Last week’s bombshell Variety report looking at the chaos behind the scenes at Marvel Studios has generated a lot of discussion. The company is facing some very real problems, many of which are tied to larger market forces and so can’t really be solved by a few shrewd decisions. However, there is one lingering issue that the company is seemingly refusing to address: Jonathan Majors.

Majors has been cast as Kang the Conqueror, the multi-dimensional threat who will serve as the backbone holding together the next few years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU). He is essentially replacing Josh Brolin as Thanos, the villain who loomed large over “the Infinity Saga.” Marvel is betting big on Kang and, by extension, Majors. The next ensemble Avengers film has been announced with the subtitle of The Kang Dynasty, referencing a Kurt Busiek story arc.

When he was cast, Majors was regarded as one of the most promising actors of his generation. He had broken out in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, to the point that critic Kyle Buchanan advocated for a Best Supporting Actor nomination and even Richard Brody’s negative review singled out the performer as “reflectively and sensitively persuasive.” Majors followed that up with a starring role in Lovecraft Country and appeared as the youngest member of the ensemble in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods.

When Majors was announced as Kang in September 2020, his casting was a coup for Marvel. As the company had done by casting performers like Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt during the previous decade, and arguably as they’d done in reinventing more established-but-adrift leads like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, Marvel Studios was making a big bet on an emerging talent with an incredible amount of potential. Ant-Man director Peyton Reed called him “the most exciting actor of his generation.”

Of course, things have changed dramatically since then. In March 2023, Majors was arrested and charged with assault in New York City. Very quickly, allegations of domestic abuse began to surface, along with reports suggesting a larger pattern of behavior. These allegations do not exist separate from his work with Marvel. Prosecutors are investigating “a Molineaux incident” that occurred while he was in London filming his role in Loki.

These reports are incredibly serious. To the credit of the major studios, it appears that the reports are being taken seriously in Hollywood. The actor was dropped by his management firm, Entertainment 360. There are unconfirmed reports that the talent agency CAA has also dropped him because of his “brutal conduct” towards staff.) He was removed from the upcoming adaptation of The Man in My Basement. Even Disney removed his awards contender, Magazine Dreams, from the release slate.

However, Marvel Studios has yet to make a decision about whether Jonathan Majors will remain as Kang the Conqueror. More than that, the company has done little to downplay or marginalize Majors within their shared universe. The performer was a significant part of the advertising for the second season of Loki, appearing as a big reveal in the trailer for the season, even though he is just a recurring guest star in the six-episode season.

According to Variety, the company is adopting a wait-and-see approach, considering the possibility of replacing Kang the Conqueror with Doctor Doom. This arguably makes sense anyway, given that Doom was a key figure in both Secret Wars comic book storylines. However, it’s unclear what exactly Marvel is waiting for. Court cases can take a long time, and it’s clear that the company needs to make some quick decisions to help fight the rising tide.

It’s important to be clear. Majors’ guilt or innocence will be determined by a court of law, adhering to a burden of proof. That standard does not apply to an actor starring in a gigantic multimedia franchise. Actors can be replaced and fired without a criminal conviction. No performer is entitled to stand at the center of the largest movie franchise in the world. Even beyond the standards of a basic “morality clause,” Marvel Studios’ decision to part ways with Majors is independent of criminality.

After all, Marvel Studios has recast roles before, under a variety of circumstances. The studio replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle because Howard asked for too much money. They swapped out Edward Norton with Mark Ruffalo because Norton wanted to make a movie to his own standards. Harrison Ford will step into the role of Thunderbolt Ross vacated by the passing of William Hurt. None of these examples imply any criminal guilt for any of the actors replaced.

There are obviously examples where recasting might be a bad or tasteless idea. Chadwick Boseman was so iconic and definitive as T’Challa that it would be an insult to his memory to replace him in the role. Hopefully, it is not a controversial statement to suggest that Jonathan Majors is no Chadwick Boseman. Indeed, the possible emergency switch to Doctor Doom seems unnecessary. The character of Kang the Conqueror comes with a fairly handy internal justification for any possible recasting.

As established in Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Kang the Conqueror is a supervillain with countless variants across the multiverse. Indeed, several of his variants have already been killed off on-screen: He Who Remains and Victor Timely in Loki, and the version who appeared in Quantumania. While the MCU has established that some variants, notably most of those featured in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, are identical, it has also revealed that many aren’t.

There is no hard-and-fast rule that every variant of a multiversal character needs to be played by the same actor. Spider-Man: No Way Home features three versions of the title character played by Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield. Loki has featured a diverse array of variants of the trickster god played by actors like Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Richard E. Grant, Deobia Oparei, Jack Veal and more. There is no reason that every version of Kang needs to look like Majors.

Majors is a growing problem for the studio. Reviews of the second season of Loki tend to mention the actor’s controversies, creating a narrative that ties them to the studio. ScreenRant noted that the controversy “hangs over what is otherwise a solid run of episodes.” SlashFilm opined that Majors’ grandstanding “made for an unpleasant viewing experience.” Even an agnostic Hollywood Reporter review conceded that Majors’ presence “either will or won’t prove to be a point of distraction.”

Part of the issue is the nature of the role itself. It is perhaps possible for an actor mired in controversy to give a compelling and engaging performance. The morality of employing such a performer is a larger debate, but there are cases where the work speaks for itself. Oppenheimer, for example, makes excellent use of Casey Affleck, an actor who comes with no shortage of off-screen baggage, by casting him in a role that relies on his ability to make the audience feel ill-at-ease.

In contrast, Kang is a role that can often feel like an acting exercise. Over the next few years, the audience is going to see countless variations on Kang, and the actor playing the role will have to come up with a way of differentiating them from each other. It’s an interesting concept — one that feels quite academic. Can an actor play what is essentially the same role in an infinitely diverse number of ways? It’s the kind of challenge that attracts a showy performer.

Majors has talked about “the potential” that Kang has and how he “didn’t recognize” himself as Kang in the Quantumania trailer. According to Majors, the role of Kang “is an actor’s dream or an actor’s nightmare.” It’s a fun idea to play with, and one that taps into the improvisational roots of the shared cinematic universe. Producer Jeremy Latcham has talked about Marvel Studios as a place where people “want to come play,” and that is certainly the vibe with Majors’ approach to Kang.

To put it simply, Majors is doing a lot. Watching Majors in Loki and Quantumania, this is an actor who is putting a lot of mayonnaise on the sandwich. Particularly on Loki, Majors distinguishes the different versions of Kang by giving them mannerisms and tics. Victor Timely even has a pronounced stutter. Majors is constantly making big choices in the role, which makes sense. He needs to be able to sell these characters as fundamentally the same, but superficially different.

However, this performance relies on the audience’s goodwill. It’s playful and fun, but it requires an actor with whom the audience wants to play and have fun. There’s a minimum threshold of goodwill required to sell and sustain this sort of performance, and Majors has lost that. As IndieWire mused in their review of Loki’s second season, “it’s hard to kick back and enjoy his frenzied energy or stilted intonations when you know the monstrous accusations levied against the man in real life.”

Loki executive producer Kevin Wright has explained that the show’s second season didn’t recast Majors because it was “maybe – not maybe – this is the first Marvel series to never have any additional photography.” In a world where Quantumania was seemingly reshooting its ending just weeks before release and Multiverse of Madness was shooting up to the last minute, recasting Majors might be a more valid excuse for the studio to employ its trademark postproduction reshoots.

Still, with Loki wrapping up its second season, there’s no excuse for Marvel to wait any longer. The past few years have been surprisingly tough for the company, and those in charge will undoubtedly face tough decisions in the months and years to come. Right now, they face an incredibly easy problem with a very simple solution: just recast Kang the Conqueror.

Invincible is back this week, premiering on Amazon Prime. The show is a glorious and gleeful celebration of comic tropes, but it is also layered with compelling human drama.

In some ways, Invincible is a reminder of just how thoroughly the conventions of superhero storytelling have permeated the mainstream. The show takes place in a world that feels fully formed, in which superheroism is just a fact of life. As such, the series has to do remarkably little handholding to guide the audience through this universe populated by incredibly powerful aliens, clones confused about the nature of their identity, hidden empires of fish people, and societies of lizard supervillains.

Of course, in many cases it’s possible to identify an obvious influence on a given Invincible character or concept. Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins), the head of the Global Defense Initiative, is clearly evoking characters like Amanda Waller or Nick Fury. The Guardians of the Globe suggest the Justice League or the Avengers. Dimension-hopping supervillain Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) recalls Kang the Conqueror.

In many cases, these parallels help to orient the viewer within the world of the show. Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) is recognizable as a Superman stand-in. By that logic, Darkwing (Lennie James) is Batman, War Woman (Lauren Cohan) is Wonder Woman, Red Rush (Michael Cudlitz) is the Flash, Aquarus (Ross Marquand) is Aquaman, and Martian Man (Chad L. Coleman) is the Martian Manhunter. Aquarus’ kingdom is obviously Aquaman’s Atlantis. The Lizard League recalls the Serpent Society.

It is a clever approach to building a superhero world, as it allows Invincible to just throw the audience into an existing framework and have them figure it out as they go along. It’s a refreshing approach in a landscape dominated by superhero movies that are still fixated on origin stories. Even recent superhero movies that aren’t explicitly origin stories, like Spider-Man: No Way Home or The Batman, are often stories about the start of their protagonists’ career.

This approach is understandable. Origin stories are appealing because they provide a clear structure and arc. In a genre defined by “the illusion of change,” it’s reasonable that most superhero multimedia would be drawn to stories about that narrow window in a hero’s career where they can change. It makes for gripping drama. It’s very hard to sell a movie or television show where the character doesn’t change, but instead remains static in the way that comic book superheroes tend to.

However, this comes at a cost. Many of the best Marvel and DC comic book stories could only be told in a universe that has the baggage of decades of continuity on which they might build. These stories tend to take for granted elements that have been set up over years and decades. To pick a straightforward example, A Death in the Family is a story built around the emotional crux of the death of the second character to carry the mantle of Robin, which requires a lot of groundwork.

It is hard to build to those sorts of emotional or dramatic payoffs when stories keep starting over, even in shared continuity. The Marvels film is going to have to introduce both Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) for moviegoers who didn’t watch the streaming series Ms. Marvel or WandaVision. Despite the ground covered in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Captain America: Brave New World is going to have to reintroduce Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as the new Captain America.

There are exceptions to this general trend. In particular, writer and director James Gunn is very good at capturing this sense of a lived-in superhero world in projects like his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy or The Suicide Squad. Those are movies that take superhero concepts at face value, rather than trying to over-explain or justify them. The same is true of the recent Spider-Verse movies, which speedrun their origins as a joke. However, these are the exception rather than the rule.

For its part, Invincible uses shorthand to bypass a lot of the nitty-gritty setup. It is built on the assumption that, by this point, the average audience member has been exposed to literally decades of superhero media. They are media literate and know how these stories work. As such, they can jump on board with concepts like the Mauler Twins (Kevin Michael Richardson), a mad scientist who has cloned himself so often that there are always two of him and neither knows which is the original.

On one level, this just frees Invincible to deliver the kind of good old-fashioned superhero fun that other more conventional superhero shared universes like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) or the DC Extended Universe (the DCEU) should embrace. The show can just casually introduce vast interstellar empires or cool underwater kingdoms because that’s how the logic of superhero stories should work. The assumption is that the audience knows that this is how these stories work.

It helps that Invincible is animated rather than live action. Even ignoring the budgetary concerns of trying to render this level of spectacle for a weekly live action television show, there is a greater suspension of disbelief in animation than in film. It’s one reason why Disney’s photorealistic remakes of their animated classics wander into the uncanny valley. It also helps that animation is, by its nature, closer to the visual language of comic books than live action film or television.

Of course, this raises the question of why there aren’t more animated superhero films and shows. After all, with shows like Invincible and Harley Quinn or movies like the Spider-Verse franchise, the genre arguably has a more consistent track record in animation than live action. It seems likely that the existing stigma against western animation as a medium aimed at children plays a key role here. Live action adaptations are seen as more prestigious and more respectable.

Invincible is not a show aimed at children. This is true in both form and content. It is graphically violent and explicitly sexual. However, it is also structured as a collection of hour-long episodes, a format that distinguishes it from the tradition of animated superhero shows intended for children like Batman: The Animated Series or X-Men: The Animated Series. The individual episodes of Invincible have runtimes comparable to prestige shows like Better Call Saul or Mad Men.

