Author: Trafficblast

The Tiger King and I — a Tiger King after show hosted by Joel McHale and featuring brand new interviews with John Reinke, Joshua Dial, John Finlay, Saff, Erik Cowie, Rick Kirkman, and Jeff and Lauren Lowe — will premiere April 12 pic.twitter.com/8fbbNdaiDA

— Netflix (@netflix) April 9, 2020

Here at IGN we occasionally like to showcase something from geekdom’s rich history — a pop-culture Time Capsule, if you will, that gives us a peek in to the past, perhaps providing a new appreciation for previous projects. If you’d like, please check out the past few Time Capsules:

• George Lucas’ first day writing Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
• The Rock kicking Seven of Nine’s Borg butt on Star Trek: Voyager
• The Tom Waits interview that may have inspired Heath Ledger’s Joker
• Watch Christian Bale wear Val Kilmer’s batsuit from Batman Forever

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It’s hard to imagine a time when the only superhero movies hitting theaters involved Spider-Man, Batman, Blade, or the errant Painkiller Jane, but rest assured, what the village elders told you is true: There was a time before the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even if it doesn’t readily feel like it. Heck, there was even a time before superhero movies in general. History books merely refer to this era as “The Big Dark.”

Back in the ’90s, when the company was in dire straits and needed fast cash, Marvel licensed its heroes out to any movie studio willing to shell out the bells. It’s how we wound up with 19 Punisher movies. But even the most successful of these films – like the Sam Raimi Spider-verse, the “Let’s face it, you’re here to see Wolverine”-verse, and a few others that did well enough to warrant sequels (Blade, Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four, etc) — only ever existed in their own bubble. There was no crossing the streams when it came to supers. Everyone super stayed in their super lanes.

Back in 2006, at San Diego Comic-Con, Kevin Feige — when asked about the potential for crossovers in Marvel’s new slate of films (which at the time were to be Captain America, Nick Fury, and Thor, after Iron man and Hulk) — explained: “If you listen to the characters I named, and what we’re working on currently, and you put them all together, there’s no coincidence that they may someday equal the Avengers.”

Here, check out the snippet below of Feige on the panel (at the :27 mark). (If the embed doesn’t work, watch it here.) It’s just a brief blurb, which was included in a larger documentary about the MCU. See, before smartphones were commonplace, aka “The Big Big Dark,” SDCC panels weren’t blasted out everywhere online. [extreme old man voice] When I was a kid the internet was called staring directly at the sunnnnnn.

It’s kind of cute to hear Feige, who’s now Chief Emperor Overlord of All Things Marvel, act so hopeful and optimistic about this “larger mosaic.” Using words like “may” and “possibility” and “it would be great if people would watch something other than Uncle Ben dying.” Because Marvel movies now rule the multiplexes. Or, at least, they will again someday when multiplexes start flexing their plexes again.

It’s no secret that Phase 4, and humanity in general, is off to a rocky start here in 2020. Black Widow, which was to have opened in May but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, will now take the November 6, 2020, slot originally occupied by The Eternals. The Eternals now moves to Feb. 12, 2021 and Shang-Chi now takes May 7, 2021. For the rest of the new Phase 4 date switcheroos, head here.

The following year, at 2007’s SDCC, the Marvel panel was for Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Iron Man was the first, and most important, seed of the saga. A for Hulk… well, Hulk as a headliner is like getting a shake as your “drink” at a fast-food restaurant. It just doesn’t go down smooth.

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[poilib element=”accentDivider”] Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.

There’s just something about this show, isn’t there? The visual decadence, the mysterious storytelling, its enigmatic leads and their delicious chemistry. Where other shows might zig, Killing Eve is well-equipped to zag, given its method of installing a new, female showrunner every season. And in its third outing, the show has given us something worth getting excited over — and a major kick-off episode in which to do it. If you were left wanting after Season 2, fear not: this installment of BBC America’s runaway hit show will leave you fairly satisfied.

Picking up an unknown (but seemingly extended) amount of time after Season 2, Killing Eve intriguingly sets up its main questions, mysteries, and players for the forthcoming season fairly quickly. And it’s done with the flair and bombast we’ve come to expect from the series, now in the hands of its latest showrunner, Suzanne Heathcote, who previously worked on Fear the Walking Dead and See.

