A history of disappointment has lowered the bar for Stephen King adaptations. A few extraordinary exceptions aside, adaptations of King’s work tend to range from acceptable to disastrous. Some draw on weaker material. (There’s likely a ceiling on how good any film version of Thinner could be.) Others fail to explore the underlying themes of King’s books in favor of scares — like either version of Pet Sematary — or get so lost in the wispier aspects of King’s writing that the creators forget the appeal of a good scare or an unsettling moment. (Think back to Hearts in Atlantis, if any memory of it remains.)

So when a pretty good film like 2017’s It comes along, it tends to look better just by comparison. Adapting the first half of King’s ambitious 1986 novel — in which a group of Derry, Maine-based kids battle an evil entity that mostly takes the form of a clown named Pennywise — director Andy Muschietti led a talented group of child actors through a largely faithful adaptation that effectively mixed scares and sentiment. Part one of It featured a few standout setpieces, and while none topped the film-opening sewer grate encounter between a little boy and Pennywise (played with shifty malevolence by Bill Skarsgard), the winning cast worked together beautifully. The film ended on an unresolved note that set the stage for a second chapter. The second half could have been even better, as it brought in an adult cast to address the first installment’s still-lingering horrors.

It Chapter Two isn’t that even-better film, though. It’s an appreciably less-engaging film in every way, suffering from lurching storytelling, wild vacillations in tone (even within scenes), and a strong cast that never fully gels as a group. Worst of all, it substitutes excess for suspense in a long middle section that finds one character after another having interchangeable encounters with Pennywise in which the self-proclaimed “eater of worlds” never appears to be a real threat. Sure, he munches on a few minor characters, but the main cast appears to be off-limits. At worst, he seems like an eater of child actors and other characters who are much lower on the call sheet than the leads.

The film opens with a flashback featuring the cast of the original film (most of them noticeably de-aged via digital effects), the first of many such moments. Screenwriter Gary Dauberman (Annabelle, The Nun) has a hard time staying true to the “Chapter Two” portion of the title. He repeatedly returns to the summer of 1989 to flesh out the backstories of the now-middle-aged friends who call themselves the Losers’ Club. Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) has remained behind in Derry, keeping a watchful eye for their enemy’s return while setting up house in the attic of the town library. Others have scattered to the four winds, including Bill (James McAvoy), now a successful novelist; Richie (Bill Hader), who’s spun his talent for wisecracks into a career as a self-loathing stand-up comic; and Beverly (Jessica Chastain), now a successful fashion designer whose abusive marriage echoes her relationship with her father. 

She isn’t alone in directly translating her childhood into adulthood. Eddie (James Ransone) has traded a worry-paralyzed mother for a similarly inclined wife. The film does little to flesh out the psychological shorthand of King’s novel, in which grown-ups blindly reenact the trauma of their childhoods, but at least Bev and Eddie feel connected to the past. Ben (Jay Ryan) has grown from a soulful overweight kid to a dull hunk of a man who seems to have little in common with his former self beyond carrying a torch for Beverly.

When the killings fire up in Derry again, Mike summons his old friends back home, and they respond to the call, even though they only have vague memories of what happened to them in the summer of ’89. They barely remember each other or Mike. That changes upon arrival when the past starts to come back to them, first in ripples, then in waves. Pennywise starts to make his presence felt almost immediately. 

At the same time, the movie starts to trip over itself. Charged by Mike with finding tokens from the past they can use in their fight against Pennywise, each character wanders Derry and experiences both a flashback to their younger selves and an encounter with Pennywise. Some of these scenes work, like Bev’s return to her childhood apartment. (Most of that scene was released as a teaser trailer.) Some sequences don’t gel, like Richie’s middle-of-the-day encounter with a murderous Paul Bunyan statue, the most insubstantial CG effect in a film crawling with them — sometimes literally. But none of these face-offs push the plot forward or reveal much about the characters, in spite of some strong performances, particularly from Chastain and Hader.

That’s particularly frustrating when those performances do hit their stride during the individual scenes that do push the story forward. The many scenes featuring the child cast of the first film feel extraneous. But they also don’t do the adult cast any favors because they remind viewers of the children’s chemistry, which their elders never find together. That mismatch might have worked if Muschietti had tied it to the obvious themes the film could have explored, like how adulthood keeps people anchored to what shaped us as kids while pushing us away from the companionship and freedom that made childhood tolerable. But where It had a lot to say about what it feels like to be a 13-year-old outcast who takes solace in friendship, It Chapter Two struggles to express much about middle age, its disappointments, or its compensations.

