AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

In many ways KINGDOM is just a reversal on the events of the successful 2018 AQUAMAN. Both had two of the credited writers in common (including director James Wan) and just as the first film concerned the Sea King looking for an ancient trident to signify his lordship of Atlantis, KINGDOM concerns a trident as well. The "Black Trident" incarnates the malefic magic power of Necrus, the titular lost kingdom, which had formerly been a member-state of Atlantis until its people embraced forbidden arts. It comes out in the end that the ancient king of Necrus, Kordax, is acting through the trident, possessing Aquaman's foremost enemy Black Manta to carry out a world-destroying agenda.

In the 2018 film, Aquaman (Jason Momoa) partnered with Mera (Amber Heard) to prove his right to the Atlantean throne. Four years later, the two of them are married and have an infant son, Arthur Jr. However, possibly because of adverse publicity given actress Amber, the character of Mera is sidelined for most of the movie. This time out, the Sea King needs to set a fiend to catch a fiend, setting free his half-brother Ocean Master, former rival for the throne and for the hand of Mera (though that potential conflict goes unexplored in KINGDOM).

The interplay of Aquaman and Ocean Master is never more than adequate, and the visual effects of the undersea dominions are uninspired this time out. There's lots of climate change rhetoric ladled into the mix, but it's rendered nugatory given that the actual threat is, after all, that of an evil magical subsea kingdom. The strongest action-scene was the climactic battle of Aquaman, Mera and Ocean Master against the hyper-powered Black Manta, but this too just seemed rather rote. The puppet master Kordax doesn't seem to have any real reason to destroy the world with climate change, so he lacks any deeper resonance.

KINGDOM didn't do as well as its predecessor, though it wasn't such a bomb that the live-action franchise was destroyed. Allegedly Momoa wants to play the character again, so this sophomore effort doesn't necessarily prevent the franchise from "graduating" to a higher level.

AQUAMAN, KING OF ATLANTIS (2021)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

I was sure there was no way this 3-part HBO Max series-- edited into a movie for the DVD market-- would be even passably good. The last time I saw this sort of "extreme bigfoot" animation, it was in the 2020 teleseries THUNDERCATS ROAR, which turned the THUNDERCATS franchise into low farce, apparently in a lame attempt to emulate Cartoon Network's popular TEEN TITANS GO.

To my surprise, KING is actually a reasonably well-done comedy-adventure despite all the silly humor-- which is all the more remarkable in that three of the four credited KING writers worked on THUNDERCATS ROAR. Possibly someone-- DC Comics, or James Wan, who produced the series-- told the scribes not to go overboard with the jokes and maybe ruin the movie franchise, given that Wan had enjoyed financial success with the 2018 live-action Aqua-movie and planned to direct the sequel. 

KING takes place some time after the events of the 2018 movie but is not strictly bound by its continuity, nor does its story play into the two-years-later Aqua-sequel. All that essentially matters is that Aquaman reigns in Atlantis and apparently has had some heavy dates with Mera, though the two are not yet married as they would be in the official sequel. But Aquaman is much more of a dweeb (with unexplained sea-green hair), and Mera is extremely pugnacious, constantly advocating that the two of them should punch their way out of problems. Yet, even though the comics character is more traditionally feminine, somehow the schtick of feisty Mera and the more reserved Sea King works pretty well. Also an unexpected plus: changing the support-character of Vulko-- a grave older man in the comics and in the live-action film (played by Willem Dafoe) -- into an anally retentive young guy.

The three episodes are plotted so that they seem like installments of the same story, largely because the first one starts with the hero and his squeeze investigating a missing Atlantean city. This leads them into battle with a Russian evildoer named Mortikov, who disappears in Episode 2, which focuses upon a classic Aqua-villain, The Fisherman, and then Mortikov returns in the third part, taking on a revised version of a very obscure Aqua-foe, The Scavenger. And as a bonus, the script works in the hero's vexatious half-brother Ocean Master. Further, when the writers worked in a couple of very minor "assistant menaces" who were and are ultra-obscure-- "The Fire Trolls" from the comic book, and "Mirror Men" from the Aqua-cartoon of the sixties-- I suspected the scribes were instructed to try winning over old comics-fogeys (like me) with nods to very old continuity-fodder.

