Monthly Archives: December 2015

Cinema Sit-Down, Movies/TV

Disney Under the Scope Part 2: Pinocchio

Just three years after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney followed it up with an adaptation of Pinocchio, by Italian author, Carlo Collodi. Unfortunately, upon its initial release, Pinocchio was considered a box office bomb. Time proved to be kind to the film; however, future reissues in 1945 turned the bomb into a profitable venture for Disney, and critically it has been hailed as one of the finest works of animation ever produced. Similar claims are made about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but as I explained in my previous review, save for its technical achievements and unique usages of animation, Snow White was about as enjoyable watching a snail race a rock. Pinocchio is a far different movie from Snow White in many ways, and serves as a follow up to many of the animation techniques used in Disney’s debut animated film. So let’s crack open this egg the world insists is golden.

Being a Disney film, Pinocchio is not lacking in its fair quantity of musical numbers, and thankfully they are much better here than in Snow White. “When You Wish Upon a Star” is a classic and is the closest Disney has to a theme song, as it perfectly encapsulates the company’s image of being the creators of childhood dreams. “Give a Little Whistle” and “Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee” are ear worms after the first listen, and “I’ve Got No Strings” is no less catchy. However, more than just being nice show tunes, the music of Pinocchio also directly interacts with the plot of film. “I’ve Got No Strings” is an actual performance Pinocchio gives with Stromboli’s troupe, and contrasts the puppets Stromboli manipulates with Pinocchio’s opportunity to choose a different life from them.

Pinocchio seems somewhat terrified looking at the lifelessness of other puppets.
Pinocchio seems somewhat terrified looking at the lifelessness of other puppets.

“When You Wish Upon a Star” gives us a view into the almost child-like naivety of Geppetto’s hopes for a son to magically appear in his life and provides book ends to the film. Honest John’s number, “Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee,” despite being among the simpler songs, is interesting for how much it tells us about Honest John’s intentions. At first glance, it’s just a little ditty John sings on the way to whatever he talked Pinocchio into doing, but he makes important changes to it as the film continues. After several repetitions of the same prose, John cuts out words all together and only scats the melody, reflecting how empty Honest John’s silver tongue is. As John escorts Pinocchio to the Pleasure Island coach, his lyrics change all together. While maintaining the same song structure and melody, he paints the song as a mere tool to trick gullible kids.

In my previous review, I commented on how great the animation of Snow White is; however, Pinocchio makes it hard to believe there was only a three-year gap between the two. Most of the animation in Snow White focuses on the actual characters, with mostly static backgrounds, and only a few instances of the characters really interacting with the world. The environments are detailed, but that’s all, and the story is told on an entirely different plane. The world of Pinocchio is almost a character in itself, and changes as the movie progresses. Smoke from cigars bend along with the characters’ movement. Most scenes are drawn with realistic lighting, with a clear source of light.

A lighting is treated as if there were a real lamp in the room, so Lampwick casts a shadow over Pinocchio as he stands in front of the light source of the room.
Shading is treated as if there were a real light in the room, so Lampwick casts a shadow over Pinocchio as he stands in front of the light source of the room.

The last act in particular showcases water effects that look live-action. As Pinocchio splashes into the ocean, a current forms around his body. As Jiminy and Pinocchio explore the ocean floor and ask the fish for the location of Monstro, air bubbles form from their movements and plop out of their mouths.

Not only are the underwater scenes vibrant, but the distorted lines of sunlight can be seen flowing on the ocean floor, as if actual waves are above Pinocchio.
Not only are the underwater scenes vibrant, but the distorted lines of sunlight can be seen flowing on the ocean floor, as if actual waves are above Pinocchio.

Monstro himself is a site to behold. Throughout the final act of the film, the audience is reminded of how massive and deadly the creature who swallowed Geppetto and his ship whole is. Once Monstro finally appears, he’s less of a monster and more of a force of nature. His entire being bends the world to his whim and his impact shows the audience just how minuscule everything else is compared to him.

