Celestial Depths

I just played through all of the Dragon Age games for the first time ever. Please walk with me through my joys and disappointments, I have no one else to talk to about this.

(This is coming from the point of view of someone who started playing these games with no idea of what to expect other than dragons, and who has not yet delved into the discourse, fandom lore, or critical reception surrounding these games; I assume all of this has already been picked clean by longtime fans of these games.)

So the Dragon Age series currently consists of four games released over 15 years. Each installment has its own visual style, narrative perspective, and player-customized protagonist, yet they are all directly linked to one another by a linear plot and gameplay elements. There's a clear family resemblance between the first three games, as they all rely on certain aesthetic, narrative, and technical principles that give the Dragon Age series its essence, yet the fourth and latest installment is so different in almost every way that I was left scratching my head and wondering what on earth possessed the creative team to steer the series so off course that they're practically on dry land.

What precisely are the principles that define the first three games? I'm sure somebody somewhere has a ready list, but here is the impression I gathered during my playthrough of the series.

The first DA game sets up the world, the tone, the themes, and gameplay standards of the series: this is a character-driven, strategy-heavy action-adventure game set in a high fantasy world with an intricate lore. As far as gameplay goes, one of the main goals is to make good strategic decisions about the team you command, the gear you wear, the inventory you carry, and the skills you have at hand to defeat your foes in combat – but the game is also as much about making moral choices, choosing alignments, and nurturing relationships, all of which may drastically affect the course of the story and the state of the world the characters live in.

Both aspects of the gameplay lend the game a sense of gravity. What you choose to do on any given moment – whether that's choosing the right kind of weapon to equip on a mission, attempting to sweet-talk your favorite companion, or persuading an influential ally – has a weight to it. You are constantly aware of the possible consequences of your actions, of how easily they can hurt or benefit you or the rest of the characters in this world. All of this compliments the themes of the game: power, justice, responsibility, and the pursuit of peace and balance in a world inhabited by factions whose interests are directly at odds with one another.

The graphics of Dragon Age: Origins may be dated, as well as many of its politics, but the writing, the gameplay mechanics, and the voice acting were so strong that I had an absolute blast playing it. My Warden was a rogue with a Dalish elf background, and I decided to play her as a morally grey character who made the most chaotic choices, just because I didn't feel like being a classic hero. She romanced Zevran (who won me over with his thinly veiled trauma and promise of erotic massage), bullied Alistair for no reason, kept supporting all of Morrigan's rights and wrongs no matter what, and wriggled out of heroic self-sacrifice by convincing Alistair to make what I assumed would be something akin to a hellspawn with Morrigan (mostly because I thought it would be hilarious). What a fun time!

I jumped straight into Dragon Age II after completing the first game and its additions, and I liked it even more than the first one. Visually, DA II is drastically different from its predecessor, opting for a stylized look over the first game's what-passes-as-realism, and the single-location setting is also a change of pace, but the themes and basic gameplay mechanics are very much in keeping with DA:O. In my opinion, this is a great direction for a sequel, as it allowed the game to keep what really worked about the first game without feeling like a repeat of it. This time, you're making difficult decisions and building ties in a city (and its vicinity) in turmoil, yet somehow the stakes feel even higher than they did in the first game, in which you are attempting to stop an apocalyptic event that threatens an entire country. This game develops the politics even further and throws you in the middle of messy societal and personal conflicts that cannot be resolved in everybody's favor no matter what you do. Again, the theme of the game is power – who gets to wield it, and who gets to restrict it – as well as the balance between liberty and order. These questions are embodied by both the different groups struggling over the city of Kirkwall as well as the player character's companions, who all have distinct moral and political standpoints.

My lady Hawke was a fetching warrior with a solid moral compass. I decided to play her as someone who would always swing her huge sword in defense of the weak and the downtrodden, but would also attempt to talk things out before reaching for her weapon. Naturally, she defended the mages at every turn because she would not stand for enslavement nor subjugation, and she romanced Anders, because of course she did. I immensely enjoyed the moral complexity of this game, and I look forward to playing it again one day as a different kind of Hawke just out of curiosity.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is spiritually closer to the first game in terms of its realistic visual style, grand scale, and vast world, though the themes and conflicts in it are directly linked to the mage-templar conflict that was so central to the second game. The gameplay has some new features (I can jump???) but the basic structure remains the same. As usual, the game is about power, but this time the focus is on the power of institutions, specifically religious ones. Your character accidentally becomes important at work by receiving a strange mystical power that many people believe marks you as the chosen of the divine, and the game allows you to choose several different way to handle the political and religious influence that has been thrust upon you. And the weight of the choices you've made in the previous games really come into play as you get to include your own Hawke in the story in a pretty major role as well as deal with the consequences of certain actions you may have taken in the first game. It felt surprising meaningful and rewarding for me to see a reunion between Morrigan, Alistair, and their weird child, especially knowing that this interaction, as brief as it was, only happened because of several specific choices I made way back in the first game.

