Coming Soon – The Book of Boba Fett
Here’s a look at the upcoming First Season of The Mandalorian spin-off The Book of Boba Fett coming to Disney+ on December 29th.
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Science Fiction
Eternals
- Title: Eternals
- IMDb: link
Eternals is ambitious as hell. It may be the most ambitious movie Marvel has attempted since weaving together various threads into a single story in The Avengers. Sadly, it’s nowhere near as successful. With an opening crawl, monologues aplenty, and flashbacks, Eternals struggles to introduce and flesh out a dozen characters, their purpose, their backstory, and their place in the MCU.
I’ll give writer/director Chloé Zhao credit for assembling a talented and diverse cast, but with so many characters to keep track of (many of who disappear for large amounts of screentime) more than once I forgot an actor was even in the film.
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Star Wars: The High Republic: Trail of Shadows #1
- Title: Star Wars: The High Republic: Trail of Shadows #1 (of 5)
- wiki: link
- Writer: Daniel José Older
- Artist: David Wachter
Set during the High Republic, in the years prior to the Star Wars prequels, opens with the death of Jedi Master Loden Greatstorm and the unexplained disintegration of his body. Jedi Investigator Emerick Caphtor is assigned to the case which will lead him to Vrant Tarnum and a mystery that will somehow tie into a children’s nursery rhyme and the actions of Coruscant private detective Sian Holt looking out for a friend who has gotten in over his head.
The idea of tying together Star Wars and detective story isn’t something I expected. The Emerick and Sian storylines feel very disconnected in the issue which has enough mystery going on without needing to add how the two tales supposedly will fit together. While an interesting idea, I don’t know that there’s enough here for me to come back and search for any answers.
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Steel Dawn
- Title: Steel Dawn
- IMDb: link
Set in a post-apocalyptic future where water is the most precious resource, 1987’s Steel Dawn stars Patrick Swayze as a former soldier turned nameless traveler, credited only as “Nomad,” whose search for the killer (Christopher Neame) of his mentor (John Fujioka) leads him to a farm run by a widow (Lisa Niemi) under attack by a ruthless nearby landowner (Anthony Zerbe).
Steel Dawn offers your basic western plot (borrowing more than a little from Shane, complete with a young boy taking a shine to our hero) with a modest amount of sci-fi trappings featuring weird mutants in the desert wasteland and struggle over scant resources. Re-released on Blu-ray, the film is at most a curiosity for Swayze fans and holds little other actual value other than the extended fight between our hero and the assassin.
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Dune: Part One
- Title: Dune (2021)
- IMDb: link
More coherent, but less complete, than David Lynch‘s bizarre 1984 film, director Denis Villeneuve‘s adaptation of the first half of Frank Herbert’s Dune is rich and elaborate storytelling. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still Dune, meaning the story is still complex and bizarre, but, despite only giving us half the story, offers a more satisfying movie experience.
Breaking the film into two halves allows this Dune to spend more time with character, worldbuilding, and setting the stage for a hero’s emergence which won’t fully be explored until the next movie. Gone are the emperor, who is referred to but never seen, the odd space traveling creatures of Lynch’s film, the sound-based weapons which will play such a pivotal role in the second-half of the story, and the narration of the emperor’s daughter which helped explain the story and the large gaps necessary for Lynch to fit the entire tale into a single film.
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