THE FULL LID
17th June 2022
|
|
Hi everyone! Welcome to The Full Lid!
I'm Alasdair, our editor is the amazing Marguerite, and it's Friday at 5 - isn't it time you had something fun in your inbox? How about some pop culture enthusiasm, career notes, reviews and anything else that I've enjoyed this week. Think of it as email, but good!
This week's interstitials explore some of the fantastic new games whose trailers hit this week. And our contents, they look like this:
|
|
Contents
Watching the Dinosaur
The Wall: Climb for Gold
Signal Boost
Where You Can Find Us This Week
Department of Received Esoteric Print Goods
Signing Off / Playing Out
|
|
Watching the Dinosaur
Editor's note: Spoilers. Jurassic World Dominion (2022) is rated UK 12A / US PG-13, with content warnings for extended scenes of threat and peril, mild profanity, and giant prehistoric monsters attacking and eating people. Feature? Bug? You decide.
A Play in Three Acts
Me, one week ago:
Well, I saw Jurassic World Dominion and it was fine. Guess I don't have to think about it anymore!
Me, an hour ago:
I’m not doing it. I’m not suiting up to defend the least-worst Chris Pratt dinosaur movie. It doesn't matter that people are complaining about there not being enough dinosaurs in a movie where there is literally a dinosaur every 5 minutes and at least one of them has knives for hands. Nope. Nope. Choosing joy. Not doing it. Not doing it.
Me, now:
Welcome to my TED Talk.
Look, I come not to bury Jurassic World: Dominion but to… praise it? Is it absolutely too long? Yes. Is it self-indulgent? Whoo boy. It’s the least-worst of the Jurassic World trilogy but it’s still a bad movie. Compels me, though.
Here’s why:
|
|
|
|
Dwanda Wise, playing Kayla Watts, a Han Solo-esque pilot, is much, much better than the movie asks of her.
|
|
It Doesn’t Kill It’s POC Characters, Who Do Not Share A Skin Tone
Yes I know this is basic. Yes I know this should be so commonplace that it goes without notice. Almost no one does it, though, and Dominion does.
Not only that but it's three primary POC characters are fun and interesting! And embody multiple viewpoints on the changing world! Dewanda Wise (up there, next to Burt Macklin) is especially great as Kayla, the ramshackle zen smuggler/pilot who absolutely deserves her own movie.
Elsewhere Justice Smith makes about three minutes of screen time sing as Franklin from Fallen Kingdom, only this time he gets agency! And literally joins The Agency! A movie about the department responsible for shutting down the dinosaur black market, dealing with habitat incursions and peacefully re-homing dinosaurs would be fascinating! I'm absolutely here for that! We get like 5 minutes of it! Finally, Mamodou Athie, so good in Archive 81, is great as Ramsay Cole, a marketing guru with a neatly handled moral ambiguity that begs to be further explored.
None of them die! None of them get the screen time they deserve, of course, but none of them die.
|
|
|
|
HE'S JUST A DUMP TRUCK WITH A LOT OF FEELINGS, OKAY?!
|
|
The Sauropod Singularity
The movie has a lot of fun with its dinosaurs.
The first chase scene has Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard, now tied with Matt Smith for Talent Wasted by Most Franchises) drive through a herd of nasutoceratops who basically mosh pit her opponents’ trucks to death. The two level atrociraptor chase through Malta is great, urgent and uses geography to heighten the action. One of the best moments is also the quietest, as an opening scene has Maisie (Isabella Sermon who is EXCELLENT) help a paper mill get two massive, sad apatasaurus’ out of their lumber yard.
At the same time, Owen (Worst Chris) is leading a dinosaur roundup that feels like the opening to a much more focused, interesting movie we didn't get. The dinosaurs are in this thing a lot and they're more interesting as problems or environment to navigate than as predators but they're on screen a lot and that's kind of the point of a movie about dinosaurs.
|
|
|
|
Crichton wrote some really fun books. And also this one.
|
|
The Crichton Effect
Original Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton is yet another member of the pantheon of White Guys Who Got Away With Some Shit. I loved the tech thriller elements of Rising Sun when I was a kid; the inherent racism singed my nostrils when I revisited it in later life. Likewise his profoundly depressing embracing of climate change denial.
