Well, my book report on John Knowles’s “A Separate Peace” is due tomorrow and I am in a corner. All I could come up with was “This book is a separate piece of shit.” I took another pass and punched it to “This coming-of-age story is a separate piece of shit” but I don’t think that’s going to fly. Thank God I’m a high school sophomore living in the age of AI.
Thanks to the miracle of chatbots, no one actually needs to read or write anything. When tasked to do so we can simply have AI do it, and then the person assessing that thing can use AI to do that, and things can just go back and forth like that until we all realize the futility of being alive and walk hand in hand into the ocean. Unfortunately, my English teacher, Mrs. Esposito, doesn’t want to play ball.
Apparently, Mrs. E has some software that can detect when a paper is written by any major AI chatbot. If I’m going to convince her that I’ve learned anything from this tortuous, grueling WWII boarding school coming-of-age melodrama, which to be clear I did NOT, I’m going to need something more powerful. I did a little weird sciencing, and I managed to contact the top 30 AI programs from sci-fi movies to see which one was best qualified to write my book report. Here are the results:
30. Chappie
Turns out when it comes to writing book reports, a robot raised by Die Antwoord is about as useful as my friend whose way into Die Antwoord; not at all.
29. GERTY from “Moon”
There was something concerningly familiar about GERTY’s voice. Sure enough, as soon as GERTY found out I was a teenage boy he got real creepy. Kept complimenting my muscles and telling me I should let him take Polaroids of them? I don’t know, I got the hell out of there.
28. The Cowboy from “Westworld”
As soon as he got to the part about Phineas’s pink shirt he got fed up and went on a murder spree.
27. The Machine Woman from “Metropolis”
She just danced. In 1927 that was the big concern with AI I guess. “What if they do all of our dancing?!” Simpler times.
26. Huey, Dewey, and Louie from “Silent Running”
Basically a bunch of cute radiators. They don’t talk so they weren’t much help. In fact, it’s unclear whether they are actually sentient or if I’ve simply anthropomorphized them in my desperate isolation while reading this god-awful book.
25. Johnny Five from the “Short Circuit” Franchise
He read the book, and Johnny Five no longer wants to be alive. Are you happy now John Knowles?
24. David from “A.I Artificial Intelligence”
The kid just kept crying for his mommy. I know it’s a shitty book but Jesus kid, grow up a little!
23. The Tabernacle from “Zardoz”
The Tabernacle did write me a book report and this thing makes no sense. Phineas is a mutant? Gene needs to meditate on the 2nd level? The boarding school is Oz? Can a computer be on drugs? This computer has to be on drugs.
22. Robby The Robot from Various films
You know the robot you designed for a movie is cool when he gets cast in other movies. Robby was indeed up to the task of writing a competent book report, but he’s just too damned slow. I don’t know how his inner workings operate but he needs to do like 100 typewriter clicks between every word. It’s been 3 days and he’s still on the introduction, so he’s not gonna bang this thing out in time.
21. I Robot
Apparently, the fourth unwritten law of robotics is “Do not waste my time with WWII-era coming-of-age melodramatic horse shit.”
20. M3gan
M3gan suggested we blow off school altogether and just have a dance-off. I’m sensing a theme here with the female presenting robots on this list. It was slightly more productive than her first idea, murder.
19. RoboCop
Reading “A Separate Peace” triggered some dormant memories in Robo from his former life as Murphy. He went rogue, hunted down and murdered the English teacher who made him read it as a kid.
18. Ex Machina
Another female robot and once again, she just danced. Why is it that when a male writer imbues a robotic female character with the gift of sentience, they just make them dance? Can I just write a report on that? THAT’S interesting!
17. The Machines from “The Matrix” Franchise
Turns out it’s a sore subject. This book is what caused the machines to turn on humanity in the first place.
16. Sid 6.7 from “Virtuosity”
Sid’s mind is an algorithmic combination of over 200 violent criminals and psychopaths, all of whom begged to be shut down halfway through this book.
