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The Full Lid
29th January 2021

Welcome, my friends, to The Full Lid, your weekly Friday at 5 . chunk of pop culture enthusiasm, career notes, reviews and anything else that I've enjoyed this week. Think of it as email, but good! And I promise it will never, ever ask whether you'd like to join its LinkedIn network.

This week's interstitials are a tribute to Mira Furlan, best known in the west for Babylon 5, who sadly passed away last week.

Onward to contents!

Contents

Outside the Wire
Feeling Neighbourly
Away
Signal Boost
Where You Can Find Me This Week
Signing Off / Playing Out

Outside the Wire


Editor's note: spoilers

A civil war has torn Europe in half and left a resurgent Russia hungry for it's old territory. American armed forces are on the ground as peacekeepers and frequent targets. Lt. Thomas Harp (Damson Idris) learns this the hard way when his drone mission leads to two dead marines. From Harp's point of view it saved 38 others. From the perspective of Captain Leo (Anthony Mackie), it makes Harp his ideal right hand man.

Leo is a ghost hunter - a Special Forces operator whose sole job is to find the architects of this war. Leo is also an android, and one who needs a handler he can trust. A man like Harp.

Rob Yescombe and Rowan Athale's script is the exact opposite of its deceptively-likable leading man. Harp is cold and precise where the movie is big and expansive, running headlong at every big idea the subgenre can muster. It doesn't catch all of them but it gives it, under director Mikael Håfström, one hell of a try.

It's most successful when Idris and Mackie provide a sparky, instantly likable central relationship that echoes Mackie's earlier work with fellow future Avenger Jeremy Renner on The Hurt Locker. There, he was the uptight new guy. Here he's calm, principled and driven in a manner which should make anyone looking forward to Falcon and The Winter Soldier very happy. Leo has an exhausted, sarcastic decency to him which carries the movie through it's occasional lows. He's clearly invested in the campaign in the exact way Harp isn't. The friction between the two men powers the first hour, culminating in a gruelling run and gun at a bank which leaves them in the crosshairs of every faction in the field, including their own.

It's also, thanks to Håfström rendered in painfully up close and realistic detail. The 'Gumps', the robotic soldiers from both sides, are a tangible and brutalist threat. Idris in particular excels as Harp realizes not only that where he is on the battlefield but just how hard to kill he is not compared to his opponents escalating the tension and threat level even more. Which makes what follows that fight all the more impressive.
In one blisteringly smart moment , you (and Harp) realize there's 40 minutes of movie still to go. And that's when Outside the Wire starts pulling the cards from its sleeves.

First, the movie tackles digital consciousness. Leo and his grim charm doesn't want to be a weapon in a (implied but never said) white man's war. In one of the movie's best moments he explains to Harp why 'they made him black', and it boils down to Hearts and Minds. Because the only way to make a US soldier non-threatening is to not make him white. Looked at this way, Leo is a consciousness trapped inside a body he doesn't want following orders he doesn't believe in. No wonder he rebels.

The nature of that rebellion is the second issue. He lies to Harp so he'll help remove the android's tracker, becoming unbound in every sense. The idea of a weapon so powerful it wants to end wars is both common and familiar ground in these genre-savvy hallways (Howls in Bad Wolf) and is handled particularly well here.

Lastly, and regrettably, the movie falls down when it comes to central tenants like personal power and agency. Leo has agency from the start and, from his perspective, only loses it to Harp. But as the movie proceeds Harp goes on a journey of his own. The arrogant drone driver is reduced to a terrified observer and finally, someone more at home on the ground than in the air. The final bitter irony being he sounds more like a robot than Leo ever did as he accepts the cost of a war his colleague refused to accept needed to be fought at all.

This constant juggle of ambition and action defines the second half, including a maddeningly interesting final confrontation between the two men which balances the pulp ('stop that nuke we're shooting each other near!') with the philosophical ('what makes a good man?') and the action cinema of the 1990s ('we're gonna have to juuuump!'). It all works but you can't help but wonder what this would look like if it had settled down, picked a lane and run with it. 

Outside the Wire is an ambitious, complex movie that strives for depth when most of it's subgenre reaches for adequacy and calls it a day. This is what action science fiction is trying to become and I'm delighted to see the progress it represents. Well worth a watch.

Outside the Wire is on Netflix UK now.
Mira Furlan: Delenn and Lennier

This first meeting between Furlan's Delenn and Bill Mumy as her wonderful, doomed assistant Lennier is a masterclass in Furlan's talent. She moves entirely differently as this Delenn, her presence colder and more alien. Just really impressive, intuitive craft.

Feeling Neighbourly


Editor's note: spoilers for episode one


Do you ever wonder about your neighbours? Who they are? What they do? Just what they're shrieking through the wall at 12.30am? I do, and so does Matthew 'OK' Smith, who writes, produces and stars in this first episode. Matthew has more than a slight air of Rod Serling, a joyous, gentle voice wrapping us up in the description of Little Street and the friendly, gentle syllables that unroll like you always imagine cotton wool should.

Dorothy and Robert live in Number 1 with their daughter Agatha. Dorothy and Robert are cheerful home bodies and loving parents who, as Matthew welcomes us into their home, have a very odd stain on the floor of their hall.

This is the story of that stain. And everything beneath it.

