Review: Fallout (Season 2, Episode 6 “The Other Player”)

Posted on January 21, 2026 by Arleigh

“So, for our daughter, you would kill millions of people. Billions of people. Other-other mothers just like you. Other daughters just like our daughter!” — Copper Howard

Episode 6 of Fallout season 2, titled “The Other Player,” ramps up the tension as the series dives deeper into the messy origins of the apocalypse and the fragile illusions of control in its aftermath. This installment centers on power dynamics—who pulls the strings before the bombs fall, who grabs them afterward, and who dares to cling to ideals like justice in a wasteland that mocks them at every turn. It delivers some standout moments for key characters like Barb and Lucy, blending corporate horror with personal reckonings, though a few subplots in the irradiated wilds feel like they’re just treading water ahead of bigger payoffs.

Barb’s storyline takes the spotlight early, peeling back the pre-war curtain to reveal Vault-Tec’s chilling machinery of doom. Picture her navigating a day packed with boardroom horrors: pitches for vaults rigged to fail on purpose, exclusive escape routes for elite clients, and slick strategies to polish the end times into a marketable package. The satire bites hard, but things darken when she brushes up against the shadowy layers beneath the corporate facade, including a tense encounter that exposes the ruthless leverage being used against her family. By the time she’s cornered into advancing the nuclear launch herself, her shift from confident insider to reluctant pawn feels raw and human—someone who glimpses the abyss but steps closer anyway.

This arc shines because it doesn’t paint Barb as a cartoon villain or a blameless dupe; she’s stuck in that gray zone of complicity, making choices under duress that echo through centuries. Her eventual clash with Cooper, where he probes just how deep the rot goes, hits with real weight, forcing her to confront the fallout of her inaction. When she aids in a high-stakes extraction involving Hank, it’s a flicker of atonement laced with disaster, underscoring how good intentions in this universe always curdle. The episode leaves her arc hanging in a compelling limbo, hinting at ripple effects that could redefine loyalties as the Enclave’s shadow looms larger.

Lucy’s journey mirrors this theme of fractured morality, thrusting her into a reconstructed slice of her Vault 33 life that’s equal parts nostalgic trap and dystopian experiment. She stirs in a familiar setup, only to spot the mind-control collars on patrolling guards—Hank’s twisted vision of order, where impulses are leashed to forge a “civilized” society from savages. True to form, Lucy opts for due process over vengeance, collaring her dad for a trial back home, betting on the vault-bred rules that have crumbled around her. It’s a stubborn spark of optimism that the show handles with nuance, never letting it tip into naivety.

As she prowls Hank’s operation, Lucy witnesses the eerie results: former killers and cannibals reshaped into mundane workers, content in their programmed bliss. Her bid to liberate them backfires when some admit they’d rather stay subdued, posing the gut-punch question at Fallout‘s core—is peace worth the chains if it’s chosen? The episode’s visceral demo drives it home: a restrained brute turns feral, brutalizing a captive in a frenzy of violence until Lucy flips the override switch, transforming rage into rote camaraderie. Hank’s philosophy—that curbing free will is the ultimate mercy—creeps under the skin, challenging Lucy’s worldview without fully vindicating him.

Hank embodies the franchise’s archetype of the self-righteous tyrant, framing his atrocities as paternal duty. Shackling himself for “accountability” feels like calculated theater, a nod to Shady Sands’ destruction wrapped in protective bluster. Their father-daughter standoff crackles with unresolved pain, elevating what could be talky scenes into emotional tinder. He doesn’t dodge blame entirely, but his rationalizations muddy the waters just enough to keep Lucy—and viewers—wrestling with the cost of survival.

The wasteland threads, by contrast, deliver flashes of grit but lack the same punch. The Ghoul kicks off skewered and desperate, his radiation-fueled rasp devolving into pleas about lost family as he fights for his gear. A massive super mutant swoops in for the save, channeling that gravelly lore vibe with a uranium “cure” and whispers of an anti-Enclave uprising. It’s a thrilling nod to the games’ icons, yet the sequence fizzles by sidelining the mutant’s deeper motives and knocking Ghoul out cold too soon—cool on paper, but it whets the appetite without satisfying.

Maximus and Thaddeus fare worse, stuck in nomadic chit-chat mode. Ditching the traceable armor leads to debates over hawking their prize or gifting it to some vague “greater good,” laced with buddy-cop quips around the campfire. It’s breezy filler that humanizes them amid the heavier drama, and their eventual Ghoul rendezvous teases convergence, but it drags compared to the vault intrigue. These beats keep the ensemble breathing, yet they underscore how the episode prioritizes cerebral clashes over explosive action.

Down in the vaults, bureaucratic farce provides lighter relief: a support group devolves into snack-hoarding chaos until the overseer axes it over budget cuts. Reg’s defiant munching on pilfered treats captures that petty vault defiance, a microcosm of resistance against soul-crushing routine. Still, this undercurrent ties loosely to the topside stakes, feeling more like world-building seasoning than plot fuel.

Clocking in as a character-driven pivot, “The Other Player” excels at unpacking ethical quagmires—Barb’s pre-war slide, Lucy’s moral tightrope, Hank’s paternal authoritarianism—while teasing Enclave escalation. The super mutant tease and wasteland wanderings underwhelm in execution, marking time until the ensemble collides, but the thematic heft carries it. Season 2’s back half feels primed for chaos, with these personal fractures promising a powder keg payoff amid the radiation storms. If it balances the introspection with more wasteland fury, this episode will slot neatly as the calm before the irradiated storm.

Fallout Season 2 Episodes

Guilty Pleasure No. 99: Death Merchant Series (by Joseph Rosenberger)

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Arleigh

The Death Merchant series by Joseph Rosenberger is a loud, relentless block of pulp action that feels less like a set of tidy thrillers and more like being dropped into a never-ending firefight powered by paranoia, gore, and fringe theorizing. It is the kind of series where your tolerance for over-the-top violence and unfiltered ideology will decide almost immediately whether you keep going or tap out after a book or two.

At the center of it all is Richard Camellion, the so-called Death Merchant: a master of disguise, martial arts, and “wet work” who usually contracts with off-the-books branches of Western intelligence for the jobs that are too dirty or politically dangerous to be handled in daylight. He is pitched as “a man without a face,” a professional who drifts from mission to mission, changing identities as easily as he swaps weapons, and charging serious money for operations that will leave plenty of bodies on the ground. Over the life of the series, he goes from taking on organized crime in the States to fighting terrorists, neo-Nazis, rogue generals, occult cults, and even plots involving aliens and lost civilizations. The world these books build is an anything-goes playground where paramilitary raids, Cold War spy games, and bizarre pseudo-science exist side by side, held together less by realism and more by sheer velocity and an obsession with tactics, gear, and mayhem.

Camellion, as a character, is deliberately underdeveloped in the conventional sense. There are fragments of backstory—St. Louis roots, an engineering degree, a Texas ranch with pet pigs, hints that he once taught history—but these details feel more like flavor text than emotional anchors. His real personality is defined by efficiency and detachment. He doesn’t agonize over moral lines; the mission objective comes first, and if that means innocent people or even cops get killed, so be it. The series is notably more nihilistic than many of its men’s-adventure peers, going so far as to show Camellion and his team gunning down large numbers of police officers when they get in the way of a job. There are gestures toward a personal code—he donates part of his fees to struggling students and the underprivileged in Texas—but that philanthropic angle never softens the basic reality that you’re dealing with a protagonist who treats lethal force as a casual tool rather than a last resort.

