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The Sense of Wonder Reviews

Caution doesn't prevent the movie from sliding into realms of kitsch, even if it's a kitsch that tries to disguise its tracks beneath a cinematic veneer of gentleness.

Full Review | Jan 10, 2018

A film where the fascinating chemistry of its main characters stand out, as well of the subtle way to tell a sentimental story that leaves such a sweet taste in the viewer. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 2, 2016

Everything in The Sense of Wonder may be just a little too good to be true, but it's intelligent escapism.

Full Review | Oct 27, 2016

An unoriginal story about of a widow that "returns to life", exhausted by the daily difficulties. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 21, 2016

A pleasant experience with an excellent photography and a great cast of actors. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Oct 21, 2016

A simple and beautiful love story where charm and warmth overflows. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 21, 2016

The Sense of Wonder

Where to Watch

Virginie Efira (Louise Legrand) Benjamin Lavernhe (Pierre) Lucie Fagedet (Emma Legrand) Léo Lorléac'h (Félix Legrand) Hervé Pierre (Jules) Hiam Abbass (Dr. Mélanie Ferenza) Laurent Bateau (Paul) Natalie Beder (La jeune femme librairie) France Darry (La cliente marché) Valentin Merlet (Le banquier)

Éric Besnard

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought.

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The Sense of Wonder

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought. The Sense of Wonder featuring Virginie Efira and Benjamin Lavernhe is available for rent or purchase on Apple TV, and available for rent or purchase on Prime Video. It's a drama and romance movie with a better than average IMDb audience rating of 6.8 (3,425 votes) and was well received by critics.

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'the sense of wonder' streaming: how to watch anywhere.

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Streaming availability last updated: 03:02:54 AM, 07/02/2024 PST

More Information on The Sense of Wonder

Éric besnard, virginie efira, benjamin lavernhe, lucie fagedet, léo lorléac'h, hervé pierre.

Mélanie Ferenza

Hiam Abbass

Laurent bateau.

La cliente marché

France Darry

La jeune femme librairie

Natalie Beder

Le banquier

Valentin Merlet

Le patron du bar

François Bureloup

L'aide-soignant

Franck Adrien

Le livreur de fleurs

Julien Ratel

Le chanteur karaoké

Christian Valsamidis

Michel seydoux, patrice ledoux.

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• "A 'comedie sentimentale' in the French manner, this is mostly predictable in terms of especially its romantic leanings but also refreshingly (...) It is also an immensely warm film."  Boyd van Hoeij : The Hollywood Reporter

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Based on the R.J. Palacio novel of the same name, “Wonder” follows a year in the life of August Pullman ( Jacob Tremblay ), Auggie, for short. He was born with a genetic abnormality that has required him to undergo surgeries and medical treatments since his earliest days. 

Director Stephen Chbosky has managed to take a story that could have been painfully mawkish and made it genuinely moving in (mostly) understated ways. The makeup work here is solid and believable, revealing Auggie’s sad eyes behind downturned facial lines and nubs of skin for ears. He’s a prepubescent Rocky Dennis. The script, co-written by Chbosky, Steve Conrad and Jack Thorne , is wise to establish quickly that Auggie is a regular kid in every other way. He loves “ Star Wars ” and Minecraft. He has an aptitude for science, a sly sense of humor, and an active imagination that helps him navigate uncomfortable situations. (“Wonder” occasionally dabbles in magical realism, but in ways that are more amusing than distracting.)

Uniformly strong performances help ground the story. Tremblay, who showed instincts beyond his years in the devastating 2015 drama “ Room ,” provides both a sweetness and an intelligence to his 10-year-old character that make him accessible even when he’s wearing an astronaut helmet to hide his face. Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson find just the right notes as his supportive parents. But the real surprise here is Izabela Vidovic as Tremblay’s older sister, who’s been generous enough to allow her brother to be the center of the family’s attention at the expense of her own emotional need.

His mom, Isabel (Roberts), put her career on hold to homeschool him from the beginning in the family’s Brooklyn brownstone. But now that Auggie is of middle school age, Isabel and his dad, Nate (Wilson), decide to send him to Beecher Prep so he’ll learn to socialize with other kids and become more comfortable in the outside world. All are understandably apprehensive about this major shift, fraught as it is with the potential for bullying and isolation. And indeed, when his parents walk him to the front gates and send him off on his own for the first time, the kids on campus stop their conversations to gawk and part for him. But Chbosky depicts this event matter-of-factly, allowing the tension of the moment to emerge naturally.

There are some familiar figures here: the hip teacher who gives innovative assignments that just happen to coincide with the film’s themes ( Daveed Diggs ); the mean rich kid who torments him alongside a posse of brutes ( Bryce Gheisar ); the shy girl who might become an unexpected friend ( Millie Davis ). But the effortless connection Auggie strikes up with a kid named Jack Will ( Noah Jupe )—who also feels like an outsider as a working-class scholarship student—is one of the film’s truest joys, as well as a source of legitimate drama.

Just when “Wonder” seems to be settling into a routine at school, it shifts and revisits that first day from a variety of other characters’ perspectives. So we learn what happened to Auggie’s lonely sister, Via, when she met a cute new boy ( Nadji Jeter ) and dared to sign up for the high school play. We get a glimpse into Jack Will’s home life, which enriches the significance of his relationship with Auggie. We find out what’s really going on with Via’s lifelong best friend, Miranda ( Danielle Rose Russell ), who suddenly snubbed her at the start of the school year.

As he did with his insightful young adult drama “ The Perks of Being a Wallflower ,” Chbosky handles major adolescent events with decency and grace. The cumulative effect—as overly simplistic as it may sound – is the powerful understanding of what it feels like to walk in someone else’s shoes. The emotion of this enlightenment sneaks up on you in quiet ways. Even Wilson, whose character feels underwritten beyond providing comic relief during moments of family tension, gets perhaps the most heartbreaking, uplifting line in the whole film. You’ll shed a tear or two—especially if you’re a parent—and they’ll be totally earned.

