Film – The Implausi.blog

2025 Summer Media Roundup

In the most recent Newsletter (Issue 11), I mentioned how there was a lot of movies and media that I experienced that would have been a good fit for the “Multi-Melting” section. Or individual posts. But as time slipped out of the moment, it felt a little weird to wedge them all in. So let’s recap the summer of 2025 here:

System Shock 2 (2025 Remaster)

In the late 1990s video gaming was undergoing a real paradigm shift, and this was most apparent in the FPS genre. The trifecta of post-Doom FPSs that moved the genre forward includes Half Life (1998), Deus Ex (2000), and System Shock 2 (2000). They brought innovations to the genre that are still with us today: branching missions, novel environments, game story embedded in the environment as you play through. Weapon upgrades, skill upgrades, and multiple paths to success.

I played a lot of these three back when they came out, and I was happy to finally see SS2 make the light of day in the remastered version. It plays smoothly, and the high res textures are nice, though later levels of the ship feel almost barren by today’s standards, so they didn’t add a lot to the maps for the new version, save for the textures. Feels a little empty, somehow, and not just in the “desolate spaceship” way.

While both Half-Life and Deus Ex had a few sequels, SS2 didn’t, though it was (spiritually) followed by the Bioshock series which most modern gamers may be more familiar with. They haven’t had the chance to experience the horror of the decrepit spaceship in the original release. 25 years later there’s still something to hearing that synthesized voice call you “insect” that reverberates and shakes you to your core. Still a great game, worth tracking down.

F1 (2025)

Impressive in size, but mostly cardboard. Truth in advertising.

Saw it the weekend after it came out. All the action and cinematography you’ve come to expect from a Bruckheimer film, along with all the acting and plot you’ve come to expect from a Bruckheimer film. Saw it on IMAX, which is the recommended viewing scale (it really does look awesome), but this two-hour long ode to product placement was a little slow at times. This was mostly due to staying overlong on certain races, where the minutiae of the lap-by-lap progression didn’t impact the overall result that much*. Let’s score it a 6.

* Spoiler: much like Brad Pitt’s character arc. Him ending up where he started, looking to take a race in Baja, essentially meant that his impact was minimal, and the entire F1 “season” could have been a daydream or in his head while he recovered from injury.

Superman (2025)

Hey, turns out that bright summer movies are fun! There was a lot I enjoyed in this latest Superman movie. Most of that is due to it’s assumption of the intelligence of the audience, that we could figure stuff our as we went along, and that we didn’t need a deep origin story at the outset, just the 4 lines of text in a scroll and cut to the action. (Yes, there is some info about the origin, but it’s interleaved throughout the story, and again, the movie trusts us to figure it out).

There are some probs, mostly in the action sequences feeling weightless in that way peculiar to superhero movies and the Fast and Furious franchise. My eyes tend to glaze over during these fights. A few other misses in there too, but otherwise – fun and enjoyable. I’d give it a solid 7

Great Outdoor Comedy Festival Thoughts

A quick little road trip to check out the Great Outdoor Comedy Festival (GOCF), and this ended up being a lot of fun. Held at Kinsmen Park in Edmonton, Alberta, this massive green space provided a huge audience for the performers.

But it took a little while to get going. For the pre-show we had a musician doing the Ed Sheeran acoustic guitar with a looper schtick for a few songs. Then a video package of the history of the GOCF, and an introduction by the MC, who is apparently TikTok famous for something or other.

We finally got to the main event around 9pm or so. First up was Melissa Villasenor, late of SNL where she was for 6 years. She’s supremely talented, but comes across a bit nervous, and not as a stand up, or at least not with the reps behind her and level of polish the others had.

Pete Holmes was next, with a decent amount of energy which he flipped to build a good rapport with the crowd. He seemed to be enjoying the venue and the giant stage with an outdoor crowd. This can be said for Nick Kroll too: both of them commented on the nature of the event, the chilly temp even in midsummer, and the sunlight staying out late, til 10 pm. Kroll surprised me a bit, as I haven’t seen much of his stand-up work but he was engaging and funny, firing off the jokes rapid-fire.

