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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It’s been five whole decades now since Rocky first galvanized a generation. And at fifty years old, few films have held as enduring a spot in the hearts of Americans.

As a lifelong Philadelphian, it shames me to say that I only just watched the movie for the first time last week. As a self-appointed outsider of the professional sports domain, I assumed that Rocky’s appeal depended entirely on viewers’ pre-existing love for boxing.

Even as a modernist who struggles to sit through anything pre-1980, I was impressed at how well the movie holds up. Rocky depicts a city different from the one I’ve known throughout my life. Its culture is different, its atmosphere is charmingly askew, and its skyline is completely unrecognizable. Today, most of the buildings that can be seen during Rocky’s iconic run up the Art Museum steps have been razed and replaced. The once-tallest building in the city has been dwarfed by a new generation of skyscrapers. Where City Hall used to loom over the rough-edged metropolis like a monolith, today it looks quaint.

But the most fascinating distinction between the world then and the world now appears during a scene in which Rocky made a sexual advance on his love interest, Adrian. It’s a scene that’s often overlooked when talking about the film’s continued cultural relevance. In it, Rocky invites his reluctant date into his apartment, and she rejects the offer three times over. Adrian expresses continual discomfort once inside, where Rocky implores her to come closer, “make herself comfortable,” and “relax.”

Once she asks to leave, he blocks the door, inviting her to begin undressing. The five-minute scene offers a masterclass in just about everything that men are taught not to do while navigating the world of dating today. It was evidently written before the conversation about the importance of consent had even began.

One of the interesting components of the scene is that, even in spite of Adrian’s repeated rejections, she’s not portrayed as so unwanting that she appears to mind the kiss or relationship that follows. Yet even still, “no means no” is such an unassailable rule in modern romance that it’s easy for contemporary audiences to see coercion in Rocky’s actions all the same.

“She only complied because she was scared,” it’s easy to argue. “She only agreed to a relationship because she feared he might be violent if she rejected his advances.” He was, after all, a professional fighter.

But even if through the modern social lens Rocky’s actions might be considered tantamount to sexual assault, one controversial aspect of the scene worth examining is that not every situation involving consent is as dualistic as modern discourse suggests. Rocky makes room for that nuance. Of course, back then society was so different that the film’s depiction of romance fell within accepted norms. There wasn’t anything particularly brave or contentious about the director’s handling of the scene.

Rocky is forward maybe, but not to be considered a criminal. He doesn’t respect her continued rejections, and yet, he isn’t portrayed as ignoble. I’ve been surprised by how many female fans of the movie, across generations, are able to cleanly separate Rocky’s behavior from the crime of sexual assault. A couple of women that I spoke with about it were outright dismissive when I made the suggestion. “I mean, yeah, that was inappropriate, but you can still obviously tell that Rocky is a good guy,” they more or less explained.

Ironically, I don’t know a lot of women today who would excuse Rocky’s behavior toward Adrian if they encountered it in person. And yet, in the context of his entire hero’s arc, it’s easy for many viewers to simply deem his actions as a misstep — if even deserving of a footnote.

One of my favorite features of entertainment is the ability to see enough of a character’s backstory and internal world that it humanizes their intentions. In real life, we’re never afforded that opportunity. There’s something that’s inherently enticing for audiences in seeing the kernels of good in antagonists and the shades of evil in heroes.

In Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister pushes a child out of a window and cripples him before the end of the first episode. And yet, by the time we reach season 3, we know enough of who he is that audiences can’t help but root for him. Similarly with Rocky, though his actions with Adrian are enough to get a celebrity cancelled in this day and age, the movie presents them with enough additional context about his personality that simply assigning him the label “rapist” would feel incomplete at best. He proceeds without Adrian’s consent, but the movie doesn’t portray that transgression as canceling out his caring half, or change the fact that he’s also evidently someone who loves and defends her.

In a way, it’s because the scene feels so jarring to modern viewers that it may actually be one of the movie’s most important.

When cancel culture first began taking hold, I felt a reflexive urge to glom onto the movement. Before the term “woke” became derogatory, I was one of the ones holding up pitchforks and calling for every personality accused of sexual deviance to be deplatformed. I certainly won’t be losing sleep over the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys who lost their careers and credibility over their crimes. But it isn’t every Al Franken, Louie CK, or Aziz Ansari who deserved to have their careers tarnished over allegations or details that should have remained in their private lives.

The biggest fallacy in the progressive shift toward cancel culture is the in-built assumption that all of us, apart from the accused, are above reproach. In the calls to cancel public figures over each demerit we find in their personalities or histories is the belief that we all should be remembered by our very worst days or foulest interpretations of our actions. Unless there’s no moment from our past that we’d prefer be stricken from our records, the obsession with celebrity missteps is rarely righteous.

In the days after watching Rocky, a clip of a standup routine appeared on my feed in which the comedian joked that if “you ask a couple in their 90s how they met each other… they will just describe a crime to you.”

The comic then painted the all-too-common-back-then scenario of a man, years older than the woman he was pursuing, asking her out over and over again until she finally said yes. I couldn’t help but laugh because of how true that rang with my own experience talking to the elderly. The societal conventions of their youth now sound like the features of a bygone world. And what was considered normal back when Rocky came out would often be likened to rape today.

I think the conversation about consent we’re having now is important, and that it’s a reflection of societal growth that the scene rang so discordantly for me on that initial viewing. It’s a sign of progress that the protagonist’s actions register as sufficiently off to inspire Reddit board discussions.

But as I reflected more on it, I found myself appreciating how much more the scene has grown to represent in the years since Rocky was initially released.

The scene offers a case study in the idea that intimate scenarios are often too complicated to be reduced to the black-and-white categories that modern standards seem to dictate. Even to most contemporary viewers, Rocky can do what he does without coming across as a textbook rapist or criminal. One of the big takeaways for me there is that, in all of our social progress, there’s also been an element of overcorrection in our treatment of intimate scenarios. We certainly shouldn’t return to the misogynistic attitudes that prevailed when Rocky first came out, but nor should people dating today expect every romantic situation that arises to yield to a clear “do you agree to this sex?” crossroads.

I wish that in today’s social climate, it didn’t feel so controversial to challenge some of the attitudes we’ve adopted. It’s unfortunate that my raising critical objections here will invariably be construed as anti-consent or pro-sexual assault to some readers.

All throughout middle school and high school, my peers and I were implicitly expected to know when and how to make our moves. My first kiss didn’t need to be preceded by an “Is it okay to kiss you right now?” and my first girlfriend certainly didn’t mind. She didn’t feel violated just because I didn’t explicitly ask before acting.

As dating adults, my friends and I have adapted to an ecosystem where we need to be even more careful than we were in middle school. Now that we’re grown up, we’re more mature, more independent, and more capable of recognizing bad situations as they arise. Still, we’re all less trusted to navigate the haziness that romance inevitably breeds.

As a grown man, I ask a woman now if it’s okay for me to proceed in an intimate scenario. And on numerous occasions, I’ve had women tell me after the fact that they would have preferred me to read the room instead of asking so explicitly. Such direct requests can sap the magic from a moment.

