My habit is to go to see a new, usually Japanese movie every Wednesday because it’s the one night of the week in my city where I can watch for a relatively cheap price (probably around eight dollars instead of twelve). This time, because I saw the reviews were pretty good, I went to see “Rosuto Kea,” or, under it’s English title, Do Unto Others—a new film from Nikkatsu Studios. The title comes from the famous Bible verse in Matthew—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I really didn’t know what I was getting into with this movie. Note that I will be discussing some spoilers here, but if you are interested in taking a gander and don’t want the spoilers, jump to the bottom of the review.
The movie is about a particular worker named Shiba (played by Kenichi Matsuyama, probably most famous in the West for his role as super sleuth L in the Death Note films) who compassionately has devoted his life to helping the elderly as their ability to serve themselves ekes away. His coworkers look up to him, his clients adore him, he goes the extra mile every time someone on his radar needs help… and that includes a longstanding penchant for secretly murdering individuals who he deems are suffering too much, and also creating too terrible a burden on their caring families. Prosecuting Attorney Otomo (played by Masami Nagasawa, recently in Shin Ultraman) sniffs out his evil deeds, and soon discovers (as the poster shockingly points out—geez, spoilers!) Shiba killed 42 people. In the ensuing court case, though, she has to search her own heart as she considers how she has treated her own family, and Shiba’s actions seem more morally cloudy than originally suspected when his painful past comes to light.
Film critic Mark Schilling characterizes this film as making an argument for euthanasia, and I don’t fully agree. Shiba is depicted as a torn individual who has had his moral compass ripped apart by societal stresses and an economic impossibility, as well as his father asking him to help him die. Yet even as some of the families of his victims come forth in support of what Shiba has done, and even Otomo (who acts much more like a detective than a prosecutor in the film) partially comes around to his position, nevertheless there is an undercurrent pushing back against Shiba’s narrative. Of course Otomo tongue-lashes the eerily calm murderer to little outward effect, but tellingly in the court room after Otomo once again tries to justify himself, a member in the audience shrieks out, demanding he return the mother he had murdered and thus stolen away from her. A side story concerning two older lovebirds underscores the bare fact that every loving relationship means that we “cause trouble” for one another as part of what it means to love and be human. And Otomo, in a searing confession to Shiba, certainly does not come to agree with what he did—she instead finds blame in her own neglect of her father, and a stinging guilt in that her mother (a Christian) insisted in entering a nursing home when she reached dotage so that Otomo could pursue her independent adult life (I don’t think the movie gives an impression that Otomo dumped her mother into the system—it is explicitly pointed out that the decision was her mother’s, presumably coming from her Christian convictions related to that verse from the title).
I think what makes the movie interesting, and disturbing, is that it dares ask these questions, and it dares to present Shiba as more than just a crazed and vicious madman ala Satoshi Uematsu, a real-life care worker in Japan who stabbed 19 disabled individuals to death back in 2016. I am not sure that the movie wants to be fully realistic in this narrative—as with most movies, the emotions are exaggerated, the situations heightened and ridiculous, and the central question of how to care for the old and infirm (a lightning rod topic for aging Japan, where over a quarter of the population is over 65 years old) is presented in a stark and painful light that anyway worked for me as a gut-wrenching emotional trigger. The movie is filled with harsh scenes of geriatric individuals suffering from dementia causing messes, breaking into fights, living in squalor, and urinating on the floor. Comments from viewers who have written mostly positive reviews on sites like eiga.com praise the film for how it cuts home for them, citing their own experiences as caregivers for the elderly, and pointing to how uncomfortable the movie made them in considering their own position and their experiences in life. I saw comment after comment about how viewers felt “stabbed” by the movie, as if it had assaulted them with its narrative force, and I felt that uncomfortable heft as I sat bludgeoned in my seat as the film ended, too.
This movie is not a thriller per se. There is little action, and even the tense sequences are often overlaid with gentle music. It’s mawkish at times, oversimplified, and I think it’s disturbing how the movie positions Shiba in a positive light during choice sequences—but I think that dissonance is also deliberate. I like that the movie struggles with the moral quandary of its subject matter without landing on a resounding moral gong one way or the other. No one is calling for euthanasia laws at the end. Otomo is left questioning how she didn’t treat her family in a way she could be proud of, and there is a strong sense that Shiba is ravaged inside as he relives the moments that drove him to his first horrible murder. The cinematography cleverly plays the two actors against each other through reflections and their contrasting tears—each gripped in the hellish guilt of having taken part either directly or indirectly in the deaths of their respective fathers.
For me, Do Unto Others was a grinding endurance for my nerves. It asks important questions about the elderly in an outlandish way, but does so I think to shock audiences into contemplation, and the performances from leads Nagasawa and Matsumura anchor the movie, with strong supporting work by the rest of the cast–especially Akira Emoto (as Matsumura’s father). I am not entirely comfortable with where the movie went, but I want more movies to take me to places and urge me to engage with topics I don’t want to consider, and do so with a measure of craft. This movie did those things better than I expected (though I think 2019’s Talking to the Starry Sky deals with some similar issues more tactfully and with at least equal power). A thought-provoking and disturbing film, if flawed in execution—much like its villainous protagonist.
“The tyrannosaurus truly and sincerely wants to live in your garage.”
Mayor Pilky was sitting in my house, looking at me with pleading eyes. I crossed my arms and glared at her.
“I won’t force you, Walter,” said the mayor. “But the tyrannosaur has really taken a shine to you. And he is our king now, after all. You really should consider—”
“That old lizard is not a king,” I said.
“Well, he is more like a figurehead,” said Pilky. “Like the royalty in Japan or in England. He doesn’t have complete power over everyone in Final Pumpkin in the same way a king of old would have. But still, he is a king under the modern definition.”
“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “Why would I want a dinosaur living in my garage?”
Mayor Pilky uncrossed her legs and leaned forward placatingly.
“Please understand,” she said. “Any upgrades to the garage that might be installed for our new king’s comfort will be covered by the royal fund. You won’t have to pay a dime.”
“That lizard is a meat-eater!” I said. “He might eat me in my sleep!”
“So far King T-Rex has just been nibbling on the local trees. He doesn’t even have sharp teeth.”
“Yeah, what is up with that anyway?” I said. “Since when do tyrannosaurs not have sharp teeth?”
Pilky tried a smile on me. It didn’t work.
“I think King T-Rex’s winning smile was part of why the judge decided in his favor,” she said. “He really does have nice teeth.”
“I don’t see how his dental pulchritude has anything to do with…”
“We are prepared to pay you,” Pilky said then.
My ears perked up.
“Really?” I said.
“You would be King T-Rex’s official ambassador and caretaker,” Pilky said. “And for that role, you would be compensated generously.”
“Really?” I said again.
“I mean with money,” she said.
“Yes, I understand that,” I said. “But how much money are we talking here?”
Pilky named a number. The number had a lot of zeroes. I might not have been too crazy about the idea of having a giant flesh-eating monster living in my garage, but sometimes a big check makes all the difference when it comes to putting up with the blatantly absurd and potentially dangerous.
Today I was stressing myself looking over various creative writings I have done in the past and trying to find one that was perfect to share, and I finally came to the conclusion, nah. I am going to write up a review of a book I read recently, and leave it at that. This blog is kind of a conglomeration of my thoughts and readings and watchings of many stripes, and so today I want to share something of my language learning journey in a freeform review of this bilingual comic.
Part of learning any language involves lots of input–reading and listening. One of the most famous linguistic scholars on second language acquisition, Krashen, is well known for his writings on the importance of input, and increasingly I agree with him–in order to really understand and use a language, you need to input, input, input, input tons and tons of language. But it’s hard, especially at the beginning, because reading anything or listening to anything that was made for native speakers especially can be immediately overwhelming because there is just SO MUCH new and strange and confusing when you’re learning a language.
