The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 4

TV #27 of 2024:

Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 4

Still a loving and satisfyingly funny low-stakes riff on the Star Trek franchise, but not quite as tight a production as the last couple seasons (especially following the phenomenal crossover “Those Old Scientists” on Strange New Worlds). There’s an overarching storyline involving ships of various species being attacked by a mysterious adversary, but in practice, that amounts to a quick scene at the top of every episode that repeats the same beats with slightly different punchlines.

Other elements feel repeated too: another Badgey appearance, another Peanut Hamper / AGIMUS scheme, another look at Tendi’s conflict with traditional Orion criminal values, and so on. These aren’t exactly dull in their execution, but they’re not the freshest ideas for the show, either. Meanwhile, the core cast and their Vulcan friend T’Lyn have all been promoted to lieutenant junior grade — the lowest officer level in Starfleet, but a step up from the ensigns they’ve been in the past, to the point where they’re not even assigned to the titular lower decks anymore. It’s at least an attempt to breathe new life into the series premise, but it plays out as the writers perhaps running out of things to say about these characters and their wider universe.

It’s not all dire, and the comedy and esoteric references from across Trek history continue to land pretty well. But I’m not heartbroken that the show will be ending after next year.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

Book #88 of 2024:

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

I know from her publicity materials for this standalone adult fantasy novel that it’s a very personal project for author Leigh Bardugo, drawing on her own family history for its tale of a sixteenth-century converso (a member of Spain’s Jewish population or their descendants, whose ethnoreligious identity was violently suppressed under forced conversion to Catholicism). The setting does feel well-drawn, especially near the end when the longstanding threat of the Inquisition finally crashes down upon the heroine and even her magic doesn’t seem like it’ll be able to save her and her loved ones.

And yet… I want so much more from this book. It’s disappointing but understandable that the protagonist is so out-of-touch with her heritage, and I could imagine a version of this story where that conflict is front and center, with her grasping after the pieces of her birthright that have been denied her. But we don’t get that sort of focus here. She’s justifiably worried that she could be targeted for the Judaism in her past, but not about its absence as a tangible feeling in her present. (And when she is seized by the authorities, it’s for basic political intrigue, her sexual impropriety, and her special powers, not anything to do with her status as a secret Jew. The sorcery doesn’t appear to be connected to that aspect of her either, although its strictures are so poorly-defined throughout the text that it’s hard to say for certain why she’s able to do the things that she can.)

The romantic subplot is also a letdown for me. This may be a matter of personal taste, but it’s 2024 and I am pretty over the trope of a virginal teenage girl catching the heart of a brooding centuries-old man (to say nothing of how she’s one of those characters who’s continually calling herself plain while the love interest raves about her striking beauty). Bardugo managed to take that general concept in a few interesting directions with her Darkling in the Grisha series, but his equivalent here is a far more standard illustration of the type. I don’t really see what either lover sees in the other, to be honest.

Set all that aside and we’re left with the loose plot of a magical tournament to earn the right to serve the Spanish king, which a hidden enemy is attempting to fatally sabotage instead of outperforming the other competitors as instructed. The intense immortal’s tragic backstory is eventually revealed, as is the extent of his cruel master’s villainy, and there are some isolated passages of figurative language that are rather lovely. It’s all fine enough, but nowhere near the quality level of this writer at her best.

[Content warning for sexual assault, domestic abuse, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Book #87 of 2024:

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

This story seems like it fundamentally shouldn’t work, and yet it pretty much does, and rather gloriously throughout. One heroine is a trans teen runaway, fleeing her parents’ domestic abuse and refusal to accept her identity. Another is the elderly mentor she finds for her violin playing, who manages to be a compelling figure despite having previously delivered the souls of six students to hell and openly acknowledging that she’d like Katrina to be the seventh, which would complete her compact with the demon before the upcoming deadline. And a third is the alien refugee disguising her spaceship’s technology by running a local donut shop, who feels a mutual attraction with the music teacher and volunteers her A.I. daughter to create a virtual recording studio in her house. All are Asian-American (or else extraterrestrials presenting as such), and the novel is in part an ownvoices love letter to elements of that diverse community and culture.