Anthony Jeselnik was the headliner, and despite seeing some of his earlier stuff, I feel like he was the weaker of the major acts – putting him behind Holmes and Kroll, as least on this night. I know he just released a special last year, so he’s in the middle of working on new material, but it just wasn’t clicking. The set was disjointed, and there wasn’t a lot of flow between jokes. Maybe this is him shortening the set for the festival format; hard to say. Definitely felt off.

Overall though, a good experience. Will I go again? Sure. Will I travel over 300 km for it? Less likely. Not enough that’ll pre-buy a ticket for next year without knowing the full lineup.

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

Plain and depressing. It’s odd how accurate these posters are…

A few years ago I caught The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) at the cheap theaters solely on the basis of seeing the trailer in front of a Marvel movie (probably Cap 2, though the Marvel releases have blurred with age). And I absolutely adored it.

This was not that movie, though so much of the DNA was there. You can trace the lineage: the quirky characters, the rapid dialogue, the innovative sets, the intentional use of colour, all these things that show the intentionality behind all the choices, and still have it come away flat. I’m not sure what the missing spark was, perhaps Del Toro’s traditional mumbling line delivery, or the lack of electricity between the characters, or not really being able to identify with the lives of rich criminals who flaunt the rules in the current era (though saying that out loud, I think we hit on the answer). But overall, I felt it was overlong and boring, despite recognizing the level of artistry and craft that went into it. 4/10, not recommended.

Monument Valley (2014/2022)

Grabbed this as an Epic Games freebie, a puzzle game that had been released a decade ago on mobile that was recently available on PC. I really liked this, taking my time to work through a level or two an evening, and really exploring the game. I’m not sure if this is the best example of “non-Euclidean geometry” of classic Cthulhu lore, but if anyone ever needed an explanation, I’d point them this way. Recommended.

Naked Gun (2025) Thoughts

Sometimes, you need a break from the inherent silliness of the superhero movies, and so the inherent silliness of a Naked Gun movie serves as a suitable distraction. Wasn’t sure about seeing this initially, but good word of mouth on the opening weekend made it worth checking out.

This is one of those movies that’s enjoyable in the moment but flits away from your memory as soon as you leave the theatre. It’s odd, in that it is both move and less over the top the the original Leslie Nielsen flicks, in that it tries hard but blazes well past the point of absurdity, and also lacks the volume of gags that were in the originals as well.

But we shouldn’t criticize the films for not being their predecessors. It’s a light, fun, absurb romp, a quick 90 minute gag fest, and both Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are engaging in their roles. I had fun in the moment, and the movie made me smile. 6 out of 10.

Tron: Ares (2025)

Some quick thoughts after viewing the film in IMAX, as I’m starting to see that the IFC are telling me it’s a bad movie, in ways that I clearly don’t agree with. So let’s talk about what I liked about the film.

The graphics were hyper-stylized, in a way that felt was an homage to some of the sci-fi of the 70s and 80s, and in that way have a much stronger connection to the original Tron film. A lot of the work in that film used costuming and odd camera angles and set design to imagine the insides of the computer, and this was a return to form.

The ladder sequence during Dillinger’s hack was wild to me , a conceptual view of cyberspace, agents, and IC, that felt straight out of a cyberpunk novel in the late 80s or 90s. It’s hard for me to express how much I loved this bit, and the style that it had.

Similar was the return to the set pieces of the original Tron, which were recognizable and felt for lack of a better term “Lo Rez” despite being rendered on the IMAX screen along with the rest of the movie. Simpler, fewer things going on in the background, feeling like an early 3D rendered video game.

As for the tech, it took me a minute to come around, as I originally thoughts the constructs bursting out of the familiar black-carbon “supports” was a little… goofy perhaps, but I came to like it, and it definitely had an aesthetic to them. It left a bit to the imagination of what constitutes the objects – are they holograms, or built out of raw carbon and other elements? It was left undefined, and that’s okay, really. We are allowed to handwave some stuff in our sci-fi to prevent it from bogging down the story.

That being said, I found this approach to addressing the question of digital materiality really interesting. DM is that point where the virtual crosses over to the real world. If cyberspace happens at the point of connection where a telephone conversation takes place in the wires, DM is where our 3D constructs cross over into realspace (or meatspace, or objective reality, however you want to frame it).