That’s why I really like bilingual comics. I like reading them even now, even after reading many manga straight in Japanese, and even after reading several novels in Japanese. The Shogakukan English Comics Doraemon bilingual series was one of the first Japanese-English bilingual works that I stumbled upon early in my Japanese language-learning life. Doraemon is a phenomenon in Japan, extremely popular–the kind of property wherein practically every schoolkid can doodle his face in their homework, and new episodes of his anime are ever on the air and new movies based on his comic adventures are released in theaters practically every year. The idea is basically that this dopey kid named Nobita is visited by Doraemon from the future (I think his future self sends him, but I am forgetting some of the details) at a crisis point (maybe Nobita forgot his homework or something). So Nobita regularly gets into some relatable and always idiotic snafu, Doraemon then produces some future technology that can magically fix Nobita’s problem, Nobita inevitably misuses the technology to Doraemon’s chagrin, and in the end usually things are messier or crazier than when they began. (Note that if you ever ask Japanese students to think of an invention they would like to see in the future, inevitably many of them will choose Doraemon inventions.) In reference to language learning, these comics use mostly easy Japanese in the first place, so reading them is not too hard–though it should be stressed that the Japanese text has been replaced with English in the word bubbles, and the Japanese is set in smaller text outside the panels of the comic. That means that all the kanji in the words have no glosses–no hiragana. Now, again, the vocabulary is usually low level, but if you are using these books to learn Japanese (they are actually made for Japanese learners of English), the reading can be a little frustrating if you don’t know the particular kanji.
This book has 15 stories in its scant 170 pages, so you can tell that usually the tales take around ten pages or so to finish, providing bite-size chunks for swallowable learning times. These are “fantastic stories,” which generally means that the tales tend to be related to fairy tales and fantasy tropes–sometimes a riff on a Japanese fairy tale like Issun Boshi, sometimes Nobita might step into a Western fantasy like Cinderella. You might have fairies making appearances, or a story about Santa, or a tale around a sort of superhero. Some of the stories only seem tangentially related to fairy tales, and just have wild magic-like future tech… which almost all Doraemon stories tend to have. So, in the end, the book starts to feel arbitrary. It’s still fun, though, and Doraemon comics are almost universally episodic (though occasionally reference may be made to tech from a previous story); basically you can jump in and immediately enjoy the ridiculous misadventures without reading any of the other selections.
Part of the selling point for this book was apparently teaching fantasy-related vocabulary and expressions… and the stories don’t feature much sword-and-sorcery-type vocab. Thus the publisher added several pages in the end that function like a vocabulary list for fantasy–things like “devil” and “resurrect” and “legend” and “treasure,” plus an explanation of how the planets in the solar system are named after gods, and a page of terms that come from Greek myths in the end (like “Achilles Heel”). This section has the Japanese equivalents for the words and phrases, too, so it works as a Japanese-learning tool, too–albeit it’s probably better for higher-level learners.
Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc. Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc.
Looking at my list, I have things like “mimizuku” (horned owl), “kingyobachi” (goldfish bowl), “otamajyakushi” (tadpole, ladle), and “zehitomo” (by all means), among many others. I wrote a bunch from the final section of the book with the legendary terms, too–stuff like “meifu” (realm of the dead) and “meikyuu” (labyrinth).
For those who are interested in reading more, there are six books in this series, which tries to sort Doraemon tales under specific varieties–love stories, funny stories, touching stories, scary stories. I have read several of the other collections, and they are of a similar quality as this one. Again, reading books like these are great way to practice Japanese and just get started, so if you are looking for something along those lines, there are worse places to start! Why not give it a try? Just don’t give up, and keep getting more input to keep growing!
Bringing a tyrannosaurus to court is really difficult. I don’t know how long the judge (and whoever else is in charge of putting together a court proceeding) talked and planned, but it wasn’t long enough. Someone had paid a lot of money to make a large chair for the tyrannosaurus to sit in. The “dino-chair” did not survive one encounter with the tyrannosaur’s bottom. The tyrannosaur ended up mostly standing (he got antsy sometimes during the long court case, and his tail became a dangerous weapon as he twitched it around in boredom or agitation or whatever tyrannosaurs have for emotions).
The most amusing part for me was when the court tried to swear in the tyrannosaurus. To swear in a witness (in this case, a giant dinosaur), the witness is supposed to put one hand on a Holy Bible and one hand in the air. But it was really awkward to position the Bible so that the tyrannosaurus could put one of his claws on the book with his head jutting far out over the audience in the stands, and he looked really funny with his other hand sticking out at an awkward angle. Someone suggested that the dinosaur put his free hand over his heart instead, but then there was a debate about where a tyrannosaurus’ heart might be. I think everyone else in the room (including me) swore a lot more than the tyrannosaurus ever did.
“Honestly, I am not going to lie,” said the tyrannosaur after much foofaraw. “I think the truth is self-evident anyway.”
And the evidence was impressive. With some searching, the police were able to find over several dozen fossilized footprints that perfectly matched the tyrannosaur’s own foot (or feet) all around the city of Final Pumpkin (our city has a strange name related to agricultural scarcity and competition back in the day)—though there was some consternation about why many of those footprints had not been found before. The fact that some did not fit the rex’s feet caused concern that another dinosaur might be running rampant. Footprint experts came and talked about feet and described in detail the contours of the old lizard’s soles. I got so bored listening that I started watching the old lizard to see if he had any reaction to all the attention, but he didn’t seem very self-conscious. Even experiments on the cave in which the tyrannosaur had been sleeping, as well as his prehistoric pillow, came back with the same results: they (the dinosaur, the pillow, the cave) were really old.
So the tyrannosaur had been living in Final Pumpkin long before us humans had moved in. We just didn’t notice.
“And what’s more,” said the tyrannosaur, standing impressively in front of the lectern. “A tyrannosaurus is known as the king of the dinosaurs. It is just natural that I would also become the king of Final Pumpkin City.”
Finally, I took the witness stand to deliver my testimony as the first person to have met the rex, which gave my position an exaggerated sense of importance which I hadn’t really earned. Nevertheless, I was pretty upset by this point, and I would use any advantage I could get.
“Your honor, footprints don’t mean ownership,” I said. “I can walk through wet cement, but my shoe prints don’t mean I own the sidewalk. We have here an old lizard. But being old and a lizard doesn’t make someone royalty. That would be ridiculous.”
Some people were nodding in the audience. I pressed forward.
“Plus he can’t live in my garage,” I said. “I like my garage. I paid for my garage. A lot of money. This old lizard didn’t pay anything. He can live in his cave.”
I thought my arguments were really good. An hour later, the judge came back with the verdict.
“We don’t want to make the same mistakes our nation has made in the past,” said Judge Farrensquelcher, who was presiding. “This court recognizes the tyrannosaurus over there as the king of Final Pumpkin City.”
Originally submitted to a story contest on Reedsy Prompts, in response to the prompt “Write about someone who’s so obsessed with a goal that it leads to the destruction of their closest relationship.”
Leonard Field watched the blurry white dot high above, longing to pull himself out of the muck at the bottom of the swamp. He was halfway submerged beneath the mud, and the rest of his body too was darker now. He clenched his right hand around a chain that happened to be splayed out across the swamp bottom, the individual links digging into his fresh-rugged flesh.
“I can breathe out there,” he said. “Nothing is keeping me down here.”
He could speak underwater, and when he did, no rush of bubbles emitted from his mouth. He did not breathe air in the way he used to. Technically, he didn’t breathe at all. He didn’t need it anymore.
He felt fleshy tendrils around his shoulders gently press against his body; the armored tubes that pierced his chest expanded and contracted.
“We can breathe here for you,” said the voice on his back. “As long as we need to.”
Leonard allowed himself to sink an inch more into the mud, his eyes still staring upwards. The white blur shifted and twinkled, and the fear he felt that it might go away constricted his heart.
“I have to go up there,” he said. “I can’t stay here forever.”
The voice on his back hummed contemplatively, the vibrations providing his body a warm and gentle massage.
“We must agree together,” it said. “Wherever we go.”
Leonard did not reply. The mud covered his mouth. He pushed himself deeper into the dank sludge, brushing against the chain as he did so. He heard the click of metal links, the shifting of silt. He was beneath the floor of the swamp.
Restless. Waiting.