The real appeal, at least for fans, lies in the way Rosenberger stages and describes action. The violence is intensely graphic and highly technical, full of precise talk about trajectories, calibers, anatomy, and battlefield tactics. Shootouts and raids are broken down moment by moment, like a cross between a field manual and splatter prose, and they tend to go on long enough that you either settle into the rhythm or start to feel like you’re stuck in an endless report. Between all the bullets and explosions, the books frequently pause for gear talk—special gadgets, exotic weapons, improvised tech—and this side of the series is surprisingly imaginative, from microwave jammers to bizarre field devices that wouldn’t look out of place in a low-budget spy movie. When the stories drift into science-fiction or occult territory, that same almost deadpan, “here’s how it works” tone is applied to alien relics, psionic warfare, or secret cities, which only adds to the series’ strange charm.

Set against the broader landscape of 1970s–80s men’s adventure fiction, The Death Merchant both fits and mutates the template. It shares the basic chassis with series like The Executioner and The Destroyer: a super-competent operative, a paperback-per-mission structure, high body counts, and a constant churn of global crises. Where Mack Bolan’s saga leans on revenge, wounded honor, and a tangible sense of moral outrage, Camellion’s world is colder and more openly cynical; the emotional framing is thinner, and the books care much more about how an op is executed than about the psychological fallout. Compared to Remo Williams and his mentors in The Destroyer, the difference is tone. The Destroyer often treats its excesses with a wink, using satire and self-awareness to keep the carnage oddly light on its feet, while The Death Merchant plays things straight, even when plots involve cloning the hero, stumbling across Atlantean technology, or battling cults armed with mind-control drugs. In that sense, Rosenberger’s series feels like the genre with the safety off—less polished, less accessible, but also more unapologetic in how far it will chase its own wild ideas.

None of this would be quite so jarring if the worldview baked into the books weren’t as sharp-edged as it is. The series openly reflects the prejudices and anxieties of its time, and not in a subtle way: racism, sexism, and class hostility are frequent, along with a deep suspicion of almost everyone outside the protagonist’s narrow circle. Long digressions into politics, conspiracy theories, and metaphysics often read like the author stepping onto a soapbox, turning scenes into lectures that can be fascinating, infuriating, or simply exhausting depending on your mood. That ideological intensity, combined with the clinical violence and the lack of real emotional counterweight, makes the series a tough sell for readers looking for nuance or heroism in the more traditional sense. At the same time, it is exactly what gives these books their unmistakable flavor and helps explain why they’ve developed a cult following rather than vanishing completely into the used-book bins.

Taken together, The Death Merchant novels are wildly uneven, sometimes ridiculous, and frequently offensive, but they are also distinct and weirdly committed to their own warped vision of men’s adventure fiction. If you approach them as straightforward thrillers with the usual expectations of character arcs and tidy plotting, they will almost certainly disappoint. If you come to them as artifacts from the outer fringes of pulp—paperbacks that push violence, ideology, and high-concept plotting further than their more famous shelfmates—they become a fascinating, if abrasive, deep dive into what this genre looks like when nothing is toned down. For readers who like their action fiction loud, excessive, and unconcerned with respectability, there is a certain grim entertainment to be had in watching Richard Camellion move from one catastrophe to the next.

Below is a list of the main series titles, which gives a good sense of the range and escalating absurdity of Camellion’s missions:

1. The Death Merchant – Richard Camellion versus the Chicago mob.

2. Operation Overkill – The demented leaders of the Knights of Vigilance plan to assassinate the President and overthrow the government.

3. The Psychotron Plot – The Russians and Egyptians team up to use a brain-scrambling device on Israel.

4. Chinese Conspiracy – The Chinese plan to maneuver a submarine into Canadian waters and shoot a US space shuttle out of the sky.

5. Satan Strike – The CIA and GRU combine forces to stop a dictator of a Caribbean nation from using a potent and deadly super-virus.

6. The Albanian Connection – Neo-Nazis, bent on reunifying Germany and restoring the Reich, have assembled seven nuclear bombs to use against the U.S., Europe, and Russia.

7. The Castro File – The Russians plan to gain complete control of Cuba by assassinating Castro and having a lookalike take his place.

8. The Billionaire Mission – Cleveland Winston Silvestter, a paranoid billionaire, believes he is Satan’s chosen disciple and is hellbent on triggering World War III.

9. The Laser War – A Nazi super-laser is pursued.

10. The Mainline Plot – Communists in North Korea have created a super-potent, super-addictive strain of heroin called Peacock-4. By introducing the heroin into the U.S., they hope to enslave a generation of young adults.

11. Manhattan Wipeout – The Death Merchant causes trouble for the four mob families in New York City.

12. The KGB Frame – Flash! Camellion turns double agent. The target of both his colleagues and his enemies, the Death Merchant becomes the object of the most intense manhunt in the history of international espionage.

13. The Mato Grosso Horror – Camellion leads an expedition into the Brazilian jungle to locate a group of Nazis who are perfecting a mind-control drug.

14. Vengeance of the Golden Hawk – The DM is tasked with saving Tel Aviv from a rocket barrage containing a deadly nerve gas.

15. The Iron Swastika Plot – The Nazi organization known as the Spider returns!

16. Invasion of the Clones – Camellion versus five clones of himself in Africa.

17. The Zemlya Expedition – The Death Merchant attempts to rescue a scientist from an underwater Russian city/complex in the Arctic Ocean.

18. Nightmare in Algeria – Camellion battles two terrorist organizations who have joined forces: the Black Avengers and the Blood Sons of Allah.

19. Armageddon, USA! – A far-right group threatens to set off nukes in three American cities unless its demands are met.

20. Hell in Hindu Land – The Death Merchant leads an expedition to a Buddhist monastery in India, where the bodies of aliens (and the secrets of their civilization) may be hidden.

21. The Pole Star Secret – Camellion treks to the North Pole to investigate a possible alien world hidden under the ice cap.

22. The Kondrashev Chase – A highly placed spy behind the Iron Curtain has disappeared while trying to escape to the West, and Camellion must find and rescue him.

23. The Budapest Action – The Hungarians are working with the KGB to develop a hallucinogenic toxin to be released over American cities and the DM is tasked with stopping them.

24. The Kronos Plot – Fidel Castro plans to destroy the Panama Canal.

25. The Enigma Project – Spying on Russia under the cover of finding Noah’s Ark.

26. The Mexican Hit

27. The Surinam Affair

28. Nipponese Nightmare – Japanese terrorists try to frame the CIA for murder.

29. Fatal Formula – Tracking a man-made flu strain.

30. Shambhala Strike – An ancient maze of caverns means China could easily invade.

31. Operation Thunderbolt – A bomb-maker is captured by North Korean forces.

32. Deadly Manhunt – An ally betrays Camellion.

33. Alaska Conspiracy

34. Operation Mind-Murder

35. Massacre in Rome – A civilian seems to be able to predict the future.

36. The Cosmic Reality Kill – A cult leader is targeting kids.

37. The Bermuda Triangle Action – The Russians are drilling along a fault line in the Atlantic, where a few well-placed hydrogen bombs could cause catastrophe for the U.S.

38. The Burning Blue Death – A neo-Nazi group called the Brotherhood has created a device that can make a human being spontaneously combust.

39. The Fourth Reich – A neo-Nazi conspiracy to trigger an atom bomb (twice as powerful as Hiroshima) in Cairo is crushed.

40. Blueprint Invisibility – The Red Chinese have stolen a vital top secret U.S. file dealing with electronic camouflage.

41. Shamrock Smash – Someone is supplying the IRA with weapons and the CIA and SIS call on Richard Camellion to find out who.

42. High Command Murder – At the end of World War II, American soldiers stole 100 crates of Nazi gold and hid the loot in an abandoned mine shaft in northern France. The Death Merchant races the Nazis to find it.

43. The Devil’s Trashcan – Did the Nazis bury treasure at the bottom of Lake Toplitz during World War II? Camellion, et al. plan to find out.

