A Political History of the Future: Black Panther at Lawyers, Guns & Money

In my latest Political History of the Future column at Lawyers, Guns & Money, I discuss Black Panther, a genuinely remarkable movie that sets a bar that other MCU films are going to struggle to clear.  There's been a lot of fascinating conversation about this movie, not least its importance to African-Americans as both the first MCU movie to star a black man, and a representation of a fictional African nation that is powerful, self-sufficient, and never colonized.  In this essay, I discuss how that act of worldbuilding puts Black Panther squarely in the tradition of utopian SF, and how its utopia is enriched by the film's deep interest in blackness and African heritage.  As I write in the essay, it's interesting to compare Black Panther to Star Trek: Discovery, and find that the movie delivers exactly what I was looking for in that show.

Beyond its importance as a work of worldbuilding, however, what excites me about Black Panther—and sets it head and shoulders above any other work in the MCU, as far as I’m concerned—is the fact that it’s a story about worldbuilders. "Just because something works doesn’t mean it cannot be improved", T'Challa is informed by his sister, the bright-eyed inventor Shuri (Letitia Wright). And indeed, Black Panther and Wakanda are full of people who, despite living in a seeming paradise, keep asking themselves how they can make it better, and what responsibility they have to help improve the rest of the world.

Recent Movie Roundup 27

The blockbuster movies of 2017 are winding down--there's really only The Last Jedi left to go--and then it'll be time for Israeli movie theaters to furiously start scheduling the year's Oscar movies before the ceremony (still bereft of release dates: The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird, and probably several others I'm forgetting).  Here are my thoughts on a few of the stragglers (though really, only one of them has proven to be a bona fide blockbuster) in what has proved to be a strong year for solid popcorn entertainment, even if there have been no genuine exceptional examples of the genre (except possibly Get Out, which is really more of a horror movie).

• Blade Runner 2049 - I have trouble deciding how I feel about Denis Villeneuve's 35-years-later follow-up to Ridley Scott's cult classic.  On the one hand, this is a beautiful, evocative work of science fiction of the kind one doesn't get to see in the movie theater very often.  On the other hand, it's self-indulgent, overlong, and most importantly, adds almost nothing to the original movie.  You see this most distinctly in the film's decision to reveal, in its opening minutes, that this iteration's blade runner, the cop tasked with "retiring" runaway replicants, is a replicant himself.  There's an obvious argument for choosing to front-load this shift to the story, thus forestalling much of the debate that has come to consume the original movie (which is especially valuable since "is Deckard a replicant" is literally the most boring, pointless question you can ask about the original Blade Runner; no matter what answer you come up with, it tells you nothing about the character, his world, or his story).  But it also means that the already-not-particularly-deeply-buried subtext of the original movie--that this a world in which the distinctions between human and inhuman are imposed by the demands of capitalism, and have nothing to do with how human replicants actually are--is right there on the surface.  The same is true of the film's backbone of story, in which Officer K (Ryan Gosling) must track down a child born to a replicant, and brutally suppress the knowledge that such a thing is even possible.  It's a profound reduction of the original Blade Runner's humanism--which extended to recognizing the personhood of flawed, murderous beings like Roy Batty or Pris--to suggest, as Blade Runner 2049 does, that replicants can only "prove" their humanity if they have fertility (which, in typical Hollywood fashion, is treated as interchangeable with female fertility).
  
  Or maybe the problem lies with the original concept.  Villeneuve has shown himself to be an exceptional director, including of SF stories, and he pulls out all the stops with 2049, all-but gorging the viewer on cyberpunk cityscapes, dust-covered ruins, junk deserts populated by dehumanized scavengers, and the corporate-architecture-on-acid interiors of the offices of Wallace corporation (the inheritors of the original movie's now-defunct Tyrell).  But it doesn't take very long in this rather overlong movie to realize that all this splendor is in service of very little in the way of ideas.  As Aaron Bady wrote last year about another work, all robot stories are ultimately about slavery, and there's really not that much you can say about that concept when your starting position is "are slaves human?"  Blade Runner 2049 keeps teetering on the verge of interesting SFnal ideas, such as the fact that K spends much of the movie trying to convince himself that he is the child he's been looking for.  Or his holographic live-in girlfriend, Joi (Ana de Armas), an AI playing house with a robot, each trying to convince the other that they are real people even as they consume each other like the products that they are.  Or the idea that the world's economy now includes replicants like K or the prostitute Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), who live as pseudo-humans, consuming resources such as food and living space even as they're viewed as subhuman.  But the film is too caught up in homages to the original movie (including a brief and not very satisfying appearance by Harrison Ford) to ever give these ideas the space they deserve.  For all its visual expansiveness, its world feels narrow and predictable.  It never manages to be more than a retread of what came before it, a variation on a theme.
  
  As we saw last year with Westworld, trying to tell a slave story with robots almost inevitably skews the racial and gender politics of your story to an extent that can render it worse than useless.  Once again, these are issues that 2049 could have done interesting things with.  The fact that almost all the replicants we meet are white, or that non-white humans seem to have been relegated to the outskirts of even the degraded, dystopian society at the film's center, could have been a commentary on how racial prejudice plays out in a society in which it is possible to manufacture an underclass.  Instead, it's treated as so unremarkable as to not even require an explanation.  Similarly, the increasingly oppressive images of female commodification and objectification that keep cropping up in the movie--the giant, holographic naked women that K walks past in the city, the statues of equally naked women he encounters in the ruins of Las Vegas, the naked female replicant that Niander Wallace (Jared Leto in a distracting, tedious performance) fondles and then murders--end up feeling cynical and self-satisfied.  Yes, the film is calling attention to the misogyny of its world (and a premise where sexbots, again almost always female, are de rigueur), but once again it has nothing to say about the issue once it's raised it, and its actual female characters are mostly devoid of personality.  Joi, for example, can only "prove" that she is a person by expressing devotion to K that goes beyond her programming and eventually gets her killed, while Mariette proves hers by being catty to Joi, reminding her that she isn't real.  It's enough to make you root for the film's villain, Wallace's assistant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), a replicant who seems to realize just how disturbed and monstrous her boss truly is, but who nevertheless kills remorselessly for him because it's her only way to express her anger at her enslavement.  It's only in Luv that 2049 achieves anything close to the complexity of the original Blade Runner, and it's fairly typical of this latter-day repetition's shallowness that it doesn't seem to realize this.
  
  
• Thor: Ragnarok - Marvel has spent several months pumping up Taika Waititi's attempt to revitalize its least successful (critically and artistically, if not financially) sub-franchise, bombarding us with lush posters and trailers that parade its psychedelic, 80s-arcade-inspired visual style and irreverent sense of humor.  It's perhaps inevitable, then, that the actual film, enjoyable and fun to look at as it is, doesn't quite live up to the hype.  Waititi and the film's writers make several very smart choices when they come to craft the third solo outing for their title character.  They play up the fact that he's a bit of a dimwitted jerk, and they constantly put him in situations in which these qualities get him into trouble, as he bites off more than he can chew and incorrectly assumes that everyone around him will be impressed by his pedigree and fighting prowess.  Ragnarok quickly wraps up the dangling threads of plot left by The Dark World, and then sends Chris Hemsworth's Thor and Tom Hiddleston's Loki on a quest to find their missing father, which quickly becomes more serious when they encounter Hela (Cate Blanchett, chewing the scenery with tremendous and exhilarating gusto), their hidden older sister, who wants to claim the throne of Asgard and use its armies to conquer the multiverse.  This, through yet more convolutions of plot, leads to the brothers being dumped on a junkyard planet, and to Thor being made to fight in gladiatorial combat against the reigning champion, who turns out to be Mark Ruffalo's The Hulk.
  
  It's all a lot of fun, but also a bit much, especially when you consider that there's a parallel storyline about Hela's takeover of Asgard, and a redemption story for lost Asgardian Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson, fantastic despite the really unfortunate choice to attempt an accent) who has been drinking away her traumatic memories while procuring fighters for the fey, casually psychopathic Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), the majordomo of the games arena.  These are all great performances who make the film feel vital and exuberant, not to mention extremely funny (though it must be said that every genuinely funny joke, there's at least one moment that's more like "isn't it funny that we chose to make a joke, here, where another movie might be serious?").  Taken together, however, they're a bit of an assault, and the film doesn't really give any of them enough time to shine.  Despite what the film's trailers promise, Ragnarok isn't really a buddy comedy--the Hulk is only prominent for a few, albeit extremely funny, scenes in the middle of the movie--but instead yet another journey of self-discovery for Thor, as he remembers that beneath his bluster, he genuinely cares about his people and the fate of the world.  And while the choice to stress (and puncture) Thor's arrogance, even as it reaffirms his sense of responsibility and his courage, means that Ragnarok is a much more satisfying iteration of this story than either Thor or The Dark World, it is still, ultimately, the same story we've seen before and probably will again, albeit in a much shinier and more humorous guise.  That might be enough for MCU fans who are more attached to the character than I am, but for those hoping that Ragnarok will seriously break the mold, it might be wise to manage expectations.
  
