2025: A Year of Great Movies I Missed

It’s Oscar night again, and I enjoy thinking about the movie I managed to see and what I’d pick for each category out of those (see my 2025, 2024, and 2023 posts). But sadly, I somehow missed a lot of movies this past year. Like, almost all of them. I can’t even do a top 10 list because, as much as I did love the MCU films of 2025… I know I’d be lying if I put those in there, and I just have not seen enough else.

EVEN SO! I will carry on and make my picks out of a very limited pool.

Although, ultimately, I would be shocked if any movies I missed were better than Sinners. That movie is incredible on, like, every level, it had damn well better sweep.

Best Picture (or, My Top 9 Films of 2025, Most of Which I’d Never Consider for Best Picture I Just Didn’t See Enough)

• Sinners
• Weapons
• Train Dreams
• Wake Up Dead Man
• Hedda
• The Mastermind
• The Fantastic Four: First Steps
• Thunderbolts*
• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

I told you I haven’t seen enough, this list is a mess. I have seen many more movies than this, but a lot of them either disappointed me or just don’t feel like they belong on the top 10. Even some of these I doubt would have made the cut if I’d just seen a bit more. Also If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is one of the most stressful movies I’ve ever seen. That’s not a criticism I just don’t know how to rate something that stresses me out so hard. Some people say it’s a comedy??
But I do think that if I saw more, Wake Up Dead Man (and the rest below it) would end up further down the list. It is rather good, but I think there is something of a jump in how much I like it versus the top 3. Though I also have some issues with Train Dreams just because of the general discomfort I have with westerns and the settler-colonial history of the US!

Best Director

• Ryan Coogler (Sinners)
• Lynne Ramsay (Die My Love)
• Clint Bentley (Train Dreams)
• Zach Cregger (Weapons)
• Rian Johnson (Wake up Dead Man)
• Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein)
• Nia DaCosta (Hedda)
• Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You)

Honourable mentions: Kelly Reichardt for The Mastermind, Celine Song for Materialists, Annemarie Jacir for Palestine 36.
I’ve said before that both the Academy and a lot of viewers don’t get the distinction between Best Director and Best Picture but there is a lot that can make a movie an astounding experience as a whole picture that doesn’t necessarily speak to the director in particular. For example, I may think del Toro’s Frankenstein isn’t Best Picture worthy for script and structural reasons, but damn if it isn’t masterfully made.

Best Score: THREE WAY TIE!

• Ludwig Göransson (Sinners)
• Michael Giacchino (The Fantastic Four: First Steps)
• Sol Lux (Thunderbolts*)

Honourably mention for Bryce Dessner (Train Dreams).

Trump Was a Warmonger in the 2016 Primary Too

A part of me thinks this isn’t really the time to write this post. The present reality is Trump has spent his second term escalating massacres of civilians across the globe, taking out foreign leaders with no regard to the stability and safety of civilian populations, and sowing the seeds of future war and terrorism. The murders, the maimings, the ruined lives matter every bit as much no matter whether or not in the 2016 primary he had promised to be anti-war. And right here, right now, we need to focus on his wars in the here and now. His attacks on Iran murdered children.

If returning to his decade-old comments on war were just about record-setting, I’d say it’s important but not the priority in the moment. Yet I think there is something very instructive about US American imperialism, as a structural matter and a cultural one.

In the 2016 Republican presidential primary and general election, Donald Trump lambasted his opponents, in both parties, who had supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The reasons he gave for condemning the invasion were simple: The US hadn’t been brutal enough, hadn’t committed enough war crimes, and had been too gentle.

This sociopath was upset that the staggering tragedy of the Iraq War hadn’t harmed the people of Iraq enough and hadn’t benefited US capitalists enough.

For some reason, many pundits pushed the idea that Trump was against the ‘establishment,’ interventionism, and forever wars. Many voters bought it. It’s not hard to come up with reasons why, but it is hard to list all the reasons why.

But first, let’s revisit Trump’s actual words, because to this day many people think his wars in Venezuela and Iran (and looming war in Cuba perhaps…) are somehow an about-face from his first term (we’ll get to his escalation of air strikes in his first term in a moment).

Note: For the purposes of this post, double quotation marks “…” indicate a direct quote and a source will always be provided. Single quotes ‘…’ indicate that I’m attributing an idea to someone (or some group/org) not because they said exactly those very words themselves, but rather that I’m expressing a sentiment conveyed— or I’m being sarcastic/mocking. Emphasis in any quotes (e.g. italicised or bold font) is always added by me. Square brackets […] indicate something that was not part of the original quote but which I added to clarify context.

Background: 1990-2004

George H. W. Bush went to war with Iraq in late 1990, ending in early 1991. Many neoconservatives spent the ’90s complaining that the first Bush didn’t ‘finish’ the war by taking out Saddam Hussein. Dick Cheney was one of those neocons. The inauguration of George W. Bush with Vice President Cheney in 2001 meant a lot of neocons were hopeful to re-invade and ‘complete’ their objectives. The 9/11 terror attacks of course led to the invasion of Afghanistan instead, but chatter quickly began about invading Iraq despite there being no connection to 9/11.

This brings us to the first anniversary of September 11, in 2002, when Donald Trump was asked by Howard Stern if he supported a potential invasion of Iraq and said:

Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish the first time it was done correctly.

Trump on Howard Stern, quoted in The Washington Post and FactCheck.org

Interesting, isn’t it, how his framing is that the first war wasn’t “done correctly.” Trump’s only other comments on the pending invasion for the next several months are to complain that Bush hasn’t been decisive enough in either direction. Post-invasion, he initially praised it (“it looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint“) a few days latter saying it’s going badly (“If they keep fighting it the way they did today, they’re going to have a real problem“) and on the second anniversary of 9/11 saying the problem was the how, not war in general (“It wasn’t a mistake to fight terrorism and fight it hard“).