I made my Inquisitor an elven mage, which was incidentally the best choice as many of the story's threads are specifically about elven history and the position of mages in different countries. I decided that she would be a reluctant hero who wants to better the world but does not wish to see herself sitting on a throne, that she would align herself with the common people before anyone else, that she would always be true to her elvish roots, and that she would value honesty, simple life, and freedom. I made the unfortunate choice of romancing Blackwall specifically because I was charmed by his honesty (🤡) and humbleness, and ended up breaking up with him after the trial, with Cullen becoming my character's rebound and her husband later in the story.

As stupid as I felt for falling for Blackwall's lies, I kinda liked the messy drama my Inquisitor's love life became, because I love a good sting in the heart. That's why I naturally had to go back to an earlier save and replay the rest of the game with Solas as my girl's lover just to experience the sensation of being bamboozled by him with the added heartbreak of having been in love with him. Absolutely worth the time and effort!

Overall, I found DA:I to be a grand, larger-than-life kind of game that seemed to elevate what was great about the first two games and rewarded the player's investment in the series by showing that choices you made in previously do matter. The only downside of the game is that Varrick, the sexiest man in Thedas, is not a romanceable character, because I wanted to ride that dwarf like a goddamn miniature pony.

Having enjoyed the three previous games so much, I was very excited to start Dragon Age: Veilguard, only to be completely let down by it. I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed with a piece of media that I felt almost heartbroken. My problem isn't that I thought that the game was simply bad (I thought it was okay, when taken out of the context of the rest of the series); my problem is that it ignores or changes so many of the basic building blocks of the series that it doesn't feel like a Dragon Age game at all. The visual style, the tone, the basic gameplay, the themes, and the lack of significance of past choices – none of these aspects are in keeping with the previous games, and what we are getting instead isn't good enough to justify the change.

Visually, the game looks like a Dreamworks movie. The characters are stylized to have large heads that make them look childlike, which is a design choice often used in children's media. They have expressive, cartoonish faces and whimsical outfits. Even the darkspawn and the risen dead look cute and whimsical. The game does not look badly designed in of itself, and there's nothing wrong with a stylized look in general – DA II has a stylized look, too – but the problem lies in the mood these designs evoke, and how inconsistent it is with the tone established in the previous games. These characters do not seem like they live in a grounded, gritty world where real people live and die as a consequence of your actions; they look like they live inside a funhouse mirror. This world looks wacky and bright and bubbly, and it creates such a tone problem not only between this games and the previous ones, but also between the game's look and its plot.

That wacky tone is also present in the writing and the acting. Every character who isn't from a previous game talks in a wildly modern tone using trendy contemporary vocabulary, and the actors are voicing their characters like they're members of the family Madrigal. I do not blame the voice actors for this; I blame whoever made the creative decision to direct them to perform in this cartoonish manner. The humor in the game is also quite childish and frankly dumb. Every moment that might be serious and therefore meaningful is undercut by the kind of lame joke you might expect to see in a second-tier MCU movie.

The humor isn't the only problem with the writing, either. The previous games had such great dialogue, but in this game the characters seem to be either yapping on without saying anything of substance, repeating the same talking points over and over again, or having one of those over-stated conversations where the characters just flat out spell out the lesson of this week's episode, as if the writers were expecting the players to be far too dumb to ponder things on their own or work things out by themselves. And neither the main plot nor the companion plots were very interesting to begin with. The characters lacked depth and complexity, and their personalities seemed to be parsed together out of two personality traits and a favorite food. Again, it was like this was written for children, by somebody who underestimates children. The previous games were not devoid of silly humor (let's not forget Shale, my pigeon-hating golem diva, for example) but the comedy was dispensed mindfully and not in a way that undermined the gravitas of key plot moments.

The only parts in the game that seemed to have both substance and a thematic connection to the previous games were the parts involving Solas. I found myself wading through the game with great reluctance only to enjoy the few morsels of content that felt like the Dragon Age I'd come to expect. That shouldn't happen. I should have learned to become as invested in the stories of Rook and their companions as I had in the previous games' protagonists. Instead, I found it impossible to care about any of them.