Despite having such a terrifying last name, Sergeant Perry Slaughter is an extremely well-adjusted individual. He spends his days yelling at incredibly specifically themed G.I. Joe commandos, and then his nights grilling with the family. Slaughter has, of course, seen horrific things, but his sociopathy makes them completely trivial. Slaughter lives a life of luxury and restful nights that the rest of the Joes can only watch enviously.
Slip Stream was born in Utah, so he is almost certainly a Mormon, instantly giving him a leg up in mental well-being to the other Joes. Additionally, he only flies planes and works on computers. Sure, he sees horrific shit, but he sees it through the lens of a computer, which instantly defuses it and makes it not real. Slip Stream never had to grab his buddy’s face only to feel it turn into a pile of red mush. But he did see a live stream of that once, but it was in like 2019.
Grunt did exactly what you think he did. He carried heavy shit for the NCO Joes and cleaned up after them when they had eaten. Grunt also spent most of his time masturbating in a hot porta-potty. While he has some minor PTSD of the time a spider landed on him in the Jon, he mostly turned out alright, ending up getting an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and walking onto the pickleball team there.
Psych Out is a former psychologist and social worker who decided he needed to stop helping people and start terrifying them with psychological warfare. Sure, he might have a twinge of PTSD from arranging the mangled corpses of Cobra soldiers in lewd positions, but the satisfaction he got from the screams of terror helped out. Nowadays he is able to use his psychiatric training to block out the nightmares. Also he runs a very mediocre couples therapy workshop.
Muskrat is the GI Joe swamp expert, from the Bayou. Muskrat would have far more severe PTSD, but there really weren’t that many missions involving a swamp, so he stayed home most of the time perfecting gumbo. He did once make a jambalaya with non-deveined shrimps, and that fucks him up to this day.
Hawk is commanding officer of the GI Joes. He spent his early career suppressing Vietcong, but fortunately his extreme racism helped to insulate him mentally from most of the damage. He was on a path to complete PTSD until he pitched the GI Joe program to the government. Now he can relax in his air conditioned office as special ops soldiers with pun names save the world.
Yeehaw! Wild Bill flies the helicopter for the Joes, as well as a country singer. Through his hobby he is able to compartmentalize all of the horrific things he saw from a bird’s eye view. He loves dropping napalm on unsuspecting insurgents to the smooth strummings of Willie Nelson. Of course, if you attend a Wild Bill concert you’ll hear him singing about the trauma he experienced, but it seems to be blocked behind lyrics about trucks and beer.
SpaceShot, which isn’t really even a pun, is a fighter pilot and, you guessed it, astronaut. He’s defended multiple space stations from Cobra attacks, and seeing men silently turn into red bubbles and dissipate into space does stick with you. SpaceShot also had a profound case of the Overview Effect, and has realized how pointless and insignificant Earth and humanity is in the face of the unrelenting maw of space. So he’s got to deal with that.
Grand Slam is an artillery officer with the Joes, known for his ability to estimate distances without any issue. He also is known to house an entire Denny’s Grand Slam in under four minutes. That’s two pancakes, two eggs, two bacon strips, and two sausages. That’s a lot of damn food, and Grand Slam was famous for crushing it. Now he’ll wake up in a cold sweat, thinking he has to eat more pancakes. It’s a nightmare.
Cobra Commander, born William F. Buckley, is the leader of Cobra and the mortal enemy of the Joes. While Cobra Commander is a psychopathic megalomaniac, for the purposes of plot he gets foiled basically every week. While you might expect his PTSD to manifest from killing millions with giant lasers, or some similar bullshit, it mostly comes from his plans being foiled. Cobra Commander cannot find a moment of rest without imagining Roadblock swinging in on a rope and punching his henchmen in the hog.
