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With the future of communal cinema feeling so perilous, many of us who love the movies might be feeling it’s time to go big or go home. Give me a spectacle or give me nothing; don’t just tease me, jolt me. It’s possible to be both exhausted and hungry for experience, almost any experience. Most of us don’t know what we want right now—so we feel our way along, hoping that we’ll know it when we see it, or bump into it.
Is Annette—the first film in nine years from French filmmaker and madman poet Leos Carax, and a collaboration with the enduring and ceaselessly inventive art-pop duo Sparks—the it we’ve been waiting for? Or is it the year’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for movie, the monkey’s paw that pretends to fulfill some unexpressed longing but really just leaves you with a handful of air?
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As I stare at the air in my hand, I have to concede that Annette is not the movie I was hoping for, nor is it the movie I didn’t know I wanted. A picture that’s gorgeous to look at but too hyper-manicured to be genuinely moving, it hovers somewhere in an indefinable in-between. I keep believing that if I just think about it more, I’ll like it better, but it’s time to give up. Annette is an extravagant-looking and often inventive film, but it’s not a great one.
Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver star as mismatched lovers Ann and Henry, both in show-biz but each playing to the audience in different ways. Ann is an opera singer, fragile and captivating onstage, somewhere between waif and warrior. Each night she sends spectral melodies out into the universe, songs with the weblike clarity of spun glass. Then she dies on-stage, and the crowd goes wild—it’s her signature move. Henry is a perpetually angry comedian—his moniker is the Ape of God—and in performance, he almost literally comes out swinging, dressed in a hooded terry wrapper that’s a cross between a boxer’s robe and the kind of thing a bitter old man shuffles around the house in. He challenges his audience by refusing to capitulate to them, and they love it—his self-loathing pugilism is a turn-on.
Still, he does confess to that audience that he’s a changed man now that he’s fallen in love with his opera singer. And when, after his show, he zips through the streets of Los Angeles to pick her up after her show, you think for a minute there might be hope for these two—that she can soften his hard edges as you’d wear in a pair of leather shoes, and he can give her a little ballast, to prevent her, sensitive creature that she is, from blowing off the face of the Earth altogether.
These two are in love—we know it because they sing a pensive ballad to one another, “We Love Each Other So Much,” whose lyrics consist largely of that repeated line. (Driver’s voice is robust, like brown suede; Cotillard’s has the tone and texture of pastel watered silk. There’s plenty that doesn’t work in Annette, but the sound of these two singing together is one of the movie’s charms.) In their minimalist-chic house in the woods, Henry and Ann have lush, elegant sex, including some artfully administered cunnilingus. Carax and cinematographer Caroline Champetier stage these scenes beautifully, if decorously: the character’s bodies curl together like pale forest mushrooms brushed with moonlight, an image of fairytale enchantment that’s also delicately carnal.
And inevitably, these two conceive a child, though she isn’t actually a child—she’s a marionette, a beautifully sculpted puppet with enormous ears and unnervingly plaintive, expressive features. Her name is Annette, and she’s been born with an extraordinary gift.
Annette is an operatic tragedy written in big loops, as well as in some very repetitive songs. Ann and Henry may love each other just that much—like those little naked statuettes from the 1970s who profess their adoration with outstretched arms—but it’s not enough to save them. Henry’s love for Ann doesn’t make him stronger and kinder, but angrier and meaner. Driver’s height and brawn are used to menacing effect here. He’s never been so believably unlikable, which is certainly an achievement, if it’s the kind of thing you want to see. Ann becomes a victim of his fury; little Annette becomes a pawn. A fourth party, Ann’s loyal piano accompanist (played, with resonant tenderness, by Simon Helberg), holds a lonely secret.
There’s a lot of movie here: Ron Mael and Russell Mael, of Sparks (and the subjects of Edgar Wright’s recent and wholly delightful documentary The Sparks Brothers), have concocted a sprawling mansion of a story. There’s always a new door, opening almost inevitably into a shadowy room you might be hesitant to look into. The ending is set up to be poignant, and some may find it so—but I felt so worked over by the movie’s excessive self-awareness that, even at the end of this extravagant and sometimes impressive sprawl, I found myself echoing Peggy Lee: Is that all there is?
