THE FULL LID
19th August 2022
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Welcome, my friends, to The Full Lid, where every Friday we bring you the best of positive pop culture commentary. This week we've got some of the wonderful cover versions Westworld has used as our interstitials, as well as all of this:
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Contents
Prey
Golden Rage
Signal Boost
Where You Can Find Us This Week
The Department of Received Esoteric Print Goods
Signing Off / Playing Out
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Prey
Editor's note: Spoilers. Prey (2022) is rated UK 16 / US R and has content warnings for violence and gore (human and animals). The dog is injured but lives and is an excellent doggo.
It's 1719 on the Great Plains and its hunting season. For Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman, that means struggling to be seen as an equal to her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) and his friends. But Naru isn't alone out in the wilds and whether she's hunter, prey or both is about to become the biggest question in her life.
The Predator movies are blood-stained mirrors, reflecting whatever they're held up to. Sometimes that's a cornucopia (the correct collective noun, I choose to believe, is 'A Flex') of classic action stars. Sometimes it's a likable and profoundly doomed group of cops from the dystopian near future of the 1990s. Sometimes it's a group of terrifying humans marooned on an alien world. Sometimes it's an unholy combination of massive re-shoots and terrible choices.
Here its Naru, and her foe the Predator (Dane DiLiegro). A conflict as simple as blood.
Except it isn't. Prey works because every choice weaves into a larger story. Director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison have put together a movie that casts multiple reflections: a self-contained event, a prequel to everything else we've seen from the franchise before, and the pressures of proving yourself in a field where no one knows or cares who you are. For the Predator, it's a whistle stop tour of murdering their way up the food chain. For Naru it's realizing she's no longer looking for the good fight, the good fight has found her. Now she just has to win.
Midthunder turns in the best lead performance this franchise has ever seen. She's a physical presence throughout with exemplary action work, all the while showing us the battle Naru constantly fights just to be acknowledged. That battle is neatly off set by her scenes with her mother, Aruka (Michelle Thrush), and there's a refreshing lack of the sort of 'But you're just a girl!' beats you'd expect. Aruka is supportive of both her children, even if she'd prefer Naru to follow the same path as she did.
Her other relationships are far closer to the frontline. Taabe, played with amiable older brother charm by Beavers, struggles to accept his sister is the woman she is and not the kid he still remembers. Wasape (Stormee Kipp) and his friends bully Naru not because she's weaker than they are but because they know she doesn't back down. It's not that Naru doesn't stop, it's that she doesn't stop thinking, an edge over her opponents she hones constantly.
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Speaking of everyone's favourite murderous big lad, Deligro has a lot of screen time as the movie progresses. His Predator is more reptilian, lankier and far more hands-on with an exuberant brutality that conveys 'THREAT' from the moment we first see him and his faceless helmet made of bone.
All of this is impressive, but Trachtenberg and Aison make choices that ground the portrayal not only in their historical context, but also reflect modern audiences. The Predator's weapons, here several hundreds years before the first movie, are recognizable but noticeably less advanced. The French trappers speak French without subtitles, just as Naru would hear it. All the Comanche characters in the movie are portrayed by Comanche actors, and there's even a Comanche language track.
Trachtenberg and cinematographer Jeff Cutter continuously shoot in massive open spaces and find fun new ways to show the Predator moving through them. A fight with the French trappers unfolds in a dead forest and is a nightmare of ash and blood. Naru's first encounter with the Predator sees him outlined in the blood of the bear he's just killed. The final clash between Naru and the Predator happens on ground where Naru almost died in an earlier scene. As Naru's edge sharpens, we see the Predator's advantage diminish until we realize -- it's young. Deligro's Predator is an impulsive teenage murder lizard: showboating, taking hits it shouldn't, letting its temper get the best of it.
It's trying to prove itself, just like Naru. One of them succeeds.
Prey is a film about the precision born of necessity. It salutes its predecessors but breaks new ground, far better than most of them ever did. Frankly, the franchise needs it, more even than it needs new memes. As clever and careful as its lead (and her amazing doggo!), Prey doesn't put a foot wrong.
Prey is streaming via Hulu (in the US) and Disney+ (in the UK) now.
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The delicious cognitive dissonance of hearing this for the first time will always make me smile. And they keep re-using it! Which is absolutely in line with the core ideals of the show! Good job, soundtrack!
Video description: Over an image of a Host from the show in the Vitruvian Man pose, the Ramin Djawadi cover 'Paint It Black' used in Westworld Season 1 plays.
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New reader? Looking for a back issue?
Buy me a coffee?
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Golden Rage
Editor's note: spoilers and content warnings for violence and mild nudity.
We meet Jay mid-riot, surrounded by the island's murderous older women. Jay's unable to understand, to process what's going on until a force of nature named Rosie is nice to her. It's a moment of reckless, brutal kindness - the emotions at the core of both the series and it's first issue.
If anger is a weapon, kindness is a shield. From the first page to the last, Chrissy Williams' script interrogates the concept of kindness through the same lens used by Battle Royale and Lord of the Flies, spying on the awful things we do when we're cut off from society.