  
• Justice League - There's a part of me that thinks that in another year, Justice League might have been received more positively.  I think we've gotten all we're going to get out of the (richly deserved, but in hindsight a little overwrought) collective hate-on of the DC movies occasioned by Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad.  And with Wonder Woman's success and the behind the scenes upheaval at Justice League indicating that WB have definitely gotten the memo, a little indulgence might have been in order.  The problem is, Justice League comes to us at the tail end of what has, completely unexpectedly, been a truly excellent year for superhero movies.  Think about it: until the third week of November, the worst superhero movie of 2017 was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which wasn't bad so much as redundant and a little mean-spirited.  And aside from that, we've enjoyed a slew of extremely well-made crowdpleasers such as Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor: Ragnarok, as well as some more adventurous fare like Logan and Colossal.  That Justice League, in comparison, is merely rather dull, with a tepid villain and character work carried almost exclusively by its actors, might have been enough in a weaker year, but it won't fly in 2017.
  
  Justice League wastes little time in assuring us that it's changed and eager to do better.  After an opening scene that feels almost like a coda to Batman v Superman, and especially its Nietzsche-for-dummies take on Superman as a living god whose existence gave humanity a sense of purpose, the film jettisons all that thematic weight in favor of pure comic book storytelling--an alien villain who wants to destroy the world.  The problem is that as tepid and juvenile as Zack Snyder's ideas were in Batman v Superman and Man of Steel, they were at least ideas.  When Justice League abandons them, it's left with nothing but warmed-over Avengers.  And unlike that movie, it lacks humanizing points of interest to make us care about its shopworn, underwritten plot.  The villain, Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds in motion capture as some sort of horned demon), has no personality, and his motivations are as generic as they come.  His plan--to collect a set of McGuffins with which he can construct a mega-McGuffin--is so boring that the film itself can't be bothered to take an interest in it, quickly racing through the interim acquisitions so that it can get to the main event.  But this, too, is fairly perfunctory, a CGI extravaganza with little flair or excitement.  Joss Whedon, parachuted in to freshen up the film's script (and take over directing duties from Snyder after a family tragedy, which can't have improved the film's action scenes) tries to recreate the magic he managed with Avengers with some very obvious Whedonisms.  But these almost invariably fall flat, and in a few cases, are actively skeevy.
  
  Justice League thus ends up resting on the shoulders of its characters, which is to say its actors.  This is not the worst thing.  Gal Gadot and Ben Affleck continue to do good work as the grown-ups in the room, weary soldiers who recognize the enormity of the task before them but also the necessity of seeing it through.  Jason Momoa is given almost nothing to work with as renegade Atlantean Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman.  One senses that his backstory is being held back for his own movie, but in Justice League this means that Arthur comes off as blustering and thoughtless.  Happily, Momoa has so much charisma that he manages to make even this underwritten type leap off the screen, but Aquaman's handling is typical of how Justice League approaches its characters, reducing them to types instead of making a case for them as complicated heroes in their own right.  Ezra Miller's Barry Allen, for example, is laden with the bulk of the film's comedic moments.  He's up to the task, but along the way the film loses sight of Barry as a person, and his only dramatic scenes are retreads of material only recently (and more effectively) covered bin The Flash.  The most interesting character is Victor Stone, aka Cyborg (Ray Fisher), but even that comes down to the actor's choices, amping up Victor's ironic detachment as he's slowly taken over by an alien machine.  (Henry Cavill's Superman, who returns halfway through the story, is probably Justice League's biggest misstep.  There's a palpable attempt to move away from the brooding, joyless Superman of the Snyder movies, but Cavill can't seem to unbend sufficiently to actually make Superman heroic, or even likable.  He ends up coming off as a condescending jerk.)
  
  Buried deep in the core of its underwritten character interactions is Justice League's sole claim to originality, the barest hint that it has an idea of how to distinguish the DC movies from the MCU without wallowing in unearned angst.  As in Wonder Woman, this comes down to the difficulty of continuing to fight for an inherently broken world, and there are some solid and refreshingly unsensationalistic exchanges between Batman and Wonder Woman over the figures they could both cut in a world without Superman.  Unfortunately, Justice League is completely the wrong movie for these conversations to happen in.  Unlike Avengers, it can't figure out how to tie together its characters' personal problems and the threat to the world.  It becomes, instead, a story of how its heroes kicked a nondescript villain's ass and along the way got their groove back, but this is far too thin a frame on which to hang not just this overlong, CGI-heavy movie, but an entire cinematic universe.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2017 Edition

I've been doing these fall TV reviews for more than a decade, and every year they feel less relevant, as either a guide to shows that people might like to watch or a commentary on the state of TV.  It's not that I believe that network TV is no longer capable of producing worthwhile, exciting fare--after all, my favorite show currently airing, whose second season is somehow managing to top even its stellar first one, is a network sitcom.  But pretty much everything the networks have trotted out this fall, good and bad, has felt inessential, like retreads of old ideas and trends that aren't really worth taking the time to talk about.  My focus in this post, then, is on the one thing that makes this fall unusual--the fact that in the space of a month, we've seen the premieres of four different SF shows.  Not all of them are good, but their subject matter means that all of them are sufficiently far from the standard network template that I can find something to say about them.

• The Orville - By now you've probably heard that Seth MacFarlane's new space-set show is not, as you might expect from its description, appearance, and MacFarlane's involvement, a parody of Star Trek, but an hour-long adventure show that is entirely earnest in its use of Star Trek's tropes and conventions.  This, however, doesn't even come close to capturing the strangeness, and the awkwardness, of what MacFarlane has produced with The Orville.  Watching it feels like what I imagine it would be like if you could follow along and watch--but never participate--in someone else's not-very-sophisticated but extremely well-funded Star Trek LARP.  As a television show, The Orville is bad--the storytelling is slow and dull, the dialogue is stilted and full of infodumps (which none of the actors know how to deliver), the characters are barely there--but one feels almost embarrassed to point this out, as if by doing so you're interrupting someone else's fun.  In all my years of watching way too much TV, I have never encountered a show that gave off so pronounced an impression of being completely uninterested in me or any other member of the audience, of existing solely so that its creator--MacFarlane, as Ed Mercer, the newly-minted captain of the titular ship--could cosplay in his favorite fictional universe.
  
  As a Star Trek fan myself, this is an impulse that I might be expected to sympathize with.  But one of the very first things The Orville reveals, once you get past the strangeness of its project, is how shallow MacFarlane's take on Star Trek actually is.  Oh, the look is all there--the costumes, cityscapes, and spaceships all look exactly like what you'd get if you took the aesthetic of The Next Generation and updated it to keep up with 2017 fashions and production values--and the terms are all easily recognizable--instead of the Federation you've got the Union; instead of Klingons you've got a species whose name I didn't even bother to learn, but who cares, they're Klingons.  And in interviews, MacFarlane has spoken about his desire to return to the "optimistic" type of space exploration stories that Star Trek specialized in.  But the actual stories showing up on screen contain none of the depth or wit that made Star Trek actually good, and the prevailing emotion in the show is less optimism than blandness.  Star Trek has a reputation for being sterile, for ignoring the real messiness of human life and relationships in its zeal to depict a future in which so many (but by no means all) of the sources of human misery had been eliminated.  Leaving aside for a moment whether that's an accurate perception, The Orville's solution to this alleged problem only reveals what a depth of emotion there was in the series it takes off from, and how insufficient MacFarlane's "modernized" take on it is.  The characters on The Orville aren't messy and human; they're shallow and immature.  And not even in fun ways--if the show were more strongly comedic, it might be possible to forgive the fact that its characterization comes down to having the cast speak in 21st century slang and make ever-so-slightly risque jokes.  But given its earnest tone, the thinness of its stories and character arcs is simply unforgivable.
  
  Instead of relying on humor, The Orville cadges storylines from both its obvious inspiration and real life--the second episode borrows from several top-notch Star Trek episodes when it reveals the existence of an alien zoo where sentient species are kept as displays; the third episode revolves around a female baby born to an all-male species, whose parents want to give her gender reassignment surgery.  But the handling of these ideas is invariably shallow, dull, and terrified of controversy--in the third episode, MacFarlane and his writers somehow manage to go a whole hour without ever mentioning the existence of intersex humans, much less suggesting that in The Orville's idealized future, such people might be considered unremarkable.  A similar shallowness afflicts the characters' relationships, the most important one of which is between Ed and his ex-wife, Kelly (Adrianne Palicki, who deserves so much better than this), who cheated on him and is now trying to make amends by helping to put his career, derailed by their divorce, back on track by serving as his second-in-command.  It's tempting to roll your eyes at such a hoary premise, but it might have been better if The Orville were wall-to-wall ex-wife jokes.  Instead, it plays the relationship between Ed and Kelly mostly straight, and in so doing draws attention to the fact that neither one of them behaves like anything resembling a human being, much less one wracked by the kind of deep feelings you'd expect the breakdown of a marriage following infidelity to arouse.  There's the slightest uptick in drama in the third episode, when we witness the conflict between the alien parents who disagree over whether to "conform" their female child, but still not at the level of getting us to care about these people, one of whom is a series regular.  I can almost sympathize with MacFarlane's desire to have another show like Star Trek on the air, but he's so bad at making a version of Star Trek that realizes why that show was special that he might as well not have bothered.
  