All of which makes it so frustrating that “Wonder” throws that restraint and goodwill out the window in its finale and turns wildly sentimental. Chbosky cranks up the feel-good with a climax full of wild applause at the most clichéd place possible: a school assembly. How is it possible that so many cinematic moments of truth take place before a packed auditorium?

But the film does so much so well for so long that its pat conclusion feels forgivable. Early on during a screening of “Wonder,” when the film first reveals the scars and deformities that mark the hero’s face, my eight-year-old son turned to me and whispered, “He looks weird.” Once the movie was over, as we were walking out of the theater and I asked him what he thought, he exclaimed: “I loved it!” Such is the film’s transformative power. It is a machine for creating empathy.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Wonder (2017)

Rated PG for thematic elements including bullying, and some mild language.

113 minutes

Jacob Tremblay as Auggie

Owen Wilson as Nate

Izabela Vidovic as Via

Julia Roberts as Isabel

Noah Jupe as Jack Will

• Stephen Chbosky

Writer (based on the novel by)

• R.J. Palacio
• Steve Conrad
• Jack Thorne

Cinematographer

• Don Burgess
• Mark Livolsi
• Marcelo Zarvos

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The Sense Of Wonder Reviews

• 1 hr 40 mins
• Drama, Comedy
• Watchlist Where to Watch

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought.

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'The Sense of Wonder': A Film Too Tasteful for Its Own Good

This gorgeous-looking movie about two gentle souls suffers from being constantly poised on the brink of romantic fantasy, at the expense of human complexity.

Visual, emotional and conceptual romanticizing dominate “Le gout des merveilles,” a film by the French director Eric Besnard, whose English title is “The Sense of Wonder.” Its seemingly exceptional love story is set amid spectacular scenery in southern France, bounded from afar by the Alps and shot as though it were decoration for a tourism campaign. From this point of view, the movie works: After watching it, I now have a hankering to visit the area in which it was filmed. Another reason to visit derives from the scrumptious-looking pastry known as merveilles that the female lead, Louise (Virginie Efira), bakes and sells in the local market. In fact, a more accurate rendering of the French title would be “The Taste of Wonders.”

When Did King Hezekiah Reign? Controversial Artifacts May Resolve Biblical Controversy

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'the sense of wonder' combines the author's love of basketball and korean dramas.

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The Sense of Wonder (2015)

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The Sense of Wonder streaming: where to watch online?

Currently you are able to watch "The Sense of Wonder" streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads or for free with ads on Amazon Prime Video with Ads. It is also possible to rent "The Sense of Wonder" on Amazon Video, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube online and to download it on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube.

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought.

Where does The Sense of Wonder rank today? The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

The Sense of Wonder is 3820 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 1504 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Irish Wish but less popular than Marlowe.

Streaming charts last updated: 1:16:30 AM, 07/02/2024

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Horizon: an american saga - chapter 1, common sense media reviewers.

Costner's violent, epic Western is meandering but watchable.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Compassion is sometimes valued, as characters try

Violence and revenge drive most of the action, so

The movie tries to show the American West as sligh

Guns and shooting, with people (including a child)

A woman bathes outdoors; her breasts are visible,

Several uses of "goddamn," plus "s--t," "Jesus Chr

A doctor appears to be very drunk; he weaves and s

Parents need to know that Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is an epic Western directed by and starring Kevin Costner, the first of four proposed films. At three hours long (and still left off as "to be continued"), it has a meandering, sometimes confusing quality, but it may appeal to some viewers…

Positive Messages

Compassion is sometimes valued, as characters try to help one another out. The movie also makes an attempt to reject racism and show some diversity, although it also resorts to certain cliches.

Positive Role Models

Violence and revenge drive most of the action, so even if some characters are positive and helpful and/or demonstrate compassion, they also have a dark side and are capable of violence.

Diverse Representations

The movie tries to show the American West as slightly more diverse than it's usually depicted, with Black characters living alongside White ones in Horizon and portrayals of sympathetic Chinese immigrants and helpful Mexican and Native American characters. But all of these characters occupy fairly small or supporting roles. White characters are the main focus here. One sneeringly calls a Mexican character "vato," a White character refers to a Native American as "chief," and a White character uses the term "Injun."

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and shooting, with people (including a child) shot and killed. Characters are stabbed with spears or arrows. Blood spurts, pools of blood, and bloody corpses. One character grapples with another and attempts to stab him with knife but is shot in the head. Several bloody scalps are shown; a character "playfully" rubs one on a boy's forehead, leaving a bloody streak. A house is attacked by forces outside; arrows punch through walls, and flames sneak in from above. People attack a village, flinging lanterns to set buildings on fire, shooting and killing innocents with arrows, and kidnapping a young child. Several characters die by suicide, blowing up a tent and deliberately taking out several attackers. Person shot in the hand, punched in the face and kicked (face shown to be bloody and bruised), slapped, and hit with a rifle butt. Person is pistol-whipped. Women in peril, trapped in a cellar that's slowly filling with dirt. Dead bodies are buried, with lime sprinkled onto their corpses. Children shown handling and shooting guns. Smacking in face. Character attacked by a group of other people. Person is kicked. Woman whacks men with umbrella.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A woman bathes outdoors; her breasts are visible, and her hand runs up and down her legs, while two men watch, unseen. A woman seduces a man, rubbing her hand on his crotch area and then positioning herself on top of him under the covers and telling him, "you just lay there." Kissing. A woman is a sex worker; she solicits clients, and she's seen getting dressed after a session with a client. Sex-related dialogue. A sex worker wears a cleavage-enhancing outfit, her breasts bulging in close-up.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "goddamn," plus "s--t," "Jesus Christ" (or "Jesus" or "Christ), "bitch," "ass," "bastard," "damn," "hell," "piss," "my God," "shut up."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A doctor appears to be very drunk; he weaves and slurs (a character dumps a bucket of water on him). Bartender pours "free" whiskey for another character. Character accused of "drinking before noon." Character swigs brandy out of a small glass bottle. Character sips whiskey while working. Casual drinking. Background smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is an epic Western directed by and starring Kevin Costner , the first of four proposed films. At three hours long (and still left off as "to be continued"), it has a meandering, sometimes confusing quality, but it may appeal to some viewers. Expect strong violence, including guns and shooting, deaths, people being pierced with arrows or stabbed with spears, dead bodies, blood spurts, pools of blood, bloody scalps, a village being attacked and burned, women getting hit or threatened, and more. A woman's bare breasts are seen, and there are sexual situations, brief kissing, and mild sex-related dialogue. Language includes occasional uses of "goddamn," "s--t," "Jesus Christ," "bitch," "ass," "bastard," "damn," "hell," "piss," etc. Characters drink casually (sometimes to excess) and smoke. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (4)

