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If you value my work here and want to help me keep publishing, becoming a paid subscriber would make a real difference. Writing is how I make my living, and it's been an especially difficult stretch lately. Your support helps keep this publication alive. If a paid subscription isn't possible, reposting or sharing this piece with someone who might enjoy it would mean a lot.

When Oppenheimer first released to theaters in the summer of 2023, I enjoyed it so much that I saw it twice. The way that director Christopher Nolan told the story of the atomic bomb pierced me so deeply that I decided to heed his repeated nudges and track down tickets for a 70mm IMAX showing. As one of the select few earthlings living within a manageable drive of a theater that actually meets those stringent screening requirements, I decided it was only right to experience the summer blockbuster “as Nolan intended.”

The above phrase has become a running joke following the release of The Odyssey as purists scramble to secure seats for those rarefied screenings, as contrarians taunt those aficionados by macgyvering ways to stream the movie on crank-powered Game Boy knock-offs, digital scales, and nicotine delivery devices instead, and as Christopher Nolan continues stoking the pandemonium on both ends by imploring viewers to seek out cinemas that, more often than not, require air travel before one can even enter their parking lots.

I had to buy tickets three weeks in advance for my 70mm outing with Oppenheimer, as I recently did with The Odyssey. But sitting down with popcorn in hand, it was immediately clear why Nolan had been so adamant. Dramatically more visual information was on display than in a typical theater. The screen occupied so much of my field of view that it immersed me in the narrative in a way that almost no movie ever had. (Interstellar was then my lone exception — another Nolan movie I had the privilege of seeing in Philadelphia’s Tuttleman IMAX before it tragically closed. As a child, I never stopped to savor being born within a 15-mile drive of two of Earth’s then forty-two remaining 70mm theaters.)

I found Oppenheimer stimulating enough that, between my two viewings, I managed to write three separate pieces on the film — one standard review, one discussion about the IMAX experience, and one about the movie’s broader cultural significance. In truth, I can’t stand to read any of them today.

And yet, I’m grateful that those humble beginnings continue to stand as enduring reminders of how much my writing has grown and changed. Those Oppenheimer pieces in particular also represented a turning point in my career as a writer, and my entire relationship with entertainment.

It was one of those articles that put me in touch with Simon Dillon, who had recently been recruited by Eric Pierce to serve as an editor for Fanfare, the largest entertainment-focused publication on Medium. It was one of the first publications I encountered that ran such a tight editorial ship that the idea of having my work there seemed like it would be a real honor. And when I began submitting there, it was among the first experiences that I had on Medium with editors who truly cared about what they published. (Sarah Paris and Paul Combs also warrant special shout-outs here.)

Seeing my work featured there for the first time, alongside a queue of so many other talented authors, felt as though I’d reached a new milestone. Though I’d been on Medium for well over a year before submitting my first article to Fanfare, I quickly recognized it as a Goldilocks zone between the rigidly bureaucratic experiences I had had writing for a professional newspaper and the hands-off-to-the-point-of-raising-concerns approach that I’d experienced with so many of Medium’s purported editors prior to then.

Fanfare’s standards pushed me just enough outside of my comfort zone to continue growing as a writer, but never so much that I felt stifled. Having such a terrific home for my entertainment pieces also inspired me to develop my writing within a particular niche in a way I never before had. (I’m still unwilling to give up pestering my email subscribers with satires about raccoons in RFK JR. costumes, heavy political diatribes, or lofty screeds on religion and the ramifications of technology. It would be an equal shame to forfeit my love for circuitously overlong anecdotes and openings.)

All of this thus far is to say that The Odyssey indirectly reminded me of my love for writing, and not because of its greatness (it is awesome), but because a new Christoper Nolan movie can’t help but mark a personal inflection point for me. It’s an anniversary of the summer three years ago when I began taking my entertainment writing more seriously, and when covering my favorite shows and movies evolved from an experiment into a core part of my voice and identity as a writer.

There’s a poetry to the fact that Oppenheimer and The Odyssey would both celebrate July releases, separated by only a few years and a few days; that I’d watch each at the same IMAX theater as an escape from the same, swampy Pennsylvania heat; and that this latest film would be every bit as spectacular and provocative as that prior entry — if not more so.

It only seemed fitting that I write another three articles on another Nolan movie to bring this journey full circle — even if this piece, admittedly, has very little to do with the film itself.

There was another actually-pertinent-to-The Odyssey topic I thought I might be able to efficiently squeeze into this reflection. But out of fear of this piece becoming even more top-heavy than it has thus far, I’ll save my thoughts on the movie’s writing for another day and keep this one focused squarely on the personal.

With that, I’ll close with a request to my readers to forgive my discursive ways, a heartfelt thank you to any of you still aboard this crazy train, and — should the gods or Aeolian winds propel me onward — a gentle warning to brace yourself for the possibility of a fourth piece on this same movie.

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Growing up, most of the readers in my school preferred to remain invisible. Our anti-intellectualist attitude was so pervasive that it rendered the admission “I like to read” into a borderline unspeakable taboo.

