Video Game Review: Marathon (Season 1) by Bungie

This ain't a sprint, it's a goddamn marathon.

My teammates are dead. I can hear the enemy team scurrying about; they’re searching for me: the rat in the attic. They know I’m somewhere around and they want to enforce a “no mercy” policy lest the festering rat comes back to bite them. I can hear them continuing their hunt. It feels like they can smell my blood. Then I hear a Recon prime ability activation; my heartbeat quickens: they’re scanning my location. I apply a signal jammer and try to lose myself in a group of bots. Two of the enemies give chase, but I lose them while they fight bots and then I circle back. One player stayed back to loot my teammates. I catch them with their pants down and kill them, then lay claymores around the body bag. I use my Triage Prime ability to bring one of my teammates back instantly (normally a ten-second process). While he heals up, the remainder of the enemy team rushes us. One hits the claymores and goes down to a few bullets, then my teammate and I take down the final player. The rat bites back. Marathon is filled with PvPvE moments like this, from 3v3 to 1v3 to 1v2 to 2v2 to 2v1, all in the matter of a few minutes. What seem like impossible odds are quickly reversed with patience and game knowledge. Not to mention hitting some of your shots.

Marathon is the latest effort by Bungie, an extraction shooter set in the world of their original Marathon IP from the mid-90s. While the original was a single-player series with some LAN multiplayer options, Marathon of 2026 is anything but: a first-person shooter multiplayer with no single-player elements whatsoever. If any of the old guard are seeking a throwback to the old days, this isn’t it. What Marathon is, however, is absolutely brilliant.

Bungie, despite its developmental and managerial mishaps, makes some good gameplay, and Marathon is no exception. For those who haven’t played an extraction shooter, the goal of the game is to gather loot, get to an extraction point, then leave with it. You can then use the good loot you’ve gotten to use in a future match. If you want to do a quest, or have a key for a loot room, or run Cryo Archive, you’ll want to equip your best gear. Bungie does this with panache. Every element of the game, while not perfect, is meticulously designed and creates an addictive loop that can hook you for hours on end.

The movement is smooth but weighted, with a feel that borders on Halo and Apex Legends. In a similar fashion to the latter-mentioned game, Marathon’s playable entities comprise different shells (playable characters) with different skill-sets. Each one has a tactical, passive, and prime ability, similar to Apex and Overwatch. My main shell, Triage, has three main abilities; med drones that heal over time and prevent a full death of a teammate on a down (not to mention, if a teammate has a drone attached, you can share your consumables with them), an ability that increases the efficiency of volt weapons, and the ability to revive teammates instantly or EMP enemies (or even both simultaneously if you aim it right). In addition, each shell comes with preset baseline stats. These stats can be upgraded over the course of the season either through faction upgrades or implants. For instance, a knife skill of 5 will take five stabs to kill an enemy at full health, but at 100? Two stabs and they’re mince meat. Gunplay feels incredibly responsive with satisfying hit detection. Playing the game is a real treat.

Marathon is a looker. With top-tier graphics and peak lighting, it would almost make me want to visit if it weren’t so deadly. Tau Ceti IV is a dangerous place, with UESC patrols coming in and out, not to mention alien lifeforms nagging you around every corner (damn you, poison plants!). Every map is distinct and enjoyable to play for its own reasons. Want a smaller, open map with opportunities for mid to long range combat? Perimeter will do the trick. Want to snipe to your heart’s content? Dire Marsh has your back. Close to mid-range? Focus on Outpost. Want to question your life choices and whether one, as a thirty-seven year old person like me, should even play video games anymore? Play Cryo Archive (only available on weekends). Each map is beautifully created and distinct from one another. And while there are certain parts of specific maps that look a little too similar for my liking (like North and South Relay on Perimeter, or some wings of Cryo), the attention to detail is there. Combined with the Codex entries, the artists at Bungie paint a lurid picture of the lives of the Tau Ceti IV settlers.

Speaking of the Codex, this is absolutely brilliant and a huge part of what drew me into Marathon. Certain items that you extract, or specific story missions you complete, or even certain places you discover open up codex entries that share insights into the lives of the scientists and settlers of Tau Ceti IV. What problems did they face? What diseases did they have to fight off? What was this room used for? What were the power dynamics between superiors and inferiors? While much is unanswered, there is much to read up on between matches, and it fills in some holes left by omitting a single-player mode. By doing this, they make four maps feel like part of something bigger. And the best part? Despite dying over and over and over, you can still make progress toward unlocking lore goodies. It makes the defeat not feel so daunting.

One of the biggest elements of this game is the audio. I highly recommend a decent headset for playing Marathon; it can be the difference between life and death and is without a doubt a game saver. Everything, and I meant EVERYTHING, makes a sound. Healing? Makes a sound. Aiming down your sights? Makes a sound. Switching guns? Makes a sound. Crouch walking? Sound. Granted, some things make less noise than others; being able to hear everything puts a player at a distinct advantage, and Bungle has created a game that rewards the ever vigilant. Turn your sound up and focus. The more time spent in the game, the easier it becomes to distinguish what each sound is and how far along an enemy player is toward pulling off a heal or revive.

