Queerness in Comics

Why is the Quantum Leap Reboot Just Okay?

This article has spoilers for both the original show and the reboot.

Here’s a phrase you don’t hear a lot of young people saying these days—I’m a big fan of 1989’s hit sci-fi show Quantum Leap, about wayward time traveler Sam Beckett trying to mend the lives of people in the past with the help of his best friend, a hologram from the future named Al that only he can see and hear. I started watching the show with a close friend in 2020 and while I still haven’t seen every episode, I’ve more than got a handle on the show by now. So obviously my ears pricked when I found out about the new Quantum Leap show, starring Raymond Lee as Ben Song, a new time traveler tossed on a journey of helping others and self discovery after a revival of the fictional Project Quantum Leap by the United States government. And now that the first season is complete and we can properly compare the two shows—although the reboot/sequel (or “requel”) is renewed for a second season, so there’s still more to come—I’ve decided to write this review to set the matter straight on where I think the new Quantum Leap falls short and how I think it could improve in the future.

Raymond Lee on the poster for the new *Quantum Leap.*

To start off with, I do think there are some things the Quantum Leap reboot does extremely right. Primarily, I think their decision to cast Raymond Lee as their leading man was a fantastic one. I’ve never seen him in anything else, but from his performance on this show I can confidently say that he’s a very good actor (…when they allow him to be, but I’ll get to that in a minute). He’s not the same as Scott Bakula’s Sam Beckett, even though they’re both amnesiac geniuses and fish out of water, and it feels fresh in the right ways. They took careful strides to make sure that Ben is not simply Sam cut out and pasted into a new body, although the qualities they share include having compassion in spades and being able to relate to just about everyone. My personal favorite performances of his include his demon-slaying exorcist rant in season one’s seventh episode, “O Ye of Little Faith,” and the way he talks a radicalized scientist off the ledge three episodes later in creatively-written time loop episode “Leap. Die. Repeat.” Ben as a character especially shines in “Family Style,” where he’s able to connect with the person he’s leapt into specifically because of their shared background as the child of an immigrant, something that I don’t think would have worked in the original show given Sam’s own “from the heartland” backstory. This wouldn’t work with the original character but does here is a great thing to be able to say about a reboot. He’s a charismatic main character played by an actor with some serious talent and I enjoy watching him onscreen.

In fact, most of the cast is charismatic. Mason Alexander Park’s Ian Wright is a delightful standout and you’d be hard-pressed to find a project of any quality that Ernie Hudson (here playing a legacy character from the original show, Herbert “Magic” Williams) doesn’t give a solid performance in. Nanrisa Lee is giving a fine performance in a very limited role as Jenn Chu that finally has a chance to be excellent in episode fifteen before she’s promptly forgotten about again. Georgina Reilly’s Janis Calavicci is… Okay? I don’t think she’s a bad actor, and I really do like when female characters go nuts and try to sabotage the government, but I think she’s somehow been both over- and under-utilized thus far. Then, of course, there’s relative newcomer Caitlin Bassett playing Ben’s holographic link to the future (and fiancée), Addison Augustine, whose performance I probably like the least. Saying that makes me feel bad, because she’s not really a bad or unskilled actor—I’d probably put her on the same level as Nanrisa Lee or Georgina Reilly. The issue is how they’ve utilized her thus far, which is where my problem with most of the show lies.

In the original Quantum Leap, while Addison’s predecessor Al Calavicci was the only consistent character other than Sam himself, he often took a back seat. There are many episodes where this isn’t the case—think of “Shock Theater” and of course episodes like “The Leap Back” and “M.I.A.,” but there are others where Al doesn’t even show up until a third of the way into an episode. It gives Sam time to adjust to the leap while he figures out what’s going on and gives Bakula a chance to walk around chewing scenery while the audience tries to piece together what’s happening before he can. In the reboot, we’re lucky if we get five minutes of Ben trying to get a handle on where he is and what he’s supposed to be doing before Addison pops up. This is problematic because in the original show, Sam is often the straight man to Al’s jokes and lecherous ways despite the absurdity of the situation he’s inevitably found himself in. But because Addison doesn’t bring that to the table, the show becomes about two straight men struggling to bounce off of each other. It’s especially noticeable because often when Addison is removed from the episode for whatever reason Ben immediately starts to shine more—one of the above examples of Raymond Lee’s acting, Ben’s monologue while he prepares to fight what he thinks is a demon, almost certainly only narratively happens because of how Project Quantum Leap and therefore Addison has lost contact with him. Yes, there are times when having Addison there works well, such as in episode sixteen (“Ben, Interrupted”) where she anguishes over watching Ben as he dies without being able to touch him or do anything to save his life beyond beg him to get up, but most of the time her being so no-nonsense is detrimental to the scene. Her characterization would work much better if Ben leaned a bit more into the comedic—and when Raymond Lee gets the chance to say a line with a comedic delivery, he absolutely excels at it, with charisma practically oozing off the screen. The show does deal with serious topics, but so did the original, and it still found time for plenty of comedy, often at the expense of Al’s responses to Sam’s trials and tribulations.

