interests before the family. She tries to get in a few points, but he isn’t really listening, going as far as to call her a selfish, power-hungry bitch. And that’s not even really the worst of it. As they air all of their dirty laundry, the scene ends with a funny beat as Marty realizes what Sue just heard. She’s going to need, in her words, a “shitload” of money to stay quiet.

That’s the first key explosive moment, the other two being the gunfire on the beach and the explosion and carnage at the end. In between, there are a lot of minor beats, mostly one-on-one scenes that push the characters to the next major events in their lives. Let’s break them down by character this episode:

Ruth Langmore & Ben Davis

The slower pace allows Julia Garner to do her best work of the season to date; she may have just won another Emmy with this. She’s excellent both in scenes with Tom Pelphrey’s Ben and Charlie Tahan’s Wyatt. As the fight with Frank Cosgrove Jr. continues to escalate, she’s falling in love with Ben, although she discovers that her new boyfriend has a problem in the bedroom because of his medication. He tells her he will go off the meds, but Wendy reveals that they’re for bipolar disorder, and a Ben off his meds is super dangerous. (That’s probably the Ben we saw in his introduction in the second episode, losing his mind on a landscaper.) She seems to tell Wendy that she’ll encourage Ben to stay on his meds, but it’s another variable in this season’s unstable environment.

In a heartbreaking scene, Ruth also finally has an emotional moment with Wyatt after learning from Three Langmore (Carson Holmes) that Wyatt is living and sleeping with Darlene Snell. Garner perfectly captures the blame Ruth feels. After all, it’s her murder of Wyatt’s father that has now pushed her cousin into a deadly situation with Darlene. If Wyatt ends up crushed under the Snell empire, Ruth will never forgive herself.

Darlene Snell

Speaking of Darlene, she finally gets an episode in which she feels like less of a peripheral character. She wants her drug operation back up and running, and she wants Helen Pierce’s help. That’s not going to happen. Importantly, Darlene also goes to the dirty cops whom her husband Jacob used to control and basically tries to get them back under her thumb. It seems to work a bit, although it’s too soon to tell if they’ll be loyal to the Snells or Byrdes when it comes down to it. She also tries to woo Wyatt’s brother Three into the empire. Don’t do it, kid!

Charlotte & Jonah Byrde

The Byrde children have a formative day at the beach with Tommy, who seems to just be a garden variety idiot, but it’s later revealed is working with Agent Evans (McKinley Belcher III). Before that, Tommy gets high with Erin Pierce and the Byrde children before whipping out a gun and getting super-aggro. The cops eventually swing in, but it’s a scary moment, and one that reminds us that Jonah Byrde is a crack shot.

Wendy Byrde

After therapy, Wendy kicks Marty out of the house, sending him to the same motel occupied by Agent Miller. She needs a new project, so she decides to get a charitable foundation off the ground. In one of the best scenes of the episode, Jonah suggests it’s a good laundering operation. She just wants to do something positive and her children instantly presume it’s for illegal ends.

Marty Byrde

Finally, Marty seems to be working to bring Agent Miller into the fold, befriending her at the motel, and telling her that he needs time to convince Wendy. That’s not true. He needs time to turn Miller. He also discovers he’s being tailed. Is it Agent Evans? Someone from one of the cartels? He ditches his tail by escaping through a Dollar General, but the final scene reveals that the cartel drug war has come to the Ozarks with gunpower. Men are killed, money is burned, a truck explodes, and Ruth Langmore barely escapes with her life. All of this tension seems designed to push Marty back into the Byrde family. There’s even a game night. After all, nothing brings a couple together like fear. And board games.

Dirty Laundry

• Does Helen feel a little too naïve about Erin? She brings her down to the middle of an illegal operation, lets her become friends with the family running the cartel’s laundering scam in the area, and then is surprised that she may be getting closer to the truth? Yes, children can be blind spots for smart people, but Helen is often the smartest person in any room and this feels a bit off in terms of writing.

• When Wendy says about Ben not taking his meds, “His judgment is completely impaired,” it sounds very foreboding. Will Ben make a bad choice before the end of the season?

• Here’s another one: “Broken promises get consequences.” That’s from Darlene Snell, who feels pushed aside by everyone in the Ozarks. Snell is nowhere near as dangerous as an Omar Navarro or a Frank Cosgrove, but she doesn’t think that, and she could easily cause big problems for everyone.

