Guilty Pleasure No. 126: Alligator (dir. by Lewis Teague)

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Arleigh

Lewis Teague’s Alligator is exactly the sort of movie that sounds like a bad joke until you sit down with it and realize it is having a much better time than most “serious” creature features. The premise is pure drive-in delirium: a baby alligator is flushed down a toilet, survives in the sewer system beneath St. Louis, Missouri, feeds on discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones, and eventually becomes a gigantic, people-eating urban nightmare. It is absurd from the start, but that absurdity is the movie’s best asset. Alligator is not a good film in the polished, tightly controlled sense. It is too clunky, too broad, and too openly ridiculous for that. But it is never boring, and it understands that a movie about a giant alligator stalking the sewer tunnels under St. Louis should be grimy, nasty, funny, and just a little bit stupid.

The film arrives in that sweet spot between the straightforward animal-attack movies of the 1970s and the increasingly self-aware horror comedies of the 1980s. It has some of the structure of a Jaws knockoff, of course: authorities dismiss warnings, a difficult investigator takes the danger seriously, and a creature grows into an outsized public threat before the final confrontation. But Alligator does not have the resources, atmosphere, or aquatic terror of Spielberg’s film, and to its credit, it does not really pretend to. Instead, it leans into the cheapness of its materials. The alligator is mostly an oversized practical effect, sometimes convincing enough to be threatening and sometimes looking like the kind of thing that should be knocking over miniature buildings in a 1950s monster movie. The difference is that Teague knows how to frame the thing. He keeps the creature partly hidden when that helps, lets the sewer setting do much of the atmospheric heavy lifting, and saves the full ridiculousness of the monster for when ridiculousness is exactly what the audience wants.

There is an immediately appealing trashy logic to the story. The alligator is not simply an animal that wandered into the wrong place; it is a product of environmental carelessness, corporate experimentation, and the city’s tendency to throw its problems underground. The movie opens with a young girl’s pet alligator being flushed away after it bites someone, a cruelly comic act that functions as the film’s entire moral universe in miniature. Humans dispose of an inconvenient creature, neglect the consequences, and then act shocked when the creature becomes a gigantic murderous problem. The idea is broadly ecological and vaguely anti-corporate, but Alligator never becomes preachy. It keeps those elements in the background as an excuse for gore, sewer crawling, and a steadily escalating body count.

Robert Forster plays David Madison, a St. Louis cop with the permanently tired demeanor of someone who has been forced to listen to too many witnesses describe impossible things. Forster is a major reason the movie works as well as it does. He does not play the material like a joke, but he also does not strain to elevate it into prestige horror. His performance is dry, irritated, and completely appropriate for a man investigating missing-person cases that increasingly point toward a subterranean reptile large enough to eat a car. Madison is not a particularly complicated protagonist, but Forster gives him enough weary professionalism that the audience can follow him through the nonsense. His deadpan approach also makes the film funnier without turning it into outright parody.

The supporting cast is a strange, entertaining mixture of familiar character-actor energy and exploitation-movie weirdness. Robin Riker plays Marisa, a reptile expert and Madison’s eventual love interest, and she is better than the role strictly requires. She has a brisk, practical presence, which is useful in a movie where most characters either refuse to believe the obvious or exist to become alligator food. The romance between her and Madison is thin, but it is handled with enough low-key charm that it does not stop the movie cold. It feels like a necessary B-movie ingredient rather than a desperate attempt to convince viewers that they are watching something emotionally profound.

Then there is Henry Silva. Honestly, the presence of Henry Silva alone tells you what kind of movie Alligator is trying to be. Silva plays Colonel Brockman, a professional hunter hired by the evil pharmaceutical company to find and kill Ramon, the giant gator created by its illegal growth-hormone dumping. He is not the mastermind behind the scientific mess; he is the company’s hired cleanup crew, brought in once the whole operation has become too big and too toothy to bury. Silva approaches the role with exactly the degree of swaggering, oily menace it needs. He is here to be Henry Silva in a monster movie, which means glaring, sneering, and acting as though the chance to hunt a massive sewer reptile is simply another profitable afternoon at work. Every time he shows up, the movie gets a little more fun.

The screenplay comes from John Sayles, which is almost comically overqualified on paper, though it makes more sense once the dialogue starts landing. Sayles gives the movie flashes of wit and an edge of social satire that keep it from being totally disposable. There are jokes about cops, politicians, wealthy elites, and corporate corruption, and while none of them are especially subtle, they have the right bite for a film this grubby. The story’s best satirical impulse is its refusal to make the rich and powerful merely unlucky victims of the monster. The alligator’s rampage eventually collides with a wealthy social gathering, and the movie takes obvious pleasure in turning a fancy event into a feeding ground. It is not exactly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in its class consciousness, but it does understand that watching an enormous reptile crash through the polished facade of upper-class respectability is satisfying.

Teague directs with the workmanlike confidence of someone who knows that the material only needs to get from one entertaining set piece to another. The sewer scenes are the film’s strongest visual material. They are damp, shadowy, cluttered, and full of the sort of industrial grime that exploitation cinema loves. The setting is inherently creepy because it is both unreal and plausible: everyone knows a city like St. Louis has tunnels, pipes, forgotten chambers, and places where things can disappear, even if nobody really believes a giant alligator lives down there. The movie uses that unease effectively. When characters descend into the darkness, the tension is simple but real. You know something huge is moving nearby, and you know the special effects are not going to hold up to close inspection, but the atmosphere carries you through.

The attacks are uneven, but that is part of the charm. Some are genuinely nasty, particularly when the movie lets the creature strike suddenly from the shadows. Others are so exaggerated that they become funny in ways the filmmakers likely anticipated. There is a particularly memorable moment involving a child and a swimming pool that has the gleefully tasteless punch of old-school grindhouse horror. Alligator is never as graphic as the nastier exploitation films of its era, but it has enough blood, torn bodies, and monstrous chomping to satisfy an audience looking for low-rent carnage. It knows the basic rule of this kind of movie: if you are going to ask viewers to accept a mutant sewer alligator, you had better let it eat some people.

What makes Alligator last beyond its premise is that it does not seem embarrassed by what it is. There are many creature features that feel apologetic, as if the filmmakers know they are making junk and are waiting for the audience to laugh at them. Teague’s film is junk, absolutely, but it is crafted junk. It has actual pacing, committed actors, useful atmosphere, and a screenplay that occasionally has more on its mind than the average monster-on-the-loose picture. It is bad enough that its flaws become part of the entertainment, especially whenever the huge reptile lumbers into view or the plot makes a leap that only makes sense if nobody involved pauses to think for ten seconds. Yet it is not so bad that it becomes a chore. That is the crucial distinction.

By the time Alligator reaches its climax, it has delivered nearly everything its title promises: sewers, corrupt businessmen, cops with guns, practical monster effects, socialites getting their comeuppance, and Henry Silva looking like he would gladly accept a corporate paycheck to hunt an enormous mutant reptile. It is the kind of film best watched with an appreciation for grime, excess, and the noble tradition of exploitation cinema turning a ridiculous idea into a perfectly decent Saturday-night monster movie. Alligator will not make anyone forget the great creature features, but it earns its place as a scrappy, trashy, oddly lovable B-movie. It is not awful. It is not even truly bad. It is just delightfully cheap, mean, and goofy enough to remind you why bad movies can sometimes be more fun than good ones.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Anime You Should Be Watching: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Posted on August 16, 2026 by Arleigh

“Don’t forget. Believe in yourself. Not in the you who believes in me. Not the me who believes in you. Believe in the you who believes in yourself.” — Kamina

Gurren Lagann is one of those anime that seems to announce itself at maximum volume before the opening theme has even finished. It is loud, ridiculous, earnest, aggressively stylish, and so emotionally committed to its own escalation that it somehow transforms drills, sunglasses, tiny robots, and increasingly impossible acts of defiance into a genuinely moving epic. Produced by Gainax and originally broadcast in 2007, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann begins underground with a timid boy named Simon and ends in a place so cosmically huge that describing it risks making the show sound like parody. But that journey—from cramped tunnels beneath the earth to a battle for humanity’s future among the stars—is exactly why it still lands so hard.