But the use of "moldy oldies" didn't sell me on KING; I just liked the fact that a fair number of the jokes landed. A few were driven into the ground-- really, is the Atlanteans inability to understand how baseball works all that amusing? But others work reasonably well, particularly with regard to slapstick violence. When Mera tries to punch out Scavenger, the villain uses Aquaman as a shield, so that Mera ends up simultaneously hitting her boyfriend and apologizing for the hits.

Despite my positive comments, I think it's just as well this experiment was confined (thus far) to just these three outings.

KNIGHTS OF THE ZODIAC (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

I don't envy the American writers who tried to translate an extremely complicated manga series from 1985-1990, one probably only remembered by older fans of either the manga ST SEIYA or its dubbed American anime adaptation, KNIGHTS OF THE ZODIAC. I have certainly seen worse, though I'd still have to judge the 2023 ZODIAC as somewhat pedestrian.

I should note that I only have nodding familiarity with the dubbed anime TV show, and that I never became intimately acquainted with the "Seiya" universe. So I'll take it for granted that the basic setup in the movie at least loosely resembles that of the manga.

Though there's only one de facto knight in the film, the use of the term is not abstract: the knights of the zodiac (there are five in the manga) are pledged to defend a monarch-like figure. The movie seems to take place roughly in contemporary times, while the manga depicts a world with a very involved tournament for possession of the magical armor of long vanished gods. Both suggest that one goddess of ancient times, Athena, became incarnate in the body of a young woman, Sienna (Madison Iseman), and she's destined to be protected by the Pegasus Knight.

At movie's start, Seiya (Mackenyu, son of Sonny Chiba) is a street kid who competes in underground fights while seeking his missing sister Patricia. Two rival factions seek Seiya because both suspect he possesses a god-derived power, "Cosmo," power which can transform Seiya into the Pegasus Knight. As in many similar boys' manga, the protagonist is destined to take on the duty of serving a royal figure, and to his dubious fortune, he's first contacted by Alman (Sean Bean), adoptive father of Sienna. This leads to a lengthy segment in which he's given tough martial arts training by a masked woman, Marin (Caitlyn Hutson).

Seiya's motive for going along with this farrago is the suggestion that Alman may help Seiya find his lost sister, though by movie's end this possibility remains up in the air. But he also likes Sienna, and there's some nice "poor boy-rich girl" tension, for all that it's not certain whether the two have any romantic interest in one another. Seiya definitely does not like any of the persons associated with Alman's enemy Guraad (Famke Janssen), who are trying to capture Sienna to tap into her Athena-powers, which are much more dangerous than the "Cosmo" possessed by aspiring knights.

The script most drops the ball by its casual mention of the fact that Guraad is actually Sienna's adoptive mother, and that she lost her arms from one of the Sienna-baby's power-tantrums. Since Guraad has both arms, one assumes they're supposed to be artificial ones, but this too is remarkably underplayed. Guraad's motivations remain unclear from start to finish, as if the writers couldn't quite decide what they wanted to do with her-- or what if anything to use from the source material.

The training sequences, rife with lots of expensive CGI, are the most interesting scenes, more watchable than the predictable pyrotechnics when Seiya finally "knights up" to battle Guraad's minions. Mackenyu and Iseman have some pleasant interactions, but ZODIAC as a whole is just ordinary-- not least because the casual viewer won't get just what the whole "zodiac" thing is about. ZODIAC was a box office bomb and as a result this particular manga series probably won't see further live action iterations.

GOTHAM SEASON FIVE (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Season Five improves somewhat on the shitshow of Season Four in three respects. There are fewer episodes, so there's less gratuitous slaughter. For the same reason, the writers didn't have time to introduce any waste-of-space new characters like Sofia Falcone, though they can't be bothered to do much with the villains already in play and so glut Gotham City with their ramshackle versions of Bane, Nyssa Al Ghul, Magpie and The Ventriloquist. Thirdly, the scribes shook up the routine of urban adventure somewhat with a very compressed version of a nineties comic-book arc about Gotham being turned into an isolated, resource-deprived "No Man's Land."