All that might not have mattered nearly as much if the film was scarier. Skarsgard has some chilling moments, but when he isn’t on-screen, It Chapter Two struggles to remain unsettling as its protagonists stumble down one reality-warped version of Derry after another before escaping back to reality — if “escape” is even the right word. (The film nods to one obvious inspiration by featuring a marquee for A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and while it’s much better than that movie, even in that weak entry, Freddy Krueger seemed capable of harm.)

Maybe that’s why It Chapter Two keeps undercutting its creepiness with gags and one-liners that often feel wildly out of place, even when being delivered by a pro like Hader. One running gag does work, however. As an author of Stephen King-esque best-sellers, Bill keeps encountering people who are all too eager to mock his books’ lousy endings, a complaint often leveled at King’s novels as well. It’s too bad acknowledging a problem isn’t the same as solving it.

But while It Chapter Two brings the story to an unsatisfying close, the It movies taken as a whole deserve credit for their ambition and for trying to capture one of King’s best books in full. It Chapter Two never really depicts the way dewy sentimentality can curdle into pain and regret or considers whether the other side of middle age offers a way of letting go of the past. Its monster only occasionally embodies the otherworldly fearfulness that leads the characters to speak of it in hushed tones.

But at least Muschietti is trying for something epic and intimidating, a story on a grand scale instead of the kind of minor, just-good-enough storytelling that’s marked so many King adaptations. His work gets points for thoughtfulness and effort. But while his films are better than a lot of King adaptations, the way they often seem this close to reaching greatness without getting there ultimately makes them more frustrating than films made by people who are trying half as hard and settling for something half as good.

The Fast and the Furious series has undergone some profound changes since 2001 when the franchise launched with a film about LA car enthusiasts who fund their passion for illegal street races by boosting DVD players. (It was a different era.) The original film wasn’t exactly a low-key indie, but nothing about it suggested that it would eventually evolve into a globetrotting action franchise that pitted Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his ever-expanding crew against international terrorists and other nefarious foes.

The series has switched genres a couple of times, but at this point, it resembles nothing so much as the X-Men (not the superpowered mutants of the movies so much as the X-Men from the long-running comics, in which colorful characters with specialized skills unite around a common cause and save the world). Group members drift in and out, presumed-dead teammates sometimes turn out to have just had amnesia for a bit, and as they navigate a hostile world that doesn’t understand them, a charismatic bald leader keeps them together by emphasizing that they’ve become a makeshift family.

To continue the analogy, that would make Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw the franchise’s equivalent of Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, a spinoff project in which two teammates with a fun dynamic and unique chemistry set off on their own for a sidequest. Hobbs & Shaw reteams DSS Agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) with Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), a British black-ops-agent-turned-bad-guy-turned-good-guy (more or less) who’d previously been accepted into the F&F fold, even though he killed beloved team member Han. (He did, however, save Dom’s baby, which apparently makes things even. The series has a strange sense of morality.) Of course, that doesn’t mean Shaw and Hobbs like each other as the film opens. What kind of buddy movie would it be without contentious banter?

Co-writing with Drew Pearce, longtime series writer Chris Morgan provides contentious banter aplenty when Hobbs and Shaw reluctantly reunite to deal with a world-threatening programmable supervirus that’s gone missing in London — with Shaw’s MI6 agent sister Hattie Shaw (Vanessa Kirby) as the virus’s apparent thief. There’s more to the story, of course. Hattie has injected herself with the virus, sure, but only to keep it away from Etheon, an evil corporation with plans to save humanity by killing off large swaths of it. Etheon has vast resources and a killer app in the form of Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), a rogue MI6 operative whose broken body has been rebuilt and reprogrammed with superhuman capabilities. Can the protagonists save the world despite overwhelming odds? Maybe, but in the tradition of the recent F&F films, they’ll first have to travel to a bunch of exotic locations.

It doesn’t hurt to bring Fast & Furious knowledge to Hobbs & Shaw, but what’s come before doesn’t much matter. That’s partly because Hobbs and Shaw pick up where they left off, bickering and threatening each other, partly because the spinoff uses characters who aren’t dependent on their personal histories so much as their stars’ personas. Statham and Johnson are two of the most likable action stars working today, but neither mixes up what they do from movie to movie all that much. (The Johnson who shows up for the disaster film San Andreas isn’t that different from the one who shows up for the Kevin Hart comedy Central Intelligence.) There’s a reason for this: those personas work. And Hobbs & Shaw proves they work well together, stretching out the sparky dynamic of their previous appearances together to feature length.