As much as I gripe about the aesthetics and the lackluster writing, my biggest disappointment had to be the way the world felt dumbed down. The intricate politics of Thedas and the way it affected both the everyday lives of individuals and the grand scheme of things was the meat of the story in all three previous games. In Veilguard, politics barely seem to matter. All the companions may come from different walks of life, but that only seems to mean as much as belonging to a high school clique. Individually, the characters do reflect on the connections they've inherited and formed, but it's all centered around the individual and the shaping of one's identity. The companions do address their differences, but it's done in a weightless, humorous way that lays no ground for meaningful exchange of ideas.

The gameplay also paled in comparison to the previous games. I might be just a bad player, but most of the time during combat I had to resort to dodging upon dodging and mindless button-smashing instead of winning by carefully strategizing, which had made the first three games very enjoyable. Even more so, I was disappointed by how all but a few choices made in the previous games didn't carry over to this game. I get it that writing the game while being mindful of dozens of different paths the player may have taken in previous games is more laborious a task with every new game, and that assuming that the player has played the previous games might alienate new players, yet it still feels dismissive of the journey a lot of the players have had with this series to ignore the past altogether. The game is already a direct sequel, so why pretend that the past doesn't matter?

All these grievances I had can be summed up in one question: who is this game for? If it's aimed at players who played and enjoyed the previous games, why change almost everything in this one? If it's for new players, why bother tethering it to a plot carried over from a previous game? Why make this a Dragon Age game at all? Why the juvenile humor, visual style, and writing when the game is rated PEGI 18? Was this game made by people who just really hated the Dragon Age games? Who asked for this?

I keep thinking whether I would have enjoyed the game if it had been its own thing unrelated to Dragon Age, or at the very least a spin-off set in a distant past, the distant future, or a distant continent that would justify it being so wildly different. Maybe I would have? Apart from the grave inconsistencies in tone, it's not horrible out of context. Scrap away the threads that tie it to the previous Dragon Age games and you've got yourself a fun, unserious fantasy-scifi adventure game with puzzles. But I just can't help being frustrated with the wasted opportunity here. Even if the series was continued and the next game was a return to form, it would still upset me that this game is now a part of the canon. It upsets me that that the Solas story was not concluded in a better game. It upsets me that all this time, money, and effort was poured into such a misguided endeavor instead of a project that understood the essence of the previous games.

(spoilers for Poor Things)

I stumbled on a discussion on whether Bella Baxter from the movie Poor Things (2023) is a representation of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope coined by video essayist Pop Culture Detective, who defines it as a mostly fantasy and sci-fi adjacent trope of a regular human man falling in love with a beautiful, otherworldly woman who, through some plot quirk or another, has no knowledge of social norms and no sexual or romantic past. Even though he is brutally average, he is able to win her love simply because he is the first (human) man she connects with and thus everything that's basic about him is impressive to her. Some examples of the trope given by Pop Culture Detective in his video essay are Leeloo from Fifth Element (the physically grown yet mentally child-like alien creature who falls in love with a taxi driver in a wifebeater) and Madison from Splash (a clothes-aversive mermaid who thinks that Tom Hanks is the most enchanting man in the world). I love Pop Culture Detective's work, and the Born Sexy Yesterday video essay was a cultural reset in my personal history. I saw the video when it premiered six years ago, but it has never fully left my mind, so of course I immediately thought of it when I saw Poor Things a couple of weeks ago. The movie certainly touches on the same themes that the Born Sexy Yesterday is made of. However, I think that the movie is an intentional subversion and a satire of the trope rather than a sincere execution of it.

The main character of the movie Bella Baxter starts out as a grotesquely literal version of the trope, as she is literally a newborn in the shape of a conventionally attractive woman who is being actively shielded from the influence of the outside world. She has the brain of a baby salvaged from the fresh corpse of a deceased pregnant woman, planted inside the skull of the reanimated body of the aforementioned woman as an experiment done by the unorthodox doctor Godwin Baxter. He keeps her locked inside his house and controls every aspect of her life, so when he invites the young doctor Max McCandles to join his research, McCandles is served what is essentially the perfect Born Sexy Yesterday experience: an exclusive access to a beautiful and naive young woman who is in a prime position of being groomed into whatever her keepers wish her to become.

Or so they would think.

A sincere Born Sexy Yesterday would be fully fascinated by this power dynamic and probably leave her here to be romanced by McCandles for the rest of the film. The audience would be expected to assume McCandles's perspective and indulge in the fantasy of falling in love with the untainted woman who has neither the life experience nor the critical thinking skills needed to question him.