Clear opposition only came by 2004, when much of the country was outraged as well. That is to say, Trump’s stance on the war went from ‘yeah sure, it wasn’t done right the first time so I guess do it again?’ in 2002 to ‘it’s being managed terribly’ once enough of the country were enraged by the ever-escalating deaths of US soldiers.

Not once does he express an opposition to war in general, nor opposition to interventionism, or even a modicum of sympathy for non-US persons being massacred.

The 2016 Elections: 2015-2016

Now let’s jump 12 years to the 2016 primary, which began in 2015 because the US is bad at democracy.

On 10 August 2015 Trump said the way to deal with ISIS as to “take away their wealth, that you go and knock the hell out of the oil, take back the oil,” telling MSNBC host Joe Sarborough “I’d take the oil for our country.” In a November campaign speech he reiterated:

I would bomb the shit out of them [ISIS]. I would just bomb those suckers. And that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the refineries. I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left, and you know what, you’ll get Exxon to come in there, and in two months, you ever see these guys how good they are, the great oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker brand new. It will be beautiful, and I’ll take the oil. And I said I’ll take the oil.

Trump campaign speech quoted by CBS News

Trump has always been of the same mind as the rest of the neocon ‘take their oil’ looters. What he complained about was the perception of losing:

You know, it used to be the victor belong the spoils. Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victory. But I always said, take the oil.

Trump on NBC News

He considered stealing their resources as ‘reimbursement.’

Ultimately, his attacks on Jeb Bush and Hilary Clinton for supporting the 2003 invasion were a mix of opportunistic crowd-pandering regarding a deeply unpopular war, and bitter resentment that the US ‘lost’. He said one night that George Bush “lied” about the pretext for the war, then a few nights later refused to commit to that, saying “Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.” His milquetoast critiques of his opponents belied a lack of real conviction.

And then there’s his open advocacy for war crimes. In December 2015 he said:

The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.

Trump on Fox & Friends, quoted by CNN

After much outrage, he issued an incredibly tepid statement saying he won’t order the military to do crimes. Not terribly convincing. The most you can say about this is that if he were constrained by the rest of his party, a large portion of whom share the desire to expand torture programmes and ignore all rules of engagement, then maybe he would be willing to reign in these impulses. But that’s not remotely the same as saying he was an anti-war, anti-imperialist candidate.

Campaign Trump boasted about expanding torture programmes to include “a hell of a lot worse than water-boarding.” He condemned the Geneva conventions as though they made US soldiers “afraid to fight.” He told Anderson Cooper that he supported Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia acquiring nuclear weapons.

It is at this point my memory tells me he also said the US military should bomb soldiers who are in retreat, a blatant violation of international law and also deeply immoral, but I cannot find a record of this. I perhaps should not even mention it then, lest it bias a reader into believing something that didn’t happen, but I am also asking if anyone has a source on this. Consider this example to be a false memory unless I’ve updated this post with a real source. The above, however, remain true and documented.

Trump told everyone, repeatedly throughout the primary and general election campaigns, that he fully supported foreign wars as long as they were exceptionally brutal, committed even more atrocities and war crimes than the US already does, and stole more resources than we already do. He told us.

He also complained that Iran would steal Iraq’s oil before the US could and consistently raged that the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration was weak and soft.

Trump’s First Term Bloodbaths: 2017-2021

The Name “Alligator Alcatraz” Evokes Horrifying History of Racist Violence

That phrase, “Alligator Alcatraz”, is evil. It’s not just a gross joke about a prison being located in the Everglades, it’s a reference to hundreds of years of US racists gleefully imagining Black people being eaten alive. It was a trope, a popular image in collective imagination, evinced in various forms of art, media, and collectables. White racists wanted to believed that if enslaved people ran away, or freed Black people were deigning to have their own communities after slavery was ended, that nature itself would be hostile to them.

From the colonisation of Florida by slaveholders through the Jim Crow era and up to the freaking PRESENT DAY APPARENTLY, various forms of media have disgustingly revelled in the image of runaway slaves dying gruesomely or the bodies of lynching victims being disposed of via alligator. White Southerners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries would buy postcards with pictures of these scenes. They were popular. And it’s part of an even broader gross tradition of racist paraphernalia.

It gets worse. The Jim Crow Museum of Ferris State University in Michigan has a post on their website saying even Black children were slaughtered:

It isn’t really a question of whether African American babies were used as alligator bait, but the question is how frequent was the practice? … African American babies being used as alligator bait really happened, and it happened to real people. It doesn’t seem to have been a widespread practice, but it did happen.

And yes, there was push-back to that piece, with criticism of some of the sources. The museum website published a response to years later explaining that while, again, the practice wasn’t exactly common, there is some evidence of rare occurrence. And considering this was an era where phenomenal violence against Black bodies was celebrated… Well, even if you conclude babies were never used as bait, I hope you can understand why it wouldn’t be out of place if it were true! And no one denies that the image of Black children being fed to alligators was shockingly popular in media of that time.

When they call it “Alligator Alcatraz”, remember that. Remember what they’re saying is “We like the thought of people we deem to be inferior races being eaten alive by alligators.”

It’s gruesome and vile and it sickens me.

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The Fascinating Overlap between Moon Landing Deniers and Fascists who Want to Colonise It

Many on the far right, be they Elon Musk, Trump’s interim NASA head Sean Duffy, or any of their fandoms, have been demanding the US waste money creating colonies and outposts on the Moon (or in Duffy’s case, a nuclear reactor). All of these people are also hardcore science deniers. And I don’t just mean they love space and physics but deny biology (e.g. Musk’s transphobia or lies about covid) or economics etc, but these people also really hate it when physics itself doesn’t align with their worldviews.

