Teenage Bounty Hunters

 TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS

** SPOILERS **

When Teenage Bounty Hunters begins, Bowser Jenkins' (Kadeem Hardison) reaction upon meeting fraternal twins Blair (Anjelica Bette Fellini) and Sterling Wesley (Maddie Phillips) is spot-on: "Y'all just weird." The girls somehow collared a skip thanks to Sterling being an uncanny shot and Blair being as fast and fearless as Vin Diesel before Blair proudly announced that Sterling just got laid (for the first time). Weird is one word to describe Sterling and Blair. Others would be endearing, irrepressible, terrific. Thanks to Bowser, who wonders aloud how he became their Obi-Wan Kenobi, Blair and Sterling become Teenage Bounty Hunters, and they, like this surprisingly fantastic Netflix series, are the great Gen Z hope we've been waiting for. We didn't expect that hope to be in the form of Blair and Sterling but now we wonder how we ever got along without them.

Blair and Sterling are holy creations; the daughters of affluent Atlanta white Republicans, they attend Willingham Academy, a private Christian school, and while they love and respect God, they're curiously open-minded, liberal-leaning, social justice-seeking angels. Well, sometimes. Blair, played by The Gifted season 2 scene-stealer Anjelica Bette Fellini, is headstrong, dramatic, and thinks constantly about sex. Sterling, played by Van Helsing scene-stealer Maddie Phillips, describes herself as a nervous person but she's kind, open, patient, and exceptionally bright. In Teenage Bounty Hunters, the two leads don't steal scenes; rather, Fellini and Phillips own every moment they're on screen, together or apart. Meanwhile, for those of us who really haven't seen Kadeem Hardison since he wore flip-up Harry Potter glasses in A Different World, he's a world-weary but good-hearted revelation as Bowser, who takes a shine to the twins even as they baffle and frustrate him.

Teenage Bounty Hunters promised wit and action but there's far more wit in the crackerjack writing and hilarious and insightful dialogue. Blair and Sterling have a deliriously fun banter where the girls effortlessly sell that they've been as one for their entire lives, and the love they feel for each other is palpable even when they are occasionally at loggerheads. While each episode has a case for the teenage bounty hunters to investigate, the real meat of the story happens at Willingham, where Sterling is at odds with her rival since the fifth grade, April Stevens (a remarkable Devon Hales), the mean girl at school who's hiding a secret that she tragically can't share. But Sterling is on a stunning path of self-awakening, which leads her to ditch her sweet but dim-witted boyfriend Luke (Spencer House from The Society), and her evolving relationship with April is delightfully surprising, deftly handled, and heartfelt.

Meanwhile, Blair has her own romance with Miles (Myles Evans), the African-American valet at their exclusive country club who was hiding his own secret. After rebuffing Miles' interest, Blair becomes interested and then obsessed with him, and eventually, Blair genuinely falls in love. With Miles and Blair's dual relationships, Teenage Bounty Hunters cleverly addresses issues of race and class, with an ingenious inversion taking place between the two. Just as Sterling is endearingly angelic, Blair is endearingly the wrecking ball Miley Cyrus described in her song, and the show also has a lot of fun with how terrible Blair is at interrogating people. But Blair's love story with Miles is as emotional, honest, and real as Sterling's is with April. Teenage Bounty Hunters' greatest trick is to lure you in with humor and then smack you in the feels with how deeply substantive it is.

Yet through all of Blair and Sterling's dramas in school and in the field with Bowser - who has his own relationship trials with his bail bondsman, Yolanda (Shirley Rumierk) - Teenage Bounty Hunters plays the long game with a season-long mystery surrounding the twins' parents and a mysterious Wanted poster of a woman who looks exactly like Sterling and Blair's mother Debbie (Virginia Williams). Teenage Bounty Hunters drops clues we don't even notice at first, but like Blair's uncanny Spider-Sense for her parents lying to her, we discover that there's much more going on with Debbie and her well-heeled husband Anderson (Mackenzie Astin) than meets the eye. I won't ruin the shocking revelations but, by the end of Teenage Bounty Hunters season 1, everything Blair and Sterling ever believed explodes in their faces and we're left as aghast as they are. 