The Maels have been making music as Sparks for some 50 years; their work tends to be clever and lively and laced with bone-dry humor. But they’re also at times guilty of being arch, perhaps too taken with their own wicked wordplay. And Annette is, overall, too knowingly affected. In its deliberate stylization, it’s weird, all right—but this is assertive weirdness as opposed to organic weirdness. It also suffers from a maddening lack of clarity, even within its own world of opera-fairytale logic: In one musical number, a group of women come forward with MeToo-style allegations against Henry, but this bombshell is dropped and then forgotten. Meanwhile, Ann’s feelings largely remain opaque, and it’s not Cotillard’s fault: She spends a great deal of time staring moonily from the window of her limo, a half-eaten apple nearby. She’s having feelings, clearly, but they’re detached from her being, like a cartoon voice bubble.
Marion Cotillard plays a delicate opera singer in ‘Annette’
It could be that the Mael brothers and Carax just aren’t the best fit; maybe their idiosyncrasies spark an unintentional dissonance. The movie’s opening number, “So May We Start?” is the strongest, and it’s thrilling: We see Carax and his daughter, Nastya, as well as Ron and Russell Mael and a few of the story’s supporting players spilling out of a recording studio and into the street, where they’re joined by Cotillard, Driver and Helberg. Just for now, we’re seeing these performers as versions of themselves, if not quite themselves, and their singing is hearty and definitive. They’re warming us up for the show ahead, promising great wonders to come as they set up for us that figurative fourth wall we all love so much.
But nothing in Annette, as ambitious and sometimes gorgeous as it is, comes close to the haunting beauty of Carax’s last movie, the 2012 Holy Motors. In that film, the astonishing acrobatic actor Denis Lavant played a mysterious peddler of dreams and sometimes nightmares, tooling around the most beautiful Paris imaginable in a white stretch limo. The Samaritaine department store—once grand, but recently shuttered at the time of the movie’s filming—had its own supporting role, looming over the proceedings like a mournful gray ghost. What is Holy Motors about, literally? Damned if I know—beyond that it’s about all the things we ask of movies, blessings that, if we’re lucky, we actually receive. Annette makes a similar promise of emotional richness, but no matter how much of themselves the filmmakers have poured into it, the payoff is skimpy. This is a movie singing passionately to itself, even as we sit patiently all the way through, wishing it were singing to us.
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Here’s how you fly a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft: Climb aboard; strap yourself in; close the hatch; fly to space. The Dragon takes care of everything, so relax and enjoy the ride—unless, of course, something goes wrong, and in space, something can always go wrong.
So here’s how you prepare for that possibility: Spend months of 60-hour weeks in classrooms and simulators; master hundreds of pages of technical specs and procedures; learn the workings of dozens of systems and subsystems aboard the spacecraft; train for emergencies ranging from communications blackouts to navigation failures to on-board fires; and, not for nothing, spend a little time in a centrifuge and an altitude chamber, practicing for the g-forces you’re going to have to endure and the possibility of depressurization.
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“There’s north of 60 procedures that range from normal contingency to emergency,” says Jared Isaacman, the CEO of Shift4 Payments, an online payment service, who will be commanding the Inspiration4 mission in September, spending three days in orbit with three other civilian astronauts. “In a multi-day mission there is a lot of time for a lot of things to go wrong.”(TIME Studios is producing adocumentary serieson the Inspiration4 mission.)
Practicing for those eventualities aboard a Dragon requires a whole new kind of training, because by any measure, the new ship is not your daddy’s spacecraft. NASA’s old Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules were very much designed with an airplane cockpit in mind. Their sheet metal instrument panels were studded with hundreds of switches, dials, lights and analog gauges. Their simple on-board computers were controlled by a mechanical keyboard. The commander flew those ships the same way you’d fly a plane—with a control stick determining velocity, attitude, altitude and direction.
The Dragon’s designers swept all of that away, replacing everything—including the control stick—with three large touch screens facing four side-by-side seats. Each screen is capable of calling up as many as 10 sets of displays, allowing the crew to focus on a particular set of systems—guidance, environmental, electrical, and more.