Monstro rips apart a gigantic wave that Geppetto and Pinocchio struggled to climb. the water bends to meet Monstro's will, and our two heroes are further diminished by their size next to Monstro.
Monstro rips apart a gigantic wave that Geppetto and Pinocchio struggled to climb. the water bends to meet Monstro’s will, and our two heroes are further diminished by their size next to Monstro.

One of the greatest strengths of the animation in Pinocchio is how it gives each character its own visual personality. This is not just in terms of how the actual characters look, but it’s how they move and interact with both each other, and their world. Pinocchio’s movements tend to have a very double jointed nature to them; he can twist and turn in ways others can’t because he is a puppet. He turns his body around under his head a full 360 degrees and bends his limbs in grotesque angles.

Pinocchio bends in ways that would snap the bones of normal people.
Pinocchio bends in ways that would snap the bones of normal people.

While Geppetto is the opposite, and throughout the movie, we can see his struggles with an aging body. He struggles to bend and pick up the book Pinocchio is supposed to take to school, his hands shaking as if they are strained to do such a simple task. It creates a sense of vulnerability from Geppetto. In turn, his struggling helps the audience feel sympathetic towards him, and makes his attempts to save Pinocchio that much more heroic. Honest John moves fast and slyly, which mirrors his fast-witted, improvisational method of conning others into serving his goals. This contrasts perfectly with Gideon, his dumb and slow moving partner. Just by seeing the two carry themselves, it’s readily apparent both of their personalities and relationship with each other. The Blue Fairy is the uncanny valley problem that Snow White had in her movie, but with a glowing aura around her that makes her seem even more out of place. However, unlike in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Blue Fairy seeming out of place makes sense. She’s meant to be this great powerful being who can give life to wooden puppets, and her oddly realistic art design and motions make her presence take over the scene.

The Blue Fairy was animated through rotoscoping (tracing over live-action footage) which is why she looks so different from the rest of the cast.
The Blue Fairy was animated through rotoscoping (tracing over live-action footage) which is why she looks so different from the rest of the cast.

The Blue Fairy is a foil of sorts to Monstro: both act as forces of nature, and as such take center stage in their respective scenes. While Monstro acts with forceful, angry acts of destruction, The Blue Fairy creates her presence through subtle and gentle motions.

Pinocchio lacks the more metaphorical uses of animation that Snow White has; it’s all fairly straightforward. While it is very impressive, the movie dabbles in a little too much, “animation for animation’s sake.” There are sequences that are in the movie strictly to show off the fruits of the animators’ efforts, rather than advance the plot. Close to the beginning of the movie, the various clocks in Geppetto’s shop begin to ring to inform him it’s time for sleep. Then, the movie basically pauses to show us each and every clock’s unique alarm. Yes, they look well animated, but this takes several minutes to show us what could’ve just been a few seconds. This in turn takes up time that could be spent on more interesting set pieces. Compare a scene like that to a scene such as the children playing in Pleasure Island, where the scene is both visually more appealing and actually informs the plot. Through the acts the children commit on Pleasure Island, we see the destructive nature that lies behind kids when left to their own devices.

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The kids on Pleasure Island run amok, and we see first hand their destructive capability.
The kids on Pleasure Island run amok, and we see first hand their destructive capability.

We can see this come to a head when Lampwick throws a brick through a stained glass window. It can be inferred from the prominent usage of praying in many early Disney films that the company held religion in high regard, so to have a child deface church property would be regarded as a high act of debauchery. However, the movie uses up much of its run time with sequences that don’t inform nearly as much, and as such many of the plot elements of the movie cannot be expanded upon.

