Quarantine Control #18: Apocalypse Witch

It’s become too easy to despair about the longevity of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has, unbelievably, enveloped most of the world for nearly five months, through it’s felt much longer. This hasn’t been helped by the embarrassing response to dealing with it in several countries. The pitiful situation in the United States has been featured a lot in ledes for the Quarantine Control entries posted on this blog, but that’s not to undermine how bad it’s been in territories like Brazil and Japan, where leaders have also either undermined its severity to dangerous degrees or have chosen to do little about it. It’s sobering, but the least we can do is bother ourselves with entertainment.

 

Geoffrey Barnes

The pandemic has been bad enough, but this can all feel extremely overwhelming when it’s combined with any other kind of catastrophic event. This was the general feeling when the protests erupted after the death of George Floyd between late May and early June, and that returned this week in a different form when Hurricane/Tropical Storm Isaias made its way up the East Coast. Forecasts made it clear that it would do some damage, but the classification of a Category 1 storm and then a downgraded Tropical Storm made it sound manageable for most areas. This was how I felt in Philadelphia… until it arrived. The storm left plenty of damage and power outages in its wake, including around where I live.

Several houses were flooded around here, with people and families having to be evacuated by the fire department. I also lost power for around 19 hours between Tuesday and Wednesday, which made for one of the roughest nights of sleep I’ve ever experienced thanks to the lingering humidity. This was despite my power surviving bigger hurricanes like Irene and Superstorm Sandy in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Big surprises come when you least expect them, and it’s downright sobering to remember that this horrifying Hurricane Season is very far from over and the overall increasingly northward trajectories of many hurricanes and tropical storms isn’t comforting to think about. This will not get any better over the next several years as the climate continues to change.

Meanwhile, I did get a chance to watch something while I wasn’t paying attention to the news.

X-Men: Apocalypse
Source: Disney+
It’s a movie

I felt that I’d adjusted my expectations for X-Men: Apocalypse well enough before I sat down and watched it. Going in, I knew full-well this movie wasn’t anywhere near as well-received as the well-made X-Men: First Class and the superlative X-Men: Days of Future Past (the Rogue Cut especially), the latter of which I recently watched in April. After watching Apocalypse, I came to two personal realizations: Either I didn’t do a good-enough job adjusting expectations, or it simply wasn’t possible for me to wind them down far enough. Regardless of which one occurred, I wished took the advice I gave to myself on Twitter after watching DoFP in April, though I wasn’t serious about that comment.

X-Men: Apocalypse seemed like a good continuation conceptually. This was to be the first X-Men movie to feature series supervillain Apocalypse, and continue the saga established with the newer cast of X-Men actors from the first two films, this one taking place in the 1980s. The film would also introduce younger iterations of X-Men characters from other films like Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Storm, along with those who were largely missing like Jubilee and Psylocke. But the execution made me wonder what the hell kind of film director Bryan Singer (since largely disgraced) was going for.

One big problem is how too much of the runtime is devoted to building up the conflict between the X-Men and Apocalypse, but it doesn’t spend as much time on the conflict itself. It establishes the hell out of Apocalypse’s motivations, and the mutants he’ll have at his side. I understood the need to focus on why Storm and Magneto were teaming up with him, but it took too much time and reduced the pacing to a crawl. I can’t tell you the number of times I checked to see how much time remained for the movie while watching it.

This wasn’t helped by some characters they chose to focus on and the aesthetics behind them. A big portion of that went to Mystique, thanks to her ostensibly heroic actions in DoFP. This was fine in concept, but her scenes were a struggle to get through thanks to being played by a Jennifer Lawrence who very, very clearly could not have cared less about playing the character at this point. On that note: Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey isn’t in the same ballpark as Famke Janssen’s portrayal, though not for lack of effort. This makes me feel bad, because unlike Lawrence, Turner was clearly enthusiastic about the role. She might just need a better writer.

