Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

The strangest thing about director Jon Favreau's Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu isn't that Disney have decided to relaunch the big screen aspect of their ailing space saga with an adaptation of an off-the-boil streaming series, it's that in centring Jabba the Hutt's offspring, Rotta the Hutt (voiced here by Jeremy Allen White), this adventure now becomes something of a sequel to Dave Filoni's unwatchable animated feature Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Speaking of Filoni, Lucasfilm's new Chief Creative Officer gets a co-writing credit with Favreau and Noah Kloor for this film; voices a couple of characters; and even scores a distracting cameo in the X-Wing pilot equivalent of a staff canteen. Actually, returning to Hutts, it's definitely more bizarre that, in detailing the living arrangements of Jabba's massive, slug-like species, viewers are treated to repeated instances of these creatures - sometimes even a pair that are related - writhing and intertwined. 

When Pedro Pascal (actually seen as well as heard)'s bounty hunter first arrives at the palace of these intergalactic gangsters, he walks along corridors lined with darkened rooms that appear, very much, like they have recently hosted gastropod orgies. The participants are abashed; pulling apart and reorganising themselves as Pascal (or Brendan Wayne or Lateef Crowder) stomp past. Perhaps it's the confrontational nakedness of The Hutts that gives pause? The film's repeated demand that we appraise blubbery bodies that sometimes look like puppets and other times look like their primitively textured ancestor from the 1997 revision of Star Wars? The grown-up Rotta - a gladiator who battles scaled-up monsters from Chewbacca's chess board - sports pumped-up arms and bulging pectoral muscles, an explicit point of departure from every other reptilian mobster we've seen so far. If nothing else it seems notable that Rotta's acceptance into the ranks of the Galactic Republic pointedly comes with a promise of clothing that is big enough to fit, and therefore conceal, his enormous body. 

This preoccupation with minor variations and the three-dimensionality of the film's participants speaks to, really, the piece's core appeal: these are the kind of adventures dreamed up by children as they played with their Kenner action figures. The first instance of connection with Star Wars for this viewer was, in the mid-1980s, seeing the overstocked occupants of Jabba's sail barge, from Return of the Jedi, heavily discounted in open-air markets. You might never come across a Luke Skywalker or a Darth Vader on these stalls but if you wanted a 3.75 inch reproduction of a Gamorrean Guard or a Weequay, you were in luck. You could slowly amass an entire collection of these bystanders and background players; characters who made basically zero impact on the unfolding saga but held their own creepy visual appeal as pure merchandise. Keenly aware that his film is, at its best, a rolling bestiary, director Favreau finds umpteen ways - beyond previous speculation on the Hutts' sex life - to fascinate and entertain. To wit: Pascal's delivery may be flat; his action so expert as to be dull, with a face buried beneath a gleaming helmet, but his side-kick is often delightful. 

A mixture of puppetry and computer-generated imagery, Grogu is of a piece with the Mogwais from Gremlins when sharing his scenes with larger characters. He's rapid and chaotic; possessed of an insatiable hunger for luminous snacks. When the film contracts to accommodate his tiny stature though, we are regaled with a sustained, wordless sequence in which this frog-like guru fashions a clay barracks around his deathly ill parent then traverses an inhospitable jungle and the swamp beyond, stealing smoked fish from Stephen McKinley Henderson's kindly, reptilian medicine man. If Mandalorian and Grogu is a truncated season of streaming television then this interlude is its own little bottle episode, reminiscent of similar asides in the Lone Wolf and Cub movies. As time passes to Ludwig Göransson's pitch-perfect Amblin score, and the camouflaged structure around the unconscious bounty hunter grows, there's a brief sense of a different, more ambitious movie: a Star Wars in which we are confronted with a melancholic permanence rather than just a temporary setback. Grogu seems to toil for days if not weeks. What if Mandalorians had a constitution closer to human? What if they were a little more fragile? What would that film look like then, if Favreau completely gave himself over to the Jim Henson of it all? Baby Yoda living amongst the bones of its parent, slowly honing his extra-sensory skills and fashioning his own approximation of armour before walking his own, vengeful path.  

