Thoughts about things I saw: The Magnus Archives

I have a couple of posts about The Magnus Archives in the works, but they aren’t finished and I’m not really sure if they ever will be. I am also technically still in the process of finishing the podcast (I’m still missing like 12 episodes or so). Nevertheless, I want to share some of my feelings with you (and elaborate on a point mentioned in the The Evil You Know post.

Spoilers through seasons 1-3.



If you don’t know, The Magnus Archives is a horror podcast that starts out as mostly disconnected tales of terror and develops more of a story line as it goes on. The Magnus Institute collects statements of people who had a terrifying supernatural encounter. Jonathan Sims, the new archivist (not to be confused with Jonathan Sims the author of the podcast), reads and records those statements for posterity and comments on them.

He is, at the beginning, extremely skeptical and comes off as a bit of a pretentious asshole. For a while he is the only character we hear. He does, however, mention three assistants. Sasha, who is good with computers, Tim, who flirts info out of people and Martin, who Jon has taken a particular dislike to due to his perceived incompetence. Martin is the first other main character we hear talk and from that first moment I (and many others listening to the podcast) fell in love. Martin wanted to impress Jon to prove himself and maybe get Jon to think better of him and got besieged by a worm monster for his troubles. He had been gone for two weeks at that point without anyone checking up on him.

As the seasons go on the Martin we get to know remains caring and sweet - although he can be petty, sarcastic and cutting when he wants to be. He makes tea for everyone, stubbornly checks up on an increasingly frazzled - and extremely unwilling - Jon, forgives easily, accepts hostile behavior and tries to keep as much harmony as he can. He is criticized for his efforts by his colleagues who perceive his behavior as weakness, naivety or cowardice.

Jon and the audience, meanwhile, learn that Martin had faked his CV to get the job, which he desperately needs to support his sick mother and that he has been working to support her since he was a teenager.

By season 3 I am deeply invested in the characters. They developed and changed in response to the horror that their job has become and are now trying to free themselves of a contract and a nightmare boss (while also trying to stop the apocalypse). Tricking the nightmare boss involves distracting him and distracting him involves having him pry open your deepest trauma.

It’s a good plan, one Martin came up with, and because Martin came up with it, he decides he will be the one to sit through this psychological torture session. Earlier in the season the audience has been witness to such a psychological torture session featuring a different character and has heard how awful it was. That did not, however, prepare me in any way, shape or form for what would happen in episode 118.

At first it seems like the nightmare boss would go for Martin’s obvious romantic feelings for Jon. He does bypass those and instead digs for Martin’s childhood.

When Martin was young, his mother got diagnosed with an unspecified incurable disease. The father promptly left the family because he did not want to deal with that. Martin now devoted himself to helping and supporting a mother that grew increasingly resentful and hostile. While Martin gave up his life almost completely, dropping out of school, never forging any lasting friendships or romantic relationships, abandoning his dreams, she never thanked him and made him feel like every effort he took to help her wasn’t only not appreciated or even unwelcome but actually resented. Nowadays, his mother is in a nursing home and mostly does not even want to have contact with him. The nightmare boss finally reveals that Martin’s deepest fears are right and that his mother does in fact hate him. She hates him because he reminds her of his father, the husband who left her. She hates him because despite her resentment, she is reliant on his help. And no matter what Martin does or says or how much he tries, there is nothing he can do to make her, who has been the center of his life since he was a young teenager, even like - let alone love - him.

There are many aspects of this I find so deeply tragic. Martin has always suspected that his mother felt this way but hoped - desperately - to be wrong. He developed a skewed perspective of what love means as a result, which influences every relationship he attempts to forge. The fact that it’s so deeply personal but fully out of his control since he can’t influence it in the least. And mostly, maybe, the sheer mundanity of it all.

Despite all the creative and deeply unsettling supernatural horrors the podcast gifts us, there is nothing in it that fucks me up deeper than this. Martin, who is so stubbornly kind and caring, has, at this point, not been loved by anyone since he was a young teenager. It brilliantly recontextualizes what we saw of him throughout the show and gives the character tragic complexity. When I first listened to this episode I had to stop the podcast and take a couple of minutes to cry for the very real pain I felt for this fictional character and to this day this episode brings tears to my eyes.

Any podcast that can make me feel so deeply is worth checking out!


Satori over and out


P.S. Have my authentic reactions I texted my friend who got me into The Magnus Archives:

[5/14/2019, 20:27] Me: Ohhhhhh goddddddd
[5/14/2019, 20:28] Me: I'm crying for Martin right now
[5/14/2019, 20:28] Me: That's godddd that's terrible that's so terrible
[5/14/2019, 20:58] Me: I don't think I'll ever be able to experience joy again

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished - Spider-Man: No Way Home and the crux of MCU media

aka 'It is, ultimately, better to let people die than to try and help them.' Wait? Is that really what the movie's telling me?

