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Humans love mysteries. They tap into our natural desire to grow in knowledge and plumb the depths of God’s wondrous creation, and they point to our eternal destiny. In heaven, we’ll be able to contemplate the infinite divine mystery forever, but since we’re not there yet, we have to settle for more earthly mysteries in the meantime (outside of prayer, of course!). Sometimes they take the form of real-life riddles, like science or true crime cases, and other times they come in fictional stories like the Sherlock Holmes books. Either way, we just can’t get enough of these brain-busting conundrums, so when I first heard about the new sci-fi horror mystery Ash, I knew I had to check it out. I bought a ticket for opening weekend as soon as I got the chance, and I couldn’t wait to see what mind-melting secrets this movie had in store.
Ash was directed by Flying Lotus, and he also stars in the film alongside Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, and Beulah Koale. The story follows Riya, an astronaut who wakes up on a distant planet with no memory of who she is or why she’s there. To make matters worse, as she explores the space station, she finds that all her fellow crew members are dead, so she has no idea what kind of danger she might be in. Eventually, she runs into Brion, another astronaut who says he received a distress signal from her location, but in typical horror movie fashion, it’s not entirely clear if Riya can trust the guy. Is he really who he says he is, or does he have sinister ulterior motives connected to the death of Riya’s crewmates? As you might be able to guess from that plot synopsis, Ash drops us right in the middle of this head-scratching mystery. Sure, the film eventually fills in all the gaps for us, but that information only comes in flashbacks. When the story begins, we know nothing about these characters or Riya’s dire situation, and in a lot of movies, that lack of connection to the protagonist would be fatal. But not here. Director Flying Lotus uses every trick in his arsenal to make up for that deficiency, and the man succeeds brilliantly. He employs trippy visuals, unconventional lighting, and ethereal background music to craft an almost dreamlike atmosphere that pulls you in right away, and lead actress Eiza González completely sells the mystery. From the moment Riya first wakes up, you totally believe that she’s just as lost as you are. She’s a perfect proxy for the audience as she explores her surroundings and slowly discovers the aftermath of whatever horrific event happened there, so despite not having a preexisting connection to the woman, you identify with her almost immediately. You feel like you’re right there with her as she struggles to wrap her head around everything she’s seeing, so you can’t help but get caught up in the puzzle yourself. You desperately want to know what evil befell these poor people, and that question fuels the entire film. See, soon after Ash begins, Riya starts experiencing flashbacks to the time before she fell asleep, and these flashbacks give you an inkling of what really happened to her and the rest of the crew. But it’s only an inkling, as the movie takes a number of unexpected twists and turns that will keep you guessing the whole way through. Every time you think you have it figured out, the film will pull the rug out from under you, so you’ll have to start your theorizing all over again. It’s like a cinematic onion that just raises new questions every time you pull back another layer, so as a mystery, this movie is top-notch. And as a fun sci-fi horror flick, Ash knocks it out of the park as well. For starters, the aftermath of the horrific incident and Riya’s flashbacks to it can get pretty bloody, but these images are never gratuitous. The victims’ gruesome fate makes the mystery that much more puzzling, so the gore has genuine narrative purpose. On top of that, there are also a number of times when Ash ratchets the action up to eleven, and Flying Lotus infuses these scenes with a frenetic energy that will instantly put you on the edge of your seat. He finds the perfect combination of score, editing, and camera movements to make the intensity of these moments palpable, so you’ll almost be able to taste the characters’ anxiety as they fight for their lives. Last but not least, I have to mention the ending. I obviously can’t get into any specifics, but I can say that the last five minutes or so of the film are great. They add another kind of super fun horror into the mix, so if you’re a fan of the genre, you’re almost guaranteed to enjoy this “final boss.” All that being said, I don’t want to give the impression that Ash is a perfect movie. It’s not. It has a lot going for it, but thematically, the film is rather thin. I can’t fully explain why without spoiling some of the surprises, but this story just doesn’t say much. There’s a line towards the end that hints at a possible message about colonialism or the flaws inherent in our broken human nature, but those ideas aren’t prominent enough to constitute genuine themes. The best we can say is probably that this is a basic good vs. evil story, but even that message comes through as little more than a faint whisper. The mystery is just so prominent it drowns out any deeper meaning the story might contain, so as much as I enjoyed that mystery, I wish the filmmakers had added in a bit more thematic substance to balance it out. Thankfully though, that one flaw doesn’t even come close to ruining the entire experience. Ash is still an excellent sci-fi horror mystery brought to life by a unique, creative voice in the genre, so if this sounds like something you’d enjoy, I highly recommend that you give the film a watch.