  
• Star Trek: Discovery - An additional reason to resent the existence of The Orville is that it has exposed a surprisingly wide seam in Star Trek fandom who, like MacFarlane, seem to think that Star Trek's appeal begins and ends with nostalgia.  These are the people who tend to slag off the most recent addition to the actual Star Trek canon, Discovery, while claiming that The Orville represents "real" Star Trek.  Which is probably making me a lot more partial to Discovery than the show currently deserves.  Taken on its own merits, Discovery is a frustrating but fascinating mix of good and bad, Trek and not-Trek.  But what I appreciate about it is that, even in its worst moments, there is a palpable sense that the people creating it are trying to move Star Trek forward, both as an idea and a work of television.  Not everything they're doing works, and given how withholding the show's storytelling is, even four episodes in, it'll probably take me until the end of the season to decide where I come down on it.  But the idea that it is necessary to grow and change in order to keep telling a story about the infinite possibilities of the future is the most quintessentially Star Trek thing imaginable, so in that sense at least, Discovery is on the right track.
  
  Perhaps the most disorienting--and at the moment, un-Star Trek-like--thing about Discovery is that it's the story of a person, not a ship or a place.  Heroine Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) quickly goes from rising star in the Starfleet ranks to mutineer to a press-ganged crewmember on the titular ship, whose captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) is conducting a mysterious and probably ill-fated experiment in new propulsion systems, and whose ship is filled with secrets and mysteries.  It's not how Star Trek is supposed to work--the ship is always supposed to be home; the crew, even if they disagree, are always supposed to be allies--and, especially for fans traumatized by the recent movies' tendency to throw every idea and principle that made Star Trek what it was out the window in service of a generic action plot and an unearned hero narrative, it's a worrying decision.  What keeps me feeling hopeful about Discovery is mainly Michael herself, who is a wonderful blend of intellect and temper, calm reasoning and self-destructive urges.  The badass/fuckup combination that failed so catastrophically with NuKirk works wonderfully here, mainly because the writing and the performance combine to create the impression that Michael is always thinking, always questioning, genuinely curious about her surroundings and genuinely thoughtful in her choices--even the bad ones.  If she's not quite the Hornblower-esque figure that the original Kirk was, she's a fascinating modern variation on it--not least for being a black woman.
  
  The rest of the Discovery crew are still being revealed, but there's a similar complexity to some of the ones we've already met.  Commander Saru (Doug Jones), a member of an alien race who are congenitally fearful and pessimistic, but who is also decent and kind; Lieutenant Stamets (Anthony Rapp), a scientist who is caught between elation and disgust that the military are fast-tracking his project; Cadet Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Michael's roommate who appears to have some sort of anxiety disorder, but who is also ambitious, and willing to learn even from an unlikely source like Michael.  They all feel like people with their own points of view, and more importantly for a Star Trek context, like people who are used to looking at the universe like a puzzle, not an obstacle course.  There are other aspects of the show that feel more conventional, more like the action-adventure direction that the movies took--Lorca and the suggestion that he's a villain; his mean-tempered chief of security Commander Landry (Rekha Sharma); most of all, the show's take on the Klingons, who have so much less personality and individuality than they did in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.  As I've said, I probably won't know how I feel about Discovery until at least the end of the first season.  But what I do know is that there isn't another character like Michael Burnham on TV right now, nor another story that gives her the opportunity to be a badass, a scientist, and a political thinker.  That, to me, feels like Star Trek.
  
  
• The Gifted - Fox's second X-Men series is a great deal less trippy and surreal than Legion, but has essentially the same premise--mutants fleeing for their lives and freedom from sinister government agencies.  The more conventional style and structure allows The Gifted to be more political, though I'm reserving judgment on how successfully.  In a world where draconian laws allow the government to detain and intern mutants, a middle class couple discover that their children have abilities, and go on the run, teaming up with the mutant underground.  The twist is that the family's father, Reed Strucker (Stephen Moyer) is a lawyer for the government whose job is to criminalize and prosecute mutants.  In fairness, The Gifted seems aware of the inherent problems of focusing its story about oppression on a former oppressor, who only realizes his actions were wrong when they affect his own family.  Already in the first episode there is evidence of subtle criticism of Reed and his wife Kate (Amy Acker, once again being unimaginatively asked to play weepy and overwhelmed), who are the kind of people who pride themselves on being decent and law-abiding, but who, when push comes to shove, genuinely don't seem to believe that the laws should apply to them.  An early scene sees Reed demand severe treatment of students who have bullied his son by, ironically enough, bullying one of his teachers, and when the scary Sentinel Services come to take away the Strucker children after an incident at their school, Kate, who had previously told Reed that he is "keeping us safe" from mutants, flatly denies that the government has any right to take her kids.
  
  It's still possible that The Gifted means for us to see this behavior as uncomplicatedly heroic, and not to notice the Struckers' privileged habits of thought (though the second episode sees Kate being confronted with the fact that she didn't care about how badly mutants were being mistreated until she realized her children were mutants).  But an additional way in which the show addresses its potential problems is by not focusing exclusively on Reed and Kate.  Equal time is given to the Strucker children, Lauren and Andy (Natalie Alyn Lind and Percy Hynes White), who have a nice big sister-little brother rapport, and who clearly don't entirely trust their parents--one of the best scenes in the pilot comes when Lauren reveals that she's been hiding her mutant abilities for three years because she didn't know how Reed and Kate would react.  The mutant underground are also given their own storyline, and though I could wish that the show were told more strongly from their point of view (not least because the underground is a great deal more diverse than the lily-white Strucker family), it doesn't treat them as a means to Reed's ends, nor as helpless victims who need him to save them.  A lot depends on how The Gifted will develop its story going forward--there's a lot of potential for the show to be a story about a racist who Learns Better, and by this point we should all be able to look around and see that it doesn't work that way.  But if the show continues to challenge Reed and Kate on their privilege, and to develop the storylines of the kids and the other mutants, it might end up having something interesting to say about its extremely familiar premise.
  
  
• Marvel's Inhumans - There's probably nothing I can say at this stage that will add to the torrent of scorn that has rained down on Marvel TV's latest effort.  The only thing I can say is that it's all deserved.  Inhumans is a genuinely awful show: poorly written, indifferently acted, and with almost no characters that anyone could care about or be interested in.  What I will say is that I was a little surprised by this failure.  Scott Buck's last tour of duty with Marvel, Iron Fist, was pretty bad in its own right (though, amazingly, still better than Inhumans), but the one thing it got right was the twisted 1% family drama of the Meachums, Danny Rand's business partners.  Given that the one thing I kept hearing about the Inhumans was that they were a superpowered Dynasty, Buck seemed like the perfect fit.  And yet for some reason, he seems to have misplaced the instincts he had for that kind of soap opera storytelling when it came time to write Inhumans, trying to sell the show as a straightforward story of good versus evil, even as the actual characters and premise he presents completely fail to earn those designations.
  
  Inhumans is set in the secret city of Attilan on the Moon, where the part-alien title characters live in a society governed by a rigid caste system.  At puberty, young Inhumans are exposed to Terrigen Mist, which either transforms them and gives them powers, or leaves them human.  The latter group are then sent to toil in the mines, while the former live like kings--literally, as our heroes Black Bolt and Medusa (Anson Mount and Serinda Swan) rule over Attilan along with the rest of the royal family.  The obvious perversity of this arrangement is recognized only by Black Bolt's brother, Maximus (Iwan Rheon), who orchestrates a palace coup and gains the people's support by promising them new living space on Earth.  In other words, at the very least Inhumans should be a twisty tale of intrigue and double-crosses where no one is purely good or bad (though frankly, the only reason not to be completely on Maximus's side is that he keeps killing people who get in his way).  Instead, the show presents Black Bolt, Medusa, and their supporters as completely in the right, and Maximus's actions as completely evil, and leaves no space for the kind of political machinations its premise clearly demands.
  
  Of the cast, only Rheon and Swan seem to realize that they should be playing entitled, arrogant aristocrats, whose appeal comes not from being likable but from total self-possession.  Even they, however, can't do much with the story or characters they've been given.  The show fares much worse with Black Bolt, who can't speak because his voice has terrible concussive properties.  Seemingly no thought has been given to how to convey the personality of a completely silent character, and so Maximus's accusation that Black Bolt is passive and unwilling to plan for the future end up carrying a lot of weight, further cementing the feeling that neither he nor his family deserve to win this particular game of thrones.  One imagines that, like The Gifted, the arc of this story will be for the "good" Inhuman characters to take the opportunity of having been humbled in order to Learn Better and then remake Inhuman society into a more equal place.  But, even if the execution so far were not so very bad, that feels like a waste of a good premise.  There's nothing wrong with a twisty soap opera, and the world of Marvel is obviously a rich setting for one.  Not everything needs to be about heroes and villains.

Recent Movie Roundup 26

I haven't seen a lot of people take note of this--and what with everything else going on, that's hardly surprising--but 2017 is shaping up to be a really good movie year.  Specifically, the genre/action/adventure movies this year has served up have been genuinely strong and enjoyable, from envelope-pushing fare like Logan, Get Out, and Colossal, to well-made, thoughtful variations on familiar formulas like Wonder Woman.  (This is especially noticeable in comparison to 2016, which in terms of its movie offerings pretty much peaked with Deadpool.)  I didn't love all of the movies discussed in this post, but I enjoyed all of them, and more than that, I admired their attempts to do something different, even if in some cases those attempts didn't quite work for me.  In a movie scene that seems increasingly governed by formula and last year's successes, it's heartening to see so many idiosyncratic efforts, and hopefully their success bodes well for the future.