Something else about this dynamic that doesn’t work is the distribution of screen time and audience attention. In the original show, as I mentioned above, Sam and Al are the only consistent characters, although the other people working at Project Quantum Leap are often referenced and we learn small tidbits about their personalities through the main characters’ recollections of them. We do glimpse it on occasion, such as when we see the waiting room in episodes like the two-part season five premiere “Lee Harvey Oswald,” or when Sam and Al switch places in previously name-dropped episode “The Leap Back,” but for the most part Project Quantum Leap is as mysterious to us as it would be to any civilian living in that world. The reboot constantly flashes back and forth between the past—and then future—that Ben is trapped in and our present as his coworkers try to retrieve him. I can see how this would be a good idea on paper; TV shows in general tend to have more than two characters and an unseen artificial intelligence making up their main cast, the machinations and goings-on of Project Quantum Leap are inherently intriguing, and it’s an aspect of the original that wasn’t fleshed out which makes it ripe for a revamp. But in practice, it just means we don’t have time to get properly invested in the leap. Ben is meant to be isolated in the past with his only support forced to be a passive observer. Even in the scene I praised earlier, where Addison has to come to terms with the fact that Ben is dying and she can’t do anything to physically stop it, is disjointed because we spend half of it away from the actual conflict. When Ben has a team of people monitoring his vital signs and trying to give him pep talks, he feels less like a lost time traveler trying to put right what once went wrong and more like a dime-a-dozen superhero. It’s a disservice to Raymond Lee’s performance and feels like the show is afraid of fully handing him the reins.

The plot itself is equally frustrating, because half the time it feels like the show doesn’t even want to have one. Story elements such as Ziggy being the mole on the team feeding information to Walter Perez’s “Leaper X,” the latest in a short line of evil time travelers (I will admit that I yelled out loud with delight when they mentioned the “evil leapers” Sam encountered in the original show), essentially go nowhere and presumably won’t be picked up again now that he’s been shot and killed by a random supporting character last seen in an episode that originally aired five months before the finale. Janis sashays in and out of the story dropping cryptic hints about the events of the future that only she and Ben have been warned about that don’t really wind up going anywhere. While the mini-twist we get at the start of the show that Addison was the one originally intended to leap into the past with Ben as her guiding hologram is an intriguing one and it does factor into the finale in a somewhat interesting way, between those two points it hardly matters. Any potential scenes of the two of them grappling with the fact that Addison has training Ben doesn’t and vice versa are pushed aside. Every episode is a battle between the factions I mentioned above—Ben and his journey through time versus the project trying to bring him home and figure out why he left in the first place.

Spending time at the project also feels like another mishandling of connections to the original show. Chronologically, the events of the new Quantum Leap’s present take place twenty-three years after the present day of the original, but instead of fleshing out the bizarre future vision of 1999 presented by late-80s/early-90s writers, the world looks just like our own. There are no businesses named “Sex World” or blinking neon signs in the desert to be found. Thus, even the potentially quirky characters following in the footsteps of their predecessors feel too… normal. While I commended the aforementioned Ernie Hudson’s performance as Magic, the show never really does anything with the fact that his body was once used by Sam during a leap. The waiting room, the place where “overwritten” people would go while they were being piloted, is utterly discarded as a concept. Why? Wouldn’t it be interesting to have Magic talk to the people brought there as someone who was once in the exact same position?

Magic, Jenn, Ian, and Addison at Project Quantum Leap.