The premise starts simply. Simon lives in an underground village where people have been conditioned to accept a small, confined existence beneath a hostile surface world. He spends his days digging tunnels, largely ignored by the others around him, until his life is upended by Kamina, a reckless older boy who insists that the surface exists and that humans belong there. Kamina’s conviction is less a coherent philosophy than a full-force personality trait: he believes in breaking through walls because walls are there to be broken. When Simon discovers a small drill-shaped device and a miniature mecha called Lagann, the pair’s ambitions become suddenly possible. Their escape to the surface introduces Yoko, the series’ sharp-shooting, level-headed third lead, and kicks off a war against the Beastmen and their towering Gunmen.

On paper, that sounds like a standard mecha adventure. In practice, Gurren Lagann uses that foundation as a launchpad for a story about grief, courage, self-definition, and the strange process of becoming the person you need to be after the person you depended on is gone. Its early episodes are especially effective because Simon is not immediately framed as a hidden hero. He is anxious, withdrawn, and clearly accustomed to having Kamina speak for him. Kamina may be the show’s loudest presence, but Simon is its emotional center. The series understands that confidence is not just something a character “gets” after a training montage. It has to be built through failure, fear, loss, responsibility, and the gradual realization that admiration is not the same thing as identity.

Kamina is still the character most people remember first, and it is easy to see why. His dialogue is endlessly quotable, his poses are absurdly theatrical, and his belief in Simon is powerful precisely because it is so unconditional. Kamina does not believe Simon is capable because Simon has proven himself; he believes Simon will prove himself because he already sees something in him. That relationship gives the early part of Gurren Lagann its heart. Kamina is not merely a mentor figure or a source of comic bravado. He is the force that makes Simon look upward. The show’s famous “believe in the me that believes in you” idea could have been corny in another context, but here it becomes a sincere expression of what it means to lend someone confidence until they can create their own.

The series’ willingness to change after its major emotional turning point is what elevates it beyond a very good action show. Gurren Lagann understands that inspirational speeches cannot erase trauma. Simon does not simply inherit Kamina’s confidence; he has to confront the fact that trying to imitate Kamina leaves him hollow. His eventual growth is about accepting Kamina’s influence without becoming trapped inside it. That distinction gives the show surprising maturity beneath all the bombast. Simon’s ultimate strength comes not from copying another person’s legend, but from finding a voice and resolve that belong to him alone.

Yoko is also more important than the usual “female lead in a shōnen-style action series” label would suggest. She has to serve as both a capable fighter and one of the few people who can puncture the boys’ more reckless impulses, but Gurren Lagann gives her a real emotional presence beyond that function. Her grief, her resilience, and her continued movement through a world that keeps changing around her make her feel essential to the story’s broader ideas about survival. The show’s presentation of Yoko can be very much of its mid-2000s anime era, and some of its fanservice has not aged particularly gracefully. Still, she is never reduced entirely to that material, and the series repeatedly reminds the audience that she is a veteran combatant and a person carrying losses of her own.

Visually, Gurren Lagann remains an absolute blast. Its art style is dynamic in a way that feels almost physically restless. The animation stretches bodies, machines, perspective, and scale for emotional effect rather than strict mechanical realism. Characters lean into poses so hard they feel like they might burst through the frame. Mecha do not merely move; they lunge, twist, slam, and spiral forward with a sense of weight and raw momentum. The show frequently uses exaggerated proportions, thick expressive linework, explosive color, and wild camera angles to make every confrontation feel bigger than the last. Even its stillness has energy, because the designs and compositions are always angled toward motion.

That visual approach has had a real influence on anime in the years since its release. You can see echoes of Gurren Lagann’s expressive exaggeration, bold color blocking, elastic action, and preference for emotional impact over restrained realism in much of the work associated with former Gainax talent and Studio Trigger, particularly Kill la Kill, Promare, Little Witch Academia, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Its influence is broader than any one studio, though. The show helped solidify a modern appetite for animation that can be rough-edged, hyperactive, and knowingly excessive without sacrificing sincerity. A lot of later anime have chased its surface energy—the crazy transformations, the screaming declarations, the impossible scale—but fewer have replicated how carefully Gurren Lagann ties that escalation to character growth.

The mecha designs deserve special credit because they capture the show’s philosophy better than any speech could. Lagann starts as a small, almost toy-like machine, while Gurren is clunky, hot-blooded, and visually associated with Kamina’s swagger. When they combine into Gurren Lagann, the result is not sleek or conventionally elegant. It looks improvised, rebellious, and barely interested in obeying the normal rules of robotics. That is exactly the point. In Gurren Lagann, machines become expressions of willpower. They are not military hardware treated with sterile technical reverence; they are emotional extensions of the people piloting them. The more the characters believe they can surpass a limitation, the more absurdly grand their machines become.

The escalation is famously outrageous, but it is not random. The series moves from village-scale conflict to planetary stakes and eventually to something far beyond that, while preserving the same central question: what do people do when someone or something tells them that they have reached their limit? The antagonistic force behind the story, particularly through the Anti-Spiral, represents stagnation disguised as protection. The Anti-Spiral’s logic has a certain bleak rationality: humanity’s capacity to grow is dangerous, so it must be contained. Simon and the rest of Team Dai-Gurren respond with the series’ central rebuttal—that the risk of moving forward is inseparable from being alive. It is a simple message, but the show sells it with such conviction that it feels almost mythic.

This is also where Gurren Lagann separates itself from pure power fantasy. The characters win because they keep pushing forward, but the series does not pretend that forward movement makes pain disappear. People die. Dreams change. The ending, for all its spectacle, is not a cheap promise that determination guarantees a perfect reward. It recognizes that growing up often means accepting the cost of the choices that define you. Simon’s final arc is compelling because he becomes powerful enough to reshape the universe, yet the story still asks him to live with restraint, loss, and the knowledge that not every desire should be fulfilled simply because it can be.

The soundtrack is equally crucial to the experience. Taku Iwasaki’s score knows exactly when to go huge, mixing orchestral intensity, dramatic choral material, rock energy, and hip-hop-inflected momentum. “Libera Me From Hell” is the obvious standout, and it remains one of the most gloriously over-the-top climactic tracks in anime. It should not work as well as it does. The blend of opera and rap sounds like something invented as a joke, but in the context of Gurren Lagann, it feels completely natural. The song captures the entire show’s spirit: dramatic, strange, sincere, and unwilling to accept the idea that two seemingly incompatible things cannot be fused into something incredible.

There are flaws, of course. The first few episodes can feel especially frantic, and the humor occasionally leans into juvenile territory in ways that may test a new viewer’s patience. Some supporting characters get less development than they deserve, especially once the plot begins accelerating toward its larger conflicts. The fanservice is the element most likely to feel dated, since it can interrupt scenes that are otherwise focused on emotional gravity or visual spectacle. Yet even with those issues, Gurren Lagann never loses its sense of purpose. It is too alive, too earnest, and too committed to its own vision to feel disposable.