And yet, I don’t know how to reconcile that personal experience with the fact that real harm can sometimes be avoided through those simple questions. If we were to return to our old ways, the losses would outweigh the gains. But that doesn’t mean the issue of consent is as binary as it’s often framed in pop culture today. fifty years after its release, that Rocky scene sheds a light on the moral ambiguities that still crop up in dating today and spurs viewers to reflect on how we regard them.

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It’s a recurrent theme for me while writing that I’ll begin to feel the piece I’m working on tug in multiple directions. New ideas surface, and as I explore them, sometimes one paragraph evolves into three. Pretty soon, I’m working with a tangent that’s far too unwieldy to be housed within the same article as my central thesis. Other times, it’s important for me to commit to my detour for just long enough to demonstrate how two seemingly disparate ideas connect.

Now, before I get to how any of this ties in to Steven Spielberg’s new summer blockbuster, I’ll ask you to bear with me as I ferret into this rabbit hole just a few feet deeper.

In recently putting together an article on the movie Backrooms, I began to feel as though my draft had mutated away from its original intent and become a broader exploration of liminal spaces and The Shining. There was a personal connection that I’d initially wanted to explore as well, but as it had already begun to suffer from a bit of bloating, I decided that the memoir component of the story would function best with enough room to breathe and as its own piece.

By contrast, there’s a philosophical diatribe that I’ve now spent over a week constructing. It’s about the oddity of life on earth throughout the advent of AI, and moreover, about the relationship that we have with progress. Pieces like this are simultaneously among the most challenging and fulfilling to write. Because they’re so grand in scope, they feel like the very most important work that I have to offer as a writer. But in their sky-high aims, I think that they run the risk of failing most miserably. Because the ideas I’m trying to tackle are so enormous, it’s easy to fall short in my efforts to do them justice.

Before this train of thought careens past its main destination and becomes yet another piece of its own, I’ll get to Spielberg.

The reason for my lengthy opening anecdote is that I can’t help but see the same struggle at play in Disclosure Day. And because I’m sympathetic to what a balancing act it can be for creators to pursue our loftiest ideas through to completion, I’m reluctant to speak too negatively about the film’s shortcomings. What Spielberg attempts to create here is even more colossal in its scale than Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Schindler’s List. He tries to capture humanity from arguably the very broadest lens that he has yet, and deserves real commendation for the effort. (Close Encounters depicts a similarly momentous crossroads for our species, but deals more with the personal side of the event instead of its far-reaching implications.)

As per Disclosure Day’s title, it’s a story about the day that humankind learns that we’re not alone in the universe. It’s such an enormous event to convey that it would have been difficult for any director to do it justice. And I think Spielberg is the rare auteur who may have been up to the challenge. In moments, he drives home the gravity of the day so beautifully that I can’t help but recommend the movie.

But where I think Spielberg went astray was introducing enough of a sci-fi/fantasy element to the movie that it obscured the grounded, human side of his story. In attempting to say too much, he muffles the potency of his vision.

The congestion creates a kind of tonal dissonance. On one hand, among Disclosure Day’s greatest strengths is its presentation of humanity as we discover we’re not alone. There’s a spellbinding realism to the globalized revelation that aliens exist. It’s at once intimate and epochal.

Even as we see footage flood TV screens across the globe of tiny men being pulled from crash sites and prodded, Spielberg effectively sells the illusion that we’re sharing in that monumental, species-wide experience. As we see reporters react live to the news, the mixture of awe, fear, and existential bewilderment on their faces drives home the history-defining moment. (Courtney Grace, in particular, viscerally captures that range of emotions.)

And yet, Spielberg spends a healthy amount of the movie’s runtime effectively undermining the poignancy that such scenes can impart. At times, Disclosure Day leans into the sci-fi enough that it borders on hokey and generic.

Despite our awakening to aliens’ existence being central to the movie, there’s very little about their disclosure itself that calls for anything supernatural. I think the movie would have been most effective if it were simply about our humanity as we approached this seismic new chapter. Ethereal forces didn’t need to be called into action. If it had just been a film about two factions—the protagonists trying to disseminate the information to the public and the nefarious agencies trying to keep it a secret—it would be both more digestible and more poignant. It works far better as a conspiracy thriller than as a metaphysical wonder tale.

I think Disclosure Day’s two halves could have been effectively fleshed out into their own separate movies. But as one project, it can feel disjointed enough to induce mild whiplash in its worst moments. I suspect that there was a draft of this movie (apparently, it went through over 40 iterations) that tied the elements together a bit more cohesively. But it’s hard for me to imagine that version running much shy of 4 hours.

Had Spielberg turned Disclosure Day into a mini-series, I think such a canvas would have been better suited for the high-reaching visions he had for this story. Inversely, if he’d cut out all but what made the movie most emotionally resonant, I think its credits could have rolled in time for the 90-minute marker. But in committing to both sides of this story and a 2-and-a-half-hour runtime, it comes across as both bloated and rushed.

Yet for all of its weaknesses, Disclosure Day gave me plenty to enjoy. The acting is strong, the cinematography is engrossing, the scenery is well-chosen, and the action sequences are nail-biting. It’s also nice to have John Williams return to do the score, though I doubt many will find this one reaches the heights of the melodies that feathered the Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, and Star Wars franchises. (Or maybe I’m just bitter that this article convinced me to stick around after the movie for “something awe-inspiring,” only to discover it was referring, not to an earth-shattering post-credit scene or some sort of cosmic epilogue, but merely a tepid John Williams tune accompanying the credits.)

One of my favorite aspects of the movie is how it pairs with one of my all-time favorites, Don’t Look Up. In Don’t Look Up, in the face of the revelation that Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid, people go on more or less as we always have. It’s a just-exaggerated-enough allegory to humanity’s climate change response that’s hilarious in its scathing accuracy. Where so many disaster movies make the mistake of depicting a species that rises to the challenge of the threats at hand, Don’t Look Up portrays a cavalier sort of indifference that makes for worse storytelling, but also a more accurate portrait of humanity.

In Disclosure Day, the globalized announcement that aliens are real is met with an uncharacteristically unified response that, while beautiful to watch unfold, feels less true to the species I know. I’d like to believe that Spielberg’s portrayal of humankind broaching this new chapter is accurate. As a child, I had similarly idealistic views of what such a day could look like. And there’s a magic in seeing those childhood fantasies realized.

But events of recent years have convinced me that if such a societal rupture were really to occur, if our species were to collectively accept once and for all that aliens are real, it wouldn’t be much harder for us to adapt to than it was when cell phones or smart homes were first introduced.

Recent years have lent more and more credibility to the notion that aliens are real. Yet the mounting footage and testimonies from ex-government officials have done very little to usher in the watershed moment that Disclosure Day presents.

I no longer believe proof will ever accumulate to a point where newscasters of the world will come together to report that aliens are real, no matter how copious or incontrovertible the evidence. Should there come a time when we each accept that extraterrestrial life is real, I think the onset of that understanding will be so gradual that our day-to-day routines never halt for even a moment. It won’t be the grand event that separates all of history into a stark before and after. Far more likely, it will be just yet another oddity we adapt to.

