Let’s make movies about characters people already know, whether they’re from comic books or video games!

Reference the things they remember and give the characters their iconic lines!

If you run out of ideas, throw in a few characters from the same universe, people will get excited when they recognize them!

And whatever you do, DO NOT deviate from the source material!

Let’s use Space Jam since we’re talking Looney Tunes. After decades of false starts, Warner Bros. finally greenlit a sequel, only to essentially tell the same story as the first Space Jam. The twist? More characters and a tour through Warner Bros.’ other movie universes.

Coyote vs. Acme gives Hollywood the template for how to revitalize tired IP: take the characters we love and tell us a NEW story.

What if Wile E. Coyote finally sued Acme? is a brilliant premise because suddenly, eighty years of Looney Tunes cartoons become evidence. You take every rocket that malfunctioned and every trap that exploded and ask the obvious question: Why are all these Acme products terrible?

And just like that, you have the bones for an actual legal thriller.

The movie isn’t using the courtroom as an excuse for strictly jokes, it actually understands why legal dramas are compelling in the first place.

You get to watch people build a case, you get the arguments over competing versions of the truth, and you get the underdog taking on a large corporation.

The legal genre tropes are executed so well that you eventually stop thinking about the ridiculous premise and start rooting for this silent cartoon coyote to actually win.

That's the lesson of Coyote vs. Acme: the story never takes a backseat to the IP. The IP is working in service of the story.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit understood this decades ago, taking cartoon characters we all recognized and dropping them into an actual detective noir. The cartoons were never replacing the genre.

Coyote vs. Acme does the same thing with the legal drama… it uses the genre to tell a surprisingly relevant story about corporate overreach. Acme has spent decades putting dangerous products into the hands of consumers without properly testing them, a sharp commentary on how tech. companies in our world behave today (exhibit a: Tesla, exhibit b: Meta, exhibit c: ChatGPT).

And once the movie establishes that Coyote's fight against Acme is about more than just getting revenge, it gives the story room to become something else entirely: a story about friendship.

I love Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Their cartoons were some of my favorites growing up. But let’s be real, we’ve pretty much seen every variation of their cat-and-mouse game. Coyote chases Road Runner. Coyote builds something insane. Coyote gets destroyed by his own invention.

The movie takes this rivalry and recontextualizes their relationship, delivering an emotional payoff that only works because we've known these characters for decades… it leverages what we know of the IP to deliver an emotional beat instead of just “jingling the keys” by throwing recognizable characters at us.

Don’t just give us the same story again with more CGI and more references. Take the characters we know, along with the history we’ve built up with them, and place them in unexpected scenarios.

Put them in a new genre.

Give them new stakes and relationships.

Break the formula.

That’s how our favorite franchises can stay relevant, show us something we never imagined these characters doing.

Wile. E. Coyote and the Roadrunner have been around for 80 years… nobody expected them in a legal drama, nobody expected a story that humanizes them, but against all odds, that movie exists, and it’s one of the best of the year.

That's what reinvention looks like.

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I wasn’t sure if it’s because I’ve simply seen too much of the same thing, or because the movies have actually gotten worse. Turns out it’s a little bit of column A and column B.

I remember when the Avengers were first coming together and how exciting each movie felt. Nobody had figured out this cinematic universe thing, but Kevin Feige was executing on his vision.

Iron Man, Thor and Captain America were getting their own adventure, and eventually they were going to be in the same big movie.

What was more impressive is that Marvel was doing this with their second-tier characters. They didn’t have Spider-Man, X-Men, or The Fantastic Four back then… watching Marvel turn Iron Man, Cap and Thor into movie stars felt like rooting for the underdogs.

Half the fun during those first few years came from simply wondering whether Marvel could figure out this “cinematic universe”. The comics gave them a rough blueprint to follow, but that’s different… Putting Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye on the same page is easier than negotiating contracts, screen-time, and schedules with so many movie stars.

We had never seen Hollywood attempt something of this scale.

Could they really make all of these characters work together? Could the individual movies actually feel like their own thing while also building toward something bigger? Will the actual team-up movie be any good?

Not only did they pull it off, but they made it look easy.

That’s what gets lost when we look back at the Infinity Saga. Regardless of how you feel about superhero movies in general, those first ten years of the MCU might be the most successful example of a long-term creative vision in blockbuster history.

There were bumps along the way, but the consistency of the overall plan was absurd. They kept introducing characters, expanding the world, crossing different franchises over, changing directors, and somehow keeping the whole thing moving in the same direction.

And just to flex, every few years, they would take a series that seemed like it shouldn’t work and successfully turn it into and a hit (see: Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man).

Marvel Studios during that time reminds me a lot of Pixar’s first fifteen years... the studio had built up this ridiculous level of trust, you could blindly buy a ticket for one of their movies and be guaranteed to have a good time.

This was a golden era. Marvel could do no wrong, and they deserved all the love from critics and audiences.

Seeing the superheroes coming to life felt like my childhood coming to life again… the world kept on getting bigger, and with every movie, more of your friends were getting into it. It was cool seeing something that once felt like niche nerd culture become actual pop culture.

But the MCU eventually started feeling like the default setting for Hollywood.

Endgame was the Perfect Ending

Like many of you, I noticed the MCU formula before Endgame, but at first I wasn’t bothered by it. I knew the trick, but we were building up to an ending. And right when we thought we knew the playbook, Infinity War and that great cliffhanger fucked up all our expectations… ten years in and they somehow managed to surprise us.

We figured the heroes were coming back, but we didn’t know how! And for the real nerds, the way in which they eventually solved things in Endgame was refreshing because it did not match the story from the comics.

Endgame felt like the ultimate ending. Ten years of stories had built toward that moment, but we were given no time to let it digest… as soon as we cut to credits we knew the slate of movies and TV shows that were around the corner.

Right after Endgame would have been the perfect time to take a break and completely reinvent the MCU.

They had successfully finished one of the biggest experiments in blockbuster filmmaking. They had retired some of their biggest characters and effectively given themselves a clean slate.

The Multi-Verse is the Same Magic Trick

Instead, we just got the same formula as before but with MULTI-VERSE thrown in the mix.

Introduce new character. Origin story. Add MULTI-VERSE elements. Forgettable villain. CGI third act. Post-credit scene (with another hint at the MULTI-VERSE). Next movie!

After 10 years… you can recognize the pattern.

The Infinity War saga was one of the greatest magic tricks of all time… and Marvel follows it up by doing the same act? And you think I’m going to be excited?

Shock me, surprise me, scare me… sorry for just repeating the same thing as my write-up on why I love the The Last Jedi:

GIVE ME SOMETHING NEW!

Instead we’re doing the character crossover thing? But now it’s different universes?

IT’S THE SAME MAGIC TRICK!

At least the Infinity Saga took its time with its story… We spent multiple movies with the characters before they ever became a team. We watched Tony become Iron Man, we watched the Guardians become a family. We had favorites! We were invested!

But also, the Infinity War saga was the first time we were seeing a cinematic universe come together.

We had spent years wondering if they could actually pull this off. Could these movies connect? Could these characters coexist? Could all these separate franchises eventually become one giant story?

And then suddenly we see Thor hanging out with the Guardians, and it was like, holy shit, they actually did it.

But that feeling was unique to the Infinity Saga. Stop trying to chase it… Tom Holland’s Spidey brings back Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and their enemies, Deadpool brings back half a century of forgotten characters…

‘Look at how many characters we can get together’ is NOT a story!

That’s why I’m concerned about Avengers: Doomsday, the marketing hook so far is mostly pitching the big reunion…

And don’t get me started on how these next two Avengers movie are more than likely going to run the same story structure as Infinity War and Endgame.

Doomsday will establish Doom as a threat, give him a big victory, and leave the heroes broken or scattered.

And then Secret Wars will be the big comeback. They heroes will team up and take Doom down… but not before ONE sacrifice from a beloved character and ONE emotional goodbye!

We all knew Cap was going to come back… but personally, I never thought they would hit the panic button so quickly. It’s only been seven years! Give us a chance to miss these characters.

Even though I’m surprised Marvel didn’t wait longer to play their ace, it ultimately makes sense… Disney is desperate for another multi-billion dollar hit, and outside of our little bubble where we talk about movies with strangers on the internet, most people are excited for this film. People will show up for it.

Marvel Takes Us for Granted

But if your going to give me the same thing over and over, then at least keep up with the same standards in craftsmanship… ILM figured out how to make a guy in a metal suit feel like he was real back in 2008. Now look at some of the beautiful slop we’ve gotten since 2019:

We’ve all seen what Nolan cooks up on the regular with LESS money? How is it possible for these movies with sky-high budgets to look like SHIT?

Somewhere along the way, they stopped trying to impress us and took our attention for granted.

The Marvel of fifteen years ago had something to prove… they were literally betting on themselves before Disney acquired them, they had to convince us that the investment in this universe was worth it.

But now they know we’re going to show up regardless of the quality.

So why spend another three months polishing the CGI? Why build a practical suit when you can add it in post? Why pay more for a good director?

Please Clap

I don’t need every Marvel movie to be a grand experiment... I just want something different. For all MCU movies, the dominating thought has become ’What is this setting up?’ and ‘Who will be showing up this time?’.

The Fantastic Four didn’t have time to become a family and only got one movie before getting RUSH EXPEDITED to the multi-verse. Even Spidey got stuck setting up the X-Men.

If I look at the post-Endgame slate, it was Deadpool & Wolverine that broke the camel’s back.

That movie was nerd culture eating itself from the inside… back in 2008, someone who knew absolutely nothing about Iron Man could watch that first movie and still follow along. Deadpool & Wolverine on the other hand is more concerned with getting audiences to clap and cheer for obscure cameos (one of our greatest filmmakers called these movies theme park ride and he wasn’t far off!).

It’s ok to love the cameos, but we use to get good stories to go along with them.

What’s ironic about my distaste for all of this is that I’m the audience for it. Instead I’m one of the few defenders of The Eternals, because that movie felt different.

…And Yet, I’m Still Here

I’m exhausted by the formula but I keep showing up on opening weekend.

I don’t know if I’m chasing the high from the Infinity War saga or if I’m enjoying the humbling downfall… sometimes, the series you love needs to be broken into irrelevance so that the studio heads can happily take a risk by giving it to a new voice (look at how Dan Trachtenberg has reinvented the Predator franchise).

With that said… I’m still curious to see what they do with the X-Men movie.

I hope that first trailer surprises me. Give me a new art style. These are comic book movies after all! Make it colorful. And please let’s take a break on the character cross-overs.

Let these movies be their own movie.

I want to forget about the cinematic universe and get lost in the story again. I want a movie that ends instead of one that hands me homework afterwards. I want an identity that belongs to the filmmaker instead of the corporate overlords.

Take risks! Trust us Marvel, we’re not that shallow, look at how the youth turned up for Backrooms, we can handle different!

It’s ironic really… the MCU became the biggest franchise in the world because Marvel was willing to bet on characters nobody thought could carry a movie.

Now that they have EVERY CHARACTER available, but they are TERRIFIED of doing something new. And that tells you why they’re creatively stuck.

I don’t hate the MCU. I just miss it.

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I’m not sure if this piece will change anyone’s mind but I’ve been talking about this film for nearly 10 years. I need a place to just say everything I have to say about Rian Johnson’s masterpiece, so here we go.

Why Do We Love Star Wars?

Here’s a question worth asking before we get anywhere near the discourse: why did we fall in love with Star Wars in the first place?