More than anything, Gurren Lagann endures because it understands the appeal of impossible optimism. It does not tell viewers that the world will always reward them, or that bravery means never being afraid. Instead, it argues that fear, grief, and uncertainty are not final states. You can carry them with you and still move forward. You can outgrow the person you used to be without betraying them. You can take inspiration from someone else without surrendering your own identity. And if the wall in front of you seems impossible to break, maybe the answer is not to wait for permission. Maybe you pick up a drill and start spinning.

Anime You Should Be Watching

Review: The Last House (dir. by Louis Leterrier)

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Arleigh

“The day the rains came, we learned we were not alone.” — Ruth Delgado

The Last House has the kind of premise that is immediately effective: a family wakes up to find that their home has become an inescapable prison. Doors refuse to open, windows cannot be broken, and the outside world is suddenly as unreachable as it is threatening. Directed by Louis Leterrier, the Netflix thriller gets plenty of mileage out of that simple idea. It turns a comfortable suburban house into a claustrophobic survival space, pushes a family toward desperation, and gives its familiar setting a creeping sense of hostility. Still, while the movie is often tense and well-acted, it eventually becomes too crowded with ideas to make any one of them land as strongly as it should.

Wagner Moura and Greta Lee play Jason and Ann Delgado, parents trying to keep their two children calm while they figure out why they have been sealed inside their own home. The film wisely does not waste much time getting to the central crisis. Once the family realizes that no amount of force can open a door or shatter a window, the atmosphere shifts quickly from confusion to panic. At first, there is still a practical logic to their reactions. They test the house’s boundaries, look for tools, try to contact the outside world, and ration what they have. But as each option fails, the family begins to understand that this is not a temporary inconvenience. It is a situation that may outlast their food, water, patience, and ability to trust one another.

That is where The Last House is at its strongest. The film understands how quickly a normal home can become frightening once its basic purpose changes. Kitchens, bedrooms, closets, and hallways are not inherently scary spaces, but the movie makes them feel smaller and more oppressive as the Delgados lose their sense of control. A stocked pantry becomes a countdown. A closed bedroom door no longer offers privacy. The family’s routines and minor annoyances, which initially make the house feel lived-in, become sources of friction when nobody has the option to leave. The production design effectively captures that deterioration, gradually turning an ordinary family home into a cramped, stale environment defined by empty shelves, dim rooms, and blocked exits.

Moura is the film’s standout. Jason begins as someone who wants to solve the problem through force of will and practical action, but that confidence wears down as he realizes that the situation is beyond him. Moura gives the character a believable mix of frustration, fear, and stubbornness. He is not simply an action-thriller father trying to save the day; he is a man whose sense of usefulness begins to collapse when he cannot protect his family or even provide a way out. Greta Lee is also good as Ann, particularly when the film allows her to show the exhaustion of having to steady everyone else while quietly processing the danger herself. However, Ann is not written with quite as much specificity as Jason, and Lee is sometimes left carrying scenes that ask her to reassure or react rather than reveal more about who she is.

The children help maintain the emotional stakes, though their roles are less developed. Their fear and frustration make sense, and the film does a decent job of showing how confinement affects them differently than it affects their parents. But they often function more as pressure points for Jason and Ann than as characters with their own fully formed perspectives. The family dynamic is convincing enough to keep the story grounded, yet the screenplay never digs quite deeply enough into their shared history or unresolved tensions. There are signs of financial strain, parental guilt, and marital distance, but the movie tends to introduce these ideas without fully following through on them.

The film also brushes against an interesting nature-versus-civilization theme. The Delgados’ home represents the ordinary comforts that make modern life feel secure: stocked food, electricity, sturdy walls, private rooms, and the assumption that help is available when something goes wrong. Once the house becomes sealed, those comforts lose their meaning. The family is forced to focus on the basics—food, water, shelter, sleep, and cooperation. Their home no longer separates them from danger; it contains them inside it. The movie’s best thematic moments come from that reversal, as it suggests that civilization is much more fragile than people like to believe.

Unfortunately, The Last House complicates this solid foundation by adding another mysterious danger from the depths. The threat remains vague for much of the story, and that uncertainty creates an unnatural, ominous feeling around the family’s confinement. It gives the film an extra layer of dread, making the Delgados’ problem feel bigger than a sealed house or an isolated storm. But it also pulls attention away from the more compelling material already in place. The family’s struggle to survive, their conflict over dwindling resources, and their gradual loss of trust are strong enough to sustain the movie without needing such an elaborate additional mystery.

That is ultimately the film’s main weakness: it keeps expanding its scope when it should be tightening its focus. The intimate story of a family stuck together under impossible conditions is more powerful than the larger explanation the movie slowly reaches for. As the plot adds more questions about the source of the danger, it risks making the situation feel less immediate. The best scenes are not necessarily the ones that hint at what is happening beyond the walls. They are the ones where the Delgados must decide who gets the last resources, whether to take a reckless chance, or how much truth the parents should tell their children. Those moments make the house feel like a real emotional battleground rather than simply the setting for a mystery.

Leterrier keeps the pacing moving well enough, especially in the first half, and the rainy exterior, muted lighting, and increasingly worn-down interiors give the film a consistently uneasy mood. Even when the screenplay starts to overreach, the movie remains watchable because it knows how to frame the house as a hostile space. It is not a deeply original visual concept, but it is effective. The sense of enclosure becomes almost physical as the family’s world shrinks to a few rooms and the possibility of escape starts to feel less real with every failed attempt.

In the end, The Last House is a decent, occasionally gripping survival thriller that does not fully live up to the potential of its premise. Moura and Lee give it enough emotional weight, and the movie’s domestic setting gives the tension a relatable edge. Yet the script does not always trust its strongest idea: that being trapped with the people you love can become frightening when there is no exit, no help, and no certainty that normal life will return. By piling a mysterious external danger onto its family drama and survival story, The Last House becomes more ambitious without becoming more meaningful. It is worth watching for its atmosphere, performances, and early suspense, but it would have been stronger as a leaner, more focused film about a family discovering how quickly safety can turn into confinement.

Review: Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 – Back on the Street

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.” — Spider Jerusalem

There is a particular kind of jolt that comes from revisiting a story written decades earlier and realizing it was not so much predicting the future as identifying a sickness already taking hold. Written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan Vol. 1: Back on the Street is exactly that kind of book. It is loud, filthy, hilarious, and vicious in all the ways it needs to be, and it lands differently now than it likely did in the late nineties. What once read primarily as a wild, hyperbolic satire of politics, media, consumerism, and public numbness now can feel unnervingly close to reportage with the names changed. Its 23rd-century City remains an over-the-top cyberpunk nightmare, but the institutions, personalities, and manufactured distractions running it feel very familiar.

The volume begins with Spider Jerusalem living in isolation, hiding in the mountains after abandoning the City and the career that made him famous. He has a book contract to fulfill, a pile of debts to settle, and no actual desire to rejoin civilized life. Unfortunately for him, the people financing his escape have had enough. Spider is forced back into the City, a vast, overcrowded cyberpunk metropolis that seems to have taken every bad impulse of contemporary society and pushed it beyond all reasonable limits. His return is not a heroic homecoming. It is more like dropping an angry, drug-addled, heavily armed journalist into the middle of a garbage fire and asking him to write a column about the smoke.

Spider’s immediate appeal is that he has no interest in performing respectability. He is rude, vindictive, profane, selfish, and fully capable of treating even his friends terribly. He uses violence too casually, insults everyone around him, and carries a bowel disruptor gun that can incapacitate people in the most humiliating manner imaginable. In another book, these traits might make him an unbearable edgelord. Back on the Street, however, understands that Spider’s ugliness is part of a larger contradiction. He is not cruel because he does not care; he is cruel because he cares too much and has no healthy way of processing how badly the world fails ordinary people.

