Back in 2001, a moody, slick little $38 million action movie called The Fast and the Furious became a big hit, racking up more than $200 million in box office returns worldwide. A sequel was inevitable, but the series’s rapid expansion has been surprising, especially considering its unevenness and its gleeful, unabashed ridiculousness. From timeline-warping leaps to outsized stunts to its habit of converting villains to anti-hero buddies, the series has unabashedly embraced an over-the-top aesthetic where no twist is too ridiculous, if it’s played straight enough. What started out as a comparatively low-key, low-stakes action drama has turned into “the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but with cars.” The cast just keeps getting bigger, as the shoutouts and fan-service piles up, and the stunts have to get bigger as well. How do you top a team of cars parachuting out of a plane in Furious 7? Apparently by hacking a quarter of the cars in Manhattan into a fleet, aggressive remote-controlled army.

The eighth movie in the series, The Fate of the Furious, is as big as the world stage, and as gloriously, unapologetically dumb as its creators could make it. It’s also meant as a new start for the series, a recentering after the death of original series star Paul Walker, and the kickoff of a trilogy that continues its characters’ mutation from criminals in a soap opera melodrama to globetrotting, government-sanctioned action-heroes in a soap opera melodrama. In this edition of Question Club, we consider the series’s new and bigger look, and ask: has this gotten too fast or too furious for us yet?

Warning: Fate of the Furious spoilers ahead. 

How do you feel about Vin Diesel taking over Paul Walker's place as the series’s heart?

Chris: I fundamentally disagree with the notion that Vin Diesel is now the heart of this series. I liked Diesel in the original film, loved his return after he skipped the second entry (and most of the third), and overall appreciated the relationship his “outlaw with a heart of gold” shared with Paul Walker’s “cop with a lead foot.” But Fate of the Furious has me second-guessing Diesel’s significance within this series, and wondering if Walker quietly did the emotional heavy lifting for the duo.

Tasha: If he isn’t the heart, who is? Fate of the Furious revolves around Dominic Toretto’s decisions, his big action moves, his angst over making those moves, and his emotional torment over the kidnapping of his ex and the baby he didn’t know he had. The film is fundamentally about his emotions, and about everyone else’s emotions primarily as they relate to him. Diesel’s character isn’t just the hero here, he’s the focus of nearly every feeling in the movie. Jason Statham’s character, Deckard Shaw, is the only one with an agenda that doesn’t really tie into Diesel’s in some way.

Chris: And then Statham literally gets an action sequence dedicated to saving Dom’s baby! The guy is set up for a big emotional beat, delivering the baby to Toretto, and Diesel, soaking in the golden sunset of the New York skyline, looks like he forgot all of this was over a kid. Could he not muster the slightest enthusiasm to be reunited with that kid? Instead, we get an overwrought Hallmark moment, and the hackneyed reveal of the baby’s name.

So yeah, on paper, all roads lead back to Dominic Toretto. But the film’s most affecting character moments — the stuff with real heart — were the updates on little rivalries within the group. Roman and Tej. Tej and Ramsey. Mr. Nobody and Little Nobody. And the Rock with everybody.

A lot of hay has been made about the rumored tumultuous relationship between Diesel and co-star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. (I believe it. The two can’t even pretend to like each other in the film’s phone conversations.) If anybody should be worried about this dynamic, it’s Diesel. The Rock’s relationships with both Jason Statham and Scott Eastwood (Little Nobody, the would-be Paul Walker replacement) are light, funny, and warm in a way Diesel can’t manage with anyone else in the film, including his love interest, Michelle Rodriguez. And The Rock just happens to be the biggest movie star on the planet. It’s not tough to see which actor the studio would choose if forced to make the choice.

Fate of the Furious felt like the series rediscovering itself, and surprisingly, Diesel felt like a guest star — even though the movie is all about him.

Does the movie's central betrayal work as a plot device?

Tasha: You know who absolutely hated that development? Our own Bryan Bishop, who said Dom’s willingness to turn on his family (the series’s absolute favorite word) “undermines the entire franchise’s thematic foundation.” But frankly, it worked fine for me. So much about this movie feels like a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon, especially the way all the major characters have to drive their own signature vehicles in the action scenes, even though that leaves them all simultaneously isolated from each other, and crowded up against each other as they try to maneuver all those cars around. These flotillas of vehicles charging into action recall old series like MASK or the original Transformers for me — cartoons expressly designed to sell as many toy cars as possible. Taken in the light of the film’s cartoony aesthetic, Dom’s faux-betrayal seems pretty fitting. At least they didn’t bonk him on the head with a coconut and have that switch him over to “evil” for a few hours. And keep in mind, this is a series that routinely brings people back from the dead. A major plot arc centered on one of the heroes contracting amnesia, becoming a villain, and slowly making her way back to the hero fold. This is a ridiculous, hyperbolic soap opera. “I switched sides because reasons” is pretty par for the course.

Kwame: I’m basically fine with the idea that Dom could be turned against his familia. I like the idea that Superman can be corrupted, and the movie’s twist being centered on Dom’s son with Elena (who we last saw at the very end of Fast & Furious 6) felt completely aligned with his values and the values of the series as a whole. What I didn’t love was the execution, and how out of nowhere everything felt involving Dom’s face-heel turn. I have a lot of trouble buying the idea that Dom would run Hobbs off the road, nearly blow up his whole crew, or leave everyone for dead on the streets of New York City in broad daylight without communicating to them that something’s up and he’s acting against his will. Instead, he reaches out to Deckard Shaw’s mother for an assist? Instead of making it an intimate, high-stakes drama, the movie just padded on a few more characters for the sake of a few callbacks. And in some ways, that’s fine. I recognize that this is basically a movie about taking action figures, sticking them inside Hot Wheels cars, and smashing them together. But the story could have been more effective if it were smaller.