It wasn’t because Star Wars followed the rules. In 1977, there weren’t any rules to follow.

George Lucas took a space opera, a samurai movie, a World War II dogfight, a Flash Gordon serial, and a bunch of ideas from old mythology, threw them into a blender, and created something we’d never seen before.

That’s what made Star Wars feel like Star Wars. It was strange, risky, and NEW… it expanded on our ideas of what fantasy could be.

And then Lucas ran it back with The Empire Strikes Back.

The heroes lost. The villain turned out to be the hero’s father. The movie ended with the good guys broken and uncertain about what comes next. The Empire Strikes Back is beloved precisely because it refused to repeat what Star Wars had already done.

Which is why I’ve always found the reaction to The Last Jedi so strange, because Rian Johnson did the same thing.

He made the Star Wars movie that said, you’ve never seen this before? Here you go.

A three-perspective Rashomon-style flashback. A Force connection that lets people on opposite sides of the galaxy communicate (and flirt?) face-to-face. Leia using the Force to save herself. A lightspeed Star Destroyer attack. Luke Skywalker projecting himself across the galaxy. Yoda summoning lightning. A villain who kills his master halfway through the trilogy. A final scene where the Force belongs not to a Skywalker, but to a nameless child staring at the stars.

The movie also introduces new ideas about what the Force means, what the Jedi were wrong about, what heroism actually looks like, why failure matters, and whether the Star Wars universe really belongs to the dynasties we’ve been following for forty years.

For those of us who’ve been dying for something new from the series, this movie felt like getting toys on Christmas.

It’s new in its craft.
It’s new in its themes.
It’s new in its storytelling.
It’s new in its lore.

Isn’t that why we fell in love with Star Wars?

The Movie’s Two Big Ideas

At the center of the movies are two ideas that seem contradictory until you realize they complete each other:

and

The first, from Kylo, is about letting go:

• Luke has to let go of the Jedi he thought he was supposed to be.

• Rey has to let go of the idea that her parents are the key to her identity.

• Kylo has to let go of Vader’s legacy.

• Poe has to let go of his instinct to solve every problem by blowing something up.

• Finn has to let go of survival as his only motivation.

But destroying the old thing isn’t enough… Kylo wants to burn everything down: the Jedi, the Sith, Vader, Snoke, the past itself, but he has no idea what he wants to build in its place.

That’s why Rose’s line about saving what we love is equally important. You can’t defeat hatred with hate. You have to find something worth protecting.

One thesis tells you what to let go of. The other tells you what to hold onto. Most modern blockbusters don’t even bother giving you ONE single idea to hold onto, The Last Jedi gave you two complex, intertwined, AND beautiful message… and Rian Johnson foolishly trusted the audience to sit with them.

Luke Skywalker: You’re Mad at the Wrong Movie

Let’s talk about The Force Awakens because it’s JJ Abrams that set us up with Luke in exile. Why did he leave? Why did he abandon the Jedi? What happened with Ben Solo? What is he doing on this island?

The Force Awakens didn’t give us a single hint on the answer to those questions… just a couple of beep boops from R2 and a map, good luck Rian!

By the time The Last Jedi arrived, people weren’t just waiting to hear Rian Johnson’s answers to these questions, they wanted to feel validated by hearing their answers.

And if your version was “Luke shows up with six-pack abs, grabs a lightsaber, says something cool, and immediately goes back to being the galaxy’s greatest hero” then yea… The Last Jedi was probably going to upset you.

But let’s be honest. What exactly did you think was going to happen?

If Luke is ready for battle right away, then why did he spend years in exile? You have to explain why he disappeared in the first place.

The answer is that Luke failed. And for Luke, it can’t just be an easy failure. It has to be a failure so devastating that it would send him into exile… that’s how we get to Luke pushing his nephew to the dark side.

I get it, it’s uncomfortable for “OUR” Luke Skywalker to go through something so dark, but THAT’S THE POINT!

People and their nostalgia have this Christ-like image of Luke, but he’s meant to be flawed. That’s what makes him human and relatable.

And isn’t Luke’s ability to bounce back from such a low point a beautiful exemplification of his strength and heroics?

The common objection is that “Luke would never do that”… but that misreads the movie, the Rashoman-style flashback clearly explains what broke between Luke and Ben:

• From Luke’s perspective, he sees a flash of darkness in Ben, ignites his saber instinctively, and immediately regrets it.

• From Ben’s perspective, he wakes up to find his uncle standing over him with a weapon.

One moment. Two perspectives. And suddenly you understand both Luke’s exile and Kylo Ren’s creation.

It’s a tragedy but goddamn is it elegant story-telling.

The other complaint is that the Luke from the Original Trilogy would never go into hiding, he always believed there was good in Vader and he wouldn’t have given up on him the way Luke from The Last Jedi gave up on Kylo.

Once again, this tracks with Luke’s growth as a character… what happens when the eternal optimist believes he can save anyone, suddenly realizes he is responsible for pushing his nephew towards the dark side?

It breaks him… of course he runs into hiding!

Luke does what Obi-Wan did: his student falls, he blames himself, and he disappears into exile. The Jedi keep repeating the same pattern until someone finally breaks it.

Rey is a Nobody

Then there’s Rey. Her parents are not Skywalkers, Kenobis, or Jar-Jars… they’re not even Jedis! Just two broke asses who sold her for drinking money.

And I love it. Because look at the contrast Johnson builds:

• Kylo gets the legacy. Son of Han and Leia. Nephew of Luke. Born into myth. Turns to the dark side.

• Rey gets abandoned. A nobody on a desert planet… and yet she becomes the hero.

The original promise of Star Wars was never that the right bloodline would save the galaxy. It was that anyone could.

Rey doesn’t need to learn about her lineage, she can be anybody she wants, regardless of where she comes from… it’s a universal message.

It’s the same idea that made Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse so great: Anyone can wear the mask.

It boggles my mind that The Rise of Skywalker took such a beautiful theme and said: Actually, nevermind… she’s a Palpatine.

Snoke Didn’t Need a Backstory. He Needed a Death That Mattered.

“But Snoke! They never explained Snoke’s origins!”

We watched the Original Trilogy and never complained about the lack of backstory for Palpatine. Vader threw him down the reactor shaft and we all cheered because great villains don’t always need biographies. The mystery is the point.

Snoke’s whole character exists as fuel for Kylo… he’s powerful and condescending enough that his death could actually mean something.

And finally, Kylo, who has been belittled for a movie and a half, reshapes the entire trilogy with one lightsaber ignition.

The mask is gone. The old order is gone. Snoke is gone.

That’s that theme again… Kill the past.

And suddenly we’re set-up with a compelling villain going into the final chapter, Supeme Leader Kylo: he murdered his own master, he got a little soft spot for Rey, he’s driven by grief, rage, and unfinished business.

And once again, The Rise of Skywalker squanders the opportunity to expand on Kylo’s character… because somehow, Palpatine has returned.

Poe Dameron Learns What It Means to be a Hero

Poe opens the film by doing something heroic and reckless: destroying a dreadnought at the cost of the Resistance fleet. Leia demotes him.

That tension between the instinct to blow something up and the wisdom to restrain himself is Poe's entire movie.

By the time we reach Crait, he’s the one who calls off the charge, realizing that dying pointlessly isn’t courage.

That’s not the same Poe from the beginning. That Poe would have charged into a certain death. This Poe understand that survival is a chance to live and fight another day.

Canto Bight… Yes, I’m Defending Canto Bight

Canto Bight is ten minutes of this movie and yet it gets treated like Rian Johnson personally spit the audience in the face for ten minutes.

Finn starts The Force Awakens as a stormtrooper deserter and finishes as someone attached to Rey… he has no strong loyalties to the Resistance.

Canto Bight is where that changes. Rose takes him to a planet of obscenely wealthy arms dealers and opens his eyes to the corruption: people who sell weapons to both sides, the children in forced labor. Canto Bight turns Finn into a Resistance fighter… rebel scum.

Ten simple minutes builds an arc for Finn and expose us to a side of Star Wars we’d never seen before.

Leia’s Force Moment Isn’t A Problem. The Cape Is.

Leia has been Force-sensitive since Return of the Jedi. She’s Luke’s sister. The idea that she could instinctively reach out and use the Force in a moment of death is not a stretch.

People have a problem with the execution and just get turned off by the whole idea as a result. Leia’s cape, along with her floating in space, makes her first usage of the force look like a superhero flight instead of something more grounded.

That’s fair criticism… but the idea itself works, the Force in Star Wars has never operated by hard, fixed rules. Luke lifts rocks with his mind. Palpatine shoots lightening. All those powers were introduced without explanation, because the Force is mystical.

Watching it in theaters, I was still overwhelmed by this moment knowing it’s some of Carrie Fisher’s final footage, it felt like Leia Organa was refusing to disappear even though Fisher had passed away.

Holdo’s Maneuver is ABSOLUTE CINEMA

Name a more striking image in Star Wars. I’ll wait.

Silence. A flash of white light. A entire fleet of Star Destroyers split in half.

No music. No explosion.

The complaints afterward were... what, exactly? That it raises continuity questions about why lightspeed ramming isn't used more often?

We love Star Wars because it is pure fantasy, but suddenly people want to discuss physics and the rules of space fights!? We had gasps of silence in my theater on opening night… the Holdo Maneuver is one of those movie moments I will always remember.

Luke’s Force Projection Is the Perfect Ending

And then there’s the ending, which, when you understand the film’s thesis, is the only ending that makes sense.

Luke Skywalker, alone on his island, saves the Resistance, not by showing up and swinging a lightsaber like an action figure, but by projecting himself across the entire galaxy.

He faces an impossible barrage of firepower but he gets to Kylo just to flex on him… their lightsabers never clash and yet their fight is one of the most thrilling in all of Star Wars. The reveal that he’s been a projection for the entirety of the fight made my theater explode on opening night.

Luke buys his friends the time they need to escape. And then, peacefully, becomes one with the Force while watching the twin suns. This was all tears for me.

And the complaint here is that you wanted Luke actually fight in person?

Think about what that movie looks like. Luke arrives, defeats the First Order on his own, beats Kylo in one-on-one combat, and then what? If he’s essentially an invincible killing machine then why did he go into exile?

The ending we got is Luke at his most powerful, most heroic, most wise, and coolest! The ability to reach across light years, materialize on a battlefield, save the people he loves, and leave Kylo swinging at air is just bad ass.

That’s Luke Skywalker having fully, finally understood what the Force is actually for. And his death is a direct callback to Obi-Wan telling Vader that striking him down will only make him more powerful.

The Sequel We Never Got

The online discourse around The Last Jedi was a different than the actual moviegoing experience.

Our crowd was electric and alive on opening weekend. But online, the YouTube outrage economy that had spent two years profiting off speculations from The Force Awakens immediately pivoted to The Last Jedi hate content.

This noise was amplified by the social media incentive to reward negativity, and, this part is well documented, an actual coordinated campaign by Russian trolls using the movie as a culture war accelerant.

Division was the product, The Last Jedi was just the delivery mechanism.

And so Disney looked at the online reactions and panicked. Colin Trevorrow was out. JJ was back. And the mandate given to him was to fix what Rian broke:

Every major decision in Rise of Skywalker is a direct response to complaints about The Last Jedi:

• Rey was a nobody? She’s a Palpatine now.

• Snoke wasn’t explained? Turns out he was a clone, who cares.