Maybe that isn’t fair, because it’s not the only thing the show doesn’t do with Magic—beyond some cute scenes with him and Ian or Jenn, he practically has no role here. He exists only to gesture in the direction of the original show. Honestly, the same goes for Janis Calavicci, who shares a last name with her late father and nothing more. She’s visually bland with none of Al’s flamboyance and her interesting relationship with her mother is left entirely offscreen beyond when she drugs her and hides out at her house. It’s a shame because of how much promise she showed as Ben’s unseen partner in the season’s first handful of episodes. She even gives us a glimpse of the third of the original show’s handlinks, a charming doodad that looks like it’s made of rubber LEGOs. (In the rest of the show, it’s replaced by a generic tablet and a glowing hockey puck, which gives Addison no chance for characterization through her trusty equipment, although at least one can easily imagine a world in which that bland choice is shorthand for characterizing someone as too uptight. This is actually a mistake 1989’s Quantum Leap wound up correcting, changing the black plastic handlink to the gummy one that felt more in line with Al’s character and their vision of the future.) Not even Ziggy is carried over—instead of a floating orb with a sultry voice and a big ego, she’s a voiceless bank of monitors without even her original transgenderism. While I understand these changes through the lens of a sequel trying to step away from what the original show did, the fact that they were included in the finished product means that concept is essentially an act of pantomime. The show wants to both bring an overarching plot to something that originally only had the faintest gestures toward a grander narrative and it wants to keep the aspects of the original show that remind us of just how much better it worked without a plot.

As you can see, I have many criticisms of the new Quantum Leap. I don’t, however, have much ill will toward its politics. Some of the most bizarre critiques I’ve seen of this show are related to how it’s shoving progressive politics down our throats. I won’t spend very long on this point because even acknowledging this ridiculous argument is more than I want to do, but it genuinely drives me up the wall. To pretend in bad faith that this is the first time this now-franchise has had the concept of “progressive politics” in it is downright laughable. The original show had episodes like “Black on White on Fire,” where Sam leaps into a medic on the ground during the Watts Uprising who must save lives endangered by police brutality, “Running for Honor,” which sees Sam having to protect a gay classmate of his host from being lynched, and “Unchained,” in which Sam battles a corrupt prison system in order to escape from a chain gang with a wrongfully convicted Black man. Not everything about these episodes and the dozens more like them holds up, and newspaper articles exist to prove that they didn’t always work at the time, either—looking primarily at my second example here—but they tried as hard as they could to say their piece about standing up for the rights of others. Trust me, it’s not the end of the world because a TV show told you that you should respect the rights and autonomy of transgender people while having a transgender character as a main cast member. What’s more Quantum Leap than a somewhat clumsy but earnest and deeply well-meaning episode about a social issue meant for consumption by people largely unaffected by it?

It’s in moments like that where the original spirit of Quantum Leap glimmers through in the reboot. When Ben refuses to take the easy way out and insists that every child be saved from the abusive “wilderness therapy” camp that his host and their friends are escaping from, we see the strength of his character. When Ian breaks down a barrier in their relationship with Addison and tells her about their suicide attempt when they were a kid, it feels almost like a direct response to the end of the original show’s transmisogynistic episode “What Price Gloria?” in a way that, to me, feels natural. When Ben teams up with his enemy to rescue someone from a mental institution, the evil leapers demonstrate that they have the same potential now as they did in the original. And when the show does something completely new, such as when their time loop episode gives a new coat of paint to the genre by having Ben inhabit a different person each time it restarts, the clever writing and Raymond Lee’s performance stand tall on their own as the show becomes genuinely good if not great. Even in the poorly constructed finale, the all-out fistfight that Ben survives by remembering advice given to him when he inhabited a boxer is fun and triumphant. There’s a reason I didn’t title this piece “Why is the Quantum Leap Reboot Bad?” For as much as I’ve talked about the parts of this show I don’t like, it isn’t bad and I’m not rooting for it to crash and burn. I want this show to be good. I want it to be worthy of having the cast it does and the name it’s been given. I want to see Raymond Lee making right what once went wrong and maybe fighting evil leapers along the way. Every time the show gives its premise room to breathe and allows Ben to be himself, I can see that show just under the surface, frustratingly out of reach.

