Issue #91: Hit 'Em High And Low 🪭

Happy Halloween! Whatever your plans for the evening, we hope you’ll still make time to enjoy this week’s reviews. First Zosha on Nia DaCosta’s latest film Hedda and her triumphs of adaptation. Then, Cate on the latest propulsive installment in the Tron franchise: Tron: Ares. Double or nothing. Cotton candy for the win. Enjoy!

After seeing Manhunter for the first time this fall, I was talking with someone about Silence of the Lambs, and specifically about one of the things it does so well: Be a movie that is very much about Clarice being a woman in a boy’s club, without needing that to be its singular focus. The film is ever-aware of its gender dynamics — between the FBI agent and the famous serial killer, cooked through with smaller moments like the famous elevator scene to highlight how she stands out. It’s a movie totally aware of how complicated it is to just slot in a female FBI agent working with a cannibal where before there’d been a male one. There’s a slipperiness to the way it plays with identity as at once vital to our understanding and ancillary, in the same way the whites of an egg slime your fingers as you try to separate out the yolk.

The notion returned to my mind after seeing Hedda, the new film written and directed by Nia DaCosta, and adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Hedda shifts almost everything on the surface of the play, and yet stays so true to (and dare I say, as someone who had not seen or read Ibsen’s original, even deepens?) the ideas in the play. It’s part of what I find so remarkable about Hedda, the film: It’s a work that feels totally evocative of an original work, enough that I went on a furious Googling and reading tear about the story itself after seeing it, while still feeling whole in its own right. Hedda takes several leaps away from its core text, and in the process complicates it in all the right ways. 

Importantly the bones of the story stay the same: Hedda (here played with arch lushness by Tessa Thompson) has entered into a marriage she does not want, and now lives in a house her husband George (Tom Bateman) can’t afford. His best bet is to get a high-paid professorship slot at a nearby university, but that depends on him beating out his long-time academic rival — who also happens to be Hedda’s ex-flame. Hedda wants luxury and is extremely manipulative, putting into action a plot that has tragic consequences. 

But the story is redone from there. DaCosta’s film pulls this story from then-contemporary 1890s Norway and into 1950s England, wrapping it in a lavish party for the couple to announce their arrival to society. Everything takes place over the course of a single night where Hedda — who, like Thompson, is Black; this is no “colorblind” period piece — swans over the affair with a genial but firm remove. She is a host who seems to flit above the goings on of the party even as she’s constantly manipulating them. She sparks chaos and dancing and conversation however she pleases, as if she’s secretly having a party of her own. She is the life of the party and an architect of destruction, all in a low-cut dress. 

But her manipulation never feels incidental. Which brings us to the other major update of Hedda’s story; in DaCosta’s movie her troubled ex-lover is a woman, Eileen (Nina Hoss). DaCosta smartly lets this alteration be a burden that sits on each woman uneasily: Neither is looking to be out out, but their definitions on freedom differ. Eileen wants a life she has built for herself, that allows her the agency to manage her affairs and her intellect. Her queerness informs her work, and makes her a better, more curious and exposed scholar than George. Hedda wants security and a good time, and while Eileen says she’s smart enough to be in academia alongside her, Hedda’s smart enough to see Eileen doesn’t appreciate that being Black is a major obstacle in 1950s England. 

It’d be an easy enough impasse if the feelings between them had cooled, but they certainly haven’t. There are livelihoods on the line. Lingering tenderness to the whole affair. And Hedda is all too eager to pull the strings of the party, her husband, his would-be boss, Eileen, her new girlfriend Thea (Imogen Poots), and really whatever else she needs to do to put people on collision courses. Hedda is a film that revels in the complicated inner turmoil of its lead, and is all the better for it. 

DaCosta lets the camerawork evolve as the party does, allowing for language both formal (Hedda getting dolly-pulled towards Eileen when she first walks in) and instinctive (a handheld camera getting too close during a drunken sidebar). Thompson plays Hedda expertly, opaque to those around her but crystal clear in all her self-preservation and desperation. Anyone who knows me knows I am a sucker for a bottle episode, but Hedda’s change feels keenly aware of the potential for moving the play’s events to the course of a single night over a grand estate. It’s a solid rebuke on the theatrical adaptations that go far bigger than they need to and corrupt the story in the process; everything is more immediate, far too close, full of fuckin’ melodrama that feels all too real. 