I cannot complain about Pinocchio being a boring movie, if only for how ridiculous it gets. It does progress at a quick pace, making sure not to drag on like Snow White does. The movie essentially revolves around Pinocchio’s journey to morality and learning to resist temptation. To that end, it focuses on two major arcs about things that lead us astray from the straight and narrow path: fame and pleasure. In each act, Pinocchio attempts to walk to school are halted by Honest John and Gideon, essentially the embodiments of the temptation that exists for him to misbehave. Each tale inevitably ends with Pinocchio learning why that path doesn’t pay in the end and narrowly escaping its consequences. The film does a fairly decent job of showing why someone would want to take these routes in life, however, the film ends up falling flat in each.

Pinocchio is about the titular wooden boy developing a conscience and experiencing his own rite of passage, but Pinocchio never makes his own decisions about how he wants to run his life. Yes, Pinocchio goes back on the path of education and morality, but it’s only ever because the other paths he took had run their course and basically forced him to return to the good path. Pinocchio was fully willing to become an actor in Stromboli’s marionette troupe, he enjoyed the fame it brought him, but then he wanted out once Stromboli’s true intentions were revealed. At that point, Pinocchio was faced with a decision of returning to the straight and narrow, or live to be used by Stromboli until his usefulness was up, then killed.

Seems like a good reason to stop.
Seems like a good reason to stop.

When Pinocchio meets up with Honest John again after escaping from Stromboli, Pinocchio tells him he doesn’t want to be an actor anymore, because “Stromboli was horrible.” This implies that had Stromboli not been horrible, Pinocchio would still be riding the gravy train of fame. At that point, Pinocchio is not making a moral decision and he is not developing a conscience, just a functioning brain. The same applies to his venture into debauchery on Pleasure Island. Pinocchio is all fun and games until people literally start turning into jackasses. People don’t develop their morality by having a variety of metaphorical guns pointed at their heads, they need to be able to sit down and assess their own decisions and make them of their own free will. Once Pinocchio decides to set off to save Geppetto from Monstro we finally see him make his first decision that’s not purely based on an ultimately selfish motive. His decision serves as an effective end to Pinocchio’s arc, shame the arc itself doesn’t live up to it.

Despite the main character arc’s problems, the film does succeed in creating memorable and likeable characters. Pinocchio may act like a naive kid who only thinks about what’s good for himself a few minutes in the future, but that makes sense given he’s essentially a newborn child. The center of Pinocchio’s world is Geppetto, and this can be seen in his interactions with Stromboli. Stromboli does everything he can to take advantage of Pinocchio: he gives him a useless hunk of metal as payment for his performance, he tells him how he’s going to make him travel and give nonstop performances and he even berates him during the show whenever Pinocchio does something slightly out of line, yet none of it really registers with Pinocchio.

He smiles as Stromboli nearly chops his arm off. Funny fact: Stromboli's a rather offensive Italian stereotype, with all that delicious angry broken English, yet the original story was written by an Italian.
He smiles as Stromboli nearly chops his arm off. Funny fact: Stromboli’s a rather offensive Italian stereotype, with all that delicious angry broken English, yet the original story was written by an Italian.

It’s not until Stromboli threatens to never let Pinocchio see Geppetto again that Pinocchio finally realizes the situation he’s in. This makes up for his lack of real development in the film, and allows Pinocchio risking his own skin to save Geppetto to makes sense.

Geppetto himself is largely made compelling due to his animation. At first glance, all we really get from him is that he is a loving father, but through the visuals surrounding him, we learn a lot more. He trembles as he tries to perform simple tasks, he always has a noticeable hunch when he walks and he apparently needs several dozen clocks going off at the same time to even begin to register the alarm that tells him to go to sleep. This gives us a view into how age is catching up with him.

Seeing Geppetto go to such lengths to search for Pinocchio despite his physical weakness is quite endearing.
Seeing Geppetto go to such lengths to search for Pinocchio despite his physical weakness is quite endearing.