There are precious few perfect seasons of television - Veronica Mars season 1 and The Wire season 3 immediately come to mind - but Teenage Bounty Hunters is a perfect show; fully-formed, endlessly surprising, bursting with charm, intelligence, heart, daring, and two of the best young female characters in recent memory. Ending the season with Blair and Sterling's mouths agape (along with mine) while Radiohead's "Idioteque" plays over the credits is a perfect topping on the frozen yogurt.

TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS: EVER CLUE TO [SPOILER]'S BIG TWIST

TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS SEASON 1'S BIGGEST UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS SEASON 1 CLIFFHANGER ENDING EXPLAINED

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS SEASON 2

TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS CAST GUIDE:
WHERE YOU RECOGNIZE THE ACTORS FROM

Hanna Season 2

HANNA SEASON 2

** SPOILERS **

Hanna season 2 ingeniously reinvents the series about the teenage super-soldier Hanna Petrescu (Esme Creed-Miles) and injects the story about one lone girl searching for purpose into a compelling larger universe of an entire school of teenage assassins looking for a greater purpose. Hanna season 1 was loosely adapted from the 2011 feature film directed by Joe Wright starring Saoirse Ronan in the title role before it veered in a different, and frankly, better direction. With Hanna season 2, showrunner David Farr's soft reboot cleverly forces Hanna to answer the question of where she fits in and what role she will have in this new expanded universe she finds herself at the center of.

Hanna was originally part of Utrax, a clandestine CIA program that began in the early 2000s in Romania. Utrax has a vague, science fiction-y premise of injecting infants with wolf DNA to make them superior soldiers... uh, however that works. Regardless, Hanna and her adoptive father Erik Heller (Joel Kinnaman) shut down Utrax in Hanna season 1, although it cost Erik his life and Hanna fled back to the forest where she grew up with her 'sister' from Utrax, Clara (Yasmin Monet Prince). Hanna season 2 picks up some time after; as Hanna and Clara continue hiding in the Romanian wilderness, Utrax relocated to a Downton Abbey-like English country manor called the Meadows. Utrax's trainees, who were treated like robots in season 1 and are now enhanced synthetically instead of through genetic manipulation, received a serious lifestyle upgrade. Each given fabricated names and histories, the girls of Utrax find themselves living and learning in a boarding school for assassins. Hanna turns season 2 into a cross between Harry Potter and Killing Eve - it's brilliant and it works like gangbusters.

Naturally, Clara is unhappy living in the forest (who can blame her?) and she's obsessed with finding her birth mother (again, hard to blame her). Utrax reacquires Clara and sends her to the Meadows where she's the problem child in the school -- until Hanna arrives to rescue her and Hanna herself becomes the school's even more-of-a-problem child. But the best characters of the show are the girls who are gung-ho to be in Utrax. Hanna's prize pupils are Sandy Phillips (Aine Rose Daly), the blonde, effervescent true believer, and Jules Allen (Gianna Kiehl), the headstrong, independent thinker who figures out pretty early on that she fancies girls more than boys. When Hanna season 2 focuses on the trainees at Utrax, their training, and their attempts to be "normal teenage girls" (wholly sponsored by their CIA overseers), the series really crackles. These girls are being trained to become US Government sanctioned assassins but they're delightful, bright, naive, and incredibly dangerous. No teenage boy is a match for Utrax's trainees and they know it. Placing the girls of Utrax at the heart of the show alongside Hanna is the series' masterstroke.