But what are the flaws? Great question. I didn’t find very many in my multi-month marathon of Marathon. An occasional sound glitch here, a geometry bug there has definitely spoiled an experience and/or ruined a run, but they were rare instances. I’d say the biggest drawback of the game is the learning curve, and that’s not necessarily a negative regarding the game itself, but in the ability to onboard potential players. It took me five hours before I felt like I had somewhat of a grasp on what was going on, even longer to distinguish between the footsteps of UESC and Runner shells, and I am a dedicated gamer. I can only imagine what it would be like for someone a little more casual. The UI management system could be smoother, but like every other aspect of the game, I came to learn it and appreciate its depth. And, as is persistent in most multiplayer games, the occasional weapon balancing issues occur. At first it was the knife, then the bubble/shotgun meta on Cryo Archive, but Bungie has been doing its best to tweak these imbalances.

And don’t get me started on Cryo Archive. It is both the most frustrating and rewarding gaming experience I’ve ever had (in a multiplayer game). I completed a Compiler run (the final raid boss) the night before the end of the season, as well as every Vault except 4, thanks to some friends. The map is so huge it still confuses me in some areas, and despite how much time I’ve spent in there, I still have a ton to learn. I wish the visuals had a little more variance throughout the map (like how Control and Panopticon feel very distinct). But despite the challenge, the reward feels worthwhile.

Marathon is unapologetically hardcore. There is absolutely nothing about this game that I would recommend to a casual player unless they were willing to take the time to ensure that they learned the game’s systems. You don’t have to be great at this game (I’m not), though it certainly helps. What you need is stubbornness, perseverance, and the knowledge that you will die a lot. Sometimes unfairly, but mostly because you did something stupid. In an age of gaming where everything is made easier (not saying I have any problems with accessibility!), it is nice to see a game that doubles down on its goal, deepening the experience by creating a very hardcore sci-fi multiplayer experience. With Bungie’s regular efforts to update the game and consistently balance not only the gameplay but also the systems within the game, the future for Marathon seems bright, so long as they can retain a decent number of players. My advice: if you are going to play Marathon, expect to play for an entire season and give the game the time it deserves; otherwise, you’re doing both yourself and the game a disservice. With Marathon, I truly believe Bungie has crafted one of the best multiplayer experiences of the last decade and I'm so glad I took the gamble and purchased the game.

--

The Math

Objective Assessment: 9/10

Bonus: +1 for gameplay depth. +1 for world building.

Penalties: -1 for poor player onboarding. -1 for weapon balancing issues.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Book Review: Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead

The latest novel by K.J. Parker set in his Parkerland ‘verse

K.J. Parker has settled into doing novels set in his Parkerland ‘verse. For lack of a better term for the setting, since it involves a variety of locations, timelines, characters, and inconsistencies, it is a medieval world that isn’t our own, but rhymes and plays with that rhyme in a whole bunch of different ways. Be it the Siege (Sixteen Ways to Defend a City) Trilogy about the not-quite-fall of Byzantium to Saevus Corax, battlefield salvager who winds up trying to head off international conflicts, to various novellas involving the ubiquitous Salonicus, who is a con artist, inventor, playwright, and possibly also the most brilliant person in the entire timeline. The novellas and novels aren’t in any sort of sensical order, the very idea of a map is scoffed at, and just when things actually took place is not clear.

Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead is the latest in these. This novel feels, from internal evidence, to be late in the timeline of events compared to the others. The church has been going along for quite a while and doesn’t have any competition anymore, and seems ready to have a schism of some size. The eternal threat of the Sashan Empire seems muted. Once again we have people lamenting lost manuscripts, writings and whole technologies.¹

And an impious monk and a female assassin/nun are dispatched to a synod where they have been tasked with killing a troublesome princess. But things get hot and hairy before they can even get there, and when they get to the synod itself, trouble erupts not of their own making, but definitely because they are there.

Despite the title, our viewpoint character is not the assassin/nun Sister Svangerd herself, but rather a more typical Parker point-of-view character: Brother Desiderius. He is a well worn and familiar archetype to readers of Parker’s work. A cynical, knowledgeable, brains-driven protagonist. He’s also an out-and-out atheist, even given that he’s a monk. He also has some other useful skills, and the classic Parker game of “I reveal this about the character and that changes what you just read” runs riot through his story. Sister Svangerd, for all that she is in the title, doesn’t hold a candle to our real protagonist, and that is a shame and a missed opportunity.

This novel’s theological debates about The Invincible Sun and the minutiae of its dogma are interesting if you want a debate over a religion in a fantasy novel. Parker, and to various extents his characters, are engaged with it. And there is a veneer of the idea that maybe there are supernatural forces using human agents here—or are the human agents simply thinking they are working for those supernatural elements—or is it all lies, delusions and half truths?

