Akhil Arora

Inside Out was a breathtaking showcase of Pixar at its best. In imagining our inner selves, the original Pixar movie gave life to our warring emotions, how memories are formed or repressed, and what it means to embrace great change. It truly understood how our brains work. But it wasn’t a philosophical treatise—Inside Out was great entertainment too. Amy Poehler’s unbridled optimistic Joy was a driving force behind that. She contrasted nicely with Anger’s (Lewis Black) outbursts, Fear’s (Bill Hader) jittery and Disgust’s (Mindy Kaling) judgmental behaviour, and Sadness’ (Phyllis Smith) willingness to wallow.

In one of the early episodes from The Boys season 4, a white woman—dressed in a tight-fitting red and blue outfit, who describes herself as an author, filmmaker, political activist, commentator, and leading voice of the alt-supe movement on YouTube—addresses a small audience at a conspiracy theory convention. In her opening rant, which she says will last the next two hours, she claims that Starlight (Erin Moriarty) is working with the “Hollywood paedophile cabal”. She plugs in a false flag operation, references to Satan, and implies that Tom Hanks had a whistleblower killed. Sitting amidst the audience, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) asks Frenchie (Tomer Capone) if people really fall for this kind of nonsense. He replies: “People will believe anything. Even something as ludicrous as the moon landing.”

Since the beginning, every Star Wars movie has had a lightsaber duel. On rare occasions, only in the prequel trilogy, have there been situations where we have had more than two lightsabers in one scene. Towards the end of the fourth episode of the new Star Wars series The Acolyte, a masked stranger—wielding a red lightsaber—confronts our protagonist. In response, they are met with eight lightsabers: some green, others yellow, and one blue. It’s a fascinating and incredulous moment, not least because we haven’t seen the likes of it in live-action Star Wars. It’s made possible thanks to The Acolyte’s setting in the High Republic era—a hundred years prior to Episode I – The Phantom Menace—during a time when the Jedi Order was at the peak of its power.

Less than an hour into Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga—the franchise’s first prequel, first spin-off, and first movie centred on a woman—the audience is treated to a 15-minute ultra-complex action sequence. In it, a young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who has hidden herself to escape the brutal and captive life she’s known, is caught in a raid on a newly built War Rig. It’s a giant of a thing—an all-wheel drive truck pulling a chrome-plated tanker, with a rail on top that allows men to defend it, and two digger arms attached to the side to deal with nuisances. The scene is even more fascinating. What begins as a parasail wing shooting out of a motorcycle is just the start. It has countless moving parts—the multiple fliers add dynamism to the set piece—and yet it’s all coherent and easy to follow.

“Are you happy with your life? Or have you ever wondered what else you could have been?” This is the setup and the premise of Dark Matter—the new Apple TV+ sci-fi series—that’s been created by the very author who wrote the novel, Blake Crouch. It’s a rarity in the world of TV adaptations. Unlike what the title might imply, Dark Matter essentially explores the infinite possibilities of the multiverse. The choices we make, and the roads not taken. There are a bunch of heady ideas floating through the series—some are given the treatment they deserve, though others are not tackled as deeply as they could have. The characters, outside of the protagonist, also suffer. Crouch does expand on the book’s rather straightforward third act in the final two episodes.