It’s been a really long time since I did a proper video game review (holy shit, 7 years!?), but I’ve been trying to get back into writing more regularly. A few years ago, I saw a post on Reddit about a developer’s upcoming strategy game which would let you play as a Mad Max/Fallout-style raider pillaging the wasteland. I was fascinated by this premise and instantly wishlisted the game, Raiders! Forsaken Earth, although it wasn’t until this year that I finally got the urge and free time to purchase and play the game.
In a broad sense, Raiders! is a strategy game with lite management and RPG elements, not too dissimilar to the XCOM franchise. You play as a player-created raider who has just taken the mantle of leadership and need to bring your band of scumbags from a ragtag group of thieves, to the uncontested rulers of the wasteland. This plays out in classic fashion – raiding caravans, dodging lawmen coming after you, and eventually building up your strength enough that you can extort entire towns to avoid your wrath. The management elements come into play as you have to build-up your base, manage your ever-expanding groups of raiders, and make sure there are enough resources available to survive and craft everything you need to survive. Meanwhile, the wasteland will react to your attacks with ever-increasing levels of offensive and defensive presence.
That’s a fairly rudimentary overview of the game, but it’s emblematic of Raiders! core gameplay – it’s a tried-and-tested formula and the game executes it well. There’s always some new little goal pushing you forwards, and I found myself on multiple occasions getting that “one more turn” compulsion, and then suddenly 30 more minutes would pass as I raided another settlement and made sure all my lowlifes were equipped with the best items. It’s not as deep as, say, a Paradox Interactive game, but I think it strikes a good balance between strategy and breezy fun.
That said, Raiders! is unmistakably an indie game and its flaws are readily apparent. The most obvious of these is that the game has basically no animation at all. World events are told via a static image and text box, the world map is navigated with a bunch of static PNGs being moved around the screen, and don’t even get me started on combat – you’re lucky if you get a 2 frame “animation” whenever someone does an action (honestly, the most “impressive” animation in the whole game is that you can see spent shell casings ejected out when you fire a gun, but that’s because they can just apply the same small JPG every time and rotate it a few times). While not exactly a major detriment to the core gameplay, it does leave Raiders! with a very unimpressive presentation. On the one hand, it captures the sort of vibes you’d get from the first two Fallout games, but it’s so dated that it’s likely enough to turn some people off the game entirely.
I mean… just look at it. If not for the resolution, you could mistake this for a 90s game.
Beyond the presentation issues, the game’s combat is fairly rudimentary. You get 2 rows per side, up to 4 ranged fighters, and up to 4 melee fighters per row, with melee having to fight adjacent enemies, and ranged being able to shoot anyone they want to. As fighters are defeated, units in reserve will move in to take their place, if any are available. Any fighter has about a dozen options available to them per turn, but most of these don’t matter – you can do heavy attacks (at the cost of accuracy), give an enemy a status condition, heal yourself, regain stamina, break armour, insult an enemy’s mother, etc. However, you rarely need to do anything other than just make a standard attack. The XCOM comparison earlier wasn’t just for show – accuracy is a major issue for your raiders, especially in the early game when they might have 20-30% hit rates, and +10 damage for -10% accuracy is not worth it unless you will literally die otherwise. Likewise, who needs status effects when you can just spec your raiders to be able to one-shot everyone you come across? This also makes a lot of the game’s optional level-up perks kinda useless, because about half of them are activated abilities, and then the good half are all passive bonuses. All of this is even more important because you can cheese this game’s AI pretty reliably – if you hit an enemy and get them around 50% HP, they will usually waste a turn healing. Meanwhile, if you kill an enemy, their replacement usually won’t be able to attack, so you can just cycle through enemies without getting a scratch if you have spec’d your band well enough. All this means that, once you get your band together, combat becomes fairly tedious and trivial outside of all but the most overwhelming battles, and it only gets easier when you get access to WMDs and artillery strikes. Thankfully, the game does have an auto-battle option, so you can speed through caravan raids into the late-game when you know that you will definitely win.
The management aspects of the game can get pretty annoying as well. Maybe it’s just because I spec’d by leader to give XP bonuses galore, but my raiders were constantly leveling up, necessitating a trip into the Roster menu after every fight to assign stat bonuses, buy perks, update weapon loadouts, etc, which only gets worse as you get more and more raiders in your party. Eventually I just gave up and started auto-leveling my raiders, but you’re probably going to want to manually level everyone until you have at least 6-8 max level scoundrels spec’d out with high accuracy, high damage, and high crit-chance as your core so they can annihilate anyone you come across. As you start conquering settlements, you also have to babysit them to make sure they’re all fortified and defended, because if not, then they’ll get destroyed by regulators and need to be recaptured and re-stocked. There’s no way to order units to travel between places, so you have to recruit dirtbags from a city into your party, then walk all the way over to the place you want them to be in.
All of this is small beans though compared to this game’s real glaring issue. The fact that they’ve programmed this game where you buy/sell items either 1 at a time, or all of them at once, is INSANE. My raider band carries up to a maximum of 300 units each of water, meat, and beer. I usually keep these around 150 each, because I will quickly top these all up through regular raiding, and then sell off the excess for easy cash. Now, think about what that means – I am regularly having to click the “sell” button 450 times for an incredibly basic action. I legitimately don’t know how this managed to make it through playtesting and how it has not been patched out, because it’s absolutely moronic that this in the game.
I also ran into a pretty major issue in the late game during my playthrough. If you’ve captured all the major settlements, the suddenly caravans stop running… This is a game about raiding caravans in order to get money and resources. When that gets taken away from you, you suddenly become extremely limited on options that you need to actually finish the game. Luckily, I had enough strength left in my band that I was able to capture the remaining slaver and arms dealer settlements so I could get a ton of cash, but even then I had to wait 2 in-game days to generate enough income to be able to get over the threshold to declare myself governor.
Like I said, Raiders! is a game where its flaws are glaringly obvious… but goddamn, I don’t really care, because this game lets you do some awesome shit. I pretty much always play a good guy in games, but it’s nice to give in to the fantasy of playing the irredeemable, chaotic evil villains for once, and Raiders! delivers how you’d expect it to. For one thing, you can go full-hog as a cannibal if you want to – you can kill and eat your own raiders (or just eat them when they are killed in battle), demand captives from a town and then eat them, capture enemies and then eat them, butcher someone and then sell that meat to merchants… It’s despicable and hilarious in equal measure. You don’t even have to eat people either if you don’t want to – hostages can be ransomed for money, killed to send a message, or you can put a bag on their head and use them as a human shield in combat (…guess which option I used half the time). You can perform human sacrifices to your savage wasteland god for combat bonuses. You can unleash napalm and mustard gas attacks on settlements. You can burn down the remaining pockets of civilization for the sheer fun of it. You can recruit feral dogs and boars to fight alongside you. You can engage in polygamy and build up a harem of up to 3 spouses (and if you want more, just kill and eat one of the existing ones). You can build up your base will all sorts of services, including (naturally) a brothel, which your evil-as-fuck ass can keep in business with literal sex slaves.
The game also has some fun random events hidden in the world map off the beaten path. One of my best raiders was welcomed into the group after being found in the desert. Another time, I found a thunderdome and fought a guy there. Then there was the time we came across an old nuclear submarine and found a goddamn tactical nuke inside, which I promptly took to blast the shit out of a pesky settlement. Then there was the time I found a group of cultists and sold them a bunch of slaves to sacrifice, which was handy because I really needed the money at the time. Clearly, the game allows you to be a real son of a bitch, although the dated, text-based presentation might actually help to not make it feel as “grimdark” as it could otherwise – yeah, you’re doing a lot of fucked-up shit, but most of it is left to roleplay and your imagination. You can also play with a conscience if you want to, but that doesn’t feel like the spirit of this game to me: you can be the good guy in every other game, after all.
While I have harped on the game’s presentation, I will give it some major props for the way that it portrays your raiders and their equipment. Every raider has a randomized appearance and name, and you’ll rarely see raiders with the same face (although I did see names repeating every once in a while). Probably around 95% of the weapons, armour, and items you can equip on your raiders will be reflected on their character model (and, conversely, you can prioritize attacking enemy fighters based on the equipment you see on them). The equipment is all classic raider items – hockey masks, riot helmets, nail baseball bats, rusty guns, shields made of manhole covers and stop signs, spiky armour, dusty jackets, etc. Considering the low production value, I was pretty surprised by this, as it no doubt took quite a bit of work to make this all happen, but I’m so glad they put in the effort.
As you play and level these guys (and gals) up, you grow attached to them as they bring you victories. Like I said, you can marry up to 3 of them. You can also promote up to 2 of them to higher positions of command in your band – this can potentially cause them to get too big for their britches and challenge your for control, although this never happened to me in my game; my officers were all ride-or-die. All of this helps to build affection for your regular group of raiders, which is important because, again, this game is like XCOM – no matter how good you are, eventually a lucky crit is going to happen, one of your favourites is going to die, and it is going to hurt. The game keeps track of your fallen brethren (and whether you ate them), and I had a few memorable losses in my playthrough. Poor Blackburn, he was my best marksman early on, and my first spouse and officer. He died at the end of our first big settlement raid, and it was a devastating loss. Then there was Shockmaster, a regulator who was hunting our band down, but when he was defeated in battle, he defected and became a scumbag himself. In one particularly devastating battle when I was outnumbered and outgunned by another band of regulators, I lost Shockmaster and Snaggle, 2 of my 3 best remaining marksmen at the time. If you’ve ever played XCOM, you know exactly what sort of feels this game gives you and just how ripe it is for roleplay.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t go through some of the hilarious names your raiders can have in this game. Like… there’s literally a dude named “Cock” in my band. I didn’t name him that, that’s just what the game called him. In addition to being appropriate for the “raider fantasy”, it also encourages more roleplay: like, I imagine that all these nicknames were made up by the other raiders during initiation and then stuck from there, so you start wondering how they got some of these names. Some highlights from my playthrough include: Hooligan, Shifty, White Legs, Sniffer, Wrists, Smutty, Rotten, Night Hate, Worms, Maggot, Dank, Pisser, Gonorrhea.
I put about a dozen hours into my playthrough of Raiders! Forsaken Earth. For me, that’s a solid amount of time to sink into a game. I don’t have time, or interest, in games that are dozens of hours long, so this was fantastic. However, I can see Raiders! being one of those games you could sink and much, or as little, time into as you want. The game has procedurally-generated maps and lots of customizable difficulty options, so you could easily have several more playthroughs to challenge yourself more, maybe try handling your band differently, or just replay on a different map – the choice is yours, really. Again, like XCOM in that regard, or like the 90s strategy/management games I used to play all the time, like Age of Empires II or Rollercoaster Tycoon, where it’s a different experience each time.
Raiders! Forsaken Earth has some really rough edges, but its core pillars are rock solid. Honestly, I’d love to see a sequel with more quality of life improvements (let me type how many items I want to sell, PLEASE), more weapons/armour/equipment, more random events, more rival raiders, larger maps, goddamn car chases… I think there’s still a lot of untapped potential here that could make for a real homerun if given the chance.
It’s been a quiet year for IC2S, but I’ve been kind of needing the break. Since the birth of my daughter, I haven’t had the time or desire to write like I did before. I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things again though, and what better way to commit than with another round of reused writing and corporate whoring? There have been quite a few Reese’s products released since I last updated this list and I’ve been keeping track of my thoughts on them this whole time.
As before, I’m not exclusively going over “official” Reese’s products, but any exceptions are done at my discretion. I’ve also once again excluded the original Peanut Butter Cups from the list, because they’re just timeless and the default baseline for quality (and therefore would just end up on the lower half of the list for being less interesting, which I feel is unfair for something that good).
Anyway, without further ado, let’s get started!
60) Reese Mix – These things got a dishonourable mention in the original version of list because they’re way too expensive for what you get, so I could never bring myself to buy them. However, my (at the time) fiancé knows I like to try new Reese products and hadn’t seen one of these before so she bought me a couple. So, it turns out that Reese Mix are kind of worse than I expected. I mean, it’s just the sum of its parts – peanuts, pretzel, Pieces and Minis, but the pretzel bits are really salty. On the one hand, this just makes you want to eat the Minis more to counter-act the excessive salty taste, but it’s a pretty bad look when your snack food is actively making me want to ignore parts of it to get to the bits I like. Plus, the saltiness is so prevalent that the taste has been passed over to everything else in the package anyway. All-in-all, it’s not the ideal way of eating any of the ingredients and I’m 100% certain you could make your own Reese Mix that would not only taste better but be far cheaper overall. Hell, the neighbourhood pre-teen entrepreneur could make a killing on knock-off Reese Mix and they’d taste better to boot. These things are just all-round failures as far as I’m concerned.
59) Reese’s Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Peanut Butter Cup – These are a disaster. You’d think that a peanut butter cup made entirely out of peanut butter would be tasty but then you try it and, oh yeah, it really is entirely made up of peanut butter. It’s interesting how Reese have been advancing their technology to make half-and-half shells or shells that aren’t chocolate at all, but this is just science gone mad. Think about it – you’re basically just eating several large globs of peanut butter that is too rich and too sweet and it goes against the whole idea of Reese, that chocolate and peanut butter are a match made in heaven. Never again.
58) Reese Puffs – Reese Puffs are the KFC Double Down of the breakfast cereal world: breakfast cereals are already towing a fine line trying to justify themselves as something other than sugary junk food, but Puffs shit all over that line and head into territory that’s just disgusting. I mean, the tag line when I was a kid was that they’re “Reese, for breakfast!” Yeah, uh, no thanks. I mean, I like Coca-Cola, but I don’t want one until after noon at the earliest because who starts their day that way? Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms at least pretend like they aren’t pure sugar in a bowl, but Reese Puffs don’t even put up a pretense about what this product is. I had these maybe once as a kid, and even then I was not taken in. Of all the things on this list, if I had to sacrifice one Reese product for the good of humanity, this is the one I’d cast into the fire.
57) Reese’s Pieces Peanut – These might have been the first Reese’s product I’ve ever tried that I will straight-up never buy again. Like, at least I like parts of the Reese Mix, but these? Reese’s Pieces Peanut is so… bleh. Nothing about it worked for me – the salty peanuts just didn’t gel with the peanut butter taste, and since they’re Pieces there’s no chocolate in them to balance out the peanut butter. So basically, you’re just eating a bag full of crunchy, salty peanut butter. It’s super disappointing and I hated it.
56) Reese’s Mallow-Top Peanut Butter Cup – I don’t like marshmallows. With this in mind, when I saw the Reese’s Mallow-top I knew that my enjoyment of it was going to hinge on whether the white top actually tastes like marshmallow or not. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve got to give some props to the marketing and R&D team because boy does that top taste like a marshmallow… unfortunately, that also means that they were revolting to me. I’m not even sure if the marshmallow is mixed right into the creme top, or if it’s a syrupy layer of flavour between the peanut butter and the creme, but either way it ruins the taste of this for me. Maybe that’s just my personal preferences tanking this product, but if you’re a big marshmallow junkie then this could easily be a hit for you.
55) Reese’s Pieces Shake & Break Egg – I’m not sure what I expected of this. It’s a fairly standard, hollow, chocolate Easter egg, but the twist is that it has some Reese’s Pieces inside. So you’re just eating a boring, vanilla Easter treat with next to no peanut butter taste (and with less Pieces inside than you would expect). I wasn’t expecting much of this, but even then I was disappointed. Considering that Reese’s put out several top-tier Easter products every year, you’re wasting your money if you put it towards a Shake & Break egg.
54) Reese’s Pieces with Caramel Flavoured Milk Chocolate – The idea of Pieces with a caramel center is intriguing, but then you realize that that is not what this is. Instead, someone decided that caramel flavoured milk chocolate would be better (and, I’m sure, cheaper to execute). As a result, we get the worst of all worlds – the center of the Pieces have a hint of caramel flavour, but it makes the chocolate hard, rather than chewy, and the taste ultimately clashes with the peanut butter. Definitely the worst of the four main Pieces varieties released in 2023.
53) Reese’s Creamy Peanut Butter Cup – At a certain point, it feels like Reese’s are scraping the barrel with some of their variants. Was anyone complaining that the peanut butter in a Reese cup is not smooth enough? I was not expecting much when I tried these out, but even then I was left underwhelmed. You can barely notice any difference between these and a regular peanut butter cup, you could put both in front of me blind and I honestly don’t think I could pick them out. This variant is maybe a fraction less-solid than normal, and is definitely not worth the extra cost and pomp.
52) Reese’s Peanut Butter Clusters – Imagine a Reese’s version of Turtles chocolates – that sounds amazing, right? Just swap out the caramel in Turtles with peanut butter and we’re golden. However, I was very surprised by how underwhelmed I was with Clusters. You’d think that taking a Turtles and then adding peanut butter to it would just make Clusters tastier and better by default, but I’m not particularly keen on them. Personally, I don’t feel like the peanut butter really adds much to the taste. If anything, it makes them a bit too sweet, to the point where I’d rather have a Turtles chocolate instead. Hell, I’d rather have a knock-off Turtles chocolate like Almondillos instead of a Clusters. However, the real crippling issue with Clusters is that they also ripped off the worst part about Turtles – they are bloody expensive. Like, I’m talking $7 on the low-end for a small box of these things. I’ve actually seen them selling for as high as $10 before! And, like Turtles, you’re not getting enough chocolate in that box to make that steep price worth it. If you see any marked down 50% after Christmas is over then they might be worth the purchase, but I would never pay full retail price for these again. In fact, I did pick a box of these up at 50% off on Boxing Day for about $5 and I’m still pretty iffy on whether they were worth that price.
51) Reese’s Half-Pound Peanut Butter Cup – In the original version of this list back in 2018, I made a joke about how a half-pound Peanut Butter cup was just too much Reese’s to actually enjoy yourself… well, I went and bought one to test out that theory. It is, indeed, a huge peanut butter cup and, as expected, way too much to eat by yourself in one sitting. I got about halfway through before it started to make me feel that sickly feeling of peanut butter and chocolate overload. These things are just too rich and it’s not like they’re cheap either (over $5 for one), so I can’t really see why someone would go for one of these other than as a gimmick… that said, a couple weeks after I finished it, I was sorely tempted to get another. There’s something about the extra sweetness of a half-pound cup’s ludicrous excess that justifies its existence and tempts me, but in my head I know that it has so many caveats that it’s not really worthwhile.
50) Reese’s Popped Snack Mix – Sure, this is basically one of those shitty Reese’s Mix packages, but the addition of chocolate-coated popcorn makes enough of a difference that it actually improves the overall package. Instead of just having a bunch of excessively-salty filler to slog through and then some compromised Miniatures to actually enjoy, the addition of the popcorn at least gives you something else to make the whole package feel worthwhile. That said, these still have most of the same weaknesses as a regular Mix, including the excessive saltiness and the high price, but at least the tasty popcorn make it a much more balanced product if you do decide to indulge in it.
49) Reese’s Big Cup with Reese’s Puffs – These were really disappointing, the Reese Puffs are tiny and not very well distributed, you may only get a few in a single cup and they don’t make much of a difference to taste or texture. Basically just a Big Cup which has maybe a tiny bit of crunch on occasion, which isn’t going to cut it given all the far superior varieties of Big Cups out there (and given that these are sold at a premium in comparison). I had some hope for these but they really flopped.
48) Reese’s Whipps – I swear that I tried one of these things when I was a kid, but I can’t remember much about it, it didn’t leave any sort of fond memories. I don’t recall it being bad, but there’s not much else on this list that I wouldn’t rather have instead. I’d probably buy one just for the memories if I saw one, but it isn’t a particularly interesting choice. That said, considering that it’s like 90% nougat I can see why it wouldn’t leave much of an impression either.
47) Reese Bar – I’ve had a Reese Bar a few times, but I’ve never been particularly impressed. Maybe it’s just me, but these things are too big and push over the limit where you’re getting “too much” sweetness. Plus they don’t hold together very well – I always find that if you try to break pieces off of the bar it caves in on itself and the peanut butter filling is very soft, almost liquid. They’re certainly edible, but whenever I buy them I inevitably will tell myself “Oh right, that’s why I stopped buying these things.”
46) Reese Blizzard – So I usually order a Reese’s Blizzard on the rare occasion where I go to Diary Queen, but that said I definitely have issues with them. For one thing, Dairy Queen Blizzards are stupidly expensive in general, and keep getting worse year after year. Furthermore, if I order anything more than a medium, I feel gross afterwards. I mean, think about what you’re actually ordering: you’re basically eating 3 or more packs of Peanut Butter cups, in addition to the ice cream itself. I have gotten sick from the sweetness overload on multiple occasions… not that that stops me from ordering them again, but the fact that these things literally can make me feel sick makes them harder to recommend than nearly everything on this list.
45) Reese Minis – They aren’t quite as satisfying as a full-sized Peanut Butter Cup, or even the wrapped Miniatures for that matter, but Reese Minis are a nice little treat. The fact that they come in resealable bags is great, it helps to make them last and not over-indulge in them. There are 2 varieties of Minis available too, regular and white chocolate. The variety is nice, but I tend to lean towards the white chocolate – for one thing, I think that they taste better, and Hershey’s rarely sells white chocolate Reese products north of the border so I’ll take whatever avenue I can get for that fix.
44) Reese’s Pieces – These things are iconic, easily the second most popular Reese product after the original peanut butter cups, in part thanks to the textbook usage of product placement in E.T. which made everyone want to try them. While I enjoy Reese’s Pieces, I find that their quality is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes I’ll buy a box and they just don’t taste all that great. I’m not sure if it’s inconsistent recipes, poor quality control, corner cutting, or what. When I was in high school I remember several occasions where this would happen, so it was like a flip of the coin on whether I was actually going to enjoy my box of Pieces or not and it completely soured me on them. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still have Pieces on occasion, but I don’t care for them nearly as much as some other people might and I don’t actively seek them out.
43) Reese’s Crispy Crunchy – I was pretty disappointed by this thing. It’s essentially a Crispy Crunch bar, which I do really like, but bigger and with peanut butter and nuts added to the mix. Wow, how can that possibly go wrong? Well… it did somehow, because I would rather have a Crispy Crunch, no contest. This bar tastes like a cheap, dollar store knock-off of a Crispy Crunch rather than a product put out by a major chocolate manufacturer and nothing about it really “works” for me. Hell, it doesn’t even deserve to be a Crispy Crunch knock-off, it’s a freaking Butterfinger knock-off. Just unfortunate all around.
42) Dark Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Thins – Holy shit, they weren’t kidding when they called these things “thins”. They’re, like, half the size of a normal cup at least! Clearly intended as a “diet” option for the calorie-conscious, the chocolate on these is much harder and denser by necessity in order to keep the cup from collapsing on itself, and there’s far less peanut butter inside than usual. They’re certainly not bad, but… like, if you’re trying to be calorie-conscious and eating these as a result then you’re not going to be making much of a difference. Meanwhile, my indulgent ass is just going to be gravitating to the full-sized versions of these instead. Of the three varieties that launched with the “Thins” label, the dark chocolate is my least favourite, but it’s still worth checking out.
41) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Thins – I have to give the milk chocolate thins the slight edge over their dark chocolate counterparts, but honestly there’s barely a difference. They’re still tasty, still thin and still a fool’s refuge if you’re looking for something that’s actually calorie-conscious.
40) Reese’s Big Cup Peanut Brittle – The “chocolate” part is replaced with peanut butter creme (which Reese seem to be obsessed with experimenting with these days) while the interior is crunchy (read: extra nutty) peanut butter. Honestly, the crunchy peanut butter is the draw here, the peanut brittle creme has a different taste but it isn’t better than chocolate IMHO. That said, this tastes way better than the peanut butter lovers and the fact that the peanut brittle isn’t just more PB probably helps.
39) Reese’s Pieces with Pretzel – These taste about how you’d expect, they’re Pieces with a hard pretzel crunch, salty taste and that signature aftertaste. They’re pretty tasty overall, but there’s an unexpected issue where the pretzel pieces are a bit too large and are harder than the peanut butter and shell, so every time you bite into one, the exterior all crumbles around the pretzel piece.
38) Reese’s Dark Chocolate Miniatures – I was on vacation in Niagara Falls in the summer of 2020 when I found these at the Hershey store and bought a big bag of them. I’m glad I did too because I haven’t seen any since then. I don’t typically care for dark chocolate, but I can imagine that particular taste working well with Reese’s peanut butter. Unfortunately, the balance just isn’t quite there in Reese’s Miniatures, meaning you get just a bit too much dark chocolate for my liking and not enough peanut butter. If you like dark chocolate anyway then this probably isn’t a negative, but for me it manages to tip a very delicate balance in the wrong direction.
37) Reese’s Chocolate Lovers Peanut Butter Cup – I’m not entirely sure who this product is for. It’s just a peanut butter cup, but with slightly less peanut butter and slightly more/somewhat richer chocolate. It’s like they tried to design a peanut butter cup for people who don’t like peanut butter cups… but still left a lot of peanut butter in there so it doesn’t even accomplish that. Oh, and it only comes with 2 cups, so I really don’t see why someone would buy these over other Reese’s products, except as a gimmick. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this well enough, but I just don’t understand why these exist when they’re so similar to a regular peanut butter cup, but with less in a package.
36) Eggs, Hearts & Christmas Bells – This entry covers a couple seasonal Reese’s variants under one umbrella; they don’t really deserve to have their own separate entries, since they’re all basically the same product in different shapes and packaging each time. The Christmas Bells, Valentines Hearts and Easter Eggs are, in essence, seasonal versions of Reese’s Miniatures – small, individually wrapped peanut butter cups with a shape based on the season they’re made for. They’re great, and if you find some of these in your Christmas stocking or on an Easter egg hunt, you know that whoever bought the chocolates was slaying it this year. Always a welcome gift, although the one thing keeping them a bit lower is that, as seasonal releases, Reese price gouge you for them. On the flip-side, as soon as the holiday is over the prices will get slashed in half so you can get lots of them cheap, so it’s a bit of a trade-off.
35) Reese’s Peanut Butter Lovers Peanut Butter Cup – The Peanut Butter Lovers cup definitely comes out on top compared to the Chocolate Lovers. That said, neither of them do much to stand out, instead just providing a bit more of a niche for a Reese’s lover. What makes the Peanut Butter Lovers cup stand out is that the top quarter of the cup has been replaced with shaped peanut butter, which naturally gives the whole cup a more pronounced peanut butter taste. I’d say that it is more akin to the taste of a Big Cup, just in a smaller package. It suffers the same sort of issue as the Chocolate Lovers cup where the difference isn’t a big deal and there are only two cups in a package, but I’d have to say that the Peanut Butter Lovers does a little bit more to stand out and at least it still has some chocolate in it, unlike the disastrous Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Cup.
34) Reese’s Nutrageous Bar – I’m kind of surprised that I hadn’t tried a Reese’s Nutrageous before 2020, considering that they’ve been around since 1994. That said, I can kind of understand why they haven’t become particularly widespread, because this is basically just an Oh Henry! with peanut butter… except that there are also Oh Henry! bars with Reese’s peanut butter in the middle, which taste basically the same and are cheaper, so I struggle to see the point for this product to even exist. The bar itself tastes fine, but I did find the caramel to be particularly sticky, making the bar a bit more of an effort to eat than I was expecting.
33) Reese’s Pieces with Milk Chocolate – As soon as I saw these Pieces with some chocolate inside them I thought “oh, these are just the peanut butter M&Ms”… and my intuition was 100% correct, they are practically identical in taste to that candy which has been on the market for years already. That said, peanut butter M&Ms are great and they taste 100x better than actual Pieces, so this is still a win overall, even if it is very unoriginal.
32) Reese’s Nutcrackers – Reese’s must have been putting a lot of money into R&D in the last few years. For decades we’ve gotten “shaped” holiday chocolates which resemble giant chocolate turds more than they do Christmas trees and bats, so imagine my shock when I opened up a Reese’s Nutcracker and found that the chocolate nutcracker shape and design was very well-defined and firm. Even more surprisingly, they are filled with a generous amount of peanut butter, making for a really delicious package. The only thing keeping these from being higher is that you only get like 10ish total in a bag, but if you can pick some up after the holidays for a discount, then you are in for a treat.
31) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup with Pieces – These things have been around in years in king sized form so it was surprising that it took them this long for regular-sized versions to start being sold. That said, maybe there’s a reason for that, because in standard-sized form they really don’t taste all that different from a regular or crunchy Peanut Butter Cup. The Pieces in this are tiny and all they do is provide a little extra crunch. Not bad by any means, but not much to get excited over.
30) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Stuffed with Crunchy Cookie – These things sound like an amazing combo… I mean, peanut butter, chocolate AND cookie bits!? Unfortunately, they don’t really live up to the hype. It’s really just a regular Peanut Butter Cup but with a subtle crunch to it from the cookie bits. The cookie bits don’t change the taste substantially, but the crunch is very satisfying. However, you only get 2 cups in these packs, whereas you get 3 in a Crunchy Peanut Butter Cups pack and I can’t really say that it’s worth the difference considering that they taste basically identical in the end.
29) Reese’s Take 5 Bar – The Reese’s Take 5 is a very unique addition to the Reese canon, combining a thin layer of caramel and peanut butter with a pretzel and then coating it all with chocolate. Apparently these have existed for years as their own separate thing but were recently brought under the Reese’s umbrella, which kind of makes sense because they’re unlike any other Reese product. It all comes down to that pretzel, which dominates the taste and texture of the bar, giving it a nice crunch and salty taste. That said, I don’t particularly care all that much for pretzels and there’s a bit of that pretzel aftertaste, which is unfortunate, but I found this bar far more intriguing than I was expecting. I don’t know if I’d buy these with any sort of regularity, but I can definitely see myself trying them again if I encounter any.
28) Reese’s Pieces with Chocolate Cookie – These had to be one of the most intriguing Reese’s varieties to experience for the first time. First of all, they’re unusually round for a Reese’s product, basically full spheres. The so-called “cookie” also has a very interesting taste and texture – imagine a corn pop with a crunchy Pieces shell and you have a good idea what eating these is like. I actually quite enjoyed these and would happily buy them again!
27) Reese’s Bites – Every time I go to do these updated lists, some long-forgotten memory gets dredged up of a Reese’s product I used to enjoy and have completely forgotten until now. This time, that product are Reese’s Bites, a long-since discontinued product which were basically small balls with a thin-but-hard chocolate exterior and a generous peanut butter center. Like a lot of Reese’s products, I’d eat too many of these and feel sick afterwards due to the peanut butter overload, but they were just so damn good that I couldn’t help myself.
26) Reese’s Fast Break – As far as Reese’s chocolate bars go, the Fast Break is definitely one of the better ones. The nougat is very soft and subtle, but it’s the healthy serving of the peanut butter that really makes this thing shine. It’s very simple (basically a Snickers, but with the peanuts and caramel swapped out for extra peanut butter), but it works so well. If I come across one of these again anytime soon I know that I’ll be buying one because these are delicious.
25) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with Crunchy Peanut Butter – I’m not sure if I’m just not remembering these things very well, but the big “crunchy peanut butter” gimmick of this product never actually stood out to me – they always tasted like a normal Peanut Butter Cup, just maybe a bit less smooth. It’s a small difference I guess, but not much to justify having a whole other variation on the market. I think Reese agreed because I haven’t seen one of these things in years and imagine they were probably discontinued. It’s too bad though, just remembering that these exist makes me hungry for one…
24) Reese’s Miniature Cups – On first glance, these might just seem to be the same thing as the aforementioned Minis, but there are a couple notable differences which make Miniatures stand out. First of all, Miniatures are all individually wrapped and are maybe about twice the size of an individual Mini. This might not seem like a huge difference, but for whatever reason, Miniatures just taste better to me. There just seems to be more quality put into each one and the size makes for a better balance of chocolate and peanut butter taste. Plus, they come in regular and white chocolate versions, which just helps to vault them over the comparable seasonal Reese’s chocolates, in my opinion.
23) Christmas Trees & Easter Eggs – At first glance, these appear to be nothing more than low-effort, cheap holiday cash-ins (hell, that “tree” is more reminiscent of a chocolate turd than an evergreen). However, these things over-deliver in a big way, being enormous compared to other Reese products and are stuffed with that delicious peanut butter. Plus, unlike most seasonal chocolate, they actually tend to be priced reasonably. The fact that they come in regular and white chocolate varieties is just icing on the cake. I fondly remember buying these things all the time around Christmas when I was in university. Hell, I would not be surprised if I was eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Tree while writing some of the earliest posts on this blog.
22) Reese’s Easter Eggs with Pieces – Reese’s have clearly figured out the answer to the question “How do you make a Reese’s product better?” Answer: Just added Pieces. That’s really the only difference here between regular Reese’s Easter Eggs and these, but it’s enough of a difference that it deserves its own entry. I haven’t seen Reese’s Christmas Trees with Pieces yet but I’m sure they’ll exist by soon enough.
21) Reese Swoops – I can remember back when Reese Swoops first came out and really enjoyed them at the time. They had a very unique taste and texture that no other Reese product has had before or since. I was saddened when I heard that they were discontinued. If you never got the chance to try one, imagine a Pringle made entirely of chocolate and with a little Reese’s peanut butter swirl mixed in directly with the chocolate. Suffice to say, they were delicious and it was easy to forget just how much chocolate you were consuming as you scarfed them down, especially considering that they were originally intended as a “lite”, diet chocolate.