In a time (if we’ve ever not been in one!) where queerness feels so under attack, it honestly feels refreshing to see something like Hedda. I’m tired of saccharine queer stories that treat characters with kid gloves, and run them not through story arcs but moral litmus tests. I want something rich and true; Hedda, as the parlance goes, is some good fucking food. In a way it feels like an extension of I Saw the TV Glow, similarly plumbing the costs of trying to push away the life you want. Hedda herself is so conniving and delicious and tautly powerful. She feels sincere just as often as she feels wicked. It’s the center you need for a story like this, one that always knows exactly who its protagonist is.

Every now and then, I see a film that reminds me that the magic of the movies is made by the craftspeople whose names we rarely know. An exciting script, helmed by a visionary director, brought to life by actors who out lap their generation are all well and good. But it’s the artisans below the line — costumers, production designers, composers, special effects teams — who do the actual labor of creating the worlds these stories inhabit. Their work is, to my mind, much harder than the intangible demands made of actors and directors. It is their job to quite literally make a world real. And when they do their jobs well, you’re transported into the imaginations of a group of people who came together to tell you a story big enough to earn your attention. It’s a romantic notion, but it’s also precisely why I love the movies so dearly. And Tron: Ares brought me right back to that transcendental space where stories are the only thing that matter.

The third in Disney’s futuristic franchise, Tron: Ares meets computer company ENCOM with a new CEO in Eve Kim (Greta Lee). The company is locked in a digital arms race with Dillinger Systems, led by the squirrely Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of Edward Dillinger Sr. — the first film’s main antagonist. Here, the MacGuffin is called a "permanence code.” With it, the holder can manifest digitally-created objects into the real world, without the current pesky 29-minutes time-limit. Kim wants to use it to feed the hungry and help the environment. Dillinger wants to sell the tech to the military. 

Following that, the computer program Ares (Jared Leto) is the new Master Control Program of Dillinger’s proprietary Grid. Because, Dillinger doesn’t want to just manifest digital tanks and warships. He wants to create the people to operate them too. And Ares thinks he likes Kim’s plans for AI much better than Dillinger’s.

There are other details that later prove essential, but for the most part, the film’s plot is simple enough for a franchise-newcomer to follow, yet dense enough with lore to satisfy any long-time fans. The film’s exploration of the misuse of AI feels timely and relevant without being too heavily on the nose. And the familiar themes of artificial personhood are given a new dimension by painting them inside an explicitly military context. But the film’s real dazzle is in its worldbuilding. The neon accents remain, but the tech — and its physical embodiments — have evolved. 

This entry in the canon dispatches with Tron: Legacy’s Flynn Grid of black, silver and orange. In its place, the Dillinger Grid takes form in harsh, hollow reds. Angular, hard-shell uniforms replace the latex-suited smoothness of its predecessor. The unrelenting ubiquity of blood red makes it hard not to evoke Dillinger’s philosophy that anyone, and anything is expendable. It’s reflected in the new gadgets too. The sleek lightcycle design is even sleeker, with angular finishes that reinforce the military setting.

It’s a mark of the times that dystopian futures now both look and feel contemporary. But production designer Darren Gilford manages to find a way to transport us to a parallel present instead. As the Grid invades the real world, things retain the feel of a videogame. There’s much more of the A Minecraft Story aesthetic here than meets the eye, and that isn’t a bad thing. 

But the real standout is the pulsating score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. For the first time, the duo are credited on a score under their band name Nine Inch Nails. Daft Punk brought a smooth, low-fi techno feel to Tron: Legacy. But for Ares, NIN paints a more industrial scene, with a key theme that’s catchy as hell. It follows the metaphor: as technology gets more sophisticated, so too do the programs that inhabit these digital worlds. And that means innovation in musical experimentation. Multiple melodies fight for attention, each exploring a different grade of sound. Synths, drum machines and electric guitars abound. Intentional static, and the throbbing, ceaseless backbeat tie the whole thing together. Does the beat drop whenever there’s a big to-do onscreen? Do you care? Unlikely. You’ll be too busy bopping your head.