I’ve even heard it theorized that evidence of aliens has been purposefully slow-walked in order to prevent the mass-scale destabilization that Spielberg suggests at. After all, if our belief in extraterrestrial life comes on gradually rather than in one fell swoop, it won’t be so disruptive for the powers that be.

Walking out of the theater, I found myself grateful for Spielberg’s bright-eyed telling of events. And I was thankful that, even in falling short of its earth-shattering ambitions, his story still managed to inspire viewers to congregate outside of the theater in feverish discussion after it had ended. And moreover, I was thankful for a cinematic experience that performed one of the most central functions that movies can: to make me think more critically about the world in which I’m living.

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Despite being the “movie guy” in my friend group, many might be shocked to discover that I’ve still never seen Star Wars. Among the most criminal entries on the list of all-time greats I still had yet to watch, though, was Rocky. At least, until this week it was.

But just in time for the film’s 50th anniversary, and for America’s-250th-birthday-slash-celebratory-UFC-fight-on-the-lawn-of-the-White-House extravaganza, I’ve finally knocked that hallowed boxing movie off of my watch-before-I-die list. (Admittedly, America’s semiquincentennial played no role in the decision to finally confront Rocky, and I’m well aware that boxing and UFC are separate enterprises. But having finished the film, I’m now at least 6% more inclined to grant these modern gladiator duels a few minutes of free viewing.)

Much of the shame over my failure to watch Rocky until now owes to the fact that I’m a native Philadelphian, and there’s likely no movie that’s ever served as a greater source of honor for our city. Each time I pass the art museum, night or day, rain or shine, there are tourists from around the world lined up to take their turn running up its illustrious steps — or, at the very least, snap a picture with the Rocky statue fixed atop it.

Traveling abroad, there’s no guarantee that people will be familiar with the state of Pennsylvania when they ask me where I’m from. Nor is our state capitol likely to trigger any immediate name recognition. Yet, when I say I grew up in Philadelphia, it generally elicits one of four specific reactions: they reference the Eagles and our recent Super Bowl win(s), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or our unchallengeable reign over the cheesesteak domain. But likely the most common reaction of all is to simply name-drop Rocky Balboa.

“Ahh Philadelphia! Like Rocky!” I’ve heard echoed a hundred different times in a hundred different accents. The enthusiastic mentions have grown into a hilarious staple from my time abroad. More than even the Liberty Bell, it’s that venerated boxing mascot who has become the enduring emblem of Philadelphia pride.

At face value, I wouldn’t think that Rocky would hold the broad appeal that it does. While the cultural popularity of baseball and football explains the success of films like Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, Remember the Titans, and The Blind Side, the allure of boxing has always seemed more circumstantial.

When typical sports seasons would kick into gear, people would wear their jerseys to school, proudly parading their fandom on their sleeves. But it would only be in the immediate days leading up to a fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, or whatever other fighters happened to be headlining, that I’d be reminded of the sport’s persevering intrigue. Fans I never knew existed would rapidly emerge from the woodwork. Chatter about where they’d each be watching the pay-per-view event would overtake the halls.

I didn’t realize it then, but I think much of my district’s enthusiasm owed directly to Rocky. In another city, these sporadic KO contests likely wouldn’t have become such a draw for my peers. But in Philadelphia, we learned to take a rare level of pride in these gruesome feats of human endurance.

Before watching Rocky, I hardly ever stopped to ask myself what made these harrowing fights so enticing. Though boxing often seems sidelined when compared to the MLB or NFL, IMDb lists Rocky as the single greatest sports movie of all time, above even films built around those more traditionally well-liked sports. It’s no wonder that the movie transcends borders and warrants shoutouts every other time I mention where I’m from. Director John G. Avildsen is uniquely effective at bringing the sport to life and humanizing his characters. He establishes a sense of stakes that feels palpable even for viewers who’ve never watched a boxing match in their lives.

I didn’t expect to be captivated by Rocky’s training, or to be so enamored with Syllvester Stallone’s portrayal of him. He’s simple and inarticulate, but still retains wit and a world-weary sense of charm.

As Rocky traded blows with his opponent, I didn’t expect to be so invested in the fight’s outcome. It was hard to watch yet hard to turn away from. Boxing feels simultaneously at odds with civilized society, and one of the most scabrously pure forms of sport that we have. There’s something elemental about a competitor achieving victory on such raw and animalistic terms.

In the same way that football has taken hold of the American psyche for the tectonic clashes between teams of 300-pound men, there’s a primal sort of magnetism to the notion of two trained fighters pushing themselves to the absolute brink of what their bodies can withstand.

It’s fascinating how universal of an icon Rocky has become, not just across borders, but across generations. As a self-proclaimed modernist, much of my resistance to the movie was simply its pre-1980 release date. After all, my lone attempt to watch Star Wars (1977) was cut short at the hands of my tragically limited tastes.

“Dad, this looks old and stupid,” a ten-year-old me lamented as my kindly father fruitlessly coaxed me to continue.

But as an older, maturer man now, I’m proud to say that I’m modestly more open-minded toward the movies of yore. And Rocky went over far more smoothly than I feared. (Some day soon, I’ll grant Star Wars a proper revisit.)

The only real reminder that I was stepping into another era when starting Rocky wasn’t the pacing or the film grain, but that the culture on display was nearly beyond recognition.

Not only is that 1970s version of Philadelphia almost completely different from the one I’ve known throughout my life — with different customs, skyline, and demographics — but the dynamic between men and women was also completely different.

In one scene, Rocky implores his reluctant date to come into his apartment, and when she tries to leave, he blocks the door. He then invites her to begin undressing. In the scene, it’s framed as typical, gentlemanly behavior, even bordering on something chivalrous. It’s hard to believe it was so recently that Rocky’s sexual advances toward his love interest were received by audiences as so innocuous.

Today, in a world where explicit consent has grown to mean so much, the protagonist’s actions would often be likened to rape. They feel especially discordant coming from this character we so often lionize for his bravery and nobility.

Yet, it might be a disservice to judge directors of the past by the standards of today, and if we always fell into that trap, we’d be deprived of some of the greatest stories ever made into movies. That such social conventions feel so antiquated today, more than anything else, stands as a fascinating case study of just how much culture can change and progress in half of a century. Perhaps Rocky’s greatest achievement is that it’s continued to remain such a relevant part of culture even as the world in which it was released has evolved beyond recognition.

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For most of my life as a horror lover, The Shining stood as the gold standard. Ever since my dad first introduced me to the movie as a kid, the very definition of horror has come paired with a mental picture of the infamous mountaintop hotel that frames the movie. It’s the rare horror film that’s disturbing enough to cause nightmares, yet, like a siren song, still regularly beckon me to revisit. For all of its creepiness, the Overlook Hotel has always held a strangely alluring quality. Being haunted doesn’t completely remove its warmth.

There have been times when I’ve watched The Shining through to its closing credits just to immediately start the movie over again from scratch. You’d think it’s weird for the horror genre to ever elicit such a reaction. (Admittedly, it probably is a little odd.) But even among all-time genre greats, few films are capable of balancing terror with intrigue so beautifully.