Meanwhile, there are also adults on this show. Hanna season 2 brings back devious and tough-as-nails Marissa Wiegler (Mireille Enos), who was relentlessly hunting Hanna in season 1 but they're now on the same side, although Hanna can't bring herself to fully trust Marissa (Erik taught her well). Marissa's real obsession is getting to the bottom of Utrax and her old teacher at the agency, John Carmichael (Dermot Mulroney), who now runs the program for a shadowy section of the CIA called the Pioneer Group. Marissa has a tough season 2; she's beaten up and captured several times (Hanna also hands Wiegler her ass) but she's the smartest person on the show and, eventually, Marissa figures out how to take Utrax over to her own advantage. Another compelling new character is Terri Miller (Cherrelle Skeete), a fresh recruit from the CIA who creates all of the Utrax girls' identities and intimately gets to know them in ways no one else does. Also, Carmichael doesn't seem all that bad for a bad guy. Late in the series, Carmichael gently pats Sandy on the shoulder and tells her "I'm proud of you". This sweet moment was one of the highlights of young Sandy's life.

As entertaining as the Meadows school setting is, the final three episodes of the season highlight the new direction's true potential when Hanna and Jules are deployed to London while Sandy and Clara are sent to Barcelona to take out their targets. Hanna season 2's spy games are a cross between the first Mission: Impossible movie and Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Utrax's girls are trying to acquire a list of future targets but that list sounds suspiciously like Hydra's Project Insight plan - except Utrax will use 18 -year-old female assassins in lieu of Helicarriers. Hanna, Jules, Sandy, and Clara plunged into the real world, and posing as international boarding school students delightfully brings with it all of the requisite coming-of-age thrills of travel, discovery, rebelliousness, and, of course, gun-toting violence. More of this please, Hanna.

If there's a stick-in-the-mud at the Meadows, it's Hanna herself, who can't bring herself to fit in at Utrax, even though it's really where she belongs. Esme Creed-Miles always makes Hanna empathetic, but come on, she's not much fun to be around, is she? It's certainly hard to go to school with Hanna. To her credit, Hanna fundamentally objects to being used as an assassin, which is what makes her a hero, and yet, she simply can't survive in a world where the CIA will continually hunt her. As the Utrax O.G., Hanna is certainly tough, clever, and resourceful but Hanna season 2 does a thorough job of defining her limits. The show doesn't flinch from the harsh realities that Hanna has no options for a happy life of freedom, but Hanna herself, for all of her abilities and life experience her 'sisters' lack, can't see how to make Utrax work for her. This is why the ending of Hanna season 2 is so brilliant: Marissa takes over Utrax from Carmichael and will use them to fight their patrons, the Pioneer Group in season 3. That's a hell of a hook and Hanna season 3 can't come soon enough.

Killing Eve Season 3

KILLING EVE SEASON 3

** SPOILERS** 

When Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) originally recruited Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) to MI6 and brought her to what would be their office in Killing Eve season 1, she pointed out to Eve that she once saw a rat drinking from a can of Coke with both hands. "Extraordinary!" Carolyn mused. That's as apt a simile as any to describe my fascination with Killing Eve, which just wrapped its third, and possibly, its most seismic season. The series is long past the giddy novelty and sheer inventiveness of the Phoebe Waller-Bridge-helmed first season, but Killing Eve remains a lurid and florid dream, anchored by the consistently impressive performances of its leads. Jodie Comer is undeniably magnetic and finds never-ending ways to be electifyingly provocative as Villanelle, Sandra Oh is an understated cauldron of barely suppressed rage and desire as Eve, Fiona Shaw's stiff-upper-lipped, calculating calm only grows more riveting as Carolyn, and no one forces himself to swallow down his evident, rampant fears more than Kim Bodnia as Konstanin Vasiliev.