• Baby Driver - For months, reviewers and filmmakers have been priming us have our socks knocked off by Baby Driver, Edgar Wright's victory lap after being unceremoniously dumped from Ant-Man.  The praise for the film was as unanimous and rapturous as it was strangely unspecific--everyone seemed to love Baby Driver, but no one seemed able to say why, beyond some vague gestures towards its soundtrack (and you know, the last film I saw where the soundtrack was a major selling point was the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which is hardly an encouraging comparison).  So when I went to see Baby Driver, it was less in the spirit of enthusiasm and more out of curiosity--what was it about this movie that made people go so gaga over it?  I'm sorry to say that my questions have not been answered.  Baby Driver is enjoyable and well-made.  There are some extremely fun action and car chase scenes (though on that last front the film peaks in its first ten minutes, and never quite recaptures the same high).  But none of this is quite enough to elevate the film past its thoroughly generic story and characters.
  
  The premise of Baby Driver is so familiar that it practically follows from the film's description as a heist movie.  A demon-behind-the-wheel getaway driver agrees to do One Last Job for some shady characters in order to protect the lives of his loved ones, including his angelic girlfriend, and then things get complicated.  The one twist that Wright offers is that Baby (Ansel Elgort, in a brilliant physical performance that nevertheless feels like little more than a support beam for the film's plot) is obsessed with, constantly listening to, and filtering the world through, music, which he pipes in through the earbuds he hardly ever takes off, ostensibly to ward off the tinnitus that has plagued him since childhood, though like so much else about the film this is a plot element that is introduced and then quickly left by the wayside.  This turns Baby Driver into essentially a long sequence of music videos, an approach that is at first exhilarating, but quickly loses its flavor when it turns out that Wright doesn't have a second gear for it.  For a little while, it feels as if Baby Driver is trying to be the portrait of slightly different person (perhaps even neuroatypical), who needs a soundtrack to his life to function, and who can only truly express his humanity through movement--whether behind the wheel of a car, or walking down the street, or dancing in his apartment.  But as the plot of Baby Driver progresses, this obsession comes to feel less like a character trait and more like a gimmick, a way of establishing the film's coolness credentials--to which end it also gathers actors such as Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm, and Jamie Foxx to play the over-the-top criminal types whom Baby squares against.  By the film's final act, in which Baby must save his girlfriend Debora (Lily James) while also retrieving the tape containing the last recording of his mother's singing, he comes off as a less engaging version of Guardians's Starlord, and the film's use of music feels just as calculated.  (This is also a good place to note how few and uninteresting Baby Driver's female characters are, all of them defined by the love, protectiveness, and vengefulness of men.)
  
  The most obvious point of comparison for Baby Driver is Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, and the difference between how these two movies handle their protagonist feels extremely telling.  Drive's most brilliant touch is the third-act revelation that beneath its angel-faced protagonist's placid exterior, there is a great big nothing.  That his coolness is merely a thin veneer for genuine psychopathy, which eventually tarnishes, and sometimes destroys, the lives of everyone he gets close to.  Baby Driver feels like the movie for people who found that conclusion too depressing, who wanted to be able to keep rooting for the Driver with no moral qualms or complications.  The contortions the film goes through in order to assure us that Baby is a good person, even an innocent--at the same time as he willingly participates in horrific violence--are ultimately more alienating than Drive's condemnation of its hero.  The film's ending feels almost like a parody of the way the American justice system bends over backwards to avoid "destroying the life" of photogenic white criminals.  This is a problem less from an ethical standpoint (though the film's approach to race is troubling, and deserves a lot more attention from reviewers than it's gotten) than from a storytelling one.  If Baby Driver won't give its title character a personality, and won't admit that the absence of a personality is an indication that there is something wrong with him, then all that's left is the film's obsession with coolness, which--for me at least--is not nearly enough to carry it over the finish line.
  
  
• Spider-Man: Homecoming - If the rapturous reception for Baby Driver left me feeling warily curious, the only reaction I had to similarly positive reviews for the latest Spider-Man film was resigned fatigue.  As the sixth (!) Spider-Man movie in fifteen years, Homecoming seemed more like a chore than a pleasure, and the fact that Marvel was clearly only making the movie so that the web-crawler could appear in Infinity War and then become the lynchpin of phase four of the MCU certainly didn't help.  For all that Homecoming turned out to be a smart, charming movie, I'm still not convinced that this character needed to be rebooted for the third time.  But I am impressed with how Marvel has handled the significant challenges of doing so, with a great deal more wit and care than comparable franchise launches (much less re-launches) from other studios have managed.
  
  It's not surprising that Homecoming steers clear of the over-familiar tropes of the Spider-Man story (in fact some of them, like the burden of guilt Peter carries for the death of Uncle Ben, feel weirdly absent from this story, in which he is far too insouciant and carefree than your standard Peter Parker).  What I didn't expect was for the film to face head-on some of the growing problems with the more recent MCU movies, and to swiftly disarm them.  Homecoming strikes a compelling middle ground between the overheated bombast of MCU team-up movies, and the by-the-numbers plotting of recent standalones.  It tells a story with relatively modest stakes and scope, with a hero who is frequently out of his depth, and villains who are just trying to get paid.  But by giving its setting and characters room to breathe, it paradoxically ends up the most involving MCU movie in some time.  Tom Holland plays Peter as something between Tobey Maguire's soulful nerd and Andrew Garfield's dimwitted jokester, but most of all he plays the character as young.  His Peter is fundamentally decent and heroic, whether he's giving an old lady directions or thoughtlessly stepping up to take a bullet for a street criminal caught in over his head.  But he's also immature, playful, unclear on how this whole superhero business works, and star-struck by his recent adventures with Iron Man in Civil War.  That looseness in his characterization extends to the rest of the cast.  The kids in Peter's school--best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), popular nice girl Liz (Laura Harrier), too-cool-for-school Michelle (Zendaya), asshole Flash (Tony Revolori), and even some of the background players--all get space to be their own, idiosyncratic versions of these types, each a little bit weird in their own way.  As a result, Homecoming ends up feeling more grounded than most films in this genre, like a teen movie about a superhero, not a superhero movie just waiting to shake off its teenage hero's ordinary life.
  
  There's a similar heft and humanity in the film's handling of its villains, whether it's a small-time crook played by Donald Glover, or the main bad guys.  All feel like people first and plot tokens second, with lives that exist outside of Peter's drama, and limits to their villainy informed by their being part of a community and a family (when Peter convinces Glover's character to give him information, he does it by pointing out that the bad guys have blown up a popular local sandwich shop).  The film's villain, Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), breaks the MCU films' villain curse, ending up simultaneously terrifying and sympathetic.  He makes the largely convincing argument that people like Tony Stark cause tremendous damage that they never look down and notice, much less face consequences for.  Peter's heroism is expressed by recognizing the rightness of this criticism, but also the evil of Toomes's reaction to it--he steals and modifies alien technology, and sells it to criminals.  Even then, the true measure of Toomes's villainy comes not when he dons a terrifying flying suit, but through the mundane details of his double life--the hurt that he causes his family, and the damage he does to his community.
  
  Much has been made of Tony Stark's presence in Homecoming, with some critics even calling it half an Iron Man movie.  I was actually surprised by how little space Tony takes up in the movie, and more than that, by how Homecoming feels free to subtly criticize him.  If, like myself, you thought Tony's decision to recruit Peter in Civil War was reckless and irresponsible, then Homecoming will be the film for you, as it delves into the unintended consequences of that decision--such as Peter retreating from his life in the belief that he will soon be called to join the Avengers.  When Tony tries to repair the damage he's caused, he repeatedly overcompensates, either ghosting Peter completely or micro-managing him, in both cases expecting him to follow orders without considering that he is still a child.  A major component of Peter's growth into heroism and maturity is the fact that he outgrows Tony, rejecting his worldview and choosing to a be a street-level hero, someone who can address the damage that Tony and the Avengers don't see.  (The film also gets in a few jabs at Captain America, who appears as the star of some breathtakingly clueless PSAs screened at Peter's school, even as the teachers admit that he is currently a war criminal.)  It's an ending that also brings Homecoming full circle, back in conversation with the previous Spider-Man movies.  Whereas those films were driven by Peter's tragic inability to balance his life as a person and a hero, Homecoming concludes that it is essential to Peter's heroism that he maintain his humanity, and not ignore his life for the sake of the excitement of being a hero.  It's a little surprising for a Spider-Man movie to end up concluding that its hero should stay "close to the ground" (many of the film's jokes even rely on Peter's inability to find tall buildings and structures to swing from), but for this moment, in both the MCU and this much-rebooted character's existence, that feels like the right decision.
  
  
• Okja - Bong Joon Ho's follow-up to Snowpiercer (produced by Netflix and available to stream on it) is, like its predecessor, a film that veers somewhat haphazardly between dark social satire and earnest social commentary.  Also like Snowpiercer, Okja is a collection of set pieces that vary wildly in tone and even genre, but without the organizing principle of a journey along a train, the result feels even more bitty.  That's not necessarily a complaint.  Some of Okja's set-pieces--chiefly a truck-heist/prison-break scene in the streets of Seoul that gives Baby Driver a run for its money--are worth the price of admission in their own right.  But especially for a film so driven by its message, it can be hard to get a grip on the story Okja is trying to tell.
  