NASA composite image of the moon using Clementine data from 1994.

So, how can a worldview grounded in science denial be so tied to space colonisation?

Interestingly, I think an interesting group to compare with is Moon landing deniers. A stunningly common refrain from this lot is “well why didn’t we go back!?” Setting aside that we went back many times up to 1972, a question deniers cannot answer is “why should we?”

Human spaceflight was not only expensive financially, but exceptionally dangerous. Deniers don’t think the lives of the astronauts who died before Apollo 11 matter, but they do. Every death was a horrible tragedy, and every death was a lesson to learn from to make sure the trips to the Moon were as safe as possible.

How often did we need to risk that?

As someone with a longstanding love of planetary geology, I would love to get more missions to the Moon to study it more and more, but that doesn’t mean we should rush it. Nor does it mean we need to send people. Probes have been going to space and looking at the Moon, if not travelling there outright, off and on since the 70s, science is continuing to advance. And there’s more to study out there than the Moon!

Conspiracy theorists do not get this. They will not get this. It challenges, and undermines, their entire understanding of the purpose of science and exploration. For them, science is very simple, very rudimentary, and requires a physical human presence to scoop up a rock and say “there is a rock in my hand.” God forbid you actually study the rock’s composition or internal structure. God forbid you apply chemistry and physics to look inside the Moon.

No, conspiracy theorists don’t treat scientific study as a means to understand our wondrous cosmos, it’s a tool you use to do things on a visible, macroscopic, and immediate level, with no room for small steps building up to long term change, and no room for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. And in a number of cases conspiracy theorists start to overlap with the far-right in believing that “science” is how you command authority over the world itself.

There is no doubt that the fascists who want to colonise the Moon (not all fascists want this, to be clear, and not everyone who wants permanent habitats on the Moon is a fascist either) see that goal as an extension of their broader ideology of settler-colonialism. That is, they want people from their in group physically in the place to mark it as their “territory” because “biggest territory is best territory” and other half-assed fascist nonsense.

But it is also true that a great many science deniers and people who don’t understand science, of all political persuasions, see case for Moon colonisation on that same uninspired, uncritical, reductive lens that asks “if science, why no people there?”

Again, I think there is a strong case to send humans back the Moon for scientific reasons. It would be a good opportunity to improve, and test, our space-faring capability, and there are surely all manner of experiments better done with adaptable humans operating the instruments than robots.

The point is that we have been studying the Moon all these years with so many alternatives, and again the financial cost and risk to life of sending humans is so high, if we’re just gallivanting off to the Moon haphazardly “because science”, then I’m afraid that sounds much too similar to the conspiracy theorists who can’t fathom why scientists spent the last 50 years saying they’d love to go back to the Moon but it’s not the biggest priority.

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Fantastic!

I rarely see movies in Imax. I don’t think it’s all that much better of an experience, especially for the cost. But having heard snippets of the theme music in the trailers already, and being a pre-existing big fan of compose Michael Giacchino, I did spend a little extra to see The Fantastic Four: First Steps in Imax on Thursday. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew I wanted that theme music blasted into me with the most intense speakers I could come by. Imax movies tend to be preceded by a CGI countdown showing off the visual and audio quality. It’s been the same animations for years.

I did not expect even this animation would be redone for the Fantastic Four. Using their font for the numbers, featuring animations of the characters, and kicking off the entire experience with that blast of extraordinary music right off the bat.

Before the movie even started I was fully on board.

I was so nervous about it going in, but the MCU’s Fantastic Four, presented in FantastiVision, was close to everything I ever wanted from an F4 movie. There were some massive drawbacks that I have to acknowledge, particularly with the handling of women. I swear Hollywood is making no progress, if not moving backwards.

But when it’s not making me uncomfortable, the movie is visually delightful (mostly), pretty creative, and engaging. This post will be non-spoilers, as I honestly I don’t feel the need to mention any this time. I’ll come back with spoiler-y thoughts in a piece on some of the science mentioned in the movie.

To begin with, I have to acknowledge that a big part of what has me so hyped for this movie is the music. I adore this soundtrack, I adore this theme. I really do hold Giacchino’s Fantastic Four theme up there with William’s Superman and Silvestri’s Avengers themes. It has echoes of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra at the beginning to evoke that sense of adventure and cosmic wonder, but then weaves that into a powerful, energetic, and jaunty hero theme that just plain slaps. I can understand why some viewers might think the theme is overplayed in the movie itself, but I loved its many variations and how it weaves in an out of the other pieces. I can’t get enough of this music, I’m happy to have it play over and over.

And the Silver Surfer’s theme is perfectly haunting and elegiac, but becomes threatening when necessary. Delivers adequate emotional punches when we confront her backstory.

As for the acting? Fabulous. Richie is one of my favourite characters in The Bear in no small part due to Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s incredible performance, and he brings a lot of that energy to Ben Grimm (who he plays with motion capture, not prosthetic, and it looks quite good!). Prior to this I would have said Michael Chiklis from the 2005 and 2007 movies was my favourite rendition, but I think now Moss-Bachrach edges him out, even though the movie didn’t really have enough time to give him much attention.

To say nothing of the rest of the cast, another highlight being Joseph Quinn’s Johnny Storm. And while I do really like this interpretation of Reed Richards and Pedro Pascal plays it well, it is a purely down to personal, subjective preference when I say I prefer lighter, more starry-eyed versions of the character. On Reed, I will add that this version is very thankfully not a “so smart he’s mean” archetype that the comics tried to push at different periods in the Four’s history. It’s an awful trope that perpetuates dangerous myths that one must be mean or unempathetic to be smart, but I think this film conveys Reed’s compassion, and his love, pretty well while still coming across as a bit distant. Though here, he’s not distant because he’s emotionless or narcissistic, but because he’s got anxiety, lots of anxiety. I relate, Reed. I relate.