Leonard and the thing slipped across the bottom of the swamp, exploring. The voice on his back was moving its muscles as they went. Leonard could feel it probing, snapping up weeds and small fish, crunching up crustaceans.
They never rose far from the floor of the swamp, always staying close to the mud, where they could easily escape danger any moment. Though the mud floor seemed like nothing but slime and sludge from the surface, there was a home underneath of tunnels and chambers that could easily be accessed by easing through the filmy, gooey silt and ooze that was the floor and was the ceiling.
Leonard paddled languidly while pulling himself along with his hands, dislodging plants, chasing out small animals so the thing on his back could catch them and eat them.
“You should eat, too,” it said. “Your body can eat them now.”
Though Leonard looked down at the floor of the swamp, his mind was above. He remembered cooked foods. Steak. Hamburgers. Even skewers of fish roasted over a fire. A wriggling swamp worm was not food. It was a horror show.
“Are they still there?” he asked.
“We share much now,” the voice said. “When I eat, you take nutrients, but… If you don’t eat and use your own body, you become weaker. It’s bad for us both.”
“It’s bad for us if I don’t see her,” he said. “It makes me weak not to see her.”
“You want to mate,” it said. “It’s a good thing, to reproduce. But the timing isn’t right.”
“I want to live,” Leonard said, and he turned his body around so that his face was towards the sky.
The white blur was still there, not far away. Still shifting in the waves. Still calling to him. Despite being underwater, his mouth felt suddenly dry.
“Watch out!”
The voice spoke too late. Leonard’s head collided with a large rock. He curled up in a ball, clutching at the back of his skull. When he opened his eyes again, he saw strings of red rising around his line of sight.
“It’s not serious, I think,” said the voice. “I can look. I can lick it and make the wound clean.”
“No, no,” Leonard protested. “I’ll check it myself.”
He touched the wound, flinched.
“Oh, no one saved this one either,” said a voice.
Leonard felt his heart drop, and he began to uncurl himself to get a better look.
The rock he had hit his head on was in reality a piece of concrete, round, heavy, sunk in the mud. Above it was another chain, still mostly clean with only minor accretions of swamp muck in the links. The chain floated upwards towards the surface and attached at the end of the chain was a man, naked, and very much dead. But his body was still buoyant enough to keep the corpse from settling down to the ocean floor just yet. Leonard stared at dead body, the series of bubbles still stringing up faintly from the deathly dumb face.
“We can eat him,” said the voice. “He is still fresh, and the flesh will be good for you. Familiar flesh for your body.”
The man looked familiar. Leonard had not known the man well, but he had been a crewmember on the ship. John or Dell or something, it didn’t matter anymore.
Something was happening up there. Crewmembers were dying, and they were burying them in the swamp, where their bodies could become a part of the ecosystem again—a cold and scientific way to deal with the dead, but one he approved of. It was the right thing to do. But still, why were they dying?
Were his friends okay? And what about her?
“I have to see why these men are dying,” Leonard said. “I can’t stay down here forever.”
“That which floats on the surface is large and dangerous,” said the voice. “It swallows many lives. Even before you fell to this world, that which floats took many lives from below. This voice does not trust it.”
Leonard was quiet for a time.
“I came from there,” he said. “They are waiting for me.”
“Are they?” asked the voice, monotone.
Leonard continued to pull himself along the bottom of the swampland, and a slow prickling annoyance arose and seemed to prance upon his temples. Of course they were waiting for him.
Of course she was waiting for him.
Several days later he caught sight of her. When the voice on his back was asleep, Leonard crept out onto a small island far from the ship. It was barely an island so much as a swath of thick mud and reeds that could only just bear his weight, and his limbs were deep in the muck.
Though he was far from the ship, he knew a way to peer long distances with clarity, as if looking through a pair of binoculars. It was a trick the voice had taught him after they had become one. Leonard’s body had changed in some ways after the voice had fused with his back. His hair had thinned, and webs had grown between fingers and toes. The voice had shown him that he could touch fingers to thumb in a certain way, and then, after running his hand through the water, pick up bubbles that, if he shifted his fingers just right, would form into makeshift lenses in his hand—lenses through which he could peer and see farther away.
Of course, peering through a bubble caused some distortion and warping of the image, and if there were impurities in the bubble—refuse from the swamp water—they could disrupt his vision. It took him several tries that morning on the mud island, hiding behind the reeds, before he could get the bubbles shaped just right in his hands, and clean and clear enough to look through.
She was walking on the deck. Long, dark hair framed her perfect, moon-shaped face, now distorted through the filmy water She was wearing a white one-piece swimming suit that hugged her curves, delineating her body. His mouth watered as he stared at her breasts, her hips. Even through the bubbles in his hand, she was gorgeous.
He remembered the first time he had been close to her, smelling a warm scent of jasmine. When they had held hands, the flesh of her fingers so soft in his rough laborer’s hands, the way she would kiss him fiercely on the lips, how they would…
On the ship, she raised her hand to her mouth, a small red dot winked on, then she flicked something into the water below. A cigarette—no doubt one of the new “safe” ones with none of the dangers and a healthy hit of vitamin C, but still… littering here? That was against regulations. He would have to chastise her lightly when he…
The thing with the voice on his back seemed to hum, a feeling like a light vibration playing against his spine. It was waking up. It wouldn’t want him on the surface of the water. It definitely wouldn’t want him spying like this. He didn’t want a fight over what his body did or where his body went.
He clenched his teeth and backed away into the water, letting the colorful and translucent water cress close over his head.
The voice didn’t say anything about the island visit until they were in the tunnels later that day.
The tunnels stretched in every direction underneath the swamp. They were not just the living quarters that Leonard and the thing on his back called home, but other scampering creatures lived there, too. Leonard was always careful stepping through the tunnels because he didn’t know when one of the clawed, sinuous lyre worms would ping like a struck note and lunge out of the puddles to latch on to his heel.
“It is good to walk carefully above too,” the voice said.
“I was careful,” Leonard replied. “I wasn’t even walking. I was low. I got down into the water when you started waking up.”
He had hoped the voice hadn’t noticed that he had been out. It often slept so deeply, but this time… He clenched his fists, and the webbing between his fingers crinkling uncomfortably.
“Better to stay in the tunnels,” said the voice. “You can’t find anything of value on the mud banks.”
“She is my girlfriend!” snapped Leonard. “She cares about me, and you’re keeping me from her! What do you expect me to do, wait underwater until my balls fall off?”
The thing on his back seemed to tense against his shoulders, and it let out a thin stream of warm water that ran down the small of his back. He used to think the creature was urinating on him, but apparently it thought it was calming him down with a “gift” of warm and comforting liquid stored and heated in its body.
It didn’t comfort him. The anger burned hotter.
“If we leave this swamp, we can find other options,” said the voice.
Leonard felt his eyes flash, and he nearly choked with rage.
“I am a human being! And I want to love a human being!”
The thing on his back seemed to consider this. Leonard waited, expecting another warm trickle of not-urine to snake its way down his thighs. It didn’t come.
“Are you sure who she is?” the thing said.
“I’m in love with her,” Leonard said, feeling an overwhelming longing. “I want her.”
The thing hummed and held him, crouching in the dark in the tunnel.
“I will catch a twinkling eel tonight,” said the voice. “It has a pleasing poison inside, it will make you feel good.”
No, thought Leonard. Nothing would make him feel good enough as long as he was under the swamp, stuck in these tunnels, away from his real life, away from everything that he was supposed to be.
The twinkling eel—a long and sinuous blue creature with dozens of sparkling appendages that snap and writhe as it swims—was delicious in its way. Leonard did not eat it, of course. However, even still, after the thing on his back consumed it, Leonard felt the effects of the toxins in the eel’s body entering his own bloodstream.
They filled him, fingertip to fingertip, toes to scalp, with a sense of kinetic energy and a rush of euphoria. Like jagged waves of energy, he felt his nerves jangle and swim across his skin. It felt as if the allure of the toxin reached into his farthest depths, into his deepest desires.
And he saw her. Salinda Powers. Her flashing smile, her curving waist, her flowing hair. Every word like steam from her lips, beckoning him. Every movement lithe and smooth and seductive, like the most delectable dream.