I have to hope that season two will be better with whatever it entails. The final scene of the season one finale is so vague and open-ended that as of yet I have no idea how things might shake out. But I want to believe in this project. With a more diverse main cast and hopefully a more diverse writing room, it has the opportunity to outshine its predecessor in some aspects, even though so far it hasn’t. I know this show can be good. It can even be great. So—like Sam and Ben on their respective time travel adventures, you could say—I have to have faith that things will eventually work out. All I can hope is that the upcoming season will be what finally brings this version of Quantum Leap home.

Wonder Woman 1984: A Flaming Mess

I did not have the intended viewing experience for Wonder Woman 1984, directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot.

This was a big superhero movie meant for theaters and destined to be a blockbuster. But because of the global pandemic, I wound up watching the movie in my backyard in the freezing cold with a cup of hot chocolate and my best friend streaming the movie for us on her small computer screen, subtitles turned on so we wouldn’t disturb the neighbors with anything more than our confused screaming. We didn’t go in expecting a masterpiece, as we’d both separately heard bad things about the movie. We just wanted to have fun, and in a way, we did.

Wonder Woman 1984 is a movie made up of disjointed story elements, racist caricatures, and confusing choices. The first Wonder Woman movie, which came out in 2017 and was also directed by Patty Jenkins, was substantially better, and despite a lackluster third act as well as many other flaws it had a coherent story and the plot beats made sense. Its sequel couldn’t even manage a sensible plot beyond the racism and disorienting editing. But to talk about it properly, I’m going to need to break it down into chunks. This movie was two and a half hours long, after all. There’s a lot to talk about.

First, I want to address the elephant in the room and talk about my claim above, that this movie is full of several racist caricatures. This is a tough topic, and I am absolutely not the best person to tackle it, being a white person living in America. But I’m going to do my best to talk about this respectfully, because when talking about this movie, it’s one of the most important things to criticize. While I’m certain I won’t be able to cover all of it, I’m going to discuss some of the bigger points.

I’ll start with this movie’s nearly cartoonish portrayal of Arab men. Somewhere in the middle of the film, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) visits Cairo and asks a high-class man who lives there what he would wish for if he could have anything he wanted—the wishes are a large part of the plot of this movie, but we’ll get there when we get there. The man, Emir Said Bin Adyos (Amr Waked) wishes to have his land returned to him and that all “heathens” would be cast out. A wall immediately forms. Lord, in exchange, asks for all of the oil on his land, which could be commentary on how America steals oil from countries in Western Asia/The Middle East and North Africa if it didn’t immediately follow such a horrifying stereotype.

The only other people from this region that we see are children who exist only for Wonder Woman to white-savior-style rescue them from being run over by the evil Arab men working for Emir and Lord (which is almost hilariously sickening considering Gal Gadot’s past as an IDF soldier and Israel’s historic and current practice of bombing Syria and Palestine), a man who wishes for nuclear weapons and later recants his wish while crying and holding a machine gun, and another man who approaches Lord to make a wish in heavily-accented and broken English about an alliance with the Soviet Union. I shouldn’t have to explain why these are terrible and offensive stereotypes to put in a modern-day movie, even one set in the 80s, when offensive stereotypes of West Asian/Middle Eastern and North African people were all the rage.

There are also notably zero Asian characters in the film, barring Babajide (Ravi Patel), an Indian man wearing a terrible wig with fake dreadlocks who presents himself as a direct descendant of and an expert on the Maya people. The movie tries to make a cute joke about how his name is actually “Frank” and he is as much an expect on Maya culture as any random person who read a few history books and has an ancestor who was supposedly Indigenous, while ignoring that he seems to be their research consultant, considering they explicitly state that the Maya people went “extinct” due to a cataclysmic event caused by the McGuffin in the movie, despite the attempted erasure of their culture and existence being a function of colonialism, and there being Maya people still alive today. Some of them even go to see movies like Wonder Woman 1984! Shocking, I know. There are also zero notable Black characters, and the only background characters we see who are Black are a little girl who Diana saves at the beginning of the movie and a homeless man who shows up to demonstrate the morality switch of antagonist Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig).