The ending of Killing Eve season 3 haunted me. Eve and Villanelle were kept apart for almost the entire season; except for a brawl and long-awaited kiss on a London bus in episode 3, "Meetings Have Biscuits", the obsessed would-be lovers didn't spend any real time together until the season finale, "Are You Leading Or Am I?" By the time they met up in a dance hall (the site of Villanelle's first murder in London), it seems everything between them has been tentatively forgiven: Villanelle shooting Eve (dead, she thought) in the season 2 finale now seems like a lifetime ago (despite less than a year passing in the series' timeline). By this moment, Villanelle can call Eve for help and she comes running. As the two of them sat together and watched happy couples dancing, everything has changed for them as individuals. Eve has lost her marriage - Niko miraculously and inexplicably survived Dasha Durzan (Harriet Walter) framing Villanelle by stabbing him in the neck with a pitchfork and he told Eve to "piss off" - and she has no career direction.

Meanwhile, Villanelle's entire self-designed world collapsed in season 3. Already deeply unhappy (season 3 forgot that Villanelle got married at the start of the season and she presumably still is), she had an identity crisis that led Villanelle back to Russia to confront her mother Titania (Evgenia Dodina) and then kill her. Villanelle hasn't been the same (how could she be?) and she no longer wants to kill. But being the best assassin money can buy is not only her first, best destiny, but the series poses the question (directly articulated by Carolyn) of what value Villanelle holds to anyone if she's not a killer? Throughout the season, Villanelle, who "was trained to be devastating" and invented a glamorously appealing persona she was quite pleased with in season 1, has only grown sadder and, in a way, behaves in a more childlike and pure way. She wanted a hug from her mother, who was an abusive psychopath incapable of affection. The hug that Villanelle expectedly did get (which stunningly brought her to tears) was from Helene (Camille Cottin), the leader of The Twelve, who only rewarded her for being a "beautiful monster". But is that all Villanelle truly is?

"Do you ever think about the past?" Villanelle asked Eve. "All the time," Eve responded, sadly. "It's all I think about." Indeed. Everything Eve gave up, everything she lost, was because deep down she wanted to. And for Villanelle, her past is lined with blood and corpses, including her own mother's. In their climactic scene at the Tower Bridge, Eve tacitly admitted that she didn't really want her marriage to Niko, their home, or their chicken (and she probably never did) and that the monster inside Villanelle enabled the monster inside Eve. And that Eve wants her to. She doesn't want it to stop, even though she thinks she does.

And with that, Killing Eve asks us to consider, for Villanelle and Eve, and for ourselves in this violently unfair, tumultuously uncertain world we live in, what is the future? What can we really hope for? What is possible for us? What is hopeless but worth reaching for anyway? Before they tried to walk away from each other - and they both stopped and betrayed their agreement never to look back - Eve confessed that every time she visualized her future now, she saw Villanelle's face. "It's a very beautiful face," Villanelle assured her. Killing Eve season 3 sadly comes to the conclusion that Eve and Villanelle are two people swimming against the tide, doomed to drown with each other, their futures forever in doubt. Their two monsters wrecked the other relationships in their lives, and yet, they do have each other, which, in the twisted way that's pure Killing Eve, makes them both lucky. In their world, and in ours, what more can Villanelle and Eve really ask for? 

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

BIRDS OF PREY

 (AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN)

** SPOILERS **

Mmm BoP

You know those little windup toys you can get for cheap? Maybe one's a little monkey clanging cymbals, another could be a little dinosaur with chattering teeth, and a windup car that goes vroom for a few feet before coming to a dead stop? Director Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is like five of those toys clanging together for an hour and 47 minutes. The only things they have in common is the kid who happens to be playing with them and at the end, she lines them all up and has a little race, which is, admittedly, kinda fun, but then she gets called inside for dinner and leaves all her trinkets on the sidewalk.