This is Invincible’s most impressive trick. It lovingly riffs on the conventions and narrative logic of classic Silver and Bronze Age comics, where cities can be randomly cursed to “perpetual midnight, permanent darkness, summer on the dark side of the moon” and where Omni-Man’s son, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), can find himself tasked with marrying Aquarus’ widow Aquaria (Tatiana Maslany), but it is also engaged with the inner emotional lives of its characters. Superheroism takes a toll.

Invincible might embrace the inherent ridiculousness of superhero storytelling, but it takes its characters seriously. The show explores what it might be like to live through the bizarro narrative logic that guides stories like these. For example, Omni-Man murdered Cecil’s personal aide, Donald Ferguson (Chris Diamantopoulos), at the end of the first season. However, in the second season, Donald is alive again. Comic book resurrections are business-as-usual, but Donald is clearly unsettled.

Much of the second season is given over to Omni-Man’s wife and Mark’s mother, Debbie (Sandra Oh). Debbie is dealing with the emotional fallout of Omni-Man’s betrayal, his mass murder of both superheroes and civilians, and the realization that after decades of marriage he only loved her “like a pet.” Debbie struggles to process those emotions, eventually ending up at a support group for superhero spouses, populated by characters working through similar issues.

There are plenty of other examples. Mark pushes himself to the limits in an effort to both atone for his father’s sins and prove that he is a completely different person. Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) deals with her own father’s (Fred Tatasciore) feelings of inadequacy when confronted with his daughter’s superpowers. When superhero Robot (Zachary Quinto and Ross Marquand) clones a child body for himself so he can be flesh and blood again, he struggles with human emotions like fear.

There is an emotional complexity and nuance here that is missing from so much modern superhero media. In Avengers: Endgame, half of the world’s population just vanished for five years. That should have had profound consequences, leading to something similar to The Leftovers. However, “the Blip” was treated as a joke in Spider-Man: Far From Home and while it has come up as a plot point in some recent productions there has been no real attempt to explore the emotional fallout from it.

Of course, Invincible is far from the first superhero story to try to engage with the emotional reality of these heightened concepts. Comic book writer Grant Morrison has been exploring this idea for decades, through genre-defining works like Animal Man or All-Star Superman. Morrison’s comics are often about characters reacting emotionally to the absurd logic of comic book plotting. However, Invincible feels like the first superhero adaptation to attempt something similar in film or television.

It might sound reasonable to ask why these stories should try to convey recognizable emotional responses to fundamentally absurd plot points. If these stories are about events that could never really happen, perhaps it’s pointless to try to engage with them emotionally. This is a myopic understanding of how stories work. Put simply, characters are easier to engage with and empathize with when they are allowed to express emotion, even in the face of something unreal.

More to the point, these sorts of stories are heightened expressions of recognizable human drama. Most children struggle to escape the shadow of their parents, as Mark does with Omni-Man. Many people have felt betrayed by a loved one, like Debbie does with Omni-Man. Sometimes things happen that people just don’t have a framework to process, as Donald experiences. After all, the past few years have felt somewhat apocalyptic, so it is not as if these stories are entirely unrelatable.

Invincible is titled in reference to Mark’s superhero persona, a reminder that the young man is as physically invulnerable as Silver Age Superman. However, the show’s real trick is understanding that the deepest scars aren’t always physical, and that even a fantastical world of aliens, robots, and fish empires can still be deeply traumatic.

That love has taken any number of forms. Scorsese has been the subject of profile pieces in which the aging director grapples with his mortality. There have been loving and thoughtful retrospectives covering some of the director’s more overlooked films. His daughter Francesca has shared a collection of hilarious and endearing TikToks featuring her father, allowing audiences to see a delightful and playful side to the octogenarian filmmaker that is rare for an artist of his stature.

Part of this is simply a matter of timing. Killers of the Flower Moon stars Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Lily Gladstone, who would normally front a lot of the publicity. However, the ongoing actors’ strike has meant that much of the press coverage of Killers of the Flower Moon has had to be built around Scorsese himself. The result is a publicity campaign that has foregrounded a director in a way that is relatively rare in modern Hollywood, reminding audiences just how wonderful “Marty” is.

It helps that Killers of the Flower Moon is a vibrant and urgent piece of work. The movie has been embraced by critics and gave Scorsese the third best opening of his career. Of course, the film’s gigantic budget is a concern, but Apple are footing that bill and have never been too concerned about box office. Killers of the Flower Moon seems assured major awards contention, and seems likely to earn Scorsese his tenth nomination for the Best Director Oscar.

Scorsese also gives no impression of slowing down. He has already signaled interest in a number of other projects, including a second movie about the life of Jesus Christ. He is already reteaming with Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann and his “muse” Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wager, a story about an 18^th century shipwreck. Scorsese is prolific and productive, his energy putting filmmakers half his age to shame. His career has been – and will continue to be – incredible.

It’s interesting to contrast Martin Scorsese with another beloved and iconic American filmmaker — Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is currently working on his new movie, The Movie Critic. However, despite the fact that Tarantino is twenty years younger than Scorsese, he has made a big deal of the fact that The Movie Critic will be his last movie.  Tarantino has long signaled that his career as a movie maker came with a time limit, planning to retire at 60 or after a total of ten films.

Tarantino is kinda cheating here. He turned 60 earlier this year, crossing the first of his red lines. There is also some creative accounting required to line up The Movie Critic as his tenth film; it disregards his first film, My Best Friend’s Birthday, and requires either ignoring Death Proof or counting Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Kill Bill, Vol. 2 as a single film. Still, Tarantino is operating by his own rules. It seems reasonable to allow the director some leeway.

Still, even if the filmmaker sticks to the letter of his promise, he is unlikely to retire into obscurity. Tarantino has a long history directing television shows like E.R. and CSI, and has already announced plans to make his own television show, likely Bounty Law. The director has long expressed interest in becoming a television auteur. He has already written a couple of books. Tarantino has even argued that potential studio gigs like a hypothetical Star Trek film wouldn’t “count against [his] ten.”

That said, Tarantino is one of the most successful and beloved directors in modern Hollywood. He is one of the last filmmakers to become an honest-to-goodness celebrity, as popular on talk shows as he is behind the camera. As such, it is disheartening to think that he might simply step aside and retire from filmmaking. After all, plenty of directors have had long and celebrated careers beyond their sixth or seventh decade. Clint Eastwood is still making movies at the age of 93.

For Tarantino, this is the point. When Bill Maher argued that Tarantino was still at the top of his game and was too young to quit, Tarantino countered, “I know film history, and from here on in directors do not get better.” He told CNN, “I don’t want to work to diminishing returns. I don’t want to be… one, I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch when already I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now.”

There is a vanity in this. Tarantino is concerned with his own legacy as a filmmaker. “Directors don’t get better as they get older,” he told Playboy in 2012. “Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film fucks up three good ones.” This isn’t an academic argument for Tarantino. He specifically cites “William Wyler and The Liberation of L.B. Jones or Billy Wilder with Fedora and then Buddy Buddy or whatever the hell.”

There is an obvious counterargument to this. Nobody except hardcore cinephiles care that Billy Wilder directed Buddy Buddy. Nobody but completionists will even watch it. Instead, they associate Wilder with the best films in his career. If Wilder had stopped after only ten films, the world would have been denied Some Like It Hot or The Apartment. If Clint Eastwood stopped at 60, audiences would have never seen Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima, or Gran Torino.

Naturally, Tarantino’s argument came up on the press tour for Killers of the Flower Moon, with Scorsese agreeing with an interviewer that he was simply “built differently” than Tarantino. However, there is a more fundamental juxtaposition to be made here. The issue isn’t simply that Scorsese has continued to be a defining influence on American cinema, like his good friend Steven Spielberg. It’s that Scorsese has arguably only truly found his niche in the later years of his career.

Scorsese was always an important American director. He emerged alongside the other “Movie Brats” of the 1970s, but never quite enjoyed the same success as his contemporaries Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Frances Ford Coppola. Scorsese had his champions, and enjoyed a certain degree of critical and commercial success, but never truly broke through. He has talked about feeling “like an outsider” and profiles as recent as the late 1990s described him as “a career Hollywood outsider.”

Scorsese’s first ten feature films include all-timers like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. However, Scorsese himself would acknowledge that those were difficult films and that their reception left him somewhat adrift. He has talked about his “kamikaze” approach to making Raging Bull, convinced that he wouldn’t have an American career left afterwards. For Scorsese, most of the 1980s was a lost decade, a collection of work-for-hire gigs including television and music videos.

Had Scorsese’s career ended there, it seems unlikely that he would be as beloved and as iconic as he is today. Even in the 1990s, when Scorsese was directing movies like Goodfellas or Casino, he still felt quite apart from the larger movie culture. His then-girlfriend Illeana Douglas recalls his reaction to losing the 1991 Best Director Oscar to Kevin Costner, “They don’t like me. They really, really don’t like me.” Even a film like Casino took years to burnish its reputation.

Scorsese has talked about how he almost gave up filmmaking during the 2000s. The production of Gangs of New York was so troubled that he briefly “decided it was over.” The editing process on The Aviator was so stressful that he briefly “left the business.” Reportedly tensions got so high with Warner Bros. during post production on The Departed that Scorsese told the studio, “Fire me, shoot me, kill me — we’re gonna wrestle this thing to the ground.”

Scorsese only really hit the “beloved filmmaker trifecta” of critical acclaim, box office success, and awards recognition after he turned 60. The Aviator was Scorsese’s first film to gross over $200 million worldwide. This was followed by massive commercial success for The Departed, by far the highest-grossing Best Picture nominee of its year. Next came Shutter Island, Scorsese’s biggest earner at the American box office — at least until The Wolf of Wall Street three years later.

This box office success came with the acknowledgement that Scorsese was finally an insider. He won Best Picture and Best Director for The Departed, with his victory such a sure thing that it was handed to him by Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola. Scorsese finally earned the recognition that he had long sought. The transformation from the 1970s cocaine goblin who cameoed in Taxi Driver to the lovable movie grandpa of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies was complete.

Of course, tastes differ and mileage varies. There’s an open-ended debate to be had about whether Scorsese’s 21^st century run is as good as his 1970s classics. However, it is a debate. Both Scorsese’ filmography and wider culture are undoubtedly richer for including movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or The Irishman. Even relative underperformers like Hugo or Silence seem likely to be rediscovered as hidden gems in the years ahead, as many of Scorsese’s other films have been.

After all, for decades, the mainstream didn’t truly appreciate the work that Scorsese was doing. The director is still understandably bitter at the critical drubbing that King of Comedy received when it was released in 1982, and that movie is now considered a classic. The box office disappointment of After Hours led to the “lowest ebb” of Scorsese’s career, but has since become beloved. Would those reappraisals of older movies have happened if Scorsese had retired or stepped away?

Of course, Tarantino’s career is his own. He can and should make his own choices, and decide what works best for him. He certainly doesn’t owe pop culture anything more than he has already given it. Still, looking at the success and the popularity that Scorsese has enjoyed in recent years, along with both the consistency of his output and the continuous reminders of his past successes, it’s hard not to think that Tarantino’s legacy would be better served by just letting himself make movies.

There is a moment over an hour into Five Nights at Freddy’s in which Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), the new nightwatchman supervising the abandoned and dilapidated family restaurant Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, wakes up to discover that his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) has left the office. He hears screams coming from the dining area. He rushes out to save his sibling, and finds her surrounded by the restaurant’s animatronic animal characters, who have seemingly come to life.

Now, this should be terrifying. It is a combination of images and ideas that at once riffs on the familiar horror trope of childish imagery turned monstrous and which is unsettlingly absurd. Certainly, nothing in Mike’s life has prepared him for the possibility that he might one day be charged with acting as a security guard at an old pizzeria populated by killer robots, let alone the revelation that those killer robots are controlled by the ghosts of murdered children.

However, Mike reacts to all this with what might be charitably described as “dull surprise.” To be fair, at least some of this is performance. Whatever strengths Hutcherson possesses as an actor, he has never been especially expressive. His breakout role was in the Hunger Games franchise, where he served as a romantic foil to Liam Hemsworth. The most unbelievable scene in Five Nights at Freddy’s is when Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a local police officer, notes that Mike’s pulse is racing.

That said, there is a sense in which the movie is aware of this and actively plays into it. Mike spends a not-insignificant portion of Five Nights at Freddy’s taking sleeping pills, which feels like a commentary on the movie’s lethargic pacing. The movie treats these killer animatronics in a very matter-of-fact way. It’s revealed quite early on that Vanessa has known about them for a while. Over breakfast the following morning, Mike asks, “Are they ghosts?” Abby replies, nonchalantly, “Of course.”