Lastly, though there are certainly things I must be forgetting, we have Maxwell Lord himself. As I stated, he is played by Pedro Pascal, a Chilean-American actor. I am someone who is burdened by being a fan of DC Comics, and I was intrigued by the decision to cast a Latino actor as Lord, who is white and comes from old, old money in the source material. Were they just going to ignore that they had cast someone who is Latine? To my surprise, they did not. Lord is said to have anglicized his name in order to fit in with the racist white “higher society” and to make it better as a businessman and wears a blond wig to hide his naturally dark hair (a detail which admittedly slightly confuses me, as in the comics Lord’s hair is already brown). I am not immediately opposed to this. I like it when characters who are “race-bent” in an adaptation are given ties to their culture—a good example of this being Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) on Elementary, who talks about things like her own family’s anglicized last name and her connections to her heritage. In my opinion, it almost always makes for a great character detail. So what’s the problem?

Part of it is that Lord’s backstory in the movie is that he comes from a dirt poor and violently abusive family and had to deal with racist and classist bullying as a child from other kids around him. I specify in the movie because this is not his backstory in the comics, where as I said he comes from very old money, has been rich his entire life, and was not abused. Yes, they specifically made a character Latino and then changed his backstory to be that he came from no money and had an abusive and potentially alcoholic father. He also has an exaggerated accent that Pascal does not have in real life. I find this to be pretty reprehensible. There was no reason for this character to be Maxwell Lord, as he is in almost every respect an in-name-only adaptation of the character. They made the choice to make him into a stereotypical depiction of a Latino man, and it only comes off as mean-spirited.

This is not at all to disparage Pascal’s performance. Indeed, he is easily the standout of the movie, bringing the character charisma as well as manic energy. Pascal’s iteration of Lord is electric and charming and campy and in my opinion pitch-perfect for the kind of character he’s playing, even if I find that he’s not much like the manipulative and dryly humorous Max Lord of the comics. He brings the film a sense of energy that it really lacks in most of its scenes. There’s only one major problem with Lord, beyond the racism infecting his new backstory, and it’s that I have absolutely no idea what his role is in this movie.

To be fair to Lord, I have no idea what the roles of most of the people in this movie are. What does Diana, the titular Wonder Woman, want? I don’t know. What does Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) want? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s nothing. What does Max Lord want? Power? Sure, but beyond that, I don’t know.

The only person whose motivations make sense and follow a kind of linear development is Barbara, who was presented in the advertising as the main antagonist of the movie and only actually appears as her comic counterpart Cheetah for five or so underwhelming minutes. She wants to feel powerful and looked up to after a lifetime of being ignored and stepped on. This is a standard motivation for a villain that could be done very well by a good screenwriter, director, and actor, and I don’t inherently have any problems with it. But the lackluster arc Cheetah follows stands out starkly considering she’s the character with the most clearly defined needs. The audience empathizes with how she’s been treated as disposable for her entire life, and it’s easy to see how she’d fall under the spell of Max Lord, a wealthy and powerful man showing interest in her purely to suit his own ends. How she goes from an overlooked worker at the Smithsonian to a so-called apex predator fighting to keep her place on the food chain is understandable, as disjointed as it is made to be by the editing, pacing, and the placement of other story beats.

This especially stands out when compared to the arc of our protagonist, Wonder Woman herself.

At the beginning of the movie, Diana is working as an anthropologist at the Smithsonian, while also occasionally going out to anonymously stop crimes and save people from things like mall jewelry store robberies. (My uncle’s best friend played one of the robbers, so hi, Jimmy, if you’re reading this. I promise, you weren’t one of the bad things about this movie.) She’s still mourning the loss of Steve Trevor and finds herself investigating the mystery of a certain crystalline artifact that the mall burglars attempted to steal. This is not a bad setup. It’s simple and it’s understandable, even if the question of why she suddenly decided to start doing Wonder Woman-y things again after decades of radio silence goes unanswered. It’s when the crystal’s odd wish-granting powers come into play that things start to get incomprehensible.

The crystal can grant wishes (actually, it can only grant one singular wish to each person, unless the movie wants someone to have two wishes for some reason) to anybody with some kind of inevitable price, and Max Lord wants it so he can… have more oil? Become the ruler of the world? It starts out seeming like that first one, but his motivations disappear at some point toward the end of the second act. Diana, not knowing the crystal’s powers, makes a wish to see Steve again. This manifests as… Steve’s consciousness being transplanted into the body of a man credited as Handsome Man (Kristoffer Polaha) as if this were an episode of Quantum Leap (1989) starring Scott Bakula, right down to the mirror scene where Steve looks in the mirror and sees a stranger’s face staring back at him. This is also a decent plot point, even if it cheapens Steve’s sacrifice at the end of the first Wonder Woman movie. If the wishes can be granted at a price, is this one’s price that an innocent man’s entire soul has been overwritten so he can be puppeteered by a man who died at the end of World War I? Does our hero have to contend with being an accomplice to murder if she accepts her friend/lover back into her life?