Chris: Diesel’s motivations are so backward that I found him barely recognizable as his character from the series. Like Kwame said, his heel-turn isn’t just silly, it’s illogical. The plot gymnastics required to, first, give Dom a child, and second, make Toretto a willing accomplice in a nuclear-missile launch, are as exhausting as they are dumb. I agree with Tasha that this series is often at its best when leaning into its soap opera instincts. But the nuclear-war-leveraging surprise baby is so poorly handled that it manages to be, of all things, boring. And Diesel does nothing to help. He delivers lines with the passion of my laptop’s text-to-speech function.

Tasha: C’mon, whenever Diesel was frowning over having to nearly kill people he loves? He was emoting super hard, y’all.

But honestly, I think I would have bought the Dom-goes-bad plot less if they’d tried to justify it more, if they’d tried to make it some kind of small, intimate, personal story. This is a series where cars jump out of planes and through buildings. It’s a series where someone can crash his car in order to propel himself through the air just in time to catch someone who’s also flying through the air. In this installment of the franchise, a hated villain who outright murdered one of Dom’s crew is suddenly accepted as a buddy because he hates one of the same people they hate. Within the context of these kinds of outsized action beats, it doesn’t much surprise me that, say, Dom would understand that he can run Hobbs off the road, and Hobbs will come out of it physically fine. Sure, he goes to supermax super-prison, but his shadowy government buddies immediately deal with that problem — which Dom also had to see coming. Dom steps in to make sure Letty isn’t actually killed. He sets up an angle to rescue his baby, from a source no one is expecting, instead of his familia, who his blackmailer is watching closely and intently.

In other words, he does bad things, but he never does anything he considers permanent, or that his family can’t ultimately handle, physically or emotionally. It’s all big and silly, and it relies on crackerjack timing, nigh-immortal characters, and outsized coincidences, but those are all things that already exist in this franchise in large numbers. It stands to reason that Dom expected all of these things to work in his favor throughout the story.

How do you feel about Charlize Theron’s super-hacker villain character, Cipher?

Kwame: I think Cipher is the weakest part of the movie. The films haven’t ever had the strongest villains, but by the sixth installment, the crew was suddenly dealing with special-ops superhumans and god-level hackers. Because reasons. But these are James Bond / superhero movies with cars, so it was easy to forgive. But the idea that there was an even bigger and badder uber-hacker working in the background for years that we simply never heard about is a little too silly for me. If the movies want to turn her into some kind of Ernst Blofeld-esque presence, then I want a little more than Charlize Theron spouting terrible lines from behind a computer between explosions. I’d like her to have a more believable attachment to the world that the movies have established. That shouldn’t even be hard!

Tasha: When I first realized that was her character name, I rolled my eyes so hard, they detached from my optic nerves, and I had to get them replaced with cyber-eyes like Batou in Ghost In the Shell. (Oh wait, virtually no one saw that film, so that’s a lousy reference. Oh well.) My first thought was “Is there also a big tough guy named Bruiser and a smart, nerdy guy named Specs?” My first thought was “1992 called, they want their clichés back.” But Kwame and I talked about it, and he was the one who pointed out to me that 1999 called, and they want Joe Pantoliano’s character from The Matrix back.

Chris: Do y’all think critics have been a little easy on the Fast and the Furious series when it comes to its complicity with Hollywood sexism? I feel like in the past, the films got a bit of a free pass for the objectification of women, particularly the way the camera lingered from one butt to the next before each film’s obligatory street race. The two-pronged defense went something like this. “Ogling butts is part of the series’s DNA! And name another franchise with this many strong women!”

I don’t think The Fate of the Furious rises to either of those excuses. This series can barely see its roots in street racing from the spy plane that delivers so much of the film’s exposition. And the female characters get nothing to do.

Tasha: The further the series goes into international stories with world-altering stakes, the more boring and juvenile the “Ooo! Lady-asses!” moments become. But I didn’t see sexism in the characterization this time around, just hand-waving narrative laziness. Elena’s use as a cringing, crying victim is ugly and pointless, and her whole plot suggests she’s a disposable brood cow — Dom and Letty contemplate starting a family, but they don’t have to go through the messy particulars, because Elena’s already handled that for them! Poof, instant family, with no messy strings or complications! Letty has nothing to do in this film but get rescued by Dom, and generally represent the family’s frustration and betrayal as Dom cheats on them with another family. It’s as though screenwriter Chris Morgan doesn’t know who Letty is when she’s not concussed and confused and evil. But don’t discount Helen Mirren’s brief, fun turn as a badass capable of slapping Jason Statham into guilty submission. And I’m all for women as villains, especially sociopathic supervillains.

Chris: But Charlize Theron is a brilliant actress and action star who is given zilch in this role. Her character is, without question, the least interesting villain in a series that normally nails its baddies. She’s a whispering parody of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission Impossible 3.

Cipher is emblematic of the film’s larger problem. The series killed off Gal Gadot’s Gisele and wrote off Jordana Brewster’s Mia. In previous entries, we had Gina Carano’s Riley and Ronda Rousey’s Kara beating the snot out of fools. In Fate, Elsa Pataky returns as Elena, and literally plays a plot device that exists to birth a child and get iced. Like you said, Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty could be the heart of the movie, but she’s barely given a moment to emote, let alone discover any purpose. And Nathalie Emmanuel as Ramsey gets a big final laugh line — by pointing out that nobody knows a damned thing about her. I enjoyed a lot of this movie, but holy schnikes, the writers were so busy catering to The Rock and Vin Diesel’s contractual demands, they forgot to give the female characters a fleck of personality.

Is the franchise's increasing focus on international spy antics a positive development?

