Month: February 2018

Black Panther, Film, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Reviews

BLACK PANTHER is thrilling, powerful & elegant black superhero myth making | Film Review

A J. Black

Black Panther feels as much like a moment as it does a movie. There has been something transformative about the response to what, in another time and place, might have just ended up as another Marvel movie. It’s yet again proof that Marvel are expanding their reach, upping their game, and doubling their odds.

Ryan Coogler’s entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, adapting the successful if not widely known outside comic-book circles story of King T’Challa of Wakanda, is the second picture in a row from the comics studio, after Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, to feel like the true work of an auteur filmmaker. This has been a balance Kevin Feige’s game-changing franchise has previously struggled with since Jon Favreau’s Iron Man changed the course of blockbuster cinema in 2008; you only have to point to the wreckage of films such as The Incredible Hulk or Thor: The Dark World as good examples of how it took Marvel a while to truly embrace a filmmaker’s singular vision alongside the beats and overarching universal frameworks Marvel have spent a decade building toward, which will reach a conclusion with Avengers: Infinity War this year and its untitled 2019 sequel.

Could it be that the reason both Thor: Ragnarok and now Black Panther are such strong entities within the Marvel family is precisely because they didn’t have to particularly fit that framework? That’s a strong possibility. All Waititi had to do was position Thor in a space whereby he could be slotted back into Infinity War – beyond that he had carte blanche to re-imagine the world of Asgard as a neon, Guardians of the Galaxy-esque, 1980’s retro-futuristic blend of mythology and Antipodean eccentricity, and for the most part it worked beautifully.

Coogler has perhaps even greater freedom with Black Panther, allowed as he is to truly develop the internal mythology and world of Wakanda around what isn’t a traditional origin story for T’Challa, given his previous introduction in Captain America: Civil War, but something deeper: a liberal-minded tale of colonial rejection, imperialist globalisation, and the haunting embers of black persecution.

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Season Reviews, Star Trek: Discovery, TV

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY (Season 1, Part 2): Reflections on the Journey | TV Review

A J. Black

Star Trek: Discovery has enjoyed a fascinating first season, both in the context of its place in the television landscape and the historic Trek franchise as a whole.

For a start, it was a season of two halves, both shaped by different creatives with different aesthetics. Bryan Fuller’s original influence you can feel in the opening arc regarding the revered Klingon extremist T’Kuvma and how his death makes him a religious martyr, triggers civil infighting and launches a ‘crusade’ against the Federation who killed him. The parallels to modern religious fundamentalist terrorism are as potent an allegory as we’ve ever seen in Star Trek, with old series hand Fuller aware for any new show to work (especially one designed to relaunch the franchise on television), it would need to hold true to the precepts of what people loved about Star Trek: the fact it always reflected where we are as a modern 20th or 21st century society.

Those reflections became even more pointed following the mid-season break, as the combined stamp of Alex Kurtzman & Akiva Goldsman, plus key writers Gretchen Berg & Aaron Harbarts moved further into focus. The reflection became literal as the Discovery and her crew were thrown into the legendary Mirror Universe, a dark, inverse reflection of the Federation and humanity’s ‘future history’ first seen on The Original Series, and later continued on Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. For the most extended spell in the MU the franchise has ever given us, we are placed between the Terran Empire seen in ENT’s ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’ and TOS’ ‘Mirror, Mirror’, and the writers give themselves the freedom to explore this universe in much greater detail and tie together the majority of story and character arcs rumbling across the season, in the context of visiting this alternate universe.

What telling an extended story in the Mirror Universe affords the writers is the opportunity to make a pointed commentary and comparison with current global politics and social change. Many fans and commentators have made the point that given our current path as a species, our future is more likely to be the despotic, warlike, totalitarian Empire than the progressive, peaceful Federation – it’s not exactly a subtle point of analysis. What in TOS was a pulpy science-fiction concept designed to allow the main cast to play villainous versions of themselves, has now become far more of a genuine point of dramatic allegory.