This is especially important when trying to understand Geppetto’s bizarre mindset in wishing to turn his puppet into a real boy. Geppetto is a lonely old man who never was able to have a family of his own. He overcompensates for this through his woodwork and his house pets, giving each the care and attention not unlike a father to his offspring. Even his interactions with Pinocchio seem based on how he’s heard a parent should take care of their son, not from experience. This depressing subtle undertone shows us the kind of hopeful person Geppetto is. Despite never getting the son he wanted throughout his entire life, he’s still hoping for it into old age. He is willing to fight for this hope once he gets it, going so far as to go on an overseas journey to save his son from Pleasure Island. The film would’ve benefited had more time been spent dealing with Geppetto’s crash course on fatherhood, but he ends up being in very little of the movie.

The story of Pinocchio’s trials to attain boyhood, is almost equally the story of Jiminy learning how hard life can be to do the right thing. The only reason Jiminy is appointed by The Blue Fairy is because he proudly boasts his knowledge about what a conscience is. The Blue Fairy seems to find his assertion so humorous that she immediately lets him guide the life she just created, as if to tell Jiminy to put up or shut up. Serving as Pinocchio’s moral compass, one would reasonably assume he is just a one-note, know-it-all, but Jiminy ends up knowing very little. He consistently makes poor judgment calls in his mission to teach Pinocchio how to be a good boy. He leaves Pinocchio to Stromboli after he sees him at a show and thinks Pinocchio is a success. He gets frustrated at Pinocchio’s immature behavior at Pleasure Island and abandons him. While this makes him a questionable choice by The Blue Fairy as Pinocchio’s conscience, it does make him a more compelling character. While Jiminy does mess up a lot, he also works to solve his mistakes. By the end of the movie, Jiminy is awarded a golden badge, which basically is The Blue Fairy outright telling the audience Jiminy’s character arc is complete. While not the most subtle approach, Jiminy’s arc falls on its face a lot less than Pinocchio’s, so I’m willing to overlook the small moral anvil.

At least it's a small badge, so that's a a point towards subtlety, I suppose.
At least it’s a small badge, so that’s a a point towards subtlety, I suppose.

Coming from Snow White, Pinocchio is a relief. It solves much of my complaints with the previous film in the Disney canon: it’s not boring, the characters aren’t merely caricatures and the music is vastly improved. However, with the good, comes its own set of problems, such as the primary arc breaking a few of its legs, causing its moral to fall flat, or the lack of development between Geppetto and Pinocchio. Overall, Pinocchio is like waking up in the middle of a really good dream, it was fun while it lasted, but you wish it there was more to it.

More like copper Walt. Copper's good.
More like copper Walt. Copper’s good.

Hilarity Ensues

Batman You son of a…

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Cinema Sit-Down, Movies/TV

‘Mockingjay’ is No Mockery: My Review of ‘Mockingjay, Part 2’

The poster for the film, which was released November 20, 2015.

After nearly four years and as many films, the Hunger Games “trilogy” has come to an end. So huge was the climax that, as is tradition with young adult book series adaptations (see Twilight Saga and Harry Potter), it took not one but two films to contain it. After leaving filmgoers starving for more (see what I did there?) last year, were the odds ever in the favor of Part 2?

With the war escalating, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) leads a Section 13 strike team into the Capital, intent on assassinating President Snow (Donald Sutherland), all the while everything she holds dear—including Peeta (Josh Hutcherson)—hangs in the balance.

 

(SPOILER WARNING!)


 

First, let me apologize, Giga readers, for not publishing this review sooner. Normally I’d see a film like this during opening weekend, but I waited so I could see it with my little sister when she came home for the holidays. She loves the films, and I wanted to experience it with her.

Second, I think I should give brief thoughts on the films and books before I continue, especially since this is the second half of a what’s essentially one long movie. I didn’t see the first film until I’d read the book by Suzanne Collins, for which I was glad. I honestly think the books shouldn’t be considered “young adult.” In my opinion, they’re excellent dystopian science fiction that just happens to have a teenage girl as the protagonist.