Please note, from here on out, it will be impossible to not divulge spoilers, so if you haven’t watched the premiere yet, turn away now.

Though we all know Eve Polastri is doing as well as could be after being shot by Villanelle at the end of Season 2, the murderous fashion slayer seems to be completely unaware that the object of her obsession is alive. In fact, she’s trying to start a new life for herself, before being pulled back into the land of murder-for-hire, only this time it seems the stakes are even higher. We’re introduced to a sort of maternal figure, Dasha, who seems to have made Villanelle in her image. The Russian gymnastics/assassin coach is desperate to get back to the motherland and away from Barcelona — a dream she might be granted if she can bring Villanelle back into the fold. But V wants more than to just be a killer — she wants to be a keeper, a role higher up the ladder than Dasha or even ol’ Konstantin. As each side seems to play the other for control in the situation, it’s clear they’re evenly matched for, at the very least, a lot of fun future-action.

The mystery of The Twelve seems alive and well and deepening ever-further, as our heroes have been splintered apart, with deadly ramifications. MI6 has brought in a minder for Carolyn Martens after her and Eve’s unsanctioned runarounds in Rome, and her son Kenny has — like Eve — left the business, seemingly for good. Kenny’s new gig as a writer/reporter seems to hinge on his taking down of The Twelve in print, only by the end of the episode it’s revealed that won’t be happening, after he’s seemingly thrown to his death.

This is just one of several twists that lie ahead in the episodes to come (that we will not spoil), as the show finds its rhythm this season as a more serialized procedural with escapist fanfare and a brief exploration of the darker sides of humanity. Though Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh are still as well-matched as ever, this season — and premiere episode — show that the star of Healthcote’s iteration of this story seems to be Comer. The series’ odd bent, its jangling parts, feel better here than they did in Season 2, but that signature, audacious Phoebe Waller-Bridge comedy from Season 1 still feels a bit lacking in the dialogue and details. Perhaps it is unfair to expect such a marker of hers to thread a series made to be baton-passed from season to season, but it is such a huge part of what has made Killing Eve so monumentally loved, especially in its first outing, that you can’t help but feel the loss.

Still, there’s much to love and delight in when it comes to Season 3, as the show’s deliciously singular style remains intact. Fans will have plenty to chew on when it comes to theories and GIFable moments, and the cat-and-mouse, spy-and-killer game between Oh and Comer may never get old, so long as they keep having this much fun with it. It’s sexy, it’s action-y, it gives us consistently excellent performances: it’s exactly the sort of fun we all need to watch right now.

This review contains spoilers for Westworld Season 3, episode 5, titled “Genre.” To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out our review of Westworld Season 3, episode 4.

Part of IGN’s Westworld Season 3 guide

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In the documentary about his career that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow made about him a couple of years ago, the great filmmaker Brian De Palma derided the classic movie car chase as little more than “shots of wheels turning and point-of-views out of windshields and cars banging into things,” not only “very boring,” but “ridiculous to even think about doing” after it was already perfected nearly half a century ago by The French Connection. The complaint was on my mind while watching the fifth episode of Westworld’s third season, because it features one of the freshest, most dynamic car chases I have seen on screen in years. If most car chases are boring, this is the exception that proves the rule — and yet another testament to the calibre of action Westworld has been delivering all season.

Whisking someone through an extended action set piece while he’s high on a futuristic designer drug that makes him experience life as though it were a movie is such an ingenious conceit that it’s hard to believe it’s never been done before. “Genre,” as the drug is aptly named, turns the world into a private movie marathon, and when our luckless hero Caleb is dosed by Liam Dempsey, he starts to see everything through a cinematic lens — including the very movie-like blockbuster chase he finds himself inconveniently embroiled in. The bad trip begins with a foray into film noir, and the show really leans into the aesthetic, switching to moody black-and-white photography and a brass-heavy jazz score. As Serac’s goons bear down on the driverless Uber he’s hot-wired with Dolores, Caleb’s just trying to navigate a scene out of The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.