There are a few other improvements resulting from the writers' desire to tie things up. Though they shunt Mister Freeze and Firefly off stage, never to be seen again, and make only cursory use of Scarecrow and Mad Hatter, they finally get some actual use out of Poison Ivy. In the last episodes of Season Four, Maybe-Joker Velasca shoots Selina merely to twist Bruce Wayne's tail, and Selina's doctors tell Bruce that his girlfriend will probably remain crippled. Ivy provides some handy plant-magic that heals Selina's injuries and makes her into something of a preternatural badass, out to gain revenge on Maybe-Joker. 

Similarly, Tabitha, though left alive at the end of Season Four, is quickly dispatched by Penguin in Five's first episode. This stratagem at least gives Barbara Kean a slightly more coherent storyline-- that of vengeance on Penguin-- than the idiotic arc from Season Four, with her aspiring to take over the League of Shadows. She's not any better as a character, though, and she's in no way improved by the far-fetched notion that she inveigles Jim Gordon into sleeping with her. This results in Psycho Barbara becoming a brand-new Baby Mama, thus driving a new wedge between Gordon and Lee Tompkins-- who suddenly have decided that they're back to having feelings for one another. 

Other plotlines are about the same. Riddler's dopey split personality arc gets finessed into an equally dopey one about his committing mass murder thanks to Hugo Strange. Penguin plans to leave the ruined, depleted city at first-- and Selina and Riddler both plan to join him, at least in theory-- but all three change their minds for cockamamie reasons. 

I commented earlier that whatever inspiration Bruce Wayne takes from Ra's Al Ghul in this series is at least an improvement on Christopher Nolan's wretched take on their relationship in BATMAN BEGINS. In the case of Nyssa Al Ghul, she's no better or worse than Nolan's Talia Al Ghul in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, out to avenge the slaying of Ra's by Bruce and Barbara. Maybe-Joker lacks any of the impact he had in earlier seasons, despite an attempt to align him with Real-Joker with a sort of "secondary origin story." But neither that, nor the injection of a "Definitely Not Harley Quinn," yields any strong moments.

The only arc in Season Five that works reasonably well is the one between Bruce and Selina, which leads me to believe that for the writing-staff this was the "true north" around which all the nonsense coalesced. During a plotline in which Ivy enthralls Bruce and makes him do her bidding, Selina thinks the boy billionaire plans to leave destitute Gotham of his own accord. Thus, she whales the tar out of him, thinking he means to leave her behind. Though Bruce comes back to his senses in that scene, Selina's suspicions turn out to be prophetic, for in the next to last episode, Bruce does leave Gotham, and her, behind. Ten years later, during which time Gordon has become commissioner and is thinking about retiring, Bruce comes back as the Dark Knight, having presumably honed his skills enough to be Gotham's foremost protector. A rooftop scene between Selina and the newly forged Batman establishes the dynamic of her scofflaw ethics and his dedication to duty for the Bat-mythos that is to come.

At one point I loosely compared GOTHAM to SMALLVILLE, but I should have specified that this was only in terms of the final episode of both serials, where the costumed hero comes on stage for the final moments of the final episode. But SMALLVILLE was a show whose creators wanted the readers to be invested in the characters' lives. Too often, the writers of GOTHAM seem like Hugo Strange, performing sadistic experiments on the subjects of their narrative experiment.

The fact that the writers managed to keep the Bruce-Selina relationship reasonably intact for five seasons recalls a similar storytelling strategy in another series: LOST, which, for all its chaotic revelations held true to a central plotline regarding the fate of Jack Shepherd. Now, the stories of LOST frequently wrote philosophical checks that the writers' intellectual accounts could not cover. But at least there was an attempt to find some significance in the lives of the LOST characters, however unlikeable some of them were. I don't think the showrunners of GOTHAM ever had that much investment in the Bat-mythos. GOTHAM can be lauded for having provided a lot of fine actors with the chance to strut their stuff on a Bat-stage-- even if the stories signified, if not nothing, far less than the lowly funnybooks on which they were based.

EIGHT MAN AFTER (1993)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

From what I've been able to learn, EIGHT MAN AFTER was created by a different production team than the previous year's EIGHT MAN.EIGHT MAN. But even though AFTER was an animated project, consisting of four OVA episodes later compiled into a feature, the creators seem to have decided to stick with the somewhat noirish feel of the live-action movie, grounding the hero's adventures in the mean streets of the city, instead of having him fight exotic supervillains.