While every now and then you might find an out-of-the-closet bookworm if you conducted enough interrogations, even high school honors English classes were comprised predominantly of kids who were there to impress or appease their parents. Whenever an unfamiliar stack of books took up residence inside our rooms, we peered suspiciously toward it, hoping and praying that the teetering omen was a concern for another class to shoulder.

When those fateful days finally arrived and the tower of identically-editioned texts toppled into our laps, an unmistakable sense of dread suffused the room. Whether it was Fahrenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, or Macbeth that our teacher was doling out, we squirmed in our seats as we reluctantly scrawled names and dates into our respective copies, our eyes bouncing between windows and walls as we fruitlessly searched for ways to weasel out of each assignment.

Much of our distaste for literature simply owed to the self-perpetuating cycles of coolness that crop up in any school or social hierarchy. But more than that, I think it was due to how much technology had seeped into our lives before we’d ever even heard the name Orwell.

By the time one of us learned that the book had a SparkNotes breakdown available online — or better yet, had been adapted into a movie, the prospect of more than 20% of us actually reading the story at hand was a wash. I’m proud to have fallen within that prestigious minority more often than not. But throughout middle school and high school, I admit that there were a fair number of books that were dull enough that I opted to read summaries or scour out cinematic adaptations instead.

My father read Crime and Punishment alongside me to soften the blow of my daunting summer reading assignment. But by the time we were halfway through, he agreed with my searing appraisal of the writing and granted me express permission to abandon ship just so long as I found a different, dad-approved book to read in its wake.

Brave New World was challenging for a class of ninth graders, but the narrative was adequately engrossing for most of us to at least test its waters even if many of us returned to dry land when we caught first wind of Aldous Huxley’s expansive vocabulary. Romeo and Juliet was onerous, but with a sufficient number of “No fear Shakespeare” translations trading hands between students, most of us could at least grasp the story behind the Pre-Elizabethan English enough to pass our exams.

But I’m not sure any literary obstacle we confronted throughout our high school careers felt quite as insurmountable as The Odyssey (8th century BCE).

From the moment our teacher passed around the books, aged old paperbacks that looked to have been held by Homer himself, it grew clear that the only way we’d endure long enough to reach the conclusion was if we were handcuffed to our desks and drip-fed caffeine. The mere cover on the Robert Fagles edition — a rust-colored ribbon across a jaundiced yellow background — was soporific enough that it made students fight off daydreams and transformed chairs into memory foam mattresses. The wear on the copies seemed to stem more from successive years of bottom-of-backpack neglect rather than anything like affection or fascination. There were no pages turned carefully inward at their corners to mark where readings started and stopped. It bore the kind of wounds that are rarely inflicted on inanimate objects without a prerequisite level of resentment.

Whether split into chunks or procrastinated on until the bitter end, our assigned reading segments never went over smoothly. The hours before tests and discussions were spent commiserating and hastily exchanging retellings. There were fleeting moments when the text managed to pierce our smartphone-addled attention spans. But it just as quickly lost us, setting us adrift at sea with long-winded diatribes of long-lost gods.

Even our teacher deemed some segments so impassably dense that, at one point, she actually instructed us to skip 150 pages. The directive seemed sacrilegious coming from the language-loving pedant, but there wasn’t a lone student among us who was prepared to question the head-turning mandate over the fear it might be rescinded just as abruptly as her silver-platterred offer surfaced. There was a cynical exchange of eyes among the sophomore students as whole chapters flitted effortlessly by in our fingers. But there was comfort in the absolution that came with “just following orders.”

None of us were brave or curious enough to question what the voided material might contain. Our brief stint in Homer’s world hadn’t magically infused us with heroism.

By the end of the book, there were at least a few isolated passages of The Odyssey that I managed to enjoy. Typically they demanded multiple read-throughs in order for me to properly grasp them, but by the time we finished the last chapter, I could at least say I’d caught a few passing glimpses of what makes the story so timeless and revolutionary. I had a hazy understanding of the characters and their relationships, and couldn’t quite see each scene described in my mind’s eye, but I could at least concede that there was something there.

When I heard Christopher Nolan would be adapting The Odyssey, I was excited for one primary reason, and unlike for many, it wasn’t because I had enjoyed the book so much when I was younger. I was excited because it seemed like an opportunity to truly experience the greatness in Homer’s seminal story.

I viewed Nolan as one of the few directors capable of such an ambitious undertaking. Had Roland Emmerich or Kevin Feige been tasked with revivifying the same story, it wouldn’t have excited me a fifth as much. But from the director behind Oppenheimer, Inception, and Interstellar, it was a safe bet that audiences would be treated to something special.

While Nolan has drawn his share of criticism for the omissions that were made in bringing Homer’s epic to the big screen, if one thing was evident from the little time I spent with the source material, it was that it didn’t efficiently lend itself to a cinematic adaptation. While a few directors before Nolan have tried, those finished products have largely suffered from those same elements that made the written form feel so alienating. The language is impenetrable, and the presence of gods is cheesy at best and laughable at worst.