Based on 4 parent reviews

Absolutely Loved It!

Great western saga chapter 1, what's the story.

In HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1, it's 1859, and members of the Apache tribe have been attacking and killing settlers who've tried to build a town called "Horizon." Frances Kittredge ( Sienna Miller ) and her daughter, Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail), survive one such attack and are taken in by the U.S. Cavalry, where First Lt. Trent Gephardt ( Sam Worthington ) takes a shine to Frances. Meanwhile, Ellen Harvey ( Jena Malone ) is in hiding from the powerful, murderous Sykes family. She lives in a remote cabin with her husband, Walter ( Michael Angarano ), and a 2-year-old child. Sex worker Mary ( Abbey Lee ) sometimes looks after the child, and it's during one of these occasions that Hayes Ellison ( Kevin Costner ) comes to visit. Unfortunately, he arrives at the same time as Caleb Sykes ( Jamie Campbell Bower ). Caleb draws, and Hayes shoots and kills him, prompting him to go on the run with Mary and the child. Then, a wagon train led by Matthew Van Weyden ( Luke Wilson ) makes its way through Native American territory, hampered by a naive, pampered English couple, Juliette ( Ella Hunt ) and Hugh ( Tom Payne ). And others have also hit the trail, seeking revenge for the attack on Horizon.

Is It Any Good?

Kevin Costner 's three-hour Western, the first of four proposed chapters, meanders a bit and often looks more small-screen than big-screen spectacle, but if you give it a chance, it grows on you. Directed and co-written by Costner -- his first feature since his well-crafted, low-key Open Range -- Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 's biggest challenge is the fact that the story isn't over yet. In other words, it's hard to judge it completely, given that we don't yet know exactly how things will pan out yet. Costner was clearly inspired by the gargantuan How the West Was Won (1963), which told a similarly sprawling story of the American West. It, too, was split into segments (each directed by different filmmakers), but it was easier to follow than Costner's film, which jumps back and forth between three or four storylines. (One is introduced in the third hour, which is a little confusing.)

And it's disappointing that the filmmaker who offered a sympathetic look at Indigenous people in Dances With Wolves resorts to more traditional techniques here, like villainous "Indians," which feels like a step backward. Nonetheless, as the movie's three hours roll along and certain of the dozens of faces start to become recognizable (most of the performances are solid), things start to come together in a familiar rhythm, and it captures your attention, especially for viewers interested in Western-type stories. But the real test of Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 will be seeing how it ties in with the rest of its story.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

What does the movie have to say about racial equality or discrimination? Does it use stereotypes ?

What's interesting about the Western genre? In what ways does it use the past to tell stories about the present?

How are drinking and smoking depicted? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? How does the time and setting affect the way these activities are portrayed?

Movie Details

• In theaters : June 28, 2024
• Cast : Kevin Costner , Sienna Miller , Sam Worthington
• Director : Kevin Costner
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Western
• Run time : 181 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence, some nudity and sexuality
• Last updated : June 29, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Broken Trail

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Netflix movie of the day: Wonder is a coming of age tale that tugs at the heartstrings

It’s hard not to get a little sentimental while watching this one

Every day, we cut through the bottomless list of streaming options and recommend something to watch. See all our  Netflix movie of the day  picks, or our  Prime Video movie of the day  choices.

I’ve recommended some truly twisted tales in our movie of the day section, but this time, I want to talk about a lovely coming of age story. Wonder is today’s pick, and it’s a movie about a young boy with a rare facial deformity as he tries to fit in at school. But it’s so much more than that, it’s a big movie that’s full of hope, and it might even restore your faith in humanity.

10-year-old Auggie goes through a huge change in Wonder, where we see him transitioning from being homeschooled to joining a public school. This is his first time being in a big class setting and that’s daunting for any kid before you even take into consideration the other struggles he’s been facing. Jacob Tremblay in particular shines in this one, he also made me cry in Room, so he’s definitely perfected the art of heartfelt performance.

Kids can be cruel, but they can also be kind, and this movie focuses on those all important childhood friendships. This includes inevitable conflict resolution, such as a sweet scene where two characters apologise via Minecraft . We are truly rooted in Auggie’s world and see a lot of it from his perspective, which is a very important part of the movie’s storytelling.

While Jacob Tremblay steals the show, Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson are wonderful as his on-screen parents, who try their best to support Auggie as best they can even if it means sometimes neglecting their other child, Via, who is Auggie’s older sister. Family is front and center of this piece and it doesn’t sugarcoat the struggles that both parents and children often face when trying to navigate the world together.

A truly Wonder(ful) film

Wonder currently has a 86% Rotten Tomatoes score, making it certified fresh and earning a place on our best Netflix movies list. The general consensus is that it doesn't shy away from its bestselling source material's sentiment, and does the novel justice.

