Quarantine Control #161: May the Screams, Monsters, and Bunnies Be With You

DC Staff | May 4, 2023 | Animation, Features, Movies, Television, Videogames | No Comments

The issue worth quarantining over in the United States these days is no longer COVID-19 (through whether people should have never stopped doing so is another issue), but the sheer amount of violence in the country. We can’t go a day without hearing about, if not seeing, a mass shooting incident, the kind that’s become so normalized that it only dominates the news cycle for a few hours of the day. It’s another catalyst of how quickly the news cycle moves these days, sometimes to another shooting. It’s bad that this is accepted as normal, and it could only get worse as summer approaches.

Drew Young

Scream VI (2023)
Episodes: 1 movie

I can only imagine what went through your head when I teased my first movie review of the year was coming. Did you think it would be Super Mario Bros.? Or Dungeons & Dragons? Ant-Man and the Wasp? Shazam? Tetris? Even if you were expecting a curveball, you probably had your money on Cocaine Bear or Blood and Honey.

It has only occurred to me as I write this that the next sequel desperately needs to have Ghostface wax on about Blood and Honey during one of the cold open “what’s your favorite scary movie?” phone calls.

And make no mistake that more is coming. Scream VII was greenlit before this installment even opened. It seems like a solid bet, considering Scream VI went on to beat the total domestic gross of Scream and Scream II‘s entire runs in just its first month.

The post-Wes Craven Scream universe did get off to a good start, with Scream 5 following the themes of the the series fantastically well and also having a precinct new motivation for the killers.

Scream VI, on the other hand, while still at least flirting with the themes, had killers who were more like ordinary psychos who actually had what in previous movies would be the red herring motives (and not done nearly as well as, say, in Hot Fuzz). The movie was more concerned about providing a new setting that allowed for new, interesting ghostface chase/murder scenes than using the killers as a forward-looking commentary on new, futuristic sources of narcissistic maniacs.

And that’s a bit of a let down, given how how well 5 fit in with the vibe of the rest of the series. However, I get the impression this shift was done with deliberation and not because they tried and failed to do it again. Because Scream VI was interesting. It was fun. And it wasn’t so different as to be unrecognizable (unlike Stab! 8), just enough to keep the suspense fresh, lest Scream itself fall into its own retread tropes that it was designed to hang a lampshade on.

Geoffrey Barnes

Today is, as it turns out, Star Wars Day, the day in which you say “May the 4th Be with You” to anyone who knows what you’re talking about and won’t think you sound like an irredeemable corny-ass nerd. Don’t worry, I prepared for the occasion.

The Mandalorian — Season 3 (2023)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 8

I’ve seen plenty of talk regarding how far The Mandalorian series has strayed too far from its origins since the first season, but it was bound to wind up at this current point. Mandalore, the Star Wars planet on which Mandalorians like protagonist Din Djarin aka Mando (Pedro Pascal) were born, played a significant part in the animated The Clone Wars and Rebels shows. A work bearing this name and involving Dave Filoni (who spearheaded the animated works) was bound to tackle what remained of Mandalore several years after it was decimated by the Empire and during the subsequent civil war from the two respective animated shows.

The concepts proposed for the overall story aren’t the issue. It’s a pity that anyone who hasn’t seen those animated shows will be a little in the dark, but they aren’t fully necessary for enjoyment. The way in which the concepts were utilized is a problem plagues this entire season, which made for a more uneven experience compared to prior seasons.

This season opens by following up on a plot thread left open after The Book of Boba Fett (another series that should be watched before this). Din is safely reunited with Grogu, because it’s not possible to have what’s essentially an outer space Lone Wolf & Cub without the two together. But Din removed his helmet while bonding with the child, a forbidden act in the Mandalorian tribe he’s part of. This is the catalyst for bringing Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackoff) back to the fold, the sister of the former ruler of Mandalore, after Din overestimates how much danger lies on the planet. In addition to continuing the bond between what’s essentially a father and child combo (and incidentally bringing a mother along), the season tackles what remains of the Mandalorian tribe, the New Republic established after Return of the Jedi, and how the Empire is rebuilding itself.

This all sounds fine in concept. Great, even. The problems arise through how the writing and allotted runtime for each episode don’t provide enough opportunity to explore all the subplots in enough detail, while others are in active contradiction of each other. The rules for the Mandalorian tribe seem clear at one point, until The Armorer (Emily Swallow) changes them for… some reason. The way was tough to determine here, so to speak.

Din himself also gets little character development after the first couple of episodes, with Grogu similarly suffering from it outside some of them. This could have been due to Pascal himself being busy filming HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation, but that’s not much of an excuse for a character who primarily keeps his helmet on with stunt doubles often inside the outfit. It’s Bo-Katan who steps up as co-protagonist for a good chunk of the series, receiving the bulk of the character development here in return. Maybe the show should have been retitled “A Mandalorian.” Other actions from some returning villains (the identities for whom I’m withholding for spoiler reasons) could have used more time and elaboration.

