Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 43

The Sandman has been brought to life. And it’s amazing.

Visuals like the captured Dream in the summoning circle and the glass globe. The Gates of Horn and Ivory. The castle at the center of the Dreaming. Goldie. Martin Tenbones. The Threshold. So many fantastic images pulled directly from the page.

Seeing the story unfold – yes, with changes. Some to separate it from the DC Comics elements (like Arkham, the Justice League and the 1970s Sandman). Some to raise the stakes or give it more emotional punch. (What Morpheus asks of Cain and Abel to recharge his powers is a lot more impactful.) Some to connect the different parts of the season more solidly. (Bringing in the Corinthian early on. Bringing Ethel forward to the present day to make Dee’s link to Burgess both clearer and more immediate.) And some to set things up since this time through, they know where the story’s going. Ultimately it’s all about how stories change, and how Dream has to change, and what happens when he reaches a wall and can’t change any further.

’Cause at this point in his existence, Morpheus is more than a bit of a jerk.

I picked up the first volume of the comics again a few episodes in, and had to stop myself before I got too far ahead. But I was surprised at how much of the original dialogue made it through!

The horror is toned down a little, which fits more with the tone the comics settled into later on. Except of course for the diner and the cereal convention. And anytime the Corinthian is “working.” And Dee is creepy as hell (more about that later). He and the Corinthian make an interesting contrast, one sad, one charming, both dangerous.

Bringing the present-day story into the actual present day, rather than making it a 1990s period piece, is a better choice overall. It messes with characters’ ages a bit, especially for Unity and Dee, but hey, they tracked Mad Hettie’s age: 247 in 1989, 280 in 2022. And Dream missing his 1989 appointment with Hob Gadling actually added to the way that story resolved.

Speaking of Hob Gadling, I’m so glad they managed to include some of my favorite one-shots between the longer arcs!

Stand-Outs: Death

Death is perfectly cast. Does Kirby Howell-Baptiste look different than on the page? Sure. Does she sound different than the character’s voice in my head? Yeah. Is she a perfect representation of the kind, caring, personification of Death who appears in the comics? Absolutely! I’m really looking forward to seeing more of her in upcoming seasons.

Stand-Outs: John Dee

John Dee in the TV series actually is a more interesting character than the wasted-away Dr. Destiny from the comics. He isn’t just a one-note megalomaniac supervillain who wants to take over the world just because. He has reasons for what he’s doing. A horrible, messed-up, one-track obsession of a reason, but a reason nonetheless. He’s sort of a less deliberately malicious TV Killgrave. Or Gollum.

And putting more focus on Ethel forward to the present day helps tie Dee more clearly to Burgess with a more solid through-line for the ruby.

But holy crap, David Thewlis can be seriously creepy when he wants to be. Two people in a car was more tense than Dream literally walking into hell and engaging in a battle of wits with Lucifer. And that’s not even getting into the diner, which was just as disturbingly f’ed up as it was supposed to be.

Diverse Cast and Characters

I’m pretty sure that anyone who considers this TV adaptation to be “too woke” either wouldn’t have liked the original comics to begin with, or is hung up on characters being played by Black actors, which makes you wonder why they’d choose that hill to die on…

I mean, Death is perfect. Rose is perfect. Unity’s great. Hector is frankly a better version of the character anyway. Lucienne looks the most different, but her performance is spot-on as Lucien.

The rest of the socio-political aspects, though? The LGBTQ characters being both present and fully human? The writer who claims to be feminist while assaulting a woman he keeps locked up in his house? The Corinthian inspiring a century of the worst of humanity and tying it to the dark side of the American Dream?

It’s all there in the source material. It just would’ve been harder to put it on TV back in 1989.

The surrealism is the best part of Doctor Strange. Creative use of Escher gravity, portals, astral projection, and time manipulation. Incredibly detailed alterations to reality - buildings don’t just stretch and fold, they add and remove bricks, windows, etc. as needed. Fights where some people are moving forward in time and others backward, or between astral forms while things are still going on with their physical bodies. And the effects make all of that look incredible.