• Ozark has never been a show that’s shy about killing characters. If you’re reading these before watching the final quartet, who do you think isn’t making it to season four? Maya Miller? Ben Davis? Will the time finally come for Darlene Snell? Or could we be in for a truly major death, like Helen Pierce or a Byrde child? We’ll know soon.

Superman #1-6: The Unity Saga

THE UNITY SAGA

from vocal.media.geeks
https://vocal.media/geeks/superman-vol-1-the-unity-saga-phantom-earth-review

Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Penciled by Ivan Reis
Published July-Dec 2018

'Superman Vol. 1 The Unity Saga: Phantom Earth' Review

by LESTAT DE LIONCOURT 2 years ago in COMICS

It’s the start of a new era for 'Superman,' as the status quo is about to get rocked in this collected edition of Brian Michael Bendis’ Man of Steel comic!

Superman Vol. 1 The Unity Saga: Phantom Earth Cover (Credit: DC Comics)

Superman is on a mission. He needs to find his family who have been incommunicado ever since his estranged father, Jor-El, returned and decided to take Superman’s son Jon on a galactic walkabout to ‘find himself as a man’. Lois Lane, Superman’s partner, and Jon’s mother, decided to join them. Now, they’re AWOL, and the Man of Steel has no way to contact them.

Super-Sad

But soon, his family are going to be the last people on his mind in Superman Vol. 1 The Unity Saga: Phantom Earth. The villainous Rogol-Zaar re-appears with one sole intent—to rid the universe of the Kryptonian plague. While Superman is distracted by his missing family, how will he fight this scourge, and protect the world he loves so much?

Superman, the One Superhero Army

"Do I always have to do EVERYTHING myself?!"

Kal-El. Clark Kent. Superman. All these names make up one superhero—the Man of Steel from Krypton, protector of Earth and occasional reporter for the Daily Planet. The story of Superman is beloved by all comic book fans, but with DC Comics’ Rebirth arc, the backstories of almost all the superheroes were re-written with slight updates. Under Brian Michael Bendis’ penmanship, Superman’s home planet was not destroyed by the Kryptonians’ hubris, but by something else. A corporeal being that Superman can punch—but can he defeat it?

In this volume, Superman is left to his own devices to fight evil in the Phantom Zone while the rest of the universe’s superheroes are incapacitated or missing. He has to do all the heavy lifting, which seems like a long-shot, even for this alien hero. Panels upon panels concentrate on his unwavering determination and stamina.

But what I loved about his characterisation in Superman Vol. 1 The Unity Saga: Phantom Earth is that Superman knows he can’t be everywhere at once. He turns down an offer to be a galactic leader, while later he needs the conscious members of Justice League to save Earth while he fights his enemy. All the while, it’s the memory of the people he knows and loves most that keep him going.

This tactic works for the majority of the book, though I would have liked to see Superman interact with the rest of the Justice League a little more than he does. Also, where’s Supergirl? She fought the same enemy in the previous volume, but she’s all but forgotten in this one.

Is there such a thing as a perfect superhero?

Superman holds his own against a formidable opponent in this volume. At times, it seems impossible to fathom how he’s able to keep going despite his depleting energy. But the stakes never feel that out of reach. Bendis writes Superman with a great deal of reverence—he is a god among men in Bendis’ rendition. This makes Superman super-perfect in every way, and that is to the detriment of the book.

Never does Superman have a stray bad thought, or a moment of selfishness. He is goodness and light, and thereby perceives the world that way as well. It’s all a bit too twee. We get that he’s an alien, but not all Kryptonians were paragons of virtue, so what makes Superman so special?

What would have worked in this book’s favour would have been a story about emotional turmoil rather than brute force. Superman is powerful, everyone knows that, but there has to be more to keep the reader at the edge of their seats. There is hardly any human interaction at all for the Man of Steel, and this leads to several pages just being verbose with no heart.

Conclusion

I received an advanced Netgalley copy of Superman Vol. 1 The Unity Saga: Phantom Earth from DC Comics for review purposes. Even for a reader who is unfamiliar with Bendis’ previous volume The Man of Steel, this book easily catches you up with what has been happening in Superman’s life. I appreciated the touches of humour, especially early on in the volume when Superman and Martian Manhunter meet. We could have done with more of that.

