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Star Wars Episode IX Teaser Trailer!

This is going to be something of an unusual review. I will admit why right up front.

The truth is, I haven’t watched the last few Star Wars movies. The original trilogy? The prequels? I’ve watched those, multiple times. But this new saga had never appealed to me until now, when, suddenly, I find myself standing dazed and confused wondering what on earth, or what on Tattooine, this trailer means. And that is very unfortunate, because this trailer looks pretty awesome, even though a good bit of its symbolism is probably lost on me.

We’ll discuss the big stuff first though, just because this is the stuff I do understand pretty much entirely. SPOILERS AHEAD, for those of you, who, like me, had never watched the last two Star Wars movies.

1: The Title. The film’s long-anticipated title has been revealed to be Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, which is very cool – “Every Generation Has A Legend” is the movie’s slogan. I am aware that Luke Skywalker is dead, and I have no clue whether this title is supposed to refer to him returning, or something like that. We hear Luke’s voice in the first part of the trailer, as he tells Rey about her inner power, and how a thousand generations live within her.

2: Princess Leia! The late great Carrie Fisher is in the movie, as expected, and gets a beautiful and heart-warming moment in the trailer, tearfully embracing Rey (Daisy Ridley). Having not watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I can’t give any opinion on Rey herself, except that she looks like an incredible heroine: there’s a moment here, at the 1:08 mark, where she backflips onto a very fast moving spaceship that seems to be trying to mow her down. It’s a great shot.

3: THE EMPEROR IS BACK? I didn’t even realize what I was seeing, at the 1:39 mark, when we see Rey and her team looking out over a wide barren landscape, gazing towards some distant mass of broken metal: I probably should have realized immediately that this is the remains of the literal Death Star – and, at the very end of the trailer, we hear the ominous laughter of Emperor Palpatine: who I, at least, thought was dead. Was this common knowledge to people, that the Emperor is back? That the Death Star is still out there, somewhere in the universe? Though, to be fair, the Death Star looks pretty dead and lifeless at this point, but it looked only half-built in The Return of the Jedi and turned out to be fully functional, so I don’t trust that megalithic weapon, however broken it might look. There’s something really scary about the Death Star, honestly, that makes its appearance here really awe-inspiring.

Those are most of the big things, I think, that this trailer shows. One surprising reveal, at least for me, was the appearance of Billy Dee Williams reprising his role as Lando from the original trilogy. We see characters like Chewbacca and C-3P0 again, though, of course, there’s also appearances from the newer generation, such as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Poe (Oscar Isaac), and Finn (John Boyega). The backstories of these new characters are a total mystery to me, and I’m eager to fill this gap in my knowledge, because they all look pretty interesting. The droid BB-8, I could do without: I’ve seen this character pretty much everywhere for years now – like Olaf from Frozen, or Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, these “mascot” characters always become really annoying to me, really quickly.

The trailer looks really awesome, and there’s no way I’m gonna miss seeing this in theaters: this is the end of an incredible and beloved era. I used to love the Star Wars movies, but lost my enthusiasm for them – now, as the story comes to an end, my passion for this brilliant universe has been renewed. Maybe I’ll even get around to watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi sometime in between now and December, when The Rise of Skywalker will come out.

Trailer Rating: 9.5/10

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“The Lion King” Trailer!

For one of the most highly-anticipated movies of 2019, the marketing for The Lion King has been virtually nonexistent up until today. One teaser back in November, and then just…nothing. Until today. And today, they made up for all that with this.

It starts off nice and slow, tingling with suspense: young Simba and Nala are scampering through the Outlands beyond Pride Rock. Hyenas dart around them in the shadows, and the two lion cubs cower as a voice narrates to them about how “life’s not fair” for those who “spend their lives in the dark, begging for scraps”. Then the hyenas approach, and with them comes their leader: Scar (voiced by Chiwetel Ejiofor). He looks terrifying: the way his tattered ear twitches as he advances on Simba; his ragged and disheveled coat of fur; his cold, malevolent voice. He’s perhaps lacking just a little something of the original, that almost exaggerated Shakespearean vibe to the character as voiced by Jeremy Irons, with his wild black mane and angular shape, but those are minor nitpicks – Scar looks absolutely awesome.

Then the trailer briefly turns into a nature-documentary: Mufasa brings Simba up onto Pride Rock, and in the voice of James Earl Jones tells us how the Pridelands exist in a “delicate balance”, while the music swells up, scenes flash by of Simba playing with other animals (including Zazu, voiced by John Oliver), and antelope prancing around. In this tranquil and idyllic corner of the world, we see Scar’s words made clear: Mufasa’s evil brother is bitterly jealous of this beautiful, bountiful kingdom – must be hard, when you live with a pack of ratty hyenas and your brother is living it up in this exquisitely-lit CGI paradise.