Even though Statham and Johnson are both big, bald slabs of muscle, they make a fun study in contrasts, from an early split-screen sequence capturing their morning routines to a later fight scene in which Shaw has to take out a room full of bad guys using grace and finesse, and Hobbs has to take out a somehow-even-bigger foe through brute force. Hobbs speaks with wrestling-ring bravado. Shaw uses insults like daggers. Hobbs looms over Shaw. Shaw makes up in scrappiness what he lacks in size. They have some fundamental differences, and yet, in a not-so-shocking development, they make a pretty good team. 

Kirby is fun, too, as are Helen Mirren (as a criminal matriarch), a handful of big-name actors making surprise cameos, and Elba who plays a formidable foe. But Hobbs & Shaw is very much about its eponymous duo saving the world through a series of action setpieces staged with panache by stunt coordinator-turned-director David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2). Leitch continues a streak of films that treat action scenes almost like musical sequences, with swelling rhythms built around a handful of jaw-dropping images. The gunplay and hand-to-hand combat (and fights with other weaponry best left unspoiled, even though they appear in the trailer) have real impact, though some of the chase scenes lean too heavily on CGI for their effectiveness.

In fact, the gearhead-pleasing moments almost feel like obligatory nods to the mother series that Hobbs & Shaw otherwise seems happy to forget. The unresolved animosities between key cast members make it hard to see a full-on Fast & Furious reunion in the future, but Hobbs and Shaw seem like they’ll be okay on their own if that never happens. Their film leaves the door wide open for sequels and sets up a supporting cast for future installments, and the excessively entertaining, eager-to-please nature of this movie makes it easy to welcome that option. The X-Men have survived the departure of key personnel plenty of times. No doubt Dom and his family can do the same.

Much of the 1969 Los Angeles seen in Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is real, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The film’s characters, like most Los Angelenos, spend a lot of time driving from place to place. Their travels find them floating along to mostly forgotten versions of famous songs while they pass theaters with marquees promoting movies possibly no one but Tarantino has thought about for years. The 1969 we now remember — with its political upheaval, Moon landing, and game-changing films like Easy Rider — mostly exists outside of this world. This is a 1969 LA in which José Feliciano sings “California Dreamin’” and ads promote an intriguing new sex comedy called 3 in the Attic, both of which are vaporous bits of pop culture that have since faded into hazy memory. There’s a lot going on in Tarantino’s latest film, including an exploration of the delicacy of a moment in time and how easily an era can be swept away.

The one landmark 1969 event the film does depict — at least, sort of — only reinforces that notion. On the night of August 8th, 1969, three members of the Manson family committed mass murder at the home of Roman Polanski (who was out of town working on a movie at the time) and Sharon Tate (who was among the victims). Joan Didion famously signposted the murders as the symbolic end of the 1960s, and they serve that purpose well. Yet, despite the major role that the Manson family plays in the film (this review will do its best to keep that and other major plot elements unspoiled), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is very much a film about the moments before an era comes to an end and the people who live in that era, including their joys, frustrations, and inability to see what’s coming around the corner.

When the film opens, frustrations have long since overtaken joy for Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). He saw considerable success as the star of the Western TV series Bounty Law in the early ’60s, but he hasn’t quite figured out how to roll with the times. His film career has never taken off, and while he doesn’t want for work, that mostly means putting in guest spots as bad guys on shows helmed by younger up-and-coming stars. He drinks too much and worries even more, as one habit feeds into the other in a self-destructive cycle. But Dalton also knows he can still act, given the right surroundings. He’s forced to consider a change of scenery after a meeting with Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), a Hollywood agent who wants to send him to Rome to star in Westerns, which is a move Rick really doesn’t want to make.

Counseling him through this crisis — and driving him, since Dalton’s license has been suspended — is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Dalton’s longtime stuntman who now mostly helps out his old boss by doing odd jobs, running errands, and, above all, lending moral support. Cliff has a dubious past and sometimes exercises questionable judgment, which are qualities that have cut into his own professional prospects. But Cliff doesn’t seem to mind all that much. He believes in Rick and seems perfectly happy doing his chores when not hanging out in the trailer he shares with an obedient and extremely hungry pit bull behind a drive-in theater in Van Nuys.