• Kylo is the villain? Just kidding, here’s Palpatine back from the dead, somehow.

• You didn’t like Rose? She’s pretty much gone!

Imagine the version where Disney stands behind The Last Jedi instead of apologizing for it. With Kylo as an unstable ruler, and Rey defining her own identity.

The Empire Strikes Back was also a divisive movie after release… but Lucas didn’t listen to any of the complaints and the movie only gained its iconic status once Return of the Jedi followed through on the ideas in Empire.

The real failure of this trilogy is in Disney’s cowardice… they should have follow up on what The Last Jedi built instead of validating every complaint from the online crowd.

Star Wars Grew Up. Some Fans Didn’t.

I understand some of the criticism against the film, but what I don’t understand is the idea that the film betrays Star Wars. Star Wars has never been about stability. Lucas built this world and continued to expand on it with sequels, The Last Jedi is just another expansion in this universe.

Rian Johnson made a film about failure instead of certainty, a hero without lineage, a villain who breaks the system halfway through, a Force that belongs to no one, and a story that lets its characters be wrong and then learn.

At its center are two ideas: let the past die and save what you love. And nearly ten years later, we are still dissecting and debating its themes.

The irony is that the film accused of killing Star Wars might be the one that understood it best, because Star Wars was never about preservation but about discovery, and sometimes discovery means letting go, even if that means letting go of your previous image of Luke Skywalker.

This all brings me back to the beginning: why did we fall in love with Star Wars?

Because it made us feel like we’d never seen anything like it before. The Last Jedi gave us that feeling again, and for that, I’ll always love it.

Now, Disney… please give Rian Johnson his blank check and let him cook on his trilogy.

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Not only is Who Framed Roger Rabbit the best live-action cartoon movie ever made (there isn’t a lot of competition in this category, sorry Space Jam), it’s also one of the best films of all time, and it only became a landmark because of a handful of things that had no business going right.

Everybody’s Here

Somebody looked at the entire history of American animation and said let’s grab every character ever made and put them into one film together… Super Smash Bros. style.

That’s a nightmare to clear legally, and it nearly didn’t happen. Spielberg got involved and talked Warner Bros. into lending Bugs Bunny to a Disney movie. The one condition was that Bugs couldn’t share a frame with Mickey unless the two of them got exactly equal screen time, same deal with Donald and Daffy dueling it out at the piano. This is like a kids version of the DeNiro and Pacino diner scene in Heat… to this day, it’s still the only time Looney Tunes and Disney characters ever shared a scene.

A New Star

You’d figure the obvious move is to center everything on a famous cartoon character, but the popular toons get reduced to cameos so we got Roger Rabbit instead, a brand new character created just for this movie.

Roger is hilarious, everything from the fit to his voice… he’s one of our great movie stars and I’m fairly sure I built part of my own personality as a kid on him: the class clown who gets laughs by hurting himself, dumb and clumsy on purpose. The film’s best running joke is that this goofy walking disaster is somehow married to the hottest women in Hollywood and everyone assumes she’s the lucky one! She loves him because he’s funny, a great life lesson for all of us, no wonder I acted like him as a kid.

Playing It Completely Straight

The lazy version of this movie would attempt to explain why toons and humans live together, but this film doesn’t waste your time on any exposition. Instead it just drops you into this world of toons and humans living with different laws of physics and never explains any of it.

That frees up the movie to focus on an actual detective story which amounts to Chinatown with cartoon characters. Eddie Valiant is the burnt-out private eye, Roger is framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and Jessica Rabbit is the sexy femme fatale… I was seven when this movie came out and I’m pretty sure the moment she walked out on that stage is when I realized I liked girls.

Bob Hoskins

Let me get to the point: Bob Hoskins deserved an Oscar for this performance. The man was acting against absolutely nothing years before Jar Jar or Gollum. Hoskins prepared for the role by training his brain to hallucinate cartoons… it worked so well that even after filming he kept seeing characters pop out in real life.

His Eddie Valiant has an exasperated energy and the chemistry he builds with Roger turns the film into a genuine buddy comedy. The handcuff gag, where Roger slips his hands free when Valiant stops sawing because he “could’ve done that at any time,” is one of my all-time favorite movie jokes, and it only works because Hoskins already sold you on their relationship… he’s the reason you believe in Roger as a real character.

It’s insane to look at the long list of actors who passed on the role: Harrison Ford, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Martin… Maybe couple of these guys can pull it off, but I can’t picture it. This is one of those roles nobody else gets to own, Hoskins made it his.

All Done Without CGI (!)

None of the film works without the actual craft behind the illusion of humans and cartoons living together. The live-action was shot on VistaVision cameras, giving the animators a much larger canvas to work on. Every frame was then printed as a black-and-white photo and all the toons were drawn in, frame-by-frame. And they didn’t stop at the characters, for every single frame, they hand-drew the shadows so that the cartoons would actually catch light and cast shadows like everything else in the shot. No computer animation touched this movie and it’s a big part of why the effects still look convincing today.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit had no right to be this good:

1. It needed legal agreements from rival studios

2. It needed to build the whole movie around a brand new character

3. It needed a tight script that never tried to explains its silly premise

4. It needed talented actors and animators that could sell you on the illusion

I’ll be happy with Coyote vs. Acme as long as it’s a good comedy, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit set an insanely high bar… it’s a masterpiece.

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That conversation sent me down a rabbit hole and I started realizing that the same pandemic that almost killed movie theaters is actually the reason why the movie industry is doing so well right now.

Let’s go back to the lockdowns… For nearly two years, the entire business of movie theaters shut down: Warner Bros. fully committed to streaming and fumbled Christopher Nolan away, Tom Cruise fought with Paramount to hold off on Top Gun: Maverick’s theatrical release. But as the studios fought to stay alive, social distancing gave birth to a new generation of film lovers.

If you want proof, look no further than Letterboxd. I’ve been on that site since 2018, and I saw more engagement during COVID. The actual data backs this up, the number of Letterboxd users spiked from ~2 million to ~26 million users from 2020 to 2026. This app used to be a niche thing for film nerds and now it’s something my co-workers know about.

The streamers are also responsible for this boom. Netflix’s focus on quantity over quality makes them the worst out of all the streamers, but I can’t deny that their catalog is the most accessible. Maybe your Netflix subscription led to a Criterion subscription, and suddenly you have access to cult classics and foreign movies… the history of cinema just a click away. This is similar to the effect VHS and local video stores had in the 80s when they sparked love for movies onto a whole generation.

If I compare today’s box-office to the one we had before COVID then we are clearly in a better shape. We’re hitting new highs and setting new records, and sure we still rely on sequels to popular franchises and superhero movies, but those types of films are no longer guaranteed hits. We got more original movies succeeding… look at last year with Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Marty Supreme, or this year with Backrooms, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, and The Odyssey, all bigger hits than anyone expected. Today’s audience wants to see a movie in a theater because the movie itself is the event.

We have to keep this momentum going, support original work and indie movies so that studios continue to take more risks, support theatrical releases, support physical media, support the communities that celebrate this art form through local screenings of classic movies and sites like Letterboxd and FilmStack.

My cousin got into movies because of boredom, curiosity, and tons of free time… we gotta hand the next generation that same spark without waiting for a pandemic.

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Then you get older and Chaplin just becomes an idea, like a memory from the past. Maybe you see him again in a clip from a documentary or he gets name dropped in film class. At some point I realized I hadn’t actually sat down and watched one of his movies since I was a little kid.

So this past week I fixed that and revisited City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator. Three of his best films, three films that are about a hundred years old… and surprise, they still hold up! Not just in the comedy but in their themes as well.

City Lights (1931)

City Lights is Chaplin at his most soulful. Released deep into the Great Depression, the message couldn’t be more clear: a blind flower girl mistakes the Tramp for a millionaire, and an actual millionaire only remembers the Tramp when he’s drunk. The film’s point on wealth and status is still relevant today: the flower girl, who can’t see at all, treats the Tramp better than the millionaire who can see him just fine.

The ending is really special here… Orson Welles called it the greatest closing shot put on film: the flower girl finally sees the Tramp for who he is and the camera just sits on his face. There’s no dialogue, no swelling score, just one sweet moment of recognition that brings more emotions than most movies manage in their entire runtime.

Modern Times (1936)

If City Lights is Chaplin’s heart, Modern Times is him at his funniest. This is the one I consider his masterpiece. It’s kind of nuts that a 90-year old movie can get real laughs out of me but everything with the assembly line and the auto-feeder plays like scenes pulled from your favorite sketch comedy show.

Chaplin’s performance is a lot more physical here… it’s all in the expressions he makes with his face and the way he moves his body, it’s the inspiration for so many future comedians, like Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, and Rowan Atkinson. Pay attention to how he reacts to the chaos that he often causes and you can even see a little bit of Jackie Chan in his performance.

This is also the film where Chaplin finally lets sound in, but it’s very much on his own terms. Near the end he gives us his actual voice for the first time ever, singing a completely nonsensical song. He’d held off for so long on giving the Tramp real dialogue because he didn’t want to tie the character down to one language, so instead of an actual song we get gibberish and it still works, because even his voice plays like a gag.

Modern Times is about a man getting chewed up by industrial automation, it’s the fear of getting replaced by a machine and a society that can’t figure out how a regular person is supposed to hold onto a job, a home, or whatever the “American dream” meant back in 1936. Watching it today you can’t not think about AI. People were scared of machines taking jobs back then for the same reasons people are scared today. Chaplin wasn’t predicting anything, he just told a story about mankind’s fears around technological advancement.

The Great Dictator (1940)

The Great Dictator might be Chaplin’s most important film, but it’s also his most bloated. The dual narrative with the Jewish barber and dictator Hynkel plot takes too long to pay off, so even though the Hitler parody is hilarious, you spend most of the runtime waiting for the two stories to cross paths.

But then you get to the last scene where Chaplin drops character and just talks directly into the camera about greed, hatred, fascism, and humanity.

This final note shouldn’t work, it breaks every “show don’t tell” rule of cinema… the actor who defined the silent era is suddenly using his voice to make his point, but that’s exactly why it’s effective, it grabs your attention because Chaplin rarely used his voice up to this point.

The Great Dictator came out in 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor, while the U.S. was still neutral in the war and most of Hollywood was busy not pissing off Hitler. Chaplin bankrolled a huge chunk of this film himself because United Artists was afraid of the obvious political message… Anyone can be righteous with hindsight but Chaplin chose to be righteous while it still cost him something. Revisiting it today, you don’t need too much imagination to picture this movie getting made about someone like Trump.

After this rewatch, it’s clear why Chaplin is still relevant a hundred years later, his movies still hold up: the gags are funny and these three films in particular all have something different to say about class inequality, work, technology, and fascism.

The world has changed a lot since Chaplin made these films but what he cared about hasn’t and that’s why his movies are timeless.

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It’s about the moment when the people who raised you can no longer completely protect you. It’s realizing that your parents’ idea of who you are may not match with the person you’re becoming… it’s about the things you hide from them, not because you don’t love or trust them, but because you’re terrified that them knowing the truth might change the way they see you.

That’s what makes Across the Spider-Verse so much more than a great superhero movie.

Fathers and Sons

Let’s start with Miles and his dad trying to navigate the complicated expectations between fathers and sons… it’s all the things that never gets said out loud because we don’t have the language for it. It’s never a shouting match between the two. It’s just two people who love and respect each other but can’t bridge the gap between who Miles actually is and who his dad thinks he should be.