But, fortunately, the movie doesn't remain here. After the first act, the movie switches its point of view from McCandles to Bella and starts putting her experiences to the forefront. She starts developing interests that absolutely do not align with the wants and needs of the men around her, and she begins to learn things that clash with the essence of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope. Soon, she has grown into a headstrong, independent, sexually experienced, intellectually curious woman who had zero interest in entertaining the whims of men and who intends to live fully for herself and herself alone: an absolute antithesis of the clueless and subservient blank slate the trope would require her to be. My reading of the film is that it's an intentional satire and an autopsy of the BSY trope and the gender politics that gave birth to it. It criticizes the men who entertain fantasies like it by making them look like absolute losers, urging us to ponder on what the hell is wrong with these creeps who see nothing wrong with drooling over a woman who is mentally a toddler instead of their intellectual equal.

The movie also reads as a critique of how women are socialized into a patriarchy. Godwin treats Bella just like a possession of his. Her body and her life are completely under his control from the moment she is "born" (another act in which neither Bella nor the woman she was born from had any say in), which isn't dissimilar to how a lot of fathers view their daughters. He wishes to keep her under constant supervision until the end of her life, until she protests and gets him to change his mind. When he asks McCandles to marry her, the two men treat the proposed marriage as a contract between the two of them rather than as a contract between McCandles and Bella herself. Again, this isn't too different to what marriage between men and women has meant throughout history.

McCandles is romantically interested in Bella even though he is fully aware of the fact that she is mentally a child. He seems to be looking forward to starting a sexual relationship with her after they are wed, as if the seal of marriage would make the intellectual disparity between them any less iffy. This bears resemblance to the way men in the real world prey on young girls with little to no sexual experience and whose brains are not fully developed because they're easier to control than grown women. I don't think that McCandles's hypocrisy is lost on the film. He agrees to marry Bella almost in the same breath as expressing his desire to keep her safe from other men, as if his desire to bed a person who is intellectually at the level of a five-year-old was any better than theirs.

When Bella chooses to leave Godwin's house to explore the world, the two men immediately replace her with a new experiment, showing that they were never truly interested in her as a person. They wanted the eternal baby, the thing that they can cage and control, and not the person who can think and learn and disagree with them. This exemplifies how disposable women are when they no longer serve their limited purpose in a patriarchy, and how replaceable people are when they are primarily viewed as bodies to be used. (Sidenote: I do think that Godwin and McCandles eventually learn to appreciate Bella for the person she is and that they both grow to be better people by the end of the film, but I still attest that these two are total creeps at least by this point of the movie.)

And then there's the supreme loser of the movie: the sleazy lawyer Wedderburn, who slithers into Bella's life and convinces her to run away with him. He is the darkest example of the kind of person who is drawn to inexperienced women like the ones represented in BSY movies - a predator who finds pleasure in the prospect of getting to corrupt and consume an innocent. He intends to take advantage of Bella and abandon her once he's gotten his fill only to find himself choking on his prey, who turns out not to be the malleable, naive creature he thought her to be.

This is the point where I think the movie goes from simply critiquing the BSY trope and everything it represents to successfully subverting it. The characters who embody the BSY trope don't really evolve. The movies they appear in are not really interested in their inner worlds and individual experiences beyond whatever serves the interests of the male protagonists. These characters are projections of male fantasies, so there really isn't a way for them to exist without centering men. This is not the case with Bella, who quickly grows into her own woman who is only tangentially interested in the men around her.

The bright side of Bella's condition is that she isn't just unaware of the ways of the world, but that she's also unaffected by the years of patriarchal conditioning that most normal women are burdened with. She literally has no shame, no internalized misogyny, no history of crushing blows to her sense of self-worth, and no looming knowledge of societal norms society. She has skipped the part in life where she is constantly bombarded with demands to make herself smaller and more palatable, to hate herself, to think of her body and the way it finds pleasure as something disgusting and abnormal, to treat other women as competition, and to think of herself as so much less important than men that she must pursue their validation beyond all else. Because of this blessed defect, she is free in a very rare way.

Wedderburn absolutely cannot handle that. When Bella first gets to know him, he paints a flattering picture of himself as a proud social deviant who gleefully eschews the rules of polite society. However, when faced with the actually deviant Bella, who flatly refuses to obey and center him, Wedderburn is revealed to be a phony. He is not a genuine libertine. He does not want to live in a truly free world with a free spirit like Bella, because he is a pathetic, insecure little man who only likes women in scenarios where the power balance is stacked against them. In my opinion, this is a direct shot fired at the BSY trope and its average enjoyers: if your ideal woman is someone who is many steps behind you in terms of mental capacity and experience, you are quite pitiful and would not stand a chance in an equal playing field.

It's hilarious how Wedderburn loses his mind when Bella starts exhibiting the kind of behavior he himself has proudly displayed earlier in the film: having multiple sexual partners, keeping sex and feelings separate, not falling in love with him or treating him like he's special, dropping him once she's had enough of him, and generally living life in an unconventional way. Again, the movie is pointing out the hypocrisy in men who fetishize inexperienced women while bragging about their own sexual conquests.