44. Island of the Damned – Soviet forces develop mind-reading technology.

45. The Rim of Fire Conspiracy – The Russians hope to trigger volcanoes on the U.S. West Coast by exploding bombs along fault lines.

46. Blood Bath – Camellion assists South Africa’s ruling whites defeat groups of blacks demanding an end to apartheid.

47. Operation Skyhook

48. Psionics War

49. Night of the Peacock

50. The Hellbomb Theft – Camellion must stop two mini-nukes from falling into the hands of Kaddafi, the dictator of Libya.

51. The Inca File

52. The Flight of the Phoenix

53. The Judas Scrolls

54. Apocalypse, USA! – Libyan terrorists plan to spray deadly nerve gas across the Eastern Seaboard. Not if the Death Merchant has anything to say about it!

55. Slaughter in El Salvador – The Death Merchant heads to war-torn El Salvador, where he tangles with death squads and Communist Sandinista rebels, with predictable carnage.

56. Afghanistan Crashout

57. The Romanian Operation

58. The Silicon Valley Connection

59. The Burma Probe – The Death Merchant teams up with Thunderbolt Unit Omega and Lester Vernon “The Widowmaker” Cole to stop a Chinese territory grab.

60. The Methuselah Factor

61. The Bulgarian Termination

62. The Soul Search Project – Camellion pursues a scientist who can talk to the dead. The protagonist and his allies willingly kill several dozen NYPD officers.

63. The Pakistan Mission – A Communist plan to invade Pakistan.

64. The Atlantean Horror – Camellion is in Antarctica, trying to keep an “energy converter” (buried 70,000 years ago by scientists from Atlantis) out of the hands of the Russians.

65. Mission Deadly Snow – The Death Merchant must destroy a South American drug cartel intent on supplying Fidel Castro with thousands of pounds of cocaine.

66. The Cobra Chase – Camellion tracks the Cobra, who escaped from the cocaine processing plant in the previous book.

67. Escape From Gulag Taria – A Soviet physicist who specializes in weather modification wants to defect.

68. The Hindu Trinity Caper – Camellion tracks down an East German spy who has stolen some parts to a nuclear weapon.

69. The Miracle Mission – The Shroud of Turin is stolen by an Arab terrorist group. Camellion’s job is to get it back.

70. The Greenland Mission – Camellion and his crew investigate a ‘U.F.O.’ in Greenland.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Review: The Fall of the House of Usher (by Mike Flanagan)

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Arleigh

“If pain and suffering were the kisses of Jesus, then he kissed the living fuck out of my mother.” — Roderick Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher delivers Mike Flanagan’s signature blend of gothic dread and modern moral reckoning, reimagining Edgar Allan Poe’s tales as a savage family implosion tied to corporate excess. This Netflix miniseries unfolds over eight taut episodes, framing the confessions of a pharmaceutical tycoon as his bloodline meets grisly, poetic ends. It balances sharp satire with emotional undercurrents, though its heavy-handed messaging and repetitive structure occasionally blunt the impact.

Roderick Usher, now a hollowed-out patriarch, recounts his empire’s collapse to a relentless prosecutor in the crumbling family mansion, flashing back to decades of ambition, betrayal, and supernatural intervention. His twin sister Madeline, the brains behind their Fortunato Pharmaceuticals fortune, shares equal narrative weight, their pact with a enigmatic figure sealing a curse that claims each heir in turn. The setup echoes Poe’s original story but explodes it into a sprawling anthology, with every installment riffing on a different work from the author’s macabre catalog. This structure keeps the momentum high, turning personal flaws into fatal traps, yet it risks formula once the pattern of vice-reveal-demise becomes predictable.

A standout early episode channels The Masque of the Red Death, where a debauched heir’s orgiastic gala spirals into carnage, blending excess with infectious horror in a sequence that’s equal parts thrilling and grotesque. Later, Goldbug skewers influencer wellness culture through a sibling’s pyramid-scheme downfall, its tech-glitch kills inventive and on-theme. These Poe-infused vignettes shine when they lean into visceral spectacle—impalements, immolations, animalistic frenzies—elevating routine family feuds into something operatic. However, weaker entries, like those fixated on lab accidents or courtroom paranoia, feel more procedural than poetic, diluting the supernatural menace amid procedural tangents.

Flanagan’s direction thrives in the atmospheric details: opulent sets that rot from within, shadows pooling like guilt, a score that swells with mournful strings underscoring inevitable doom. Performances anchor the excess, with Carla Gugino’s shape-shifting Verna stealing scenes as a devilish facilitator—charming one moment, apocalyptic the next. Bruce Greenwood lends Roderick a defeated majesty, his monologues on greed and legacy landing with gravitas despite their length. Mark Hamill’s fixer adds gravelly comic menace, a cold pragmatist navigating the Ushers’ moral sewer. The younger cast fares variably; some heirs pop as vicious caricatures—the coke-fueled playboy, the ruthless scientist—while others blur into interchangeable privilege.

Thematically, the series wields Poe’s obsessions—entombment, madness, retribution—against Big Pharma’s sins, drawing parallels to real-world opioid scandals without subtlety. Roderick and Madeline’s rise from rags via a addictive painkiller mirrors ethical shortcuts in pursuit of immortality, their “house” both literal estate and dynastic delusion. Verna embodies karmic balance, not mindless evil, her interventions exposing how wealth insulates sin until cosmic debt collectors arrive. This critique bites, especially in rants decrying humanity’s commodification of suffering, but preachy asides can halt the dread, turning horror into TED Talk territory. Flanagan fans will recognize his grief motifs, here twisted into generational poison rather than personal catharsis.

Pacing falters in the midsection, where flashbacks to the Ushers’ origin drag against the ticking present-day trial. The frame narrative, while elegant, withholds twists too long, making early hours feel like setup over payoff. Gorehounds get inventive set pieces, from pendulum blades to heart-pounding pursuits, but scares prioritize irony over outright terror—less Hereditary shocks, more Final Destination comeuppance. For a one-season arc, it wraps tightly, circling back to Poe’s raven as a symbol of unending loss, though the finale’s revelations feel more intellectually tidy than emotionally shattering.

As adaptation, it honors Poe’s spirit over fidelity, cherry-picking motifs from tales like The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Pit and the Pendulum to fuel a contemporary revenge saga. Purists might chafe at the liberties—Poe’s claustrophobic intimacy traded for ensemble sprawl—but the result captures his misanthropy, updating crumbling aristocracy to cutthroat capitalism. It’s Flanagan’s angriest work, swapping supernatural melancholy for gleeful vengeance, yet retains his humanism: even monsters get poignant final beats, hinting at redemption’s flicker amid ruin.

The Fall of the House of Usher polarizes like much of Flanagan’s output—loved for audacity, critiqued for indulgence. Its ensemble and kills draw praise, but detractors note tonal whiplash between camp and sincerity. For horror enthusiasts craving literary flair over found-footage tropes, it’s a feast; casual viewers may tire of the lectures. Compared to Flanagan’s Hill House or Midnight Mass, it’s less introspective, more punitive, trading tears for dark laughs at the mighty’s tumble.

Ultimately, the miniseries succeeds as pulpy prestige, a bloody valentine to Poe that indicts modern excess without fully escaping melodrama’s clutches. Its highs—Gugino’s tour de force, baroque deaths, thematic ambition—outweigh the bloat, making it binge-worthy for gothic fans. In Netflix’s crowded horror slate, it stands out for wit and wickedness, a flawed but ferocious reminder that some houses, and legacies, deserve to fall.

Song of the Day: The Number of the Beast (by Iron Maiden)

Posted on January 18, 2026 by Arleigh

Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” has always been more than its fire-and-brimstone title suggests — it’s paranoia turned into power. The song’s galloping riffs and Bruce Dickinson’s almost theatrical wail capture the feeling of witnessing something apocalyptic yet beautiful. In the context of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, that sense of awe and fear fits perfectly with the film’s tone. The track mirrors the world’s collapse into ritual madness — humanity trying to reframe its pain through cultish belief, just as Maiden’s lyrics dance between religious imagery and sheer existential panic.