One of Nolan’s greatest achievements in this 2026 adaptation is his ability to imbue a constant air of believability into the mythic. While historians doubt that the famous “Trojan Horse” was a real historical event that occurred, Nolan breathes so much realism into the invasion of Troy that I found myself earnestly wondering whether this was real history being depicted. He portrays the legends with the same level of groundedness that he employs in Dunkirk. And he capitalizes on the tectonic ripple effects that spring from Troy’s sacking in the same way that he does with Oppenheimer and the invention of the atomic bomb.

Not only does Nolan do away with the antiquated depictions of gods, but he introduces so much character to these apocryphal tales that they begin to feel like more than folklore. He preserves the mysticism in Homer’s world with his faithful depiction of giants, witches, and sirens, but does wonders in ensuring that those fantastical elements don’t fester or crumble under the weight of their archaicism.

While I can’t call it a 1:1 substitution for reading The Odyssey, my initial experience with the book was so underwhelming that I actively hoped it wouldn’t be. More than being holistically faithful to the Ancient Greek text, one of the greatest accomplishments that this movie could strive for was to flesh out the story for a new generation. And on that front, I think Nolan succeeds on all counts.

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It’s no fun to address a film without being able to speak to its faults. As much as I would have preferred for The Odyssey to warrant beginning-to-end gushing in this review, that would quickly grow dull for readers. To simply hop aboard the bandwagon and label it a masterpiece without covering its most obvious shortcoming would also be dishonest.

Prior to The Odyssey’s release, my social media feed was so overrun with praise of Nolan’s upcoming film that it was easy to conclude that it would be his magnum opus, if not one of the crowning cinematic achievements of the century. (I’m not here to deny that it’s spectacular.)

What it gets right it gets so astonishingly correct that it leaves almost no room for criticism. It creates an awe-inspiring sense of scope, its practical effects are second to none, and the sweeping landscapes effectively drive home what it is to be small beings in a world ruled by capricious gods. It strikes a delicate balance between taking those older beliefs seriously, yet not portraying them with such a strict adherence to the source material that it makes his adaptation feel hokey or inaccessible to modern audiences.

The acting is terrific, the plot is tight enough to make 3 hours breeze by, and the musical score perfectly accompanies Odysseus’ sweeping journey.

By nearly all accounts, Christopher Nolan went to breathtaking lengths to make audiences feel as though they’re alongside his protagonist and crew as they invade Troy, get lost at sea, and face off against everything from sword-wielding giants to witches, sirens, and a sheep-herding cyclops. And yet, I felt as though Nolan poked holes in his own work, not by failing to go the extra mile, but in going a mile too far. The story is so riddled with stars that it almost feels as though he didn’t believe the film could rest on its own laurels. It not only betrays a certain insecurity from Nolan, but distracts from the components that most distinguish the cinematic spectacle.

In the months leading up to The Odyssey, I paid no mind at all to the controversies that encircled the impending release. As ignoramouses railed against a movie they hadn’t seen, as social media commentators stirred up storms over each casting choice they deemed questionable, I stayed silent — trusting that Nolan would deliver as he almost always had in the past.

I’ve never been one to work myself up over the cultural misappropriations and misrepresentations that are inevitably bound to crop up in any story that depicts the ancient past. When history becomes obscured by legend, “historically accurate” loses its meaning.

I didn’t care that Odysseus would be played by Matt Damon, regardless of his decidedly un-Homeric appearance. I didn’t care that Tom Holland was cast as his son, Telemachus, despite their glaring void of shared physical attributes.

Just so long as directors aren’t tasking Timothée Chalamets to play Martin Luther King Jrs., I don’t see anything inherently problematic. I took no issue with any of the individual actors that Nolan brought aboard. It was only in looking over the final crew he assembled that cracks began to appear in his vessel.

By incorporating so many major Hollywood actors into The Odyssey, Nolan sabotages what he attempts to drive home. Listing each actor that made their way into the movie, it’s almost a miracle that the story lands so well — that it doesn’t crumble completely from the weight of all of its star power.

From Matt Damon and Robert Pattinson to Anne Hathaway, Hamesh Patel, and Mia Goth to Charlize Theron — both Tom Holland and Zendaya — to Travis Scott, Elliot Page, Lupita Nyong’o, John Leguizamo, Benny Safdie, and Jon Bernthal, The Odyssey is so brimming with familiar faces that it begins to sound almost like an SNL satire of itself. If the overall movie’s execution weren’t so close to flawless, if each actor didn’t embody their respective roles so well, the accumulation of casting decisions would ring as almost comical.

Among The Odyssey’s greatest achievements is how dutifully it smooths over the bumps that Nolan introduces into the picture. Never is an actor so out of place that it irreversibly breaks his hold over audiences’ attention. But the friction is so needless that it couldn’t help but raise questions for me. Each time Nolan’s siren song lost its charm, more than any out-of-place accent or anachronistic expression, it was because I found myself wondering some form of the question, “Wait, isn’t that the guy from The Walking Dead?”

