Review: The Distinguished Gentleman (dir. by Jonathan Lynn)

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Arleigh

“With all this money coming in from both sides, how does anything ever get done?” — Thomas Jefferson Johnson

The Distinguished Gentleman is an uneven but enjoyable Eddie Murphy comedy whose premise has become more relevant with time. Directed by Jonathan Lynn, the 1992 film casts Murphy as Thomas Jefferson Johnson, a Florida con man who discovers that a recently deceased congressman had the exact same name. Seeing a shortcut to money and status, Johnson runs for the vacant House seat, wins largely on name recognition, and enters Washington with no meaningful political experience. In 1992, that premise played as broad political satire. Today, it carries a more uneasy edge, because its suggestion that image, recognition, and confidence can outrun scrutiny does not seem nearly as far-fetched.

That change in perspective makes the film’s central joke more interesting. Johnson begins as a small-time hustler who understands scams, pressure, ego, and persuasion. Once he reaches Congress, however, he discovers a political world that runs on many of the same instincts. The people around him do not call their dealings scams. They talk about donations, access, relationships, opportunities, and constituent concerns. But Johnson sees the transaction beneath the polished language immediately. The movie’s sharpest idea is that he may be a con man, yet he is not automatically the least honest person in Washington. He merely lacks the expensive suits and professional vocabulary used to make self-interest look respectable.

Murphy is exactly the right actor to make that contradiction work. Thomas Jefferson Johnson has to be selfish enough for the premise to hold together, clever enough to survive in an unfamiliar environment, and charming enough that the audience still wants to follow him after he wins office through deception. Murphy brings all of those qualities to the role. Johnson enjoys the attention, travel, influence, and special treatment attached to public office because he sees Congress as the biggest score he has ever found. At the same time, Murphy gives him enough quickness and warmth that he never becomes unpleasant. Even when Johnson does not understand what is happening around him, he moves through Washington with the confidence of someone who assumes he belongs there.

That confidence drives the movie’s strongest material. Johnson may not know committee procedure, legislative language, or public policy, but he knows people. He can recognize when praise is a setup, when a favor comes with strings attached, and when a supposedly helpful figure is treating him as an investment. This makes him an effective comic guide through Washington’s rituals. He is unqualified in the usual sense, but he is unusually qualified to identify the self-dealing hidden behind political formality. Jonathan Lynn understands the humor in that contrast and keeps the early scenes moving briskly through offices, hearings, fundraisers, press events, and lobbyist meetings. His direction is functional rather than visually distinctive, but it gives Murphy room to work and makes the political setting clear without drowning the comedy in procedure.

The problem is that the movie gradually moves away from the very idea that gives it its satirical bite. Johnson’s election is a pointed joke about name recognition, voter inattentiveness, and political branding. He wins because his name is familiar enough to inspire trust, not because anyone has evaluated his experience, policies, or character. That setup could have supported a more sustained comedy about campaigns, media manipulation, and the ease with which public image can substitute for qualification. Instead, the film shifts into a more conventional pharmaceutical-company corruption plot, giving Johnson an external villain and a clear reason to become more responsible.

That shift is understandable, since the story needs stakes beyond Johnson simply enjoying the perks of Congress. It also gives Murphy a more sympathetic character arc. Once Johnson sees the real-world consequences of corporate influence and political favors, he begins to use his instincts against people whose schemes are more damaging than his own. The change works because he does not become a completely different person. He remains fast-talking, opportunistic, and alert to every available angle. What changes is his sense of scale: his scams are about quick money, while the larger political and corporate schemes around him can hurt ordinary people while remaining hidden behind legal language and respectable appearances.

Still, making the conflict so clear-cut also weakens the satire. The opening suggests that corruption is part of a broader culture of money, access, public relations, and political influence. The later plot makes it easier to imagine that the problem lies mainly with a few especially corrupt people. Lane Smith’s Dick Dodge represents that polished form of corruption effectively. Dodge has the calm authority and practiced respectability of a politician who can make unethical behavior sound like normal procedure. He is a good villain precisely because he does not need to look obviously sinister; he simply treats power as something to be managed for private benefit.

Dodge’s presence becomes more useful because the film gives him a genuine counterweight in Charles S. Dutton’s Congressman Elijah Hawkins. Hawkins is almost Dodge’s opposite: plainspoken, principled, and committed to the idea that public office should mean public service. Dutton gives the role enough strength that Hawkins does not come across as a bland symbol of virtue. He is not there simply to lecture Johnson. Instead, he demonstrates that integrity and competence can exist within the same institution that has rewarded Dodge’s cynicism. Through these two men, Johnson sees both versions of political life: Dodge shows how power can be abused, while Hawkins shows what it is supposed to accomplish.

That contrast helps the film’s best themes land even when the plot becomes more routine. Johnson starts out believing that public office is just another hustle, only with better benefits and larger payouts. Hawkins gives him a reason to see the job differently, while Dodge proves that the cynicism Johnson brought to Washington is not entirely misplaced. Johnson’s eventual decision to push back against corruption therefore feels earned, even if the film resolves the conflict more neatly than its setup deserves. He does not become an idealist so much as a hustler who finally recognizes that the people above him are running a far bigger and more harmful game.

Viewed now, that idea carries more weight than it did in 1992. George Santos’s rise and eventual expulsion from Congress following repeated revelations about his background and finances offered a modern example of political presentation outpacing public scrutiny. Tommy Tuberville’s move from high-profile college-football coach and broadcaster into the U.S. Senate reflects a different but related reality: name recognition built outside politics can be a major electoral asset. The point is not that either man is literally comparable to Thomas Jefferson Johnson. It is that the film’s basic concern—how easily familiarity and confidence can be mistaken for qualification—has become harder to dismiss as mere comic exaggeration.

The same pattern can be seen beyond Congress. Donald Trump reached the presidency after decades as a celebrity businessman and television personality, while Arnold Schwarzenegger’s worldwide fame as a bodybuilder and movie star became a significant advantage in his successful run for governor of California. Celebrity alone never explains an election, and prior careers in sports or entertainment do not automatically make someone unfit for public office. Still, those examples show why the film’s name-recognition joke now feels more pointed. A highly recognizable candidate begins with a built-in audience, a simple public identity, and the kind of familiarity that many traditional candidates spend years trying to earn.

That dynamic has only become more visible as media personalities from different ideological camps seek office. Television hosts, pundits, podcasters, athletes, entertainers, and online figures can launch campaigns with established audiences, fundraising networks, and brand recognition already in place. In that environment, Johnson’s path to office feels less like an impossible gag and more like a deliberately exaggerated version of a real political tendency. The Distinguished Gentleman is not predicting every modern development, but it understands that voters may attach trust to a familiar name or face before they ask harder questions about qualifications, judgment, or policy.

This added relevance does not erase the film’s flaws. The comedy is still inconsistent, and the lobbyists, politicians, and corporate villains are often broader than they are funny. Murphy can make routine scenes entertaining, particularly when Johnson bluffs through official settings with total confidence despite not knowing the rules. But the movie often settles for familiar Washington stereotypes when it could push its satire further. It is rarely dull, yet it repeatedly avoids the messier implications of its best idea.

Even so, The Distinguished Gentleman remains worth revisiting as a mid-tier Murphy vehicle with more ambition than its reputation suggests. It does not have the comic consistency of Trading Places, the invention of Coming to America, or the effortless momentum of Beverly Hills Cop. Its pharmaceutical-company plot is too conventional, and its ending is more reassuring than genuinely sharp. Yet Murphy gives it a strong center, Dutton and Smith create an effective moral and political contrast, and the premise has gained resonance with time. What began as a funny story about a con man finding his way into Congress now plays as a reminder that political satire becomes less comfortable when reality starts catching up to it.