This allows him to spend time cruising, where he meets all kinds of intriguing characters, including Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), a teenage hippie whom he eventually learns is staying at the old Spahn Movie Ranch with a bunch of followers of someone named Charlie. But Cliff has no way of making a connection between this Charlie and the odd-looking fellow he witnessed showing up at the home of Rick’s neighbor, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), or knowing that Sharon’s experiencing a less-pronounced version of the same career ennui that’s troubling Rick.

That’s the basic setup of a movie that’s more about the setup than a traditional plot. Tarantino coined the term “hang-out movie” to describe the tradition to which he felt Jackie Brown belonged, films in which spending time with appealing, memorable characters mattered more than what happened to those characters. He also cited his favorite film, Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, as the beau ideal of such a movie. If anything, even less happens in Hollywood than most hang-out movies. The presence of the Manson family points toward an endpoint for the story, but the stretches leading up to that moment are less about pushing a narrative forward and more about observing the main characters at telling moments: Rick guest stars on the pilot of the (real) TV show Lancer. Cliff takes a hitchhiker to Spahn Ranch and observes how much its new residents have changed it. Sharon spends an afternoon alone at the movies.

All the while, the film uses a scrupulous production design to create the illusion of time travel. Tarantino, as usual, draws on several sources. In this crucial respect, it most resembles Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women, his memory-driven revisiting of the late 1970s. Though it’s less directly autobiographical, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels similarly personal, like an attempt to re-create the world Tarantino glimpsed as a kid growing up in Los Angeles and, in the process, maybe better understanding that moment and capturing what was lost in August 1969. This happens on a personal level — Robbie’s warm, openhearted performance as Tate helps humanize a woman who will be forever known as a murder victim — and a cultural level.

It’s also an attempt to understand those who lived there. First seen drawling and stuttering as he nervously awaits a meeting that could change his life, Rick is a fascinatingly contradictory character. He has an outsized ego and an outsized vulnerability to match. He tries to avoid work he feels is beneath him, while desperately clinging to what he’s earned before it slips away. DiCaprio beautifully captures that swirl of emotions and the ways they can spin out of control. Rick talks and smokes and rarely sits still. It’s a stark contrast to Cliff, who says as little as possible and seems happy to drift through life. But it also alludes to darkness in his past and trails even darker rumors behind him. Cliff is on-screen through much of the film, and he exits as much of a mystery as he enters.

There’s one thing that is knowable about Cliff: he loves Rick, and Rick loves him. Their bond, though occasionally put under stress, forms the heart of this surprisingly warm movie. Tarantino doesn’t short audiences on the expected technical bravado, memorable dialogue, or flashes of violence — see an early scene following Cliff home that finds a camera flying above a drive-in screen and a long scene between Rick and a precocious child actor (Julia Butters) for examples. But in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, none of that matters as much as the central friendship, an unlikely partnership that could only have happened in a moment long lost. Here, it’s summoned and returned as a place we’re invited to visit with the bittersweet understanding that our stay, like the era it depicts, must eventually end.

Search for Alien 3 on your favorite video-on-demand service, and you’ll inevitably land on a specific movie: David Fincher’s 1992 sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 hit Alien and James Cameron’s blockbuster 1986 follow-up Aliens. There are different versions out there — the theatrical version and the longer “assembly cut,” a recreation of an earlier version of the film. But they’re variations on the same work, a moody, visually striking, but not entirely successful film that drops protagonist Ellen Ripley on a lice-ridden prison planet that isn’t prepared to fend off an infestation of the xenomorphs she fought in the first two films.

Moving outside the realm of film, though, there are multiple Alien 3s, and there have been for years: Alien 3s that never shot a frame of footage, that exist only as discarded screenplay drafts. Ordinarily, that kind of draft would be read by a select few people, then forgotten. But with Alien 3, some of the earlier versions ended up online in the early days of the internet. Fans who were disappointed with the tepidly received film suddenly had a chance to fill their heads with alternate versions of the story.

Audible Studios’ new audio drama Alien III by William Gibson offers one of those alternate paths for the Alien series. Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, has his own vision of what happened after Ripley, Hicks, Bishop, and Newt nuked LV-426 from orbit in Aliens. What was once a discarded draft has, in the hands of writer and director Dirk Maggs, become a fleshed-out audio production featuring Aliens stars Michael Biehn (as Hicks, the Marine who showed Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley how to fire a high-powered gun in Aliens) and Lance Henriksen (as Bishop, the “artificial person” who changes Ripley’s mind about working with synthetic life forms). Close your eyes, and it’s like slipping into an alternate universe in which this is the third Alien film, rather than the one we know.