(I am aware of the fact that Mufasa and Scar apparently aren’t brothers, or are brothers, depending on which Disney executive you ask: I’m calling them brothers, for simplicity’s sake).

And, because Disney is evil, they even have the audacity to show us glimpses of a certain scene…hmm, is this a spoiler? Technically, I guess it is, so I won’t clarify exactly what this spoiler is, just that this scene in the trailer happens to involve a canyon, and a herd of stampeding water-buffalo. Yeah, they show us part of that scene.

In a throwback to the original animated feature, there’s a scene of Simba, Timon and Pumbaa walking, while the background behind them changes, and Simba grows older. I’m still left wondering how much of this film will literally just be a copy-and-paste of the original, but, hey, it looks beautiful.

We get our first good look at Nala, voiced by pop icon Beyoncé, and she looks…like a lioness. Not much more to say about her than that. She doesn’t sing, if that’s what you were expecting.

But, on that note, the trailer is not entirely without some lively song-and-dance: it closes, in fact, with Timon and Pumbaa skipping merrily along through the jungle, singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, which is peculiarly hilarious.

It looks good. It looks really good, in fact. There’s an epic quality to all the scenes, or maybe that’s just the brilliant visual effects, but it has beauty and atmosphere. The tone is perfect. A better voice-cast could not have been assembled – though I still have some reservations about Donald Glover voicing Simba himself. The movie looks like it will be incredible – or, at the very least, it looks like it will look incredible.

Trailer Rating: 8/10

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New Clip From “Tolkien”

This movie does seem to be getting more appealing to me – though this clip, which was released today by Empire, is somewhat conflicting. On the one hand, it has beautiful background music, which helps the dialogue immensely; the spoken words seem to flow around melodiously in a rhythm, the effect of which would almost be hypnotic if it weren’t for the fact that the interaction between J.R.R Tolkien and Edith Bratt here seemed so peculiarly awkward! I mean, yes, their interruptions and mumbling does lend to the interest of the scene, but it doesn’t seem to work entirely. Tolkien himself (played by Nicholas Hoult) seems a little self-absorbed – when Edith (Lily Collins) tells him she has thought of a name for a character in a story, he corrects her: “It’s not a name,” he says. “It’s something else.”

He’s referring to the fact that, in his invented language, the word Edith has created is a place-name. But the line delivery sounds too sharp, too abrupt.

Similarly, at the opening of the scene, the back-and-forth between the two seems less romantic than it does snippy. Edith pushes Tolkien to tell her a story, but can only persuade him when she gives him the choice of doing it “in any language”. Once things get moving and Tolkien starts showing off his incredible imagination, the whole scene gets much better, but the dialogue between the two feels like it could have been toned down just a little. Tolkien is currently coming off somewhat impolite – not entirely rude, but very secluded and private. Edith is much more relatable: she’s clearly fascinated by Tolkien’s intellect and her eyes are wide with wonder as Tolkien explains that the name she created (which,  by the way, is just the words “cellar door”) properly belongs to an ancient place, almost impossible to reach, but held in reverence by those who find it. “Oh, is it now?,” Edith says: proving she, too, seems to have a tendency to cut in at just the wrong moment.

Tolkien, however, is by now lost in his imagination: he talks about the shrine at the heart of this magical place, and how it is marked by – and there he pauses suddenly, and the music gently trembles around him. This is the best moment in the clip. Tolkien is on the brink of saying that this place was marked by the Elves, the legendary people who inhabit much of his invented world. But he stops, staring dreamily into space, and says – “by trees.”

In a way, the idea that the trees were responsible for this place’s magic would not be alien to Tolkien – he revered trees, and would often stop to stare at them for very long times when he was out walking. Some of his most notable characters are the Ents, the tree-shaped forest dwellers who rise up against industrialism in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Magical trees populate Middle-earth, from the enchanting mellyrn of Lórien to the Forest of Nightshade in Beleriand. So for a moment I was actually caught off guard by this line, and didn’t realize that it was meant to be a substitute for Elves. When I did realize, and re-watched the whole scene, the magic is indeed much more noticeable – but the interactions between Edith and John might have needed just a little more work.

All in all, the scene is quite good: the focus on Tolkien’s linguistic and philological skills is delightful. The use of the phrase “cellar door” to drive the scene is wonderful: Tolkien once said that the word “cellar door” was one of the most beautiful in the English language. The music is just perfect (honestly, the music is so good: very Elven). And the acting from Hoult and Collins is, for the most part, really good – I just think certain lines could have been edited slightly for an even better effect. I would be lying, though, if I said that this brief clip didn’t make me more excited than any Avengers: Endgame trailer. The truth is, I am wildly hyped for Tolkien, and I’m giving it all the benefit of the doubt for now.