That is what makes him more than a Hunter S. Thompson imitation with futuristic sunglasses. Spider is a gonzo journalist, but his journalism is not merely an excuse for a manic lifestyle or a stage for his personality. At his best, he is driven by an almost old-fashioned moral belief that the truth matters, that citizens deserve to know what is being done in their name, and that powerful people should not be allowed to bury their crimes under public-relations language. The series positions journalism as something active rather than passive. Spider does not just report what happens; he investigates, provokes, exposes, and refuses to let the comfortable look away.

His column, “I Hate It Here,” captures the character’s relationship with the City. Spider hates it because he sees it clearly. He sees the absurdity of its consumer culture, the cruelty hiding behind political slogans, and the way people are taught to accept exploitation as normal. Yet he also understands the City in a way that few other characters do. It is full of strange, desperate, damaged people trying to survive in a system that is too big, too loud, and too indifferent to care whether they live with dignity. Spider’s contempt is not aimed equally at everyone. He has little patience for complacency, hypocrisy, and stupidity, but he shows genuine anger when vulnerable people are victimized by police, politicians, corporations, or public indifference. His idealism is twisted, abrasive, and buried beneath several layers of chemical abuse, but it is still idealism.

The City itself is the book’s other major character. Robertson’s art sells its overwhelming scale and ugliness. Every street looks packed with signs, body modifications, crowds, trash, strange fashion, predatory businesses, and people whose lives have been reshaped by technology in ways both liberating and grotesque. The future is not sleek in the familiar science-fiction sense. It is grubby, crowded, commercial, and deeply human. People can alter their bodies, change their identities, pursue bizarre new faiths, and live inside an endless stream of media stimulation, but none of those developments have solved poverty, loneliness, corruption, or abuse of power.

That is why the book has aged more effectively than many stories set in a supposedly distant future. Its technology is exaggerated, but its social anxieties feel much closer now. The City is saturated with information, yet its people are often less informed than ever. Everyone has access to spectacle, outrage, personality-driven media, and instant distractions, but the institutions shaping their lives remain opaque and unaccountable. The comic’s dystopia is not based on the idea that technology automatically destroys humanity. Instead, it suggests that technology amplifies the priorities already built into society. If a culture values profit, spectacle, division, and convenience over empathy and truth, more advanced technology simply gives those impulses more efficient tools.

The political material in this first volume is especially pointed. Ellis is interested in the gap between public image and actual power. Politicians do not need to be secretly subtle or brilliant to be dangerous; they only need to understand how to manipulate fear, identity, frustration, and media attention. The institutions around them—police, corporate media, wealthy interests, and political operatives—help sustain the illusion that ordinary people have meaningful control while making sure the system remains insulated from consequences. The book’s vision of power can be blunt, but bluntness is part of its style. Transmetropolitan does not whisper its anger. It shouts because it believes politeness is often one of the tools that lets abuse continue unchallenged.

At the same time, Back on the Street is not flawless. Its satire can be so broad that it occasionally feels like the story is pointing at a target with both hands and yelling until the reader gets it. Some of the shock humor and sexual material carry an intentionally trashy late-nineties edge that may feel juvenile or dated. The supporting cast is still taking shape, so many people primarily exist as foils for Spider’s verbal attacks or examples of the City’s bizarre social landscape. The book’s relentless attitude can also wear readers down if they need a more emotionally grounded entry point.

Still, the excess is usually purposeful. This is a world where the boundaries between entertainment, propaganda, commerce, and personal identity have all but collapsed, so subtle world-building would almost be dishonest. The visual and verbal overload puts the reader in Spider’s position: constantly assaulted by nonsense, constantly asked to separate meaningful horror from everyday noise. The absurdity makes the real injustice sharper. A city can be full of outrageous fashion, talking animals, hallucinogens, and body-modification trends, yet its most disturbing feature remains how easily human suffering is turned into content, data, or a political talking point.

Ultimately, Transmetropolitan Vol. 1: Back on the Street works because Spider Jerusalem is not presented as a clean solution to a corrupt society. He is a mess, an irritant, and sometimes a monster in miniature. But he is also someone who refuses to be numb. In a world built to keep people distracted, passive, and exhausted, that refusal has real value. The book’s cyberpunk future remains wildly over-the-top, but its central warning feels uncomfortably familiar: the most dangerous dystopias are not always the ones with impossible technology. Sometimes they are the ones where the public is flooded with noise, the powerful face no consequences, and telling the truth becomes an act of open rebellion.

Song of the Day: Colors (by Ice-T)

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Arleigh

Ice-T’s “Colors” feels like one of those records where West Coast hip-hop stops sounding like a regional offshoot and starts speaking with its own unmistakable voice. Released for Dennis Hopper’s 1988 film of the same name, it does not romanticize Los Angeles gang life so much as report from inside its atmosphere: territorial, tense, and tragically routine. Ice-T’s narrator is not offering a neat moral lesson or trying to turn the street into a fantasy; he is laying out a social reality in plain, hard language. That documentary quality is a major reason the song still lands so forcefully.

What makes “Colors” especially important is how natural Ice-T makes its perspective sound. The flow is controlled and conversational, almost like somebody walking you through the rules of a place where the wrong glance, neighborhood, or color can carry consequences. That approach helped define a West Coast identity built around local detail, storytelling, and lived environment. The song’s world is specifically Los Angeles—not a generic “inner city”—and its focus on the Bloods-and-Crips color divide gave rap listeners outside California a stark picture of how geography and identity could become inseparable.

That was a crucial foundation for what gangsta rap would become. Before the genre hardened into a marketable label—and, later, into endless caricature—“Colors” showed that street-centered rap could be vivid social observation. Ice-T was already a major West Coast presence, and the song helped establish the template that artists such as N.W.A. would push further: police pressure, neighborhood politics, danger, survival, and anger described with little interest in making outsiders comfortable. The song is confrontational, but its real power comes from its clarity; it makes a listener feel how a culture of affiliation can become a trap.

It also helped distinguish the West Coast from the East Coast tradition that had shaped hip-hop’s earliest public identity. New York rap was often treated as the genre’s center of gravity, with its own emphasis on DJ culture, battle skills, dense rhyme patterns, and sample-driven production. “Colors” did not reject lyricism—it is a sharply written record—but it put place and narration ahead of verbal acrobatics. The West Coast voice that grew around songs like this left more room for a direct, cinematic account of life in Los Angeles. That difference should not be flattened into a simplistic coast-versus-coast rivalry, but “Colors” made clear that California hip-hop had its own stories, rhythms, and stakes—and would not need New York’s approval to matter.