Nolan has never been one to shy away from recruiting well-known actors. But at no point in The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Inception, Tenet, or Oppenheimer do the films feel so overloaded with A-listers that they disrupt. Set exclusively in worlds that are more reminiscent of life today, never did one of those stories insist on a new set of faces as resolutely as The Odyssey.

Where even Nolan’s foray into the superhero franchise was marked by grounded realism, The Odyssey catapults viewers into a world where mystical forces reign supreme. It’s impressive that Nolan pulls off the thematic leap as well as he does, and that it’s only in brief moments where the celebrity status of his cast causes his masterful illusion to thin.

A few recognizable leads would be both expected and welcome, but this is the first time I feel as though Nolan has distinctly crossed over the threshold where star power begins to feel obtrusive. Maybe he simply wanted to ensure that this film would live up to his lofty ambitions and garner all of the acclaim that he hoped it would, and maybe having enough Damons and Zendayas in the movie was the easiest way to guarantee that would happen.

But for a director who’s so famously resistant to using special effects, who travels the world to record at the most authentic locations possible, it’s ironic that he couldn’t go just a single step further and hire a slightly more convincing cast. Rather than going a step further, it would actually have required him to go a step less far. The Odyssey would have not only been more engrossing if he’d found equally talented unknowns to take on those roles, but it would have demanded a radically lower budget. The cast was every bit as much of a financial drain on the picture as the scenes that were unprecedented in their technical prowess.

If only Nolan had cheaped out and found a less recognizable cast of actors — and perhaps a more regionally appropriate one while he was at it — it would leave me with next to nothing to complain about. But in populating his ancient Greece with as many household names as an Avengers movie, Nolan not only dilutes the potency of the illusion on display, but does something that’s fundamentally at odds with his own cinematic principles.

Nolan’s religious focus on authenticity sees him regularly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible through practical effects alone, all in the name of immersing audiences in movies in a way that they never have been before. And yet, Tom Holland and John Leguizamo, however good their acting, have faces that can’t help but detract from the storied world Nolan goes to such painstaking lengths to build.

I’d hate for my singular objection to talk anyone out of seeing Nolan’s latest blockbuster. It was one of the best adventure movies I’ve ever seen and a film I’d wholeheartedly recommend seeking out and viewing on the biggest screen possible. It’s likely to stand as the most cinematically impressive spectacle I consume all year. But it’s both funny and a little frustrating that what kept The Odyssey from being a masterpiece isn’t any lack of mastery, but a display of it that’s so maximalist it occasionally borders on jarring.

Had the millions needed to feather Nolan’s Ancient Greece with Hollywood stars gone instead toward enhancing the level of realism, one can only imagine the final product we’d have on our hands today instead. I’m not disappointed because my probable movie of the year was imperfect, but because Nolan was so maddeningly close to realizing his sky-high aims. He shot for the moon but paid too much attention to the stars.

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Following a years-long barrage of satirical attacks that saw late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham portrayed as everything from an emotionally dependent garden gnome to a sentient throw pillow, his communication director reported that the veteran lawmaker finally felt compelled to take matters into his own hands.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” he explained. “Really, we exhausted all other options. We tried simply ignoring the attacks. We tried denouncing the writer of those petulant satires as just some Liberal hack from Substack. We even placed parental locks on all of Graham’s devices so he couldn’t read the damn articles to begin with… Admittedly, it looked like we found our solution until the crafty bastard figured out how to turn our guardrails off….”

The staffer appeared to have more to say, but remembered the central topic at hand and cauterized his tangent before it could fester.

“But the ball didn’t really get rolling until one strategist pointed out that ‘It’s not in good taste to make fun of dead people.’ At first we just laughed at what he was implying, but as the laughter dissipated, a gravely serious atmosphere descended over the room… Graham sorta just took the idea and ran with it.”

“It was the line about Graham being a shoddily taxidermied ferret in a hand-me-down Tommy Hilfiger suit… I think it just pushed him too far,” one of two former aides of the late senator explained to our team on the condition of anonymity. “It was his breaking point. At first when he said, ‘I’ve had it! I’m putting an end to things once and for all!’ I thought he might just be taking a breather from the politics for a bit. But to will himself out of this mortal plane entirely? I really didn’t see that coming,” he continued before taking a sip from what appeared to be a frappuccino from Starbucks.

“I told him that he could try to have a sense of humor about it, or that he could, like, grow a spine and confront the coward who wrote those satires to begin with, but he simply reverted to the fetal position in which he’s spent most of his professional career.”

Another colleague and former staffer who bore witness to the South Carolina Senator’s chemical dissolution helped to shed light on the situation. He, too, spoke to our reporters under the condition of anonymity. “So the late senator is coiled into a ball like a god damned rolly polly. ‘Okay, business as usual,’ I thought. But he proceeded to coil so tight that he simply… disintegrated. Vanished from existence. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be frank,” he said with a moderately traumatized sigh. “It was like a black hole collapsing in on itself… but there was something disarmingly vaginal about it.”