It’s a strikingly different experience. As a movie, this version of the story wouldn’t have radically reinvented the Alien franchise. But it’s easy to picture it being an effective thriller. Gibson’s script combines elements from the first two films with unexpected twists. And as much as the Alien films depend on their striking imagery, Maggs’ audio drama works effectively on its own terms.

The audio drama spins a gripping story that focuses on Hicks and Bishop’s adventures after the Sulaco drifts first into territory controlled by the Union of Progressive Peoples, then to Anchorpoint, a space station staffed with idealistic scientists. (Though it’s ultimately under the influence of the powerful Weyland-Yutani Corporation.) What follows echoes the Cold War: the communist-esque UPP and the Anchorpoint scientists both begin experimenting on the alien genetic material left on Bishop’s body, eventually forcing Hicks, Bishop, and some new acquaintances to confront an old threat that takes on new forms.

Maggs set out to make his Alien III as immersive as possible. Based in Britain, where audio dramas remained a popular medium even after the introduction of television, the prolific, innovative producer has worked on a well-received adaptation of the later entries of Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, X-Files stories featuring the original stars, and several previous ventures into the Alien universe. But he doesn’t see the form as a purely sonic experience.

“All of my work, I have a visual image in my mind,” he tells The Verge via phone from London. “I’ll have a sort of movie screen in front of me, and if you listen on earbuds or whatever, you hear the characters move around within a sort of cinema frame. In fact, when I was talking with Gary [Hayton], who did the sound design with me, I storyboarded scenes to show him where I felt the characters would be, and where the exits and entrances were in the room.”

Maggs was largely on his own in fleshing out the Aliens III world. Gibson’s input didn’t extend much beyond a friendly “good luck,” after Maggs reached out via their mutual friend Neil Gaiman. “It’s pretty much ancient history to him,” Maggs says, “although he did say the other day on Twitter that it’s the screenplay he’s proudest of, which is really nice to know.”

Even if its origins can’t objectively be called ancient, Alien III has had a long journey from page to speakers. Series producers Walter Hill and David Giler commissioned Gibson’s script when they decided to push ahead with a sequel to Cameron’s Aliens — and to design the third film to set up a fourth — in spite of the huge question mark around whether series star Sigourney Weaver would participate in future entries.

Searching for new ideas, they turned to Gibson, whose early short stories and 1984 novel Neuromancer had become defining texts for the movement known as cyberpunk. Gibson was a fan of both Alien films, and the acknowledged influence of Blade Runner on his writing made him feel indebted to Alien director Ridley Scott for inspiration. Gibson took on the challenge.

Working from Hill and Giler’s ideas, Gibson took two passes at the screenplay, then declined to do a third for director Renny Harlin, who had signed on to helm the film. Harlin ultimately left the project, which became the feature debut of David Fincher, then a highly in-demand commercial and music video director. Along the way, it went through wildly different drafts written by Eric Red, David Twohy, and Vincent Ward and John Fasano.

Ward and Fasano’s version, set on an artificial planet made of wood, and populated by a religious order, also went on to enjoy a second life via the internet. And the final film, which combines elements from the Twohy and Ward / Fasano scripts, gave Ward story credit, while crediting the screenplay to Hill, Giler, and Larry Ferguson.

In the end, a lot of creative people spent many hours hammering out ideas for Alien 3. No movie satisfies everyone, especially an entry in a much-loved franchise that tries to push that franchise’s boundaries. But Alien 3 created more dissatisfaction than usual. It provides an early showcase for Fincher’s visual gifts, and it has some unforgettable moments. But the story never coheres, and the climactic showdown with the xenomorph is impossible to follow.

Would Gibson’s original ideas have improved the film? That question has long shadowed Alien 3, and Alien III by William Gibson doesn’t really answer it. Gibson’s script (which also served as fodder for a recently concluded Dark Horse comic book adaptation), isn’t the treasure trove of cyberpunk-y concepts fans of the author might expect. “I think [it’s] definitely him very consciously aiming to write a tentpole summer movie,” Maggs says. “I think he’s reining in some of his more out-there instincts.”