Guilty Pleasure No. 130: The 13th Warrior (dir. by John McTiernan)

Posted on September 22, 2026 by Arleigh

“The All-Father wove the skein of your life a long time ago. Go and hide in a hole if you wish, but you won’t live one instant longer. Your fate is fixed. Fear profits a man nothing.” — Herger the Joyous

Few films wear the scars of a difficult production as visibly—and as entertainingly—as John McTiernan’s The 13th Warrior. It is messy, truncated, occasionally incoherent, and visibly caught between two competing creative visions. Yet it also has an atmosphere that many more polished historical adventures lack: wet forests, torchlit halls, thick fog, blackened skies, grim Norse rituals, and a band of warriors who look as though they have spent their entire lives sleeping in armor and drinking themselves toward an early grave. It is not a great film, but it is an undeniably entertaining one—and one of the more fascinating guilty pleasures of the late-1990s blockbuster era.

Loosely adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead, which itself plays with the historical legend of Ahmad ibn Fadlan and folds it into a rough retelling of Beowulf, The 13th Warrior begins with Antonio Banderas as Ahmed ibn Fahdlan. Ahmed is an Arab court poet and diplomat banished from Baghdad after an indiscretion involving a powerful man’s wife. He is sent north as an ambassador, where his refined manners, education, and cultivated worldview put him in immediate contrast with the brutal, loud, heavily armed Norsemen he encounters. The movie gets a surprising amount of mileage out of that culture-clash premise. Ahmed is initially horrified by the Vikings’ hygiene, manners, food, and casual relationship with violence, while the Vikings regard him as an odd, under-equipped foreigner who seems far too elegant to be useful in a fight.

The story kicks into gear when a group of Norse warriors is summoned to aid a distant village terrorized by mysterious attackers known as the Wendol. According to prophecy, thirteen men must go—and the thirteenth cannot be a Northman. Ahmed, despite having no real desire to be involved in this nightmare expedition, becomes the required outsider. From there, the film turns into a lean survival-horror adventure: the warriors travel into an isolated northern settlement where people are being abducted and mutilated by enemies who seem to emerge from the darkness itself. The Wendol wear animal skulls, move through the night like ghosts, and are initially presented less as a human army than as something ancient and supernatural.

That eerie buildup is easily the best thing about The 13th Warrior. McTiernan, the director of Die Hard, Predator, and The Hunt for Red October, knew how to make hostile environments feel dangerous. The village is surrounded by dense woods and oppressive mountains, while the interiors are lit by fire, smoke, and shadows. The film often feels as if it is taking place at the edge of the known world. Even when the plot becomes shaky, the mood holds. There is a genuinely creepy quality to the Wendol’s first attacks, especially when horns sound in the distance and figures descend from the hills in the rain. The movie may never fully sell the mythology behind its villains, but it absolutely sells the fear they inspire.

Banderas is a somewhat unconventional choice for Ahmed, and his casting has always been one of the film’s stranger elements. He brings charisma and physical presence, but the accent situation is obviously all over the place. Still, he makes the character’s gradual transformation satisfying. Ahmed begins as a man who sees himself as superior to these crude northerners, only to discover that their apparent barbarism is paired with courage, loyalty, humor, and a practical intelligence he had underestimated. His evolution into a capable warrior is predictable, but it works because Banderas plays the early discomfort well. The famous moment when Ahmed learns the Norse language simply by listening around the campfire is absurdly accelerated, but it is also one of the movie’s most memorable scenes. It tells the audience, with no subtlety whatsoever, that he has crossed into their world.

The supporting cast gives the film much of its appeal. Vladimir Kulich’s Buliwyf is the quiet center of the group, a noble warrior king whose death is basically foretold from the moment he appears. Kulich has the right imposing, mythic presence for the role, and he makes Buliwyf feel like a living folk hero rather than just another stock Viking chief. Dennis Storhøi, Tony Curran, Richard Bremmer, and the rest of the warriors are not always given much individual development, but they create a convincing sense of companionship. Their banter, drinking, ritualized insults, and battle-ready camaraderie help the group feel like a unit with a history long before Ahmed arrived.

The action is another mixed but memorable part of the experience. McTiernan’s best films are often celebrated for their clarity of geography and movement, but The 13th Warrior is much murkier. Some of that is intentional: fights take place at night, in rain, amid smoke, fire, and chaos. But some of it also feels like a byproduct of an uneven post-production process. The movie is often too dark, too quickly edited, and too vague about what is happening from one beat to the next. Even so, there are flashes of real power. Ahmed forging a sword from a Viking weapon is a solid transformation moment, while the climactic infiltration of the Wendol cave has the pulpy appeal of an old adventure serial filtered through mud, blood, and 1990s studio excess.

The behind-the-scenes drama is arguably just as intriguing as the movie itself. The 13th Warrior became infamous for going significantly over budget and for the creative conflict between McTiernan and the studio. The reported disputes centered on the film’s tone, pacing, and specific scenes, with the studio evidently concerned that McTiernan’s version was too dark, too strange, and too inaccessible for a massive summer release. This was not a minor disagreement over a few trims. It became the kind of production struggle that leaves fingerprints all over the finished film. You can feel the tension between a moody, almost horror-driven historical fantasy and a more conventional action-adventure picture trying to break through the same material.

Michael Crichton, the author of Eaters of the Dead and a major force behind the project, eventually stepped in to oversee reshoots and re-editing. That fact alone makes The 13th Warrior unusually fascinating. It is not every day that the author of the source novel takes such a direct role in reshaping a film after its original director has already completed his work. Crichton reportedly pushed for a more straightforward, audience-friendly version, trimming and restructuring the movie in ways meant to clarify the story and increase its commercial appeal. The result is a film that often feels like two versions grafted together: one a grim, unnerving tale about outsiders confronting an almost prehistoric terror, the other a compressed heroic adventure about a reluctant man discovering his warrior spirit.

That conflict helps explain why the finished movie can feel so abrupt. Characters appear and disappear with little explanation, the Wendol mythology is only partially developed, and the final stretch rushes through material that could have supported a longer, more coherent climax. The film is barely over 100 minutes, yet it sometimes feels as though an entire half-hour of connective tissue vanished somewhere between the shoot and the theatrical cut. This is especially frustrating because there is clearly a richer movie buried inside the existing one. The setting, the central premise, the cultural collision, and the supernatural ambiguity all deserved more room to breathe.

Still, those flaws are part of why The 13th Warrior has endured as a cult favorite. It is easy to imagine a cleaner, more successful version, but it is also difficult to imagine that version being as peculiar or as memorable. The finished film has a strange, bruised personality. It carries the weight of a troubled production, but it also has enough great imagery, strong atmosphere, and old-fashioned adventure momentum to overcome its rough edges. It never reaches the level of McTiernan’s best work, and it is certainly not the definitive cinematic take on Beowulf. But as a cult, guilty-pleasure fantasy adventure, The 13th Warrior delivers more than its reputation might suggest.

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Review: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (dir. by Sergio Leone)

Posted on September 21, 2026 by Arleigh

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.” — Blondie

Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the kind of movie that feels so foundational that it can be easy to forget how strange, bold, funny, and downright operatic it still is. Released in 1966, it was the third and final leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” following A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, and it takes the stripped-down antihero Western formula of those earlier films to its most grandiose extreme. It is bigger in scale, longer in runtime, more openly concerned with the Civil War, and more confident about lingering on faces, landscapes, corpses, explosions, and silences until they become almost mythic. It is also just an enormously entertaining movie: violent, cynical, hilarious, tense, and powered by one of the greatest scores ever written for film.

The title is simple, but the movie’s moral categories are deliberately slippery. Clint Eastwood plays Blondie, the “Good,” though he is not good in any conventional heroic sense. He is a mercenary drifter with a cool head, a quick draw, and a willingness to exploit the desperate when there is money involved. Lee Van Cleef is Angel Eyes, the “Bad,” a cold professional killer whose cruelty is more orderly and methodical than emotional. Eli Wallach, meanwhile, plays Tuco, the “Ugly,” a bandit, liar, survivor, and chaos agent who is arguably the most human person in the whole film. Leone uses those labels less as literal definitions than as a rough guide to the way each man moves through the world. Blondie may possess the closest thing the story has to a moral code, Angel Eyes is openly monstrous, and Tuco is shamelessly selfish, but all three are driven by greed and survival.

