Hereticus: Eisenhorn (by Dan Abnett) Review

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Arleigh

“Trust me, Eisenhorn, if I ever thought you were, I’d shoot you myself.” — Godwyn Fischig

Hereticus is a strong, satisfying, and frequently brutal conclusion to Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn trilogy, turning the moral compromises that have been building since Xenos and Malleus into consequences that Gregor Eisenhorn can no longer evade. It is part detective story, part occult-horror thriller, part tragic character study, and it shows why the Eisenhorn books remain such a good way to begin one’s journey into the massive fictional universe that is Warhammer 40,000.

Following the more investigative structure of Xenos and the increasingly supernatural, morally uncomfortable territory of Malleus, Hereticus feels like the point where every bad decision, personal loss, old rivalry, and forbidden shortcut finally comes due. The novel does not merely ask whether Eisenhorn can stop a dangerous conspiracy. It asks whether he has already become the kind of man he once set out to hunt. That is the real engine behind the book, and Abnett handles it with the right mixture of action, melancholy, and grim inevitability.

As discussed in my review of Xenos, the first Eisenhorn novel worked so well because it introduced Warhammer 40,000 through a mystery rather than simply tossing readers into a battlefield full of Space Marines, bolters, skulls, and incomprehensible proper nouns. It let the setting reveal itself through an Inquisitor’s work: secret cults, criminal underworlds, alien dangers, Imperial bureaucracy, psychic threats, and the everyday oppression of life under the Imperium. Malleus expanded that formula into darker territory, showing Eisenhorn’s growing willingness to consider Radical methods and the dangerous temptation of using Chaos-tainted tools against Chaos itself. Hereticus brings that arc to its most painful and compelling form. The question is no longer whether Eisenhorn might someday cross a line. He has crossed several, and now the Inquisition is beginning to notice.

That setup gives the novel an unusually personal stake from the beginning. Eisenhorn has always been a complicated protagonist, but earlier books allowed him enough authority, competence, and narrative control that readers could often accept his arguments for taking extreme measures. He was an Inquisitor confronting threats most ordinary people could not understand, much less defeat. In a galaxy where daemons can possess human beings, forbidden books can destroy souls, and alien relics can doom entire worlds, it is not hard to understand why someone might conclude that conventional rules are inadequate. Hereticus does not pretend that Eisenhorn’s choices were foolish or made without cause. In fact, one of Abnett’s great strengths is making those choices feel disturbingly rational.

The trouble is that rationality can be a dangerous thing in Warhammer 40,000. Chaos does not always arrive as a screaming monster bursting through a warp gate. Sometimes it arrives as an argument: this one terrible act will save thousands of lives; this forbidden weapon can be controlled; this sacrifice is necessary; this rule is too rigid for the reality of the situation. Eisenhorn has spent years convincing himself that he is strong enough, disciplined enough, and committed enough to use dangerous methods without being consumed by them. Hereticus forces him to confront the possibility that good intentions do not erase consequences, especially in a setting where corruption is not just a moral metaphor but a literal, predatory force.

The title itself carries a lot of weight. In the wider Warhammer 40,000 setting, “Hereticus” evokes the Inquisition’s struggle against internal human heresy, and the book makes that idea painfully relevant to Eisenhorn. He is not dealing only with an external enemy, an alien menace, or a distant daemonic conspiracy. He is being judged by the institution he has served for most of his life. The Inquisition’s authority has always been one of the most fascinating parts of the Eisenhorn series. It is an organization empowered to investigate almost anyone, demand resources from almost any Imperial authority, and commit horrifying acts in the name of humanity’s survival. But even an Inquisitor has limits, at least in theory. Eisenhorn has spent much of the trilogy acting as judge, jury, and executioner. In Hereticus, he begins to understand what it feels like to be on the other side of that power.

That reversal adds real tension to the story. Eisenhorn is still intelligent, resourceful, and capable of operating several moves ahead of many opponents, but he is no longer the untouchable figure who can simply arrive, announce his authority, and take control of a situation. He has enemies within the Inquisition, people who have watched his methods with growing alarm and who have every reason to believe that his use of forbidden powers is proof of Radical corruption. The Puritan-Radical conflict that was such an important undercurrent in Malleus now becomes intensely personal. Eisenhorn may still see himself as a loyal servant of humanity, but others see a man who has bound a daemonhost, embraced outlawed knowledge, and repeatedly decided that his own judgment matters more than Imperial doctrine.

The uncomfortable part is that the Puritans are not entirely wrong. This is what makes Hereticus more interesting than a simplistic “rigid establishment persecutes heroic rebel” story. Eisenhorn’s enemies can be self-righteous, politically motivated, and inflexible, but their fear of him is not baseless. He has genuinely moved beyond the boundaries that most Inquisitors would consider acceptable. He may not worship Chaos, seek personal power for its own sake, or want to destroy the Imperium, yet he has still convinced himself that he can master things that destroy other people. Abnett understands that this is how moral collapse often works: not through a single grand betrayal, but through an accumulation of exceptions.

Cherubael remains central to that idea. The daemonhost is one of the most memorable creations in the trilogy because he embodies the exact temptation Eisenhorn cannot fully reject. Cherubael is monstrous, dangerous, manipulative, and fundamentally opposed to everything the Imperium claims to defend. Yet he is also useful. He possesses knowledge and power that conventional Imperial resources simply cannot match. Every time Eisenhorn turns to him, the decision can be explained. Sometimes it may even be the only practical way to survive. But that usefulness is exactly the trap. The more valuable Cherubael becomes, the more Eisenhorn has to tell himself that he remains in control.

Abnett wisely avoids making this dynamic feel repetitive. Cherubael is not just a magical superweapon that appears whenever the plot needs a burst of daemonic violence. His presence changes the moral temperature of every scene around him. He is a reminder that Eisenhorn has become willing to use what he once would have condemned without hesitation. Even if Eisenhorn’s goals remain noble, the means he employs have become harder and harder to separate from the evil he fights. In a less effective novel, this might come across as obvious or heavy-handed. Here, it works because Abnett has spent two previous books earning the reader’s investment in Eisenhorn’s perspective. Readers understand why he thinks he needs Cherubael. That makes it much more troubling when he reaches for him again.

The novel also benefits from the emotional history Abnett has built around Eisenhorn’s inner circle. Aemos, Bequin, and the other figures who have survived Eisenhorn’s investigations are not merely backup characters brought in for action scenes or exposition. They represent the human cost of Eisenhorn’s life and work. He may be one of the most powerful individuals in the Imperium, but power has not spared him loneliness, grief, or guilt. If anything, it has magnified them. His authority means that people depend on him, follow him into danger, and sometimes die because of choices he makes from behind the badge of the Inquisition.

Bequin remains particularly important because she has always complicated Eisenhorn’s tendency to turn everything into duty, strategy, and necessity. Her relationship with him is not treated like an easy romantic subplot, and that is one of the trilogy’s better decisions. In the grim, paranoid, endlessly violent setting of Warhammer 40,000, affection cannot simply be separated from danger. Eisenhorn’s work stains everything around him. He cannot protect people without exposing them to threats, and he cannot build a normal life because his role requires secrecy, ruthlessness, and a constant readiness to sacrifice personal happiness for the mission. Hereticus understands that this is not just unfortunate background material. It is part of the tragedy of who Eisenhorn has become.

The plot itself is suitably large in scale, but Abnett keeps it grounded in the characters rather than losing the story in lore. There are conspiracies, dark rituals, dangerous enemies, political maneuvering, high-stakes action, and more of the strange Gothic science-fiction imagery that defines the setting. The Imperium remains a fascinatingly ugly backdrop: a galaxy-spanning empire built on religious fanaticism, vast bureaucracy, fear, poverty, military force, and a permanent sense that disaster is always one hidden cult away. Yet Abnett’s real gift is making this enormous universe feel inhabited. The places Eisenhorn visits have social structures, histories, class divisions, institutions, and ordinary people trying to survive in a civilization so large that most of its citizens will never understand the horrors being fought in secret above their heads.

That perspective continues to make the Eisenhorn trilogy unusually accessible. A newcomer does not need to have memorized every Space Marine Chapter, every alien faction, or every detail of the Horus Heresy to enjoy Hereticus. The novel assumes that the reader can follow a story rather than requiring them to pass a lore exam. Terms and concepts appear naturally through the characters’ experiences, and the emotional stakes remain clear even when the setting becomes strange. That is why the series is still one of the best entry points into Warhammer 40,000. It offers the darkness, religion, cosmic horror, military violence, and massive scale that fans expect from the franchise, but it filters all of it through a compelling human story.

If Xenos introduced Eisenhorn as a determined investigator and Malleus showed him becoming increasingly willing to compromise, Hereticus is the book that asks the unavoidable question: what does all of that make him? The answer is not neat. Eisenhorn is not secretly a villain in the simplistic sense, nor is he a spotless hero unfairly accused by lesser men. He is a capable, brave, damaged, and increasingly isolated man who has spent so long fighting monsters that he has begun to accept monstrous tools. That does not erase his courage or his desire to save lives. It simply means that the line between salvation and damnation has become far more difficult to see.

Abnett’s prose remains a major asset throughout. He writes action with momentum and clarity, but he is at his best when building dread. A tense conversation, an accusation from a former ally, the discovery of forbidden evidence, or the appearance of something that should not exist can be more unsettling than the book’s gunfights and confrontations. The Gothic quality of Warhammer 40,000 is present, but Abnett does not bury the story under purple prose. His writing is vivid without becoming exhausting, and that readability is a big reason these books have endured beyond the audience that initially came to them from the tabletop game.