However, despite the grandiloquent art by Ivan Reis, and at times uninspiring text, the denouement sets up that much needed emotional anticipation that was missing for most of this volume. How will this play out in Action Comics Vol. 1: Invisible Mafia, we will have to wait and find out in April.

Superman Vol. 1 The Unity Saga: Phantom Earth hits bookstores everywhere Tuesday, March 5, 2019.

Fantastic Four #14-19: Point of Origin

POINT OF ORIGIN

Written by Dan Slott
Penciled by Paco Medina and Sean Izaakse
Published Aug 19 -Feb 20




   At an event celebrating the Fantastic Four donating the Marvel 1, the cosmic rocket that turned them into heroes, Reed can’t let go of the thoughts of what went wrong when they wrecked it. He and Johnny decide to build a replica coined the Marvel 2, and the team sets off to complete it’s very first mission ever.
   As they near the planet Spyre, their leader the Overseer senses their approach. He summons his own band of heroes to defend the planet and the Unparalleled attacks. During their brief fight, we learn that Sky is allegedly betrothed to Johnny Storm, as Ben Grimm is tossed into a gulch known ominously as LowTown.

   As Reed and Sue are brought to the Overseer to talk, Johnny learns a little more about who he’s apparently supposed to marry. Meanwhile the Thing is forced to fight wave after wave of mutates from below. As they talk, the Overseer reveals that after spying on the Fantastic Four, he harnessed the power of his planets cosmic rays that originally powered the travelers. By using them on his own people, some triumphed. Some however were not so lucky, and if their mutation went awry, they were cast into the ditch where Ben Grimm now finds himself. 

   After Mr. Fantastic chides the Overseer for experimenting on innocent people, he demands the Unparalleled kill them - which luckily they deem just a little extreme. The Human Torch and Sky are alerted during their romance that they’re needed on both sides of the isle, while Ben works the monsters in Freak Alley into a Hightown attacking frenzy.

   En route to making a stand, Krumson reveals to the Thing he was an experiment gone wrong during the Overseer’s Fantastic ripoff attempt. Sky is attacked by Reed when Johnny tells his sister and brother in law to knock it off because she’s his soulmate. Their explanation is cut short however and the team is again divided on who’s just on who’s side.

   Up top, the Unparalleled face off with the Thing and the mutants of lowtown when Human Torch arrives and the Fantastic Two try to figure things out. Before long, Reed and Sue arrive as well and they spill the beans: Overseer has been collecting the cosmic rays from 50 light years away, and conversely, actually created the Fantastic Four in the first place.

   With the truth finally out, he tells them he was just trying to scuttle their ship. Now with the battle raging in full force, Ben and Krumson plan an attack on the Overseer. Only problem is that the fight starts to topple the spire they’re in while the fight below continues. Later with their leader temporarily down, their FF are confined to a dome that Susan uses to protect them. 

   Finally the Overseer challenges Mr Fantastic to a showdown. They begin to fight but in the ensuing constant monologuing, they learn that the worlds have basically  created an infinite arms race. They decide to make peace, and Ben Grimm tells them about the “Almost Cure”, a gift of the Future Foundation that turns a superhero back into a human for a day. Now with the Unparalleled on their side, they’re able to repair their ship. And this time, they’ll be returning with one extra passenger. Sky bids her family goodbye and decides returning to Earth with her soulmate is her true destiny. With that, the Fantastic...Five return to Earth. But their newest and latest adventures lie ahead.

   So after a looooooong story arc that slowly trickled across 6 months of comics, I’m just reminded how prolific and chocked full of imagination Dan Slott truly is. Although it seemed like kind of a demotion to put him on this book and off Amazing Spidfer-Man, he’s more than made this series into some cant miss action - and this story is no exception. I give this one a 9/10.

If you like this review, check out my video of it HERE.

You can also buy my physical copy of this book below:

Fantastic Four #14

Fantastic Four #15 (Already Sold)

Fantastic Four #16 (Already Sold)

Fantastic Four #17 (Already Sold)

Fantastic Four #18 (Already Sold)

Fantastic Four #19 (Already Sold)

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