The plot begins with Blondie and Tuco running a scam across the frontier. Blondie collects bounties by turning Tuco in to authorities, then rescues him at the last possible moment before a hanging, allowing the two men to repeat the process elsewhere. Their partnership is profitable but unstable, especially because Blondie holds all the power. When he finally abandons Tuco in the desert after an argument, it sets the tone for the film’s shifting alliances and personal grudges. From there, the story expands into a hunt for buried Confederate gold, with Angel Eyes learning of the treasure independently and pursuing it with ruthless efficiency. The treasure hunt is the basic engine of the story, but the movie keeps finding detours that make it richer: prison camps, mistaken identities, Confederate soldiers, battlefield carnage, a destroyed bridge, family resentments, and a final trip to a cemetery that has become one of the most famous endings in cinema.

Leone’s great gift is making time itself feel dramatic. The movie is long, but it rarely feels aimless because the director understands how to stretch anticipation. He can hold a close-up for what seems like an eternity, cut between eyes and hands, let a character slowly realize they are trapped, and then release all that pressure in a flash of violence or a perfectly timed joke. The famous three-way standoff at Sad Hill Cemetery is the clearest example. It is not simply a gunfight. It is a miniature psychological war in which every glance matters, every hand movement becomes a potential death sentence, and Ennio Morricone’s music turns the scene into a kind of ritual. The sequence is so iconic because Leone earns it through buildup. He has spent nearly three hours teaching the audience that in this world, watching someone’s eyes can be more important than hearing what they say.

The direction is often described as stylized, but that undersells how carefully Leone balances visual exaggeration with emotional clarity. His close-ups are huge and intimate, showing cracked skin, sweat, stubble, narrowed eyes, and crooked grins in almost absurd detail. Then he will cut to an enormous wide shot in which a lone person barely registers against a desert, battlefield, or cemetery. That contrast makes the characters feel both larger than life and insignificant before the violence surrounding them. Leone’s West is not the clean, heroic frontier found in many older Hollywood Westerns. It is dusty, harsh, crowded with hungry people, and full of soldiers dying for causes that seem distant from their actual suffering. Even when the movie is funny, its world feels unforgiving.

The Civil War setting gives The Good, the Bad and the Ugly a weight that the earlier films in the trilogy do not have in quite the same way. Leone does not transform the picture into a historical drama, and the central story remains about three men chasing money, but he keeps placing their selfish adventure against the machinery of mass death. Blondie and Tuco witness prisoners being beaten, soldiers dying pointlessly, and whole military operations built around the destruction of a bridge. One of the film’s most memorable passages involves a Union captain who has become numb to the casualties under his command. His view of war is not glorious or triumphant; it is weary and sickened. That attitude makes Leone’s spectacle more complicated. The explosions are impressive, and the battle scenes are visually massive, but the movie never suggests that war is noble simply because it looks grand on screen.

Clint Eastwood’s performance is a major reason Blondie remains one of cinema’s defining gunslingers. Eastwood had already established the character type in the previous Leone films, but here he seems fully at ease with the role’s economy. He does not need much dialogue because his posture, timing, and faintly amused stare communicate almost everything. Blondie is always calculating. Even when he appears relaxed, he is noticing the exit, the weapon, the weakness in the other person’s plan. Eastwood makes him cool without making him hollow, and he wisely avoids trying to turn Blondie into a conventional saint. The character can be compassionate, especially compared with Angel Eyes, but he also enjoys having leverage over Tuco. Their relationship is not friendship in any easy sense. It is an ugly, funny bond forged out of mutual usefulness.

Lee Van Cleef is equally effective, though in a very different register. Angel Eyes is terrifying because he never seems hurried or uncertain. He treats murder as a job, and his calm politeness only makes him worse. There is a scene early in the movie where he murders a man after receiving information from him, and the point is immediately clear: Angel Eyes does not make promises he considers inconvenient, and he does not feel guilty about it. Van Cleef’s sharp features and measured delivery make him seem almost supernatural, like death walking around in a black hat. Yet he is not a cartoon. He is a predator with discipline, and the movie understands that competence can be frightening on its own.

Still, Eli Wallach is arguably the film’s secret weapon. Tuco is the character who gives the movie much of its energy, humor, and emotional unpredictability. He is loud where Eastwood is quiet, messy where Van Cleef is controlled, and constantly talking because silence would probably drive him crazy. Wallach gives a performance that could have become exhausting in lesser hands, but he makes Tuco vivid rather than merely obnoxious. You can see the intelligence beneath his impulsiveness. Tuco survives because he can adapt, plead, threaten, deceive, and explode into violence depending on what the moment requires. He also has flashes of pain that make him more than comic relief, particularly when the story briefly brings him face to face with his brother and the life he might have had. That scene gives the movie an unexpected emotional wrinkle without forcing Tuco into a redemption arc he does not deserve.

Morricone’s score deserves its legendary reputation because it does much more than decorate the action. The music creates the film’s atmosphere from the first seconds, with its coyote-like call, whistles, percussion, voices, and electric-guitar edge. It sounds ancient and modern at the same time, perfectly suited to Leone’s version of the West, which is less historical recreation than fever dream. Themes such as “The Ecstasy of Gold” and “The Trio” have become inseparable from the film, but they retain their power even outside their famous scenes. “The Ecstasy of Gold,” accompanying Tuco’s frantic run through the cemetery, is especially remarkable. The music turns what could have been a simple moment of greed into a spiritual experience. Tuco is not merely looking for a grave; he is racing through a landscape of death toward the possibility of salvation, wealth, and survival.

What makes the movie endure is that it never asks the audience to choose between pleasure and substance. It is a masterpiece of style, full of unforgettable faces, brilliant editing, enormous landscapes, and some of the sharpest visual storytelling in the genre. At the same time, it is funny in a dark, mean-spirited way, and it is skeptical about every institution around its characters. Governments send men to die. Criminals betray one another. Families fail to heal old wounds. Religion offers comfort but not necessarily rescue. Money remains the closest thing to a shared religion, and even that cannot guarantee anyone’s safety.

As the final installment of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly feels like a culmination rather than just a sequel. It takes the mysterious Eastwood gunslinger, the tension between rival bounty hunters and criminals, and the morally barren frontier of the first two films, then expands them into something almost epic. The movie’s scale can make it feel less intimate than For a Few Dollars More, but that is part of its appeal. Leone is not trying to make a neat ending to a continuous story. He is making the biggest, loudest, most definitive statement he can with the ideas the trilogy has been building toward.

Even now, the film’s influence is everywhere: in action movies that use silence as suspense, in antiheroes whose morality is relative rather than pure, in directors who treat a showdown as choreography, and in scores that become characters in their own right. But influence is not the same as replacement. Plenty of movies have copied Leone’s close-ups, pacing, gunfighters, and musical bravado. Very few have matched the strange balance that makes The Good, the Bad and the Ugly feel so alive. It is simultaneously a Western adventure, a black comedy, a war movie, a fable about greed, and a giant cinematic performance piece. By the time the final duel arrives, the film has become exactly what the title promises: a collision between the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of human nature, staged with enough style to make it unforgettable.

Review: Yurusarezaru Mono (dir. by Lee Sang-il)

Posted on September 20, 2026 by Arleigh

“Wait for me in hell.” — Jubei Kamata

Unforgiven, released in Japan as Yurusarezaru Mono—literally “The Unforgiven” or “Unforgivable”—is the 2013 Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 revisionist Western. Rather than treating the original as a sacred object that cannot be touched, director Lee Sang-il and star Ken Watanabe prove that its central ideas can travel surprisingly well. The story moves from the fading American frontier to Hokkaido in the early Meiji era, when Japan was modernizing quickly and the samurai class was becoming a relic of a vanishing order. In that sense, the film finds the perfect Japanese equivalent to Eastwood’s aging gunslingers. Just as William Munny belongs to an Old West that is dying around him, Jubei Kamata belongs to a Japan that no longer has a clear place for men like him.