Recently, I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was the first MCU movie I didn't catch in the theater. But after the experience of Far from Home, which I was ambivalent to, and Endgame, which I did not like at all, I was in no rush to see this one. 

Spoilers from now on, I guess. 

Also, forgive me if I sound bitter. If you enjoyed this movie, this post is not for you.

So now I finally sat down to watch it, with the promise of at least seeing Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as well as old villains reprising their roles. At the very least that would be enjoyable, I thought.

And I was right. That was enjoyable. However, almost nothing else was. What made this movie almost unbearable for me, was its contradictory messaging that ruined any theme it could have had.

It seems like the basis for this movie was mainly, 'we can have the other Spider-Men and characters from the Sony franchises, we should do something with that!' with a dash of 'need to further establish the multiverse'. This is not unusual for the newer MCU movies and although I don't like it, it would not have bothered me this much if that had been all it was.

Unfortunately, they attempted to throw in a 'Peter learns about responsibility and consequences'-lesson that backfired spectacularly.

Okay. Before I explain my issues, a quick rundown of the movie:
- The world now knows that Peter is Spider-Man and a large chunk believes that he really did kill Mysterio. That is not good. In fact, it costs him (and MJ and Ned) their ticket to MIT.
- Upset about that, Peter turns to Doctor Strange to ask him to make people forget he's Spider-Man. While Strange is casting the spell, Peter changes his mind multiple times about who should remember the secret which messes up the spell and breaks open the multiverse.
- The villains arrive and start causing havok. With the help of Strange's magic they catch them easily.
- Strange wants to send them back immediately but in the meantime Peter found out that at least three of them would for sure die if he sent them back. Because May insists he help them, Peter stops Strange from sending them back and instead attempts to cure them of whatever made them evil.
- They manage to cure Dr. Octopus but then Green Goblin destroys the building and kills May who chooses her last moments to underline her earlier point about needing to help the villains and 'with great power comes great responsibility'.
- Peter meets the other Spider-Men and they fight the villains, managing to cure each of them.
- But 'oh, no! the multiverse is open now and everone who knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man will come through unless we make everyone forget who Peter Parker is'. So that's what they do.
- The end.

Now, this is already a lot. But what struck me immediately, is that the moral the movie wants us to take away is not the one it presents. 

May here insists to her death that Peter is responsible for the villains. She tells him in no uncertain terms that sending them back to their realities to die is morally wrong and he instead has a duty to help cure them and thus ensure the possibility for a happy life. That is, out of context, a reasonable message: Everyone deserves a chance at redemption. I can get behind that.

However. The context the movie provides instead turns the message into 'attempting to help only makes your life worse' or maybe 'don't get mixed up in other people's matters and if they die they die' or as Green Goblin states 'no good deed goes unpunished'.

Because Peter's attempt to help the villains is directly responsible for destruction, injuries, May's death and everyone forgetting who he is*. Had he allowed Strange to send the villains back - like he wanted to originally, none of the tragedy of this movie would have happened. 

'With great power comes great responsibility' works in the Spider-Man origin because uncle Ben dies because Peter does not take action (responsibility). Here, he does take action (responsibility) - in the way May wants him to - and she dies because of that, turning her statement on its head.

Inreasingly, the actions of the MCU superheroes leave the world in worse shape than they found it and so it is with this movie. Peter directly causes all the drama in this movie because he did not get into college. Oh yeah, and Doctor Strange casually tampers with space-time and people's minds to help a kid with his impulsive plan. It just doesn't mean anything. Spider-Man is good because he is a little guy suddenly thrust into having power which he uses to help the little guy. He is 'your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man'. This movie really shows how the MCU uses the classic Spider-Man beats without understanding why they worked - or, more likely - not caring in the least.

And that is - apart from absolutely horrific production issues (excessive use of CGI instead of costumes, sets, props and practical effects; spoiler-mania forcing actors to read lines in isolation; movies being planned out almost fully years in advance) - what truly makes recent MCU movies so soulless. 

Satori over and out

* Also like. not to try and take this mess seriously, but would this spell - to affect the people coming over from the other universes - not also make everyone in these universes forget who Peter Parker is. And therefore also affect the loved ones of all other Peter Parkers? Much to think about.

Don't even get me started that people still know who Spider-Man is. The implication being that everyone would still remember everything they did with Spider-Man (considering that J Jonah Jameson, who knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man still remembers Spider-Man's existence and that he's responsible for the destruction). So MJ and Ned would AT LEAST remember the things they did with Peter as Spider-Man just not that Peter existed. Also did the spell erase all video, photo, documents and related objects (like the shrine at the school)? It seems like it but damn. Also also people still remember May was connected to Spider-Man? How do they think she was connected to him? Where did Peter get an ID from and anything needed to rent a flat? Yeah, I know, I shouldn't attempt to make sense of this.