It’s instantly relatable to anyone who has ever felt the weight of a parent’s hopes, dreams, and expectations.

Jefferson has no idea he’s hunting his own son, so he talks to Spidey about his son with a mix of pride and worry…. and Miles has to sit there and absorb his dad’s opinion about who he is without being able to say a word back.

Their relationship is the father-son dynamic broken down to its rawest form: a parent forming a judgment of his son from only half the picture because the son decided, out of love, to not to give him the other half.

Jefferson isn’t a bad dad for not knowing Miles, and Miles isn’t a bad son for not telling him who he really is is.

That’s what makes their relationship so much more complicated than a simple secret-identity plot. Jefferson isn’t asking Miles to follow in his footsteps, he just wants to actually know his son. And Miles desperately wants to be known, but he can’t figure out how to do that without destroying his dad’s image of him… And that fear of being fully seen might cost him the relationship instead of deepening it.

This is something we all navigate as we grow up, whether we’re hiding behind a superhero mask or something much more personal.

Maternal Love

That same fear shows up differently in Miles’ relationship with his mom. Rio explains that she will love him more matter what, but it’s in her nature as a mother to always worry about Miles, no matter how big or strong he gets. Because nobody out there is going to take care of him the way she did.

But what makes Rio so great is that she does trust Miles. She knows she raised him right. She knows who her son is at his core. What she doesn’t trust is everyone and everything else out there in the city.

Trust in your kid and trust in the world are two completely different things.

That’s what makes the rooftop scene between Miles and his mom so crushing. Miles has to sit there and receive all of that love and worry from his mom without saying a word, because correcting her means telling her everything about his super-powers… that’s the irony of the relationship, the safer he lets her feel, the further away he drifts from telling her the truth.

When you’re little, you tell your parents everything, the good and the bad, but at some point, you start doing a little mental math before you speak. You ask yourself whether telling them what’s actually bothering you is worth all the worrying they’ll do.

We start holding things back not because we don’t trust our parents, but because we love them enough to carry certain things ourselves. We know there are problems they can’t fix, and we don’t want to stress them over something they have no power to change.

That’s real love, but it’s also the moment the relationship with our parents change shape: your parents are still taking care of you, but for the first time, you’re also taking care of them. That’s growing up.

Mask Off

Which is why Miles and Gwen’s secret identities work so beautifully as a coming-out metaphor. Across the Spider-Verse understands something about coming out that a lot of stories get wrong: the fear isn’t that your parents will stop loving you, it’s that they won’t fully understand you.

Miles and Gwen find their community through the Spider-Society and they finally feel comfortable in their own skin. And yet telling their parents who they really are feels impossible.

From the moment you’re born, your parents build up an idea of who you are in their heads. And when you reveal something they didn’t know, you’re not just revealing a secret, you’re asking them to redraw the picture they’ve had of you for years.

That’s what makes Miles and Gwen’s masks so powerful. They aren’t hiding because there’s something wrong with who they are. They’re hiding because they’re afraid of what the truth might do to the people they love.

The movie understands that growing up isn’t simply about discovering who you are. It’s about realizing that the people who love you the most will have to discover you all over again.

Break the Canon

Which brings us to the series’ central idea: anyone can wear the mask, meaning you have the power to be whoever you want to be, regardless of the expectations from your parents (or anyone else!).

In the movie, the Spider-Society calls these expectations the canon. Miles defies the expectations from his parents as well as the ones imposed by Miguel and his army… so he calls bullshit and breaks the canon. The message is simple: take charge of your life, fuck the expectations, tell your own story (Last Jedi gang represent!). This theme is also in Gwen’s arc as she rebels against her dad’s version of who she should become.

Growing up is realizing that YOU get to write your story. It’s not your parents, it’s not your mentors, it’s not your friends. At some point, you have to pick up the pen yourself.

And Across the Spider-Verse makes that idea feel exhilarating because the entire movie is built around it.

Style Becomes Story

The movie’s themes tie directly into its dynamic visual language. Across the Spider-Verse is pure candy… an inter-dimensional explosion of comic-book panels, watercolor paintings, sketchbooks, psychedelic action sequences, graffitis, and halftones.

It’s an astounding technical achievement, but the animation isn’t just there to make the movie look cool and pretty. It’s the movie’s thesis expressed visually. Every character has their own visual language. Every universe has its own identity. The movie constantly changes its style depending on the character that’s on screen.

Even the music works this way. Daniel Pemberton’s score gives every characters their own rhythm, sound, and emotion.

That’s why the films feels so uniquely alive, it’s a story about finding your own identity, made by a group of artists who refused to accept that a Spider-Man movie had to look or feel a certain way. They made a movie about breaking the canon by refusing to stay inside the lines, breaking the rules of filmmaking itself.

This is our generation’s defining Spider-Man, and if they stick the landing with the third film, we might be looking at one of the greatest trilogies ever made.

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It starts with a planet intro that quietly deceives you. We’re flying through what look like clouds, and then bonk, the clouds have turned into ice. It’s a small moment, but it sets the tone for the next 20 minutes, nothing here is quite what it first appears to be, starting with the landscape itself.

Then comes our intro to Dr. Mann, which might be the biggest surprise in the entire film. Nobody knew Matt Damon was in this movie going into release week, he wasn’t on the poster, he didn’t do press. So the first time that pod cracks open on a first watch, there’s a genuine moment of wonder… we’ve already met the whole cast by that point, who is this going to be? Then Damon’s face pops up and it’s an instant, warm surprise. We all love this guy. We’re trained to expect Damon as a good guy, so the second we see him we’re bought in on Dr. Mann’s integrity without a shred of doubt.

Pay close attention to Damon’s reaction as the crew tells him why they came to his planet. Watch him plot his scheme and his lies in real time once he realizes they screwed up. It’s a beautiful piece of acting.

We’re set up to believe Dr. Mann and that’s exactly why it hits so hard once his real intentions come out and he attempts his escape.

The act closes with one of my all-time favorite set-pieces: the docking scene. It was established earlier in the movie that Cooper needed both TARS and CASE just to dock safely at the start of the film… now Mann is going about it entirely on his own.

The stakes ratchet up again, Mann is clearly too cocky, but part of you still buys it, because everyone’s been hyping him up the whole movie… he is the best of us. He doesn’t dock correctly: imperfect contact, imperfect contact, and then boom, the explosion, sound cuts out completely, Mann is gone, and the Endurance is spinning out of control.

We just watched that exact maneuver kill Mann, and now the movie wants me to believe Cooper can pull it off at high speed? Even the robots are telling him it’s a lost cause, it’s not possible. But Cooper just locks in: no, it’s necessary.

Kick in Hans Zimmer’s organs from outer space, yet another reason to see this movie in IMAX, the score escalates in intensity and makes every single moment feel like the most important one as Cooper completes the impossible. Come on TARS. I forget to breathe during this whole scene!!

That’s why this sequence is the best part of the movie. It’s not just one good scene, it’s a full arc, casting twist into character betrayal into the tensest set piece in the film.

Nolan spends two and a half hours building an insanely complicated heist across four layers of dreams, then resolves the whole thing using nothing but his actors’ faces and Hans Zimmer’s score. No exposition dump. No dialogue explaining who made it out and who didn’t.

Let’s break it down beat-by-beat, because every single moment is doing work.

Leo wakes up. The Zimmer score kicks in, he looks around, stunned: wtf, I’m back on the plane!? Even we as the audience are shocked. At this point, we haven’t been in the real world for over an hour, and that’s an eternity in movie time. It’s a small structural flex, but it lands: the film has trained us so thoroughly to live inside the dream-logic that being back in reality itself feels like the twist.

Cillian Murphy is already awake, lost in thought, startled when the hostess offers him a hot towel. That’s all you need to know about whether the heist worked. He’s ready to sell his father’s business and be his own man.

Cut back to Leo, still in shock. Joseph-Gordon Levitt gives him a mischievous “we did it, you son of a bitch” smirk. Elliot Page shoots him a quizzical nod, almost surprised Leo made it out of limbo alive. Every glance in this sequence is doing the job an entire scene of dialogue would do in a lesser movie.

Ken Watanabe wakes up, looking like he’s recovering from an edible overdose. Leo just furrows his eyebrows at him, a little threatening, and that’s all Watanabe needs to make the call. So much conveyed with zero dialogue… are Leo’s legal problems solved? Will they let him back home?

Then passport control. A flicker of suspense: are they gonna let Leo in? Of course they will. But Nolan lets the tension sit there anyway, because by this point he’s earned the right to squeeze one more beat of doubt out of you even though you know the answer… Welcome home Mr. Cobb.

The crew grabs their bags, they trade one last look, one last acknowledgment of what they just pulled off. Tom Hardy looking sexy as usual, Cillian Murphy glancing at Leo like is this the man from my dreams?

Leo walks past one more security gate, and there’s Michael Caine waiting for him. That’s when you know our boy is home free.

He gets home, spins the totem, and finally sees his kids. We see them too. Hans Zimmer’s score has been patiently building up to this moment, we still have no dialogue but you know exactly what Leo is feeling because Zimmer is telling you…. It gets quieter for a moment of peace.

And here’s the part that actually makes the ending an all-timer: Nolan never confirms whether the top falls.

People have spent 16 years arguing about that last frame, but the ending was never about whether we are in a dream or not, it’s about whether Cobb can find peace.

He walks toward his kids without looking back at the totem, and that choice, to be present instead of certain, is the actual ending. The spinning top is a MacGuffin dressed up as a mystery. It doesn’t matter if those kids are real as long as he believes they’re real.

We cut to black with the totem still spinning…dream or not, the catharsis is this real.

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To be clear, I don’t expect his favorite movies to match my favorites. I want him to have a normal childhood and I know he’ll go through his period of Paw Patrols and Minions… But I’m thinking more about his taste as he gets older. I’ve seen it backfire where a parent or older sibling force something they’re passionate about too strongly and eventually get pusback.

I keep coming back to how my own parents did it, because they evidently did it right. And they did it by giving me a lot of agency.

They never sat me down and said watch this film, it’s important. They just watched movies because they loved movies. We went to the theater maybe once a month, it always felt like a special event, but my love for the movies was really built through our weekly movie nights at home. Towards the end of the week, we’d go to our local video store and rent two movies: a kids’ movie for me, and a more adult drama for them. They’d usually send me to my room when it was time for their movie, but I got curious by proximity. What are you guys watching? Why can’t I see this? It looks interesting.

When I think back on it, I remember my dad being more involved than I realized. It never felt pushy, but he’d give his opinion on whatever movie I picked and often steer me toward something he thought I’d like more. He was very patient in nurturing my tastes… the man should have won Father of the Year just for sitting through a double-billing of the ‘93 Super Mario Bros. movie and Ninja Turtles 3.

My mom, on the other hand, would question any movie that looked too violent but was mostly game for anything. Her MVP moment came when she took me to see Jurassic Park four times while it was playing in theaters.

It’s one thing to look back on how my parents supported my tastes, but when I think about our current reality, the model gets harder to replicate. You have video games that never end and the infinite amount of slop on Netflix… there are so many choices and that’s my real question: how do you lay a strong foundation in today’s world? Like I said, I don’t expect his taste in movies to match mine. It would actually be great if his passion lands in a completely different genre. I really don’t care, as long as the little guy has quality taste.

