The talk of the past week has been all about the new Wonder Woman movie. Again. Although, to be fair, we have had a rather impressive new poster (above) and a rather shiny new trailer to mull over.
Lots to discuss in that, obviously, although Diana flying, Dr Poison et al have all been hinted at elsewhere:
Diana thinks London’s hideous. Then again, it’s 1917/1918 and she’s probably already had to sail past the still-working wharfs before getting to Tower Bridge, so she probably would think that.
Elsewhere, Greg Rucka and Liam Sharp’s run on Wonder Woman is currently part of an exhibit at the Israeli Museum of Caricature and Comics in Holon, Israel. And if you’re a big buyer of cereals, now’s the time to switch to Cheerios in the US, since they feature a whole bunch of DC comics and artwork, including Diana as drawn by Neal Adams.
And on TV, NBC’s Powerless not only revealed Themyscira’s (current?) time zone…
…it also hinted that the technology used in Diana’s invisible plane is being made available to the manufacturers of children’s toys.
Can’t imagine that ending badly.
After the jump, a look at the latest DC comics to feature our Diana: Wonder Woman #18, Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77 #8 and Justice League/Power Rangers #3. But not in that order.
In the US: Monday, 10/9c, NBC In the UK: Tuesdays, Amazon
Three episodes into NBC’s Taken, a prequel of sorts to the movie franchise, it’s now reasonably clear that the show wants even less to do with Liam Neeson’s European family drama than the first episode intimated. Instead, what it really wants to be doing is a slightly smarter version of 24, but without the full-on, balls-out belief in the efficacy of torture that being on the Fox network brings.
What it really doesn’t want to do is have prequel Liam (Clive Standen) acting in any way even remotely resembling Liam Neeson did in the movies. Things like being a father, working by himself for no-one but himself, having contacts. That kind of thing.
So, each week since the pilot, we’ve had our Clive off with his team, doing team things together, at the behest of boss Jennifer Beals. He’s not learning his very particular set of skills, either, since he already has them. Unlike in the pilot, though, there’s absolutely no reference to the movies, no foreshadowing, no characters who’ll show up in the movies.
Indeed, beyond the fact it’s called Taken and features ‘Brian Mills’, there’s nothing Takenish about it. Even Standen’s hint at a Northern Irish accent in the pilot has disappeared, perhaps suggesting it wasn’t deliberate, although getting him to be a soccer player in the third episode suggests the producers want to hint at some kind of European background, at least.
That said, the scripts are a lot less stupid,Standish is a vastly more compelling lead and the action scenes are about 1,000% better than those of 24: Legacy. Certainly, you can usually rely on each episode to serve up an unexpected fillip to a fight or a scene that you’ve never seen before in a TV show.
But other than that, in its foundations, it’s unremarkable. There’s nothing unique about its set-up, characters or scenarios that you won’t have seen in a dozen other TV shows. Characterisation is shallow, perfunctory and uncompelling, and there’s certainly nothing that makes you think, “Ah, that’s why Liam Neeson is so frightened of Paris in the movie!”, for example.
If you can get by purely on action scenes and the occasional signs of intelligence, Taken‘s worth a punt. If you miss 24 and find 24: Legacy an unsatisfactory replacement, give Taken a whirl. But if you need involving plots, dialogue and characterisation, Taken‘s not for you.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
Grrr. Aargh. Sundays. They really make this whole thing harder. As of last week, there was already The Good Fight, Billions, Time After Time and Making History, but now American Crime is back and there’s The Arrangement to watch, too. So, given I do actually have a day job and the whole of Marvel’s Iron Fist is coming out on Netflix this Friday, let’s face facts and accept I’m going to be a week behind with everything that airs on Sunday from now.
Soz.
All the same, Time After Time will be getting a third-episode verdict later this week, seeing as I reviewed the first two last week; and I’ll be casting my eyes over the first two episodes of The Arrangement (US) as well, so there is at least hope in sight.
Elsewhere this week, I reviewed the first episode of Making History and passed verdict on The Good Fight, which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of: 24: Legacy, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, Imposters, Legion, Lethal Weapon, The Magicians, Powerless and Taken, as well as the season finale of Man Seeking Woman. The observant will notice I haven’t watched Fortitude or Prime Suspect 1973 this week. Sorry about that, although it probably says something about both them that I haven’t pushed myself to watch either.
However, I did watch the first episode of the new season of The Americans, which I’ll also be covering after the jump. And in other news, I’m going to drop not one but two regular shows this week. Can you guess which?
I also managed to watch a movie at the weekend, mind.
Arrival (2016) Mysterious aliens ‘the heptapods’ arrive on Earth, but they don’t speak Earth languages. It’s the job of linguist Amy Adams and theoretical physicist Jeremy Renner (a ‘Christmas Jones’ on the plausible casting scale) to try to learn how to communicate with them and find out what they want.
Arrival was heavily hyped as the new 2001 of intelligent science-fiction movies, so we went into this with high expectations, particularly given what language nerds lovely wife and I both are. Disappointed we were. Disappointed.
While there was a little bit about the difficulties of learning any language, this was a bowdlerised version of the original book’s linguistic intrigue…
The heptapods have two distinct forms of language. Heptapod A is their spoken language, which is described as having free word order and many levels of center-embedded clauses.… Unlike its spoken counterpart, Heptapod B has such complex structure that a single semantic symbol cannot be excluded without changing the entire meaning of a sentence.
…in much the same way as The Martian changed the original book’s constant Macgyvering-in-extremis into a far simpler tale of surviving against the odds.
Even so, despite some beautiful visual direction, Arrival is largely a film in which Renner and Adams repeatedly go into a room, see some circles, then go away again, interspersed with Adams thinking about her dead daughter. Tension and excitement there are not.
That said, there is a point in the movie when Adams finally learns the aliens’ language where Arrival comes together, everything becomes clear and the movie becomes a much more interesting piece thanks to a couple of properly genius ideas. There are a couple of scenes that probably will linger for a long time in the memory, too.
Not so much the new 2001, then, so much as the new (spoilers, because they’re very, very similar) Interstellar.