 But there are also some substantial things to consider thematically. Though it may have been unintentional, the movie perfectly demonstrates the double bind that so many Black women find themselves in: punished for their hypercompetence. Part of the mythology of Ares’ awakening sentience is that he is a malfunctioning program. His second-in-command Athena (Jodi Turner-Smith) is not. So when Dillinger carelessly instructs her to retrieve and eliminate Eve Kim “by any means necessary,” she obeys. She does what she has been explicitly created to do. And for her trouble, she winds up the main villain of the film’s third act, while its actual villain is left pitiable and small, mourning the loss of his mother. 

When her 29 minute timer zeroes out, Athena independently recreates herself in the real world to pursue her objective. She doesn’t hesitate, despite the terror and pain she suffers from every deresolution — digital death. But in the end, while Ares’s rebellion is rewarded with the permanence code: “life,” Athena’s is punished with permanent deletion. As ever, white men’s revolt is preferable to Black women’s obedience.

Then there’s Dillinger himself. The boy-King of a tech empire, Julian cares only about impressing his company’s board and making a name for himself. His approach to the development of AI is reckless at best, profit-driven at worst. It makes complete sense that his immediate instinct would be to weaponize the technology, because that’s precisely what his real world counterparts have done. Recognizers don’t end up floating over New York City because someone’s been using the tech responsibly. It mirrors current concerns around the rapid rollout of and use cases for LLM chatbots. If this technology is supposed to change the world, then why is it literally driving people into psychosis? 

But what makes Julian stand out as a visitor from the recent future is his decision to make “people” with it. Ares, Athena and their counterparts are little digital slaves he abuses at his whim. But despite manifesting code that looks, talks, moves and feels like a person, Dillinger hasn’t even considered the possibility of their personhood. The usual moral questions haven’t entered the chat. On the other hand, it never seems to have occurred to Eve that “making a person” with the tech would even be an option. Because what kind of amoral person would want to create autonomous beings that lack free will? The money-loving kind.

Ironically, it’s Ares’ Pinnochio-lite plotline that most appeals to me. In the world as it exists now, it’s hopeful to wonder if an agent of violence might one day simply choose to go a kinder, gentler route. Ares, commander of the Dillinger digital army, was so dissatisfied with the abusive culture perpetuated by his maker that he sought out a new leader who was explicit in her belief that the tech could be benevolent. Now Dillinger is left to survive the ugly world he created. Perhaps we should look into replicating that in the real world.

Part of what I love about science-fiction is that eventually, it all ages into period film. Every attempt to paint the future becomes a record of imaginations past. And sci-fi is all about radical imagination. A little kookiness is more than inevitable — it’s what big thinking requires. After all it’s only the kooky ideas that are truly new. So, silly and indulgent as it is, Tron: Ares truly is a movie of the moment, that engages with our current anxieties around artificial intelligence in a dazzling showcase of tech, music and imagination. Having seen it twice now, it’s quickly crossed into Fast and Furious levels of appreciation for me. If you’ve been reading us long enough, you know what a high compliment that is. It’s impossible for me to capture all of the razor-sharp, dazzling details that make this such a fun night out at the movies. So spring for the 3D screening, and open your heart up to the idea that it’s okay to take things seriously even if they’re a little bit silly. Do yourself a favor and meet this neon explosion of a film exactly where it is.

Bad news: The Wayback Machine isn’t indexing news sites like it used to. Kevin Tinghe talks OBAA and his career. Nia DaCosta wanted to “define freedom” with Hedda. “Nobody Wants This doesn’t need to find God to be good, but it ought to find something to fill the void at its core.” The pneuma illusion!! is a fun read. Some words with the “interview assassin.”

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Zosha + Cate <3