Birds of Prey is as colorful and messy as Harley Quinn herself and the film is, shall we say, not very good, but it tries very hard and earnestly. Centering entirely on Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the breakout character of Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey is about her coming into her own as a strong, independent, clown princess of crime (kind of) after her breakup with the Joker (presumably Jared Leto, but Mr. J is unseen but constantly talked about, like Poochie). The Joker actually throws Harley out unceremoniously (by literally just locking her out of his house) and Harley narrates her own emancipation as she tries to start anew without being the harlequin subservient to her male master (her words). Unfortunately, little Miss Quinn learns that her affiliation with the Joker was the only thing that was shielding her from Gotham's underworld wanting to string her up by her heels. Harley becomes a target of every (non-costume-wearing) thug wanting to collect a huge bounty in Gotham City's East End, a section of town Batman apparently never visits and is run by trust fund baby/crime boss Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), aka Black Mask. Why is he called Black Mask? Because, by the end of the movie, he wears a black mask (that's as deep as this thing gets).

Because Harley is narrating this little tale (and she's cuh-razy... sometimes), Birds of Prey is somehow both thinly-plotted and overplotted simultaneously and the movie unfolds in bewildering fits and starts. It's as if screenwriter Christina Hodson (who wrote the excellent Bumblebee) tried to crib Pulp Fiction while she was high on meth, but then she gave up and got hit by a bus, scattering the pages every which way. The film introduces us (and Harley) to the other Gotham girls in this Gang of Five: First, there's Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), who likes to be called Black Canary (according to Harley, but Dinah herself never says so), and is a chanteuse/chauffeur working for Sionis. Dinah is the only one with superpowers: a Canary Cry sonic scream that she only uses once (on purpose). Then there's Detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), a grizzled cop always being passed over by mediocre men in the GCPD (but not Commissioner James Gordon, who is never mentioned). There's also Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a teenage pickpocket who steals this movie's MacGuffan - a diamond containing the serial numbers to the fabulous fortune of the Bertinelli crime family, the richest people in Gotham (not named Wayne). Finally, there's Helena Bertinelli (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a vigilante murdering the criminals who executed her family like the Romanovs with a crossbow, and goes by the name Huntress. The running gag of Helena always trying to dramatically say her codename - "They call me..." and everyone cutting her off and calling her "The Crossbow Killer" is the best joke of the whole movie but also drags across the whole movie. 

This is a lot of characters to juggle and it takes them for-fucking-ever to all get-together. Anyone going into Birds of Prey expecting Harley to be surrounded by a loyal girl gang that sticks it to the asshole men in their lives has to literally wait until the last 10 minutes for it to happen. Instead, each of the Birds of Prey is belittled, abused, and victimized ad nauseam by every character with a Y chromosome in the film (even Harley's kindly Chinese landlord betrays her for a wad of cash). Harley spends the length of the movie alternating between being a damsel in distress and a relentless fighting machine who can take out scores of thugs while high on cocaine. There's a little mentor-student stuff where Harley takes Cassandra under her criminal wing and there are fleeting references to how Harley owns a stuffed beaver she talks to (because she's crazy) and a hyena named Bruce (named after "that hunky Wayne guy") that nods to her comic books but falls flat in the film. There's also a lot of action, in that the movie basically delivers the same fight scenes 3-4 times where Harley (and later, with the rest of the BoP) acrobatically takes out legions of thugs with her signature baseball bat. 

As the main character who's essentially a human Looney Tunes (she even watches Bugs Bunny cartoons while eating cereal at home), Harley Quinn is equal parts grating and irresistible - the latter can be attributed to the irrepressible movie star charisma of Margot Robbie and it's hard to see how this character could work anywhere near as well with someone else playing her. The other characters get little moments to shine but are underserved, comparatively; Dinah needed a lot more to do while Helena is mostly kept on the wayside and she doesn't even get to show her personality until the final minutes of the movie. However, the real embarrassment are the villains: McGregor is a disaster as Roman Sionis, playing Black Mask as a seething man baby that skirts towards Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever farcical. Just as awful is Chris Messina as Victor Zsasz, Sionis' skeevy, psychotic henchman who is apparently super into Roman but the movie doesn't really get into it. Zsasz is supposed to be one of Gotham's worst serial killers but he doesn't kill anyone in the movie. He does, however, get pickpocketed like a rube. Anyway, they're terrible villains and by the end, Batman will never even get to punch Black Mask in the face in this version of the DCEU. Overall, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) feels like too much of a good Quinn, but then again, Harley is never more relatable or endearing than when she's just trying to eat a breakfast sandwich.