Chris: It’s fine for now, but I hope the series isn’t locked into the formula. Intentional or not, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh films were like an ultra-expensive experiment in genre. Tokyo Drift is a yakuza noir, Fast and Furious is a 1970s action thriller, Fast Five is a heist film, Fast & Furious 6 is a mishmash of James Bond and Mission Impossible, and Furious 7 is a superhero team-up movie. Fate of the Furious settles into a model, one that mixes the sixth and seventh entries into a proven blockbuster recipe. Maybe that’s good for business, but for me, it loses something that made the series special and unpredictable.

Tasha: Agreed. The series has been so all over the place that it feels deliberate rather than messy — almost like the rotating team of filmmakers are trying to prove that characters this broad and iconic can fit into any flavor of blockbuster. It’s like checking in on them every year or two to see what franchise the same group is cosplaying from this week. But the big “stop the submarine” action sequence from the end was one of the weakest parts of the movie for me, because the stakes stopped being about the people involved, and started being about some big abstract. Do we even know where that nuke is pointed, or how obliterating one city will get Cipher control of the world when she doesn’t have any other weapons as backup? Does anything happen in that sequence that feels like it involves real people instead of CGI? Were we really supposed to buy anything that happened to Roman, with his underwater car and its ice sled detached door? At some point, these movies have to stop trying to scale up to bigger and bigger sizes, because there’s nowhere left to go.

Is anything in this movie too far, too much, too fast, or too furious for you?

Tasha: I laughed out loud when Dom appeared in the middle of a heap of wrecked cars, hefting a shield and waving a weaponized circular saw around, like the most lost-in-time Mad Max combatant George Miller ever let escape off his set. That was pretty ridiculous. (Especially when the dude spraying him with bullets didn’t try to kneecap him, and just dutifully emptied a clip into the center of Dom’s shield.) The whole sequence at the end, where the nuclear sub bucks and steers like a mechanical bull in the back room of a bar, was laughable, too. But the only part that really bothered me was the car-harpoon (or carpoon) sequence, in part because it’s so visually muddled. As near as I can tell, Dom revs his engine and cars… just go flying through the air, because horsepower? I don’t care how many ponies you have under the hood, that doesn’t make other cars suddenly flip and fly. This isn’t a kung-fu movie.

Kwame: I’m furious we haven’t gotten rid of Roman Pierce yet. I know he’s there to be comic relief and an occasional audience surrogate, but I have so little patience for Tyrese whining about how crazy things are. You and your car got launched out of a plane in the last movie! Surely you know what the deal is with this team! Tej is funny. Hobbs is funny. We don’t know Roman. He’s barely useful in these situations anyway.

Chris: Kwame, I kid you not, the dude next to me could barely breathe because he was laughing so hard at Tyrese. Tyrese coughed, and this dude went into a full giggle fit.

Kwame: Okay, beyond my personal irritation, I was surprised at how lifeless some of the action scenes seemed. The prison breakout set piece was amazing, and I’d love to watch that again, but the zombie car sequence didn’t leave much of an impression on me. And then the whole submarine chase at the end was so long that I started to tune out by the time Dom switched sides. The drag race at the end of The Fast and the Furious was more thrilling than that finale.

Chris: Yeah, I second this. To return to Tasha’s initial comparison to the Transformers cartoons, I’d argue this movie, more than any in the franchise, worked like a collection of human-vs.-human fight scenes interrupted by magical robots disguised as cars performing borderline science-fiction hijinks. That’s fine and good, but at its best, the series blends human stunts with vehicular warfare. Remember the scene Tasha referenced, at the end of Fast and Furious 6, when Dom crashes his car into a highway median to launch himself into the air and catch Letty, who was ghost-riding a tank? That felt like peak Fast and Furious, and I haven’t seen anything like it since.

Ghost in the Shell is a sprawling, beloved cyberpunk series starring one of the most iconic female anime characters of all time. But the buzz around its live-action adaptation has been decidedly nervous. Part of that is the usual anxiety over how Hollywood will turn weird, complex source material into a blockbuster movie. But it’s also because of the controversial decision to cast white actress Scarlett Johansson in the role of protagonist Motoko Kusanagi, renamed Mira Killian in this film.

So when the movie was released last week, we went into it with a lot of questions. Would Johansson’s performance overcome our doubts about her casting? What would the filmmakers do with Ghost in the Shell’s distinctive cyberpunk aesthetic? And would it deliver on the combination of action and philosophizing that made us love the original? Now, we can finally answer them.

Major Ghost in the Shell spoilers ahead.

Let’s just jump in here: we’ve got a white actress playing a character who’s Japanese in the source material, with her whiteness supposedly justified in a big twist. Does it work?

Angela Chen: I’m going to go with “no.” I came to the movie with no background. I did know about the whitewashing controversy, but I was ready to give the movie a fair shot.

So, I knew Major was now Mira Killian instead of a presumably Japanese woman Motoko, but I assumed that she had always been Mira. When it turned out that she had been a Japanese woman who was literally destroyed and turned into a white woman, I was shocked. It’s like the directors heard the whitewashing criticism and thought this was a clever way around it — but this seems worse than just always having her be white. On a very visceral level, there are several scenes where people talk about how beautiful Mira is (and she is, of course — she’s ScarJo), whereas we never get to even see Motoko’s face.

Adi Robertson: It did seem like an emotional bombshell that was shrugged off. The idea might work if you emphasized the alienation of getting shoved into a “universal” white body by a company trying to produce the ideal human. If that had happened, her being called beautiful could work as intentional commentary. It would call back to the fears that designer babies will translate our biases and blind spots into permanent decisions about human bodies. What happens if our idea of perfection is one specific race?

Angela: People love to find the “objective” measure of perfection. Every so often, someone will publish a list of “most beautiful women, as determined by science” and it’s basically always 10 white women. Yeah, right. It’s never truly objective.

Kwame Opam: I’d really enjoy chewing on a Ghost in the Shell that approached Mira’s whiteness as monstrous, but the movie doesn’t do the heavy lifting to justify the transformation as anything other than an homage to fans of Kusanagi.

