The Oath | Through the Shattered Lens

Despite the success of Wonder Woman, DC Entertainment has still struggled when it comes to crafting a compelling cinematic universe. The upcoming Joker is not an official part of the DCEU but that could change if the film is a success. An origin story, Joker features Joaquin Phoenix taking on the role of the clown prince of crime. Though it will be over a year before we see the final results, director Todd Phillips has released a teaser, showing us Phoenix in his Joker makeup.

In Stan & Ollie, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy finally get the biopic treatment, with John C. Reilly in the role of Hardy and Steve Coogan as Laurel.

Along with playing Oliver Hardy, John C. Reilly will also be returning to the role of Ralph in Ralph Breaks The Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2. The mayhem continues on November 2nd.

In The Oath, all Americans are required to sign a loyalty oath the day after Thanksgiving. A new red band trailer for this dark comedy was released this week.

In Solis, Steven Ogg plays an astronaut who is trapped on a spacecraft that is on a collision course with the sun. That’s not a good place to be.

Just in time for Halloween, Netflix will be reimagining The Haunting of Hill House as a ten-episode television series. The show drops on October 12th.

Finally, The Twilight Zone is returning once again, this time under the direction of Jordan Peele. The CBS All Access show will premiere in 2019.

Other trailers that were released this week:

What has become a yearly ritual, whenever a new season of The Walking Dead inches closer to it’s premiere AMC and the folks running the show shoot a series of webisodes telling the story of a group of survivors outside of the show’s main cast. These individuals never come into contact with Rick and his band of survivors, but they do come across similar places that we’ve seen in past episodes.

The first webisode series was the 6-parter “Torn Apart” arrived just prior to Season 2 and told of the origins of the so-callled “Bicycle Girl” zombie Rick comes across soon after waking up from his coma. Then we had the 4-parter “Cold Storage” preceding Season 3’s premiere. Now we have the 3-parter “The Oath” which extends each webisode and deals with a surviving couple whose camp have been overrun by a swarm the night before.

“The Oath” stars Ashley Bell (The Last Exorcism) as Karina with Wyatt Russell (Cowboys & Aliens) playing Paul. The duo races to find medical help in the early months of the zombie apocalypse and they soon come across an abandoned hospital that should be familiar to fans of the show from the very beginning. We even see the origin of the barricaded door in the hospital with the ominous warning to keep any passer-by away.

While the webisodes themselves have been hit-or-miss when it comes to the casts performances they do fill in some backstory on the fringes of the main show. With “The Oath” we see that the Governor and Michonne may not be the only ones to have found a way to use the zombies as a sort of mascot/camouflage.

Overall, “The Oath” was a nice webisode with some average acting from the cast. The teleplay by Luke Passmore was actually quite good and series executive producer Greg Nicotero does a good job directing the whole affair. Some sequences turn out to be very tense and scary. Maybe it’s the nature of the webisode itself that the acting could be uneven, but it was still a good little story that should help whet the appetite of the fans who have been waiting a year for Season 4 to start.

“Alone”