There are moments when Hereticus feels crowded, especially because it has to bring together plot threads, characters, rivalries, and consequences from across the trilogy. Readers who prefer the tighter, pure mystery structure of Xenos may find this finale more sprawling. But that messiness also feels appropriate. Eisenhorn’s world has grown too complicated for a clean solution. His enemies are no longer isolated cultists or external threats that can be purged and forgotten. They are connected to his past, his choices, his friends, and his own self-image. The story has to feel larger and more tangled because Eisenhorn himself has created a life that cannot be easily sorted into right and wrong.

Ultimately, Hereticus is a powerful conclusion because it does not treat moral ambiguity as an empty excuse for darkness. It makes Eisenhorn’s compromises matter. It makes his losses hurt. It recognizes that in a universe as cruel as Warhammer 40,000, purity can become fatal rigidity, but pragmatism can become corruption just as easily. The novel’s real achievement is that it lets readers sympathize with Eisenhorn even while making them increasingly nervous about the person he is becoming.

For longtime fans, Hereticus delivers the kind of grim Inquisitorial intrigue, occult horror, action, and Imperial paranoia that the setting does exceptionally well. For newer readers, it confirms why the Eisenhorn trilogy is such a smart place to start. Beginning with Xenos, continuing through Malleus, and ending with Hereticus, the series offers a full and approachable tour through the vast fictional universe of Warhammer 40,000 without ever losing sight of its central character. Hereticus is not just an entertaining finale. It is the book that turns Gregor Eisenhorn’s story into a genuine tragedy—and makes the reader wonder whether the man trying to protect humanity has become one more thing humanity needs protection from.

Eisenhorn Saga

Xenos
Malleus

Review: Chicken Run (dir. by Peter Lord & Nick Park)

Posted on September 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“I don’t want to be a pie. I don’t like gravy.” — Babs

Chicken Run is one of those animated films that seems simple at first glance: a bunch of chickens want to escape a farm before they become pies. That basic premise could have easily turned into a lightweight family comedy full of barnyard jokes and little else. Instead, the 2000 DreamWorks and Aardman production, directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, plays like a miniature war movie, prison-break thriller, romance, survival adventure, and pitch-black satire all at once. It is consistently funny, but its comedy works because the stakes feel real. These chickens are not merely trying to get away from an annoying farmer; they are trying to survive an industrial system that sees them as disposable raw material.

The first thing that makes Chicken Run so memorable is how completely it commits to its central influence: John Sturges’s The Great Escape. Ginger, voiced with determined energy by Julia Sawalha, is essentially the Steve McQueen-like mastermind of a prisoner-of-war escape film, only without the motorcycle. She has attempted escape after escape from the Tweedys’ chicken farm, and every failure has made her more experienced, more stubborn, and more isolated from the flock. The farm itself is built and filmed like a prison camp: there are fences, watchtowers, guards, roll calls, surveillance, punishments, and a constant feeling that someone is always being watched. The chickens dig tunnels, build plans, assign tasks, debate leadership, and struggle with morale in a way that directly echoes the Allied prisoners in The Great Escape.

That influence is not just a clever parody. It gives the movie a real sense of structure and urgency. Ginger is not a character who simply wishes for freedom; she is obsessed with earning it. Every failed attempt lands her in the punishment shed, a tiny isolated box that is funny in its exaggerated stop-motion form but also genuinely unpleasant. The sight of Ginger sitting alone in darkness, listening to the rain and realizing that another escape has failed, establishes that the movie is willing to make her suffering count. She is not invincible, and the other chickens do not always believe in her. That gives her eventual success much more weight than it would have had in a more conventional cartoon.

The Tweedys are also far more sinister than the average animated villains. Mr. Tweedy, voiced by Tony Haygarth, is the bumbling half of the pair: nervous, confused, increasingly paranoid, and convinced that “the chickens are organizing.” It is one of the best-running jokes in the movie because he is absolutely right, but his wife refuses to take him seriously. Melisha Tweedy, voiced by Miranda Richardson, is the truly frightening one. She is cold, practical, greedy, and almost entirely without sentiment. When egg production drops, she does not consider improving conditions for the chickens. She decides to turn them into chicken pies.

That is where Chicken Run goes into much darker territory than its cheerful clay-animation style initially suggests. The film’s narrative is built around factory farming, confinement, exploitation, and mass slaughter. The chickens know that when one of them stops laying eggs, she is not being taken somewhere safe. She is taken away to die. The scene involving the elderly hen Edwina is particularly unsettling because it is handled with restraint. The audience never sees explicit violence, but the implication is unmistakable. The sound of the axe, the sudden absence, and the reactions of the other chickens tell the whole story. It is dark material for a family film, but it is never treated as a joke. The humor comes from character behavior and British deadpan timing, not from dismissing the fear these animals feel.

That balance is one of the movie’s greatest achievements. Chicken Run is undeniably an animated comedy, filled with visual gags, eccentric voices, and absurdly specific bits of dialogue, yet its themes remain surprisingly grim. The Tweedys’ new pie machine is not just a goofy invention. It is a huge, mechanized symbol of industrialized cruelty, a machine designed to turn living creatures into products at maximum efficiency. Once it appears, the farm stops feeling merely like a prison camp and starts feeling like something even more horrifying: a production line where the inmates are literally the merchandise. The comedy makes the movie accessible, but the darker ideas give it teeth.

Aardman’s stop-motion animation is essential to that effect. The chickens are expressive in a way that never makes them overly cute or polished. Their handmade look gives them texture and personality. You can see the fingerprints of the animators in the characters’ surfaces, the uneven little details of the farm, and the tangible construction of the machinery. Modern computer animation can create smoother movement and more elaborate spectacle, but Chicken Run has a physical presence that is hard to replicate digitally. The fences feel like real fences. The mud feels like real mud. The pie machine feels enormous and dangerous because it is a real object built in miniature and photographed frame by frame.

The design also helps sell the film’s strange mix of bleakness and whimsy. The Tweedys’ farm is gray, muddy, cramped, and oppressive, a place where every chicken coop resembles a barracks. Beyond the fence is a bright green countryside that feels almost mythic to the trapped flock. Freedom is not some vague emotional idea; it is visible right there, just beyond reach. That visual contrast makes Ginger’s desperation easy to understand. She is not asking for luxury. She wants sunlight, open space, and the ability to live without being counted, confined, or killed for failing to produce enough eggs.

Mel Gibson’s Rocky Rhodes enters the story as the possible answer to Ginger’s problem. He is introduced as a flying American rooster who crashes into the farm like a larger-than-life war hero. His nickname, “the Lone Free Ranger,” and his exaggerated confidence make him feel like a parody of classic American movie masculinity. Rocky is all swagger, charm, and improvised survival instinct, which makes him a good contrast to Ginger’s disciplined, strategic personality. He tells the chickens he can teach them to fly, and the entire farm becomes invested in the idea even when the plan seems impossible.

Rocky works because the film does not make him a flawless hero. He is entertaining and ultimately brave, but he is also a fraud. His supposed ability to fly is part of a circus act, and he has escaped captivity before by using a human-operated catapult rather than his own wings. When the truth comes out, it hurts because the chickens have placed their hope in him. Ginger especially feels betrayed, not only because Rocky lied but because she allowed herself to believe that someone else might finally have the answer. Their relationship has a nice edge to it; it is not a sweeping romance so much as a reluctant partnership between two strong-willed survivors who approach freedom in completely different ways.

The sequences built around the escape plan show how much fun Lord and Park have with action-adventure movie language. While The Great Escape is the most obvious inspiration, certain moments have an energy reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are close calls with traps, rapid-fire improvisation, looming mechanical threats, and escapes that depend on inches of timing. The climax inside and around the pie machine especially has that pulpy serial-adventure tension. Characters are dragged toward blades and conveyor belts, machinery rattles and groans, and plans collapse only for someone to invent another solution at the last possible second.

The final act also brings in a strong resemblance to The Flight of the Phoenix, particularly in the way the chickens turn desperation into engineering. The flock has to build a flying machine out of whatever materials they can gather, and the project depends on cooperation between characters with very different skills. Fowler, the elderly rooster voiced by Benjamin Whitrow, becomes crucial here. At first he seems like a pompous relic, forever talking about his days in the Royal Air Force and resisting Ginger’s modern plans. But his knowledge and experience eventually become useful. He gives the group the language, confidence, and organizational spark needed to turn their makeshift aircraft from a dream into something that might actually leave the ground.

Fowler is also one of the funniest parts of the film because he represents a specific kind of old British pride: stubborn, ceremonial, and deeply attached to the past. His stories about serving under “the old RAF” seem ridiculous until the moment the chickens actually need someone who understands the basic principles of flying. The film never makes him into a conventional action hero, but it allows him to reclaim some dignity. Like many of the supporting characters, he gets a small but satisfying arc.

The rest of the flock is memorable because they are not interchangeable background animals. Babs is sweet, distracted, and constantly knitting, but her innocent manner hides an ability to contribute when it matters. Bunty is blunt, cynical, and always ready to question Ginger’s plans. Mac, with her Scottish accent and technical expertise, is the group’s engineer and probably the person most likely to explain why a wild idea will not work. Fetcher, the rat, is opportunistic and cowardly, but he is useful in the way only a black-market scavenger can be. Even the two dimwitted farm dogs have personality, serving as comic obstacles while still making the farm feel guarded and dangerous.

What makes Chicken Run endure is that it never treats its characters’ freedom as a trivial goal. The story has jokes about eggs, knitting, chicken behavior, British class attitudes, and American bravado, but beneath all of that is a serious belief that a community can refuse to accept the role assigned to it. Ginger’s greatest strength is not that she has the perfect plan. It is that she refuses to surrender when every plan fails. Her determination eventually spreads to the other chickens, who stop seeing themselves as helpless inmates and start acting like participants in their own rescue.

The ending is satisfying because it feels earned. The chickens do not escape through luck alone, and they do not wait for a human to save them. They escape because they organize, take risks, use their talents, forgive one another’s failures, and choose action over resignation. That is a surprisingly powerful message for a film about clay chickens escaping a pie factory.