The clash of genres marks this volume as offbeat, but it never descends to the level of quirkiness that some of those plot details might suggest. Everyone’s issues and concerns are taken seriously, especially the ones affecting the younger protagonist, whom transgender author Ryka Aoki imbues with rich and sorrowful authenticity whilst simultaneously surrounding her with the nurturing sort of environment the character was denied at home. There’s a tension here: Shizuka accepts her new ward’s gender without batting an eye, pushes back against the transphobia the girl gets from others, buys her hormone treatments, and doesn’t even judge her for engaging in sex work — and yet she meanwhile continues to lay the foundation for her pupil to someday be tortured with eternal damnation. But that angle isn’t played for drama, and neither violinist is at all trying to trick the other. If the young prodigy wants to strike a bargain for guaranteed fame, her tutor will facilitate that to satisfy the terms of her own agreement. But she isn’t applying any particular pressure on the decision, and is clear that the lessons and generous accommodations are in no way contingent upon it. The passivity is unsettling, but nice.

Where this book falters somewhat for me is in its prose style. It weaves between different POVs without warning, sometimes mid-paragraph, which makes it harder to get a feel for them all as distinct individuals with their own perspectives on events. (Captain Lan and her family are particularly underserved in that regard.) There are also a lot of deeply emotional passages about how amazing and transportive music in general and certain instrumental performances are, which personally leave me cold as a reader. I can buy that cover arrangements of video game soundtracks could be revelatory to someone with only classical training, but not to the point of a weepy listener being swept away to a specific memory intended by the artist, at least without the aid of demonic intervention. Still, no other title has yet provided me with a cross-species older lesbian romance like this, so I’m calling it a win overall. Happy Pride!

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, racism, and rape.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 12

TV #26 of 2024:

Classic Doctor Who, season 12

A bright new era for the show, with incoming Fourth Doctor Tom Baker — still many viewers’ platonic ideal of the gallivanting Time Lord hero, who would go on for a record seven seasons in the role — making an immediate impression. This initial material doesn’t always live up to his performance, but it improves as it goes along and finds a better feel for how his version of the character differs from his predecessors. The writing for new companion Harry Sullivan gets tweaked as the year progresses too; he’s rather insufferably misogynistic at the start as an intended contrast for the returning feminist reporter Sarah Jane Smith, but that characterization is thankfully dropped after his first few adventures (just in time for him to be written off soon into the following season, of course).

This stretch also features the introduction of the recurring villain Davros, creator of the Daleks, in a serial that’s so strong throughout it’s a solid contender for the very best story Doctor Who has ever told. And while the others in this season understandably can’t match it in quality, they are linked together nicely, with each tending to flow organically into the next. The Doctor and his friends repeatedly leave one situation only to find themselves in the setup for another, adding a welcome cohesion to the overall run. It’s a great launch and a return to the program’s more rambling roots, with the Brigadier and the rest of the earthbound UNIT team consequently fading in importance from here on out. I’ll miss them, but it’s no surprise that a franchise built on regular change and renewal has managed to successfully regenerate once again.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN (12×17 – 12×20)
ROBOT (12×1 – 12/4)
THE ARK IN SPACE (12×5 – 12×8)

★★★★☆
THE SONTARAN EXPERIMENT (12×9 – 12×10)

★★★★★
GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (12×11 – 12×16)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★★☆

Book Review: Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie

Book #86 of 2024:

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #44)

This final Hercule Poirot novel is not one of the better mysteries in its series, relying as it does on an implausible understanding of psychology for a serial killer’s eventually revealed motivation and means. It can also be frustrating to read, as the detective has returned to his didactic and patronizing ways towards our narrator Hastings, whom he summons back to the scene of their first investigation with news that he’s tracked a murderer there (someone linked to five previous and seemingly unrelated deaths, all of which have been officially attributed to other parties). Arrogantly, the old Belgian asks his supposed friend to help him look around for signs of who the next victim will be, but then refuses to share his own findings or identify the suspect for him, which constitutes a considerable handicap. He even pooh-poohs the reasonable objection from Hastings that killers don’t necessarily kill everywhere they visit, and there’s no evidence that this particular one is preparing to strike again. It’s strange too that the captain’s own adult daughter is one of the current residents of Styles — and thus a potential target if Poirot is to be believed! — and yet neither gentleman ever warns her to be on guard or attempts to convince her to leave. Instead, her father is more concerned that she might possibly be romantically involved with another guest, who’s a married man.