Take the Not-Quite-Dead from the title. Yes, this novel has a type of zombie in it. Or at least an undead. But there is a real fascination with Parker with the idea of people thinking they are supernatural, and regarding their presence as prima facie evidence for the truth of evil, versus the alternative. Our protagonist is from a country where this happens in families: naturally, there are families where, when people die, they come back as these undead. He’s an atheist and has a materialistic view of the entire affair, even if nearly nobody else does. It’s like this novel is having arguments with the more fantastical novellas such as Inside Man about whether the supernatural elements of Parkerland are actually real or not. Are they? Unclear!

And that is the thing about this novel, for better or worse. This novel is very much, absolutely meant as inside baseball catnip for people who have read a bunch of these novels and stories already and want to keep burrowing into this world and try to figure it out and see if there is a consistent design behind everything. Is there? Some days I think Parker is deliberately inconsistent just to mess with his longtime deep readers, and half the time I think he is just winging it and doesn’t have a consistent theory of worldbuilding. As I have read a number of books and reviewed them, here. Making History, for example, seems like a serious contemplation on the nature of history and its transmission. The Saevus Corax series, which this book resembles in some ways, does a lot of what this novel does, although with a somewhat different focus and at a different point in the timeline. I do think, especially given his academic focused stories, that it is all a game to Parker.

And that’s fine, but, and here’s the but. I might enjoy trying to figure out things here, trying to tease out where and when in Parkerland these events are happening and what it all means for the history and development of the world. I might enjoy the reading references, the aforementioned familiar archetype of a character. There is a well worn groove here in these novels.

The problem, the but, as it were, is that there is no way I would recommend this book to someone absolutely new to Parker. I am glad Parker is not writing solely for the inside baseball (the aforementioned Making History works pretty well for readers who haven’t read much or any of Parker). But a novel like this, although it is first in a series, really isn’t the first in a series at all. It’s a novel for a limited audience—deep fans of Parkerland.

I can hope, based on prior experience, that the next two novels will tie things together and get me to reconsider this novel and its merits. But then again, that’s once again something for the deep Parkerland reader, not for the casual fantasy reader picking up Parker for the first time. And so we come back to the original problem.

So in a real way what this review boils down to is: If you like and read lots of Parkerland novels, you get more of the same here. Other readers probably won’t derive as much enjoyment out of the novel as you’d hope. I think it’s not worth your time, frankly. I enjoy Parker’s tone and world, and his knowledgable protagonist, but this is down deep in that, and starting here won’t land well at all. There are better places to start, I think (e.g. Sixteen Ways to Defend a City).

Highlights:

• A novel set late in the Parkerland timeline
• A familiar protagonist despite the book title
• Too well worn a groove for a limited audience

Reference: Parker, K.J. Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead [Orbit, 2026].

¹ Inside baseball here. One of the things that make it hard to date and come up with a chronology of the Parkerland ‘verse is that technology and knowledge keeps getting lost. This world seems to be continually in a trap where no sustained technological development can take place without a war or other disaster knocking the sandcastle down all over again and regressing to an equilibrium. Even for a world with multiple organizations trying to preserve and extend knowledge, in Parkerland, it never *lasts*.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Obsession, Backrooms and the rise of the YouTube movie

Can saving Hollywood be as simple as this One Weird Trick?

Movies created by YouTubers are having a moment. A very, very lucrative moment.

In January of this year, video game YouTuber Markiplier released his self-financed, $3-million debut theatrical film, Iron Lung, which he mostly promoted by appealing directly to his 40 million YouTube subscribers. In its opening weekend, it looked like it might beat Send Help, legendary director Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre after his adventures in the MCU. The Walt Disney Company financed, produced, and marketed that movie, with an estimated budget of $40 million, and Oscar-nominee Rachel McAdams played the lead.

In May of this year, Curry Barker, an aspiring actor and director of popular YouTube horror shorts, released his theatrical writing and directorial debut, Obsession, produced for a reported $750,000. It finished third at the box office on its opening weekend, with $17 million. The following weekend, it made even more money, landing in second place with $24 million. On its third weekend, it made even more more money, finishing again in second place, with $27 million. As a rule, movies don’t improve on their opening weekend in their second weekend. And they certainly don’t improve on their second weekend in their third weekend. The last movie to do so was, I kid you not, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in friggin’ caveman days back in 1982 (editor’s note: this post’s author saw E.T. in the theater in the caveman days of 1982. Don’t even let him pretend like he didn’t.).

In Obsession’s third weekend, it finished second behind a new release, Backrooms, the theatrical directorial debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, based on his YouTube series of the same name. Produced on a budget of $10 million, it grossed over $80 million in its opening weekend, tying the previous weekend's haul for the debut of the latest Star Wars movie. By just its second weekend, Backrooms had already become distributor A24’s biggest release ever, beating the total domestic haul of last year’s Timothée Chalamet Oscar-vehicle Marty Supreme.

So… what’s going on? What does it mean?

Capsule Reviews

The Occam’s Razor answer to why these three movies are doing absolute gangbusters at the box office is, hey, maybe they're all just really good? Let's see.