I keep thinking about the actual lineage of my own taste. My accidental curriculum started with Jurassic Park. That film led me to the rest of Spielberg, and Spielberg unlocked everything else. He took me to Jaws and Indiana Jones, which took me to Lucas and Star Wars. The Spielberg web spread to the films he produced: Gremlins, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I don’t want my son watching Citizen Kane or Kurosawa at nine. There’s time for the canon. I’m still working my way through it. But I want to build the foundation that will eventually lead him there.

If the timing is right, maybe he gets to experience some of my favorite films through the theatrical re-releases that are becoming more popular. After all, my first experience with Star Wars was opening night of the Special Edition release in 1997, and my mind was appropriately blown.

The closest thing I have to a working model is how I introduced my wife to all of this. She didn’t watch too many movies when we first met, but we quickly got into the habit of watching films together every week, either at home or in the theater. She loves rom-coms, those are her comfort films, and we got into a rhythm of rotating picks: one week something she was into, the next something I was into.

I quickly learned I couldn’t get her into the classics right away. She had an aversion to anything that looked old. I remember pitching Heat to her and it just didn’t connect, but then we watched The Town in theaters and suddenly she loves heist movies. Heat was an easy sell after that and it’s since become one of her favorite films. I keep coming back to that example: how do I build a curriculum that helps my kid find his way back to the classics?

As I write this, I realize I didn’t plan any of this out with my wife. I just went with the flow, and maybe that’s the real answer. Don’t overthink it, just go with what feels right, and the passion will naturally grow if it was meant to be.

If you’ve raised a kid who loves what you love, tell me what worked and what you’d take back. Did you let your kid lead more than you wanted to? Did you ever force certain movies on them? And even if you're not a parent, I'm still curious: have you ever successfully built someone's taste? A partner, a sibling, a friend?

Baby is due anytime now but I have a couple of years before finalize his watchlist.

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I might have taken too strong of a dose on the night I re-watched Toy Story 3, but that experience was transcendent, suddenly, instead of watching a movie about toys coming to life, I saw an allegory about God and faith. I jotted my thoughts in the Notes app, and I revisited my scribbles after a recent sober rewatch, and I cannot unsee the religious parallels in the film: Toy Story 3 is what happens when people stop believing in God, and in the Toy Story universe, the name of that God is Andy.

Faith on the Boot

Woody’s cowboy boot is one of the most iconic images in the series, it represents Andy’s love for his favorite toy, but in the context of Toy Story 3, that marking is what the entire story is built on. It’s a sign of faith, a permanent religious symbol.

When Woody says his purpose is “to be there for Andy, whenever he needs us” he’s not just being loyal. He’s confessing his faith in Andy. He believes the name on his boot means what it meant the day it was written, regardless of how long it’s been since Andy played with him.

The rest of the toys represent the full spectrum of doubt. Buzz, Jessie, Hamm, Rex belong to the Church of Andy but their faith is wavering. Andy hasn’t played with them in years. He’s leaving for college. Maybe the name on the boot has an expiration date. This is the anxiety of every believer who questions their faith: why would God abandon me if he exists and loves me?

Woody stands between the toys and defections, he continues to tell them that absence isn’t abandonment, that the name on the boot still means something. He knows Andy well enough to interpret his silence to people who don’t. Every religion has the messenger who explains God to the masses.

The others can’t accept it even though they’re safe in the attic. They exist without purpose, without being seen, without the active experience of being loved. They’re not dead but they’re not living either. The attic is purgatory… at least death is final.

Woody can accept the attic because his faith doesn’t require Andy to be present, believing is enough. But the others need more.

So they go looking for heaven and find Lotso instead.

A False Paradise

Sunnyside Daycare is designed to look exactly like paradise.

The colors are bright. The children are delighted. Lotso is warm, strawberry-scented, and grandfatherly… he welcomes the new toys with open arms and tells them the good news: here, toys are always played with. No aging out. No college.

“Never abandoned or forgotten”

“No owners means no heartbreak”

This is a sermon. Lotso is promising liberation from the very thing the toys have been grieving: the pain of loving someone who might stop loving you back. He offers a world without God, and he frames it as freedom. Secular humanism with a strawberry scent.

That’s what false prophets do. They don’t preach obvious lies. They preach seductive half-truths aimed directly at real wounds. His whole operations turns love into a resource to be rationed: he decides which toys deserves the comfort of the Butterfly room and who gets suffering in the Caterpillar room. That’s not faith, it’s a cult.

Lotso’s backstory explains the difference between him and Woody. Lotso lost his faith the moment his original owner replaced him, and he’s now too broken to let any love reach him.

He tells Woody his faith is in a God who has forgotten him, who is never coming back, who cannot save him. But Woody’s faith was never contingent on Andy showing up. That’s the difference between him and Lotso. Woody has decades of love from Andy. That’s not blind faith, it’s the certainty that Andy, his God, has already done enough to deserve his love, even when he’s not present.

Deus Ex Machina

The religious allegory becomes literal during the incinerator scene. Facing death, the toys stop running and reach for each other, holding hands, ready for their fate… their posture is similar to believers who refuse to renounce their faith under the threat of death.

And then the claw descends and rescues them at the last possible second. The three squeaky toy aliens save the gang out of nowhere… the plot device is a Deus ex machina, literally translating to “God from the machine”… the hand of God saves the faithful.

Meanwhile Lotso, the non-believer, ends up becoming the very thing he feared, a discarded object.

The Resurrection

In the end, Andy doesn’t take the toys back. He stops at Bonnie’s house and introduces each toy by name: their personalities, their quirks, what makes them special, transferring something of himself into them.

This is the resurrection. Bonnie isn’t a replacement for Andy. She’s how Andy’s love survives him. He can no longer be what the toys need him to be, so he passes that love forward, reborn into new hands that will love the toys.

Andy holds on to Woody the longest as he describes the cowboy to Bonnie: “He’ll never give up on you, ever, he’ll be there for you no matter what.” Andy gave Woody a purpose. Woody gave Andy his childhood. Neither could have been what they were without the other.

That’s faith, the kind of love that makes you believe in someone even after they’re gone.

…or maybe I got way too high and it’s just a movie about growing up.

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How would the world react to the evidence of alien life? What would it do to every belief system we’ve built? What happens when we encounter the truly unknown? Do we fight it, or do we welcome it? And does facing a miracle finally change how we treat each other?

I understand why this movie is divisive, because the answers don’t come through an alien invasion. Instead you have a chase movie nested inside a conspiracy thriller, and the reveal of the film’s thesis is deeper than just UFOs and alien action. In a film with alien technology, our most powerful weapon turns out to be empathy. Spielberg’s sincere message is that our ability to truly see and hear one another is what makes us unique as a species. That’s our superpower.

It’s the last thirty minutes that put this movie into a special place for me. Watching the proof of alien life broadcast to the entire world left me with the highest high I’ve felt in a theater since Sinners.

I was on the edge of my seat from the start of the third act… the tension is building like a heist as our characters try to get on air. I’m leaning in, fully invested. At this point our villain is already defeated… he doesn’t even put up a fight, he just stops chasing, overwhelmed by a message too large to contain.

Then the footage drops, and even though I know what’s being revealed I’m still in the same disbelief as the news anchors and the crowds around the world. Shock and awe. Everyone is glued to their screens, including the audience.

The alien footage that’s disclosed is documentary-style found footage that feels raw and authentic, but it’s the feeling of watching earth-shattering news break live into a broadcast that makes this sequence feel real. Spielberg nails the rush we felt when 9/11 broke on live TV, those moments where you’re frozen in front of a screen and the world is visibly splitting into before and after.

But it’s the “Spielberg faces” that complete the immersion. Instead of showing you the thing, he shows you people watching the thing… the spectacle isn’t the aliens, it’s the realization, written across every character, that our world has changed forever.

The best thing a movie can do is to make you forget you’re watching one… it’s what I chase anytime I step into a theater. Don’t just move me or entertain me, but pull me in so completely into the world you’ve built.

I grew up afraid of aliens as a kid. Then the movies taught me to fall in love with the possibility of other civilizations and other kinds of life. So I was moved to tears by the ending of Disclosure Day, because for one disorienting, electric moment, I forgot I was in a theater. I thought I was watching actual proof of alien life being revealed to the world in real time.

That’s Spielberg operating at his highest level. He doesn’t just make you believe that the characters believe it, he makes YOU believe it. And the film’s magic trick is in the final note: the news has been broken to the world, an actual alien is wheeled out, a whisper is shared, Spielberg has our complete attention, we’re all ears, completely open, and he ends it with a simple message tied into one word.

Listen.

It’s beautiful. Disclosure Day is another sci-fi masterpiece from Spielberg, and it’s my favorite film of the year.

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Disclosure Day comes out in a couple weeks, so let’s kick it off with another one of his sci-fi classics: Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I was nine when I learned that Spielberg had made a UFO movie. I was entering that phase where I found the concept of aliens cool and the idea of life beyond earth was fun to speculate on. Independence Day and Mars Attacks had came out… so obviously I was excited about my favorite director’s take on an alien movie. My dad loved Close Encounters, it was one of the first films he watched in theaters when he moved to France, so he tracked down the VHS and we watched it together.

That first watch did not click. Most of the film felt too slow, too adult, too strange… I expected alien action and got something I didn’t have the life experience to decode yet. It became one of the few Spielberg films I never revisited as a kid.

I’ve rewatched it a few times as an adult and it hits completely different. Because what Spielberg is doing in Close Encounters, and what separates it from almost every alien film before or since, is how he treats terror and wonder as if they’re the same emotion. The aliens are not a threat, and yet the first thirty minutes are as unsettling as anything in a horror film. The anomalies in the first act are a masterclass in building up curiosity and dread. Lights flickering. Phones ringing. Toys activating on their own. The power going out. And then the UFO banking overhead, close enough to feel, whooshing past the characters at high-speed before it vanishes.

Spielberg builds this sequence the same way he builds all his best set-piece: he doesn’t show you the thing, he shows you the effect of the thing on ordinary people in ordinary spaces. The little boy at the door. The car on a dark road. The unreal crashes into the mundane and terror turns into wonder.

You need to have lived a little to understand Roy Neary, maybe you’ve made some questionable choices in the name of something you can’t explain… it’s that specific feeling of being chosen, of something vast and unknowable deciding to find you. Close Encounters is ultimately about obsession more so than it is about aliens. Roy starts off as a family man before one encounter with a UFO got him building a mountain out of mashed potatoes. By the end he’s walking onto a spaceship and leaving his children behind. Spielberg still got you rooting for Roy because you feel his obsession as if it were your own. That's the specific madness at the heart of the film: being called toward something you cannot name or justify, something that overrides every reasonable obligation in your life, like love, religion, or an extraterrestrial civilization.

Roy’s obsession mirrors Spielberg’s own. Close Encounters arrived in 1977, the same year his parents’ divorce finalized a troubled marriage. Roy becomes consumed by something he can’t explain, walks away from his family, and boards that spaceship. Spielberg became consumed by cinema, snuck onto the Universal lot as a teenager, and poured himself into Hollywood while his family fell apart around him. The film is a complicated confession.

The last act is where all of this lands. The approach to Devil’s Tower is Spielberg doing what he does better than anyone: building scale and awe through his masterful sense of where the camera should be. He frames the Tower so that it dwarfs everything around it: cars, people, the landscape itself. And then mothership arrives as a city-sized vessel and it makes the previously enormous Devil’s Tower look like a little hill.

Spielberg keeps cutting to faces looking up, open-mouthed, unable to process what they’re seeing. It’s a trick he’ll use again and again throughout his career: put the camera on the humans and let their reactions convince us we’re witnessing a miracle.