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Before we begin this review, I have to give a bit of a disclaimer. Magazine Dreams star Jonathan Majors has been in the news a lot lately, and not for good reasons. I’m not going to rehash the court case against him and the new evidence that recently surfaced (a quick Google search will tell you everything you need to know), but I have to mention it because his presence in the movie is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. And that’s okay.
The question of whether to separate the art from the artist has no easy answers, so if you’d rather not see Majors on screen, you have every right to give this film a pass. But my job isn’t to make that decision for you. It’s to judge the movie on its own merits, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to review this film simply as a piece of art, and it’s up to you to weigh that judgement against the real-life drama involving the movie’s lead star. With that brief caveat out of the way, let’s get the ball rolling. Magazine Dreams was written and directed by Elijah Bynum, and it stars Jonathan Majors, Haley Bennett, Taylour Paige, Harrison Page, Harriet Sansom Harris, and Mike O’Hearn. In the film, Killian Maddox is a bodybuilder with dreams of making it big. He wants his picture to be on magazine covers (hence the name), but as you might be able to guess, his quest for stardom has a dark side. The guy has given up just about everything–his health, his social life, and eventually, even his mental stability–to achieve his goals. Nothing is going to stop Killian from becoming the next big thing in the bodybuilding world, but soon enough, the sacrifices he’s made are going to catch up to him. Like a lot of dramas, Magazine Dreams isn’t really about the plot. It’s more about the main character and the ups and downs of his life as he pursues his dream, so this movie rests almost entirely on Jonathan Majors’s shoulders. It’s a lot to ask one man to carry, but thankfully, he’s more than up to the task. Right from the start, this guy pulls off a pitch-perfect blend of utter determination and almost total brokenness. Whenever Killian is working on his body, he exudes a single-minded resolve that makes you believe he can and will rise to the top, but when he’s doing just about anything else, you can see how broken he really is. It’s most notable in his interactions with Jessie, a grocery store worker he’s had a crush on for a while. After finally building up the courage to ask her out, their first date is an absolute disaster. Killian’s lack of social skills reach nearly The Office-esque levels of cringeworthy awkwardness, so after just a few minutes, you might find yourself squirming in your seat. To be fair, a lot of that is due to the great writing, but even top-notch dialogue is worthless if it’s not brought to life by a skillful performer. And like I said before, Majors completely knocks it out of the park. He nails every side of this complex and fascinating character, and when Killian’s ailments and actions begin to catch up with him, the actor doesn’t skip a beat. To take just one example, there’s a scene where the guy faints on stage during a bodybuilding competition, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think Jonathan Majors really did pass out on camera. From the obviously painful grimaces to the full-body trembling that precedes the fall, this guy perfectly mimics the way your body will slowly give out on you if it takes enough punishment. That acting masterclass alone is worth the price of admission, but it’s not the only thing Magazine Dreams does well. The movie also uses Majors’s top-tier performance to highlight the thin line separating ambition from obsession. It’s good to have goals, and it’s good to dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to your craft, but if you’re not careful, those dreams can take over your life and become a form of idolatry. Granted, it’s not always clear where that line is, but when you start sacrificing your health and injecting yourself with drugs that turn your temper into a raging fire, you’ve probably gone a bit too far. All that being said, Magazine Dreams isn’t just a simple cautionary tale. Especially in the second half, this film also highlights the roots of Killian’s single-minded pursuit of bodybuilding perfection, and they’re quite tragic. This guy just wants to be loved, but he thinks he has to earn it by doing something extraordinary. Otherwise, in his mind, he’s simply another worthless nobody. That deep emotional wound leads him to do some crazy things just so people will like him, but the real tragedy is that he already has the love he so desperately desires. Killian lives with his grandfather, and there’s a scene where he tells the old-timer he’s going to win a competition and make him proud. In response, the man tells Killian that he’s already proud of him, but Killian just keeps walking as if he didn’t even hear it. All he needs to do is accept the love his grandfather wants to give him, but instead, he searches for validation in all the wrong places. It’s a genuinely heartbreaking dynamic, and it contains a number of important lessons we’d all do well to heed. For instance, it highlights the vital importance of love and human connection, and it shows that we don’t need to be extraordinary to be worthy of love. We deserve it exactly the way we are, so we don’t have to go to unhealthy extremes to justify our existence. Together with Majors’s great performance, that rich thematic substance makes Magazine Dreams a great watch, but I can’t say it’s a perfect film. No matter how bad life gets for Killian, he doesn’t seem to face any consequences. Sure, he experiences a number of genuine hardships, but every time he does, the movie just mentions them once or twice and then seems to