Tags: tv, blog, sci-fi, thriller, 2025, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Tuesday May 20th, 2025
There's an episode of the tv series Spaced that features the greatest depiction of clubbing in cinema history. It's greatness is that it understood that a truly great night out isn't just about the club you go to. It's what you're running from, to get to where you end up. It spends most of the episode detailing the tensions and problems of the cast, the bit in the club is literally just a few minutes. But because of the time spent on the tensions and anxieties and problems and fears, you get the release of an epic night out.
Anyway...part way through the second series of Andor, fifteen episodes into a relentless narrative equivalent of a Shepard tone, there's a wedding party scene. And it goes OFF
And maybe Spaced doesn't have the best club scene anymore.
I don't think I can add much to the conversation regarding Andor's greatness, other than my slightly shonky Spaced comparisons. Pick an element: music, costumes, acting, script, anything at all, it's all superb. However, I do want to mention a couple of personal highlights.
Firstly, the brokeneness of the antagonists. Every single character working for the empire is a shell of a human being, living half a life. Too many movie and tv villains are hyper-competent, charismatic, sexy bastards. When the reality is these kind of people are deeply pathetic, emotionally limited turds.
Secondly, all of them are punsished for their loyalty and competence. Literally every single one of them is crushed by the weight of the system they are trying to uphold. If any of them had just clocked in, did the bare minimum and clocked out again they'd have been fine. But the one thing fascism absolutely demands is comformity. Stick your head up too high and it's going to get scythed off.
And lastly, if there's one point that Andor hammers home relentlessly, it's that fascism contains within it the seeds of it's own destruction. Fascism won't work, can never work, will never work because it will always create the conditions that will bring it down. The harder the Empire pushes, the more the people push back.
To go back to that G.K. Chesterton "quote"
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
Andor tells us that whilst that victory is long, painful and must be fought for, it is inevitable.
Tags: blog, film, action, sci-fi, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Friday August 22nd, 2025
Lessons Learned from Predator I to Predator III
Lesson One. Tell the story through the action. Don’t have your characters sit around explaining the plot and backstory to each other, that’s just wasting time that would be better spent with something blowing up, which is what we came for. P:KoK1 absolutely rattles along. The total amount of time it spends where someone isn’t being punched, stabbed, shot, blown up or at least threatened with one of those probably amounts to less than five minutes across the entire film. It does not hang about. And yet it still manages to pack in four stories that each have a beginning, a middle and an end. Because the action is the story, not the thing that breaks it up.
Lesson Two. Have the characters do stuff because of who they are. Don’t have your characters do stuff just because that’s the only way for the next big set piece to happen. It just makes them look stupid and we’ll stop believing in them. P:KoK sets its characters up by telling us who they are and what’s important to them. And then everything that they do is because of those two things. They have to suffer the consequences of their decisions, both for good and for bad. There’s nothing complicated here, but it all works.
Lesson Three. Don’t explain everything, we don’t care. Big Alien Wants Big Fight, that’s it. Everything else is background detail and should remain there, in the background. If us scifi nerds want to delve deeper into this stuff2 then we’ll do it anyway. For god sake don’t slow the pace down by explaining stuff. Best case scenario: you ruin the mystery. Worst case scenario: you ruin the film. P:KoK has loads of interesting design stuff that it resolutely, point-blank refuses to slow down for. Blink and oh-no you’ve already missed it, too late there’s another explosion, guess you’re going to have to re-watch the film with your finger over the frame-skip button. There’s more interesting stuff happening in the background here than there is in the combined John Wick films and they last about five weeks.
In summary, this steps over the staggeringly low bar set by modern action films with ease. It’s not as great as Prey but it’s a lot of fun and keeps the anticipation up for Predator: Badlands.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. Yes, that’s what I’m calling it. ↩
2. And yes, yes we really do ↩
Tags: blog, tv, animation, sci-fi, 2024, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday April 25th, 2024
Stranger, Wilder Things
A standard way to start a review like this would be to give an overview of the main characters and the start of the story. But the characters who find themselves crash landed on an alien planet aren’t really the protagonists and it’s not their story.
The star here is the planet itself and the ecosystem that exists on it. The story is one of billions of years of evolution and adaptation. The ecology here is wild and fantastical. Some things are seen in the context of a co-dependant ecosystem. Others are presented completely devoid of context or explanation, with no clue as to whether it’s a once-in-a-millennia moment or an every day occurrence. The planets complete indifference to the characters who are journeying through it is both terrifying and awe inspiring.
Terrifyingly, the only thing on the planet that really pays attention to them sees them as a resource to be exploited. 1
That’s not to say that there’s nothing to the character’s stories. Whilst the beauty of the alien world is incredible, it’s the beating hearts of the humans that drive us through it and allow us to experience it alongside them. Whilst the animation is the showstopper, it’s the warmth of the story that’ll get you to binge watch it in a few evenings.
Unique and essential viewing.
1. Whilst the humans only want to survive and get off the planet, the only alien that is interested in them is driven by traditional human motivations of exploitation and greed ↩