“You have an overall systems page on the screen, and then you can drill down into individual pages as well,” says Doug Hurley, the commander of the first crewed SpaceX mission, which launched in May of 2020. “There’s a total of 25 to 30 individual pages, and SpaceX may have added some more since my flight. With any aircraft or spacecraft, you always iterate because it makes sense and it’s easy and will help the crew.”
Courtesy SpaceXThe seats in the Crew Dragon spacecraft are reconfigurable, allowing it to carry up to seven people—though four is typical for a NASA mission. Three large touchscreens replace the traditional instrument panel.
Ideally, the spacecraft helps the astronauts so much that they have virtually nothing to do, with the ship operating entirely autonomously. “And if the automation doesn’t take care of a problem, then the ground is your next layer of defense,” says Hurley, referencing SpaceX ground controllers who can problem-solve and issue commands to the spacecraft from the comfort of mission control. Only if the Dragon fails to look after itself and the ground staffers can’t solve the problem would the astronauts take over.
That’s the case too when it comes to the most critical aspect of commanding the spacecraft: flying it. The Dragon features a full-time autopilot program, requiring no astronaut intervention. On Hurley’s flight, he took over in the final stages of the spacecraft’s approach to the International Space Station, steering the ship in all axes, flying above, below and to the left and right of the station. But the purpose of that exercise was just to prove that the manual systems worked.
“In space you’ve got to trust and verify,” Hurley says. “But there’s no plans to do any more manual flying, unless there’s a need for it from a systems failure kind of scenario.”
Those failures do occur, and learning to fly the Dragon by hand can take some doing. Stripping out the control stick and replacing it with buttons on a touch screen may make for a more elegant spacecraft, but it also eliminates the most important physical connection a pilot has to their vehicle. Pilots using a stick never have to look at it because they operate by feel, but that’s impossible with a touch screen that offers nothing by way of tactile response. “When you’re flying off soft keys on a touch screen it’s a totally different feel, and a lot of muscle memory is lost,” says Isaacman, who is a licensed jet pilot and knows a thing or two about stick-and-rudder skills. “There is that delay when you look at the screen and input a command before it’s executed, versus something instantaneous when you move the stick.”
Courtesy SpaceX/NASAThe Crew Dragon spacecraft before being mated to its Falcon 9 rocket (left); the Falcon’s second stage is disposable, and the first stage returns to Earth, landing on a barge, to be refitted and reused.
Then too, there are the kinds of emergencies that not only require on-site human intervention, but require it to be executed immediately—and perfectly. Fires can and do break out aboard spacecraft; crew members on Russia’s Mir space station had to battle a blaze in 1997 when a fuel canister ignited. The biggest risk aboard Dragon is a fire caused by a battery overheating, and there are a lot of batteries aboard the ship—not only the spacecraft’s own, but those that power the tablets, cameras and smartphones the crew members will carry.
There is also the risk of a spacecraft depressurization, requiring the crew to look for the breach, try to seal it off and scramble into their suits at the same time. A launch emergency may happen too—if, say, the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that carries the ship to space fails to separate from the Dragon and the commander has to manually execute the separation maneuver. The Dragon’s guidance system is also subject to failure, potentially causing the ship’s solar panels to slip out of alignment with the sun and requiring human intervention to set things right.
Finally, there are the overall risks raised by the simple number of days the Inspiration4 crew will spend in orbit. Crews heading for the space station fly there directly and are usually aboard within a day or so of launching. The Inspiration4 crew will be in orbit for three days, flying independently, without the security the giant station provides—the longest a U.S. space a U.S. crew has been aloft in a vehicle other than the station since the last shuttle stood down in 2011. Every day spent on their own is another day during which something can go wrong.
Courtesy SpaceXThe Crew Dragon spacecraft and the Falcon 9 rocket a few days before the launch of Crew-1 Mission in Nov. 2020.
Ideally, nothing goes wrong on any given mission—and on the three crewed flights SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has flown so far, the ideal has been the real. But space remains, ever and always, a dangerous place to go. It’s for the Dragon designers to remove the risk—and even the work—from the equation. It’s for the crew to be prepared if that equation does not add up.