Iron Lung: Based on a somewhat popular video game, the movie takes place almost entirely inside a small submarine, with only Simon (Markiplier) appearing onscreen. It is over 2 hours long. Markiplier is not an actor, and doesn’t know how to command the screen. But he's the only actor we get. There is a section of the film where we watch water drip. Later, something happens. We don’t know what. Maybe he’s hallucinating it. Maybe there are giant dead aliens outside the sub. It’s not clear. Then there is so much blood. So, so very much blood, and Simon's body begins to disintegrate. I don’t know why. From the blood maybe. This is a bad movie. But you know what? Markiplier stans went and saw it, they had a great time, and I have zero desire to take that away from them. It had a great opening, it made the folks who saw it happy, it made Markiplier a good return on investment, limped across a couple more weekends, and was gone. It’s not looking good for Occam’s Razor.

Obsession: Bear has a crush on his friend Nikki, but doesn’t have the nerve to tell her. She’s about to quit her job at the music store where they both work, alongside friends Ian and Sarah, so Bear buys her a going away present at a New Age store, a novelty toy called a One-Wish Willow. But Bear chickens out before he can give it to her, and makes his own wish on it—that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. He gets his wish. Inspired by the Monkey’s Paw vignette in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror anthology, it’s also the basic setup of a Twilight Zone episode, a million other things, and the aphorism “be careful what you wish for.” Sounds kinda derivative. But in execution, this movie is flawless. It’s not just that Inde Navarrette gives an all-time horror movie performance as Nikki, but the writing and the implications for things taking place just outside the frame of the movie’s point of view will stick with you for days after you leave the theater. It’s a phenomenal film.

Backrooms: This movie has a lot going for it. First, you’ve got a small cast led by magnetic Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve. Second, there is something primal and dreamlike in the basic premise of finding another room that somehow you’ve always missed before in a space you are intimately familiar with, maybe even living in. This is eerily similar to the closest thing I’ve ever had to a recurring dream. So when Ejiofor’s Clark finds a secret, permeable section of the basement wall in the furniture store he owns that opens into a seemingly never-ending network of (mostly) empty rooms, I for one felt a profound sense of uncanny recognition. But moments later, I realized that if this actually happened to me in real life, I would nope out of there so fast I’d leave vapor trails through the portal. So even though the direction is competent and the producers brought in a veteran TV writer to handle the screenplay, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the characters in this movie and believable human behavior. I think it’s a good movie, but it’s a good movie that feels like a talented young filmmaker with a lot of support trying to find their way. And, it must be said, once we do see the monster of the backrooms, it’s pretty derpy.

Despite a strong (for January) opening, Iron Lung wound up with only $50 million in worldwide grosses. Backrooms has, at the time of this writing, made over $300 million worldwide, but its week-over-week drop-offs have been massive. Obsession has made almost $400 million, and when I saw it last weekend on a Sunday at 5 pm, the theater was sold out. So with the exception of Obsession, I don’t think these are great movies where word of mouth is driving their success in theaters.

A Grand Theory

So not Occam’s Razor, then. What's the next simplest explanation? Probably that these creators were successful on YouTube and just brought their audiences out to the theaters. Let's check that one.

Markiplier is one of the most successful YouTubers on the platform, with nearly 40 million subscribers. He made multiple webseries for YouTube as his popularity expanded, and Iron Lung is a video game adaptation, which feels at home with his core content of the video game play-through. Massive YouTuber brings $17 million of ticket sales to the box office by hyping the movie on his channel throughout production, editing, behind-the-scenes, and as it neared release. Cool. Seems reasonable.

As of today, as I type this—even after the success of the movie—the Backrooms YouTube channel has 4 million subscribers. Obsession’s Curry Barker‘s channel—again, even after the black swan success of the film—has a little over 1 million subscribers. It seems implausible that these creators ported their vastly smaller YouTube audiences over into the multiplex seats in the same way that Markiplier did to multiples of that success. So what gives?

I think it’s actually really simple. You know who has always gone to the movies? At least since the 1950s, anyway? Teenagers. Young people. You know whom studios have been trying to lure into the theaters for the last 20 or so years? Families. “Four-quadrant pictures” that appeal to everybody, where parents can take their kids. The conglomerate-owned studios justify $200-400 million investments in IP and sequel-driven four-quadrant pictures by wagering that these are safe bets. But you know who doesn’t want to sit with their parents at the movies? Teenagers. These massive tentpole pictures have spent 20 years teaching young people that going to theaters is boring and for old people or little kids.

These three directors have something in common that I think is much more powerful than their shared YouTube origins—they're young people. Markiplier is the oldest—he's in his thirties, but he's been on YouTube since 2012 (same year this blog started. James Wan, call me).

These are young people making movies for young people. Where have we heard that before?

A… ahem… New Hope?

Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet got in trouble during his Oscars blitz because he said he was worried that the theatrical experience was moving toward niche entertainment, like the ballet or opera. I found his comments utterly unobjectionable, but lots of folks got Big Mad. Not that Timmy C needs me in his corner, but box office has been down for years, never bouncing back from the pandemic closures, and the rise of streaming has led to so much hand-wringing and so, so many op-eds about whether or not this is the End of Cinema.