The part in the movie where Bella becomes a sex worker delivers the final blow to whatever is left of the BSY trope in her story, because the trope relies on sexual exclusivity and the fetishization of virginity. By having many partners and gaining lots of sexual experience out of her own free will, Bella stops fitting the ideal of the untouched woman who can be deflowered and exclusively possessed by the male protagonist. Also, through the conversations between Bella and the other sex workers, the movie finds another way to address the politics behind certain men's sexual fantasies of women - such as pointing out that some men enjoy sex with women more the less the women themselves enjoy it. It's a stray observation that the movie doesn't get deep into, but it has its place in the tapestry of the general theme of what desire reveals about people.

Finally, there's Alfie, who gives Bella (and us) an idea of the kind of life Bella's "mother" lived - as well as the kind of life Bella herself might be living had she grown up the normal way. It seems hellish. She'd be living under the tyranny of her awful husband, under a constant threat of violence, under absolute bodily control. Alfie wants to impregnate her against her will and to mutilate her genitals to deprive her of pleasure, and there's nothing that she could do about it because he is her husband and thus legally allowed to lord over her. She sees a terrifying glimpse of the role even privileged women like her have in this world: objects who exist solely for the pleasure of the men who own them. I would venture to say that the same description lies in the underbelly of the BSY trope.

I am happy that the movie doesn't take its sweet time to revel in the horror of this part of the story like so many other movies that address the oppression of women do. Instead, Bella stays with Alfie just enough time to say a hard and a well-informed no to his bullshit before getting on her merry way.

(SPOILERS FOR DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS) I was really expecting to love Doctor Strange And the Multiverse of Madness, but I didn’t. It did contain fun moments of splashy camp horror, but as a whole it sorely lacked soul and emotion, and the pacing was very much off.

Here’s a long-ass post detailing the problems I had with the movie:

1. Previously, in the MCU

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness relied way too heavily on references to previous installments of the MCU in place of genuine plot and character development. Instead using the tools of filmmaking to set up the story and building emotional beats that lead to a pay-off, the movie just sort of vaguely waved its hand at its cinematic past and expected it to be enough.

The problem with this isn’t really even about some of the audience not being caught up (though that is not not a problem). I’ve seen all the previous movies and series, and I was nevertheless annoyed with the way the movie used references to other movies as a substitute for work it should have done for itself. Hence, the movie was missing many of its vital organs.

Example: Instead of taking the time to establish the concept of the multiverse and, most importantly, Stephen’s attitude towards it, the movie just skipped this whole part by quickly referring to the events of the recent Spider-Man movie. It’s perfectly fine for the movie not to pretend like the multiverse is a thing Stephen isn’t already very much aware of, but what the movie ended up throwing away with the bathwater was Stephen’s point of view.

How does he feel about messing with the multiverse with Spider-Man? Does he regret it? Has he learned something? Did this experience warn him against doing it again, or is he even more curious about exploring the possibilities multiverse?

We don’t know. The movie never allowed him to go there and show us what he thinks of his past actions.

2. According to the legends...

I bet that this movie went through many, MANY rewrites because it can’t seem to commit to a plot point long enough to turn it into something that matters. I felt like I was playing a game with way too many time-wasting side quests and a main object that never delivers.

The characters keep running from one mystical thing of utmost importance only to abandon it for the next mystical thing of utmost importance, and all that only ends up diluting the significance and muddying the meaning of these things in the process.

Meanwhile, the movie was sorely lacking in moments that do feel meaningful. Moments when character grow, when they bond with each other, when their conflicts clash, when they make crucial choices that tell us who they are deep down inside, when they just feel their feelings. There wasn’t any time for those, with the next big action sequence or the next magical ritual just around the corner from the previous one.

This is also a pacing issue. The movie had very few peaceful scenes, which also hurt the action and the excitement. It’s hard to remain invested in what’s essentially a two hour chase sequence when you’re allowed no moments to take a breath and reflect. Even Mad Max: Fury Road had pit stops.

3. Quo Vadis, Stephen Strange?

Marvel movies tend to work more often than not because the studio has had the good sense to focus on building strong characters who keep all the spectacle grounded.

Spider-Man: No Way Home, which premiered not long before this movie, is a very good example of this practice. That movie was full of hyped-up crossover appearances, mind-warping dips into the world of magic and multiverses, and maximalist action sequences, yet the movie worked because it was all anchored in Peter’s emotionally resonant character arc and the relationship he had with the people he loved. 

