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So, what is everyone watching (films, shows, even YouTube if you think it counts)?
I've seen two movies recently:
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017): This is the second Lanthimos film I've seen after Bugonia and Dogtooth, the former of which I loved and the latter of which was meh. KSD felt like it was awkwardly edgy and vague, but I very well may have missed the point. The actors did an excellent job of making me feel uncomfortable throughout. 4.2/10 enjoyment, give me those hours of my life back.
Train Dreams (2025): I've always enjoyed movies about everyday, simple lives (I don't have any others off the top of my head, but I know they exist). This one resonated with me because of a forest in my life, one that I half-seriously say I grew up in through mountain biking, trail running, airsoft battles, exploring, fort-building, and general elementary and teenage debauchery. 8.1/10 enjoyment, give me those years of my life back. I was a bit surprised everyone else's ratings were so high, though.
1: The Amazing Digital Circus (ongoing). I watched it all from episode 1-7 after hearing a lot about it, expecting to find nothing but mediocrity at best and brainrot at worst. But... I'm ashamed to say I like it. It's a weird mix between a Pixar movie and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
There are some parts that feel unnecessarily fan-servicey (e.g. putting a character in a maid outfit temporarily), and the characters have one too many Ted Lasso-esque heart-to-hearts, but there are good character moments and in general it toes the line between absurd zoomer humour and existential dread quite well. Despite the fact that it's clearly not meant to be overly highbrow (and it isn't), there's also some surprising references hidden in all of the bullshit, such as a brief reference to Searle's Chinese Room which just gets played off as a gag. Overall, it's a pretty decent and fun watch, I see why it achieved internet fame. 7.5/10 enjoyment.
2: Pluribus (2025). Against my better judgement, I watched the season all the way through, and it was somehow more disappointing than the first 3 episodes made it out to be. Oh, this rant is going to be long and angry.
Firstly, the pacing and themes: The series is hilariously slow-paced and spends a large amount of its runtime on expository scenes that primarily serve to illustrate the same handful of themes over and over again, you can see all of the plot developments from a mile away, and it covers all the bog standard fare for a sci-fi hive mind show (asking questions about the value of individualism vs collectivism, about if it's worth it if the cost of peace is one's selfhood and the loss of these valuable human things that arise from our attempts to reach out to each other, about if a person is ever really "independent", etc). I can't see it as treading much new ground in that regard, aside from the fact that it does so in a far more ponderous and soap-operatic manner than other science fiction. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I also can't help but think that the people who actually think that the show adventurously breaks new ground are the pseudo-literary kind, the kind who would stay away from anything that they consider as pulp, and who genuinely believe that this concept is a new vehicle through which to tackle these philosophical themes because they would never be seen dead consuming genre fiction.
Secondly, the characterisation: Considering its fans tout it as a character study, there's noticeably little character development. Carol starts the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, and... she ends the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, after a brief period of wilfully deluding herself into believing that Zosia loves her. Pretty much the only dynamic that ends up changing is the newfound presence of Manousos at the end of the season. And most of Carol's (circular) character arc, far from redeeming her, seems to paint her as a worse character than you initially thought she was; initially it's possible to think of her as steadfastly principled in spite of her abrasive, aggressive nature, but the second she finds out that the hive can't convert her without her consent she immediately embraces pure hedonism, and goes so far as to have sex with a member of the hive (something she hypocritically criticises Koumba for doing earlier on in the show). The second she finds out again she can be converted by means of her frozen eggs, a plot point that makes zero sense for various reasons (including the fact that induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from virtually any bodily cell and germ cells are actually some of the worst candidates for stem cell creation due to the fact they only contain half the genome), she reverts to her original stance on the hive. It reveals that her opposition to the hive was not out of any kind of principle or selflessness, but out of her own self-interest. By the end of the season, I genuinely could not think of a single thing to like about her - she started out as a miserable Karen who you might have been able to argue had principles, and that argument gets eroded so heavily throughout the course of the season such that there isn't anything to like by the time the season is done. And she's so stuck in a holding pattern that the season leaves no room for her character growth.
Thirdly and finally, the visuals. In spite of an insane per episode budget of $15 million, many of the shots just look bad. There are multiple scenes that are clearly and obviously greenscreened: the rooftop scene in Episode 5 (which is so ugly it looks like a certain shot from The Room), as well as Kusimayu's conversion scene, Manousos and Carol's fight scene, and the scene with Carol and Zosia in "Thailand" in Episode 9 just look awful. And apparently the rooftop scene was by far the most costly scene in the show! Some other scenes were shot on location and look fine, but some scenes require such terrible VFX, are so expensive and yet are so irrelevant to the plot that it boggles my mind why they even attempted such a shot in the first place. Frankly, it's so obsessed with its cool visual concepts that it almost feels like the point of the story: Karolina Wydra flying a plane, the hive emptying out an entire supermarket and coordinating a large cast of extras to "fill it out" again, Carol's rooftop scene, etc; the show often feels like it's visuals-first and plot-second. There is so much pointless VFX and so much shooting across multiple continents with many extras, and that's a stark difference compared with Breaking Bad, which had little VFX, a small budget, minimal sets, etc, and managed a 10-13 month turnover between seasons. Meanwhile Pluribus is going to take a long time apparently despite being greenlit for a second season from the get-go. What does any of this actually ever get you?
In other words, I'm disappointed. I liked Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and had high hopes for this, but this isn't it. 5/10 enjoyment, basically the show equivalent of drinking water.
I found there to be an annoying number of unasked questions and unargued arguments. Given that the hivemind can't even pick fruit (never mind that the tree WANTS you to eat the apples and crap out the seeds, this still counts as harm), the virus winds up being a pesticide that kills off an entire species, but also causes the target to tidy up after itself while it dies off.
Oh, jesus. Speaking of unasked questions, don’t even get me started about the very concept of the hive. We first see it being cultivated in rats, who seem to exhibit the same kind of behaviours that humans do once infected (convulsing, a subsequent desire to spread itself) and then it jumps to patient zero. This opens up a whole can of worms that somehow never gets explored in spite of its implications.
Does this mean there are rats in the hivemind now? Does the hive know everything the rats know as well and partially see the world through their perspective? Since there are estimated to be as many rats as humans in the world doesn’t that mean the hive mind’s perspective is half rat? Or do different species have their own hives? Why aren’t the coyotes and dogs featured in the show ever affected if the virus can effortlessly jump species? Surely at least close relatives such as chimpanzees and bonobos could be affected, etc.
The show has a million things like this that it doesn’t even seem the writers considered, and it makes it feel very sloppy. Also, is there a fuck pile featuring the most genetically fit individuals so the hive can continue to live on? I want to know these things way more than I want to see Carol crashing out for the three millionth time.
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