It's not. It never is. But as I wrote at the end of last year, Hollywood will become something different. It has to, and it always does.

The studio system collapsed throughout the 1950s, and in the 1960s young people like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and other young filmmakers who either got their start or a significant boost from Roger Corman (my man, the GOAT, whom I interviewed in 2017). The thing that Corman gave them was an opportunity to get reps, to make things, to learn the ropes as storytellers, and to introduce themselves to other producers who could give them work on bigger platforms. It sure seems like YouTube gives today’s creative folks the same opportunities.

As the 1970s reached their back half, suddenly Stephen Spielberg gave us Jaws and George Lucas gave us Star Wars—both previously unimaginable box office and cultural successes. Lucas was 32 or 33 when he directed Star Wars, his third feature film. Spielberg was 29 when he made Jaws, his third theatrical feature and fifth or sixth overall including made-for-TV movies. These were all young guys. Spielberg and Lucas went on to be responsible for most of the top-10 highest grossing movies of the 1980s.

Moving forward in time, Spike Jonze was 30 when he made Being John Malkovich after a career in successful music videos. M. Night Shyamalan was 29 when he made The Sixth Sense. Quentin Tarantino was 31 when he made Pulp Fiction, which essentially invented an entire genre of 90s action movies by mashing up things Tarantino grew up with into a distinct package that appealed to young moviegoers and other young filmmakers.

So Hollywood will probably learn the wrong lesson from this year, because it usually does. Back in the early aughts, blogs and Twitter feeds were the new hotness, especially after blogger Diablo Cody’s script for Juno turned into such a beautiful movie. Hollywood signed everybody with a blog or a Twitter feed, resulting in utterly forgettable (or worse!) shows like Shit My Dad Says and movies like I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell. So they'll probably sign folks who have big YouTube channels, regardless of their storytelling ability, and some of them will never make anything, and some creators behind breakout hits (remember The Blair Witch Project? Remember?) will fizzle.

But others will not. Other creators will go on to write and direct movies that we will talk about forever. The nice thing is that the success of this year’s smaller movies will create a permission structure for not only distributors like A24 and NEON, but also for studios to take chances on more and smaller movies. And if they’re made by young people for young people, in a way that excites young people, or scares them, or reflects back to them a world that they recognize or dream of, then that’s what movies do best, and that’s what brings people together to experience them together.

I know Toy Story 5 just made all the money in the world this weekend. But if you are rooting for the future of movies in theaters, go see Obsession. Or if you’re squeamish, go see Backrooms. Don’t dismiss them because their filmmakers came from YouTube. In the end, these particular movies might not be for you, exactly, but their success will open the door to more movies in theaters that don’t start with the word “Avengers” or end in a number.

Posted by Vance K - co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together, and Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer.

Review: Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

The adversary in no man's land

cover artist: Julia Lloyd

This is my first Daniel Kraus, and I came to it because it won a prize and because I’ve been on something of a horror kick the last few months. In case you didn’t know, Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and another of his novels, Whalefall, is about to hit cinemas.

This is by way of saying I don’t think I would have picked this up if it wasn’t for Kraus being seen by other people first. Talk about the things you love, folks.

>It’s also a novel that’s quickly become (in)famous for its treatment of punctuation. Angel Down is told as a single sentence. There are people who’ll raise their eyebrows at that, others who’ll say that books should cater for the reader first. I have no time for either. I love it when writers play with the form of the novel as much as the text. Sure, it doesn’t always work, and sometimes it’s clear the writer thinks they’re cleverer than they are, but so what? Personally I think we should reward ambition and intensity and reaching for the edges of things.

Still, stuff like this can be a gimmick, and by that I mean they add nothing to the narrative, the sense and atmosphere of the novel itself.

Kraus’s first big achievement, then, is to make this structure work. He does it in a specific way that allows you as the reader to breathe while also rendering the entire story urgent and imminent in a way that more conventional punctuation would have missed.

This urgency, the quasi-stream of consciousness that Kraus invokes on the page, is essential to the tale he builds over the course of the book, and I didn’t even notice I’d not seen a full stop until three or four pages in. Then I noticed, and then I thought hard about what it was accomplishing, and then I relished getting back to the rest of it.

The story itself follows one Private First Class Cyril Bagger: scumbag, conman, son of a bishop who lost his faith and, mostly, concerned with surviving the First World War no matter who else dies in the process.

Bagger has spent most of his life insulating himself from feelings towards his fellow man. He’s done this because feelings make it harder to steal from rubes, fools and the greedy, and these folks are Bagger’s congregation.

If his father is a bishop, in one of the endless self-made Puritan inspired American expressions of Christianity, then Bagger is his own sort of preacher—one of confidence and misplaced faith, of chance and getting ahead of those around you. Bagger’s view is the distillation of the American dream—the idea that you can make it big, built on the truth that if you do, others can’t. Kraus illuminates in swift strokes of the pen how the American Dream is built on a zero-sum game where, for you to win, many others have to lose.