Horror movies are typically about suspense and build-up. The title of Five Nights at Freddy’s suggests a countdown. What happens on the first four nights? How does the tension mount? What does Mike experience and how does he rationalize it as events escalate? However, Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t work like that. Mike doesn’t really have any near misses with the animatronics. He walks into the dining area, and they are all standing in the open, looking at him. It’s like any other day, really.

This is a very strange approach to adapting Five Nights at Freddy’s. After all, horror is meant to be scary. Indeed, this particular kind of horror is meant to be unsettling and uncomfortable. Five Nights at Freddy’s is about taking something recognizable and familiar – classic chain restaurants and animatronic animals – and rendering it alien and monstrous. Indeed, the source video game is “famous for its jumpscares,” which makes this dull familiarity particularly weird. There’s no awe here, no wonder, no horror.

There are moments when Five Nights at Freddy’s seems to understand the power of the uncanny and the irrational. Throughout the movie, Mike is constantly slipping into a dream world disconnected from reality. While awake, he struggles to connect with Abby, who seems to communicate primarily through drawings. Doctor Lillian (Tadasay Young) explains to Mike that these images are abstractions, ways of communicating ideas in a non-verbal manner. That’s what the film should be.

It’s worth situating Five Nights at Freddy’s in a larger context. While the film is based on a video game that was itself created in reaction to the response to developer Scott Cawthon’s previous game, Chipper and Sons, it can also be situated in a wider trend of contemporary horror built around the perversion of childhood markers. The most obvious recent examples might be Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or The Banana Splits Movie, but it’s a rich contemporary genre.

In particular, writers like Christopher Barkman have situated the original video game in terms of contemporary internet horror, particularly the idea of the “creepypasta.” Indeed, this idea of seemingly innocuous children’s entertainment pushed into the realm of the uncanny evokes classic creepypasta stories like Candle Cove or 1999. It’s not too difficult to imagine a version of Five Nights at Freddy’s that might have emerged from that same internet subculture.

Although creepypastas are arguably just a modern twist on the classic urban legend or ghost story, the genre reflects the internet age. It’s possible for creepypastas to expand to entire shared universes of stories, but most of them are tied to a fairly simple idea that can be easily shared and expanded or elaborated upon in any number of directions. In many cases, it’s the lack of context that makes these stories so unsettling, like a staircase standing randomly in the middle of a forest.

Of course, the fact that this vagueness is part of the appeal serves to attract fans who are specifically drawn to explain the uncanniness. There is a large online fandom that is dedicated to obsessively and thoroughly explaining Five Nights at Freddy’s, constructing elaborate theories that cobble together a cohesive internal mythology. Although controversial within the fandom, this sort of activity can be fun and involving so long as it doesn’t take things too far.

However, this sort of obsessive theorizing is exciting to hardcore fans precisely because of the lacunas in the original work. It is a process that exists separate from the work itself; as a reaction to it. It is an argument in favor of that negative narrative space, not a justification for filling it. One of the big problems with the film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s is that it folds this perspective into the narrative itself, even including a cameo from prominent theorizer MatPat.

Hollywood studios have traditionally struggled to adapt internet horror. There is an obvious desire to chase that trend, given that horror audiences skew younger, but it often leads to uninspired results like Friend Request or Slenderman. There are great movies that tap into that rich vein of internet horror – that electronic folklore feeling – but they usually come from outside the studio system: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Skinamarink, The Empty Man, and even Talk to Me.

One of the central issues with the film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s is that it is packed to the brim with lore. The movie is constantly explaining itself. It is full of backstory and exposition, all of which neatly fits together in the end. There are none of those gaps that were so enticing to fans. When the movie begins, Mike is dealing with the lingering trauma around the mysterious disappearance of his younger brother Garrett (Lucas Grant). As a result, Mike is struggling to hold down a steady job.

Through his career counselor, Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), Mike is offered the position at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. That restaurant was the site of multiple disappearances, and only remains standing because of the owner’s lingering sentimentality. While there, Mike begins dreaming more vividly of the day that his brother disappeared. He is also haunted by visions of the children who disappeared from the restaurant, as Vanessa helps him delve into the restaurant’s history.

Inevitably, everything is connected. It turns out that Steve Raglan is really William Afton, the owner of the restaurant. Afton murdered the five children at the restaurant and also abducted and murdered Garrett. “I killed your brother and now I’m going to kill you,” he boasts to Mike at the climax. “Symmetry, my friend.” Also, the reason that Vanessa knows about the child-possessed-animatronics is because she is really Afton’s daughter.

These plot decisions manage the impressive feat of being both absurdly neat and horrendously contrived. It imposes a clear structure on the movie, allowing Mike closure over his brother’s death and it ties all of the characters and events of the movie together in a bow, even if none of it makes any sense. Why is William Afton working as a career counselor under another alias? If he was a prominent businessman in the local community, surely people would recognize him as William Afton? If he can afford not to sell or demolish the restaurant, why does he need a fairly generic office job?

All of this just serves to make Five Nights at Freddy’s knowable, to beat a set of uncanny imagery and iconography into a recognizable shape. It applies a depressingly predictable narrative template to the movie, a checklist of beats that Mike needs to hit on his hero’s journey. There is nothing even remotely unfamiliar about Five Nights at Freddy’s. Indeed, the movie even goes out of its way to humanize and empathize with its monsters, turning them into cute mascots.

Five Nights at Freddy’s opens with the animatronics murdering the last nightwatchman (Ryan Reinike), implying that this has been a regular occurrence. However, most of their onscreen violence is directed at characters who can be seen to deserve it, such as Carl (Joseph Poliquin) and his gang, who trash the restaurant in an effort to get Mike fired, or Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), who is trying to take Abby away from Mike. These monsters aren’t allowed to be monstrous.

Any violence undertaken by the killer mascots is explained as Afton’s perverse influence over them. Abby wants to befriend the animatronic animals. The film’s closing moments suggest that Mike isn’t inherently against taking Abby to visit them at some point in the future. It’s a bizarre approach to the concept. The key appeal of the concept of Five Nights at Freddy’s is the perversion of innocent childhood imagery, but the film circles back around to making that imagery cute and cuddly again.

Then again, this is perhaps the result of living in the age of intellectual property, where these movies are built around the very concept of familiarity. These films are pre-packaged. Everybody going to Five Nights at Freddy’s knows exactly what they are getting. They know each of the animatronics by name and by backstory. The naming of Lillard’s character as Afton in early press was something of a spoiler that later publicity tried to walk back. The goal with these sorts of projects isn’t to surprise or unsettle audiences, but to present them with things that they already recognize and enjoy. This limits the effectiveness of Five Nights at Freddy’s as a horror movie. Then again, it is at least true to the experience of those creepy old family eateries.

If nothing else, Five Nights at Freddy’s captures the dull familiarity of reheated chain restaurant pizza.

Bodies arrived on Netflix last week. The eight-part limited series follows a murder investigation in London across four different time periods. The body of Gabriel Defoe (Tom Mothersdale) is recovered in the fictional Longharvest Lane in 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053. However, as the mystery develops, Bodies becomes a show less about Defoe than it does about London itself.

Bodies is adapted from an eight-issue comic book series published by the DC imprint Vertigo. It was written by Si Spencer, and illustrated by Dean Ormston, Tula Lotay, Meghan Hetrick, and Phil Winslade. The central gimmick of the comic was that each of the artists handled one of the four time periods, ensuring that each era had a very distinct sensibility. While the series takes certain liberties in adapting the source material to screen, it remains true to the spirit of the original work.

To put it simply, Bodies feels heavily influenced by the work of Alan Moore. Moore is arguably the greatest comic book writer of his generation, and almost certainly the most influential British comic book writer in history. As writer, Moore was responsible for genre- and even medium-defining works like Swamp Thing, Miracleman, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen. He also inspired a generation of British writers who followed in his wake — the “British Invasion” of American comics.

Moore was undeniably a massive influence on Spencer. On Spencer’s passing, his friend Will Vigar noted that Moore was a frequent topic of discussion for the pair. “When the British invasion of comic writers happened, we would have spirited conversations (i.e. massive arguments) about the Alan Moore effect on comics, and it became apparent that this is where he wanted his writing to take him,” Vigar recalled. Of course, there are very few British writers who would deny Moore’s influence.

Moore’s work is so inescapable that even audiences who have never picked up a comic book can see its influence on Bodies. This is most obvious at the two extremes of the timeline. The 1890 investigation, overseen by Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller), recalls From Hell, Moore’s account of the famous Jack the Ripper case illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It was adapted into a feature film by Albert and Allen Hughes. Like most adaptations of his work, Moore did not care for it.

The 2023 setting evokes the dystopia of V for Vendetta, illustrated by David Lloyd. It was adapted into film by James McTeigue, which Moore also didn’t want to be involved with. Of course, much like From Hell drew from the real Jack the Ripper case, V for Vendetta owed a lot to George Orwell’s 1984. Still, this ominous future overseen by Commander Elias Mannix (Stephen Graham) and rooted in a staged terrorist attack recalls a lot of the peculiarly British fascism of V for Vendetta.

To a certain extent, Mannix also recalls the character of Ozymandias for Watchmen, illustrated by Dave Gibbons. In Watchmen, Ozymandias is a well-meaning liberal who concocts an elaborate plan to fake a horrific terrorist attack that kills millions of New Yorkers, in what he believes to be a necessary sacrifice to establish his utopia. Bodies presents Mannix as a particularly unsettling dictator, with his followers constantly reassuring each other, “Know that you are loved.”

However, Bodies shares more than just an aesthetic with Moore’s influential body of work. The comic and the television show are in conversation with some of the writer’s core themes and ideas. In particular, the show uses London in some very interesting ways. While the series has at least four protagonists, each leading the investigation in one of the four time periods, it is also very invested in the idea of London itself. This is a story about how a city changes — and, crucially, how it doesn’t.

Critics have pointed out that the show frequently employs split screen to evoke “the panels of a comic book,” but these shots also serve to situate the characters in relationship to one another. Throughout Bodies, characters occupy the same spaces, separated by oceans of time. Still, there is a connection. Longharvest Lane is always there. Hillinghead can mark a brick in 1890, and Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas) can read that engraving over a century and a half later.

Longharvest Lane is not unique. Hillinghead works in New Scotland Yard, the police headquarters established in 1890. Karl Weissman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) and Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) work in the same complex in 1941 and 2023. The series conveniently straddles the period between 1967 and 2016 when the Metropolitan Police Service moved out of that area, although they eventually returned to part of that original complex. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

There are obvious differences between each time period, but Bodies suggests that these are largely superficial. Hillinghead searches handwritten records in gigantic tomes, while Hasan runs equivalent inquiries more efficiently on computers. Hillinghead, Weissman, and Hasan each face prejudice in their respective times, even if the nature of that prejudice shifts: Hillinghead is a closeted gay man, Weissman is a Jewish man who has taken the gentrified name “Whiteman,” Hasan is a Muslim woman.

Separated by more than a century, procedures and assumptions remain consistent. When Hillinghead and Hasan recover their bodies, the autopsies are cut against one another. Both detectives note the strange marking on the body’s right arm. It is assumed to be an identifier. In 1890, it could be “Fenian or Hebrew claptrap.” In 2023, it’s possibly “far-right.” Some scars run deep. Even in 2053, Mannix still ruminates on what “the Fenians” learned from Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite.

In the world of Bodies, London is a certainty. It is a fixture. Weissman’s storyline unfolds against the backdrop of the Blitz, a sustained bombing campaign that destroyed more than 70,000 buildings and damaged 1.7 million more. Even then, the city endures. Weissman can hide a record in an old police bar for Hasan to recover more than six decades later, unblemished. The followers of Sir Julian Harker (also Graham) can hide a bomb in “the oldest part of” his bank, and it can remain untouched.

This is the character of London. It is not one of the oldest cities in the world, but it prides itself on being one of the most consistent. The London Metro was the world’s first underground railway. The Royal Society is the world’s oldest national scientific academy. London Zoo is the world’s oldest scientific zoo. Even Hamleys is the world’s oldest toy store. All of these institutions remain operating today. Bodies argues that there is a certain permanence to London, reflecting the city’s soul.

The French Situationists proposed the concept of “psychogeography,” with Guy Debord defining it as “the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” It was brought into British cultural consciousness by writer Iain Sinclair in his 1972 work Lud Heat, charting the city’s occult psychogeography. Sinclair has since lamented that he has “some weird brand image as the London psychogeographer.”