The voice was silenced on his back. Whatever effects the toxins may have had on Leonard, their force must have been multiplied several times over on the thing as it was the one who consumed the eel directly.
Thinking that the voice could not resist any longer, Leonard stumbled through the tunnels, treading over lyre worms and clicker crabs, and pushed out of the muddy bottom of the swamp, out into the water, and up, up, the excitement inside him building, eyes wide, staring at the blur of white above as it grew larger and larger.
He felt the power inside, felt invincible, felt a lust he could not contain. His webbed hands grasped the chain leading off the side of the ship. The cold metal sent a shock of pleasure through him, almost as if he was caressing her arm. Hand over hand he climbed, his breathing ragged, the thing on his back like a dead weight.
He clawed his way onto the ship, gasping, eyes on fire, teeth bared in desire, and pushed himself to his feet.
“Salinda,” he croaked.
He saw her, pointing at him. He tried to smile.
And the men came. They had sticks of electricity. He could not look at them, but only at Salinda, even as the electricity called out his voice and sent his screams spearing into the sky.
When Leonard awoke, something was missing, and something else was there. In his state of mind, it took him some time to figure out which was which, despite the gaping psychological absence. He tried to feel his face, but found that he was bound, and when he tried to turn his head, he discovered himself encased in wires and tubes at every quarter.
Clacking footsteps rang out, and when Leonard looked up, he saw Salinda. As she came more clearly into view, he saw she was wearing a long white coat over a professional gray top and ironed raven-black pants. Her mouth was open in excitement, and he tried to speak, but heard a strange rasping sound instead.
“Shhh,” Salinda said. “You’ve gone through a lot. Your throat sustained a lot of damage I’m afraid.”
She sounded gentle, and Leonard wanted to lean into the comfort of her voice, but he saw in her eyes a jet professionalism mixed with a frightening excitement that pulled at the corners of her mouth and gave a taut character to the skin around her eyes.
“Salinda,” he managed, hearing his voice finally in that awful rasping.
“You remember me,” she said, and allowed her face to be pulled into a savage smile. “I thought you might.”
Leonard imagined those days before, in the spaceship, holding Salinda close, his hand upon her cheek, her hand upon his side. Feeling his hands now as he clawed at the bedsheets, he only found rough scales, the webs between his digits stiffer now, even more uncomfortable.
“I love you,” he said.
The savage smile softened a bit, and she pressed her lips together in a sympathetic grin.
“That might have been the difference,” she said. “That might have been what finally brought one of you back.”
He stared at her, desperately, willing the restraints to go away, aching to reach out for her.
“You deserve an explanation,” she said, taking notes from the monitors connected to his flesh. “We wanted the parasite. But the parasites are smart. Smart, but, I don’t know, good-hearted? Some of the other scientists are already calling them the Samaritan suckers. They suck onto you, you know—and they are suckers for someone who is dying underwater.”
Leonard almost choked.
“Some people did die,” Salinda said. “The suckers don’t always rescue everyone. They bond with land-dwellers so that they, too, can become ambulatory on land. But they also seem to want to save people, and prefer to bond with sentient lifeforms. We don’t really know why yet, but we are trying to figure it out.”
Leonard thought back to the many times it had warned him, how it tried to help him.
“Turns out we got real lucky,” she said, patting Leonard on the upper arm. “Not only did one of the suckers go for the bait finally, it just happened to be a bait that I had had a fling with. At the time I never dreamed that dalliance would matter. Just a nice pastime, you know, and you weren’t so ugly, and I knew you wouldn’t stay around forever. We just tied you to a rock, like we deal with corpses anyway. We thought the chains would hold you, and then we would have the sucker, too, captured as it tried to bond with you. But it managed to get you loose.”
Leonard felt fireworks in his mind, broken shards of darkness and light.
“Where is he?” he hissed.
“Oh,” said Salinda, frowning a little. “Unfortunately the sucker didn’t survive. Thought it would be hardier than that. But we can still learn a lot from its remains. We are dissecting it now.”
The smile appeared again on Salinda’s face, the same kind of taut excitement returning, pulling open her cheeks so that they revealed teeth that nearly snarled, flashing in the harsh light. She put her hand on his, her flesh soft, her fingers hooking around his scales.
Sometimes love and care, when applied to the wrong part of a film, can feel like sloppiness, or a lack of craft. Shazam: Fury of the Gods has gotten a nasty trouncing by the critics and has bombed out badly at the box office, with many finding the movie shallow and unfulfilling, all spectacle with little of the heart from the first film. While I think such complaints may be merited from a particular point of view (especially in reference to some weak baddies and convoluted MacGuffin chasing), I am not sure as a whole the movie lacks the tender loving care that some critics attest, and I can’t help but wonder if in a few years audiences might rediscover this film as a minor hidden gem.
The story follows the daughters of Atlas arriving to steal that broken Shazam scepter from the first film. When Billy broke the scepter, he opened up congress between worlds, and the daughters of Atlas (Kalypso and Hespera) crossed over on a mission of vengeance. See, the powers of Shazam actually are stolen from six “gods”—his name is actually an acronym of those gods. Shazam is supposed to have the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury—where the families of these other gods are is never mentioned. Shazam and his Captain Marvel family have become dysfunctional in their mission to protect Fawcett City, causing a lot of damage and goofing off while saving lives, a problem that has gotten to the point that they have received mocking nicknames. Kalypso and Hespera create a massive energy dome around the city, trapping everyone inside, and begin the hunt for Shazam and co—as well as searching for a mysterious seed that they want to grow a tree (though I personally got a little confused about why they wanted the apple, and how they were going to get back Atlas’ powers, and what exactly they were going for). As the story progresses, Billy Batson/Shazam must deal with his insecurities about his future, the splintering of his team, and his past failures as the deadly goddesses attack the city and unleash an army of monsters to create a transformed world.
Much digital ink and video noise has already been shared about any number of failings in Shazam 2, which is already a massive failure at the box office, and is receiving widespread derision from the fans who bothered to attend. Much of the derision stems from shallow and seemingly thoughtless character work and poorly constructed worldbuilding, as well as an overall step down in heart and storytelling from the first film (bizarrely, the easter egg from the last movie has very little payoff here, and despite Shazam’s archnemesis receiving a movie just three months ago in theaters, Black Adam is never mentioned in the entire movie). Some of the complaints (which are understandable) include wafer-thin and predictable villains with cliched bad-guy lines; an even more childish and downright stupid characterization for Shazam despite Billy Batson’s more mature stature; and for me anyway confusing powers irregularly used and badly executed in the film. It’s been a while since I sat through the original Shazam, and so my memory is cloudy with a chance of forgetfulness, but methinks the humor in Shazam 2 feels a bit degraded, with many gags not quite landing.
A big part of these issues probably comes down to how Billy Batson’s utter absence for 98% or more of the movie. Seriously, the actor maybe trips onto stage in two scenes, briefly—and I thought they were decent scenes! This is the MAIN CHARACTER of the film, the protagonist, and he barely even appears. Now I know what you’re thinking—Shazam is the main character, Shazam is Billy Batson, how can you say that the main character of the movie doesn’t appear in the film? And yeah, okay, I hear you, and you make a good point… but Shazam here, he is barely Batson at all.
As mentioned previously, Shazam is uber immature in this movie. With his big expressions and idiotic shallow thoughts, I kept thinking this guy, he supposed to be like five years old. This is a weird choice, because Batson is seventeen in this movie—coming up on eighteen, worried about “graduating out” and losing his foster family. He is practically an adult. And I think you can take Batson hiding inside Shazam as our hero worried about facing the truth of his situation. Maybe his immature behavior also is meant as a way to shield himself from maturity, that he acts like a doofus because he doesn’t want to cross that threshold into adult life. You can read it that way, but I am not sure the film intends such a reading. After all, Batson/Shazam seems to want to be a good leader. He seems to want to create solid plans and turn around the Captain Marvel team so that everyone can work together well and they can overcome their negative reputation. And we never see Batson hint that he wants to be a dopey kid. When Batson appears on the screen, he immediately seems ten times more mature than Shazam. This despite the fact that Shazam is supposed to possess the wisdom of Solomon—a problem in the script that is lampshaded in the dialogue! But folks, mentioning the problem doesn’t make it go away! (Lampshading is an ongoing issue in the movie, and continues with a 6,000-year-old goddess falling in love with and dating a minor—a major plot point, and its creepiness is pointedly remarked upon… and ignored.)