And Private Bagger is determined to win that game—other people are his stepping stones.

The thing is, in the battalion in which Bagger serves (and swindles soldiers around him to go over the top on his behalf), there are very few good men of his acquaintance.

On a morning when the familiar screams of the wounded fill the air from no man’s land, Bagger and four of the worst soldiers in the battalion are left behind by their commander as the rest of the unit marches away. Their mission? To find and “help” the person screaming. By which they know to kill them, as that’s the easiest thing they can do.

Kraus has the patter and feelings of these fellows down—he has done the work to make this feel like a specific time and place. Attitudes, technology, experiences are all there situating Kraus’s characters in the most miserable of trenches at the end of WWI.

I think this would be enough to tell a story with. Erich Maria Remarque did it with All Quiet on the Western Front and told one of the most profound anti-war stories ever seen.

Kraus does something different here. This setting, with its horror—bodily, social, political and existential—morphs into something else when they discover that the person wailing in no man’s land is no wounded soldier. They retrieve an unconscious body whose appearance none of them can agree on, save to say it’s a woman (clean and unspoiled by mud, war or time).

Krauss departs here, using this woman’s presence to help outline each of Bagger’s comrades, to show them at their weakest and most venal, their most desperate and most vulnerable. None of these men are good, but none of them are quite intentionally evil either.

Don’t get me wrong, part of Kraus’s theme here is that men do evil things and relish them for the benefits they bring them. However, he’s also quite clear that it is this equation, that evil brings good things to those performing the evil deeds, that drives so much suffering and harm.

Krauss doesn’t say that this justifies acts, or even that the perceived and actual benefits of doing evil last. He just carefully lays out how ordinary people are quite capable and willing to do evil to others if it helps them get what they want in the moment. It’s not even that they’re great planners—a momentary feeling of satisfaction can be enough. We see this in the acts of complying in advance we have observed in the USA since White Supremacists came to power there. For each valorous act of resistance there are the equivalent acts of cowardice, complicity and collusion.

Bagger and his comrades are prepared to suffer so long as it means those around them suffer more. Kraus is clear that each of these men are traumatised, but also that they brought nothing but themselves to the war, and those selves were already primed to walk paths in which other peoples’ suffering was a price they were happy to see paid.

War is misery, says Kraus, but war exists because we make it. Where, then, the blame?

I don’t want to say too much about the story here—it is a gossamer thing which rewards a lightness of expectation and a lack of foreknowledge, especially around who this woman is and what she wants. I'm going to elide the way Kraus treats the uncanny too. It is good but nothing special in its own right. It's the service to which he puts it I find especially interesting.

Suffice to say that Kraus is, I think, playing with our ideas of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, not simply with the story but with the way he’s written the book. Bagger is human. In the end he can’t escape feeling things for the people around him. He hates this as much as it’s a salve for his soul. Kraus isn’t writing a Disney movie here—the real story isn’t the friends he makes along the way. It is about the choices we make—the ones we barrel through and feel are inevitable because we are hemmed in on all sides, as well as the power to stop and choose something different, something new, something that can break not just us but the world around us.

There are revelations that Kraus delivers to people who think about changing but often cannot, or who might try but have no moral muscles and so can’t make it stick. The weight is too heavy to lift. So they find change hard and leave it untried.

Angel Down is a horror novel. It is a speculative novel. It is an anti-war novel. It is a novel about the American Dream. Most of all it is a novel about how, across our entire lives, it might be that only one choice matters and how we might miss it because we sleepwalk through life without considering what we do and how it changes us and the world around us.

It’s not about agency per se; it’s about moments when who we are and what we choose matters, about how the rest of our lives might seem full of choice but are, really, expressions of us playing in tiny little prison cells where we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we’re acting across the entire world.

Kraus, in the end, skewers the idea of agency as the supreme good in the same way a tender philosopher might skewer the idea that free will is absolute, and he does so with the uncanny and the otherworldly sitting in judgment of our hubris.

Highlights:

• One freaking sentence
• Layered, thoughtful and mystical

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, a superb experimental novel that has a lot to say about the things we take for granted as good and the things we might really consider if we wanted to actually do good.

Reference: Kraus, Daniel. Angel Down [First Atria Books, 2025].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at @stewarthotston.com.

Woman of Tomorrow deserved better than this lackluster adaptation

Supermeh

(First things first: of course the dog survives. This movie may be mediocre, but they’re not that foolish at Warner.)

The comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a wonderful piece of art. It dances between moments of striking action, serious thought and generous color. It absolutely deserved its Hugo nomination in 2023. So it’s a strange whiplash to sit for the two hours of this year’s Supergirl, which supposedly adapts the comic but unnecessarily restricts itself to an emotional range between ennui and sullenness, and to a visual palette of dirty yellows and dusty browns. If this is the movie Warner chose to make, one has to ask: why did they adapt that particular comic, and what did they like about it, and why doesn’t it show up anywhere in the movie?