With all that being said: I do ultimately like this story a lot, and would call it a worthy sendoff for Poirot, who still gets to deliver his traditional stunning and insightful denouement reveal. While he doesn’t do much investigating beforehand — he’s elderly and in a wheelchair now — the book as a whole functions as a sharp character study and critique of him in all his vanity and moralizing. It’s not quite the genre I expected from this title, but I can see why author Agatha Christie famously saved it for last, writing the manuscript and locking it away in a vault for several decades before publication. It would be the final work she released in her lifetime, and she’s made no apparent effort throughout to edit it to conform with anything written subsequently but published first. Fans obsessing over continuity of the series at large will thus find plenty of details here like certain character ages that are difficult if not impossible to reconcile across the volumes. Nevertheless, it provides a powerful parting image of the detective exercising his little grey cells to defeat a criminal once more.

[Content warning for suicide, gun violence, and eugenics.]

★★★★☆

Postscript: I’m not going to rank every volume like I normally would when I finish a series, but here’s how I would sort the Poirot books as rated by tier. Note that I’m using the series numbering according to Goodreads, but that I didn’t read #7 Black Coffee: A Mystery Play in Three Acts (a play and not a book), #28 The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories (a collection comprised entirely of stories I’d already read elsewhere), or #43 Poirot’s Early Cases: 18 Hercule Poirot Mysteries (likewise).

★☆☆☆☆

#5 The Big Four

★★☆☆☆

#1 The Mysterious Affair at Styles, #2 The Murder on the Links, #3 Poirot Investigates, #6 The Mystery of the Blue Train, #14 Murder in Mesopotamia, #20 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, #21 The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories, #29 Taken at the Flood, #31 The Under Dog and Other Stories, #32 Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, #34 Hickory Dickory Dock, #39 The Clocks, #41 Hallowe’en Party, #42 Elephants Can Remember

★★★☆☆

#9 Lord Edgware Dies, #11 Three Act Tragedy, #15 Cards on the Table, #16 Murder in the Mews, #17 Dumb Witness, #19 Appointment with Death, #22 Sad Cypress, #23 One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, #24 Evil Under the Sun, #27 The Labours of Hercules, #33 After the Funeral, #35 Dead Man’s Folly, #36 Cat Among the Pigeons, #37 The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, #38 Double Sin and Other Stories, #40 Third Girl

★★★★☆

#8 Peril at End House, #10 Murder on the Orient Express, #12 Death in the Clouds, #13 The A.B.C. Murders, #18 Death on the Nile, #25 Five Little Pigs, #26 The Hollow, #30 Three Blind Mice and Other Stories, #44 Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

★★★★★

#4 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Overall rating for the Hercule Poirot series: ★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen

Book #85 of 2024:

A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen (Waxways #1)

This YA fantasy novel grows on me as it goes along, but the first quarter or so of the text could really have been tightened up. That’s how long it takes for the story to spring its basic premise, introduced in the opening pages before the lengthy flashback: a transportation spell has gone wrong, stranding a half-dozen student wizards in the uninhabited lands far from the safety of home. One of the teens is dead upon arrival, and the rest soon realize that something is hunting them as they make their slow way back towards civilization on foot, carefully rationing their dwindling magic. It’s a genre twist on a wilderness survival plot, sort of like The Scholomance meets The Hunger Games (with perhaps a hint of Red Rising, given the protagonist’s status as a scholarship kid secretly resentful of her privileged upper-class peers).

The bulk of the ensuing tale is great, with additional slasher movie vibes as the remaining group members get steadily picked off by the creature stalking after them. I enjoy the distinctive candle-based magical system, as well as the complicated romance that develops. And the ending does eventually reconnect with everything established about the characters’ city and school early on, setting up the next installment in the trilogy quite nicely. At the same time, however, the narrative plays coy around some of the heroine’s specific motivations for far too long, leading her to feel a bit ungrounded outside of the immediate crisis until rather late in the book. I’ll stop there before I stray into spoilers, but generally speaking I’d give this title 3.5 stars rounded up, with high hopes that a more straightforward sequel will be even better.