So why is Shazam so incredibly stupid in this movie? Again, this comes down to a weak script. In the end, Shazam has to put his life on the line in a dramatic way, but I am not convinced that he was ever unwilling to do such heroic deeds in the face of danger. He isn’t shown to be a coward, it isn’t part of his apparent character arc that he was unable to be brave at the beginning and only capable of sacrifice by the end. Unless we are to interpret his fear of losing his family (including his fellow super fam members) as a lack of bravery? There is a line towards the end that seems to indicate that his acts of daring do qualify him for being a genuine god—but that never seemed like his goal, either.
This sort of vague character motivation plagues other aspects of the story, too. Hespera and Kalypso are both very bland as villains, despite the talents of their respective actors, and even their goal can feel unfocused. They seem upset that Shazam possesses the power of Atlas (his strength), and so they try to zap the power away from our hero with the staff—but then they seem more concerned about this fruit that Shazam has in his chamber of secrets for some reason. How Shazam got the fruit isn’t clear—it may have been mentioned, but the delivery felt muddled to me. It’s not entirely clear what good the fruit will do Hespera and Kalypso once they get it, though there are some gestures at the idea the fruit will restore the villains’ world somehow. So did the wizard who gave Batson his powers steal the fruit and destroy Hespera and Kalypso’s magical dwelling for some reason? If so, why? We don’t know. It feels very arbitrary.
However, if you can embrace the arbitrariness as a standard classic superhero story element, you can still find a lot to enjoy in this movie. The cockeyed storytelling and half-wit motivations feel like golden-age comic book poppycock, which has its dream-like charm. Yes, the inner workings of the story are a maze of contradictions, the world-building is a mystical colander, and the character motivations are a mess, and the character arcs are poorly constructed—but there is still a true sense of head-down, all-in fun that the movie delivers. Over and over throughout the film I was noticing clever touches and background details, set dressing, and cute lines that helped forecast plot developments. The movie has a cheerful devil-may-care attitude that carries the movie, injecting it with a freewheeling charm that pulled me along with the ricocheting narrative and allowed me the space to overlook some of its narrative weak points. For example, I totally dig Freddy Freeman’s wacky t-shirt design.
Plus we get a host of monsters and excellent effects. The army of creatures springs right out of folklore and legend and betrays an affection for classic monster films, especially with the design of a certain Cyclops that is an obvious tribute to Ray Harryhausen and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The main dragon, too, is more than just your usual reptilian dinosaur with wings—its called Ladon (Radon in Japanese, which is also the name of a famous pterosaur kaiju from Toho’s Godzilla franchise), and its made from a tree. It’s a plant beasty, so its bark is as bad as its bite because its bite has bark… you know what I mean.
There… is a lot to be annoyed about in Shazam: Fury of the Gods. I had to restrain myself from complaining about some bits (a bizarre homing magic blast, for example, or an excruciatingly long scene where Ladon menaces two main characters without actually killing them for absolutely no reason than plot armor). Still, I walked out of the theater grinning because it’s the kind of movie that screams freedom of silliness, that gives permission just to laugh and have a good time, that resists the gloomy storytelling that occasionally pervades action cinema, and that embraces a bright and optimistic color palette in a time when because of health and a world that seems constantly on the edge of collapse, I need some cheer, man. Shazam 2 gave me some of that happy juice. I’m just thankful for that.
By this time, there were dozens of bystanders taking pictures, posing, and even asking for the tyrannosaurus’ autograph. I didn’t know what to say. For one thing, it was still difficult for me to know what I should say to a giant flesh-eating lizard. If I said the wrong thing, I thought maybe he would bite my head off—literally. But at the same time, I liked my garage. I liked my garage a lot. So, in other words, I had ample motivation to say something.
Thankfully, at that moment, the police arrived. Two of them anyway—though they did not look very intimidating. Not much does next to a rex.
“What’s going on?” said one, eyes popping as he approached the old lizard. “Is this some kind of prank?”
The tyrannosaurus turned to the officer.
“Hello there,” said the tyrannosaur.
“Officers, thank goodness you are here,” I said. “This tyrannosaur wants to steal my garage. Please arrest him!”
The policemen looked at the tyrannosaur, and then they looked at each other.
“I don’t think he would fit in the back of the police car,” said one.
“We will get this all sorted out somehow,” said the other, and he walked up to the tyrannosaur. “Did you try to steal this man’s garage?”
“No,” said the tyrannosaur. “The garage is still right over there. And despite the fact that I am a very large dinosaur, I think it is obvious I am not big enough to carry away the entire building. Plus, and this is the important part—this man Wal lives on my land. So his garage, and this entire town, are legally my property.”
Some of my neighbors were setting up lawn chairs so they could sit and watch what was happening. My neighbor Charlie’s daughter Harriet, always the little entrepreneur, had set up a lemonade stand and was drawing dinosaurs on the paper cups. The policemen just stared at the tyrannosaur.
“Please take a look,” said the dinosaur. And then he showed the police his feet, the fossilized footprints, and how well his feet fit the footprints, plus the hole where he claimed he had been sleeping. He even had a dinosaur-sized pillow.
“As you can see, I took a very long nap, and while I was sleeping, your country was built on my land,” said the tyrannosaur.
“Without my permission,” he added.
The policemen were listening, but they didn’t seem to understand.
“Do you want to see the footprint again?” asked the tyrannosaur. “Look, you can see every wrinkle and line from my feet. You won’t find another tyrannosaur with a foot that matches these prints.”
“Are you trying to take over the country?” asked one police officer finally after a long pause.
“Not the whole country,” said the tyrannosaur. “But this town is obviously mine. You will find more of my footprints all over the area.”
The policemen looked at each other again.
“Should we call the mayor, or the army, or both?” asked one of the officers to the other.
“This isn’t in the training manuals,” said the other. “Let’s just call everyone to make sure. And I think we need to take his fingerprints, too.”
“The big guy’s fingerprints?”
“Yeah.”
That afternoon was very long. Many people came. Many people talked. We had dozens of meetings. The tyrannosaur stayed cheerful throughout. Harriet made a lot of money from her dinosaur lemonade.
Finally, those in charge decided to take the issue to court—and I was called to be one of the primary witnesses. But how do you bring a dinosaur to trial?
The tyrannosaurus led me to my own back yard, talking all the way. The crowd of bystanders began to follow us as well. Everyone was taking pictures, but the tyrannosaurus didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he sometimes put his fingers up in a “peace” sign. Or maybe he was just waving. It’s hard to tell because a tyrannosaurus only has two fingers.
“Look, before we go any further, let’s at least exchange names,” I said. “Unless you just want me to call you ‘Rexy.’ My name is Walter.”
“Come back here, Wal,” said the tyrannosaurus. “Follow me. I think you will find this interesting. You know, I guess maybe you haven’t seen any dinosaurs for a while. And you can call me ‘your majesty.’”
“You are right about not seeing your kind around for awhile, Rexy,” I said. “You are all supposed to be dead.”
“You might think that,” the tyrannosaurus said, noting my insolent remark with a raised eyebrow. “But you would be wrong. Really, did you think we all just died? All of us? I heard people were pretty smart. Maybe it was just a rumor.”
“Don’t tell me there are more of you?” I said.
“There are more of us,” the tyrannosaurus said. “Of course there are. But maybe my friends aren’t going to come out right away. At least, not from your perspective.”
Behind my house was a clearing with a big lawn. Beyond the lawn was a rocky area, with plateaus and cliffs in the distance, most notably a large, towering rock structure relatively close to my property called the Pumpkin Smasher Rock. The Pumpkin Smasher Rock is a tower of stone poised precariously as if it could fall at any moment, though I am told it actually is quite stable.