But the film isn’t devoid of out-there instincts, either. Its boldest contribution comes in the form of a hybrid xenomorph created by the aliens’ previously unknown ability to merge with other life forms via infection. “There’s a lot of pure Gibson in that,” Maggs says. “And maybe that’s why — and I’m only supposing here — that’s why it wasn’t pursued in the end, the idea of the contagion. It’s curious that it only came into being much later on, with Ridley Scott’s prequels.”

Like the Dark Horse comic, Maggs’ version adapts Gibson’s second, more scaled-down draft, which trimmed some of the extensive (and potentially expensive) fight scenes. What the audio drama loses in visual impact, it makes up for in momentum, atmosphere, and strong performances. Maggs moves the story along at an increasingly brisk pace, and the cast captures both their characters’ mounting panic and an almost Lovecraftian bafflement when confronted with monsters beyond their imagination.

Biehn and Henriksen, both slipping effortlessly back into their famous roles, help as well. Henriksen’s voice occasionally betrays the passage of time since Aliens, but he’s still adept at conveying Bishop’s wry sense of humor in the face of death. To hear Henriksen tell it, bringing Bishop back was easy. “It’s never left me,” he tells The Verge by phone from Los Angeles. To recreate Bishop for the audio drama, he drew on the past and his experience making Aliens. “Your memories come back. I remember the sets, I remember everybody that was in the movie. And it was a high point in my life, so why would I forget that state of being? I wouldn’t.”

Maggs’ working method helped as well. “Dirk set up a climate where the material was very clear, [as were] the demands that were going to be made on us,” Henriksen says. “I found myself snapping right back into a kind of innocence about the story, and the needs, and all of those things. And it was really, really a lot of fun.”

Even serving the needs of a preexisting universe, Gibson’s sensibility similarly feels at home here. The Alien franchise has always distrusted a corporate-dominated world. It envisioned a future where technology has made human existence more complicated, and not necessarily any better. That philosophy squares with Gibson’s work, and so does the depiction of the way a foreign element can bring down even seemingly monolithic systems.

Still, Alien III is ultimately more beholden to its title than its author. Gibson seems to have regarded it as a work-for-hire situation even back then. Speaking to Starlog between drafts, he observed, “Writing a screenplay is not as demanding as writing a novel. They’ve got an unusually well-established universe.” He admitted, “It’s difficult to surprise without violating the story premise.”

Yet, all these years later, Alien III does manage to surprise audiences simply by presenting a new version of what might have been, and providing an intriguing new model for similar projects. Could we someday be able to listen to Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, or some other sequel that was scripted but never filmed? Could the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League take the form of an audio drama? Will fans someday get the Game of Thrones ending they actually want, but in a different form? For fans of some popular franchises, a multitude of alternate possibilities could be as close as the nearest pair of earbuds.

Viewers may understandably feel a sense of déjà vu when watching Dark Phoenix, the 12th film in the X-Men franchise once spinoffs like Logan and the Deadpool are factored in. Written and directed by longtime series producer Simon Kinberg, the film adapts one of the most famous stories in the history of X-Men comics: the Dark Phoenix saga. Playing out over four years between 1976 and 1980 in issues written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Dave Cockrum and John Byrne, the storyline depicts the possession of longtime team member Jean Grey by the ultra-power cosmic force known as Phoenix. But even if you don’t know the comics, you might know the story since it provided fodder for the third X-Men movie, 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. So why tell this story again?

Dark Phoenix suggests two possible answers. One is simply that the series has earned the right to a do-over, having generated enough goodwill by hitting the reset button with 2011’s X-Men: First Class, which ushered in a fresh-faced cast to play X-Men both familiar and new, and 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, which cleverly folded the new elements into the old continuity via time-travel and other bits of comic book trickery. After introducing a new Jean Grey (played by Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner) in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, why not take a second stab at the story, especially since Brett Ratner’s Last Stand (co-written by Kinberg) is, to put it mildly, not the most beloved entry in the X-Men film series?

The second, more compelling reason is to offer a take on the story so strikingly different in its approach that the previous version can be forgotten. In its best moments, Dark Phoenix comes admirably close to getting there. This time around, Kinberg goes darker and scarier, emphasizing the tragic elements of Jean’s story by recasting her origin as a story of betrayal and deception and her possession as a condition fueled by justifiable rage. The only problem: it all works better in concept than in execution.