forget they ever happened. Even when he gets into serious legal trouble, nothing appears to come of it, and while your mileage may vary, I simply can’t suspend disbelief quite that much. Along similar lines, this film also ends on a slightly confused note. I obviously can’t spoil the details, but I can tell you that the final scene suffers from a bit of thematic ambivalence. It takes the lack of consequences to a head-scratching extreme that appears to dilute the movie’s message, so if you ask me, the story should’ve ended a few minutes earlier. Thankfully though, those problems aren’t nearly egregious enough to ruin the entire experience. They’ll take the movie down a few spots in my end-of-year ranking, but I still had a great time with it. I found Magazine Dreams to be a moving exploration of the dangers of obsession and the emotional scars that cause us to seek validation in what we do rather than who we are, and if you’ve ever experienced similar struggles in your own life, I think this film will resonate with you on a deep level. I’m not going to lie, when I started working on this article, I felt a bit overwhelmed. The Wild Robot has so many great themes–like motherhood, solidarity, and the importance of kindness–I wasn’t sure what to write about. It’s like trying to pick just one dish from a menu of your favorite foods, but after some reflection, I finally settled on the idea that resonated with me the most. As you might be able to guess, it’s a concept that lies at the heart of our Catholic faith, so rather than try to explain it myself, I’ll let the Church spell it out in her own words:
“Jesus…reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (Gaudium et Spes 24) At first glance, it may be tough to imagine how The Wild Robot could even begin to embody that teaching. As the name suggests, this film centers around a robot, not a person, so what could it possibly have to say about human nature? Perhaps surprisingly, quite a bit. At its core, The Wild Robot is a touching and heartwarming parable about what it means to be human, so let’s dive into this animated masterpiece and see just how it encapsulates a timeless truth about our nature. The Basic Plot of The Wild Robot Before we get started, I want to take a minute or two to briefly go over the plot of the movie. When The Wild Robot begins, a storm causes a Universal Dynamics ship to lose its store of advanced ROZZUM robots, and they end up on an uninhabited island. Some time afterwards, one of these units, ROZZUM 7134, is activated by animals, and she immediately begins searching for a task. See, ROZZUM robots are designed to be helpers. They’re programmed to complete any task they’re given, so naturally, this particular unit is looking for something to do. Eventually, she ends up accidentally squashing a goose nest and killing all the birds in it, but luckily, one of the eggs manages to survive. The baby bird soon hatches and imprints on the robot, so with the help of a fox named Fink, the ROZZUM unit cares for the gosling and teaches him how to swim and fly. In the course of raising this baby, the android names him Brightbill and takes on the name Roz, and soon enough, she completes her task. Brightbill is able to fly south with his fellow geese for their yearly migration, and when the time comes for the birds to return, Brightbill makes it back safely to the island. However, before he can see Roz again, a fleet of Universal Dynamics retrieval robots attempts to snatch Roz away and bring her back to the factory for study, so all the animals on the island have to band together to fight them off. They want Roz to stay, but after they successfully fend off the invaders, Roz makes a startling decision. She realizes that Universal Dynamics won’t stop sending retrieval units until they finally have her, so she chooses to turn herself in so her friends can stay safe. She promises to return one day, but for now, she’s doing what she can to protect Brightbill and the other residents of her new home. Following Her Programming With that out of the way, let’s get to the real meat of this article. How exactly does The Wild Robot embody the Church’s teaching that we find ourselves by giving ourselves to others? To answer that question, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. See, Roz doesn’t start out particularly human. Instead, when we first meet her, she’s just a robot. She doesn’t understand that she’s dealing with animals, not people, so she hands out stickers and keeps asking for a task even though it becomes very obvious very quickly that the island’s residents want nothing to do with her. She simply doesn’t understand anything beyond her programming, so to the surprise of no one, her speech and her interactions with these woodland creatures are stiff and awkward. And in case that’s not clear enough, some of the dialogue in the opening act of The Wild Robot hammers the point home even further. For example, there’s a scene where Roz tells Fink, “I’m a robot. I do robot-y things. I seek tasks and ensure all essential needs have been met or exceeded,” and she sometimes even uses the word “programming” to refer to the animals’ natural instincts. But above all else, Roz’s lack of humanity is made crystal clear when Fink tells Brightbill a story. It’s a fictionalized account of how Roz found the gosling, and Roz interrupts the fox a few times as he tells the tale. Unsurprisingly, her interjections are always technically true, but they’re not very comforting. For example, at one point in the scene, Roz exclaims, “I will not leave until I have completed this task, which has delayed me, damaged me, and violated my protocols, potentially voiding my warranty,” and Fink has to quickly add, “which is robot for, she loves you very much.” Even the fox understands that love is about more than just completing