As time has gone on, I’ve grown to realize that it isn’t the characters that define The Shining for me. Nor is it the plot or writing that makes the movie. Something I think that most people miss when discussing its place on the all-time great list is the magnetism that the hotel holds for so many viewers. At the same time that it’s inherently creepy, there’s also a seductive, last-man-on-earth attraction to the idea of three characters sharing that colossal resort all to themselves.

Every room is unoccupied (sparing a few loose spirits). And if the protagonists want to, they can take up residence in a different room each night, walk to the kitchen in bathrobes, or navigate its cavernous halls via bicycle. It’s both terrifying and mesmerizing in its barren enormity, simultaneously pulling from both nightmares and dreams.

Each time I rewatch The Shining, it taps into the kid in me that used to fashion forts from blankets and chairs, inflating my makeshift home into what felt like entire palaces with corridors between rooms. Those scenes shot from a child’s perspective poignantly capture what it is to be small in a sprawling world.

The snowed-in Overlook Hotel feels removed from time, worries, and obligations. When the movie ends, there’s this feeling of near-envy that I have toward Jack in his ability to remain there forever. It’s an odd sensation, and much of what makes the movie so appealing is that it’s able to activate that part of me that feels drawn to something that, by all appearances, shouldn’t be desirable. It’s chilling largely because I relate to Jack, not in his marital troubles or his madness, but in succumbing to the desolate hotel’s seduction. There’s something strangely comforting about its timeless halls, and an odd romanticism to the notion of an eternity caught in Jack’s unique limbo, forever insulated from the hectic world we know outside.

In making The Shining, I think Stanley Kubrick tapped into a psychological phenomenon that wasn’t yet widely understood. Though the concept of liminality dates back to the early 20th century, the role that “liminal spaces” have begun to play in media today is something few could have anticipated.

According to the Wikipedia page for the concept, liminal spaces are “empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, uncanny, and often surreal.” Hundreds of accounts have cropped up across social media that play into the growing obsession, the most famous of which belongs to Kane Parsons, who made a name for himself with a YouTube series called “The Backrooms.” Released when he was only a teenager, the videos are direct predecessors to the Backrooms movie currently in theaters and are what first caught the attention of the A24 studio that produced it. Now at only 20, he’s the second figure to recently sell out theaters after honing his movie-making craft online.

Viewers couldn’t put their fingers on what exactly made The Shining impactful when it was initially released. But if you find either of the “liminal spaces” depicted below to be evocative, then there’s a chance you see what made the film so darkly enchanting. And more specifically, why so many people right now are suddenly talking about Backrooms.

More than The Overlook’s ghosts and evil entities and more than Jack’s descent into insanity, what most distinguishes The Shining is the appeal of inhabiting a place that feels both soothing and profoundly wrong. The liminal spaces depicted above exude enough familiarity that they give the mind something to latch onto and contextualize. But it’s that sense of familiarity that makes the uncanniness feel all the more pronounced. Rather than a totally alien environment, objects are arranged just logically enough to trigger recognition, but just strangely enough to create a visceral sense of wrongness.

In many ways, liminal spaces operate like an uncanny valley for architecture. In the renderings above, we see balloons and colored slides and bright wallpapers that conjure childhood, but in the absence of people, activity, or even windows, there’s an unmistakably off-putting aspect to the imagery. They resemble places that most of us have been or seen portrayed, yet each is stripped of the details that would anchor them to any specific experience. Backrooms takes place almost entirely within this strange terrain.

Another aspect of Backrooms that’s so resonant for viewers is its allegory to artificial intelligence. The source of the film’s horror and attraction is essentially a building misremembering reality, growing more and more inhuman as it stretches endlessly onward. Much like the images generated by AI, the rooms in Backrooms feel assembled by something that grasps the loose outline of the world without truly understanding its rules, physics, or culture. Or as the protagonist tries to explain to his therapist, “It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog, and then asking them to draw it. They might get some things right, but there’s no way they’d get everything right.”

In the same way that AI-generated pictures and videos often have a disconcerting quality to them, it’s the likeness to the world we know that haunts more than something totally foreign would. At the same time that the artificial output unnerves audiences, they’re also perplexingly drawn to it. In the same way that people are leery of AI, yet grow more attached to it with each passing day, viewers are unsettled by Parsons’ distorted labyrinth, yet strangely lulled by it.

Backrooms is one of the first movies since The Shining to effectively couple the terrible with the hypnotic. But more than that hallowed predecessor, Backrooms plays directly into the innate unease and lock-eyed fascination that liminal spaces often induce. There are few films that have transfixed me so fully.

The set design is one of the most nightmarishly bizarre that I’ve ever seen brought to life, but in its nightmarishness, it can’t help but remind viewers at the same time of that most wonderfully loose and boundless quality of dreams. The fantastical rooms and environments depicted are each products of reason in suspension.

Objects are sunken into expansive dingy rugs, stop signs mark the entries to specific halls, doors have multiple knobs and are found on both ceilings and floors. Some passageways are so small that they need to be crawled through, and others can only be accessed by climbing steep, carpeted mounds at the corners of rooms. And through the entire maze are humming fluorescents and monotone yellow walls. The net result is both maddening and bizarrely intoxicating. It’s homey and nostalgic but also twisted and malevolent. It’s dread-inducing, yet strangely pacifying.

Where The Shining takes place in an isolated resort that can’t be accessed by cars through its winter months, Backrooms doesn’t just entomb its protagonists in snow, but thrusts them into a world where nothing is quite right. And as in The Shining, none of the madness seems to matter. The world is indifferent to their plight.

The rooms are sprawling and largely devoid of windows. The windows that can be found only compound the sense of isolation, looking out on walls, other rooms, and model townhomes that are all contained within the expansive, otherworldly complex.

I’m not sure if Backrooms will stand the test of time in quite the same way that The Shining has. The script was a significant shortcoming for the film. But Backrooms’ few flaws are easily forgiven when we remember that Parsons is only twenty. The film’s acting, cinematography, and set design were outstanding enough to cement it as one of the greatest, most memorable horrors I’ve ever seen.

Whatever criticisms can be leveled against him, Parsons has paved a road that future creators will be all but forced to expand on and has proven once again that YouTubers may be some of the most innovative directors of our generation.

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When I read that The Boys’ final act would initially air in theaters before making its way to streaming, I quickly began searching for tickets. But two full weeks out from the final episode’s air date, I was discouraged to learn that its limited screen times were already sold out. With only two theaters in a hundred-mile radius that had agreed to house the finale, and a mere two time windows to choose between at each location, all of the interest that the 5-season show had generated within my tri-state area was seemingly funneled into just 4 packed-theater showings.

Adding travesty to tragedy, the only way to (sort of) watch the finale the night it premiered was to wait until it was available to stream on Prime — at a less-than-ideal 3 AM EST. This not only encouraged some less-than-advisable sleep decisions among loyalists, but ensured that, for those more rationally restrained viewers, their social media feeds would be awash with spoilers from the previous night’s episode. Fortunately, as a lifelong insomniac who can stave off slumber until sunrise when the right article, movie, or video game demands it, staying up into the wee-ish hours of the night to watch a lean 60-minute finale is anything but onerous.