There’s also a rhythm to the song that mirrors how The Bone Temple paces its moments of horror and release. The pounding drums feel like the heartbeat of survivors, racing through collapsed cities while their faith in reason splinters. Just as Iron Maiden’s piece builds to a manic crescendo, the film layers intensity until chaos feels almost sacred. The chorus could easily underscore the movie’s climactic sequences — not as a literal choice, but emotionally, where fascination with evil becomes indistinguishable from fear.

What ties them together most is their shared refusal to moralize the apocalypse. Iron Maiden tells a story about vision and hysteria — not right or wrong — and The Bone Temple does the same, showing how people build new devotions in the ashes of old systems. Both suggest that when we stare into horror long enough, it stares back with rhythm and purpose. In that way, “The Number of the Beast” isn’t just an anthem of terror; it’s a hymn for the end of reason — making it the perfect spiritual soundtrack for this chapter of the 28 Years Later world.

The Number of the Beast

Woe to you, o’er Earth and Sea
For the Devil sends the beast with wrath
Because he knows the time is short
Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast
For it is a human number
Its number is six hundred and sixty six

I left alone, my mind was blank
I needed time to think to get the memories from my mind
What did I see? Can I believe that what I saw
That night was real and not just fantasy?
Just what I saw, in my old dreams, were they
Reflections of my warped mind staring back at me?
Cause in my dreams, it’s always there
The evil face that twists my mind and brings me to despair

Yeah!

The night was black, was no use holding back
Cause I just had to see, was someone watching me?
In the mist, dark figures move and twist
Was all this for real or just some kind of hell?

666 the number of the beast
Hell and fire was spawned to be released

Torches blazed and sacred chants were phrased
As they start to cry, hands held to the sky
In the night, the fires are burning bright
The ritual has begun, Satan’s work is done

666 the number of the beast
Sacrifice is going on tonight

This can’t go on, I must inform the law
Can this still be real, or just some crazy dream?
But I feel drawn towards the chanting hordes
They seem to mesmerize, can’t avoid their eyes

666 the number of the beast
666 the one for you and me

I’m coming back, I will return
And I’ll possess your body and I’ll make you burn
I have the fire, I have the force
I have the power to make my evil take its course

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (dir. by Nia DaCosta) Review

Posted on January 17, 2026 by Arleigh

“Every skull is a set of thoughts. These sockets saw and these jaws spoke and swallowed. This is a monument to them. A temple.” — Dr. Ian Kelson

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple crashes into 2026 with the force of a Rage-infected sprint, claiming its spot as one of the year’s top films right out of the gate, flaws and all. Directed by Nia DaCosta, the film continues to showcase her evolving command as a filmmaker, building directly on the promise of her 2025 character study Hedda, where she dissected emotional isolation with surgical precision and atmospheric tension. Where The Marvels in 2023 felt like a worthy attempt hampered by a screenplay that couldn’t decide on a tone—swinging between quippy banter and high-stakes drama while beholden to the cinematic universe’s endless interconnections—The Bone Temple unleashes DaCosta at full throttle, free from franchise baggage to craft a horror epic that’s visually poetic, thematically fearless, and rhythmically assured.

Yeah, it revels in bleakness that can border on exhausting, and its structure wanders more than it charges forward, but those imperfections only underscore how fiercely original and alive it feels compared to the rote horror sequels we’re usually fed. Decades past the initial outbreak that defined 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, the apocalypse here isn’t a fresh crisis anymore—it’s infrastructure, a grim new normal etched into the landscape. Survivors haven’t rebuilt so much as repurposed the ruins, carving out rituals and monuments that say as much about lingering trauma as they do about adaptation. The Rage virus still turns people into feral killers, ripping through flesh in those signature bursts of speed and savagery, but the infected have evolved in intriguing ways that deepen the world’s mythology without overshadowing the human core. The spotlight swings to human extremes: towering bone architectures raised as memorials, nomadic gangs treating murder like liturgy, and lone figures wrestling with whether dignity even matters when bodies pile up unmarked. This pivot lets the film breathe in ways the earlier entries couldn’t, expanding a zombie-adjacent thriller into something folk-horrific and introspective.

Dr. Ian Kelson embodies that shift, and Ralph Fiennes delivers what might be his meatiest role in years—a reclusive physician-architect whose Bone Temple dominates the story like a character itself, adding a profound level of tragic humanity that stands in stark, poignant contrast to the nihilistic worldview of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal and his blindly devoted followers. Picture spires of meticulously arranged skulls and femurs, bleached white against misty Scottish skies, lit at night like profane altars: it’s production design that hits you visually first, then sinks in thematically as Kelson’s obsession with cataloging the dead. Fiennes plays him not as a villain or eccentric, but as a man fraying at the edges—tender when easing a dying woman’s passage (Spike’s mother, in a flashback that sets the whole narrative in motion), ruthless in his logic about preserving memory over sentiment. “Every skull is a set of thoughts,” he murmurs in one standout line, sockets staring empty, jaws frozen mid-word—a perfect encapsulation of the film’s meditation on legacy amid oblivion. Those quiet scenes, where Kelson debates ethics with survivors or observes the infected Samson with clinical curiosity shading into something paternal, ground the movie’s wilder swings and prove Fiennes can carry horror on sheer presence alone.

Spike, our entry point into this madness, carries scars from that childhood brush with the Temple and his mother’s end, propelling him toward Jimmy Crystal’s orbit like fate’s cruel magnet. He’s no square-jawed lead; he’s reactive, watchful, hardening through trials that test his humanity without fully erasing it. That arc collides with Jimmy’s cult—a roving pack of devotees renamed his “seven fingers,” all aping the leader’s bleach-blond hair, loud tracksuits, and flashy trinkets in a uniformity that’s both comic and chilling. Jack O’Connell chews the scenery as Jimmy, a pint-sized prophet whose charisma masks profound damage: twitchy grins, boyish rants blending kids’ TV catchphrases with fire-and-brimstone, devotion to his “Old Nick” devil figure turning every kill into theater. The Savile visual parallels—those garish outfits evoking the real-life abuser’s predatory fame—add a layer of cultural poison, implying charisma survives apocalypse by mutating into something even uglier, with institutions gone but the hunger for idols intact. O’Connell makes Jimmy magnetic and monstrous, a performance that elevates the cult from trope to tragedy.

If the film’s greatness shines through performances and visuals, its violence tests that shine—deliberately, one suspects. Infected attacks deliver franchise-expected chaos: heads torn free, eyes clawed out, bodies pulped in handheld frenzy. But Jimmy’s rituals amp the sadism—knife duels extended into endurance ordeals, flayings half-glimpsed but fully heard, victims’ pleas dragging until empathy fatigues. It’s grueling, sometimes overlong, risking audience burnout, yet it serves the theme: in a Rage world, human-inflicted torment outlasts viral rage because it feeds on belief. DaCosta pulls punches visually (smart cuts, shadows over gore) but lingers on emotional fallout, making cruelty feel earned rather than exploited— a maturation from The Marvels‘ tonal whiplash into controlled, purposeful discomfort. Counterpoints pierce through: Jimmy Ink’s furtive kindnesses toward Spike, Ian and Samson’s drug-hazy field dances blurring monster and man, fragments of backstory humanizing even Jimmy’s frenzy. These glimmers don’t redeem the world—they make its harshness sting deeper, proving flickers of connection persist as defiant accidents.