And then the communication sequence. Five notes. A simple phrase, played back and forth between humans and aliens like two musicians finding a key together. It remains the most optimistic vision of first contact ever put on film, the idea that music is the universal language, that if we approach the unknown with curiosity instead of fear, it will meet us halfway. It’s so hopeful it makes me tear up.

So much has been said about the film’s ending, even as a kid it felt wrong for Roy to walk onto the spaceship… doesn’t this man have a whole family!? Spielberg rarely speaks on the changes he would make to his film but he has said he wouldn’t let Roy walk away from his kids if he were to make the film today. That’s the father in him talking. But Close Encounters belongs to the younger man who made it, and that tension in Roy’s decision is exactly what makes the film so singular in Spielberg’s filmography

Close Encounters is not really about aliens. It’s about that specific human capacity to be possessed by something you cannot justify… something so powerful it makes you do the inexplicable. We recognize this. It’s what falling in love looks like from the outside. It’s what faith looks like to a non-believer.

Spielberg never tells you if Roy does the right thing by walking onto the spaceship.

He just holds the camera until it disappears.

Sometimes we are pulled towards something we can’t explain; God, love, a spaceship, a life dedicated to cinema. Others might call it an obsession, we call it a calling. Whether it’s worth the sacrifice is a question Close Encounters refuses to answer. And for a filmmaker as direct as Spielberg, that refusal is the most mysterious thing he’s ever put on screen.

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Seven years since The Rise of Skywalker, a mess of a film so desperate to please everyone that it pleased no one.

Seven years of Disney+ shows of varying quality. Seven years of a storied franchise spinning its wheels.

I still love this series despite all the ups and down, Star Wars played a huge part of my childhood, and very little matches the high this franchise can offer when it operates at its very best. But I should be honest about my expectations for The Mandalorian and Grogu, because the floor I had set for this movie was basically underground.

I had a specific image in my head: the entire galaxy is in danger, Thrawn is back as the big bad, Ahsoka, Ezra, Boba Fett, Bo-Katan, and CGI Luke show up, we get yet another story centered around the Darksaber. I was pretty much anticipating a Filoni All-Stars movie… That’s where the last season and a half of The Mandalorian show lost me, Filoni just got too in love with bringing back all his favorites from the cartoons and the stakes got bloated. I was bracing myself for movie full of fan service and cameos dressed up as story.

But instead this movie is just Mando and Grogu going on a space adventure… and there’s a simplicity to that premise that I truly found refreshing after years of blockbusters with ‘world-ending’ stakes (whether it’s Star Wars or your favorite superhero film).

So yeah, I’m genuinely shocked that this movie dials it back. It’s the type of restraint we hadn’t seen since the first season of The Mandalorian. Our heroes jump from planet to planet, each one looking different, encountering monsters and aliens, some threatening, some helpful. You got your serious moments with stoic (and boring) Mando, but it’s all the silly that ultimately won me over: Scorsese giving a genuinely committed performance as a monkey-ish sandwich maker / criminal informant, Rotta the Hutt all jacked and grown up with the voice (and eyes?) of Jeremy Allen White, rolling in the beach with Grogu, reminding Mando he’s a good dad because his own dad was terrible. And as much as I want to resist the cuteness of that damn baby Yoda (because I know he’s been designed to sell merch!), all his puppetry just gives him way too much charm and personality… he gets a ten-minute segment where he goes on his own solo adventure and it’s some of the best Star Wars has ever been. Playful, tactile, completely unburdened by the weight of the saga.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a great movie. Some of the action is sloppy, the CGI isn’t always clean, the movie looks dull (how did we go from Greig Fraser in Season 1 to David Klein in the cinematography department?), and the visual effects on the Hutts either deserved more time or a return to practical effects. But this side-adventure is actually what I want from Star Wars in-between the big swings… yes, give me the next epic saga (Disney should be begging Rian Johnson or Tony Gilroy to come back), but also give me these low-stakes adventures that expands the world by making you care about the smaller players in this universe

The first season of The Mandalorian is the closest Disney has come to honoring some of Lucas’ original inspiration for Star Wars. It’s Flash Gordon, it’s a Western, you just replace the the lone gunman with a bounty hunter and the frontier towns with planets. I figured Disney got scared of these smaller films after the underrated Solo fizzled at the box-office, so I hope they continue investing in more movies like this instead of turning them into bloated TV shows and pushing them to Disney+, just give me better production values and more interesting characters.

One final note… that man Ludwig Göransson is the real MVP of the movie. He has an uncanny ability to create sounds that feel epic and grand and completely unlike anything else, and his score for this film is some of the best Star Wars music since the prequels. His theme sets the mood from the moment the film opens, but it’s more than just replaying the Mando tune we all know, it sounds new, it sounds different, but more importantly it sounds like an epic movie, and it does all the heavy lifting that gets you to lean into what is mostly an uneven film.

The fact that I don’t actively hate The Mandalorian and Grogu might just be my surprise of the year, but what can I say, I would have loved this as a kid, but even now as an adult, I was entertained despite its flaws… Star Wars doesn’t need to save the universe every time. Not every story needs to be essential or mythic, sometimes a fun little adventure is enough for a good time.

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I. The Theme: The Quest for Home

Every movie in Nolan’s filmography is essentially about the same struggle: lost men trying to get home, seeking peace. This theme can be physical or existential.

In Memento, Leonard’s search for home is psychological since he can’t remember anything.

The entire Dark Knight trilogy is Bruce Wayne trying to earn the right to stop being Batman so he can just live a normal life as Bruce Wayne.

Cobb needs one last dream heist before he can see his children again.

Cooper heads to the stars because he wants to save the planet for his children.

The soldiers at Dunkirk just want to survive long enough to return to England.

Even Oppenheimer is about a man who has mentally exiled himself through his own creation, another kind of curse, another impossible journey home.

And now, after 25 years and twelve films, Nolan is making a movie about the actual guy who can’t get home. The Odyssey is the original version of this story and Odysseus is the ultimate Nolan protagonist: he’s too clever for his own good, he thinks he can control every outcome, but he learns that hubris has consequences. You can’t outsmart the Gods, and Odysseus spends years paying for his mistakes as he tries to find his way home.

Nolan’s obsession with this theme might be personal. The man has spent his career making movies that take him across the world for years, away from his family. Maybe the theme isn’t just artistic, maybe it’s a confession of guilt.

But Nolan captures a very universal feeling with this focus on the journey home: we all want peace, we all have responsibilities that pull us in multiple directions, and it’s normal to feel conflicted about our choices along the way. It’s why The Odyssey has survived three thousand years… it doesn’t matter whether you’re fighting cyclopses, pulling temporal pincer movements, or traveling through a black hole, the quest for home is eternal and always relatable, and Nolan has been making that movie his entire life.

II. The Narrative Structure: Time-Fuckery as a Language

Nolan’s films are like puzzles, and his favorite tool for building these puzzles comes in the editing room as he plays and mixes with the timeline of his movies.

Memento tells its story backwards so that we can get in Leonard’s lost mental state.

The Prestige breaks across timelines because obsession warps time, showing us how the rivaling magicians lose track of what they were fighting for.

In Inception, Cobb’s grief is trapped under layers dreams, memory, and denial.

Dunkirk gives us one week, one day, one hour.

Even Oppenheimer, a biopic based on a book told completely linearly, layers multiple timelines with flashbacks and flash-forwards to make us feel the full weight of the ”most important fucking thing to ever happen in the history of the world”.

So we’ve been trained by now… we walk into a Nolan film ready to hold multiple timelines in our heads. Which is why The Odyssey feels like such an obvious choice for the director: the story starts in the middle, jumps to the end, loops back to the beginning, and picks up Telemachus’s story before we return to Odysseus.

For most directors, that type of fragmented narrative would be a challenge. For Nolan, it's the language he's been speaking his entire career.

III. The Scale: Make it Real, Make it Big

Nolan’s most visible trademark is his commitment to making the theatrical experience feel as real, as grand, and as visceral as possible. He knows audiences can feel the difference between practical effects and CGI, and he knows the best way to experience everything his films offer is through the biggest screen possible.

His obsession with practical effects started quietly and got louder as his budgets grew. By the time we got to Tenet, he was crashing real 747s just for fun. In Oppenheimer, he wanted audiences to feel the Trinity test, and so he used actual pyrotechnics and real explosives to film the atomic bomb detonation.

For a swords-and-sandals epic like The Odyssey, this matters more than it would in any other genre. The reason most of these genre films age poorly is because CGI armies, digital monsters, and green-screen landscapes show their seams. You know it’s fake, and the illusion collapses. Nolan, forever the magician, refuses to let that happen.

Scale also applies to his love affair with IMAX. It started with a handful of scenes in The Dark Knight, longer sequences in Interstellar, and then entire acts by the time we got to Dunkirk… each film pushing the format further, each one bringing new engineering solutions and new camera housings as he lobbied theaters to keep 70mm projection alive. Nolan didn’t just use IMAX, he rescued it, and now the entire industry is following his lead.

The Odyssey is a culmination of Nolan’s dedication to making things as real and tactile as possible: the cyclops = practical, the sea battles = practical, Jon Bernthal’s accent = also practical. And it’s all done on the largest scale possible, The Odyssey is the first film to be shot entirely in 70mm IMAX, from start to finish.

So What Comes Next

I love that Nolan is taking another big swing with The Odyssey… he could have played it safe after his Oscar coronation, but instead he’s jumping straight to the biggest film of his career. No palate cleanser, no side project, no break. Just: here’s the dream project, an adaptation of one of the oldest and most revered stories in Western literature. Cash in that blank check.

Which raises the obvious question: what does Nolan make after the movie that synthesizes his entire filmography? Does he start exploring new territory and ideas? Maybe a story with a linear narrative or something more intimate? Or does he just keep finding ways to go bigger? Which at this point feels impossible but I wouldn’t put it past him.

Regardless of what’s next, I’m hyped for July 17… Nolan is finally making the movie he’s been building towards his entire career: the themes, the time-fuckery, the obsessive commitment to scale. It was always going to be The Odyssey.

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My dad picks me up from school and tells me we’re going to watch Jurassic Park tonight. I’m six. I have no idea what it’s about, movie trailers didn’t play often enough back then for it to stick to my six-year-old brain. He picks up a newspaper and scans the showtimes. I glance over and see the iconic poster: a dinosaur skeleton with that memorable typography. I don’t know what “Jurassic” means, I’m not even sure I know what dinosaurs are… But I’m at that age where seeing my parents excited is enough to get me excited, and I can tell my dad is hyped so I’m hyped.

Everything about Jurassic Park was a marketing masterstroke. It was all teasers, the poster was just a logo, no leaks, no set photos, no dinosaurs in the trailers. We all walked into Jurassic Park without seeing what the real stars looked like… Imagine walking into Avengers without seeing the heroes. Spielberg was protecting the film’s most valuable asset: the audience’s first look.

We drop off my backpack, grab a quick dinner, and take the subway to our local theater in Paris. We step out of the station and I’ve never seen it like this… the line isn’t just snaking in front of the theater, it extends across multiple shops and past our metro stop. A sea of adults waiting in line and I’m just a little kid in the middle of all of it. To quote Ian Malcolm: What have they got in there, King Kong?