Anyway, it’s a nice view, which is why I picked this place for my house. Who doesn’t like looking at big, dirty rocks?
We were starting to walk into the boulders and dust and what-not. While the stony structures are pretty in their way, I hadn’t often gone out there due to the possibility that there could be so many big poisonous snakes and spiders. But I had a passing thought that I would rather deal with snakes and spiders than a tyrannosaurus.
“What are we supposed to find out here?” I asked. “A rock with your name on it? Or maybe a 65-million-year-old bill of sale?”
“Kind of like that, Wal,” the tyrannosaurus said. “But it’s not a paper deed. I was actually sleeping out here for a long time. You wouldn’t be able to say my name.”
“You were asleep for 65 million years?” I asked.
“Sixty-five million years, six thousand years, a day—it all feels the same when you’re asleep!” said the tyrannosaurus. “You try counting the years when your sleeping underground! Ah, here we are. Here is where I woke up.”
In the space the dino was indicating, rocks and dirt were broken away and a big hole had been ripped out of the ground. Something had definitely clawed its way out of the ground here. Stones and bits of dirt in all sizes were scattered around the terrain. Some cactuses and plants had been torn up, too.
“You can’t imagine the kind of dreams a fellow has when he sleeps that long,” the tyrannosaurus said.
“A smelly old cave doesn’t prove anything,” I said, and crossed my arms.
“Look beside the cave,” the tyrannosaur said. “I marked this territory as my own many years ago. You can see the proof and I can prove its from me.”
After searching for a few moments, we found what the tyrannosaurus was talking about: a series of huge dinosaur footprints imbedded in the stone. These were very old footprints, but extremely well preserved.
“These footprints are from my time,” said the dinosaur. “And as you can see, they fit my feet perfectly. I was here before you were, I claimed the land myself, I was sleeping on this land and so occupied it all along. You have to admit, this land—actually, this town, come to think of it, is actually mine.”
On that morning, one of mountains moved. The people of New First City had been expecting this day to come. Many mountains stood around the city, and the sound of their breathing provided a cadence for the passing of the days. Many said that it was the breath of the mountains that provided the breezes, and the people of New First City often murmured their thanks to the mountains for the services they provided. The mountains were beautiful in their way, covered over with mosses and trees, shrubs that took hold as the creatures underneath the outer-rock skin slept.
But eventually, for reasons that the denizens of the city still did not fully understand, the mountains would sometimes awake. Rarely more than one at a time, but even one was a dire threat that could wipe out the entire city. One walking mountain could be hundreds of kilometers tall, and such a massive, god-like being strolling through the streets would be enough to cause untold devastation and the loss of many lives, even in their technologically advanced civilization.
Panic rose on the morning the mountain awoke. As the mountain began to rise, the evergreens, boulders and moss growing on the creature’s back and sides slipped and shivered, streams of soil fell in black waterfalls. The side of the mountain seemed to open, caves yawning and revealing darkness and secrets. At least a dozen caves opened along the front side of the mountain—perhaps nostrils, perhaps mouths, perhaps eyes. No man knew. All they knew was the blackness of the gawping maws that signaled coming death.
Arms along the mountainsides moved like a coming avalanche. The head shook, and a small forest broke away, twigs showered down. The sound of breathing roared, a reality-shattering rumble sucking in, gusting out.
The mountain was lumbered directly towards the city. They always did. Perhaps they were attracted to the lights, or they could sense the presence of life, or by some chance the mountains could read the thoughts of the citizens and were pulled towards their fear. Scientists made their guesses and their research a thousand times over, but just as they had never found a way to kill the giants, no one knew they had never discovered why they without fail approach the city upon awakening.
But the people of New First City had prepared for the mountain’s coming.
No conventional weapon was powerful enough to stop a mountain. Even the most powerful explosives would do nothing but dislodge dirt, rock, and trees—worthless detritus to be ground beneath the mountain’s feet. In times past, near other cities now long destroyed, when mountains awoke, when missiles and rockets were used, the explosions were known to do nothing but spur the creatures to move faster—enraged or perhaps excited by the attacks.
No, only one method had ever been found that could stop the mountains from coming, and that was the bullet men. They were coming out now, hurrying, stumbling in their haste as they burst from their doors, charged towards the cannons, desperately throwing on their peculiar armor.
Each bullet man wore thick metal armor and a stiff helmet that attached to the shoulder pads below. The suits were equipped with weapons, burst rays, explosives, and more for their mission. The armor was enough to protect them for the trip they had to make.
But usually, when the bullet men were deployed, at best, none of them came back. At worst, they all died.
Harris was the fastest that day. Not because he was the most athletic—he actually had a paunch now, and so encountered some difficulty in squeezing himself into the armored suit—a fact which prompted him to wear the metal all the time. No, rather than for his speed, he was first because of his personality. He lived in anxiety about the mountains, more so even than the usual bullet man, and so every night he barely slept, waiting for the alarm, tormented by nightmares of the coming doom.
He had been known on several occasions to run from his home, thundering down the road half-naked as he pulled on the rest of his gear, only to discover that the alarm he had been sure had sounded was only in his mind.
But this day, the alarm was not in a mere figment in his mind, and he was out and to the cannons with fleet feet. The cannon men were priming the cannons already, warming up the gears, the electricity buzzing, lights flashing. They welcomed him, eyes thick with a kind of detached sorrow. He felt their hands upon the armor on his shoulders, felt them checking his straps, the connections, running final diagnostics to ensure everything was ready.
Harris waited fretfully for the diagnostics check on his armor to be finished. He knew they would find no problems. He examined the armor every day himself, and was aware of even the smallest nicks and lingering kinks, the sections of cloth that were beginning to wear down, and everything on his suit was well above the acceptable rating required to participate in the Shot.
Standing there with those testing hands prodding so slowly, Harris wanted to scream, to just step forward, to leap into the air and into his destiny. And finally they gave him the okay with the sweat of fear dribbling down their chins, beading on their foreheads. Harris strolled forward, worried the other teams might be faster, that someone else might be shot first.
The door to the cannon opened, the shining tube stretched up towards the sky. Harris squeezed in, his paunch squeaking against the sleek sheen of the barrel. He clenched his teeth, worried for a moment that his weight might disqualify him. But no one called him out, and he found himself with face centimeters from the edge, sharp scent of metal and residual explosive powder stinging his nostrils and driving his heart to run.
He had to wait in the darkness then, with the cannon moving into position, the vibrations of the movement numbing his muscles, pinching him where his joint armor shifted uncomfortably. He heard the countdown, and felt it, too, as the sound became part of the vibrations around him. He said the words, slurring the numbers against the metal armor, exiting his mouth in a rope of saliva that bit through his beard.
The final number was called, and then the explosion, and all he could feel was pressure and speed and a horrible kind of deafness, as if the world was gone from him. His armor around his middle burned white hot as his paunch pushed the plates against the bore. Everything was light and roaring sound, and he saw the landscape snap by below, the woods waving at him as he seared towards his target.
The cannon had been fired aiming at the spine of the mountain, just above its slowly bobbing head, which crouched underneath a hunched, bulking back. The only method discovered so far that could stop a mountain from crushing the city was to attack the spine, and it only worked with a human bullet. Usually hitting home was not an issue, as the mountains moved slowly, and so a well-aimed shot was nearly guaranteed to strike.
This shot—the Harris-shot—however, did not hit home. As the mountain took another step forward, its front leg sagged suddenly, throwing off the center of the beast’s weight. With a sudden jerk, the creature twisted sideways slightly—but even that slight movement was enough to cause the shot to miss its mark by some distance.
Instead of the bullet plowing through the dirt and bone into the spine growing up out of the back of the mountain’s neck, Harris found himself pummeled into the thick rocky skin of the mountain’s shoulder. Immediately Harris knew something was wrong. From simulations, he knew what burrowing into the vertebrae should feel like. He knew the solid slap of the bullet armor as it sank into the bone, and how the head of the armor then could dig through gristle and cartilage deeper down. The kind of resistance the material of the monster’s bones provided was a rough grind, a hard and tight feel, according to the simulations.