The video game side quest-style nature of some episodes doesn’t work well when the comparatively-mainline story elements aren’t explored to a satisfactory degree. There’s nothing wrong with episodic tales in theory, but they’re easier to pull off in shows with more episodes per season like those made for broadcast TV, or one with twice the number like fellow animated show The Bad Batch. This is extremely difficult to pull off in a series with only eight episodes per season, and with some episode times themselves being so short.

This is a season of squandered potential, but I still had a good time with it. The production values are through the roof, with incredible set and environmental design despite the use of the Volume green screen, complemented by superlative special effects work. The same applies to the overall direction, with mainstay talent like Rick Famuyiwa and Bryce Dallas Howard, and even one from Minari’s Lee Issac Chung. It also learned well from Obi-Wan that the ticket to leaving a lasting impression is to end well with a solidly-paced and conclusive finale that wraps up most established plot threads, even if they could have used more depth.

The ending to this season of The Mandalorian is surprisingly conclusive for a show assuredly not ending anytime soon, with lead writer Jon Favreau mentioning how the fourth season has already been written. But it’s also the newest in what has become its own little saga serving as an interquel between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, set to conclude with a theatrical film whenever Lucasfilm starts releasing Star Wars movies again.

It’s nice that season ends on a note that implies how the tone could shift back to one resembling the first season and the first half of the second season, a space cowboy tale that saw Din and Grogu exploring portions of the galaxy largely untouched in live-action form while searching for bounties. I appreciated the ideas that led to the pair being involved in the larger overarching Star Wars tale, and it could return there given the popularity of both characters and future saga plans. But the space cowboy concept is where the series, and Favreau by extension, worked best.

Angela Moseley

Monster Hunter Stories (2017)
Source: 3DS, Android, iOS
Episodes: 1 video game

I wrote about Monster Hunter Stories for my 3DS Retrospective at the end of March. It is a game I probably wouldn’t have considered if not for falling in love with Monster Hunter World. I grabbed a copy in 2020 and just started playing late last year. I realized I wanted to play this 3DS game before further continuing with Monster Hunter Stories 2, a game I streamed the first few hours of in 2021. Overall, I’m happy with my decision as I near the end of Stories.

Three children from the village of Hakum are out in the forest one day when they find an egg. The kids, Cheval, Lilia, and the protagonist hail from a village filled with Riders, or monster tamers that create bonds with their monsters (aka Monsties) via a stone known as Kinship stone. The trio decide to perform their own version of the Rite of Kinship (sans the actual stone) in order to bond with the monster. The egg hatches and a baby Rathalos forms a bond with the game’s protagonist. The three take it back to the village. A few days later, a Nargacuga afflicted with a strange phenomenon known as the Black Blight attacks the village. The monster flattens a bunch of huts and Cheval’s mother is killed in the chaos. The baby Rathalos, now named Ratha, attempts to fight off the Nargacuga and is lost in the process.

A year passes and Cheval, now withdrawn and angry leaves the village. The protagonist undertakes the actual Rite of Kinship, and officially becomes a rider. In response, Lilia leaves to find her own way in the world. Shortly afterward, the protagonist meets the traveling Felyne, Navirou who claims to be wordly. The two team up, and leave the village to learn more about the Black Blight and find a way to halt its spread.

As I said in my retrospective, the combat from the mainline Monster Hunter games translates well into turn-based combat. Both the rider and the Monstie have special attacks and basic attacks. Basic attacks are a rock, paper, scissors based system. Power attacks beat technical attacks, technical attacks beat speed attacks, and speed attacks beat power attacks. The difficulty comes from guessing which movies an enemy monster will go for. A bad match-up could see you lose anywhere from a big damage advantage, to an entire move depending on the skill selected. Speaking of skills, some specialized ones do fall into the attack triangle. Again, a bad match up can see you lose that move if an enemy picks an attack that overpowers your own in the match-up. For example, choosing a Diablos’ “Fierce Stab” which is a power type move, and the enemy counters with their own speed attack– the move is simply negated, and you lose that turn.

Monsties generally act on their own favoring some attack types over others, and their AI does a decent enough job picking the correct attacks. You have the ability to directly issue commands to the monsters, but only regarding their specialized skills. (The computer will always pick the basic attacks and the player has no control over this.) Those specialized skills draw from a pool of points, called Kinship Points. The points are measured on the Kinship Gauge, and once the meter fills up the protagonist can ride on their monster. This basically combines the Monstie and rider into one unit with a shared health pool.