Colors

I am a nightmare walking, psychopath talking
King of my jungle, just a gangster stalking
Living life like a firecracker, quick is my fuse
Then dead as a death pack, the colors I choose

Red or blue ‘cuss or blood
It just don’t matter
Sucker die for your life when my shotgun scatters
We gangs of L.A. will never die, just multiply

Colors

You don’t know me, fool, you disown me, cool
I don’t need your assistance, social persistence
Any problem I got I just put my fist in
My life is violent, but violent is life

Peace is a dream, reality is a knife
My colors my honor my colors my all
With my colors upon me one soldier stands tall
Tell me what have you left me

What have I got
Last night in cold blood my young brother got shot
My homeboy got jacked, my mother’s on crack
My sister can’t work ’cause her arms show tax

Madness insanity, live in profanity
Then some punk claiming’ they understanding’ me
Give me a break, what world do you live in
Death is my sect, guess my religion

Colors

My pants are sagging’ braided hair
Suckers stare but I don’t care
My game ain’t knowledge, my game’s fear
I’ve no remorse so squares beware

But my true mission is just revenge
You ain’t in my sect, you ain’t my friend
Wear the wrong color, your life could end
Homicide’s my favorite venue

Colors

So I’ll just walk like a giant, police defiant
You’ll say to stop but I’ll say that I can’t
My gangs my family, it’s all that I have
I’m a star on the wall’s my autograph

You don’t like it, so you know where you can go
‘Cause the streets are my stage and terror’s my show
Psycho-analyze try and diagnose me, why?
It wasn’t your brother that brutally died

But it was mine, so let me define my territory don’t cross the line
Don’t try to act crazy ’cause the shit don’t faze me
If you ran like a punk, it wouldn’t amaze me
‘Cause my colors death, though we all want peace
But our war won’t end till all wars cease

Colors

Review: Colors (dir. by Dennis Hopper)

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Arleigh

“You got problems with the whole fuckin’ world.” — Officer Bob Hodges

Consider, for a moment, the cultural landscape of 1988. Inner-city gang violence was hardly a new phenomenon, but it remained largely relegated to local news broadcasts and distant urban nightmares for most of the country. Dennis Hopper’s Colors changed that dynamic almost overnight, serving as a brutal, unfiltered introduction to a world that mainstream America had collectively chosen to ignore. Hopper, whose own countercultural credentials were cemented decades earlier with Easy Rider, took a considerable risk here, and while the final product is undeniably uneven, its cultural footprint is impossible to overstate. The film functions simultaneously as a historical document, a cautionary tale, and a cinematic watermark that forever altered how audiences perceived the volatile landscape of Los Angeles.

The basic setup is old-school buddy-cop material. Robert Duvall plays Bob Hodges, a seasoned LAPD officer in the CRASH unit—Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums—who has spent enough years policing Los Angeles to understand that aggression does not automatically produce respect. Sean Penn plays Danny McGavin, his hotheaded new partner, a guy who approaches every situation like he has something to prove. They are assigned to patrol neighborhoods divided by Bloods, Crips, and Chicano gangs, attempting to keep retaliation killings from escalating into full-scale warfare. The main plot is not especially complicated, and that is probably intentional. Hopper is less interested in a twist-heavy police procedural than in dropping the viewer into a city where tension seems to hang over every street corner, traffic stop, and act of public bravado.

Duvall is the film’s anchor. Hodges is not written as a saint—he is still a cop working inside a hostile and often brutal institution—but Duvall gives him a weary, almost paternal quality that makes him more compelling than the standard “veteran teaching the rookie a lesson” archetype. He understands that policing gangs is not as simple as walking in, making arrests, and congratulating yourself afterward. He has a kind of street fluency, knowing when to talk, when to threaten, and when to step back before a small humiliation becomes a body count. Penn, meanwhile, is all sharp edges. McGavin is reckless, racist in ways he may not fully recognize, and always a half-second away from making a situation worse. Penn can be exhausting here, but that is the point. His character embodies the movie’s fear that a badge, a gun, and an appetite for confrontation can be as combustible as any gang rivalry.

Hopper directs Colors with a lot of energy and an almost documentary-like alertness to its setting. The film’s Los Angeles feels sun-blasted, crowded, and perpetually unstable, not the glossy dream factory of postcards and celebrity magazines. Haskell Wexler’s cinematography does huge work in making the city feel tactile and lived-in. Hopper also has a sharp ear for the way music, cars, clothing, graffiti, and neighborhood boundaries become a visual language of identity. The title is not subtle, but it works: colors signify affiliation, pride, danger, and the instantly visible lines people are willing to kill or die over. The film’s soundtrack, including Ice-T’s title song, further locks it into the cultural moment, giving the movie a rawness that separates it from more generic police thrillers.

What makes Colors uncomfortable is also what makes it valuable. Its attention to gangs was controversial from the beginning, with critics and community voices arguing that it risked sensationalizing violence and reducing Black and Latino communities to dangerous backdrops for a cop story. The criticism is fair. The film sees gang life largely from the windshield of the LAPD cruiser; its gang-affiliated characters are often treated as threats, symbols, or tragic consequences rather than people granted the same interiority as Hodges and McGavin. Even at its strongest, Colors can make complex social realities feel like an arena in which two white cops test their methods and masculinity.

Still, it would be wrong to dismiss it as empty exploitation. Colors does not really romanticize its violence. Hopper shoots drive-bys, funerals, and retaliations with a nasty abruptness; nobody comes out looking triumphant. The gang members are not cleanly divided into monsters and victims either. Some are cruel, some are frightened, some are locked into a status they may not know how to escape, and some clearly enjoy the power that comes with being feared. The movie may not fully examine poverty, segregation, institutional racism, the drug economy, or generational trauma, but the instability of its world comes through. The police are not presented as saviors, either. They are frequently antagonistic, operating through intimidation and humiliation, while McGavin’s actions repeatedly demonstrate how easily law enforcement can intensify exactly the conflict it claims to contain.

This is where Colors matters most historically. Before it, movies had certainly depicted urban crime, racial conflict, and youth violence, but Hopper’s film made contemporary L.A. gang culture recognizable as a major studio subject. It helped bring gang culture, strained police-community relations, and inner-city issues into a much wider popular conversation. The film did not invent the genre that followed, but it helped clear a path for the wave of gang-related and urban-crime movies that arrived in the late ’80s and especially the ’90s. Films such as Boyz n the Hood, American Me, South Central, New Jack City, and Menace II Society inherited some of its urgency, its focus on neighborhoods under siege, and its refusal to pretend gang violence was merely a distant news-story problem.

The major difference is that many of those later movies also corrected Colors’ biggest limitation: they shifted the point of view inward. Boyz n the Hood does not treat South Central as a backdrop for police work; it makes the residents’ friendships, families, dreams, grief, and daily routines the emotional center. American Me follows the historical and institutional roots of Chicano gang identity with a scope Colors never attempts. South Central turns toward redemption, fatherhood, and the possibility—however fragile—of interrupting the cycle. In that sense, Hopper’s film can feel like an important opening statement rather than the final word. It showed mainstream audiences the subject; the films that followed increasingly demanded that audiences understand the people living inside it.

Its influence can also be felt internationally, though it is best understood as part of a broader transnational exchange of urban-crime cinema, hip-hop culture, and anti-police sentiment rather than a simple one-to-one blueprint. Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine is far more formally daring and politically focused than Colors, but both films draw power from a city divided by territory, race, policing, and simmering retaliation. La Haine brought France’s banlieues to mainstream French audiences and put police violence and marginalized youth at the center of the frame. Where Colors views the street crisis through law enforcement’s eyes, La Haine makes its young Black, Jewish, and Arab protagonists the whole point. Yet the resemblance is there in the oppressive sense of escalation, the combustible police encounters, and the idea that one violent incident can send an already alienated community toward catastrophe. Colors helped establish a mainstream vocabulary for this kind of story, while La Haine transformed that vocabulary into something more intimate, stylized, and politically devastating.

In the end, Colors is messy, dated in places, and frustratingly narrow in its perspective, but those flaws are part of why it is worth revisiting. It captures a Hollywood industry beginning to confront an issue it did not fully understand, using the sturdy frame of a cop thriller to look at a social wound much larger than its plot. Dennis Hopper brings volatility, Duvall brings soul, Penn brings danger, and Los Angeles itself does the rest. It is not the definitive gang film—later movies would surpass it in depth, perspective, and emotional force—but it is a crucial precursor. Colors made the subject visible to the mainstream, and the films that came after kept pushing the camera closer to the people trapped inside the picture.