While I may have only discovered the show a modest 14 months prior, putting off bedtime till’ dawn was the very least I could do to repay its generous writers for giving me enough value to stay aboard this subversive train until its final stop. (Or maybe I’ll just make whatever excuses I can find to ensure my rhythms remain as uncircadian as possible.)

But as fate would have it, last Tuesday may have proven one of the rare nights where I would have been better served by a good night’s sleep than staying up until the sound of morning birds contributed backup vocals to my coveted conclusion. The finished product was so abominably tepid that I was both incensed with its producers for building up consumers’ collective hopes, and grateful to all of the glorified Boys aficionados who bought tickets before me and spared me from driving an hour to watch the Titanic sink in person.

Okay, the ending wasn’t that bad. But it was underwhelming enough to plummet to the very lowest IMDB ranking for any episode to date and inspire an army of disillusioned fans to turn to artificial intelligence in hopes it might craft them a better one. I’ll get back to that second part in a bit.

The Boys is a unique creation in the world of superheroes, and its success is what largely guaranteed that its ending would be so poorly received. It arrived into the world as an antidote to the bloated DC and Marvel Cinematic Universes. Immediately, it made a name for itself by depicting superheroes, not as the one-liner trading demigods in tights that so many have grown weary of in recent years, but as undeserving people emboldened by inhuman powers. They’re as flawed, self-serving, and unaccountable as any billionaire— hardly driven by the noble desire to make the world a safer place. And in cynical keeping with reality, governments and corporate entities try their best to politicize the situation, branding bad guys as “super terrorists,” and trying to maximize profits off of their cycling palette of payrolled mascots.

In many regards, The Boys is a satire of the superhero stories that predate it. It was engineered not to simply devolve into a bloated special effects extravaganza as so many other comparable franchises have. And yet, in stretching on for five whole seasons, it ended up succumbing to more than a few of the tired tropes that plagued DC and MCU. With entire seasons of hour-long episodes to fill, there are lamentable character arcs that needed to be devised and significant concessions that had to be made. As the show wore on, it didn’t always feel like the same animal that it started out as.

It became such a central attraction for the Prime streaming platform that it was renewed for season after season. Yet by sheer virtue of its repeated renewals, it started to resemble the shows and movies that it was so busy satirizing. It was an almost inescapable problem in continuing. When one of the primary aspects of its predecessors that The Boys poked fun at was the convolution of other superhero IP, how could it go on — introducing new plots, new characters and new histories— without becoming like them?

To The Boys’ credit, its humorous undercurrent never faded, and the parallels that the show presents to the United States’ political turmoil have buoyed it from season to season. In fact, this recent chapter mirrored our current chaos so completely that its writers seemed to have foresight into certain current events before they came to pass. Creator Eric Kripke even expressed grief over how closely The Boys’ plot portended reality.

But despite The Boys serving as an allegory to our culture since the show first aired, that political undertone of the plot never received any real payoff in the end. It establishes a problem that’s perfectly analogous to our own — a cult-like political movement that’s consumed the American public. But as the snake’s head is removed, we’re left out on the ensuing fallout.

There’s a poignant lesson in that omission, in that none of our own political woes will be solved overnight simply by electing new leaders; the conditions that caused our strife won’t disintegrate overnight. But for fans seeking finality, the failure to even cursorily address the aftermath comes across as a bit of a cop-out. (This aspect of the world will allegedly be explored in a spin-off show helmed by a different creative team, but it would be nice not to be roped into another series just to get answers this final season should likely have delivered.)

While the scope of The Boys is unfair to compare to Game of Thrones, the issues that befell them are more similar than they might appear at face value. Both had too many problems to address within a single, concluding chapter. As a result, the last episodes of each feel like lazy attempts to dispatch the characters left standing and tie off the threads still hanging.

As The Boys burgeoned out into this broader analogy to our political moment, it bit off more than it could chew. And as in Game of Thrones, the way the writers dealt with the single biggest threat in the series was to more or less throw up their hands and just give fans something.

The Boys’ series-long arc that led toward the antagonist attaining god-like strength amounted to a fireworks display that petered out before it even began. Why they decided on a theatrical release for that last episode — and in gut-rattling 4DX of all formats —I can’t begin to fathom. But I’m grateful not to have driven the entire episode’s length just to walk out of theaters with a three-quarters-full bucket of popcorn, mild whiplash, and a welling sense I’d been betrayed.

One of the most interesting aspects of this finale’s reception is that it appears to signal a watershed moment in the relationship between entertainment and AI. In months past, I’d seen this trend beginning to take hold: people prompting AI to depict famous scenes in pop culture playing out differently. Fallen heroes would put up better fights, and antagonists would meet more satisfyingly righteous ends. (We saw another similar use of AI recently, when Iran used it to reimagine a scene President Trump had posted to his social media page depicting himself as Jesus; in Iran’s version, the real Jesus comes down from heaven and casts the falsely halo’d WWIII instigator into a fiery abyss.)

In the past, these AI renderings were often comical in their overt crappiness. But occasionally when I stumbled onto them in my social media feed, I was amused if nothing else.

Yet, unlike only a few months ago, some of the AI-prompted creations made in response to this latest finale — while still checkered by the oddities and artifacts I’m used to in AI-generated content — at their best, are both more captivating and more intellectually intriguing than what the series’ visual effects team produced. They deliver on the seismic showdowns that the promotional material for the final season promised.

Watching the alternate, AI-rendered finales that the fanbase has concocted — or directed computer programs to concoct for them — has also marked a personal turning point for me. I didn’t think it would be so soon that I’d earnestly argue on behalf of a few devotees with Sora memberships over a VFX team with a 100-million-dollar-per-season budget. But if the show had allocated even a tenth of that revenue toward a team of tech-savvy teenagers playing trial and error with video generators, I trust that the completed product would likely have been a more gratifying experience for fans. The show would have been seemingly more equipped to deliver the bombastic ending it spent five whole seasons foreshadowing.

Had The Boys concluded after only a season or two, I think this pared-down conclusion would have felt like an appropriate punchline. But its identity had changed so much since the show’s humble beginnings that it started to call for something different. In creating such an elaborate network of characters and lore, the series’ trajectory shifted and began to point toward a more and more momentous close. The conclusion we got may have worked, but as the head of a different horse.

When The Boys was intent on being a humorous counterpart to more deep-pocketed superhero franchises, anti-climax would have felt like the perfect way to spite them. But as the show continued to balloon in intensity and popularity, it grew increasingly certain that this kind of controlled letdown would never be well-received. Spectators are too far removed from the series’ starting point for this extinguished-fireworks ending to feel like something other than a misstep.

While The Boys finale may not go down in history as one of the worst denouements of all time, it represented a dramatic departure from the lightning-in-a-bottle sensation I felt as I first began the saga. I’m convinced the show just had far greater ambitions than its conclusion was able to meaningfully deliver on.