The anime's story rings in a change in the status quo. At some point in the past, Sachiko-- former girlfriend of the slain man whose intelligence infused the robot body of Eight Man-- finds out that Azuma, the P.I. for whom she's provided secretarial duties, was the speedy superhero. Eight Man, for unclear reasons, simply runs off, and remains absent for years.

During that time, the criminal underworld begins dealing in cyborg-tech that can enhance ordinary humans, be they rogue punks or players in professional sports. Whatever their profession, the users have to also employ drugs to make the enhancements function, and the drugs tend to make people go batshit crazy.

Eight Man appears on the scene, but he seems a much more brutal figure. He shows up when a gang, including an augmented member, are harassing citizens, and the super-fast robot not only takes down the thugs, he rips the artificial arm off the one gangbanger. It turns out that there's a reason, albeit convoluted, for this bizarre behavior, because some nebulous thing happened to the artificial man in his absence. Someone deleted the personality of Detective Azuma, and thus that of the cop Yokoda as well. In the place of this persona, a new persona, a second detective named Hazama, has usurped the guiding intelligence of Eight Man.

The script introduces this major twist and then fails to follow through with any revelations that might have made it meaningful. There's some nugatory subplot in which the underworld killed the original Hazama's sister, and maybe that contributes to his rage problems as a "hero." But the villains are just bargain-basement a-holes, so they don't evoke a great desire for rough justice. It almost feels as if the writers wanted to come up with the greatest amount of emotional torment for Sachiko, the only legacy character from the original series. Perhaps she's a stand-in for the writers' rejection of the original light-hearted heroics. It's almost as if the scribes thought they were the Japanese equivalents of Alan Moore, out to tarnish old idols in the name of realism.

In any event, though there's more super-action here, the film's depressing and ugly, and not worth a second screening.

EIGHT MAN (1992)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

I've never read any of the 1960s EIGHT MAN manga, but I followed the dubbed anime series of that same decade. I don't know how similar the two were, but I suspect that they were pretty close in tone and content. Both media-serials were originally directed at a kid-audience that tended to want maximum excitement, with lots of flashy sci-fi concepts. 

Most reviews take issue with some of the advertising for this 1992 production, apparently touting the movie's kinetic action sequences. It's true that EIGHT MAN doesn't have many strong battle-scenes. But I liked the way the movie saw the cyborg-superhero through a film noir lens, just as the contemporaneous Tim Burton Bat-films did. It might not be stunningly original, but it has some honest emotion in its melodramatic story-- hence its noir-ish Japanese subtitle, "For All the Lonely Nights."

Sometime in the past, a cop named Yokoda was killed in the line of duty. His superior officer somehow commandeered the body and took it to his scientist friend Doctor Tani (Jo Shishido). Tani happened to be working on a project involving a super-powered robot, dubbed Eight Man, and the scientist downloaded Yokoda's mind into the robot. The result is a mechanical man-- not really a true cyborg despite the advertising-- with human intelligence and emotions, even if Eight Man doesn't precisely remember his old life.'

Unlike the anime hero, who was constantly encountering supercriminals with names like "Doctor Spectra," Eight Man seems to have been used to fight street-level crooks like drug dealers. He assumes a human identity, private detective Azuma (Kai Shishido, son of the actor playing the scientist). Not only does the detective work intermittently with Yokoda's old police-partner, Azuma also engages a secretary who just happens to be Sachiko, the former girlfriend of deceased Yokoda.

While Azuma deals with recrudescent memories of his former humanity, he gets an "opposite number" type of villain in Ken (Osamu Ohtomo). Before creating Eight Man, Tani had another working model. His real-life son Ken, a hellraiser-type, killed himself in a car-crash, so Tani transplanted Ken's brain into "Seven Man." Unfortunately, Ken became unstable, and he hates being a human robot so much that he starts killing people. 

I fully admit that, even though Ken and Eight Man have some spiffy powers, they don't have a big super-fight toward the end. But then, the climactic battle of the two BLADE RUNNER opponents succeeds less by overblown kinetics than by emotional tone. The fact that these foes are "brothers" by virtue of their shared history-- even though one is a stone killer and the other is comparatively sane-- makes EIGHT MAN a solid melodrama. Oh, and the Eight Man costume makes Shishido one of the better-looking live-action superheroes of nineties cinema.

GOTHAM SEASON FOUR (2017-18)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

At the end of my review of GOTHAM SEASON THREE, I said:

My recollection is that the next two seasons maintain this same overheated level of storytelling. 