Instead of the tightness and grit, Harris felt something soft and flimsy, and a rush of warm, sticky fluid coating his armor. Harris’ heart redoubled in speed, chattering against his ribs as he hit the emergency reverse. The head of the armor spun backwards, pushing back, extricating Harris from the musculature. He fell out of the hole and into a waterfall of blood.
Part of the safety mechanism built in to the suit just for situations like this included pikes on wires automatically deploying from his armor upon impact with the beast. Not all of the pikes held in the flesh of the mountain, but enough did that Harris found himself dangling awkwardly in the air, swinging back and forth, shoulder skipping against the blood-slicked rocks that made up the area between the mountain’s shoulder and neck.
Harris knew he was the only chance now. With a failed hit close to the mountain’s neck, dozens of smaller holes in the side of the mountain had immediately gaped across the creature’s face, neck, and chest. Out of these holes surged thundering winds and battering rays of disrupting energy. Any further shots would be disrupted by the wind and fire that was exploding in waves from the creature now. There was no clear shot anymore, though Harris knew the citizens of New First City would almost certainly try again. Any further bullet men would most likely be thrown far off their mark, slamming into thick rock, or being sucked into one of the caves to impact harmlessly inside.
Harmlessly for the mountain at least. The bullet men shot now were also almost certain to perish in the attempt. Just as he was likely to do here, dangling and burnt, twisting in the wind, so scared his legs shook.
Harris scrambled to get himself up the wires, straining to reach up far enough to grasp one of the cables. His stomach burned against any movement, his armor still searing hot. Still, he grabbed the wire with his left hand, then up with his right, up, farther. Moments later he was clinging to the ragged lip of the wound, which was now oozing dark brown ichor.
The vertebrae. Where were they? Brain still spinning a little, Harris scanned the area, with a computer overlay across his goggles analyzing the stony structures surrounding him, probing the flesh in search of the nervous tissue underneath. The sensors caught something, a telltale icon began flashing, and at first in his excitement Harris thought it was the spine.
But the tone was wrong. The sensors had not identified the spine. They had identified a parasite lurking on the surface of the mountain. The alarm screeched in Harris ears, and he whipped his head back and forth while he tried to get a better purchase, partially pulled back into the hole he had made.
He saw it, and his guts turned.
It was like a shadowy goat with glowing red eyes and long, spidery legs that stuck into the rock and pulled out in long, arcing strides. Rather than balancing on the nigh-vertical slopes, it skittered sideways silentl except for a wet popping sound as its legs slipped in and out of the rocks and the mountain’s external, largely nerveless flesh.
Harris let out a yell. He had never seen a devil goat before, not in person—but more than enough times he had seen illustrations and video surveillance, seen training videos where bullet men were torn apart by those arcing legs. He aimed his right arm, swinging it towards the creature just as it pounced onto him.
One of the devil goat’s tentacles snapped through Harris’ left shoulder, but he barely felt it for the adrenaline. As the creature’s face bore down into Harris’ face, he pulled the trigger, and the bone-digging cannon built into the wrist of his right arm unleashed a guttering energy bar that liquified the goat’s abdomen, narrowly missing the creature’s head.
The devil goat’s red eyes jutted and faded, its mouth gasped silently, and the creature seemed to burst apart, falling off the side of the mountain in pieces. As the remains of the creature tumbled down, Harris felt something wet on his shoulder.
The wound. He was bleeding. Seeing the puncture from an angle, he knew suddenly he was hurt even before he felt anything, and by knowing it, suddenly the pain became real.
There were only very limited first aid capabilities built into the bullet suit. And Harris couldn’t really use them while dangling off the side of the mountain. He gripped the rocks with his right hand, scooting along sideways when the mountain moved in such a way as to create semi-horizontal land beneath him, using the mechanical strength of the suit to pull himself up onto a more stable ledge.
He rolled against a bulging crystalline formation to steady himself as it shifted gently below him. Almost immediately he saw a patch of red growing underneath where he lay. Pulling a thick device from his belt, he set it for puncture, and several hypodermic needles emerged from the front end, which he jammed into his shoulder. Pain killers, blood clotting mechanisms, antibiotics flooded into him, but the pain seemed only to redouble.
He had to stay awake, had to keep his brain clear. Harris bit down on his tongue, focusing on the pain as a way to stay cognizant, feeling his mouth fill with a metallic flavor. He allowed himself a full minute’s rest to regain his bearings, but the nausea of panic continued hazing over the forefront of his mind.
The mountain continued to waver beneath him as the massive creature creeped forward. He couldn’t stay seated forever. The longer he waited, the more lives would be lost. He imagined even as he lay there that he heard another bullet man misfire through the air and impact uselessly against a rock outcropping.
Harris forced himself to stand up and keep moving. Worms of numbness crisscrossed with white stripes of pain across his shoulder. He clenched his teeth, blood squeaking against his molars. The augmented reality display on his goggles continued to scan the rocks, searching for an access point to the vertebrae underneath. Also, after the encounter with the devil goat, Harris found himself nervously glancing around to see if there were other parasites that might be looking for an easy meal.
Far above he thought he saw shadowy figures snapping across the cliff-face. Devil goats or rock worms or maybe something worse. Harris didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t have the luxury to think about it, the space in his mind to allow for distractions.
The AR system was flashing, a buzzer going off in his ear. A patch of inconspicuous earth ahead, indistinguishable from the surrounding rock and shrubbery, apparently was the closest access point to the mountain’s spine.
Shakily, painfully, Harris ran as he ignited the bone-digging cannon. Using the cannon was far from ideal. The original shot into the monster’s flesh had been his best chance for success. The cannon took longer, and it called more attention to himself, throwing up smoke and flashing lights that could attract unwanted attention—more devil goats could easily gather around and shred him in moments with his body half in the ground. There just was no choice in the matter. It had to be done.
Harris thrust the cannon down, the bar of light and fire colliding with the ground and instantly throwing up a cloud of dust and sparks. Soon he was choking and gagging, but he followed protocol, burning out a tight circle where he could fit into the hole, yanking out individual rocks and tossing them down the side of the beast.
Within moments he had hit skin, and ichor began to pool, gush over, sizzle and steam against the bar of light. The stench was nauseating, and Harris turned up the power, liquefying the muscle and skin and burying himself down into the body of the beast.
Now that he had made entry, he pushed in head-first, engaging his drill helmet. The body of his armor had grooves and even conveyor belts for taking away rock and bone from the hole so he could make progress. His body went down slowly into the muscle and mess. The heartbeat of the mountain began to ring in his ear, reverberate against his body.
The augmented reality screen showed that he was digging through bone, and that the bones were not thick here. At the rate he was digging, he should be able to implant into the nervous system, and…
A sharp pain slammed through his body. Something had just grabbed hold of his right leg. He could feel claws piercing through the armor, through his skin. Some kind of creature had indeed been attracted to the smoke and fire thrown up by the bone-digger cannon. It had followed him into the dark and was now trying to pull him out.
The suit engaged spikes that shot out in all directions into the surrounding bone and rock, holding him in, preventing him from getting pulled free. The creature—a horned stab beetle, or a viciolizard perhaps—continued to yank furiously at his lower leg, his skin raked and sliced in the process.
It wasn’t going to let go, and Harris couldn’t confront it or shoot the creature in the face. There was really only one solution. Taking a deep breath, bracing himself, squeezing his eyes shut, he engaged his escape and blew his right leg off.
The pressure was immediately gone. The monster that had been pulling so voraciously had been blasted right out of the hold while still holding on to the leg. With any luck, the explosion would send the creature plummeting to its death. The charge, too, had been set up inside his own leg in such a way that, when it blew, it automatically cauterized the resultant wound and prevented Harris from bleeding out. According to design, the explosion was also supposed to burn away his nerves so that he wouldn’t feel the loss of his leg.
In practice, it didn’t quite work that way. Not only did his right leg stump burn and smart, his left leg had been scorched by the explosion as well.
Harris suddenly felt as if his whole body had been battered and beaten, as if he were about to fall apart inside the mountain.