Psychogeography is the idea that a location can have a feeling or a vibe. “Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it,” explains psychogeographer Wilfried Hou Je Bek. It is also an essential part of Moore’s work, most obviously in Watchmen and From Hell. Moore had been inspired by Sinclair’s “concept of London as a web of signs and signals.” The fourth chapter of From Hell follows Sir William Gull on a journey through that psychic web.

Bodies builds on this, with an added complication. Bodies does not just travel through space. It cuts across time. Comics lend themselves to this approach. Panels are still snapshots, and it is a common trick for artists to use the format to capture a sequence of events that share the same physical space as contained within the page but occupying different positions in time within particular panels. Alison Bechdel has described her graphic memoirs as “the psychochronology of everyday life.”

There is something magical in this. Sinclair and Moore suggested that architect Nicholas Hawksmoor built his churches in a pentagram pattern overlaying the city. Moore is a practicing wizard. Bodies offers a pseudo-scientific explanation for its central mystery, a stable time loop in which Mannix travels back in time to become Harker and thus become his own great-grandfather, but couches this in occult imagery, like the seances conducted by Harker’s mother (Anna Calder-Marshall).

“The TARDIS is essentially a funny shaped car with extraordinary specs but does time travel even need a vehicle?” Spencer asked in an interview during the comic’s publication. “In a quantum world filled with chaos theory and chaos magick where a single electron may exist simultaneously at every time and point in space why would you need a glorified truck? Is a ghost a present day person seeing a vision of the past? Or a time traveler jaunting forward in time to observe us? And what about past life regression, shamanic journeying, astral planes? Is that time travel?” It’s all very mystical.

Tellingly, Mannix’s grand plan to truly reshape Britain cannot be completed if London is left standing. To create his utopia, Mannix must accomplish what the Germans could not. He must completely destroy London, shattering the city’s soul and breaking that sense of continuity. He designs a bomb that will kill 200,000 people in the initial “firestorm” and “half a million people” in total. It also completely demolishes the city. The futuristic skyline visible from Maplewood’s apartment is alien.

If psychogeography suggests that a city can have a soul, then Bodies contends that soul is tied to a continuity of history. It isn’t just that these places exist, it is that they endure. Mannix’s attack is a disruption of that continuity. Interestingly, Spencer named Shahara Hasan after his close friend Shahara Islam. Islam died in the London terrorist bombings on July 7^th, 2005, traveling on a bus that Spencer regularly took into town.

Although it was largely shot in Yorkshire, Bodies is a show about how London stands as a monument to its own history. It ends with Hasan thwarting Mannix’s scheme. She gets to relive the opening of the show, suggesting that continuity has been restored. Fittingly, the show’s closing shot is a pan up to the iconic London skyline. Of course, there’s a last-minute twist – the initials KYAL (“Know You Are Loved”) light up the side of the Bishopsgate skyscraper – but there is a sense that London abides.

Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic from a defining American filmmaker. It is a western and a crime story, a romance and a tragedy. It is the history the United States played out in miniature, against the backdrop of a series of murders of wealthy indigenous people in Osage County. As one expects from director Martin Scorsese, it is a story of the intertwined forces of masculinity and capitalism. However, it’s also a study of those intersected with white supremacy.

Scorsese’s movies are preoccupied with the idea of masculinity. It simmers through virtually his entire filmography, but is most pronounced in movies like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street. He is also fascinated with the way that American culture is shaped by capitalism, but not just in his gangster films like Goodfellas and Casino, but also in movies like The Color of Money, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

However, race has always been something of a blind spot for Scorsese, as noted by critics like Ashley Clark. While Scorsese’s movies tend to focus on outsiders to a particular subculture, like the Irish Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas or Frank Sheehan (Robert De Niro) in The Irishman or the Jewish Sammy “Ace” Rothstein (De Niro) in Casino, his movies haven’t always had a broad perspective that includes cultures outside traditionally “white” America.

Related: Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon Trailer Asks If You Can Find the Wolves

Of course, it is easy to overstate this. Race ends up being a major part of the climax of Gangs of New York, with draft riots sweeping through the city. Scorsese also directed Kundun, about the life and times of the Dalai Lama. Scorsese has also used his platform to champion minority filmmakers telling stories from their own perspectives. He famously established The Film Foundation, which supports initiatives like The World Cinema Project and The African Film Heritage Project.

Indeed, it’s a valid question to ask whether it is Scorsese’s place to tell stories about these other communities. They have their own voices and their own filmmakers after all, even if Scorsese occupies a rarified place in the popular consciousness. Still, there is something to be said for white filmmakers engaging with the question and the legacy of racism in America’s history. Certainly, the Osage people have embraced and encouraged Scorsese, nicknaming him “Uncle Marty.”

Scorsese has made western-adjacent projects before. To varying degrees, The Age of Innocence, Casino, and Gangs of New York all trade in the tropes and conventions of the western, particularly the arrival of western settlers on the continent and the desire to build a new world. However, Killers of the Flower Moon marks the first time that Scorsese has engaged with the experience of the indigenous population and the violence inflicted by the settlers — America’s other original sin.

Like The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon plays as a belated companion piece to Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Certainly, Scorsese uses regular collaborator Robert De Niro in a very similar way. Quiet, beady-eyed and scheming, De Niro’s William King Hale feels like a spiritual ancestor of his Jimmy Conway, particularly when it comes to ruthlessly dispatching potential loose ends. The film also borrows a lot of the montage rhythm that has informed Scorsese’s work since Goodfellas.

This creates a thematic bridge. Goodfellas is a crime film. Jimmy Conway’s planning and execution of the infamous real-life Lufthansa heist is a pivot on which Goodfellas spins. It is, according to Henry, “the biggest heist in American history.” Killers of the Flower Moon suggests that King Hale masterminded an even bigger heist, displacing the indigenous settlers of Osage County and systematically robbing them of their claims to the region’s oil wells.

Of course, Killers of the Flower Moon exists in conversation with another class of film, one outside Scorsese’s filmography. Goodfellas famously (and perhaps infamously) lost the Best Picture Oscar to Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves. This was a source of frustration to Scorsese, who at least expected to take home Best Director. According to his then-girlfriend Illeana Douglas, he lamented, “They put me in the front row with my mother, and then I didn’t win.”

Dances With Wolves was one of the neo-westerns that emerged during the early 1990s, including movies like Unforgiven and The Quick and the Dead. In particular, films like Dances With Wolves and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans attempted to engage with the genre’s somewhat spotty history of representation of Native Americans. However, these movies did this by centering a white perspective, focusing on white men embraced and adopted by indigenous tribes.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie that feels informed by those earlier attempts at revisionist westerns, which focused on white men like John J. Dunbar (Costner) or Nathaniel Poe (Daniel Day-Lewis), who integrated into these communities to the point of transcending racial boundaries. The climax of The Last of the Mohicans finds Poe arguing that he is effectively more in tune with indigenous culture than the villainous Native American Magua (Wes Studi).

These movies are clumsy and uncomfortable, and they often feel like romantic fantasies of white Americans who want to acknowledge the injustices committed against the native population while still framing white characters as the heroes of these narratives. In contrast, Killers of the Flower Moon plays with this idea, focusing on white men marrying into Osage families. However, this is not a heroic act. It is one of usurpation and displacement. It’s an act of violence and oppression.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a typical Scorsese film in many ways. It is preoccupied with masculine anxieties. Its male characters are insecure, and that insecurity tends to push them toward violence. This is a story in which the women, who come from the indigenous population, tend to hold the wealth and the political power. The white men marry them in an effort to claim some of that power for themselves. There’s a sense that this imbalance makes the men uncomfortable.

Related: Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon Gets Violent in Official Trailer

King Hale’s nephew, Bryan Burkhart (Scott Shepherd), marries Anna (Cara Jade Myers). However, he bristles at her ostentatious displays of wealth and her power over him. He responds by sexually assaulting their nanny (Sarah Spurger) as a way of asserting his masculinity, and eventually conspires to murder Anna. The term “squaw man” is whispered as an insult by these husbands who depend on their wives’ wealth to live. It is implied to be a thoroughly emasculating experience for these men.

Bryan’s brother Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) marries Anna’s sister Mollie (Lily Gladstone). He initially has to work as her driver, and she has to buy him his Stetson cowboy hat. Ernest is initially unenthused about King Hale’s plans to murder Henry Roan (William Belleau), but seems to be convinced once he discovers that Henry was Mollie’s first husband. For his part, Henry is driven into a drunken rage by his own wife’s affair with the local butcher, Roy Bunch (Joey Oglesby).

The western is a genre firmly tied to ideas of white male masculinity, which makes interrogations of the concept in projects like The Power of the Dog so compelling and subversive. King Hale owns a cattle ranch, one of the most potent images of the Wild West. Ernest names his son “Cowboy” (River Rhoades), a direct invocation of that rugged stereotypical masculinity, and one very much at odds with how the men in The Killers of the Flower Moon behave.

Of course, the western is also a genre about the march of capitalism. Money is power. As Killers of the Flower Moon explains, Osage County was once the most prosperous region of the country per capita. The schemes to displace the indigenous population are largely financial in nature. King Hale even takes out insurance policies on men that he murders, including Henry. “We mix these families together,” King Hale tells Ernest, “and that estate money flows the right direction, it’ll come to us.”

However, Killers of the Flower Moon distinguishes itself from Scorsese’s earlier films in how it intertwines these two recurring Scorsese fascinations with the idea of systemic racism. Killers of the Flower Moon is about an attempt to wipe out the indigenous population. Guns and murder are part of that ethnic cleansing, but so is sex. These white men try to erase the Osage through marriage and genealogy. White relatives note the skin colors of the children, pondering which can pass as white.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a true story set in the 1920s, but it resonates today. In particular, it understands that white supremacy is often rooted in an anxiety around masculinity and impotence. This is why the term “cuck” has become such a common insult among white nationalists, as it suggests the fear of racial displacement through sexual reproduction. It’s the fear that underpins conspiracy theories like “the great replacement” and informs obsessions around racial birth rates.

Killers of the Flower Moon understands this point of intersection. Despite insisting that everybody call him “King,” Hale has no male heirs. Bryan and Ernest are his nephews, not his sons. Ernest cannot even protect his own family, with his daughter Lizzie (Kinsleigh McNac) dying from illness. Hale speaks in the language of modern white supremacy, warning Ernest, “We’ve got to take back control of our home.” It feels very much informed by the chants of “you will not replace us,” tapping into the white male anxiety that their racial bloodline might not endure.

One of the great rhetorical tricks of this sort of populism is displacement and projection — to accuse one’s enemy of one’s own sins. Interestingly, Killers of the Flower Moon returns repeatedly to a familiar western trope as scalps are peeled from characters’ skulls. This was a common accusation leveled at the indigenous people to prove their “savagery,” ignoring the fact that the settlers also eagerly engaged in the practice.

Related: Martin Scorsese’s Casino is a Western and a Religious Parable

When a scalp is removed in Killers of the Flower Moon, it is of an indigenous character as a result of violence from the white community. Doctors James (Steve Witting) and David Shoun (Steve Routman) peel the skin off the top of Anna’s skull while looking for the bullet that killed her. They keep her skull as a trophy. When Ernest rushes to the site of a bomb blast on their street and tries to lift Millie’s cousin Reta (JaNae Collins) off the ground amidst the wreckage, the back of her skull peels off.

Killers of the Flower Moon understands that much of this white supremacy is rooted in masculine insecurity. The sexual language and subtext employed by white nationalists is a way of displacing and projecting these sorts of sins. King Hale plots to destroy the Native Osage population through violence, but also through sex. Hale seeks to destroy a nation and its culture by displacing its men and marrying its women. It’s a very clever and nuanced understanding of the logic that underpins such hatred.

It is a movie that places this historical crime in its proper context, and which weaves together several of Scorsese’s central preoccupations into a thesis statement on white supremacy. It’s a bold and daring piece of work, and it is affirmation of Scorsese as one of the defining American filmmakers.

The Fall of the House of Usher is a phenomenal accomplishment from showrunner Mike Flanagan, capping off his trilogy of horror miniseries for Netflix that began with The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, and which was supplemented by miniseries like Midnight Mass and The Midnight Club. The show marks the end of Flanagan’s fruitful relationship with Netflix, which also included the film Gerald’s Game. Flanagan is a horror auteur, and one of the best working today.