  The title character is a genetically engineered pig hybrid the size of an elephant, bred as a new, environmentally-friendly food alternative.  Ten years ago, sample piglets were handed out to farmers all over the world, as a publicity stunt meant to normalize the new protein source.  Now, with Korean-raised Okja deemed the "best super-pig" and carted off to the US to be fêted (and then slaughtered), Mija (An Seo Hyun), the granddaughter of the farmer who raised Okja, sets off on a journey to rescue her friend.  It's a fairly basic animal-in-peril story, and yet Okja veers into some extremely weird tangents that never quite coalesce into a coherent whole, whether it's the animal rights group that helps Mija (led by a pacifist Paul Dano and a slightly shady Steven Yeun), or the dissipated former animal show host who has been coopted by the corporation to put a smiley face on Okja's looming fate (Jake Gyllenhaal, in what is easily the most deranged performance of his career).  Some of these bits work very well--the fact that the corporation's CEOs are twins both played by Tilda Swinton, one a money-obsessed monster, the other an airy wannabe-celebrity desperate to remake her company's image, ends up making a subtly cutting statement--it doesn't matter which of these women takes over the running of the company, because the end result of animal abuse will be the same, whether or not it's sugarcoated with good PR.  And even when the film's weirdness doesn't work, it's so expertly done as to be fun to watch.  But the constant shift between absurdism and utterly serious animal rights rhetoric--chiefly a long sojourn in a super-pig slaughterhouse that has definite concentration camp associations--can make it hard to know how to react.
  
  Perhaps the most significant way in which Okja holds back from its audience is the title character itself.  The CGI for Okja can get a little ropey in the film's action scenes, but it works where it counts, in convincing us that this is a feeling creature whom Mija loves and who is capable of returning that affection, and in making us root for her survival.  And yet Okja, as a character, feels curiously absent from the movie that bears her name.  In most animal in peril stories, the animal is in many ways in the main character (think, for example, of the way Dawn of the Planet of the Apes spends its middle segment focused almost entire on Caesar).  But in Okja, even in scenes in which she is alone (or alone with her abusers), the focus is almost always on the human characters, not on Okja's feelings.  (This is particularly strange because there's a strong implication in the film that Okja and the other super-pigs are a lot smarter than suspected, perhaps even self-aware, and yet ultimately nothing is made of this.)  Okja only really comes to life when she's paired with Mija, and though that pairing, and the love and devotion the two have for one another, are never less than entirely convincing, it's yet another way in which Okja feels confused about what it wants to be.  It's a film that I'm glad exists (not least for how it pushes forward Netflix's willingness to take a shot on strange material and creators from outside of Hollywood) but it's worth watching more for its pieces than its whole.
  
  
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets - On paper, Luc Besson's latest movie (based on the comic by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières) should be an unmitigated disaster.  The plot is predictable and frequently relies on the characters being stupid, or worse, following stupid rules and regulations.  The characters are flat, with informed personality traits that never manage to emerge from the actors' performances.  In particular, Dane DeHaan is woefully miscast as the title character, a rougeish adventurer with no time for rules (except right at the end of the film, when he suddenly decides that abiding by the rules defines him).  It's a role that ends up wearing him, rather than allowing him to make it his own.  The film's decision to hang its emotional arc on a putative romance between him and his partner, Laureline (Cara Delevingne), is almost comically misguided--not only is DeHaan completely unconvincing as a lothario whom Laureline desires but can't trust, but the film never gives us any reason, any romantic or sexual spark, to make us root for Valerian and Laureline as a couple.  And despite aiming at a message of inclusivity and tolerance, Valerian's character work frequently plumps for thoughtless stereotypes, particularly in an ill-advised sojourn in a red light district, where Valerian befriends a shape-changing prostitute (Rihanna) who can't get away from her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold type, or the racially insensitive guises her clients favor.
  
  And yet for all these flaws, I found Valerian utterly delightful, for the simple reason that the film's world is so broad, so varied, and so much fun, that it's possible to tune out the leaden dialogue, the annoying characters, and the idiot plotting, and simply enjoy the ride.  This isn't simply a matter of visuals--though these are spectacular and constantly evolving throughout the film's run--but of worldbuilding.  Valerian mostly takes place on a travelling space station, Alpha, where humans and other species have for centuries mingled freely and peacefully, adding modules and segments as each species joins the journey.  The film's opening scene, which shows us Alpha's origins as an international space station orbiting Earth, establishes a theme of tolerance and mutual respect, and though, as noted above, that's something Valerian honors as much in the breach as in the observance, it's still a powerful message that informs how Besson builds his world, and how Valerian and Laureline move through it.  This isn't a Guardians of the Galaxy-esque setting, where entire space-faring civilizations exist solely for our heroes to punch their way through.  It's a living, functional world, whose rules and values are worth preserving because they allow its inhabitants to live in (relative) peace and prosperity.  It's no surprise that the villain of the piece turns out to be someone who thought he had the right to tear through another civilization for his own goals, and that our heroes triumph not just by defeating him, but by bringing him to justice.
  
  All of this is to make Valerian sound a great deal more high-minded than it actually is (not least because, as noted, for all the film's lofty intentions its actual execution is at best awkward, at worst actively working against its message).  But the belief that the world he's constructed is interesting and worth exploring informs how Besson constructs his action plot, and as a result Valerian never stops moving, and never stops showing us new corners of its world.  The film is made up of several gargantuan, and incredibly fun, set pieces, from a chase through an intergalactic market that exists in several dimensions, to Valerian pursuing aliens who have kidnapped his commander by jumping from one environ in Alpha to another, to an underwater quest for a jellyfish that will help Laureline find a missing Valerian.  Perhaps most importantly, the aliens whose dispossession is the film's inciting incident have a society that feels, if not exactly realistic, then sympathetic and interesting.  You find yourself rooting for them to have a happy ending, and it almost makes Valerian and Laureline bearable that they clearly see this as a more important goal than obeying orders.  None of this is enough to make Valerian into a good movie, but it's one that left me feeling a great deal more hopeful and exuberant than any other recent example of this genre, and that's worth celebrating.

Recent Movie Roundup 25

This bunch of movies is something of a transitional group--a few of the early blockbusters of the year, but also some of last year's art-house movies that only made it into Israeli movie theaters recently, and one movie that I wasn't expecting to see here at all.  The coming summer doesn't have much that appeals to me (though I was excited to learn, just today, that both Colossal and The Big Sick have scheduled Israeli releases), so this might end up being the most intriguing group of movies I see for some time.

• Get Out - It's a bit of a shame to come to Jordan Peele's blockbusting debut film so long after its release, given that its topic, twists, and most memorable moments have been the subject of so much discussion (not to mention GIF-ing and meme-ifying) in the intervening months.  I would have loved to approach Get Out knowing a lot less about it (but then, until very recently it was quite unusual for Israeli film distributors to even purchase films by or about African-Americans, so I guess even a delayed release is something to celebrate).  Still, even knowing what to expect, there's a lot to enjoy and admire here, both the audacity of creating a film that melds the horror genre and the real-life horror of racism and racially motivated violence so seamlessly, and the skill with which that melding is accomplished.  In its early scenes, Get Out feels like a pitch-perfect dark comedy of social awkwardness, as photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, excellent) nervously accompanies his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) on a weekend visit to her family, uncertain what to expect in a white enclave where he is likely to be the only black presence.  Chris's interactions with Rose's parents, Dean and Missy (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), initially balance on the knife's edge between well-meaning cluelessness (Dean assuring Chris that he would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have) and something more sinister.  The more Chris sees of the neighborhood, however, the more suspicious it seems, and particularly his interactions with the few black members of the community: Dean and Missy's servants Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel), or friend of the family Logan (Lakeith Stanfield), whose behavior grows increasingly creepy and inhuman as the film draws on.
  
  Peele has such a perfect grasp on the slowly mounting tension and wrongness in the Chris-focused parts of the film, that the ones that move away from him can feel slack in comparison (in particular, a plot strand involving Chris's friend Rod (LiRel Howery), who grows suspicious of Chris's reports, is very funny, but could have stood to be pared down significantly).  When the film returns to the family home, however, it is a perfect engine of suspense, black humor, and keen social observations.  The core conceit of Get Out is, of course, overturning the racist trope in which the black interloper endangers an innocent white family, by reversing the direction of danger.  But even knowing that going in, I couldn't help but gasp at some of the ways Peele found to express that idea, such as the fact that Chris is literally auctioned off by his hosts (the slow revelation of what's actually going on in this scene is one of the film's most shocking and brilliantly executed directorial flourishes), or the realization, as sirens sound in the distance in the film's final moments, that Chris may be in as much danger from the cops coming to his rescue, who might automatically see him as the assailant, as he was from the people trying to kill him.  But the most audacious and provocative twist Peele makes to his premise is to reveal that the danger Chris is placed in is motivated not by straightforward hatred of black people, but by the fetishization of them and their bodies.  The people he ends up running from desperately want to be black, while feeling so secure in their privilege that they are unable to even imagine the danger that can sometimes pose for real black people--a danger they end up embodying.  It's a rich, heady examination of the inherent contradictions and irrationality of racism, wrapped in a genuinely thrilling and engaging story.
  