Caroline, Rosie, and Lottie are conscientious objectors. Caroline is a retired academic, Lottie has worked hard to present as everyone's archetypal grandma, and Rosie is a woman whose huge physical size hides how considerate she is. All of them have been dumped on the island by a society that's decided they're useless after menopause. None of them want any part of the mysterious culture we catch glimpses of.
Caroline and Lottie are content to survive, but Alice wants to help - returning to the lighthouse where she and the others liver, with a bedraggled, terrified Jay. Rosie is every inch the action heroine, intoning a Schwarzeneggerian 'WE HAVE GUEST.' Caroline and Lottie look like she's signed their death warrant. All of this presented in the tense, terse lines of Lauren Knight's art and washed with Sofie Dodgson's midnight soaked colours. The island is a serene battlefield, a place where cable knits are used to mop up viscera and where swearing isn't allowed while you're cleaning your weapons. As Rosie says:
'Your things are our things now. This island. Very hard. We make you strong. You help us. No one leaves.'
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Kindness as a shield. Kindness as a manacle. Kindness as the one direction the compass still points.
Williams is a fantastic poet and there's a poetic economy of language and expansiveness of meaning to the scene above and the book as a whole. The narrative feels human and cautious, the fear baked into the pages. That fragility is helped further by the way Becca Carey's lettering shows us the rhythm of speech and how Shayne Hannah Cui's flats give us a sense of volume, space, isolation and danger. Along with Knight's art and Dodgson's colours the sense of place is absolute, all focused by Joamette Gil's editing.
As Rosie also says:
'Is nowhere else to go.'
Golden Rage is a five issue miniseries brandishing knuckle dusters that read NUMBER 1 GRAN with a heart on its sleeve that it guards by any means necessary. Pick up your copy, or face the peril of no baths.
Golden Rage is published by Image and the first issue is available now. Find it at your local comic shop, my local comic shop or the Galactic BezosSphere.
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I love this song, and love the scene it scores even more. It stacks Westworld and the show's themes of personal identity, digital sentience, exploitation, slavery and societal change on top of a deeply successful nod to Fight Club and this bizarre hopeful moment that perhaps the good trouble has finally started. SO good.
Video description: Over an image of a Host from the show collapsed in the sand and stripped of its outer coating, the Ramin Djawadi cover of 'Brain Damage' by Pink Floyd used in Westworld Season 3 plays.
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Signal Boost
Featured Boost Special This Week: Two For One!
- Friends of the Lid Ankorr 643 are still crowdfunding! Want to hear me as a jovial gladiator cop? Want to hear Marguerite as a crusading and totally not suss news reporter? Want to hear a cavalcade of friends old and new do future science crime and or crimes, some of which will be recorded in our living room? Sure you do! Check out the campaign!
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Books
Comics
Hashtags and Shenanigans
Podcasting
Music
People
- Friend of the Lid Dean J. Smith is fundraising for his top surgery. Please help out if you can. And hey maybe help Dean out and get cool dog related merchandise for yourself?
- Melissa C. Navia of Strange New Worlds has written the best, and hardest thing I've read this week. It's about grief and how to do it and how it changes as you change. Go in prepared, but do go in.
That's this week's Signal Boost! If you have a project you'd like to see here get in touch or check Twitter for my weekly call.
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Not just a haunting piece of music but again one that speaks to the core motifs of the show, the idea of story as a maze we're trapped in and of the same things happening in a different key. Listen especially to the end where this merges with one of the main orchestral themes for the show.
Video description: Over an image of a Host from the show in the Virtruvian Man pose, the Ramin Djawadi cover of 'Exit Music - For A Film' by Radiohead used in Westworld Season 1 plays.
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Where You Can Find Us This Week
In The Booth
Twitch
- An adorable lake monster! Questionable accents! UN!DEAD! GANGSTERS! The Darkside Detective continues to be immense fun and it turns out the solution to the case was three bonus cases!
- Another ending! Some SERIOUS cosmic horror! Slay the Princess is amazing and we can't wait to play the full game next year! Here, as ever, are the Show Notes.
Podcast Land
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The all-cyberpunk, all the time third season of the show gets a lot of hate but I dug the heck out of it. The music choices also remained excellent.
Video description: Over an image of a Host from the show collapsed in the sand and stripped of its outer coating, the Ramin Djawadi cover of 'Sweet Child o 'Mine' by Guns 'n Roses used in Westworld Season 3 plays.
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Department of Received
Esoteric Print Goods
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Portal Bookshop are the BEST. Walk the Vanished Earth is a generational story about a family on Earth and beyond, Godslayers is the sequel to the best rom-com with mecha and patriarchy smashing I've ever read, and the Wyndhams are new editions with new forewords.
I don't reread books, by and large. For Wyndham I'll make an exception.
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Signing Off / Playing Out
Thanks for reading, folks! I hope the week was good and you had at least as much fun as these goodest of boys did.
TFL returns next week. Check my Carrd for all the places you can find me, including the Twitters, where I continue to laugh in the face of linear time, the attention economy and false critical hierarchies -- join me! Follow us on Twitch to be notified when we go live.
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And thank you!
Playing us out this week is Tom Cardy. Because it's been a few weeks. And because... look just press play. It's been a long week, and this?
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is a Full Lid.
Video Description: Tom Cardy explains that he does not work here to an uncaring universe.
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