Netflix's Dracula at Screen Rant

NETFLIX'S DRACULA AT SCREEN RANT

Dracula on Netflix, by the creators of Sherlock, was a fantastic New Year's surprise. Witty, penetrating, constantly surprising, I had a bloody great time covering Dracula for Screen Rant.

WHO TURNED DRACULA INTO A VAMPIRE 

(IN ORIGINAL BOOKS AND NETFLIX SHOW)

NETFLIX'S DRACULA: DIFFERENCES AND COMPARISONS

TO STOKER'S ORIGINAL STORY

NETFLIX'S DRACULA: WHY THE VAMPIRE FEARS THE CROSS

NETFLIX'S DRACULA SEASON 1 ENDING EXPLAINED

NETFLIX'S DRACULA SUGGESTS MOZART BECAME A VAMPIRE

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM NETFLIX'S DRACULA SEASON 2

NETFLIX'S DRACULA CAST AND CHARACTER GUIDE

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

** SPOILERS **

The Last Skywalker

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is everything: the conclusion of the 42-year, 9-film Skywalker Saga, the last of the Disney sequel trilogy, the death of cinema, the end of the Star Wars franchise (to hear some lament it), the biggest, craziest, balls-to-the-wall, overstuffed, most ridiculous Star Wars movie of all - take your pick. Hell, take more than one thing. The Rise of Skywalker is like one of those booths where you stand still and money flies around you - in this case, instead of money, it's Star Wars references and your nerd love itself for the galaxy far, far away - and you just grab everything you can to keep as yours. It's not a movie as much as it is a checklist the length of a CVS receipt. It is a jaw-dropping disaster from a structural, screenwriting, and editing (certain) point of view. Overflowing with a trilogy's worth of half-baked ideas, it is hellbent on cramming anything and everything - this is "the last one", after all - into a manic 2 1/2 hour runtime. It is the light and the dark. It is a mess. So, I, uh... I kinda loved it.

Full disclosure: After falling deliriously in love with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which reignited the warm, fuzzy feels of the Force inside me that I hadn't felt since I was a child, sometime after the toxic malaise surrounding Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the who-gives-a-shit failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story, I became emotionally divested from Star Wars. I've never given a whiff (or a Whill) for the expanded universe; I only like the movies but I don't really care about the galaxy far, far away like so many seem to. Therefore, whatever director J.J. Abrams ended up doing with The Rise of Skywalker, as long as the damn thing didn't bore me, I figured I'd be fine. Well, The Rise of Skywalker wasn't boring, I'll tell you that much. Half the time, I had no idea what was going on or why the characters were doing what they were doing to get this ludicrous movie from plot point to plot point, but never once was I bored. And there were even moments, like when Rey (Daisy Ridley, as beautiful and wildly charismatic as ever) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, probably in his trailer complaining to his agent after every "CUT!") Force dueled over an escaping transport and Rey shot Force lightning from her hands, that I gasped in delight. Because I was having fun thanks to being gobsmacked at this insane movie relentlessly going for broke every single second.

The screenplay by Chris Terrio and J.J. Abrams is like a fairly decent second draft that needed a serious polish but instead got workshopped by a bunch of eleven-year-olds. To recount the plot would lead me to madness but, suffice to say, somehow Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is still alive because some Sith weirdos cloned him but they cloned him to still be a decrepit old man for some reason. Not unlike how Spectre retconned Daniel Craig's (himself a Star Wars veteran) James Bond movies so Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) was the main villain all along, Palpatine is now the man who was behind everything from Ben Solo's fall to the Dark Side to become Kylo Ren to Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong'o) losing her goggles, probably. Palpatine has been busy in the last 30 years not just being alive but also somehow building a gigantic fleet called the Final Order where every Star Destroyer now has a planet-killing Death Star laser cannon. What's the plan, Sheev, you mastermind? Blow up every planet in the galaxy so no one has anywhere to live except Star Destroyers? Probably. Doesn't matter. Palpatine gives Kylo Ren marching orders: kill Rey. Except he doesn't really want Rey killed; he needs her to transfer his life essence into so she can become Empress Palpatine. For you see, Rey's full name is Rey Palpatine and she's Sheev's granddaughter. Whatever I feel about this (I feel fine), it's washed down with a spoonful of sugar because Jodie Comer from Killing Eve cameos as Rey's Mom (for me, personally, this is the best thing in the movie).