More than two decades later, Chicken Run still stands as one of the strongest animated films of its era. Its stop-motion craft remains beautiful, its jokes still land, and its references to The Great Escape, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Flight of the Phoenix add an extra layer of fun for viewers familiar with those films. But it is the movie’s willingness to acknowledge fear, exploitation, and death beneath the comedy that makes it more than a clever genre spoof. Chicken Run is funny because it is inventive, but it is memorable because it understands that freedom means the most when it is hardest to achieve.

Review: Flight of the Navigator (dir. by Randal Kleiser)

Posted on September 12, 2026 by Arleigh

“That is my family, but that’s not my home. My home is back in 1978!” — David Freeman

Flight of the Navigator turns a child’s worst possible homecoming into an unexpectedly funny, wistful, and imaginative science-fiction adventure. Released in 1986, it begins as a modest suburban mystery before expanding into a story about time displacement, missing years, alien technology, and the strange loneliness of returning home to a life that has moved on without you. It has the glossy, accessible surface of a Disney adventure, but there is a surprisingly melancholy idea at its center: what would it feel like to lose eight years of your life while everyone you love has had to live through them without you?

The movie follows David Freeman, a 12-year-old boy who disappears in 1978 after going into the woods to retrieve his younger brother Jeff. David wakes up in 1986, apparently having been gone only a few hours from his own point of view. The shock is immediate. His parents are older, Jeff is now his taller teenage brother, the family has moved, and David has become a long-unsolved missing-person case. This opening stretch is probably the film’s strongest material because it plays the scenario straight enough to make it genuinely unsettling. David is not simply a kid dropped into a flashy futuristic world; he is a child abruptly disconnected from the only reality he knows.

That emotional hook gives Flight of the Navigator more weight than many similar children’s adventures. David’s confusion is easy to understand, and the film wisely lets the situation breathe before revealing all of its science-fiction machinery. The sight of his family recognizing him after years of grief is touching, but it also comes with discomfort. David wants everything to return to normal, while his parents are overwhelmed by the impossible fact that their vanished son has returned unchanged. The movie does not dig into the full psychological consequences of that situation, because it is still fundamentally a family adventure, but it gives the idea enough attention to make the stakes feel personal.

Once NASA becomes involved, the story shifts into a more conventional but still entertaining sci-fi mode. Doctors discover that David has advanced knowledge in his brain that he cannot consciously explain, and the mystery leads him to a crashed alien spacecraft. The ship, known as the Trimaxion Drone Ship, is the movie’s most iconic element. Its smooth silver form, with no visible seams or conventional cockpit, still looks appealing because it has a simple, alien elegance. It is not overly busy or mechanical in the way many science-fiction vehicles are. Instead, it resembles a floating metallic organism, something sleek and strange that could plausibly have appeared in a child’s dream.

The ship’s computer, MAX, is what really gives the movie its personality. Voiced by Paul Reubens, MAX begins as a calm, efficient artificial intelligence but gradually becomes sillier and more mischievous after downloading human information from David’s era. Reubens’ performance is a major reason the character works. He does not simply do a recognizable Pee-wee Herman routine, although the playful vocal energy is certainly there. MAX’s changing voice and increasingly erratic sense of humor make him feel like an alien intelligence trying to imitate human behavior and getting it only partly right.

There is a fine line between amusing and annoying when a movie lets its comic sidekick become too hyperactive, and Flight of the Navigator occasionally crosses it. MAX can become a little much, especially during the later scenes where he starts cracking jokes, changing his vocal effects, and behaving like an overexcited child with access to interstellar technology. Still, that energy is part of what makes the film feel uniquely of its era. MAX is not as polished or emotionally sophisticated as later animated or CGI companions, but he remains memorable because he is odd. His humor feels less like a studio-tested collection of one-liners and more like a machine that has accidentally discovered cartoons, pop culture, and sarcasm all at once.

Joey Cramer carries much of the movie as David, and he gives the role more sincerity than the material sometimes requires. He is believable as a regular kid who becomes frightened, angry, curious, and eventually exhilarated by what is happening around him. David is not written as a perfect young hero. He can be stubborn and impulsive, especially when he decides he has to take control of his own situation, but that makes sense. Adults have spent much of the story examining him, restraining him, and treating him as a scientific puzzle. His decision to escape with MAX is reckless, yet it also feels like the response of a child who is desperate to reclaim some agency.

The film’s visual effects deserve credit for helping sell its larger ideas. By modern standards, the effects are obviously dated in places, particularly when the ship changes shape or moves at impossible speeds. Yet the movie uses its effects well enough that they remain charming rather than distracting. The morphing sequence in which the ship transforms into its sleeker form was especially impressive for the time, and even now it has an appealing practical-digital hybrid quality. It does not look completely real, but it looks imaginative. The ship has presence, and the movie understands the pleasure of simply watching it fly through clouds, skim across water, or streak through the night sky.

The electronic score by Alan Silvestri is another major part of the film’s identity. Silvestri is often associated with larger, more overtly heroic scores, especially in films such as Back to the Future, but his work here is more synthetic and futuristic. The music helps create a sense of wonder while also grounding the film in the mid-1980s. It can sound very much of its time, with prominent synthesizers and a clean electronic texture, but that is not a weakness. The score fits a movie about an ordinary kid encountering a cold, shiny, unknowable piece of advanced technology.

One of the better things about Flight of the Navigator is that it does not make its protagonist’s adventure entirely consequence-free. David gets to fly an alien ship, travel at incredible speeds, and encounter a universe beyond his suburban life. That is the wish-fulfillment element, and the film delivers it well. At the same time, the adventure exists because something has gone wrong in David’s life. His journey begins with loss. The movie never becomes as emotionally dark as its premise could allow, but it never completely forgets that David has been separated from his family and displaced in time.

The ending is satisfying because it returns the story to that emotional core. David’s ultimate choice is not just about whether he wants to keep flying around with MAX. It is about whether he can go home, even if home is no longer exactly what it was. The resolution is neat and arguably a little too convenient, but it earns its feel-good payoff. This is a family film, after all, and the movie knows that its audience wants the wonder of space travel without being left in despair over the time-travel implications.

In the end, Flight of the Navigator remains a warm, inventive, and slightly strange piece of 1980s science-fiction. It is not a perfect movie. Some of the comedy is broad, the adults at NASA are more functional than memorable, and the story occasionally rushes past ideas that could have been explored more deeply. But its central concept is strong, its spaceship is iconic, its score is distinctive, and its combination of melancholy and fun gives it more staying power than many nostalgia-driven family movies. It captures the feeling of being a kid who wants to escape into the unknown, while also recognizing that the people waiting at home are what make that escape matter.

Review: The Last Starfighter (dir. by Nick Castle)

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Arleigh

“Alex! Alex! You’re walking away from history! History! Did Chris Columbus say he wanted to stay home? No! What if the Wright Brothers thought that only birds should fly?” — Centauri

The Last Starfighter is one of the most purely enjoyable science-fiction adventures of the 1980s: earnest, inventive, occasionally corny, and driven by the kind of wide-eyed imagination that modern blockbusters too often confuse with sheer scale. Directed by Nick Castle, the 1984 film builds an entire intergalactic adventure around a premise that could have been dismissed as a gimmick: an arcade champion discovers that his favorite game is actually a recruitment test for a real war in space. Instead of treating that premise ironically, the film commits to it wholeheartedly, and that sincerity is ultimately what makes it endure.

Lance Guest stars as Alex Rogan, a teenager living in the Starlite Starbrite trailer park with his mother and younger brother, Louis. Alex is smart, resourceful, and visibly restless. He wants to get out of his small-town surroundings, attend college, and build a better future, but financial strain and family responsibility keep making those ambitions seem less realistic. His one reliable escape comes from an arcade machine outside the local store called The Last Starfighter. Alex plays constantly, eventually achieving a record score that attracts the attention of the game’s mysterious creator, Centauri.

Robert Preston’s Centauri is one of the film’s great pleasures. He is an interstellar recruiter who behaves like a flamboyant carnival salesman, arriving in Alex’s life with a strange vehicle, flashy clothes, a rapid-fire sales pitch, and a proposition that sounds completely insane. Centauri reveals that The Last Starfighter is not merely a video game; it is a test designed to identify young people with the reflexes, tactical instincts, and courage needed to become Gunstar pilots for the Rylan Star League. Alex has not just beaten a difficult arcade game. He has qualified to defend an entire civilization from the Kodan Armada.

That central idea remains the movie’s strongest asset. It transforms a familiar adolescent fantasy into something emotionally resonant. Alex is not gifted with a magical sword, superpowers, or an ancient royal lineage. He is selected because he became exceptionally skilled at something the adults around him would probably regard as a waste of time. His ability to master a video game becomes proof that he has discipline, intelligence, hand-eye coordination, and the ability to make decisions under pressure. For anyone who grew up playing arcade games, it is an irresistible fantasy: the thing you are good at for fun might one day turn out to matter more than anyone realizes.

The film understands, however, that being offered a larger life is not the same as being ready for it. Alex initially reacts to the truth with disbelief and fear rather than instant heroism. He wants to return home. He assumes there has been a mistake. That response helps ground the movie, because Alex is not a prepackaged action hero. He is a teenager who has dreamed of escaping his circumstances but has never seriously considered the sacrifices that escape might require. It is easy to want a more exciting future when it is only an idea. It is harder when that future involves leaving your family, crossing the galaxy, and possibly dying in a war you barely understand.