Technically, the film flexes non-stop, with DaCosta’s post-Hedda assurance evident in every frame. Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography weds gritty digital shakes to sweeping drone shots, turning Highlands into deceptive idylls ruptured by whip-pans and flame flares. Sound design hums with menace—whistling winds masking howls, train rumbles underscoring rituals, screams echoing into silence for maximum unease. Editing mirrors the narrative’s spiral: episodic loops around Spike’s hardening, Ian’s doubt, Jimmy’s collapse, eschewing linear escalation for dream-logic dread that suits a “settled” apocalypse. The Temple centerpiece ritual explodes into metal-thrash worship, cultists moshing amid pyres—a grotesque stadium parody where faith meets fandom in blood-soaked ecstasy. Even the score pulses with restraint, letting ambient horror fill gaps better than bombast ever could.

Tonally, it juggles masterfully: tender Kelson vignettes abut cult carnage, philosophical riffs on atheism versus delusion frame gore-fests, folk-horror monuments clash with infection thriller roots. Themes of faith-as-coping, grief-as-art, ideology’s pitfalls land without preaching—Kelson’s secular duty versus Jimmy’s ecstatic nihilism debates through action, not monologue. The ending circles back to series emotional cores (survival’s cost, hope’s fragility) while forging ahead, teasing Spike’s grim purpose without cheap uplift.

Flaws? The runtime sags in cult stretches, bleakness borders masochistic, sprawl might frustrate plot-chasers. But these are risks of ambition, not laziness—choices that make triumphs (Fiennes’ gravitas, O’Connell’s feral spark, visuals’ poetry) land harder, all under DaCosta’s steady hand that Hedda honed and The Marvels tested. In January 2026, amid safe genre retreads, The Bone Temple towers: a sequel philosophically dense, actor-propelled, unafraid to wound deeply then whisper mercy. It hurts because it sees us clearly—craving structure in chaos, building temples from bones, real or imagined. One of the year’s best, period, for daring to evolve rather than echo.

Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 (by John Carpenter) Review

Posted on January 16, 2026 by Arleigh

John Carpenter’s Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 is an absolute gem of a compilation, breathing new life into 13 of his most unforgettable film themes with a killer mix of synth menace and live-band muscle that feels both nostalgic and freshly electrifying. Released in 2017 on the indie powerhouse Sacred Bones Records, this project pulls straight from Carpenter’s golden era of directing, spanning the lo-fi space oddities of Dark Star in 1974 all the way to the blood-soaked Western vibes of Vampires in 1998. Here, the master himself teams up with his son Cody Carpenter handling keyboards and his godson Daniel Davies ripping on guitar, delivering rerecorded versions that aren’t just facsimiles of the originals but revitalized beasts with modern production muscle. Clocking in at a tight 42 minutes, the album strikes that sweet spot between crystalline clarity and the warm, gritty analog fuzz of vintage synths, making it an essential spin for horror fans, synthwave enthusiasts, or anyone craving pure cinematic chills without firing up the projector. It’s the kind of record that turns your living room into a foggy, neon-lit nightmare factory, proving Carpenter’s scores were never mere background noise—they’re standalone monsters.

Right out of the gate, the album spotlights three absolute titans as its major standouts: the themes from The Thing, Halloween, and Escape from New York. These aren’t just tracks; they’re the sonic DNA of horror and sci-fi tension, retooled here to hit even harder with the benefit of hindsight and better gear. Take the Halloween theme—it’s the undisputed king of the collection, that iconic, haunting piano riff slicing through stabbing synth accents and a relentless, mechanical beat that creates this perfect off-kilter unease. It mirrors Michael Myers’ unstoppable, shambling lurch so viscerally that you can practically hear the Shape breathing down your neck; the simplicity is its genius—repetitive enough to burrow into your skull like a parasite, yet layered just right with those eerie high-end whistles and a pulse that never lets up. In this rerecord, the piano feels more intimate and ominous, the synths sharper, turning what was already a cultural earworm into something that demands volume cranked to 11.

Then there’s Escape from New York, which cranks everything up to gritty, dystopian overdrive with its crunchy guitar riff chewing through swelling synth waves and pounding, no-nonsense drums. It evokes Snake Plissken’s lone-wolf crawl through a prison-island Manhattan like a bluesy battle cry—mid-tempo swagger that’s tailor-made for high-stakes heists, shadowy escapes, and that pure ’80s anti-hero cool. Fans often mix it up with his Big Trouble in Little China groove because of the shared tough-guy energy, but here the rerecord leans harder into the guitar’s snarl and the synths’ ominous undercurrent, making it feel tougher, meaner, and ready for a modern apocalypse playlist. And don’t sleep on The Thing—it grabs Ennio Morricone’s frosty original cue and mutates it into peak Carpenter dread: deep, throbbing synth pulses underpin eerie, isolated stabs and desolate windswept effects that build a suffocating frozen isolation. This one’s all about the paranoia of shape-shifting aliens in an Antarctic hellscape—slow-burn horror that creeps under your skin, rewarding patient listeners with layers of tension that unfold over multiple spins. Critics might tuck it behind the flashier hits, but its subtlety makes it a powerhouse, especially in this version where the low-end rumble feels like cracking ice underfoot.

While those three rightfully dominate every conversation about the album (and they should, as they’re the heart-pounding peaks that define Carpenter’s sound), two deeply underrated gems absolutely deserve way more shine: the Christine theme and “Santiago (Vampires).” Christine sneaks up on you, opening with these foggy, ambient synth washes that evoke a quiet garage at midnight before exploding into full-on rock fury—fuzzy guitars screech, driving rhythms kick in, and it all nails the possessed Plymouth Fury’s vengeful, supernatural roar. It’s often overlooked amid the bigger icons, but this rerecord injects fresh menace, highlighting its dynamic arc from subtle creep to all-out chaos; imagine the car’s headlights flickering to life as the music revs up—pure possessed-machine terror that lingers like burnt rubber. “Santiago (Vampires)” is the other hidden firecracker, completely ditching the synth-heavy storm for sparse acoustic strums and reverb-drenched electric guitar in a sun-baked, dusty groove that screams Southwestern vampire hunt. It’s a total mood shifter—breezy yet tense, like a standoff in a ghost town at high noon—and criminally underappreciated next to the heavier hitters; the modal twang and open spaces give it a unique flavor that breaks up the album’s darker pulse beautifully, begging for more road-trip spins.

The rest of the tracklist does a stellar job setting up and framing these peaks without ever overshadowing them. “Assault on Precinct 13” barrels in early with its oppressive synth riff and militaristic pounding, hammering home that raw siege-mentality dread—still a total banger, but it takes a slight backseat to The Thing‘s more nuanced chill. “In the Mouth of Madness” dives from aggressive guitar riffs into vast ambient drifts, perfectly suiting the film’s reality-warping madness. “The Fog” floats delicate piano over misty, reverb-soaked swells that build a supernatural haze, like fog horns calling from the deep. “Prince of Darkness” broods heavy with slow, echoing riffs and a sense of gathering evil, feeding right into the album’s cohesive horror heartbeat. “Porkchop Express (Big Trouble in Little China)” grooves with that infectious trucker-rock energy, echoing Escape‘s swagger but with brighter, adventure-ready lifts for Kurt Russell’s wild ride. “They Live” layers in bluesy harmonica and slide guitar for a laconic, consumerist snarl, while “Starman” blooms into warm, romantic synth-orchestral bliss—think soaring melodies and rolling timpani for heartfelt ’80s alien love. The ultra-brief “Dark Star” blasts a proto-synth drone in under 90 seconds, more historical sketch than full banger, but it nods to Carpenter’s early experiments. All these solid supporting players keep the energy flowing, ensuring the majors land with maximum impact.