Creatively, I do think the movie could and should have gone further, but I still got more than I expected from the MCU. I fully intend to write more about it when the movie’s been out for a while (again, no spoilers yet) but there was interesting use of warped spacetime and time dilation, and Reed’s first proposed solution to the problem is unhinged and all the better for it! The devourer of worlds Galactus was simultaneously a cosmic horror and a comic-accurate man in a big suit, a tough feat to pull off. Granted, I do think his ship deserved more colour. I think Jack Kirby (co-creator of the Four and Galactus, and sole creator of the Silver Surfer) would have wanted more colour. But I won’t deny there is a dreariness to the dark interior of Galactus’s ship that lends itself to the atmosphere, and his first appearance does evoke a “distance incomprehensible god” while still being, again, a man in a suit.

The last time Galactus was in a movie he was just a big space cloud, it was disappointing.

The retro-futuristic pseudo-60s vibe is mostly handled wonderfully. The title sequence at the end is so great, but again I know that I’m biased because I’m in love with the theme music.

And the visuals are nothing to scoff at either. Again I do think more colour would have been in order, but some of the shots are just stunning to look at. Sadly, some of the most stunning visuals whip past so fast because the movie was over-tightened in the editing, which really is a shame because I think in general Marvel has a tendency to not let dramatic and artistic moments just sit there for a moment. But I’ll come back to that in the criticism section…

The Silver Surfer was also different than I expected, she seemed to retain her memories from her previous life and have more emotional range than the character did in their introduction in the comics, but it works for this movie and ties into the main plot well. I do have a gripe about her hair though, it feels like she only has hair to add to her “femininity” so that Johnny (or rather, the studio executives) can find her attractive. The Silver Surfer should be bald, it just feels wrong for a Surfer to have hair, and this might be nitpicking but I can’t help but remember when a creature designer for Doctor Who said outright that the modern design for the Silurians was purposefully more human than lizard so that the female Silurians would be attractive. And I don’t like that. Which is a good segué…

Because I do have substantial complaints.

To begin with, the movie feels small. I know a lot was cut during post-production, John Malkovich filmed a whole sequence as a supervillain that was left out, and you can tell. The early part of the film feels a bit rushed with awkward pacing, and there are so few speaking characters besides the Four themselves. Ben walking down Yancy Street interacting with people is great because the world feels so alive and lived in, but so much of the film is the Four alone in their skyscraper without staff or guests or other residents, and I wish there’d be more of the wider world.

In no small part because of those few other speaking characters, one of the very few poc to have any lines at all is Sue’s secretary. Or so I thought, she acts like a secretary, seems to have no life or purpose besides serving Sue, and yet the credits reminded me that this woman is supposed to be the CEO of the Future Foundation. If her character had more depth or more independence in cut scenes, those really needed to be left in, because it’s just not a good look as it is.

Then there is Sue herself.

Since 1961, Marvel has not known what the hell to do with Sue. Initially Lee and Kirby just had her as “the woman”. Ben was emotionally distant and aggressive, Johnny was a hot-headed teenager, Reed was the leader and genius, and Sue was… the woman. She liked shopping and fashion and being in love with Reed.

Originally her only power was invisibility. Not knowing how to utilise this effectively, Lee eventually retconned her power to be light-bending force-fields, which she could turn into any shape and project outward.

As time wore on, comics from all publishers started to fall into a trap of not knowing how to write women, and so over-correcting by overpowering them. At some point Sue became the strongest member of the F4 by an unimaginable margin. The result is that instead of sidelining her because she was under-powered, she gets sidelined because the writers can’t let her solve every problem in a page.

The 2005 films try to solve the Sue problem by making her a biologist to Reed’s physicist. I think this is a great approach. Media love to portray geniuses as being good at everything, and that’s just not how it works. Trust me, physicists are really bad at biology and vice versa. Giving Reed the physics domain and Sue biology can really help their dynamic and justify a lot more of their plots without making Reed the only smart boy in the room. (Side note: I also think this could be done with Ant-Man and the Wasp. Make Janet van Dyne a physicist who accidentally shrinks her myrmecologist husband Hank Pym, and they can be science couple friends with Reed and Sue!)

The recent Ryan North run of Fantastic Four comics has Sue has a whip-smart member of the team but not a full scientist, though she does have a degree in archaeology which is also neat!

The new movie, First Steps, initially positions Sue as the diplomat, the one who handles delicate negotiations with states and supervillains, and who leads the Future Foundation (and, apparently, treats the CEO like a secretary…). This isn’t bad in and of itself but it just feels a bit like “we still don’t know where Sue fits into the group”, and there is a long history of media tending toward making the women characters the “sensible”, demure, kept-together and “diplomatic” characters while the men get to be varying degrees of emotional messes.

A tremendous amount of the movie hinges on Sue’s pregnancy and motherhood and again I am not saying it’s necessarily all bad, but it feels very trope-y and reductive. If women see this movie and tell me I’m trying too hard, that I’m acting like a white knight because the way Sue is written is actually fine, then okay. But I won’t be surprised if plenty of women watch and say “come on“. Especially in light of the fact that, and this is not a spoiler, her pregnancy is important enough to the core conflict that it sort of falls into that problem where women in fiction are impregnated for the plot. They are incubators of plot.

There are moments, oh so brief moments, where Sue gets to be silly like the others, engages in banter and even a prank, and these moments are fleeting but so great and just make me wish we got more of that.