  
• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 - The second Guardians of the Galaxy film is sentimental, self-indulgent, and very heavily dependent on the twin crutches of its catchy soundtrack and jokes that seem cleverer than they actually are.  It's also a lot of fun--at least while you're watching it--largely because of a still-game cast, psychedelic visuals, and some genuinely exciting action scenes.  The actual plot is overstuffed, but circles mostly around manchild Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) being reunited with his father, Ego (Kurt Russell), a living planet who has taken the form of a man, and whose plans for Peter quickly turn out to be sinister.  There's the hint of a genuinely interesting idea in Ego's dilemma, as an all-powerful immortal who desperately searches for meaning to his existence, and lands on something monstrous but, in its own way, understandable.  But Vol. 2 is much more interested in Ego as an engine for Peter's never-ending daddy issues, to which end it also brings back Michael Rooker's Yondu, the brusque space-pirate who raised Peter, and who spends the last act of the film fighting with Ego over the titles of good and bad dad.  The whole thing looks rather silly and, again, self-indulgent if you think about it for very long, but it works in the moment, largely because Pratt manages to sell Peter's vulnerability and craving for a father-figure without ever surrendering his inherent immaturity and silliness.  (The same, unfortunately, can't be said of Dave Bautista's Drax, who like Peter is meant to be both clueless and deeply damaged, but whose humor in this movie mainly comes off as mean and unpleasant.)
  
  The other Guardians get their own storylines--Gamora (Zoe Saldana) continues to fight with her adoptive sister Nebula (Karen Gillan); Rocket (Bradley Cooper) pushes people away with obnoxious behavior; and Groot (Vin Diesel) is going through the stages of tree-person development.  It's good that Vol. 2 works so hard to give each member of the team their turn in the spotlight, while also introducing new member Mantis (Pom Klementieff), as well as several new locales and potentially recurring characters (certainly the film does a much better job of juggling multiple main characters and settings than either Civil War or Age of Ultron).  But with each of these storylines being just as heavy-handed as the main one, the ultimate result is both overwrought, and not entirely earned.  It's nice, for example, that Gamora spends most of her on-screen time with Nebula (which also means that Vol. 2 has the most meaningful Bechdel pass of probably any MCU movie), but their shared scenes, which reveal more of the horrors they endured as the adopted daughters of Thanos, only reinforce the impression created by the first film, that Gamora's well-adjusted, even slightly boring personality makes no sense--except as the film needs her to be the adult to Peter's child.  And even when the film's subplots land, Vol. 2 doesn't have a strong control of its tone.  Like its predecessor, it bills itself as cheeky but heartwarming, but what shows up on screen is often much darker, and all the more so for going unacknowledged.  An excessively long sequence in which Yondu's men mutiny, for example, leading first to his supporters being spaced, and then to the mutineers being killed off one by one by Yondu to the sounds a jaunty tune, is weirdly graphic and brutal.  And yet the film clearly means for us to find it cool, or even funny.  It's a good thing that Vol. 2 is so ephemeral, slipping from your fingers even as you step out of the movie theater; thinking about it more than a little reveals some pretty disturbing stuff beneath the surface.
  
  
• To Walk Invisible - I don't know why it took me so long to get around to watching this movie, since it combines so many things I like: the writing of Sally Wainwright, of Happy Valley fame; stories about prickly women artists who keep plugging on despite the obstacles piled in their path; and the Brontë sisters.  Once I sat down to watch the film itself, however, I found its structural choices a bit strange, perhaps even offputting.  To Walk Invisible focuses on the period between 1846 and 1848, when Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë (Finn Atkins, Chloe Pirrie, and Charlie Murphy) decided to focus seriously on their writing as a potential career, encouraging and advising one another on their work, and sending it out to publishers under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.  But it frames that story through the narrative of the final deterioration of the only Brontë son, Branwell (Adam Nagaitis).  The film begins as he returns home, after having been dismissed from a his position as a tutor for having an affair with his employer's wife.  It follows him as he sinks into depression and alcoholism, and ends with his death.
  
  The film paints a chilling portrait of the agony of living with an addict who won't even try to get better--the queasy combination of frustration, pity, resentment, and love the sisters feel for their brother, especially since, even in his dissipation, he is considered more respectable, and more capable, than they are simply because of his gender.  But because Branwell's actions--drinking and whoring and haranguing his father (Jonathan Pryce) for money--are inherently more dramatic than the sisters' writing, or their silent rage and frustration with him, he can end up taking an outsized role in a story that doesn't belong to him.  Even more disturbingly, the juxtaposition between Branwell's downward spiral and the sisters' success can end up feeling rather moralistic--Branwell is a failure because he won't "get over" serious emotional problems, while his hardworking sisters triumph because they persevere in the face of profound discouragement.  This isn't wrong, obviously--and the film even makes the point that part of the reason Branwell is so fragile is that he's been taught to think only of himself, while his sisters were trained to work hard without the expectation of reward and recognition--but by the end of the story there seems to be a tinge of gloating to the way the film contrasts the male and female Brontës.  It feels particularly pointed that the film ends with Branwell's death, and only informs us that Emily and Anne followed him soon after in its end titles.  Especially when you recall that one of the causes of Emily's death was her refusal to accept medical attention until it was too late.
  
  All that said, there is still a great deal to enjoy in To Walk Invisible, and particularly the way that it draws each of the sisters as her own unique person, whose personality is reflected in the work she ends up producing.  Charlotte is deeply ambitious, and most able to clearly articulate the frustration of being discounted because of her gender.  Emily is short-tempered and hard-headed, perhaps the most purely talented of the three sisters, but also the one most afraid of exposing herself to public judgment.  Anne is outwardly conciliatory, but also has the keenest social awareness, and is eager to use her writing to advance social causes.  The depiction of writing as work, and of publishing as a business, are not only engaging in themselves, but set up the film's best and most moving scene, when Charlotte presents herself at her publisher's office to quash the rumors that the Bell siblings are all the same person.  Watching her be met first by befuddlement, and then with total, unabashed fannishness is gratifying twice over.  As someone who has been watching Charlotte struggle both professionally and personally, it's wonderful to finally see her get the recognition she deserves.  And as a reader, it's marvelous to imagine how it might be for an author you deeply admire to simply walk into your workplace one day.  If I remain dubious about some of To Walk Invisible's framing choices, its commitment to the idea that the Brontë sisters were remarkable artists, worthy of celebration, is certainly laudable and worth watching for.
  
  
• Paterson - For about its first half hour, it's hard not to feel a sense of slight puzzlement towards Jim Jarmusch's most recent movie.  What is it about this gentle but repetitive film, about the life of a bus driver and his wife, that enraptured so many critics?  Once you get into the rhythm of Paterson, though, the magic of it becomes apparent, though not very easy to explain.  Set over the course of a week, Paterson follows its title character (Adam Driver) as he goes about his routine in the New Jersey town whose name he shares.  He wakes up early in the morning, eats breakfast, walks to work, drives the #23 bus back and forth across town, walks home, eats dinner with his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahni), walks their dog, and stops at his local bar for a beer.  In between these mundane actions, Paterson observes the sights of his town, listens to the conversations between his passengers, and interacts with friends and strangers, all of which inspire him to write poetry, which he jots down in a notebook he carries with him.  Nor is Paterson the only artist in the movie.  Throughout the week he runs into other poets, from a little girl to a Japanese tourist to an aspiring rapper, all of whom take the time to observe the world, and try to put something new in it.  Laura, meanwhile, is bursting with talent and creativity, experimenting with everything from fashion to music to cookery, but unable to decide on a single direction.  There's an obvious risk that a movie with this premise will fall into the trap of treating its subjects like an anthropological curiosity: a bus driver who writes poetry!  Working class people with dreams of being taken seriously as artists!  But instead Paterson makes its premise seem not just unremarkable, but entirely inevitable.  It puts us so thoroughly in its protagonist's head that we start to see the world through his eyes, and to see how the things and people he encounters can only be captured through poetry.  It's a feeling that persists even after you walk out of the movie theater--the belief that even in the mundane, there is something worth creating art over.
  
  
• Wonder Woman - Plot-wise, DC's latest movie--and, amazingly, the very first superhero movie in the decade-old "expanded universe" craze to star a woman--is not much to write home about.  Its opening segment on the island of Themyscira is overlong and stuffed with portentous pronouncements (though it does feature the film's most distinctive action sequence, in which a legion of Amazons on horseback battle a boatload of pistol-packing German infantry soldiers).  The rest of the movie, after heroine Diana (Gal Gadot) leaves her home with crash-landed spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) in order to bring an end to WWI, feels almost like a remake of Captain America: The First Avenger, and especially because, despite some solid action scenes, Wonder Woman doesn't really have a signature moment along the lines of Winter Soldier's elevator fight.  None of which is intended as a criticism of this movie, but more an observation that its strengths lie elsewhere than plot.
  
  Near the top of any list of those strengths would be the characters.  Gadot plays up the young Diana's naivete without ever losing sight of her innate heroism.  Neither the audience nor the characters around her ever doubt that Diana is a born hero, but she also spends the movie in genuine dismay at the cruelty and suffering of the first modern war, and her conviction that this is all the work of the war god Ares, and that all she needs to do is kill him in order to restore peace to the world, grows thinner and less persuasive as the story progresses.  One might expect Pine's Steve to be a cynical contrast to Diana's idealism, but instead his is merely a more mature, more compromised version of her belief in the need to do everything possible to save lives.  (As much as I liked Steve as a character, one can't help but notice how much space Wonder Woman gives him, and how much of a role he has in moving the story and helping Diana develop into a hero, compared to female love interests.  In particular, it feels as if the film ends up downplaying the romance between the two in favor of giving Steve his own story in a way that would never have happened with, say, Peggy Carter.)  The band of misfits the two collect in their quest to destroy a poison gas production site, while obviously based on the Howling Commandos, is compelling for being more obviously damaged: a French-Muslim charlatan who dreamed of being an actor but couldn't make it because of his race (Saïd Taghmaoui), a shell-shocked Scottish sniper (Ewen Bremner), and a Native American smuggler who pointedly observes that he is following the lead of a man whose people exterminated his own (Eugene Brave Rock).  That these unappreciated denizens of the demimonde are nevertheless willing to risk their lives for the greater good--and that Diana recognizes their heroism even when it is curtailed by their various weaknesses--is a powerful statement that hardly any other superhero movie has made.
  