What ties it all together is Carpenter’s effortlessly cool style: deep, pulsating synth bass locks in with fuzzy, overdriven guitars and tight, hypnotic drumming to create grooves that build tension like a jump scare coiled to spring. The production is a standout—crisp and punchy, with Cody owning the rumbling low end while Davies carves sharp midrange bite, sidestepping the muffled haze of some vintage OST pressings. These themes thrive completely standalone now, untethered from their films but still evoking every shadowy corner. Yeah, there’s a touch of repetition in the fuzzy guitar tones and mid-tempo plods that can make straight-through listens feel a bit samey—it’s more killer playlist than wildly eclectic LP—but that’s a tiny nitpick when the big guns (The Thing, Halloween, Escape from New York, plus the slept-on Christine and Vampires) deliver one haymaker after another.

This collection doesn’t just compile; it cements Carpenter’s legacy as a shoestring-budget genius who scored generational nightmares with a handful of synths, guitars, and sheer instinct, directly inspiring synthwave legions like Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, and beyond. Don’t sleep on it; these tracks don’t just play—they haunt, they pump, and they endure for life, turning everyday moments into edge-of-your-seat thrills.

Song of the Day: Luck Be a Lady (by Robert Alda)

Posted on January 15, 2026 by Arleigh

In The Wrangler, using Robert Alda’s original version of “Luck Be a Lady” from Guys and Dolls hits differently than the more famous Sinatra take. Alda’s rendition, coming from the Broadway stage, is less smooth and more desperate—it’s a man bargaining with luck, not charming her. That’s a crucial difference in Fallout’s world. When Alda’s voice drifts through the smoky ruin of The Wrangler, it feels like an echo from a long-dead civilization—one where people still believed that fortune was something you could negotiate with. It grounds the scene in Fallout’s favorite tension: the clash between old optimism and new despair.

Thematically, the original version suits Fallout’s tone better. Sinatra’s version oozes control and self-assurance, while Alda sings with the anxious rhythm of someone clinging to hope. In the episode, that anxiety fits the stakes perfectly—characters gambling with their lives, exchanging trust for survival, and hoping the “lady” of luck doesn’t turn her back at the wrong moment. The Broadway earnestness becomes a tragic counterpoint to the brutality around it, emphasizing how fragile that old-world faith in luck or charm truly is.

By choosing Alda over Sinatra, the show subtly reframes what “luck” means in this universe. It’s not style or swagger—it’s survival by the skin of one’s teeth. The song’s theatrical flair feels almost haunting in a world where the audience is gone and the casino’s collapsed. Yet that’s what gives the moment its punch: Fallout has always used nostalgia as both soundtrack and satire, and with Alda’s pleading vocals hanging in the air, The Wrangler reminds us that sometimes, luck isn’t a lady at all—it’s just what’s left when everything else runs out.

Luck Be a Lady

They call you Lady Luck
But there is room for doubt
At times, you’ve had a very unlady-like way of running out
You’re on this date with me
The pickin’s have been lush
And yet before this evening is over
You might give me the brush

You might forget your manners
You might refuse to stay
And so the best that I can do is pray

Luck be a lady tonight
Luck be a lady tonight
Luck if you’ve ever been a lady to begin with, luck be a lady tonight

Luck let a gentleman see
How nice a dame you can be
I know the way you’ve treated other guys you’ve been with
Luck, be a lady with me

A lady doesn’t leave her escort
It isn’t fair, it isn’t nice
A lady doesn’t wander all over the room
And blow on some other guy’s dice
Let’s keep this party polite
Never get out of my sight
Stick me with me baby, I’m the fella you came in with
Luck, be a lady tonight

Luck, let a gentleman see
Just how nice, how nice a dame you can be
I know the way you’ve treated other guys you’ve been with
Luck be a lady with me

A lady doesn’t leave her escort
It isn’t fair, and it’s not nice
A lady doesn’t wander all over the room
And blow on some other guy’s dice
So let’s keep the party polite
Never get out of my sight
Stick with me baby, I’m the guy that you came in with
Luck be a lady
Luck be a lady
Luck be a lady, tonight

Review: Fallout (Season 2, Episode 5 “The Wrangler”)

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“Where I come from, which is America, the House always wins.” — Robert House

Episode 5 of Fallout Season 2 (“The Wrangler”) is the point where the show stops flirting with heartbreak and finally commits to it, using a brutally inevitable betrayal to crack open its core relationships while quietly escalating the bigger myth arc in the background. It is not the flashiest hour of the season, but it is one of the most emotionally coherent, and that focus is both its biggest strength and its main limitation.

Most of the episode’s weight lands on the dynamic between Lucy and The Ghoul, and the writers lean hard into that “we knew this was coming” tension without turning it into a cheap twist. The Ghoul’s choice to hand Lucy over to Hank in exchange for the continued survival of his cryo-frozen family feels properly miserable: the kind of decision that is logically defendable and morally ugly at the same time. Watching Lucy slowly clock that she’s been a bargaining chip this whole time, right after she and Coop finally seemed to be in sync, gives the betrayal some sting beyond the spectacle of her Power Fist launching him out the window and onto a pole. The performances sell it; Ella Purnell plays Lucy’s hurt as a mix of disbelief and exhaustion, while Walton Goggins lets just enough regret bleed through the monster façade to make it clear that this is hurting him, too, even as he pulls the trigger on the plan.

Structurally, the episode benefits from narrowing its scope to a few intersecting tracks instead of trying to cover the entire wasteland at once. On the Strip, Lucy’s Buffout fallout continues, sending her hunting for Addictol and instead into a mess involving price-gouging, a fake Sonny, and a very dead real Sonny in a bucket. That sequence walks the line between dark comedy and horror in a way that fits Fallout nicely, turning a simple “go buy meds” errand into a reminder that every familiar storefront can hide a fresh corpse and a new trauma. In parallel, The Ghoul drifts toward his fateful deal at the hotel bar, framed as a guy who has been running for two centuries and finally hits a wall he can’t brute-force his way through. The pacing is patient without feeling sluggish, and the way these threads converge in the final act makes the ending feel earned rather than engineered.

The big lore bomb this week is less about who’s shooting whom in New Vegas and more about who actually ended the world and what Vault-Tec was really doing. Mr. House’s scenes with pre-Ghoul Cooper ramp up the paranoia by suggesting that Barb may not be the one who actually pushed the apocalypse over the edge, hinting at “another player at the table” tied to the creation of Deathclaws and bigger, unseen forces. It is classic Fallout conspiracy energy: corporations within corporations, shadow projects like FEV and “Future Enterprise Ventures,” and a corporate end-of-the-world plan that feels less like a singular villain’s choice and more like the outcome of a lot of self-interested people nudging the same disaster. The episode does not over-explain any of this, which is smart; it plants a few specific clues—like Norm’s discovery that Vault-Tec’s phase two revolves around genetic testing and forced evolution—and then lets your mind connect it to everything from Deathclaws to the vault experiments we have already seen.

Norm’s storyline, which could easily feel like a cutaway from the “real” show, actually rebounds this week by giving the corporate plot teeth. His trip with the defrosted junior executives to Vault-Tec HQ mixes bleak humor—finding Janice’s corpse still at her desk, complete with coworkers sniping about her work ethic—with genuine dread as he starts to piece together that FEV is basically a “gene-altering agent for organism supercharging.” It is not subtle, but it works, especially when you realize how neatly it dovetails with what Hank is doing with that head-device in New Vegas: mind control, memory wiping, and turning humans into tools that fit Vault-Tec’s objectives better than their original personalities ever would. Norm getting choked out just as he starts to get real answers is a little on-the-nose as a cliffhanger, yet it keeps his thread from feeling aimless and promises that his office snooping will matter more than it might initially seem.