Lance Guest gives Alex enough insecurity and frustration to make his eventual growth satisfying. Alex can be impatient and occasionally self-centered, but he never comes across as unlikable. He feels trapped, and the film makes that frustration understandable. His conflict is not simply whether he can destroy enemy ships; it is whether he can accept that he deserves a larger destiny than the one he has assumed is available to him. By the time he decides to fight, he has moved beyond wanting adventure as an escape. He has chosen to take responsibility for something greater than himself.

Catherine Mary Stewart is also appealing as Maggie Gordon, Alex’s girlfriend. Maggie is not given an enormous amount to do, but she has more personality than the standard passive romantic interest in many 1980s adventure films. She cares deeply about Alex, yet she also has every reason to be hurt and confused when he suddenly disappears and begins acting strangely. Her scenes with Beta Alex, the android duplicate sent to take Alex’s place on Earth, provide some of the movie’s most amusing moments. Beta Alex looks exactly like him, but his behavior is just strange enough to create an entertaining mixture of comedy and unease.

The Beta Alex subplot is one of the film’s cleverest touches because it allows the story to explore Alex’s absence without simply abandoning the Earthbound characters. Beta Alex is a convincing physical duplicate, but he cannot quite replicate the nuances of being human. His overly literal responses, awkward attempts at social interaction, and bizarre behavior around Maggie make him a memorable comic creation. The device also reinforces the contrast between Alex’s old life and the extraordinary new situation he has been pulled into. While the real Alex is in space facing a galactic conflict, the people at home are left trying to make sense of a version of him that seems familiar but fundamentally wrong.

Robert Preston’s performance gives the entire movie energy whenever Centauri appears. He could easily have become an irritating eccentric, but Preston makes him funny, charismatic, and unexpectedly warm. Centauri sees Alex’s potential before Alex sees it himself. Beneath the fast talking and theatrical mannerisms is a real belief in the people he recruits. He does not merely need another pilot; he genuinely wants Alex to become the person he is capable of being. Preston’s presence adds an old-fashioned show-business charm to a film otherwise built around futuristic hardware and computer-generated spacecraft.

Dan O’Herlihy is equally important as Grig, the reptilian alien navigator assigned to work with Alex. Grig initially seems like the typical stern mentor figure, but he gradually becomes one of the movie’s most likable characters. He has experience, discipline, and a personal history with the war that gives the conflict some added seriousness. His partnership with Alex works because they begin from very different places. Grig is a hardened veteran who has seen the cost of battle, while Alex is an overwhelmed rookie who still wants to go home. As they learn to trust each other, their relationship becomes the heart of the space-adventure material.

The villains are broad but effective. Xur and the Kodan Armada are not psychologically complex antagonists, yet the movie does not need them to be. Their purpose is to represent a threat large enough to force Alex into a defining choice. Xur’s willingness to betray the Star League and sacrifice innocent lives for power makes him an appropriately clear villain for this kind of adventure. The conflict is straightforward: a small group of defenders must stand against an overwhelming enemy force, and Alex must decide whether he will be one of those defenders.

The visual effects are perhaps the most historically fascinating part of The Last Starfighter. The film was an early showcase for computer-generated imagery, using digital effects for its spacecraft, alien environments, and space-combat sequences. At the time, this was revolutionary. Seen today, the visual effects are obviously dated. The ships have a smooth, artificial quality, the textures are basic, and the movement lacks the weight and complexity audiences expect from modern computer animation. Yet there is still something charming about them. They represent a major transitional period in science-fiction filmmaking, when filmmakers were beginning to discover what computers could do for cinematic spectacle.

The early CGI gives the movie a distinctive visual identity rather than simply making it look obsolete. The Gunstar fighter, the Kodan fleet, and the distant alien landscapes have the clean, geometric appearance of an advanced arcade game brought to life. That is fitting for a story about a teenager whose gaming skills translate into real combat ability. The computer-generated imagery may not have the tactile realism of the practical miniature work seen in films such as Star Wars or Blade Runner, but it has an important place in the history of visual effects. The movie was imagining a future that the technology of its day could only partially create, and that ambition remains visible in every digital battle.

The Gunstar itself is a memorable piece of science-fiction design. It looks futuristic while still retaining the simplicity of a classic arcade spaceship, and the cockpit scenes effectively sell the sensation of Alex being thrown into something far beyond his experience. The climactic use of the “Death Blossom” maneuver is especially satisfying because the film treats it as a genuine last resort. It is the cinematic equivalent of unleashing a devastating power-up at the exact moment an arcade game seems impossible to win. The sequence is flashy, uncomplicated, and immensely fun.

What makes The Last Starfighter last is not its special effects alone, nor is it just nostalgia for the arcade era. The movie works because it is fundamentally optimistic. It believes that potential can emerge from unlikely places and that someone who feels ignored, trapped, or underestimated may still possess the ability to do something remarkable. Alex is not chosen because he is already fearless. He becomes heroic because he eventually chooses to act despite being afraid.

The film is not perfect. Its dialogue can be cheesy, some characters are thinly developed, and the dated effects may be difficult for viewers accustomed to modern CGI. Even so, those imperfections are part of its charm. The Last Starfighter is colorful, sincere, and unashamedly enthusiastic about its own premise. It remains a lovable science-fiction adventure because it takes the dreams of a video-game-playing teenager seriously. It asks viewers to imagine that the skill everyone dismisses, the hobby that feels like an escape from ordinary life, might actually be the first sign that they are capable of something far greater.

Review: The Blood of Dawnwalker

Posted on September 10, 2026 by Arleigh

“Lord, please grant me the strength to resist this damn thirst… Grant me the will to keep the beast at bay.” — Coen

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a strong first showing from Rebel Wolves: a dark-fantasy action RPG that uses its vampire premise as the foundation for combat, exploration, role-playing, and player choice rather than as a simple visual hook. It is moody, bloody, occasionally demanding, and clearly made by a team that understands why players enjoy wandering through a richly imagined fantasy world and stumbling into trouble on their own terms.

Rebel Wolves comes into this project with a pedigree that is hard to ignore. The Polish studio includes several former top creatives from CD Projekt Red, the developer best known for The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077. Co-founder and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and held senior production and directing roles on Cyberpunk 2077, while other key Rebel Wolves figures—including narrative director Jakub Szamałek, art director Bartłomiej Gaweł, design director Daniel Sadowski, and creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz—also have experience across The Witcher and Cyberpunk projects. That background does not mean The Blood of Dawnwalker is simply another Witcher, but you can absolutely see the shared interest in morally messy quests, local legends, dense world-building, and player-led approaches to problems.

The setting is one of the game’s greatest strengths. The Blood of Dawnwalker takes place in the fictional Vale Sangora, a dark medieval valley positioned in a 14th-century Europe devastated by plague, fear, political collapse, and religious unease. It is the kind of setting where villagers whisper about curses, old forests feel genuinely hostile, abandoned ruins suggest much older civilizations beneath the current order, and every noble house or holy institution seems to be concealing something ugly. Rather than relying only on the usual medieval-fantasy shorthand of castles, taverns, and bandits, Rebel Wolves grounds the setting in a more distinctive historical and cultural blend.

The world-building draws on local myths, folklore, legends, archetypes, and archaeological discoveries associated with Southeastern and Central Europe, especially Romania, Hungary, and Poland. Vale Sangora is not meant to be a direct recreation of any one real place, but the regional influence gives it a different texture from fantasy worlds modeled primarily on England, France, or generic “medieval Europe.” The atmosphere leans into Carpathian landscapes, mountain settlements, burial traditions, old sacred sites, folk monsters, regional superstition, and the tension between Christian authority and older beliefs that never fully disappeared. It gives the game a sense of place. You are not just moving through another interchangeable fantasy map; you are exploring a region where history, religion, folklore, and the supernatural seem permanently tangled together.

At the center of everything is Coen, a young man who exists between two states. By day, he is human. By night, he transforms into a vampire-like being called a Dawnwalker. That central duality is not merely part of the story or a convenient excuse for some special moves. It changes how you play the game, how you navigate locations, what abilities you have access to, and how you approach encounters. The day-and-night structure is easily the best thing about The Blood of Dawnwalker, because it keeps the game from becoming mechanically repetitive.

During the day, Coen plays more like a tough but vulnerable medieval warrior with access to unsettling occult magic. Human combat revolves around swordplay, and Rebel Wolves has put a surprising amount of thought into making that combat flexible for different kinds of players. If you prefer a simpler action-RPG setup, the game includes Omniattack and Omniblock options, allowing you to focus on timing, movement, and general survival without constantly managing directional inputs. If you want something more technical, you can use directional attacks and directional blocks, choosing which side to strike or defend from while reading an enemy’s position and responses.

That more hands-on combat style can make a fight feel like a proper duel instead of a button-mashing brawl. Blocking an incoming strike from the correct direction, parrying at the right moment, and following with a counterattack gives human Coen a satisfying grounded quality. He is capable, but he is not invincible. You need to pay attention to spacing, defense, stamina, and the number of enemies surrounding you. In a genre full of heroes who can flatten entire rooms without slowing down, there is something refreshing about the daytime game making you respect a sword fight.

Coen’s daytime magic adds another useful layer. His human abilities are tied to runes carved into his skin, turning scars into magical tools. Because his vampiric transformation heals those marks at night, this style of magic is specifically associated with his daylight form. That is a clever bit of design because it prevents daytime Coen from feeling like the lesser, restricted version of the protagonist. He has his own advantages and his own way of interacting with the world. Some magic is built for combat, but the more interesting powers support investigation and exploration. Compel Soul, for example, allows Coen to communicate with the dead, opening up possibilities for gathering information, investigating mysteries, and finding answers that living characters may not be willing or able to provide.

The nighttime half of the game delivers the vampire power fantasy, but it does so in a way that changes the rhythm rather than simply making Coen stronger. Once darkness falls, Coen gains vampiric abilities that favor speed, aggression, stealth, and vertical movement. His claws become central to combat, offering a more brutal and immediate alternative to the controlled, weapon-based swordplay of the day. Nighttime fights can feel much more predatory. You are quicker, more mobile, and better equipped to overwhelm isolated enemies, but there is also a constant undertone of hunger and self-control.