  Being willing, even eager, to accept the damaged and the flawed is, in fact, Wonder Woman's greatest strength, and the thing that most sets it apart from The First Avenger.  When I first heard that the film was going to have a WWI setting, I assumed that this would be a fig leaf, and that it would nevertheless treat its German villains as cod-Nazis.  Instead, Wonder Woman faces head on the senseless slaughter of the first world war, the fact that there were no right sides in this dispute, and no clear-cut villains (in fact, the actual villains of the film's superhero plot--Danny Huston as a German general who refuses the proposed armistice, and Elena Anaya as a chemist developing new poisons--barely even register compared to the impersonal evil of modern warfare).  Against this much suffering, even a superhero might quail, and indeed the core question of Wonder Woman is what its heroine can (and should) do to save the world from itself--a question that it handles with more nuance and delicacy than the Captain America movies, refusing to blame the ills of the world on a single villain or an infiltration of evil, while insisting that humanity is still worth fighting for.  Diana herself is simultaneously unequal to the challenges set before her, and a figure of hope and inspiration whose strength lies, in no small part, in her refusal to accept that she can't save everyone.  Another way of putting it is that Wonder Woman earns the tone of bleak hopelessness that infected the previous Justice League movies--Diana's experiences actually justify the loss of faith in humanity that both Batman and Superman take as their starting position.  And yet this is by no means a hopeless movie, but rather one that powers through hopelessness, the recognition that there is evil in the hearts of men that no superhero can vanquish, and nevertheless lands on the choice to continue fighting.  I don't know if future DC movies will follow in Wonder Woman's ideological footsteps, but they might be wise to, as it lays out a template for setting themselves apart from the MCU while still remaining recognizably heroic.

Five Comments on Iron Fist

Marvel and Netflix's latest series dropped this past weekend, a week and a half after the pre-air reviews pretty much savaged it, calling it the partnership's (if not the MCU's) first complete dud.  What I found particularly damning about Iron Fist's reviews was their uniformity.  When one reviewer gives you a pan, you can blame the reviewer.  When a dozen reviewers give you pans that all make exactly the same criticisms--a dull and unsympathetic lead performance, an increasing emphasis on an unappealing villain, storylines that focus too much on boardroom shenanigans, lousy fight scenes--you've probably got a turkey on your hands.  Having watched the entire first season of Iron Fist, my only quibble with the reviewers is that most of the flaws they ascribe to the show were also present in the second season of Daredevil, which received generally favorable notices.  In fact, it's not so much that Iron Fist is worse than Daredevil's second season, as that it is more boring (it lacks, for example, a magnetic central performance in the vein of Jon Bernthal's Punisher), and this makes it easier to notice flaws that have been present in all of the Defenders shows, albeit taken to far greater extremes here.  The boring part means that the show doesn't really deserve a full review, but there are a few points about it that I thought were worth discussing.

1. It is almost impossible to overstate how much of a drag Danny Rand himself is on this show.  To the extent that I strongly suspect that if you tweaked Danny but left everything else exactly as it was, Iron Fist would have gotten much kinder reviews.  In the show's first scene, a barefoot and bedraggled Danny (Finn Jones) arrives at the headquarters of his father's company, after a fifteen-year absence during which was presumed to have died in the plane crash that killed his parents, but in which he was actually training in the mystical city of K'un-Lun.  When he's refused entrance, he attacks and beats the guards who try to stop him, then makes his way to the executive floor where he accosts the grown-up children of his father's partner, Ward and Joy Meachum (Tom Pelphrey and Jessica Stroup), insisting that he is their long-lost friend.  Later, he breaks into Joy's house (where he and his family used to live) and then boasts to her about it.  Later still, he steals Ward's car with Ward inside, and, after disarming Ward of his own gun, threatens him with it.  Through it all, Danny is increasingly affronted by the world's refusal to recognize him, and perceives that refusal as a flaw in the people he interacts with.  "You need to calm down," he condescendingly tells Ward after the latter orders him out of his office, and then later complains that "I have been met by nothing but anger and hostility."
   
   You can almost imagine how all these interactions might have worked in a show that was more willing to make Danny look vulnerable, misguided, or just plain wrong.  But it's clear throughout Iron Fist's first episode that we're meant to be on Danny's side, to feel that his behavior is reasonable and that it is the people who are refusing him who are being foolish and thus deserve everything he does to them.  What's worse, it's clear that Danny feels this way as well.  The show tries to spin him as an innocent who doesn't understand how invasive and creepy his behavior is, but--even leaving aside the fact that this is always the excuse offered when privileged men abuse their power over others--that is simply not how Jones plays the part.  His Danny is smugly certain of his right to other people's attention, and when that certainty is punctured, he slides almost directly into anger.
   
   You see this, in particular, in Danny's interactions with his new friends, dojo owner Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick) and Defenders stalwart Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson).  All of Danny's interactions with Colleen in Iron Fist's early episodes betray his conviction that he is entitled to her time and attention.  He repeatedly abuses her generosity--when she offers him a place to stay for the night but insists that he be gone in the morning, he instead wakes her up with loud music--and pushes against her clearly-stated boundaries.  In one particularly teeth-gnashing scene, he interrupts Colleen's lesson with Claire to take her out to lunch.  When Colleen points out that they made no plans and that she has prior commitments, he complains that "I ordered takeout"--actually, a full-course meal that he has had delivered to the dojo, complete with white tablecloth and waiters.  It's clear that Iron Fist's writers see this behavior as, at worst, clueless, and at best, sweet (and, eventually, romantic).  But it's a dynamic that constantly puts Colleen and Claire on their back feet, reacting to the rules Danny sets and never being allowed to set their own.  Later in the season, when Danny begins succumbing to PTSD from his unprocessed feelings over his parents' deaths, it falls to Colleen and Claire to baby him when he has outbursts of anger and even violence, and to reassure him that these reactions are not his fault.
   
   In the season's first episode, Danny is befriended by a homeless man, and after listening to his delusional ravings, muses that "I'm guessing people think we're pretty much alike".  Implicit in all of Danny's interactions in Iron Fist's first half, and in the show's constant validation of his sense of entitlement, is the belief that if people knew who he really was--the real Danny Rand, or the Iron Fist, defender of K'un-Lun--they would treat him differently.  But the truth is, most of the people who interact with Danny do see him for what he is: a pushy, arrogant, condescending man who feels entitled to their time and becomes hostile when they don't give it to him.  That Iron Fist fails to acknowledge this comes down to the show's misguided conviction that we will want to see Danny as a hero, and thus share his belief in his entitlement.  It does not seem to have occurred to the show's writers that Danny needs to earn his role as a hero, and that his behavior instead pushes him further and further away from it.
   
   Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the show's handling of the Iron Fist concept itself.  As Danny explains to Joy in the fourth episode, the Iron Fist is charged with the sacred duty of defending K'un-Lun from invaders.  In the same breath, he admits that he only wanted the job because no one thought that an outsider could be chosen for it.  But as soon as the passage between K'un-Lun and our reality opened (which only happens every fifteen years), Danny left his post.  The only justification the show can offer for this dereliction is to argue that Danny's PTSD and feelings of abandonment caused him to pursue the role of Iron Fist for the wrong reasons, but (leaving aside that it makes the monks who chose him for the job look pretty foolish) that excuse doesn't make things any better for the people Danny abandoned--especially since the end of the season reveals that in Danny's absence, some calamity has befallen K'un-Lun.  Once again, there are interesting things that could have been done with this--if Danny were introduced at the beginning of the season as a failure who needs to redeem himself for his betrayal of his duty.  But Iron Fist seems genuinely not to realize how bad it makes its main character look to have pursued a position of great responsibility and importance simply because everyone assumed he couldn't do it, and then, once he realized what it entailed, to abandon it at the first opportunity.  It still wants us to see Danny as a hero, and entitled to the role of Iron Fist, without him having to do any work to (re)earn it.
   
   
2. Iron Fist is about wealth and capitalism in a way that has been largely obscured in the publicity surrounding it.  There's been a lot of conversation about Marvel's decision to cast a white man as Danny Rand, despite loud voices coming out of the fandom requesting that the character--who is, let's face it, a tired '80s trope that doesn't make a lot of sense as a superhero in 2017--be cast with an Asian actor.  Like a lot of people, I had assumed that the choice to ignore those voices was rooted, at least in part, in the desire to make Iron Fist a "plot" show rather than a "message" show like Jessica Jones or Luke Cage (to be clear, I think that this is a false dichotomy, but I could believe that the decision-makers at Marvel bought into it).  Instead, Iron Fist turns out to be just as politically blatant as the Defenders shows preceding it, albeit in the exact opposite direction.  Danny's position as a member of the 1% turns out to be just as important--if not more so--to his story as his martial arts skills and magical powers.  Once again, this does not mean that Danny could not have been cast with an Asian actor, but given the political slant of the show, I think the only thing that would have been accomplished by this would be to give an actor from an under-represented group a high-profile job.  The hopes of so much of fandom, that casting an Asian Danny would be a way for Marvel to grapple with its history of Orientalism and dismantle the "white kung-fu superhero" trope, would probably have been left unanswered, because that is not at all where Iron Fist places its thematic weight.
   