[Content warning for drug abuse, torture, amputation, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Happy Place by Emily Henry

Book #84 of 2024:

Happy Place by Emily Henry

I don’t read a ton of romance novels, but author Emily Henry’s Book Lovers was such a pleasant surprise for me that I decided to check out this next title of hers as well. Unfortunately, I haven’t liked it nearly as much in either its premise or its execution, both of which rely on a frustratingly high degree of miscommunication — a trope that I don’t have very much patience for in general, and especially not in stories about seemingly well-adjusted adults with grown-up responsibilities.

Our 30-year-old protagonist here, for example, broke up with her long-distance fiancé six months ago and still hasn’t gotten around to informing her supposed best friends, who were in the same tight-knit social circle with the two of them back in college. When one invites her to visit the family vacation home where they’ve made fond memories in the past, she thinks it’ll be a good opportunity to finally break the news, only to be surprised when she gets there that her ex has flown in too. So that’s already multiple counts of people not talking to one another: the heroine and the guy each keeping their breakup a secret from everyone else, and him not telling her he’d be coming after getting pressured into it by their hostess. (He protests that he called and left her a voicemail, which she didn’t get because she blocked his number. But he didn’t confirm she’d received the message before booking airfare for a super awkward reunion? He didn’t try reaching out by email or social media or any other method??)

To not ruin the weeklong getaway for the others, the former couple pretend to still be an item, though it’s obvious from their chemistry that they’re not really over one another anyway. It doesn’t help that, per genre conventions, they’re stuck in close quarters and sharing a single bed, either. They’re also only obliquely discussing the reasons behind their separation in whispered private asides, which means that readers are kept in the dark about any specifics until relatively late in the text. Eventually we learn that, sure enough, it all stems from a series of misunderstandings and assumptions they never questioned about each other and their respective priorities. Oh — and minor spoiler alert, but it turns out the love interest was included in these plans because the organizer found out about the split and is trying to Parent Trap the lovers back together again, so she’s been patronizingly lying the whole time too. Sigh.

Different elements are handled better. I do like the six main characters for the most part, and the non-romantic side of the plot is a fairly nuanced exploration of the sadness and anxiety that can stem from the natural progression of time and the post-collegiate feeling of moving on in life from the folks who used to be your closest peers. But this is primarily a love story with a predictable ending, all predicated on none of the participants actually voicing what’s upsetting them, and that’s just not my cup of tea overall.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Day Tripper by James Goodhand

Book #83 of 2024:

The Day Tripper by James Goodhand

An interesting time-travel premise bogged down by an unlikable protagonist and a few unresolved logistical issues. Following a traumatic head injury, our hero begins bouncing around his personal timeline, waking up each morning at some new point in his future — never earlier than when he was hit in 1995, but anywhere between then and 2023 or so. The most compelling element here is initially how bleak those later days are, and how that history apparently cannot be changed. He finds for example that his older self is a homeless drug addict, estranged from all his family and friends, and that he’s served time in prison for his role in the death of the woman he’s dating back in the present.

Eventually, he’s scared straight Scrooge-style and learns that he can make changes after all, leading him to seek help for his problems and ultimately win a happily-ever-after with the girl of his dreams. (Weirdly, A Christmas Carol isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text, while It’s a Wonderful Life is brought up at several points — yet of those two classic Yuletide stories about time-travel, the former is surely far closer to paralleling Alex’s situation.) I don’t quite buy his growth, however, and I’m somewhat bothered over the people whose fates he disrupts through his actions, like the man his love interest would have originally gone on to marry before he rewrites their reality. Because he never once comes clean with her — or anybody else — about his circumstances and the knowledge he’s gained about the future, there’s a predatory calculation to his moves that I don’t believe is intentional but goes utterly unaddressed. As a result, she reads less like a person with her own agency and interiority in this novel and more like a video game challenge he’s taking multiple attempts to solve.