*Steve Trevor, appearing to the audience and to Diana as Chris Pine while being Handsome Man to everyone else.*

No, actually. The price to pay for Diana’s wish is that she’s losing her powers. Handsome Man being taken over in an act of horrifying cosmic resurrection is never presented as a bad thing for Handsome Man, only a bad thing for Diana and Steve, as the wheel of fate separates them once again. This doesn’t even get into the automatic minefield of consent issues that come from taking over a man’s body and life and then immediately having sex with someone who is in a stranger’s skin. Never once do the protagonists have to contend with the fact that Handsome Man could’ve had a life and a family that he was almost permanently ripped away from. While we do see a scene at the end of the movie where Diana talks to Handsome Man after his life and body have been rightfully returned to him, prior to that Handsome Man is treated narratively as nothing more than a vessel for Steve. Even when Steve “dies” again, we don’t actually see Handsome Man’s body being restored. Instead it happens offscreen as Diana runs away from him after renouncing her wish, giving it zero of the emotional weight Steve’s vibrant self-sacrifice in the first movie had. In that moment I should have felt terrible for Steve and Diana. Instead I was only worried about Handsome Man, a character who doesn’t even have a name.

Technically, Diana’s arc in this movie is supposed to be set around truth. But I don’t think she learned anything about “truth” in this movie at all. She learns to move on from Steve. She learns that it’s impossible to truly “have it all,” as Maxwell Lord puts it. She learns to fly, which is very exciting for her, I’m sure. But none of this has to do with truth. She’s a protagonist who doesn’t learn anything about the very theme of the movie. Nor does she technically teach anyone about truth. All she teaches the world while pulling the old “the camera was broadcasting the whole time!” trick is that Lord is lying when he says that when their wishes are granted nothing bad will happen. That doesn’t tie into her speech about truth to Lord or the speech she is given at the beginning of the movie from a parental figure as a child, which is supposed to set up that same arc.

A story with a weak plotline for the protagonist must rely on the villain. And while I said that Barbara’s storyline is serviceable on paper and is simply done in a way that lacks most of the pizazz that’s required to bring a predictable storyline to life, I meant it when I said I don’t actually know what Max Lord, the perceived secondary antagonist who turned out to be the big bad all along, really wants.

It should be a simple tale about the corruptive power of capitalism. A man who always wants more money and more power. He wants the wish-granting crystal so that he can have both of those things and keep reaping the benefits. And then, of course, his greed is his own grand undoing, as he sacrifices everything including his own health for power. Easy, right? So why does he offer everyone else around him the same opportunity to grant wishes? Why does he act like he can only grant one wish to one person, but Cheetah gets two—is it because the first one she made was next to the stone, and not directly to him? And if so, why isn’t that explained? Why does his motivation for more power seemingly entirely disappear after he manages to secure a timeslot on the TVs of literally everybody in the world, making his goal an utter mystery? Lord is a confusing character and the writing is honestly a waste of Pascal’s wonderful performance, which is a shame considering his solid comic book history, where the thing he’s second-most known for is getting killed by Diana herself.

So it’s a confusing cast of characters. We have a protagonist who seems to be having a different arc than the theme of the movie wants her to. We have a main villain whose motives seem to vanish from the screen part of the way through the film. We have a secondary villain who has a predictable plot line that is at least parseable. And we have Steve Trevor, who is another character with zero storyline beyond learning what some at-the-time modern things are—which is a shame, because after Pedro Pascal, Chris Pine’s performance is by far the next most enjoyable one to watch, just because “man out of time” is a fun character to play, and the scene where he and Diana are flying the invisible jet through a fireworks display is genuinely delightful.