The Fall of the House of Usher is immediately recognizable within Flanagan’s oeuvre. The cast includes many of his previous collaborators, including Bruce Greenwood, Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, T’Nia Miller, Michael Trucco, Ruth Codd, and many more. As the title suggests, it is a miniseries built around the work of a great American horror author, in this case Edgar Allen Poe. It is also a story about family as a space defined by trauma and violence.

However, The Fall of the House of Usher also feels distinct from Flanagan’s previous miniseries. It’s undoubtedly gothic and atmospheric, but it exists in a different milieu. Like Alice Birch’s recent adaptation of Dead Ringers, it is a show that is very much in conversation with Jesse Armstrong’s Succession. This is the story about Roderick Usher (Greenwood), the patriarch of a vast financial empire who finds himself in his final days forced to confront the world he has made for his children.

The show wears its influences on its sleeve. The Newton Brothers’ score for The Fall of the House of Usher directly evokes Nicholas Britell’s work on Succession. There are shades of Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) in Roderick’s eager-to-please son Frederick (Thomas), Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) in his publicity-manager-at-a-remove-from-the-family daughter Camille (Siegel), and Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) in his hedonistic youngest son Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota). The description of his son Napoleon (Kohli) as an “Xbox Gatsby” even evokes Kendall’s self-description as “a fuckin’ techno Gatsby.”

Flanagan’s earlier work is largely built around humanism and empathy. This extends to his film work outside of Netflix, including movies like Oculus and Doctor Sleep. Flanagan’s protagonists tend to be broken and damaged people. Many of his characters are addicts, struggling and recovering. These are deeply personal works, informed by his own experiences with alcoholism. What’s interesting about The Fall of the House of Usher is how the miniseries inverts that dynamic.

The series humanizes its central characters, but it is rarely unwaveringly sympathetic to them.The story’s framing device finds Assistant District Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) visiting Roderick in the decaying remains of his old family home to hear his confession. Roderick recounts his life and his self-justifications, and explains the deaths of each of his six children in turn. Roderick is by turns conciliatory and self-aggrandizing, candid and cynical.

Dupin records their extended conversation on a personal device. At the end of the series, after Roderick has passed, Dupin leaves that recording at his grave. It does not become part of the public record. “Didn’t know what to do with this,” he admits in his final conversation with the deceased billionaire. “Because it don’t matter in the end why you did any of it. I don’t fucking care why you did it. We don’t want your confession, or your rationale, or your explanation.”

This is a recurring theme throughout The Fall of the House of Usher, which acknowledges the way that its characters have been shaped by horrible deeds while refusing to let that trauma excuse their own actions. As Verna (Gugino) confides to Frederick in his final moments, he was shaped by his abusive father. “He did you wrong, Freddie,” Verna admits. “You only ever wanted to be loved by him. You only ever wanted his approval. And it’s still no fucking excuse.”

The Usher fortune is built on the miracle drug Ligodone, a massively addictive pain-relief medication. It’s an opioid, and The Fall of the House of Usher belongs to the wave of modern media grappling with that unimaginable tragedy, like Dopesick, Painkiller, and Pain Hustlers. Dupin has spent his career trying to hold Roderick to account for “the mountain of corpses” upon which the billionaire has built his empire. In the finale, Roderick sees that mountain, what Verna describes as his “true monument.”

However, this emphasis on an addictive painkiller is more than just a timely choice. It ties together two of Flanagan’s big recurring themes. This is a story about addiction, but it is also a story about the idea of deferring pain. Flanagan’s stories are often about how pain and trauma have to be confronted. When his characters receive happy – or even just redemptive – endings, they do so by working through their pain and their trauma. They confront what they’ve repressed and hidden.

Pitching Ligadone to Rufus Griswold (Trucco), the former CEO of Fortunato, Roderick boasts, “This whole industry has always been about pain management. This is about pain erasure.” The lure of Ligadone is the promise of “a world without pain,” something that most of Flanagan’s protagonists seem to be seeking. Years later, Roderick concedes that such a promise was unkeepable. “That’s the biggest lie we told,” he admits. “You can’t eliminate pain. There’s no such thing as a painkiller.” There is only “denial.”

Roderick is seduced by his own creation. The eldest of his illegitimate children, Victorine (Miller), is the daughter of a nurse. He met his second wife, Juno (Codd), while touring a hospital. She was hooked on Ligadone. “You are a miracle,” he tells Juno. “Your body just… soaks it up. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s like my drug is water and you are a flower. You are the most perfect and beautiful thing I have ever seen. You know, a huge part of you is Ligadone. How could I not marry you?”

This idea comes across most directly in his relationship with the mysterious Verna. As a younger man (Zach Gilford), Roderick met Verna at a dingy bar on New Year’s Eve, with his sister Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald). Verna offers the two siblings a deal. She promises them fortune and success beyond their wildest dreams. More than that, she assures them that there will be “no legal consequences. Guaranteed. For your whole life.” In other words, Verna promises a world without pain.

This idea of a life without consequences is a central pillar of the House of Usher. “They believe that people like them don’t go to prison,” Dupin explains to the jury during his indictment of Roderick Usher. “Ladies and gentlemen, they’re right.” Outlining the family’s history of greed and sin, Dupin laments, “Not one consequence has stuck to Roderick Usher.” Prospero even tries to fashion this into a lifestyle brand, opening a club “with killer music, few rules, fewer consequences.”

Prospero is the first of Roderick’s children to be visited by Verna at that club, in that “dark room.” She warns him, “Things like this – all things, in fact – have consequences.” Prospero insists, “Not this. I mean that’s the whole point. Didn’t you read the invite?” Verna simply replies, “There are always consequences.” She elaborates that Prospero himself, as Roderick’s son, was “the harmless consequence of a harmless choice made by someone in a moment when you didn’t exist. And that choice defined your whole life. You are consequence, Perry. And tonight you are consequential.”

Ultimately, Verna’s promise to Roderick was based on a lie. There is no such thing as a world without pain or consequence. They can only be deferred. “It won’t even go on your tab,” Verna assures Roderick and Madeline. “What if I said you get all that, the whole thing, and the price is deferred? Let the next generation foot the bill. So that’s the deal. You get the whole world, and when you’re done, at the end of it all, just before you would have died, Roderick, just before you would have died anyway… your bloodline dies with you.”

Flanagan’s stories have always been about generational trauma. The culmination of his work at Netflix, The Fall of the House of Usher extrapolates it out to something more profound. This isn’t just a story about a dysfunctional family. This is a story about society. It tells the tale of an older generation who sacrificed their children’s future at the altar of prosperity, creating a world where those children face consequences like climate change, economic uncertainty, and political instability. These children foot the bill.

It is no coincidence that Roderick and Madeline make their deal with Verna on New Year’s Eve, 1979. The show isn’t shy in its political commentary. “I’m just excited that we get to kick Carter out of the White House this year,” Madeline boasts. Roderick replies, “You think Reagan’s going to run?” Madeline prophesizes, “I think if he does, it’ll be a landslide and great for business.” The Fall of the House of Usher suggests that the current generation faces the legacy of the 1980s.

As with Logan Roy (Brian Cox) in Succession, Roderick Usher’s empire falls apart because he cannot see beyond himself. Roderick and Madeline claim not to believe Verna’s deal, but they each try to cheat it in their own way. As an older woman, Madeline (Mary McDonnell) never has children. Reflecting real-life billionaires, Roderick and Madeline invest heavily in immortality to prolong their lives. They cannot imagine anything that might outlive them.

A life insulated from pain prevents growth. Roderick never has to change, because he never has to confront the consequences of his mistakes. The traumatic death of his mother (Annabeth Gish) shakes him to his core and informs his relationship to his own children, but he inherits a lot of his business acumen from Griswold, a man whom he hates and murders. Because neither Griswold nor Roderick never face any consequences for their actions, Roderick makes many of the same choices.

Just as Griswold falsified medical data and records, Roderick presses Victorine to manipulate the results of her own trials. Prospero dies because Roderick had been using a condemned company building to store hazardous materials, waiting to get conveniently “lost” during the demolition, the same trick that Griswold employed to get rid of incriminating documents. Indeed, Griswold’s corpse ends up walled up in the basement of Fortunato, a foundation stone of the Usher empire.

Throughout the series, Roderick and Madeline liken themselves to royalty and to gods. From the boardroom of his skyscraper, Roderick surveys his empire. Madeline obsesses over the burial rituals of the ancient Pharaohs. However, the show’s visual language implies this is ultimately self-delusion. It often looks down on the characters from above, fixating on instruments of their reckoning hanging just overhead: the poison-filled sprinklers over Prospero’s party, the wrecking ball on Roderick’s demolition site. Napoleon throws himself to his death from his balcony.

Gravity is a law of the universe and it cannot be cheated. There is always consequence. The bill comes due. The tab must be settled. In its own way, there is something humanist in this, in the idea that Roderick and Madeline will face some reckoning for the harm that they have caused. Still, that’s little comfort to Roderick’s innocent granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) in her final moments. The Fall of the House of Usher suggests that consequence is its own inescapable form of generational trauma.

It is to the credit of producer Malek Akkad, who assumed creative control of the franchise following the tragic passing of his father Moustapha in 2005, that the Halloween franchise has been willing to take big creative swings. When the cycle of 2000s horror reboots hit Halloween, it was one of the only examples of the trend to hire a genuine auteur to revisit the original film. However one might feel about Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies, they are undeniably Rob Zombie movies.

After Zombie’s Halloween II, the decision was made to “deboot” the franchise, to partially restore the original continuity by making a sequel to John Carpenter’s original Halloween while jettisoning all of the sequels. Taking over production from Miramax, Blumhouse turned to director David Gordon Green. Green was a promising indie director who had emerged from the same Texas scene that had produced filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater. He was an odd choice for the role.

Green has made an impression with his low-budget debut, George Washington. However, his career took a number of sharp turns. He would strike up a relationship with actor Danny McBride, who served as second unit director on George Washington, and with whom he would go on to collaborate with frequently. He would embrace comedy with movies like Pineapple Express and Your Highness. Green would collaborate with McBride on shows like Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones. McBride would serve as a story and screenwriting collaborator on Green’s Halloween and Exorcist movies.

Green’s work on the Halloween franchise is interesting for a couple of reasons. Most obviously and most superficially, he is the first director since Tommy Lee Wallace on Halloween III: The Season of the Witch to feel genuinely influenced by John Carpenter’s style and sensibility. (Wallace had worked as Carpenter’s editor on the original Halloween, and actor Tom Atkins described Wallace as “John’s right hand man.”) Green’s films feel stylistically of a piece with Carpenter’s work on the franchise.

However, there is also something simmering beneath the trilogy’ surface. They are undeniably movies of their cultural moment. Largely driven by returning lead Jamie Lee Curtis, much of the narrative around these films has focused on “trauma.” That is certainly part of their thematic focus. The first of the three movies was released in the context of #MeToo. That said, they also reinvent Michael Myers (Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney) to speak to their moment.

Discussion of modern horror often fixates on the term “elevated horror,” although “metaphorror” is perhaps the better descriptor. While the genre has always been a tool for social commentary, a significant number of recent horrors aggressively and occasionally heavy-handedly foreground their themes. Green’s Halloween movies aren’t arthouse horror like Hereditary or Men, nor are they “social thrillers” like Get Out or Candyman. They are slashers, but they also speak to their moment.

To be clear, this has always been the case. The original Halloween was a movie that spoke to the anxieties of its moments. It was released in the midst of what has been termed “the golden age of serial murderers.” In its own way, it spoke to the fears underpinning “white flight” — the anxieties of affluent parents who had taken their children away from the perceived depravity of the inner city to the safety and security of the suburbs, only to realize that the real evil was inside their community.

The same is true of even the grungiest of the sequels. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is a movie that resonates with the resurgent conservatism of the Reagan era. Michael (Tom Morga and George P. Wilbur) is framed as the literal devil by Reverend Jackson P. Sayer (Carmen Filpi). Locals discover that big government cannot save them after Michael murders the entire sheriff’s department, driving them to vigilantism. The climax finds the literal family homestead under siege.

The sixth film in the series, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, even resonates with the conspiracism of the Clinton era. Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd) pores over newspaper clippings and ancient prophecies to construct a grand unified theory about what drives Michael (Wilbur). Michael is no longer a random killing machine, but instead exposed as the tool of a sinister cabal conducting sinister research, headed by Dr. Terence Wynn (Mitch Ryan). It’s all very JFK and X-Files, but with knives and druids.