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Episode Reviews, The X-Files, TV

THE X-FILES 11×06: ‘Kitten’ | TV Review

A J. Black

One of the major criticisms of the previous season of The X-Files, the six-part revival series after many years of uncertainty about the show’s future, is that we didn’t see nearly enough of Mitch Pileggi and his character, Assistant Director Walter Skinner. It was a more than valid concern in regards to a character (and actor) who have been, without question, one of the key reasons Chris Carter’s series became such a pop-cultural success. Kitten is a clear, unashamed attempt to redress that balance, squaring the focus entirely on Skinner, his past and his present.

The fact it disappoints, therefore, is not only a touch unexpected, but more than a little frustrating.

The character of Skinner has been with The X-Files since late in the show’s first season, debuting in Tooms which aired early in 1994. Fitting the template of Agents Mulder & Scully’s boss, a template Carter had struggled to fill across the first season with a succession of potential, internal antagonists who came briefly and went, Skinner represented not just the FBI, but a bulwark of old-fashioned masculinity in a show with a female scientist and nerdy conspiracy theorist as leads.

Skinner is the equivalent of a small-town Sherriff in an American Western; a compromised man having to tolerate the lawless thugs who run his streets wild while proving sympathetic to the lawmakers and townsfolk he’s there to serve. Skinner described himself once by declaring to Mulder that “I stand right on the line that you keep crossing” and this contextualises his function, since essentially Season Two premiere Little Green Men, for the entire run of the series.

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Essays, Extras, TV

Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant’s EXTRAS remains a sparkling, sad satire of fame | Retrospective

A J. Black

Looking at Extras, the second comedy project from Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant, a decade on, you realise for all the Leveson enquiries, disgraced newspapers and changing models of television, the world of media and entertainment looks a great deal similar. Few lessons have been learned. Most structures and institutions remain the same.

Because, let’s not split hairs, Extras was and indeed remains a quite clear cautionary tale about the lure and subsequent perils of fame. Not just fame either but fame for fame’s sake, both of which are areas Gervais’ show touches upon the deeper it propels into its narrative over the course of two six part seasons and a feature-length Christmas special finale.

Extras turned out to be much like The Office, its predecessor that took Gervais from a memorably offensive supporting player on late-90’s edgy Channel 4 comedy and made him a star of international, indeed Hollywood proportions. Not in style, not even in story, but in the sense of how it constructed a story arc around a concept and concluded in strong, often quite dramatic fashion.

Though it lacked the iconic nature of The Office, Extras had the heart, many of the laughs, and certainly had the point of why it existed, right up to the very final scene.

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Episode Reviews, The X-Files, TV

THE X-FILES 11×05: ‘Ghouli’ | TV Review

A J. Black

When plans for the latest season of The X-Files were announced, quite a number of fans were surprised to be informed by FOX head honcho Dana Walden that Season 11 would feature only two episodes concerning the ‘mytharc’, Chris Carter’s long-running, labyrinthian mythology which has coursed through the series over the last twenty-five years. Ghouli proves that statement was never entirely accurate, and continues what was already established in This – the mythology is being weaved in more with stealth than grandiosity.

Ostensibly, of course, Ghouli is a monster story – two teenage girls try and kill each other, each believing the other to be a tentacled beast from some kind of Lovecraftian nether realm. It recalls Season 5’s Folie a Deux, which memorably dealt with the literal idea of an unspeakable ‘thing’ hiding in plain sight, with a dash of Season 3’s cosmically apocalyptic black comedy Syzygy (just without the laughs). Before the episode, a neat level of viral marketing presented the fictional ghouli.net discovered by Agents Mulder & Scully in the episode as a real site fans could click on, reading the fictional urban legend recounting of people seeing or encountering the mysterious Ghouli. Everything about the episode, on the face of it, points to a classic monster of the week.

If not for a character named Jackson van de Kamp, who very swiftly establishes himself as the raison d’être for James Wong’s entire piece. Look away now—no seriously, don’t say I didn’t warn you—but Jackson is, of course, Mulder & Scully’s long-lost biological son William (or Scully’s for certain, at least). William was born at the end of Season 8 having been coveted by alien super-soldiers and later bonkers cultists for being some kind of supreme alien/human hybrid being, indeed prophecies exist about how he may either save humanity or lead the aliens to their complete destruction (in Season 9, so we try and forget about all that). Nevertheless, William is important with a capital I. He was crucial to the last two seasons of the original series. He played a key, off-screen role in Season 10.

And he is central to everything about Ghouli.

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