 What an understatement that was!

I gave the first three season "fair" mythicity ratings, but Season Four is an unholy mess in all respects. I don't intend to check, but it feels as if there was some huge staff upheaval behind the scenes, and all the writers could do was to tread water.

The trope that served GOTHAM best in the second and third seasons was that of "the madhouse taking over normal life." In addition to the villains of the show's subordinate ensemble-- Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman-- those seasons introduced a half-dozen of well-known comics characters: Mister Freeze, Firefly, Poison Ivy (technically in Season 1 but in a non-villainous role), The Mad Hatter, a new version of Scarecrow, and the delightfully evil Hugo Strange. Even if Gotham's "normalcy" was a token thing at best, it was certainly more fun to see these weirdos romping about, compared to mobsters shafting one another or killing innocents with no reprisal. Back in the day I wasn't sure that these characters might not get some decent development.

However, in all likelihood the writers were told to build up only the three ensemble-fiends, so that none of the six lesser subordinates got much attention. Poison Ivy, who as I said had been tangentially introduced in the first season, finally mutates into a plant-woman in Season 4, but she just kills a few people, fights a little with Catwoman, and disappears with no closure-- while the other five are confined to "stooge roles." This is also partly due to an emphasis on "Maybe-Joker" Velasca, who had some good Ledger-esque scenes in previous seasons and here becomes a uniting force for most of the weirdies. Cameron Monaghan still does well with the scenes he's given but there's a strong sense of running in place, especially when Maybe-Joker turns out to have a twin brother whom he can torment and then transform into his own likeness. Penguin and Riddler also get a lot of scenes but they're usually spinning their wheels, Riddler because he falls in love with Jim Gordon's former flame Lee and Penguin because he thinks his crime-rule threatened by the daughter of crime-boss Carmine Falcone. Penguin also has a couple of episodes during which he's forced to serve time in the same asylum bossed by Valesca, and though it's a dubious pairing, at least Taylor and Monaghan strike the right sparks.

A couple of other comics-villains debut as well-- versions of Professor Pyg and Solomon Grundy-- but all are overshadowed by the badness of Sofia Falcone (Crystal Reed). She leaves her father's palatial estate with some plan to take over Gotham's underworld from Penguin. But the scripts never really tell us what motivates her. Does she just have daddy issues, trying to imitate her notorious father? The first day she meets Jim Gordon, she initiates a booty call. But is she actually attracted to him, as it sometimes seems, or does she intend to avenge the brother whom Gordon slew? She gratuitously maims Lee's hand: is this just business, or was she jealous of Lee and Gordon? It's a relief when she gets knocked off. This stands in contrast to Ra's Al Ghul, who finally reveals his true interest in Bruce Wayne-- the young man being the only person able to end the mastermind's immortal life-- except that for various reasons, he comes back from the dead to spin some more wheels. 

Not much better are the Three Little Ho's: crazy Barbara Kean, stoic Tabitha Galavan, and capricious Selina Kyle. They're given leave to operate under Penguin's rule-- in which, BTW, criminals can be licensed to steal if they get Penguin's approval. But wait; didn't Tabitha kill Penguin's mother? Why does he seem to forget about that until the season's final episode? And why does Penguin's calculated vengeance upon Tabitha hinge upon an event he could not possibly have foreseen-- namely, the recrudescence of the dead gangster Butch into the form of Solomon Grundy? Barbara, for her part, gets uncomfortably shoehorned into the Ra's Al Ghul plot, and since the scripts give actress Erin Richards nothing but stupid lines, she delivers them by shouting most of the time.

The heroes get little better treatment. Gordon, Bullock and Alfred have little to do but react to the latest ploys of Ra's and Maybe-Joker. Bruce is given a potentially decent arc in that he almost committed murder under the control of Ra's, and in reaction to his guilt, he begins to act like an entitled douche, particularly toward Selina. He eventually gets his head on straight, and the scenes between Mazouz and Bicondova are close to being the only interactions with any emotional nuance.  

I assume that by Season Four the bloom was off the rating-rose, because the final season gets just 12 episodes. I do have two or three favorable memories of Season Five-- which is more than I did of Four-- but it's unlikely that in just a dozen installments, the showrunners managed to up their game back to the previous "fair" level.