Blood is not just a healing item with gothic packaging. Feeding is tied to Coen’s condition, and managing bloodlust is part of the vampire experience. You can draw blood from different sources, and the choice can matter both mechanically and morally. Feeding may help sustain Coen, but it also makes the player consider what kind of person—or creature—he is becoming. If his hunger becomes too severe, he can become weakened or lose control, creating the possibility of consequences beyond a routine game-over screen. It is a more interesting use of vampirism than simply giving the player red eyes and a damage boost.

The other major nighttime advantage is movement. Coen can use Shadowstep, a short-distance teleporting ability that opens up fast escapes, surprise attacks, rooftop routes, stealthier paths, and alternate ways through guarded spaces. This is where the game’s two identities really begin to click. A location that seems straightforward during the day may reveal a completely different set of opportunities after dark. Walls, balconies, broken towers, rooftops, scaffolding, cliffs, and high windows become potential routes instead of mere scenery. At night, the game lets you think less like a knight walking through a gate and more like a supernatural predator looking for the path no one else can use.

The RPG side of The Blood of Dawnwalker is equally important, because the game does not treat dialogue as a brief pause between fights. Conversations can shape how characters view Coen, what information he receives, which opportunities become available, and how a given conflict develops. Your choices determine whether Coen comes across as diplomatic, threatening, manipulative, compassionate, secretive, ruthless, or simply desperate. That gives conversations a genuine role-playing function. You are not only picking the response that earns a reward or advances a marker; you are deciding how Coen handles people in a world that already fears monsters and has plenty of reason not to trust strangers.

Those choices carry beyond individual scenes. A side quest can be solved through violence, investigation, negotiation, stealth, supernatural ability, or a decision to walk away and deal with something else. The same applies to major story missions. A locked fortress, guarded estate, religious site, village dispute, or monster problem might offer more than one entry point and more than one resolution. You may learn useful information in a conversation, use your daylight magic to uncover a clue, wait for nightfall to find a new route, take the direct combat approach, or commit to a choice that changes the fate of a character or local community. The game’s best role-playing ideas come from allowing those systems to overlap rather than separating “dialogue choices,” “combat,” and “exploration” into isolated parts of the experience.

That design philosophy extends to quests and the larger structure of the game. The Blood of Dawnwalker uses a 30-day-and-night timeframe, but it does not appear to be a harsh real-time countdown that forces players to sprint through the main story. Time is treated as a resource. It advances when Coen commits to important actions, missions, or major choices, rather than simply because the player spent too long exploring an abandoned mine or checking every corner of a village. Before spending time, the game indicates the cost, letting players decide whether an opportunity is worth pursuing.

This makes the game’s narrative mechanics more meaningful than the usual good-versus-evil decision wheel. You cannot necessarily see every story thread, solve every problem, help every character, or complete every quest in one run. The order in which you pursue objectives matters, conversations can send situations in different directions, and choices made during side content can influence the broader experience. A main quest may be approached differently depending on what you learned elsewhere, who you allied with, which characters remain available, and whether you arrive as human Coen by day or vampire Coen by night.

The game’s multiple endings are a natural consequence of that structure. Rather than feeling like an arbitrary final selection screen, different endings grow out of the cumulative choices you make throughout the adventure: how you resolve key quests, how you handle relationships, what paths you prioritize, what consequences you accept, and how you use—or resist—Coen’s vampiric nature. That makes replay value feel built into the narrative rather than added afterward. A second playthrough is not just an excuse to choose a different dialogue line at the end; it is a chance to take alternate quest routes, make different alliances, pursue missed story threads, try new solutions, and see how those decisions reshape the road toward a different conclusion.

The biggest compliment I can give The Blood of Dawnwalker is that its mechanics and setting reinforce each other. The 14th-century landscape of Vale Sangora is not just a place to fight monsters; it is a setting built to make monsters feel plausible. In a world shaped by plague, rural isolation, ancient ruins, fragile faith, folklore, and social desperation, stories of vampires, curses, spirits, and hidden things in the dark do not feel like random fantasy decoration. They feel like natural extensions of how people might interpret a brutal and frightening world.

There are still a few potential sticking points. Players looking for a breezy, simple action game may find the more deliberate sword mechanics demanding, especially if they opt into directional offense and defense. The time-management framework may also create anxiety for people who dislike the idea of missing quests or content. The bloodlust system will depend heavily on balance: it needs to create real tension without becoming repetitive busywork. Still, those are the risks of a game trying to do something more ambitious than handing the player another enormous map full of icons.

Overall, The Blood of Dawnwalker succeeds because it has a real point of view. Rebel Wolves has taken a familiar fantasy subject—vampires—and tied it to an unusually specific cultural and historical atmosphere, then built its RPG systems around the tension between humanity and monstrosity. Daytime Coen is a sword-wielding investigator marked by ritual magic; nighttime Coen is a fast, lethal hunter with new routes through the world and dangerous urges to manage. Add in consequential conversations, flexible quest solutions, branching story paths, and multiple endings, and the game becomes much more than a vampire action RPG. It is a role-playing experience designed to make each player’s version of Coen—and each journey through Vale Sangora—feel meaningfully different.

Hero of the Day: Ash Williams (Evil Dead Series)

Posted on September 9, 2026 by Arleigh

“Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the gun.” — Ash Williams

Ash Williams endures because he is not a conventional chosen-one hero. Across the Evil Dead franchise, he begins as an ordinary young man on a disastrous cabin getaway—vain, impatient, frightened, and spectacularly unprepared for supernatural horror. Yet the series turns those limitations into its central appeal. Ash is never compelling because he is innately noble or especially capable; he is compelling because demonic catastrophe repeatedly forces him to become capable. Every victory feels improvised, painful, and slightly ridiculous, earned through panic, rage, bad luck, and a stubborn refusal to die.

In The Evil Dead, Ash is primarily a survivor, defined by shock and escalating isolation as the people around him are possessed or killed. Bruce Campbell’s performance gives the character a physical vulnerability that later entries deliberately reshape: this Ash screams, hesitates, grieves, and looks genuinely overwhelmed by what he is witnessing. The cruel ingenuity of the Deadites makes survival an ordeal rather than a triumph. By the end, Ash has not cleanly conquered evil so much as endured an experience that has stripped away his normal life. That origin matters because the swagger of the later character retains a trace of trauma underneath it.

Evil Dead II transforms that shaken survivor into the archetypal Ash: a battered, increasingly unhinged fighter whose body becomes the franchise’s most elastic special effect and comic battlefield. His severed hand attacking him, the chainsaw prosthetic, and his mounting psychological collapse turn horror into a kind of brutal slapstick. But the comedy does not make the danger meaningless. Instead, it reveals Ash’s defining heroic quality: adaptability. Faced with a nightmare that cannot be reasoned with, he finds increasingly absurd practical solutions. He can be cowardly, selfish, and short-tempered, but when the moment demands it, he picks up the chainsaw and does what no one else can.

By Army of Darkness, Ash has become a deliberate parody of the macho action hero: a loud, arrogant time-displaced retail employee who talks like a conquering legend before fully earning the title. Lines such as “Groovy” and “This is my boomstick” work because Campbell delivers them with absolute, unearned confidence. Ash’s bravado is funny precisely because it is often defensive; he projects invincibility while repeatedly bungling spells, alienating allies, and creating new disasters. Even so, his eventual willingness to fight for people in a world that is not his own gives the character emotional weight. He may complain the entire time, but he does not ultimately abandon the fight.

That balance remains the foundation of Ash vs Evil Dead, which reunites the character with the consequences of his past rather than pretending he ever truly escaped them. Older Ash is still crude, impulsive, and prone to making catastrophically bad choices, but the series allows him to become a mentor and a protector without sanding down his worst qualities. The broader franchise, including comic-book continuations such as Army of Darkness and crossover material like Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, keeps returning to the same essential comic-book principle: Ash is an underqualified man facing impossibly large evil with whatever weapon is within reach. He is compelling because he never becomes a polished hero. He remains a damaged, vulgar, frightened human being who keeps stepping forward anyway—and in a horror universe built to reduce people to victims, that messy persistence is genuinely heroic.

Hero of the Day

Icarus File No. 31: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Posted on September 9, 2026 by Arleigh

“I’m looking for the coming thing.” — Brisco County, Jr.

Few television series embrace their own oddness as joyfully as The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. Blending frontier shootouts, pulp-serial adventure, broad comedy, sci-fi weirdness, and old-fashioned heroics into one deliberately unruly package, the short-lived Bruce Campbell vehicle has only grown more distinctive with time. It ran for a single season between 1993 and 1994, produced 27 episodes, and then vanished from network television before it had the chance to fully grow into the strange, funny, action-packed cult institution it deserved to be. That short life is part of its legend now. The show remains a wonderfully odd hybrid: a Western, an adventure serial, a sci-fi mystery, a screwball comedy, a buddy show, and a loving parody of old-fashioned television heroics. It was never content to simply be one thing, and that creative restlessness is exactly why it was so distinctive.

Bruce Campbell stars as Brisco County, Jr., a Harvard-educated lawyer who becomes a bounty hunter after the murder of his father, legendary lawman Brisco County, Sr. At first glance, that setup sounds like the foundation for a hard-edged revenge Western. Brisco is hired by a group of wealthy robber barons to track down John Bly, a charismatic outlaw who escaped after killing Brisco’s father. The show does not ignore that emotional hook, either. Campbell gives Brisco just enough sincerity that the character’s grief and desire to live up to his father’s reputation land when they need to. But the series almost immediately makes clear that it has no interest in being grim prestige television before prestige television was even a common phrase. Brisco may be motivated by vengeance, but he is also a cheerful idiot at times, an inventor’s dream customer, a romantic disaster, and a man genuinely enthusiastic about the future.

