Directed by Walt Dohrn (Trolls World Tour) Starring Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect), Justin Timberlake (Friends with Benefits), Eric André (Sing 2), Kid Cudi (Bill & Ted Face the Music), Daveed Diggs (Soul), Andrew Rannells (A Simple Favour), Amy Schumer (Trainwreck), Troye Sivan (Three Months), Kenan Thompson (Snakes on a Plane), Camila Cabello (Cinderella) and Zosia Mamet (The Last Keepers)
At the wedding of the Bergen King Gristle (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, How to Train Your Dragon) and Bridget (Zooey Deschanel, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), grumpy troll Branch (Timberlake) is unexpectedly reunited with his long-lost brother John Dory (Andre) who reveals that they, with brothers Spruce (Diggs), Clay (Cudi) and Floyd (Sivan), were once the boy band phenomenon Bro Zone. Now, Floyd has been kidnapped by fame-obsessed twins Velvet (Schumer) and Veneer (Rannells), who have him trapped in a diamond prison so that they can drain his voice to fuel their own performances.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began life as a comic book written by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird as a parody of the superhero comics of the 1980s, and especially Daredevil, from which it took its recurring Ninja villains, dubbed the Foot to reflect Daredevil’s Hand. Its leads were mutated by chemicals, like Daredevil, but instead of being lawyers with superhearing, they were four anthropomorphised turtles, raised by a rat who had once belonged to a ninja master and given the names of Renaissance artists (Michaelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and Donatello.) While a parody, the comics were originally as dark and bloody as any of their source material, although the brand was softened significantly by conversion into a Saturday morning cartoon from 1987.
Since then, the Turtles have gone through five comic titles, six Japanese manga titles and a daily comic strip syndicated in more than 250 newspapers. In addition to their own titles, they crossed over into others, including Usagi Yojimbo. They have had five animated series, a two-episode anime OVA and a live action series (Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation) which introduced a fifth, problematic female turtle named Venus de Milo and had a crossover with Power Rangers. They had a three-part, live-action film adaptation in the early 90s which brought us the highs of Partners in Kryme’s ‘Turtle Power’ and the lows of Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ninja Rap’, an animated movie in 2007, and a two part Michael Bay joint in 2014 and 2016.
The Latest Offering
2023 saw the Turtles back, this time in a claymation-themed CGI project spearheaded by actor Seth Rogen. This version focused more on a teenage coming of age narrative than on martial arts action, with the Turtles acting their age and recurring foil April O’Neil recast as a student journalist (also black and slightly overweight, instead of a curvy redhead, leading many definitely confirmed feminists to cry ginger erasure in the same way they didn’t when Bay cast brunette Megan Fox.)
Rogue scientist Baxter Stockman (Esposito) flees his employers, Techno Cosmic Research Institute in the hope of using his mutagenic ooze to create a family. A strike force sent by TCRI executive Cynthia Utrom (Rudolph) kills Stockman and spills ooze into the sewers before being killed by his first creation, and the spilled ooze mutates a rat and four baby turtles, the former, Splinter (Chan) deciding to raise the latter as his sons, naming them Donatello (Abbey), Michaelangelo (Brown), Leonardo (Cantu) and Raphael (Noon). He trains them in self-taught ninjitsu and commands them to hide from humans, who will hate and experiment on them.
Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings) Starring Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai), Belissa Escobedo (Sex Appeal), Bruna Marquezine (Breaking Through), Adriana Barraza (Dora and the Lost City of Gold), Damián Alcázar (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian), Raoul Max Trujillo (Cowboys and Aliens), Susan Sarandon (Thelma and Louise) and George Lopez (No Man’s Land)
Jaime Reyes (Mariduena) is his family’s great hope, the first Reyes to graduate college (specifically Gotham Law.) On returning home, however, he is devastated to learn that this came at the cost of his family’s near-destitution as his father Alberto’s (Alcazar) failing health made it harder and harder to cover tuition costs and rent on the family home. A short-lived job with tech CEO Victoria Kord (Sarandon) leads to a meeting with her niece, Jenny (Marquezine), who entrusts Jaime with a stolen artefact: The Scarab.