Tara Brady from the Irish Times said it best with: “Director Stephen Chbosky, who previously adapted The Perks of Being a Wallflower (his own novel) for the screen has fashioned a irresistibly warm, unabashedly humanist family picture.”

While The Wrap ’s Alonso Duralde added: “It's never mawkish or manipulative, and its characters are so well-established both in the writing and in the performances that the movie ultimately does the hard work of earning those damp Kleenexes.”

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So if you’re looking for a heartwarming movie this week, Wonder is definitely worth your time while it’s available on the best streaming service .

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Lucy is a long-time movie and television lover who is an approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes. She has written several reviews in her time, starting with a small self-ran blog called Lucy Goes to Hollywood before moving onto bigger websites such as What's on TV and What to Watch, with TechRadar being her most recent venture. Her interests primarily lie within horror and thriller, loving nothing more than a chilling story that keeps her thinking moments after the credits have rolled. Many of these creepy tales can be found on the streaming services she covers regularly.

When she’s not scaring herself half to death with the various shows and movies she watches, she likes to unwind by playing video games on Easy Mode and has no shame in admitting she’s terrible at them. She also quotes The Simpsons religiously and has a Blinky the Fish tattoo, solidifying her position as a complete nerd. 

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The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Claude Mellan (French, Abbeville 1598–1688 Paris), The Moon in Its First Quarter , 1635. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, courtesy of the the Elisha Whittelsey Fund.

I. The World Worlds

It’s probably not the most promising beginning to this talk for me to observe that my subject, like silence, has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it. Love, anger, regret, even boredom—wonder’s antipodes—may entrench themselves in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair. Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself.

Let’s begin with an early wonder of the Western literary tradition. In Book 18 of the Iliad , the god Hephaestus forges a shield for Achilles, who’s lost his armor in the bloody fog of war. But as Hephaestus works the shield’s surface, this peculiar blacksmith—being a god, after all—simply can’t resist creating a world, too:

There he made the earth and there the sky and the sea and the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full and there the constellations, all that crown the heavens

A little creation myth blossoms amid the slaughter, as Hephaestus hammers not only Earth but—within the brief passage of three dactylic hexameters—the totality of the known cosmos onto the shield as well. And he’s only just getting warmed up, really. Over the next 150 lines of the poem, Hephaestus emblazons the shield’s surface with a compact survey of ancient civilization, including the arts of war, law, agriculture, animal husbandry, astronomy, music, dance, and so on. A sensualist at heart, he sets this panorama buzzing all over with Epicurean minutiae: we see “bunches of lustrous grapes in gold, ripening deep purple”; we hear a boy plucking his lyre, “so clear it could break the heart with longing”; we even taste the savor of “a cup of honeyed, mellow wine.” Not bad for a piece of antiquated military equipment. Faced with such artistry, I can’t help thinking of the shield’s disabled maker as a kind of poet, like the blind Homer himself. Sure enough, Hephaestus incorporates a miniature epic into the shield’s pageantry, too, with its own besieged city, fraught war councils, interfering gods, and loved ones watching anxiously from the ramparts as a tiny surrogate Hector is hauled “through the slaughter by the heels.” No wonder Homer describes the shield as “a world of gorgeous immortal work.” It contains an entire Iliad and more within its gilt compass.

Beguiled by Homer’s art, some readers have even tried to reverse engineer real shields from this literary blueprint over the millennia. Probably the most spectacular example of all time was fabricated for display at George IV’s coronation banquet by the sculptor, draftsman, and Homer enthusiast John Flaxman in 1821. It’s a marvel of nineteenth-century British punctiliousness in low relief.

The Shield of Achilles designed by John Flaxman and cast by Rundell & Bridge.

Here we find bunches of lustrous grapes in gold, a boy with his lyre, and that cup of honeyed wine—all meticulously accounted for. And yet I can’t help feeling this luminous artifact offers, at best, only a low-resolution copy of the Homeric original. Let’s zoom in for a moment on those golden hounds at their masters’ feet to have a closer look.

I’m not sure why Homer enumerates the figures in this little tableau with such exactitude amid all the shield’s armies, crowds, and processions—“and the golden drovers kept the herd in line, / four in all, with nine dogs at their heels”—but it offers us a perfect opportunity to check Flaxman’s work for quality control. Four drovers? Check. Now let’s count the dogs. (You might think I’m being persnickety here, and with good reason, but bear with me just a little longer.) So where is that ninth hound? Marianne Moore once famously claimed that “omissions are not accidents.” It’s hard to say whether Flaxman’s missing hound is an omission or an accident, but it makes me wonder.

Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the poor beast—“barking, cringing away”—somewhere in the vaporous limbo between fiction and reality. “Paws flickering,” it’s a creaturely cipher for what’s lost when we translate the virtual into the real. The former U.S. Army cryptographer and Homer enthusiast Cy Twombly illustrates this loss in oil, crayon, and graphite in his postmodern Shield of Achilles a century and a half later.

Shield of Achilles by Cy Twombly, courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989–90–1. Courtesy of the Cy Twombly Foundation.

You won’t find our missing hound here, either—and that’s the whole point of Twombly’s abstraction. All those kinetic scribbles convey Homer’s energeia , or literary energy, but they also make an absolute hash of the shield’s pictorial imagery. Not even a cryptographer can code so much world into so small a space. Whether you reconstruct it like Flaxman or deconstruct it like Twombly, the shield of Achilles will forever remain an impossible object. It belongs to that wondrous category of things that are larger inside than outside, like a poem, or a person, or a world. “The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand,” writes Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art , “but neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds.” Homer’s shield isn’t a picture of all the countable or uncountable things—star systems, ripening grape clusters, flickering hounds—that populate the world. As Flaxman and Twombly discovered, it can’t even be pictured at all. But it worlds.