The genius of the show lies in the contrast between what people see and what's really going on, all wrapped up in Smith's voice. There's constant mirth here, a sense of a story well told and with one eye on the audience. The host as willing conspirator in a benevolent cabal rather than the standoffish sentinel of The Twilight Zone. The show is so fun to listen to, and Matthew such a charming narrator than when the first hints arrive you almost miss them. Then the second and the third follow and before you know it both you and Agatha are seeing just how far from normal 1 Little Street's residents are.

But the show isn't done yet. This is that rarest of beasts, a horror story that doesn't finish where you'd expect but somewhere better and darker, somewhere that recontextualizes what came before (the trailers are excellent) and sets up what's to come.

All under 40 minutes. All with a smile that you notice, far too late, doesn't quite reach the eyes...

Neighbourly's first episode is out now and an absolute, blood-soaked joy. Suburban dystopia has never sounded this welcoming. Find all the links you need at Neighbourly's carrd, including credits for music (Alex Schwartz), art (Cloudy Apple Art) and the ensemble writing cast.

An amazing debut - I can't wait for more. Reserve your plot on Little Street at their Patreon.
Mira Furlan: Danielle Rousseau

I have a very complex relationship with Lost. I love the later seasons (especially this) but the early seasons make me want to shake them and yell 'TALK! ABOUT! THE POLAR BEAR!'. Furlan was never a big part of the show but always an impressive one.

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Away

 

Editor's note: spoilers


A boy wakes up in a parachute, in a tree. He watches, horror-struck as a hulking, dark liquid figure walks slowly towards him, absorbs him and then...

The boy is on the ground. He gets up, and runs. The figure follows.

This is the world of Away.

Gints Zilbalodis is an astounding talent. He's produced this movie entirely alone. Written, animated, scored, directed, all of it is Zilbalodis. It's entrancing to watch. His animation style has been compared to Miyazaki but honestly I see video game design far more present. The Colossus has the look of something from Ico or Shadow of the Colossus while the boy, incongruously modern and frail, could be a descendant of the stunningly good The Last Guardian's protagonist.

Where the Miyazaki comparison is absolutely on point is in the way Zilbalodis uses silence. In one twin action scene, boy's pet bird and a fox stalk one another at the same time as the boy sets a trap for the Colossus. Both parties aware of the other, both aware of the stakes and both do what they do anyway. It's an unbearably tense moment which is also impossibly beautiful, a seemingly infinite bridge just the latest battleground in a gorgeous, silent, verdant landscape the boy finds himself running across. The effect is Miyazakian in pacing with of the tension of It Follows

The boy is only ever relaxed for a while. The Colossus is always on the way. There's always another problem, another decision gate, another thing to do before you go sleep or rest.

Oof. 
The challenge of a story like this is it trusts you to bring meaning to it. The beauty of a story like this is it challenges you to bring meaning to it. For me, the boy's journey is about learning to take time for himself and others because that's the major issue in my life right now. Others will find the Colossus resonates with the pandemic -- an ever present, ever approaching threat. Others still will view this as an extended adulthood metaphor, or a story about the horror of being unable to escape their family. Or the joy of that certainty. Or all of them at once.

A movie like this is a beautiful backdrop, letting what you bring to it unfold at take center. Zilbalodis' purpose is as pure as the boy's and whether it's rescuing a turtle, the most distressing mountain sequence since Journeyor the joyous lakebed sequence below, there is always something to ascribe meaning from. Always something to run from. Always where to return.

The ending of Away is deliberately obtuse. I want it to be hopeful and can see how it is. Others will see it as anything but. Both are equally valid, shivering and dancing in the heat haze of a boy, a bike and a bird, all, for the moment, getting Away.

AWAY is out now on all major digital download platforms, as well as various independent cinema platforms, including Curzon Home Cinema and Modern Films.
Mira Furlan: Garibaldi's Second Favorite Thing

Full disclosure: Uncle Mike is my DUDE and this is his finest hour by some distance. But Furlan makes the scene with her combination of intelligence and goofiness coming through to lands the whole routine.

Signal Boost

 

Books

Podcasts

RPGs

That's this week's Signal Boost, folks. If you have a project you'd like to see here get in touch.

Want More?

Where You Can Find Me This Week

 

The Clock App

Twitch 

Podcast Land
 

PseudoPod 741: Lukundoo

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Mira Furlan: Le Cinema
 
And on top of all that she did spiky pseudo-Blondie punk?! Rest in power, Ambassador.

Signing Off / Playing Out


Thanks for reading, folks!  Weird week. Weird fast week.

TFL will return next week. Check out my shiny new Carrd for all the places you can find me, including the Team KennerStuart Instagram and the Twitters, that will make you a bacon sarnie and deliver it whether you want to not. Twitch streams are also ongoing -- follow the channel to get notified when we go live.

This work is produced for free. If you like what you read please consider dropping something in the tip jar or sign up for The Full Lid Plus, my monthly subscription substack (currently on hiatus for relocation because fuck Nazis) where I'm deep-diving into the Disney+ back catalog. And thank you!

Playing us out this week is is the best man behind a desk in the business, asking the questions no one else dares.

His name? John Oliver And this?
is a Full Lid.
Copyright Alasdair Stuart © 2021 -- All rights reserved

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Agathon Towers · Cheapside Road · Reading, Berkshire RG1 7AG · United Kingdom

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