It also belongs to a much longer tradition in which samurai and Western gunslingers have become closely intertwined character types. Both are often portrayed as isolated men shaped by violence, reputation, personal codes, and the decline of the worlds that made them useful. Both can drift into a troubled town, become involved in someone else’s conflict, and turn into a larger-than-life figure whether they want to or not. The exchange between the genres has gone on for decades, most famously when Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo became the basis for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Yurusarezaru Mono feels like an especially appropriate continuation of that conversation: a Japanese filmmaker takes an American Western that was itself deeply interested in dismantling the gunslinger myth and uses it to confront the equally romanticized myth of the samurai.

The original Unforgiven was already a film about stripping the glamour away from violence. Eastwood took the familiar image of the weathered gunfighter coming back for one final job and showed the ugliness underneath it. Violence is not clean, heroic, or especially skillful when it happens for real. It is frightening, clumsy, painful, and impossible to undo. Lee Sang-il keeps that moral core but finds a distinct cultural target. The Japanese version examines the idealized samurai image: the disciplined swordsman, the honorable warrior, the proud survivor of a more noble age. It asks whether any of those myths can survive when the man behind them has killed people, carries terrible memories, and no longer knows who he is without violence.

Ken Watanabe plays Jubei Kamata, a former samurai once feared as “Jubei the Killer.” He is the film’s William Munny equivalent, but Watanabe does not simply imitate Eastwood’s performance. Jubei is introduced as an exhausted farmer and widower raising two children in hard conditions. He is poor, physically worn down, and clearly ashamed of the person he used to be. Watanabe gives him an almost painful heaviness. Jubei is not merely an old warrior who wants peace; he is a man who has spent years trying to become someone else because he knows exactly what “Jubei the Killer” was capable of.

The early-Meiji setting gives that character arc a stronger historical charge. Jubei is not just retired from a bloody life. He is part of a fading warrior caste in a country remaking itself through new laws, new institutions, modernization, and expanding state power. The samurai may still exist in memory and in popular myth, but their old social role is slipping away. That mirrors the original film’s dying Old West perfectly. The gunslinger and the samurai are both figures from a violent past who have become obsolete, yet neither can completely escape the reputation that past gave them.

The plot begins after a prostitute is viciously assaulted and scarred by two men in a northern settlement. The town’s authorities treat the crime as an economic issue instead of an act of cruelty against a human being, so the women of the brothel raise a bounty for the attackers’ deaths. Kingo Baba, Jubei’s old companion, approaches him about the bounty and offers him a share of the reward. Jubei refuses at first because he has children, a failing farm, and a life he is trying to preserve. But poverty, desperation, and the lingering pull of his former identity eventually drag him back into violence.

The film’s real power is that it never turns this decision into a simple revenge fantasy. The men being hunted deserve condemnation for what they did, and the film does not soften that. Still, it never suggests that killing them will restore the woman they harmed or somehow balance the moral scale. Murder does not solve the original injustice; it only broadens the cycle of pain. Like Eastwood’s film, Yurusarezaru Mono constantly pushes against the audience’s instinct to treat revenge as satisfying or cleansing.

Jubei teams up with Kingo Baba, played by Akira Emoto, an old companion who fills the role of Ned Logan from the original. Their relationship is one of the remake’s best qualities. Emoto gives Kingo a tired, approachable decency, but he also makes clear that the man has lived long enough to understand the price of violence. He and Jubei do not need to explain their history in long speeches. Their shared past comes through in their guarded conversations, familiar irritation, and unspoken awareness that they are both far too old to be pretending this job will end cleanly.

Goro Sawada, played by Yuya Yagira, is just as important because he represents the fantasy of violence before reality destroys it. He wants a name. He wants to be feared. He wants stories about himself that will make him sound larger than life. But the film dismantles him in the same way Unforgiven dismantled the Schofield Kid. The first time he confronts the real consequences of killing, there is no rush of glory. There is only confusion, panic, and guilt. A legend is always easier to believe in when someone else has done the killing.

One of the Japanese remake’s most meaningful additions is its inclusion of the Ainu people, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido. The original film largely avoided directly engaging with the history of Native Americans in the American frontier, but Yurusarezaru Mono brings Indigenous displacement and discrimination into the story in a major way. Jubei’s late wife was Ainu, and his children therefore carry that heritage. Goro is also connected to the Ainu community and can speak the language. The film takes place during a period in which the Japanese state was expanding its control over Hokkaido, dispossessing and assimilating Ainu people while suppressing their culture and language.

That addition does not merely provide a local equivalent for the Western’s Native American history. It changes the emotional stakes of the entire story. Jubei is not only a former samurai made obsolete by Japan’s new order; he is tied by family to people being actively marginalized by that order. His farm, his children, and his dead wife become part of a larger historical wound. The film’s frontier is not empty land waiting for settlement. It is land already inhabited by people whose rights, identities, and futures are being threatened. By including the Ainu, the remake adds racial and colonial dimensions that the original’s story did not fully explore.

It also reframes Goro’s desire to prove himself. His hunger for reputation is not just youthful swagger. It comes from living in a society that treats people connected to the Ainu as inferior or disposable. He wants to be seen as somebody in a world eager to reduce him to less than that. Jubei understands this more deeply than he initially lets on. His eventual concern for Goro is shaped not only by friendship but by a recognition that the authorities could use Goro’s participation in the killings as an excuse to punish or target Ainu people more broadly.

Koichi Sato plays the local lawman, the Japanese counterpart to Gene Hackman’s Little Bill. He does not copy Hackman’s performance, which is a smart choice. Hackman’s Little Bill had a bluff, talkative confidence and an almost absurdly casual capacity for brutality. Sato’s version is colder and more calculating, with a distinctly bureaucratic edge. He sees himself as the defender of law and social order, but his version of order is built on intimidation, humiliation, and selective cruelty. He treats the abused woman as a problem, the prostitutes as a nuisance, and anyone outside his preferred hierarchy as someone to be controlled.

The emerging Meiji state may promise progress, but the film refuses to portray it as automatically enlightened. The samurai system’s decline does not erase injustice; it simply gives power a newer, more bureaucratic face. The lawman claims to hate disorder, yet he creates the kind of world where people can only pursue justice through murder because the law refuses to recognize their suffering. That makes him more than a simple villain. He is the embodiment of a new authority that insists it is civilized while using the same old cruelty to keep vulnerable people in their place.

The snowbound Hokkaido landscape gives the movie a visual identity that sets it apart from the dusty Wyoming imagery of the original. The cold, mud, wind, and vast stretches of white make the characters look even more vulnerable and lost. This is not the kind of samurai story built around beautiful duels and graceful swordplay. Lee Sang-il keeps the violence ugly and exhausting. When Jubei finally falls back into the terrifying persona of “Jubei the Killer,” it does not feel like he has rediscovered his true heroic self. It feels like a man surrendering to the worst part of himself because grief, anger, and desperation have burned away his restraint.

The ending closely follows the original in the way it brings Jubei’s buried reputation and frightening capacity for violence back to the surface. The climactic confrontation itself remains broadly faithful to Eastwood’s version, so the remake’s biggest distinction is not really in the setting or moment-to-moment mechanics of the final fight. The more meaningful change comes afterward, in what the film suggests about Jubei’s future once he has once again become “Jubei the Killer.”

Yurusarezaru Mono gives this question more weight through its focus on shame, guilt, and the possibility that some actions cannot be left behind simply because a man has spent years living differently. Jubei built a quieter life with his wife and children in the hope of becoming more than the killer he once was. But revisiting that past, even for reasons the audience can understand, forces him to confront whether he has truly escaped it—or whether he was only temporarily pretending it was gone. The remake’s final variation gives the story a sadder and more personally haunted edge, making Jubei’s past feel less like a legend he can reluctantly put back on and more like a moral burden that may have permanently separated him from the life he tried to build.