“Glorious armor shall be his, armor / that any man in the world of men will marvel at / through all the years to come,” Hephaestus predicts as he hammers the glowing cosmos on his forge. If you were to survey the readers’ responses to this literary marvel over the millennia—from the anonymous commentators of antiquity to moderns like Alexander Pope and G. E. Lessing to undergraduate term papers in Humanities 101—you’d end up with something like a brief history of wonder in Western civilization. Describing the plowmen at work on the shield’s figured surface, Homer himself is the first among mortals to express wonder at its construction:

And the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning, solid gold as it was—that was the wonder of Hephaestus’ work.

I can’t imagine a more gorgeous description of humanity’s passage through the dark field of world: “the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning.” But why doesn’t Homer say the shield’s golden surface churned like earth churning? This Möbius strip of a simile is a marvel in its own right. Spellbound by Hephaestus’s artistry, we forget the shield’s a shield in the first place—so we feel we’re watching soil behave “like” itself. It’s a kind of reverse alchemy, where gold becomes dirt, vehicle becomes tenor, and shield becomes world. Sometimes it seems there’s no escaping wonder before such worlding work. Of the golden women depicted in the shield’s wedding procession, Homer writes, “Each stood moved with wonder.” I’m not sure whether we should envy or pity these embossed figures, forever frozen in transport at the wonder they inhabit.

But there’s a serious glitch in the god’s plans for this “world of gorgeous immortal work.” Though Hephaestus prophesies that “any man in the world of men will marvel” at his craft, none of the many men in the Iliad —Trojan or Greek—ever marvel at the shield’s construction. Achilles’s fellow soldiers won’t even look at the god’s radiant work: “none dared / to look straight at the glare, each fighter shrank away.” Only a blind genius could invent such tragic optics. Homer embeds a gilded cosmos in the midst of the epic for his readers to marvel at through the ages, but the Iliad ’s inhabitants remain forever blind to this wonder hidden in plain view. Beholding his gift from the gods, even Achilles—the only mortal who scrutinizes the shield’s figured surface—fails to wonder at the sight:

                       The more he gazed, the deeper his anger went, his eyes flashing under his eyelids, fierce as fire— exulting, holding the god’s shining gifts in his hands.

Rage ( m ē nis ) is the first word of the Iliad , and we usually associate it with blindness rather than perception: “I was blinded, lost in my inhuman rage,” says Agamemnon during one of his many changes of heart in the poem. But Homer envisions something like a phenomenology of rage in this scene: “The more he gazed, the deeper his anger went.” For Achilles, anger is more than affect—it’s an adjunct of perception itself. Only once he’s “thrilled his heart with looking hard / at the armor’s well-wrought beauty” does he break off his furious gaze. Instead of blinding him, rage furnishes this exceptional character with a singular perspective on things.

Why does Achilles alone rage at this “world of gorgeous immortal work”? It may have something to do with his sense of vocation. In Book 9 of the Iliad , we find him in his tent, “plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre” he won in battle long ago, “singing the famous deeds of fighting heroes.” I can’t help feeling this armchair bard would have made a passable poet in a different world. (Isn’t every poet a sulky egotist with a hyperactive death drive, after all?) But Achilles is born to fight, not to sing. Anything that comes between him and his bloody vocation—including the “beautifully carved” lyre, “its silver bridge set firm”—must be cast aside for him to follow this calling. Not even life itself matters more to him than this grim occupation. “Hard on the heels of Hector’s death your death / must come at once,” his mother warns him, but Achilles only retorts, “Then let me die at once.” What’s the point of living if you can no longer kill? Achilles doesn’t work to live, he lives to work—Homer uses the word ergon , which means something like “labor,” to describe the hero’s exertions on the battlefield—and his business is death.

Wonder, for the Greeks, led to a very different sort of vocation. We see this illustrated in a scene from Plato’s Theaetetus , where Socrates plays his customary role of career counselor to a youth he’s interrogated to the point of utter perplexity:

Theaetetus: By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder when I think of all these things, and sometimes when I regard them it really makes my head swim. Socrates: It seems that Theodorus was not far from the truth when he guessed what kind of person you are. For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering [ thaumazein ]: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else.

Funny how Theaetetus must first become “lost in wonder” in order to find himself. He learns “what kind of person” he is—a philosopher—from his brush with thaumazein . This beats any aptitude test I took in high school. For Plato, wonder “is where philosophy begins and nowhere else.” No wonder, no philosophers. Even Aristotle, who built a whole philosophical system from his lover’s quarrel with Plato, agrees on this point. “It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize,” he observes in the Metaphysics , “wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve come full circle, to the origin of the cosmos—the earth, the stars, “the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full”—that Hephaestus hammered onto the shield’s bright circumference in the first place. But we’ve yet to consider those “greater matters” that form the astronomical rungs on the ladder of Aristotle’s ascent into thaumazein —the moon, the sun, the stars, and the origin of the universe. Let’s take the next step in wonder’s philosophical progression and look to the moon.

II. Worlds Beyond

Sooner or later, the moon pops up on pretty much every poet’s literary horizon. Whether you’re a Japanese courtesan, a Yoruban folk singer, or a Conceptualist cosmonaut, it’s as close as the art comes to a timeless universal motif. But how many poets ever make the moon feel new in their art? Nearly 350 years ago, John Milton managed to work a nifty little lunar renovation into the epic paraphernalia of Paradise Lost , as the irrepressible Satan—after nine days and nights in free fall from the battlefield of heaven—takes up arms once again:

                                          His ponderous shield, Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, Behind him cast. The broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesolè, Or in Valdarno to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.