Multiverse of Madness lacked that emotional anchor, and it showed. Stephen Strange didn’t have a well-defined character arc of his own in this movie, and his relationships with the other characters in the film were barely fleshed out. There was a hint of a theme in him being sort of unhappy about not ending up with his ex and a highlighted yet disconnected line about his obsession with being in control, but the movie didn’t spend enough time exploring those inner conflicts long enough for them to truly matter.

I do feel like there’s a story to be told about Stephen’s hubris going wild in the multiverse when things don’t go his way, and that story was already told in one of the better episodes of What If...? Somehow, the Multiverse of Madness ended up doing so much less with Stephen than a single episode of a mediocre AU animated series did, and that’s telling.

I’m honestly not sure if anyone in charge of this franchise knows what to do with Stephen. He seems kind of lost and unmotivated in the beginning of this movie and ended up pretty much the same way. What’s his story, where is he going? Why is he the main character of this movie? I know that seems like a superfluous question because the movie bears his name, but being the main character requires more than just standing in the spotlight. We need to know what drives Stephen into what direction and why we should care, and I feel like this movie just didn’t do the work on that front.

Doctor Strange shouldn’t be a stranger in his own movie.

4. Wanda Why?

Wanda’s motivations in this film were strongly established, yet simplified to a fault. She was the best character in the movie thanks to Elizabeth Olsen’s magnetic performance, and because she got to be the centerpiece of the most memorable scenes of the movie. Sadly, it all came at the expense of Wanda’s complexity.

Gone was the layered character Wanda became in the brilliant WandaVision, in which she gained power and learned a valuable lesson about dealing with grief and loss, and in her place was a flattened villain who has completely forgotten that lesson and incapable of thinking past her most primal instincts. This was explained in the movie by her having been corrupted by the Darkhold, but that felt like a lazy excuse to get out of coming up with more interesting a way of turning her into the relentless yet soulless monster the story needed her to be.

What a force of nature she would have made had she been allowed to be the villain of this movie while still retaining the depth, the heart, and the mind she had when we last saw her.

Now, this is also a problem I have with the way the character is sometimes written in the comics, but it just really annoys me that Scarlet Witch falls victim to the sexist tropes of a) the woman who goes crazy because she has too much power for her pesky female emotions to handle, and b) the woman who goes crazy when she loses her children because motherhood is apparently an all-consuming identity that leaves women no other reason to exist.

I was kinda hoping that the MCU version of Wanda would not go there this hard. Wanda could still struggle with her mental health, love her children fiercely, and do very questionable things without being this unhinged.

There’s also an ableist angle here: this whole concept of “going crazy” and what it entails. As a personal with a long history of mental health issues, I care a lot about how all sorts of mental health struggles are portrayed in popular media, and one of my biggest annoyances is the way they are often treated as something that inevitably turns people into unhinged murderers. Even if this movie is just a bit of light entertainment, it still shapes the attitudes towards mental health issues, and I would rather not see yet another piece of media that equates “going crazy” with becoming a violent killer. 

5. And Why Are They Here?

The other characters of the movie felt also more or less empty.

America Chavez was allowed to be little else than a passive plot device who spend way too much time standing around and looking scared instead of making conscious choices or emotionally resonant contributions to the story. We barely got to know her personality and she never developed a meaningful bond with Doctor Strange, which hurt the climax of the movie. They ended up being just co-runners-away-from-scary-things with no personal relationship.

This was no fault of actor Xochitl Gomez, whose performance left me looking forward to seeing her character again. In fact, the cast was overall very good, and they all felt more or less wasted in thankless parts that either gave them nothing to do or too little depth.

Rachel McAdams is way too good an actress to be here just as Dr. Generic Love Interest. I am eternally confused about why the movie kept putting such an emphasis on the importance of her relationship with Stephen while also having zero interest in exploring it the slightest. Chiwetel Ejiofor returned as Baron Mordo and once again gave too much to a part that gave him nothing in return.

As for the parade of Marvel cameos, it was a mixed bag for me. Live action Captain Carter made me weak in the knees, and just a few minutes of Lashana Lynch as Captain Marvel convinced me that Maria Rambeau should have the title in the 616 universe as well (sorry, Carol). I don’t usually care about Black Bolt, but the two scenes that showed off his power were some of the highlights of the whole movie for me.

Meanwhile, I wish that Sir Patrick had not walked back his previous decision to let his appearance in the tremendous Logan be his last round as Xavier. As much as I love seeing him, I just feel like his presence here was unnecessary and not good enough a reason to bring back his beloved Xavier. I hesitate to use the phrase “this cheapens the legacy of the character” in a world where Wolverine: Origins exists, but yeah, that.