On the spectacle side, the episode plays a funny trick: it teases what looks like a huge Deathclaw set piece on the Strip and then has Lucy and The Ghoul do what any sensible player has done in the games—run like hell and load into a different area. For anyone hoping for a full-on Deathclaw brawl, it is bound to be a letdown, especially since three of them are staged as this major escalation and then promptly sidestepped. That said, the choice is thematically on point; the show leans into the fear of the creatures rather than the mechanics of fighting them, and seeing The Ghoul genuinely terrified ties nicely back to his first encounter with one in Alaska two centuries ago. New Vegas itself feels more alive here, with Freeside looking busier and the Strip more dangerous, even if the action is more about near-misses and quick exits than big choreographed battles.

The humor is hit-and-miss but usually lands on the right side of weird. The Snake Oil Salesman’s return, only to be drafted as Hank’s “voluntary” guinea pig for a head gadget that can pop skulls or wipe memories, leans into the show’s nastier comedic streak. His eagerness to forget a life full of sleaze says a lot about him in a single, darkly funny beat, while also underlining how casually Hank treats human minds as raw material. Not every gag works—some of the junior exec bits feel like they are chasing a joke about tech-bro sociopathy we have already seen before—but the episode keeps the comedy tightly woven into character and plot instead of dropping in random skits.

If there is a legitimate knock against this episode, it is that the emotional gut-punch between Lucy and The Ghoul is so strong that almost everything else can feel like setup by comparison. The supposed “answer” about who dropped the bombs is really more of another mystery box, and viewers looking for a clearer reveal may feel strung along. The Deathclaw fake-out also risks feeling like the show talking a big game and then refusing to spend the budget to pay it off, even if the character beats that replace the fight are strong. And while Norm’s storyline is finally paying off, it still sometimes plays like a slower, less visceral series running parallel to the one in New Vegas, which might frustrate anyone hooked primarily on Lucy and The Ghoul’s arc.

Still, as a midpoint episode, this is exactly where Fallout needs to hurt. The Ghoul’s betrayal is painful precisely because the show has spent so much time making Lucy good for him, setting her up as the one person who makes his humanity flicker back on—and then forcing him to choose the ghosts of his past over the partner standing right in front of him. Episode 5 might not deliver the biggest action of the season, but it gives the story a necessary emotional crash-out, sharpens the larger Vault-Tec conspiracy, and leaves nearly every character in a worse, more interesting place than they started.

Fallout Season 2 Episodes

Review: Greenland 2 – Migration (dir. by Ric Roman Waugh)

Posted on January 13, 2026 by Arleigh

Greenland 2: Migration is a sequel that mostly leans into “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” for better and for worse. It delivers sturdy spectacle, a committed Gerard Butler, and a tense family-through-hell journey, but it also rehashes a lot of the first film’s beats and pushes the plausibility envelope more often this time around. If you were on board with Greenland as a grounded, human-scale disaster movie, this one feels like the more bombastic, road-movie expansion pack rather than a full evolution.

Set about five years after the comet strike that wiped out most of civilization, Greenland 2: Migration finds the Garrity family still holed up in the Greenland bunker complex, part of a fragile community waiting for the surface to become livable again. John (Gerard Butler) now works as a scout/engineer, Allison (Morena Baccarin) has stepped into more of a leadership role within the bunker, and their son Nathan is older, restless, and itching to prove himself outside the relative safety of underground life. When escalating quakes, electromagnetic storms, and general planetary chaos literally collapse the bunker around them, the film quickly turns into a survival trek across a devastated Europe toward the Clarke impact crater in southern France, rumored to be the one spot on Earth that has actually healed.

As a premise, the film works; it gives the story a clear A-to-B structure and justifies the shift from the contained panic of the first movie to a post-apocalyptic road odyssey. The script keeps the stakes straightforward: reach the crater region or die trying, while dodging unpredictable weather events, territorial military forces, and desperate survivors who are just as dangerous as the environment. There is something appealingly old‑school about how it plays as a throwback survival picture—less interested in intricate worldbuilding and more in reaction, improvisation, and narrow escapes.

The downside is that you can feel the film constantly echoing Greenland’s structure: another long, peril-filled journey, another series of escalating close calls, another parade of briefly sketched side characters who exist to either help or threaten the Garritys for a single sequence. The first film had novelty on its side and a sharper sense of dread as the comet approached; here, the formula is familiar enough that you can often tell who will live, who will die, and roughly when another set piece is about to kick off. That predictability doesn’t kill the tension outright, but it does flatten the emotional peaks, especially if you walked in hoping for a genuinely new angle on this world.

Gerard Butler remains the anchor, and this is squarely in his comfort zone. He plays John as perpetually exhausted yet stubbornly practical, the kind of guy who will grumble his way through heroism, and there’s an easy, weathered charm to that. Morena Baccarin gets a bit more agency this time, with Allison often driving decisions instead of just reacting to them, though the movie still stops short of really turning her into a co-lead with equal interiority. Roman Griffin Davis steps in as the older Nathan, and he brings a nervous, teenage energy that fits the “kid who grew up in a bunker and wants to see the world” vibe, even if the character’s arc hits pretty familiar notes about bravery and responsibility.

The script does flirt with heavier themes: the psychological toll of surviving the end of the world, the guilt of those who made it into the bunkers versus those left outside, and the question of what “home” even means when the planet itself has effectively turned against you. There are moments—like the chaotic clashes around remaining bunkers or the wary interactions with other survivor groups—that suggest a more morally murky, Children of Men‑style story lurking underneath. But the movie rarely lingers on these ideas; it tends to touch them, nod, and then hurry back to the next escape sequence or visual spectacle.

Visually, though, Greenland 2: Migration is where the sequel justifies its existence. Director Ric Roman Waugh and the crew make great use of European locations and Icelandic landscapes to sell a world that has been carved up by tectonic violence and choked with ash, but is slowly, unevenly rebuilding. The dried-out English Channel, the ravaged coastlines, and the eerie, storm‑lit skies give the film a distinct apocalyptic texture that feels different enough from the North American focus of the first movie. While some of the physics and survival odds strain credibility—especially as the Garritys walk away from setpiece after setpiece—there’s no denying the spectacle is engaging on a big screen.

The pacing is generally brisk; at around an hour and a half, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it’s usually onto the next problem before you have time to overthink the last one. That said, the middle stretch starts to feel a little modular, like a video game where each region is an encounter: Liverpool bunker standoff, English Channel crossing, roadside bandits, insurgent ambush, and so on. Each of these sequences is competently staged, but because the emotional throughline is fairly simple—protect the family, get to the crater—the movie risks becoming a string of obstacle courses rather than a journey that deepens the characters in meaningful ways.

Where the film does land emotionally is in its treatment of sacrifice and the long-term cost of survival. John’s cumulative radiation exposure, picked up over years of scouting the hazardous surface, is a smart, quietly tragic detail, and the way the story gradually brings that to the forefront gives the third act a genuine sense of finality. The losses along the way, including allies who join the trek and do not make it, often feel a bit telegraphed, but they at least reinforce the idea that survival in this world comes with a steep bill that keeps coming due. The film’s ending, at the Clarke crater, delivers a cautiously hopeful image without completely sugarcoating what it took to get there, and that balance of bleakness and optimism fits the series well.

On the more mechanical side, the editing and sound design do a lot of heavy lifting. The cross‑cutting in the disaster scenes keeps geography mostly clear, and the low, grinding rumble of shifting earth and sudden storms adds tension even when the visuals are mostly people running or driving. The score is functional rather than memorable, but it meshes with the film’s focus on constant forward momentum instead of big thematic musical statements. It’s the kind of craft that doesn’t call attention to itself, which suits a movie that wants to feel like a direct, unpretentious survival yarn.