In Supergirl, Superman’s cousin Kara is drinking away her childhood trauma when she meets Ruthye, an orphan on a mission of revenge. Ruthye hopes that Kara can help her hunt down the interstellar outlaw who killed her family, but Kara can’t be bothered to get involved—that is, until said outlaw poisons her dog. Now it’s personal. During the quest to find the cure for her dog, Kara learns to become a heroine.

The basic outline of the plot has a lot of potential for drama that the film doesn’t fully utilize. When we meet Kara, she’s a mess. Unlike Superman, who didn’t witness the end of Krypton, Kara was old enough to live through the whole tragedy, and though her cousin is a fellow Kryptonian, she doesn’t feel he’d understand her suffering. So she routinely travels to planets where the red sun cancels her superpowers so she can numb her pain with alcohol. The encounter with Ruthye should give Kara an opportunity to create a meaning and a purpose for her suffering by serving as a guide to another orphan who is also confused and directionless, but instead we get clumsily inserted blocks of exposition and endless moralizing.

For a movie that is set on several planets, Supergirl looks disappointingly bland. Space locations should be weird and surprising, but the set designs we get look generic and lazy. I’m going to show you an image from the comic and one from the movie so you understand the magnitude of the problem.

Supergirl sends us to half a dozen planets that look all the same and may as well be any dilapidated neighborhood on Earth. Aside from the briefest shots of alien faces in the background, there’s very little sense of the wonder of traveling across the galaxy. On its own, this movie looks just ugly. But as an adaptation of Woman of Tomorrow, it’s unforgivable.

And as an action movie, it’s scattershot. Not only does it resort to conveniently depowering Kara too often; when she’s at full power, it’s not clear how much strength we should expect of her. Last year we had Superman punching a kaiju and holding a whole building with his hands; here Kara struggles to deal with a handful of bandits. There’s a ridiculous scene where the plot forgets that she has superhearing and X-ray vision, and the villain stabs three innocents right under her nose, while she’s less than a block away and actively searching for him. The moment provides juicy drama, but it shouldn’t happen with this character.

This is not exactly a bad movie, but rather one that had great material on its hands but took the boring option every time. The villain’s visual design is so over the top that it goes full circle into forgettable, the twists are obvious (there’s a family of helpful locals that have WE WILL BETRAY YOU painted on their faces), the pacing is broken by misplaced flashbacks, and the delivery of some crucial character-defining lines is careless. In the trailer, Kara says “My cousin sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth” with the tone of proper gravitas that it deserves; in the actual movie, she blurts it out like she’s annoyed at the thought. Does she disapprove of Clark’s philosophy? Does she disagree with being a hero? What does it say about Kara that she finds it easier to connect with a dog than with Clark? We get no clue.

Supergirl should have been the story of a detached loner who discovers a cause worth the risk, a cynic who learns to care. But it stays stuck in cynic mode for too long, and in the end it’s hard for the viewer to care, either.

Oh, and Lobo is there too. I don’t know why.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Villain, by Natalie Zina Walschots

Everything's connected, and it's all fucked up.

Six years ago, Hench appeared, the first book in this very fine exploration of the nuances of villainy, and the dangers of knee-jerk support for institutions we are instructed to regard as the good guys. How much of superhero vs. supervillain is good vs evil, and how much is merely antagonist against antagonist? Even if we flip the good/evil spectrum, how many of the superheros are actually baddies, and how many of them are mere victims of the self-serving machinations of their institutional overseers?

Villain picks up where Hench left off, with our narrator, Anna Tromedlov fully embodying her new name of The Auditor. She has become Leviathan's right-hand woman; she runs the organization in his name while he plays dead, and drives policy when he returns to the job. As Leviathon’s team continues its conflict with the Draft – the institution that controls and organizes superhero activities -- her relationship with him develops along lines that would be tedious and predictable if they were so gosh-dang thematically grounded: What types of intimacy can define relationships, and how do they interact with institutional control? This book refuses to offer any easy answers. It’s all kind of fucked up. And, to misquote Tolstoy, exploring the domains and degrees of fucked-up-edness is where all the fun lies.

Let’s take the question of intimacy. Nemeses are very explicitly presented as if their mutual hatred behaves exactly like love. After any superhero’s death, the funeral events traditionally include a Night Service, during which the venue is left symbolically locked and unguarded at night. This allows villains to symbolically break in so that they may pay their own respects. Everyone recognizes that nemeses, like allies, need to mourn. And the Auditor does mourn: I wish we had more time, she thinks during Supercollider’s Night Service. I could have hated you so much longer.  She feels hollowed out by his loss: A deep sense of loss sloshed around in my chest. Without Supercollidor to focus on, there was a great void left behind, a huge volume of hatred without a focal point. Replace 'hate' with 'love' and this could be the ending of any tragic romance. 