The King's Man sure is a movie, huh?

Notes on English royalist propaganda, war movies, and weird politics

I really do like the first Kingsman movie. It came out of nowhere and swept me up. I like the second one less and I like this one... hmm... not at all. 

Disclaimer: I want to make very sure that you understand that I'm not making any sort of objective judgement on the quality of the movie. These are my personal opinions which you are, of course, very free to disagree with.

Also: spoilers from here on out!

 

My first and maybe most significant problem with this movie is the lasting impression that this movie was actually two - if not three - movies in a trenchcoat. The part of the movie seen in the trailer I saw in the movie theater and suggested by the poster is only about a third of the movie. And while, yes, it is customary that the trailers only show parts of a film or the beginning, this trailer suggested a tone and style and atmosphere that the rest of the movie lacked. Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) dies about a third of the way through and with him almost all the fun the movie had. The ominous shepherd (Matthew Goode) is instead the main villain (more on him later). Afterwards the movie turns into a war movie for a bit, which I did not expect and did not enjoy in the least. If I had wanted to watch a war movie, which I never do, I would have watched a war movie. Mind you, I don't generally hate having WWI be an integral part of the movie, however, there is a difference between having war as a setting and a war movie, where we see desperate fighting in the trenches and across no-man's-land. After the war movie interlude, it tries to pick up the funky spy action part again but - at least to me - fails in getting back on track. The last scene (before the credits) where they sit together and toast to the newformed kingsman agency was almost one of the most enjoyable scenes in the movie.

Look. I don't think that this movie's structure was neccessarily terrible. If it had not been a Kingsman movie, I might have been more forgiving. But it is a Kingsman movie. I go and watch a Kingsman movie because it has good and interesting-to-look-at action, because it is a fun spy movie that affectionately ribs on tropes of the genre, because the villain is funky and has a plan that is wildly out there. This movie has almost none of that. Apart from maybe one or two fun fight scenes and the odd reference here and there, it could've been any other movie.

Apart from my misgivings about tone and plot, I was perturbed by the socio-political implications in this movie. First of all, I feel uncomfortable with the movie's stance that both Hitler and Lenin among other historical figures were working with and for the same shadow organisation completely divorced from their actual ideologies and reasonings. Maybe you could argue that I am being too sensitive but to me these are unacceptable implications.

Secondly, I found the insistence on the goodness of the British monarchy to be a bit odd, neutrally speaking. I mean, sure, the movie is called The KING's Man, so some royalist notions shouldn't really surprise me, but the length to which this movie goes to show that King George - and only King George - is a friendly and good and reasonable leader, was kind of baffling to me. In the end, the movie makes a point to stress how glad we all are that he did not suffer the fate of his counterparts and is still here to lead England without a hint of irony. Furthermore, the villain's stated motivation plays into this as well. He is a Scotsman with extremely valid grievances; the criticisms he has of England and its treatment of Scotland ring true but his methods are so wildly overblown (starting a devastating multi-nation war just to bring England to its knees) that they seem manic instead. Because he is tyrannical and cruel and unquestionably a bad guy, his motivations become entwined with him and thus lose credibility while the good guys, friendly to the English monarchy, become righteous and ultimately victorious.

This tactic of discrediting valid social grievances in movies is one the MCU especially - and rightfully - is criticized for and it is found here as well.

Now, over to my list of petty complaints:
- I like Djimon Hounsou and would've liked to see him more.
- I always dislike the 'woman dies to give men motivation'-trope and this movie starts out like that.
- Close to the end Polly (Gemma Arterton), the one significant female character, kisses Duke Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes). To me that was so out of the blue, as if the creators had realized that they were almost through with the movie and had completely forgotten the customary heterosexual romance.
- Conrad (Harris Dickinson) dies so unneccessarily, shot in the head by friendly troops due to a misunderstanding. If they had wanted him to die, why not have him die in no-man's-land? Maybe the fact that he died unneccessarily was the point but I didn't like it.

I rarely feel like I wasted my money watching a movie, but I really could have let this one go.

Satori over and out

P.S. If you want to read a more structured and less rambling review of this movie, why not check out Siran Hans' one in The Guardian or Brian Tallerico's.

It's time for a movie spree add-on: Gunpowder Milkshake

 I did end up getting to watch Gunpowder Milkshake after all. The movie theater added another showing so I could watch this movie at night. 

Gunpowder Milkshake

I'm glad I got to watch it. It's an enjoyable action flick with heart. The action is innovative and brutal and I loved the aesthetics and the way they gave the movie an alternate universe out of time feel. 3.5/5