Review: Rollercoaster (dir. by James Goldstone)

Posted on August 12, 2026 by Arleigh

“If they pay me and if they do what I say, I’ll never bother them again.” — Young Man

James Goldstone’s 1977 film Rollercoaster exists in a fascinating, albeit deeply flawed, space within the history of seventies disaster cinema. If you are a fan of retro 70s movies, specifically the whole Sensurround era where Hollywood was desperately trying to get people out of their living rooms and into theaters with seat-rumbling audio gimmicks, you have probably heard of this one. It has a genuinely neat, gritty vibe because it was actually shot on location at real amusement parks like Kings Island and Magic Mountain. You get this awesome, vintage, mid-century theme park atmosphere that you just cannot fake on a studio backlot. You can almost smell the cotton candy, the hot asphalt, and the stale beer. But once that initial wave of nostalgia wears off, you are left looking at what is actually on the screen, and honestly, Rollercoaster is not a great film. In fact, one could very easily say it is not even a good film. At its absolute best of times, it is a thoroughly average, middle-of-the-road thriller that feels more like a slightly elevated, padded-out television movie of the week than a major theatrical release.

The plot is about as standard as it gets for this era of disaster-adjacent cinema. A mysterious, young terrorist starts blowing up rollercoasters, not for any grand political manifesto, but simply to extort amusement park owners for millions of dollars. Enter our protagonist, Harry Calder, played by George Segal, who is a cynical safety inspector that just happens to survive the first derailment. Segal is basically just playing George Segal here—exasperated, a bit snarky, wearing a rumpled suit, and teaming up with an FBI agent played by Richard Widmark. The villain is played by a very young Timothy Bottoms, who is effectively creepy but given virtually zero backstory or motivation. He is just a blank-eyed psycho doing psycho things because the script needs an antagonist. The movie essentially just bounces from one park to another, with Segal walking around looking stressed while the FBI tries to figure out where the next bomb is hidden.

The pacing is arguably the film’s biggest sin. For a movie literally named Rollercoaster, it is shockingly lacking in momentum. Goldstone’s direction completely lacks the tight, pulse-pounding beats you would expect from a high-stakes thriller. There is so much filler here, so many scenes of Segal drinking coffee and staring at blueprints, and so much tedious FBI bureaucratic nonsense that it completely kills any tension. The romantic subplot feels entirely tacked on, and the climax fails to deliver the massive, explosive payoff you have been waiting for. If you judge Rollercoaster purely on its cinematic merits—the acting, the script, the direction—it is undeniably average, the kind of movie you leave on in the background while you fold laundry.

However, despite all of these glaring, undeniable flaws, Rollercoaster has a fascinating, almost prophetic legacy when you look back at the history of the thriller genre. It may not be remembered as a great movie, but it essentially built the exact template for an entire subgenre of cat-and-mouse thrillers that dominated the 90s. It practically invented the “specific-professional-against-a-psychopathic-mastermind” formula. Before Rollercoaster, thrillers were usually about spies, cops, or generic everymen. But this film introduced the idea of a highly specific, niche expert being forced into a one-on-one intellectual duel with a terrorist who targets them specifically because of their expertise. Think about how that exact template was endlessly copied and refined in the decades that followed. Look at In the Line of Fire, where Clint Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent hunted by a psycho played by John Malkovich. Or look at Blown Away, where Jeff Bridges is a bomb-defusing expert tormented by an Irish terrorist played by Tommy Lee Jones. Even The Bone Collector fits this mold perfectly, with Denzel Washington’s bedridden forensics expert being targeted by a serial killer who uses specific crime scenes just to test Washington’s intellect. All of these films drew direct DNA from Rollercoaster, using that exact same dynamic of a reluctant protagonist with a very particular set of skills being singled out by a psychopath who treats mass murder like a twisted, personalized game of chess. And if you want the absolute pinnacle of the “expert vs. bomb” trope, you have to look at Speed, which polished the cat-and-mouse dynamic perfected right here in Rollercoaster.

Because the original film was so hampered by 1970s filmmaking technology, it really makes you realize how easily this movie could be remade in this day and age. Back then, the actual destruction of the rides was limited by practical effects, clunky models, and standard camera angles that made the crashes feel somewhat static and safe. Today, technology in filmmaking has advanced to the point that the sheer scale, speed, and physical danger of the rides themselves really does become the focus of real danger. With modern CGI, drone cameras, and advanced practical rigging, you could put the audience right inside the front car of a 300-foot hyper-coaster as the tracks buckle and twist in slow motion. You could make the metal fatigue, the snapping cables, and the horrific physics of a derailment feel genuinely terrifying, turning the amusement park rides into massive, mechanical monsters rather than just static backdrop props for guys in suits to talk around.

Naturally, if Hollywood were to actually remake Rollercoaster today, you know exactly how it would look and who would star in it. It would undoubtedly star someone like Dwayne Johnson or Chris Pratt, a guy who can deliver a quip while looking concerned and holding a blueprint. They would inevitably give the safety inspector a tragic backstory, probably a dead wife or a kid they are estranged from, just to artificially raise the emotional stakes. And because it is a high-concept thriller that does not quite have the cultural weight of a massive comic book franchise, the remake would almost certainly be relegated to a streaming release. It would drop on a Friday on Netflix or Amazon Prime with a generic, algorithmically tested poster and a slick, forgettable title. It would be exactly the kind of mid-budget, mildly entertaining action flick you watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon before completely forgetting about it by Monday morning.

So, ultimately, how do you rate a movie like Rollercoaster? You just have to accept its extreme averageness and respect its ripple effect. It is clunky, the performances are uneven, and it is rarely as thrilling as its title promises. But it absolutely should not be written off entirely. It was the exact moment Hollywood realized that pitting highly specialized professionals against high-concept villains made for compelling, relatable drama. Without George Segal boredly walking around Magic Mountain, we probably do not get the overly dramatic, incredibly ridiculous, yet thoroughly entertaining 90s thriller boom, nor the slick, CGI-heavy streaming thrillers of today. Rollercoaster might just be a mediocre hill, but it is undeniably the hill that started the entire ride.

Artist Profile: Alex Ross

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Arleigh

Alex Ross fundamentally transformed the visual language of American comic books by introducing a level of photorealistic fine art painting previously unseen in the medium. Eschewing traditional pen-and-ink line work, Ross utilized gouache, watercolor, and ink to render iconic superheroes with a tangible weight and texture that made them feel startlingly real. His approach treated comic book characters not as colorful abstractions, but as living, breathing figures existing in a recognizable world. By grounding these fantastical beings in reality through meticulous brushwork, realistic lighting, and lifelike facial expressions, Ross elevated the comic book cover and interior page to the status of gallery-worthy illustration, forever changing the expectations of comic book artistry.

Ross’s impact is indelibly tied to his defining projects for the industry’s “Big Two” publishers. At Marvel Comics, his groundbreaking 1994 miniseries Marvels recontextualized the Golden and Silver Ages of the publisher’s universe through the weary eyes of an ordinary photojournalist, capturing the awe and terror of living alongside gods. He later expanded this sprawling mythos with the Earth X trilogy. However, it was at DC Comics where Ross arguably cemented his legacy. His 1996 magnum opus Kingdom Come offered a grand, prophetic, and deeply moral vision of the DC Universe’s future, utilizing his painted style to bridge the gap between the publisher’s Golden Age innocence and modern cynicism. Through works like Justice and Peace on Earth, Ross continually reimagined DC’s most famous characters, stripping away decades of dark reinterpretations to restore their fundamental nobility and mythic grandeur.

