AMC's The Terror (2018)

Now available on Netflix, AMC's The Terror was an unexpectedly good find. Billed as an anthology series, you can take the first season on its own (I've heard not great things about the second). It's an adaptation in 10 episodes - each about an hour long - of a fictionalized account of John Franklin's mid-19th century naval expedition in the Arctic, in search of a Northwest Passage over the top of Canada. Harsh environmental conditions mixed with hubris, exacerbated by a steadily growing sickness of the body and mind, as well as the presence of a vengeful polar bear-like creature tied to native folklore, all ensure the expedition's tragic outcome. Gripping, heartfelt, and imaginative, it was a harrowing journey from start to finish. I recommend it highly.

The X-Files - S5:E9 "Schizogeny"

[ S5:E8 "Kitsunegari" <<< Season 5 >>> S5:E10 "Chinga" ]

Now this is what I like to see - a good, old-fashioned freak-of-the-week episode. It's funny how much things have changed - going back to the first season, these were the kinds of episodes I considered as filler between the more interesting (mainly mythology) episodes. Of course, having an episode to watch and review every day (for the past four months and counting), factors into my state of mind every time I sit down to watch an episode. There are more mythology episodes now than there were in the first season, but even the non-mythology episodes are branching out and experimenting a lot, and interpreting and analyzing them requires a certain touch. A straightforward episode like this one is comfort food - easy like Sunday morning. Ah, the days when I could be satisfied with reviewing an episode in two sentences or less... Let's see how succinctly I can sum this one up:

Abusive parents start turning up dead under mysterious circumstances, making their kids look responsible, but could an orchard of killer trees be involved? Chad Lindberg plays the angsty teen bit with aplomb, drawing parallels to season 3's D.P.O. Katharine Isabelle is cute as his soft-spoken friend, and Sarah-Jane Redmond plays their morally ambiguous therapist. Like Teliko (and Kaddish, and probably plenty of others), this is another episode where a disadvantaged class (or sub-population)'s revenge raises difficult questions as to whether or when crimes might be justified (although, thankfully, this largely remains as subtext in this episode). It's also another good example of the rest of the investigators (which I'm sorry to say includes Scully) following the obvious clues while Mulder puts the more subtle pieces together to figure out what's really going on. This is a solid episode that doesn't overextend its reach, but frankly, I think I like it for that. I guess, five years into the series, it takes outside writers to capture the atmosphere and simple formula that defined this series in its formative days.

Memorable quotes:

Karin Matthews: There are all sorts of crimes, not just the ones you might find reason to investigate.

Karin Matthews: My approach is with the victims solely, to allow them to empower themselves.
Mulder: In what ways?
Karin Matthews: By breaking the cycle of abuse. By owning it, by confronting it, and by standing up against it.
Mulder: Seems to be working.

Mulder: Hey, Scully, is this demonstration of boyish agility turning you on at all?

Mulder: I don't think this was an act of grave robbing, Scully.
Scully: No, that's what we were doing.

Scully: These were abused children.
Mulder: Who couldn't defend themselves.
Scully: What, so nature did it for them?

Mulder: Rage unconfronted takes its own path.

The X-Files - S5:E4 "Detour"

[ S5:E3 "Unusual Suspects" <<< Season 5 >>> S5:E5 "The Post-Modern Prometheus" ]

Stopped by a road block while en route to a totally unnecessary team-building seminar (as if Mulder and Scully aren't already the best pair of investigators in the bureau), Mulder and Scully take the opportunity to ditch the annoyingly cheerful agents they are carpooling with (I have to say, as cool as it sounds, "Stonecypher" is a really weird name) in order to investigate the unexplained case of a strange predator (one of whose victims is a man I couldn't help noticing was played by the same actor who protrayed Scully's one-time hypnotic regression therapist in The Blessing Way) in the swampy woods of Florida (still filmed in miraculous Vancouver). How's that for a run-on sentence?

It's funny, but when I started watching Darkness Falls in season 1, I thought it was this episode, and I was confused, because I thought it was supposed to come much later in the series. Well, as I now know, it was this episode I was thinking of. The opener is somewhat reminiscent of F. Emasculata, which also started out in a dangerous jungle environment, but this episode, pervaded by a subtle sense of humor, is closer in tone to Quagmire, although not quite as good. There is even a point at which Mulder and Scully become stranded out in the woods at night, in a scene that seems to want to be the infamous "conversation on the rock" from that episode.

The episode is written by Frank Spotnitz, who usually sticks to mythology episodes - but his last non-mythology solo writing credit was on Our Town from season 2, which was a pretty decent episode. There is some dialogue about the encroachment of civilization upon mother nature, but the social commentary is subtler than it's been in the past on this series. The monster in this episode is some kind of camouflage humanoid with glowing, red eyes, that Mulder compares to the West Virginia legend of the Mothman. But being stalked in the woods by an invisible, intelligent creature - especially when they use infrared to track it, and start talking about it regulating its body temperature to avoid detection - can't help but conjure up images of Predator in one's mind.