Directed by Steven Caple Jr (Creed II) Starring Anthony Ramos (In the Heights), Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah), Peter Cullen (Tigger and Pooh and a Musical Too), Ron Perlman (Kronos), Peter Dinklage (Cyrano), Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Pete Davidson (The Suicide Squad) and Liza Koshy (Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken)
Long ago, but also in the future, the Terrorcons, servants of the planet-eater Unicron (Colman Domingo, Assassination Nation) led by Scourge (Dinklage) seek to capture the Transwarp Key, an artefact capable of opening portals in space and time, which would allow Unicron to consume yet more worlds. Apelinq (one of several characters voiced by David Sobolov, Bumblebee), the leader of the Maximals, keepers of the Key, sacrifices himself to buy time for the other Maximals to flee to Earth with the Key.
Directed by James Cameron (The Terminator) Starring Sam Worthington (Terminator: Salvation), Zoe Saldana (Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2), Sigourney Weaver (Aliens), Stephen Lang (Mortal Engines), Kate Winslet (Titanic), Cliff Curtis (10,000BC), Edie Falco (Gods Behaving Badly), Brendan Cowell (Save Your Legs!), Jemaine Clement (Muppets Most Wanted), Jamie Flatters (The Forgotten Battle), Britain Dalton (Ready Player One), Trinity Jo-Li Bliss (feature debut), Jack Champion (The Night Sitter) and Bailey Bass (feature debut)
The Original
In 2009, James Cameron, director of SF classics The Terminator, Terminator 2 and Aliens, as well as 1997’s Titanic, released a highly personal project at the highly personal budget of $237 million, which has to date netted a deeply personal box office take of $2.92 billion, holding the record for the highest grossing movie of all time until Avengers: Endgame, and then retaking the record when it was re-released in 2022 in the run up to the release of The Way of Water.
Avatar was a sprawling epic about a paraplegic marine called on to take the place of his twin brother, a scientist, in a project intended to foster relations with the native inhabitants of Pandora, an Earth-scale moon and the site of Earth’s largest offworld mining operation. Using an avatar – a genetically engineered hybrid of his brother’s DNA and that of the native Na’vi which looks like a Na’vi, he joins a team aiming to make contact with the natives, but is also tasked by the miltary support for the mine to spy on Na’vi defences. He does so, but falls in love both with the Na’vi way of life and with a Na’vi woman, and ultimately comes to the aid of the beleagured Na’vi when the military try to take their land by force.
A gorgeous exercise in 3D, computer-aided filmmaking, Avatar was condemned as a white saviour narrative and for casting primarily white actors as thinly-veiled Native American stereotypes in ‘blue-face,’ as well as for thin plotting and characterisation. Cameron elicited particular venom by claiming that his inspiration was the thought that the Lakota Sioux would have ‘fought much harder’ against European colonists if they had known how bad their descendents would have it in the twenty-first century. Despite the huge amount of money it made, and Cameron’s desire for a series of four sequels, he stated that the technology did not exist yet for what he wanted to do, and so it was not until 2022 that he released The Way of Water.
The Late Sequel
After helping the native Na’vi to drive off the occupying human forces on Pandora, Jake Sully (Worthington) lives in his hybrid Na’vi-human avatar, leading his new tribe alongside his wife, Neytiri (Sadana). They have two sons – upright, not to say uptight, eldest Neteyam (Flatters), and wild, dangerously free-spirited Lo’ak (Dalton) – and a young daughter, Tuk (Bliss), and have adopted Kiri (Weaver), a child born from the comatose avatar of the deceased Dr Grace Augustine (also Weaver), and also care for Spider (Champion), a human who was too young to return with the others, when the ‘Sky Folk’ return. This time, instead of merely stripping resources from Pandora, General Ardmore (Falco) has been task with preparing the moon to be humanity’s new home, having crapped up the old place but good. With the Na’vi putting up a steadfast resistance under Jake’s leadership and with the support of Pandora’s quasi-sentient ecosystem, Ardmore calls up a force of ‘recombinants,’ avatars inhabited by the memories and personality of Marines killed during the intial battle for Pandora, lead by a recombinant Colonel Miles Quaritch (Lang).
Directed by Lana Wachaowski (Cloud Atlas) Starring Keanu Reeves (Bill & Ted Face the Music), Carrie-Anne Moss (Memento), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman), Jessica Henwick (Love and Monsters), Jonathan Groff (Frozen II), Neil Patrick Harris (Starship Troopers), Priyanka Chopra Jonas (We Can Be Heroes) and Jada Pinkett Smith (Angel Has Fallen)
The Original
“I’m just looking for my contact lens!”