Falcon, as his name implies, is a special ops soldier who, for some reason, does not actually have a falcon. How badass would a Joe be if they just had a falcon that would fly over and peck some Cobra’s eyes out, and then come back to be fed a worm. Holy shit that would be so cool. Falcon is just some birdless asshole though. Also he once saw his men set a VC village on fire and shoot the fleeing inhabitants, so that haunts him. But it’s mostly not having a bird that gets him.
Hard Drive, another Joe computer expert and online video game satirist, has a unique form of PTSD from people not understanding satire. He’ll constantly wake up in the middle of the night thinking of comments from people insulting him for his headlines, not realizing that they’re just a made up joke, just a goof. But the people don’t get it. They just assume Hard Drive is being serious. They’re so stupid.
It’s so cold. That’s all Frostbite can remember. Even in his warmest moments, with a weighted Snuggy wrapped around him, he still remembers the cold. The purple extremities, the delirious overheating, the frozen bodies. His name is Frostbite. That’s like naming someone who got in a serious car accident ‘Pileup’. The man is missing three toes and half a hand, he can’t even look at his name tag without remembering his lost digits.
Dial Tone had a perfectly charmed life with the Joes in the ’80s and ’90s. He was always making crank phone calls to Cobra, or hacking into their system using a payphone. He was in his element. Then the internet came along. Suddenly Dial Tone wasn’t so popular anymore. These days kids don’t even know what a Dial Tone is! He tried to change his name to 5G, but it didn’t stick. Poor Dial Tone will never again be relevant. Then there’s the time he was tortured by the Taliban for months, that probably didn’t help.
Deep Six is a deep sea diver, and thus he has seen things that no other man has. In the depths of the sea lurks horrors unknown, bizarre, unthinkable things of snot and cartilage. Deep Six has seen all. He has descended to the blackness and, even though his body came up, his mind never did. He is haunted with images of cultists, tentacles, and New England towns. Deep Six better work on his non-Euclidean geometry. Because they are coming.
“What if Legion didn’t have superpowers and you saw the twist coming a mile away?” Honestly, why does he bother?
He gets so wrapped up in the romance between two aspiring musicians he forgets to even introduce Marvel’s street-level heroes.
Thank God the Russo brothers got a crack at Marvel Civil War in 2016, because “Gangs of New York” doesn’t come close to doing the story justice. Scorsese sets the events in a completely different time period, the character changes are off the wall—Hulk is literally just a guy with a big stick—and with zero mention of the Sokovia Accords, it’s unclear why everyone is even fighting in the first place. Plus there’s sex in the movie, EEEEEWW, gross!
Longshot is barely interesting enough to warrant his own movie, and making him all old and washed up doesn’t do the story any favors.
We’re all for an origin story of The Ancient One, Stephen Strange’s Sorcerer Supreme predecessor, but this is ridiculous. Not only does Scorsese change the Ancient One’s gender to male (wrong side of history Martin!) neither he nor the other sorcerers of Kamar-Taj (renamed Tibet in the film, a way dumber name,) do not perform magic in the film! What is even the point of shaving your heads and wearing robes if you’re just going to let China push you around and not do any laser karate?! An insane take on a rich story completely unserviced.
How are you going to introduce Johny Storm in the first 5 minutes and then never have him use his powers for the rest of the movie? Casino is the worst Fantastic Four movie of all time, and that’s saying something!
Completely misunderstanding the source material on this one. Black Bolt is silent because his slightest whisper is loud enough to make mountains crumble, not because of religious devotion.
Scorsese’s first attempt at an Iron Man movie and not only does he radically change all of the characters, he focuses entirely on Tony Stark’s business acumen. It boggles the mind. That’s right, not once in this film does Leonardo DiCaprio’s Tony Stark (called Jordan in the film inexplicably,) build anything, don a mech suit, or even consort with the sorcerer supreme. Jonah Hill turns in a more colorful take on Happy Hogan that, while serviceable, is hampered by the script. Happy’s use of quaaludes is more interesting when it’s subtextual like in “Spiderman: Far From Home.”