   The villains of Iron Fist are The Hand, a clandestine, all-powerful cult who have appeared in both seasons of Daredevil, to very little effect.  Led by the perpetually-smiling Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho), the Hand have tendrils in both organized crime and the occult, and in Iron Fist it's revealed that they have co-opted Rand Corporation by offering Ward and Joy's father, Harold Meachum (David Wenham), a cure for his terminal cancer.  This means that a great deal of Iron Fist is spent in boardrooms, as the Meachums first try to prevent Danny from taking his place on the Rand board, and then act exasperated when he tries to take the company in a more ethical, and less profitable, direction.  But what at first seems like the show treading water before Danny discovers the Hand's presence at Rand, actually turns out to be the point of the exercise.  Iron Fist is seriously trying to argue that all it takes for a billion-dollar corporation to be ethical is for one boardmember with a controlling share to insist on approaches such as selling a new drug at cost.  In one particularly tone-deaf plotline, Rand is sued by people living near one of their chemical plants who have been experiencing abnormally high levels of cancer.  Rather than reveal that the plant is indeed poisoning the residents, the show instead offers the weirdly implausible conclusion that Rand have abided by all existing regulations, but that they may be poisoning the residents through a process not yet understood, or regulated by the law.  This gives Danny the opportunity to insist that the plant be closed nonetheless, but more importantly, it allows the show to paint Rand as innocent--a company that has followed all the rules and is being sued nonetheless.
   
   The significance of this becomes clear when the show reveals that the Hand is actually an umbrella term that encompasses several warring factions.  Opposing Gao's violent, drug-funded faction is a seemingly more peaceful one, led by a charismatic guru named Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez).  He introduces the Hand to Danny as a sort of benevolence association, who give a home and an education to disadvantaged children, and encourage them to go out into the world and take positions in public service.  One of the biggest twists of the season is the revelation that Colleen is a graduate of this program, Bakuto's own prize pupil, and that her dojo is a recruitment post.  Given the overt cult vibes that Bakuto and his compound give off, it's not surprising when this branch of the Hand also turns out to be sinister, but the terms in which Iron Fist couches this evil are telling.  This version of the Hand are the stereotypical evil Communist infiltrators, seemingly benign and concerned with the public good, but actually obsessed with obedience and conformity, and hard at work placing their operatives at every level of society.  When Colleen realizes she's been working for the wrong people and betrays the Hand to save Danny, her punishment is to be literally drained of her blood--which Bakuto describes as "giving to the Hand".
   
   In other words, Iron Fist is a story about an innocent corporation escaping from the clutches of an evil Communist plot.  And while Rand Corporation can be saved through the simple expedient of removing Harold Meachum and placing Danny and Ward at its head (Joy has, by this point, been seduced by the forces of evil), the Communist Hand can't be saved.  All of the good it does is corrupted by its ulterior motives, and with the exception of Colleen, its members are brainwashed, willing to turn on their former teacher and benefactor if their leader tells them to (the fact that the leadership of Rand is white and rich, while the Hand is carefully multiethnic and drawn from among the poor and working classes, only makes this conclusion more pointed).  It is, quite frankly, a bizarre turn of plot, and one that I'd like to see get more attention.
   
   
3. Colleen Wing could--and should--have been the show's lead character.  That in the early episodes of the season Colleen ends up being more sympathetic and magnetic than Danny isn't terribly surprising--where he is a son of privilege who has run away from his obligations, she is a young woman with few advantages who has taken on obligations, to train and help the kids in her neighborhood.  It certainly doesn't hurt that Jessica Henwick has a great deal more presence than Finn Jones, as an actress and in her fight scenes.  She manages to sell lines like "you dishonor yourself when you fight for money" or "I stepped way outside the code of Bushido" where he doesn't, because her character always comes off as a person with a code that she believes in but nevertheless struggles to live up to.  Colleen's storyline in the season's first half involves participating in underground cage matches, which not only gives the show its only truly engaging fight scenes--there's a heft and energy to Henwick's fighting that is completely absent from Jones's underpowered attempts at it--but raises the suggestion that Colleen is fighting more because she likes the thrill of it than in order to keep her dojo afloat.
   
   What is surprising about all this is how closely Colleen's story follows the contours of a standard hero narrative.  All it would take is shunting Danny to the side for the show to be about her and her journey.  Even the revelation that she is working for the Hand--though it makes her anxiety about funding the dojo seem completely unfounded--could easily have been folded into this kind of story, with Colleen learning to see that the people who saved and trained her are actually evil, and striking out on her own.  It's such a blatant heroic journey that one can hardly believe it when the later episodes of the season sideline Colleen in favor of Danny's perspective on her, prioritizing the question of whether he can learn to trust her again, and whether their nascent romance can survive the trauma of learning about her deception, over her own path towards the side of good.
   
   There's a sense that Iron Fist is grasping towards an equivalence between Danny and Colleen, two young people raised and trained by rigid, dogmatic systems, taught to hate each other but forced to reconsider their prejudices when they actually encounter the enemy (especially since Ward and Joy Meachum, and Danny's friend and fellow acolyte from K'un-Lun, Davos (Sacha Dhawan), who follows him to New York, can also be said to be products of similar systems).  But this would require the show to have spent more time establishing what K'un-Lun is actually like, and less time demonizing Bakuto's faction of the Hand.  Most of all, it would require the show to place a great deal less emphasis on Danny, and turn Iron Fist into more of an ensemble show, and this is clearly not something the writers were interested in doing.
   
   
4. The most interesting character dynamic in the show doesn't involve Danny at all.  In one late-episode scene, after removing Danny from a tense interaction between Harold, Ward, and Joy Meachum, Bakuto comments that "those people... are a pit of vipers.  You should thank me for getting you away from them".  He's right, but that's also why the scenes between the Meachums are consistently--and unexpectedly--the most entertaining thing about Iron Fist.  Though saved from cancer by the Hand, Harold is officially dead, and he's been prohibited from stepping foot outside of his lush penthouse, which he has decorated as nearly a parody of masculine obsessions.  This leaves Ward as his father's go-between, conveying his orders to the Rand board as if they were his own ideas, while an oblivious Joy takes him to be a business genius.
   
   The dynamic that develops between the three Meachums is thus deliciously twisted.  Ward--who is shown in flashbacks to Danny's childhood to have been a vicious bully--is hardly a sympathetic character, especially when he does things like send goons after Danny or loot the Rand employee pension fund.  But he's also the most self-aware character on the show, recognizing that his father is a monster, and that the path he's taking his family and company on is one of madness.  Ground down by his father's emotional and physical abuse, and lacking the strength to break away, Ward instead spirals into anxiety and drug abuse, which is a refreshingly realistic reaction to the kind of madness that tends to pervade in a Defenders show--not to mention a well-executed portrait of the toll of toxic masculinity.
   
   Joy, meanwhile, feels like White Feminism personified.  Smart and ambitious, and more than willing to play dirty--in order to close a deal, she manipulates the organ transplant list to help the nephew of a putative business partner; and when threatened with ouster from the Rand board, she coolly gathers sordid blackmail material on her enemies--she's nevertheless been allowed to think of herself as an innocent in all of Rand's dealings.  But Joy is smart enough to have known better, and even when she becomes an active participant in Harold's schemes, she refuses to see what's in front of her--for example, the fact that her father is murdering their opponents on Rand's board.  That there is nevertheless a great deal of love between the three Meachums--in particular between Joy and Ward, who despite their differences strongly support one another until their father comes between them--only makes the tangled family drama more fun to watch.
   
   The only problem with all this is that there's no place in it for Danny, or at least not Iron Fist's version of Danny.  The Meachums were Danny's second family before the plane crash that killed his parents and derailed his life, and after his return it's clear that he still romanticizes them and the chance to form a new family with them.  Playing on this desire in much the same way that he manipulates his own son, Harold very quickly suborns Danny and convinces him that he has been an unwilling dupe of the Hand.  But that is almost the extent of Danny's interactions with the Meachums.  He spends the season thinking that Harold is a victim--it's only right before the end that we discover, unsurprisingly, that Harold orchestrated Danny's fateful plane crash--and is not privy to Harold's abuse of Ward, or Ward and Joy's close bond and its corruption by secrets, or Joy's growing willingness to adopt her father's tactics.  When Danny finally catches a glimpse of the real Meachums near the end of the season, he's utterly befuddled, because the most interesting story in his own show has been happening largely without his input.
   
   
5. You do not need to watch Iron Fist in order to understand the plot of The Defenders.  This is, obviously, mostly speculation, but Iron Fist is actually fairly self-contained in its storytelling.  Very little is left for The Defenders to resolve, and the only dangling thread that seems as if it might be relevant to that show's story is the fact that Bakuto's faction of the Hand has infiltrated much of New York's government and public services.  It's likely, however, that The Defenders will reintroduce this plot point in order to make its own storytelling work, so if you're planning to watch Iron Fist as a necessary stepping stone to the team-up event, don't bother.