“There was even a little queef sound,” explained the first aide in a tone that was equal parts solemn and assistive. “He just… disappeared into the ether. Poof. With the sound of a bashful vagina fart… Senator Graham left the world just as he had lived his life.” He paused and sighed as he reflectively twirled the straw in his frozen caffeinated treat. “And I think there’s something kind of beautiful about that.”

President Trump addressed the development roiling Washington in a 4:43 AM Truth Social post, announcing, “Lindsey Graham couldn’t Take the HEAT. Vanished into Oblivion like a DOG. People are saying he disintegrated. ‘Toot’ like a little vagina fart, they’re saying. Personally I believe it. I told Lindsey, look, you can’t just take what these SOCIALIST DUMOCRATS like Ben Ulansey say about you. You have to FIGHT back. You have to be MEAN. But HE didn’t have it in him! Low-energy Lindsey folded in on himself from the crushing weight of his own obsequiousness. SAD!”

When reached for comment the following morning, Texas Senator Ted Cruz was found with his nose partially lodged in the commander-in-chief’s rectum and inhaling loudly. He helped himself to his feet, adjusted his hair, and placed an Altoid into his mouth before reaching for the microphone. “Look, I’m as appalled by what happened to my colleague as the next guy. He was a legendary figure in the Senate. But I’ve got a patriotic obligation to fill the void he left behind.” He paused briefly to lick his lips. “And maybe in time, our Dear Leader will recognize me, too, as the most brazenly spineless sycophant in the Senate. These titles aren’t just won overnight, after all,” he exclaimed with the duty-bound commitment of a superhero rising to the moment. The disordered splotches of fecal matter on his face nobly refracted the setting sun as it streamed in through the Oval Office window.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also spoke to the odd circumstances of Graham’s departure from our material realm. “I don’t celebrate what happened to Senator Graham. I really don’t. But if your political philosophy is so structurally fragile that being likened to a sentient throw pillow causes you to shrink down to an incorporeal speck of shame and self-loathing, perhaps you shouldn’t be in the Senate.”

Hearing reports that Ben Ulansey has continued to posthumously make fun of the former South Carolina senator, Graham has allegedly opened talks with his PR team about reprising his mortal form. But with the media now focused on Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell as he recovers from a bout with pneumonia, reports claim that Graham’s staffers have handily dismissed his proposed return as “just too soon.”

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I initially wrote this piece last week, but decided it made a little more sense to publish it after I put up this analysis on the series’ shifts in animation. The article below is a broader review of the Toy Story 5.

The name Toy Story 5 alone can’t help but breed a certain cynicism. It’s rare for a franchise to retain its essence as sequels begin to mount. Each successive entry tends to feel more soulless and profit-driven than the ones that predate it. But Toy Story has continually proven an exception to that trend.

Few film series have so elegantly mirrored my own personal evolution, and it likely explains much of my enduring love for the saga. Released just a year before I was born, Toy Story was practically destined to define my youth. The 1999 sequel arrived when I was only three, and in the years that followed, the two VHS tapes relentlessly traded turns in our family VCR, both played and rewound more times than I could count. My parents were happy to see their only child happy, and were sufficiently astounded by the quality of the animation on display that they were content forfeiting whatever screen real estate it required for me to run my feverish Pixar marathons.

They gifted me Woody and Buzz Lightyear action figures for Christmas and I made silly sounds as they soared through my bedroom and I narrated each of their odysseys and escapades. I fancied myself the Andy of their world: a playmate by day, and a custodian to a hidden society that came alive in my absence. I didn’t need to catch them going about their various dealings. I delighted in the knowledge of their secret inner lives, but the mental image of my toys scrambling back to where I’d placed them was precious enough for me to respect their sanctity. (On a couple of occasions, I may have flicked off my light switch and pretended to sneak away in order to spur my plastic sidekicks into action, but alas, the sentient figurines were perspicacious enough to see right through my little ruse.)

By the time the third installment came out, I was a brooding adolescent, closed off from the wonder that the talking toys used to impart. Watching the movie in at a local cinema, I was too preoccupied by the angst in my first romantic relationship to lose myself in the story. I felt as though my world in seventh grade was far too serious for me to entertain the plights of these talking toys. In a way, it’s perfectly apt that the story where Andy grows too old for toys came out at the same time that I set aside my own love of action figures, and likewise, became disenchanted by the stories of talking playthings that had once enlivened my childhood.

(I’m happy to report that, in the years since its release, I’ve finally developed a love for the tenderhearted conclusion to Andy’s trilogy.)

