The Protectors, Season 2 (1973)

 

Harry Rule is still heading up his private band of international detectives and troubleshooters, The Protectors, in this second series of the show.  Much like the prior season, the team takes on various cases around Europe.  These could be either on behalf of private individuals who have fallen foul of some criminal scheme, or for 'friendly' (that is, western) governments.

Just as the basic outline of the show has not changed, the strengths and weaknesses of this second season are much as they were in the first.  The 25-minute running time continues to be a problem, as the set-up, investigation and resolution of each scenario must be rushed through in order to fit the time.

Said scenarios again vary wildly in tone.  For instance in the somewhat comical episode "Sugar & Spice", the team must protect a young girl from criminals, without letting her know she is at risk; while at the other end of the spectrum we have the surprisingly thoughtful "Border Line" about the compromises that both governments and individuals will make to their principles, when offered something they desperately want.

In general though, the show definitely leans more toward the light entertainment end of the spectrum, such as the particularly daft episode about a fringe religious group.  The people behind the soundtrack certainly seem to approach it as a less than serious program: action sequences are often scored with jaunty tunes that speak more to slapstick than tension.

And then there's the early seventies costuming, which provides what I assume is unintentional comedy.

Such as this.

The Protectors is ultimately a hit and miss affair, with more miss than hit, but the episodes are at least short enough that they rarely outstay their welcome.

Voyagers (2021)

 

In the mid 21st Century, Earth is ravaged by climate-change.  Fortunately, astrophysicists have discovered a human-habitable planet.  Plans are made to send a scouting mission, but as it will take the craft 86 years to reach its destination, this will need to be a multi-generational trip.

Because of this, and to conserve resources on the flight, the mission planners resolve to use children born from IVF and raised in isolation from the world, in a confined location very similar to the vessel on which they will spend the rest of their lives.  The mission itself will be launched while they are still pre-teens, with a single adult to guide them.

Future generations will be performed when then crew turn 24, then again when those offspring reach that age, so that the grandkids of the original crew reach their destination.

"What about sexual reproduction, and the sex drive in general?" you may ask; as the mission planners do.  They decide to include a chemical in the daily diet that will suppress the sex drive - and many emotional responses - to keep the grew placid and cooperative.

Yeah, that goes about as well as you might expect.

So, the basic concept for Voyagers is pretty much "Lord of the Flies in space".  Honestly, it's not a bad elevator pitch.  Unfortunately, it seems like the script has no real ideas outside of that.  Other than the setting and the inclusion of female characters as well as male, it largely follows the outline of the book.  Once the crew ween themselves off the chemical that is keeping them docile, conflict quickly follows.  Even the creation of an imaginary "beast" in the novel - which drives much of the aggression there - is paralleled in the film, with paranoid fears of an "alien" menace driving much of the intra-drew antagonism.

The film does have a reasonably talented young cast, who work hard to make the material engaging.  However, they're definitely hampered in this by the fact that the script gives them little to work with.  There are no surprises here, no nuances.  The good/bad divide is very blatant and stark, and rather heavy-handed.  A shame, I think, since the 'bad guys' resentment of being secretly dosed with chemicals is definitely something I can empathise with, and it would have been interesting to see them get a more sympathetic treatment.

Another aspect that lacks nuance is the film's use of symbolic montages to represent the awakening of emotion and sexual desire. They lack any subtlety, to the point that they may as well have shown a bunch of pistons pounding up and down and called it a day.  This is particularly frustrating when they show that they can depict this a lot more naturalistically and effectively through mimicking the characters' actual gazes.  The lingering camera on the central female character's arm, or her neck and the curve of her jaw, is structurally much less intrusive, and it even avoids being overtly male-gazey, given it does not focus on breast or buttock.

A decent concept, decently acted, but let down by the script and some of the imagery.

Upload, Season 1 (2020)

 

In 2033, humans who are on the verge of death can "upload" themselves into a virtual afterlife of their choosing.  Assuming they have the money to do so, that is.

When handsome but rather self-centred computer programmer Nathan Brown dies prematurely, his wealthy girlfriend Ingrid pays for him to be uploaded to the very expensive Lakeview.  Which is better than being dead, but Ingrid - although by far the best person in her own family - is narcissistic and possessive.  Being financially beholden to her is not exactly a walk in the park.

As Nathan adjusts to the pros and cons of digital heaven, he bonds with Nora, his customer service rep.  In the living world, Nora struggles with the pressures of her job, her dying father who does not want to be uploaded, and her growing feelings for Nathan, all while slowly coming to believe that Nathan's premature death was a case of murder ...