As a final note, I was worried when Mulder started questioning an attractive red-haired police detective that this was going to be another one of those uncomfortable situations where Scully gets jealous and petty, like she frequently did in season 3. Thankfully, it didn't go that route. Even though it may have been a result of the professional distance between them in their early days, I liked when the two of them wouldn't get all bent out of shape every time one of them showed fleeting interest in someone else. They should certainly have enough confidence by now in the bond between them, especially after recent events, to know that even if one of them were to momentarily stray, they would always come back. They may not be "together" in a traditional sense, but they could still adopt a poly sensibility.

Memorable quotes:

Mulder: Pop quiz. What animal will attack the strongest, leaving the weak to escape?
Scully: ...
Mulder: The answer is none. Not one of the over four thousand species native to North America will attack the strongest when the weak is vulnerable.
Scully: And what does that have to do with anything?
Mulder: It makes me think that what we're dealing with here is no ordinary predator.

Mulder: Civilization is pushing very hard into these woods. Maybe something in these woods is pushing back.

Jeff: Nature is populated by creatures either trying to kill something they need to survive, or...trying to avoid being killed by something that needs them to survive. If we become blinded by the beauty of nature, we may fail to see its cruelty and violence.
Scully: Walt Whitman?
Jeff: No, When Animals Attack on the Fox Network.

(Lol, more self-advertisement. Not quite as effective as Nisei's take on Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, though).

Mulder: I think nature is supremely indifferent to whether we live or die. I mean, if you're lucky, you get 75 years. If you're really lucky, you get 80 years. And if you're extraordinarily lucky, you get to have 50 of those years with a decent head of hair.
Scully: I guess it's like Las Vegas - the house always wins.

The Happening (2008)

Note: This review was originally posted on Bridge To Better Days. I am reposting it here for archival purposes. It has been backdated to the date of its original posting.

The Happening reinforces my belief that M. Night Shyamalan's greatest weakness is over-preachiness. The Sixth Sense was a great movie, and The Village is probably my personal favorite Night flick. Overlooking the Silvertide tease, I enjoyed Lady in the Water, and I think it works well as a fairy tale - and, I will mention in passing, Bryce Dallas Howard looked particularly good wearing nothing more than a shirt for the majority of that movie. But, the pro-faith conclusion of Signs was a huge disappointment, and the moralistic overtones in The Happening distract from the fun of an apocalyptic thriller.

For example, early in the film, the main character, a science teacher, is teaching his class about a "happening" in which the world's honey bees simply disappeared. He asks various students in the class what they think might be the cause of this anomaly, only to conclude that it was an "act of nature" that we will never fully understand - and that it is important to recognize the limits of our knowledge. Uh-huh. This is not a science teacher speaking. The words may be coming from the actor's mouth, and uttered in his voice, but it is clearly M. Night Shyamalan speaking this passage.

Warning: Spoilers from here on out!

So what is "The Happening"? Well, if you don't mind spoilers, the general idea is this: all of a sudden the plants in the northeast corner of the US have identified mankind as a serious threat to their wellbeing, and have developed a toxin which causes people to pro-actively kill themselves without remorse. We're talking about an airborne toxin that causes an epidemic of mass suicides here. When you think about the fact that trees are largely responsible for the very oxygen we need to breathe for survival, the idea of such a plant-based attack on humanity is rather frightening, indeed.

And indeed, the concept behind this movie is very interesting. Unfortunately, the execution doesn't quite live up to its potential. The movie is supposedly Night's first R-rated flick - and in fact, without the need to cater to a PG-13 rating, they supposedly went all out to get a "hard" R. And while there are some pretty creepy and gruesome scenes, I don't think overall that it measures up to what an R movie could be. A "hard" R, at least. I mean, Hostel is a hard R. Shyamalan doesn't really seem to me to be a hard R kinda guy. He acts like it in the behind the scenes footage, but let's be realistic. He says he tried to cast "light" actors so that he could be as dark as he wanted with the material, and light actors would keep it from going too far, being too much. He obviously hasn't studied under Edgar Allan Poe. "Every word should serve the overall goal of the story - if it doesn't support that goal, get rid of it" (paraphrase from memory, of a quote I read in elementary school...).

Anyway, I don't mean to rag on M. Night Shyamalan, I like the guy. (Does anyone else think he looks like Jeff Goldblum?). One of the great scenes in The Happening was when the two punk kids got offed. That was definitely one of the more satisfying "offing of dead weight characters" I've seen recently. The one kid gets shot and you're like, omg, is this really happening? This is getting serious. And then the gun barrel goes for the other kid, and you're like, there's no way Night's gonna kill off this kid, too. And then bam! They had it coming.

The old lady at the end was pretty cool at first. She's this loner, living out on a farm in the middle of nowhere, without even electricity. She's totally disconnected from the rest of the world, and she has no concern or interest for it. She could have been this awesome loner character, but Night had to go and make her psychotic. When she ran out into the garden, for a second I thought it would turn out that the "Happening" was all her doing - that she was the one who wanted mankind wiped off the face of the planet, but then she became just another victim of the toxin and I knew it wasn't meant to be.

Alongside the apocalyptic story (with its environmentalist overtones) was the story of the two main characters - a young couple whose marriage is facing some problems. Going through the ordeal, they unsurprisingly reconcile their differences and end up living happily together, after it all. Kind of annoying, yes, but hey, it was fun watching Zooey Deschanel in the somewhat airheaded but sensitive cutie role. And by god, she's got eyes you could just fall into...

And now that I've lost my train of thought, I think that's a perfect place to end this review.