By the time Toy Story 4 was released, I’d graduated high school, gone away to college, voted in my first election, and was fast approaching my first pandemic. By then, another Toy Story struck me as more far-fetched than the notion of a Finding Dory’s Granddaughter (2037). But once I sat down in the theater with popcorn in hand, it managed to capture my heart every bit as much as the previous iterations. Having shed my final traces of adolescence, I felt emboldened to shamelessly enjoy kids movies once again.

Going in, I knew nothing about Toy Story 5 apart from the fact that it was set to take on the issue of technology and screen addiction — and that it was allegedly tailed by a new Taylor Swift song. Even after loving the first four Toy Story movies and seeing the positive reviews of this new installment begin rolling in, I couldn’t help but fear that a fifth entry was simply a bridge too far for the beloved franchise to cross without brokering a deal with the devil.

I was also concerned that the movie’s handling of tech would feel preachy and contrived. The number of shows, films, and documentaries that have taken on the topic has grown so copious that most new portrayals of screen addiction in media have begun to feel trite. I wish the issue didn’t feel so annoyingly overdone, because there’s likely no crisis that’s emerged throughout my lifetime that deserves to be taken so seriously.

Yet cellphone addiction has become so commonplace that railing against the phenomenon inevitably looks tone deaf, wide-eyed, behind the curve, or some jarring combination of the three. For Toy Story 5 to address this ubiquitous problem appropriately was all but guaranteed to be a tightrope walk, but its cast and creators handle it adeptly.

It’s neither so restrained that it feels sanitized, nor so overwrought that it stops feeling like a Toy Story movie. To handle the issue with much more nuance than it does would run the risk of setting aside the series’ core identity. It effectively drives home what these devices steal from us without being so militaristically anti-technology that it borders on political. It’s digestible enough that almost any six-year-old can grasp the moral, yet heart-rending enough in its delivery that even the most hardened Pixar veterans could likely benefit from tissues.

One subtle point that the movie drove home that I couldn’t help but laugh at was about the unique uselessness of the first wave of digital toys.

Where dolls and action figures still hold an integral spot in children’s playtime, there’s not much utility today for the mid-2000s battery-powered devices that cropped up throughout my childhood. They’ve all been replaced by newer and sleeker cousins who’ve ditched their battery compartments for USB-C ports. Watching the movie, I wondered what message it would ultimately deliver about these dated digital sidekicks that help the main gang to take on the menacing, new-age tablet. Surely no Andy or Bonnie today would occupy themselves with a potty-training tech toy from before they were born, after all. But the film finds a humorous way to keep from sidelining them completely.

Jessie’s arc from Toy Story 2 (still my favorite of the franchise) is revisited to a similarly poignant effect, but from a lens that was particularly hard-hitting for viewers like myself who’ve grown up on these stories. Another clever subplot involves a storage crate full of new Buzz Lightyears washing ashore on a deserted island, seeking out “Star Command,” employing their drone capabilities, and trying to figure out their purpose. It makes for some of the more humorous sequences in the movie, and is so detached from the main plot that director Andrew Stanton actually admitted to following Breaking Bad’s precedent in order to tie the disparate pieces together.

There’s another aspect of Toy Story 5 I wanted to address here. But as I began to, I quickly started to realize my thoughts would take long enough to fully unpack that the tangent would be best saved for a separate piece. In short, there’s a shift to the animation style for certain scenes that cleverly reinvents the relationship between the kids and their toys. On its own, I think the varied approach serves as adequate justification for this new entry in the saga.

As cash-grabbingly opportunistic as it sounds right now for them to make another, I’m officially on board for a Toy Story 6. And if we’re granting septologies to the runaway mutant that is the Jurassic Park series, studios might be wise to just grant go-aheads to Toy Stories 7, 8, 9, and 10. Hell, bring on Toy Story 19: the first live-action installment. Now, in lieu of a proper conclusion, I invite you to click on the link above and revel with me in the glorious future it foretells.

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Going into Toy Story 5, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some reservations. Despite the few glowing reviews that I read beforehand, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this would finally be the Toy Story to cross the threshold and devolve into just another soulless, Hollywood-style cash grab.

One thing I didn’t expect was that Toy Story 5 would be arguably the most inventive entry in the franchise since the original. Nor did I expect it to reveal a blind spot that I’d had toward one of the series’ only pitfalls.

Toy Story 5 profoundly reimagines the way that scenes between toys and humans unfold. Not only has the art style continued to improve incrementally with each new installment, but there’s a brilliant emotional shift in the way that playtime is illustrated.

In the first four Toy Stories, the toys we know to have elaborate inner worlds are forced to play dead each time children (or adults) enter the room. As a result, there’s an undeniable stiffness to the time with their owners that the toys repeatedly describe as most meaningful. Kids pick up the lilliputian protagonists and swing them around the room as their limbs go limp and eyes become lifeless. Woody reverts to the rag doll that he is.

I hate to make this point because these animated movies have meant so much throughout my life, and I have no plans to stop enjoying them. But if I’m already smearing beloved classics like Rocky, I suppose it’s only par for the course to fire off a few shots at the Toy Story franchise.