“I don’t know that there’s ever been a human spaceflight mission that did not have some anomaly,” says Isaacman. “People are telling us we’re making good progress. I think we’ve definitely arrived at the point where we’re ready and this is going to be a well-executed mission.”
The new DC movie The Suicide Squad is a classic James Gunn flick: Like Gunn’s other franchise for rival studio Marvel, The Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad is very weird and features violent talking creatures—just sub out a raccoon and tree for a shark and a weasel. But Warner Bros. and DC clearly gave Gunn carte blanche to make this movie as violent and un-Disney as he wanted: A lot of people’s heads get blown up, bitten off and sliced in half. The camera loves to linger on the bloody aftermath.
But wait, didn’t we already see some villains’ heads explode in another Suicide Squad movie. Why, yes, we did. 2021’s The Suicide Squad is a soft reboot of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad from 2016. (Note the all-important article at the beginning of the 2021 film’s title). Why didn’t they just call this movie Suicide Squad 2? Well, because Warner Bros. clearly wants to hit the reset button on much of the DC Entertainment Universe (DCEU). Some DCEU movies, like Wonder Woman and Aquaman, have been smashing successes at the box office and pleased critics. Others, like the original Suicide Squad, we are all better off forgetting—though it’s hard to stop thinking about the horrifying anecdotes of Jared Leto sending used condoms to Will Smith on the set of the 2016 movie to “get into character” as the Joker.
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While Marvel’s intertwining films and TV shows all seem to be leading to another massive team-up movie, the trajectory of the DC Entertainment Universe (DCEU) is much less clear. Both the MCU and DCEU are embracing the multiverse, with different heroes and villains living in parallel universes to one another. We will soon see multiple Spider-Men from different worlds together in one MCU movie and multiple Batmans from different worlds together in one DCEU movie. In this year’s MCU movies and TV shows, Marvel has introduced its new big heroes and villains for the next phase of its films. But with no The Suicide Squad sequel greenlit, Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill—who played Batman and Superman in Justice League—leaving the franchise and a new Batman movie starring Robert Pattinson set for next year, it’s difficult to determine how the pieces of the DCEU fit together and who the major players in the franchise’s future will be.
One thing is certain: The stinger at the end of The Suicide Squad signals that we’ll be seeing some of the movie’s anti-heroes again. Here’s everything you need to know about a potential TheSuicide Squad sequel (threequel?) and how it relates to the future of the DCEU.
The Suicide Squad’s end-credits scene teases a Peacemaker TV series with John Cena
Warner Bros. Pictures & DC ComicsJohn Cena and Joel Kinnaman in The Suicide Squad
Technically, The Suicide Squad serves up two extra scenes after the end of the movie. The first one comes mid-credits and simply shows that Weasel (Sean Gunn), who was left for dead during a beach raid early in the movie, is still alive. He wanders off into the forrest and, most likely, into future Suicide Squad films.
The second stinger centers on John Cena’s Peacemaker. In the movie, Peacemaker turned out to be a villain, or at least an anti-hero. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), the amoral government agent who came up with the idea for a Suicide Squad, tasked Peacemaker with destroying evidence that the U.S. government had been involved with Project Starfish. When Joel Kinnamen’s Rick Flag threatened to release the evidence that the U.S. government tortured innocent people in order to power a gigantic starfish weapon to the press, Peacemaker stabbed him through the heart.
Peacemaker was poised to off Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior) as well when Idris Elba’s Bloodsport put a bullet in his neck. Bloodsport and Ratcatcher II escaped, leaving Peacemaker for dead. Bloodsport used the evidence as leverage to keep his daughter safe from Waller.
Peacemaker must have some sort of superhuman strength (or plot armor) because it is revealed in the end-credits scene that he survived both being shot in the throat and having a gigantic building collapse on him. Waller orders that he be recovered from the rubble and tasks two of her minions with minding him, punishment, they believe, for undermining her and helping the Suicide Squad.
The teaser hints at the plot of the Peacemaker TV show coming to HBO Max in January of 2022. James Gunn wrote all eight episodes of the series and directed four of them. While every other new hero in Suicide Squad shared an anecdote from their childhood to explain how they got their superpowers, Peacemaker didn’t get an origin story. The show will explain how the character became the patriotic menace he now is.