I really enjoyed this comedy-drama.  I think it does a lot of things well.

First off, Upload is a show about some deeply flawed people. Nora is by far the 'best' human human being here, but even she is not without her foibles.  But is it also a show about how those flawed people might, as they work through some truly unusual situations in their lives, slowly evolve and change and - maybe, just maybe - become better people than they were.  I like that it takes the position that anyone can become more caring and worthwhile as a human being ... though it acknowledges that some might choose not to do so.  It draws a lot of its humour from these struggles.

It also profits from a strong cast.  Robbie Amell and Andy Allo are charming as Nathan and Nora, but the real stand-out might be Allegra Edwards.  She has the very challenging job of taking the narcissistic, rude and vain Ingrid and making her still somewhat sympathetic.  Because as awful as she is in many ways, she does care about Nathan and she does occasionally recognise how awful the rest of her family are, and try to be better than that.

Of course, hard-working actors couldn't save the show if it was sloppily written.  Fortunately, it is generally quite tightly constructed.  The writers have obviously given some thought to how the availability of a digital afterlife might work, financially and culturally, and the impacts it might have on the 'real' world.  Can the dead vote?  Work?  What other influences can they have on the still living?  These questions and others have been considered and they get addressed in the fiction.  It's nice to see that they're thinking about the wider picture, and not just the very narrow needs of a specific plotline on their show.

All in all, this is a smart, well-written and well-acted show.  If the premise sounds at all interesting to you, check it out.

Rise of the Predator (2014)

 

The Blackjacks are an elite team of private military contractors.  Their latest mission comes from a powerful venture capitalist named Cromwell.  He has lost contact with his high security energy research facility, located somewhere in Kazakhstan.  The Blackjacks need to enter the facility, find the chief scientist, and extract him safely.

To help locate the scientist, Cromwell provides a psychic named Lisa Westbrook.  This is merely the first signal that there's something unusual about this apparently straight-forward extraction job.  And sure enough, once the Blackjacks get on site, they find themselves in a desperate battle with an extra-dimensional monster that the scientist's research accidentally unleashed.

If the above summary sounds like a very generic SF/horror monster movie, well that's because this film - which is also known as SEAL Patrol - is indeed a very generic SF/horror monster movie.  A fact that is probably tipped off by the coattail-riding use of 'Predator' in the title.

The big problem here is the writing, which is plodding and meandering, despite the brief, sub-80 minute runtime.  There are a lot of sequences that smack heavily of padding, as the film desperately tries to fill time with content that doesn't need it to show the monster itself.  Probably due to financial constraints.

A particular example of this kind of padding is a sub-plot about the scientist's daughter.  She is missing, presumed dead.  But then the Blackjacks find her alive!  Huzzah! ... and then two minutes later she is killed off.  So glad we had that time together.

On the plus side, when we do finally see the monster, it's actually a reasonably good design.  A shame then that it does very little while 'on camera', presumably again due to those financial limitations.

If you're really hankering for an SF/horror monster mash, there are much better options.  Including some movies that are technically worse, but at least have more chutzpah.

Dexter: New Blood (2021)

 

After faking his death ten years ago in a hurricane, serial killer Dexter Morgan has moved to the small town of Iron Lake, New York. There, under the assumed identity of Jim Lindsay, a clerk at the local wilderness sporting gear store, he has successfully suppressed his homicidal urges for a full decade.

Which is definitely not to say that he is "better".  He continues to feel those urges, and his longstanding practice of speaking to an imaginary representation of his dead father continues ... though now it is an imaginary representation of his dead sister, whose demise was Dexter's fault.

Still.  It finally seems like Dexter has his 'dark passenger' under control.  He's gone ten years without a kill.  He won't break that streak now, right?  And even if he did, there's no-one around to tie him to his old life, right?

Well, I bet you can guess what happens next.

Season eight of Dexter is notoriously bad.  Particularly the ending, which comes in at #3 on Screen Rant's list of Most Hated Series Finales.  It's so reviled that when word of New Blood got out, the initial reaction was "it's the revival no-one asked for".  Certainly, when I sat down to watch it, it was with a sense of morbid curiosity rather than hope.

But you know what?  Dexter: New Blood is actually pretty good.  It takes the original series baffling ending and uses the decade of elapsed time - both in fiction and in the real world - to develop sometime much more entertaining and satisfying.

I suspect that the return of the original show runner, Clyde Phillips, was a major factor in the uptick in quality.  Philips left the original show at the end of season 4 - considered by many 'the last good one', though I'm actually not its biggest fan - and has brought the character and the show back toward the tone of the earliest seasons.