It's cool to see Rey running off into a breakneck, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants adventure with Finn (John Boyega), Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), BB-8, C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels), and their new Droid friend D/O (who I loved). R2D2 got left behind because too many Droids, I guess? Who can say? Things just have to keep moving, everyone has lots of places to be. From a new desert planet to a new seedy underworld planet to the old forest moon of Endor, Rey and the Gang are busy bees and they even break into Kylo Ren's personal Star Destroyer for reasons I can no longer remember, if I even knew what they were to begin with. Regardless, Rey is chasing after a McGuffin, a Sith wayfinder device that points the way to Palpatine. Lots of crazy stuff happens like mind-wiping Threepio, meeting a new helmeted ally and ex-flame (?) of Poe's named Zorri Bliss (Keri Russell), and Rey Force healing a giant snake that wandered in from the Harry Potter set. On Endor, Finn - who spends the whole movie trying to tell Rey a secret and then never actually getting to say it - meets another ex-Stormtrooper named Jannah (Naomi Ackie) while Rey briefly fights herself as Dark Rey before spending a lot longer fighting Kylo Ren on the ruins of the Death Star. That is, until General Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher worked in as smoothly as possible using old footage) decides to give her life to briefly distract her son so Rey can kill him. But, like many other deaths in this movie, it's a fakeout that doesn't stick.

For the record: people who died in The Rise of Skywalker but came back to life: Rey, Kylo Ren (mortally wounded but healed), Chewbacca (believed dead but wasn't). People who died for reals: Leia, Ben Solo, General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E. Grant), Palpatine, Snap Wexley (Greg Grunberg). People who were dead but showed up as ghosts: Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, who can do shit as a Force ghost like catch a lightsaber and raise his own X-Wing from the sea), Han Solo (Harrison Ford - which I really liked even if it makes maybe less sense than the stuff ghost Luke did). Geez, I haven't even mentioned Billy Dee Williams returning as Lando Calrissian or all of the guest voice cameos like Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, Ewan McGregor and Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu, and Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn. I mean, this movie is, as stated before, ridiculous, but it's the 'last one' so whatever, throw it all in there, who gives a shit? Oh, Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) is in this too and she got seriously turfed because they couldn't think of anything for her to do. But at least there were more space horses in this movie. Oh my God, the Knights of Ren were in this too and boy, weren't they just worth the wait? 

And yet, it all comes down to Rey, the hero of this saga, facing off against her grandfather Emperor Palpatine alongside the newly redeemed Ben Solo while the biggest fleet of Star Destroyers ever takes on the biggest fleet of Rebel ships ever. After she saves the galaxy, knowing full well that the last name "Palpatine" would lead to doors all over the galaxy slammed in her face, Rey adopts the slightly less tainted last name Skywalker, thereby inheriting everything that was her grandfather's and everything passed down from Anakin to his twin children to Leia's prodigal son - and she deserves it. A constant theme in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is characters announcing, "If this doesn't work, everything we did will have been for nothing" and the movie itself seems to be desperately aware of this too. So, did it work? Did this bombastic, turducken of a final film deliver? As someone who truly likes Rey, my agenda of Give Rey Everything was completely shared by J.J. Abrams. By the end, Rey is the Last Jedi, the first of the new Jedi, she gets her first kiss (finally!), and she even visits the old Lars/Skywalker homestead on Tatooine and looks at the setting twin suns with BB-8 at her side. So, for me, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker worked as well as it possibly could have. I wish Rey Skywalker the best and look forward to seeing her again someday because, as The Rise of Skywalker reminds us, no one's ever really gone.