In scenes like the one above, the toys don’t present as either consenting or particularly enjoying themselves. At best, what they do seems like a labor of love. The majority of the time they’re in use, it’s hard to imagine they’re comfortable. As a result, there’s something that registers as mildly violating about these moments.

It’s likely reading too much into the situation, as I certainly never had a toy verbally consent to playtime in all of my childhood. But if the series is going to spend so much time characterizing and humanizing these toys, it’s bound to feel a little unsettling when they’re forced to suppress all of their traits and personalities by functional giants. I was never haunted by these scenes as a kid. But nor did I ever particularly enjoy them.

Toy Story 3 seems to begin grappling with this problem by introducing a gentler, more mature Andy. And when he donates his toys to Bonnie, she’s presented from the very start as kinder and more sympathetic toward the tiny protagonists. The enhancements in animation accompanying Toy Story 4 also aid in drawing humanity from the characters even as they’re frozen in position.

But Toy Story 5 feels like the distinct culmination of the series’ efforts to cast these relationships in a more loving and mutually fulfilling light.

In a franchise where winsome children serve as the gravitational center, it feels like a significant error in storytelling that none of the scenes that stick out in my mind from the first few movies actually involve the kids playing with their toys. I think the primary reason they haven’t lingered is that something is a little off about them. The rest of the stories are just so brimming with warmth and whimsy that this tiny creative oversight is easily ignored. What the broader saga achieves is so ingeniously novel that it reshaped the world of animation moving forward.

Yet these scenes almost uniformly fail to depict the wonder of play, and the personality that children so effortlessly breathe into lifeless objects. In Toy Story 5, playtime is finally portrayed as every bit as alive as it should be. Toys are swept into whatever off-the-wall scenarios that kids have concocted for them as the animation becomes abstract. They come to life in the presence of their owners rather than playing dead. It’s these zany, theatrical sequences they’re pulled into that gives their existence purpose. The characters can remain characters rather than reverting to inanimate props.

There was a stiltedness to the series’ prior approach that I never identified as a kid. The toys love their owners, and yet, they have to conceal all that they are inside in order to spend time with them. The fix that this latest adaptation applies feels like a revelation. It’s as artful as it is overdue, and it achieves a best-of-both-worlds effect where the toys still need to sneak around and conceal the fact that they’re conscious (these scenes are some of the very most fun in the franchise), but are granted the opportunity to actually inhabit the parts their humans assign them.

If the child envisions some off-the-wall scene with a cowgirl and her conniving horse, it feels more natural for the cast to join in that narrative and remain active participants in the world rather than be manhandled and contorted into position however a kindergartener sees fit. The cartoonish animation style employed for these scenes is a welcome change of pace in a franchise that’s grown so photorealistic that it leaves little room for improvement. It also effectively draws borders between the secret life of toys that audiences see and the joyous fantasy lives the characters are whisked away into whenever playtime begins.

It reminds me of one of Rugrats’ most defining features: we not only get to see a room or situation from adults’ perspective, but whatever the disobedient toddlers inflate it into. Trips to retrieve toys turn into intergalactic odysseys, backyards become sprawling jungles, and innocent misunderstandings serve as launching pads into adventure. As with Rugrats, Toy Story 5 doesn’t just show what an adult would see if they walked into the room on their child playing, but shows us the fantastical worlds that kids see in their minds’ eye. It feels like a great kindness toward a new generation of viewers to take their imagination so seriously.

In addition to the visual stiffness in the series’ prior approach, there was also a subtle cynicism in treating something as ethereal as playtime so concretely. In retrospect, it seems obvious that this more enchanted, stylized approach would have better driven home the wonder in these make-believe friendships that the series always aimed to impart.

I would argue that this evolved approach warrants this new chapter in the Toy Story saga more than anything else. It provides more to the franchise than its handling of tech addiction, the main theme of this new entry, and I expect it will be a roadmap for its visual direction moving forward. While it’s hardly tainted my impression of the earlier movies, this revelation feels so overdue that I can’t help but wonder why it didn’t cross my mind sooner.

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I’m certainly not alone in saying this, but when I think of the most impactful deaths from throughout the world of fiction, it isn’t generally the people that come to mind first. More often, it’s the non-verbal creatures that pull at my heartstrings and linger in my mind. They spur a raw kind of empathy that audiences can’t always feel toward fellow humans.

Few 90s and 2000s childhoods went unmarred by the memory of Mufasa’s untimely departure in The Lion King. (I know, I know. It’s still too soon.)

Before I ever even had a pet of my own, I remember being driven to tears when our septuagenarian substitute teacher introduced us to Old Yeller.

Again, during a stormy day at summer camp, nearly a hundred of us filed into a large cabin as one of the counselors wheeled out a box-shaped TV from a creaky wooden closet, positioned it at the center of the room, and tasked us with deciding on a movie to watch. As thunder rolled in the background, rain misted in through tattered screen windows, and the woods descended into darkness, we deliberated between Sandlot, The Goonies, and Air Bud using a show of hands. With enough six and seven-year-olds’ sticky fingers on the scale, our democratic process guided us toward “the dog movie” cradled in the all-powerful teenager’s palm.