20) Reese Big Cups – Unlike some of the Reese’s products I mentioned earlier, while Big Cups tow the fine line between decadence and overindulgence, I feel like they strike the perfect balance where I feel just guilty enough. I definitely feel like I’m pushing some limits with a Big Cup, but I never feel like they’re too much or like I’m going to be sick or disgusted with myself for having one. There’s got to be some Catholic priest on staff at Hershey HQ who’s doling out the exact measurements of guilt that are acceptable whenever a candy bar is released and goddamn he towed the line flawlessly with the Big Cup.
19) Reese’s Big Cup Crunchy – It’s a Big Cup, but with peanuts in it. It really simple and doesn’t make a major difference in terms of the actual taste, but I’d be lying if I said that the crunch of the peanuts isn’t really satisfying. Literally, that’s it, I enjoy the crunch of the big peanuts pieces more, that’s enough to put it over the regular Big Cups and Cookie Big Cups for me.
18) Reese’s Outrageous! Stuffed with Pieces – The naming convention for this chocolate bar is pretty weird. It’s a Reese’s Nutrageous bar… but the nuts have been replaced with Reese’s Pieces. I don’t know why they didn’t just come up with a completely new name, especially since they make sure to specify that the bar is stuffed with Pieces anyway, but whatever, I’m not a big marketing exec now am I? In any case, the Outrageous bar is quite good! In fact, it is significantly better than the original Nutrageous bar. It tastes very similar to the peanut butter Oh Henry! bars, minus the nuts of course, and adding in Pieces always makes a Reese’s product better by orders of magnitude. My only real complaint is that the standard size version is quite small for a chocolate bar and, like the Nutrageous bar, the caramel is still a bit too sticky, but it is a tasty treat regardless.
17) Reese’s Big Cup with Pretzels – I’m not a huge fan of pretzels, so I was a bit wary of putting them in a peanut butter cup where the saltiness could overpower the perfect balance of chocolate and peanut butter. Thankfully, I actually had it backwards, because the pretzel taste is overwhelmed by the peanut butter and chocolate. What gives this a leg up is the fact that the surprisingly-big chunks of pretzel you get give you more “crunch” than most Reese products I’ve ever tried, and if you’ve learned anything about me thus far it’s that I love me some crunch. This was good enough that, after I finished my one-cup package, I was sad that I didn’t have a second cup to go with it, which is about as good an endorsement as I can offer. Will definitely buy again if I see any.
16) Reese Sticks – It shocks me just how good these damn things are. If you thought peanut butter and chocolate were a match made in heaven, Reese Sticks prove that 3 thin strips of wafer make a case for a hot threesome. Just… these things are brilliant. They sell smaller versions in the same sorts of bags as Minis too, and they are so addictive that you risk scarfing down half a bag in one sitting if you’re not careful. If you’ve never tried these, then seriously, freaking do it.
15) Hershey’s Milk Chocolate with Reese’s Pieces – I normally don’t care about a Hershey’s bar; the milk chocolate is tasty but it’s a boring product as far as chocolate options go and so they’re almost always overshadowed by more enticing treats. However, the fusion of Reese and Hershey bar really surprised me – the bits of peanut butter taste and the crunch from the Pieces gives the simple Hershey’s bar some more flavour than usual and there’s even little bits of peanut added in for added texture and taste! All-in-all, it’s pretty similar to the M&Ms Bar (which I do really like), but much better!
14) Reese’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups – Like I said with the miniature and thin versions of these things, I don’t typically care for dark chocolate, but I had a feeling that dark chocolate would work really well with Reese’s peanut butter. That said – goddamn, I was not expecting them to be this good! Like, given the choice between these and regular peanut butter cups I’d say that I’d go with the dark chocolate ones more often than not (assuming the number of cups in a package and the price are equal). The balance between dark chocolate and peanut butter is so much better in the full-sized cups compared to the minis or thins. Compared to standard peanut butter cups, these have a bit of a richer taste to the chocolate which works spectacularly with the peanut butter. These get a hearty recommendation from me, whether you like dark chocolate or not.
13) Reese Crunchers – These might be the most surprising entry on this list for me. I saw a package of these at a gas station and, similarly to Reese Mix, the price seemed steep but I figured I’d give them their one shot to impress me. The price is definitely a bit too high, but bloody hell are they worth the cost. They’re kind of like little, delicious bite-sized clusters and just writing about them is making me want to eat the package of them sitting beside my desk. (Post-script: Yeah, within 5 minutes I had that package opened and was scarfing them down greedily.)
12) Reese’s Outrageous! Crunchers Stuffed With Pieces – These things are nearly identical to regular Crunchers, but they’ve had miniature Pieces added in. That gives them the slightest of edges over regular Crunchers for me, but they’re so close that you can’t really go wrong either way. That said, if you have to pick between the two in a pinch? Outrageous! Crunchers, 100% of the time.
11) Breyers Reese Ice Cream – Breyers’ Reese ice cream has some big legs up on the Reese Blizzard which propel it so far up the list. For one thing, a whole container of Breyers ice cream can be purchased for about the price of a Blizzard… even less when they go on sale for around $4 on the reg. Secondly, the ice cream is flavoured to actually complement the peanut butter cups in there, which makes it taste better than a Blizzard in general. Thirdly, you control the portioning, so you shouldn’t ever feel sick when eating this. Whenever I see this product on sale at the grocery store, I love to pick it up because I know that I’ll get to enjoying it on a hot day. Still less economical than, say, buying a big tub of vanilla ice cream, but it’s Reese ice cream, can you blame me if I want to indulge a little sometimes?
10) Reese’s Crunchy Peanut Bar – You’ve probably gotten the idea by now that I like my Reese’s peanut butter with a crunchy texture and the Crunchy Peanut Bar may be the best way to experience that particular taste. There is a lot of peanut butter in this surprisingly-wide bar, so peanut butter lovers are going to be over the moon. Taste-wise, it’s very comparable to the King Size Crunchy Peanut Butter Cups, but you get a lot more here and in a more convenient package. I checked this out on a whim and I came away very impressed.
9) Reese’s Big Cup with Potato Chips – Okay, I said that the Reese’s Crunchy Peanut Bar may be the best way to get a crunchy peanut butter texture, but these seem like they’re going to be impossible to top. If you haven’t tried them, I imagine you’re thinking “Potato chips, chocolate and peanut butter!? That sounds disgusting!”, and I thought that as well… for about 3 seconds. Think about it at all and you’ll realize that unparalleled crunch and a hint of extra salt make this unconventional trio a genius move, far better executed than the litany of other attempts at making a crunchy peanut butter cup.
8) White Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Thins – White chocolate Reese’s are the best and these thins offer one of the most convenient ways to get ahold of them. They are quite comparable to their full-sized counter-parts and don’t feel like a sacrifice in quality like, say, the White Chocolate Minis. They are also by far the sweetest option between the three Thins varieties, but they are just so damn good that I’d pick them nearly every time.
7) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Eggs – I overlooked these things on previous versions of this list, which isn’t too surprising considering that Reese’s have at least 5 distinct Easter egg products. However, Peanut Butter Eggs are easily one of the best seasonal variants out there, so I do feel bad for missing them for so long. Unlike the aforementioned Reese Easter Eggs (which are mostly peanut butter with a thin chocolate shell) and Mini Eggs (which are bite-sized treats), Peanut Butter Eggs are a nice sized egg with a thick chocolate shell around a generous interior of delicious peanut butter. I love them, but their only real drawback is that they’re expensive. Individually-wrapped Peanut Butter eggs are about $1.50 each, but if you want a bag of them you’re looking at about $15+. Unlike some expensive Reese’s products though, I’d actually be tempted to spend this on Peanut Butter Eggs, because they’re just that good. That said, I’ll always prowl the local Walmarts and Giant Tigers when Easter is over to find bags of these things at discount prices, but you have to be quick because they usually get snatched up within hours of opening on the day after Easter.
6) Royal Reese’s Brownie Blizzard – My God, a Reese’s Blizzard is already tasty enough, but this one was so over the top that it was unbelievable. A peanut butter filling and brownie bits in addition to the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? Holy crap, this thing is completely amazing. Like most Dairy Queen products, it’s insanely expensive, so you’re only going to be indulging in this kind of thing on a special occasion, but man… that special occasion is going to be the freaking best. This product is also discontinued as of the time of writing this, but if you tried one then you know the magical time that the Royal Reese’s Brownie Blizzard graced us with.
5) Pieces Eggs – The most exciting part of the Easter season for me is that the Easter chocolates are going on sale. For most people, that means Cadbury Mini Eggs, but for me that means Pieces Eggs. While Pieces themselves don’t set my world on fire, Pieces Eggs are a whole other animal. To put it simply, Pieces Eggs are quite a bit bigger than a regular Reese’s Pieces and have 2-3x more peanut butter filling, so they’re far more satisfying to me. The only real issue is that, like all Easter chocolates, they charge you through the nose for them. That said, I’ve paid nearly $20 for a big bag of Pieces Eggs before, which pains me, but it’s (just barely) worth it and that bag will probably last me for months when all is said and done.
4) Reese’s Peanut Butter Franken-Cups – I made the bold declaration that these Halloween chocolates were the best Reese’s product I had ever had the first time I tried one and while I have cooled slightly since then, they’re still easily the best seasonal variant I’ve ever tried. The reason for this is simple – that green creme you see? That’s not mint like I originally thought. It’s basically just green-coloured white chocolate. In other words, Franken-Cups are half milk chocolate, half white chocolate peanut butter cups. Can you see why I got so enthusiastic about them? Taste-wise, they’re quite close to a white chocolate peanut butter cup, but a tad less sweet, hence why I was so enthusiastic about them. Having had them a couple more times alongside white chocolate peanut butter cups, I still have to give the edge to the full white chocolate cups, but the fact that a new product was able to get so close is remarkable in itself. Plus they came in packs of 3 or 4, which is freaking generous as far as promo Reese products go.
3) Big Cups with Reese’s Pieces – Who is the diabolical candy-making genius who thought up this decadent combination? Taking a big cup and then adding a whole additional candy into it is just such a brilliant mixture that I have to applaud it, even if it might be enough to break that delicate balance that Big Cups strike and put them on the side of over-indulgence. They’re as good as they look, but I definitely feel some shame afterwards for how decadent they are… not that that has done anything to stop me from eating several of these since they first came out.
2) Miniatures with Reese’s Pieces – As I predicted in my original rendition of this list years ago, Miniatures with Reese’s Pieces are the perfect version of the “just add Pieces” puzzle which Reese has been pursuing the past few years. Whereas Big Cups with Pieces feel like they’re too decadent, Miniatures with Pieces give you the benefit of portion control. Unlike some of the other, smaller “just add pieces” products, Miniatures are just big enough that you can distinctly taste the crunch of the miniature Pieces. They are small enough that you can eat a few at a time without feeling like you’re going overboard, although you know that some people are going to eat the whole damn bag at once.
1) White Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups – Dear God, white chocolate Peanut Butter Cups are still absolutely amazing. There’s only 2 of these in a package, compared to 3 in a regular package of Peanut Butter Cups. When I was in my early teens they sold these everywhere in Canada, but for a decade or more they were bloody impossible to find here. I’ve seen enterprising international candy-sellers listing these things for $5 EACH, and I love these so much that I begrudgingly bought 3 packages of them. Hell, I’ve considered dropping $60 or more of a whole box of them on Ebay, because they are just that good. The white chocolate Minis aren’t nearly the same, and while the white chocolate Trees and Miniatures get close, they’re still hard to get ahold of and nothing quite matches just how good a white chocolate Peanut Butter Cup is. That said, in recent years I have been finding these on sale more often at specialist chocolate stores, so I try to get a few packages on hand to enjoy on special occasions and they’re always just the goddamn best. While these finally got some legitimate competition from the Franken-Cups, white chocolate Reese Cups are still the absolute best.
Oh hey, it’s time for me to be a corporate whore and provide an update of my opinions on what the best Reese’s products are. As before, I’m not exclusively going over “official” Reese’s products, but any exceptions are done at my discretion. I’ve also once again excluded the original Peanut Butter Cups from the list, because they’re just timeless and the default baseline for quality (and therefore would just end up on the lower half of the list for being less interesting, which I feel is unfair for something that good).
Also, I really don’t know how regularly I’m going to update this list. Updates depend, of course, on Reese’s releasing new products, which is inevitable but also unpredictable. Maybe I’ll update again in 2022, maybe not. That said, I also don’t really like effectively copy and pasting the same list with minor updates every couple years, so we’ll see. Maybe this will be my last, definitive list and we’ll keep it at that. Who knows?
Oh, and I stopped by the Hershey store in Niagara Falls in summer 2020 and picked up some new Reese products (which I added to this list) and some Reese socks… which I proudly wore to my own wedding. I liked them so much that, sadly, I’ve already worn a hole though them. A nerd and a corporate whore? Yup, that’s me.
Anyway, without further ado, let’s get started!
49) Reese Mix – These things got a dishonourable mention in the original version of list because they’re way too expensive for what you get, so I could never bring myself to buy them. However, my (at the time) fiancé knows I like to try new Reese products and hadn’t seen one of these before so she bought me a couple. So, it turns out that Reese Mix are kind of worse than I expected. I mean, it’s just the sum of its parts – peanuts, pretzel, Pieces and Minis, but the pretzel bits are really salty. On the one hand, this just makes you want to eat the Minis more to counter-act the excessive salty taste, but it’s a pretty bad look when your snack food is actively making me want to ignore parts of it to get to the bits I like. Plus, the saltiness is so prevalent that the taste has been passed over to everything else in the package anyway. All-in-all, it’s not the ideal way of eating any of the ingredients and I’m 100% certain you could make your own Reese Mix that would not only taste better but be far cheaper overall. Hell, the neighbourhood pre-teen entrepreneur could make a killing on knock-off Reese Mix and they’d taste better. These things are just all-round failures as far as I’m concerned.
48) Reese’s Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Peanut Butter Cup – These are a disaster. You’d think that a peanut butter cup made entirely out of peanut butter would be tasty but then you try it and, oh yeah, it really is entirely made up of peanut butter. It’s interesting how Reese have been advancing their technology to make half-and-half shells or shells that aren’t chocolate at all, but this is just science gone mad. Think about it – you’re basically just eating several large globs of peanut butter that is too rich and too sweet and it goes against the whole idea of Reese, that chocolate and peanut butter are a match made in heaven. Never again.
47) Reese Puffs – Reese Puffs are the KFC Double Down of the breakfast cereal world: breakfast cereals are already towing a fine line trying to justify themselves as something other than sugary junk food, but Puffs shit all over that line and head into territory that’s just disgusting. I mean, the tag line when I was a kid was that they’re “Reese, for breakfast!” Yeah, uh, no thanks. I mean, I like Coca-Cola, but I don’t want one until after noon at the earliest because who starts their day that way? Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms at least pretend like they aren’t pure sugar in a bowl, but Reese Puffs don’t even put up a pretense about what this product is. I had these maybe once as a kid, and even then I was not taken in. Of all the things on this list, if I had to sacrifice one Reese product for the good of humanity, this is the one I’d cast into the fire.
46) Reese’s Pieces Peanut – These might have been the first Reese’s product I’ve ever tried that I will straight-up never buy again. Like, at least I like parts of the Reese Mix, but these? Reese’s Pieces Peanut is so… bleh. Nothing about it worked for me – the salty peanuts just didn’t gel with the peanut butter taste, and since they’re Pieces there’s no chocolate in them to balance out the peanut butter. So basically, you’re just eating a bag full of crunchy, salty peanut butter. It’s super disappointing and I hated it.
45) Reese’s Mallow-Top Peanut Butter Cup – I don’t like marshmallows. With this in mind, when I saw the Reese’s Mallow-top I knew that my enjoyment of it was going to hinge on whether the white top actually tastes like marshmallow or not. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve got to give some props to the marketing and R&D team because boy does that top taste like a marshmallow. Unfortunately, that also means that there were revolting to me. Maybe that’s just my preferences tanking this product for me, but if you’re a big marshmallow junkie then this could easily be a big hit for you.
44) Reese’s Peanut Butter Clusters – Imagine a Reese’s version of Turtles chocolates – that sounds amazing, right? Just swap out the caramel in Turtles with peanut butter and we’re golden. However, I was very surprised by how underwhelmed I was with Clusters. You’d think that taking a Turtles and then adding peanut butter to it would just make Clusters tastier and better by default, but I’m not particularly keen on them. Personally, I don’t feel like the peanut butter really adds much to the taste. If anything, it makes them a bit too sweet, to the point where I’d rather have a Turtles chocolate instead. Hell, I’d rather have a knock-off Turtles chocolate like Almondillos instead of a Clusters. However, the real crippling issue with Clusters is that they also ripped off the worst part about Turtles – they are bloody expensive. Like, I’m talking $7 on the low-end for a small box of these things. I’ve actually seen them selling for as high as $10 before! And, like Turtles, you’re not getting enough chocolate in that box to make that steep price worth it. If you see any marked down 50% after Christmas is over then they might be worth the purchase, but I would never pay full retail price for these again. In fact, I did pick a box of these up at 50% off on Boxing Day for about $5 and I’m still pretty iffy on whether they were worth that price.
43) Reese’s Half-Pound Peanut Butter Cup – In the original version of this list back in 2018, I made a joke about how a half-pound Peanut Butter cup was just too much Reese’s to actually enjoy yourself… well, I went and bought one to test out that theory. It is, indeed, a huge peanut butter cup and, as expected, way too much to eat by yourself in one sitting. I got about halfway through before it started to make me feel that sickly feeling of peanut butter and chocolate overload. These things are just too rich and it’s not like they’re cheap either (over $5 for one), so I can’t really see why someone would go for one of these other than as a gimmick… that said, a couple weeks after I finished it, I was sorely tempted to get another. There’s something about the extra sweetness of a half-pound cup’s ludicrous excess that justifies its existence and tempts me, but in my head I know that it has so many caveats that it’s not really worthwhile.
42) Reese’s Popped Snack Mix – Sure, this is basically one of those shitty Reese’s Mix packages, but the addition of chocolate-coated popcorn makes enough of a difference that it actually improves the overall package. Instead of just having a bunch of excessively-salty filler to slog through and then some compromised Miniatures to actually enjoy, the addition of the popcorn at least gives you something else to make the whole package feel worthwhile. That said, these still have most of the same weaknesses as a regular Mix, including the excessive saltiness and the high price, but at least the tasty popcorn make it a much more balanced product if you do decide to indulge in it.
41) Reese’s Whipps – I swear that I tried one of these things when I was a kid, but I can’t remember much about it, it didn’t leave any sort of fond memories. I don’t recall it being bad, but there’s not much else on this list that I wouldn’t rather have instead. I’d probably buy one just for the memories if I saw one, but it isn’t a particularly interesting choice. That said, considering that it’s like 90% nougat I can see why it wouldn’t leave much of an impression either.
40) Reese Bar – I’ve had a Reese Bar a few times, but I’ve never been particularly impressed. Maybe it’s just me, but these things are too big and push over the limit where you’re getting “too much” sweetness. Plus they don’t hold together very well – I always find that if you try to break pieces off of the bar it caves in on itself and the peanut butter filling is very soft, almost liquid. They’re certainly edible, but whenever I buy them I inevitably will tell myself “Oh right, that’s why I stopped buying these things.”
39) Reese Blizzard – So I usually order a Reese’s Blizzard on the rare occasion where I go to Diary Queen, but that said I definitely have issues with them. For one thing, Dairy Queen Blizzards are stupidly expensive in general, and keep getting worse year after year. Furthermore, if I order anything more than a medium, I feel gross afterwards. I mean, think about what you’re actually ordering: you’re basically eating 3 or more packs of Peanut Butter cups, in addition to the ice cream itself. I have gotten sick from the sweetness overload on multiple occasions… not that that stops me from ordering them again, but the fact that these things literally can make me feel sick makes them harder to recommend than nearly everything on this list.
38) Reese Minis – They aren’t quite as satisfying as a full-sized Peanut Butter Cup, or even the wrapped Miniatures for that matter, but Reese Minis are a nice little treat. The fact that they come in resealable bags is great, it helps to make them last and not over-indulge in them. There are 2 varieties of Minis available too, regular and white chocolate. The variety is nice, but I tend to lean towards the white chocolate – for one thing, I think that they taste better, and Hershey’s rarely sells white chocolate Reese products north of the border so I’ll take whatever avenue I can get for that fix.
37) Reese’s Pieces – These things are iconic, easily the second most popular Reese product after the original peanut butter cups, in part thanks to the textbook usage of product placement in E.T. which made everyone want to try them. While I enjoy Reese’s Pieces, I find that their quality is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes I’ll buy a box and they just don’t taste all that great. I’m not sure if it’s inconsistent recipes, poor quality control, corner cutting, or what. When I was in high school I remember several occasions where this would happen, so it was like a flip of the coin on whether I was actually going to enjoy my box of Pieces or not and it completely soured me on them. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still have Pieces on occasion, but I don’t care for them nearly as much as some other people might and I don’t actively seek them out.
36) Reese’s Crispy Crunchy – I was pretty disappointed by this thing. It’s essentially a Crispy Crunch bar, which I do really like, but bigger and with peanut butter and nuts added to the mix. Wow, how can that possibly go wrong? Well… it did somehow, because I would rather have a Crispy Crunch, no contest. This bar tastes like a cheap, dollar store knock-off of a Crispy Crunch rather than a product put out by a major chocolate manufacturer and nothing about it really “works” for me. Hell, it doesn’t even deserve to be a Crispy Crunch knock-off, it’s a freaking Butterfinger knock-off. Just unfortunate all around.
35) Dark Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Thins – Holy shit, they weren’t kidding when they called these things “thins”. They’re, like, half the size of a normal cup at least! Clearly intended as a “diet” option for the calorie-conscious, the chocolate on these is much harder and denser by necessity in order to keep the cup from collapsing on itself, and there’s far less peanut butter inside than usual. They’re certainly not bad, but… like, if you’re trying to be calorie-conscious and eating these as a result then you’re not going to be making much of a difference. Meanwhile, my indulgent ass is just going to be gravitating to the full-sized versions of these instead. Of the three varieties that launched with the “Thins” label, the dark chocolate is my least favourite, but it’s still worth checking out.
34) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Thins – I have to give the milk chocolate thins the slight edge over their dark chocolate counterparts, but honestly there’s barely a difference. They’re still tasty, still thin and still a fool’s refuge if you’re looking for something that’s actually calorie-conscious.
33) Reese’s Dark Chocolate Miniatures – I was on vacation in Niagara Falls in the summer of 2020 when I found these at the Hershey store and bought a big bag of them. I’m glad I did too because I haven’t seen any since then. I don’t typically care for dark chocolate, but I can imagine that particular taste working well with Reese’s peanut butter. Unfortunately, the balance just isn’t quite there in Reese’s Miniatures, meaning you get just a bit too much dark chocolate for my liking and not enough peanut butter. If you like dark chocolate anyway then this probably isn’t a negative, but for me it manages to tip a very delicate balance in the wrong direction.
32) Reese’s Chocolate Lovers Peanut Butter Cup – I’m not entirely sure who this product is for. It’s just a peanut butter cup, but with slightly less peanut butter and slightly more/somewhat richer chocolate. It’s like they tried to design a peanut butter cup for people who don’t like peanut butter cups… but still left a lot of peanut butter in there so it doesn’t even accomplish that. Oh, and it only comes with 2 cups, so I really don’t see why someone would buy these over other Reese’s products, except as a gimmick. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this well enough, but I just don’t understand why these exist when they’re so similar to a regular peanut butter cup, but with less in a package.
31) Eggs, Hearts & Christmas Bells – This entry covers a couple seasonal Reese’s variants under one umbrella; they don’t really deserve to have their own separate entries, since they’re all basically the same product in different shapes and packaging each time. The Christmas Bells, Valentines Hearts and Easter Eggs are, in essence, seasonal versions of Reese’s Miniatures – small, individually wrapped peanut butter cups with a shape based on the season they’re made for. They’re great, and if you find some of these in your Christmas stocking or on an Easter egg hunt, you know that whoever bought the chocolates was slaying it this year. Always a welcome gift, although the one thing keeping them a bit lower is that, as seasonal releases, Reese price gouge you for them. On the flip-side, as soon as the holiday is over the prices will get slashed in half so you can get lots of them cheap, so it’s a bit of a trade-off.
30) Reese’s Peanut Butter Lovers Peanut Butter Cup – The Peanut Butter Lovers cup definitely comes out on top compared to the Chocolate Lovers. That said, neither of them do much to stand out, instead just providing a bit more of a niche for a Reese’s lover. What makes the Peanut Butter Lovers cup stand out is that the top quarter of the cup has been replaced with shaped peanut butter, which naturally gives the whole cup a more pronounced peanut butter taste. I’d say that it is more akin to the taste of a Big Cup, just in a smaller package. It suffers the same sort of issue as the Chocolate Lovers cup where the difference isn’t a big deal and there are only two cups in a package, but I’d have to say that the Peanut Butter Lovers does a little bit more to stand out and at least it still has some chocolate in it, unlike the disastrous Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Cup.
29) Reese’s Nutrageous Bar – I’m kind of surprised that I hadn’t tried a Reese’s Nutrageous before 2020, considering that they’ve been around since 1994. That said, I can kind of understand why they haven’t become particularly widespread, because this is basically just an Oh Henry! with peanut butter… except that there are also Oh Henry! bars with Reese’s peanut butter in the middle, which taste basically the same and are cheaper, so I struggle to see the point for this product to even exist. The bar itself tastes fine, but I did find the caramel to be particularly sticky, making the bar a bit more of an effort to eat than I was expecting.
28) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup with Pieces – These things have been around in years in king sized form so it was surprising that it took them this long for regular-sized versions to start being sold. That said, maybe there’s a reason for that, because in standard-sized form they really don’t taste all that different from a regular or crunchy Peanut Butter Cup. The Pieces in this are tiny and all they do is provide a little extra crunch. Not bad by any means, but not much to get excited over.
27) Reese’s Take 5 Bar – The Reese’s Take 5 is a very unique addition to the Reese canon, combining a thin layer of caramel and peanut butter with a pretzel and then coating it all with chocolate. Apparently these have existed for years as their own separate thing but were recently brought under the Reese’s umbrella, which kind of makes sense because they’re unlike any other Reese product. It all comes down to that pretzel, which dominates the taste and texture of the bar, giving it a nice crunch and salty taste. That said, I don’t particularly care all that much for pretzels and there’s a bit of that pretzel aftertaste, which is unfortunate, but I found this bar far more intriguing than I was expecting. I don’t know if I’d buy these with any sort of regularity, but I can definitely see myself trying them again if I encounter any.
26) Reese’s Fast Break – As far as Reese’s chocolate bars go, the Fast Break is definitely one of the better ones. The nougat is very soft and subtle, but it’s the healthy serving of the peanut butter that really makes this thing shine. It’s very simple (basically a Snickers, but with the peanuts and caramel swapped out for extra peanut butter), but it works so well. If I come across one of these again anytime soon I know that I’ll be buying one because these are delicious.
25) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Stuffed with Crunchy Cookie – These things sound like an amazing combo… I mean, peanut butter, chocolate AND cookie bits!? Unfortunately, they don’t really live up to the hype. It’s really just a regular Peanut Butter Cup but with a subtle crunch to it from the cookie bits. The cookie bits don’t change the taste substantially, but the crunch is very satisfying. However, you only get 2 cups in these packs, whereas you get 3 in a Crunchy Peanut Butter Cups pack and I can’t really say that it’s worth the difference considering that they taste basically identical in the end.
24) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with Crunchy Peanut Butter – I’m not sure if I’m just not remembering these things very well, but the big “crunchy peanut butter” gimmick of this product never actually stood out to me – they always tasted like a normal Peanut Butter Cup, just maybe a bit less smooth. It’s a small difference I guess, but not much to justify having a whole other variation on the market. I think Reese agreed because I haven’t seen one of these things in years and imagine they were probably discontinued. It’s too bad though, just remembering that these exist makes me hungry for one…
23) Reese’s Miniature Cups – On first glance, these might just seem to be the same thing as the aforementioned Minis, but there are a couple notable differences which make Miniatures stand out. First of all, Miniatures are all individually wrapped and are maybe about twice the size of an individual Mini. This might not seem like a huge difference, but for whatever reason, Miniatures just taste better to me. There just seems to be more quality put into each one and the size makes for a better balance of chocolate and peanut butter taste. Plus, they come in regular and white chocolate versions, which just helps to vault them over the comparable seasonal Reese’s chocolates, in my opinion.
22) Christmas Trees & Easter Eggs – At first glance, these appear to be nothing more than low-effort, cheap holiday cash-ins (hell, that “tree” is more reminiscent of a chocolate turd than an evergreen). However, these things over-deliver in a big way, being enormous compared to other Reese products and are stuffed with that delicious peanut butter. Plus, unlike most seasonal chocolate, they actually tend to be priced reasonably. The fact that they come in regular and white chocolate varieties is just icing on the cake. I fondly remember buying these things all the time around Christmas when I was in university. Hell, I would not be surprised if I was eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Tree while writing some of the earliest posts on this blog.
21) Reese’s Easter Eggs with Pieces – Reese’s have clearly figured out the answer to the question “How do you make a Reese’s product better?” Answer: Just added Pieces. That’s really the only difference here between regular Reese’s Easter Eggs and these, but it’s enough of a difference that it deserves its own entry. I haven’t seen Reese’s Christmas Trees with Pieces yet but I’m sure they’ll exist by soon enough.
20) Reese Swoops – I can remember back when Reese Swoops first came out and really enjoyed them at the time. They had a very unique taste and texture that no other Reese product has had before or since. I was saddened when I heard that they were discontinued. If you never got the chance to try one, imagine a Pringle made entirely of chocolate and with a little Reese’s peanut butter swirl mixed in directly with the chocolate. Suffice to say, they were delicious and it was easy to forget just how much chocolate you were consuming as you scarfed them down, especially considering that they were originally intended as a “lite”, diet chocolate.
19) Reese Big Cups – Unlike some of the Reese’s products I mentioned earlier, while Big Cups tow the fine line between decadence and overindulgence, I feel like they strike the perfect balance where I feel just guilty enough. I definitely feel like I’m pushing some limits with a Big Cup, but I never feel like they’re too much or like I’m going to be sick or disgusted with myself for having one. There’s got to be some Catholic priest on staff at Hershey HQ who’s doling out the exact measurements of guilt that are acceptable whenever a candy bar is released and goddamn he towed the line flawlessly with the Big Cup.
18) Reese’s Big Cup Crunchy – It’s a Big Cup, but with peanuts in it. It really simple and doesn’t make a major difference in terms of the actual taste, but I’d be lying if I said that the crunch of the peanuts isn’t really satisfying. Literally, that’s it, I enjoy the crunch of the big peanuts pieces more, that’s enough to put it over the regular Big Cups and Cookie Big Cups for me.
17) Reese’s Outrageous! Stuffed with Pieces – The naming convention for this chocolate bar is pretty weird. It’s a Reese’s Nutrageous bar… but the nuts have been replaced with Reese’s Pieces. I don’t know why they didn’t just come up with a completely new name, especially since they make sure to specify that the bar is stuffed with Pieces anyway, but whatever, I’m not a big marketing exec now am I? In any case, the Outrageous bar is quite good! In fact, it is significantly better than the original Nutrageous bar. It tastes very similar to the peanut butter Oh Henry! bars, minus the nuts of course, and adding in Pieces always makes a Reese’s product better by orders of magnitude. My only real complaint is that the standard size version is quite small for a chocolate bar and, like the Nutrageous bar, the caramel is still a bit too sticky, but it is a tasty treat regardless.
16) Reese’s Big Cup with Pretzels – I’m not a huge fan of pretzels, so I was a bit wary of putting them in a peanut butter cup where the saltiness could overpower the perfect balance of chocolate and peanut butter. Thankfully, I actually had it backwards, because the pretzel taste is overwhelmed by the peanut butter and chocolate. What gives this a leg up is the fact that the surprisingly-big chunks of pretzel you get give you the most “crunch” of any Reese add-on I’ve ever tried and if you’ve learned anything about me thus far it’s that I love me some crunch. This was good enough that after I finished by one-cup package I was sad that I didn’t have a second cup to go with it, which is about as good an endorsement as I can offer. Will definitely buy again if I see any.
15) Reese Sticks – It shocks me just how good these damn things are. If you thought peanut butter and chocolate were a match made in heaven, Reese Sticks prove that 3 thin strips of wafer make a case for a hot threesome. Just… these things are brilliant. They sell smaller versions in the same sorts of bags as Minis too, and they are so addictive that you risk scarfing down half a bag in one sitting if you’re not careful. If you’ve never tried these, then seriously, freaking do it.
14) Hershey’s Milk Chocolate with Reese’s Pieces – I normally don’t care about a Hershey’s bar; the milk chocolate is tasty but it’s a boring product as far as chocolate options go and so they’re almost always overshadowed by more enticing treats. However, the fusion of Reese and Hershey bar really surprised me – the bits of peanut butter taste and the crunch from the Pieces gives the simple Hershey’s bar some more flavour than usual and there’s even little bits of peanut added in for added texture and taste! All-in-all, it’s pretty similar to the M&Ms Bar (which I do really like), but much better!
13) Reese’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups – Like I said with the miniature and thin versions of these things, I don’t typically care for dark chocolate, but I had a feeling that dark chocolate would work really well with Reese’s peanut butter. That said – goddamn, I was not expecting them to be this good! Like, given the choice between these and regular peanut butter cups I’d say that I’d go with the dark chocolate ones more often than not (assuming the number of cups in a package and the price are equal). The balance between dark chocolate and peanut butter is so much better in the full-sized cups compared to the minis or thins. Compared to standard peanut butter cups, these have a bit of a richer taste to the chocolate which works spectacularly with the peanut butter. These get a hearty recommendation from me, whether you like dark chocolate or not.