The year is 1999 and the western action movie genre is at the start of its journey out of the stolid, muscular ouevre of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Lundgren, under the influence of highly kinetic Hong Kong imports like the films of Jackie Chan and John Woo. Into this field comes the second film from sibling directors the Wachowskis (Jupiter Ascending), whose debut – neo-noir crime thriller Bound – gave little hint of the scope of their sophomore picture’s ambitions. The Matrix was an action movie in the new mould, with highly-choreographed scenes of almost balletic martial arts and gunplay, made extensive use of the rapidly maturing CGI effects technology, and introduced a new twist with ‘bullet time,’ a technique in which a rapid sequence of shots taken from different angles allowed the viewpoint to swoop cleanly around a performer in slow-motion. It was also spiced with just enough philosophy to really get people talking on this newfangled thing called the internet.
The Matrix was the story of a young computer programmer, Thomas ‘Neo’ Anderson (Reeves), who learns that his world is a computer simulation in which humanity is trapped by artificially intelligent machines that they once created, but which rebelled against their control. Together with a group of resistance fighters from the subterranean city of Zion – most notably Trinity (Moss) and the group’s leader, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum) – Neo struggled with his possible destiny as ‘the One,’ a prophesied saviour who would arise to defeat the machines, while battling the system’s defensive ‘agents,’ in particular the malevolent Smith (Hugo Weaving, Mortal Engines.) It talked a lot about free will, predestination and the subjective and potentially constructed nature of reality and had a lot of really, really cool action scenes. It also had a script with a meme potential that was wasted on the early internet, but managed to linger for years.
This meme has kept going for two decades, despite the fact that the fourth version is absolutely true.
The Matrix wasn’t the smartest game in town, but that was because it was smart enough not to get fancy. Its philosophy was accessible, so it provoked discussions across the internet and into a multitude of published books (and in less academic circles; at the time I somehow ended up having an extensive discussion of the ‘brain in a jar’ hypothesis with a Big Issue seller based on my leather coat – I was a student, it was the nineties, don’t at me.) It’s action was exciting and distinctive, and its effects work laid the groundwork for much of what would come in the next two decades. It also confirmed Reeves – whose career up until then had been pretty up and down – as a legitimate superstar, and the Wachowskis as a force to be reckoned with.
The Sequels
Like the original, but about 40% less coherent and with 97% more fetishware.
And then… Oh, my the sequels.
So, the first thing about the sequels is that they were never just the sequels. 2003 saw the release of The Matrix: Reloaded in May and The Matrix: Revolutions in November, but also The Animatrix – a collection of animated spin-offs – the first collection of Matrix comics, and Enter the Matrix, a video game with a plot interwoven with that of Reloaded. In short, the Wachowskis took their original movie and exploded it into a multimedia product.
The sequels were not as well received as the original movie (the spin-off media actually did better.) Reloaded made the mistake the original didn’t and took its philosophical ramblings to the pint of vanishing up themselves in a scene where an old white dude with a beard pontificated about control for what felt like ten minutes. We also got to see Zion, and then got to see the people of Zion having a rave for, again, what felt like ten minutes. The climax of the film involved three crews working together to achieve a single goal, but in such a way that when one crew – the one with very few lines – were taken out, Trinity could cover for them, and the third got to do their part in Enter the Matrix instead of in the film itself. The lines between the Matrix and the real world were blurred as programmes possessed human bodies and Neo apparently gained the ability to connect wirelessly to control physical machines, leading to the particular rabbithole of ‘is Zion another layer of the Matrix’ theories.
Revolutions took place predominantly in the real world, with lots of hovercraft chases, and the battle for Zion as its set piece. It culminated with Trinity dead and a blinded-in-the-real-world Neo sacrificing himself in a final battle against an army of Smiths. Too much CGI robbed the climactic conflicts of much of their impact and the whole thing was just a bit disappointing, especially compared to the other multi-film project of the same period, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. There was a lot of stuff about renegade programmes that never really came to anything, especially the story of Sati, a sort of electronic version of Neo and pre-pubescent god of the new Matrix.
The Late Sequel
“My days of waiting for my hanging plot thread to be resolved are definitely coming to a middle.”