While Sue is often inconsistent across different versions of the Fantastic Four, at her best she’s a great character. Ryan North writes her as sharing a lot of her brother’s cheekiness. Christopher Yost had her not as a scientist but still able to go toe-to-toe with Reed in his animated series Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. The 2005 movie… great concept, awful execution. I think First Steps gives us a better Sue than the 2005 film even though I miss biologist Sue, I think biologist Sue is such a good idea.

In summary, that may be the big criticism I have of the film: It’s a delight, but it could have been more. It didn’t need to be 2 and a half hours and I applaud Marvel for trying very hard to rein in runtimes, but 10 more minutes would have been enough to get us a bit more character for Sue and the CEO, to give us more heroics from the Four before the big bad shows up (keep John Malkovich!) and to make the world feel more vibrant and full outside of the Four.

And, like, I know they didn’t include Ben’s love interest Alicia Masters because they plan to bring these characters into the main MCU universe and will want the option to introduce her later, but inserting a new love interest for him instead feels like a waste, like she’s just there to support Ben’s emotional development then get left behind (all while removing a blind character from the story). It’s not a huge issue since I do expect them to include Alicia in later projects but still, she could have been in this movie already.

But for what we got, outside of my concerns, it was fantastic!

And now back to listening to the soundtrack ad nauseum.

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July’s a Big Month for My Two Most Favourite Superheroes

Yes, my two top-most favourite superheroes are Superman and The Fantastic Four (they count as one because they’re a family). For all the reasons you might expect of a left-wing humanist science-loving nerd.

I grew up in the ’90s, when the Batman and Spider-Man cartoons were huge hits. Like many children, they were my two favourite superheroes, at the time. Though as I’ve mentioned, I was also really into Iron Man thanks to his eponymous cartoon, and other superhero cartoons back then included Superman and Fantastic Four.

Somewhere in the late ’90s and early ’00s, I went through that phase of wanting to be more “mature” and “adult”, and despite very-young-me loving the Chris Reeve Superman movies, I became adamant that Superman was too silly for me. He’s too strong, I protested, that’s boring, all he does his shoot lasers at silly aliens!

Around this time, I wanted my superheroes to be dark and gritty, and I wanted my science fiction to be about “real” science (I was a preteen, I wouldn’t even know what “real” science was).

I did start to change my mind when I started buying comics more regularly. I’d dabbled a couple times in the 90s but it wasn’t until 2004 that I consistently followed some titles. I got into Fantastic Four with #517 in August 2004, during the Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo era. That issue was part of the Avengers: Disassembled event, and I followed the rest of the Waid run, then through the J. Michael Straczynski run a few years later.

I was beginning to see the value in silliness, humour, and camp. Though I still thought Superman was boring for being overpowered, I was once again getting on board with the zaniness of the F4 and the sense of adventure and cosmic wonder their nonsense adventures were full of. The Fantastic Four were never really science fiction, but they did espouse a kind of conceptual respect for science as a quest for knowledge and understanding of this big beautiful universe, and that’s cool.

The 2005 return of Doctor Who also played a big role in getting me off my “it’s not cool unless it’s dark and dour” contrarianism. Russel T. Davies brought in camp and self-awareness of the absurdity with a hearty dose of humanism and, again, cosmic wonder.

Then Superman Returns came out in 2006. Okay, I have to acknowledge that director Bryan Singer and Lex Luthor actor Kevin Spacey were predators. I did not know this at the time, but it needs to be said that the world would be better off had they never existed. As a 16 year old, I didn’t know what they were doing, so to me, at that time, it was just a movie.

And as a movie, Superman Returns was the final stroke that won me back over to Superman. Brandon Routh’s performance made me root for the nerd who just wanted to do good in this world. The John Williams theme was enrapturing. The movie was just a delight, it melted my heart.

I picked up collections of old comics from my local library. You know what’s really awesome? The original pre-war comics where Superman has absolutely no chill and will straight up trap a mine owner and all his millionaire social circle in a collapsing mine until he agrees to give into union demands. One of the original slogans was “champion of the oppressed.” Hell yeah.

I even started watching Smallville. Now, granted, I still wasn’t a huge fan of that show, because it never really gave me what I wanted. The soap opera stories were… very weak teen-oriented soapiness. And the superhero stories were… often a bit slapdash, to put it lightly. But still, I was a convert to Superman.

At the end of the day, Superman tells a story that’s extremely compelling: What if someone with immense (but not infinite) power was good? What does it really take to do good without abusing one’s power? How far can one not use one’s power when they have a responsibility to? What’s the toll on the “man” striving to be “super”?

And as a counterpoint to Batman: What if we gave great power to a regular person, not a second-generation billionaire, not an agent of the state, not a god.

Granted, all of those stories can be compelling too. Captain America was created before the US entered the war, it’s the story of a man who wants to fight fascism at a time when his country was reluctant to. He becomes a symbol of both the state and the ideals that the people want to believe it. That’s also compelling as hell. Batman can and often is compelling, Iron Man is compelling! Don’t get me started on how much I love Marvel comics’ Thor!

But for me, the orphaned refugee raised in Kansas who wants to be a good man and will do so using his brains as a reporter and his brawn as a superhero, that’s a story just so imbued with hope and humanity that I love it.

And then there’s the Fantastic Four. Created in 1961 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (both), the Fantastic Four were a somewhat obvious rip-off of DC’s Challengers of the Unknown (also created by Kirby). Both were groups of cosmic adventurers and heroes, although the Challengers didn’t have superpowers. The Fantastic Four had powers because Marvel also wanted a team to compete with DC’s new Justice League comic.

What set the Four apart was that, at a time when a lot (not all!) of superhero comics were about really good, heroic people fighting injustice, the F4 were a bunch of regular, kinda messed up people who didn’t even want these powers. Ben Grimm was turned into a hideous rock monster. Johnny Storm is a hot-headed teen (later young adult). Reed Richards just wanted to explore space and got his friends and family’s lives completely upturned. Sue… was not well written at first, though her constantly being overlooked later became part of the story as all of their powers reflect who they were before the accident.