About that “man out of time” thing—for a movie that really wants you to know it’s set in the 80s with its title literally including the year and its occasional glimpses of timely fashion and its one or two jokes about things like parachute pants, there really isn’t a reason for the movie to take place in that decade at all. I was expecting a lot of 80s aesthetics, outfits, and musical choices, but there really aren’t many things that tie it to the period, barring the same offensive racist stereotypes that you’d see in almost any film of the day. The score by Hans Zimmer is fine. I’m not a music person, but I didn’t notice anything wrong with it and I still think the main Wonder Woman character theme is an excellent piece of composition. However, I don’t recall any nods to 80s musical trends within it, and there definitely were little to none on the film’s soundtrack. Why not take advantage of the decade’s iconic and unique sound for the film? It’s a wasted opportunity to bring some much-needed energy to this bloated mess of a movie.

Another thing that tends to bring energy to movies is snappy editing. Shots and cuts that feel like they’re smoothly and cleanly carrying the movie from one scene to the next. Someone who isn’t well-versed in film editing shouldn’t even notice most of those edits and shots, unless there’s something extra in there for the “wow” factor like a long take or a practical effect that goes off without a hitch. Unfortunately, Wonder Woman 1984 doesn’t even manage that. I’m not an expert on editing. But the choppy style of the entire film—my favorite jump cut being at the edit of the outfit montage with Steve in the body of Handsome Man and Diana, when it switches between one angle and a slightly different angle for no reason—makes it feel to the average viewer (me) like I’m watching someone’s high-budget YouTube video, not a would-be blockbuster film. And as I said, this movie is two and a half hours. Without editing and a clean pace, it just feels like the world’s most confusing marathon crawl.

A third Wonder Woman movie has already been announced, of course. I’m curious to see whether it will be like its immediate predecessor. I don’t expect this brief review to change anything—I’m not a professional movie critic, just a comic book fan who was absently looking forward to this movie and was disappointed or disgusted or both by a lot of it. But I wanted to talk about the movie, somewhat because every advertisement I’ve gotten for it assures me is doing well with critics, and somewhat because I feel like it’s my duty to call out DC’s garbage for what it is.

At the end of the day, Wonder Woman 1984 is a mess with shiny paint and low-quality CGI. It’s a mess that isn’t bad enough to be a so-bad-it’s-good movie like the Catwoman movie from 2004 or good enough to be a mid-tier Marvel film like Ant-man (2015). It’s a mess that I don’t even see becoming someone’s guilty pleasure the way 2016’s Suicide Squad is for me, where I recognize that it’s an incompetent and bad movie but I still watch it whenever it’s re-aired on TV. It’s sad partially because, while the first film wasn’t exactly Oscar-worthy, it was at least decently good-to-great, depending on who you ask. I don’t think the sequel will receive the same affection, nor do I think it deserves it.

Wonder Woman 1984 is a movie allegedly set in the 80s that could take place anywhere at any time. It’s a movie that allegedly has two villains, but one is basically a non-presence with a predictable story and the other has all of his motivation surgically removed at some point during the runtime. It’s a movie allegedly starring Diana Prince, but she learns essentially nothing and the film only plays at giving her a proper arc around what is supposed to be the primary theme of the movie. It’s a movie that fails to be a movie instead of a first-draft script with a digital furry slapped into it for the sake of having Wonder Woman’s most famous “nemesis” in the marketing.

I’ve seen people online trying to fix the movie with simple band-aids, or saying that the racism and terrible screenwriting are ignorable in favor of the good movie hidden beneath. But I don’t think there is a good movie beneath those layers. When you cut out the racist caricatures, the shoddy editing, the unremarkable soundtrack, the bizarre consent issues, the terrible pacing, and the lack of any real development in the story of the protagonist…

The only thing left is the bad taste in my mouth.

YouTube’s Corvid Problem

I volunteer at my local Audubon Society. Founded in 1902, it’s separate from the other Audubon Societies in the United States. As of right now (February 28th, 2019), they have five education animals living on the property. Education animals cannot be released back into the wild for a variety of possible reasons, and instead are given the best lives possible in captivity, as well as used to educate the public about animals that they would most likely otherwise not come in contact with up close.