The film opens with a harrowingly depicted car crash caused by young Jean’s psychic powers. The accident leaves her orphaned with nowhere to turn but the School For Gifted Youngsters that’s run by Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). Fast-forwarding a few years past the ’80s era when 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse was set, Dark Phoenix finds an adult Jean seemingly thriving, alongside the other X-Men and various up-and-coming students, in a world that now sees them as heroes. Xavier even has a direct line to America’s president, conveyed by an Oval Office phone with an “X” on it, no less. Called on to rescue the space shuttle Endeavor after its astronauts are endangered by an apparent solar flare, Professor X doesn’t hesitate to send them into danger, though some team members, like Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), do hesitate.

Her concern is justified: in the course of a daring rescue, Jean is engulfed by a strange cosmic force. She recovers quickly enough and seems to emerge stronger for the experience. But those closest to her, like Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), notice a change. As the power grows within her, her manic confidence gives way to other emotions, particularly when she feels Xavier has betrayed her. Soon, her anger and new abilities are spinning calamitously out of control. When the powerful shapeshifting extraterrestrial D’Bari arrive, led by a creature that’s taken human form (Jessica Chastain), they tempt her to put those powers to even more destructive use. Soon, the future of Earth itself appears to be at risk.

Yet, for all the global stakes, the intimate moments are what make Dark Phoenix innovative. Working with cinematographer Mauro Fiore (a veteran of Avatar and several Antoine Fuqua movies), Kinberg creates a look that veers from dreamy (particularly in a lovely school party scene where a previously unseen comic book favorite provides musical accompaniment) to nightmarish in scenes of friends turning against each other and powers spinning out of control. At times, Dark Phoenix plays more like a psychological horror movie than a superhero film.

If only it were more effective at the horror. McAvoy has some unexpected moments exploring Xavier’s darker side — he’s clutching a drink for much of the film, and his success with integrating mutants into mainstream society has clearly gone to his head — but the new Jean and Scott haven’t been around long enough to get most viewers invested in their fates. They’re both well-cast, but neither actor made much of an impression in the overly busy Apocalypse. Here, Jean has barely a moment of normalcy before she’s possessed. Her transformation feels too rushed to matter.

That applies to most of the other X-Men as well. As gifted as Jennifer Lawrence is, she’s always been an odd fit for Raven, aka Mystique. And while Nicholas Hoult is still a charming Beast, he hasn’t been front and center in any of the films. For all of their virtues, the new batch of X-Men films hasn’t spent any significant time developing the characters that helped distinguish the series’s earliest entries.

The exceptions have been McAvoy’s Xavier and Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, Xavier’s friend-turned-philosophical opponent. They still have a combustible chemistry, and the film makes both their points of view seem relatable. But Jean isn’t a character so much as a cosmic ping-pong ball, which is an odd choice for any film’s eponymous character. While Dark Phoenix manages a handful of memorable action set pieces (particularly a New York showdown and a sequence aboard a train), some big moments feel on loan from previous entries, including yet another slowed-down scene with super-speedster Quicksilver (Evan Peters) navigating a slowed-down world, and a showcase for Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to use his teleportation abilities. A dud of a climax, featuring some excessively on-the-nose dialogue summarizing Dark Phoenix’s central themes, doesn’t help either.

Still, Dark Phoenix deserves points for taking a new approach. Where Apocalypse felt like an attempt to beat the MCU movies at their own game, this one takes the road less traveled. Nineteen years after X-Men — the film most responsible for kicking off America’s current, seemingly never-ending hunger for superhero movies — it’s unclear how much further that road will stretch. The oft-delayed New Mutants remains on the horizon and presumably so does an as-yet-unannounced Deadpool movie. With Disney acquiring Fox, the future of these characters may belong within the MCU proper. That could open up new possibilities, but it would also mark the end of an era that, through all its ups and downs, has never been predictable.

Dark Phoenix has its issues, but at least they’re different issues from the ones hampering leaden films like X-Men: Apocalypse. It’s easy to cheer on the risk-taking impulse behind the new film. Kinberg could have opted for a back-to-basics heroes versus baddies approach. Instead, the film dives into the moral murk that’s been present from the series’s start — in particular, by questioning how Professor X operates, what he owes the people around him, and what responsible uses of power look like for any mutant. The X-Men and all of Marvel’s mutant characters have been defined as outcasts and misfits. Having them star in an oddball, ever-mutating series has made a weird sort of sense. While that series has had its misses, the superhero landscape will feel duller and more predictable if they leave it.