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While Part 2 has more action sequences and set pieces than Part 1, it’s still not a glorification of violence or war. Some complained this made both halves slow and plodding. I, for one, was never bored. I knew that this was a film that wanted to ponder ideas and show the ravages of war. Ask any veteran and he’ll tell you, “War is Hell.” Collins pulled no punches with her characters, and neither does the film. Every character is either broken or killed. The novel, in most respects, has a very un-Hollywood ending. There are few, if any, happy moments until that ending, and even then they are realistically tainted by tragedy. Mind you, that brokenness is a bit stronger in the novel, but it still comes through loud and clear in the film.

Yet despite showing the horrors of war, the film, like the novel, isn’t strictly antiwar. War is ugly, but it is often necessary. Those who wish to wage it, especially if for a just cause, must be willing to pay the price. This is a difficult balance to strike. In a time when war-weariness seems to be on the rise, this film dares to say there is a time and a place for a “just war.” Yet it never glorifies it. In fact, Section 13 President Coin (Julianne Moore) uses tactics that are arguably as despicable, if not more so, than that of the cruel Snow. I applaud the filmmakers for unflinchingly exploring this idea.

Media has always been a huge theme in this series. The focus has shifted from being a criticism of reality television as the brutal opiate of the masses, to its use as a propaganda tool in wartime. Both Section 13 and the Capital use state-controlled media to perpetuate a mixture of truth and falsehood, though proportions obviously differ. This is timely in an age when information is rampantly available, yet most sources are biased. Deciphering the truth in the cacophony is an almost impossible task. This is seen most strongly toward the end of the film when Snow tells Katniss it was Coin, not him, who ordered the bomb drop that killed her sister and hundreds of Capital children. She refused to believe him, a man who had lied to the masses, but he reminds her that they’d promised never to lie to each other. This forces Katniss to see Coin in a different light—and in the end, assassinate her instead of Snow.

Mockingjay Part 2 is no lightweight in terms of acting. While every actor gives a good performance, it’s Jennifer Lawrence who, unsurprisingly, steals the show. Katniss is a complicated character: a young woman of intermingled strength and weakness. Lawrence is at her best near the film’s end when Katniss has returned to her ruined home in Section 12 and finds her sister’s beloved cat, who had always hated her. She tells it Prim is gone, but when the cat ignores her, she has a breakdown. She yells at the cat, throwing dishes that narrowly miss it, until finally embracing the feline, which no longer hisses at her. Lawrence proves once again why she won an Oscar.

Becoming more common in many films these days, the special effects are a mix of practical and CGI, though it seems to favor the former. Even when Katniss and her troupe are accosted zombie-like Mutts, the creatures are CGI only when necessary, which adds to the horror. Most things feel “real” and “present,” even when it’s a CGI hovercraft flying overhead. The special effects are used not as a spectacle unto itself, but as a means of telling the story. That’s an uncommon thing in modern cinema.

Mockingjay Part 2 closes out a thought-provoking yet exciting series of films in the most appropriate way possible: with a faithful adaptation of the final novel that gives the story time to breathe while pondering its big ideas.

Final Grade: A

Movies/TV

Going Into The Badlands: Episode 2 Reviewed

So another week has passed, and here we are, at the second episode of Into the Badlands. While the first episode didn’t exactly impress me, I was looking forward to this week’s installment. After the satisfying town fight scene in “The Fort,” I was confident in getting more good and corny action. However, I was less confident in getting a solid story and actors who haven’t recently undergone lobotomies. Despite my reservations, I still went into this with a hopeful mindset, so now I can talk about how “Fist Like a Bullet” didn’t raise my hopes much.

Action is this show’s forte, and episode two at the very least gave me more reason to say that. The first fight scene involves The Widow (Emily Beecham) fending off several minions in what I can only assume is a strip club. The Widow has an agile ninja fighting style, so much of the fight focuses on her dodging her brutish opponents and using her environment as a weapon. She jumps on top of the bar and kicks bottles at her enemies, and she swings around a stripper pole, kicking everyone around her. It all flows naturally, even giving it a unique pole dancing feel to it.

