We live in a entertainment landscape shaped by sequels, spin offs, and reboots. There are so many Star Wars, Marvel and D.C. variations that what made the original tales so inspiring, and fun is lost amid the merchandising and marketing opportunities. As someone who used purchase Marvel comics back when they were 12 cent and saw the first ‘Star Wars’ in a Times Square theater, it still stuns me to realize that these childhood and teenage fictions have become the backbones of billion-dollar empires and that there are grown folks who’ve dedicated much of their lives in thrall to them. Often, I imagine George Lucas in a small California room typing the words “Luke Skywalker” on white bond paper or Stan Lee filling in the thought bubbles on a Jack Kirby drawing in a cluttered midtown Manhattan office and how those fleeting moments of corny creativity have traveled from an analog reality to our digital world.
The exasperating thing about the current storytelling environment is that the financiers of content and a legion of market driven artists now toil to produce an unending stream of futuristic, fantastical and futile knockoffs of a) ‘Star Wars’ b) the Marvel Universe c) D.C. characters d) ‘Lord of the Rings’ e) ‘Game of Thrones.’ Lucas, Lee, Kirby, Tolkien, Martin etc were pretty clear that they were making pulp fiction, content to be consumed rapidly (and discarded quickly) by children and adults looking to be lifted, albeit briefly, out of everyday life. That they are now treated like Biblical texts of great importance suggest our collective search for new Gods where traditional religion has failed us.
Flipping through Netflix, Amazon or the shelf of a bookstore is to sift through official and unofficial spinoffs that are laughably derivative and so removed from the original source that only exist to possibly sell toys or be McDonald’s tie ins. Even worse many of these projects carry an air of unnecessary self-importance. To miss one, they suggest, is to miss a key piece in a larger story when they only truly offer distraction and are so inflated, they leave an aftertaste of boredom.
(Of all the recent spinoffs I thought ‘Andor’ on Netflix tried, fairly successfully to crack open the tied Star Wars play book but, like most Netflix series, it felt at two episodes too long.)
If you’re gonna watch inflated storytelling at least let be buy folks who actually make cinema. Critics have been more cold than warm on ‘Babylon’ and ‘Bardo’ by, respectively, Damien Chazelle and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, former Oscar winning directors who have new films on Netflix after brief theatrical runs. I don’t think either of their new films matches their previous work for narrative coherence. But they are masters at staging, blocking, and shooting extravagant scenes with scores of extras that captivate the eye and are products of their imagination, not a production line. I’ve found both very different personal films refreshing in their ambition and beautiful in their execution (when they work) and respite from spaceships, CGI villains and visual cliches of the Star Wars-meets-Game of Thrones matrix.