There’s a way to read what we see as intentional commentary. All the Hanka scientists and officials we meet are white, contrasting with the more diverse Section 9. The idea that Hanka is trying to create the perfect human-machine hybrid could also align with their vision of white racial superiority. The trouble is, the film never offers us a real way into that read, since we spend most of our time with Mira. There’s no thread in the movie that suggests the movie is about white supremacy in any meaningful way, and there isn’t enough world building to give us a picture of Hanka’s activities to back up the idea that they have any racial hang-ups.

What’s more, the evil of that cultural erasure isn’t dealt with in any meaningful way other than the idea that Mira and Kuze’s lives were stolen from them. If it were, it’d be really hard to position Mira as a superhero who’s still working for Section 9 at the end of the movie, armed with the belief that there will be more beings like her in the future. It’s a sunny outlook on a horrific situation. If all that happened to me, I’d quit outright, go on a road trip, and develop a real hatred of technology. There’s also the fact that ScarJo has explicitly said that Mira is raceless. That generous read just doesn’t hold up.

Nick Statt: I think one the biggest issues for me is that the twist has no grounding in the original. (Major is always Motoko in the Ghost in the Shell canon.) The script writers seem to have deliberately manufactured a reason for a white cyborg body to be the shell around a Japanese woman’s mind, either as a way to stave off criticism or perhaps as a manipulation of the original series’s message of transcending cultural identity.

But as you mention, Kwame, they do so without any of the deliberate narrative legwork. Never once does Mira utter a word of Japanese or contemplate her heritage, not even when meeting her birth mother. The film also seems afraid to even go near the fact that the setting is clearly a Tokyo-inspired city, in a time when America must be fractured — Mira thinks she’s a refugee — and Japan must be a dominant superpower.

I also see the twist as a pretty shameful, disingenuous reading of the ethnic fluidity of anime characters, which itself has serious historical significance. I’m already seeing people online defending the Mira / Motoko twist with, “Well, the Major never looked Asian to begin with.” Neither do a majority of anime characters, even when they have names like Naruto Uzimaki or Shinji Ikari. But that doesn’t absolve adaptations from acknowledging that these are Japanese stories populated by Japanese characters, regardless of how the plot or anime traditions allows them to appear.

Adi: On a side note, I find this doubly frustrating because I wasn’t a fan of Johansson’s performance. I like her as Black Widow, but I didn’t get the kind of cold, self-loathing recklessness it seems like she was trying to project here. It was more like murderous sleepiness.

Plot and ScarJo aside, how do we feel about the aesthetic?

Kwame: I really enjoyed the aesthetic, but so much of that is knowing that the creators really love the Ghost in the Shell aesthetic and cyberpunk overall. The entire opening sequence is lifted right out of Oshii’s film. The cityscape is right out of Blade Runner. Mira’s thermoptic suit is beautifully rendered (even though you never really think it’s a part of her body). I thought the world, though super blueish-gray, felt really lived in and fully realized, even though we don’t spend a whole lot of time exploring it.

Adi: How long can we keep calling back to the ‘80s cyberpunk future, though? Ghost in the Shell obviously has source material to honor, but it’s all starting to feel too familiar — yeah, we get it, giant hologram ads and flamboyant sex workers in foggy alleys. While it almost pains me to admit this, I liked watching it in 3D, though. It gave aerial shots of the city an interesting toylike feel. The makeup and facial effects were delightfully weird and varied — you’ve got a doctor with perfect human eyes that peel off her face like a sticker, and then Batou with his crude body horror camera lenses. Johansson’s fight choreography was solid. And to be clear, I do think this was a gorgeous movie.

Angela: I loved the aesthetic and loved the 3D. I agree with Adi that the “future” parts of it seemed familiar, but I didn’t mind. This is in part because the Asia of the future looks pretty much like the Asia of now (or at least the cities I’ve spent time in, like Beijing and Shanghai). So it didn’t make me think of ‘80s cyberpunk tropes as much as current world plus holograms.

Nick: It was immensely satisfying to see elements of the original film and anime series rendered with such care, even if it did come off as a bit too fan-pleasing. I also did enjoy the weird, disjointed clashing of Batou’s and other minor characters’ enhancements with those of the Hanka scientists and the Major. I like to think it was in service to the idea that cybernetic enhancement in the future is just as stratified by class as the homes, cars, and gadgets of today. In the nightclub, you had gangsters with horrifying prosthetic teeth and unconcealed implants on their temples and eyes. It even seemed as if the film was suggesting that these implants were like the Yakuza tattoos of the year 2030, a sign you underwent cyberization and perhaps did so under the table and with sketchy parts.

The Ghost in the Shell series has a lot to say about what it means to be human. Did the movie get at anything interesting there?

Adi: There’s so much fiction about cyborgs that it’s difficult to say anything new, and it’s particularly difficult to look at nuanced questions about memory and being — the film’s ostensible themes — when the core conflict is “should an evil corporation murder dozens of teenage dissidents, put their brains in robot bodies that they usually fail to mesh with, and then treat them with total contempt if they somehow survive?” (Probably not?) Setting things at the very inception of full-body cyborgism also means we don’t get to see people already dealing with its effects in diverse and interesting ways.

I’m willing to accept these limits in a serviceable, fast-moving thriller plot. But with everything we talked about above, there are a lot of things it could have examined more deeply.

Nick: This to me is where the film fails most visibly. The series’s loose theme is that the nature of consciousness is a tricky ever-moving target that, in the age of cyberization, is even harder to pin down. What makes you human when pretty much every aspect of the human body can be manufactured? This film adaptation scratches only the surface of the question, and it ditches the original’s deeper exploration of artificial intelligence to keep the script from complete collapse. It would have been nice to get a movie that could, like The Matrix, be both action-packed and philosophical. But maybe that’s expecting too much from this adaptation.