12) Reese Crunchers – These might be the most surprising entry on this list for me. I saw a package of these at a gas station and, similarly to Reese Mix, the price seemed steep but I figured I’d give them their one shot to impress me. The price is definitely a bit too high, but bloody hell are they worth the cost. They’re kind of like little, delicious bite-sized clusters and just writing about them is making me want to eat the package of them sitting beside my desk. (Post-script: Yeah, within 5 minutes I had that package opened and was scarfing them down greedily.)
11) Reese’s Outrageous! Crunchers Stuffed With Pieces – These things are nearly identical to regular Crunchers, but they’ve had miniature Pieces added in. That gives them the slightest of edges over regular Crunchers for me, but they’re so close that you can’t really go wrong either way. That said, if you have to pick between the two in a pinch? Outrageous! Crunchers, 100% of the time.
10) Breyers Reese Ice Cream – Breyers’ Reese ice cream has some big legs up on the Reese Blizzard which propel it so far up the list. For one thing, a whole container of Breyers ice cream can be purchased for about the price of a Blizzard… even less when they go on sale for around $4 on the reg. Secondly, the ice cream is flavoured to actually complement the peanut butter cups in there, which makes it taste better than a Blizzard in general. Thirdly, you control the portioning, so you shouldn’t ever feel sick when eating this. Whenever I see this product on sale at the grocery store, I love to pick it up because I know that I’ll get to enjoying it on a hot day. Still less economical than, say, buying a big tub of vanilla ice cream, but it’s Reese ice cream, can you blame me if I want to indulge a little sometimes?
9) Reese’s Crunchy Peanut Bar – You’ve probably gotten the idea by now that I like my Reese’s peanut butter with a crunchy texture and the Crunchy Peanut Bar may just be the best way to experience that particular taste. There is a lot of peanut butter in this surprisingly-wide bar, so peanut butter lovers are going to be over the moon. Taste-wise, it’s very comparable to the King Size Crunchy Peanut Butter Cups, but you get a lot more here and in a more convenient package. I checked this out on a whim and I came away very impressed.
8) White Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Thins – White chocolate Reese’s are the best and these thins offer one of the most convenient ways to get ahold of them. They are quite comparable to their full-sized counter-parts and don’t feel like a sacrifice in quality like, say, the White Chocolate Minis. They are also by far the sweetest option between the three Thins varieties, but they are just so damn good that I’d pick them nearly every time.
7) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Eggs – I overlooked these things on previous versions of this list, which isn’t too surprising considering that Reese’s have at least 5 distinct Easter egg products. However, Peanut Butter Eggs are easily one of the best seasonal variants out there, so I do feel bad for missing them for so long. Unlike the aforementioned Reese Easter Eggs (which are mostly peanut butter with a thin chocolate shell) and Mini Eggs (which are bite-sized treats), Peanut Butter Eggs are a nice sized egg with a thick chocolate shell around a generous interior of delicious peanut butter. I love them, but their only real drawback is that they’re expensive. Individually-wrapped Peanut Butter eggs are about $1.50 each, but if you want a bag of them you’re looking at about $15+. Unlike some expensive Reese’s products though, I’d actually be tempted to spend this on Peanut Butter Eggs, because they’re just that good. That said, I’ll always prowl the local Walmarts and Giant Tigers when Easter is over to find bags of these things at discount prices, but you have to be quick because they usually get snatched up within hours of opening on the day after Easter.
6) Royal Reese’s Brownie Blizzard – My God, a Reese’s Blizzard is already tasty enough, but this one was so over the top that it was unbelievable. A peanut butter filling and brownie bits in addition to the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? Holy crap, this thing is completely amazing. Like most Dairy Queen products, it’s insanely expensive, so you’re only going to be indulging in this kind of thing on a special occasion, but man… that special occasion is going to be the freaking best. This product is also discontinued as of the time of writing this, but if you tried one then you know the magical time that the Royal Reese’s Brownie Blizzard graced us with.
5) Pieces Eggs – The most exciting part of the Easter season for me is that the Easter chocolates are going on sale. For most people, that means Cadbury Mini Eggs, but for me that means Pieces Eggs. While Pieces themselves don’t set my world on fire, Pieces Eggs are a whole other animal. To put it simply, Pieces Eggs are quite a bit bigger than a regular Reese’s Pieces and have 2-3x more peanut butter filling, so they’re far more satisfying to me. The only real issue is that, like all Easter chocolates, they charge you through the nose for them. That said, I’ve paid nearly $20 for a big bag of Pieces Eggs before, which pains me, but it’s (just barely) worth it and that bag will probably last me for months when all is said and done.
4) Reese’s Peanut Butter Franken-Cups – I made the bold declaration that these Halloween chocolates were the best Reese’s product I had ever had the first time I tried one and while I have cooled slightly since then, they’re still easily the best seasonal variant I’ve ever tried. The reason for this is simple – that green creme you see? That’s not mint like I originally thought. It’s basically just green-coloured white chocolate. In other words, Franken-Cups are half milk chocolate, half white chocolate peanut butter cups. Can you see why I got so enthusiastic about them? Taste-wise, they’re quite close to a white chocolate peanut butter cup, but a tad less sweet, hence why I was so enthusiastic about them. Having had them a couple more times alongside white chocolate peanut butter cups, I still have to give the edge to the full white chocolate cups, but the fact that a new product was able to get so close is remarkable in itself. Plus they came in packs of 3 or 4, which is freaking generous as far as promo Reese products go.
3) Big Cups with Reese’s Pieces – Who is the diabolical candy-making genius who thought up this decadent combination? Taking a big cup and then adding a whole additional candy into it is just such a brilliant mixture that I have to applaud it, even if it might be enough to break that delicate balance that Big Cups strike and put them on the side of over-indulgence. They’re as good as they look, but I definitely feel some shame afterwards for how decadent they are… not that that has done anything to stop me from eating several of these since they first came out.
2) Miniatures with Reese’s Pieces – As I predicted in my original rendition of this list years ago, Miniatures with Reese’s Pieces are the perfect version of the “just add Pieces” puzzle which Reese has been pursuing the past few years. Whereas Big Cups with Pieces feel like they’re too decadent, Miniatures with Pieces give you the benefit of portion control. Unlike some of the other, smaller “just add pieces” products, Miniatures are just big enough that you can distinctly taste the crunch of the miniature Pieces. They are small enough that you can eat a few at a time without feeling like you’re going overboard, although you know that some people are going to eat the whole damn bag at once.
1) White Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups – Dear God, white chocolate Peanut Butter Cups are still absolutely amazing. There’s only 2 of these in a package, compared to 3 in a regular package of Peanut Butter Cups. When I was in my early teens they sold these everywhere in Canada, but for a decade or more they were bloody impossible to find here. I’ve seen enterprising international candy-sellers listing these things for $5 EACH, and I love these so much that I begrudgingly bought 3 packages of them. Hell, I’ve considered dropping $60 or more of a whole box of them on Ebay, because they are just that good. The white chocolate Minis aren’t nearly the same, and while the white chocolate Trees and Miniatures get close, they’re still hard to get ahold of and nothing quite matches just how good a white chocolate Peanut Butter Cup is. That said, in recent years I have been finding these on sale more often at specialist chocolate stores, so I try to get a few packages on hand to enjoy on special occasions and they’re always just the goddamn best. While these finally got some legitimate competition from the Franken-Cups, white chocolate Reese Cups are still the absolute best.
Welcome back to the 2000AD Humble Bundle round-up! I’ve finally gotten a chance to sink my teeth into the rest of this comic book overload and have plenty of thoughts to share. If you missed part one then I would definitely recommend checking it out before reading this. With that said though, let’s dive right back in with a real banger…
Judge Anderson: The Psi Files
Judge Dredd may be the poster-boy for 2000AD but I’d argue that Judge Anderson is the far more compelling judge character. Bizarrely, the Humble Bundle only includes volume two of Judge Anderson: The Psi Files, but luckily it is a compelling snapshot into what makes this character so great. The volume picks up in the wake of the tragic suicide of one of Judge Anderson’s friends and her final words haunt her throughout the entirety of the book: “People with gifts like ours shouldn’t use them for ugly things.” Unlike Dredd, Judge Anderson sees the judges for what they really are, oppressive fascists who make life worse for everyone and questions her role in propping up this system. The social commentary is pointed, including a story which is a blatant Rodney King analogy and which is just as relevant today and another which equates the judges with the Roman legionnaires who persecuted the early Christians. This refusal to just play along makes Anderson a far more radical and personable character, to the point where she abandons her post and goes on a soul-searching journey for the rest of the book. Anderson and the villainous Orlok the Assassin start to have a complicated relationship during this period as well, which is as unlikely as it is intriguing to see play out. The lengthy, serialized nature of the stories makes The Psi Files less focused than, say, Halo Jones (for example, the first third of the book is steeped in Christian imagery before suddenly switching to a story about freaking ancient aliens), but it’s still impressive that this collection is as coherent as it is.
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files
Of the books included in the Humble Bundle, the Judge Dredd case files were the only ones I had already read and I knew that they, by themselves, were well worth the $20 asking price several times over. The bundle includes the first five volumes and there are several all-time classics in these pages. While there are far two many good stories to list them all, especially notable are the series’ signature “mega-epics”, including such monumental stories as “The Cursed Earth” and “The Day the Law Died” in volume two, “The Judge Child” in volume four and the eye-wateringly epic “Block Mania” and “The Apocalypse War” in volume five (an event so momentous in the history of Judge Dredd that we’re still feeling the effects of it over 40 years later). Honestly, I’m underselling just how amazing these stories are because I just want you to go ahead and get them for yourself – they’re seriously that good!
Kingdom
Oh hey, another story from the mind of Dan Abnett! Kingdom is a far different beast than Abnett’s other story in this bundle, Brink. Set in a world where giant insects have taken over the world, most of humanity has gone into cryo-sleep to allow genetically modified dog soldiers to win the war in their stead. We follow Gene the Hackman, an alpha male dog soldier who loses his pack and begins wandering around the world trying to repel Them. As you can probably tell, Kingdom is full of dog/soldier pop culture references, to the point where the giant insect antagonists are literally called “Them“. The story is also loaded with dramatic irony, largely revolving around the fact that Gene is kind of an idiot – like, he’s cunning but his understanding of the world is incredibly limited and he generally doesn’t bother to expand his horizons. In a particularly funny example, one of his dog soldier companions is put down for being too old to fight and a human tells Gene that he was taken away to a nice farm where he can run around and enjoy himself, a lie which Gene references throughout the series as a place he’d like to visit someday. This wry humour helps to keep Kingdom from getting too grimdark and makes it consistently enjoyable, while Abnett’s writing keeps the story engaging. There are four whole volumes of Kingdom in this bundle and by the time I got to the second one I was hooked. The scope becomes more expansive and complex as it goes, but my one main complaint would be that Abnett has a bad habit of resetting the cast of supporting characters at the start of each volume, which is more annoying and frustrating than anything.
Mazeworld
Mazeworld is an intriguing self-contained story from Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, the duo responsible for some of the best stories from volume two of Judge Anderson. Mazeworld largely succeeds due to its protagonist Adam Cadman, an unrepentant asshole on death row who learns to work with others and become a hero when he is transported to the titular Mazeworld. Cadman himself doesn’t change that much, merely his perception of himself – in Mazeworld he’s seen as a hero and so he attempts to live up to that reputation. The world itself is interesting, being built up of several mazes which the local populace lack the complete (or true) maps to, which helps the maze-lords keep control over them and Arthur Ranson’s art utilizes Aztec architecture which gives it an exotic and unconventional feel. However, the world itself isn’t particularly well sketched out, especially compared to a similar sort of high-concept fantasy setting like Brass Sun. The finale is also pretty underwhelming, it feels like Alan Grant wanted to make this a limited series and as a result rushed the ending instead of getting there naturally. The ending itself is certainly appropriate, but I feel like it could have been more satisfying if they had given it a bit more room to breathe. Still, Mazeworld‘s a fun, short read that leaves you feeling better about the potential of humankind.
Scarlet Traces
We’re back with another Ian Edginton story, one which I’ve actually read a bit of in 2000AD already – Scarlet Traces, which acts as a companion piece, and eventually sequel, to The War of the Worlds. Featuring art from D’Israeli (for my money, one of the most distinctive artists at 2000AD), the humble bundle collects the first volume of the story along with Edginton and D’Israeli’s graphic novel adaptation of The War of the Worlds. This adaptation is fairly faithful to the source, if somewhat truncated, although it loses a lot of its literary significance in translation. That said, the first part of Scarlet Traces captures the sinister anti-colonial elements of the original novel far better, giving us a nice little pulp mystery which takes on a shockingly bleak and tragic tone as it goes along. Unfortunately, volume one ends just as things are getting truly interesting. There is a second volume available which I’ve purchased and I’ve already followed some of the newer issues in 2000AD, so I know this is a story that I’m really into but just be aware that the single volume in the bundle is but a tease of how good Scarlet Traces really is.
Shakara
Shakara is bonkers. To set the tone, the first page of the book has humanity and the Earth being destroyed unceremoniously, while the last surviving human, a defiant, would-be “hero”, has his head crushed in humiliating fashion just pages later. That’s barely scratching the surface of how insane Shakara gets though. The story follows a bio-mechanical alien who is basically John Wick in space, cranked up to 11. Like… seriously, everything about Shakara is so over the top that it’s brilliant. I’m talking over-the-top aliens (one species is basically a spinal column in a vat, another is a gaunt creature with a giant floating eyeball for a head, while yet another is a sentient dwarf galaxy), impossible planetoids and imaginative spacecraft (one psionic species literally flies around in giant brains). The out-there denizens of the story match just how insane the story itself is. The first act follows the titular Shakara as he interrupts galactic-scale atrocities and takes on entire armies single-handedly in his quest for vengeance. The second act has a team of equally over-the-top assassins being brought together to hunt down and kill Shakara. The third act has every mercenary in the freaking galaxy coming after Shakara… again, it’s basically like John Wick, with the story and world slowly being doled out over time. I love it, it’s such a joy to read and each panel just gets more and more imaginative as it goes along. Like many of these stories there’s a second volume available outside the Humble Bundle and you know I snatched that up before I had even finished the first volume.
Sláine
From what I understand, Sláine is something of a big deal in 2000AD, to the point where he has his own entire tab in the graphic novels section of the webstore. He’s basically an Irish version of Conan the Barbarian and has been with 2000AD since the 80s. I’ve never really read any of his stuff before now and… hoo boy, I have to say that I was really not into it. The Humble Bundle has two Sláine graphic novels included in it. The first is Warrior’s Dawn, a collection of Sláine’s original adventures which sees the titular character and his dwarf companion Ukko trying to make their way back north to reunite with Sláine’s love, Niamh. Warrior’s Dawn is… fine. It’s typical barbarian fantasy fare, with most of the entertainment coming from the constant bickering between the meat-headed Sláine and the unscrupulous Ukko.
If Warrior’s Dawn was the only Sláine story in the Humble Bundle then I would have been unimpressed, but the graphic novel entitled Book of Invasions vol. 1 completely turned me off all things Sláine. Set sometime looong after Warrior’s Dawn, Sláine has gone from a pulpy adventure story to thoroughly-unenjoyable, grimdark seriousness. It’s just so damn cliché, basically coasting off its grimdark tone and art style to try to appeal, but it did not work for me at all. Clint Langley’s art really leaves me mixed – on the one hand it has some of the most detailed and impressive work in the entire bundle. Langley’s style reminds me of Chrisopher Shy’s gorgeous work on the Dead Space graphic novels, not to mention that his work for Warhammer 40,000 is some of my favourite and really captures the horror of that setting well. However, there are times in Sláine where it is just ugly and feels like too much. When Sláine has a “warp-spasm” (translation: he hulks out) his muscles are exaggerated to such a ridiculous degree that I had to laugh at how stupid his tiny torso looked in comparison. To be fair, his warp-spasms have always looked stupid even in Warrior’s Dawn, but here they really clash with the more serious tone. It also does not help that the story itself is just a bunch of boring, grimdark barbarian clichés. Like, oh no, the demon army is only invading because they delight in raping the women and killing the children, how awful! The council of elders are dumb cowards, the only power that matters in this world is the sword and overwhelming violence! And spoiler alert, can you believe that Sláine goes on his quest for vengeance because the demons rape and murder his wife, Niamh? To make matters even worse, Ukko is basically shunted away in this story, so we don’t even get any sort of entertaining banter. Maybe Book of Invasions is just a shitty starting point to get into Sláine, but frankly I’m completely turned off by it. Like… at least I turned around on Bec & Kawl a bit by the end, Sláine was just a slog for me from start to finish. Book of Invasions is easily the worst story in the bundle and Warrior’s Dawn wasn’t much better. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste, but Sláine did not work for me at all.
Zenith
Oh hey it’s another comic from an industry legend, Grant Morrison (who, I was recently informed by some dumbass on Twitter, sucks donkey balls… oh hey, and then another Twitter user informed me Morrison recently came out as non-binary, cool! As a result, I will be using they/them pronouns as they have requested). Zenith is a straight-up superhero comic, which is very unusual in the sci-fi and fantasy-dominated pages of 2000AD, and the Humble Bundle collects all four volumes of the story. It’s obvious that Phase One was written in the wake of industry titans Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, having been published just over a year after both landmark comics came out and shook up superhero narratives forever. It bears some resemblance to Watchmen in its narrative, taking place in an alternate-history timeline where superhumans fought on both sides of World War II, where an atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin and where the superheroes of the 60s have become washed-up shells of their former selves. The only hero still active is the titular Zenith, the only third-generation superhuman who happens to be a selfish, yuppie arsehole more interested in furthering his music career than helping people.
The most interesting thing in Zenith is the world Grant Morrison has created for his story. Finding out about the backstory of the first superhero, Maximan, learning about the second generation of heroes who refused to be tools of the government and instead joined the hippy movement, discovering that the second generation of superheroes have been lying about losing their powers, etc – personally I found this more interesting than the actual A-plot about Zenith dealing with life as a reluctant hero. The side-characters tend to be more interesting than Zenith as well. Washed-up superhero Siadwell Rhys (aka Red Dragon) spends most of Phase One an alcoholic, but Zenith helps to get him off the bottle and into fighting form to deal with a superpowered Nazi… only for him to instantly get one-shotted when they finally do battle. It’s a shocking and tragic moment because by that point Morrison had really gotten me to like Rhys before cruelly snatching him away. Peter St John (aka Mandala) is also fascinating in what he represents. Powers-wise he’s basically Mysterio and he was the ultimate hippy figure during the 60s. However, by the time Zenith takes place, he has fallen so far from his ideals that he has become a key politician in Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government! These generational commentaries are very clear throughout Zenith and are perhaps the most interesting aspect of the stories in my opinion.
All that said, the story starts to go a bit off the rails by the end of the second volume. Suddenly the story involves superheroes from hundreds of alternate dimensions teaming up to defeat the Lovecraftian Old Ones (literally, they name-drop them on a few occasions) and there are several dimension jumps, entire universes being destroyed and a bunch of new characters to keep track of. The art can also make it really hard to understand what’s going on, but Phase Three does give us a couple good twists and a brilliant splash panel of a robot riding a smiley face dinosaur into battle (which is as awesome as it sounds, even if it’s basically pointless in the actual story). Unfortunately, it also ends with an awful trans panic joke, which isn’t unusual for a comic written back in the 80s, but it’s disappointing none-the-less. Meanwhile, Phase Four is a disappointing conclusion. It finally reveals “The Plan” which has been teased for four whole volumes and it’s far more conventional than I had expected. This volume also tease a End of Evangelion-style apocalypse but doesn’t commit to it. Perhaps worst of all, Phase Four continues to just have Zenith as a passive actor within a story that is obstinately his own, making the whole endeavour feel kind of pointless. Zenith is just… strange. If you already know and like Grant Morrison then it might resonate with you, but I find it to be more interesting as a curiosity of a bygone era and a writer stretching himself rather than as a piece of entertainment on its own merits.
Zombo
Zombo wastes no time. Within a couple pages it has already set up its world, story and demonstrated its morbid sense of humour… which is to say that I dig it. The deadpan, dark humour is what really makes Zombo stand out. Sure, like any good piece of zombie media it’s loaded with gore, but how many other zombie stories have a half-human, half-zombie who asks if he can eat you? Zombo scratches the same sort of itch that Metalocalypse does for me, with stories about people getting stranded on a death world getting eviscerated in humourous ways, a suicide cult trying to make their deaths trend on a snuff version of Youtube, a half-zombie, half-bee hybrid called… Zom-bee, and Zombo having to fight his evil twin using the backup brain that’s been built into his ass. For all its dumb thrills though there’s some interesting commentary about putting too much trust in the government and an intriguing concept about the universe consciously pushing back against unchecked human expansion. The Humble Bundle collects the two volumes of graphic novels which have been released so far. I liked the first quite a bit and the second is also good but the second story in the second volume leans way too heavily on the same sort of referential humour that I hated in Bec & Kawl and really soured me on the whole thing. That said, if there was a third Zombo volume I probably would have bought it, so they clearly are doing something right.
And that does it for the stories in this Humble Bundle! There are definitely some great stories here and even at full price I’d recommend several of them wholeheartedly. That said, because I have an obsessive compulsion with ranking the things that I consume, here’s how I’d rank each collection in this bundle. Think of it as a quick-and-dirty recommendation list:
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files
The Ballad of Halo Jones
Shakara!
Brink
Judge Anderson: The Psi Files
Absalom
Brass Sun
Kingdom
Scarlet Traces (This rank based purely on the limited volumes in the Humble Bundle; if I was counting the continued volumes then this would surely rank higher.)
Defoe 1666
2000 AD‘s Greatest: Celebrating 40 Years of Thrill-Power!
This review has been a long time coming. Like, to put it into perspective, I tend to start drafts on my blog so that I remember ideas and am able to come back to them later. Sometimes they even get completed and get published here! Well, it was around seven years ago when I thought “hey, I love DOA: Dead or Alive and would love to write a review explaining why!” For whatever reason, that idea kept getting shoved back in favour of other ideas, but that draft has been sitting in here for literally years in various iterations, including two serious attempts to complete it that got shelved and the whole blog migration to WordPress. This also means that I have had to rewatch the film on several occasions whenever I planned on sitting down to work on this review.
Well, a few months ago I realized that I was rapidly closing in on my 300th blog post. Considering that I celebrated my 200th blog post with a review of DOAX3, what better time to finally get off my ass and review this movie? DOA: Dead or Alive is the best video game movie of all time and I’m going to explain why (yes, better than Detective Pikachu – no one is more shocked by that statement than me).
I remember seeing this film’s DVD cover in the local movie rental place when I was in high school… it looked identical to the covers of the porn DVDs nearby. That was obviously an intentional choice.
Production
After the box office success of the first two Resident Evil films, the producers of the first film, Paul W.S. Anderson, Jeremy Bolt and Bernd Eichinger, were eager to tap into the burgeoning video game adaptation gold rush and searched for the next big hit (funnily enough, of all the video game adaptations listed in production on that link, the only ones that would actually come out were DOA and Resident Evil: Extinction). Perhaps owing to Anderson’s success with the 1995 fighting game adaptation Mortal Kombat, the producers decided to give Dead or Alive a shot – after all, it was all about action sequences and sexy women, so it would surely draw out all the teenage boys, right? Also being brought on to help produce the film was Mark A. Altman, who had previously produced freaking House of the Dead (fighting The Howling 2 for the championship title of most insane film to ever make it into theatres).
Corey Yuen was brought on as the film’s director. Yuen was well-known for his impressive Hong Kong action films and fight choreography, and had just found success with Western audiences with The Transporter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lead actresses were all models: Devon Aoki (of Sin City and 2 Fast 2 Furious fame) was cast as Kasumi, Holly Valance (known for the soap opera Neighbours, Prison Break and… what, she was in Taken!? Oh shit, she was the pop singer Liam Neeson has to protect, of course!) was cast as Christie and Jaime Pressly (probably the biggest name in the main cast, best known for My Name is Earl) was cast as Tina Armstrong. The supporting cast are also filled with plenty of interesting actors. By far the most notable is professional wrestler Kevin Nash as Bass Armstrong. This was an absolutely perfect casting, he steals the show whenever he’s on screen. The film also has several notable character actors and B-movie stars, such as Matthew Marsen (who has been in many films, but was last seen on IC2S in Atlas Shrugged) as Max, Eric Roberts (here playing a discount John Carradine) as Donovan, and Natassia Malthe (a kick-ass Uwe Boll regular) as Ayane. Some relative unknowns were also cast in major roles, such as Sarah Carter as Helena Douglas, Steve Howey as Weatherby and Brian J. White as Zack (who plays the role to perfection). Rounding out the cast were a pair of martial artists, Collin Chou as Hayate and Kane Kosugi as Ryu Hayabusa (he’s fine for the role they wrote for him, but good God do not expect this Ryu to be anything like the demon-slaying badass from Ninja Gaiden or you are going to be disappointed).
Filming took place in various locations in China. Most of the cast had never played a Dead or Alive game before, although most checked it out during production (Matthew Marsden specifically acknowledged that he sucked at it). According to the “Making Of” featurette (which really sucks by the way, nearly half of it is uninterrupted footage from the movie), the cast trained for 3 months with US marines and martial arts experts in order to learn their characters’ fighting styles. According to Sarah Carter, the entire cast performed most of their own stunts and some fight sequences could take up to 7 days to film (such as the impressive Helena vs Christie fight at the mid-point). The film also features a volleyball scene which was 100% pure fan service and which went through a staggering forty pairs of bikinis to complete.
Unfortunately for the producers, DOA: Dead or Alive didn’t light up the box anywhere near as much as Resident Evil had. In fact, while those films had wracked up grosses over $100 million worldwide, DOA brought in a paltry $7.7 million on a $30 million budget. Ouch.
Plot Summary
The film opens at a ninja palace in the mountains where princess Kasumi resolves to find her brother, Hayate, who went missing after being invited to the Dead or Alive martial arts tournament and is presumed dead. However, she is warned by Hayate’s friend, Ryu Hayabusa, that if she abandons the castle then she will be condemned to death by the laws of their people. Unperturbed, Kasumi escapes, pursued by her vengeful half-sister, Ayane, and is invited to participate in Dead of Alive. The film then cuts to Tina Armstrong, a professional wrestler who is trying to prove that her talents aren’t all just showmanship (which she quickly proves to us by beating up a group of pirates who board her boat, securing her invite to Dead or Alive). Finally, we’re introduced to Christie, a criminal who uses her femme fatale wiles to fight her way through a group of Interpol agents who have cornered her in her hotel room, earning herself an invitation to Dead or Alive in the process. With our main cast assembled, the group is flown to the island where Dead or Alive is held, alongside fellow competitors including Zack, Hayabusa (who has entered the tournament to watch over and protect Kasumi), Helena Douglas (daughter of the tournament’s recently-deceased co-founder), Bass Armstrong (Tina’s enthusiastic and laid-back father) and Max Marsh (Christie’s partner in crime, who is joining her to try to steal the company’s fortune). After parachuting to the island and traversing the rugged terrain to reach the tournament grounds, the group is introduced to Dead or Alive’s organizer, Victor Donovan, who explains the rules of the tournament – fighters will be tracked with nano-bots, fights can be called at any time and any place with single-round eliminations determining who will move on to the next round of competition.
As the first rounds of the tournament slowly get underway, the characters begin getting to know each other. Zack spends all his time hitting on a very unreceptive Tina, while a computer technician for the tournament named Weatherby tries to work up the courage to ask out Helena (who, surprisingly, decides to give him a chance). Meanwhile, Kasumi continues her search for Hayate, avoiding attacks from Ayane and the other competitors. She is eventually joined by Hayabusa, but he goes missing while infiltrating Donovan’s headquarters, making Kasumi even more suspicious about what’s going on. Finally, Christie and Max discover the location of Dead or Alive’s vault and try to figure out the password to get inside. Max eventually realizes that the code is tattooed on Helena, a fact which adds additional tension when Helena and Christie are paired off against one another in a quarter finals match. After an intense fight, Christie manages to come out on top while also discovering the tattooed code.
Concerned about Hayabusa, Kasumi convinces Tina and Christie to join her in infiltrating Donovan’s headquarters. They discover Hayabusa unconscious, but are incapacitated and captured by Donovan. Meanwhile, saddened by Helena’s defeat to Christie, Weatherby confesses to Helena that Donovan is working on some sort of secret project and that he believes that her father was murdered to cover it up. Helena decides to stop Donovan, but they are attacked by his cronies. They manage to defeat the mob and then head into the complex to get to the bottom of Donovan’s scheme. Donovan monologues to the captured heroes about his plan – he has been using the nanobots in their bloodstream to collect data on the worlds greatest fighters, which will be fed directly into a pair of computer-enhanced glasses he has developed, allowing him to instantly learn their techniques and counter them all. He plans to sell these glasses to several international criminals to rake in millions of dollars. Donovan then reveals that Hayate is still alive and uses him as a demonstration of the glasses’ power, defeating him in one-on-one combat easily and throwing him through a wall. He is left to die but Ayane saves him, which causes her to finally realize that Kasumi was right all along.
Before Donovan can send the data to his buyers, he is interrupted by Weatherby, who cuts off the upload and alerts the CIA of Donovan’s dealings. Donovan and Helena fight while Weatherby frees Hayabusa, Tina, Kasumi and Christie just before Donovan actives a self-destruct sequence. The fighters all converge on Donovan, with Helena, Kasumi, Ayane, Hayate, Tina and Christie all beating on the old man at once while Weatherby and Hayabusa try to find an escape route. They encounter Max, who has been trying to break into the vault, and help him escape (despite his protestations). Overwhelmed by the sheer number of people attacking him, Donovan’s glasses are knocked off and he is left in a paralytic state by Hayate and Kasumi and watches helplessly as the heroes all escape the island before the base explodes, consuming Donovan in the inferno. The group quickly come across the pirates who Tina had fought earlier and steal their boat as they ride off into the sunset… to a final stinger where our heroines all face off against an army of ninjas at Kasumi’s palace.
Review
The opening of DOA is a perfect encapsulation of what makes this movie work. It starts with a terrible CGI tracking shot through a palace in the sky and then assaults us with stilted acting, bad dialogue and melodrama… and then suddenly Kasumi’s escapes by throwing a sword into the wall, leaps the cross the backs of an entire army, uses the sword as a springboard to launch herself over the walls of the palace and then reveals that she has a freaking hang glider hidden under her clothes to sail away as a robot ninja star just comes out of nowhere and invites her to DOA.
Holy shit, what did I just watch?!
The movie just gets better from there and makes it unmistakable that Corey Yuen and his cast know exactly what kind of film they’re making and then wring every ounce of fun out of the premise that they can with tongue planted firmly in cheek. That’s the thing, DOA has several elements that would tank any other film – paper-thin story, bad acting, a stupid and cheap third act, etc. However, Yuen executes this all in such a manner that they either don’t matter or they even enhance the experience. For example, how many times have I criticized Resident Evil for its crappy stories? The difference here is that the story serves DOA‘s actual strengths – fantastic action sequences and fun characters (and for the record, these are the exact elements that made the twoResident Evil movies I actually like work). There’s very little time wasted on pointless exposition or worldbuilding, the film knows what you’re here for and it will give you enough to make that function and create some stakes in an efficient manner. Again, this would usually sound like a bad thing, but how many action movies have we seen where they put in a forced romance, or set up a long-winded relationship in order to give our character motivation when it’s taken away, or just spent time trying to prove that this is not “just some b-movie”? There’s a reason movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, Taken and John Wick are so beloved and that’s because they cut the fat… and it just occurred to me while typing this sentence that I’m unironically going to argue that DOA: Dead or Alive is at least in the same ballpark as those movies.
First off, DOA has some fantastic fight sequences. This should be expected, but you’d be surprised how many video game movies (let alone lower-budget movies in general) that are all about their action sequences fail to even surpass this simple hurdle. Films like The Legend of Chun-Li are supposed to be all about the action but fail to even succeed there. Again, look no further than the most recent Resident Evil, which was basically just an excuse to string together action setpieces but which had the worst directed and edited action sequences in the franchise so far in the process. In this regard, DOA scored a homerun right off the bat by hiring Corey Yuen, whose expertise is clearly reflected in the plethora of fun and exciting fights peppered throughout this film’s runtime.
There are two particular sequences I want to highlight – the showdown between Kasumi and Ayane in the bamboo forest and the rain-soaked, bare-knuckle beatdown between Christie and Helena. The bamboo forest fight is a clear riff on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a sword-wielding Ayane tries to kill an unarmed Kasumi and features all sorts of acrobatics, wire stunts and creative use of the environment to allow Kasumi to survive her half-sister’s furious onslaught. I highlight this particular fight because it’s basically just thrown there for the sake of an action sequence, but it’s so damn cool that it doesn’t matter that it halts the actual story for a couple minutes. On the other hand, the fight between Christie and Helena is not only really cool (shot in slow-motion close-ups during a pouring rain storm), but is also tense because we have no idea who is going to win. We like both characters by this point and don’t want to see either of them lose. Some of the best acting in the film is demonstrated in this sequence, you can really feel that these characters are fighting a desperate battle against one another and doing whatever they can to come out on top. In a movie with tons of great fight sequences, this one really stands out because it makes you realize just how effectively it has gotten you to like these characters.