Ma opens with a vision of disappointment. U-Haul trailer in tow, newly divorced mom Erica (Juliette Lewis) and her 16-year-old daughter Maggie (Diana Silvers) roll into a small town that promises nothing but boredom. Erica is returning to the home she left years ago for the promise of California. Maggie is seeing it for the first time, and she approaches the place with an appropriate sense of resignation. It isn’t San Diego, but they can’t afford San Diego anymore.

When Erica gets a job at a nearby casino that keeps her away from home at odd hours, Maggie falls in with some kids who get their kicks drinking at the rock quarry, because what else is there to do? And when middle-aged veterinary assistant Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer) agrees to buy them booze and offers the slightly more appealing option of partying in her basement, Maggie and her friends jump at the chance. When you’re this bored, why not? And when your host asks you to call her Ma, and then starts acting weird, well, maybe that’s just the price you have to pay to make the boredom go away.

Directed by Tate Taylor (The Help, Get on Up), the new horror movie Ma is messy in ways both large and small — sometimes to its benefit, sometimes not. But it gets the details of a certain kind of small-town life right. It’s set in a place where everyone knows everyone else, high school humiliations stick around forever, and teenagers wind up unwittingly or unwillingly falling into the same roles their parents played before them. Ma’s characters — most of them deeply unpleasant — snipe at each other in jest (but not really), express themselves via frequently homophobic insults, and patronize Sue Ann, even as she goes out of her way to accommodate them. For them, the disappointment of their hometown is still new, and defined more by dullness than pain. For Sue Ann, it’s the place where she first knew loneliness and humiliation, and the years have only intensified those feelings. And for this, her new friends will soon pay a price.

Without giving too much away, Ma ultimately reveals itself as a kind of time-release take on Carrie, but without the supernatural elements. Sue Ann’s kindness and permissiveness take on a creepy edge long before her teenage guests start to suspect she has her own agenda. After first leaving Maggie and company to their own devices in her basement, making them promise they won’t take the Lord’s name in vain or try to come upstairs, Sue Ann starts to party with them, dancing and drinking with them when they show up at her house, and texting them when she’s lonely. The party basement lets her be the popular teen she never was, but it also lets her plot revenge.

As might be expected from an actress who frequently finds depths in roles both large and small, Spencer takes the chance to get beneath her character’s skin, playing Sue Ann as simultaneously insane, justifiably angry, unnervingly empathetic, and unexpectedly glamorous. She seems to take real pleasure in dancing with the teens and dressing up for drinks, which lends her an air of tragedy, even as her behavior becomes increasingly disturbing. She commits monstrous deeds, but she never quite seems like a monster.

In interviews, Spencer has said she took the lead in Ma — a reunion with Taylor, who directed her in The Help — because it not only offered her a chance to appear in a horror movie different from those in which “black people always die in the first 15 minutes,” but because she’d get to kill people, a rarity for a black woman in a genre film. (Spencer speaks from experience; her character doesn’t make it out of Rob Zombie’s Halloween II alive.) As originally scripted by Workaholics writer Scotty Landes, Sue Ann was white.

But even though Ma’s race is rarely mentioned explicitly, it wraps itself around the themes of the film. Maggie’s friends, only one of them black, treat her condescendingly and quickly decide to discard her once she becomes too demanding, as if they’ve been taught that some people deserve more respect than others. In flashbacks to Sue Ann’s high school days, she appears to be the only black kid in her school, and she’s surrounded by white tormentors.

Watching Ma, it’s hard not to wish it either gave Spencer more space to work through some of the character’s contradictions over the course of a more thoughtful drama (with some killing thrown in for good measure, of course), or that it went all-in on being a trashy exploitation film that let the blood and social commentary flow freely. Instead, it tries to walk a middle road in addressing its racial angle, and the timidity doesn’t always serve it well. Taylor dutifully checks all the genre’s boxes — including the now de rigueur scenes of the villain using social media — but he isn’t particularly adept at building suspense or keeping up the story’s momentum. Weird loose ends, like the murder of a major supporting character that takes place on-screen and in graphic detail, then goes virtually uncommented upon for the rest of the movie, start to become distracting.

But while it’s ultimately a sloppily put-together shocker, having Spencer at the center makes it a memorable sloppy shocker, one that lets a black woman take her revenge out on the innocent and the guilty alike, and comes this close to treating it as justifiable. Taylor understands how small towns operate, by ostracizing people who don’t fit in, while cycling one generation after another through the same boozy rites of passage, and Spencer’s Sue Ann becomes just the sort of restless avenger such a place deserves. Maybe the only cure for nastiness, injustice, and endless boredom is to burn it all down.