Point is, people may moan that Superman’s unbelievable for being too “good” (a point which I contest is not unbelievable or unrealistic, but even if it were I still find it a compelling story), but here the Fantastic Four are unsure if they even want to be heroes or do good. They love each other, but they fight. They don’t want bad things to happen, but they’re so tired from the responsibility on them. But they try.

It’s more of that optimistic humanism. But this time, with a big dash of love of science.

Currently the comics are written by the incredible Ryan North, a big ol’ nerd who is infusing such delightfully unhinge ideas that borrow from real science and twist them just enough to make them worthy of an absurd comic series. In one issue, a wizard applies a four-dimensional rotation to all of the Fantastic Four’s molecules. Most of our molecules are symmetric, but amino acids in all life on Earth all share the same orientation (called “chirality”) that makes them asymmetric under rotation. With their amino acids and proteins “flipped”, the Four can no longer properly digest any protein.

That’s just a crazy idea. It’s not real science in that it could ever happen (hence invoking a wizard) but it takes that kernel and runs wild with it.

And it affects the microbes that were caught up in the transformation too! And because those microbes are no inedible to other microbes, they start growing out of control!

Comedian Craig Ferguson once described Doctor Who as being “all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”

The Fantastic Four aren’t all scientists, but they are all explorers. They use their powers as bluntly as they need to, but they’re regularly confronted with problems they have to think their way out of.

At their best, both Superman and the Fantastic Four are just that: Triumphs of intellect and romance (and humanism and hope and love and kindness) over brute force and cynicism.

And yes, I am saying Lex Luthor is in the camp of “brute force and cynicism”. James Gunn’s Superman demonstrates this brilliantly.

Uhoh, am I seguéing into a review of the new Superman movie? I sure am! Tune in… hopefully in the next day or two for that!

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Iron Man and Me

OK so every day some wild news comes out of the US and despite my goal to demysterify what’s going on for this blog, I am just way behind. And now Ironheart is out on Disney+ and I’m still behind on politics posts so let’s talk about some superheroes.

Like many children of the 90s (technically late 80s but just barely) I grew up with Batman and Spider-Man as the big superheroes I loved, but there were so many Marvel cartoons in this period. I don’t know why, but I loved Iron Man. I loved the cartoon, I had an Iron Man toy (yes just one, I had a lot of toys but usually couldn’t afford multiples from one franchise, so one Iron Man, one Spider-Man, a hand-me-down Batman, a Dalek but no Doctors Who…) and the second comic I ever bought was an Invincible Iron Man issue (having previously bought a Spectacular Spider-Man). I had very little money then, I was a small child! But in my teens I started buying Iron Man regularly. I am again currently buying Iron Man comics, the lead writer of which is now Spencer Ackerman, a very reputable journalist and expert on matters of national and international security (wild, right?).

Leading off the MCU with Iron Man was delightful for teenage me, and despite many missteps lately I am still hooked on the franchise.

Yasmine Putri’s cover for Iron Man #5 (by Spencer Ackerman and Javier Pina) features Ironheart (bottom right) flying alongside Iron Man (top)

So I’m pumped for Ironheart. She’s a character I know actually very little about. But “working class Iron Man from Chicago” is enough of a hook for me already!

I have discussed a little bit before how, despite my nostalgic love for Iron Man, a lot of writers of comics and movies generally have no idea how intelligence or inventions or science or engineering actually work. It is funny to have Jeff Bridges scream “Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!” And it’s not unreasonable to have inventions that competitors struggle for years to reverse engineer. But it does push credulity to have one singular genius hold all the secret knowledge.

There’s a little bit of leniency in our suspension of disbelief when it comes to our horrifying oligarchic economic system because sure, why shouldn’t a billionaire be able to just buy all the material he needs and use his clout to avoid legal consequences. Sure.

But how many of us really want to cheer on a billionaire?

Early in the MCU Tony at least has an arc of trying to undo the damage he caused as a plutocrat, and I’m all for complex heroes and redemption arcs and all that. Still, give me a hero like Iron Man without that billionaire baggage and I’m in.

I still hope the show avoids some of the more annoying tropes about singular genius, and it’s getting increasingly difficult not to ask “where are these heroes getting all of their equipment for their elaborate machines?”

But the point still stands: I’m a lifelong Iron Man fan, and therefore I am excited to see what the Ironheart series has in store. I really want the best, but you can expect whatever review I write to come with some nitpicks about science.

But the character seems cool, and I liked her in Wakanda Forever, so I’m hoping for the best.

Side note, y’all seen Sinners yet? Ryan Coogler just keeps making banger movies, it’s wild.

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Guess We Arrestin’ Senators Now (or: It’s Not a Distraction)

On Thursday, 12 June, Senator Padilla of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, went to a press conference by Homeland Security Kristi Noem to ask a question. In response, federal agents pushed him, slammed him to the ground and handcuffed him. He had unquestionably identified himself as a US Senator, we have video of it, they ignored him.

This is where we’re at.

In April, the FBI arrested a judge in Wisconsin. Not simply indicted or charged, but they sent agents to handcuff and arrest her. Why? Because earlier that week, she hadn’t allowed ICE agents into her court room to arrest a man because the type of warrant they had wasn’t signed by a judge. Legally, it’s not a clear cut case of an invalid warrant, it was signed by an FBI special agent, that’s not invalid, but it’s also the judges discretion how to operate her courtroom and she determined they should come back with a warrant signed by a judge. And they sent the FBI for her. (And they’re still trying to keep the case from getting dismissed.)