I also think that the switch of locale from sunny, metropolitan Florida to snowbound, rural upstate New York works well.  What seemed one of the most random elements of the series finale - "what, Dexter's a lumberjack, now?" - has been used to create a very different visual and cultural dynamic to the show.  That helps it feel fresh and different even as the show returns to its thematic and narrative roots.  All in all, it's a smart blend of different and familiar.

Then there's the switch to having Dexter's sister, Debra, become the on-screen face of Dexter's internal struggle.  It makes sense that Dexter would personify these things as her since her passing: even more-so than his father, Debra was the most important person in his life, and in many ways his anchor to something approaching normality.  The two actors also always had great chemistry (they were actually married, for a while), and Debra's foul-mouthed energy works really well for the self-loathing Dexter experiences.

Finally, the show does a good job of creating a volatile, dangerous situation and then following through on that.  Gone are the original show's many convenient escapes from consequence: characters both major and minor genuinely feel at risk here, and Dexter's mistakes have consequences for him and for those he cares about.  Which is not to say that the entire thing is misery and failure: it's not.  But it feels much more organic, and far less contrived.  And it has a real ending.  One that feels like a proper send-off for the character.

I'm not sure I would come back for a season 2 of New Blood - it would very much depend on the concept behind it - but I am glad they made these ten episodes.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

 

London, 1970.  Farrokh "Freddie" Bulsara works as a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport, but dreams of a bigger life: one lived on the stage.  His chance comes when he goes to see the band 'Smile' play at a local club.  It's their planned gig: they've just lost their lead singer.

"Freddie" applies for the position.  He lacks his predecessor's movie star good looks, but he's definitely got a stronger voice.  He's also a fine song-writer, and has huge ambition.  He legally changes his name to Freddie Mercury, persuades the band to adopt the moniker "Queen", and well ... the rest is history.  Over a dozen hit albums released over three different decades.  A greatest hits album that solid 15 million copies in the US alone.  A world-stopping live performance at Live Aid 1985.

What's not history is most of this film. which is only very loosely based on the life and career of one of the world's most memorable entertainers and most accomplished vocalists.  The surviving members of Queen were heavily involved in the development of the picture and its events are sometimes quite highly fictionalised for purposes of drama.  For example, the sub-plot about Freddie being tempted by a solo career, and the dissension this causes in the band, is complete fiction.  Drummer Roger Taylor was actually the first member of Queen to release a solo project, nearly a decade before Mercury did so.  Similarly the presentation of the band's preparation for Live Aid, and Freddie's concurrent struggle with his AIDS diagnosis.  The film merrily ignores the truth (the band were actively touring together just weeks before the concert, and Mercury's diagnosis was not until a year or two later) in favour of the more narratively convenient "emotional reunion and masterful performance" finale.

But of course, this is a bio-pic, not a true biography, and some (or a lot) of artistic license in the name of entertainment is to be expected.  If you want a true account of Freddie's life, or of Queen's history as a band, you will need to look elsewhere.  This is not that movie.  It's much more interested in telling a neatly packaged, relatively conventional narrative with some bangin' tunes in it.

I know some people who have complained about the film's structure: "It's just a bunch of scenes of them recording their biggest hits, like a bunch of music videos strung together".  To which my answer is: "Yeah, but that's exactly the movie about Queen that I want."  They're a band who delivered some hugely memorable tunes, filled with bombast and swagger.  This film unabashedly celebrates their music, and as a long-time fan, I am quite okay with that.

Of course, no matter how much great Queen music you throw up there, a film like this is going to live or die on its casting of Freddie Mercury.  He was one of the greatest entertainers of all time, and a weak performance would sink the film.  I'm pleased to say that Rami Malek most definitely does not deliver a weak performance.  He captures Mercury's charisma and bravado, as well as his loneliness and insecurity in a world that he knows is still deeply prejudiced against men of his sexuality.  It's the virtuosic performance the role requires.  Excellent work.

If you've ever enjoyed Queen's music, this is worth a watch.

Absentia, Season 1 (2017)

 

Emily Byrne disappears without a trace while hunting one of Boston's most notorious serial killers.  She is declared dead in absentia, and Conrad Harlow, the prime suspect of her investigation, is successfully prosecuted for her kidnap and murder.  The FBI never managed to get him on the serial killer charge, but at least they got him, right?