tasks, but that truth goes completely over Roz’s head. All she understands is following her programming, so once again, it’s clear that she’s still very much just a robot. Becoming Human However, even at that early stage, we can already see a few hints of the humanity that will eventually flower within her. The fact that she’s allowed her care for Brightbill to “violate her protocols” already shows that she’s not completely beholden to her programming, and soon after Fink tells this story, Roz takes another small step towards transcending her artificial nature. She asks the fox, “How do you tell a story about something you say you know nothing about?”, and when Fink asks for clarification, she responds with a single word: love. The Wild Robot doesn’t explicitly tell us why this exchange is significant, but if you ponder it for a moment, the importance of that one-word answer isn’t hard to discover. Sure, Roz doesn’t really understand love, but she clearly wants to. Even if only implicitly, she wants to transcend her programming and perform the most human act of all, and as The Wild Robot goes on, she moves closer and closer to achieving that goal. For instance, consider the moment when Brightbill finds out that Roz killed his family (albeit accidentally). Upon learning that painful truth, he disowns the robot and says she’s not his mother, and even though Roz doesn’t have a real face, her pain is impossible to miss. The music, her eye movements, and the position of her head make it clear that Brightbill’s words have cut her to the core, so she’s obviously developed some semblance of humanity. Soon after that, Roz heads out to the place where she was awakened, and when she finds another ROZZUM unit, she activates it and asks it for help. She explains, “My responses to problems increasingly rely on improvised solutions. The processing that used to happen here [pointing to her head] is now coming more from here [pointing to her chest],” and when the robot runs a diagnostic test on her, it finds that she’s been overriding her programming for months and tells her that she’s “become the wrong thing.” The android doesn’t say exactly what that means, but it’s not hard to figure out. By overriding her programming, Roz has slowly been gaining free will, so she’s slowly gaining the ability to truly love Brightbill and make decisions from her heart, not just from her head. The robot truly is turning into something else, and that “something else” is human. This process of slow humanization continues for the rest of the film, and it culminates in a third act in which Roz defies not just her programming but the very company that made her. She refuses to go back to the factory, so she fights the retrieval units that have come to take her away. In fact, one of those robots even says she’s changed, clearly referring to her newfound humanity, and during this big fight, the action slows down for a few moments to highlight just how far Roz has come. When it appears that the invaders have finally managed to wipe the android’s mind, Brightbill tells her seemingly lifeless body that he loves her, and after a few seconds, she wakes up and says she loves him too. It’s a touching scene, and it completes Roz’s transformation from mindless robot to genuine human. She now has free will and the ability to truly love, so despite her humble beginnings, her arc really is a parable about what it means to be human. A Sincere Gift of Self At this point, you might be scratching your head a bit. Sure, Roz displays some distinctive human qualities by the end of The Wild Robot, but what does any of this have to do with the Church's teaching about making a sincere gift of self? Quite a bit, actually. See, as the robot slowly becomes more human, she also begins to display an increasingly sacrificial heart. For starters, when Roz and Fink teach Brightbill how to fly, there’s a brief moment when Roz injures herself a bit and leaks some sort of “robot blood.” We don’t know exactly what it is, but it doesn’t seem good. In fact, Fink even gets a concerned look on his face when he sees it, but Roz just shrugs it off and continues helping her gosling son. Then, after the geese head south, Roz does something remarkable. The winter storm that year is particularly brutal, so the robot finds each one of the island’s inhabitants and brings them to her warm hut. The task is genuinely herculean, and by the end of it, Roz can barely move or speak. She’s so tired she has to shut down until spring, and Fink even remarks that she “risked everything” to save her neighbors. That bold act alone qualifies as a heroic self-gift, but Roz isn’t done yet. As I said in my brief plot synopsis, The Wild Robot ends with Roz literally handing herself over to Universal Dynamics, the very people she fought so hard to escape. She clearly doesn’t want to go, but it’s the only way to keep her friends safe, and if that’s not a sincere gift of self, I don’t know what is. It’s the high point of her humanity, and it's also the high point of the movie’s message. As Roz becomes increasingly human, she gives more and more of herself to her friends and neighbors, and the pinnacle of that transformation is an act of completely selfless love. For her, becoming human invariably entails learning to make a sincere gift of herself to the people around her (they're technically animals, but you get the point), and the correlation isn’t accidental. That’s simply what it means to be human, so despite being about an android, The Wild Robot truly embodies the Church's teaching on self-giving love. |
Jp Nunezis a longtime film buff and theology nerd with master's degrees in theology and philosophy from Franciscan University of Steubenville. His favorite movie genres are horror, superheroes, and giant monsters. Archives
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