I may not be able to write up very much about the intricacies of Trump seizing the California National Guard (the National Guard are state organisations, it should be clear, that can only be called up by the federal government under very special and controlled circumstances) or deploying the military on civilians (also something that is extremely restricted) because hoo boy is that complex and I myself have learned a lot.

But it is bad. Like, unprecedented bad, even in a country where 1950s racism was so intense President Eisenhower had to take over the Arkansas National Guard to protect Black students during school integration (which, to be clear, was a good move by Eisenhower, the point is the country has a huge racist violence problem). And 1970s imperialism was so bad that Ohio governor Jim Rhodes sent the National Guard to quell anti-war student protesters and it led to the Kent State massacre where they shot and killed four students and injured nine others.

Which is not to say we’re a million lightyears from those incidents or even more recent failures (like President George H. W. Bush sending the National Guard and the Marines, legally, to LA during the uprising after the beating of Rodney King by police), this is just an escalation of our long shameful history.

But it is an escalation. Hell, even if Trump did nothing materially or immediately worse, the mere seizing of extra power to do anything is an escalation because clawing power back after it’s been seized is no easy task.

But here’s the thing:

I see a lot of people saying the ICE crackdowns, the illegal takeover of the National Guard and deployment of the Marines on civilian populations are just “distractions” from Trump’s real goals.

Trump, and the Republican Party as a whole, have multiple goals!

This has been in the works for, well, in the strict sense weeks. The Wall Street Journal documented how, after deportation numbers were shown to be below what Trump had promised, the White House held a meeting in which they (particularly Stephen Miller) demanded law enforcement escalate their violence and damn anyone who got in the way. I should note, arrests are up. Detentions are up. The government was definitely grabbing more people than ever and hiding them in mystery prisons. But deportations, getting them out of the country, didn’t go up, at least not like they wanted. Hence this angry meeting, which set into motion the rapid increase in raids which naturally led to protests which, following on from the aggressive orders from the White House, led to the effective invasion of a state by the federal government. A lot of this goes back to that meeting, weeks ago (again see this WSJ piece).

The invasion of California isn’t a distraction, it’s one of many goals. Of course, it’s Stephen Miller’s highest priority to use the military to control the country as a totalitarian white national state with mass deportations of everyone he considers less than human. But other people in the cabinet and the party as a whole have other goals. Tax cuts, mass privatisation and an absolute run on public infrastructure by oligarchs taking all our data and resources. Oil drilling. The terrorising of trans, gay, and all other queer people. These are all goals.

Which is to say: No one is a distraction.

They’re arresting political opponents from branches of government supposed to be co-equal. They’ve sent the military into a state for political reasons. They are attacking the population, they are terrorising migrants and citizens, and disappearing them as ICE take off their badges and uniforms and put on masks and go where they will.

It’s not a distraction. It’s authoritarianism.

And they want us to accept it, because god knows they are not prepared for us if we don’t. Morale is down. Competence is low. Strategy is all over the place. They won’t fall apart on their own, but they are over-reaching. Their failure isn’t inevitable, but neither is their victory.

But that’s easy for me to say from across an ocean. I’ll try to highlight some effective activism in future posts, if I can.

The main point is: Don’t let anyone tell you this is a distraction. People are being beaten, tear-gassed, even disappeared, and what they’re willing to do to senior Senators pales in comparison to what they do to normal people when no one is looking. This matters. It’s scary, it’s horrifying, it’s what they want, it is their goal. It’s not a distraction.

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RFK Jr Continues to Spread Falsehoods Using Bogus Citations

A good while ago I wrote about a hilariously bad climate denial “article”, and I dissected one of the tricks of pseudo-science: Padding a reference section to give the illusion of due diligence. After all, real scientific research always ends with a big section of references, so attaching any kind of bibliography will appear more “authentic” to someone who is just glancing at the material and not investigating it.

This has always been a trend among science deniers, so it’s no surprise that RFK Jr’s manipulated Health & Human Services Department is doing the same. A May report from the department on trans healthcare is awash with irrelevant, inaccurate, and in some cases imaginary references. NOTUS reports

[O]nly about half of the report’s 850 citations link to peer-reviewed scientific papers. The other references are to news articles, blog posts, opinion pieces and books, including one authored by the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Marty Makary[.]

This is following up an earlier “Make America Healthy Again” report that cited fabricated studies. NOTUS documented several citations to papers that don’t exist, even using real authors who had to speak out and say they never wrote such papers and were confused why their names were appearing in there at all.

Then there are citations to discredited, highly suspect, or inconclusive work. Now, citing work that is controversial among scientists is also not inherently a bad thing, we do want our governments to be thoroughly surveying the entire field. But we don’t want the government to be pretending something is settled when it isn’t. And in the case of trans health care, well, there’s a good reason the American Academy of Pediatrics condemned the HSS report. Transphobia relies on pseudo-science, outdated works long debunked, and improper methodology to justify its conclusions.

In my earlier post I talked about my acronym for non-experts to do a quick assessment for any citation-related red flags. It is imperative to remember that red flags don’t automatically mean a document is invalid or even bad science, but the more red flags there are the more suspect it is that real science was involved at any stage. I called this RUIN:

• Relevance – Are the citations referring to research articles or data sets? Or are they citing tertiary summaries and personal opinions, such as in blog posts or news articles? Are the references primarily to unrelated or tangential issues?
• Use – Are all claims made by the authors given citations to back them up? Or do you mostly see a lot of citations in one section but not another? Does the document spent a lot of time talking about a side-issue with a lot of citations but the main issues has only a few?
• Independence – Do the references reflect a degree of independence from each other? Do the same authors get undue weight relative to their contributions in the field? Do the authors cite themselves and their associates without regard to others with substantial work on the topic?
• Number – Does the number of references feel appropriate to the scope and breadth of the subject?