Those changes are important because they give Yurusarezaru Mono a distinct identity beyond simply being a Japanese version of a famous American film. The original Unforgiven ends with its own deliberately uneasy ambiguity. This remake reaches a similarly tragic, morally unsettled place, but it does so through the specific burdens of early-Meiji Hokkaido: the decline of the samurai, the oppression of the Ainu, and the false promise that modernization automatically means justice. The result is an ending that honors the emotional power of Eastwood’s film while still finding its own voice.

Ultimately, Yurusarezaru Mono works because it understands that Unforgiven was never only about the American West. It was about the myths societies build around violent men, the damage hidden by those myths, and the painful impossibility of separating a person from what he has done. By placing that story in early-Meiji Hokkaido, adding the history and oppression of the Ainu people, and revising key elements of the final act, Lee Sang-il’s film becomes more than a competent remake. It is a serious reinterpretation of a great Western through the lens of Japan’s own fading warrior mythology, colonial violence, and troubled modern identity.

Review: Unforgiven (dir. by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on September 19, 2026 by Arleigh

“It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” — William Munny

There is a point in Unforgiven when the familiar fantasy of the Western gunfighter finally collapses under the weight of what killing actually means. Clint Eastwood’s 1992 masterpiece is a revenge story, a character study, and an unusually merciless critique of the myths that turned killers into folk heroes. It takes nearly every image associated with the classic Western—the lone rider, the righteous bounty, the corrupt frontier town, the feared gunslinger, the climactic saloon showdown—and asks what those images would look like if the people involved had to suffer the consequences afterward. The answer is bleak, often grimly funny, and far more powerful than a simple “anti-Western” label suggests.

Eastwood stars as William Munny, a former outlaw and murderer trying to survive as a widowed pig farmer in Kansas. He has two young children, a failing farm, and little talent for the peaceful life he has supposedly embraced. At the beginning of the film, Munny is practically the opposite of the cool, razor-sharp gunfighters Eastwood played in his younger years. He falls into mud, cannot shoot straight, and looks exhausted before the real journey even begins. That physical decline matters because Eastwood wants the audience to see the distance between a Western legend and the actual, aging human being beneath it.

Munny’s chance to return to violence arrives when the Schofield Kid, an arrogant young would-be gunslinger, offers him a share of a bounty. In the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming, two cowboys have viciously cut up a prostitute named Delilah Fitzgerald. The town’s sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, punishes them with a fine paid to the brothel owner rather than giving Delilah anything resembling justice. Furious, the other prostitutes gather money and put out a reward for the men responsible. Munny initially hesitates, but the bounty is enough to draw him out of retirement. He convinces his old partner Ned Logan to ride with him, and the three men head toward Big Whiskey.

On paper, that setup sounds like the start of a traditional revenge Western. The crime is vicious, the local law is corrupt, and armed men set out to punish the guilty. Unforgiven, though, immediately complicates every part of that formula. The women have every reason to be furious, but their bounty does not turn the mission into a clean act of justice. Munny and Ned may be targeting cruel men, but they are still going to kill them for money. The Schofield Kid talks about the bounty like it is an adventure, but he has no real idea what killing another person does to someone. The film keeps refusing the easy emotional release that a more conventional Western would offer.

Eastwood’s direction is particularly sharp whenever violence finally breaks out. There are no elegant shootouts designed to make the viewer cheer. Guns misfire, men miss, people panic, and the victims do not fall over conveniently after being hit. When Munny and Ned shoot one of the cowboys, the sequence is awkward, tense, and almost miserable to watch. The wounded man suffers for a long time, calling out for water while his companions are too frightened to help him. Munny does not suddenly look like an unbeatable hero. He looks like a man who has made a terrible choice and now has to stand there listening to the result.

That approach makes Unforgiven feel much harsher than most Westerns, but it also gives the film its emotional weight. It is not saying that violence is never understandable. The cowboys who attacked Delilah are not treated as innocent victims, and Little Bill’s indifference to her suffering is infuriating. What the movie understands is that a justified act can still be ugly, frightening, and spiritually damaging. Killing someone may solve a practical problem, but it does not automatically restore dignity or erase pain. The movie’s view of revenge is not that it never works; it is that it always costs more than the stories promise.

Eastwood’s performance is one of the reasons the film lands so hard. William Munny is clearly connected to the Eastwood screen persona audiences knew from earlier Westerns, but he is a far sadder and more frightening version of it. Munny’s past is revealed gradually through other characters’ stories. Before he married Claudia, he was drunk, violent, and seemingly capable of killing anyone who got in his way. Claudia helped turn him toward a better life, and after her death he has tried to honor that change. Yet the movie never suggests that redemption has erased who he was. It only suggests that he has managed to keep that part of himself under control.

As the story moves forward, Munny becomes increasingly sick, angry, and emotionally stripped down. His old skills come back, but the return is not triumphant. It is more like watching someone relapse into a destructive part of themselves. Eastwood plays this change with remarkable restraint. He does not overdo the anger or announce the transformation with long speeches. Instead, Munny’s face gets harder, his voice becomes flatter, and his decisions become more final. By the end, he has become the frightening killer people said he was, and the movie makes that feel tragic rather than exhilarating.

Gene Hackman gives one of the film’s best performances as Little Bill Daggett, the sheriff of Big Whiskey. Little Bill is cruel, blunt, and completely convinced that he is the only person keeping the town from falling apart. He sees himself as a realist. In his mind, the cowboys have paid for their crime, the prostitutes are causing unnecessary trouble, and every outside gunman is a threat to the peace he has built. But his “peace” depends on denying Delilah justice and beating anyone who challenges his authority. He is not a noble lawman protecting civilization from barbarism. He is a violent man with a badge who has decided that his version of order matters more than anyone else’s pain.

Hackman makes Little Bill compelling because he never plays him as a cartoon villain. The character can be funny, conversational, and even oddly charming when he is talking about building his house or explaining how a gunfight really works. Those ordinary details make his cruelty more believable. Little Bill is not a monster because he twirls his mustache or enjoys evil for its own sake. He is a monster because he has made violence routine. He can beat a man nearly to death, then return to discussing carpentry as if nothing meaningful has happened.

The movie’s fascination with mythmaking is another reason it remains so great. Unforgiven constantly contrasts what people say about gunfighters with what gunfighters are actually like. Richard Harris appears as English Bob, an aging outlaw who has turned himself into a storybook figure. He travels with W. W. Beauchamp, a writer who records exaggerated tales of duels, bravery, and glamorous frontier violence. English Bob wants to be remembered as the sort of man old Westerns love: a polished, fearless killer who can outdraw anyone in a fair fight.

Little Bill quickly destroys that image, humiliating English Bob and explaining that most gunfights are not won by the fastest hand or the bravest heart. They are won by whoever gets lucky, whoever fires first, or whoever is less scared at the right moment. That speech is one of the clearest examples of what Unforgiven is doing with the genre. It does not merely say that the old stories were exaggerated. It shows why people prefer exaggeration. The truth is messy, cowardly, and often too ugly to make a satisfying legend.

The Schofield Kid represents the danger of believing those legends too completely. He talks big about killing men, insists he is a famous gunfighter, and assumes the bounty will make him rich and important. But when the moment comes, he cannot handle the reality of what he has done. After taking a life, he drinks heavily and admits that he has never killed anyone before. His fantasy collapses almost instantly. Munny’s response is one of the film’s coldest and most honest moments: when you kill a man, you take away everything he has and everything he is ever going to have. There is no speech about courage, justice, or glory. There is only the permanent fact of death.

Morgan Freeman is excellent as Ned Logan, Munny’s old partner and closest friend. Ned has a quiet decency that does not erase his violent past but makes clear that he wants no part of it anymore. His scenes with Munny feel lived-in, as if the two men understand each other without needing to explain their history. Ned knows exactly what Munny used to be, and that knowledge makes him nervous about what his friend may become again. Freeman brings warmth and humor to the movie, which makes the eventual loss of that warmth feel devastating.

Ned is especially important because he shows that a person can decide not to keep living by old violent rules. He has a life with Sally Two Trees, and when the killing becomes real, he chooses to leave rather than continue. That choice separates him from Munny. Both men have done terrible things, but Ned recognizes that he has reached the point where he cannot go back. Munny, on the other hand, is eventually pulled all the way back into the identity he thought he had escaped.