The focus on fast moving and small strikes gives The Widow a unique fighting style to Sunny.

The scene does lack the interesting cinematography shown in the town fight from episode one, but that’s saved by The Widow’s flips and her marksmanship with her throwing knives. The fight also maintains a tongue-in-cheek tone, which saves it from the return of the hilariously bad blood effects. All of the problems from the first episode’s attempt at gore are preserved here. At one point, The Widow repeatedly slices a guy up, and with each swipe of her blade, the same paint looking blood from last episode splatters. All of it looks goofy, but since the fight itself features a dress-wearing ninja pole dancing her enemies to death in a strip club, goofy isn’t out of place.

Sunny, once again, gets the spotlight in the second action sequence, and it’s very reminiscent of the first one from “The Fort.” It’s Sunny against a bunch of outclassed thugs, but now in a warehouse, which isn’t winning any awards for set design, but it’s better than generic woods. The fight is oddly serious save for one visual gag. The tone was especially hard for me to take, because the gang leader reminded me of Paul Giamatti.

Sunny deflecting the Paul Giamatti look-alike's axe back at one of his men was good for a chuckle.
Sunny deflecting the Paul Giamatti look-alike’s axe back at one of his men was good for a chuckle.

The theme of the fight is a race against time to save Ryder. After he is hung by the neck from the warehouse ceiling, he slowly begins to suffocate, and Sunny must clear the room full of baddies to get to him. This setup doesn’t really add much to the fight though, as Sunny still takes his sweet time fighting and making sure he looks cool while doing it. When the scene first starts, Ryder takes out a weapon as well, which got my hopes up that I’d get to see a team up between him and Sunny, but he’s strung up immediately after the fight begins. The choreography has gone up considerably for Sunny. Despite still being mostly Sunny walking all over everyone, choreography still manages to be entertaining. There’s a few interesting set pieces present here as well, including a fight on a series of steel girders and Sunny cornering himself in a small tunnel. Again, the gore effects are present, and are still bad, especially the scene where Sunny chops a guy’s arm off, and we get to see the stump. The more serious tone here does clash with the effects more than The Widow’s scene, but it’s still not a deal breaker.

I guess Sunny’s enemies were gelatin monsters.

Outside of the fighting, this episode did much better at keeping my attention than the last one. The plot was mostly more well paced, and I never felt the story was rushing as much as in “The Fort”. However, the characters must see something in M.K.’s “amazing” ability to emote that I simply don’t. Once again, M.K. manages to convince someone he’s just met, who’s supposed to be trained from childhood to be loyal to their baron, to directly risk their stations and/or life to help him. In this case, it was Tilda, played by Ally Ioannides, who falls to M.K.’s alleged charm. Within the first few seconds of the two making eye contact, it was obnoxiously obvious that the two would develop a thing for each other, although “develop” is a poor choice of words here. The overall M.K./Tilda plot line is a revisiting of sorts of the Sunny/M.K. plot of the first episode. The two meet, one is an outsider, the other is a baron’s loyal assassin, and the assassin brings M.K. back to their respective baron to be brought into their ranks. Then it ends with said assassin letting M.K. escape against their baron’s ultimate wishes due to a poorly developed relationship. So basically, if Sunny had made out with M.K. in “The Fort”, half of this episode would be the same.

Truly the face of an angel.
Truly the face of an angel.

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The B story of the episode follows Sunny’s further disillusionment with Quinn. As Quinn faces the realization that a tumor will soon claim his life, he becomes paranoid to the point of asking Sunny to kill the doctor who diagnosed him and his wife, as they are the only two who know of his impending death. Sunny refuses, forcing Quinn to commit the atrocity himself leaving Sunny to watch helplessly. This causes Sunny to commit himself fully to escaping The Badlands with Veil, who’s parents happened to be the two people Quinn killed.