Specialized skills disappear, but you can directly control basic attacks. In addition to that, you now have option of a super attack that is unique to each monster. The attack itself has levels that range from one to three and progressively become stronger. Levels are increased by successfully countering basic attacks. Fail to counter basic attacks correctly, and you run the risk of having the protagonist knocked off their Monstie. Of course, immediately choosing the super attack is always an option. It’s a fun risk-reward system. Riding a Monstie can be done multiple times in a battle, as long as the Kinship Gauge is full. The gauge is completely drained after performing a super attack. Using specialized skills from either the rider or the Monstie drains the gauge, while landing successful basic attacks fills it.

To keep the battles exciting, there are also action based commands that proc from time to time. These actions can range from rapidly tapping buttons to rotating the analog pad to have monsters clash head on or battle each other with beam attacks. It’s a great way to keep the combat from feeling too rote and repetitive. Though having to grind for levels or doing a bunch of side quests (which is the quickest way to earn money) WILL feel repetitive at times.

Monsties gain skills as they level up. Unlike Pokémon or a Shin Megami Tensei game, there isn’t a limit on how many skills can be carried by a Monstie or the rider. Additionally, different skills can be learned through Gene Channeling, which channels the genes or abilities of one Monstie into another Monstie. The monster passing on its genes disappears, which definitely reminds me of fusion from the Megaten games. Using gems instead of other Monsties are also an option. Gene Channeling is a great way to get rid of unwanted moves, power up a Monstie, rid it of elemental weaknesses, or give it immunity to certain aliments. Each monster only has a limited number of gene slots, and some creatures get more than others. This is determined by the Monstie’s rank (1 through 7), and how heavy it was when it was still an egg. Light eggs give you few gene slots, while heavier eggs give you more.

The protagonist gains some support and self-healing skills by leveling up, but many skills are tied to whatever weapon they’re currently using. Only four weapon types are available in Stories– Great Sword, Sword and Shield, Hammer, and Hunting Horn. Each weapon comes with their own unique abilities. However, additional unique weapon skills must be learned via scrolls. These scrolls are generally obtained through completing side quests. Just like the mainline games, new armor and weapons are forged from the parts of defeated monsters.

So Stories falls into a comfortable pattern. Slay monsters, get their parts, craft new gear out of those parts. The obvious twist here is that the rider doesn’t fight monsters alone, and their Monsties are physically stronger. In fact, these battles would be unwinnable without the help of Monsties– unlike the brutish hunters of the mainline games.

If you’ve tried Monster Hunter in the past, but the action or the grind was too much, I do recommend giving Monster Hunter Stories a try. The same goes if you just like turn-based RPGs, especially ones similar to Pokémon. I’ve not completed the game yet, but I’m about 80% of the way done with the story, and I’ve put over 40 hours into the game. If you missed out on buying the 3DS version before the eShop closed or getting a second-hand copy is too expensive, there are mobile versions of this game.

Joseph Daniels

A couple weeks ago, I ranted about having very little time to work on things outside of getting sleep. My original plan for Quarantine Control columns in April had been to talk about various big movies starring rabbits and which also combined live and animated actors. I did cover Hop, but the rest of my plans fell by the wayside.

Since then, I’ve had a lot more time to cover the movies I wanted to cover, but I find myself unwilling to actually watch them, for one reason or another. Two of them are movies I’ve already seen several times, and I just can’t bring myself to watch them again for QC. I’ll briefly talk about them this week so that hopefully I can move on and talk about other stuff next week that I do want to watch.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
Source: Disney+
Rabbits?: Roger, duh. Also, Bugs Bunny

When it comes to a blend of live action and animation, this is definitely the go-to example. Movies had been blending live action and animation for years already, like in Mary Poppins or Bedknobs & Broomsticks. Wikipedia lists a ton of movies that count as combining live action with animation, although a lot of the live action films listed only have animated credit sequences, or the animated films utilize the framing device of having a real book open and close to start and end the story. When I think about movies that blend live action and animation, Pete’s Dragon, where an animated character interacts with human actors, comes to mind rather than Grease, which has an animated opening but the live actors never interact with it.

In recent years, the line between animation and realism has been blurred to the point where you can’t really lump movies like Guardians of the Galaxy in with Pete’s Dragon even though Rocket and Elliot are pretty much the same: animated characters interacting with human actors. Rocket is meant to blend so seamlessly into the action that you think of him as a real character, whereas you can see the lines that are used to draw Elliot, so you’re supposed to pretend he’s real while knowing he’s not. There’s a kind of kayfabe to movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, Hop or even Alvin & the Chipmunks where you still know that these characters don’t exist, but the fact that they’re CGI now means that they’re more “real” than the animated characters from the 1960s and 1970s.

This brings me to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which leans into the separation between live actors and animated characters in a bit more of a unique way, by acknowledging in universe that Roger and everyone else are “toons”, a kind of living being deliberately made to look like they’re drawn by an artist and inserted into a scene. They talk about their existence as if they really are hand drawn by someone, even though they’re real in the world of the film.