Green wisely jettisons all of this, and returns to the idea of Michael Myers as a silent and mysterious figure. However, over the course of Green’s three films, Michael comes to embody a number of anxieties that speak to this specific cultural moment. The precise meaning shifts with each of the three films – Michael’s blank white mask is something designed to be projected upon, after all – but they come together as an expression of contemporary American nightmares.

In Halloween, Michael is just evil. The film is populated with characters who attempt to explain Michael’s violence, like Doctor Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) or podcasters Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall) and Dana Haines (Rhian Rees). Even Laurie Strode (Curtis), the survivor of Michael’s first attack, tries to impose a narrative on his brutality. “He waited for this night,” she assures her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer). “He’s waited for me.” Ultimately, Halloween rejects these various theories.

However, while Green’s Halloween refuses to explain why Michael is, the film offers a number of overt hints about what Michael might be. In particular, what form of evil he might embody in the context of 2018. Without ever seeming heavy-handed or obvious, the film suggests that Michael can be read as a metaphor for encroaching and insidious fascism. This was very obviously a fear percolating through the American consciousness at the height of the Trump presidency.

The iconic fascist salute – the raised right arm – appears repeatedly in the film. Aaron raises Michael’s mask in his clenched right fist as the film cuts dramatically to opening credits. Later on, one of the dummies in Laurie’s bedroom stands in the pose, although Michael adjusts it with his bloody hand as if to draw the audience’s attention to the gesture. It is worth acknowledging that the gesture itself re-entered American public life during the Trump era.

There are other similar visual cues. Early in the film, Dave (Miles Robbins) boasts of the tattoo that he got marking the date. After Michael murders Dave, the last shot of the teen’s body closes in on the six digits tattooed on his arm, another evocative image of fascism. Even Michael’s violence is fascist coded. In one of the film’s most unsettling images, he removes the teeth of a gas station attendant and taunts Dana with them, recalling another image of the Holocaust. He kills Sartain by crushing his skull beneath his boots, suggesting curb-stomping.

The most pointed aspect of Green’s Halloween trilogy is not Michael himself. It is the reaction to Michael. In Halloween, the characters try to explain Michael’s evil. It recalls the way in which the mainstream media could often seem to normalize and excuse this resurgent fascism. Editorials were written that seemed to sympathize with white supremacists. Arguments were made that such beliefs were rooted in “economic anxiety” and that they could be reasoned with and understood.

Halloween has very little patience for this. Tellingly, Michael turns very quickly on Sartain, Aaron, and Dana, just as quickly as real-life fascists turn on those well-meaning individuals who provide them with the cover of legitimacy. It’s the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The real fear in Halloween isn’t Michael. After all, Michael is only unleashed by Sartain, who wants to see what will happen. The true threat in Halloween is those people who cannot recognize evil for what it is.

This theme continues through the next two movies, although it takes different forms. In Halloween Kills, one of the bleakest and most nihilistic mainstream studio releases in recent memory, Michael continues to tear through the community of Haddonfield. Like The Exorcist: Believer, Halloween Kills is a story about the dissolution of community. It is about the idea that there is no longer any sense of shared identity or common purpose between citizens.

Reflecting America’s polarized reality, Haddonfield descends into madness. It’s also a film that inverts the traditional gender dynamics of the slasher movie, offering a timely portrait of masculinity in crisis. Cameron (Dylan Arnold) tries to win his girlfriend Allyson (Andi Matichak) back by participating in the hunt for Michael, just as Marcus (Michael Smallwood) tries to impress his wife Vanessa (Carmela McNeal). Tommy (Anthony Michael Hall) and Lonnie (Robert Longstreet) attempt to work through their own childhood traumas by killing Michael. They do not succeed.

Halloween Ends doubles down on this masculine anxiety with the character of Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell). After Michael disappears, Corey becomes the community outcast when he accidentally kills the child (Jaxon Goldberg) he was babysitting. Corey comes to feel anger and resentment towards Haddonfield. He’s brought into contact with Michael, who is – in his weakened state – living in the sewers beneath the city as if hiding in the community’s collective subconscious.

An angry young man who feels misunderstood by his community, Corey taps back into the classic subtext of the slasher movie. Dating back to the original Halloween, Michael has been read as an expression of a particular kind of white male violence. Recent years have seen a renewed focus on these crimes, often perpetrated by young white men angry at women or their communities, turning a sense of disenfranchisement into an excuse for mass murder.

Like Sartain, Dana, and Aaron in Halloween, Corey is an acolyte of Michael Myers. He is a stand-in for all those young men seduced by the allure of fascism, and driven to violence in service of it. Just like Sartain, Dana, and Aaron in Halloween, Michael doesn’t actually care about Corey. At the climax of the film, Corey isn’t killed by Laurie. He attempts to kill himself, but is ultimately killed by Michael. It’s a reminder that this evil doesn’t actually care for those who sacrifice themselves at its altar.

Green’s Halloween trilogy is a monument to a particular moment in American culture. It offers a timely take on its central monster, outlining “the Shape” nestled in a nation’s nightmares. Michael Myers is the embodiment of pure evil. Between 2018 and 2022, that evil took a very specific form. In his three Halloween films, Green offers a portrait of America stalked by a resurgent fascism and unraveling in real-time. Michael Myers becomes a boogeyman for the 21^st century.

This makes sense. It is the brainchild of writer, director and producer Dave Filoni. Filoni is an interesting character. He was personally poached from Nickelodeon by George Lucas, and was responsible for overseeing The Clone Wars and the first two seasons of Rebels. Filoni’s personal association with Lucas has become part of his mythology, as has the relative success of The Clone Wars and Rebels within the larger Star Wars brand.

Filoni has been positioned as “George Lucas’ padawan” and described as the man who “rescued Star Wars.” Filoni has been confirmed to direct the upcoming “climactic event feature” that will tie together The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka into a single gigantic crossover. Given the track record that Disney has had producing new Star Wars feature films in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker, there is a very real possibility that Filoni might direct the next theatrical Star Wars film.

Related: Ahsoka’s Age in Every Star Wars Show

As such, Filoni has been positioned as a potential guiding architect for the larger Star Wars franchise. His vision will potentially shape what Star Wars can be. As such, it’s worth unpacking what exactly that vision looks like. To its credit, Ahsoka is at least more coherent and more functional than other recent Star Wars shows like The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi or the most recent seasons of The Mandalorian. However, it becomes a bit tougher to figure out what it actually has to say.

To put it simply, Ahsoka is fixated on continuity. It is a show that is built around the audience’s assumed familiarity and attachment to the characters that it depicts and the story that it tells, to the point that Ahsoka itself is completely uninterested in either building or demonstrating emotional attachment. It presumes that the audience has shown up already invested in these characters, and that simply showing them on screen running through fetch quests will elicit an emotional response.

To be fair, this is not a problem unique to Ahsoka. A lot of modern pop culture is built around this template. “The Power of the Doctor”, the finale of the Chris Chibnall era of Doctor Who, is built around emotional reunions of actors who have not appeared on the show since before most of the target audience was born. The third season of Star Trek: Picard was populated by characters running around museums filled with continuity references. Ahsoka is not unique. It’s not especially egregious.

However, what makes Ahsoka’s nostalgia so interesting is the objects of its fixations. The Rise of Skywalker was a series of lazy nostalgic cameos from characters like Sheev Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) or Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), but at least those characters had appeared in films before. They were known to mass audiences. The assumption that their mere presence would be enough to trigger the audience’s nostalgia was incredibly cynical, but at least it assumed a mass audience.

In contrast, Ahsoka takes these emotional, thematic and narrative shortcuts with characters that are much more marginal. Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) was one of the lead characters in The Clone Wars. The droid Huyang (David Tennant) also appeared in that animated series. Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi), Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) all come from Rebels.

Of course, Thrawn is a refugee from a deeper sort of continuity. The character was effectively the star of the Heir to the Empire trilogy of novels, written by Timothy Zahn. Ahsoka herself identifies Thrawn as “Heir to the Empire” in Ahsoka. Published in 1991, the series became the cornerstone of the Expanded Universe, the supplementary Star Wars material published in the wake of Return of the Jedi. It is widely beloved among Star Wars fans, even today.

Related: Why Ahsoka Refused to Train The Mandalorian’s Grogu

The Expanded Universe was effectively discarded by Disney after their purchase of Lucasfilm. The company made the arguably quite reasonable decision to service general audiences ahead of hardcore fans fixated on a continuity that most moviegoers didn’t know existed. It gave the creative teams working under Disney complete creative freedom to tell their own stories and find their own approaches to these characters, without being beholden to continuity minutiae.

To a certain extent, Ahsoka feels like an attempt at restoration. The entire series is premised around an attempt to recover Bridger and Thrawn from a distant galaxy, bringing them back into Star Wars continuity. In the teaser to the fifth episode, as Ahsoka and Huyang journey between galaxies, the droid fills the silence with a story. That story begins with the classic Star Wars intro, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” They are, in essence, journeying back to Star Wars.

Later in that same episode, Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) considers this strange new galaxy. “This is a land of dreams and madness,” he muses to his apprentice (Ivanna Sakhno). “Children’s stories come to life.” He recalls being raised on tales of this strange other galaxy. “Stories of this galaxy are considered folktales,” he explains. “Some ancient past, long forgotten. With good reason.” In other words, they are “Legends”, to use the designation that Disney imposed on the Expanded Universe.

Watching Ahsoka, it can often feel like the primary purpose of the series has nothing to do with character, theme, or story. It is simply an excuse to bring these fringe elements of larger Star Wars into focus. Thrawn repeatedly monologues about the “exile” endured by his forces, which implies something decidedly more organized than what actually happened. Indeed, the dialogue only really makes sense if Thrawn is talking more broadly about being “exiled from continuity”, as it were.

Unfortunately, it’s necessary to stress that Ahsoka isn’t replacing anything. Despite the conspiratorial ravings of certain segments of the fandom, Disney is not removing the sequel trilogy from the canon. Obi-Wan Kenobi explains why Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) names her son “Ben” (Adam Driver). Skoll’s wrist device includes an easter egg pointing to Ben Solo. More broadly, the streaming shows are full of seeds that feed into the sequel trilogy, from clone laboratories to Imperial remnants.

Watching Ahsoka, it often feels like these continuity references are the entire point of the exercise. Hera Syndulla is a credited lead in Ahsoka, and ostensibly has her own arc while Ahsoka journeys to that other galaxy to confront Thrawn. However, barring a small appearance in the finale, Hera’s arc concludes when she confronts New Republic officials about the imminent threat posed by Thrawn’s return. These officials refuse to listen to her and prepare to sanction her.

However, the problem is resolved when C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) shows up with a message from Leia Organa that effectively strong arms the New Republic into letting Hera go. Of course, Leia doesn’t actually appear because Carrie Fisher passed away over half-a-decade ago. Still, it’s similar to the intervention of the computer-generated Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) at the end of the second season of The Mandalorian. It wraps up Hera’s story by making it about an older, absent character.

Related: Every Episode of Ahsoka, Ranked From Worst to Best

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with continuity references. They can be clever and subtle, illuminating character, narrative, and theme. It is possible to use an audience’s existing relationship with the source material to tell a powerful and compelling story. However, the problem arises when these continuity references exist in place of the more fundamental building blocks of storytelling, when the references exist at the center of the work as nothing more than references.

This is most obvious in how Ahsoka approaches Thrawn. The audience is repeatedly told that Thrawn is a tactical genius and a massive threat to the New Republic. This is, after all, how Zahn characterized him in the Heir to the Empire trilogy. However, Thrawn doesn’t do anything particularly clever over the three episodes of Ahsoka in which he appears. He certainly doesn’t do anything as clever as Palpatine’s Death Star ruse in Return of the Jedi. He just teams up with some witches.

The assumption appears to be that the audience is coming to Ahsoka already aware of and impressed by Thrawn. Ahsoka seems to position Thrawn as an existential threat to the New Republic, but never bothers to explain even the basics about him. Why is he fighting for the Empire? How did an alien rise so fast through the ranks of the Empire? Of course, these questions are answered in spin-off material, but Ahsoka seems to assume that the audience has arrived pre-invested.

This assumption undermines so much of the drama. Thrawn is seemingly positioned as the villain of the story, but the series never bothers to establish a meaningful conflict between him and Ahsoka. Ahsoka is looking for Bridger, and Thrawn is just looking for a way back to his home galaxy. The two are never truly at odds. Indeed, they only interact fleetingly in the finale. “I regret we haven’t met face to face, and perhaps now we never shall,” Thrawn boasts over radio. It’s far from satisfying.