The legacy of Alex Ross extends far beyond the individual pages of his graphic novels; he essentially spawned an entire subgenre of painted comic book art that dominated the industry in the late twentieth century. While many imitators emerged attempting to replicate his style, few could match his nuanced understanding of color theory, historical costume design, and emotional resonance. Furthermore, his aesthetic influence has bled heavily into broader pop culture, with his conceptual character designs serving as direct visual inspiration for numerous animated television shows and live-action films. By proving that superhero mythology could be approached with the same gravitas and classical technique as Norman Rockwell’s illustrations or Renaissance portraiture, Ross forced the comic book industry to permanently expand its artistic boundaries.

Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 3 – Hang Up on the Hang Low

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Arleigh

“I never told you to kill him. I just gave you the opportunity.” — Agent Graves

With Hang Up on the Hang Low, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso continue to prove that 100 Bullets is far more than a series about revenge fantasies and mysterious briefcases. The first two collections introduced the basic concept of Agent Graves approaching damaged people with a gun, one hundred untraceable bullets, and proof of who ruined their lives. That premise was already strong, but this third volume starts showing just how much uglier and more complicated the world around Graves really is. This is where the series begins to feel less like a set of loosely connected crime stories and more like a large, carefully constructed noir epic. The revenge angle is still present, but it is no longer the whole point. The people who receive Graves’s offer are getting pulled into a much bigger machine, whether they realize it or not.

The main character this time is Loop Hughes, a young man who has spent much of his life acting tougher, smarter, and more connected than he actually is. He is a small-time street hustler, someone who talks a good game but clearly has no real direction in life. That makes him an interesting choice for Agent Graves. Loop is not someone who has already been crushed by a terrible tragedy in the same direct way as Dizzy Cordova or Lee Dolan. His grievance is more personal and more complicated: his father, a man known as the Rain, abandoned him and his mother when he was still a child. Loop has built up years of anger around that absence, even if he has never really known what to do with it.

When Graves gives Loop one of his trademark attaché cases, it seems at first like another straightforward setup. Loop has the gun, the bullets, the evidence, and the freedom to act without legal consequences. The temptation is there, and Azzarello makes it easy to understand why Loop would want to pull the trigger. The Rain did not just leave; he left a hole in Loop’s life that the younger man has filled with insecurity, bravado, and bad decisions. But the story becomes much more interesting when Loop finally finds his father and discovers that the Rain is not some helpless old man waiting to be punished. He is deeply involved with dangerous people and has his own place in the criminal underworld.

That is where Hang Up on the Hang Low really finds its momentum. Rather than immediately becoming a story about a son taking revenge on his father, it turns into a story about Loop being drawn into the world that helped create his father in the first place. The Rain is connected to organized crime, old grudges, and the kind of people who can make a murder look like business as usual. Loop thinks he is finally getting some answers, but every answer only opens another door to something worse. He is in well over his head almost from the beginning, and the book does a great job of making the reader feel that constant pressure.

Loop is one of the more sympathetic characters in the series so far because, underneath all of his posturing, he does seem to have a conscience. He is not innocent, exactly, and he certainly makes some dumb choices, but he is not naturally cruel. He wants respect, money, and an explanation for why his father left, but he also cares about people in a way that many of the hardened gangsters around him do not. Azzarello does not turn him into a saint, though. Loop is still immature and easily manipulated, which is exactly why his journey through this volume becomes so tragic. He keeps thinking he has found a way to gain control over his life, only to learn that somebody else has already decided the terms.

Agent Graves remains the most fascinating figure in the book. In the early volumes, he could be seen as a mysterious avenger or a kind of grim wish-fulfillment figure, handing victims the tools to get justice on their own terms. This collection makes him feel more unsettling than heroic. Graves is not necessarily lying to Loop, but he is absolutely steering him toward a result that serves some larger purpose. He is a man who sees people as pieces on a board, and even when he gives them a choice, it is hard to believe that he does not already have an idea of how they will respond. The briefcase may offer freedom from prosecution, but it never offers freedom from consequences.

The book also continues expanding the larger mythology involving the Trust and the Minutemen. Azzarello is still not explaining everything, and that can be frustrating if someone wants clean answers right away. At the same time, the lack of full explanation is part of what gives 100 Bullets its pull. The reader gets the sense that every crime boss, stray conversation, and seemingly random killing could matter later. People who initially seem like minor players keep revealing hidden ties to the larger conspiracy. Even the deaths and betrayals carry an extra weight because they do not feel random. This series is building toward something, and by the end of this volume it is clear that Graves has been setting events in motion for a long time.

Eduardo Risso’s artwork continues to be one of the best things about the series. His characters look stylized without ever feeling too cartoonish, and he gives every person a distinct physical presence. You can tell who is dangerous just by the way they stand in a room. You can tell who is nervous by the way they avoid eye contact. Risso’s visual storytelling is especially effective in the bar scenes, street confrontations, and quiet moments when characters are trying to decide whether to trust someone. He knows how to make a room feel crowded, seedy, and tense without overloading the page with unnecessary detail.

Risso also has a great eye for the ugly atmosphere of this world. The bars look worn down, the apartments feel cramped, and the city streets always seem like they are one bad decision away from turning violent. The noir influence is obvious, but it does not feel like a cheap imitation of old detective stories. It feels more like a modern crime story filtered through noir imagery: low lighting, cigarette smoke, suspicious looks, crooked power structures, and people who keep trying to escape the past only to be dragged deeper into it. The coloring helps the art stand out as well, giving the grimy environments and tense confrontations a little extra visual bite without making the book look overly polished.

The ending is what really makes the volume stick. Azzarello does not rely on a giant surprise twist so much as a sense of inevitability. You can see the bad outcome coming, but that does not make it any easier to watch. Loop spends most of the story trying to become somebody who matters, somebody with control and power, and the cruel part is that the criminal world is more than happy to let him feel that way for a little while. By the time reality catches up with him, he has learned that the people offering him opportunity were never offering him a real way out.

100 Bullets Vol. 3: Hang Up on the Hang Low is the strongest collection in the series so far. It has a more focused central story than Split Second Chance, while still pushing the wider conspiracy forward in a meaningful way. Loop is a memorable lead because he is flawed, angry, and trying desperately to look fearless when he is really just lost. Azzarello keeps the dialogue sharp and streetwise, Risso keeps every page visually charged, and the larger story continues to get more dangerous the more we learn about it. This is the point where 100 Bullets stops merely promising that it has a major story to tell and starts delivering on that promise.

100 Bullets Volume Reviews

Review: Final Fantasy X

Posted on August 9, 2026 by Arleigh

“Now is the time to choose! Die and be free of pain, or live and fight your sorrow!” — Auron

While Final Fantasy VI is still my personal favorite game in the entire Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy X is the entry that reached me most directly on an emotional level. VI remains the peak of the pixel-art era for me: a sprawling, tragic, beautifully varied masterpiece whose cast, music, and broken world are impossible to separate from what the franchise means to me. But X feels more intimate. Its story of Tidus, Yuna, and a society trapped in a cycle of grief and sacrifice hits with a particular sadness because it takes the time to let its characters live inside that pain. In that sense, Final Fantasy Xis the high point of the series’ 3D era in much the same way Final Fantasy VI represents the high point of its 2D era—not necessarily my number-one favorite overall, but perhaps the most emotionally affecting game in the franchise.

That distinction matters because Final Fantasy X was not merely a graphical leap. It was a game that used its new presentation to deepen the things Final Fantasy had always done best. The move to fully three-dimensional environments, voiced dialogue, and cinematic camera work could have pushed the series toward empty spectacle, but X uses those tools to make its people and places feel more immediate. It was also a major mechanical departure, replacing Active Time Battle with the Conditional Turn-Based system and conventional leveling with the Sphere Grid. Even now, it feels like a near-perfect midpoint between the intimate pacing of classic turn-based JRPGs and the larger dramatic ambitions the series pursued in later generations.