A Batman spinoff and Justice League Dark are also coming to HBO Max
Warner Bros. Pictures & DC ComicsRobert Pattinson in The Batman
Peacemaker is not the first DC show to hit HBO Max. The excellent animated Harley Quinn series moved to the streaming service this year. Shows like Doom Patrol and Stargirl also live on the streaming service, while several other DC shows, like Supergirl and The Flash are airing on the CW.
But Peacemaker appears to signal a new era of shows that interplay with Warner Bros. superhero movies, with stars moving back and forth between television and film. HBO Max has a Green Lantern series in the works. Matt Reeves, who is directing the upcoming Batman film starring Robert Pattinson, is also working on a spinoff series centering on the Gotham City Police Department for the streamer. And J.J. Abrams is reportedly constructing an entire Justice League Darkcinematic and television universe for the studio.
The DCEU will contain multiple “worlds”
Warner Bros. Pictures & DC ComicsMargot Robbie in The Suicide Squad
Will the Gotham City Police of Reeves’ show investigate Peacemaker for his murderous ways? Probably not. The DCEU has branched off into at least two separate worlds, maybe more.
In one world exists the original pieces of the DCEU: Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, Affleck’s Batman, Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Leto’s Joker, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and Ezra Miller’s The Flash, to name a few. The initial plan was to build those pieces into a Marvel-esque interconnected story. But unlike Marvel, DC didn’t start with origin story films and build towards team-up movies. They started with the team-ups, like Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad and Justice League, and then tried to retroactively fill in the bios with spinoff movies for some of those characters.
None of the initial team-up movies were received particularly well by critics, but things really imploded with the premiere of Joss Whedon’s Justice League. The movie, which Whedon had taken over directing from Zack Snyder after Snyder stepped aside because of a family tragedy, disappointed fans and critics alike—so much so that fans started lobbying for Snyder’s cut of the film and finally got it on HBO Max earlier this year.
Now, Affleck’s Batman movie has been scuttled; Warner Bros. has issued no updates on several movies it had initially planned centered on Leto’s Joker; and Cavill is reportedly leaving the franchise for good.
Which means it’s time to reboot those characters—sort of. Warner Bros. already produced a Joker movie starring Joaquin Phoenix that has absolutely no connection to Affleck’s Batman. Now Pattinson will get a Batman movie, which will kick off a whole new Batman universe on World 2, if you will. Presumably yet another actor will get the chance to play Joker in Pattinson’s Batman sequels should the studio decide to revisit that villain.
But Warner Bros. still has some pieces that work from the original lineup, like Harley Quinn, who, despite disappointing box office returns for her confusingly-named spinoff movie Birds of Prey, has proven popular with fans. The movies about Aquaman and Wonder Woman have also performed well at the box office. These characters will soldier on in their independent movies, as will Miller’s Flash. And that’s where things get complicated.
The Flash will join together the various worlds
Warner Bros.Ezra Miller as The Flash, Ben Affleck as Batman, and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in Justice League
The Flash movie will acknowledge the existence of the multiverse. Affleck’s Batman, who starred alongside Miller’s Flash in Justice League, will appear in the film—but so will Michael Keaton’s Batman from a different universe. (Keaton starred as the caped crusader in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).)
Director Andy Muschetti toldVanity Fair, “This movie is a bit of a hinge in the sense that it presents a story that implies a unified universe where all the cinematic iterations that we’ve seen before are valid. It’s inclusive in the sense that it is saying all that you’ve seen exists, and everything that you will see exists, in the same unified multiverse.”
Confused? It’s only going to get more confusing to figure out how these multiverses work. Consider, for instance, that actor David Dastmalchian, who plays Polka Dot Man in The Suicide Squad already appeared as one of the Joker’s henchmen in TheDark Knight. Does that mean that the same man turned into two different villains in two different, parallel universes? Perhaps.
It’s unclear if any members of the Suicide Squad will ever interact with the Flash—or Wonder Woman or any of the Batmen for that matter. For now, we just have to start keeping track of the various characters in these movies on org charts and hope that studios cherry pick the best ones for spinoff movies and series.
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