But he pressed on. There was nothing else but to press on.
The minutes ticked by, and Harris kept waiting for another beetle to snap onto his remaining leg. Nothing happened. The rocks continued to be pushed out, the helmet continued to spin, dust and dirt and ground up mountain meat. Through the haze of the medicines pumped into his system, Harris watched the indicators on the display on his goggles. He breathed hard through the tubes built into his suit, sucking the hidden oxygen tanks that had been cut into his sides when he had become a bullet man. He had to prevail. He had to succeed.
The heartbeat of the mountain thundered against him harder as if the massive creature knew what was happening just when the sensors bleated out their triumphant message: He had access to the vertebra, he was inside the nervous system of the monster.
Harris let the drill dig a few feet more, deeper, deeper, waiting to make sure his entire body was inside for maximum contact. The pain in his shoulder was overcoming all the painkillers now, his missing leg as well. He could barely think, barely register where he was. He had to finish his mission. He had to hope that it would work.
He pulled the trigger. He whispered his last words.
“Goodbye.”
His body did not explode. An explosion would not slow down the mountain—not by much. They could shoot a hundred burrowing missiles to try to blast apart the inside of the monster with little effect. Cities had tried that before. Those cities were gone now. There was no destroying the mountain, there could be no successful assassination attempt against the monolith.
Instead, the back of the helmet broke open, and a harpoon-like structure shot out into the nervous structures of the monster. The harpoon was connected to a sturdy cable, and the cable was connected to Harris’ own brain. In a moment, in a snap of electricity, their minds were connected.
He felt all of the mountain’s emotions coursing through him. It’s desire to be free, to move, to mate. It’s fear as it saw the bullet men zinging through the air towards its neck. Its thick sense of touch as it walked, as it stumbled, as it lived.
And Harris engaged his training, sinking himself deep into meditation, sending out waves of peace and relaxation, out past his own panic and anxiety, deep breathing, deep concentration. Harris felt himself winking out of existence as his thoughts molded themselves into the monster, and the peace overcame his every worry.
And on the outside, the mountain began to falter. Its steps grew heavier, the wind pouring from the caves upon its cliff faces chuffed and puffed. One of its great feet reached out, fell down crushing several evacuated residential houses flat to the ground, and then stopped. Smoke and sparks of flame shot up momentarily around the foot, but the mountain did not move again.
Instead the mountain settled down, crumbling into a sitting position that shook the world, shattering windows for miles, knocking over furniture in a hundred houses.
Then everything was still again as the mountain dreamed.
Will the Taste of Cherry save or destroy? Art by me.
Most of my life I have loved movies, but I have mostly prioritized genre flicks, often with a particular focus on the cheesiest, stupidest movies I could find—even going so far as to celebrate “Stupid Movie Night” as a youth, and regularly gathering with friends with horrendous movies such as the South African ET rip off Nukie (1987) or the “Christian” anti-drug horror film Blood Freak (1972) to laugh and gasp at and wish for my money back. Recently I decided to explore the opposite end of the quality spectrum and began investigating lists of the greatest films ever made. Enter Taste of Cherry, a 1997 Iranian film by celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami. As I’ve been watching films like Taste of Cherry or the Russian Mirror (1975) or Italy’s 8 ½ (1963), I noticed how much these movies demand to be evaluated on a different set of criteria than my usual taste for excitement, or camp, or clever stories. In the case of Taste of Cherry, a movie which apparently had no script, which largely did not use professional actors, and which can come across as confusing and mysterious, I found myself bewildered as to how to evaluate the experience.
The plot is simple and tragic—a middle-aged man named Badii is driving around Tehran looking for someone to help him commit suicide. The details of why he is pursuing this end are never explained and barely hinted at. Most of the action of the film features him meeting a new person, explaining his situation and his request, and the resulting (often awkward) conversation. Some of these conversations are depicted on screen with his vehicle seen driving around dusty roads while we hear the spoken words as mere audio played across the desolate imagery, but we don’t see the actors and their reactions. If there is narrative tension, it mostly comes from the idea of the premise and whether Badii will go through with his plan to its fatal end.
As mentioned in the opening paragraph, according to multiple sources I found, the movie had no script, and instead the director rode about with the actors and prompted them to speak in character. This decision profoundly effects the tone of the film, with the actors (many of whom apparently were not actors at all) deliver their lines in a stilted, unemotional manner that nevertheless sometimes hits home on an emotional level. After all, the entire story is about Badii asking a series of individuals to help him kill himself. The characters don’t really have deep relationships with each other, and the situation is surreal in the first place. The fact that their reactions to one another can feel a bit robotic seems appropriate to the surreality of the situation—compounded by the almost complete lack of music, and the ambiguity of character motivations and back story.
Knowing that the film had no real script, too, puts a different pressure on the dialogue performed. Perhaps my greatest pleasure after viewing the movie was debating the meaning of the film and the motivations of the characters with my former coworker who volunteered to view the film with me, and so we teased out the film’s artistic choices, and talked about the confusing conclusion. But if the movie was not closely planned, if the script was not even written out, then the meanings we tried to pick apart feel like happy coincidences, like a found poem. It can feel like a cheat, like as an audience member we are being invited to search for and construct meaning out of phantoms that had little craft. After all, Roger Ebert counted Taste of Cherry as one of his “hated films,” and his excoriation can still be read online on a website devoted to chronicling his most vitriolic movie reviews.
Yet… the movie remains one of the most celebrated films ever made. Does it not deserve its reputation? So much of film criticism can feel like an artificial pursuit built more on popularity polling and celebration-for-celebration’s sake, a construction of cinema canon clicked together from hazy critical parameters that slightly tweaked or re-focused could easily produce a completely different list of champion films. As different people will have different aesthetic focuses or may gravitate to film based on emotional or circumstantial meanings, and there are no universal “film quality” rules, nor have all the critics viewed the entire range of movies made in the world, the distinction of moving picture greatness seems even thinner, even harder to grasp or evaluate. For example, director Kiarostami claimed in an interview (viewable on the Criterion Channel streaming service) that he didn’t like movies that told a story or that aimed for emotions and that he prefers “films that put their audience to sleep in the theater”—a maverick delineation of quality if I ever saw one! I would further say that, once a film has been recognized as “one of the greats,” too, they become difficult to criticize—as if the movie is now immune to jeering because of the armor of reputation and the any critic could open themselves to the counter accusation that they lack artistic sensitivities. I mean, heck, that’s half the reason I am even writing this review or watching interviews trying to figure out why this movie is so beloved!
Still, perhaps because I was searching so hard to find something to enjoy in the movie, I did find it. Perhaps because I wanted so badly to discover artistic merit and purpose and depth, I inserted my own. I think there is value in that, too. Maybe there is more value in searching for the positive qualities in film and art regardless of its pedigree, regardless of whether the film snobs recognize this or that work as a superior piece fit for display in the equivalent of a motion picture museum.
The taste of cherry in the title is a reference to where Badii wants to die (under a cherry tree), and further to a line from one of the characters Badii tries to talk into helping him kill himself. The man in question tries to talk Badii out of his morbid task, and gives various reasons to find meaning in life—including the succulent taste of a cherry. Because of that one line, and because of the proposed death location, the oncoming ominous conclusion sizzles with a sense of a confluence of meaning The cherry taste seems to pull for life and for death simultaneously depending on the perspective of the viewer, since Badii wants to die under that tree, and his acquaintance wants him to live to enjoy a delicious cherry one more time—all against the backdrop of Tehran and the wandering cast of immigrants and secondary drifters Badii encounters, and their common, limping life concerns.
Does that sense of meaning make Taste of Cherry a standout for artistic merit above, say, a great sci-fi film with clever effects, a comedy with crafted gags that transcend culture and time and place to elicit giggles from all ages, or a tightly plotted and expertly edited action-suspense thriller that supercharges the heart to run? I don’t think it does, as each of those kinds of films serves different functions, and require different kinds of valuable artistry that can be evaluated in different ways. But I still appreciate Taste of Cherry for expanding my palate and helping me to find a new taste to enjoy my life today. And that’s enough for me to recommend it!