Even the most pious poet can’t resist a bit of literary vandalism now and then. Emblazoning the full moon on Satan’s shield, Milton blots out the classical world of Achilles’s shield—just as Paradise Lost will, he hopes, eclipse the Iliad in the annals of literary history someday. “Massy” yet also “ethereal [in] temper,” Satan’s shield is another kind of impossible object, or hyperobject. It belongs to that wondrous category of things that hold dual citizenship in the realms of the material and the ideal, like a poem, or an angel, or the venerable moon itself. Since antiquity, astronomers had speculated about the moon’s ontology—was it composed of ethereal vapors, or massy like the earth?—until Milton’s “Tuscan artist” put these theories to the proof with the aid of his “optic glass.” Oddly, we don’t really see much of the moon on Satan’s shield. Superimposed on its “spotty globe,” we find a portrait of Galileo Galilei—the man in Milton’s moon—who, more than any poet or rebel angel, revolutionized our view of the heavens above.

Milton visited Galileo—by then old, blind, and under house arrest—in Florence during the summer of 1638. (DreamWorks has been sitting on my script of this story for ages.) In his book The Starry Messenger , Galileo had published the first topographical drawings of the moon’s surface to appear in the West nearly three decades earlier.

Galileo’s moon sketch. Courtesy of Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology.

Peering through his telescope, the Florentine astronomer marveled at a cratered and mountainous terrain that defied expectation:

The surface of the Moon is not even, smooth and perfectly spherical, as the majority of philosophers have conjectured that it and the other celestial bodies are but, on the contrary, rough and uneven, and covered with cavities and protuberances just like the face of the Earth, which is rendered diverse by lofty mountains and deep valleys.

Galileo discovered that the moon, too, was a world, “just like” ours. Look closely at that progression of topological nouns ending Milton’s lines, and you’ll see how the moon came of age as a world in this period—from a flat “circumference” to a volumetric “orb” to a mapmaker’s “globe.” In Galileo’s wake, the French engraver Claude Mellan’s moon maps would soon highlight the chiaroscuro curvature of the lunar orb.

Three representations of the moon by Claude Mellan, courtesy of The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1960.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the moon had assumed world-like dimensions in the British artist John Russell’s aureate globe.

Moon globe by John Russell.

All this time, Earth was yielding its last blank spots—known as sleeping beauties—to the epistemological imperium of geography. But now another “spotty globe” offered “new lands, / Rivers or mountains” to be mapped—and the moon was only the beginning.

The moon on Satan’s shield heralds a revolution in the history of cosmological wonder. Galileo’s telescope revealed a host of worlds in the heavens above—new moons circling Jupiter, stars never before seen by the human eye—all swiftly incorporated into blind Milton’s literary vision of the cosmos. Paradise Lost stages a universal masque of wonder beneath this canopy of plural worlds. Awestruck, Adam delivers a Hamletic soliloquy on outer space, which makes of “this earth a spot, a grain, / An atom with the firmament compared / And all her numbered stars that seem to roll / Spaces incomprehensible.” Milton himself wonders if God might “ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds” from chaos someday. Satan, too, plays the amateur cosmologist, speculating that “space may produce new worlds” for his legions to invade following their expulsion from the kingdom of heaven. If you find Paradise Lost slow going, try reading it as science fiction. (Spielberg, what are you waiting for?) Nebulous monsters wing their way through star systems. Angels and demons alike imagine humans colonizing other planets. For the first time in English poetry, we view Earth from outer space—“that globe whose hither side / With light from hence though but reflected shines”—half cloaked in brightness, half in shadow. I could go on. But amid all this, the archangel Raphael warns Adam—and, consequently, Star Trek aficionados everywhere—to “dream not of other worlds, what creatures there / Live in what state, condition or degree.” Maybe wonder, like the moon, has a dark side.

Let’s not forget that the most wonderstruck character in Paradise Lost also happens to be the most fiendish by far. Unlike furious Achilles, Satan simply can’t stop mooning over all of creation. From the stairway to heaven, he “looks down with wonder” at Earth below; once he’s touched down on our planet, he gazes upon Eden “with new wonder”; when he first sees Adam and Eve, he’s overcome by “wonder and could love” them, too. Such vulnerability to wonder, on Satan’s part, is frankly endearing. I, for one, can’t help feeling sympathy for the poor devil when we last see him—at the conclusion of his final speech to the rebel angels in hell—still wondering to the bitter end:

                                             He stood expecting Their universal shout and high applause To fill his ear when cóntrary he hears On all sides from innumerable tongues A dismal universal hiss, the sound Of public scorn. He wondered but not long Had leisure, wond’ring at himself now more: His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare, His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining Each other till supplanted down he fell A monstrous serpent on his belly prone

I’ve felt this way after poetry readings myself sometimes. (Isn’t every poet a narcissistic angel in reptilian form, after all?) Satan’s ultimate object of wonder in Paradise Lost isn’t a newly discovered planet, or humankind, but “himself,” transformed into a serpent. You’d expect Satan to feel horror at this grotesque Ovidian metamorphosis—his cranium warping hideously, his arms fusing into his torso, his legs corkscrewing into a scaly tail—but this antihero’s wondrous journey through the cosmos ends where it began, in a failure to see himself for what he really is. Maybe dreaming too much of worlds beyond reach can make a monster of you.

Worlds swim through Paradise Lost like bubbles in a glass of champagne, but Milton cautions us not to lose sight of ourselves in this teeming universe. Who’s more blind to our world than the astronomer squinting into his telescope’s eyepiece? “They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun,” writes Augustine in his Confessions , “but [they] do not perceive their own eclipse in the present.” I suspect Milton had this sort of inner eclipse in mind when he described Satan’s dusky radiance following the archangel’s fall from heaven:

His form had not yet lost All her original brightness nor appeared Less than archangel ruined and th’ excess Of glory obscured, as when the sun, new ris’n, Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams or from behind the moon In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs. Darkened so, yet shone Above them all th’ archangel

Milton’s selenographic shield may advertise Galileo’s discoveries, but its spotty globe also reminds us that Lucifer—the erstwhile “bringer of light”—is, in truth, eclipse personified: “Darkened so, yet shone / Above them all th’ archangel.” Nothing discloses the dark side of wonder like an eclipse. I once saw one, through a piece of welder’s glass, in a derelict park on the other side of the world. Even the crows seemed perplexed by its disastrous twilight. There was an uncanny chill, as if a refrigerator door had swung open inside me. But the wonder of it all wasn’t that the sun had been blotted out overhead. What stopped my breath was the slow silhouette of another world gliding into view.