We get in. We grab our seats. The lights go down. The Universal logo rolls in. John Williams kicks us off with that moody theme as the title appears. I still don’t know what I’m in for, but it’s already hitting different than the Disney movies I’ve been raised on. The next two hours turned that night into one of the most memorable moments of my childhood.

I. Welcome to Jurassic Park

The film opens with a flash of chaos: a container is being moved, an animal is inside, all you see is an eye. It’s the same trick as the shark’s fin in Jaws. Spielberg isn’t going to reveal his cards right away. That opening was just enough to grab my interest: what is going on? What are they moving? Why is it attacking?

Jurassic Park is structured like a theme park ride: the first 45 minutes are pure set-up, Spielberg is just walking you up the ramp before the drop, and he puts you, the audience, inside the same experience as his characters. When Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, and Ellie Sattler pile into the tour vehicles, they are as impatient as the viewer… we’re all leaning forward: what is this place? Real-life dinosaurs? That doesn’t make any sense! You might as well be in the park with the characters, because you're feeling the exact same thing.

And that’s why the Brachiosaurus reveal is pure movie magic.

I have to provide some context for anyone that’s younger than me, back in 1993, we had never experienced anything like Jurassic Park. Had we seen dinosaurs? Sure. But it was all puppetry, stop-motion, and men in suits… it was always clearly fake. CGI existed but never at this level of quality and scale. So when that Brachiosaurus appears, our reaction is once again the same as the characters: I don’t believe my eyes, how is this possible?

The camera is low to the ground. The scale is enormous. The John Williams theme swells. Grant drops to his knees. Ellie’s jaw falls open. Malcolm just laughs… and Spielberg does what he does better than any director: he lets their belief become your belief. Their shock and awe sells the reality better than any visual effect ever could. I believe that Brachiosaurus is real because the characters believe she’s real. I believe dinosaurs have come back to life because Williams’s moving score tells me a miracle just happened.

That moment is the precise reason no Jurassic Park sequel can ever match the wonder of the first one. For the characters, it’s their first time seeing dinosaurs come to life. For audiences in 1993, it was the first time we believed in the unbelievable. No sequels can top that, because nothing can top your first time.

You get the Brachiosaurus, and then Spielberg pulls back and serves us a series of appetizers before the main course: the baby Raptor hatching from its egg, Grant leaning on the belly of the sick Triceratops as she breathes in and out… it’s all tactile, intimate, and real enough to touch. Then we reach the Dilophosaurus enclosure. It’s empty. The anticipation builds right back up. We want to see more! To quote Malcolm once more: You do plan to have dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour, right?

II. Hold Onto Your Butts

Hitchcock said: “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” That’s what makes the T-Rex attack one of the all-time great set pieces, because the anticipation is suffocating: the cars stop. It’s raining. The goat is there and then it’s gone. The water trembles in the cup. A bloody leg hits the windshield. The power lines come down. Gennaro sprints to the bathroom… and then we get the BANG, and to contradict Hitchcock, the bang is much more terrifying than all the masterful tension.

The T-Rex steps out, drawn to Lex’s flashlight, nudging the car like a toy before diving headfirst through the plexiglass. The kids are terrified but it’s Ariana Richards’ piercing screams that sells the attack, you could tell me there was an actual T-Rex on set that day and I’d believe you. Grant tries to distract the T-Rex while Ian makes his own rescue attempt. The restroom gets demolished and Gennaro goes out like a Looney Tunes character: on the toilet, pants around his ankles, he’s our first victim and it’s played for laughs... Timmy is trapped under the car, drowning in mud. Don’t move. He can’t see us if we don’t move. But T-Rex doesn’t play around and before you know it, Grant and Lex are dangling off the cliff, dodging the falling car by a hair.

I still remember gripping my seat tight, as if I was on a rollercoaster.

The T-Rex attack alone is why Spielberg is my favorite filmmaker. Yes, the sequence is a milestone in cinema history, but everything from the camerawork to the blend of CGI and practical effects, to the actors’ reactions is a testament to the power of great art. Watching it for the first time felt like an out-of-body experience, I was speechless. This leap in visual effects was like going to Mars before we’d even landed on the Moon. It’s been 30 years and I’ll never forget how I felt during that set piece: what am I experiencing right now? Is this even real? Is this a dream? Is it a nightmare? That feeling is what I chase every time I sit down for a new movie.

And the ride doesn’t stop after the T-Rex attack. Spielberg is relentless.

Nedry’s scheme goes sideways. He’s stuck in the rain and the Dilophosaurus plays with him to the point where you’re almost charmed… before you know it she spits in his face and I can still hear his wailing screams. 1993 was the first year I wore glasses, so that scene scarred me then and still haunts me today.

Then the Gallimimus herd stampedes: they’re flocking this way. Muldoon stalking a Raptor, quad muscles engaged, only to turn and find he’s the one being hunted: clever girl. Ellie fighting off a Raptor in the basement, reaching for the breaker switch and finding Dr. Arnold’s severed arm instead of the rest of him. Please Spielberg, let us catch our breath, it’s too much!

And then the Raptors break into the kitchen… if the T-Rex attack was Spielberg showing us the impossible, this is him just flexing: oh you were impressed by my one big dinosaur attack? Here you go, two fast-moving dinosaurs going at it in an enclosed space, enjoy!

The Raptors are smart enough to open doors! Claws are tapping on the floor. A ladle hits the tile. One of them jumps on the counter. Lex’s reflection tricks one a Raptor into slamming herself into a metal drawer. Once again, the year is NINETEEN NINETY-THREE, our best video games could barely do 3D. How does any of this look so real? You don’t have time to ask. The computer hacking scene, the door locking right as the Raptors’ claws slip away. The escape through the ceiling. Lex’s leg dangling as a Raptor leaps up to snatch her, Grant pulling her free with inches to spare.

Our ending is a convenient deus-ex machina, the T-Rex comes out of nowhere and saves the day. The banner rolls over her as she roars. Sure it’s a leap in logic, but I guarantee nobody watching it for the first time thought: excuse me, where did the T-Rex come from? You’re so bought in you can’t imagine a more satisfying final note. That’s filmmaking at the highest level: making you feel so much you forget to think.

End of ride. Roll credits. The lights come on. I catch my breath. The lady sitting in front of me tells my dad I’d been kicking her chair non-stop. My bad lady, I legit forgot we were in a theater for the last two hours.

III. Life Finds a Way

Needless to say, Spielberg sold the illusion so completely that our culture couldn’t contain it inside the theater… Jurassic Park became a smash hit and dinosaurs became my entire personality. I had toys, video games, clothes, posters, books. I suddenly wanted to become a paleontologist, so we now had museum trips where I gave my parents lectures on dinosaur names and diets. I even read the think pieces that genuinely asked whether we could bring dinosaurs back to life.

I watched the film seven more times in theaters that year alone. The VHS came out and watching it became a ritual as I wore out the tape and memorized the dialogue.

My dad, a movie buff himself, saw what had happened to me and leaned in. You like Jurassic Park? Watch this. He introduced me to Spielberg’s full catalogue: Jaws, Indiana Jones. Indy led me to Lucas and Star Wars. Spielberg led me to Zemeckis and Back to the Future. It all eventually took me to Coppola and Scorsese which opened my world beyond dinosaurs, sci-fi, and fantasy… Forget paleontology, I now wanted to become a movie director, and it all started with Jurassic Park. I can trace a direct line from that night in 1993 to every film I’ve loved.

IV. I wanted to show them something that wasn't an illusion, something that was real, something that they could see and touch

There's a meta-angle to Jurassic Park that often gets lost in all the discourse: the creation of the dinosaurs in the movie is a direct metaphor for the CGI breakthrough in Hollywood. Hammond doesn’t fully understand what he’s made. He just knows it’s magnificent, and believes the spectacle justifies itself. The scientists warn him but he doesn’t listen. Spielberg is Hammond. He built a cautionary tale about technological hubris into his own celebration of it… and since the film became the highest grossing movie of all-time, we’re all the tourists who came to the park.

Every great visual effect that came after: Star Wars Special Edition, Casper, the full CG revolution of the late nineties and beyond, arrived in a world where Jurassic Park had already changed what was possible. And that's both the miracle and the tragedy of what Spielberg made: you can never get that first feeling back. That first watch made us question the nature of reality. The genie was out of the bottle. Hollywood learned the wrong lesson from it by over-relying on visual effects, mistaking the spectacle for the magic instead of understanding they were never the same thing.

The sequels, for the most part, never understood this. I’ll give credit where it’s due, The Lost World is better than people admit, and Jurassic Park III is a lean little side adventure. But the Jurassic World series learned the wrong lessons: dinosaurs as friends, dinosaurs as monsters, dinosaurs as product. No awe, no wonder, no majesty.

If I’m being honest about where the franchise should go: forget another sequel. Give me a tight, Andor-style series set during the construction of the original park… think of the corporate drama and the ethical debates, with Hammond as the ruthless businessman and visionary. It would barely have any dinosaur action, but if you’ve read the Crichton novel, you know that story is fascinating. Go back to basic. The magic of the original was that Spielberg made you feel like you were seeing something impossible for the first time. If Andor made us fear the Empire again then maybe a Jurassic Park origins story can make us believe in dinosaurs again.

My most recent rewatch of Jurassic Park was my wife’s first time since she was a kid. Watching her go through it was its own experience: she grabbed my hand during the T-Rex attack and pressed her nails into my skin while I laughed like a maniac, and I realized something: I have this film memorized and know every beat before it lands, and yet watching someone I love experience it gave me something close to the original feeling back. The magic still holds, not because of nostalgia, but because of the craft: Spielberg's camerawork, the blend of CGI and practical effects that still hasn't been topped, and Williams going god-mode on that score.

Is it any surprise Jurassic Park became the biggest movie ever made? It’s a film about the miracle of bringing impossible things to life, released at the exact moment cinema first made that miracle possible, directed by the one filmmaker who understood that wonder and terror are the same feeling arriving from different directions. Of course we lost our minds.

Jurassic Park is the reason I wanted to become a movie director when I was younger. Today it’s the reason I care enough about cinema to write about films in the first place. I have a kid on the way now, and I think about this a lot: how do I recreate that feeling for him? I don’t want to force it. It might not even be Jurassic Park that does it, it’s probably something that hasn’t been made yet. But whatever it is, I want him to have that moment where a film leaves a mark on his life and creates memories that he’ll carry forever, the same way my dad did for me thirty-three years ago.

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And that’s my issue exactly.

I’m not asking for Citizen Kane. But we deserve more than a movie that’s exactly like the video game… at least I can play the video game. So please enlighten me: what is the point of doing a LIVE-ACTION Mortal Kombat if it’s going to look just like the video game anyway? From the AI-slop feel of the fights and the early 2000s CGI in the fatalities, to the sets that look faker than a Spirit Halloween backdrop, was there a single real location in this $80 million movie? Where did the money go? Because it sure wasn’t toward the cast of sauce-less nobodies. (I’m sorry Karl Urban. I’m sorry Baraka.)

The fights are so weightless you’ll get more thrills watching a two-hour YouTube fight compilation. Where is the raw brutality? You’re Mortal fuckin’ Kombat, the franchise so violent that parents wrote letters to Congress, forcing the U.S. government to invent the ESRB… the most dangerous thing about this film is its runtime. Your movie has an R-rating, is it too much to ask for a level of violence that actually uses it? Break some bones. Make me wince. Make me squirm. I want to feel something real, dammit.