That’s another big strength of DOA – the characters are all really fun (well, mostly, but we’ll get to that). It helps their personalities and motivations are conveyed perfectly through the action sequences… again, just like Fury Road. I mean, just look at the character introductions for an example. Tina gets introduced complaining that, as a wrestler, she’s not taken seriously before her boat gets boarded by pirates. She takes the opportunity to then beat the crap out of them, proving to the audience that she is indeed a formidable fighter (and even kind-hearted as she allows the last pirate to throw himself off the ship to spare himself a beating). Meanwhile, Christie’s introduction establishes that she’s a charming femme fatale, using her sexuality in order to get the upper hand when she’s ambushed and seemingly cornered by Interpol. Hayate gets one of these introductions in a flashback as well. Need to prove that he’s the best fighter in the world? How about have him chuck a bunch of needles at a group of bandits, snatch these needles out of the air and prick the bandits in their pressure points to paralyze them all? Holy shit, this guy’s amazing! It makes Kasumi’s unrelenting search and Donovan’s later beatdown of Hayate all the more effective.
It’s not just about the fights though, DOA‘s characters are also just fun to watch interacting with each other and have great chemistry. The most obvious example of this is Kevin Nash’s Bass Armstrong and his interactions with Tina. He’s like the ultimate goofy, macho dad and Tina is constantly embarrassed by his inability to take anything seriously. This comes to a head when Tina and Bass get matched against each other and he bursts into her room, only to sheepishly back out when he realizes that he might have just walked in on Tina and Christie in bed together (in reality she was just sharing a bed because Christie’s room got trashed). It’s adorable how supportive he is of his daughter and is obvious that there’s a lot of love between them, even if there appears to be friction most of the time. Weatherby and Helena’s relationship is also quite cute. While Weatherby is a dork and it strains credulity to think that Helena would find him interesting, the fact that she does is adorable and both are kept interesting enough and have enough relevance that it doesn’t feel like either is a dreaded “generic love interest”. Or how about how the film establishes that Kasumi, Christie and Tina are now friends with each other? When the group parachutes onto DOA island together, they have to reach the tournament grounds in time or be disqualified. Initially they’re all looking out for themselves while climbing the temple, but quickly realize that they’re not going to make it unless they work together and are soon a solid team. It’s simple and obvious, but effective visual character building.
Unfortunately, DOA‘s one big stumbling block in terms of its characters is in its lead, Kasumi. Devon Aoki’s performance is extremely flat and I can’t help but feel like this was intentional – Kasumi herself is a bit of a personality-void in the games and I think they were trying to capture the same sort of stoic heroine energy. It’s a shame because Aoki seems very charming and fun in the film’s “Making Of” feature and it would have been nice to see her in a role that didn’t require her to be so serious the whole time. Similarly, Ayane is also very one-note, just pissed off all the time, while Ryu Hayabusa is downgraded from a demon-slaying badass to Kasumi’s generic love interest. Whenever Kasumi’s plot is in control the film loses some of its luster, but thankfully it’s more than made up for with the subplots revolving around Christie and Tina (and eventually Helena).
Another remarkable element of DOA is that the film is one of those weird movies that manages to strike the fine balance between being sexy and empowering at the same time. This is especially surprising given Dead or Alive‘s reputation as a pervy, tit-obsessed series (this certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 released only a month after DOA hit theaters). DOA does a far better job of balancing this out, if only because the cast are real human beings and not a bunch of 36DD teenagers and so they can’t just take the easy route by going with over-the-top eye-candy. Sure, the girls are in bikinis on several occasions and there are lots of shots of cleavage and butts, but it comes across far better than in the games. The games are usually just voyeuristic but when they fetishize the girls it can get straight-up creepy, not to mention that the games try to maintain this weird sort of “innocence” to them all, like they don’t realize that they’re all stupidly-hot. In DOA, the women all own their sexuality – if they’re in bikinis it generally makes sense (it is a tropical island after all and they’re often in down-time between fights) and they’re not treated like these chaste, untouchable angels with no idea of how beautiful they are. Hell, Christie is straight-up sexually active in this movie, well-aware of her wants and desires and not afraid to use her allures to get the upper-hand on an opponent. It’s kind of like Bayonetta in this regard, where the female characters are framed by the male gaze, but they don’t allow it to trap them. Beyond the characters’ sexuality though, the female cast just kick a ton of ass throughout the film. That’s actually a strength inherent to the games themselves, where several women can go toe-to-toe with the best male fighters in the world and play out their interesting storylines, but the focus on tits always drowns this out and drowns out an otherwise empowering premise. Freed from pervy obsessions, DOA shows us just how awesome these women are as they take down an evil conspiracy with their fists. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to declare the film to be outright feminist, but it’s sure as hell a kickass girl power romp.
I also have to mention the third act, which is a potentially make-or-break part of the film. For my part, I think it’s fucking hilarious and the perfect cherry on top of an enjoyable sundae, but I can understand if someone would think that it’s terrible. Basically, as soon as Donovan’s evil plan is revealed, DOA turns into a G.I. Joe-level cartoon. The sets get really cheap looking and the plot goes off the rails because Donovan’s master plan is stupid beyond comprehension. Okay, cool, you’ve scanned all the fighting techniques from the world’s best fighters and downloaded them to a set of smart glasses which show you how to fight and beat any opponent… There’s just so much about this that’s pants-on-head stupid. First of all, how do you react quick enough to the glasses’ prompts to even fight back? Second, boy it sure would suck if your opponent decided to shoot you instead of engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Third, why make the crux of this evil plan revolve around a fashion accessory which is notoriously easy to knock off, especially when you’re doing quick actions like… oh, I don’t know, fighting people? Fourth, why then antagonize the fighters you stole the data from!? If he had just waited til the tournament was over to sell the data to international terrorists (some of which look like random incels wearing sunglasses!) you wouldn’t have gotten defeated like an idiot! It’s so dumb, but given how intentionally tongue-in-cheek the rest of the film has been I can’t help but think that this plan was made so campy on purpose, so I’m more than willing to go along with it, grinning like a madman all the while.
If we’re being entirely honest, DOA isn’t a top-tier movie by any means. The acting is fine at best, the story is clearly bare-bones and the low budget makes it look cheap at times. Films like House of the Dead or Street Fighter: The Movie may be similarly fun and hilarious, but it’s clear that they were not intended to be enjoyed so ironically. On the flip-side, recent acclaimed video game movies like Detective Pikachu and Sonic aim to be taken more seriously, but they’re just ultimately mediocre popcorn films with boring characters, unimpressive action sequences and questionably-structured stories. However, everyone involved knew exactly what sort of film this was and they did away with pretension to maximize its strengths and make it as enjoyable as possible with tongue planted firmly in cheek throughout. That puts it well above every other video game movie out there.
I like checking in on the Humble Bundle store every once in a while, sometimes there are amazing deals on things I’m interested in. Back in August/September one of these deals was on comics from 2000 AD. Already being a big fan of Judge Dredd, I knew that this was going to be a total steal so I decided to drop $20 for the tier 3 rewards and have been gorging myself on quality comics ever since (in fact, I’ve since gotten a monthly subscription to 2000 AD to stay on top of their ongoing storylines). After getting a few volumes in I decided that I wanted to document my feelings on these stories, since I don’t really have anyone else to talk to about these things and I have thoughts, dammit! So, without further adieu, let’s get into it…
2000 AD‘s Greatest: Celebrating 40 Years of Thrill-Power!
If you were looking for an introduction to 2000 AD then this collection is the perfect primer. It features several short stories from the publication’s long history, many of which I would agree are among the absolute best of 2000 AD. “Meat” is a particular highlight (which you can read in its entirety on 2000 AD‘s preview page!), with fantastic writing and art which shows off just how brutal the world of Mega-City One is. “The Forever Crimes” is similarly grim, but it is also a very early comic in the publication’s history, so it’s interesting to see just how much the comic medium has evolved in the past 40 years. Also worth highlighting is “The Heart is a Lonely Klegg Hunter”, one of the funniest comics I’ve ever read. Simply put, if you’re curious about getting into the stories of 2000 AD, then this is an ideal starting point.
Absalom
Absalom was a real treat – the three volumes included in the bundle would have been worth the $20 that I paid alone. Set in a world where the English nobility made a secret pact with the forces of hell, the story follows a cantankerous investigator named Harry Absalom who secretly upholds the laws of The Accord and slays demons who break it. The main thrust of the story revolves around Absalom’s attempts to get a team together in order to break into the demons’ realm in order to save his kidnapped grandchildren. Absalom succeeds thanks to Gordon Rennie’s entertaining writing and Tiernan Trevallion’s distinctive and evocative art style. The characters are particularly great, from the titular Harry Absalom, to the lawful-evil Guv, to the cyborg demon servant Mr. Critch. The world itself is also fascinating, creating a rich world with distinctive elements (especially the freaking steampunk demons) and the story moves at a good clip. My only complaints are that it can be a bit difficult to follow the story at times, because Rennie will often drop you right into the narrative with little explanation (necessitating multiple readings to really appreciate), and that the story feels like it wasn’t explored to its fullest. In a foreword, Gordon Rennie says that he doesn’t like to stretch a story out beyond the character’s natural arc and in that way it succeeds, but there are so many more stories that could be told in this world beyond Harry Absalom himself. In addition, several plot-beats feel under-utilized. Still, Absalom is a great read and well-worth picking up, especially if you’re into the paranormal and steampunk stories!
Age of the Wolf
Oh shit, a story about a werewolf apocalypse featuring a badass, redhead female protagonist? You’ve got my attention, Alec Worley and John Davis-Hunt. Unsurprisingly, Age of the Wolf is a really fun read, featuring plenty of werewolf carnage and magical elements ripped directly from Norse mythology. The first two parts follow a fairly typical apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic storyline, with protagonist Rowan discovering how to use Nordic rune magic to fight back against the werewolves and various evil humans. The third part though… hoo boy, the third part makes the strange decision of having the werewolves evolve from mindless beasts into… furries. It’s a weird turn to say the least and I’m still not sure if it was brilliant or terrible.
The main issue though is that Age of the Wolf doesn’t explore its intriguing world nearly enough, nor does it have a lot of time to give its characters much personality. Rowan is the only character which gets any sort of development, but even she has her issues. In the foreward, Alec Worley states that he doesn’t like “strong female characters” and instead believes that we need “interesting characters” instead. However, I feel like Rowan falls on the “strong female character” side of things, as she is mainly defined by her strength rather than any sorts of conflict or development (this becomes especially notable as we get further on in this Humble Bundle and meet several much better-written and more interesting female characters). While I agree with Alec Worely that the trend of “strong female characters” is a problem, I feel like the solution is ultimately just to have more women writers and artists within the comics industry. In a lot of ways, Rowan feels like a man’s ideal woman moreso than a truly compelling female character in her own right.
The plot also zips along in unsatisfying ways, feeling like Worley and Davis-Hunt were constrained by a tight page limit to tell their story. For example, a Nazi kills Rowan’s lover and throws her into a pit of werewolves and she swears bloody vengeance against him. That’s the sort of set-up that drives entire narratives, but here it only takes like a page before she escapes the pit and then a couple more before she tracks him down and kills him. Being limited to under 150 pages to tell the entire beginning and end of the werewolf apocalypse is quite restrictive and leaves tons of unexplored territory. Don’t get me wrong, Age of the Wolf is a fun read, even one I’d give a tepid recommendation to read, but could have been a lot better.
Aquila
Gordon Rennie makes his second appearance on this list with Aquila, a comic series which follows a Roman slave who was crucified for partaking in Spartacus’ rebellion. Dying, he calls out for any god to spare his life, and a bloodthirsty deity known as The Devourer answers, granting him boons by which he can slay the wicked. Aquila is notable in part due to its unique Roman historical-fantasy setting, which sets it apart from anything else in 2000 AD‘s catalogue. The story plays out like a grimdark Forrest Gump as Aquila encounters contemporaries such as Boudicca, Saint Peter and Nero, while also shaping the course of history as we know it. Aquila himself isn’t particularly compelling, but the story is entertaining and very well-suited for episodic adventure. If you’re into history then you will probably find Aquila interesting, as it is fun to see just how it stitches events together with its more fantastical elements. It doesn’t break new ground, but I really enjoyed Aquila, it gets another hearty recommendation from me.
Bec & Kawl
Bec & Kawl is the first book in this collection that I’m a bit “meh” on. It follows the titular Bec and Kawl as they get into supernatural mishaps, usually through their own stupidity (for example, in the first story they summon a demon to intimidate Bec’s college professor into giving her a better grade). The stories are drenched in irreverent, tongue-in-cheek humour (and are often straight-up stupid). I found the constant pop culture references in the first few stories to be grating and dated, these feel very much like a product of the mid-2000s (hell, they remind me of shit that I was writing at that time, in a bad way). Special shout-out to the tooth fairy storyline for being extra insufferable with its forced pop culture references. Luckily, the stories get a bit better as it goes along and as Bec and Kawls’ characters are better-defined. There’s something endearing about Bec’s psychotic narcissism and Kawl’s slacker stupidity which makes their misadventures entertaining even if the stories themselves aren’t particularly compelling.
The Best of Tharg’s Future Shocks
Tharg’s Future Shocks is a long-running, stand-alone, short story anthology which has been running in 2000 AD for decades now. Naturally, The Best of Tharg’s Future Shocks collects several of these stories into one big collection. All of the “Future Shocks” are sci-fi, Twilight Zone-esque stories, featuring some sort of twist in the final panel. By their nature, Future Shocks are simple, disposable and (given their structure) a bit predictable, but they’re still fun. Trying to guess the twists can be an enjoyable activity in itself, and I found myself even trying to come up with my own “Future Shock” stories because the formula is so simple and structured. The Best of Tharg’s Future Shocks is a fun, pulpy collection, but I’d say it’s one of the more inessential books in the bundle.
Brass Sun
Oh hey, it’s a series by IC2S veteran Ian Edginton (last seen during the Dead Space EU Love/Hate)! Edginton had taken over as the writer for Dead Space: Liberation, which made me wonder if the action-heavy narrative shift in that comic was on him or EA. Well, having read Brass Sun I’m confident that any shortcomings in Dead Space: Liberation were down to EA’s interference, because Brass Sun is easily one of my favourite books in this collection. Brass Sun is clearly an excuse for Edginton to go wild with creative worldbuilding ideas. Here he crafts a steampunk adventure story set in a unique, clockwork solar system. The plot itself is a very standard hero’s journey – chosen one protagonist Wren has to find pieces of a nebulous key to restart the sun and save the entire clockwork solar system. The narrative bears more than a little resemblance to modern concerns about climate change, which gives it a bit more resonance. The imagination on display and the unique worlds that we experience make Brass Sun an enthralling adventure, although Wren isn’t a particularly compelling protagonist in her own right. That said, my only real complaint is that the whole story isn’t out yet, this is only the first volume. You know I’m going to be hunting down issues of 2000AD to find the next chapter!
Brink
Holy shit, Dan Abnett! As a long-time Warhammer 40,000 fan, seeing his name always fills me with excitement (Prospero Burns is, in my opinion, a legitimately great novel, especially considering that Black Library novels tend to be little more than bolter porn). Not only did Brink not disappoint, but it even surprised me in several ways. First of all, it draws attention for its protagonist, Bridget Kurtis, who is a wildly unconventional female character (I mean… just look at her, she clearly isn’t Abnett’s imaginary girlfriend). She’s great and has a no-nonsense attitude which gets her through plenty of scrapes. Speaking of which, Brink‘s story revolves around Bridget Kurtis’ investigations into cult activity on various “habitats” – corporate-owned space stations which hold the remnants of humanity after the evacuation of Earth after it is rendered inhabitable. The setting is very rich with themes and parallels to reality as well, such as the dangers (and short-sightedness) of unregulated capitalism, religious fanaticism, wealth inequality, and facing ecological disaster. Abnett’s writing is solid, focusing on character and story over non-stop action (a trap many similar serialized stories fall into), and Culbard’s art compliments it well, being strikingly, grotesquely beautiful at times. The Humble Bundle came with all three currently-released volumes of Brink, with more potentially coming in future. I’d definitely recommend picking them up, I know that I’ll be eagerly scanning 2000AD for future installments!
Counterfeit Girl
Counterfeit Girl is one of the shortest books in this collection at a mere 68 pages and doesn’t feel like only the first volume in an ongoing series. That said, what the story lacks in length it makes up for in personality. Counterfeit Girl is drenched in cyberpunk style and philosophy, raising questions of identity in a world where personas can be downloaded and stolen at a moment’s notice. The titular “counterfeit girl”, Libra, navigates the underbelly of a pulpy, dystopian sci-fi society as she tries to bring down the villainous Albion Corporation. Rufus Dayglo’s art really enhances the punk themes as well (appropriately, he is one of the artists responsible for Tank Girl). All-in-all, Counterfeit Girl isn’t exactly breaking new ground (its themes of identity are very well-trodden territory for cyberpunk narratives, especially by 2016), but it’s still an enjoyable, breezy sci-fi tale that’s worth diving into on a lunch break.
Defoe 1666
Defoe 1666 is a bit like Absalom meets Aquila – a grimdark, historical fantasy, proto-steampunk story about a fanatic who hunts zombies after an infernal disaster resurrects the dead in 1666 during the Great Fire of London. While the story itself is entertaining and engaging (although it can be told in a confusing manner at times), the main draw is the amount of research which has gone into its creative arsenal. Basically every wild, zombie-killing invention in the story was designed and/or prototyped during the time period, from the multi-barreled shotguns, to the Renaissance-era tanks, to the square bullets designed to kill infidels (as opposed to the circular bullets for Christians). The art is also worth highlighting, being strictly black and white and with very gritty, grimy lines bringing this dangerous world to life. It’s also worth noting that the Humble Bundle only has volume one of the story, but there’s a second volume available on the 2000AD store. As is, volume one feels very much like a first act, but I liked it enough that I’m definitely going to purchase volume two to find out what happens next, so you can’t get much more of an endorsement than that.
The Ballad of Halo Jones
I figured that Halo Jones was going to be good just because it was written by Alan freaking Moore, but I really wasn’t expecting just how much I was going to love it. At the beating heart of the story is Halo Jones herself, who is remarkable as a comic book heroine in that she really isn’t that remarkable at all. She’s an everywoman who isn’t particularly good at anything, but who does what she can to survive in an uncaring galaxy while desperately dreaming of a way to escape the confines of her life. In the process, Alan Moore and Ian Gibson slowly introduce us to a universe which is rich and intriguing, while also being pulpy fun at the same time. The Humble Bundle collects three volumes of this classic tale and I definitely recommend reading them all – it’s so well-written and unconventional (the conflict in volume one literally revolves around navigating traffic!) and there are so many heartbreaking moments throughout.
My only have a couple of niggling complaints about Halo Jones. Bolume one drops you right into the universe and it’s not until the very beginning of volume two that they bother to explain all the intricacies of Halo’s home, The Hoop… and by then it’s kind of pointless because she’s already left it. Honestly, this information should have just been appended to the start of volume one. Another minor issue is that Ian Gibson is clearly an ass-man because he loads the panels with womens’ shapely asses every chance he gets. Again, it’s not exactly a major problem but it kind of undermines the story’s efforts to elevate women. And finally, the most galling problem about Halo Jones – it was never finished. In classic Alan Moore style, he lost the rights to his characters to the publisher of 2000AD at the time and then never finished the story as a result. Moore himself has said that he wanted at least three more volumes and as a result the story is clearly incomplete. I was devastated when I realized that I couldn’t continue the story, which is both something worth knowing going in and a testament to how good this story is.
Hope… For the Future
Hope is definitely one of the more “meh” inclusions in the Humble Bundle. While the idea of a magical detective with a demon companion is cool, the actual story fails to do much to excite. For one thing, that demon companion? Completely silent the entire time, so you don’t even get any fun banter. Instead, we just get Hope himself, who is about as generic a hardboiled detective as you could possibly ask for. And the case that makes up this story? Also very cliché for a supernatural detective story, even down to Hope’s primary motivation being that his son was kidnapped by demonic forces. Unlike most of the stories in this collection, I can’t say I’d even bother to find out if there are any other volumes available, let alone spend money on them. I’ll probably check new issues of Hope out in 2000AD if they show up and maybe I’ll grow more interested as the story goes, but as is I was unimpressed by Hope.
And that’s it for part one of this rundown of the 2000AD Humble Bundle! Tune in again soon when we take a look at the books in part two (after, y’know, I get a chance to read through them all)!
Welcome back to the Jurassic Park retrospective! In today’s post we’re going to talk about the most recent entry in the franchise to date, 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom! After Jurassic World brought the franchise back to life, could Fallen Kingdom successfully keep the momentum going? Read on to find out…
On the one hand, I like that this is a different sort of poster for the Jurassic Park franchise. It’s action packed and actually shows off our characters for once. But on the other hand, I am so annoyed about the heavy blue filter and the pointless sparks in the foreground. These are such lazy poster-design tropes and already were super cliché by the time this movie released.
Production
Shortly after the huge success of Jurassic World (would anyone have predicted at the time that it would become the 3rd highest-grossing film ever?), Universal pictures announced that a sequel would be forthcoming on June 22, 2018. Colin Trevorrow originally considered coming back to direct the sequel, but Jurassic World made him an in-demand director and he was scooped up to direct Star Wars: Episode IX instead. As a result, he decided to take a step away from the franchise and move into a producer role alongside Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall.
Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly developed and wrote the script for the film, which would bring back Chris Pratt’s Owen and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire from the previous film. It was initially rumoured that Omar Sy, Ty Simpkins and Jake Johnson could be making a return as well, but this did not pan out. There were also rumours that characters from previous Jurassic Park films could return. Trevorrow and Connolly developed the story over an eight-day road trip. They were inspired by the idea of the unpredictability of humans and dinosaurs being forced into co-existing and wanted to further explore the boundaries of genetic engineering in this universe. Trevorrow has stated that he didn’t want to make Fallen Kingdom yet another movie about dinosaurs chasing people around an island and the dangers of messing with science, he wanted to do something different and explore the consequences of the mistakes which had already been made in previous Jurassic Park films, something which would broaden the scope of the franchise.
J. A. Bayona, who had been previously considered to direct Jurassic World, was the favourite to direct Fallen Kingdom, although he had agreed to direct the sequel to World War Z and wasn’t sure if he’d be able to make it work with his schedule. However, Bayona eventually dropped that project and joined onto Fallen Kingdom after reading the script.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard were already signed on at this point and the only other returning character would be B. D. Wong’s Henry Wu. The new cast were filled out by Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, Ted Levine, James Cromwell and Toby Jones. Casting also went out for a nine-year-old girl, which went to Isabella Sermon as her film debut. Also worth noting was that Geraldine Chaplin, a Bayona regular, was cast in a role. Finally, it was announced that Jeff Goldblum had been secured for a role in the film, and although he was all over the marketing, it would ultimately be little more than an over-glorified cameo.
Filming began in late Febraury 2017. Befitting a film of this size, the production was massive and used several locations. Much of the film was shot in England, while most of the Isla Nublar footage was filmed in Hawaii, and there was even a scene shot in Las Vegas. Whereas Jurassic World overloaded on CGI, Bayona chose to use animatronic dinosaurs whenever possible. This also extended to the action sequences – the scene where the gyrosphere goes over the cliff and starts sinking was achieved through mostly practical effects, as Bryce Dallas Howard and Justice Smith were sent rolling down a track for the fall and then this was spiced together with sequences in a dive tank where the gyrosphere (and actors inside) were actually submerged. It’s a highlight of the film and the way it was shot no doubt contributed to the excitement.
As Universal dictated, Fallen Kingdom released June 22, 2018. Anyone who thought that Jurassic World‘s enormous success was a fluke were surely silenced as Fallen Kingdom grossed $417.7 million domestically and $890.7 million overseas for a total box office haul of $1.308 billion (just shy of it’s predecessor’s $1.67 billion total).
Plot Synopsis
Sometime after Jurassic World, a team of mercenaries infiltrate Isla Nublar to retrieve skeletal remains of the Indominous rex. A submarine crew retrieve a portion of the rib and send it to the surface, but are soon killed by the Mosasaurus. The ground crew are then attacked by the T-rex, but manage to escape only for one of their men to be killed by the Mosasaur as well before it escapes into the ocean.
The film then cuts to the present, where we discover that the volcano on Isla Nublar has become active and will soon erupt and wipe out the dinosaurs on the island. The U.S. Senate debate what to do about the situation, but Ian Malcolm tells them that they should be allowed to die. The Senate agrees and decide that they will not intervene. Meanwhile, we discover that Claire Dearing has taken command of the Dinosaur Protection Group, which seeks to secure their salvation. She is contacted by Benjamin Lockwood, John Hammond’s former partner who helped bring the dinosaurs to life. Lockwood tells Claire that he plans to relocate the dinosaurs to a new island, but he needs her help in order to reactivate the park’s systems and track them successfully. Knowing that Blue, the last velociraptor, will be impossible to track down in time, she seeks out Owen Grady to try to join her in the rescue. While hesitant, Owen agrees and the pair are flown out alongside fellow DPG employees Franklin (a computer whiz) and Zia (a paleoveteranarian). They meet the head of the rescue team, a mercenary named Ken Wheatley, who takes Claire and Franklin to get the park’s tracking back online. He then leads Owen and Zia out to capture Blue. Owen is quickly able to find her, but Wheatley’s men move in too quickly and she panics, which results in a soldier being killed and Blue being shot. Wheatley turns on Owen, tranquilizing him and forcing Zia to join him to save Blue’s life. Meanwhile, Claire and Franklin are locked inside the tracking station and left for dead as the volcano begins to erupt. They manage to escape after a close call with a Baryonyx and reunite with Owen. The trio escape in a gyrosphere with a stampede of dinosaurs as the island explodes around them, just barely making it by riding off a cliff and swimming to a secluded beach. They manage to find Wheatley’s men and discover that they are loading dinosaurs aboard their ship. The trio sneak aboard the ship as the last dinosaurs left on the island are wiped out by the eruption.
We discover that Lockwood’s aide, Eli Mills, has secretly arranged to have the dinosaurs brought to the mansion to be auctioned off to the criminal underworld. He also needs Blue because Dr. Henry Wu has been developing a new weaponized dinosaur, the Indoraptor and requires Blue’s DNA in order to create the finalized version of the creature. Lockwood’s granddaughter, Maisie, discovers this and tries to warn her grandfather. He doesn’t believe her at first, but when he presents Mills with the accusation, Mills murders him as the dinosaurs and guests begin to arrive. Seeing what is happening, Owen and Claire attempt to stop the auction, but are captured by Wheatley, while Franklin is separated from the pair.
The auction then begins and several dinosaurs are sold and transported away. Using some quick thinking, Owen tricks a stygimoloch into breaking them free and then sets it loose in the auction. During the chaos, Wheatley breaks in and accidentally sets the Indoraptor loose in the building. It kills several people before it begins hunting Owen, Claire and Maisie. They are nearly cornered, until Blue arrives and begins fighting the hybrid dinosaur. Blue ultimately prevails and the Indoraptor is impaled on a fossilized triceratops skull.
However, Claire and Owen reunite with Franklin and Zia and soon discover that a gas leak is killing the last remaining dinosaurs trapped in the basement of the mansion. Claire initially decides to let the animals die, but Maisie releases them anyway – Mills revealed that she was a clone of Lockwood’s deceased daughter, not his actual grandchild, so she believes that she has a kinship with the dinosaurs. In any case, the dinosaurs escape into the wilds of America and Mills is killed by the T-rex in the process. Our heroes escape and contend with the new reality of a Jurassic World where humans and dinosaurs are now forced to coexist.
Review
If nothing else, I love that Fallen Kingdom tries to evolve the Jurassic Park formula. I’ve criticized the previous sequels for always devolving into “running and screaming” as dinosaurs chase the protagonists around for an hour. There’s certainly some of that in Fallen Kingdom, but it shakes-up the formula far more than any previous Jurassic Park film and tries to tackle the “bigger ideas” inherent in the premise of genetically-engineered dinosaurs. J. A. Bayona’s direction is also the best we’ve seen in the franchise since Steven Spielberg left the director’s chair. The film’s opening sequence and the sinking gyrosphere aren’t on par with the legendary T-rex escape or the trailers getting knocked over the cliff in the first two films, but they’re still very well executed, exciting and above-average blockbuster action set pieces. Yeah, Fallen Kingdom shakes up the Jurassic Park franchise in some much-needed ways… but to paraphrase a certain famous mathematician: “Your [studio executives] were so preoccupied with whether they could [make a Jurassic Park franchise], they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Jurassic Park needed to change if it was going to continue, but Fallen Kingdom is evidence that it should have just stayed dead.
The main issue with Fallen Kingdom is that its story is Resident Evil-levels of stupid. Within the first few minutes, we have idiocy like no one checking to see if the Mosasaur was still alive and then it escapes because its enclosure is connected to the freaking ocean! Having Wheatley betray Owen and Zia was also super contrived… like, why did they feel the need to try to murder them in the middle of the mission? Owen’s pissed off but as far as he’s concerned they are all on the same side still (not to mention that one of Wheatley’s men just got freaking mauled to death), having Wheatley try to kill Owen just seems like they wanted to make him an evil asshole. And for that matter, are you telling me that Zia doesn’t try to get Wheatley to bring Owen, Claire and Franklin along with them…? Oh right, then we wouldn’t have a bunch of action sequences instead, silly me! Speaking of which, why the hell are the dinosaurs still trying to eat things while the island is literally blowing up around them!? The stupid baryonyx is even lighting itself on fire trying to get to Claire and Franklin, just cut your losses dude! If there was a white chocolate Reese’s within reach and all I had to do was avoid falling lava to get it, I’d peace out, especially if I already got several drops of lava on me in the process!
Imagine this exchange between Trevorrow and Connelly:
“We need an action sequence on the boat, how can we get Claire and Owen in the T-rex cage?”
“Maybe they need a blood transfusion to save Blue?”
“Perfect.”
“But that doesn’t make sense, their blood isn’t the same…”
“Whatever, just make the vet say that they’re both carnivores with two or three fingers, therefore their blood will be compatible. No one will question it.”
Look, I get it, we need an excuse to get this exciting action sequence and I’m okay with it in theory. The thing is, we don’t need an actual explanation – just imply that you don’t know for sure if it will work, take the blood and leave the exact science up to our imaginations when it turns out it’s fine! Just say that the T-rex is safest to extract from because it’s heavily tranquilized and the several other three-fingered predators aboard the boat are not! Bloody hell! Oh and all this culminates with Blue freaking crying because the filmmakers really need us to like her and can’t figure out how to do that with any subtlety.
Dr. Henry Wu: “What the fuck!?”
Then when we get to the mansion, the stupidity just keeps coming. First of all, Lockwood is apparently a complete idiot. Not only is he somehow unaware that there is live dinosaur research going on in his own home, but he confronts Eli Mills and then tells him to turn himself over to the police! Mills, predictably, goes “lol no” and then kills the old bastard. We then get introduced to the Indoraptor and… hoo boy, this thing doesn’t hold a candle to the Indominus Rex in terms of being an effective villain. For one thing, it takes the “weaponized dinosaurs” idea even further and just goes to show why this idea has always been so goddamn stupid. The Indoraptor is hardcoded to pick targets by pointing a gun with a laser sight at them and then pressing a button to issue a sonic code to attack… so in other words, instead of just shooting the gun you already have pointed at a target, you tell the nearby Indoraptor to attack them instead (and that’s the thing, the Indoraptor has to be close to you for the sonic command to work, so it’s not like you can hide a kilometer away from the target and the raptor either). It’s clearly limited in usefulness and the fact that the Indoraptor starts killing everyone as soon as it can makes this idea even more stupid. Oh, but does the Indoraptor escape through clever guile? No, it escapes through Prometheus-levels of contrived idiocy. Wheatley’s given only two character traits – he’s demanding a bonus from Mills because he’s greedy, and he collects teeth from every dinosaurs because he’s an asshole. So he waltzes into the auction after some of the dinosaurs get loose, tranquilizes the Indoraptor and then immediately walks into the cage to steal its teeth!?! Again, I get that the Indoraptor has to escape for the story to progress and that is totally fine… but holy fuck movie, this is how you unleash your big villain? It doesn’t make the Indoraptor look clever or dangerous, it makes Wheatley look like an utter moron. It is far and away the stupidest moment in any Jurassic Park film.
Oh, and the whole reason half the plot revolves around recapturing Blue is certifiably insane. First of all, the Indoraptor apparently needs a mother to pacify it and because it’s part raptor it can view Blue as that mother… but also they need Blue’s DNA because they need to add that to the Indoraptor because Blue was controllable and the Indoraptor isn’t, despite the fact that they share the same velociraptor DNA… bloody hell, it doesn’t make sense and it’s the sort of thing you can miss because the movie basically drops the whole plotline about halfway through.
Then of course the movie ends with the dinosaurs escaping. The movie directly ties this into the ethical questions that were brought up in the opening of the film, as Claire has to decide whether the dinosaurs should be allowed to die, despite beginning the film trying to save them. She decides that they should die, but then Maisie gives the entire world a middle finger and unleashes them into the wild. I’m actually fine that Maisie is a clone, it’s a sensible and inevitable development in a world where you can clone dinosaurs back to live. The idea is barely explored though and ultimately feels like it was only introduced as an excuse for someone to willingly choose to unleash the dinosaurs on humanity. Hilariously, within ten seconds of being freed the dinosaurs indiscriminately murder three people (sure, these people captured the dinosaurs in the first place, but the dinosaurs don’t know that, they’d have been just as happy to stomp on a newborn baby).
Although maybe then we’d have the Dinosaurs Attack! movie we’ve always deserved. Side-note, I had the complete Dinosaurs Attack! card collection when I was in high school and they were gnarly. I lost them sometime in the last decade, much to my sorrow.