Kwame: For me, this is totally a consequence of trying to map a superhero origin story onto Ghost in the Shell, when that was never the point of the original work. Now, I’m not going to sit here and say I don’t enjoy superhero stories. But having the entire story hinge on Mira’s experience of her body and her identity, while potentially interesting in a “this is what it’s like to feel alien” way, undermines whatever exploration the movie could have done with how cyberization affects Batou or even Togusa on a deeper level. Not to mention the fact that the focus on beautiful visuals kind of takes the piss out of how difficult and messy any shift in our understanding of consciousness can be.

And that’s even before the ending blows up any real introspection into those problems by effectively saying, “This is the future, so let’s embrace it.” The movie seems pretty sure about what it means to be human, but only in the most shallow ways. Humanity isn’t only defined by what we do. Shirow and Oshii knew that, even if our ideas about selfhood have evolved since cyberpunk’s heyday. It’s why the original still holds up so well.

Angela: I agree with Kwame that there’s a missed opportunity in not focusing on how enhancement affects people like Batou or the doctor, who aren’t either fully human or synthetic. Everyone makes a big deal about how Mira is the future and she’s so special and different, but some of the other enhancements are so dramatic that it doesn’t seem that different from Mira’s experience. Where is the dividing line? 

Spoiler warning: This conversation digs into some of Logan’s major plot reveals, including the ending. Especially the ending. Hoo boy, the ending.

This past weekend saw the release of the first R-rated Wolverine movie, Logan, the bloodiest, saddest, weariest X-Men movie ever made. Many critics are also saying it’s the best. Hugh Jackman claims this is his final outing playing the superhero on-screen, and given how the movie ends, it’s easy to see why. But there are so many strikingly bleak moments before that ending arrives. This is nominally a superhero movie, in that the characters are from superhero comics and films. But it plays more like a cynical tragedy, a drama about regret, personal failings, and death. Director James Mangold and his co-writers focus on the characters’ emotions, particularly their anger at the way the world turned out, at each other, and at themselves. And in the process, they find so many tragic, telling moments. Here, three Verge staffers talk about the parts of Logan that wrecked them emotionally.

Tasha: I have never been the biggest Wolverine fan, but I still walked out of this movie absolutely devastated, and impressed with the movie for bringing up those emotions so powerfully. What hit you hardest about Logan? What stuck with you longest when you left the theater?

Kwame: I’m going for the full spoilers here. What struck me most was the fall and brutal death of Charles Xavier. That feels like a world historical tragedy within the film. Patrick Stewart has always brought such gravitas to the character. He’s the spiritual and philosophical leader for this group of people committed to protecting humanity even when they’re hated. He was never painted as infallible in the comics, but he had something of that quality in the films. So to see this great man brought low not by fighting Onslaught or the Phoenix Force, but by old age and mental illness, is a gut-punch as soon as you see him on-screen. He’s still an omega-level mutant who can kill people with his thoughts, but he has no control over his powers because he’s old. He’s not a god. He’s a frail old man who needs help going to the bathroom. And then to see him die so full of regret — I wanted to fall out of my chair seeing that.

Megan: This is really superficial, but obviously relevant to Logan: old men make me incredibly sad. I think a lot of it has to do with my own Old Dad. He’s in his 70s now. Fortunately, he’s in very good health. But I’ve spent most of my adult life away from home, and every time I go back, I can’t help but notice how he’s visibly aged; how he moves a little slower, breathes a little heavier.

Watching Logan felt like that. I’ve grown up watching Charles Xavier and Wolverine saving the day as powerful, smart superheroes. Now, returning to them in Logan, it’s like they’ve passed some invisible line. Charles is so fragile, a victim to the same powers that used to make him one of the world’s most powerful mutants. That, on top of seeing how Logan has weakened over time, drove me straight into bummer town.

Tasha: I think that also explains why it’s such a bittersweet thrill when Logan doses himself up with serum and becomes his familiar feral self for about 60 seconds. There’s such an emotional rush there, as he gets his old self back, and then such a sharp fall when the serum-rush fades. It’s like we have to watch him age all over again, this time in fast time.

But getting back to Charles: one of the many, many Most Painful Things about Logan for me is the way he seems close to dementia in his obsession over Laura, the first new young mutant, so far as he knows, born in the last 25 years. He keeps repeating her name over and over to Logan, who has no interest in her. In the limo, when Logan’s trying to escape the Reavers and Charles just keeps saying “But Laura, don’t forget Laura, we can’t leave Laura,” he’s like a little kid who keeps yelling “Mom, Mom” while she’s on the phone because he doesn’t understand she’s ignoring him, he thinks she just hasn’t heard him. The performance there doesn’t feel like Charles sees Laura as a person, as an actual child they’re abandoning. He’s not panicked, just puzzled. It’s like she’s an idea he’s fixated on. The movie is careful to not overexplain why, and I think that’s a brilliant choice, but it’s also a relatively subtle note in the middle of a big fight scene. Did that strike you the way it struck me?

Kwame: I definitely got the sense that he was desperate to save Laura not because they were all in immediate danger, but because she validated him. They’re running for their lives, but that seems almost lost on him, because he’s so fixated on her. And we only get hints of that in the dialogue and in the performances, but we do know that the X-Men, along with most of the world’s mutants, are gone. It feels like he’s trying to grasp onto his glory days as the great Professor X, as if he’s only himself when he has a young charge to nurture. And he really is warm and nurturing when Laura comes along, way more than he is when it’s just him, Logan, and Caliban. But read that way, he’s being completely self-serving and sad. He knows he’s a shell of himself.

Also: Charles totally killed the X-Men.