When he wasn’t being just awful, the weird thing about Crichton is how well he could write. Jurassic Park is The Da Vinci Code of it’s day, just a relentlessly entertaining book. Prey, about a nano-swarm gone feral, is Black Mirror decades early. Sphere is a sweaty-palmed descent into paranoia, a delightfully weird first contact story. Crichton understood big ideas and big ways to tell them. He just sucked at people who weren’t Clever White Guys Good at Science.
That’s one of the areas where Dominion works the best - filling that gap. The first hour cuts between Doctors Satler and Grant, Owen and Claire, Maisie Lockhart and Ian Malcolm and they’re all doing wildly different things in different places that end up coming together. It feels like a big, Crichton-scale story. Something director Colin Treverrow has been upfront about.
|
|
|
|
The temptation to go 'WOKKA WOKKA!' at this point...
|
|
A Cathedral Problem
If you built a cathedral, chances are you knew that was your life and you would die seeing it unfinished, which is a problem you have to deal with. York Minster was built and rebuilt over 250 years; generations living and dying in the shadow of art perpetually in progress. Even today, there’s scaffolding on it so old my parish priest used to joke about how if it ever came down it would have to be returned to the Catholic church.
Climate change is a Cathedral Problem.
The dinosaurs are a Cathedral Problem.
One of the movie’s legion of undeveloped plots is the implication Doctor Ian Malcolm has gone corporate. Sometimes it’s a cover, sometimes it’s styled as a moral awakening, but he at least pays lip service to working his new job being the only thing to do in the final years humanity has. That journey, ‘Well, may as well get paid’ is at the core of why the three POC characters are so compelling. None of them are series leads, none of them have the luxury of plot armour and all of them do different versions of the right thing in the face of a ragged, bloody toothed Singularity. The movie even says it out loud, one of Franklin's colleagues saying the locusts at the core of the plot may kill the food chain and with it the planet.
Then he goes back to work.
Each are heroic characters helping build the cathedral, trusting that others will follow once they’re gone. Choosing to hope in the face of the impossible. It's a core thread getting lost under clickbait slideshows and performative dunking on the least bad, and certainly least cruel, of its trilogy and that's a real shame.
|
|
|
|
Where is our dinosaur cowboy movie?!
|
|
'Fun' and 'thought provoking' are like humanity and dinosaurs: they can and do exist separately, and their intersection gets scrappy and complicated. But the value is still there, trapped in amber, waiting to be found.
Sometimes it's A LOT of amber. I mean, a LOT.
But it is there, and worth seeking. It's probably not worth the cost and risk of a cinema ticket in a world deluding itself COVID-19 is gone, but a perfect 'streaming service on a Friday night' choice for a few months from now. It's a visually entertaining mess, and if there's any justice in this world will launch Dewanda Wise into a major franchise role she's richly earned.
Jurassic World Dominion is in cinemas now.
|
|
|
|
Content Warning: Terrible working conditions
Kurt (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) is a cargo wrangler for a mega corporation. Skew (HELLO TO JASON ISAACS!) is his Liverpudlian robotic buddy who's never seen a crotch before and is FASCINATED. I have no idea what the gameplay is here but I love the style, the humour and the cast which also includes Tommie Earl Jenkins, Claire Hope-Ashitey, Zelda Williams and David Hewlett.
Video description: Gordon attempts to take a rest break and is deeply and comedically weirded out by the fact his robotic buddy Skew has never seen a human crotch before.
|
|
The Wall: Climb for Gold
Editor's note: Spoilers. Documentary The Wall: Climb for Gold (2022) is rated UK 12 with a mild content warning for discussions of injuries, mental health, and stress.
Four amazing climbers. Two global events. One target. The maths of climbing is brutally simple and psychologically labyrinthine. Nick Hurdle's excellent chronicle of four women's journey to the first ever Olympic Climbing competition embodies it all.