It is, of course, possible to build tension between characters who never directly interact. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) never share the same physical space in Star Trek II: The Wrath of the Khan. However, their relationship is the center of the movie, and they interact over radio at several points. In contrast, Ahsoka doesn’t generate any comparable tension between its protagonist and its antagonist. It expects their presence alone to be enough.

This suggests Filoni’s grand vision of Star Wars. Watching Ahsoka, it seems like Star Wars is really just familiar Star Wars iconography thrown together into the same bucket of content. It is a packaging of things that the audience – and an increasingly small audience – already recognize as “Star Wars stuff.” Watching Ahsoka, it increasingly feels like Star Wars is a series of Pavlovian triggers designed to appeal to audience members who already care about the objects on screen.

Andor aside, it increasingly feels like Star Wars has given up on the idea of actually telling stories – of constructing narratives designed to make audiences care about or invest in these characters or their journeys. Watching Ahsoka, there is a sense that there is nothing there for audiences who haven’t arrived already emotionally invested in these pieces of intellectual property. It’s not drama, it’s just a diorama.

The Exorcist: Believer begins with two dogs wrestling. Like a lot of the movie, this is a direct reference to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, evoking a brief shot from the extended prologue that follows Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) during an excavation in Northern Iraq. However, while that shot comes early in The Exorcist, it is not the opening shot. As such, its position in Believer is more than just an affectionate and nostalgic homage. It is a statement of purpose.

Throughout Believer, there is a recurring emphasis on doubling and division. Just as the original movie opened overseas in Northern Iraq, Believer features a prologue in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) find themselves caught in the midst of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake. Sorenne is injured, and Victor finds himself forced to choose between saving his wife or their unborn child.

The bulk of the film’s plot unfolds thirteen years after this introductory sequence. Victor is living with his teenage daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett). Just as in the original Exorcist, a single-parent family finds itself besieged by demonic forces. However, the central conceit of Believer is something of a franchise escalation. This is not the story of a single case of demonic possession. Instead, it is the story of two young girls – and two families – caught in an unimaginable horror.

One afternoon, Angela goes off into the woods with her friend, Katherine (Olivia Marcum). The two girls try a conjuring ritual to communicate with Sorenne’s spirit. Inevitably, they open the door for something monstrous to sneak through. They disappear. Three days later, the two girls are found in a stable. In the days that follow, Angela and Katherine subject their families to a variety of terrors. As the title of the movie promises, this builds to an extended climactic exorcism sequence.

Even before anything explicitly supernatural happens, there is an anger permeating Believer. Most of the cast live in the same community, as neighbors or schoolmates. However, they are introduced antagonistically. Victor’s neighbor Ann (Ann Dowd) is first seen complaining about the fact that Victor and Angela haven’t brought in their bins off the road. Katherine’s father Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) announces his presence by angrily honking his horn at Victor outside their daughters’ school.

When Katherine and Angela go missing, Victor quickly finds himself at odds with Tony and Katherine’s mother Miranda (Jennifer Nettles). The two families seem to blame each other for the disappearance. When they post missing person fliers, each family posts for their own child. When Tony makes a statement to the press stating his hope that Katherine will be returned, his local minister, Don Revans (Raphael Sbarge), has to stress that the congregation are praying for both girls.

In this context, it feels pointed that Katherine is white and Angela is Black. As has been thoroughly documented, there is a double standard in how such cases are treated, with missing white children receiving disproportionate attention compared to children of color. Indeed, even after the children are returned, they initially seem to live separate and isolated lives. Director David Gordon Green offers some very effective shots of the pair staring at one another through the windows of hospital examination rooms.

As much as this dual possession plays as a self-aware riff on the tendency of sequels to go bigger – what is bigger than an exorcism? Two exorcisms! – it serves a clear thematic purpose. This becomes obvious as the movie enters its climax. As the characters assemble to perform the exorcism, the demon inside the girls taunts them. “One girl lives, one girl dies,” it teases. “You get to choose.” It’s a very deliberate echo of the choice that Victor made earlier in the movie, between his wife and child.

It also ties back into the movie’s central theme of division. Once again, Victor is thrown into conflict with Tony and Miranda. The demon is trying to divide them, to set them against one another. It is trying to sow conflict by suggesting that this is a competition and that there can only be one winner. It tries to turn them into the dogs from that opening scene, wrestling among themselves as evil takes root. As with so many effective horror movie premises, it’s an effective piece of social commentary.

The obvious point of comparison for Believer is the recent Halloween trilogy, another Blumhouse production. Like that Halloween trilogy, Believer seems to wipe all previous Exorcist sequels from continuity. Just as that Halloween trilogy brought back Jamie Lee Curtis to reprise the iconic role of Laurie Strode, Believer makes a big deal of being the first Exorcist sequel to convince Ellen Burstyn to reprise her Oscar-nominated role from the original film. Believer is even intended to launch a trilogy.

However, the connection runs deeper than that. Believer is directed and co-written by David Gordon Green, who was also the architect of that recent Halloween trilogy. Green’s frequent collaborator, and co-writer of that recent Halloween trilogy, Danny McBride has a story credit on the film. Even beyond the fact that these are both attempts to revive iconic 1970s horror franchises by going back to the root, there’s a surprising thematic overlap between the two.

Green’s Halloween trilogy, particularly Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, are fundamentally about how the small town of Haddenfield has been broken by the horrors inflicted by Michael Myers (Nick Castle). At their core, these films are about the decay of the social fabric. With only the slightest provocation, this seemingly idyllic community turns on itself and devolves into complete chaos. Myers is really just a catalyst that accelerates a more fundamental erosion of norms.

Halloween Kills has been read as a metaphor for Donald Trump’s America and retroactively framed in terms of the January 6th riots. As Curtis explained, Halloween Kills is about “community trauma, community rage and rage against the machine.” Even Halloween Ends is about how the community ostracizes Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) in the wake of a horrific tragedy. It is about a young man who is transformed into the boogeyman because his community can’t process its trauma.

Although Halloween Kills was shot before the global pandemic deepened these social divisions, these themes are certainly timely. The United States is highly polarized, even by the standards of a very polarized time. It can often feel like Americans no longer even share a common reality. These divisions cut across every facet of American life: politics, race relations, economics. Americans are living in what psychology professor Raymond Novaco describes as “a big anger incubator.”

Believer taps into this. In this sense, it is a film that is very much in conversation with the language and conventions of classic exorcism movies, most obviously codified by The Exorcist. As a rule, these movies are inherently conservative and they tend towards an often very narrow Christian perspective. They are fundamentally stories about how America has abandoned a particular religious outlook, and how the only way to confront true evil is through a return to those specific values.

In contrast, Believer is about how evil can only truly be vanquished by unity and cooperation. The exorcism ritual at the climax of the movie involves multiple faiths coming together. Ann represents Catholicism and Don represents Protestantism. They are joined by Dr. Beehibe (Okwui Okpokwasili), who practices “rootwork,” a spiritual tradition practiced by many of the slaves brought to America. Only together can they hope to cast out the demon.

When the Catholic Church refuses to officially sanction an exorcism due to the risk involved, Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla) sits outside in his car and prays for the two girls. Victor taps on the window. “Fight’s inside, padre,” he urges the priest. Maddox is convinced to join in the ritual, even though it ultimately costs him his life. Despite their initial antagonism and skepticism, the characters are able to stand up to the demonic entity by presenting a united front.

After all, the demon offers its own twisted sense of unity. As the assembled characters prepare for the ritual, Ann hooks Angela and Katherine up to a set of heartbeat monitors. Miranda notices the steady rhythms coming from the machines. “They’re in sync,” Ann explains. As much as the demon insists that the families must choose one child over another, the truth is that Angela and Katherine are ultimately the same. As Victor promises his daughter, “If you don’t make it, I don’t make it.”

Indeed, Believer argues that division is self-defeating. It is eventually revealed that Victor actually chose to save his wife Sorenne after the earthquake in Haiti, it just didn’t work out the way that he planned. Sorenne didn’t make it, but Angela did. At the movie’s climax, in a moment of weakness, Tony breaks and tries to bargain with the demon. “I choose Katherine!” he screams, to the horror of everybody in the room. Katherine doesn’t make it, but Angela does. In a way, Tony does choose.

In its own way, Believer is a timely piece of horror cinema, a dark allegory about the way in which the modern world seems designed to pit people against one another and force them to make monstrous choices that fundamentally compromise them. It’s a movie about the divisions at the heart of these sorts of communities, and how evil festers in those spaces. Like David Gordon Green’s Halloween, Believer uses an existing horror franchise to construct a parable for modern America.

With the release of The Creator in cinemas, it seems like a good opportunity to revisit director Gareth Edwards’ last film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

To be fair, the authorship of Rogue One is somewhat contested. These days, it is easy to think of the film as the work of Tony Gilroy. After all, Disney drafted Gilroy in to make serious changes in postproduction. While not as intensive as Ron Howard’s work on Solo, these reshoots still represented a significant overhaul. Since then, Gilroy’s ties to the film have been further cemented by his work on Andor, which stands as a towering accomplishment in the franchise in its own right.

Watching Rogue One, it is definitely recognizable as part of Tony Gilroy’s larger body of work. In particular, the character of Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) is an archetypal Gilroy antagonist, a mid-level bureaucrat who inevitably gets in over his head. There are definitely the seeds of Andor characters like Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) or Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) to be found in Krennic. Like Andor, Rogue One presents a gritty and fragmented view of revolution.

Edwards has been gracious in talking about his experiences on Rogue One, but it’s clear that he doesn’t want to spend the press tour for The Creator talking about it. “Look, the only thing I can say is I was incredibly lucky,” he told Variety. “The idea of someone as privileged as me in any way implying that it was anything other than the amazing experience that it was to some extent — like, I don’t have any empathy for that person, and I don’t want to be that person either.”

Still, allowing for this, recognizing Gilroy’s contributions to Rogue One should not come at the expense of ignoring how it was shaped by Edwards as a filmmaker. Filmmaking is a collaborative process. Movies are the work of countless artists working together towards a common purpose. The beauty of art is that it can exist in multiple contexts. It is possible to situate Rogue One in terms of Tony Gilroy’s larger career arc, but that doesn’t discount its place in Edwards’ filmography.

Indeed, part of the beauty of Rogue One is the way that Gilroy and Edwards’ sensibilities integrate well. Part of this is simply structural. Edwards is a remarkable director, but his films can often seem unstructured or disorganized. Perhaps owing to Gilroy’s extensive experience as a screenwriter, Rogue One has a clear three-act structure, with each act organized around an action and dramatic set-piece on a different planet: Jedda, Eadu and Scarif. This creates a sense of mounting tension.

Related: Why Ahsoka’s Thrawn Is Called Heir to the Empire in Star Wars

However, Gilroy and Edwards also sync up quite well in their themes. Both are storytellers preoccupied with scale. For Gilroy, this tends to be abstract and systematic. In his Bourne movies and in Michael Clayton, Gilroy tends to pit his heroes against large lumbering bureaucracies with deep pockets and little humanity. For Edwards, that scale is more literal. His earlier films, Monsters and Godzilla, focused on human characters dwarfed by threats beyond their frame of reference.

Edwards’ heroes are typically presented with calamities so large that they are functionally powerless against them. Monsters originated with a simple question. “What if someone made a monster movie set years after most other monster movies end?” he recalls thinking. “When people aren’t running and screaming, but life is just going on.” There is a sense of acceptance and cosmic inevitability to Edwards’ first three films.

Edwards’ films are typically about characters presented with an enormous and existential threat to their way of life, but with no real option except to get on with getting on. Monsters and Godzilla are both about human characters just trying to get home as gigantic monsters carve a path of destruction. Even The Creator takes place in a world where artificial intelligence is so ordinary as to be mundane, and a global war has already been raging for more than half-a-decade.

The Creator is really the first of Edwards’ films to have an archetypal Hollywood protagonist, a character who can meaningfully save the world. Even Rogue One is about a bunch of characters who die providing the plot device that spurs the original Star Wars, placing them several degrees of separation from the destruction of the Death Star. Edwards’ films typically take place in worlds where the best that characters can hope to do when confronted with some new atrocity is to survive.

In this sense, Edwards is a quintessentially millennial filmmaker. His films speak to a generation of movie-goers who have endured a series of seemingly world-ending calamities from the financial crash to climate change to the pandemic and have been presented with no better option than to simply continue about their business. Indeed, Owen Gleiberman noted that Rogue One’s tale of a noble-but-doomed band of resistance fighters had a peculiar resonance after Trump’s election.