That’s the thing about Fallen Kingdom, it has some legitimately great ideas and the plot beats make sense in isolation, but whenever the film needs to make something happen, it chooses to do so in the stupidest possible way and assumes we won’t notice or care. This even extends to the ending – oh no, dinosaurs are loose in North America! But… think about it for a few seconds and it’s not as bad as it seems. Several species, especially the particularly dangerous ones, don’t have any breeding pairs so at the very worst this problem is going to sort itself out within a decade or two (and that’s making the very huge assumption that the militias or US military aren’t going to do something about a single T-rex going around killing people and livestock; hell, even without getting into anti-material rifles, the real world already has anti-T-rex rounds… I give it a week tops before the T-rex gets mounted above a rich redneck’s mantle).
Again, this isn’t Dinosaurs Attack!, but I wish it was.
Fallen Kingdom is also not helped by its characters, all of which suck. Owen is still the same as he ever was, although they have made him a bit funnier (“If I don’t make it back, remember you’re the one who made me come here” got a legitimate laugh out of me) and toned down his alpha male bullshit somewhat (although they still reintroduce him by having him build his own cabin in the wilderness because he’s a manly man). Claire has had all the sexist overtones of her character shaved away, but she has been turned into a personality-less character. She’s capable, but she rarely does anything and she (like the other characters) has no real arc or development to speak of. Like, sure, she decides to let the dinosaurs die at the end, but it doesn’t come across like she’s learned anything or changed her mind about the dinosaurs, it’s just that the circumstances are now different (rehousing the dinosaurs onto an isolated island is way different than unleashing them into the wilds of America where they will definitely fuck people up). At least Trevorrow and Connelly don’t force in an overt rekindled love subplot, but some sort of arc for the characters would have been nice.
As for the new characters, both Franklin and Zia are insufferable. Franklin’s the obligatory computer guy, but he serves his purpose within the first half hour and then spends the rest of the movie screaming and getting shuffled around uselessly. Zia’s a different sort of annoying. They never confirm it in the film, but she’s clearly a stereotypically coded lesbian, which means the movie has to make her tough and stand-offish… but honestly, it just makes her come across as an asshole. She just feels like corporate, performative, “woke” box-ticking, especially because a deleted scene confirmed that she was indeed a lesbian. Somehow they fuck this up twice-over tough, because deleting it is cowtowing to conservative international film markets and because the scene itself is fucking stupid (nothing says “woke” like having your lesbian character mention out of nowhere that she thinks Chris Pratt is fuckable, holy shit). For further evidence of this, I’m convinced that Trevorrow and Connelly were aware of the backlash Jurassic World had about its sexism, so they made sure to pass the Bechdel test by having Zia and Claire talk to a female senator about the dinosaurs in their introductory scene. Can’t criticize us now, liberals! This is, of course, why the Bechdel test is more of a guideline about sexism in film rather than a rule, because any “wokeness” in Fallen Kingdom is performative at best.
Mills makes for a suitably slimy corporate villain. He’s nothing special, but Rafe Spall makes him eminently hateable, especially when he goes into his bullshit moral equivalency speeches (which, I’m sure, were not meant to come across as bullshit but here we are). As for Maisie… she’s fine, I guess. Again, she doesn’t get any real development and mostly just sneaks around the mansion. The fact that she’s a clone also doesn’t really seem to matter. Like… she’s a little girl either way, she’s grown up like any other child, what difference does it make? I do like the theory that the Indoraptor has human DNA and that it wants Maisie to be its mother. It’s a pretty interesting idea and there’s enough evidence in the film that I’d be willing to bet it was cut very late in post-production.
Let’s be honest, if there’s anything that sets Maisie apart as inhuman it’s that she grew up in an extravagantly wealthy household and therefore deserves the guillotine.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was a depressing experience for me. I hated it when I first saw it in theatres and rewatching it for this retrospective was just tiring. It’s made all the worse by the fact that the direction is the best since Spielberg left and that film tries to take risks and shake-up the formula, things I usually love in long-running franchises like this. Unfortunately, the writing completely tanks it, taking a film with interesting ideas and dumbing them down for the lowest possible common denominator. The longer this series goes on, the more it seems like Jurassic Park should have been a stand-alone story. At this point they’re having to contort the franchise into unrecognizable shapes in order to keep it alive when what should be done is put it out of its misery.
4/10
So where does the franchise go from here? Well, the next movie is slated for 2022 with the title Jurassic World: Dominion. After nuking his Hollywood goodwill on The Book of Henry and losing the Star Wars franchise as a result, Colin Trevorrow is back as director. It sounds like a bunch of actors from the franchise’s history are making returns, but I just can’t muster any excitement for this franchise. It’s the sort of thing I’ll probably continue to watch out of obligation but… like… we already know it’s not going to be good. Oh and Trevorrow and Universal sure suck at keeping their film crews from getting COVID-19, eh?
Welcome back to the Planet of the Apes retrospective! In today’s post we’re going to be looking at the finale of the Caesar trilogy and (as of now) the latest entry in the franchise, 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes! Given the top-tier quality of the previous two films, could Matt Reeves deliver another masterpiece and make the Apes reboot one of the greatest trilogies of all time? Read on to find out…
Caesar is not fucking around.
Production
Even before the release of Dawn, plans were being put in place for the third installment in the reboot trilogy. Impressed by his work on Dawn, Matt Reeves was confirmed to be directing the next film and writing it alongside Mark Bomback once more. Unlike the last two films, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver weren’t involved in the writing of the story or script and instead served as producers on the project. Reeves and Bomback were also given far more time and leeway so that they could maintain the high quality of the reboot trilogy. In fact, while they initially set the release for summer 2016, they pushed the film’s release date back a full year in order to give Reeves enough time to make the film he wanted.
There’s a post-credits stinger at the end of Dawn which implies that Koba survived his fall at the end of the film. Reeves and Bomback briefly flirted with the idea of resurrecting Koba, but thankfully they concluded that there was nothing that he could add to the story by being alive. THANK GOD. Blockbuster films always try to repeat what already worked, but Koba’s story has been told, dragging it out would be an awful idea. It would be like if Pirates of the Carribean brought back Davy Jones or if Star Wars brought back Emperor Palpatine, but what kind of idiot would do that…?
Anyway, here’s a picture of Disney’s mascot for some unspecified reason.
In May 2015 the title of the film was revealed to be “War of the Planet of the Apes“, but was changed to “War for the Planet of the Apes” by the end of the year (which might be why I kept misspelling the title of this film all through my writing of this retrospective). Andy Serkis was, of course, returning as Caesar once more, while Judy Greer, Karin Konoval and Terry Notary would reprise their roles as the apes Cornelia, Maurice and Rocket, respectively. Tony Kebbell would also return as Koba, appearing in visions to haunt Caesar. Woody Harrelson was revealed to have been cast as the film’s antagonist, while Steve Zahn was cast as an ape and Amiah Miller was cast as a young human character.
Once again, filming took place around Vancouver, British Columbia and Weta Digital provided the film’s visual effects. War grossed $146.9 million domestically and $343.8 million internationally for a worldwide gross of $490.7 million. While less than Dawn, it was once again a solid haul for the Apes franchise.
Plot Synopsis
Two years have passed since the end of Dawn. Caesar’s apes and the U.S. military have been engaged in a bloody war. After an attack on an ape outpost is repelled by the apes, the captives are brought before Caesar. Among their ranks is a gorilla named Red, an ape who was loyal to Koba. The humans derogatively refer to these traitor-apes as “donkeys” and use them to help exterminate the other apes. Caesar decides to free the human captives as an olive branch to the Colonel leading the U.S. forces. As the humans are freed, Red escapes, wounding a gorilla named Winter in the process. Shortly thereafter, Blue Eyes and Rocket return to the apes’ encampment and reveal that they have found a new home for the apes across the desert. Winter insists that they need to leave before the Colonel attacks them, but Caesar says that they need time to prepare for the journey.
During the night, the Colonel leads a squad of humans into the apes’ base and executes Cornelia and Blue Eyes, believing him to be Caesar. Caesar is thrown into a rage, but the Colonel escapes before he can be killed. It is also discovered that Winter has gone missing during the raid. Fearing further attacks, the apes begin their journey to their new home, but Caesar decides to strike his own path. He leaves his last son, Cornelius, with Blue Eyes’ wife, Lake, and goes alone to hunt down the Colonel. Rocket, Maurice and Luca follow Caesar and join him on his journey, much to Caesar’s displeasure. On their way to the humans’ camp, they encounter a lone soldier, who Caesar kills when he tries to pull a gun on them. They find the soldier’s young daughter hiding nearby and find that she is mute. They bring her along with them, reasoning that she will die on her own if they do not, and Maurice names her “Nova”.
When the group reaches the humans’ camp, they find that the soldiers are packing up to leave and that the Colonel is already gone. They encounter Winter at the base and discover that he sold them out to the Colonel and that he believes that the humans are going to meet with the rest of the U.S. military to wipe out Caesar’s apes one and for all. When Winter tries to alert the guards, Caesar kills him. The apes then follow the human convoy to try to find their base. Along the way, they find that a group of soldiers are executed and left by the road. One of these humans is still alive and the apes discover that he is mute like Nova.
As they move further north, Caesar loses track of the convoy in the snow and they climb a radio tower to try to get a better vantage point. While they do so, a mysterious figure steals one of their horses. The apes give chase and track him down to a ski resort, where they discover that he is a fellow ape called “Bad Ape”. Bad Ape is the first intelligent ape they have encountered who isn’t a part of Caesar’s group, having been mutated by viral exposure to the Simian Flu. Bad Ape reveals that he knows the location of a nearby military base and, after some convincing, agrees to take them there. Caesar and Luca attempt to scout the base, but are spotted by sentries. The sentries are killed but Luca dies in the struggle. Not wanting any more of his companions to die for his cause, Caesar moves on the base alone, but discovers that the Colonel intercepted the ape tribe as they attempted to escape the forest and has brought them all here. Caesar is captured by Red and forced to start building a wall to protect the base along with the other apes. Caesar tries to inspire an uprising, but the Colonel puts this down violently and begins torturing Caesar in punishment.
Caesar is then brought before the Colonel, who reveals that his forces aren’t joining with the rest of the U.S. military – they’re coming to destroy him. The Colonel reveals that the Simian Flu has mutated and is causing humans to regress and lose their ability to speak. In order to halt the spread, the Colonel has been executing any man who develops the mutation, including his own son. Meanwhile, Rocket, Maurice, Bad Ape and Nova discover a sewer system beneath the base and realize they can use it to enact a rescue. Freezing and dying of exposure, Caesar regains his hope and strength when Nova sneaks into the base and gives him food, water and a doll. Fearing that Nova will be found and captured, Rocket strolls into the base as a decoy and is thrown in with the other apes, who begin enacting their escape plan.
The next morning, the Colonel is surprised to find Caesar still alive. He finds Nova’s doll and takes it with him, curious where Caesar got such a thing. The apes then spend the workday figuring out which tunnels will lead into the apes’ cages. They find that they can free the adult apes through the tunnels, but the children will have to be freed above ground. That night, the apes begin their escape and, once freed, Caesar helps the children out of their cage and into the tunnel. However, Caesar once more turns away from his people and goes after the Colonel just as the U.S. military arrives and battle erupts. He finds that the Colonel has been infected with the mutated Simian Flu through Nova’s doll and, seeing the Colonel in such a pitiful state, Caesar is finally able to overcome his rage, allowing the Colonel to commit suicide rather than kill him himself.
Outside, the battle rages between the two human forces and the fleeing apes are caught in the crossfire. Caesar tries to destroy a fuel tank to clear the way for the apes, but is shot by an arrow. Red sees all of this and finally decides to do the right thing. He kills a soldier who is about to kill Caesar and is killed in retaliation. However, the act gives Caesar time to blow up the fuel tank and annihilate the last of the Colonel’s men in the process. The U.S. military then advance on the base and discover the apes. Before they can attack, an avalanche is triggered. The apes flee into the trees and ride out the avalanche, but the exposed humans are wiped out. The apes then regroup and cross the desert to their new home, a sheltered valley paradise. While the apes celebrate, Caesar reveals to Maurice that he is dying of the arrow wound he sustained. Caesar slips away, content that he has led his people to salvation.
Review
Perhaps it should be unsurprising, but War is a dark turn for the Apes reboot trilogy. There is a persistent grimness throughout the film, which extends beyond the story itself into the film’s muted colour palette. Of course, going grimdark to try to be taken seriously can make your story feel juvenile if not done right, but I’d make the argument that Matt Reeves has crafted the most mature film in the franchise with War. The darkness in this film is less about bad things happening and more about the emotional turmoil which drives Caesar throughout this film. This is somewhat at odds with this film’s marketing and even its title, which promise a climactic showdown between apes and humans similar to Battle for the Planet of the Apes. However, aside from one skirmish in the opening scene and a battle between two human armies which happens mostly off-screen in the finale, War is pointedly uninterested in portraying war as a source of thrills (which is a trap that “war is bad” movies like Saving Private Ryan and Hacksaw Ridge fall into). As fun as it would have been to see this war play out more directly, if we’re being honest what we get in War is far more interesting. Rather, the titular “war” is the one raging within Caesar to determine the course his people will take in the future.
Through Rise and Dawn, Caesar was always an idealistic figure, one who tried to forge the path that would balance what was best for human and ape alike. This outlook set him apart from other apes because he had been raised by them and knew that they weren’t an inherently evil species, whereas Koba had been traumatized by them and viewed them all as a threat. However, when the Colonel kills Caesar’s wife and son after he showed mercy to the Colonel’s men, his idealism is shattered and he is consumed with a desire to lash out in vengeance. Caesar becomes straight-up cold-blooded, gleefully massacring human and ape alike that get in the way of his path to vengeance. He kills Nova’s father in self-defence, but he doesn’t feel any remorse and doesn’t rush to try to talk it out with him. He kills Winter, nominally for trying to alert the guards in the human camp, but it’s obvious that he’s actually doing it because Winter caused his family to be killed. He even starts hallucinating Koba taunting him, reminding him that under Caesar’s own philosophy “Ape must not kill ape”. It becomes obvious that Caesar’s quest for vengeance is fruitless – killing Nova’s father just creates an orphan and his actions are alienating him from his friends and the apes who look to him for guidance. Ultimately though, his ill-guided quest is causing Caesar to lose sight of the bigger picture. This is most clearly demonstrated when a captive Caesar tries to kill the Colonel, who berates him, asking him what he thinks would happen if he succeeded. If Caesar accomplished his goal he would be killed along with all of the apes, but his rage is blinding him from what is actually important to him.
Considering that this film came out during the Trump’s turbulent first year, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between the Colonel’s philosophy and Trumpism (even if Matt Reeves insists that these parallels are unintentional). Like… the Colonel is building a useless wall with the apes as his slave labourers, caging the apes up like an ICE detention facility, and the Colonel develops a nationalistic, fascist cult of personality around his vision of human purity. The Colonel claims to hate the apes because he believes that they will inevitably conquer the world if they aren’t stopped. He also views the speech and cognition-affecting mutation of the Simian Flu to be so dangerous that he killed his own son to prevent it from spreading and “corrupting” his pure humanity. However, for all his bluster about a long-term plan to save humanity, the Colonel has the same short-sighted weakness as Caesar – he is so set in his beliefs that he’ll destroy himself, his men, the rest of the U.S. military and the apes in order to see his ideal of humanity through, expecting divine intervention to see him through in what he calls a “holy war”. Ironically, the Colonel succumbs before his holy war even begins, becoming infected with the mutated virus and is put into such a pathetic state that he has to beg Caesar to kill him. However, Caesar finally overcomes his own short-sighted desires at this moment and relents. However, the Colonel is so set in his convictions that he kills himself rather than become what he would view as “less than human”. As you can see, you could write it off War as a typical “revenge bad” narrative, but I’d argue that it is executed well and at least we get to see exactly why revenge is so destructive and what’s being missed by fixating on it.
Another fascinating aspect of War is dehumanization. The Colonel brands all his soldiers and “donkeys” like cattle, burning their flesh with an “AO” symbol for Alpha and Omega. The soldiers under his leadership are fanatical, excited go to war with the U.S. military to see the Colonel’s will through and are rudderless without his commands. They also dehumanize those infected with the mutated Simian Flu, executing their own comrades who become infected and saying that they’re just beasts. However, Nova shows that those who become infected are still human, capable of compassion, sadness, joy and more than worthy of life – just one that’s different than what the Colonel believes is fundamentally “human”.
The most interesting example of dehumanization in the film though is for characters who aren’t human at all – the “donkeys”. The derisive nickname that these apes have been given is already dehumanizing enough, but the humans treat them as little more than more useful versions of pack mules. The donkeys fear retribution for supporting Koba’s coup, or fear the Colonel so much that they turn to the humans for refuge, aiding in the murder of their fellow apes in order to stay alive. It is reiterated several times throughout the film that this survival is temporary, as the Colonel will surely purge them from his ranks once he has won his war, as there is no place for apes in his vision of the future. In case it wasn’t obvious, this brings some potential racial interpretations of the narrative into play (it is somewhat offensive to suggest that apes would be used to represent blacks, latinos or various other marginalized groups, although the original Apes films did intentionally draw parallels so it’s not without merit). Within this film, donkeys like Winter and Red are viewed as straight-up race traitors, propping up a system which seeks to destroy them (again, pretty prophetic for a film that didn’t intentionally draw parallels to Trumpism). This ties into the theme of short-sightedness that Caesar and the Colonel have, as the donkeys are effectively expediting their own demise for the people that are destroying them. That said, the film avoids the trap of portraying the donkeys as worse than the humans. Obviously the film portrays them as bad for supporting the people killing their own kind and who treat them like garbage, but you get why they do it. Red even gets a whole redemption arc and is sympathetic by the end.
Twentieth Century Fox’s “War for the Planet of the Apes.”
All that said, I don’t believe that War is intended to be a race narrative, although it does have some parallels and borrows some imagery to make its point. Rather, it is intended to be an Exodus allegory. Unlike the Trumpism parallels, this was actually intended by Reeves and Bomback and is even more overt. Caesar is overtly meant to be a Moses figure, from being raised among the humans before leading his own people out of captivity, to intervening when an ape is being whipped, to dying just before the apes reach their literal promised land. There are elements that even feel like they have a biblical grandeur to them, such as the avalanche which buries the human military at the end like it was an act of divine intervention. These biblical parallels seem appropriate for the grandiose conclusion of a trilogy like this, especially since it cements Caesar himself as a prophetic figure whose legacy will carry on through ape society going forward.
War is also buoyed by its characters. Rise and Dawn are often criticized for their boring human leads, but War does away with them almost entirely, only really giving the Colonel and Nova any real prominence. Instead, the apes who have been with Caesar since the beginning are finally given expanded roles (oh my God, you didn’t have to shove a boring human in for us to make an emotional connection!?!). I was giddy when I found out that Rocket and Maurice were going to be part of the film’s main cast, after being disappointed that they were put on the backburner during Dawn (which is particularly egregious for Rocket considering his own son is killed in that film). The ape supporting cast are great. Maurice is such a goddamn sweetheart, always there to lend a wise word and even tells Caesar that he wants to accompany him to make sure that he “makes it back” – both physically and spiritually. Rocket, meanwhile, has grown from the arrogant bully we saw in Rise into Caesar’s most dependable friend, someone who is courageous and defends others selflessly. Of Caesar’s companions, Luca is the most underserved (and hell, was in Dawn but I couldn’t tell you where or when), but at least he gets to display a softer side during a moment of beauty and compassion with Nova before dying moments later. As for the other apes, Bad Ape is certainly the most prominent and adds several moments of much-needed levity to keep things from getting to morose. He also presents some fascinating new developments, being the first intelligent ape to be discovered from outside of Caesar’s group. Apparently the Simian Flu could be transmitted from humans to apes, which caused them to become more intelligent. Inevitably, this means that there are colonies of apes elsewhere in the world just waiting to be discovered. Even beyond the implications of Bad Ape’s existence, the character is a real joy. Steve Zahn is perfect for the role, giving him a strong mischievous personality, but slowly revealing a kind-hearted and truly sad side to the character. Lastly there is Lake, Blue Eyes’ mate who steps up and becomes a leader among the apes when Caesar is on his quest for vengeance. She even saves Caesar’s life with some quick thinking and watches out for Cornelius during the film. I’d say that she is unfortunately undercooked in this film, but there’s enough groundwork laid that I think she’d have a lot of potential in any sequels.
I feel like I’ve said plenty about the Colonel (although I’ll reiterate that Woody Harrelson makes for a great villain, by far the best human antagonist in the reboot trilogy), but I haven’t said much about Nova. For a good chunk of the film, Nova comes across as a burden, a character whose existence only symbolizes how far Caesar has fallen from his ideals. However, as the film goes on she comes to sympathize with her companions and shows that the mutated virus doesn’t make someone less human. When she sneaks into the Colonel’s base and gives Caesar food and water, she takes on an angelic role, restoring a bit of Caesar’s own idealism about peaceful coexistence between humans and apes in the process. She even does an “Apes together strong!” motion, reiterating what I said in Dawn, that the real ideal is “Everyone stronger together!” She’s great, a ray of sunshine in a very dark film.
I also want to note some more elements to this film which are at the top of their game. Andy Serkis puts in the best performance of his career here as Caesar and it’s criminal that he was snubbed during awards season. Reeves’ direction is great once again, ensuring that he will be a sought-after blockbuster director for years to come. Finally, the special effects in this movie are flawless. Dawn had a few shaky moments, but I was actively looking for bad effects in this movie and couldn’t find any. This is likely due to the longer post-production this film was afforded, but the apes look incredible and photo-realistic. Weta really outdid themselves on this film.
All that said, there are a few really annoying issues that I have with War. First of all… goddammit, are we seriously hinging this entire plot on fridging Caesar’s wife and kid? This is especially egregious because Cornelia has been with us since Rise and has done absolutely jack shit (and despite being played by freaking Judy Greer). Similarly, Blue Eyes’ Dawn arc poised him to be a future leader for the apes, so killing him off so early just feels like the character is left underserved. It also makes it really obvious that all of the films in this trilogy were thought up independently, with sequel hooks being used instead of any actual pre-planning. It isn’t a major issue, but fridging is such a lazy, overdone and even offensive trope that it’s disappointing that it was utilized here.
My second issue is that War brings back the overt references to the franchise’s past. It’s not nearly as bad as Rise was, but in Dawn it was a breath of fresh air that they allowed the references to be subtle and organic. On the lighter side of things, we have the Colonel’s “Alpha and Omega” cult of personality, a reference to the Alpha and Omega bomb from the original series films Beneath and Battle. It’s a bit of a strained reference, but at least this one’s a bit creative – instead of just recreating the bomb, this is a more symbolic reference, alluding to the Colonel’s holy war and implying that his movement is destructive enough to doom the entire world. But then on the other side of things… fucking hell, Caesar named his second son Cornelius? Cornelia was already an overt reference to Cornelius, but you had to go and double-down on that exact same reference again? Why? And for that matter why did we have to spend two separate scenes to justify why Maurice would call his human companion “Nova” in reference to Linda Harrison’s character? Does Maurice even know what a nova is, or does he just name people after random car ornaments he is given…? To make matters worse, all these references to Nova and Cornelius have caused confusion amongst some fans who believe that they’re younger versions of their namesakes from the original Planet of the Apes. Well, unless this reboot trilogy is planning on remaking the original film again and moving its timeline up significantly, that is impossible considering that the original film takes place in 3978 (…or possibly 3955). Just… goddammit, give your new characters original names, stop referencing the past for pointless nostalgia!
The final thing which annoys me about War is that the plot begins to strain credulity towards the end. It’s bad enough when Nova just strolls into the military base (which, may I remind you, is preparing for an attack coming any day now) and gives Caesar food and water without anyone noticing. The only way I can justify this is that the Colonel implies that the soldiers may have their children with them and so it wouldn’t be weird to see a random child wandering the base, but we never actually see any so they may not even be at the base at all. On top of that, the avalanche wiping out the entire U.S. military is pretty hard to swallow. Like, sure, it feels like divine intervention, but the fact that the entire military advanced on the base and then managed to get themselves killed to a man in the process is excessively convenient. Even if you could ignore all that, having Caesar dying from a wound he sustained in battle for what must have been a week’s journey across the desert at least, only to have no one notice is ridiculous. Even worse, if they had noticed, someone surely would have been able to treat it and maybe even help him survive, right!? Again, it fits the biblical feel of the story, but it’s overly convenient and feels like it could have been justified better.
Those quibbles aside, I love War. It is definitely my favourite entry in the Apes reboot trilogy and easily cements this as one of the greatest trilogies of all time. For all its darkness, War doesn’t forget to have fun, nor does it revel in nihilism. It ultimately is about hope for a future where people of all kinds can live in harmony together, as Caesar would have wanted.
9/10
So, where does Planet of the Apes go from here? Well, before I get into any official news, I’d just like to give my own ideas for where it could/should go. If there was a direct sequel, I’d like to see Lake’s role expanded, maybe even making her the protagonist. However, I feel like a sequel should be set a hundred or more years in the future, when Caesar’s ideals have already been twisted and humans are being vilified. It’s about time for Apes films to go back to having human characters as the real focal point, especially if the series is aiming to go back to the original. And speaking of which, my ideal, long-term vision for the franchise would be to make an alternate timeline following from the original Planet of the Apes. Back when I was a kid, I imagined that the Apes sequels would deal with Taylor and Nova’s children establishing a new human society and eventually taking back the planet for humanity. I’d like to see this idea play out for real, giving us an alternate timeline where Earth is not destroyed and instead the humans slowly regain their power and fight back against the apes. Given the way that this reboot trilogy has gone, I’d want one sequel where this colony is established and is violently fighting against the apes, only to be driven out in desperation. Then at the end, in a huge twist, have the humans encounter cross the forbidden zone and discover the descendants of Caesar’s ape colony who live side-by-side with humans in peace. After all, Caesar’s living on the west coast, whereas the original Apes is on the east coast, so it would make sense if they are different societies. This would lead to conflict in a sequel since the humans don’t trust the apes and would need time to come to their side, while the apes would struggle to come to the conclusion that they need to come into conflict with other apes due to their divergent ideologies. It would also mean that this trilogy’s message of “Everyone stronger together” would get a chance to actually play out and we could even get a happy ending when this is all said and done.
So those are my pie-in-the-sky ideas for an Apes continuation, but what news have we actually heard so far? Well… remember how I criticized Disney for being a bunch of limp-dick hacks with their franchises earlier? Well… they bought 20th Century Fox and the Apes franchise along with it and have already announced that there are more films on the way which would be set in the same timeline as the reboot trilogy. It has been announced that a new Apes film is in production, directed by Wes Ball of… oh fucking hell, the Maze Runner guy? Well, at least Ball’s film will be following “Caesar’s legacy”, implying that it is indeed going to be set decades after War and will deal with the corruption of Caesar’s ideals. Fingers crossed that he can pull it off and that Disney give this venerable franchise the respect it deserves.
Welcome back to the Planet of the Apes retrospective! In today’s post we’re going to be looking at 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the second entry in the reboot trilogy! Rise provided a fantastic set-up for the Apes franchise to move forward into the future. Would Dawn make good on that promise and deliver a sequel worthy of the series’ venerable legacy? Read on to find out…
Hot damn that is a gorgeous poster. We don’t get nearly enough painted blockbuster posters these days, especially if they aren’t emulating the Drew Struzan style.
Production
One of the many things that Rise did well was provide fertile narrative ground from which sequels could flourish. Director Rupert Wyatt stated his excitement over the directions potential sequels could take, specifically that the relationship between Caesar and Koba would be a natural focus. He stated his desire to have the next film take place around eight years after Rise, giving time for another generation of apes to have been born and raised. Further sequels would then continue the narrative until they could circle back to the original Planet of the Apes. Andy Serkis was secured very early on into production, while Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver returned to work on the screenplay and Wyatt was once again set to direct.
However, by September of 2012 Rupert Wyatt was having doubts about directing the film, feeling that the studio-mandated May 2014 release date wouldn’t give him enough time to create a movie he was happy with. Whatever the case, two weeks later it was announced that Matt Reeves would be taking over the director’s chair. I remember when this was announced being sad that Wyatt was leaving, but being very excited because Reeves had already proven himself as an exciting and competent director with Cloverfield, so I was certain he would be able to deliver a great movie. Reeves brought with him Mark Bomback (one of the writers of Live Free or Die Hard), who did a re-write of Jaffa and Silver’s script.
With Wyatt’s departure, James Franco and Freida Pinto’s characters were written out of the sequel, implied to have died during the apocalyptic simian flu outbreak at the end of Rise. In their place, the main human characters were filled out by Jason Clarke, Keri Russell and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Gary Oldman was also secured as the leader of the human encampment in a semi-antagonistic role. As for the apes, Terry Notary and Karin Konoval reprised their roles as Rocket and Maurice, respectively. Meanwhile, Koba was recast with Tony Kebbell taking over for Christopher Gordon, and Judy Greer took over for Devyn Dalton as Caesar’s mate, Cornelia. Finally, Nick Thurston was cast as Blue Eyes, Caesar and Cornelia’s son.
Filming began in April 2013 in British Columbia, using locations such as Campbell River and Vancouver Island to simulate the San Francisco redwoods. The next month, production moved to New Orleans for various urban environments used in the film. Like Rise, Dawn depended on computer-generated effects to bring its apes to life. In addition, several other animals in the film were created digitally, including elk, a bear and several horses. Also worth noting is that the film’s soundtrack was composed by Michael Giacchino (composer of several amazing scores, including The Incredibles, Up, Rogue One and Jurassic World) and features several terrible and awesome ape puns in the track titles. In spite of Wyatt’s worries about the film’s scheduling, Dawn‘s release date was changed a few times, eventually settling on July 11, 2014. The film was a huge success, grossing $208.5 million domestically and over $708 million worldwide, making it by far the most successful Apes movie ever.
Plot Synopsis
Ten years have passed since the events of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The ALZ-113 virus, dubbed the “Simian Flu” has wiped out 99.8% of the global human population. In the meantime, Caesar has established a commune where hundreds of apes live together in harmony. This peace is shattered when one of the apes, Ash, is shot by a human named Carver. Caesar finds Carver’s expedition, led by a man named Malcolm, and orders them to leave. The apes then follow the humans back to their colony in the ruins of San Francisco and warn them not to enter ape territory again or face retribution. However, Malcolm soon returns to ape territory with his expedition team to explain what they want. It turns out that there is a hydroelectric dam within the apes’ territory which Malcolm needs to restart, because the human colony is running dangerously low on fuel. Caesar agrees to let them work, on the condition that the humans’ guns be taken away, reasoning that they are desperate enough that they will fight the apes for access to the dam. Koba, one of Caesar’s trusted lieutenants, is infuriated at this concession and seeks to find evidence of human treachery so that Caesar will go to war. Caesar’s son, Blue Eyes, does not trust the humans either and openly disapproves of his father’s concessions.
The humans and apes begin to grow an uneasy respect for one another, sharing knowledge and helping one another. However, this respect is nearly shattered when it is revealed that Carver has smuggled a gun along with him and threatens Caesar’s sons with it. Malcolm barely manages to be allowed to continue working, having to throw Carver out of the group and have his wife treat Caesar’s wife’s illness in order to stay. However, Koba discovers that the humans in San Francisco have a stockpile of weapons and are preparing for war if Malcolm fails to get the power running soon. When he discovers that Caesar has allowed the humans to stay after they threatened his sons, Koba confronts Caesar and the pair fight. Caesar overcomes his lieutenant, but shows him mercy despite knowing that he has lost Koba’s trust.
Planning treachery, Koba sneaks back into the weapons stockpile, steals a gun, kills two guards and then kills Carver. While he’s doing this, the humans finally repair the dam and get the power running. They celebrate the accomplishment with Caesar and the other apes, but the moment is broken when Koba shoots Caesar and his body tumbles off a ledge into the river. Koba starts a fire and frames Carver for the shooting, rallying the apes to attack the human colony. Malcolm and his family flee and hide from the apes as Koba’s army attack the weapons stockpile. The humans are warned of the attack and a battle ensues, with several apes and humans being killed. However, the apes breach the gates and begin rounding up every human they can find. Blue Eyes and Ash object to Koba’s brutal treatment of the humans, but Koba kills Ash and says that he leads the apes now.
Meanwhile, Malcolm and his family find Caesar alive and head into the city to find shelter. Caesar leads them back to his old home and they take shelter here while Malcolm heads back to the colony to get medicine. He encounters a disillusioned Blue Eyes, who he tells that Caesar is still alive. Realizing that Koba is to blame for the shooting, Blue Eyes begins to lead a rebellion against the apes’ new leader, freeing the humans and apes still loyal to Caesar. Despite his wounds, Caesar goes to confront Koba at the half-built tower where the human colony is. Meanwhile, Malcolm encounters a group of human survivors beneath the tower who reveal that they have established radio contact with soldiers to the north who are on their way to help. They also reveal that they have set C4 around the base of the tower. Malcolm holds them at gunpoint, telling them that Caesar is battling Koba and that he can bring peace again. The survivors don’t listen and instead set off the C4, killing themselves and causing the tower to begin to hobble. Caesar and Koba do battle again, but when the tower begins to collapse Caesar focuses on rescuing wounded apes while Koba pushes them aside to get to Caesar. However, Caesar tackles his former lieutenant and Koba nearly falls off a ledge. He asks Caesar for mercy, but Caesar pushes him off the tower, sending him falling to his death. In the aftermath, Caesar regains control of the apes, but Malcolm warns him that soldiers are on their way to retaliate against them. The pair mourn that their bid for peace has failed and Malcolm escapes with his family while Caesar regretfully prepares his people for war.