Watchmen HBO

WATCHMEN HBO

I didn't expect to become fascinated by Damon Lindelof's Watchmen on HBO but the new series has enthralled me. I'm in, wherever the show takes me, I'm in. Here are my collected Screen Rant Features about Watchmen, the world, and the characters - because nothing ever ends.

HBO WATCHMEN'S 12 BIGGEST UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

HBO'S WATCHMEN SEASON 1 ENDING EXPLAINED

WILL WATCHMEN SEASON 2 HAPPEN? HERE'S WHAT IT COULD LOOK LIKE

WATCHMEN THEORY: DOCTOR MANHATTAN HAS ALREADY 

GIVEN AWAY HIS POWERS

HBO'S WATCHMEN RETCONS THE ORIGINAL COMICS' PLAN AGAIN

WATCHMEN THEORY: OZYMANDIAS IS ALREADY ON EARTH
(AND WAS ALL ALONG)

WATCHMEN THEORY: [SPOILER] ARE ADRIAN VEIDT'S PARENTS

WATCHMEN EPISODE 8'S SECRET POST-CREDITS SCENE EXPLAINED

WATCHMEN DOES SOMETHING UNTHINKABLE
AND BRILLIANT WITH THE TIMELINE

HBO's WATCHMEN POSTER GAVE AWAY THE BIG TWIST (AND WE ALL MISSED IT)

WATCHMEN THEORY: DOCTOR MANHATTAN'S HUMAN DISGUISE
WAS A REAL PERSON

BATMAN EXISTS IN HBO'S WATCHMEN (AND HE'S BLACK)

WATCHMEN EPISODE 7'S BIG TWIST EXPLAINED

HBO'S WATCHMEN BRINGS BACK AN OLD COMIC IDEA (AND MAKES IT LETHAL)

WATCHMEN REVEALS HOODED JUSTICE'S IDENTITY 

(AND BREAKS FROM THE COMIC)

HBO'S WATCHMEN: ORIGIN OF LOOKING GLASS AND MIRROR MASK EXPLAINED

WATCHMEN REVEALS OZYMANDIAS' FULL VILLAIN PLAN

WATCHMEN REVEALS ORIGIN OF LAURIE BLAKE'S BRIEFCASE ITEM

WATCHMEN CONFIRMS WHAT HAPPENED TO NITE OWL 

AND SILK SPECTRE AFTER THE COMIC

WATCHMEN BRINGS THE WEIRDEST COMIC IDEA TO CANON

WATCHMEN CONFIRMS OZYMANDIAS IS [SPOILER] - BUT WHERE IS HE?

HBO'S WATCHMEN REDEEMED SILK SPECTRE

WATCHMEN: OUR 9 BIGGEST QUESTIONS AFTER SEASON 1, EPISODE 3

WATCHMEN CONFIRMS JEREMY IRONS' CHARACTER - BUT WHO IS [SPOILER]?

WATCHMEN: OUR 10 BIGGEST UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
FROM SEASON 1, EPISODE 2

WATCHMEN THEORY: ADRIAN VEIDT'S BUTLER IS DOCTOR MANHATTAN

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN BETWEEN THE WATCHMEN GRAPHIC NOVEL AND THE HBO SERIES

HBO'S WATCHMEN EXPLAINS WHERE NITE-OWL IS

WATCHMEN: OUR 14 BIGGEST UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
AFTER THE SERIES PREMIERE

HBO'S WATCHMEN HAS A BIG ZACK SNYDER EASTER EGG

WATCHMEN: WHY THE POLICE WEAR MASKS REVEALED

HBO'S WATCHMEN WORLD & TIMELINE CHANGES EXPLAINED