However, stepping outside of the specifical cultural context of Edwards’ work, few working directors have as profound an understanding of size and mass. To put it simply, Edwards knows how to make things look big. In an industry where blockbusters are constantly escalating in stakes and budget, that is a very useful skill. Critics and fans often talk about how “big” a given movie looks or feels, but Edwards’ blockbusters tend to feel bigger than most.

Related: Starfield Is the Combination of Star Wars and Star Trek I’ve Always Wanted

This is an approach that lends itself to Star Wars. After all, Star Wars helped to codify the modern blockbuster. It has been described, not unreasonably, as “modern-day American mythology.” The original Star Wars was the highest-grossing movie of all-time until Titanic. The movie’s characters and dialogue has imprinted itself upon pop culture, to the point that people who have never seen a Star Wars movie can recognize Darth Vader (David Prowse, James Earl Jones) or know about “the Force.”

This sense of magnitude was reflected within the narrative itself. The original Star Wars promised its audience an entire galaxy of adventure, with a cantina populated by aliens who could each have their own back story (and most of whom did). There were references to countless off-screen characters and events. There was the suggestion of a complex shared history. In the original Star Wars, that galaxy far, far away seemed impossibly vast and incredibly deep.

Of course, familiarity has numbed that. Particularly in recent years, the Star Wars universe has started to feel much smaller. It is largely populated by characters and organizations that the audience already recognized. The galaxy far, far away seems to consist of maybe seventy named characters who all move in the same circles and constantly cross paths with one another. Movies like Solo seem to exist largely so the audience can point at things that they recognize.

The greatest accomplishment of Rogue One is that it manages to take a host of familiar Star Wars iconography and imbue it with a sense of scale. On paper, the idea of a movie built around the theft of the Death Star plans feels like the height of fan-service, and the movie’s third act set piece showcasing Darth Vader (Spencer Wilding, James Earl Jones) is certainly that. However, it is to Edwards’ credit that he manages to take that premise and make it feel exciting and new.

After all, the Death Star is one of the most familiar images in the entire Star Wars franchise. The original Star Wars is built around it, and the idea was apparently so appealing to the Empire that they doubled down on it for Return of the Jedi. The Death Star trench run is a fixture of Star Wars video games, and the superweapon even made a short cameo towards the end of Revenge of the Sith. It is a challenge to take something so familiar and make it seem threatening.

After decades of over-exposure, Rogue One makes the Death Star seem truly alien. In the original Star Wars, the characters mistake the Death Star for a moon. Rogue One films it as such. The Death Star casts a long shadow over the surface of Jedda, where it blocks the sun to create a solar eclipse. On Scarif, it hangs in the bright blue sky like a moon visible behind clouds. On the bridge of Governor Tarkin’s (Guy Henry, Peter Cushing) Star Destroyer, the Death Star takes up the entire viewport.

Edwards is very good at using the audience’s sense of special awareness to convey this scale, often placing familiar objects next to one another to create a sense of relative size. In the sequence where he introduces the Death Star, he begins by focusing on a TIE Fighter, an object that is relatively small. That Fighter is then dwarfed by a Star Destroyer. The Star Destroyer is then dwarfed by the Death Star. Even among these gigantic things, there is a clear order of magnitude.

Edwards uses the cinematic language of Star Wars to convey this enormity. The first Star Wars opens with a camera tilt downwards to reveal a planet and a moon. In Rogue One, Edwards’ repeatedly employs the oppose technique, tilting upwards. He starts with a wide shot, such as Cassian (Diego Luna) and Jynn (Felicity Jones) at Jedda, establishing scale. He then tilts up, as if the frame cannot capture the enormity of the image. Above them, a city carved in rock. Above it, a Star Destroyer.

Some of Edwards’ skill might be down to his professional background. Before becoming a director, Edwards worked as a special effects engineer. He is famously hands-on with his crews, personally operating the camera on The Creator. As a result, there is a tactility to his filmmaking that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries. Edwards understands how to use both visual effects and framing in harmony for maximal impact.

Rogue One was always going to be a challenge for Star Wars. It was the first live action film outside the “Skywalker” Saga and the first time that two Star Wars films had been be released in consecutive years. There was a very real possibility that Rogue One could devalue the brand, reduce Star Wars from an American mythology to just another franchise. This is arguably what eventually happened with Solo, perhaps the first Star Wars live action film not to feel like an event.

It’s to Edwards’ credit that Rogue One doesn’t make Star Wars feel smaller. If anything, it makes it seem larger than it ever did before.

If you’re looking for more of Darren’s thoughts on film, check out his recent In the Frame on how Edwards’ The Creator is an allegory for Vietnam War films, and why he’s got mixed feelings about the result.

Apocalypse Now is obviously a huge influence on Gareth Edwards, the director and co-writer of The Creator.

Edwards included Apocalypse Now on his ballot for the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, alongside Baraka. In interviews, Edwards has talked about how – “stylistically,” at least – Apocalypse Now is “one of the greatest films ever made.” He has been very candid about how Apocalypse Now informs his own filmmaking, conceding, “I’m always trying to get a bit of Apocalypse Now into anything I do.” Indeed, that influence is very obvious just looking at the films themselves.

Edwards’ first feature, Monsters, opens with night vision footage of American soldiers psyching themselves up by chanting “Ride of the Valkyries,” an allusion to one of the most famous and iconic scenes from Apocalypse Now. While Monsters is a science fiction film set largely in Mexico, it owes a lot to Apocalypse Now, most obviously with its depictions of decaying American ordinance and a trip up river by boat. Roger Ebert even likened Monsters to Apocalypse Now in his review.

While Edwards would follow Monsters with two big franchise films, Godzilla and Rogue One, that influence would return on The Creator, his most recent project and his first since Monsters not to be based on existing intellectual property. The bulk of the film was shot on location in Thailand, and takes place in the fictional futuristic “Republic of New Asia”, a geopolitical entity that is harboring rogue artificial intelligence from the American government.

The idea for The Creator came to Edwards while visiting the production of Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island in Vietnam. He looked at the landscapes, imagining science fiction layered over it. “So I just go over, just for a day, and I end up staying a week and traveling all up and down Vietnam with him and seeing imagery that I associate with, obviously, the Vietnam War and stuff, but through a sort of science fiction lens, because I had this movie in my head,” ” he explained. “And I’d picture that imagery, and after a while, it was like watching Apocalypse Now, but set in the Blade Runner universe.”

The Creator is saturated with imagery pulled directly from the Vietnam War. The movie is set between 2065 and 2070. Those dates mark the centenary of the arrival of the first American combat troops in Vietnam and the spread of the war to Cambodia. Much of the plot focuses on N.O.M.A.D., an orbital platform allowing the American military to bomb artificial intelligence strongholds in other nations, recalling America’s bombing of Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War.

The film also draws heavily from Vietnam War movies. After all, this is how Edwards would have experienced the conflict. Not only was he born in 1975, two years after the Paris Peace Accords, he is also British. As such, the cinematic language of The Creator evokes movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon. A raid on a peaceful village recalls that “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence, and Allison Janney’s Colonel Howell suggests Tom Berenger’s Staff Sergeant Barnes, down to the facial scars.

Much has been made of the perceived timeliness of The Creator, a movie about the threat of artificial intelligence that is releasing in the midst of a very public debate about the development of that technology. Edwards acknowledges that the film is timelier than he could have anticipated. “When I started writing this in 2018,” he stated, “AI was up there with flying on the moon. Something you would see in your lifetime? Probably not.”

As such, The Creator isn’t really about artificial intelligence. It is using artificial intelligence as a metaphor. “It was used as a device, as people who are different to us, like ‘the other,’ and exploring that idea a little bit,” Edwards remarked of his vision of the film. “In terms of where AI is going, the problem … you [read this interview] in a year or even six months, you’re going to look an idiot for trying to predict AI.”

As such, The Creator is not just an allegory for the Vietnam War, it explores how the West talks about the Vietnam War. In particular, how the American gaze tends to dehumanize the Vietnamese. “The idea was that the Vietnamese, they weren’t really people,” explains historian Nick Turse, recounting how soldiers were encouraged to use racial slurs. “Anything to take away their humanity, to dehumanize them and make it easy to see any Vietnamese — all Vietnamese — as the enemy.”

This has been a strong criticism of Vietnam War movies. Even those movies that criticized the conflict or the actions of American soldiers still tended to at best ignore and at worst caricature the Vietnamese experience. “It was an antiwar movie about the war in Vietnam, but the movie was about Americans,” noted author Viet Thanh Nguyen of Apocalypse Now. “The Vietnamese were silent and erased.” It is still a point of contention over movies like Da 5 Bloods.

To his credit, Edwards has consistently engaged with this subtext of the movies that he loves. Even in Monsters, there is a sense that the film is critiquing its two American tourists, Andrew (Scoot McNairy) and Samantha (Whitney Able), who wander through a disaster zone. Andrew snaps photos of dead children that he can sell to the American press. Samantha is a socialite looking to escape her upcoming engagement. They are both privileged tourists in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

Indeed, some aspects of Monsters feel even more pointed today, such as the discovery that the United States has built a giant wall on its southern border to keep the “monsters” out. “Yeah, it’s like we’re imprisoning ourselves,” Samantha muses at one point. Staring out at the wall from the top of some ruins, Andrew observes, “You know, it’s different looking at America from the outside.” It is a little clumsy and naïve, but Monsters is a film about Western narcissism.

That carries over to The Creator. Throughout the film, there’s an emphasis on how human beings refuse to think of their enemies as living creatures. “They’re not people!” Joshua (John David Washington) insists. “They’re not real!” When he shoots one through the chest, he insists that he didn’t kill it. “It’s off,” he explains. “It turned it off. Like the TV.” Even as the robots scream and beg, Joshua refuses to see them as anything other than monsters. “They don’t feel shit,” he explains of their agony. “It’s just programming.”

The Creator makes the point that the artificial intelligences pose no threat to humanity. The nuclear bomb that destroyed Los Angeles, sparking the war, was “a coding error” by humans, recalling the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. “Do you know what will happen to the West if the AI win this war?” asks Harun (Ken Watanabe). He answers his own rhetorical question, “Nothing. We just want to live in peace.” The war is one of Western expansion, the artificial intelligences a convenient target. There is no “domino theory.”

Indeed, one of the central recurring themes of The Creator is the question of what happens if these human characters start to see these entities as people. Joshua is introduced working undercover, having seduced machine sympathizer Maya (Gemma Chan), itself a version of the familiar story of the American soldier who falls in love with a Vietnamese woman. “Do not go native on me,” advises Joshua’s supervisor, Drew (Sturgill Simpson), rendering the imperialist subtext as text.

Throughout the movie, there’s an emphasis on human beings “donating [their] likeness,” effectively allowing robots to wear copies of their faces. This makes it harder to see them as objects. When Joshua is assigned to track down an advanced artificial intelligence that he comes to call “Alfie” (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), General Andrews (Ralph Ineson) pointedly insists on calling it “the Weapon.” Joshua cannot see Alfie that way. “It’s a kid,” he insists. He sees Alfie as a person.

Of course, this is a classic science fiction trope, one that informs movies as diverse as District 9 or Starship Troopers. It informs episodes of television like “Men Against Fire” from Black Mirror or “The Devil in the Dark” from Star Trek. This theme of othering and oppression has been a key metaphor in stories about robots going back to R.U.R.. However, The Creator stands out for taking this metaphor and applying it directly to not only the Vietnam War, but also cinematic depictions of that conflict.

To be fair, as with Monsters, there is a certain clumsiness to The Creator. As much as these are films about how myopic Western perspectives can be in how they view the outside world, there is a sense that both films are still trapped within that worldview. Monsters is aware of how self-centered Samantha is and how predatory Andrew is, but it is still ultimately their story. The pair come together through their shared experience. Their journey is still something that enriches them.

As much as The Creator feels like a commentary on the way that decades of Vietnam War movies have dehumanized the Vietnamese, it also marginalizes the perspective of its South East Asian characters. The film doesn’t give any focus to the politics or the inhabitants of “the Republic of New Asia.” Outside of a few brief snippets of interactions that suggest a bond forged in humanism, there is no exploration of what this alliance means in cultural or political terms.

Although the robots appear to practice a sort of Buddhism, there is no exploration of or connection to the culture from which Buddhism emerged. It feels like an aesthetic that the film applies to these creatures, without any real consideration of how it might meaningfully apply to them. The Creator is an ambitious film about the dehumanizing effect of the Western gaze, specifically as applied to South East Asia. However, even while critiquing it, the film cannot break free of it.