Tasha: Did he? I know it’s implied, with the news report about the fatal “accident in Westchester,” which is the canon location of the X-Mansion. And it would explain so much about why Logan feels responsible for him, and seems to hate him at the same time, which is one of the most touching and frustrating things about the movie. But I keep having mechanical issues with that idea. “The X-Men” is a big, diffuse group that changes often. They all happened to be in the area? And he killed them all? What about all the other non-X-Men mutants? Was he plugged into Cerebro at the time? Logan’s script originally laid it all out, but Mangold decided the vague implications made a better story. That decision deliberately leaves a million questions. And it feels like something we might eventually get a featurette or comic or some other tie-in about, but I do feel like it’s much better as an unexplained, implied bit of storyline.

Megan: Skipping those flashbacks didn’t bother me much, because I feel like we’ve already watched the X-Men all die in films at one point or another. Is that sociopathic? I’m like, “Y’all been dead to me since The Last Stand.”

What does get to me is the way that confession is set up. Charles is sweetly tucked into bed, reflecting on how he’s just had one of his best days in years, when you see him start to emotionally cave. He remembers what he did. He knows that he’s murdered the very students he’s meant to protect, and he knows he doesn’t deserve peace for it. And then there’s no hope for redemption, no moment of reconciliation over the anger Logan clearly has, because Fake Logan murders Charles seconds later. Charles dying, believing Logan blamed him — and subsequently punished him — for an unspeakable accident is the real gut punch for me.

Kwame: And think about what’s implied by mutants being gone. Even if we’re open to the idea that there are more in hiding — people who are just really good at hiding their powers — we’re forced to think about what the film doesn’t address, which takes us into horror territory. The X-Men have always faced persecution, but what does decades of persecution and potential genocide look like? Pierce tells us Caliban was a mutant-tracker at one point. Does that mean Transigen and who knows what other companies were hunting down mutants for 30 years before the start of the movie? The movie sure as hell suggests that happened, and it’s terrifying.

Tasha: So Logan considers the emotional fallout of big events much more important and relevant than actually presenting those events. There’s plenty of action, but even the action is more about feeling than anything else. For me, at least, that emotional focus was refreshing and daring, and an antidote to recent superhero blockbusters that have narrowed allowable emotions for heroes and villains alike down to “scared” and “angry.” For me, that’s what makes Logan feel so different as a film. It dives so deeply into the characters’ despair and mutual dependence and grief that it makes heartbreaking moments like Logan’s “Oh, that’s what fatherly pride feels like” at the end of the movie feel natural and beautiful, instead of cheaply manipulative. But how did you guys feel about it? Does the lack of detail concern you? Did the personal focus work for you?

Megan: I’m so burned out on grand-scheme superhero movies that I really appreciate the smaller lens. We’ve seen the X-Men save the world multiple times already; it’s nice to think that for once, it can take care of itself. Logan telling a more personal story makes it far more interesting to me, because even given all the mutants and evil clones, it still feels relatable. If you’ve kept up with this franchise, you have a relationship with these characters. It’s part of what makes this story so compelling. It would be sad to see these events play out on their own, but because this is Professor X and Wolverine, it becomes even more powerful. These are our heroes, and they’re falling apart in front of our eyes.

It’s kind of like that sweet family that Logan, Laura, and Charles stay with. What happens to them is a tragedy, but they’re also strangers to us.

Tasha: Oh god, that poor kind farm family. I don’t care that they’re strangers — no one thing in this movie was as emotionally traumatic to me as the moment when the Munsons invite Logan and company home. From that moment, I knew the Munsons were doomed, and the next half-hour of the movie was just waiting to see how painful and terrible their deaths would be. The fact that there’s no upside for them, no real chance of survival, and they basically all die for being nice people is one of the few things that makes Logan feel like a knife-twisting exercise in cynicism and nihilism for me. You can argue that Logan and Charles earned their deaths in karma a long time ago, with the people they’ve killed and the suffering they’ve caused. Or you could argue that they chose their deaths by choosing to be heroes, because heroes rarely go quietly in their beds of old age. But why bring civilians into it, and why give them so little chance to survive?

One of the most poignant single moments in this movie for me is when Will Munson pulls the shotgun trigger on Logan. The gun is empty and nothing happens, but it’s clear in that moment that Will sees absolutely no difference between Logan and the monster who just murdered Will’s family. And the audience can certainly understand why.

Megan: The Munsons’ death just smelled manufactured to me. They’re there to serve as collateral damage — we all knew what would happen to them the second they came on-screen. That’s probably one of the few times where I felt the movie was trying to emotionally manipulate the audience, rather than really earn a reaction.

Kwame: I’m still wrestling with that scene, to be perfectly honest. The film already goes out of its way to demonstrate that the world is ugly and cruel and that people die senselessly all the time. The fact that we go into the scene with no illusions about the fate of the Munsons actually ratcheted up the suspense for me, since I was sitting there thinking, “Maybe something good will happen! Maybe it’ll be okay!” Except that nothing is ever okay. I felt defeated when Will Munson crumpled on the spot after failing to shoot Logan. Maybe that was the point. Maybe everything about Logan’s world and what he brought to it needed to be wiped away before Laura could take up his mantle. I just can’t tell if the movie went too far in painting a world that’s so unrelentingly bleak as to destroy a family to prove a point about itself. Maybe if someone survived I’d have felt better.

Tasha: It certainly was an effective way of building tension, but yes, they seem like cannon fodder, and for me, it’s the bridge too far for this movie.

But as Megan pointed out, we know the other characters so well, and we’re presumably somewhat invested in them, and this movie just flat-out tortures them. Logan’s in pain all the time, his healing factor is failing, he’s in the process of dying. Charles is old and feeble and ineffectual. Caliban gets tortured by the bad guys and commits suicide. So it’s strange to me that I felt more emotional about the newbies to the story.

But part of that is that my investment in the lead characters doesn’t necessarily mean I want to protect them from harm. For me, the traumas they go through in Logan are about using these familiar figures in a different kind of story than we’ve seen on film so far for the X-Men — or most other long-history superheroes, for that matter. This story is about the end of stories, and usually in comics, that’s just a gimmick before a reboot. Here, it feels both final and inevitable, which for me justified whatever the filmmakers put the canon characters through. Was anything besides the Munson family too much for you in terms of the suffering and indignity and misery on-screen?

