Hello and welcome to another week!

On Wednesday, I’ll have a write-up of The Odyssey, the film that Christopher Nolan was forced to make by the DEI Commission, a shadowy cabal of powerful former Tumblr users determined to undermine America’s deep connection to ancient Greek myth. I’m excited to see it, not because I always love Nolan movies, but because I myself am a former (or, at least, dormant) Tumblr user and I can’t wait to see what my comrades have cooked up this time. I heard they added little Heartstopper animated lightning bolts every time Robert Pattinson’s character looks at Tom Holland’s character. (Which actually would be sort of historically accurate to ancient Greek culture—at least, it would be if Holland was like 15 years younger! Yikes!) 

Mostly I can’t wait for the movie to finally be out because I do think the Discourse, if one can call reactionary chronic-posting discourse, will die down once the movie is actually in theaters and normal people are seeing it and it makes lots of money. Then it will be time for Elon Musk and his band of merry homunculi to get mad at . . . Spider-Man? Because Spider-Man is played by a Greek twunk now? Or maybe they could get upset about the Anne Hathaway dinosaur movie, because none of the ancient dinosaur texts mention anything about Anne Hathaway being there. Of course, many scholars have posited that some sort of Anne Hathaway-like figure did roam the Mesozoic earth, but that’s merely a contention of the communist queers of academia, another item on their agenda to destroy Western culture, which is largely predicated on the sanctity of Greek depiction in film (most Americans are still furious that Lainie Kazan was cast in My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and of course on dinosaurs.

Speaking of dinosaurs, the late Sam Neill was, of course, most widely known for playing Dr. Grant in Jurassic Park, a role he nailed in all its nerdy awe giving way to practical, tough-minded survivalism. That’s a great part in a great movie and I’m glad Neill is being justly remembered for it. (When was the last time a big, fun tentpole blockbuster had memorable performances like that? And memorable characters? I’m sure some people would say, like, Deadpool, but that’s not really what I mean. Others might say Barbie, but that is a more expressly character-driven film. I’m talking about roles that could easily just be functionaries in service of a plot but that are instead fleshed out and interesting. Those are dismayingly rare these days!)

I was looking at some lists of other notable Sam Neill performances, and he did indeed give more than a few, in movies like Dead Calm and My Brilliant Career and The Piano. But I have not seen nearly enough mentions of what to me is Neill’s most haunting non-Jurassic role: the mad, doomed scientist-engineer Dr. Weir in Event Horizon. That movie is maybe not exactly high art, but it is a craftily made, genuinely unsettling space horror that eventually leads to Neill looking like this: 

I saw that movie when I was 14 and initially brushed it off as kind of silly and unsatisfying. But that night, when I was trying to fall asleep, that particular image (and several others in the film) kept flashing in my mind’s eye to such an extent that I had to wake my sister up and ask if I could sleep next to her because I was too scared to be alone in my room. At 14! Granted, I was a decidedly wimpy 14-year-old, but still. Neill is a big part of why that character and his dreadful arc made such an impact, and I’m sure he had geeks tell him that many, many times over the course of his interesting life. Safe journey, Mr. Neill. And thanks for all the scares.

For the third straight weekend, a big tentpole movie disappointed at the box office. First it was the not very good Supergirl, then the Old Hollywood documentary Minions & Monsters, and now Moana: Live!. The latter film, directed by Hamilton (the stage show) director Thomas Kail, debuted with a whimper, failing to clear $100 million globally. It came close, and that may sound like a lot of money, but when you consider that Disney had to pay Dwayne Johnson in actual islands, the movie needs to make way more than $95 million to cover production and promotion costs. 

So what happened? The conservative-ish trade Deadline thinks Disney has once again oversaturated a valuable brand, just like they did with Marvel and Star Wars. Deadline may have a point. The original animated Moana came out only 10 years ago, and there was a sequel just two years ago. So perhaps it was too soon for a rehash of the story, only this time with real actors in front of a green screen the size of the Pacific Ocean. 