Out of the five animals living at my Audubon Society, the most popular with the public by far is Aristophanes (Ari for short), our common raven. Ravens are incredibly smart, and they’ve adapted well to urban environments, though not quite as well as their crow relatives have. They’re huge, sleekly black all over, and one of the most charismatic bird species on the planet. They’re also extremely loud, possessive of the people they bond with, often refuse to bond with anyone but their original owners, messy, and in captivity can lead lives of over fifty years (anecdotal evidence suggests that they can live to be 80 in captivity, while the average lifespan for a wild common raven is about 15 years). They’re illegal to own without a special permit, and all of these things, even things that seem like upsides like their wide vocabularies, make them absolutely terrible pets.

But that’s exactly what Ari was for the beginning of his life. It’s unknown how he fell into the hands of someone who wanted to keep him as a pet, but what we do know is that he’s completely imprinted on humans and incapable of fending for himself in the wild. Imprinting doesn’t mean that he thinks he’s a human being because he was raised by one, but it does mean that Ari has no idea how to live as a wild raven, and it would endanger him if he were to be released and left to fend for himself in the wild. Whatever the intentions of the person who raised him, they ended up causing Ari to have to permanently live in captivity, instead of becoming the wild raven that he was meant to be, and while I don’t think they were influenced by social media, there’s a trend I’ve seen that really bothers me.

I’ve taken and shared videos of Ari interacting with other volunteers or doing enrichment activities before, as have many other Audubon visitors and volunteers. I’ve seen plenty of videos of ravens and crows that I’ve never met taken by wildlife rehabilitators around the country. The resident ravens at the Tower of London come to mind as another example of captive ravens that have videos of their behavior floating around the internet. But those aren’t the only captive ravens and crows that are famous.

YouTube has tons of videos if you search “pet raven”, both of ravens and crows. There’s a video called “How to Find a Baby Raven and Make It A Pet” on the first page of results (meaning the page doesn’t have to load at the bottom). This video has 91k views. Another one by the same YouTuber, also of his raven, has 637k views. A video called “Guide to Keeping a Pet Raven or Crow” has 8.7k views. A video called “The Joys of Pet Raven Ownership pt.2” has 1.5 million views. The video with the most views that I could find, which had 10 million views, was of Mischief (an education bird) mimicking speech (which, yes, ravens can do, and yes, it does get very annoying very fast).

You can see the problem here already. While I have no ethical issue with the existence of ravens being kept in captivity for education or in special cases like the Tower of London ravens, there is a clear and obvious issue in presenting owning ravens as easy, legal, or anything other than an expensive secondary job. Zoos, wildlife rehabilitation centers, and other organizations like them have the money and resources to properly care for these extremely intelligent birds. Ravens are not domesticated animals, and while they are trainable, it takes a lot of time and effort, something most people don’t have. They require a large enclosure they can fly freely in, lots of enrichment to keep them from getting bored and destructive, and plenty of attention to make sure they don’t get sick. Their diet must be varied to combat malnutrition. All of this, of course, on top of receiving the proper paperwork the United States government requires to allow someone to own a raven legally in the first place, something most people don’t go through. Instead, they simply take a baby bird from the wild, then find themselves with an irritable adult raven that cannot be released back into the wild.

Blind encouragement from strangers on the internet to acquire a raven isn’t the only reason people try to raise them as pets, of course. Often, people will see a fledgeling bird on the ground (baby crows are an especially common sight in urban environments, since crows get along so well in cities and suburbs) and assume that it needs human help, taking it in and attempting to raise it. If the bird doesn’t die, they will either try to keep it or release it. When the released bird inevitably refuses to leave, they end up continuing to keep it, often not knowing that it’s illegal to do so. Of course ravens and crows aren’t the only bird this happens to, but the sudden influx of videos and pictures of people with their pet ravens and crows (owls are another bird that everyone seems very enamored with recently) can do little but harm in the long run.

Remember, if you see a baby bird that needs help, don’t try to take care of it unless you are a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. If you’re not, bring it to one, or to your local domestic animal vet, since they’ll usually have the information of the nearest wildlife rehabilitation center or animal hospital willing to take it off your hands. Stick to watching videos of corvids on YouTube, or, if you have the money, see if your local wildlife hospital or sanctuary has one as an education bird. Sponsoring it will be more rewarding for both of you, and won’t lead to you being fined for illegally owning a wild animal.

Ravens are smart, social birds, and they’re absolutely beautiful. I understand the desire to want one as a pet. But remember as you’re watching YouTube videos of people showing off their pet ravens and crows that they’re wild animals. And wild animals never make good pets. Even when they look good YouTube.