The game opens with one of the strongest introductions in the entire series. Tidus, a cocky Blitzball star from the futuristic city of Zanarkand, is suddenly pulled into chaos when the massive entity called Sin attacks. He wakes up in Spira, a world that considers his home a myth from a thousand years ago. This makes Tidus a useful protagonist because he is just as confused as the player. He asks why everyone fears Sin, why technology is considered dangerous, and why people willingly accept a religious system built around loss. The initial premise is deceptively simple: Tidus joins Yuna, a summoner, and her guardians on a pilgrimage to defeat Sin. But every new location and revelation complicates the purpose of that journey.

Tidus can be obnoxious at first, and that is not necessarily a flaw. He is immature, defensive, loud, and permanently irritated by the shadow cast by his famous father, Jecht. Yet he is also emotionally transparent in a way many RPG heroes are not. He is frightened, lonely, jealous, and desperate to believe he can return to the life he lost. His character arc works because the game lets him grow out of that narrow perspective. He begins by wanting to save himself, then slowly realizes that everyone around him has been surviving a kind of pain he never understood. Even the infamous laughing scene makes more sense in context: it is two people forcing themselves to laugh because admitting how sad they are would be even harder. Tidus is messy, but that is why he feels human.

Yuna is the true heart of Final Fantasy X. At first, she appears reserved, gentle, and almost impossibly composed, but that calmness is a defense. She has been raised to accept an obligation that asks her to carry the hopes of Spira, and the game gradually exposes the brutal cost of that role. Her story is about realizing that kindness does not require obedience, and that faith does not have to mean accepting cruelty forever. Yuna is never reduced to being simply Tidus’s romantic interest. Their relationship matters because he sees her as a person before he fully understands what the world expects her to give up. That dynamic makes their romance feel earned rather than imposed.

Their relationship is one of the best in the series because it is built through ordinary moments as much as grand ones. They talk, joke, tease one another, share awkward silences, and slowly become the one person each can speak honestly with. The romance is not there to distract from the larger plot; it gives the story its emotional center. The question is never only whether Spira can be saved from Sin. It becomes whether Tidus and Yuna are allowed to imagine a life that is not defined by sacrifice. That is why the later turns of the story hurt as much as they do. Final Fantasy X understands that a world-saving quest becomes meaningful when the people involved have something personal they are fighting to keep.

The rest of the party helps make Spira feel like a lived-in place rather than a backdrop for Tidus and Yuna. Auron is the cool, stoic guardian archetype, but his guarded nature hides regret and responsibility. Wakka can be frustrating because he begins with deeply ingrained prejudices and unquestioned religious beliefs, but his growth works precisely because the game does not pretend he starts out enlightened. Lulu has some of the sharpest dialogue and a quietly emotional connection to the group. Kimahri is sparse with words, but his loyalty and history of exile make his presence meaningful. Rikku brings skepticism, humor, and a much-needed challenge to the assumptions that most of Spira has normalized. Together, they feel like a genuine group of travelers linked by old wounds, conflicting loyalties, and a growing sense that they cannot continue following the same path.

Spira is one of the series’ finest worlds because it is colorful, beautiful, and deeply sad all at once. Its beaches, temples, forests, ruined cities, and moonlit roads give it a warmer visual character than the industrial settings of several earlier entries, but that warmth never becomes carefree. Sin hangs over everything. The clash between the high-tech Zanarkand of Tidus’s memories and Spira’s restrictive religious society creates the game’s central tension. Technology is not simply treated as good or bad; it is tangled up with historical guilt, fear, and the power to decide who is allowed to define sin. The game is critical of religious institutions without being cynical about faith itself, which gives its world more depth than a simple rebellion narrative.

The music is inseparable from the story’s impact. Composed primarily by Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu, and Junya Nakano, the soundtrack understands that a melody can tell the player how to feel before the plot explains why. “To Zanarkand” is one of the defining pieces of Final Fantasy music: lonely, fragile piano notes that announce immediately that this is going to be a sad story. “Besaid Island” is warmer and lighter, creating a brief sense of peace before the pilgrimage’s true weight becomes clear. “The Hymn of the Fayth” may be even more important because it functions as an in-world sacred song, with its emotional meaning changing as the player learns more about Spira.

Other tracks turn scenes into permanent memories. “Otherworld” makes the opening Blitzball sequence feel thrilling and chaotic. “Suteki da ne” is openly romantic, but it earns its emotion because the game has patiently developed Tidus and Yuna’s connection. “A Fleeting Dream” and “Someday the Dream Will End” are quietly devastating, allowing sadness to settle rather than demanding tears from the player. Even the battle themes have a strong sense of momentum and atmosphere. Later games in the series have excellent soundtracks—some arguably have individual tracks that stand alongside anything here—but Final Fantasy X may be the strongest at integrating its music with its storytelling. Certain melodies do not just remind you of scenes; they make you feel the scenes again.

Its biggest mechanical innovation is the Sphere Grid. Instead of receiving traditional level-ups with automatic stat increases, characters earn AP after battles, gain Sphere Levels, and use those levels to travel across a huge board of connected nodes. Each node can grant a stat boost, a spell, a special technique, or a passive ability, but it must be activated with the appropriate sphere item. The result is a leveling system that feels visual and physical. You do not merely watch Strength or Magic rise in a menu. You plot a route, move through it, unlock a node, and decide where that character should grow next.

The early game gives every party member a distinct route. Tidus moves toward speed and time-based support magic, Yuna develops white magic and summoning tools, Lulu gains increasingly powerful black magic, Auron builds physical strength and defensive enemy-breaking abilities, and Rikku develops utility skills. That structure works because the battle system expects the player to rotate the party depending on enemy weaknesses. Tidus handles fast and airborne enemies, Auron crushes armored foes, Lulu punishes elemental weaknesses, and Yuna’s Aeons can change the entire rhythm of a difficult battle. The Sphere Grid makes those roles feel natural rather than arbitrary.

Later, the system becomes much freer. Key Spheres open locked paths, and special movement spheres can move a character into another person’s section of the Grid. You can turn Yuna into a formidable physical attacker, give Tidus high-level magic, or make Auron a surprisingly effective support character. The Standard Grid keeps everyone on more clearly defined routes, while the Expert Grid begins characters closer together and allows more experimentation earlier. It is one of the series’ most elegant systems because it gives newcomers direction without depriving experienced players of freedom. It also fits the story’s themes: Spira is filled with people assigned roles by faith, family, history, and fear, while the Sphere Grid lets the player decide whether to stay on the expected route or become something different.

Subsequent Final Fantasy games have surpassed Final Fantasy X visually. Final Fantasy XII offers massive environments and political scale, Final Fantasy XIII has some of the most striking art direction in the franchise, and Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy XVI, and the Final Fantasy VII Remake project achieve cinematic visual detail impossible on the PlayStation 2. Yet bigger worlds and more advanced graphics have not consistently produced better storytelling, stronger music integration, or more satisfying character progression. Later games often have tremendous individual strengths, but they can also feel more fragmented: mechanically uncertain, overly dependent on lore, or less focused in their party dynamics.

That is why Final Fantasy X still stands so tall. Like Final Fantasy VI, it feels like a point where the series’ best ideas aligned. Its story is emotional without becoming hollow spectacle, its soundtrack is embedded in the player’s memory, and the Sphere Grid makes progression feel like an active creative choice. It can be linear, very sincere, and occasionally a little corny, but those are parts of its personality rather than weaknesses that ruin it. Final Fantasy VI will always be my favorite, but Final Fantasy X is the one that hurts the most—and that is exactly why it remains the bar that later 3D Final Fantasy games still struggle to reach.