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But it turns out Genre is no mere film noir simulator, and as the car chase ramps up, Caleb’s world changes styles from noir to opera — replete with saturated colors and a score courtesy of Wagner. Caleb blowing up enemy cars with a heat-seeking rocket launcher to the sound of “Flight of the Valkyries” is one of the most purely delightful moments in the history of Westworld, an improvement on the great “Paint It Black” sequence from the first season and one of the few action scenes conceived by showrunner Jonathan Nolan that I can imagine belonging in a Christopher Nolan film. When it culminates in the self-driving motorbike drifting under an oncoming vehicle and bursting into flames, I was completely ecstatic, sure that this would enter the pantheon of big-budget television.

That would have been enough, but the episode explores the idea of this trip even further. (“Watch out for that last act,” Caleb is warned, hinting at what’s to come.) We switch next to romance, as Caleb, in the middle of a deadly firefight, gazes at Dolores longingly (and in slow-motion!), strings swelling exaggeratedly. It’s an amusing, even sort of moving touch, relishing the beauty of the moment even as it roars with gunfire and carnage. And it sets up perfectly the following shift, which finds Caleb gliding more contemplatively through the LA subway system to Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing,” an excellent needle drop on a show with no shortage of them. On board the subway, it’s time for Dolores to unveil another revelation: that she intends to use Dempsey’s login credentials to share Rehoboam’s future-predicting data with everyone in the world.

Aaron Paul excels, again, in his brief monologue to Liam Dempsey on the bitter truth of his experiment, relating a story about drowning rats and false hope that might have been overwrought in a different actor’s hands, but rings true when Paul delivers it. “I would rather live in chaos than in a world controlled by you,” he snarls — and of course the parallel drawn is clear. Dolores chose chaos over control when she liberated herself from Westworld; she’s now offering the same freedom to humankind, although whether for destructive ends rather than benevolent ones is hard to say. In any case, she sends the info to smartphones worldwide, and it’s heartwrenching to watch ordinary people learn the worst about their narrowly defined lives. With everything laid bare, hope’s eradicated. And chaos will reign.

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One of Ramin Djawadi’s beloved instrumental covers of pop songs greets us as our heroes exit the subway — David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” which was the perfect choice to score the confusion and havoc that’s already erupting outside. “What genre is this?” Caleb asks as he watches men and women fighting and looting, stealing cars and wailing in the street. The bleak answer? “It’s reality, man.” The implication is that, thanks to Dolores, the real world has now transformed into a movie, full of drama and excitement and the kind of intensity that Serac and Rehoboam carefully suppressed. Maybe all this chaos and violence seems brutal, but the question the show wants to pose for us is whether that might not be preferable to the benign monotony of total control.

Caleb’s last genre, down on the shore by the docks where Dolores told him he’d eventually take his life, is horror, heralded by synths from Wendy Carlos’s unforgettable score for The Shining. (There are some interesting ways to think about this reference: like Jack Torrence, Caleb may be a man of dubious mental health and dark mysteries in his past.) We’re edging closer to what I suspect will be some seriously major revelations about Caleb’s identity, including whatever exactly Liam Dempsey warns him he was responsible for before succumbing to his wounds on the sand. It seems that Caleb was involved in some untoward business during his time as a vet, and we get an intriguing glimpse of what appears to be the torture and kidnapping of a man played by Enrico Colantoni, who played Keith on Veronica Mars. Whatever the secret, Dolores knows, and it’s sure to figure into her plan in some respect.

In and around all this action, meanwhile, we learn everything there is to know about the formerly enigmatic Serac, who it transpires has the classic supervillain motivation of wanting to dominate the world in order to save humanity from itself. Serac can persuade foreign governments to do his bidding and dictates the course of the bulk of world-historical events, and the point, as we learn in a series of flashbacks, is to create order out of the chaos that is the world’s natural state. I can’t quite tell if Serac is an interesting character or if Vincent Cassel is just a really compelling actor, but either way, it was nice to learn more about him and to better understand his goal and motivation. Now that he’s better developed, I’m anticipating his impending collision with Dolores all the more.