Athena was effective in the film – I really liked her as a character – echoing our fears of current real world implementations of AI taking a command too far (“by any means necessary”) to disastrous consequences for Dillinger.

Ares, as an AI gaining emotional intelligence by doing the deep learning on the target of Eve Kim presents a different way. This EQ was what triggered his malfunction, but also pointed towards an avenue for growth for the AIs.

Regarding Ares as a construct in the real world, it’s interesting as he’s clearly Not Human, despite having a human form. He’s a construct , of whatever underlying form that takes, that just doesn’t decompose. We’re not given any indication that he is actually modelled after a human aside from in outward appearances. This provides a nice contrast with the various forms of post-humanity seen in the recent Alien: Earth series, where we had synthetics, cyborgs, and hybrids, in various shapes and forms. Ares represents an AI embodied within a synthetic body, more akin to the synths of Ash, Bishop, and Kirsh, but with significantly enhanced capability.

Ares in the real world is different in this way than the scanned and re-assembled Eve Kim, whose reconstituted body theoretically does not have this problem of permanence (though it’s interesting to ask why not?), but one can follow that her rebuilt body is her being reconstructed cell-by-cell. It’s much like the Teletransportation Paradox, from philosophy but also from Star Trek, as to whether the original body is destroyed and then rebuilt. Here the movie answers it with a clear “yes”, though with more intervening time in between.

The ending leaves open the possibility for further exploring what it is like for an AI to experience the world materially, in a way that is just hinted at in the postcard sequence from Ares. There’s room for some growth here.

Finally, I like how they portrayed the uses for the 3D printing technology with the permanence code enabled. Combating climate change, medical advancements, etc. – a really hopefully version of the future, and less dystopian that similar films like the Matrix and Terminator.

Overall, I enjoyed the film – no prior knowledge of the franchise was really necessary – and it seems odd that the most fantastic thing in a movie about AI, Virtual Reality, and Transhumanism, the most fantastic thing is that one can get across Vancouver in under 29 minutes.

Cybernetic Machines: AI Art and Cultural Form

A “script” is a set of instructions fed into a cybernetic bio-technical machine called a “production company” that outputs a “movie”

A “composition” is a set of instructions fed into a cybernetic bio-technical machine called an “orchestra” that outputs a “symphony”.

A “blueprint” is a set of instructions fed into a cybernetic bio-technical machine called a “construction company” that outputs a “building”.

A “context model” is a set of instructions fed into a cybernetic bio-technical machine called an “AI” that outputs a “virtual world”.

Perhaps

Or perhaps all of the above.

These are all examples of “allographic arts” as introduced by Nelson Goodman back in 1962, versions of art that is crafted by others based on a set of instructions provided by the artist. this could be the director, the composer, the architect, as Goodman postulated, or a set of instructions followed by the Generative AI at the direction of the “Prompt Engineer”.

Of course “Prompt Engineer” is at once both too banal and too unrepresentative of what is going on in the artistic process here. The slightly more upscaled “Context Engineer” (for when one prompt isn’t enough) is similarly unsuitable here. Engineering has little to do with it at all, though much like our architect example above, engineering isn’t precluded from being a part of the process.

Perhaps it’s because the Generative AI tools are too new in their development to have a singular title, like composer or architect, or Madonna or Cher, and so we’re left with the dual names to describe them, by defining them as a variation on the thing that they are somewhat akin to. Think “software architect” or “3D modeler”. Too new not quite encapsulated in the name, the way “TV Producer” has collapsed into “showrunner” in the 21st century.

Maybe it’s in the name.

Or maybe it’s in what we make with it. The art form hasn’t coalesced yet. Again too new; too recently pulled from the primordial technocultural stew. In the early days of the form, we are left reproducing the elements of older media, the same way early television and film were often stage plays and vaudeville acts. We’re caught somewhere between Pong and Space Invaders in terms of development, with Elden Ring and GTA VI undreamed of in the distant horizon.

With that in mind, what will AI art actually look like? Once it comes into its own as cultural form? I hinter at it with Virtual Worlds above. These can be produced using traditional methods, of course, but maybe that’s but one way a fed set of prompts, of contexts, of world models can be realized. AI Art will almost assuredly look something barely glimpsed or imagined.