Maybe Disney’s calculation was that the kids who loved the original Moana when it came out are now in their teens, so it’s time for a new half-generation of little ones—their cousins, their siblings—to discover the story. (And maybe some of those teens, the ones who have to sleep in their sister’s bed after seeing a scary B-movie, will want to see the new movie as an act of nostalgia.) The problem with that reasoning might be that Disney+ exists, and thus many millions of children of varying ages have no doubt consumed the original Moana many, many times since 2016. So why would parents spend all the additional money to haul out to the theater for an ersatz version of the same story and the same music, when they just spent a small fortune to see the existential bummer that is Toy Story 5? It may have just been a problem of timing. 

Or the movie flopped (despite getting really high audience scores) because it looks kinda bad? Like, aesthetically. The 2016 Moana is lush and bright and alluring; the live-action movie (which I have to see this afternoon for this week’s episode of the Critical Darlings podcast; listen!) looks drab and washed out and kinda ugly. Those who’ve seen the film say it’s actually not bad at all, but the trailer did not make a good impression. 

I’d bet that in one mansion right now, a third theory is gloomily floating around: Dwayne Johnson has lost his spark. After Black Adam failed to place him at the top of “the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe,” and The Smashing Machine failed to make him a true awards-season player, might Hollywood’s most genial braggart be having a crisis of confidence? 

Other than Moana 2, Johnson hasn’t had a bonafide hit in a while now, at least not theatrically. The heyday of his self-aware-meathead movie-star career is decidedly past, and now he’s got some thinking to do about where he goes from here. Depressing or not, I could see Johnson looking at the “success” of Netflix’s Red Notice (for a long time the most viewed original film on the platform, only recently unseated by KPop: Demon Hunters) and figuring that, like Jennifer Lopez before him, he could make a comfortable home where only the good numbers are reported—and those numbers are all coming from a single and somewhat unreliable, self-interested source. 

As for Disney, well they’ve got the live-action Lilo & Stitch to point to as evidence that not all such remakes are duds these days (in fact, there’s a sequel in the works). Thus they can turn their hopeful focus to the live-action Tangled, an upcoming movie designed for certain audience members who will—upon first seeing whoever is cast to play Flynn Rider—realize something true and infinite within themselves and then come out to their friends in the parking lot after. You can’t go broke doing that, can you?

The first proper trailer for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Digger has dropped, and I’m of two minds about it. On one side, it looks like Tom Cruise is giving the sort of mannered, transformative performances that the Academy has chosen to reward in the past. (This could be The Whale, but intentionally comedic.) It’s a wild swing away from the steely composure of the Mission: Impossible franchise, which is mostly what Cruise has been doing for the past decade. Digger could be both a departure and a return to form, a later-career reminder of the actor’s range that finally puts him back in the realm of awards-y esteem. I’d be perfectly happy for Tom Cruise to win an acting Oscar, all these years after an ether-addled Michael Caine toddled up and stole Cruise’s Magnolia prize. In that sense, I am rooting for this unfortunately titled movie.

On the other hand, this is Iñárritu we’re talking about, and he makes really annoying movies. The Digger trailer suggests a lot of, well, a lot. It almost looks like Iñárritu—working with a script that, quite ominously, he co-wrote with some Birdman people—is almost trying to do an outsized Coen Brothers riff? Which could be disastrous. There’s an all too good chance that I will appreciate Cruise’s effort here but really not like the rest of the movie. I guess that scenario would be akin to when Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his gold statue for The Revenant; it’s by no means my favorite performance of his, and the movie surrounding him is aggressively unpleasant, but it was high time DiCaprio had an Oscar, so we accepted the victory.

I will try to remain optimistic that Digger is the rare Iñárritu film that isn’t obnoxious in all of its high-style posturing. But probably only because I am invested in the Cruise narrative—and yes, I know that he is a representative of something very bad. Anyway, watch the trailer and decide for yourself.

Okay that’s it! I’m thinking of doing more of these grab-bag, multi-topic letters in the future, but only if you think they’re of value. So, let me know! [email protected].