In terms of how it stacks up to the original, Greenland 2: Migration is solid but clearly a step less distinctive. The first film surprised people by grounding its spectacle in everyday logistics—pharmacy runs, traffic jams, family arguments—and by keeping the camera mostly at human scale during an extinction‑level event. The sequel, by comparison, nudges closer to standard disaster‑franchise territory: bigger vistas, more action, and a stronger sense of franchise‑building, but less of that “this could be you and your neighbors” feeling that made Greenland stand out. Depending on what you want from a sequel, that may be a selling point or a letdown.

Overall, Greenland 2: Migration is a competent, occasionally affecting continuation that doesn’t embarrass the original but also doesn’t redefine it. If all you’re looking for is another round of grounded‑ish apocalypse survival with Gerard Butler grimly shepherding his family through increasingly wild scenarios, this delivers exactly that, with a few striking images and some sincere emotional beats along the way. If you were hoping for a more daring thematic leap or a significantly different narrative shape, this will probably feel like a polished retread with a new coat of ash and ice. Either way, it’s an easy recommendation for fans of the first film and a decent mid‑winter disaster flick for anyone in the mood to watch people crawl through the end of the world one more time.

Review: Greenland (dir. by Ric Roman Waugh)

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Arleigh

“But sometimes you just gotta suck it up. Push through, right? Even when you’re super scared.” — John Garrity

Greenland is one of those disaster movies that sneaks up on you a bit. It sells itself like another “stuff blows up while Gerard Butler scowls” kind of ride, but what’s actually on screen is a more grounded, road-trip survival story about a fractured family trying to stay together as the world quietly ends in the background. Originally slated for a wide theatrical release, the film dropped right as the COVID pandemic shutdown began in early 2020, forcing theaters to close and tanking its box office hopes before it even started. That quick pivot to video-on-demand and streaming services gave it a real second life though, letting it find an audience at home when everyone was hunkered down, doomscrolling real-world chaos that felt eerily similar to the on-screen panic. It’s not a genre reinvention, but it’s a solid entry that balances tense set pieces with surprisingly sincere family drama, even if it leans hard on contrivances and some uneven effects along the way.

The setup is simple: John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their young son Nathan are thrown into chaos when a supposedly “spectacle only” comet called Clarke turns out to be a civilization-ending event. The family receives a government alert selecting them for evacuation, which kicks off a desperate scramble through crowded bases, riots, and crumbling infrastructure as they try to get to a classified bunker system in Greenland before impact. The structure is very much “point A to point B with escalating obstacles,” and if you’ve seen any road-movie apocalypse story, you can probably predict the broad strokes: separation, dangerous strangers, moral compromises, last-minute reunions, and a hopeful-but-not-too-happy ending.

What makes Greenland stand out, at least compared to louder fare like Geostorm or the Emmerich filmography, is the way it shrinks the perspective down to the family level. The script keeps the camera glued to people on the ground instead of spending time with scientists in war rooms or presidents giving big speeches, so the apocalypse feels like a series of frightening news alerts and glimpses of distant fire instead of a nonstop CGI showreel. That choice works in the film’s favor; the tension comes less from “how big is the explosion?” and more from whether this specific kid gets his medication in time or whether this specific couple makes it through a checkpoint together.

Gerard Butler reins in his usual action-hero mode and plays John as a somewhat worn-down, very fallible guy who’s been messing up at home long before the comet showed up. He’s not the indestructible savior archetype; he panics, he makes mistakes, and he ends up in violent situations that feel ugly instead of triumphant, especially during a grim sequence on a truck full of evacuees where a man tries to take his wristband and everything spirals. Butler’s limited but believable emotional range works here, and you can see why some viewers singled this out as one of his better recent performances in a genre that usually just uses him as a gruff mascot.

Morena Baccarin gets a bit more to play than disaster-movie wives usually do, which is a pleasant surprise. Allison’s arc runs parallel to John’s for large chunks of the film as she navigates looters, manipulative would-be rescuers, and the absolute nightmare scenario of having her child kidnapped by a couple trying to pass him off as their own to gain access to evacuation flights. Baccarin sells the mix of desperation and competence; she’s constantly stuck in situations where the “right” moral call is murky, but the film never reduces her to someone who just waits around for John to fix things.

The emotional spine of the story rests on the family dynamic and the small, very human interactions they have with strangers along the way. You get scenes with compassionate people—like the FEMA workers who listen to Nathan when he insists he’s been kidnapped—that remind you the apocalypse doesn’t instantly turn everyone into a villain, even as the script also leans into the uglier side of survival instinct. That push and pull between kindness and cruelty keeps Greenland from feeling completely nihilistic, and it lines up with the recurring idea that the real threat is less the comet itself than what people are willing to do to outrun it.

On the disaster side of things, the film works with a mid-sized budget, and you can feel that restraint in both good and bad ways. When the CGI is kept at a distance—comet fragments streaking across the sky, distant impacts lighting the horizon, a sudden shockwave rolling through a neighborhood—it does a solid job of selling scope without drawing too much attention to its limitations. Up close, though, the seams show: some of the destruction shots and digital fireballs look cheap, which undercuts moments that are clearly meant to be awe-inspiring or terrifying, something multiple viewers have criticized as “not consistently convincing CGI effects.”

Pacing-wise, Greenland rarely slows down, which is both a strength and a drawback. The film opens with domestic tension and immediately starts ratcheting things up: news of impacts, sudden evacuation notices, airport chaos, violent confrontations, and constant travel. That forward momentum keeps the film from dragging, but it also leads to what some viewers see as “too many plot twists and always new obstacles to overcome,” a sense that the script keeps piling on one more crisis just to keep the adrenaline high.

Because the film tries to have it both ways—grounded survival and genre thrills—it occasionally betrays its own realism. The amount of coincidence needed to reunite characters after brutal separations, or to get the family to exactly the right airfield and exactly the right plane, feels contrived even by disaster-movie standards. By the time the story reaches its final act in Greenland, complete with last-minute sprinting toward bunkers while the worst of the comet hits, you can feel it edging closer to the “unfortunately genre-typical heroic towards the end” vibe that some reviewers pointed out.

Where Greenland does feel a bit different from many peers is in tone. It’s not quippy, it’s not self-aware, and it does not pause for big “cool” shots of landmarks getting obliterated just for spectacle. The destruction is mostly glimpsed from the vantage point of regular people, via news broadcasts or distant views, which makes the apocalypse feel weirdly more intimate and plausible, like something you’d doomscroll rather than watch unfold from a helicopter. That seriousness is refreshing if you’re tired of disaster movies that treat mass death as a theme park ride, but it also means the film can come off as dour if you were hoping for more escapist fun.

Reception-wise, Greenland landed in that “better than expected, still not amazing” territory with both critics and audiences. Some viewers praised it as “one of the best disaster movies” of recent years specifically because it prioritizes human drama over “weightless CG spectacle,” calling out how tense and emotionally engaging the smaller-scale approach feels. Others shrugged it off as “usual disaster film fare,” pointing to its predictable structure, familiar character beats, and lack of a truly clever story, saying it’s fine for passing time but not particularly memorable. Its streaming surge during lockdowns only amplified word-of-mouth, turning what could’ve been a forgotten theatrical casualty into a go-to comfort scare for pandemic viewers craving controlled chaos.

Ultimately, Greenland sits in a comfortable middle lane. It’s not trying to reinvent the genre, and it doesn’t fully escape its clichés, but it does care more about its characters than its body count, and that goes a long way. If you go in expecting a grounded, on-the-road family survival story with occasional bursts of large-scale chaos, the film mostly delivers, bolstered by committed performances from Butler and Baccarin and a tone that takes the end of the world just seriously enough. If you’re looking for jaw-dropping effects or a genuinely surprising narrative, it will probably feel like a solid, slightly grim, one-and-done watch that does its job and quietly exits before wearing out its welcome—especially resonant for those who caught it streaming while the real world felt a little too apocalyptic itself.