Again, it’s just a help guide for a non-expert to do a quick hunt for some red flags in just one section of a report or article. Without reading the full text and properly digging into the references, one cannot make a true assessment. However I continually notice that, because pseudoscience is just a mimicry of real science and cannot rely on evidence to support itself, one can often detect superficiality a mile away.

Doctor Who Forgets How Gravity Works

As I await tonight’s episode of Dr Who which won’t air on the BBC until 19:00, I keep thinking about last week’s episode, “The Interstellar Song Contest”.

In that episode there is a space station in the centre of which is a large arena with a large stage, thousands of seats, and a big dome above it. For reasons that are never explained, this dome can be opened almost instantaneously with a single button.

What bugged me then and continues to bug me now is how everyone is immediately sucked out when the roof is removed. And my question is:

Why?

Now, I’m not going to do that maths for this. At least not yet. I think it might be interesting, and I may find myself doing it in the future, but for now I just want to raise the question. Questions, actually.

The station has artificial gravity and the air pressure is comparable to Earth on the surface. Without doing math, I don’t know to what extent the air inside the station would be stratified or not. Would the pressure be equal from the floor to the ceiling? It’s a large arena, the ceiling is quite high up there, but relative to an actual planet’s atmosphere it’s teeny tiny so perhaps it would be equal pressure.

In that case, removing the roof does create a problem, because the pressure of the air below would be pushing on the air at the top and force it to expand outward into space. This would create leakage and anyone caught up in the airflow would be dragged with it.

But the thing sci-fi TV and movies often forgets is that once equilibrium is reached, that flow stops. If you open the door of a small spacecraft, the air will rush out very quickly, and then there is no more air to push anybody around. You won’t get sucked out.

Even in an arena-sized area, the instant air starts flowing out from the top, everything changes. Yes it may happen fairly rapidly, very large volumes of air may be moving with great speed (may, I’m not doing the maths) but the more it expands the less that pressure gets.

And that’s before remembering: Oh wait, there’s still gravity isn’t there? There’s still a force pulling the people and the air back down? How fast would the air actually leak with artificial gravity on? Would it leak?

On Earth, the atmosphere is held in place by gravity. There is some leakage, and without the planet’s magnetic field solar wind would crash into and strip away at the atmosphere as well. But by and large it’s fine where it is. Just from gravity.

Of course, it is also stratified. Gravity pulls the air toward the planet, and you get the densest, highest pressure layer at the bottom, and it thins as you move upward away from the surface. This is also partly a result of temperature gradients, and the heat from the sun has a large role in creating the stratification of the atmosphere and determining the specific structure of the boundaries between layers.

But the point is, even though the stratosphere is thinner and has less pressure than the troposphere, the troposphere is held down by gravity (it does interact with the stratosphere but for many reasons the boundary between the two is not quite smooth and not quite sharp, there’s more to it but I want to focus on gravity without doing the maths).

And again, this space station in Who purports to simulate gravity on Earth’s surface. It’s the same amount of force. So, should the air really be swooshing out so quickly?

Even if it were, shouldn’t the people be held in place?

And that’s before asking the question: Is the air at the top the same pressure to begin with? It’s a small arena compared to a planet, but it’s still big relative to a person, and if the air at the top is already a bit lower pressure, it might reach equilibrium with space even faster as there’s already less pressure on the top.

Space is mostly empty. The only reason it looks like something would get “sucked out” of an open spacecraft is because the pressurised air inside is pushing in all directions, and when a door is open it pushes out the door and creates a flow. As soon as the air is gone, as soon as there’s some equilibrium, that flow stops. Space doesn’t suck.

Then of course, there’s the issue of what happens to all those people who get sucked out into space. They instantly start to freeze over.

Space is also not cold. Sort of. Heat can be lost in three ways:

Conduction, in which something cold is physically touching something hot and their molecules bump into each other. The cold molecules get an extra kick from being hit by hot molecules, so now those cold molecules are a little warmer than they were before. That’s conduction.

There’s no conduction in space because there’s nothing around your body to conduct.

Convection is when a specific mass of a fluid (be it liquid or gas) is moved all at once, carrying any heat it contains along with it. So if you’re in space and you breathe out, all the heat from the air in your lung is being lost. But there’s no much else going on here.

Radiation is the third process, and radiative heat transfer is very slow. Essentially, every atom or molecule has some amount of energy, and they emit photons to carry some of that energy away. Hot molecules have a lot of energy, and they emit high energy photons. Really hot metal appears to glow because of this, but the reality is that the metal was always glowing, it’s just that when it’s cold the photons emitted are much lower energy that our eyes cannot see. When you put on infrared goggles, you see the low-energy photons emitted by cold objects, such as human bodies.

Still, the process of heat loss by radiation is very very slow. No, you would not freeze in space. Moreover, the water in and on your skin wouldn’t freeze either, because without any air pressure the water would evaporate into a gas.

One final issue: Let’s say they added a line from the villains saying “aha, we’ve turned off the gravity too” (if this line did happen and I missed it, then I’d like to point out that several characters in box seats did not experience it, they stayed put, so it is not clear what’s going on) you still have to ask whether the air flowing out would really be enough to pull thousands of people out with such speed and force. I don’t buy it.

Much has been said about the rest of the episode being not entirely well thought out, I won’t belabour those points here. But it does feel like in television and movies, especially the mainstream productions, sci-fi is writing its plots based on whats happened in previous sci-fi movies and TV, and not asking too many questions about whether repeating these tropes is the right call. Not that sci-fi writers should have to ask “is this scientifically accurate” when writing, god no. But it can feel a lot like just “going through the motions” sometimes, and hand-waving away very weird choices can come across as the writer saying “it doesn’t matter, it’s sci-fi.”

It kinda does matter though, at least a little bit.

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