III. Worlds Within

Three centuries after Paradise Lost first lit up the Western literary firmament, an American poet, cookbook author, and marijuana enthusiast named Ronald Johnson purchased an 1892 edition of Milton’s poem in a Seattle bookshop—and promptly began to black out most of the text from its pages.

Image courtesy of the Ronald Johnson Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Used with permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.

Why would anyone so meticulously deface an already outdated copy of the venerable Puritan epic? “I got about halfway through it, kind of as a joke,” Johnson later explained in an interview, like a sheepish delinquent caught spray-painting a cathedral. “But I decided you don’t tamper with Milton to be funny. You have to be serious.” What began as a little joke at Milton’s expense developed into a postmodernist masterpiece of literary eclipse in its own right. Blot out the first and last two letters of paradise , and you have radi . Lose the first and last letters of lost , and you have os . Even the title of the poem Johnson fashioned from this procedure— Radi Os —is ordained solely from Milton’s dark materials.

Before publishing this literary curio, Johnson scrupulously whitewashed the epic he’d defaced, yielding a photographic negative of his poetic eclipse:

Nobody wrote Radi Os . The poem was wondrously erased into existence. Its author’s words are nowhere to be found in this work, and yet—like Milton’s Creator—he’s everywhere.

“There is another world,” the French poet Paul Éluard once said, “but it is inside this one.” I think Johnson would gently amend this to say there are other worlds , but they are inside this one. Turning the astronomical theater of Paradise Lost inside out, Johnson investigates the plurality of worlds within: “worlds, / That both in him and all things, / drive / deepest.” A little textual puzzle from ARK , the cosmological epic Johnson labored over for twenty years, illustrates the wondrous multiplication of inner worlds throughout this poet’s work:

earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth

The literary critic Stephanie Burt has deciphered the secret messages embedded in this triple-decker concrete poem. Earth, earth, earth. Ear, the art hearth. Hear the art, hear the art. Sampling a jeremiad from the King James Bible—“O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord”—Johnson composes a manifold matrix of worlds (and hearts). It’s one thing to register the verse in universe and another entirely to construct a poetics of the multiverse. The erasurist’s decision not to delete the s that pluralizes his book’s title makes worlds of this difference. Radi Os isn’t a radio; it’s an orchestra of radios. Well, that’s not quite right. See that caesura fracturing the poem’s title? An imaginary number of broken “radi os” hums and buzzes inside this literary hyperobject. One radio may tune into a single frequency at a time, but a chorus of broken radios can broadcast everything from an infernal racket to the music of the spheres all at once. “You don’t tamper with Milton to be funny,” our holy fool may attest, but for all its radical theology, Radi Os is, in the end, a divine musical comedy.

Listen carefully, and you’ll hear a marvelously cracked piece of postmodern music playing behind the curtain of Johnson’s literary erasure. At a party with his students one night—so the story goes—the poet first heard a recording of Baroque Variations , by the composer Lukas Foss. At one point in the work, a xylophone spells out Johann Sebastian Bach in Morse code. Elsewhere, a highly trained musician smashes a bottle with a hammer. Johnson’s various enthusiasms must have lined up nicely that evening, because he embarked upon the “solitary quest in the cloud chamber” that would become Radi Os the very next day. In the dedicatory note to his book, Johnson quotes Foss’s liner notes for Variation I—on a larghetto by Handel—as a sort of key to his own work:

Groups of instruments play the Larghetto but keep submerging into inaudibility (rather than pausing). Handel’s notes are always present but often inaudible. The inaudible moments leave holes in Handel’s music (I composed the holes). The perforated Handel is played by different groups of the orchestra in three different keys at one point, in four different speeds at another.

Handel’s larghetto, from the Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no. 12, may very well be the most beautiful melody the composer ever wrote. It’s easy enough to find online, if you’d like to hear the “always present but often inaudible” original music behind Foss’s détourned Variation I sometime. Then listen to the Foss, and you’ll experience the otherworldly beauty of Handel under eclipse. It’s hard not to hear broken radios searching for a classical music broadcast in this perforated larghetto’s eerie harmonics and bursts of sonority. If you find Radi Os slow going, try reading it as the libretto for a post-structuralist space opera—lyrics erased by Johnson, score perforated by Foss.

The wonder of variations—in music, in poetry, in evolutionary biology, and elsewhere—is how one variation begets another, though you never know what you’ll beget. Perforating Paradise Lost , Johnson produced a literary variation on Foss’s musical variation on a Baroque artist who composed dozens of variations of his own—including Hephaestus’s favorite, “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” To see how Radi Os makes possible even further variations on itself, let’s look at the original passage in the 1892 edition of Paradise Lost on the page where Satan’s shield first appears.

What if somebody other than Johnson—say, a young woman in rural New England on a snowy night long ago—were to compose her own holes in this dark material?

                                                                     time Can                thunder   Here Here                                              in my

        unhappy mansion

              but                              that voice   Of                                                                          fire                       scarce     ceased                                   the Ethereal                                                            artist                                             in her        globe   Of                                   marle                            steps On                               and             on

It’s hardly “Because I could not stop for Death,” but you get the idea. There are innumerable poems encrypted in the “harmonious numbers” of Paradise Lost . I even hear echoes of the sadly underrated poet, Star Trek aficionado, and Ronald Johnson enthusiast Srikanth Reddy in this literary cloud chamber.