Competitive climbing is about as close to superhuman feats as you can get. It's right up there with gymnastics in the slack jawed astonishment it generates and the Olympic contest is a gruelling test spread across three events: speed climbing, bouldering, and lead climbing.
In Speed Climbing, climbers have to race an opponent up the wall as fast as possible. Ten seconds is considered a slow time. Yeah. Me too. Spider-Man is looking on with envy.
The Bouldering competition gives the climbers a short time to study the wall in front of them and then they're let loose on a colossal 3D puzzle where the enemy is gravity and it hates you. No ropes, no harnesses, no equipment beyond a chalk bag as you climb a wall that slopes out and back, searching for holds or the ghost of traction with every part of your body. Top the boulder, or put two hands on a particular hold and you've won. The routes are designed to be so challenging that even these top-level athletes struggle to complete them.
Finally, Lead Climbing has you belayed onto the wall with harnesses and safety equipment and the objective of getting as high up as possible before the inevitable fall. |
|
Above left is Janja Garnbret. A Slovenian prodigy, Garnbret is a rock star in every sense of the word, her extraordinary flexibility matched by an unshakeable confidence. Director Nick Hurdle shows us what happens when that confidence seemingly runs out, doing so with little sensationalism and a lot of honesty. Garnbret struggles and we see her go in and through her problems.
Next to her is Miho Nonaka. Nonaka enters the Olympics in a fascinating position: a hometown athlete, a boulderer by preference who adapts to the other two disciplines and becomes a figurehead for the Japanese Olympic effort. The pressure on all these athletes is astounding, with Nonaka arguably under the most, explored with pragmatic honesty. There's no catharsis, no sudden moment of dramatic tension or release. She's a brilliant athlete, put under seismic pressure by her brilliance. She does what climbers train to do: keep going.
|
|
Which brings us to the other two stars of the show. That's Brooke Raboutou on the left and yes that level of flexibility is astonishing. Raboutou is the daughter of two world champions, climbing very much the family business. But again there's not an iota of entitlement here, just a determined and mildly stunned young woman realizing where her hard work has taken her.
Shauna Coxsey to the left, is an English climber renowned for her astounding physical strength and mental toughness. A good chunk of the movie explores Coxsey's knee surgery and her rehab journey. As with most of the climbers we meet her family, and explore the contrast in focus on the wall and off it. Coxsey talks openly about how her mum leaving when she was young contributed to her mental toughness and one of the sweetest moments in the movie sees her dad explain their 'car time' coping ritual. It's a sweet, kind moment made doubly so by the fact the Brit athlete here is one of the most emotionally healthy, even when she discovers her knee surgery has permanently damaged her back and that her Olympic competition may be her last.
|
|
|
|
Trailer for The Wall: Climb for Gold
|
|
Hurdle slots the four women's narratives into place with the invisibility of a good documentarian. Garnbret is almost derailed by a nightmarish season of mistakes. Nonoka struggles with the incredible pressure of being a hometown hero and a persistent shoulder injury. Raboutou struggles with the conflicting demands of university and her perceived inexperience. Coxsey frantically rehabs between sessions on the wall. None of them are competing against each other in the year up to the Games, but they're all competing against themselves.
Then the pandemic begins.
The disruption to the climber's lives is mirrored by the shift in the documentary's format. Suddenly every interview is on Zoom, and the four climbers find themselves forced to hold in place at the peak of their readiness with the endpoint in constant flux. Climbers constantly battle fatigue as well as gravity, and like us all the struggle to maintain peak physical performance in lockdown conditions becomes gruelling. A viral video of Raboutou training on her parent's staircase because it's the only place she can train is a light moment; Coxsey hobbling out of hospital after a second surgery a dark one.
Finally the Games go ahead an Tokyo, the preparation ends, and The Wall looms before them all.