Visually, Unforgiven is one of Eastwood’s most beautiful films, although “beautiful” may not be the first word that comes to mind while watching it. The landscapes are often gray, rainy, muddy, and lonely. Big Whiskey is not a romantic frontier town full of colorful saloons and grand main streets. It is wet, cramped, and miserable. The open country does not feel liberating either. It feels empty and dangerous, a place where a wounded man can die slowly because help is too far away. Cinematographer Jack N. Green gives the film a somber, dusk-like look that fits its mood perfectly.

The final confrontation in the saloon is one of the most famous scenes in Eastwood’s career because it briefly gives viewers the kind of gunfighter moment they have been waiting for. Munny walks into Big Whiskey through the rain, enters the saloon, and becomes the nightmare Little Bill and the others have feared. He kills with shocking speed and delivers lines that sound immediately iconic. For a few minutes, the old Eastwood myth appears to return in full. The silent killer is back, the bad men are terrified, and the audience can feel the raw force of the scene.

But Unforgiven refuses to turn that climax into a victory lap. Munny’s rampage is not heroic liberation. It is grief, rage, alcohol, and guilt exploding through a man who has lost the fragile stability he built after leaving violence behind. He is not reclaiming some glorious identity. He is becoming the worst version of himself again. The scene is undeniably thrilling in a purely cinematic sense, but Eastwood makes sure the thrill feels contaminated. We are watching a legend come alive, but the movie has spent two hours teaching us that legends are usually built on suffering.

That is why Unforgiven became Eastwood’s Western magnum opus. It is not just a great Western made by a star who knew the genre inside out; it is the film where he fully confronted the meaning of his own Western image. Eastwood began deconstructing that image with High Plains Drifter, where the mysterious stranger was less a traditional hero than a ghostly, cruel force of revenge. He continued the process in The Outlaw Josey Wales, a more expansive and emotional film that questioned authority and showed an outlaw finding a kind of community, even while preserving much of the old gunslinger charisma. With Unforgiven, Eastwood completes that deconstruction of the Western film genre.

In Unforgiven, there is no clean heroism left behind the gunfighter’s reputation. The lone rider is exhausted and morally compromised. The sheriff is a bully. The bounty is not justice in any simple sense. The famous gunfighter is often a fraud, a coward, or simply lucky. And the man who really is capable of becoming a legend is also capable of committing horrifying acts. Eastwood does not dismiss the Western’s power; if anything, he understands that power better than almost anyone. He knows why audiences respond to the image of a lone man walking into a saloon to face impossible odds.

What makes the film so enduring is that it asks viewers to look beyond that image. Who dies so the hero can become a legend? Who gets turned into a footnote in someone else’s story? What does the survivor carry afterward? Those questions give Unforgiven a moral weight that few Westerns, revisionist or otherwise, can match. It is a film about violence, but it is also about memory, regret, masculinity, and the lies people tell to make brutality seem noble. By its final fade-out, Unforgiven leaves the Western standing not as a celebration of violence, but as a haunted reckoning with everything violence destroys.

Review: Resident Evil (dir. by Zac Cregger)

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Arleigh

“I’ve only used a gun in video games.” — Bryan

Resident Evil is a smart, tense, and surprisingly faithful reinvention of Capcom’s long-running survival-horror series—not because it tries to copy a single game beat for beat, but because it understands what makes the games unnerving in the first place. Written and directed by Zac Cregger, the film uses the world of Resident Evil as its foundation while telling a new story during the Raccoon City outbreak. Its main character is Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, an ordinary medical courier whose attempt to complete a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital drops him into the early stages of a biological disaster. He is not a S.T.A.R.S. officer, a government agent, or a pre-established franchise hero. He is simply a guy trying to finish a job and survive a night that becomes more horrifying, chaotic, and impossible with every block he crosses.

That basic setup proves to be one of the movie’s smartest choices. Resident Evil has no shortage of iconic protagonists, from Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine to Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, but Bryan gives the film a fresh perspective on its apocalypse. He is not entering Raccoon City with a gun, years of training, or inside knowledge of Umbrella. He starts as someone who does not understand why parts of the city are suddenly locked down, why emergency rooms are overwhelmed, or why ordinary people are behaving with terrifying violence. That makes him a natural audience surrogate, but he is not just a blank stand-in. Austin Abrams gives Bryan a nervous, tightly wound energy that fits someone constantly trying to keep pace with a situation that has already moved beyond anyone’s control.

The decision to center an everyman is also a strong way of translating the vulnerability of the games. In a great Resident Evil game, the player might eventually find a shotgun, healing items, and enough ammunition to handle a dangerous enemy, but the first hours are defined by instability. There is never quite enough ammo. There is never a guarantee that the room ahead is safe. You learn the layout of a location because you have to, not because exploration is relaxed. Cregger’s movie cannot reproduce the exact tension of an inventory screen or the anxiety of deciding whether to use a green herb now or save it for later, but it captures the emotional logic behind those mechanics. Bryan makes choices with incomplete information, moves through increasingly hostile spaces, and keeps going even when every instinct tells him to turn around and run.

What makes the film especially interesting is that it does not adapt any one game in the series. This is not a straight retelling of the Spencer Mansion incident from Resident Evil, Leon and Claire’s first night in Resident Evil 2, or Jill’s escape from Nemesis in Resident Evil 3. Instead, Cregger uses the games as backdrop and inspiration for an original story set in the franchise’s universe. The film takes place alongside the Raccoon City outbreak associated with Resident Evil 2, but Bryan’s journey is separate from the established storylines that fans already know. That may disappoint viewers who want an exact cinematic recreation of every familiar character and location, but it is ultimately the movie’s greatest advantage.

A strict adaptation would have to navigate an almost impossible set of fan expectations. If the movie directly followed Resident Evil 2, viewers would be waiting for the exact arrival at the Raccoon City Police Department, the exact early meetings between Leon and Claire, the exact role of Ada Wong, the exact appearances of William Birkin and Mr. X, and the exact descent into Umbrella’s underground facilities. A direct version of the original Resident Evil would carry the same burden with the Spencer Mansion, the S.T.A.R.S. team, the laboratory, and the Tyrant. That approach can quickly make a movie feel less like a story and more like a checklist. Cregger avoids that trap by taking the series’ atmosphere, visual identity, rules, and mythology, then building a new nightmare around them.

That freedom restores a sense of uncertainty. Even viewers who know Resident Evil 2 inside and out cannot assume they know where Bryan’s route will take him, who can be trusted, or when the next threat will appear. The film can nod toward familiar Resident Evil concepts without making them feel like obligatory fan-service stops. A locked facility, an Umbrella insignia, a contaminated corridor, or the emergence of a more elaborate biological threat carries weight because it serves the story first. The pleasure comes from seeing the franchise’s DNA interpreted in a fresh way, not from watching the movie pause so the audience can recognize a collectible reference.

Umbrella is treated as much more than a logo or a few bits of background lore. The company remains the central force behind the horror, and that gives the film a more specific personality than a typical zombie outbreak story. Umbrella is terrifying because it represents private power with no moral limit: a corporation able to hide experiments, manipulate information, weaponize biology, and treat ordinary people as expendable collateral. Its infected victims and bio-organic weapons are not random monsters wandering into the story. They are products. Someone designed them, approved them, tested them, and determined that whatever potential value they offered was worth the risk. That is the darker edge of Resident Evil: the monsters are terrible, but the systems that created them are worse.

Cregger understands that this corporate horror needs to feel physical. A zombie is frightening because it is a person reduced to a violent, decaying shell. A more advanced creature is frightening because it reveals experimentation that has pushed life beyond recognizable limits. The body horror works best when it does not feel ornamental. It should make the audience imagine the research process behind the mutation, the human cost of the experimentation, and the awful combination of arrogance and indifference that allowed it to happen. Resident Evil does not need to constantly escalate into larger monsters merely for spectacle. Its creatures matter when they feel like increasingly disturbing evidence of what Umbrella has been building in secret.