Ironically, the most fascinating component of The Boys’ ending may not be the finale itself, but what followed it. That disappointed viewers immediately turned to AI to imagine something grander feels like an early glimpse into the future of entertainment. It’s not a future I’m sure I’ll ever fully embrace. But it’s more of an incrimination of humans in this case that I do believe the robots — endowed by the clever prompting of sufficiently frustrated fans — cumulatively generated something more sweeping, fitting, creative, and cinematic than what actually aired.

I heard someone recently make an argument for autonomous vehicles that I was ashamed I never stopped to consider. The rationale for handing over the wheel to a robot isn’t the hope that it would somehow achieve automotive perfection; it’s that human drivers are so radically imperfect that it only requires meeting that low bar for boarding a driverless car to make sense.

The argument for AI in Hollywood isn’t that it’s going to suddenly replace Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan. It’s that, in an entertainment landscape increasingly defined by bloat, creative stagnation, and endings that fail to justify their buildup, audiences may grow more comfortable with technology that merely clears the bar continually set by human imperfection.

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There’s something special about the movies I watch on airplanes. Whether it’s the emotional states that come paired with adventures to new places, the stark lack of distractions at our disposal whilst claustrophobically crammed between strangers, or whether it’s merely the change in altitude that alters state of mind, my mid-flight film choices have an unusual tendency to elicit strong reactions.

Associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Nevada, Dustin Hines argues that, “If you look at the human emotional brain and you change anything, especially sleep or oxygen, you’re going to get what’s called a prefrontal disconnect — a disconnect between an emotional area of your brain, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex that’s trying to make sense of everything.”

Titled “Feeling Off While Flying? Here’s What Happens to Your Brain and Body at 35,000 Feet,” the article explains that, “this could result in a loss of emotional control — known in psychology as “emotional disinhibition” — and cause someone to cry when they normally wouldn’t.” I won’t deny that I’m overly sentimental. But even if the science isn’t yet there to fully confirm Hines’ theory on in-flight emotionality, I find it unlikely that 50 First Dates would have been enough to provoke glassy eyes for me under less oxygen-deprived conditions.

Whether the same can be said of my experience with Moonlight, Brokeback Mountain, and Frozen— or whether they would have only turned me into a 20% less teary-eyed mess had I been 35,000 feet closer to solid ground— it’s tough to say. But beginning Akeelah and the Bee last week as my plane careened toward Peru, it was hard to predict just how impactful I’d find it. Watching it again, I couldn’t help but see the subconscious stains that it left on that 10-year-old me. That soon-to-be-writer who filed into theaters twenty years prior, both of his word-loving parents transfixed at his side.

Akeelah and the Bee served as a breakout role for Keke Palmer, the actress who would go on to play a lead character in Nope and become a prominent cultural personality. Yet despite her spotlight in recent years, I was surprised to review her filmography and find that, to date, there may not be a single role of hers that was as uniformly well-regarded or endearing for audiences as Akeelah. Set in South Los Angeles, she plays a young girl with a prodigious love for words — an affection that she feels compelled to keep concealed from her peers over fear of ridicule.

Akeelah attends an inner-city school that’s been habitually deprived of funding, and where fellow students treat academic merit as a source of shame rather than pride. There’s a simplicity to the plot’s structure that borders on cliché. Such tropes are hardly new. And yet, they likely wouldn’t be tropes if they weren’t rooted in some painful truths.

Having grown up in a district on the outskirts of Philadelphia, my friends and I saw many of the same disparities that the movie depicts. Often, they presented in an equally stark binary. The honors and AP classes tended to be populated by the children of the upper middle class families, while the remedial ones were marked by an overrepresentation of students from poorer upbringings. We prided ourselves on our overall diversity as a student body, but so often, the way that manifested was in classes that were segregated, not by design, but by circumstance and ingrained generational patterns.

During those few times throughout high school that I signed up for less advanced classes, that culture of anti-intellectualism was all but inescapable. In my grade-level biology course, I was appalled to learn I was seated beside a class of students who thumbed their nose at the idea of evolution. “Are you tryna tell me I came from a monkey!?” I remember one of the students shouting over our feeble-demeanored teacher. She bobbed her head with scientific certainty as the class echoed the detractor’s doubts in crushing unanimity.

As in Akeelah and the Bee, there was a disdain we’d face from others in receiving good grades, and a contrarian pride we’d feel in earning poor ones, as though bleeding red Fs were a barometer of our badassery. But even while this trend of anti-intellectualism was most prominent in the lower level classes, honors English was no exception. Half of my peers would have sooner read the Sparknotes summary for any book we were assigned than going so far as to skim the first chapter.

Each week, when we were given vocabulary lists to memorize, people would scoff and moan at our need to differentiate between the words “bellicose,” “pugnacious,” and “belligerent.” Between “fractious,” “divisive,” “acrimonious,” and “acerbic.” Even in my senior year’s AP literature and composition class, I was the rare student who actively reveled in the subtle distinction between words.

For a while, I’ve wondered why spelling bees have grown to have the import that they do, given that the meanings words carry are infinitely more fascinating and important than their proper spellings — which, not infrequently, vary between regions. But one of my favorite aspects of Akeelah and the Bee is the way that it makes clear that words should never be reduced to raw acts of memorization. It’s our ability to employ them that gives them value.

One of the most poignant scenes for me involves Akeelah lamenting to her instructor that the essay she was assigned to read contains mostly words that she already knows. But her teacher, portrayed by Lawrence Fishburne, clarifies that, while her competition might be busy memorizing words like a robot, words have the power to change the world, and that Martin Luther King and W. E. B. Du Bois didn’t “acquire their vocabulary by rote memorization.”

The scene struck at the heart of why I always found those word quizzes our English teachers gave us to be so endlessly enjoyable. They granted an opportunity, not just to memorize information, but to hone our ability to convey thoughts more precisely. Without words, there are thoughts we aren’t even equipped to think, and that foundational fact of life on earth so often seems to get overlooked. It’s in comprehension of their meaning, and of those precise circumstances when specific words are called into action, that infuses our lexicon with purpose. That allows us to communicate with the people we love. The order of lettering says next to nothing about the ideas that words impart, or how wildly and wonderfully those values vary between differing contexts.

There’s a heartwarming sentimentality to the film’s final act that some might find saccharine or overly sanitized. But the uplifting ending serves it well in my eyes. Akeelah and the Bee touches on darker themes without allowing itself to be bogged down by them and the climax feels earned.

Maybe it owed largely to me barreling through the clouds miles above the Atlantic Ocean that this rescreening was so piercing for me. But I think most of its impact owes simply to the homage to language that it so intimately tenders. It offers a tribute to the criminal expanse of words that are relegated to the sidelines in favor of far less interesting ones. And it’s a reminder that words aren’t just for showing off, or some shortcut for passing tests and padding resumés. They’re instruments that fundamentally shape how we think, what we notice, and how we interact with the world around us.

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There’s a passage in the foreword of Death by Astonishment that frames the book and the lofty mission behind it beautifully. It’s at once admirably brazen and honest to a fault. How it reads for you will likely dictate the value you’re able to derive from author Andrew Gallimore’s research.