Megan: There’s a point in the film where Logan and Laura are talking about taking lives. She tells him she’s killed bad people, and he replies that she’ll have to live with it all the same. This is a violent movie, full of gore and death. Our hero is a murderer — at his best, he is a fierce, animalistic force of strength and metal. He’s always been that way. However much I may love Logan as a character, it’s hard to dispute that he has taken more lives than fans can count.

So as much as I appreciate him as a flawed, even broken, hero, I also think his suffering is earned. To throw some Shakespeare by way of Westworld up in here, these violent delights have violent ends. I don’t think Logan ever had any other path. But did Logan and Charles get what they deserve? Do their acts of cruelty, accidental or intentional, erase the good they did?

Kwame: I think the movie, as brutal and cynical as it is, is ultimately hopeful in that respect, because it assumes that what the X-Men, Logan, and Charles accomplished was ultimately good. Even if they’re all in ruins, did terrible things, and the world is on the brink of collapse, the legacy they leave behind is worthwhile. You see that in the comics Laura keeps, which literally serve to lead her to salvation. Even if, as Logan says, “in the real world, people die,” the legend is sustaining.

It’s never been clearer that Wolverine is a murder machine. He’s “the best at what he does, and what he does isn’t very nice.” But he’s still a hero. He still defends Charles and Laura, even when it defies good judgement. He still defends Will Munson from those awful corporate cowboys. And he dies protecting his successor from a monstrous version of himself. As ugly as Logan’s world is, there’s still good in it. That’s exactly why that final shot over his grave when Laura turns the cross into an X lands for us, emotionally. It’s the best way to honor the past, and what it gave Laura — and us.

Tasha: It’s also the best way to suggest a future where there are still X-Men, even if they aren’t called that. Without underlining it too pointedly, Logan gives us a group of kids with familiar mutant powers, because they’ve presumably been created from the DNA of familiar mutants — a new Iceman, a new Magneto, a new Wolverine, and so forth. And it suggest that they’re the future not just of mutant-kind, but of the X-stories in general. There’s a solemn, sweet, tragic continuity there, in that even if the originals are gone, their powers live on in new bodies. There are so many heartbreak moments in Logan that we haven’t touched on: Charles trying to convince Logan that it isn’t too late to be normal and have a family, when we all know it’s much too late. Logan literally trying to hold the life inside Charles’ broken body while saying “It wasn’t me.” That awkward, undignified toilet scene, with both men furious and embarrassed about what they’ve come to. But the film still ends on that barest note of hope, and focus on the future, and in the process, it tries to say “All that is in the past. Things might still get better for the new generation. Maybe this time they’ll do better, and be received better in return.” We can only hope.

CBS will be launching a new iteration of Star Trek next year. Discovery will premiere on the network’s All Access, and will take place about a decade before The Original Series. The show will also feature a female lieutenant commander on board Discovery, along with a cast that will include more aliens and a gay character. Needless to say, we have high hopes.

Star Trek: Discovery will be the first new Star Trek series since 2001’s Enterprise. That show lasted for four seasons and was met with mixed reactions from fans of the franchise. While the show did improve over the course of its run, it was the last entry until Paramount decided to reboot the franchise with J.J. Abrams’ 2009 film Star Trek.

While the rebooted “Kelvin universe” series (the films Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond) have been incredibly successful, they’ve also met plenty of criticism. The films departed from some of the optimism and utopian stylings of the original series, in favor of a more audience-friendly action-adventure narrative. This new series represents a major opportunity to reintroduce some elements people feel have been missing from the series. Here’s what we want to see the show accomplish:

An ongoing, developing plot, like Deep Space Nine, rather than an episodic series

The original Star Trek and some of its successors were products of their era: an ensemble cast of characters, heading off on a new adventure each week. That works well for the time, but television has changed considerably in the years since. With shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and The Expanse filling the airwaves in recent years, we’d really like to see how their more serialized nature could be applied to Star Trek.

Fortunately, this is what’s going to happen: Speaking before the Television Critics Association, showrunner Bryan Fuller noted that “we’re telling a much more serialized story, to dig deep into a very tantalizing arc.” He’s described the show as a novel in 13 parts.

How the leading lieutenant commander fits into a much larger ensemble cast

Fuller revealed that the lead character would be a different type of character than starship captains like James Kirk, Jonathan Archer, Benjamin Sisko, Kathryn Janeway, or Jean-Luc Picard. This new figure will be a lieutenant commander who doesn’t appear to be in charge of the ship, which should provide us with a new relationship with a large cast than what we’ve seen before.

We’ve always considered Star Trek to be a show that works best with ensembles, so it will be interesting to see just how this dynamic works, especially with one character taking the lead over the others. Fuller says that the show will be focused largely on her journey in Star Fleet, which is already a major departure from how classic Trek series operate. That’s something he’s already good at, as any fan of Dead Like Me or Pushing Daisies will tell you. Getting a sense of the early years of the Federation’s forays into space through her eyes will be refreshing, and potentially add more heft to the proceedings.

A diverse, groundbreaking cast of characters

While we’re looking at ensemble casts, we want to see this new ensemble push some boundaries, and to be really diverse in the racial, gender, and species makeup. The original series certainly broke some boundaries with its own racially diverse cast at the time, and the latest film, Star Trek Beyond, affirmed that Sulu is gay in the Kelvin universe.

The new show needs to do this, and a bit more. We’d love to see some nontraditional relationships and attitudes toward sex and race as a part of this world. Fortunately, Fuller has indicated that he’s fully on board here. “It’s about who’s the best actor, what can we say about diversity in every role. We’ll have more aliens than you have on a Star Trek cast”

Beyond that, we’d also like to see a bit more from the non-bridge crew people. What are their lives and motivations for joining an interstellar crew like? What are the general attitudes of rank-and-file Federation members?