Cregger’s background makes him an unusually strong fit for this material. Barbarian worked because it transformed a familiar location into a space of escalating dread. The house at the center of that film is not just a setting; it becomes a trap, a maze, and a place with its own buried history. Cregger knows how to make architecture feel dangerous. He understands that a corridor, a basement, an unlit stairwell, or a locked door can generate more tension than an explosion if the audience believes something might be waiting just outside the frame. That is basically the visual language of Resident Evil.

The games have always relied on locations that feel compromised. The Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil, the Raccoon City Police Department in Resident Evil 2, and the ruined streets in Resident Evil 3 turn places that should represent order, security, or civilization into traps. A police station becomes a fortress that cannot protect anyone. A hospital becomes a source of infection. A laboratory becomes proof that the disaster was not an accident. Cregger’s film channels that environmental fear well. Bryan’s path through Raccoon City is not just a string of monster encounters. It becomes a worsening descent through spaces that are failing one after another, with every new location offering a possible route forward while also revealing another level of the catastrophe.

The basic premise involving Bryan’s medical delivery gives the movie a focused sense of movement without spoiling the larger story. He has a practical objective, but each step toward completing it pushes him deeper into Raccoon City’s outbreak. The film lets the audience learn alongside him through half-understood warnings, panicked strangers, sealed-off areas, fragments of information, and signs that the official story does not add up. Cregger does not rush to explain every piece of Umbrella’s involvement immediately. He lets the mystery build around Bryan’s immediate need to survive, which is exactly how the strongest Resident Evil games turn scattered notes, hidden rooms, and locked pathways into part of their storytelling.

The influence of Weapons is especially clear in that willingness to let confusion and dread hang in the air. Cregger has shown an interest in narratives where the audience slowly pieces together a larger horror from incomplete perspectives and disturbing details. Resident Evil applies that instinct to a world built around secrecy. Umbrella does not announce itself with a complete explanation. Its presence is felt through the consequences: infected civilians, closed facilities, experiments that have slipped into the open, and the growing realization that Raccoon City’s crisis has roots much deeper than a random medical emergency. That approach turns exposition into suspense. The audience wants answers, but it also understands that every answer is likely to lead somewhere worse.

The film’s tone is another area where Cregger’s sensibility helps. Resident Evil should be scary, but it should not pretend that the series is grounded, ordinary horror. The franchise has always mixed genuine survival dread with B-movie science fiction, action-movie intensity, melodrama, and moments of pure, glorious weirdness. The same series that can make a player afraid of opening a narrow hallway door can also introduce giant mutant reptiles, insects, experimental super-soldiers, and outlandish biological mutations. Cregger seems comfortable operating in that space. Barbarian showed that he can move between dark humor, disgust, shock, and legitimate tension without flattening the experience into parody. That balance is crucial for Resident Evil, which should be intense without becoming embarrassed by its own pulp imagination.

The film is strongest when it lets the strange material land through the characters’ reactions rather than making a joke of it. Bryan does not become an instant action hero who dispatches monsters with effortless confidence. His fear, exhaustion, and disbelief help ground the increasingly bizarre developments around him. When the story introduces threats beyond the initial infected, those moments work because they feel like the next horrible stage of Umbrella’s hidden program rather than a required entry in a franchise encyclopedia. Cregger understands that a recognizable monster or concept only matters if it changes the stakes for the character in front of it.

There is also welcome restraint in the scale of the movie. Raccoon City’s outbreak is huge, but Resident Evil keeps the experience close to the ground. It is not mainly about elite military units, globe-spanning conspiracies, or invincible heroes fighting through armies of infected. It is about one man trying to get through a city that has become a death trap. A blocked street becomes a serious obstacle. A working car becomes a lifeline. A few infected people can be overwhelming when Bryan has limited ammunition, no clear escape route, and no way to know who has already turned. That survival focus lets the film preserve the essential question behind every good Resident Evil scenario: not “How can the hero kill everything?” but “How can the hero make it through the next room?”

Cregger’s narrative choices will probably alienate a certain segment of the fanbase, and that is understandable. Some viewers will want a movie built around Leon, Claire, Chris, Jill, or another established character. Others will want a cleaner adaptation of a specific game, with its canonical set pieces, key relationships, and familiar story beats intact. Those are reasonable desires, especially because Resident Evil has such an enormous cast of beloved characters and such a rich backlog of stories that have never been adapted faithfully. Cregger’s movie is taking a chance by prioritizing an original protagonist and a separate narrative over direct adaptation.

But that risk is also what makes the film work. Fans who go in with open expectations may be surprised by how naturally it fits inside the Resident Evil universe. It does not need to repeat every event from the games to understand their identity. The movie has the oppressive spaces, the escalating survival pressure, the corporate conspiracy, the infection-driven horror, and the feeling that any new revelation will only lead deeper into a nightmare. Bryan’s story feels like a side route through Raccoon City’s catastrophe—a story that could exist in the margins of the games without contradicting the dread, danger, and bizarre biohazard logic that define them. The film asks fans to accept that it is not trying to replace the games they love. It is trying to tell another story that could only happen in this universe.

Ultimately, Zac Cregger’s Resident Evil succeeds because it recognizes that the franchise’s appeal is not limited to familiar names, costumes, creatures, or Umbrella logos. It is about the sickening feeling of being trapped in a hostile place with too little information, too few resources, and no guarantee that the person beside you will still be alive—or human—by the next scene. By making Bryan an ordinary medical courier caught in an outbreak, Cregger gives the audience a vulnerable and compelling guide through Raccoon City. By using the games as inspiration instead of adapting a single title word for word, he gives the story space to surprise viewers who already know the series inside and out.

As a fan of the games, the film more than hits the mark of what a Resident Evil movie should feel like. It has the oppressive locations, slow-burn conspiracy, grotesque biological horror, corporate corruption, and sense of escalating hopelessness that define the series at its best. More importantly, it captures the survival-horror tension that has always been at the heart of the games: the dread of stepping into an unfamiliar room, the suspicion that supplies will not last, and the sinking realization that every answer leads deeper into Umbrella’s nightmare.

As a horror fan, Resident Evil also confirms that Zac Cregger is one of the best filmmakers currently working in the genre. After Barbarian and Weapons, this makes him three for three. Each film has its own identity, but all three display the same gifts: command of suspense, strikingly unsettling imagery, a feel for dark humor that never entirely breaks the danger, and the confidence to take an audience somewhere more disturbing than it expects. Resident Evil turns Raccoon City into a living maze of infection, secrecy, and panic, where every locked door feels like it might lead to an escape—or to the worst possible decision. It is not merely a strong video-game adaptation. It is another major win for Cregger, and a reminder that the right filmmaker can make even one of horror gaming’s most familiar worlds feel frighteningly new.

Icarus File No. 32: The Cable Guy (dir. by Ben Stiller)

Posted on September 16, 2026 by Arleigh

“You were never there for me, were you, Mother? You expected Mike and Carol Brady to raise me! I’m the bastard son of Claire Huxtable! I am a lost Cunningham! I learned the facts of life from watching The Facts of Life!” — Chip

Few 1990s studio comedies are as awkwardly fascinating—or as misunderstood on arrival—as The Cable Guy. Directed by Ben Stiller and built around one of Jim Carrey’s most deliberately uncomfortable performances, it arrived at a strange point in Carrey’s career: he had become a massive box-office draw through films such as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Batman Forever, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Audiences associated him with rubber-faced chaos, exuberant catchphrases, and a kind of manic but fundamentally likable comic energy. The Cable Guy offers something much colder. Carrey is still loud, physical, and wildly committed, but the movie twists those familiar traits into a portrait of loneliness, obsession, and emotional menace. It is a dark comedy about a man who has absorbed television culture so completely that he cannot form a normal human relationship without treating it like an episode of a sitcom.