It’s also not clear how the other character who’s in a similar predicament experiences or feels about the altered timeline, nor why he, who’s been at it for much longer, was wrongly convinced that change was impossible. And since neither of their ‘day tripper’ conditions is ever cured, it strikes me as strange that the two men are always leaping into a stable status quo where their memory gaps and erratic behaviors are inevitably noticed and called out. (If Alex spends the rest of his life hopping disjointedly from day to day, how can he possibly build anything like the happy home and new career we see at the end, especially without letting anyone in on the big secret?) Such implications nag at me, but this book isn’t really interested in exploring them.

Overall, I think the work succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is why I’ll rate it as highly as three stars out of five. Although all that darkness in the initial course of events is striking, a stronger plot might have left it immovable and forced the doomed protagonist to come to terms with the consequences that his poor choices have wrought. Instead, it seems just a bit too easy for him to figure out how to avoid that fate altogether.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse including drunk-driving, self-harm, suicide, domestic abuse, homophobic violence, and underage sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Jhereg by Steven Brust

Book #82 of 2024:

Jhereg by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #1)

Pretty decent for an authorial debut, though it’s heavier on infodumping exposition than it needs to be, especially with the protagonist repeatedly learning something that he probably should have already known as a denizen of this particular fantasy world. (On the other hand, the genre was admittedly in a different place back in 1983, and this facet isn’t egregiously worse than in many titles of that era.) I think at this point it’s at least the fifth novel in its series chronologically, as author Steven Brust has weaved his way up and down the timeline while writing, but for this reread, I’m opting to go strictly by original publication order. This book initially introduced contemporary readers to the assassin Vlad Taltos and the wider setting of the Dragaeran Empire, and so it’s the spot where I’m diving back in.

It’s a bit of a bumpy journey, and not just because I read these books haphazardly several decades ago and don’t remember them too clearly. This initial volume has a lot that it’s trying to accomplish in terms of character, worldbuilding, and plot, and it’s that middle category that the writer seems most interested in conveying. Briefly: we’re in a land ruled by a people who are basically standard Tolkien elf types, living for thousands of years and possessing a variety of useful magical skills. Humans are here too — okay, confusingly both species call themselves human, but I mean recognizable Homo sapiens — which we’re told is because another sort of being now-vanished but who enslaved the Dragaerans in the ancient past brought some of us over from Earth as control subjects for their experiments. In the present day, the two races live in relative peace, though the ‘Easterner’ Vlad is a racial minority within the empire. He’s also a member of House Jhereg, one of seventeen noble clans and the one that’s specifically structured around organized crime like the real-life Mafia. The Jhereg run illicit gambling dens, thieving rings, protection rackets, and more, and it’s an open question as to how much of their flagrant illegality is officially condoned by the authorities.

Our hero, as mentioned, is a killer for hire, though his guild has firm rules about acceptable cases and conduct. He’s also a practitioner of both sorcery (psychic-based Dragaeran magic, like telepathic communication and teleportation) and witchcraft (a more loosely-defined set of Easterner abilities), the latter of which has gained him a jhereg familiar — the lowercase variant referring to the small but ferocious flying reptile, not the imperial House named after the creature. Vlad can send Loiosh on errands or call on his aid in a fight, but mostly he’s there for private sardonic banter. Further complicating all this lore is the issue of death itself, which is obviously the protagonist’s stock-in-trade. It turns out that a) people can reincarnate, even across species lines, and can sometimes learn to access memories of their former lives, and b) corpses can be magically resurrected if the spells are performed quickly enough, though there are specialized weapons to destroy the victim’s soul utterly and thereby prevent that. Hiring someone in Vlad’s line of work to use one of those costs extra, of course.

It’s a lot to squeeze into what’s overall a fairly slim book, which results in the characters and the immediate storyline alike feeling a bit shortchanged. Vlad is already friends with a surprising number of highly skilled individuals, and while the prequels would explore the origins of those relationships at greater length, it feels a bit easy here for him to be able to call on all the specialists he requires at a moment’s thought. The mechanics of the prose are awkward too — I suppose I don’t mind a fantasy saga using colloquial nouns like “guys” and “stuff,” but it’s somewhat jarring in the midst of the more imaginative concepts, as is the point in the planning-a-heist stage when the assassin says something tropey like “Here’s the plan…” right before a scene break that’s plainly intended to keep readers in the dark for longer.