A cast of characters that aren’t simply reimagined Original Series characters

We’re looking at you, Data / Tuvok / T’Pol / Odo / Spock-alikes. The Original Series laid down some solid templates, but that doesn’t mean the new cast has to follow in that lead. Obviously, we’re probably going to see some similar roles for bridge crew, but we’d like to see what they can come up with for new personalities that avoid some of the tropes.

A professional crew of explorers and scientists

There’s something to be said for shows about the leaders, who have to manage their ship’s operations and oversee its crew. Star Trek is traditionally about exploration, so we’d be over the moon if we got a crew of genuine scientists and explorers who are venturing out into the unknown.

While we’re at it, let’s also get some sense that the Federation isn’t made up entirely of incompetents, malcontents, and villains in the making. The movies recently have suggested that Federation officers are more likely to be bad guys than heroes. It’s time for a little balance.

No shoehorned cameos from cast members from other shows

Across its films and television shows, Star Trek has put together some really notable cameos over its history. With any new show, there’s going to be some temptation for a bit of stunt casting. Let’s skip right over that. We don’t need the older cast members to make this show stand on its own, and we don’t need an episode built around a kid who turns out to be a young version of James T. Kirk.

More unique aliens that go beyond humanoid characters with some makeup on their faces

With that in mind, let’s see what we can do to go beyond the aliens that are just people with putty on their noses / ears / foreheads. CGI, makeup, prosthetics, and puppets have been used in science fiction to great effect, and it would be cool to see a bit more variety.

This is also a really great opportunity for the show to play a bit more with alien cultures, and to flesh out individual species a bit more. Humanity is a vastly complicated species and collection of civilizations, and one might expect that any aliens we come across would be similarly complicated. Let’s go beyond medieval aliens from the medieval planet.

No more [insert trope here] planet of the week, and a bit of what we’ve learned about astronomy since the show first went on the air

If there’s anything that we’ve learned with the Kepler space telescope, it’s that space is weird. There are tons and tons of planets out there, and they’re stranger than we ever could have imagined. Some shows have played with this pretty well: Battlestar Galactica did so early in its run, as did Stargate: Universe.

With that in mind, lets move beyond the planet of the week, where planet X is covered in ice, and Planet Y is a jungle pleasure planet. Planets, like civilizations, are diverse and complicated.

Similarly, let’s move beyond some of the tropes that come along with these planets, where we have the peaceful agrarian planet, pleasure planet, or the aforementioned medieval planet.

No [insert technobabble here] crises solved by reconfiguring the tachyon array to create a chrono-kinetic surge in the chromium-sphere cluster module

Okay, technobabble is definitely something we’d like to see, but hopefully, it’ll be a bit more spare than in prior shows. It’s lazy writing, and we’re hoping that the writing team will be able to put together some problems that can be solved by communication, deduction, and decision making, rather than banging made-up tech together. Darmok is still our favorite Next Generation episode for that reason.

A meaningful exploration of this era of Star Trek

Bryan Fuller has promised a futuristic 1970s visual style for the series, inspired by James Bond movies and retro-tech. Since Discovery is meant to take place five years before James T. Kirk leaves on his five-year mission, that’s an odd choice, but it fits with Fuller’s usual obsession with striking, memorable production design. But the era has to go beyond the visual aesthetic to be interesting. What can the show reveal about that era that’ll make it more interesting? Since it’s so close to original Trek in time, what don’t we already know about those years? Discovery will need to find something that defines the period in a narratively interesting way, something that makes it a time worth exploring. Did anything about that particular time period change humanity, or the Federation, or anything else about the Trek world?

Finally, we want this show to be fun and exciting

While Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse are great shows, they aren’t exactly heartwarming or uplifting. They’re dense, interesting, and intellectually stimulating. We want something that brings back that sense of fun and adventure that the earlier shows brought with them, shows that imbued the sense of wonder and adventure that came with exploring the galaxy.

What do you hope the new show includes?

It’s May the 4th and you feel obliged to celebrate by marathoning all seven episodes of Star Wars within 24 hours. Great! You are not alone! But even with moral support, this quest won’t be easy. You’ll need something to keep you attentive and awake. Like a drinking game!

It just so happens that we’ve assembled the rules for such a game. That being said, nowhere in this intro are we condoning drinking alcohol. We’re simply suggesting you and some friends grab a couple bottles of Fruitopia and have some safe, sober fun. Remember to always drink Fruitopia responsibly.

Rules are as follows:

Drink:

Whenever you see a wipe transition

Any time a character mentions The Force

Whenever someone says “I’ve got a bad feeling about this“

Any time a Skywalker whines

Whenever the Millennium Falcon doesn’t jump to lightspeed as expected

Whenever you hear the Wilhelm Scream

Whenever the numbers “1138” or “2187” are referenced

Whenever Darth Vader force-chokes someone

Whenever The Imperial March plays

Take a shot:

Whenever Greedo shoots first (Why are you watching this version, anyway? You must be punished. DOUBLE SHOT.)

Whenever a large, spherical space weapon is obliterated by upstart forces

When anyone says “It’s a trap!”

Whenever a Force Ghost appears / is heard

Whenever somebody has their hand / arm chopped off

When anyone screams “Noooooooo!”

If these rules aren’t enough you can go all-out with our extended version, complete with useless CG characters:

Drink:

Whenever someone turns a lightsaber on or off

Anytime someone does an unnecessary flip

Whenever tractor beams are used

Whenever a random, unnecessary CG character shows up in the Special Editions (Warning: to avoid dangerous levels of Fruitopication, please only implement this rule with a safety guide present.)

Take a shot:

Every time Jar-Jar steps in poop

When anyone says “midichlorians“

Anytime characters enter a wacky space bar