The sun was high in the sky, but so little light permeated the trees that the TV’s static lit up the room and transfixed the ordered rows of campers. By the time we reached Air Bud’s most traumatic scene, there was hardly a dry eye in the room. Even counselors stifled tears and tried their hardest to retain composure as shattered kids looked fruitlessly toward them for consolation.

Marley and Me was harder still on my friends and I. But of all the imaginary characters that I’ve grieved, I’m not sure any losses have ever gutted me as completely as those of the dragons of Westeros.

As strange as it is to say now, dragons had initially been one of the reasons that I was closed off to Game of Thrones. To my uninitiated eye, they symbolized everything that I would ultimately discover the show isn’t: juvenile, cartoonish, and unserious.

Never an enormous lover of fantasy, I reasoned that the storied universe that George R.R. Martin had created was simply too riddled with mythical creatures for me to be able to suspend my disbelief. It didn’t dawn on me that HBO could do for dragons what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs.

One of the aspects of the show I’ve ultimately grown to value most is the sense of realism that it manages to imbue into material I unfairly deemed childish. Dragons, sorcerers, and giants don’t automatically make a story kid-friendly.

As with the grizzled father who falls for the new family puppy, I ultimately grew to love the dragons that had previously repelled me from the world. Watching them hatch from their eggs and become graceful, formidable titans, it’s hard not to feel a vicarious sense of ownership toward them as seasons tick on.

When the dragons begin meeting their dire fates, it drives home a level of agony in viewers that movies, in their limited runtimes, rarely manage to relay. But given a whole decade to grow attached to these living relics, it’s all the more nail-biting when we see them in peril, and it cuts all the more deeply when we see them in pain.

One of Westeros’ most convincing features is that the citizens of the world are every bit as in awe of dragons as audiences. The fire-breathing leviathans are hardly an everyday sight; entire generations live and die viewing them as little more than legend. Their return from extinction is greeted with the terrified reverence that such otherworldly beings should naturally elicit. And the destruction they cause in the towns and cities of Westeros is so well-realized and unsanitized that the story naturally eschews the air of fantasy that typically comes paired with such creatures.

Much of that owes to the massive CGI budget that HBO has funneled into Westeros. Few shows or movies have ever put so much money into bringing fictional monsters to life, so it makes sense that viewers can grow so attached to them — and feel so devastated when they die.

With over $20 million funneled into each episode, House of the Dragon plays into this phenomenon as much as the name suggests. The flying colossi come to life even more than in the show that preceded it, and the advances in technology have only added fuel to their fire. It’s both harrowing to watch and impossible to avert your gaze as civil war breaks loose, and dragons begin warring with one another. The elemental clashes are as horrific as they are mesmerizing.

The monsters feel not only rare to the point of endangerment, but so titanic and majestic that their deaths leave colossal voids.

Even the dragons with limited screentime feel like irreplaceable wonders stripped from the earth when they fall victim to the spoils of war. Because there are more dragons in this prequel show, we’re given less time to familiarize ourselves with the individual members of the species and look from a broader lens at the remarkable aberration such beings represent. It’s a testament to the power of special effects that HBO can infuse these creatures with such a depth of personality that the loss of each individual feels so heart-rending.

The dragons can wipe out entire battalions of ships in minutes, yet are portrayed largely as gentle giants whose only atrocities are in direct compliance with human orders. Their participation in the conflict is no more voluntary than horses’. And their primeval abilities would merely be applied toward hunting prey if they weren’t being used as pawns in a war between royals.

A lot of the tragedy in seeing the dragons enter the war is how blameless they are in the chaos they sow, and how the only means they have to communicate their thoughts and fears is non-verbal. They’re capable of expressing a great array of emotions, but when they know their end is near, there’s no exchange of words to be had with their human masters. The only goodbyes are in the form of labored grunts and knowing glances.

It’s that same barrier that makes losing pets in real life so difficult. When my first dog lay dying, it broke my heart that there were no words I could find to make her understand that the only existence she’d ever known was coming to an end. Yet, in her inability to speak, somehow she imparted even more than words alone could manage.

The dragons in House of the Dragon aren’t given a minute of dialogue, but their presence is so realized that, when they die, they feel like colossal souls snuffed from the world all the same. In their dying groans, they convey a far deeper agony than any cliché combination of final words. They serve as a reminder that, more than the magnates and their power struggles, it’s the dragons that take center stage in this story.

There’s a season 2 line I love that succinctly captures the ground soldiers’ growing acceptance of their smallness:

“The dragons dance and men are like dust under their feet. And all our fine thoughts, all our… endeavors are as nothing.”

Maybe one of the things I value most about House of the Dragon is how effectively it mirrors our present moment. In the masses of people humbled and awed by forces beyond themselves, and in the staggering inequalities that define the world, I can’t help but see a reflection of life today.

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