When scientists come up with bold ideas and make even bolder proposals on the basis of them, they’re well-advised to do their groundwork extremely thoroughly first.

In the case of neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore, the bold idea is that for countless millennia our species has participated, largely unwittingly, in a dance of interaction with a vast alien intelligence — an intelligence not only not of this earth, but also not of this solar system, not of this galaxy, and perhaps not even of this universe. An intelligence completely other from otherwhere and otherwhen.

Gallimore’s even bolder proposal is that the most efficient means to explore, investigate, strengthen our interactions with, and ultimately understand that alien intelligence is through ingesting, by various routes, a simple molecule, widely available in nature, known to science as dimethyltryptamine-DMT for short!

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But as you read Gallimore’s masterful Death by Astonishment, you’ll discover that he has indeed done his groundwork extremely thoroughly. And this is as it should be because his big idea and the proposal arising from it have the potential to turn what science believes to be true about the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality itself upside down and inside out.

What I love about Graham Hancock’s opening is that it makes no effort at all to walk around or conceal the bizarreness or grandiosity of the book’s central hypothesis. Yet what gives me pause is that it also immediately runs the risk of alienating the very audience it most intends to persuade.

For someone who’s actually taken DMT and shared in the experiences that the author goes to such copious lengths to detail, that woo-woo introduction comes across as shockingly reasonable. But for readers who haven’t, red flags begin cropping up before the author can even clarify that cynicism is natural. When confronted with the outlandish claim that Gallimore attempts to support, knee-jerk denialism isn’t only to be expected, but may be the only rational response.

And yet, what the drug offers is so far removed from the scientific model, from the bounds of our rational thinking, that it reliably shakes users to their core. More often than not, it changes their perception of time, the universe, and opens their eyes to all of the enigmatic creatures and entities it might contain. Even those who approach the drug with deep-rooted skepticism are quickly slapped in the face by the utter incomprehensibility of what they witness upon ingestion. Worldviews collapse in an instant as users are catapulted into a circus of scintillating oddity that our vocabularies lack the ability to relay beyond its most trivial details. We encounter shapes and objects that not only don’t exist, but can’t exist— at least not within the reality we know.

Gallimore argues that, in the throes of a DMT experience, people commune with discarnate, otherworldly intelligences and report such a profound degree of common ground between their “trips” that it lends an uncanny degree of credibility to the accounts. There’s a commonality not only between who and what people witness when they take the substance today, but to what indigenous tribes of the Amazon have encountered on it throughout the thousands and thousands of years it’s been used.

When I picked up Death by Astonishment, there were a couple of objectives I hoped it would fulfill. First and foremost, I hoped that it would lend clarity to these ineffable experiences that I’ve had myself. I hoped it would grant a more scientific lens through which to interpret them. On some counts, the book succeeds. Gallimore has a deep chemical knowledge of how DMT interacts with the brains of mammals and the convoluted history of how it came to be used as it is today. He methodically takes apart the explanations science has offered for why DMT elicits precisely the experiences that it does. One by one, he illustrates how each hypothesis comes up short of accounting for the impossibility and profundity of the odysseys that the substance occasions.

The approach taken reminded me of another book I read when I was younger called Proof of Heaven. Written by Dr. Eben Alexander, it details the account of a hard-minded neurologist who, when in a coma, has a series of experiences that irreversibly shatters his perceptions of life and death. Similarly to Gallimore, he enumerates each of the ways that his brain could have potentially given rise to all of the strange phenomena that he was thrust into during the time when his body was inactive. And with a near-identical methodology, he discredits each of the explanations that science would conventionally provide for the perplexing, internal trial that he endured.

As Alexander walked me through how he began to believe in god, I felt myself undergoing the same transition. The book provided my first glimpse into a world outside the confines of what science can explain. But as months went by, the cogent argument that Alexander put forth lost its grip on the brooding, Richard Dawkins-devouring atheist that I was. I ultimately likened the neurologist’s stance to the “God of the gaps” argument. (It can essentially be summed up like this: god resides within the gaps that science has yet to explain. “Science can’t account for this mystery, therefore it must be God!” But as science explains more, god’s role in the universe appears smaller and smaller.)

So I eventually dismissed Alexander’s conclusion. I reasoned that, just because science couldn’t explain his experiences didn’t mean it never would, and it certainly didn’t mean that a divine explanation was where Occam’s Razor pointed.

Until I first tried DMT for myself, I believed more or less that the world I could see was all that there was. That if it sat outside of science’s reach, it was more than likely fiction. Claims of gods and transdimensional deities should be reserved for fables and sci-fi, I smugly concluded.

The adolescent that grew up on the New Atheism movement is still alive in me somewhere. But I have an impossible time reconciling that dormant mindset with the adult me who’s now experienced what he has. The two are at clashing, cackling odds with one another.

As a result, one of the other objectives I hoped Death by Astonishment would achieve was appeasing the vestigial cynic inside me. I hoped that the book would be a bit more compelling for the part of me that still sees a sprawling gap between where our science falls short of explaining the DMT experience and the explanation that, “therefore, it’s caused by aliens or discarnate entities.”

For my open-minded half — the one that now helms this ship of flesh and cells — the author’s explanation is the only one that can even begin to make sense of the DMT experience’s radical abstrusity. Unlike in the weeks after reading Proof of Heaven, I couldn’t simply dismiss the trials detailed in Death by Astonishment. I’d undergone them myself and found a hair-raising catharsis in all of the trip reports Gallimore compiled that were so remarkably comparable to my own.

I also attempted to read the book through the eyes of the many peers and fellow cynics for whom I’ve been woefully unable to convey the worth of my experiences. One of the biggest pitfalls of the book is one of the most relatable. I’m all too familiar with DMT and the Herculean task of attempting to put its offerings into words.

Very often, the drug inspires something almost akin to “missionary work,” where those who’ve used it can’t help but proselytize and persuade others to explore the avenue themselves. It’s a kind of zeal I’ve struggled to resist in my own writings on the topic. I relate to the frustration that Gallimore continually references; the only dependable way to dissolve people’s doubt about the drug is to convince them to do something they’re bullheadedly unwilling to. Taking DMT is simply too intrepid.

In making the case that Gallimore does, I can’t help but detect an air of that same “You can’t know Christ’s love until you’ve felt it for yourself!” mentality that I’ve always felt so reprehensible in the world’s monotheisms. It frustrates me that in the case of DMT, so much of my own argument for its value still rests on something so similar. Each time I explain what I’ve experienced, I almost invariably return to the notion that it needs to be seen and felt to be understood, and no earthbound explanation can adequately impart its meaning.

There’s a relatably unjournalistic enthusiasm to Gallimore’s tone that pokes through at times, and it detracts from the credibility he cultivates in his more grounded, scientific passages. He shies away from much of the wide-eyed mysticism that soured many to the psychedelic preachings of Timothy Leery and Terrance McKenna. Yet it still fails to strike the measured restraint and poise of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, one of the other most obvious points of comparison to Death by Astonishment.