That optimism is one of the show’s most charming qualities. Brisco lives in 1893, but he is obsessed with modernity: bicycles, early automobiles, telephones, scientific gadgets, anything that might make the Old West feel less old. He repeatedly calls these new inventions “the coming thing,” often with the confidence of someone who knows history is on his side even when the technology in front of him is barely functional. It is a funny recurring bit, but it also gives the series an unusual personality. Brisco is not a traditional Western hero longing for a disappearing frontier. He is a cowboy-lawyer-adventurer who wants to survive the frontier and help drag it toward the twentieth century.

Campbell is the ideal actor for that balancing act. He had already built a devoted following through the Evil Dead films, where he proved he could sell broad physical comedy, cartoonish bravado, and genuine intensity all at once. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. puts those qualities to excellent use. Campbell looks like the square-jawed hero of a classic matinee serial, but he plays Brisco with a sly awareness of how ridiculous the genre can be. He can throw a punch, ride a horse, fire a gun, and deliver a tough-guy line, then immediately get tangled in a rope, outsmarted by a con artist, or humiliated by one of his own overconfident schemes. The show never treats him as incompetent exactly; Brisco is clever, brave, and unusually resourceful. But it understands that a hero is more entertaining when the universe keeps refusing to cooperate.

The early arc involving John Bly gives the show a memorable villain and a sense of forward momentum. Billy Drago, a genre veteran with one of the most instantly sinister faces and voices in film and television, plays Bly as a quietly unnerving outlaw rather than a loud, swaggering gunslinger. Drago had already become familiar to audiences through roles in crime thrillers, Westerns, horror, and action stories, and his presence adds serious genre street credibility to the series. He is particularly good at making Bly feel unpredictable. The character is intelligent, dangerous, and often strangely philosophical, with Drago giving even a casual line enough menace to make it sound like a threat. His addition helps sell the idea that, beneath the jokes and gadget-driven chaos, Brisco really is moving through a world populated by lethal people.

The show’s supporting cast is equally important to its success. Julius Carry’s Lord Bowler is the real secret weapon. Initially a rival bounty hunter with a powerful need to claim rewards before Brisco does, Bowler evolves into Brisco’s closest partner and one of the series’ most dependable sources of cool. Carry plays him with perfect deadpan timing, making Bowler’s irritation at Brisco’s eccentricities endlessly funny. Their chemistry is the foundation of the series. Brisco talks too much, overthinks everything, and barrels into trouble; Bowler observes, grumbles, and then saves the day when necessary. Their partnership has the rhythm of a classic buddy-action pairing, except it exists in a world where a frontier saloon might contain a mad inventor, an escaped criminal mastermind, and a mysterious glowing orb all in the same episode.

That orb is one of the show’s boldest ideas. Known as the Orb, it becomes the central sci-fi element in a series already packed with anachronistic comedy and pulp adventure. It possesses strange powers, influences human behavior, and hints at a much bigger mythology than the show ever had time to fully explain. The Orb plotline is not always the cleanest element of the series, but it matters because it shows how willing the creators were to push beyond ordinary Western storytelling. One week, Brisco might be hunting a gang of outlaws; the next, he might be dealing with supernatural powers, secret conspiracies, bizarre inventions, or stories that feel pulled from a 1930s adventure comic. The result is a show that can feel like The Wild Wild West, Indiana Jones, and a Saturday-morning serial filtered through a 1990s sitcom sensibility.

In that sense, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. was ahead of its time in the way it fused different genres into one coherent theme and narrative. The series never treated its Western setting, science-fiction mythology, slapstick humor, action serial influences, and detective-story plotting as separate gimmicks awkwardly stapled together. All of those elements were filtered through Brisco himself: a hero caught between an old frontier world and the uncertain promise of the future. His fascination with progress, invention, and “the coming thing” gave the show a thematic center strong enough to make even its strangest detours feel like part of the same larger adventure. What might have looked like a mess on paper usually plays as a deliberate expression of the show’s central idea: the Old West was changing, and Brisco was exactly the kind of eccentric hero built to stumble, joke, and fight his way into that change.

That same genre blending, however, likely confused audiences when the series first aired. In 1993, viewers and network marketers generally had a much easier time selling a show that could be described in one clean sentence. A Western was a Western. A sitcom was a sitcom. A science-fiction series was a science-fiction series. Brisco was all of those things at once, sometimes within the same episode. Its tonal shifts were part of the fun for viewers who connected with it, but they may have made it difficult for casual audiences to know what kind of show they were committing to every week. It was too playful and surreal for people expecting a straight Western, but its period setting could also make it seem less accessible to viewers looking for a more conventional action-comedy or sci-fi series.

Critics largely recognized how clever this mixture was. The show earned praise for its humor, its self-aware but affectionate approach to genre material, its charismatic cast, and its willingness to combine Western action with science fiction and absurdist comedy. Yet those very strengths also help explain why it was so short-lived. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. was difficult to market in the conventional network-TV landscape. Its placement did not help, either. The show aired on Fox during a period when the network was still building an identity and competing for viewers against much more established broadcasters. It arrived alongside other ambitious but unconventional Fox programming, including The X-Files, but Brisco did not become the breakout hit that its better-known network sibling did.

There is a strong argument that the series would have found a much bigger audience at the turn of the century, or even later. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, audiences had become increasingly comfortable with shows that mixed tones, genres, mythology, comedy, and serialized storytelling. Viewers were more willing to follow eccentric high-concept series whose worlds did not fit neatly into one category, especially as cable television, DVD collections, online fandom, and eventually streaming made it easier to discover a show outside its original broadcast slot. Brisco could have benefited enormously from that environment. Its episodic adventures would have made it easy to casually enjoy, while the larger mysteries around John Bly and the Orb would have rewarded devoted viewers. It is easy to imagine the show building a far larger fanbase through word of mouth, repeat viewing, and a culture more eager to embrace unapologetically nerdy genre experimentation.

That mismatch between quality and ratings is why the show became such a cult fan favorite. Fans who found it did not merely enjoy it; they tended to become attached to its specific flavor. The series offers a version of television adventure that feels generous rather than cynical. It wants to entertain first. Its jokes are broad but rarely mean-spirited, its action is energetic without becoming joyless, and its heroes are allowed to be capable, kind, foolish, and enthusiastic at the same time. Campbell’s performance became central to his larger cult-TV identity, while Carry’s Bowler remains one of the great underrated sidekicks in genre television. Even the show’s oddities—the Orb, the outlandish gadgets, the deliberately pulpy villains, the historical inaccuracies played for laughs—are not flaws to fans. They are the reason the series has lasted in memory.

Ultimately, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is a lovable one-season wonder because it refuses to fit neatly into a box. It is a Western that looks toward the future, an action series that enjoys making its hero the punchline, and a sci-fi adventure that never loses sight of the human fun of two bounty hunters bickering their way across the frontier. Its cancellation remains disappointing because there was clearly more territory to explore, especially with Brisco, Bowler, Bly, and the Orb mythology. But the short run also preserves the show’s charm. It never had time to become routine. It remains a fast, funny, deeply peculiar burst of television imagination—and a reminder that sometimes the most enduring cult shows are the ones too weird, too ambitious, and too specific to become ordinary hits.

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Malleus: Eisenhorn (by Dan Abnett) Review

Posted on September 6, 2026 by Arleigh

“You have to understand the rules in the first place if you’re going to break them.” — Gregor Eisenhorn

Malleus is where Dan Abnett makes it clear that the Eisenhorn saga is not simply a highly entertaining Warhammer 40,000 detective series. It is the installment where the story grows darker, more unsettling, and considerably more interested in the price of fighting evil within a civilization that has already sacrificed much of its own humanity. Following the groundwork laid by Xenos, Malleus expands the scope of Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn’s world while also making its central figure far more morally complicated. The mystery is larger, the action is more openly supernatural, and the danger of Chaos feels much closer than before. More importantly, the novel begins forcing Eisenhorn to question whether the principles that have guided him are enough to survive the threats he faces.

As discussed in my review of Xenos, that earlier novel was such an effective introduction to the colossal setting of Warhammer 40,000 because it treated the universe as a place to be explored rather than a wall of lore to be memorized. It gave readers the perspective of an investigator moving through the Imperium’s strange social structures, criminal underworlds, religious institutions, and alien dangers. Malleus works especially well as the next step because it retains that accessibility while taking readers deeper into the setting’s darkest spiritual and ideological corners. Readers should still begin with Xenos, but the Eisenhorn trilogy as a whole remains one of the best ways to begin one’s journey into the massive fictional universe that is Warhammer 40,000. It proves that the franchise can support horror, crime fiction, political paranoia, occult mystery, and character tragedy just as effectively as battlefield spectacle.

Set years after the events of Xenos, Malleus finds Eisenhorn carrying the emotional and professional consequences of everything that came before. He is no longer simply the sharp, controlled, and confident Imperial investigator introduced in the first book. Time, loss, and years spent confronting horrors hidden beneath the Imperium’s rigid public order have taken their toll. Eisenhorn still believes in his duty and still possesses a strong sense of justice, but there is a growing exhaustion beneath his certainty. He has learned that the Imperium is too vast, corrupt, and fragile for justice to function in any clean or uncomplicated way. He has also learned that many enemies cannot be defeated by conventional means.