Well, six years later, things don't look so neat.  Emily turns up alive, locked in a tank in an isolated cabin.  She has barely any memory of the intervening time, but her very existence rather blows Harlow's conviction to pieces.  He's soon free of prison, despite everyone's conviction that he played a role in the crime.

Emily has plenty of other issues to face, though, as the life she knew is gone.  Her husband has remarried, and her son (who was an infant when she vanished) has grown up calling the other woman 'mom'.  Rather more alarmingly, a corpse turns up with her DNA under the fingernails, and there is a growing pile of other evidence that she was complicit in the serial killings and her own 'disappearance'.

With the only person who unquestioningly believes in her innocence being her cantankerous , elderly father, Emily must find for a way to prove her innocence while staying ahead of the FBI and police, who now consider her a prime suspect.

Absentia is one of those 'high concept' intrigue shows which begin with a strange and confounding event or situation and then unravel the explanations behind it.  The most famous example of this is likely Lost, but there are plenty of others, including a few I have reviewed, such as Blindspot.

High concept shows often struggle to follow through on their intriguing premise.  These struggles can take many forms.  They might fail to provide answers at all, where audiences grow frustrated with the lack of progress.  They might provide answers, but audiences may find them much less interesting than the questions were.  Or the answers could fall short in other ways, feeling far-fetched or implausible.

Absentia does a good job of avoiding the "no answers" trap.  There is a decent sense of progress throughout the season here, with Emily discovering aspects of her kidnapping, and the dynamics of the show altering as a result.  Of course it also raises new questions - going to need something to drive season 2, after all!  However, it does sometimes struggle with the challenge of keeping everything seem plausible and grounded.  There is a definite odour of 'conspiracy for conspiracy's sake' in some elements.  Several characters' schemes seem to be baroque purely for the sake of it, rather like they're from Batman's catalogue of villains.

I must also say that I sometimes found it hard to warm to the characters, with the exception of the afore-mentioned cantankerous dad.  Almost everyone in the show,. including Emily, does things that are selfish and short-sighted.  While that's probably 'true to life', it goes a little too far into the 'heroes with feet of clay' direction for my tastes.  I like the characters aI am supposed to root for to be little less blemished.

Overall though, if these kind of high concept mystery shows are your thing, this seems like a solid one: I'd certainly rate it above Blindspot.

Monster Hunter (2020)

 

In a strange world where humans co-exist with a wide variety of large and savage monsters, a Hunter, a warrior trained to hunt and kill these powerful creatures, is separated from his team when their ship is attacked by the Diablos, a horned subterranean monster.

On Earth, U.S. Army Ranger Captain Natalie Artemis and her United Nations security team search for a missing team of soldiers in the desert. A sudden storm pulls them into a portal to the hunter's world.  There, they find the remains of the missing soldiers and their vehicles. 

Artemis's team is soon stalked by the Diablos.  The beast proves impervious to bullets and grenades, and kills two members of the squad.

The survivors of the Diablos's attack escape into a cavern network, but quickly discover this is no safe haven, as they are attacked by monstrously large spiders.  Only Artemis survives, immolating dozens of the creatures as she makes her escape.

Soon after this, she encounters the Hunter.  In a straight-out-of-comic-books plot development, the two promptly beat each other black and blue.  Trust and respect somehow established by this violence, they then team up.  Their objective: the Sky Tower, which may present a way for Artemis to return home.

Of course, between them and it lies the Diablos ...

Monster Hunter is the eighth feature film collaboration between director Paul W S Anderson and his real life spouse Milla Jovovich, and the seventh of those eight to be based on a video game.  The sole exception was the 2011 steampunk interpretation of The Three Musketeers.

The other six were all Resident Evil films, and honestly, this is on the whole very much more of the same kind of movie as those earlier projects.  This is not to say Monster Hunter is identical to the Resident Evil films.  It focuses more on battles with single, very large CGI monsters than those movies tended to do.  And Artemis feels considerably more vulnerable than Alice, Jovovich's RE character, ever did.  But overall it's very reminiscent of those films.  Especially the first of them, given that this movie shares the same "badass woman finds herself in a situation she doesn't understand, and ends up fighting monsters" plot outline.

Certainly, if you have seen the Resident Evil films, I think you can use your reaction to them as the basis of your likely enjoyment of this movie: they seem very much targeted at the same audiences.  Which is to say, the Chinese market: China delivered over half of the worldwide box office for Resident Evil: the Final Chapter.  Unfortunately for this film's financial outcomes, a poorly judged line of dialogue drew the ire of Chinese authorities.  It consequently failed to recoup costs, and seems unlikely to launch a new action movie franchise.