Review
Rise was a great way to reboot the Apes franchise, but Dawn takes the ideas from that film and pushes them to a whole new level. It’s been a few years since I last saw this movie and revisiting it in 2020 was a refreshing experience. First of all, seeing the collapse of humanity to the Simian Flu hit extra hard in the middle of the second wave of COVID-19 and made it easier to empathize with the humans. Obviously there was no way they could have known this while making the movie (there are references to H1N1 and bird flu, the closest analogues we had experienced up to that point), but it makes for a far more interesting and relevant reason for society to collapse compared to the implication that nuclear war did it in the original films. Given the rise of populist fascist movements in the past four years, it was also extra-tragic seeing the apes go from a peaceful commune trying to make a better future for humans and apes, to falling under the sway of a vengeful dictator who spoils any chance for peace. The Apes franchise is inherently tragic so this is to be expected, but it makes for an affecting narrative seeing how things could have gone in a far more positive direction, especially since we get about an hour of build-up before all hell breaks loose.
That’s really the main strength of Dawn – it’s writing is superb. On Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was was taking lots of notes, making fun of dumb things and commenting on narrative developments. Dawn‘s notes were comparatively sparse, I made notes about the things I liked and things which caught my attention, but for the most part I just sat back and enjoyed the story. The relationship between Caesar and Koba which Rise hinted at is the beating heart of the film. Best of all, Koba is a legitimate friend and supporter of Caesar at the outset and you can understand the choices and motivations which cause him to turn on his old friend. He views Caesar as a figure of strength who will always put apes first, so when that perception gets questioned he turns on Caesar and lets his hatred drive him mad. His warnings to Caesar are legitimate too – the humans are a threat and it’s almost inevitable that they will come into conflict with the apes eventually. However, Caesar and Malcolm’s idealism and desire for peace manages to win out and makes possible a future where humans and apes are able to live together, not only in peace, but strengthening one another in the process. It shows that the mantra “Apes together strong!” is a limited philosophy, the best outcome is “Everyone stronger together!” It’s a very positive message, especially in 2020, and can be applied to politics, race, sexuality and a variety of other causes. It also shows that intolerance is a cancer which keeps us back from a better future for us all.
The other main relationship in the film is between Caesar and Malcolm. While Malcolm is a bit of a generic, idealistic character whose only personality trait is that he always does the right thing, he ultimately works because of the conflict he inspires within Caesar. Caesar makes shows of strength on several occasions which he undermines almost immediately every time due to Malcolm’s idealism and desperation for a better future. It’s obvious that Caesar is causing his leadership to be called into question from these choices, but Malcolm’s hope is so infectious that he can’t help but give into it. Later on in the film it is implied that this desire to help Malcolm is because Caesar sees the same sort of drive in him that he saw in his father figure, Will Rodman.
I also want to point out the understated, but compelling arc that Blue Eyes goes on throughout Dawn. Early on he finds himself struggling to match up to his father, but having never met humans before, he doesn’t understand why Caesar shows them mercy after so many incidents. As a result, he draws away from his father and starts listening to Koba’s incendiary rhetoric and joins him in the attack on the humans. However, in this battle he watches in horror as apes and humans are slaughtered and begins to realize that his father was right all along. By the end of the film he is poised as a character who has gained a lot of wisdom through hardship and has perhaps the most compelling arc of the whole film. This is particularly impressive when you consider that he barely says (or signs) a word in the film, most of this is conveyed through physical acting and emotional cues.
Unfortunately, the human characters aren’t very compelling in this film. Like I said, Malcolm is a good guy and you definitely like him, but he’s not particularly interesting, nor does he have any real conflict to deal with. He’s by far the best human character, but he’s nowhere near as compelling as Will Rodman or his father from the previous film. His family, played by the talented Keri Russell and Kodi Smit-McPhee, are wasted on nobody characters who get very little to do and are effectively written out of the movie in the third act. Gary Oldman’s Dreyfus is similarly wasted on a character who is so unimportant that I didn’t even bother to include him in my plot synopsis. Worst of all though is Carver, who is a complete moron and a writing crutch whenever they want to wring out some conflict. Unlike Rise, at least he’s the only one-dimensional asshole we get in the film, but I will say that they do a good job of justifying why he has to stay in the mix (he’s the only survivor who used to work at the dam and knows how it works). In addition, the film stalls a bit in the third act when Caesar is injured and the plot effectively spins its wheels with Malcolm until Caesar is well enough to fight Koba.
While I’m sad that Ruper Wyatt couldn’t return to follow-up Rise, I’m more than happy with Matt Reeves’ direction in Dawn. In fact, his direction is much more interesting and dynamic than Wyatt’s was. I’m really impressed that Reeves managed to get 20th Century Fox to allow the apes to continue communicating using signing, saving speech for the big emotional moments. This lack of speech also means that Reeves has to use visual language very well in order to get across the characters’ thoughts and emotions. Also, thank God Reeves and Bomback refrain from including any overt references to the original Apes films in Dawn. Sure, Dawn is a very loose remake of Conquest and War and shares some elements with them, but none of it feels forced or unsubtle. I still cringe at the in-your-face references in Rise, so seeing the restraint here was much appreciated.
As one might expect, the CGI apes in this film are once again fantastic. The apes look flawless for most of the film; there are a handful of shots that look a bit uncanny, but it’s not enough to put a blemish on this film’s effects. Unfortunately, the film’s bad special effects are frontloaded during the opening action sequence, when the apes hunt a group of deer and are ambushed by a bear. The deer and bear are all CGI creations and they all look subpar (like, I remember seeing this in theaters and thinking they looked bad at the time). It sets a bad impression but thankfully the effects from there are great.
I loved Rise, but I think that Dawn is even better. It takes the foundation set by its predecessor and capitalizes on it to the fullest, escalating the stakes and exploring the limits of its characters in the process. Blockbuster films rarely even bother to attempt this level of quality, especially when big budget films are often dumbed down as much as possible for international appeal. It stumbles slightly in its third act, but it is yet another fantastic entry in this venerable franchise.
…yes, you read that correctly. It’s been more than seven years now since I did my retrospective of the live-action Resident Evil film franchise. However, at that time the final film in the franchise, the aptly-named Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, had not come out yet and so it wasn’t included in the retrospective. I’ve mulled over the idea of doing a “Retrospectives Round-up” for a long time, covering the newest films in franchises that I’ve covered in the past and as we close in on our 300th blog post on IC2S we’re finally getting around to doing it. We’re going to start with Resident Evil today and then over the course of the week we’ll catch up on the new entries in the other retrospective series. Got it? Alright, let’s dive in and see if the Resident Evil franchise could go out on a high note…
This is… actually a pretty cool poster. Colour me surprised, good job Resident Evil marketing team.
Production
After the financial success of Resident Evil: Retribution, it was inevitable that the Resident Evil franchise would continue to shamble on. Early on the producers bandied the idea that there could be two more films in the franchise before it would be rebooted, but by December of 2012 Paul WS Anderson confirmed that the sixth film would be the final one in this continuity. Anderson signed on to direct, committing to the project after he was done work on his historical disaster-epic, Pompeii… and, well, we know how that turned out. Production was continually delayed on this film. Even when it looked like filming was about to begin in August 2014, they had to delay again for another year when it was announced that Milla Jovovich was pregnant with her second daughter.
For the cast, obviously Milla Jovovich returned once again to give Alice her last hurrah. For the other returning cast, Ali Larter reprised her role as Claire Redfield once more, while Shawn Roberts returned as Albert Wesker. Iain Glen was also announced to be returning as Dr. Isaacs, despite being killed off in Extinction. Disappointingly, these are the only characters who make their return. Despite being the grand finale, major characters like Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong and even freaking Becky (the surrogate daughter Alice was shoe-horned into adopting in the previous film) don’t return and are killed unceremoniously off-screen. I’d say it’s a middle-finger to the fans, but then again it would almost be weird if Resident Evil started caring about narrative continuity at this point. In their place, several new characters were introduced, played by Ruby Rose, Eoin Macken, William Levy, Fraser James, Rola and Lee Joon-gi.
Production was finally able to get underway in earnest in July 2015, with filming beginning in South Africa sometime in August or September. Unlike the previous two films, The Final Chapter was shot in 2D and then converted to 3D in post-production. Filming lasted just over three months and was wracked with disaster. Four crew members were injured during filming, the first being Jovovich’s stunt double, Olivia Jackson, who collided with a camera crane that failed to move during a motorcycle stunt. The accident crushed her face and caused half of it to be torn off, severed an artery in her neck, paralyzed her arm, broke several bones and tore five nerves out of her spinal cord (among many other injuries)! It was so bad that they had to put her into a medically-induced coma for two weeks and amputate her paralyzed arm. Then, near the end of filming, crewmember Ricardo Cornelius was freaking crushed to death by a Hummer, holy shit! Anderson, what the fuck is going on on your set!? Even worse, when Jackson sued the production in 2019 it came out that the producers’ insurance for stunt performers was wholly inadequate, not even providing coverage for medical care! Suffice to say, Jackson accused the producers of “elevating financial considerations over safety” and won the lawsuit. Apparently this isn’t new for the Resident Evil franchise, which has seen the hospitalizations of at least fifteen crew members over the years, a shocking number considering that most major franchises are able to get by with zero injuries, let alone fatalities.
If finances were all the producers cared about though, then The Final Chapter did not disappoint. While it grossed only $26.8 million domestically (significantly less than any previous Resident Evil film), its international haul was much higher, resulting in a worldwide total of $312.2 million, making it the highest-grossing film in the franchise. Of this total, more than half ($160 million) came from the Chinese box office. Also worth noting is that the film’s budget was only $40 million – adjusting for inflation, this is by far the lowest budget for any live-action Resident Evil film.
Plot Synopsis
Like most of these films, The Final Chapter opens with a voice-over exposition dump by Alice, who reveals that the founder of Umbrella had a daughter named Alicia who was dying of progeria, a disease which caused her to age rapidly. He developed the T-virus to try to save her, but it is soon discovered that it has the unexpected side-effect of creating zombies. When the founder tried to shut down production of the virus, he was stopped by Dr. Isaacs, who had Albert Wesker assassinate the founder and performed a hostile takeover of the company.
Cutting back to the present, we find Alice in the ruins of Washington D.C. The heroes were betrayed by Albert Wesker at the end of Retribution (who saw that coming) and everyone except for Alice was killed. She encounters the Red Queen, who tells Alice that she wants to stop Umbrella but her programming prevents her from doing so directly. Therefore, she needs Alice to act on her behalf, as she estimates that there are only 48 hours left until the last pockets of human resistance are wiped out by the zombie hordes. She tells Alice that the only way to do so is to travel back to the Umbrella Hive in the ruins of Racoon City, where an airborne anti-virus has been developed.
Alice fights her way across the country, killing monsters and Umbrella soldiers on the way, until she is captured by Dr. Isaacs and his convoy of Umbrella tanks which are leading the zombies back to Raccoon City. Alice escapes on an Umbrella motorcycle and then makes it back to Racoon City first, where she encounters Claire Redfield and a band of survivors, including Claire’s new boyfriend, Doc. The group defend against the zombie onslaught, burning the zombie hordes and killing most of the Umbrella soldiers (although a wounded Isaacs manages to escape). The group then decide to break into the Hive to save humanity, dealing with more zombies and defenses as they go.
When they finally make it into the Hive, the Red Queen reveals that Isaacs has been planning on using the T-virus to cleanse humanity and create a new world on Umbrella’s own terms. To that end, the airborne anti-virus will be released once the rest of the human resistance is wiped out and the rich and powerful being kept in cryogenic storage in the Hive will be revived to inherit the Earth. She also warns Alice that Umbrella has an agent among the ranks of her companions.
After losing several team members to traps, Alice sets bombs throughout the facility and confronts the real Dr. Isaacs. It is revealed that the other two Isaacs we have encountered so far (as well as basically every other character who has been miraculously resurrected to this point) were actually clones who thought they were the real thing. It is also revealed that Doc is the traitor as Claire and Alice are captured by Wesker. Isaacs then revives Alicia and reveals that Alice is actually her clone (shocker). Before Isaacs can eliminate them, Alicia fires Wesker, which allows the Red Queen to attack and fatally wound him. Claire executes Doc and Alice chases after Isaacs, stealing the anti-virus from him and seemingly killing him by detonating a grenade in his pocket.
Alice escapes from the Hive and tries to release the anti-virus as the clock ticks down, but Isaacs appears out of nowhere and stops her. However, then the clone Isaacs Alice had fought earlier arrives and, believing himself to be the real Isaacs, kills him before being killed by the zombie hoards. In the confusion, Alice unleashes the anti-virus, which immediately spreads out in a cloud and kills all of the zombies. The bombs in the Hive detonate and kill Wesker, Alicia and the rest of Umbrella. Claire wakes Alice sometime later, who is thanked by the Red Queen by uploading Alicia’s childhood memories into Alice’s brain. She then rides out into the wilds, searching for any remaining pockets of survivors or T-virus holdouts.
Review
I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting from The Final Chapter. It’s by far the highest-reviewed entry in the franchise, up there with the original (which is still, somehow, considered one of the best video game movies of all-time despite being crap). I guess I was hoping that it would be a fun but dumb experience, akin to Extinction or Afterlife, moreso than a mind-numbing ordeal like Retribution. Unfortunately, The Final Chapter is much closer to the mold of Retribution than anything else, providing a particularly loud, dumb and unsatisfying conclusion to the franchise.
The first big issue is that The Final Chapter is what it says – it’s the big finale and therefore it needs to feel suitably climactic. Unfortunately, its obvious that the plots of every single Resident Evil movie were made up on the fly, cockteasing us with amazing cliffhangers at the end of each movie, only to completely retcon everything by the time the next one rolls around. The Final Chapter is pretty bad for this. Oh wow, Retribution ends with a huge siege at the White House with a bunch of iconic Resident Evil characters, good and evil, in the mix? Well I hope you didn’t want to see how that goes, because everyone dies off-screen except for Alice (yes, even Becky, whose shoehorned surrogate daughter storyline was the entire point of Retribution, she gets dropped without a single reference to her). With the slate wiped clean again, Anderson sets about making up entirely new plot developments to bring this whole series to a close. Wow, Game of Thrones really took off, let’s make Dr. Isaacs secretly the main villain all along, even though he died! Oh, and let’s reveal this during a big exposition dump at the start of the film, perfect! Can’t forget to make it so that Alice was actually a clone of the Umbrella founders’ daughter… because reasons! Oh and we’ll bring back Claire Redfield as well, but we can’t let her actually do anything, because then Alice won’t be as special!
The Final Chapter also has the unenviable task of trying to plug holes that the previous’ films created (and even this film in some cases). Foremost amongst this is why the hell Umbrella are so stupid that they managed to wipe out their entire consumer base and yet are still operating all this time. The Final Chapter reveals that this was actually always intended, Umbrella has been trying to wipe out humanity so that their chosen few can repopulate the world and have all the resources to themselves. It’s idiotic, but it almost works… until you remember that the first film is all about Umbrella soldiers trying to contain the outbreak and subsequent sequels have Umbrella still trying to create bio-weapons for use in war (not to mention injecting themselves with the T-virus they’re going to wipe out soon), so it’s obvious that they’re just pulling this out of their ass at the last minute. The Final Chapter also reveals that everyone who has died and been resurrected at this point in the story? Secret clones! Considering what has been established in the franchise to this point, it kind of makes sense, but it just feels so much dumber. Around the mid-point of the film Alice tells Claire that Isaacs is alive, to which Claire says “I thought you killed him?” Alice just replies “I thought so too” and the scene moves on. It made me laugh, but that really should have been as far as they went with it, it’s the only explanation that is needed. Revealing that there are clones means that they actually put a bit of thought into this, but it just begs the question of why they would have a bunch of clones running around in the first place. Just go the route of The Fast & The Furious – with dumb fun you don’t have to dwell on the hows and whys.
Iain Glen stars as Dr. Alexander Isaacs in Screen Gems’ RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER.
Like most Resident Evil movies, the characters are also a big Achilles heel for this film. Alice is… Alice. Whatever you thought about her before, you’ll still feel it after this is over. I don’t care about her character at all, and it’s infuriating how everyone else gets kneecapped to make her seem cool, but six movies in it’s undeniable that Milla Jovovich has mastered the art of playing a badass woman, so it’s nice to see her get to ride into the sunset with her signature character. And as much as I love Ali Larter’s Claire Redfield, she gets nothing to work with here, to the point where she could have easily been written out entirely. Iain Glen’s Dr. Isaacs is also completely different in this film, to the point where I’m convinced they only brought him back because of his newfound popularity in Game of Thrones. He is now suddenly a religious fanatic, a trait which this film clubs us over the head every chance they get. He’s an okay villain I guess, but considering that he was a low-key, one-and-done villain in Extinction, he feels far less impactful than if, say, they had made the more over-the-top and slimy Albert Wesker the villain for this finale. As for the rest of the survivors… meh? They’re a bunch of personality-less nobodies. Hell, I was expecting Ruby Rose to get more of a role so when she gets minced early on in the Hive that was one of the few real surprises in the film, but that wasn’t because I had any sort of attachment to her character.
Being a Resident Evil retrospective, I feel duty-bound to point out some of the most ridiculous parts of this movie’s plot that I haven’t gone over already. First of all, the film’s literal ticking clock is ridiculous. The Red Queen tells Alice that she estimates that the last pockets of humanity will be wiped out in 48 hours by the zombies unless the T-virus can be stopped. So Alice releases the anti-virus but it’s at the last second… sooooo, umm, did the Red Queen get it wrong and everyone had died early? Even if she didn’t, that anti-virus is going to take ages to actually reach any of the disparate bastions of humanity, so odds are that it did jack-shit to save anyone outside of Raccoon City. Oh and what few humans we know for sure were alive died infiltrating the Hive and/or got blown up with the Umbrella executives. Good job, Alice! There’s also a whole action sequence which revolves around Umbrella having GI Joe tanks – Alice punches open an easily-reached emergency hatch on the exterior of the tank, which deploys a motorcycle she uses to outrun the Umbrella forces. Then there’s the scene where Ruby Rose gets sucked into a giant fan blade. This is hilarious because we literally just saw that the fan blades have no suction to them, but Wesker reverses their direction and suddenly they’re sucking harder than Superhead? The funniest sequence though is when Alicia and Dr. Isaacs start debating about who owns Umbrella… like, in this case I get that it’s to establish the twist that Alicia can fire Wesker (which begs its own questions about labour laws, but whatever), but it’s the freaking apocalypse, nearly every human has been wiped out, money doesn’t matter anymore, who cares who owns the damn company!? Seriously, it’s another moment which highlights the stupidity of Umbrella more than anything. And lastly, the movie makes a big deal out of including yet another laser hall sequence. This might have been a cool callback to the original film, especially since this takes place in the same location… if we hadn’t had laser hall call-backs in all but one of the subsequent sequels. Here I just sighed and said “Oh my fucking God, another one?”
Okay fine, the story sucks and I don’t care about the characters. That’s to be expected with a Resident Evil film, I’m just here for the action. Unfortunately, that brings me to the next issue with The Final Chapter, for a film which is almost non-stop action sequences, the action is really underwhelming. This is because the way the action is shot and edited is the worst we’ve seen in the franchise since Apocalypse. As much as I hated it, at least Retribution tried to replicate the gorgeous slow-motion action scenes from Afterlife. The Final Chapter instead feels like it’s trying to emulate freakin’ A Good Day to Die Hard of all things, with constant, rapid-fire editing which makes every action sequence incomprehensible, disorienting, annoying garbage. Seriously, I was watching for this and the average shot length in this film can’t be more than a second at most – the action sequences barely hold for half a second and even dialogue scenes cut constantly. It’s supposed to be exciting and fast-paced, but it’s just exhausting. The action is also let down by the fact that the film does nothing to establish geography and therefore you can’t build up any sort of tension (think Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones is fighting his way up the convoy – we know where everyone in the convoy is and where the objectives are, so we can build up tension as Indy fights his way through to the Ark). The Cerberus chase is a good example of this – the heroes try to escape into the Hive while being pursued by zombie dogs. This could have been exciting if we knew how far away from the entrance they were, or what their escape corridor looked like, but instead were get a solid minute of incoherent running and shooting as people we don’t give a shit about die unceremoniously.
The only time that the action feels fine in this movie is during the big siege in the second act (yes, The Final Chapter features yet another skyscraper being overrun by zombies). The Final Chapter fires on all cylinders here, managing to get around several of its other missteps and it’s obvious that a hefty chunk of the budget went towards this one action sequence. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but Anderson does a good job of finding ways to add new dangers to the siege which need to be dealt with so that it’s not just a bunch of mindless bam bam pew pews. It probably would have meant more if we gave a shit about any of the survivors, but it’s cool seeing thousands of zombies get immolated at least.
What else can I say? The Final Chapter is yet another dose of Resident Evil, but it is loooong past the series’ stupid-fun days. Like Retribution before it, The Final Chapter is just loud and dull in addition to being stupid. I kept telling myself the whole time “Well… it’s better than Retribution at least… maybe?”, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am that The Final Chapter really is the worst Resident Evil movie. It takes everything that makes these movies suck and dials it up, while simultaneously knee-capping the action sequences so that you can’t find anything to enjoy. The fact that someone died and another person was maimed to bring this movie to life just makes it even more sickening to me. Resident Evil is finally dead and thank God for that.
3/10
So… where does the series go from here? Well, a more faithful reboot of the series is already well underway and it was recently announced that the cast include such great young actors as Kaya Scodelario and Robbie Amell, which gives me a lot of hope for this attempt. Hopefully they take a cue from the recent Resident Evil video games and make this film less action more horror. I may cover this film sometime in the future and add it to the retrospective, but we will have to see. Right now I’m just burnt out on this franchise and the prospect of even more zombies is depressing, even if I am cautiously optimistic about this reboot.
Welcome back to a very special bonus entry in the Hannibal Lecter retrospective! In today’s post we’re going to be looking at the three seasons of the the TV series Hannibal! I set a precedent way back with The Planet of the Apes franchise that TV series weren’t on the table when I do retrospectives since they add a ton of extra work hours on top of having to watch, research and review however many movies are in that franchise already and, like I’ve said, I don’t get paid for this so I don’t really feel the need to go to that extra effort. However, binging Hannibal on Netflix was the catalyst that led to me doing this retrospective series in the first place, so it felt appropriate to cover it this time.
Also, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the TV series simply as Hannibal in this article. For the novel or the Ridley Scott film of the same name that we’ve already covered in this retrospective series, I will refer to those as “the novel Hannibal” and Hannibal (2001) respectively as needed.
Here, enjoy some classy promotional art for all three seasons!
PRODUCTION
After Hannibal Rising‘s poor showing at the box office, it was obvious that interest in the character had waned and the franchise went into dormancy. On November 10, 2010, long-time rights-holder of the Hannibal Lecter character Dino de Laurentiis died and the rights passed to his estate and wife, Martha. Meanwhile, Universal had a stake in the character as well, while MGM still retained the rights to the characters in The Silence of the Lambs (specifically Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill). With de Laurentiis’ death, it seems like the franchise began to make some new moves. Katie O’Connell began developing a Hannibal Lecter TV series at NBC (a television subsidiary of the same corporation that owns Universal) in 2011. Bryan Fuller, who was coming off of creating the critically acclaimed series Pushing Daisies was asked to helm the show and produce a pilot script. However, the script was so good that the show was financed and put into full production of a 13-episode season without requiring a pilot episode. Fuller based the series around the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, while he planned to spend the first two or three seasons on the backstory prior to the novels, before moving into the ground covered by the novels and then ending after one more original season.
Perhaps sensing the excitement growing for Fuller’s take on Hannibal Lecter, only a couple months after Hannibal went into production, Lifetime announced that they were going to produce their own series revolving around Clarice Starling (MGM was producing this series). However, the show never entered full production and was shelved. Fuller had hoped to secure the rights to The Silence of the Lambs characters if they ever reached that point in the show, so it’s probably for the best that it didn’t move forward.
Hugh Dancy was the first actor cast, playing Will Graham. Mads Mikkelsen (probably best known at the time as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale) was cast next as Hannibal Lecter. Rounding out the main cast was Laurence Fishburne as Jack Crawford. Fishburne was just coming off of a tenure on CSI, where he had replaced Manhunter-lead William Petersen’s character. Several other supporting characters were cast thereafter, including Caroline Dhavernas as Alana Bloom, Hettienne Park as Beverly Katz, Lara Jean Chorostecki as Freddie Lounds, Kacey Rohl as Abigail Hobbs, Raúl Esparza as Frederick Chilton and Gillian Anderson as Bedelia Du Maurier, Hannibal’s therapist. Anderson, you may remember, was one of the actresses on the shortlist to play the recast Clarice Starling in Hannibal (2001), so it was exciting to finally see her get a role in this franchise.
The first season was critically acclaimed and was nominated for several awards, winning (among others) Best Network Television Series and Best Actor on Television at the Saturn Awards in 2014. However, it didn’t do very well in its viewer ratings, likely due to the fact that NBC kept putting it in terrible time slots that kept it from growing an audience. After some apprehension, especially given the show’s considerable budget, NBC reviewed the series for another 13-episode season. For the second season, the supporting cast was expanded by the likes of Cynthia Nixon (of Sex and the City fame) as Kade Prurnell, Katharine Isabelle (the lovely Canadian scream queen of Ginger Snaps fame) as Margot Verger and Michael Pitt as Mason Verger. In addition, Fuller tried to secure freaking David Bowie to play Hannibal’s uncle Robert, but Bowie was unavailable and so the part was scrapped from the story. Unfortunately, similar viewer ratings-issues plagued the second season of Hannibal – the poor ratings and gore meant that they wouldn’t give it a prime time slot, but the time slot that they put it into guaranteed that it wouldn’t foster a wide enough audience. Furthermore, the fact that it was a network TV show ran counter to the series’ insanely violent content and some even speculated that the show would fare better on a cable network where such extreme content was expected. That said, the show’s critical reception was even greater than it had been previously and the show was nominated for even more awards, once again winning Best Network Television Series and Best Actor on Television at the Saturn Awards in 2015, as well as winning Best Supporting Actor on Television this time. This might be why NBC once again renewed the series for a third season.
For the third season of the show, Bryan Fuller dived right into adapting and remixing the books for television. The first half of the season adapts the novel Hannibal, while also mixing in elements from Hannibal Rising. The second half then adapts the events of Red Dragon. Michael Pitt suddenly decided to leave the cast and was replaced by Joe Anderson. Several new supporting cast members were added, including Fortunato Cerlino as Rinaldo Pazzi, Tao Okamoto as Chiyoh (a handmaid of Lady Murasaki), Richard Armatage (Thorin Oakenshield himself!) as Francis Dolarhyde, Rutina Wesley as Reba McClane and Nina Arianda as Molly Graham. However, the ratings still didn’t pick up and even before season three had finished airing, NBC announced that they were cancelling the series. Despite this sad news, the third season was just as acclaimed as ever, being nominated for (and winning) several more awards as fans mourned its cancellation. Since then, there were talks that Amazon or Netflix may pick up the series for renewal, but nothing has materialized…
PLOT SYNOPSIS
In the first season of the show, Will Graham is teaching at the FBI when Jack Crawford convinces him to come back into the field to help lend his talents to the hunt for the serial killer known as the Minnesota Shrike. We discover that Graham has a talent for empathy, being able to look at a crime scene and intuit the killer’s motivations and design. This takes a toll on him mentally though and Crawford asks Hannibal Lecter to monitor Will to ensure that he doesn’t harm himself. During the hunt for the Shrike, Lecter deduces the identity of the killer, Garrett Jacob Hobbs, and warns him that the FBI are coming. When they arrive, Graham is forced to kill Hobbs when he tries to cut his daughter Abigail’s throat. Graham and Lecter begin to care for Abigail while continuing to solve crimes for the FBI. During the course of the season, a serial killer known as the Chesapeake Ripper begins killing again and the hunt for this killer gets underway. At one point, it is believed that a former surgeon and psychiatric patient named Abel Gideon is the Chesapeake Ripper, but it is discovered that this is a delusion implanted by Frederick Chilton in an attempt to gain notoriety. In retribution, Gideon escapes, goes on a murder spree and mutilates Chilton, removing several of his internal organs before he is apprehended by Graham. During this time, Abigail is induced to murder a man who had been harassing her, which Hannibal helps her to cover-up. Graham’s mental state deteriorates more and more as the season progresses and eventually we come to discover that Hannibal has been accelerating this decline, subjecting him to experimental treatments and lying about his diagnoses. However, Graham begins to realize that there is a greater design at work and that several of the recent murders they’ve been tracking have had a pattern to them. Graham has a hallucination and believes that he has killed Abigail, when in reality Hannibal corners her and whisks her away. Graham is arrested for Abigail’s murder, but escapes. Realizing that Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper and has been manipulating him all this time, Graham tries to kill him but is shot and put into psychiatric care by Jack Crawford.
In the second season, Kade Prurnell is investigating Jack Crawford for misconduct in allowing Will Graham to have a mental breakdown on his watch. Meanwhile, Hannibal begins taking Graham’s place as an FBI profiler in the field, but uses it as an opportunity to commit more murders. Graham’s case goes to trial, but someone begins murdering the bailiff and the judge in a style similar to the murders Will is accused of, in order to try to save Graham from trial. Fellow FBI agent Beverly Katz begins going to Graham for insight into the murders and decides to investigate Hannibal. This ends in her death as Beverly’s evicerated body is found on display afterwards. Seeking revenge, Graham learns that an orderly at the psychiatric hospital is responsible for the death of the bailiff. The orderly believes that Graham is responsible for the crimes he is accused of and considers himself a big fan. Will uses his devotion to try to get him to kill Hannibal, but the attempt is foiled by Jack Crawford. Soon after, Jack Crawford traces clues from the Chesapeake Ripper and finds a trainee of his who had gone missing years before, Miriam Lass, still alive and held captive by the Ripper. With no evidence held against him, Will Graham is released from custody and attempts to find a way to prove his allegations about Hannibal. However, due to hypnotherapy, Miriam Lass believes that Frederick Chilton is the Chesapeake Ripper and, in a fit of panic, shoots him in the face. He survives, but is arrested for the Ripper’s crimes.
Following this, Graham goes back to work at the FBI and decides to become Hannibal’s patient again, although now Hannibal nudges Graham towards committing murder with him. Hannibal sends one of his former patients to kill Will in retribution for Graham’s earlier attempted murder, but Graham kills and mutilates him, saying that they’re even now and showing that he is willing to play Hannibal’s game now. Shortly thereafter, Freddie Lounds is investigating Will Graham when she is discovered and then her flaming body is found afterwards, presumably murdered by Graham. Meanwhile, Hannibal is trying to get one of his other patients, Margot Verger, to kill her abusive brother, Mason. Instead, she sleeps with Will Graham in order to get pregnant and be able to birth an heir to the Verger family fortune. When Hannibal informs Mason of this, he has his sister’s baby aborted and sterilizes her. Will flies into a rage and is tempted to kill Mason, but instead warns him that Hannibal is playing them all in an attempt to get Verger to kill Hannibal. We then discover that Will has been working with Jack Crawford all along, that Freddie Lounds faked her death to provide cover and that they have secured testimony from Hannibal’s therapist, Bedelia Du Maurier – all they need now is to get concrete evidence of Hannibal attempting to commit murder, since thus far he has only been caught using manipulation. Verger kidnaps Hannibal and attempts to feed him to his pigs. Will hopes that this will be his chance to get evidence, but when he frees Hannibal he gets knocked out by Verger’s men and Hannibal escapes with Mason. He drugs Mason and convinces him to cut off his own face and feed it to Will’s dogs before breaking his neck. Sensing the FBI closing in, Hannibal suggests that it’s time for he and Graham to run away together. They plan to murder Jack Crawford and then run, while Will simultaneously plans with Crawford to use the opportunity to arrest Hannibal. The sting moves forward sooner than planned though, as Prurnell becomes aware of the plan and tries to stop it and Graham warns Lecter in advance. Jack confronts Hannibal and is nearly killed when Alana Bloom arrives and draws Hannibal’s attention away. She is shocked to find Abigail Hobbs upstairs, who then pushes Alana out the window onto the concrete below. Will then arrives and is stabbed and nearly gutted by a wounded and betrayed Hannibal, who then cuts Abigail’s throat. The entire main cast lies bleeding out as the episode ends with Hannibal escaping to Europe with Bedelia Du Maurier.