There were some more video games after that, but the Wachowskis largely moved on to other projects until 2019, when a series of personal bereavements – both parents and a close friend – led the older sister, Lana, to revisit the world of their first great success. Lilly Wachowski opted not to be involved, essentially citing a different grieving process, but Reeves and Moss both signed on to return, along with Jada Pinkett Smith as Niobe (a resistance leader and Morpheus’ love interest in the sequels, and lead characater of the first video game,) and Lambert Wilson (Timeline) as The Merovingian, a rogue programme and information broker. Of course, it was a different age now, a post-Matrix world, where using landlines to connect to the real world would have left the crews desperately scrabbling around the homes of the elderly and technophobic for an exit and advances in general understanding of philosophy, psychology and computing would demand a different approach to the Matrix itself.
Thomas Anderson (Reeves) is a highly successful game designer, having created the bestselling Matrix game back in the day. He regularly interacts in passing with Tiffany (Moss) a married woman who goes to the same coffee shop as him, and feels strangely drawn to her. Although seeking new creative outlets, Anderson is under pressure from his business partner Smith (Groff) to create a new entry in the series for commercial reasons, after a long hiatus. Cue a montage of Anderson and his team basically snarking about late sequels and reboots, while a young hacker named Bugs (Henwick) discovers an artificial version of Morpheus (Abdul-Mateen II) in a modal software loop running on Anderson’s machine, and she and this Morpheus attempt to break Neo out of his new Matrix identity, resulting in Smith revealing himself as a new version of Neo’s nemesis.
Ahe Bad Guys are a notorious criminal gang, made up of the most hated ans despised species in a world of humans and anthropomorphic animals: smooth-talking thief Mr Wolf (Rockwell), curmudgeonly safe-cracker Mr Snake (Maron), super-hacker Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina), master of disguise Mr Shark (Robinson) and wild-card muscle Mr Piranha (Ramos). Goaded by the dismissal of Mayor Diane Foxington (Beetz), the Bad Guys plan a heist to steal the Golden Dolphin, a philanthropic award due to be given to Professor Marmalade (Ayoade), and a prize that has eluded even the legendary Crimson Paw.
Directed by Jeff Fowler (Sonic the Hedgehog) Starring James Marsden (X-Men: The Last Stand), Ben Schwartz (Flora and Ulysses), Tika Sumpter (Nobody’s Fool), Natasha Rothwell (SOnic the Hedgehog), Shemar Moore (The Bounce Back), Colleen O’Shaughnessey (Sailor Moon Super S: The Movie), Lee Majdoub (Dead Rising: Endgame), Idris Elba (Hobbs & Shaw) and Jim Carrey (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Dr Robotnik (Carrey) is able to escape the mushroom planet by sending a signal and making a deal with the one who comes looking for him, Knuckles the Echidna (Elba). Meanwhile, after the events of the first film, Sonic (Schwartz) is living in Green Hills with Tom (Marsden) and Maddie (Sumpter), and attempting to become a superhero – Blue Justice, trademark pending – in Seattle with… mixed results.
Michael Morbius (Charlie Shotwell, All the Money in the World) is a brilliant boy, afflicted with a blood disorder so rare that he has a regular rotation of roommates, all of whom he calls Milo, in a hospice full of fellow sufferers. When his doctor/father figure Dr Emil Nicholas (Harris) arranges for Michael to attend medical school, he leaves behind the latest Milo (Joseph Esson, screen debut) in the dickhead bullying capital of… I want to say Italy. Years later, Michael (Leto) is a brilliant young researcher, seeking a cure for his condition with the help of Dr Martine Bancroft (Arjona), funded by Milo (Smith), and rejecting a Nobel prize because he dismisses a world-changing medical discovery as an accidental side-effect of his failed work.
The heroes of Sing – impressario Buster Moon (McConaughey) and his assistant Miss Crawley (Jennings), singers Meena (Kelly) and Johnny (Egerton), dancer Gunter (Kroll) and triple-threat Rosita (Witherspoon) – are enjoying a string of theatrical successes under the watchful eye of patron Nana Noodleman (Saunders), but dream of translating their show from the New Moon to the bright lights of Redshore City. Talent scout Suki (Peretti) tells Buster that they would not make it in the Vegas-like Redshore, but Moon decides to take the troupe, plus budding rock star Ash (Johansson), and basically break into closed auditions for hotel and theatre magnate Jimmy Crystal (Cannavale). When Crystal rejects their show, Moon and Gunter spontaneously pitch an ambitious sci-fi musical and end up contracted to produce the show in three weeks and make good on Moon’s false assurances that he can secure not only the rights to the songs of reclusive rock legend Clay Calloway, but also Calloway’s personal participation.
The Bad Movie Marathon 