This is a perfectly fine film and is considered a classic, but I just can’t bring myself to watch it again for some reason. I wonder if it’s because I’ve outgrown it somehow or I just don’t feel like watching it for the twentieth time. There’s nothing wrong with it, but lately I’ve been craving new experiences, which may be why I also am still stalled out on the Retrospective articles. I’ve yet to figure out a balance between new and old stuff in order to work on them some more.

This is also keeping me from watching:

Space Jam (1996)
Source: Prime Video (United States), Netflix (Canada), Crave (Canada)
Rabbits?: Bugs, Lola

Ironically, this one also features Bugs Bunny, so maybe I’m just avoiding him and trying not to return his phone calls. Seriously, though, this is another perfectly fine film, but it’s definitely a product of its time. Whereas Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is a timeless classic, Space Jam is a very 1990s film that, if you didn’t know Michael Jordan retired from basketball at one point in his career and tried to play a different sport, you can be forgiven for thinking its premise is stupid and silly.

Even with that knowledge, though, it’s wild that they came up with a story where Michael Jordan remembers why he loved playing basketball by teaming up with Bugs Bunny in order to defend the Looney Tunes from aliens who want to use them as amusement park attractions. That said, it’s as great a premise as you can expect from a movie about Michael Jordan deciding to play basketball again. It’s also very much a Looney Tunes film, especially with a subplot where the Looney Tunes temporarily become better basketball players after being gaslit into thinking they were drinking a miracle steroid, only to find out that they were drinking water and the hidden talent was inside them all along.

The reality of Michael Jordan’s short career playing baseball is a lot less glamorous. He wanted to honour his father, who had been recently murdered at the time, by playing the sport his father had always wanted him to play. He was also growing dissatisfied with basketball, so he signed a contract with the Chicago White Sox in 1994. If you were paying attention to baseball in 1994, you’d know that this was the year Major League Baseball went on strike. I like to joke that this was because Canadian teams were suddenly dominating their sport and the Americans didn’t like it, but maybe they just didn’t want Michael Jordan to play!

We did get revenge by kicking the American teams out of the CFL after Baltimore won the Grey Cup in 1995, so hopefully that taught those uppity Americans a lesson.

Michael Jordan returned to basketball not because of Bugs Bunny, but because he didn’t want to serve as a strikebreaker, playing baseball as a non-union player. It had seemed at the time that he’d quit basketball on a whim to play baseball, but actually looking at the history of what happened, it was his return to basketball that seemed like he did it on a whim. He could’ve just retired from sports entirely when he quit baseball, but instead he returned to basketball, which turned out to be a good thing for his career. He led his Chicago Bulls to several more championships before his eventual second retirement, which he reversed once more, but his time with the Washington Wizards was pretty much the basketball equivalent of Wayne Gretzky’s last couple years playing for the New York Rangers. Or maybe Gretzky’s time playing for the St. Louis Blues.

Space Jam was lightning in a bottle when it was released. Any attempts to replicate it since would very much miss the point of the original. It’s because of a ceaseless need to create sequels to things that don’t need them that Hollywood is seen as being creatively bankrupt. Case in point: of the top ten highest grossing films, only one of them is not part of a franchise, and two of them were stand alone films when they were released. James Cameron’s Titanic has thankfully never spawned a sequel and although Avatar is intended to be a five film franchise, it was also an original property when it took over the number one spot back when it was released in 2009. The rest of the top ten are all sequels or remakes. You could consider Black Panther (currently number 15 on the list) as an original property if you ignore the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole and also don’t count the titular character’s first appearance in Captain America: Civil War, and you could consider Frozen (currently number 19) as an original property if you don’t count it as part of the Disney Animated Canon, a list of films created by Walt Disney Animation Studios, and which has been releasing films at a rate of approximately one a year since The Black Cauldron in 1985. In fact, with that in mind, the majority of the top fifty were released as part of an ongoing franchise of films with the exception of Jurassic Park (currently 44th on the list, but which at one point held the number one spot), Avatar, Titanic and possibly Joker (34th on the list), The Super Mario Bros’ Movie (39th on the list and climbing) and 2010’s Alice in Wonderland (47th on the list), depending on how you view their relationship with the properties they’re based on.

I’ve seen Space Jam a few times as well, and I just couldn’t find the ambition to watch it again for Quarantine Control. There is a sequel that I haven’t watched yet, but…

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)
Source: HBO Max (United States), Netflix (Canada)
Rabbits?: Bugs, Lola

No. Just, no.

This Week’s Short Film
Lonewolf (2020)

This has been another horrifying week in which current events are difficult to address through words without depressing everyone, those which might have come to your mind at the mere mention of them. So, let’s stop here. See you all next week.

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