The third season picks up with Hannibal and Bedelia living together in Italy. Hannibal has assumed the identity of a Dr. Fell and is attempting to become a curator at a local museum, murdering his way up to promotion as Bedelia grows increasingly erratic with his brazenness. We soon discover that Will, Jack and Alana all survived their encounter with Hannibal at the end of the last season and are all hunting down Hannibal with a vengeance (Abigail succumbed to her throat slash and bled out). In Will and Jack’s case, both are following clues which lead them to Italy directly, whereas Alana joins forces with Mason Verger and helps him to put out a bounty to capture Lecter. An Italian detective, Rinaldo Pazzi, is on Hannibal’s trail as well. Will travels to Hannibal’s childhood home and meets Chiyo, a handmaiden of Hannibal’s aunt. For years she has been keeping a man prisoner in the basement for Hannibal, who he claims ate his sister Mischa. She refuses to kill him, believing it better to keep him alive. Will frees the man and Chiyo kills him in self-defense. Realizing that he was kept prisoner all along because Hannibal wanted to test if she was capable of killing him, Chiyo agrees to help Will find Hannibal, but soon doubts his intentions and throws him from a train on the way to Italy. Meanwhile, Pazzi contacts Verger and decides to collect the bounty on Hannibal’s head, but he is killed by Hannibal when he attempts to confront him. Jack and Will close in on the rogue Hannibal, apprehending Bedelia, who attempts to convince them that she has had a mental breakdown and no longer knows her true identity. When Will finally finds Hannibal, he tries to kill him but is shot by Chiyo instead. Will and Jack are then tied up by Hannibal, who attempts to cut open Will’s skull with a saw, but is thwarted when Verger’s men find the group and whisk Will and Hannibal away to his estate. Verger reveals that he plans to eat Hannibal and transplant Will’s face onto his in retribution for his own mutilation. However, Mason’s plan begins to unravel as Alana and Margot begin to make their own plans with Will and Hannibal, arranging for Hannibal to escape and take the blame for Verger’s murder. Hannibal then kills all Verger’s men, frees Will, and secures a sample of Mason’s semen for Margot so that Alana can serve as a surrogate mother, thereby allowing Margot to have a “suitable male heir” who can inherit the family fortune. Their plan complete, Margot and Alana are then able to kill the helpless Mason. Meanwhile, Hannibal takes Will back to his home and they agree to part ways. However, when the FBI arrives, they are shocked when Hannibal surrenders to them so that Graham will always know where to find Hannibal if he needs him.
The second half of the season then time skips three years. Jack Crawford once again recruits Will Graham, who has since married, to help him find the serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy. Graham is reluctant to get sucked back in once more but agrees to help. During the investigation, he finds that he needs to speak with Hannibal once more to get further insight into the case. Sometime later, Hannibal is contacted by the Tooth Fairy (Francis Dolarhyde), who is a big fan of Hannibal’s, and who tells him that he is becoming the “great red dragon” with his killing. Dolarhyde strikes up a relationship with blind co-worker Reba McClane, but when the relationship turns physical his hallucinations tell him that she is to be his next victim. In desperation, he eats the original copy of William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun but is nearly captured by Graham who had gone to view the painting as well. When the voices aren’t silenced, Hannibal suggests to Dolarhyde that he kill Will Graham’s family instead. Dolarhyde agrees and breaks into their home, nearly Molly Graham and her son, but they barely manage to escape the killer and get into FBI custody. Jack Crawford and Alana Bloom realize that Hannibal has been corresponding with Dolarhyde and try to get him to get information on the killer the next time he calls Hannibal, but during their next conversation Lecter warns Dolarhyde that they are being eavesdropped on and their conversation ends. With this avenue cut off, Will and Crawford attempt to draw out Dolarhyde by staging an unflattering interview about him with Frederick Chilton. This works, but instead of going after Graham, Dolarhyde captures Chilton and explains his motives to him before biting off his lips and then immolating Chilton. Chilton miraculously survives and accuses Graham of setting him up intentionally. Knowing that the dragon will come for Reba soon, Dolarhyde reveals his alter ego to her and then stages suicide in order to escape. He uses this opportunity to confront Graham and demands that he be able to see Hannibal. The FBI realizes that the body they have isn’t Dolarhyde and once again tries to figure out a way to draw him out. Graham suggests that they stage Hannibal’s escape in order to accomplish this. However, the attempt is thwarted when Dolarhyde attacks their convoy and Hannibal and Graham escape for real. They flee to a cliff-side house where Hannibal had previously held victims captive and are confronted by Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde severely wounds the pair, but they manage to overpower him and stab him to death. Hannibal and Graham embrace and then fall over the cliff-side together.
REVIEW
There are a lot of things to talk about with Hannibal, so we’ll start with the first thing that really struck me about this series: holy shit it is gory! It’s wild just how much Bryan Fuller was able to get away with for a network TV series, because the level of gore is beyond anything in the movies and even gets close to The Walking Dead levels of violence. Like, we’re talking a totem pole made of dead, dismembered bodies, a pair of bodies whose back skin has been cut off and turned into wings, a guy being given a Glasgow smile, a guy having his tongue pulled through his neck, disembowelling… and that’s just the first season! Subsequent seasons have such highlights as Mason Verger cutting his face off and feeding it to Will’s dogs (something so fucked up that even the notoriously twisted Hannibal (2001) shied away from showing it), a guy’s dismembered body being broken to fit onto the skeleton of a cave bear, and a guy having his lips bit off and body immolated. God forbid they show a nipple though! Seriously though, the only reason I think that they managed to get away with any of this is because they rarely show the act itself, just the aftermath, and a judicious amount of creative lightning. Hannibal really likes to revel in its gore so you should be aware of that going in – it’s not for the squeamish.
The next thing that will really strike you about Hannibal is the production quality and cinematography. Nearly every shot in Hannibal is beautiful, easily outstripping all previous Hannibal Lecter films in terms of pure aesthetic appeal. It’s not just for the sake of style though, the abstract and symbolic imagery is often used as a way to show us a characters’ psychoses. The most obvious example of this is Will Graham’s frequent hallucinations of a pitch-black man with antlers, representing his minds-eye view of the killer who is trying to elude him. Similarly, Francis Dolarhyde’s hallucinations are is also literally portrayed, showing him painfully growing a tail or literally becoming the Great Red Dragon of Blake’s painting as his delusion grips him more and more. While some may decry the lack of subtlety, portraying the characters’ minds in such a direct way on screen is not only effective, but it helps make for some compelling and unforgettable imagery as well.
Of course, we wouldn’t get nearly as much of this on-screen psychosis if Will Graham wasn’t our lead character. Luckily, Hugh Dancy’s portrayal of the character is by far the most interesting one we’ve gotten yet. In previous incarnations of the character, it didn’t feel like there was all that much to his empathetic talent – he was apparently able to get into the mind of a killer to solve their crimes, but ultimately it just felt like he was smart and noticed a little clue which led to the breakthrough to solve the case; empathy had very little to do with it. In Hannibal though, Will Graham’s empathy is practically a super power. We get a cool sequence every time he does it where he looks at the clues at the crime scene and then lives out what happens. Through this you actually get a sense that he’s doing something no one else could do, while simultaneously being able to understand why it would take such a hefty mental toll on him to do so. Will looks like he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown for half the series, even before Hannibal starts actively manipulating and accelerating that breakdown. Manhunter and Red Dragon talked big about how being able to think like a killer was treated like some sort of moral equivalence, but I never understood this argument – isn’t acting it out the issue, rather than being able to conceive of it? Hannibal, however, does a better job of showing that Will Graham is on the verge of going off the deep end and then some. No one knows how far Will will go over the line or where his allegiances lie, not even Will himself, so in the second half of season two you seriously believe that he would start indulging in his murderous side with Hannibal.
I’ve seen many people declare that Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal Lecter is the best portrayal of the character and… well, if we ignored Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon then Hopkins might be close, but taking those two moustache-twirling portrayals into account I’m inclined to agree. Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen have described this incarnation of Hannibal as him being a personification of Lucifer, and it’s such a perfect way to describe this character. This version of Hannibal is still the refined, smart, high-class figure we know, but his evil is far more hands-off – he prefers to toy with his victims without them even knowing it, getting into their heads, tempting them, creating chaos when it interests him just to see what will happen. Since most of the characters don’t even realize that Hannibal is a serial killer for half of the series, this just makes him even more sinister and straight-up evil compared to previous incarnations. Hopkins’ Lecter was evil, sure, but they always tried to portray him as a killer with a moral compass. Mikkelsen’s Lecter is just pure evil though, treating everyone around him like playthings and holding their lives in his hands. Perhaps my favourite example is when he presides over Jack Crawford’s wife, Phyllis, as she attempts to commit suicide. After she has gone unconscious, he flips a coin to decide whether to save her life or not. It’s such a cold and emotionless response to such a charged action that it’s truly chilling that he doesn’t care about what he’s doing. Throughout the entire first season, Hannibal breaks Will’s mind, making him believe that he’s gone insane and murdered people, and when Hannibal is found out he only says that he was “curious about what would happen”. Hannibal then holds a lopsided amount of power and influence over Will for the rest of the series, causing Will to have a twisted sort of dependency on Hannibal. It makes for a super toxic relationship, one that is very uncomfortable to watch unfold (which infuriates me that so many people ship them and ignore Hannibal’s wildly abusive behaviour).
Really, most of the characters in Hannibal are portrayed at their best in this franchise, thanks largely due to the writing, the stellar cast and by virtue of being in a TV series which means more time for character growth. Laurence Fishburne is a great Jack Crawford. Fishburne could just coast by on his standard authority figure shtick (a la Mission: Impossible III, CSI, etc), but he imbues Crawford with additional depth and emotion. We actually get to really like and understand the character as we see him grapple with his wife’s imminent death, his guilt over pushing Will Graham to his limits and his sense of doom as he realizes that his close friend Hannibal has been betraying him all this time. I really like Scott Glenn’s portrayal of the character in The Silence of the Lambs, but Fishburne gets a lot more to work with in the show and makes for a much more interesting character. Mason Verger is also a bit more interesting in the show than he is in Hannibal (2001), since the show includes his abusive relationship with his sister, Margot, and expounds on the character’s obsession with eugenics and passing on his seed. He makes for a truly despicable villain, although I found Michael Pitt’s performance in season two far more interesting than Joe Anderson’s in season three. Pitt’s Mason is sinister, eccentric and arrogant, akin to a more expanded-upon version of Gary Oldman’s Mason, whereas Anderson’s Mason comes across more like a full-on angry bad guy the whole time. Perhaps my favourite performance in the entire show though is Raúl Esparza’s Frederick Chilton. Initially he just comes across as he does in the previous films – an arrogant, amoral, greasy asshole who gets what’s coming to him. However, as the show goes on you feel more and more sorry for him, in part due to Raúl Esparza’s fantastic performance. Like, maybe he deserved to get disembowelled for screwing with his patient’s mind, but I felt so sorry for him when Hannibal frames him for murder and then gets him shot in the face (which, we later find out, leaves him disfigured and blinded). As if that wasn’t bad enough, in season three he puts in a hell of a performance when Dolarhyde captures him – the terror that Esparza conveys during this scene makes it perhaps my favourite scene in the entire series. As if that wasn’t enough, he then gets his lips bit off and set on fire, leaving him horribly mutilated – plus it’s implied that Will set him up for this. Goddamn, I kind of just wish that they’d let him die, or at least make him the next season’s villain to let him get some revenge or something. Even smaller roles, like Freddie Lounds, get more depth to them in this show. Whereas previous incarnations just had Lounds as a sleazy, one-note journalist, this incarnation gives her a bit more depth. She’s ultimately concerned about getting the truth out there at all costs, even if it crosses ethical boundaries, which is far more intriguing than “wants money”.
The writing on the show tends to be strong as well, making for really engaging television. While most of the first season starts out as a CSI-style crime-of-the-week format, it really starts to hit its stride when the plot begins to revolve around the twisted relationship between Hannibal and Will Graham. Even these crime-of-the-week style episodes tend to have some great writing and themes that help justify their existence – for example, revelations during an episode revolving around a killer who is afraid of dying of cancer helps Jack Crawford to realize that his wife has cancer as well, while a later episode revolving around a killer who euthanizes victims as a “mercy” ties into Phyllis’ attempted suicide in the face of a drawn-out death. The second season doesn’t just rehash the first season’s formula, rather it turns it on its head and then goes completely in another direction. Season two starts with Will institutionalized and while I expected that it would be more of the same, but with Hannibal taking Will’s role in the FBI, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Season two instead focuses on Will’s (mis)trial before eventually bringing his murderous tutelage and attempt to entrap Hannibal to the forefront, making for some really gripping drama before ending in a Shakespearean-style bloodbath. The finale of season two has to be one of the most intense cliffhangers I’ve ever seen for a show and thank God they got the chance to follow it up or there would have been riots from fans. Season three continues to shake up the status quo, transplanting the series to Italy for several episodes, scattering its cast to the wind and adapting Hannibal and Red Dragon too for good measure. I definitely prefer the slow-building tension of Pazzi’s downfall in Hannibal (2001), but otherwise Hannibal‘s adaptation of the story cuts out a lot of the fat and boils down the story to its core – Hannibal’s on the run in Italy and Mason Verger’s trying to have him killed. It’s also rather interesting that they adapted this story out of continuity with the novel timeline, but that’s fine by me, I don’t understand why Mason Verger would wait decades to get his revenge on Hannibal Lecter anyway.
As for the Red Dragon half of season three… holy crap, it is the best (although not the most faithful) adaptation of the novel we’ve gotten by far. Richard Armitage is incredible as Francis Dolarhyde, effectively demonstrating this character’s overwhelming menace and making him a legitimately scary antagonist. He’s still sympathetic, like Ralph Fiennes’ rendition, but comes across as far more dangerous. His love interest, Rutina Welsey’s Reba McClane, is also really solid. While I don’t think she makes quite as much of an impression as Emily Watson’s adorably horny take on the character, Rutina is still fantastic in the role and is a big reason why we feel as much sympathy for Dolarhyde as we do. Dolarhyde and McClane dominate a good chunk of season three, but of course Will and Hannibal both get their own unique twists on the story, given that this is both an adaptation and a pseudo-sequel at the same time. In Manhunter (especially) and Red Dragon, Will is very much a family man at heart. Here, Will’s marriage is clearly an escape for him, a way to ignore his trauma, murderous temptations and his fascination with Hannibal Lecter. Meanwhile, Hannibal’s role gets beefed up, naturally. However, it is far better integrated into the plot than it was in Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon. Here, one can understand why Dolarhyde would be fanboying over Hannibal and, given all we know on this take of Lecter, we can understand why he would be toying with the killer and trying to drive Will over the edge. This all culminates in a totally original conclusion where Hannibal is used to draw out Dolarhyde, which results in he and Will escaping together and taking down Dolarhyde together. While a part of me wishes that they could have just stuck with the book’s ending, since this is a semi-sequel as well as an adaptation it makes sense that they would have to make the ending a bit more momentous, and in that regard they succeed.
As much as I like basically everything on this show, there are some aspects of the writing that bother me. First of all, maybe it’s due to the nature of being a TV serial, but the plot can get really ridiculous and contrived at times. Like, in the first season alone you’ve got like a dozen serial killers all operating in the vicinity of Baltimore at once? I get that it’s a TV show about cops and serial killers and therefore you need some killers for them to hunt, but the sheer volume of them that happen to be in each others’ circles just becomes silly upon reflection as the show goes on. There’s also the fact that Will straight-up admits to hiring a guy to get Hannibal killed, but then a couple episodes later he’s released from custody because they can’t find any evidence that he was involved in a different set of murders. Like… can’t they just keep him imprisoned for the attempted murder they know he committed? Or how about when Will dismembers and displays a body in public, ostensibly to maintain his cover as a burgeoning killer with Hannibal? You’re telling me that the FBI are okay with this, that they can just ignore that kind of action? Or how about Hannibal sawing Will’s head open, which gets interrupted by Verger’s men and then immediately forgotten and forgiven? As the series goes on, all these little things just add up and make nearly every single character on the show seem terrible at their jobs.
My other issue with the writing is that the female characters are almost entirely shafted by the show. Dr. Alana Bloom is by far the worst victim of this. In season one she is effectively Will’s love interest, guardian angel and moral compass, but doesn’t get a lot to do. In the second season, she then shifts to being Hannibal’s love interest, in part because she’s so distressed about what happened to Will, until she gets pushed out a window and left for dead. In season three she just goes off the rails, joining Mason Verger for revenge against Hannibal before falling in love with Margot Verger with zero set-up, then presiding over the institution that Hannibal is being kept in before just petering out of the story. For one of the headline characters on the show, the writers clearly have no idea what to do with Alana Bloom, just forcing her into where ever the plot can use her at any given time. It’s so bad that I effectively excised her role from my plot synopsis – she’s that inconsequential to the plot that she could be cut entirely. I also felt like Margot Verger wasn’t nearly as compelling as she should have been. She’s introduced as an abuse victim and then very suddenly becomes a love interest for Will, blatantly using him to get herself pregnant. When Mason finds out, she gets subjected to one of the most awful sequences in the show, where Mason has her child aborted and womb removed to prevent her from being able to conceive another. It’s fucking awful and while Margot does ultimately get her revenge, she spends the rest of season two and half of season three just operating as Mason’s lackey while she occasionally plots how to defeat him. She’s got some potentially strong material to work with but I feel like the show just doesn’t pay Margot her due in order to make it land. Beverly Katz also gets shafted in the second season. I really liked her character, easily being the most interesting member of the FBI support team and forming a close friendship with Will. However, she is captured and killed by Hannibal early in the second season… and then is basically forgotten after that. As Will’s complicated relationship with Hannibal deepens throughout the second and third season, it’s like the fact that he murdered her, mutilated her body, and then put it on display is completely forgotten and forgiven. Bedelia Du Maurier also gets screwed by the end of the third season. Her character is electrifying, managing to stay toe-to-toe with Hannibal in the first couple seasons, but by the third she has become increasingly erratic from their time spent together, to the point that she loses her mind and literally serves herself up to Hannibal. It’s an unfortunate fate for a character who had been so cunning and insightful up to that point. And what of Abigail Hobbs? She’s a major player in the first season, becoming Hannibal and Will’s surrogate daughter, but she gets whisked away by Hannibal and disappears for nearly the entirety of the second season, as everyone believes she is dead. Then, when she does show up, she’s lost her mind and is quickly killed by Hannibal in a jealous rage… like, why even bother to bring her back if you’re just going to kill her again for real? It’s such a shitty fate for another legitimately interesting character. These aren’t even all of the examples of treating female characters as afterthoughts in the show, just the most prominent, but they irk me all the same.
Nitpicks aside, Hannibal makes for great television. Everyone is giving it their all and they managed to put out a fantastic series that never really got the success it was due. I’d like to see what Bryan Fuller and company could have done with The Silence of the Lambs and onward, but if the series never gets picked up again, I can say confidently that it ended on a high note.
8/10
AFTERTHOUGHTS
So where does the franchise go from here? Unlike some retrospectives I’ve done, the path seems pretty clear in this case. For one thing, CBS has finally announced that they’re moving forward with Clarice, which is supposed to follow Clarice Starling a year after the events of The Silence of the Lambs play out. Given that MGM only owns the rights to that story and not Hannibal Lecter, I don’t really understand how they’re going to make it enticing for audiences, but Clarice Starling is a compelling enough character that I’m not willing to write it off yet. As for Hannibal, rumours of a fourth season have been persisting since even before the show’s cancellation. In fact, during the writing of this retrospectives series, more news came out that an announcement regarding the fourth season could be imminent. With the sudden surge in popularity that the series has found since coming to Netflix, the audience is finally there and I wouldn’t be surprised if we finally know the future of the series soon. Unfortunately, with Clarice underway, that makes an adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs incredibly unlikely. That’s the small screen covered, but what about the big screen? Bryan Fuller has expressed interest in making a film about this rendition of Hannibal Lecter and I would think it unlikely that we’ll see any other take on the character for quite some time, given how much Mads Mikkelsen’s rendition has captured the popular consciousness. With Thomas Harris having apparently moved on from the character (his most recent novel was 2019’s Cari Mora, a completely original tale divorced from Hannibal Lecter), it’s unlikely that we’ll be getting any more books to be adapted any time soon, meaning that the rights holders might finally have to start getting creative.
This is how I’d rank the series from worst to best:
1) The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – 9/10
2) Hannibal (2013-2015) – 8/10
3) Hannibal (2001) – 6.5/10 (again, I know a lot of people think this movie sucks, but give it another chance and just go with the campiness)
4) Manhunter (1986) – 6/10 (come at me, nerds)
5) Red Dragon (2002) – 6/10
6) Hannibal Rising (2007) – 4.5/10
Thanks for going through another retrospectives series with me. I always enjoy writing these things, even if the time commitment they require makes them difficult to put out more than once or twice a year. I can’t be certain when I will come out with a new blog post, but be sure to follow me on Twitter where I will keep you updated. ‘Til next time, bon appetit!
Welcome back to the Hannibal Lecter retrospective! In today’s entry we’re going to be looking back at 2007’s Hannibal Rising, the Anthony Hopkins-less prequel which goes back to Lecter’s origins. Could the film succeed without the star which had propelled it for the past 15 years? Read on to find out…
I’m “meh” on this poster. The eye makes for a nice callback to the much better The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal posters and the samurai mask is a clever way to play with series iconography, but there isn’t enough here to get me particularly excited. The mere presence of Hannibal Lecter would have to be enough for you to swoon for this to be truly effective.
PRODUCTION
Even prior to the release of Red Dragon, the producers were giving thought on how best to continue their franchise. During interviews to promote Red Dragon, Anthony Hopkins revealed that he had written his own screenplay for a sequel to Hannibal which would have wrapped up the series with Clarice shooting Lecter, but it was never picked up. The future of the franchise was uncertain for many years with the producers going quiet about their plans. Behind the scenes though, Dino de Laurentiis was eager to move forward with a prequel detailing Hannibal’s origins. He met with Thomas Harris and threatened to make a prequel without Harris’ involvement unless Harris would come up with a story in a timely manner. It is almost certain then that the notoriously slow Thomas Harris rushed out his next novel, Hannibal Rising, in record time to retain creative control, while also writing the accompanying screenplay for the movie adaptation. I was able to find shockingly little information about this film’s production history online, even less than Red Dragon, and this seems to be partially by design – the movie was kept a secret until only a few months before release. It seems that this was done in order to use the release of the novel as a springboard to generate hype for the film and prolong the book’s own popularity by extension. Even then, very little details were known about the film ahead of time – various incorrect rumours less than 5 months before the film’s release touted that the title would be Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask (perhaps changed because of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon?), that Anthony Hopkins would narrate the film, and that its final act would detail the time between Lecter’s arrival in America and his capture by Will Graham.
Hannibal Rising would be directed by British director Peter Webber. While not a well-known director, he was coming off of a huge critical success with his debut film Girl With a Pearl Earring and so was an interesting choice. The role of a young Hannibal Lecter would go to French actor Gaspard Ulliel, while the supporting cast would be filled out by Gong Li and such prestigious character actors as Rhys Ifans and Dominic West. After the smaller box office take by Red Dragon, the budget was also scaled back from $78 million to just $50 million.
The first trailer wouldn’t drop until mid-December 2006, just a month after the novel’s release, with the movie itself set to release less than two months later. Universal passed on distribution of the film this time around and instead it was picked up by The Weinstein Company, hoping to score themselves a hit. It wasn’t to be though because critical response to Hannibal Rising was scathing and the film opened to a modest box office take which quickly tapered off, bringing in on $82.2 million at the end of its worldwide gross… but honestly anything that makes Harvey Weinstein unhappy is a win for me.
PLOT SYNOPSIS
The film opens in 1944 with an eight-year-old Hannibal Lecter having to flee his family’s castle with his parents and little sister Mischa to avoid clashes between the Germans and Soviet Union. They retreat to a secluded cabin, but the war makes its way to the cabin and the parents are both killed during a skirmish. Hannibal and Mischa hide in the cabin until a group of five Axis deserters, led by the vicious Vladis Grutas, take shelter in the cabin. Low on food, the men decide to kill and eat Mischa in order to survive.
The film then moves forward eight years, with Hannibal back in Lecter Castle, which has been converted into an orphanage. Hannibal is still traumatized by his sister’s deaths and lashes out violently at everyone around him until he escapes to Paris. Here he finds his newly-windowed aunt, Lady Murasaki. She teaches Hannibal about the culture of the samurai. Hannibal takes one of her family swords and uses it to kill a local butcher who had insulted Lady Murasaki and who was a well-known Nazi collaborator during the war. A French detective named Pascal Popil, who hunts down war criminals, suspects Hannibal of the killing but is unable to pin the crime on him definitively.
Soon after, Hannibal enters medical school, when he finally resolves to hunt down the men who killed his sister. He is unable to recall their names, but when he witnesses a criminal being injected with sodium thiopental he steals some for himself to remember the details of what happened in the cabin. When he does so, he remembers that a bag containing the killers’ dog tags was left behind in the cabin when a bomber destroyed the building, which caused the deserters to flee and allowed Hannibal himself to avoid being eaten. Armed with this knowledge, he returns to Lithuania and finds the dog tags. However, one of the killers sees Lecter enter the country and follows him here, but Hannibal overpowers him and ties him to a tree. He tortures the man to find out where his compatriots are and then kills him when he finds out that one of the men, Kolnas, is in Paris and has been meeting with Grutas there.
Lecter goes with Lady Murasaki to a restaurant owned by Kolnas and slips Kolnas’ dog tag to his daughter as a warning. Kolnas meets with Grutas and the other deserters to warn them about Hannibal. Grutas sends one of the deserters to kill Hannibal, but Lecter is waiting for him and drowns him in his laboratory. Hannibal attacks Grutas in his home shortly thereafter, but his bodyguards break in and save him before Hannibal can get the killing blow, forcing him to escape. In retribution, Grutas kidnaps Lady Murasaki and calls Lecter to draw him out before taking her to his houseboat. Hannibal goes to Kolnas’ restaurant to find Murasaki and finds Kolnas there. He gets Kolnas to tell him where Grutas’ houseboat is before killing Kolnas. Hannibal makes his way aboard and kills everyone to get to Grutas. Before killing him, Grutas reveals that the final deserter is hiding out in Canada and tells Hannibal that he too consumed his sister. This infuriates Hannibal and he carves up Grutas in brutal fashion before escaping the boat and blowing it up to fake his death. He then heads to Canada and kills the last deserter.
REVIEW Hannibal Rising reminds me of Leatherface, in that it’s a prequel that nobody asked for, turns the series’ main psycho into a teen heartthrob, and which puts in way more effort than you would expect from a straight-forward origin story. I imagine that this is because Thomas Harris wrote the plot for this film instead of de Laurentiis handing it off to someone else. You can tell that Harris was legitimately trying to tell a fresh story and tread new ground with this character, rather than just make a bunch of references to things that will define the character in later movies (for contrast, see Solo: A Star Wars Story). In the “Making Of” documentary, Peter Webber himself acknowledges that they were trying to reinvent the franchise and I have to give them some acknowledgement for making an actual effort… unfortunately, Hannibal Rising is a mess that squanders this admirable attempt at ambition.
While the story of Hannibal Rising is a fairly standard revenge plot and it demystifies Lecter as a character, there’s nothing inherently with it that would make for a fundamentally flawed film. Instead, it’s the way that the story is told that cripples this film. One issue is that there are various disparate plot threads which never come together in a satisfying manner. Take the fact that a big deal is made of Hannibal Lecter, Lady Murasaki and Inspector Popil all having lost their families in the war. This feels like it’s ripe for a thematic payoff, but it doesn’t actually matter in the end that all of these people share a common thread, it’s just something they mention from time to time. For that matter, Popil is supposed to be one of the main characters but he could easily be cut from the film and there’d be no difference made. It feels like he was added because there has to be an obligatory inspector character in a Hannibal Lecter movie, but he’s so useless – he immediately knows that Hannibal is a murderer but does nothing about it, provides absolutely no barrier to Hannibal achieving his goals and then shrugs his shoulders and assumes Hannibal’s dead at the end of the movie. Or what about the fact that the movie shows the bad guys burning photos of Hannibal’s family for warmth? Oh no, they’re symbolically tearing away the last connections he has to his family before they take Mischa away from him too! But no, like 15 minutes later we find out that Lady Murasaki has a bunch of photos of his family so it’s another missed opportunity to tell a deeper story. There’s so many little missed opportunities like these and when you think back on the film afterwards it makes the experience feel deflating.
There’s also the first hour of the film, which is overstuffed to the point that it gets rushed through in order to get to the generic revenge plot. The first 20 minutes deal with Hannibal’s childhood and rush through his parents’ death (a Russian tank shows up in the middle of an open clearing and then within seconds a squad of Stukas pass by and kill the parents) before the bad guys show up. Then we get the revelation that Hannibal’s been kept in an orphanage which used to be his parents’ castle and is bullied by everyone there, especially a cruel overseer. That doesn’t really matter though because less than 5 minutes later he’s already escaped the orphanage and makes his way to Paris. Then we get Hannibal training in the traditions of the samurai, which gets boiled down to one training montage before he’s out murdering dudes, heads off to medical school and decides that he wants to kill some Nazis. This break-neck pace means that characters have to be cartoonishly stereotypical. Need Hannibal to kill the butcher and make it feel justified? Quick, make him a two-dimensional racist, misogynist, Vichy asshole who’s just begging to get sliced up! Need to make us feel bad about Hannibal going on a murder spree? Quick, make one of the deserters a father! On a related note, it’s implied that Hannibal is so traumatized by his sister’s death that he won’t speak, but then he kills the butcher and is suddenly chatty as all hell with everyone. I believe that we’re supposed to infer that confronting his trauma is therapeutic for him, but him going from silent to chatty happens so suddenly and unceremoniously in the film that I can’t tell if we’re just missing story beats or if having him be silent that long was a mistake. Perhaps the best analogy to describe the first half of this movie is that it feels like one of those crappy musician biopics where they just string together a bunch of important sequences from the person’s life, but then don’t bother to make them build upon one another to make a satisfying story. I feel like this half of the film has some of the most interesting ideas, but the rushed nature means that we don’t get to enjoy it before we’ve gone and moved onto something else.
The rushed first half of the movie might get a pass if the second half made up for it, but unfortunately the bulk of this movie is just a dull revenge story that tries to turn Hannibal Lecter into a more violent cross between Batman and James Bond (oh hey, Batman Begins and Casino Royale came out a couple years before this movie, imagine that). If there is a theme in this movie it is “revenge makes you a monster”, but that is such bog-standard, well-worn ground for this kind of story. I know that some people considered Hannibal an anti-hero in The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, but he was still murdering people there whose worst act was that they were either in his way or kind of rude. In Hannibal Rising they have to make the people he kills unrepentant, cartoonish monsters. I’ve already covered Hannibal’s first kill, the butcher, and how much of an asshole he is, but the film even has Inspector Popil straight-up tell us that it’s basically fine that Hannibal murdered him. As for the deserters, not only did they all kill and eat Hannibal’s sister, but they’re also Nazi war criminals for good measure. Grutas is even worse, also being a sex trafficker and attempted rapist on top of everything else. With bad guys this shitty, it’s hard to care when the film pulls a “ahh but Hannibal enjoys killing people, he’s also a monster!”-style “twist” near the end. Sure, Hannibal’s a bad guy too but everyone he kills in this movie deserves what they get and then some. If they had only eaten Hannibal’s sister and nothing else then that might have put in some level of ambiguity, between being faced with a desperate survival situation and the revelation that Hannibal also partook of the soup made from Mischa’s body. However, considering everything else these guys did, it’s hard to feel bad for any of them as he tortures them all to death.
As for Hannibal himself, he’s… fine, I guess. Gaspard Ulliel had impossibly big shoes to fill and I don’t think that he quite managed to do it, although I feel like this is more down to the material rather than any failing on his part. Due to how strung together the plot feels at times, Hannibal’s character varies wildly. At times he feels like a spoiled brat (such as, funnily enough, when he’s at the orphanage in his family’s former castle, it feels like he’s just mad that it’s not his anymore), at times he feels playfully evil (think Ramsay Bolton), other times he’s just a rage-filled psycho, and sometimes he’s just vampiric. I also find it kind of funny that the whole samurai angle means that you can accuse him of being a cultural appropriator and a weeb as well.
Fuckin’ nerrrrd!
Meanwhile, Lady Murasaki is another missed opportunity. Early on it seems like she’s going to be the one who turns Hannibal into the man we know, training him in the samurai arts to kill and giving him a code of honour to guide his morals. It even seems like this was the filmmakers intent, as in the making of documentary they state that she is supposed to be Hannibal’s Aristotle, imparting her dark side upon the young man. However, this gets largely set-aside in the second half of the film as she suddenly gets cold feet about murdering the rest of the deserters when she finds out one of them has kids. Even worse, she gets turned into a goddamn damsel in distress in the final act, with Grutas constantly trying to rape her when she’s in captivity. Oh… and then there’s the weird romance between her and Hannibal which comes out of nowhere. Honestly, I had been thinking “damn, Hannibal and Murasaki are hot, pretty close in age and get along together, they’d probably make a good couple if they weren’t related through marriage”, but then I was caught completely off guard when the makeout session started. It’s not even the first time I’ve seen this movie, but I had completely forgotten that that happened.
Anyway, I can definitely tell that my thoughts on Hannibal Rising are jumbled, but that’s reflective of this movie’s messy plot. While watching it I kept thinking that it was messy, but fine, but the more that I thought about it afterwards the less I liked it. I do feel like they put in a lot more effort to try to make the movie good than I would have expected, but the execution just isn’t there. I can’t imagine anyone seriously wanting to know how Hannibal Lecter became a monster and, despite some strong talent and decent direction, Hannibal Rising just doesn’t justify the telling of this story.
4.5/10
…but the feast is not over yet. Be sure to tune in again soon for a very special bonus Retrospective finale to this series!
Welcome back to the Hannibal Lecter retrospective! In today’s post we’ll be looking at 2002’s prequel/remake/cash-in, Red Dragon! After the negative reception of Hannibal, would a more back-to-basics prequel be able to reel in audiences? Read on to find out…
I’m not sure if you could make a more boring poster than this. Oh look, it’s Hannibal Lecter! You all love him, right? We’ll make sure he takes up 60% of the poster!