John Krasinski as Reed Richards was the biggest bummer for me because I was still hoping that Marvel was going to cast someone other than him. I am always happy to see Charlize Theron, but her mid-credit scene was probably the laziest and least exciting mid/post-credit scene to date. Seriously, guys, if you’re not even going to bother, just cut the scene and grant her the dignity of getting a proper introduction scene in another movie.

Even though I really enjoyed seeing some of these characters on screen, this aspect of the movie just seemed like the worst kind of audience pandering. Marvel cameos and crossovers are great when they lead to fun team-ups or emotional reunions. This didn’t work (beyond Captain Carter and Captain Marvel getting to kick some ass together; petition for a new Disney+ series plz) because Strange doesn’t have and didn’t end up developing a meaningful relationship with any of these characters. He didn’t care, so I couldn’t care either.

6. Some Credit to Sam Raimi

I’m not sure who to blame for the failings of this movie, but I have a feeling that it’s not director Sam Raimi. Whenever the movie did work, it worked because it felt like a good old Raimi movie.

Raimi is at his best when he gets to deliver dark humor, campy horror, and inventively gruesome imagery. He turned Scarlet Witch into a spectacular movie villain and made her seem truly terrifying whenever she got creative with her deadly powers. My favorite scene in the movie was Scarlet Witch’s first dreamwalking scene, which conjured up psychedelic images reminiscent of trashy horror movies from the 60′s and 70′s.

Raimi allowed Strange to have his moments, too. There was some real magic in the sight of him entering the haunted house version of his home inhabited by his darkest alternative version, and the image of Zombie-Strange wrapped up in the souls of the damned was nothing short iconic.

But all those cool images and atmospheric moments were not enough to save this movie from the weak story and undercooked characters. It’s just garnish on the top of a heap of hot air.

There are directors who are all style and no substance, but Raimi isn’t one of them. His Spider-Man movies are great examples of superhero movies that manage to find a balance between character development and action (yes, even the third one; it’s not good, but at least an attempt was made).

That’s why I am wondering whether this movie is yet another victim of studio interference instead of a failure on Raimi’s part. Disney tends to hire visionary directors with bold visions and then tying their hands because they’re too afraid of taking creative risks, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that explains what went wrong here.  

7. Summa Summarum

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Cats. The movie adaptation of the famous Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical premiered last month to absolutely scathing reviews. The critical and the popular response to the film has been so abysmal that it has become a spectacle of its own. Everyone in the world seems to have gathered around to join in the gleeful axing of this one trainwreck of a film – which is kind of cute. At least there’s one thing we seem to agree on in these divisive times. This is not a review of Cats (2019), because I have not seen it. I don’t care to, at least not for now. I couldn’t even get through the trailers without cringing myself to death. Still, I do have some fascination with the film as a cultural event, and I have found myself watching and reading numerous reviews and think pieces on Cats, both the original stage production and the movie adaptation, which all seemed to revolve around two major questions: 1. How did a movie like this get made? and 2. Why was this show ever popular in the first place? The latter question on particular has been on my mind. I should know the answer, because I was completely obsessed with it for a funny couple of years of my early teens – and I’m not sure why anymore. I first saw the 1998 adaptation of the musical on TV when I was 13, and something about it instantly struck a chord in me. I started watching it over and over again, until I knew every character by name and every step of the choreography. I know which cat is called Munkustrap and which one is Tumblebrutus, I’ve seen the show live a couple of times, and yes, I can even tell you what a goddamn Jellicle cat is. But eventually my interest in the musical waned, and I moved on to obsess over something else. Probably Neil Gaiman. In some ways, it’s no mystery to me why I fell in love with the show so hard at that point of my life. Teenagers tend to get obsessed over things they’re fond of, especially if they’re lonely. The show made me happy, so I kept watching it on repeat in search of a lost sense of joy. I have a tendency of becoming intensely invested in all sorts of cultural properties due to some part of my personality or brain chemistry that absolutely refuses to enjoy the things I like within reasonable limits, so of course I couldn’t stop watching it. And the show was campy as fuck; that’s certainly a common feature in a lot of things I’ve stanned since and before. So, that’s a part of the answer: I have an embarrassing history of being an ardent fan of Cats because I came across it in a time when I was in need of something fun and campy to escape to. But was in the show that made me like it so much more than anything else I might have caught on TV? That’s a harder question to answer, because I frankly can’t see it anymore. In fact, my enjoyment of the musical left me pretty much as soon as I stopped being a fan of it; just a couple of years later, I found myself looking back and wondering what on earth I saw in the show in the first place, because I could no longer stand it.