The plot begins with the kind of investigative intrigue that made Xenos so compelling, but Abnett quickly pushes the story into more dangerous territory. Eisenhorn is drawn into a conspiracy involving forbidden knowledge, hidden cult activity, old enemies, and threats that reach beyond the physical world. The story increasingly brushes against the realm of Chaos, a force that is far more insidious than a conventional military enemy. Chaos does not merely conquer territory or kill its opponents. It spreads through ambition, fear, resentment, desperation, and the belief that ordinary moral limits are unacceptable luxuries in a desperate situation. In Malleus, the greatest danger is not always a monster in a dark room or a cultist behind a mask. It is the argument that monstrous methods may be justified if they produce a necessary result.

That theme becomes even more powerful with the arrival of Cherubael, the daemonhost who becomes one of the defining and most disturbing presences in the Eisenhorn saga. Cherubael is not just an evil creature for Eisenhorn to defeat. He is a living contradiction: a being of Chaos bound into human form, capable of providing knowledge and power that could prove decisive against far greater threats. His existence immediately creates the kind of moral problem that no Inquisitor can dismiss lightly. Cherubael is useful, but he is also inherently corrupting. He is a weapon that cannot be separated from the horror of what it is.

Abnett makes Cherubael memorable because he is not written as a mindless, roaring monster. He is intelligent, articulate, mocking, and disarmingly calm. He understands human weakness and knows how to make temptation sound like logic. That quality gives him a more unnerving presence than a simple daemonic antagonist. Cherubael does not need to persuade Eisenhorn to worship Chaos. He only needs to make him consider whether he can control a dangerous resource, whether he can use forbidden power for a righteous purpose, and whether the alternative might cost even more innocent lives. In a universe where Chaos often appears through mutation, madness, ritual sacrifice, and overt possession, Cherubael represents a subtler kind of corruption: the conviction that evil can remain safely contained in the hands of a sufficiently strong and intelligent person.

Eisenhorn’s relationship with Cherubael is therefore one of the novel’s most important developments. Eisenhorn is not a reckless thrill-seeker, and he does not turn toward Radical methods because he wants power for its own sake. He understands the danger more clearly than most people could. Yet his years of experience have taught him that strict adherence to approved Imperial methods can fail when confronted with enemies who respect no rules, no laws, and no limits. The daemonhost becomes a test of whether Eisenhorn’s conviction remains rooted in principle or begins to bend around necessity. Every time he sees value in Cherubael’s power, he edges closer to a line that he once would have regarded as absolute.

That growing tension ties directly into the ideological divisions within the Inquisition. One of Malleus’ strongest qualities is that it refuses to depict the Inquisition as a single, unified force. From a distance, the Inquisition appears almost limitless in its authority. Its agents can command armies, seize resources, investigate powerful institutions, prosecute heretics, and condemn worlds in the name of humanity’s survival. But Abnett makes clear that the organization is full of competing doctrines, personal rivalries, jurisdictional disputes, and mutual suspicion. Inquisitors may share a broad mission, yet they can disagree completely on how that mission should be carried out.

The Puritan and Radical divide is especially important. Puritans believe that the Imperium must fight heresy, alien threats, and Chaos without using the weapons, knowledge, or powers of those enemies. Their position can be severe, even inflexible, but it comes from a real understanding of how corruption works in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Chaos does not need a person to consciously embrace it in order to gain influence. A single compromise, a forbidden artifact, a dangerous ritual, or an attempt to master what should never be mastered can open the door to disaster. To a Puritan, a daemonhost such as Cherubael is not an asset. It is proof that someone has already crossed a line from which there may be no return.

Radicals take a more pragmatic and far more dangerous view. They believe that the Inquisition cannot adequately fight the galaxy’s darkest forces without studying, exploiting, or weaponizing the tools those forces use. In the abstract, there is a grim logic to that approach. If Chaos is a threat unlike any ordinary military opponent, then understanding its workings may be essential to resisting it. The trouble is that the line between studying Chaos and serving it can disappear with frightening speed. A Radical may begin by using a forbidden artifact to stop a greater evil, then justify a more serious compromise during the next emergency, and eventually become unable to see the difference between tactical necessity and personal obsession.

Eisenhorn sits uncomfortably between these positions in Malleus. He remains deeply suspicious of Chaos and possesses many instincts that could be described as Puritan. He does not romanticize the enemy or dismiss the danger of corruption. At the same time, the circumstances he faces begin pressing him toward Radical choices. Cherubael is the clearest symbol of that shift. The daemonhost embodies the seductive claim that terrible power can be harnessed responsibly if the person using it has the right intentions. Eisenhorn’s willingness to consider that possibility does not make him a straightforward villain, which is exactly why the situation works so well. His choices have reasons behind them. His decisions are understandable. They may even save lives. But the novel never lets the reader forget that understandable choices can still have horrifying consequences.

The schism between Puritans and Radicals also shows how the Inquisition’s internal divisions can hinder the work of the Ordos as much as the threats they are supposed to combat. The Inquisition exists to confront dangers that ordinary Imperial institutions cannot handle, but its members can become trapped in battles over authority, doctrine, and ideological purity. Inquisitors may distrust one another, conceal evidence, challenge a colleague’s methods, or focus so intensely on proving another agent compromised that they lose sight of the immediate threat. That infighting is especially dangerous in a universe where enemies such as Chaos actively benefit from paranoia, secrecy, pride, and division.

A Puritan can be so certain that Radical methods lead only to damnation that they fail to recognize an urgent threat until it is too late. A Radical can become so convinced that they alone are capable of responsibly wielding forbidden tools that they stop seeing their own corruption. Both sides believe they are defending humanity. Both can be right about the dangers posed by the other. And both can make the Imperium more vulnerable in the process. Abnett uses this conflict to give the setting real political and philosophical texture. The Inquisition is not merely an all-powerful secret police force with dramatic titles and unlimited permission to destroy things. It is an unstable, deeply human institution whose members are themselves vulnerable to dogma, ego, grief, obsession, and fear.

The supporting cast helps keep Malleus from becoming too relentlessly bleak. Aemos remains a valuable presence because his learning, loyalty, and history with Eisenhorn give the novel an emotional foundation. Alizabeth Bequin continues to be one of the more interesting figures in the series, not simply because of her unusual nature but because she complicates Eisenhorn’s tendency to view people through the practical lens of an investigation. Eisenhorn’s associates are not faceless retainers or disposable mission assets. They are people who have endured extraordinary dangers together, and their bonds create moments of warmth and loyalty amid the book’s Gothic horror.

Abnett also continues to excel at making the Imperium feel inhabited. The setting is famous for colossal wars, massive armies, and apocalyptic imagery, but the Eisenhorn books often work best when they explore the spaces beneath that scale. Malleus moves through worlds and institutions shaped by wealth, bureaucracy, religious repression, criminality, and desperation. It shows how ordinary citizens can live their entire lives under the shadow of enormous Imperial power without fully understanding the supernatural horrors being fought on their behalf. That ground-level perspective makes the setting’s oppressive atmosphere more convincing. The galaxy is not merely dangerous because wars are constantly happening somewhere. It is dangerous because its social systems create secrecy, inequality, fear, and countless opportunities for hidden corruption to grow.

The novel is somewhat more sprawling than Xenos. It includes a larger web of characters, conspiracies, locations, and occult ideas, which can make it feel less neatly constructed than the first book’s detective narrative. However, that expanding complexity suits the story. Eisenhorn is no longer dealing with a case that can be solved by following clues toward a single clear answer. He is moving through an environment where the truth is fragmented, alliances are unstable, and each revelation raises more questions. The disorder is part of the point. Chaos should not feel comfortably organized, and Eisenhorn’s own moral certainty becomes increasingly disordered as the novel progresses.

Abnett’s prose remains one of the great strengths of the book. He can write action with clarity and force, whether the scene involves gunfights, physical confrontations, psychic peril, or full-blown daemonic horror. Just as importantly, he knows how to make a quiet conversation threatening. Some of Malleus’ best material comes from interrogations, tense exchanges between allies, confrontations with ideological opponents, and moments where a character realizes that the person they trusted may not be what they seemed. The novel’s greatest weapon is not sheer violence, but suspense. Readers can often feel that something is wrong long before Eisenhorn fully understands what it is.

Ultimately, Malleus is an excellent middle chapter because it transforms Eisenhorn’s story from a clever Inquisitorial investigation into a more troubling moral tragedy. It raises the stakes without abandoning the human perspective that made Xenos work so well. Cherubael’s arrival gives the novel a powerful symbol of temptation and compromise, while the Puritan-Radical divide reveals that the Inquisition’s most dangerous enemies are not always found outside its walls. Eisenhorn still wants to protect humanity, and he remains brave, resourceful, and fundamentally committed to his cause. But Malleus makes an increasingly uncomfortable point: a person can begin with noble intentions and still become dangerous by deciding that only they are qualified to choose which rules no longer apply.

That is what gives the novel its lingering power. Malleus is entertaining as a mystery, action story, horror novel, and tour through the stranger side of Warhammer 40,000. But it is most compelling as a story about the cost of necessity. Eisenhorn’s enemies are terrifying, yet Abnett understands that the more frightening question is what Eisenhorn will become in order to defeat them.

Eisenhorn Saga

Xenos

Guilty Pleasure No. 129: Congo (dir. by Frank Marshall)

Posted on September 5, 2026 by Arleigh

Congo is the kind of movie that makes perfect sense as a guilty pleasure because it is always hovering just above the level of complete nonsense, yet it has enough energy and conviction to remain enormously watchable. Directed by Frank Marshall, the 1995 film turns Michael Crichton’s jungle-thriller premise into a sprawling mixture of monster movie, treasure hunt, corporate conspiracy, technological anxiety, and old-fashioned adventure serial. It is loud, messy, often ridiculous, and loaded with moments that should not work at all. But that is the pleasure of Congo: it commits so completely to its bizarre material that the movie becomes difficult to dislike.