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Avatar: Fire and Ash occupies a special place in James Cameron's filmography: it's the first occurrence of a second feature-length sequel for the writer-director. Given Cameron's ability to amplify previous entries, arriving at a hair-raising timbre that pulls apart and reexamines prior works from a (somewhat) metatextual perspective, there's a confidence going in here that stakes can be raised; that our conceptual understanding of these well-established circumstances could be exploded. It's disappointing then to report that Fire and Ash does not make any great strides to push this story forward. Described in press meetings by Cameron as the other half of Avatar: The Way of Water, Fire and Ash isn't so much a distinct second portion of that particularly story, more a strange sort of echo that could very well be taking place concurrently alongside (or instead of) its own prequel. 

If anything, this threequel repeats set-pieces and situations that already felt fairly well examined in Way of Water - the children of Zoe Saldaña's increasingly bitter Neytiri and Sam Worthington's Jake Sully are relentlessly imperiled or captured and a concluding battle shifts thanks to the participation of this planet's enormous sea life. Even Brendan Cowell's repulsive human whaler returns, complete with a robotic arm and a concluding note, in this chapter, that still doesn't feel definitive enough. We all want to see this guy reduced to bleeding viscera, right? Why this obvious repetition then? Oona Chaplin's bloodthirsty Na'vi chieftain Varang, easily Fire and Ash's most exciting addition, promises blasted terrains and some kind of volcanic framing for a third-act struggle but sadly this doesn't come to pass. Although Stephen Lang's cloned Quaritch beds down with this witch, transforming her tribe of psychopaths into a subordinate, human-allied fighting force, we don't sink into their perspective like we did with the tree-dwelling Omatikaya or the sea-faring Metkayina. This collection of orphans simply enjoy burning or mutilating other sapient life. 

In a sense Fire and Ash could be likened to T2-3D: Battle Across Time, the Universal Studios stunt show attraction that Cameron co-directed a live-action element for. Both of these follow-ups frame their predecessors, in Battle Across Time's case Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as totemic license to be celebrated rather than expanded; re-deployed rather than re-examined. This state of re-telling is key to the overall product's appeal then, no matter how disappointing that might be for a more demanding viewer. With all that said, Fire and Ash is far from a misfire. Wētā's work is exemplary, even if the constant frame-rate changes do, unfortunately, replicate the passage from jittery pre-rendered cutscenes to more stable interactive sections in video games. Cameron, co-writing with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (with Josh Friedman and Shane Salemo given story credits) have crafted a film that not only gallops relentlessly forward - even if the route often feels circuitous - but also registers as a furious and timely askance at colonial projects. Save the odd Antipodean accent, Fire and Ash's many human villains are pointedly white, middle-class and American. 

They are a people likened to alien invaders; hairless, diminutive apes capable only of murderous and consumptive waste. Their blubbery vulnerability, and the vast compounds they seal themselves in, evocative of the Martian invaders in HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. These thwarted settlers are biologically incompatible with this environment yet still they persist, grasping for any kind of leverage or claim they can then transform into a revenue stream. Perhaps the film's biggest biome reveal then is the enormous human machinery that Neytiri buzzes through on her bioluminescent pterodactyl. It is a gun metal blot on this landscape; a concrete and steel melanoma that scales up the terraforming complex seen in Aliens to a city-sized mechanism that seems to produce nothing but fire and smoke. Again and again we are reassured that these pink-skinned trespassers offer nothing constructive and that their only purpose on Pandora is to be slaughtered by gigantic, alien fauna. These deaths described in gleeful, computer-generated detail with The Walt Disney Company both footing the bill and distributing the images worldwide. Nevertheless, with Fire and Ash Cameron is two sequels in and still failing to really deliver on the promise of the original Avatar's coda: Na'vi festooned with explosives and automatic weapons, ordering mankind off their world and, perhaps, even making a claim on their would-be conqueror's home planet. 

Avatar: The Way of Water

Writer-director James Cameron has a knack for writing chimera: characters who combine, or who are at least attempting to reconcile, two disparate forms of identity. His Terminators are the most obvious example of this psychological discrepancy. They are futuristic machinery wrapped up in a sheath of human flesh that either rots in place after being shot full of holes or transmits such a convincing camouflage that the deception begins to turn itself inwards, inspiring a dot matrix approximation of heroism. In the first Avatar, Sam Worthington's futuristic conquistador, Jake Sully, dreamt himself into a life in which his withered battle-scarred body had been replaced with that of a towering feline alien. This new flesh and carbon fibre bone allowed him to run and leap then, finally, soar with dragons. Sully willingly plugged into this transformative experience, consciously deciding to let his waking - human - life fade away and, eventually, die. 