Revisiting the musical today, I don’t even feel any nostalgia for it. I don’t like the songs. I don’t find the characters compelling. The show is childish, but it never fully commits to being children’s show, which gives it a weird vibe. The lack of plot is a common complaint, but that one doesn’t actually bother me all that much, since I’ve always viewed it as a kind of a revue – but it’s not like not having a plot does a show as thematically empty as Cats any favors. The dancing is pretty good, and I quite like the costumes and make-up designs of the stage production, but not enough to say that I like the show overall more than I dislike it. So, what was it? Did I simply have a poorer taste in music as a thirteen-year-old? Probably. Am I secretly a furry? Definitely not. Is there a deeper meaning to Cats that most people simple miss? I don’t know. I thought about this a lot in the wake of the crazy reaction to the first trailer of the movie. That’s also where I eventually found my answer. I try to keep up with news about upcoming movies, and I first heard that they’re turning Cats into a movie right when they first announced it. I immediately thought it sounded like a bad idea, and I assumed that the movie would never actually make it into production. Then the casting announcements starting dropping, each wilder than the one before. Dame Judi Dench! Rebel Wilson! SIR IAN? TAYLOR SWIFT? IDRIS ELBA AS MACAVITY THE MYSTERY CAT??? At some point there, I started wondering if there really was something genius about the visual presentation or the script of the movie that was drawing all these big names in, but nope – even the news about the making of the film kept me reassured that the movie was going to be... not good. I heard that Tom Hooper was directing, which did not bode well since he’s not exactly the type of visual or conceptual mastermind (unless you’re very, very into unnerving close-ups, fisheye lenses, and unmotivated mise en scène) that a source material like Cats would need in order to become remotely interesting on the big screen, and because Hooper’s previous take on a from-stage-to-screen movie was pretty uninspired, at least as far as musical movies go (Les Mis is a garbage movie FIGHT ME). And then came the news about the state of the art digital fur technology, and I could already predict that the movie was going to be not just bad, but a disaster. The first trailer and the unanimously awful reviews only confirmed what I already knew. I’m not going to pan the actual movie because, as I said, I haven’t seen it. It looks too creepy, and I am not interested in spending my money to see what I imagine is the worst possible version of something that I already dislike. But I did see enough trailer footage to realize what was it about Cats that made me like it in the first place because it was so obviously missing in the movie adaptation. Allow me to explain. In the stage version of Cats, the performers are dressed in painted leotards, shaggy wigs, and ragged leg-warmers, and their faces are covered in fanciful make-up designs. The choreography is a mix of ballet, jazz, and modern dance moves with feline movements and hisses thrown in. In other words, the costumes and the performances suggest felinity rather than attempt to represent it as closely as possible. None of the performers look or act like real-life cats – yet the magic of the theater allows the audience to accept them as cats for the duration of the show. Cats also makes very good use of its format. It’s tailored to be enjoyed live in the theater, where the audience can really appreciate the big, elaborate dance numbers and feel the scale of the set, which usually consists of big junkyard items. The performers regularly jump off the stage and come out to interact with the audience, and they tend to goof around in the background during someone else’s number, which adds to the unique and personal feel of each performance. In the movie, wigs and leotards are ditched for CGI, which turns the actors into horrifying human-cat hybrid monstrosities. While they arguably look more cat-like with their hideous moving ears and furry faces than the stage actors, they also don’t look enough like cats to justify the decision to take the look of the characters so far. The rules of the theater don’t apply to CGI; it either looks right, or it looks wrong. And Cats looks VERY wrong. From what I’ve heard, the movie has also chopped down its dance numbers into such little pieces through quick-paced editing that it’s hard to appreciate the dancing. There’s obviously no audience interaction either, no electrifying presence of a live performance. The movie has apparently taken the show and stripped away everything that might have made it somewhat enjoyable. Which brings me to my point. What’s great about Cats? It’s not the music or the costumes. It’s not the characters or the lyrics. It’s not Memory. It’s the fact that Cats channels the essence of theater. It may not be good theater, but it’s definitely theatrical to the highest degree. It’s a show that brings out and relies on elements that are unique to the medium: the presence of a set and talented live performers, the interaction between the actors and the audience, the magic of conjuring up an impression that the audience believes in through clever costuming and movements alone. Take those elements out, and you’re left with nothing but an awkward group of celebrities prancing around to dated showtunes with nonsense lyrics.   

There’s a reason why theater hasn’t become outdated as a form of art, even though it’s been competing with movies for over a century. The two mediums are not interchangeable; there are still plenty of things the theater can do that simply do not work on screen. I’m sure that this isn’t the only reason Cats the movie became such a colossal failure (I’ve heard that human-faced cockroaches who were later consumed by Rebel Wilson’s character were also involved), but I like to think that it’s a part of it.