But I want to play in the holodeck for a moment.

Because I think that gets close to what we’re imagining here. The holodeck, famously introduced in the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation “Encounter At Farpoint” (airdate 1987-09-28) and subsequently retconned and chronologically re-situated as typical with enduring narratives, would allow for the cast and crew to input a set of commands into the computer and allow it to generate the setting, players, dialogue and the like, along a relatively broad range of possibilities. The computer onboard was massively powerful, and generated these holographic simulations with relative ease, but the show(s) always made that distinction between the computer of the ship, and the AI embodied in more ambulatory agents like Lieutenant Commander Data. It stands to reason that the computer of a faster-than-light starship some 250 years in the future would be more that capable at the task at hand.

So perhaps this is what we’re moving towards, where the cultural form of AI art is more akin to an “experience” crafted by an “Imagineer”, though perhaps not in a way akin to a theme park ride held under copyright by the Disney Corporation.

We’re getting closer.

Perhaps we don’t have the words yet because we don’t know what that cultural form will be. It’s had to tell from our Pong-centered viewpoint here.

So let’s try to re-work our formula from above:

A “prompt” is a set of instructions fed into a cybernetic bio-technical machine called an “AI” that outputs an “experience”.

Not bad, though perhaps a little generic. But what it gains in that genericity is that it is divorced from the digital. No “cyber” or “virtual” prefixes are to be found. And that allows for growth, for change, for possibility – for the cultural form of AI art to transcend the digital / material barrier, to allow for an full environment to be developed like within the holodeck, or for humans to interact with material AI agents, like the hosts within Westworld. We’re still bouncing around that “theme park” model, but there is art within that creation, of the building and shaping of a full sensory experience.

And the play is the thing, a phrase that was uttered in the holodeck on more than one occasion, I’m sure. So let’s leave it there, our recognition of the incipient cultural form of AI art, and go out into the world to hunt for new words, new worlds, and discover what the future might be.

WYCU Revised

With Predator: Killer of Killers coming out this weekend, I’ve started in the rewatch of the movies, beginning with 2022’s Prey (which is fantastic; more on this later). The prep has necessitated a slight revision to the WYCU timeline, which we talked about here.

Adding in the new releases, plus the Blade Runner franchise and the chronological year, and our WYCU now looks like this:

WCYU Chronology (revised)

Title	Publication Year	‘Verse	Chrono Year	Chrono Order
Prometheus *	2012	A	0?	1
Prey	2022	P	1719	2
Predator: Killer of Killers	2025	P	1500/1800/1943	3
Predator	1987	P	1987	4
Predator 2	1990	P	1997	5
Alien v Predator	2004	X	2004	6
Alien v Predator: Requiem	2007	X	2004	7
Predators	2010	P	2010	8
The Predator	2018	P	2018	9
Blade Runner	1982	B	2019	10
Soldier	1998	B	2036	11
Blade Runner 2049	2017	B	2049	12
Predator: Badlands***	2025	P	???	13
Prometheus **	2012	A	2093	14
Alien: Covenant	2017	A	2104	15
Alien: Earth	2025	A	???	16
Alien	1979	A	2122	17
Alien: Romulus	2024	A	2142	18
Aliens	1986	A	2179	19
Alien³	1992	A	2179	20
Alien: Resurrection	1997	A	2381	21

Sinners (2025, R. Coogler)

I hold to a rather simple opinion : you can’t be movie of the year if the audience is looking at their watch at the 60 minute mark and wondering if they should leave.

And this is where I found myself at that precise point while watching Sinners (2025).

Don’t get me wrong: Sinners is a fine movie, but the pacing – especially in the first half – was atrocious. Reflecting on the movie after it finished, this was the overall feeling I got. The music was fantastic, and I would have loved to see more or it; the effects were well done. But the slow build and unnecessary bloat brought it down. The denouement felt interminable, on the levels of The Return of the King as well.

I enjoyed seeing the Buddy Guy cameo (which I don’t think is much of a spoiler at this point), and wish he had been present throughout, in some way, shape or form. But overall, I thought getting to the Juke joint faster would have made for a better flick as a whole. Let’s give it a 7/10, as far as ratings go.