It’s unfortunate that Storm and Psylocke don’t receive much development, but when a movie has to juggle so many characters, someone’s bound to get shortchanged. I had trouble not being distracted by Psylocke’s leotard, a relic of the 90s hot and sexy comic book era despite everyone else’s outfits being updated for established X-Men movie standards (Storm’s especially, who looks great). They shouldn’t have gone with it despite her actress, Olivia Munn, reportedly rallying for it.

The biggest problem is the titular Apocalypse himself. In the comics and other media, he’s one of the largest (in terms of importance and size) villains in not only X-Men history, but in the Marvel Comics legacy as a whole. The level of intimidation presented by this interpretation makes him come off as just another typical X-Men villain. There’s nothing original behind his motivations, and he isn’t a much bigger challenge than previous villains from X-Men films in the end. Not to mention his overall design would make him look more fitting in a Power Rangers film — the Ivan Ooze comparisons were not unearned. It’s a missed opportunity given how he was treated in the 1990s X-Men cartoon and the X-Men: Evolution animated series, and especially compared to how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has treated Thanos.

Underwhelming as it was, the climax of the film was at least entertaining. It showed how much better this movie could have been had it not glacially made it there, though that still wouldn’t have elevated it to the level of a good film. There was also a certain quick appearance from a certain character (obvious spoiler: It’s Wolverine) that worked as a nice nod to the previous films while retconning a certain other film that Apocalypse is still better than. (That’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, if you weren’t aware.)

X-Men Apocalypse isn’t a bad film; it’s not even mediocre. It’s merely okay, which can sometimes be worse than an outright bad movie in terms of memorability. It’s easy to think about how good it could have been with a more formidable Apocalypse. Dark Phoenix, from everything I’ve read, is considerably worse than any of these films, so I can’t wait to digging into that. That’s only a half-joke.

 

Joseph Daniels

While waiting for David Tennant to do a podcast with more people (new season starts August 11!), I tried out another podcast I’ve rediscovered on Spotify.  The good news is that there are a lot of episodes to listen to and it’s nestled firmly in the fantasy genre, but the bad news is that I don’t enjoy the humour in the early episodes.  I’m still giving it a chance but at this point, if I’m not wowed by any of the next several episodes – in other words, if it doesn’t get any better – I won’t be recommending it in a future Quarantine Control column.

Instead, this week I’m going to offer our readers a moment of zen in an otherwise stressful world.

Flying Witch (2016)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 12

Makoto is a witch who has just turned 15 and rather than go off on her own – since among witches, you’re considered an adult when you’re 15 – Makoto leaves her parents’ home and lives with relatives in the rural town of Aomori.  That’s pretty much it.  There’s not much to this anime, but there doesn’t need to be.  When it comes to slice of life shows, Flying Witch is pretty zen.

Like many slice of life shows, Flying Witch is more about characters than conflict.  There are loose threads of story that play through the entire series, the biggest of which concerns Makoto’s garden, which she first clears the weeds out of in episode three and then by episode nine, she’s harvesting radishes.  She also almost harvests a mandrake, but after her new friend Nao has a frightening experience hearing the shriek of one that was uprooted in episode one, she’s reluctant to hear it again.

There is great potential for more episodes, considering how open ended a series like Flying Witch is.  It’s a shame that only twelve episodes were ever made, and that it’s been four years since the show aired.  Given how other anime shows have revived after a few years’ hiatus, I never say never.  However, it’s not often that a show which didn’t become super popular gets a revival.  That said, Flying Witch is an anime which I would consider to be among the best slice of life shows to watch on Crunchyroll right now.

Maybe sometime in the future, I’ll compile a list of anime which I would most wish to see more of.

 

You’ve undoubtedly been hearing this a lot throughout the pandemic, but please hang in there. Given the theme of 2020, it’s still possible for things to get even worse before they get better, but there’s a little light at the end of the tunnel that appears far away. The question is just how long of a drive we’re in for within this figurative cave, enough that some people will never make it out and lose themselves to despair. There’s also a question of how long that light will shimmer even after we reach it. The state of the world remains terrible thanks to incompetent and power-hungry leaders. Good luck and stay safe, because there’s not much else we can do.