The setup is wonderfully overstuffed. A corporate expedition disappears while searching for a legendary diamond mine in the Congo, apparently after encountering some mysterious, deadly force. At the same time, primatologist Peter Elliot is preparing to return Amy, a gorilla he has raised and taught sign language, to the wild. Amy has recurring dreams—or perhaps memories—of a strange jungle city, and she communicates through a glove that translates her signs into a robotic voice. Before long, Peter, Amy, corporate representative Karen Ross, Romanian explorer Herkermer Homolka, and a mercenary guide named Captain Munro Kelly are all headed toward the same lost city, where diamonds, ancient ruins, and murderous white gorillas await.

That synopsis alone explains why Congo has developed such a devoted guilty-pleasure reputation. It is a movie where satellites, laser weapons, genetically engineered guard apes, corporate greed, sign-language research, volcanoes, and ancient African mythology all exist in the same story without anyone pausing to question the sheer overload of it. The movie treats every development with sincere urgency, even when the audience is watching Amy the gorilla say “Amy good gorilla” through a computerized voice device. It is impossible not to admire the confidence. Congo never winks at the audience, never admits that its premise is wild, and never cuts itself down to a more manageable size. It simply keeps adding more adventure-movie ingredients until the whole thing becomes strangely hypnotic.

Laura Linney’s Karen Ross and Dylan Walsh’s Peter Elliot are meant to anchor all of that craziness, but they are also among the film’s blandest elements. Linney is a talented actress, and she brings a professional focus to Karen’s corporate mission, but the character is written in such functional terms that she rarely feels like more than the person carrying the plot’s technological and business-related exposition. Karen is competent, determined, and occasionally vulnerable, but she never develops a particularly distinctive personality. Linney plays her with a seriousness that fits the film’s overall tone, yet that seriousness can make her feel oddly distant. She is there to make sure the satellite plot, the diamond plot, and the rescue plot keep moving, rather than to provide much spark on her own.

Walsh has an even tougher assignment as Peter. He is essentially the emotional center of Amy’s story, and the film needs the audience to believe in his paternal, almost codependent relationship with her. But Peter is such a mild, generic protagonist that he often gets swallowed by the movie’s more eccentric ideas. Walsh is not bad, exactly; he is simply too subdued for a film filled with volcanic eruptions, killer gorillas, and Tim Curry speaking every line as though he is announcing the end of civilization. His performance has a sincere gentleness that helps the scenes with Amy, but it also makes him feel like he wandered in from a quieter, more conventional family adventure. When the movie becomes bigger and stranger, Peter’s personality does not expand with it.

That blandness becomes especially noticeable because Ernie Hudson and Tim Curry are having such an obviously fantastic time in their roles. Hudson plays Captain Munro Kelly with the relaxed confidence of someone who knows he is the coolest person in the room. Munro is a professional guide, a fighter, a pilot, and a survivor, but Hudson does not turn him into a grim action-movie cliché. He gives the character humor, charisma, and a reassuring calm under pressure. Whenever the group faces another disaster—whether it is hostile terrain, dangerous animals, mercenaries, or the increasingly unhinged situation inside the lost city—Hudson makes Munro feel like the one person who might actually know what he is doing.

Hudson’s performance also gives Congo a sense of fun that the central characters sometimes lack. He has an easy screen presence, and he seems to understand that the film works best when it leans into the pleasures of a grand, pulpy adventure. Munro is not a particularly deep character, but Hudson makes him memorable through timing, attitude, and sheer likability. The movie becomes livelier whenever he takes charge, whether he is negotiating with people in the field or calmly reacting to another completely absurd revelation. If Karen and Peter are the story’s functional leads, Munro is the character who gives the audience someone to enjoy following.

Then there is Tim Curry as Herkermer Homolka, who delivers what can only be described as a masterclass in hammy, scenery-chewing entertainment. Curry does not merely play Homolka; he devours the role with a kind of operatic enthusiasm. Every line is delivered in his grand Romanian accent with the force of a proclamation, and every gesture suggests that Homolka believes he is the hero of the greatest expedition in history. Curry appears to be enjoying himself so much that it becomes infectious. He is not interested in realism, restraint, or subtle characterization. He is there to make every scene larger, louder, and more theatrical.

Homolka is already a ridiculous figure on the page: a pompous explorer with a famous family name, an exaggerated ego, and a dramatic flair that makes him seem less like a real adventurer than a flamboyant villain from a lost serial. Curry recognizes that the only correct way to play him is at maximum volume. His performance turns every bit of dialogue into an event. He gives the impression that he has spent years preparing speeches for this exact jungle expedition, waiting for the chance to announce his discoveries to the world. Even when Homolka is making selfish or foolish decisions, Curry makes him too entertaining to hate.

The contrast between Curry and the more restrained leads is one of the reasons Congo feels so odd. Linney and Walsh approach the material with a level of seriousness that suggests they are trying to preserve some emotional credibility. Hudson and Curry, by contrast, seem to recognize that credibility is not really the point. Hudson brings a cool, knowing charm, while Curry turns the movie into a one-man theatrical spectacle whenever he appears. Neither approach is necessarily wrong, but the difference creates a tonal imbalance. The film’s heroes feel flat because its supporting players are so much more alive.

The killer gorillas, of course, are another major source of the film’s guilty-pleasure appeal. These are not normal gorillas defending their territory. They are pale, vicious creatures bred to protect the diamond city of Zinj, and they attack with the exaggerated menace of monsters in a haunted-house ride. The effects have not aged gracefully. The suits and animatronics are visible, the movements can be stiff, and the creatures are often more amusing than frightening. Yet they remain memorable because the movie gives them a distinct, nightmarish look: white fur, glowing eyes, sharp teeth, and sudden appearances from dark corridors or jungle fog.

Frank Marshall directs the action with enough pace and polish to keep Congo from collapsing under the weight of its own silliness. The jungle setting, the ruined city, the expedition equipment, the satellite imagery, and the volcanic finale all give the movie a bigger sense of scale than its reputation might suggest. It feels like a genuine studio blockbuster from a time when Hollywood would spend serious money on an unapologetically strange idea. The film is not elegant, and it is certainly not believable, but it is never boring for long.

As a conventional adventure movie, Congo is uneven. Its African setting is often treated as a vague, dangerous backdrop, and its plot is overloaded with enough corporate jargon and techno-babble to distract from the more entertaining monster-movie material. But as a guilty pleasure, it is hard to beat. The movie is too bizarre to be generic and too sincere to feel cynical. Laura Linney and Dylan Walsh may be stuck playing bland characters at the center of the chaos, but Ernie Hudson and especially Tim Curry make the journey worth taking. Curry’s performance alone is a treasure: a joyous, magnificent display of overacting that turns Congo from a merely strange blockbuster into something genuinely unforgettable.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Song of the Day: Like a Stone (by Audioslave)

Posted on September 4, 2026 by Arleigh

“Like a Stone” is one of Audioslave’s defining songs: a slow-burning rock ballad that feels enormous without ever becoming overly busy. Released on the band’s 2002 self-titled debut, it pairs a deceptively simple, steady arrangement with a mood of isolation, reflection, and patient longing. For a new listener, the easiest way to describe it is as a late-night song—one built around the feeling of sitting with your thoughts after everyone else has gone home. The track’s famous central image, waiting “like a stone,” gives it a spiritual, almost haunted quality.

That mood reflects Chris Cornell’s own explanation of the lyrics. Cornell said the other members of Audioslave asked him what the song was about, and his answer was death—specifically, imagining what it might be like to wait in the afterlife. That idea gives the narrator’s solitude a deeper meaning: he is not simply waiting for a person or living through ordinary heartbreak, but existing in a kind of suspended spiritual space, waiting to be reunited with those who have already passed on. It is a heavy premise, yet Cornell presents it with enough ambiguity that the song still feels personal to anyone hearing longing, regret, faith, or grief in its words.

The musical backbone is strikingly restrained. Tim Commerford’s bass and Brad Wilk’s drums hold down a deliberate, spacious groove, while Tom Morello plays a clean, chiming guitar figure that gives the song its mournful atmosphere. Unlike the aggressive, effects-heavy riffs people may associate with Rage Against the Machine, Morello largely serves the song’s emotional weight here; the guitar rings out like a distant signal rather than competing for attention. Chris Cornell’s vocals are soulful and powerful, but what makes the performance special is his control: he begins in a weary, intimate register, then gradually brings more ache and force into the chorus without losing the song’s sense of loneliness.

Morello gets his standout moment in the final stretch: his guitar solo begins at roughly 2:54 in the album recording. It is brief, but it is exactly the right kind of brief—more melodic and emotionally focused than flashy, rising out of the song like a final release of tension. He bends and sustains notes instead of turning the moment into a technical showcase, which fits the track’s somber atmosphere perfectly. “Like a Stone” is proof that Audioslave could make something as memorable through patience and feeling as they could through sheer volume: Cornell’s voice gives it its soul, and Morello’s guitar gives that soul a final, searching echo.

Like a Stone

On a cobweb afternoon, in a room full of emptiness
By a freeway, I confess I was lost in the pages
Of a book full of death, reading how we’ll die alone
And if we’re good, we’ll lay to rest anywhere we wanna go

In your house, I long to be
Room by room, patiently
I’ll wait for you there like a stone
I’ll wait for you there alone

And on my deathbed, I will pray to the gods and the angels
Like a pagan to anyone who will take me to Heaven
To a place I recall, I was there so long ago
The sky was bruised, the wine was bled, and there you led me on

In your house, I long to be
Room by room, patiently
I’ll wait for you there like a stone
I’ll wait for you there alone, alone

[guitar solo @2:54]

And on I read, until the day was gone
And I sat in regret of all the things I’ve done
For all that I’ve blessed, and all that I’ve wronged
In dreams until my death, I will wander on

In your house, I long to be
Room by room, patiently
I’ll wait for you there like a stone
I’ll wait for you there alone, alone

Great Guitar Solos Series