That basic idea remains clever and surprisingly ahead of its time. Carrey plays Chip Douglas, a cable installer who enters the life of Steven Kovacs, played by Matthew Broderick, after Steven moves into a new apartment following a breakup with his girlfriend Robin, played by Leslie Mann. Steven wants cable television installed; Chip wants a best friend. What begins as awkward friendliness becomes invasive dependence, as Chip worms his way into Steven’s social circle, his professional life, and eventually his relationship with Robin. Chip is not simply a pest or an eccentric service worker. He is a lonely, emotionally stunted man whose references to television, movies, commercials, and game shows have become his entire vocabulary for intimacy.

The most interesting thing about The Cable Guy is that it understands television as both comfort and damage. Chip’s childhood was clearly shaped by neglect, with television functioning as his guardian, teacher, and surrogate parent. The movie makes this point broadly, sometimes too broadly, but it also gives the character a sad logic. Chip does not understand friendship as mutual connection; he understands it as a package deal. You meet someone, quote the same shows, hang out constantly, become inseparable, and live out the happy ending promised by popular entertainment. When Steven resists that fantasy, Chip does not know how to process rejection. His behavior turns increasingly controlling and vindictive because, in his mind, Steven has violated the rules of the relationship genre they are supposed to be playing.

In that respect, the film was well ahead of its time. In 1996, the idea of television becoming an all-encompassing babysitter for a generation of children was recognizable, but it still played largely as exaggerated satire. Chip represents the extreme result of a childhood where adults failed to provide stability, affection, supervision, and basic emotional guidance, leaving television to fill every role instead. He learned how to talk, how to joke, how to flirt, how to fight, and how to imagine friendship from whatever appeared on the screen. The tragedy is that media gave him endless information and endless imitation, but no real understanding of boundaries, empathy, or reciprocity.

That concern feels much less hypothetical today. Television did not disappear; it expanded into streaming libraries, on-demand movies, YouTube, social media feeds, online games, short-form video, and the constantly available internet. More children now grow up surrounded by screens that are not confined to a living-room television set or a few scheduled hours of programming. The old guardrails of limited channels, parental supervision around a shared TV, and the simple fact that a show ended at a certain time have weakened or, in many homes, disappeared altogether. The Cable Guy obviously does not predict every aspect of the internet age, but it does anticipate the emotional danger of allowing media to become a substitute for parenting, companionship, and healthy social development.

The film is careful enough to suggest that media alone did not create Chip. He is the product of abandonment first and television second. That distinction matters, because the movie is not arguing that children who watch too much television will inevitably become unstable stalkers. Rather, it suggests that screens can become especially powerful when they are used to fill an emotional void that should be addressed by family, community, and genuine relationships. Chip’s many references are funny at first because they are recognizable, but they become sadder as the movie reveals that he is not simply quoting pop culture for fun. He is quoting it because he has little else to draw from.

That makes the film more ambitious than its reputation as “the weird Jim Carrey movie” might suggest. The screenplay, by Lou Holtz Jr., has fun with media saturation, consumer culture, male insecurity, and the way people use technology to avoid direct emotional communication. The title itself now feels almost quaint, because cable installation hardly seems threatening in an age of smartphones, streaming services, social media surveillance, and algorithmic recommendation systems. Yet Chip’s obsession has only become more recognizable. He is essentially a proto-internet stalker, a man who treats access as entitlement. Because he can enter Steven’s home to connect his television service, he assumes he deserves access to Steven’s private life. The film exaggerates that premise for comic effect, but the underlying discomfort has aged well.

At the same time, The Cable Guy has a major problem, and it is inseparable from the reason the film exists: Jim Carrey. Casting Carrey was a commercial gamble meant to make a very dark premise accessible to a mainstream audience. In theory, it is an inspired decision. His brand of elastic, outsized comedy gives Chip a strange unpredictability; you never know whether he is going to make a ridiculous movie reference, belt out a sentimental song, physically humiliate himself, or suddenly become frightening. Carrey’s comic instincts make Chip memorable in a way that a more restrained actor likely would not have been. His version of the character is like an abandoned cartoon character who has somehow wandered into a real person’s life.

But the same performance often works against the movie. Carrey’s penchant for excessive facial expressions, exaggerated voices, and physical escalation overwhelms the subtler and more unsettling possibilities in the script. The film wants to be a satirical dark comedy, but it repeatedly gives itself over to big Jim Carrey bits. Some are undeniably funny, especially because Carrey commits to them with fearless energy, but they can make Chip feel less like a damaged human being and more like a delivery system for gags. The movie keeps shifting between “this man is dangerously unstable” and “look at Jim Carrey doing something weird,” and that unevenness prevents it from fully landing as either a truly disturbing character piece or a consistently hilarious farce.

The medieval-themed restaurant sequence is probably the clearest example of both the movie’s strengths and weaknesses. When Chip and Steven engage in an extended jousting and sword-fighting routine at Medieval Times, it is funny because it transforms a casual social outing into a ridiculous, testosterone-heavy spectacle. It also exposes the warped nature of their friendship: Chip is trying to force Steven into a grand, cinematic bonding ritual. Yet the scene is so broad and so committed to the escalating stunt comedy that it can feel detached from the film’s more interesting emotional undercurrents. It is memorable, certainly, but it is also the kind of scene that makes it easy to see why contemporary audiences may have expected another straightforward Carrey comedy rather than a satire with genuine bitterness beneath the jokes.

Broderick is important here because he provides the film’s necessary straight-man perspective. Steven is not a particularly dynamic protagonist, and that is partly the point. He is an ordinary, mildly selfish guy trying to rebuild his life after a breakup, which makes Chip’s intrusion feel even more invasive. Still, Broderick’s deliberately subdued performance can make Steven seem passive compared with the hurricane of Carrey’s performance. The movie needs Steven to be bland enough for Chip to project his fantasies onto him, but that choice also leaves the film with an imbalance: Chip is by far the most vivid person on screen, even when the story is asking us to see him as a nightmare.

Leslie Mann brings warmth and patience to Robin, while Jack Black, in an early supporting role as Steven’s friend Rick, adds a welcome jolt of weird energy without taking over the movie. The supporting cast understands the heightened tone, but Stiller’s direction occasionally pushes the material toward sketch-comedy exaggeration. That is not always a flaw; The Cable Guy is frequently inventive in its visual jokes, its television parodies, and its depictions of Chip turning every situation into a warped pop-culture performance. Still, the film is at its best when Stiller lets the strangeness breathe rather than constantly underlining it.

The movie’s lackluster initial reception makes sense in context. Audiences had been trained to see Carrey as a wildly energetic hero of broad studio comedies, not as a creepy, needy antagonist whose jokes often curdle into discomfort. The promotional challenge was enormous: sell The Cable Guy as a Jim Carrey movie, and viewers might expect another crowd-pleasing laugh machine; sell it honestly as a dark satire about loneliness and media dependency, and it becomes a much harder commercial proposition. Many viewers at the time seemed to reject it not because it lacked ideas, but because it did not give them the version of Jim Carrey they thought they were buying a ticket to see.

In the years since, however, the film has developed a deservedly large cult following. Distance has helped. Modern audiences are more accustomed to comedians making darker career turns, and the themes of mediated identity, parasocial attachment, isolation, and invasive access now feel much more relevant than they did in the mid-1990s. Carrey’s performance, once seen by many as abrasive or miscalculated, can now be appreciated as a risky attempt to weaponize his own comic persona. Chip is funny precisely because he is desperate to be liked, but he is also disturbing because his idea of being liked involves total possession.

The Cable Guy is not a perfect dark comedy. Its tone wobbles, its protagonist can feel underwritten, and Carrey’s larger-than-life antics sometimes obscure the sharper satire hiding underneath. Yet those flaws are also part of what makes it fascinating. It is a studio movie willing to be unpleasant, odd, and commercially confusing at the height of a superstar’s popularity. Rather than simply giving Jim Carrey another vehicle for his most familiar tricks, it turns those tricks into symptoms of a damaged man’s inability to connect. The result is uneven, but it is far more interesting than a safer 1996 Jim Carrey comedy would have been—and its cult status feels earned.

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

Posted on September 14, 2026 by Arleigh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on September 12, 2026 by Arleigh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Arleigh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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