Hurdle focuses on moments of deep emotional resonance: Raboutou's family in Colorado getting up at 3am to watch her compete. The weird solidarity of competitors willing each other to beat the wall. The comradery and cluster of the competitors around the boulder walls during their two minute viewing, planning strategies. Obviously there's tension, but it's between the competitors and the walls, not each other - in the end, your challenge is with yourself, not them.
Garnbret wins the first ever Women's Climbing Olympic Gold medal. Nonoka wins the first silver. Raboutou places ninth which, given she's 20, is astounding. She narrowly beats Coxsey whose curtain call is full of joy and relief, her own summit found not at the Olympic podium but at completing her Olympic journey. It's a lovely round off to a great movie, each women finding their own form of victory against the wall, each coming to the summit of their own journeys.
The Wall: Climb for Gold is available on Netflix now.
|
|
|
|
Look, you give me a 'reverse time gun' that makes things better with a perky emoji AI and you've got me. Throw in motivational posters saying things like 'If No One Has Come Back From The Future To Stop You Doing It, How Bad Can It Be?!' and frankly, I feel seen to a rude degree.
Video description: In a far future ravaged by the destruction of the sun, a hapless employee and their super chirpy Artificially Intelligent gun set out to save the world.
|
|
New reader? Looking for a back issue?
Buy me a coffee?
|
|
|
|
This came out for PC a couple of years back and I'm delighted to see it head to consoles. LOOK AT THE THING! Isn't it gorgeous?!
Video description: A tiny, graceful spaceship hurtles across stunning vistas. Content warning for tight perspective / vertigo.
|
|
Signal Boost
Featured Boost
- Friends of the Lid Strange Horizons have launched their 2023 annual crowdfunding campaign! Strange Horizons are entirely community-funded; their annual fund-drive is what allows then to continue publishing for the next calendar year. They're a brilliant speculative fiction market and absolutely deserve your support!
|
|
Comics
Hashtags and Shenanigans
Podcasting
Crowdfunding
Music
- Friend of the Lid Casee WIlson says 'Dark Speaks, the new single from @AphelionOf is out now on Bandcamp, and 27th June everywhere else:)'
Blogs
That's this week's Signal Boost! If you have a project you'd like to see here get in touch or check Twitter for my weekly call.
|
|
|
Title of Interstitial Grouping: The Cub
This is a sequel to Wasteland Golf Club! And it's in the same universe as Highwater! I love that games are starting to embrace this kind of continuity!
Video description: A small boy raised by wolves races across a ruined Earth, pursued by the employees of those that ruined it. |
|
Where You Can Find Us This Week
Accents for Fun and Profit
- Roguemaker Episode 4 is live and good news, guys! We've made radio contact! Yaaaaaay! Now as long as no one tries anything fu-OH COME ON!
Twitch
- Stupid Dark Bramble with its evil dimensionally transcendental anglerfish! Things get spiny on Outer Wilds this week.
- I would love to know if M.R. James ever went on a good holiday. You know, just a bit of fishing, nice long walks. Based on this week's story, A View From A Hill, I have my doubts...
Podcast Land
|
|
|
|
Cyberpunk noir visual novel / post-human dating sim with an entirely LGBT+ cast. I don't have the words for how up for this I am.
Video description: Farah and Sam, two possible leads, are introduced along with a string of romanceable NPCs.
|
|
Department of Received
Esoteric Print Goods
|
|
Signing Off / Playing Out
Thanks for reading, folks! I hope the week was good and you took some time for yourself. Everything is a lot right now and in many places the weather is even more than that. Be kind to yourselves and drink lots of water.
TFL returns next week. Check my Carrd for all the places you can find me, including the Twitters, where this is just absolute joy. Follow us on Twitch to be notified when we go live.
TFL is a free weekly newsletter. Here's how you can support it and me:
And thank you!
Playing us out this week is planetary treasure and truth-speaker LeVar Burton, with his comment on banning books. It's perfect.
And this?
|
|
|
|
is a Full Lid.
Video description: LeVar Burton comments on the push to ban children's books as a guest on The View.
|
|
|
|
|