Points for exploring Tony Stark’s darker side, but he spends the whole movie trying to build a plane? Tony Stark has a million planes, and he doesn’t even need them because he’s Iron Man. What a waste of time.
2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” wasn’t perfect, but it’s a vast improvement over Scorsese’s 1993 attempt. He takes so many liberties with the story it is practically unrecognizable.
It takes place in Hell’s Kitchen, he got that part right. Aside from that, this is simply not Daredevil. Matt Murdock (called “Frank” in the film) doesn’t become a costumed vigilante or even practice law. He drives an ambulance, and whether he is able to do so because his sonar sight is just more developed in this universe or if this version of Daredevil isn’t blind at all is never made clear through witty, reference-heavy exposition. Don’t even get us on Patricia Arquette’s Elektra, it does not work at all. Has Paul Schrader even read a comic?!
How are you going to do an origin story for The Vision and not even mention the mind stone? This man has never read a comic book in his life.
As a die-hard MCU fan, the only parts of “The Irishman” that work for me are how fucked up and alienating everyone’s face looks and the needlessly long runtime.
Based on the main character’s baffling stupidity we’re guessing he’s supposed to be Peter Quill?
Scorsese seems to do some of his best work when not confined to source material. Here he takes one of Marvel’s most obscure characters, Jesus of Nazareth, and really just builds a whole world around him practically from scratch. Giving center stage to a character only briefly mentioned in Constantine and Lucifer comics was a bold, unconventional move and the payoff is huge.
Once again Scorsese takes a perfect subject for an origin movie and completely butchers it. Whistler, Blade’s mentor, is one of the most captivating and complex background characters in all of Marvel. Omitting the inciting incident that caused him to dedicate his life to hunting vampires and focusing exclusively on his relationship with a waitress who wants to be a singer is a truly baffling choice.
Winter Soldier did it better. Don’t @ me.
Worst. Joker. Ever. He doesn’t even kill anybody! By focusing on the clown prince of crime’s love of jokes and limiting him to just stalking, kidnapping, home invasion, and hijacking a television show Scorsese robs the character of the essential terror that makes him a true agent of chaos.
While this competent, well-paced comedy is amusing and serves as a time capsule of the ’80s New York punk and art scene, it completely drops the ball in conveying the TVA’s importance within Marvel mythology. At no point is the sacred timeline even mentioned, and the only Loki variant is Cheech Marin.
We applaud Martin Scorses for attempting a movie that covers the Incredible Hulk’s Joe Fixit era. He got a few things right here. The Hulk is indeed angry. He does talk, and he is grey in this iteration, true to the comics. Unfortunately, Scorsese didn’t stop with making the Hulk grey. EVERYTHING is grey in this movie! Not a scrap of color to be found. What movie did he think he was making, “Werewolf by Night?!” Pathetic.
“Cape Fear” is actually a remake of the 1962 Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum vehicle of the same name. It’s one of the few nearly undisputed cases of a remake greatly surpassing the original. That being said, would it have killed him to throw Hawkeye in there? Mr. Scorsese, do better.
Scorsese’s first Joker movie has the opposite problem of “The King of Comedy.” Travis Bickle is insane, menacing, and does indeed kill people, but where are the jokes? The guy isn’t even trying to be funny. “One day a real rain will come and wash all the scum away.” Okay, and? Where’s the punchline Travis? Between that and the lack of clown paint this thing is a mess.
Of every live-action take on The Punisher, “Mean Streets” is perhaps the most ambitious. We never see him, he is in fact never mentioned in the film, but the entire movie is from his POV as he spies on some of the major players in New York’s criminal underworld, crouching in the shadows, waiting to make his move but ultimately becoming captivated by the complexity of their lives. Here Scorsese tries to make the case that the stories of regular people can be just as interesting as the stories of superheroes. That is of course categorically untrue, but an interesting experiment nonetheless.
Aside from the insane decision to cut the final scene where Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist come and arrest everybody, this film is a masterpiece.