The biggest crime in this sequel might just be that the fights carry ZERO personal stakes beyond “THE FATE OF EARTH REALM”… listen up Hollywood, we no longer care about Earth, it’s kind of like a boy who cried wolf situation, we’ve seen the planet getting almost destroyed way too many times, it doesn’t mean anything anymore. You’d think the tournament structure would generate some dramatic tension, but no, characters are teleporting from one fight to the next with zero banter, zero rivalry, and zero reason for us to care who wins. The personal is what makes the spectacle land. Without it, you just have noise.

The story can’t decide whether to anchor itself around Johnny Cage or Kitana, tries to do both, commits to neither, and therefore nobody gets anything close to an arc. The villains aren’t much better. Shao Kahn had genuine juice in the opening: menacing, physical, a little psychotic. Then you watch him fight and almost die three separate times throughout the film. By the final showdown I couldn’t care less about him. You cannot do that to your big bad… and the tragedy is that Shao Kahn is just a symptom of a much bigger problem: Mortal Kombat has some of gaming’s most genuinely interesting lore and deranged mythologies and this movie has no idea what to do with any of it.

Realms colliding. Gods with political agendas. Sorcerers manipulating history across centuries. Characters who are half-dragon or the reincarnated souls of murdered monks. There is so much to work with here. This franchise can go full camp, full grimdark, full video game absurdism, full grounded martial arts… all of those versions could work. Instead we get this cheap and vanilla rated-R MCU tone that commits to nothing and hits me like a horse tranquilizer.

Do I care too much? Absolutely. But we deserve better.

Ultimately, this is the worst type of sequel… so focused on fixing what “fans” disliked about the first film that it never stops to ask whether any of those fixes make for a better movie. Yes, we wanted a tournament. Yes, we wanted Johnny Cage. But fan service is not a substitute for craft. It’s the bare minimum. Is it too much to also ask for character arcs, convincing visual effects, and a story that holds together for two hours?

The martial art genre can make for some of the best “video game” movies, I’m looking at you Bloodsport, John Wick 3, and The Raid, this shouldn’t be so difficult!

Sigh… at least Street Fighter looks good.

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1. Star Wars

Number 1 has to be the OG, and please note I’m only ranking Star Wars as the title here, because A New Hope is a boring and joyless ‘do nothing’ retcon of a title for what is the intro to a space opera…

Just think back to the first time you heard the words ‘Star’ and ‘Wars’ combined together: what could this mean? A plural on war? We are dealing with multiple wars in these stars?! It sends your mind racing about a fight for the whole galaxy and already your thinking about an epic scope and scale, it’s catchy and straight to the point... Star Wars is so good as a title it became the name for the entire saga, easy to sell as a series of movies, easy to slap on all the merch. and toys.

2. The Empire Strikes Back

‘Strikes Back’ does so much heavy lifting in making this title pop. Just say it out loud: THEE EM-PYRE STRYKS BAK. That combination of vowels and consonants is perfect: it has oomph, it rolls off the tongue, and it’s fun to say.

Beyond just sounding phonetically strong, I love the title itself in the context of the film, it celebrates the bad guys and puts the spotlight on them… the empire striking back ties into film’s darker note.

3. The Phantom Menace

‘Phantom’ is one of those words in our lexicon that’s rarely used but always fun, it’s strange and fancy. I remember not being sure of its meaning when Episode I came out and remember looking it up:

Phan-tom: Something that appears to exist but has no physical reality, such as a ghost, illusion, or mental image

There is a paradoxical angle that gives it a cool mystique feel… I’m also a huge fan of the ‘f’ sound being spelled with a ‘ph’: elephant, phenomenal, triumph, phantom, turning an ‘f’ into a ‘ph’ is like putting on a sports jacket, it instantly makes you more elegant.

Now you pair ‘phantom’ with ‘menace’, another word you don’t hear everyday and you have a title with real aura. Something feels threatening without telling you why. And then you watch the movie and the meaning multiplies: is the phantom menace Palpatine hiding as Sidious, pulling strings we can feel but not see? Is it Anakin, the chosen one who will eventually fall to the dark side? Is it the Jedi, blind to the threat gathering around them?

Lucas originally went with The Beginning as the title for Episode I. It’s very biblical but it instantly makes the Star Wars universe smaller, this is just the beginning of Anakin’s story, but it’s not the beginning of Star Wars itself.

4. Attack of the Clones

Yes, there’s the infamous clip of Ewan McGregor learning the title for Episode II and barely concealing his horror. I can see why people think it’s cheesy but that’s exactly why I like it, it’s pulpy in a Flash Gordon-esque way, and that’s exactly what these movies are.

The title is fun to pronounce but it’s ‘Clones’ that’s the cherry on top here… we figured that clones were coming at some point in the prequels based off Kenobi’s throwaway line about the Clone Wars back in the first Star Wars, but Phantom Menace ended with zero hints about anything clone-related. So Attack of the Clones announces itself immediately: get ready y’all, the clones are coming. Who are the clones? What are they attacking? We had no clue but it piqued our curiosity. And sure, the actual attack of the clones does not happen until the very end, but it’s a better title than Episode II: A Naboo Love Story or Detective Kenobi.

5. The Last Jedi

This one sounds a bit simple at first but the finality of ‘Last’ grows on you: who is the last Jedi? Is it Luke? Rey? Kylo? Maybe Snoke or Yoda? Or is it someone we haven’t met yet? It’s an ambiguous title that makes your mind wonder. Luke starts off as the last Jedi, until he passes the torch to Rey and inspires the entire galaxy, tying into the film’s last scene with broom boy who represents the Jedi ways being passed down from one generation to another. It’s a title that carries the thesis of the film beautifully… It’s like poetry, it rhymes. An acceptable alternate title: The Last Great Star Wars.

6. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Genuinely fun combo of words… what the hell is a ‘Rogue One’? We weren’t sure but it sounded cool and we figured it was tied to the Rogue Squadron. The meaning within the movie itself is a bit of a throwaway and I wish Disney stuck with the Star Wars Anthology subtitle, it sounds epic compared to A Star Wars Story which makes these spin-offs sound like fairytales (…wait a minute).

7. Revenge of the Sith

‘Revenge’ and ‘Sith’ are both strong, but at this point we already had Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi so it’s a bit of a retread. I see the symmetry but it feels a bit safe and derivative for what was the series’ grand finale at the time. Give me something with more sparks, this title doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t expect.

8. Return of the Jedi

It’s nice to see ‘Jedi’ in an actual movie title but ‘Return’ is just too passive and soft. The title sounds exactly like what it is: a last-minute replacement for the bad-ass original title of Revenge of the Jedi.

Lucas was right, a Jedi shouldn’t seek revenge, but he should have gone back to the drawing board instead of just swapping ‘Return’ for ‘Revenge’. Again this was the series finale, give me something with more fire and passion behind it.

9. The Rise of Skywalker

Sigh. I actually really like this one phonetically, ‘Skywalker’ is one of the all-time great fictional names and combining it with ‘The Rise of’ sounds good to the ear. It also sparked a real conversation in the lead-up to the film, even though I gotta take off points here because those conversations proved to be absolutely meaningless once the film came out and spat in everyone’s face.

Also, just two movies prior you told me that the force awakened and now the Skywalker is rising? I just don’t know… like I said, I like the sound, but I think my disdain for the shit film itself makes it genuinely difficult to be unbiased about the title.

10. The Force Awakens

The title is the movie: assembled to be safe, to be familiar, to hit the same notes without taking any risk. The Force Awakens is just another way of saying A New Hope, just like the film itself, the title is a remake dressed up as a sequel.

The choice of words here is also boring… there’s none of the magic Phantom Menace offered, none of the oomph of Empire Strikes Back. Having ‘the Force‘ officially in a title should be more exciting but this truly feels like the product of a focus group that had one goal: play it safe and don’t scare anyone (well look at that, just like the movie!).

11. Solo: A Star Wars Story

“Solo” already means something in English, which makes it immediately confusing as a title with no other words around it. What was the plan here if this movie became successful? More spin-offs with just character names? What about the sequels?

The Han Solo novel series had titles like The Paradise Snare and The Hutt Gambit, strange words that feel like they belong to another universe, Solo: A Star Wars Story is a filename.

Honorable Mentions

The Mandalorian & Grogu is simple but bold. It takes nerve to put two words that mean nothing out there for the general audience, especially when most people just know Baby Yoda as Baby Yoda. I’m dreading the fact this movie is the franchise’s big theatrical return after nine years, but I respect having the words GROGU spelled out in big on the movie poster.

Star Wars: Starfighter is the most Shawn Levy movie title ever. It’s ABSOLUTE bottom tier and I blame the damn repetition of STAR WARS with STARFIGHTER, you’re saying the same thing twice and it’s not even catchy. Give me a word I have to look up.

The Hunt for Ben Solo would have been one of the best titles in the series, it announces that Ben Solo is alive and he’s being hunted? Say no more! ‘The Hunt for’ is also a great set of words to open with, it creates stakes and momentum before the movie starts. I’m still not over this film… we lost a great movie and an all-time title.

A great movie title function like a promise, the best ones: Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Phantom Menace, all use a couple words to tease you with a premise that gets your imagination running with all sorts of possibilities, just to deliver a movie that ideally exceeds your expectations and rewards your curiosity. Star Wars as a series built its mythology on wonder, the titles should too.

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That’s when cinema feels alive, when it brings people together in the theater AND after the credits.

The frustration I expressed in last week’s piece on movie discourse comes down to something much simpler: I love talking about movies.

The worst sin a film can commit is being boring. I will happily take a bad movie over a boring one, because at least the bad movie gives me something to talk about. But I straight-up feel cheated out of my time when a film gives me nothing to chew about.

And this is my core problem with the studios who play it safe running the same template with their superhero universes and reboots. Copy-pasting whatever worked last time isn’t enough. You can’t just recycle the same characters, story beats, and emotional rhythms and expect me to be excited. It’s just reheated leftovers… and don’t get me wrong, leftovers are fine, but then you get a taste for what real food tastes like (recent example: the 5-course meal that was Sinners) and you just hope that every movie can give you that same feeling.

The best films follow you home, you think about them a week later… and the all-time greats stay with you forever. That’s why we keep dissecting Kubrick even though his last film came out in 1999. That’s why I see a new essay on The Thing pop up on Substack every other week. And yes, despite all the hot takes on the prequels and the mess Disney has made with the franchise, this is exactly why Star Wars will never die, because warts and all, Star Wars is ultimately easy to nerd out on, it’s part of the myth-making.

There was a short window in October 2020 when theaters reopened despite the pandemic. My wife and I drove to San Francisco to catch Tenet at the Metreon, in glorious 70mm IMAX. It was only us and a dozen other people in the 500-seats auditorium, all masked up and socially distanced. This was my first trip to the world of temporal pincer movements and the film completely lost me in the last 40 minutes. The credits rolled and I sat there not knowing what to make of Nolan’s time-fuckery and the ear-bending score from Ludwig.

But guess what, we had a one-hour ride home and we could not stop talking about the film. Our confusion cracked open a conversation that became somewhat of an understanding of the film, we were both building our own theories by just talking to each other. My opinion on the film changed by the time we got home (and yes, after a couple of re-watches, I can confirm that it’s a masterpiece).

That level of engagement is the best thing a movie can do, anything that can spark a one-hour conversation is good art. The worst thing a film can do is to take your two hours and leave you with silence at the end of it. Give me confusion, give me arguments, give me a drive home where nobody can shut up. That’s why we go to the movies.

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