The Auditor is not the only one to feel this way. Leviathan is utterly undone by the loss of Supercollidor, spending the first several chapters of the book, Achilles-like, sulking in his office. During the Night Service itself, Doc Proton, a token hero left behind to guard the venue, can be soothed only by the intervention of Decay, his own nemesis, into whose arms he collapses in tears. Later, Leviathan explains the nature of this intimacy during a conversation about the combativeness developing between the Auditor and an ex-hero, named Decoherence. ‘The greatest divisions are a single degree from perfect understanding,’ he says. ‘She could be the great hatred of your life.’ And he says it with a degree of jealousy, because her recognizes that the intimacy between nemeses can be a genuine obstacle to the more conventional romance he wants to pursue with the Auditor. After all, he himself was not able to consider such a thing until now, after Supercollidor is dead.

But what does this kind of intimacy entail? Leviathon is not the best romantic partner, in ways that could be a reflection on types of coercive control in domestic relationships, but which I myself find much more interesting to interpret in light of his role as the boss of a vast institution. Don’t date your coworkers, and definitely don’t date your manager, amirite? 

Personal/institutional power relations are the other thematic pole of this book. To what extent do individuals have power over their own lives in a world controlled, surveilled, and manipulated by institutions? The Draft kidnaps any child with supernatural ability, and indeed will disappear non-supers as well, if they have useful skills. The deeper you are enmeshed, the less control you have, until eventually people become indistinguishable from the forces they serve. We see this process in action everywhere. ‘Mom’ – an aspiring leader of the Draft – has no private life outside of work, and no weaknesses that Leviathan's team can exploit to interfere with his quest for institutional power. The auditor of the Draft, who aspires (and fails pathetically) at being the Auditor’s nemesis , tells her at one point, ‘This isn’t about work. This is about you…’ to which the Auditor reflects, I wasn’t sure I even made such a distinction anymore.

The role of chosen names is a really lovely detail that ties into the nuances of this point further. Decoherence has adopted her new name after leaving the Draft – and her Draft identity of Quantum Entanglement – behind. A team of young heroes include Thundersnow, whose name arouses repeated comment, to which she always replies simply 'I’m Canadian'. A new teammate of Thundersnow's is transferred over from a previous team of fascistic bullies, among whom he bore the name Riot Shield. (A wealth of commentary on how purportedly good institutions like to whitewash appalling violence in that detail alone!) Now, to distance himself from that previous role, he calls himself simply Shield: pure protection, no fascism involved.

But how much of this nomenclatural flexibility represents actual control over one’s individual life, and how much is merely window-dressing for the deeper control that institution exert over everyone in their power? Thundersnow never says actually, call me Susan. She can choose her name, yes, but only as long as it fits the theme of superhero names, consistent with the role the Draft has chosen for her. The reason Decoherence is still involved in this whole mess is because she recognizes that the heroes of the Draft are victims as much as they are perpetrators of evil, and wants to persuade them that they can just leave (more on that in a moment).

Even the Auditor herself shows that this phenomenon is not restricted to Draft-affiliated individuals. When she attempts to make contact with her best friend from civilian life, she has to go back to calling herself Anna, and has to work through some Feelings at realizing that this name no longer fits. Only her institutional name is an accurate description of the person she is now.

At the Night Service, Decay warns the Auditor of the danger of dissolving oneself into one’s role. Her face is not known yet, he tells her. She is not a symbol of Leviathan's institution yet. She can still walk away. She can still detach herself, live her own life, be her own person. She refuses this path – only to be offered it later, by Mom. Except this time the opportunity is no longer a genuine personal choice. Mom shows her a spreadsheet, in which all the damage she has done acting for Leviathan is weighed against the future good she could do if she leaves . She doesn’t even need to join the Draft, Mom says – she can join an NGO and live an independent life, doing good to balance the scales she has so badly tilted during her time working for Leviathan. Like the names, though, this offer does not represent genuine autonomy. The very existence of the spreadsheet shows that any future good works a hypothetical ex-Auditor might carry out will always be under scrutiny and evaluation by the Draft. It’s just a more palatable version of the Draft’s desire to control every individual’s behaviour. 

A third invitation to leave comes from Decoherence – not as a representative of villains, like Decay, or as a representative of heroes, like Mom. Decoherence has no use for any of those: ‘Fuck all of them,’ Decoherence says. ‘Leviathan and the Draft are just opposite ends of the same fucking spectrum.’ Decoherence wants to be truly, properly independent, and she wants the Auditor to join her. Although Leviathan sees her as a prospective nemesis to the Auditor, Decoherence and the Auditor dance around the friendlier side of that spectrum in most of their interactions.

Love, hate, intimacy, control, institutions, autonomy – it’s all interconnected. It’s all fucked up. This book does not shy away from exploring how, and why, and it does not propose any solutions. To the very last sentence, all it can offer is the opportunity to understand the problem. 

--

The Math

Nerd coefficient: 9: very high quality/standout in its category

Highlights:

• Squishy, nuanced exploration of themes
• Pretty awesome superhero vs. supervillain spectacle
• Messed up romance

Reference: Walschots, Natalie Zina. Villain. [William Morrow, 2026].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.