Cameron, co-writing with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, dedicates no small part of Avatar: The Way of Water to re-examining this process from the perspective of a less enthusiastic participant. Stephen Lang's motion-captured shade of Colonel Miles Quaritch is an abomination; a high-and-tight infiltrator who makes no attempt to assimilate or even disguise his Earthly origins. He is the memories and prejudices of an American imperialist, inscribed on the eve of what he believed to be his career-defining victory then wired into another massive cobalt clone. His arrival on the satellite planet of Pandora is marked by cataclysm. The enormous retrorockets decelerating these unwelcome visitors obliterates the forest setting from the first film; animals and trees alike are shattered then consumed by bubbling firestorms. Simon Franglen's score - which otherwise builds itself around the themes and motifs of the late James Horner - seizes on this apocalyptic, mechanised imagery, quoting the pounding percussion and shrieking strings of Gustav Holst. Mankind's arrival is likened to that of a Martian invasion force. Terraforming on this habitable moon is to be achieved through extermination, a plan of envy straight out of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds. 

The Quaritch thing is always aware that it is a facsimile, it embraces the designation, allowing a video recording of its (somewhat dismissive) clone father to appoint it as a creature of pure vengeance. With very little information regarding its parent's passing - this is reproduction as the purely technological duplication of the hopelessly macho - the zipped-up Na'vi decides to retrace Sully's steps, to experience this planet as he did. Jake Sully's eager symbiosis is caricatured by a team of colossal photostats who refuse to let go of their branded sunglasses and tactical apparel. Quaritch and his thugs only speak the language of conquest, clinging on to the possessions and hang-ups that defined their (now extant) human lives. We are told a couple of times in The Way of Water that Na'vi bodies can easily survive in the oxygen rich environments mankind has created on Pandora. The Quaritch copy though remembers being human, it's fixated on its vulnerability in this harsh extraterrestrial environment. So, rather than breathe shallow in a false climate, it clings to an artificial breathing apparatus, supping on it greedily. 

Alien: Resurrection - Special Edition

Despite being centred almost entirely around Sigourney Weaver, Alien: Resurrection registers as dashed off, even perfunctory. As a sequel it's a small-scale entry that repeats a lot of the hits but in a faltering, blubbery context, eventually proposing a massive course correction for the series that didn't actually end up going anywhere. Weaver plays Number 8, an imperfect clone of the Ellen Ripley who hurled herself into a lead furnace at the end of Alien³. This military-issue copy is, thanks to genetic tampering, a mutant. Reborn hundreds of years into the future, Eight is both physically and psychologically intertwined with the creature that once grew inside her - a human vessel that has overcome its infection and been irrecoverably changed in the process.

Eight then allows Weaver the opportunity to play a kind of alien empress, the mother of the majestic, pregnant menace at the centre of this sequel's malfunctioning space station. Disappointingly, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and screenwriter Joss Whedon never find the scenes or sequences that really tap into the odd, maternal energy that Weaver is broadcasting. Yes, Winona Ryder's neurotic human-trafficker Call does end up under Eight's wing but the connection is cursory. Similarly, the bond she has with her offspring is less about exploring a peculiar feeling of bereavement or the female dominated hierarchy of the alien race and more about finding a way for Eight to end up, unmolested, in the depths of a hive, witnessing the birth of an abomination.

Although Jeunet and cinematographer Darius Khondji find a variety of ways to keep the film's endless brass corridors visually interesting, the duo struggle when presented with ADI's sopping monsters. Mostly photographed as a mouth probing away at the camera, the special effects house obliterate all sense of detail by drowning the puppets in lubricants. Wider shots default to a CG model that not only exaggerates HR Giger's original bio-mechanoid to the point of parody but also blasts back every instance of light directed at it. The unholy ambulation seen in James Cameron's Aliens is abandoned too, arriving at a beast that moves like a massive instance of the scuttling insect seen in the opening of this fractionally longer Special Edition. The Newborn, Chris Cunningham's contribution to the xenomorph pantheon, fares worst of all; the Rubber Johnny director's diseased, tumescent concept art rendered here as kin to Pizza the Hutt from Spaceballs.