But generally, this is fun. Fantasy noir is a promising combination, and if the plot is rather basic this first time out — somebody’s stolen a fortune from the Jhereg operating funds, leading the (anti)hero’s superiors to tap him for the retrieval and eventual complications — it’s still an effective showcase for all of Brust’s ideas. My hope is that the subsequent volumes don’t feel the need to explain quite so much, giving more room for the story and cast to breathe (and that the author pulls back from some of the sexism and racial essentialism that’s regrettably on display in this debut). But reading Vlad matter-of-factly describe where his weapons are hidden around his body and then watching him suddenly have to put them to use when an approaching waiter pulls a blade first? Yeah, that’s the good stuff.

[Content warning for torture and sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Movie #14 of 2024:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Prequels are tricky creatures, by design working towards an ending that the audience already knows. The ones that work best tend to focus not on lining up the logistics of the original piece, but rather a) telling compelling new stories that happen to occur earlier and b) tracing internal character evolutions rather than mechanical plot movements. In other words: the 2014 film Mad Max: Fury Road already told us that Imperator Furiosa came from an egalitarian community in a verdant oasis far from Immortan Joe’s Citadel, and that she feigned loyalty to the warlord until finding the right opportunity to return there. Seeing that same information play out on screen over several hours needs to bring something more to the equation, much as the shows Better Call Saul or Andor have done to elevate their own source material.

The effort here is moderately successful. With Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy stepping into Charlize Theron’s former role as the child / younger adult Furiosa, we watch as she’s captured by slavers, briefly rescued by her mom, caught again, and traded from one captor to another, subsequently coming of age whilst gaining the skills she’ll need to thrive in the post-apocalyptic setting of the Mad Max wasteland. Around her, those two villains are clashing — the tyrannical Immortan she’ll later betray in Fury Road and newcomer Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, a bloodthirsty chaos agent who killed her mother and hoped to raid their homeland. Although our protagonist initially plans to simply flee for home, she gets caught up in the war against Dementus and an emotional connection with another of the Citadel lieutenants, rising in Joe’s ranks and esteem as her quest for vengeance overlaps her personal concerns with his own strategic ones.

The problem is that too much of this movie isn’t about the title character’s growth or journey at all. Although she’s on screen for most of its runtime, she is mostly there as a witness to the conflict between the two antagonists, leading to lengthy scenes where our only driving concern is her specific survival, which we know is assured due to the constraints of the prequel format. The surrounding action is relatively meaningless, as nothing about Furiosa as a person or her animating goals is contingent on which evil bloke happens to triumph in the present squabble. Even the aforementioned quasi-relationship that develops between the heroine and Praetorian Jack is shortchanged by the script, relying on a few mutually longing looks and a time jump — one of several in this disjointed narrative — to sketch out their dynamic.

All that’s left is the crowd-pleasing spectacle of the violence itself, which reasonably satisfies that requirement but never feels quite as focused as the tight plotting of Fury Road. In my recent review after rewatching that film, I praised how “the editing of these sequences is always crystal-clear as to what’s happening where and when.” By contrast, this follow-up periodically loses its grasp on such matters. The exact size and location of Dementus’s forces in particular is a real head-scratcher, swelling and shrinking and moving all around the map as the immediate scene requires.

Is it fun to revisit the setting of Fury Road? Undeniably. The new worldbuilding details aren’t as rich, but it’s a delight to see the gleefully suicidal War Boys and their chrome spray paint again, not to mention all the modded cars and campy name / outfit choices as everyone races back and forth across the desert. There’s even a little thrill in spotting a few returning minor characters and places like Gastown and the Bullet Farm that were only mentioned in dialogue before, even if this sometimes strays into that trap of purely existing to answer logistical questions that no one was really asking. Overall, I wouldn’t say this newest Mad Max title is mediocre…. but it’s certainly not going to be awaited in Valhalla, either.

[Content warning for gun violence, sexual assault, and gore including amputation.]

★★★☆☆