PRODUCTION
Frustratingly enough, there’s no production history about this movie on Wikipedia or the Hannibal Lecter wiki and I couldn’t find a making of featurette with any worthwhile information so I had to get creative and look up production information from way back in 2001 and 2002. Even before the release of Hannibal, Dino and Martha de Laurentiis announced that they were going to remake Red Dragon, emphasizing that Lecter’s role in the story would be expanded and there were rumours that Ridley Scott would be back to direct it. Manhunter‘s critical reevaluation had surged by this point, with even more popularity coming its way with the premiere of CSI and there was some discontent at the idea of remaking the film less than 20 years later. However, given the more than 10 year gap between the publication of The Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter, it was obvious that no new Hannibal Lecter material was going to be produced any time soon so they needed to cash in somehow.
Hannibal‘s tepid response had soured many critics on the prospect of another outing though, with some saying that he had become a joke and moved into the realm of camp. Perhaps because of this, Ridley Scott didn’t return for Red Dragon and the project pivoted in a more serious direction, more akin to The Silence of the Lambs‘ tone. As if to confirm this direction, Ted Tally returned to write the script after skipping Hannibal due to his objections to the novel’s story. It was even rumoured that Jodie Foster may make a cameo appearance, despite the fact that Red Dragon was supposed to take place ten years prior to The Silence of the Lambs and everyone involved had noticeably aged in the interim (an obvious issue which the de Laurentiis brushed off casually). An issue which may have scuppered this idea was that MGM still held the rights to characters exclusive to The Silence of the Lambs, while Red Dragon was exclusively being distributed by Universal.
By the fall of 2001, human garbage pile Brett Ratner (of Rush Hour fame) had signed on to direct the film and a plethora of talent flocked to Tally’s script, including Edward Norton as Will Graham, Emily Watson as Reba McClane, Harvey Keitel as Jack Crawford and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Lounds. Hopkins, of course, would return as Hannibal Lecter, having secured himself an $8 million payday plus 7.5% of the film’s profits for a role that is essentially an extended cameo. That just left the role of Francis Dolarhyde in the air. While Sean Penn was in early talks to play the role, Ratner wanted Ralph Fiennes, known at the time for dramatic roles in The English Patient and The End of the Affair, as well as being the antagonist in Schindler’s List. In December of 2001, Fiennes won the role and started a hardcore workout regimen to try to get himself into shape – Dolarhyde was supposed to be an intimidating bodybuilder-type and Fiennes (who describes his body shape as “slight”) had only a month until shooting began to bulk up, especially because he is completely nude for several of his scenes.
Ladies and gentlemen, you get to see Ralph Fiennes’ great red dragon in this movie.
Also worth noting was the return of Manhunter cinematographer Dante Spinotti, who Ratner wanted so badly that he delayed production of the film in order to wait for Spinotti’s schedule to open up. While some people questioned by Spinotti would try to shoot the exact same story again, he clarified that he felt like Ted Tally’s script changed the feel of the movie; it was more faithful to the book and had a more realistic, grounded style. Faithfulness to the book also extended to the shooting, with Ratner filming on location in the book’s environs as much as possible. Production designer Kristi Zea, who had worked on The Silence of the Lambs, was also brought back to try to give Red Dragon a similar feel.
The film released on October 4, 2001 and, while it did fairly well and received mostly positive reviews, it ended up grossing only $209.1 million, a little more than half the numbers Hannibal raked in. It seemed like Lecter fatigue had well and truly set in… PLOT SYNOPSIS
…I’m actually at a bit of a loss trying to figure out how I’m going to do this, because the overarching plot of Red Dragon is nearly identical to Manhunter. I’ve done remakes on the Retrospectives series, sure, but they always had big deviations and were distinctly different. Red Dragon doesn’t do that – it has its own distinct tone and style, but that doesn’t come across in a plot synopsis when 95% of the plot beats are the same. I was tempted to just copy + paste my plot synopsis from that film and then insert a couple sentences to show where this movie deviates, but that’s literally wasting my readers’ time. So, I’m just going to summarize the differences between this movie and Manhunter:
The movie opens with Hannibal Lecter at the opera and it is heavily implied that he kills the flute player for being bad at his job and then serves him to the orchestra’s board of directors. Shortly thereafter, he meets with Will Graham to discuss a case that Graham is stumped on. During their conversation, Will suddenly realizes that Hannibal Lecter fits the profile he’s been working on and Lecter ambushes him, nearly getting him. Before Lecter can land the killing blow though, Will stabs him with three arrows and then shoots him repeatedly, incapacitating the doctor and arresting him. Over the opening credits, it is revealed that Will has a psychological breakdown and retires.
The film then plays out largely the same for a long time. The main differences are that Will meets Hannibal now because he thinks best when he’s able to bounce ideas off of the doctor and many of the revelations that he comes to himself in Manhunter now come after visiting Lecter for clues. In addition, Dolarhyde appears earlier in this film, meaning that his romance with Reba is given more time to breathe.
The next big deviation is that Dolarhyde hears voices telling him to kill Reba after they have sex. Dolarhyde tries to defy them, even threatening to commit suicide in order to save her, but he is unable to silence them. In a desperate attempt to save her, he goes to the Brooklyn Museum and eats William Blake’s original painting of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, hoping that this will break its control over him.
From there, the film plays out the same until the ending of Manhunter. Instead of taking Dolarhyde down in a shootout at his home, Dolarhyde can’t bring himself to kill Reba. Instead, he burns his house down and then stages a fake suicide, substituting co-worker Ralph Mandy’s body for his own as Reba escapes to the police. Some time later, Will Graham has returned to his family when he receives a call from Jack Crawford warning him that Dolarhyde is still on the loose. He finds Dolarhyde with Will’s son and a shootout ensues in which Will and Dolarhyde are shot several times each. Will’s wife, Molly, takes his gun and gets the final shot in on the killer, ending the reign of terror of the Red Dragon once and for all.
REVIEW Red Dragon feels like a back-to-basics effort, trying to appease the fans after the backlash Hannibal received by making something that was safe and familiar. While the plot structure is a bit different than The Silence of the Lambs, you can see that the filmmakers were trying to harken back to it. These callbacks are met with mixed results, but the most obvious and important example of this is how Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter’s relationship has been changed in Red Dragon. In Manhunter, Will visits Lecter once in order to get back into the mindset he needs to hunt the Red Dragon. In Red Dragon, Lecter and Will are effectively a dysfunctional team, with Will bouncing ideas off of Lecter and Lecter pushing Will in the right direction. I was actually surprised at how well this change works in the opening scene, it makes the relationship between Will and Lecter more interesting, helps lay out why Will is so hesitant to return to the FBI and goes a long way to justifying why Will would keep going back to Lecter several times (and therefore give Hopkins more screentime). That said, eventually it starts to get insane that Will would keep talking to Lecter. Like, are you telling me that Will would continue to see Lecter after the bastard tried to have his family killed in retribution for Will capturing him!? I get that another family could die if you don’t catch the Red Dragon soon, but continuing to bring someone who is openly antagonistic to you into the investigation just seems counter-intuitive. There’s also the issue that this change in their relationship makes Red Dragon‘s Will Graham seem less competent than he was in Manhunter, where Graham had to figure out everything on his own. Will Graham didn’t really come across as someone with a sick mind in Manhunter, but in Red Dragon it comes across even weaker since Hannibal ends up doing all the profiling and Will just puts the pieces together.
On the shittier end of the Silence callbacks is the constant, in-your-face references to The Silence of the Lambs. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I hate this kind of hamfisted nostalgia that exists for no other reason than for you to go “Oh hey I remember that!” The entire sequence where Will meets the imprisoned Lecter for the first time is a perfect example, it rips off the opening of The Silence of the Lambs entirely nearly shot-for-shot. Oh look, it’s Dr. Chilton, remember how much you hate him? Oh hey, it’s the same dungeon where Lecter is kept, remember that? This is, of course, undermined by the fact that everyone is noticeably a decade older than they were in the previous film and no amount of half-assed makeup and hair-dye can disguise that fact. Even worse, while I was impressed at how well they justified expanding Lecter’s role early on, the more the film drags on the more contrived, disruptive and tiring it gets. The further in the film gets, the less relevant to the plot Lecter is and his constant shoehorning in gets infuriating. Like, after it’s discovered that Hannibal sent Dolarhyde Will’s family address, we get a short scene where Chilton takes away all of Hannibals books… did we really need this scene? It literally feels like a DVD deleted scene, especially because Will visits Hannibal later and we’d get this same information anyway. And then, during one of the climactic moments of the film when Dolarhyde sneaks into the museum to eat the Blake painting, we keep cutting back to Hannibal eating a meal… why!? It literally just disrupts the tension of the scene. Probably worst of all though is that as the film is ending Dr. Chilton says that a female FBI agent is going to meet Hannibal… hey, you like The Silence of the Lambs, don’t you? You know who that female agent is! It’s things that you like, therefore you like this too! It doesn’t close this story, it doesn’t add anything to this movie, it just panders to what we’re familiar with.
As I’ve alluded to already, Hopkins’ Hannibal is just tiring in this film. It’s obvious that they’ve tried to tone him down after the backlash Hannibal received, but Hopkins is still hamming it up, it’s just more restrained than it was in the past… which, honestly, is a shame. If audiences don’t find your serial killer scary anymore, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle without a complete overhaul and Red Dragon doesn’t go far enough in that direction. Hopkins just doesn’t seem to have as much energy as he used to and the fact that the movie wants to shove him in our face constantly doesn’t do him any favours. As for Will Graham, Edward Norton is just fine. He portrays Will’s concerns as a family man more compellingly than William Peterson did in my opinion, but in basically every other way he’s not as strong of a protagonist (which is in part because, again, Lecter steals most of his thunder and makes him look less competent). Will Graham is just not a very compelling character for me in Red Dragon or Manhunter, he’s just your archetypal hero cop. Most of the supporting cast seem to phone in their roles as well. Harvey Keitel’s Jack Crawford is literally the exact performance you would expect from “Harvey Keitel as a boss cop”. Philip Seymour Hoffman is also just giving as baseline a performance as you could imagine an actor of his caliber to give, although in his case it works really well for Freddie Lounds, makes the character feel less cartoonishly sleazy and more interested in money to the point that he’ll do anything without remorse.
Luckily for Red Dragon, Ralph Fiennes’ Francis Dolarhyde and Emily Watson’s Reba McClane are easily the two best performances in the film and form its emotional core. I know that Tom Noonan’s performance in Manhunter has lots of fans for how imposing and weird he is, but in my opinion Fiennes makes for a much more interesting antagonist. For one thing, he is finally revealed only 40 minutes in instead of a full hour, meaning that we get significantly more time to develop his relationship with Reba. Furthermore, we get a much greater sense of Dolarhyde’s psychosis and how it creates conflict inside of him as his relationship with Reba deepens. The relationship itself is tragic, aided greatly by Emily Watson’s adorable performance as Reba. Her performance as Reba is super horny, with her trying to get Mr. D out of his awkward shell so she can get some of that Mr. D. The fact that she’s unaware of Dolarhyde’s psychopathy makes for a storyline that’s far more compelling than Will Graham’s A-plot and you’re left wondering if the Red Dragon can be defeated by love. That said, the very Psycho-esque voice-over from Dolarhyde’s grandmother which dominates his on-screen introduction is a very hamfisted way to get across his backstory. I understand that they had to get this across somehow in order for Will Graham’s taunting of the villain to work in the finale, but there had to have been a more elegant way to do so. Also, unlike Manhunter, we understand Dolarhyde’s psychology far better in Red Dragon but we don’t get a sense of why exactly he is killing families. In Manhunter it was because he wanted to possess what he couldn’t have because he was an incel loser. In Red Dragon he kills entire families because… he wants witnesses to his transformation into the Great Red Dragon? Because the voice tells him to? It’s weird that we get much more information about who Dolarhyde is but somehow understand why he kills less than we did in the comparatively sparse Manhunter.
I know that Red Dragon has a lot of fans, especially compared to Hannibal, but I personally just find it uninteresting. Whereas Hannibal went off in its own direction and wasn’t trying to be safe, Red Dragon seems terrified to try anything new. It takes a solid, well-liked story and then filters it through the lens of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, making for a very indistinct, also-ran kind of film. Manhunter is, overall, a more interesting film, but I do really like how Dolarhyde and Reba are handled by this film and prefer the ending of Red Dragon, so it’s a bit of a wash for me. The overall storyline is very solid and so it’s hard to really screw that up (even if you’re Brett Ratner; I find it hilarious that his Wikipedia page even goes out of its way to say that his movies suck), so Red Dragon is enjoyable even if it feels like it could have been conveyed better.
6/10
Be sure to tune in again soon as we take a look at the next entry in the franchise, Hannibal Rising!
Welcome back to the Hannibal Lecter retrospective! In today’s post we’ll be looking at the follow-up to the iconic The Silence of the Lambs, 2001’s Hannibal! As you may be aware, this film has a… reputation to say the least. Could it live up to its predecessor’s legacy? Read on to find out…
I goddamn love this poster. I remember as a kid seeing this in a movie theatre and having my imagination filled with possibilities about what this movie could be about. It’s so grimy and creepy, leaving much to the viewer to intuit for themselves and hinting that this is going to be a darker film than its predecessor. It’s also nice that it does its own thing while hinting at The Silence of the Lambs‘ iconic poster design.
PRODUCTION
Even before The Silence of the Lambs was published, Thomas Harris began conceptualizing a sequel where Hannibal was loose in the streets of Europe. However, after the surprise success of the film adaptation, demand for a sequel hit a fever pitch, especially from the owner of the film rights to Hannibal Lecter, producer Dino de Laurentiis. De Laurentiis regretted lending the rights to the character for free for The Silence of the Lambs, but planned on capitalizing on the newfound popularity of the character. He wasn’t the only one looking to make bank though and there was soon a mad scramble to get in on the follow-up (better strap in because the production of this movie was fascinating and a good example of why I include production history in these retrospectives in the first place).
First of all Orion Pictures, which had produced The Silence of the Lambs, had been having financial issues for years and filed for bankruptcy in 1991, even before they could celebrate The Silence of the Lambs‘ history-making Oscar run. This would ultimately result in the studio becoming a subsidiary of MGM, selling all their rights to them in the process, including the rights to the character of Clarice Starling. However, Universal studios chairman Tom Pollock tried to convince de Laurentiis to make the sequel with them instead, with de Laurentiis alleging that they were strong arming him by putting other pictures they were partnered on on the line. This would ultimately be taken to court and when it was settled it was agreed that Universal and MGM would co-distribute the forthcoming sequel.
Of course, this all still up in the air because, despite coming to an agreement, Harris was still working on his follow-up and it would be years before it would be complete. This was back during an era when studios would actually wait for a novelist to write a sequel instead of just forging ahead on their own, as demonstrated with The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Director Jonathan Demme, Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster and screenwriter Ted Tally were all interested in returning for a sequel, with it being rumoured that Hopkins and Foster would each receive a cool $15 million to reprise their Oscar-winning roles. Finally, in 1999, the next novel in the series was published, titled Hannibal. The novel was met with mixed reception, with the main complaints revolving around its twisted violence and the ending, which sees Clarice Starling being drugged by Hannibal, engaging in cannibalism and then running off together in love.
When the details of the story came out, key members of the original film began to drop out. Ted Tally was disappointed with the novel and declined to write the script. Jonathan Demme passed on directing, citing his distaste over how violent it was and his disappointment about how Clarice Starling was handled (reportedly, upon hearing this, de Laurentiis said “when the Pope-a die, we create a new Pope-a. Good luck to Jonathan Demme. Good-bye.”). Jodie Foster’s refusal to return as Clarice Starling was particularly contentious, with her putting out several excuses talking around why she wasn’t reprising her role in the film, from concerns about the story quality, to Demme not returning, to financial concerns (according to de Laurentiis, Foster’s agent demanded $20 million and 15% of the gross, which he says caused him to reject her outright). Based on what was said at the time and since, I’d be willing to bet that the main issue was that Foster didn’t like how Clarice Starling was being portrayed in Hannibal, with a secondary concern being and that de Laurentiis was going to lowball her pay. Luckily for de Laurentiis, Hopkins was viewed as the crux of the entire project and agreed to return as Hannibal Lecter, otherwise the film probably would have never been made.
With nearly all of the key figures involved in The Silence of the Lambs gone, work began on hiring the new production team. Ridley Scott was approached during the filming of Gladiator and agreed to take over the director’s chair. This was exciting news since, while he has gained a reputation for being inconsistent in the last decade, his filmography consisted of landmark film after landmark film at the time (and later in the same year of Hannibal‘s release he would put out one of the greatest and most influential modern war movies, Black Hawk Down). The script was written by David Mamet (who wrote, among other things, The Untouchables and Wag the Dog), but this draft was then rewritten by Schindler’s List screenwriter Steven Zaillian after a grueling brainstorming session between Zaillian and Scott to change the ending of the novel for the adaptation.
As for who would play Clarice Starling, several high-profile actresses were considered, including Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Gillian Anderson (remember this one, it’ll be important in the future), Hilary Swank, Ashley Judd and Helen Hunt. However, Hopkins suggested to de Laurentiis that Retrospectives veteran Julianne Moore be considered for the role, as he had worked with her a few years earlier and thought that she would be great for the role. While I can’t confirm whether Hopkins’ endorsement ultimately won her the part (Ridley Scott also said that she was his top choice), Julianne Moore was chosen to play Clarice… and I’ll bet that de Laurentiis was happy about this because she was paid a reported $3 million!!! This legitimately infuriates me. Like I said earlier, Foster and Hopkins were both expected to collect around $15 million for their roles in this movie (I couldn’t find an exact number, but it is believed that Hopkins was paid more than $10 million for this film), which reflects the fact that both characters and their performers are crucial to the film’s success. The fact that de Laurentiis was just so flippant about casting Foster aside is more blindingly obvious proof of the Hollywood wage gap. Won’t take a pay cut, little lady? That’s all right, we’ll replace you with one of the other actresses starving for a meaty female role. Also consider the fact that Foster was considered expendable whereas Hopkins exiting the project would tank the entire production. I do get that Hopkins’ Lecter was the main draw for audiences and so I wouldn’t say that he doesn’t deserve a decent payday, but Clarice Starling was the real main character of The Silence of the Lambs and the beating, emotional heart which made it all work and that should be reflected. Also consider that Julianne Moore herself is getting lowballed at $3 million – she was coming off of such box office and critical successes as The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Boogie Nights (which she would get a Best Supporting Actress nomination for), The Big Lebowski and Magnolia, and you’re telling me that she was worth less than a third of what her male co-star was getting (and that’s assuming that conservative $10 million number is correct)? Bull-fucking-shit.
For the other major roles, motherfuckin’ Christopher Reeve was offered the role of Mason Verger, but turned the role down when he actually read the script and realized that they were asking him to play a psychotic, disfigured, wheelchair-bound pedophile. The role went to their next choice, Gary Oldman. Ray Liotta was cast to play Paul Krendler, a Justice Department official who had previously appeared in The Silence of the Lambs played by Ron Vawter, but Vawter had died in 1994 and so had to be recast. Giancarlo Giannini (probably most famous internationally for playing Mathis in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace) was cast as the shady detective Rinaldo Pazzi. Also noteworthy is the fact that the only other actor to reprise his role from The Silence of the Lambs was Frankie Faison as the asylum orderly Barney. Faison had also played a different, minor role in Manhunter, making him the only actor to stay a consistent part of the franchise thus far.
Filming lasted 16 weeks, with the production going on location in Florence and various locales across the US, which is probably part of the reason that the budget ended up going over $80 million, which is high for a hard R-rated film of this nature. Luckily for all the film’s financial backers, Hannibal opened February 9, 2001 to a $58 million opening weekend, the third largest debut ever at the time, and would gross $351.6 million. However, the critical and audience reception of the film was lukewarm and many people felt that it didn’t live up to the legacy of The Silence of the Lambs.
PLOT SYNOPSIS
Ten years after the events of the previous film, Hannibal Lecter is still on the loose and is one of the FBI’s most wanted. Clarice Starling is leading a drug bust which goes awry when one of her agents disobeys an order to stand down. As a result, several people are killed and a PR nightmare ensues, with Starling taking the blame. After pulling some strings with corrupt Justice Department official Paul Krendler, Mason Verger (a grievously wounded survivor of Lecter) has Clarice Starling assigned to hunt down Lecter, believing that Lecter has a special relationship with her and that her involvement will draw him out into the open. This seems to work because shortly after being reassigned, Clarice finds a letter from Hannibal. After performing an analysis on the letter, it is discovered that it contains trace elements of a skin cream that is only legally available in certain parts of the world. Clarice requests police departments around the world to send security footage from potential shops, including in Florence. The chief inspector Rinaldo Pazzi, who has been investigating the disappearance of a library curator, recognizes someone in one of these security tapes, a man who he had interviewed about the disappearance named Dr. Fell. Putting two and two together, Pazzi investigates the FBI’s database and realizes that Dr. Fell is actually Hannibal Lecter. He soon discovers that someone has put a $3 million bounty on Lecter’s head and tries to collect it. He is told that he will require a fingerprint to positively ID Lecter before he can be apprehended. Pazzi recruits a pickpocket to get the fingerprint and, while he is successful, the pickpocket is stabbed to death by Lecter in the process. Despite this incident, Pazzi ignores ominous warnings from Lecter and a plea from Clarice to stand down and sends the fingerprint off for confirmation. He discovers that the bounty has been issued by Mason Verger and, despite being told that his own men will apprehend Lecter, Pazzi chooses to joins Verger’s crew to apprehend the serial killer. However, when he attempts to draw Lecter out into an ambush, Lecter ties up the inspector and then disembowels and hangs him from the balcony of the Palazzo Vecchio in retribution. He then murders one of Verger’s men in retribution before slipping away.
Frustrated that Hannibal slipped from his grasp, Verger bribes Paul Krendler again to put Clarice Starling in harm’s way. Verger fabricates a letter which makes it seem like Starling is aiding Lecter’s continued freedom, causing her to be suspended from the FBI. Hearing about this, Lecter calls Clarice and lures her out for a confrontation. However, Verger’s men are following her and apprehend Lecter. Clarice witnesses this and tries to get the police to inspect Verger’s estate, but they aren’t able to find anything incriminating. Clarice then decides to go on her own, finding Lecter tied up and about to be fed to Verger’s pack of carnivorous pigs. Clarice frees Lecter and kills two thugs but is shot and wounded herself. Lecter rescues her as the pigs break in and devour two of the guards after ignoring Hannibal. Lecter then convinces Verger’s physician to drop his boss into the pig pen, saying that he can blame Lecter. The physician complies and Verger is eaten alive.
Clarice wakes up sometime later at Krendler’s lakehouse, heavily drugged. She calls the police and then makes her way downstairs, where she finds Lecter preparing dinner with an even more heavily-drugged Krendler. Lecter reveals that he has sawed open the top of Krendler’s head, which he removes to expose his brain. Lecter cuts out a piece of the still-living Krendler’s brain and then sautés it and feeds it to him. Clarice then tries to stab Lecter, but he locks her ponytail in a fridge door and holds her down as she handcuffs him to her. With the police almost upon them, Lecter takes a cleaver and threatens to cut her hand off if she doesn’t release him. When she refuses to budge, he brings the cleaver down and she screams. Shortly thereafter the police find Clarice and it is implied that Hannibal chose to cut his own hand off to escape. He is seen in the ending on a plane, arm bandaged, sharing cooked brains with a child curious about his meal.
REVIEW
I think that the thing that I appreciate the most about Hannibal is that it aims to be very different from its predecessor. Too often sequels, especially sequels to a pop culture icon, end up just repeating the same bits, returning to a formula and become self-referential. The Hannibal Lecter franchise was ripe for this – hell, The Silence of the Lambs itself nearly falls into this trap since it could basically be boiled down to “Hannibal Lecter helps solve another murder case”. Hannibal is a different sort of beast though, by necessity. With Lecter on the run and ten years having passed, it would be very difficult to just do the same thing again without it feeling contrived. As a result, we get to see all sorts of fresh ideas play out. We get to spend the film’s entire second act in beautiful Florence, a breath of fresh air compared to all the comparatively boring American vistas that make up this series’ settings. We get to see a psychopath actively wanting revenge on Lecter, putting our main characters directly in danger. We get to see Lecter living out among the people and outsmarting everyone who tries to catch him. There’s some give-and-take to this approach, as the film is certainly slower and the tension is less consistent, but I do appreciate the attempt to inject fresh ideas into the formula.
There is so much to love in Hannibal. First off, the acting is great across the board. While Lecter doesn’t have quite the same spark that he did in The Silence of the Lambs, in part because he spends most of his screen time separated from Clarice, Hopkins seems to be having the time of his life and he’s always enjoyable to watch. As for Julianne Moore, she brings her own take of Clarice Starling to the film, one that is more experienced and disillusioned with the bureaucracy of the FBI. She’s much more defiant, she doesn’t take any shit from people who are still talking down to her. I’d have to say that Jodie Foster’s take was far more compelling, but Moore brings her own spin on the material that she’s given. The two best performances in the film have to be Gary Oldman’s Mason Verger and Giancarlo Giannini’s Rinaldo Pazzi. Starting with Verger, Oldman plays him like a rich, polite old man, despite the fact that his character is a self-professed pedophile who’s obsessed with the idea of torturing and killing the man who ruined his life. He’s so sinister and darkly funny at times, making for a more than worthy opponent to Lecter. I also love his obsession with feeding Hannibal alive to a pack of man-eating pigs, since that means that we get one of the most brutal and amazing set-pieces in the film which culminates in Verger’s own ironic death by pigs (a change which was made for the movie, thank God). I have to give a particular shout-out here to makeup artist Greg Cannom, whose prosthetics work makes Gary Oldman unrecognizable and so disturbing to look at. As for Rinaldo Pazzi, his story plays out over the course of the film’s second act and is easily the most compelling part of the film. It’s fascinating to watch Pazzi go from a disinterested cop to a man just barely holding onto his composure, blinded by greed to the obvious dangers he’s walking into.
Ridley Scott’s direction is also fairly solid throughout the film. I feel like Jonathan Demme’s direction favoured the characters more, but Scott brings his own take to the material. As one would expect of him, the production design is spot on (particularly aided by the fact that much of it was shot on location in some gorgeous locales) and the visuals are all top-notch. There are some moments when I feel like he has trouble keeping the audience oriented though, particularly during the chaotic opening shootout sequence (which looks cool at least, there’s so much blown up debris and sparks from ricocheting bullets) and when Hannibal draws out Clarice into a crowded station. I’m not sure if these issues come down to direction or editing, but they are two notable examples of when Hannibal‘s direction stumbles.
With all that said, let’s get to Hannibal‘s crippling flaw – the script. Damn near every aspect of this movie is firing on all cylinders and if not for the inconsistent quality of the script this could have been a very worthy successor to The Silence of the Lambs. We’ll start with what I think is the most damning flaw in the film, the treatment of Clarice Starling. Clarice is the film’s focus in the first thirty minutes: she’s devastated for having to shoot a woman holding a baby during the botched drug bust, she gets suspended unjustly, is reassigned to Lecter’s case and then starts following clues. Cool, that means she should find a clue to lead her to Lecter in time for the second act, right? Nooooope… for whatever reason, Clarice doesn’t do anything in the second act – aside from a few short and unimportant scenes, she effectively disappears for a whole fifty freaking minutes. The only things of note that she does in the third act is fail to find Hannibal when he’s right behind her, go rogue to rescue him and then basically lets Hannibal get away again. She’s a far-cry from the Clarice of The Silence of the Lambs who is the film’s emotional core and the one who’s driving the plot forward, here Clarice takes a back seat right as the plot is getting underway and gets pushed around where the story demands she go. The film also brings back hints of the sexism that Clarice faced back in The Silence of the Lambs, but it’s done to much lesser effect. Instead of being objectified and belittled by men in all areas of her life, the only person being sexist to her is her boss, Paul Krendler, who’s just a total sleaze. There’s a shot of him staring up Clarice’s legs and at one point he gets caught staring at a drawing of Clarice’s breasts that Hannibal sent her. We later discover that he’s doing this because Clarice wouldn’t have an affair with him, so he’s been making her career hell because he’s an abusive piece of shit. It’s nice at least that they acknowledge that this sort of power abuse happens, but it makes it feel like this is just the sort of thing that bad people like Krendler do instead of being a systemic issue that women routinely have to deal with. It’s such a shame that Clarice was done so dirty by this film, even with the ending being changed to be less controversial. With some more deviation from the book to make her a more active character she could have been at least on-par with Hannibal Lecter once again.
While I have complained that the second act totally shafts Clarice Starling, effectively excising her from the story for fifty minutes, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this was by far the best part of the movie. After a half hour of build-up we finally get to see Hannibal on the loose in Florence, working his way up into a curator’s position at a museum. Watching Pazzi come to the slow realization that Dr. Fell is Hannibal Lector and then trying to collect the bounty on him is fascinating. The film is at its absolute most tense and exciting during these sequences, since we know that Pazzi is no match for Lecter and we’re left waiting on the edge of our seat to see what the good doctor is going to do to this would-be hunter. And, like any good story, just when you think that Lecter is going to pounce, he relents until the tension has hit an absolute peak. This all culminates in the brilliant “bowels in or bowels out?” sequence, one of the most memorable in the entire film. And then… it just kind of ends on an inconsequential note. Hannibal escapes his pursuers and nothing comes of it. It’s ridiculous how much the air gets sucked out of the room once the second act is over. The only consequence is that Verger sees video footage of the killing where Hannibal waves, which he takes to mean that he’s waving to Clarice Starling… but, like, Verger already knew that she was Hannibal’s weak point from the very start of the movie. Hell, he already put pressure on her to lure Hannibal out once, having to do it again after this is just redundant and doesn’t flow with the story as it has been told up to this point. And to make matters worse, having Hannibal escape was pointless too because he gets captured like ten minutes later anyway. There were only really two ways to move the movie out of Florence and back to the States in a way that makes sense and doesn’t render the entire second act pointless: either have Hannibal get captured in Florence by Verger’s men after killing Pazzi, or have Hannibal realize that Verger’s onto him and that his only course of action now is to actively take on Verger (for example, think of how The Bourne Ultimatum brings Jason Bourne back to the US).
While I have my issues with how the first two acts play out, I still quite like the movie up to this point. However, the third act is a total mess. First of all, the sequence where Hannibal phones Clarice and lures her out to union station while he stalks her (complete with him brushing her hair when he goes past on a carousel) is just so silly and out of place. You’re telling me that Clarice isn’t hearing the musicians playing just beside Hannibal and trying to use that to pinpoint his location? She’s not hearing him speaking right behind her as he touches her hair? Then Hannibal gets captured by Verger’s men – I had thought that he was using Clarice to lure them out so he could pick them off one-by-one, but no, it seems like he was just a dumb-dumb all of a sudden so they could get ahold of him. Clarice just happens to see this too, so she calls the police who investigate Verger’s mansion and then leave again. You’re telling me that they’re just going to take his word that there’s no captured serial killers on my property, no sir-ee-bob!? They don’t leave any sort of surveillance, just in case he’s having him held elsewhere? Apparently not, because how else are we going to make Clarice decide to go rogue and break into the mansion to save Hannibal’s ass? I kinda love this sequence because it does result in several people being eaten to death by pigs, but feels very rushed in order to resolve the Verger plot and then get us into the finale… and hoo boy, what a finale it is. I’ve never been able to take the ending sequence of this movie seriously, which sees a drugged up Clarice watching as Hannibal peels Krendler’s skull open and feeds him parts of his own brain. It’s just too funny to be horrifying, in part because of Ray Liotta’s drugged-up acting and in part because the whole premise of feeding someone his own brain is just pure schlock comedy. Then, after that’s done, we get Clarice and Hannibal’s final confrontation, which ends with him chopping his own hand off to escape rather than harming Clarice. It’s an interesting moment, but it leaves us with no resolution for Clarice’s storyline. It’s definitely better than the book’s ending, but it’s still unsatisfying. This third act (which plays out over the last thirty minutes of the film) really sours me on Hannibal. After the first two acts move at a slow and measured pace, it suddenly feels like they had to cram too much story into the last thirty minutes and everything suffers as a result.
On a related note, this film could have been improved with some better editing and writing. The first couple acts are slow, but they could have been tightened up with more judicial cuts and better scripting. Like, did we really need two sequences where Verger realizes that Clarice is Hannibal’s weakness, where men are sent to capture Hannibal, and where Clarice gets dicked over by Krendler unjustly? There’s also moments that I don’t even understand why they made it into the film. There’s a sequence where we see Lecter scoping out Krendler’s apartment and then breaking into a hospital to steal medical tools so that he can later cut open Krendler’s head. Did we really need to spend several minutes belabouring this detail? I mean… in a post-Cinema Sins world some dickhead would probably nitpick “Oh where did Hannibal get these tools? Why did he know where Krendler lived?”, but we don’t really need to be shown this. Despite being roughly the same run time as The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal feels much flabbier and could have done with another pass on the script to tighten things up. Like I’ve said, there are elements about this movie and the story that I really like (such as the fantastic opening title sequence), but they’re bogged down with too much excess.
I’m well aware than Hannibal has a bad reputation, that it’s considered responsible for killing a lot of peoples’ interest in Hannibal Lecter with its pivot into campy, dark humour. However, I’ve always had a soft spot for it in my heart, just due to how much it deviates from the established formula and how sick and twisted it can be. That said, upon rewatching it my enthusiasm for the film has definitely dulled somewhat. There are still plenty of parts that I enjoy, but I have a hard time looking past how unsatisfying the last act is and how badly they treated Clarice Starling. Still, there’s enough here that I like that I can’t call it a complete disaster but I am disappointed that Hannibal didn’t live up to the potential it had.