Trailer Rating: 7.9/10

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“Black Widow” Cast Begins To Take Shape

"Black Widow" Cast Begins To Take Shape 1
denofgeek.com

Everything that Marvel has planned past the release of Avengers: Endgame is currently shrouded in a veil of secrecy and intense mystery – but that hasn’t stopped us from getting a few casting announcements for some of their upcoming films.

Currently, they’ve actually got quite a few movies going into production – The Eternals, a perplexing addition to the roster; Shang-Chi, set to be the first Marvel film headed by an Asian lead; and Black Widow, an origin film for a character who debuted in the MCU back in 2010.

That sounds unusual, and that’s because it is. Black Widow, or Natasha Romanoff, had her popularity peak just after the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in 2014. That would have been the best time to release a film for her, since she was one of only two original Avengers who didn’t get an origin film to begin with (the other being Hawkeye: I mean, you could say that technically the Hulk didn’t get an origin film, but technically he did). Since The Winter Soldier, Black Widow has been playing a more secondary role in the MCU, with only a few minutes of screentime in Avengers: Infinity War. That does seem to be changing with Avengers: Endgame, the trailers for which have highlighted Black Widow as one of the leading opponents of the Titan, Thanos. But that’s the thing: Endgame is…well, the end. After Endgame, where most of the other Avengers will presumably be retired or even die, what purpose does Black Widow have going forward? And why does she suddenly need an origin film, eight years after she originated?

We don’t know. But the origin film is definitely going forward, has a director (Cate Shortland) attached, has a release date of sometime in 2020, and has now begun casting. We first had preliminary reports that Beauty & The Beast star Emma Watson would be joining the cast, which actually didn’t come to pass – Fighting With My Family‘s Florence Pugh instead nabbed the role Watson was up for: the role of a spy, similar in strength to Black Widow herself. It would be hard to imagine Watson in such a role – Pugh seems like a perfectly good fit. Personally, I’m still hoping Watson gets to be Spider-Woman someday.

Then we got word that Andre Holland would be playing the movie’s villain, though those reports are still unconfirmed. There is still no word on who the villain is, either. That same report also mentioned the possibility of Alec Baldwin joining the cast.

Today, we received some definite casting: Stranger Things actor David Harbour will be joining Black Widow, in an unidentified role, and Rachel Weisz is also in talks to enter the cast.

So yeah, this thing is definitely on the move. We still don’t have any details on the plot, aside from the fact that this film is supposedly a prequel – as in, set before the events of Iron Man 2, where Black Widow first debuted onscreen, played by Scarlett Johansson (who, by the way, will continue to play the Russian spy). What is the need for an origin story now, when we don’t even know if Black Widow will survive the events of Avengers: Endgame? And what purpose could Black Widow serve in the future MCU, where the scope will be growing increasingly cosmic in scale? Is she going to fight off vast intergalactic entities like Galactus or the Silver Surfer with just her glow-stick batons and fists?

There is one link I can think of, though, and it could explain why a Black Widow movie is called for at this time, and not years ago. Crucially, Black Widow will be released next year, before The Eternals, which is set to come out in November, 2020.

You see, The Eternals itself has an interesting lineup of characters, and one of them is the villainous Druig. He is an immortal being, able to fly and teleport and do all the sorts of things that other Eternals can do – but he has one interesting thing about him. In the comics, Druig took the alias “Ivan Druig” and became a KGB officer in the Soviet Union. He even became the Prime Minister of the (fictional) country of Vorozheika. Now that may or may not be relevant, but Black Widow is also a KGB agent who operated out of the Soviet Union, and her movie should come out only a few months before The Eternals. Perhaps Natasha could have a connection to the greater cosmic beings that will inhabit the next phase of the MCU – perhaps, in the past, she had a connection to this country of Vorozheika, and even became entangled in the plots of “Ivan Druig”. It would be a brilliant link between the two films, and a great way of bridging the gap between the previous phase and the new one. It’s even possible that Andre Holland could be playing Druig, since The Eternals is currently shaping up to have a very diverse cast. Florence Pugh is rumored to be playing the “moral opposite” of Black Widow – in other words, she’ll most likely be playing Yelena Belova. I could easily imagine a scenario in which Druig recruits Belova, who trained alongside Natasha in the Red Room Program, to take out the Black Widow.

This is definitely looking like it will be a very interesting thriller. I’m sure there will be more updates on casting, plot details, etc, once Avengers: Endgame is released and Black Widow’s fate becomes known.