As for the story itself: it’s fun, but it’s also very familiar. They try to patch up or subvert old tropes, some more successfully than others. But overall it follows the same beats as the first Iron Man and Thor movies: Arrogant but extremely capable man finds himself out of his depth and unable to do what he’s accustomed to, and turns things around once he starts to see the big picture and the impact his actions have on others. And of course since this is a few years into the Infinity War saga, the stakes are higher, with the world itself in danger. (It’s still better than Thor, though.)

Coming back to the first Captain America movie after seeing the full Infinity War saga, two seasons of Agent Carter and several of Agents of SHIELD, I like the film even better than I did the first time. It deepens the story to know what the Tesseract actually is, where the Red Skull ends up (it makes more sense now than when I dimly remembered what happened to him), the future of Hydra, how Steve and Peggy and Howard and Bucky’s lives intertwine over the next few decades.

And it’s not quite what’s become the standard superhero movie. The Marvel movie formula hadn’t been established yet, and it’s more of a war movie even than Wonder Woman (which I now see as kind of a companion piece to this one…which is appropriate because she was DC’s star-spangled hero invented to fight the Axis, just like Cap was Marvel’s). The final battle is high-stakes and high-action, but it’s not the overblown special effects extravaganza that they’ve become since.

This was still back when they felt the had to justify the comic-booky visuals like Cap’s costume, or Red Skull’s appearance – or Cap’s name, for that matter! – but they made it work in an otherwise realistic war film. And I really liked the design work in the settings they invented: Stark’s facilities looked very much like a 1940s view of near-future tech, but Hydra’s looked a bit more modern – more like what you’d find in a 1960s James Bond movie, just darker.

You can see all the ways it’s setting up for the present-day MCU. But it’s also a very strong story of what makes Steve Rogers a hero: It’s not the super-soldier serum. It’s his heart. His determination to do the right thing, his integrity, and his willingness to sacrifice himself for others. That’s what defeats Hydra Mark I, that’s what keeps Cap going when he’s unfrozen, that’s what brings him into conflict with Tony Stark in Civil War…and it’s what Tony ultimately learns from him by the conclusion of Endgame.

The first Thor movie isn’t bad, but it’s not especially good either. It does its job in introducing the Marvel version of Asgard and the nine realms as an advanced alien civilization that the old Norse saw as gods. And it does its job at introducing Thor, Loki and Odin, and their family dynamic – which is where its heart is, far more than the action sequences. But it’s not quite as compelling as I remember it being. Though my memory could be mixing in the later movies and other, non-Marvel sources. At least Loki gets to debut as a complex character here, rather than the flat version seen in The Avengers.

I do really like the Asgardian designs, the mix of futuristic technology, high fantasy, and old Norse art and architecture. That aesthetic is established here, and the sets and effects and costumes really bring it to life. It’s fantastic in several senses of the word.

But I kind of feel like the Thor series didn’t hit its stride until Ragnarok, just in time for everything to be trashed in Infinity War.

It feels weird to rate this higher than the original it’s based on, H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy. I’m not sure it’s actually a better book, but it is more enjoyable, largely because it’s written in a more modern style and to today’s sensibilities. The characters are more distinct, the personal stakes are higher, the corporate malfeasance and environmental exploitation are amped up, and the twists are carefully set up instead of dropping in out of nowhere.

Fuzzy Nation tells largely the same story as Little Fuzzy: a prospector on a company-owned planet encounters a cute animal species that may or may not be sapient, in which case the company loses its license to exploit the world, finishing with a courtroom drama over murder charges and whether the fuzzies are people or animals, with a major breakthrough in communication settling the question. But it takes a different enough path that you can read it without knowing what’s coming next.

I’d recommend reading both if you have time, but space them out to let the first one you read settle.

Notes