Pollan, living most of his life and firmly establishing his career as an author before ever exploring the world of psychedelics, eschews many of the stereotypes for which those early psychonauts like Leery were so infamous. His authority doesn’t come from evangelism or personal revelation as much as his unabating diplomacy. In How to Change Your Mind, he positions himself not as a convert or prophet, but as a curious, aging skeptic who insists on placing his own experiences behind layers of reporting, historical context, and scientific consensus. Where Gallimore occasionally allows wonder to spill over into exuberance, Pollan is almost allergic to overstatement. He’s meticulous about separating what was felt from what can be fairly claimed, and what was meaningful from what can be empirically proven.

That distance is much of what lends Pollan’s work credibility, especially for readers who open the book harboring negative preconceptions about psychedelics. He doesn’t ask them to take a leap of faith.

In contrast, Gallimore’s hypothesis — no matter how rigorously argued — requires a willingness to entertain conclusions that science itself hasn’t yet equipped us to verify. Where Pollan invites curiosity, Gallimore courts astonishment.

I don’t think that Death by Astonishment is the book that will convince readers to seek out DMT or any comparable psychedelics if they weren’t previously inclined to do so. But for a reader who’s already made that leap, it’s thrilling to watch Gallimore trace the contours around what’s likely the single most confounding mystery I’ve ever confronted.

No matter how much hard science, chemistry, or history the book contains, Gallimore still doesn’t take us much closer to understanding why this substance — that’s found in everything from plants and trees to our very own biology — induces interdimensional odysseys that turn preconceptions of the universe and the laws that govern it on their heads. But I have to commend Gallimore for his attempt to humanize, destigmatize, and clarify an experience that’s so fundamentally beyond words. Even if we’re still years or decades beyond science’s ability to adequately explain DMT or its role here on earth, I’m thankful that more and more scientists are beginning to grant this mystery the attention it deserves. I’m thankful that writers as well-researched and articulate as Gallimore are grappling with this enchanting enigma, and that enough people are finally willing to entertain his abstractions for Death by Astonishment to enter the mainstream.

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It took years of relentless peer pressure before I surrendered to the cultural juggernaut that was Game of Thrones. My long held resistance owed almost entirely to the subject matter of the show. While I’d seen glimmers of greatness in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien’s world never enthralled me in the same way as so many of my friends and elders. There was a certain cheesiness to these fantastical realms comprised of cryptids, monsters, and all sorts of mystical creatures. The movies struck me as campy, self-serious, and, at worst, downright alienating.

So each time someone broached the dragon-helmed zeitgeist I was missing out on with Game of Thrones, I’d simply explain, “I don’t know, I’m just not really into all of that castles, knights, and goblins stuff.” But each Sunday, my peers would punctually queue on couches and consume the fantasy epic with a religious fervor that even the second coming of Christ would solemnly fail to suppress. And each Monday, I’d sit on the sidelines in class as ecstatic recountings commenced.

As the peer pressurings grew in volume, verve, and virulence, I grew increasingly curious about this social phenomenon I was missing out on. When I finally sat down to start Game of Thrones, its sixth season was rapidly drawing to a close.

The show didn’t take for me immediately. The writing was strong, and the universe was intriguing. But all of the characters and their interrelating titles — all of the overarching pageantry and the dense histories of sprawling dynasties — it kept the world under wraps. That walled garden proved hard to penetrate. For the first four episodes, it was mostly the cliffhangers reliably tailing each chapter that roped me into proceeding with the plot.

Yet by the time I finished season 1, there was hardly a thing I could do to resist the primal pull to binge the following five seasons. Engaged in both a desultory exercise in unemployment and an inhuman feat of HBO consumption — I managed to devour a season per day that ensuing week. Once the weekend rolled around, I’d somehow progressed two episodes beyond the friend who had most vigorously implored me to begin the show. As I prepared to watch the fateful season six finale, popcorn in hand and soda at my side, I was devastated to discover it hadn’t yet aired. I’d completely caught up to the present and would need to wait another week for my coveted conclusion.

Once I caught the Game of Thrones bug, I was incurably infected. It was a rare world that seemed to transcend the bounds of fiction entirely. Much of this owed to the brutal stakes that governed it. The characters we loved were susceptible to the same gruesome deaths as the ones we hated.

Arguably the most distinguishing factor of the world, though, is its sheer enormity and lore-soaked depths. Ironically, it was the facet that had initially made the show seem so impenetrable and unappealing for me from afar.

It’s a unique feat that George R.R. Martin achieved in inspiring me, not only to familiarize myself with nearly a hundred different knights, queens, noblemen, and all of their separate motives, but to actually research beyond that. He made me wonder, not simply about the pre-screen history of each of the characters he concocted, but about their forefathers, and how their lasting legacies continued to influence the plot.

Aerys II Targaryen, labeled “The Mad King” after his death, shapes Westeros so much that, even while we never see him on screen for more than a few seconds, he feels like a figure that looms larger than life. Despite being fictional, I wanted to learn his entire story. Looking it up online, his chronicles emerged with the same hardened objectivity in tone that I had assumed was reserved only for historians and their descriptions of Medieval kings. The reverence that denizens of the realm had toward “Aegon the Conquerer,” hundreds of years after his demise, made him feel every bit as real and historic to audiences as the Christopher Columbuses of our own world — all of those figures we learn about in school, yet remain little more than concepts or loose images in our heads.

South Park comically illustrates this feature of the show in one episode by having Mr. Garrison diagram the intricate history of Westeros while his students diligently take notes.

A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms achieves an impressive balancing act in both rewarding the fans who’ve put in the time to understand Westeros and all of its warring houses while also presenting a story that feels self-contained and approachable for outsiders. House of the Dragon, by contrast, is steeped enough in the dynasties and locations of Game of Thrones that it would likely be a daunting entry point for anyone who hadn’t seen that prior show. As in that eight-season epic that preceded it, it quickly inundates audiences with a wide cast of characters and their complicated histories. It demands careful attention, and packs such a copious amount of detail into its hour-long episodes that most will benefit from a rewatch or two.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms eschews the pacing and structure seen in both Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, opting instead for episodes that are a surprisingly digestible sub-40 minutes in length. And instead of leaping between disparate corners of the fantasy universe, it remains largely centered around two characters that are, quite notably, devoid of dragons as a mode of transport.

Less interested in exploring the noble class, the show’s insular focus on common people also helps to humanize the plot and distinguish it from its more pageantry-driven predecessors. The recurrence of familiar house names and introduction of characters we’ve encountered thus far in name alone ensure that it’s a fulfilling watch for Westeros aficionados like myself. But they’re neither secondary enough to feel like fanservice, nor too front-loaded and overstuffed for the show to serve as an accessible on-ramp into the lore.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has caught its share of early flak from fans for the way it’s diverged from the formula that House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones established. But for me, it’s these shifts in approach that make this show’s opening chapter feel so fresh, justified, and promising. Rather than a mere rehash of the tried and true, HBO is creating a unique identity for this third entry in the world of Westeros. I’m thrilled to find out where they take it.

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