Having the doctor and his wife have their blood link together was a bit trite, but it's nice to see some effort put into the cinematography that's not fighting.
Having the doctor and his wife have their blood link together was a bit trite, but it’s nice to see some effort put into the cinematography that’s not fighting.

This does unfortunately lead to the worst scene in the episode, where Sunny asks his friend Waldo about escaping. Waldo proceeds to spout nonsensical, philosophical mumbo jumbo that tries to explain that because living beings tend to desire to have a home to sleep in, they don’t actually enjoy freedom. The plot line itself continues many of the problems I had with Sunny’s relationship with Quinn in the first episode, but amplifies them. There’s a conversation between the two where Quinn tells Sunny about how the first time he felt alive was when he snapped someone’s neck, and Sunny looks surprised and horrified at this revelation. Last episode, Sunny had a conversation with the tattooist who marks each of Sunny’s kills on his back about becoming desensitized to murder, so why is Sunny now so affected by Quinn’s tale? Sunny’s lived with this man for almost his entire life, it’s not like Quinn is secretive about how callous he is towards human life, so why is Sunny being surprised by Quinn being Quinn as usual? The entire point of Quinn even mentioning the event is basically only to give Sunny more reason to hate him and hasten Sunny’s arc. The show’s difficulties in balancing it’s characters with it’s action makes it questionable that this episode introduced even more major characters.

The Widow was a fairly interesting character, part political schemer and part ninja. Her motivations are simple enough, kill Baron Quinn, but she also has interest in M.K.’s hidden power, and seems to be a bit more kind than Baron Quinn. She’s protective of her daughter, uses negotiation instead of brute force to expand her influence, and is capable of acting on a much more intimate level than Quinn. She also benefits from being played by probably the best actor in the show so far. While still not great, Emily Beecham provides far more genuine emotion than pretty much anyone else in the show. After finishing her fight in the strip club, she interrogates one of her assailants, and she is noticeably flustered. It shows us that she’s able to let her emotions come to the surface in high stress situations, even though she normally keeps a collected demeanor. Most of the episode is spent watching her engaged in negotiations, so we don’t get to see much more than her poker face, but there’s nothing seriously wrong with how Emily portrays the character.

She's also great at making minors uncomfortable by giving them baths.
She’s also great at making minors uncomfortable by giving them baths.

Ally Ioannides is less than stellar as Tilda. She is, like Sunny, supposed to be a trained assassin, however she comes off as a hormone stricken teen whenever she’s talking to M.K. The material Ally is given doesn’t really help her in that image, as most of her dialogue is meant to establish a forced relationship between the two, and it’s hard to make an endearing relationship happen with another lifeless character. She gets a few chances to show her moves as a fighter, but in each, she never looks or sounds like a fighter. Though doubtful, I hope to see the M.K. and Tilda relationship put to the side, or at least not be romantic, so that Tilda can develop more on her own.

This about sums up Tilda in this episode.
This about sums up Tilda in this episode.

Despite largely taking place in a new domain, much of this episode still carries the southern plantation aesthetic. The Widow’s HQ looks similar to Quinn’s, even though The Widow herself doesn’t fit the look. Her minions wear eastern style uniforms, but this simply clashes with the environments we see them in. If The Widow fancies eastern attire, it would make sense for her to also make her living space resemble that interest. The strip club from the beginning of the episode was a good change of pace, if only for the dancer with the saw. As the series continues, and more of the world is shown, I hope to see more variety in the sets.

...Or we can just get more of whatever the hell this is.
…Or we can just get more of whatever the hell this is.

“Fist Like a Bullet” is an improvement over “The Fort”. It has better action, more compelling plot, and has a focus on The Widow, the most interesting character so far, but it also does nothing to solve the last episode’s problems. Sunny’s relationship with Quinn still makes little sense and M.K.’s clear James Bond-esque mystique still eludes me while he uses it to charm everyone around him. Into the Badlands still has a long way to go if it wants to achieve more than just decent TV.