The mind is                       a           matter                                                                     my                                                                        friends                                                          of

                                        voice                                               the                 edge Of                       it            moving                                              like                            glass         in Rivers                                                            but                   burning

I could do this forever, and that’s exactly the point. You could, too. I suspect that’s why Johnson breaks off his own work at Book 4 of Paradise Lost , leaving nearly seven thousand lines of pristine Miltonic pentameters for others to cross out someday. “ Radi Os kind of wrote itself,” said the author of this unfinished erasure. “I think it ended when it needed to end, and I didn’t need to add the rest.” An open-ended variation on Milton’s song, Radi Os invites us to “add the rest.” And why stop at Paradise Lost , for that matter? Compose your own holes in any book— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , the Constitution of the United States of America, The Unsignificant —and you’ll unearth a manifold matrix of worlds within.

A literary multiverse, Radi Os is riddled with cosmological wormholes, theological rabbit holes, and typographical holes. From the “O        tree,” a slant rhyme for poetry that opens the work, to the “O for / The Apocalypse” that trumpets the poem’s closing revelations, Johnson makes us see the hole in whole and hear the hole in holy . There’s a hole in wonder, too, though I’d never tumbled through it until I came across the following page in Radi Os :

The first time I read this passage, I had no idea what lay behind it. But that floating little phrase—“the O / Of / wonder”—kept looping around in my head, so I dug up an old copy of Paradise Lost to read the Miltonic original and was wonderstruck. Almost three thousand years ago, a blind Greek poet pictured the world on an ancient shield. Two and a half millennia later, the moon spied through an optic glass eclipsed Homer’s world in a theological poem of Reformation England. In my own lifetime—I was four, astronauts had set foot on the moon’s surface only a few years earlier—a little-known American poet erased Milton’s spotty globe all the way down to a wondrous O . World, moon, O . The word for when things line up in this way is syzygy . The microscopic linkage of chromosomes necessary for reproduction in our species is one example. An eclipse—when three celestial bodies line up in astronomical space—is another. The word syzygy is itself a syzygy, which almost makes me believe in intelligent design as far as language is concerned. Read aloud its sequence of three identical vowels lined up in a row— y , y , y —and you’ll hear humankind grappling with the mystery of causation. Let’s not overlook that linked chain of o ’s in “the O / Of / wonder,” either. It’s a syzygy, too. Why, why, why? Oh, oh, oh. We all live that song.

So many images flicker through this O in Radi Os —a full moon, a ghostly shield, a hole in a page from a timeworn edition of Paradise Lost —but I always return to a mouth open in wonder. When we see golden acrobats turning handsprings on an ancient shield, or when the mountains of the moon first swim into focus through a telescope’s eyepiece, we say “O,” hardly aware that our lips are assuming the shape of the signifier itself. The “O” of wonder, Johnson shows us, is the o in wonder . I can’t think of any other word where our writing system and the morphology of human speech enter into such wondrous alignment. But the mouth forms an O in arousal, and in hunger, and in death’s terminal rictus, too: “Thy mouth was open,” George Herbert says to Death personified, “but thou couldst not sing.” There’s no such thing as pure or simple wonder. When thaumazein forces our lips into an O, all those ancient drives—from Eros to Thanato s —move through us as well. The art of poetry traditionally originates in this inexhaustible, sonorous “O.” O muse, O Lord, O my love, O late capitalism, O etcetera—the O that Johnson plucks out of wonder invokes endless poetic variation. With all due respect to Plato and Aristotle, philosophy isn’t the only vocation that springs from thaumazein . If you look closely at the O of wonder, you’ll see a poem beginning there, too.

Srikanth Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Review. This lecture will appear in  The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures, forthcoming from Wave Books in September.

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The Acolyte and the Long-Awaited Death of Review-Bombing

You know you’ve gone too deep into YouTube fandom when you can’t remember which dude with an expensive microphone told you what while speaking straight to camera.

Still, earlier this week, that was the particular sarlacc pit I had been sucked into. Word had spread that fans were review-bombing The Acolyte on Rotten Tomatoes and curiosity got the best of me. First, I watched this dude-with-a-mic video , which claimed that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy doesn’t like Star Wars fans and “that [Lucasfilm] started attacking the fans before the show even came out; that was to tell you that they knew they had a pile of trash.”

Another ballcapped person noted, “The main reason why this show is such a debacle is because it doesn’t feel like Star Wars … Fans like me—longtime fans like us—we’re not buying this crap. This is garbage, and we gotta call 'em out for it.” After that it was this , which explained that “the very things fans complain about are the very virtue signals the Hollywood establishment has invested so much into they simply can’t accept the audience not responding to them.” In turn, the video’s narrator concluded, the industry blames review-bombing.

It’s hard to say that any of the YouTube pundits were “wrong” or “right”—and doing so would be a surefire way to become the subject of the next analysis video . (Fast-forward to 13:51 to watch my floating head be yelled at by Carrie Fisher .) What I will suggest is this: Everyone is just fighting about fighting now.

For perspective, here’s what happened: The Acolyte hit Disney+ on June 4. The critical score on the Tomatometer sat somewhere in the 80+ percent range—not quite “Certified Fresh” but pretty solid. In the intervening weeks, the audience score plummeted and now hovers around 13 or 14 percent, which has led to reports that the show was being review-bombed, aka hit with bad-faith negative audience reviews. Since some reports connected this flood of bad scores to the show’s diverse cast and LGBTQ+ themes—er, “lesbian space witches”—there’s been debate about whether the poor reviews were coming from homophobic, racist, or misogynist corners of the fandom.

Last week, The Hollywood Reporter asked showrunner Leslye Headland ( Russian Doll ) about the response to the show. While stipulating that she didn’t think her show was “queer with a capital Q,” Headland said it was disheartening “that people would think that if something were gay, that would be bad … it makes me feel sad that a bunch of people on the internet would somehow dismantle what I consider to be the most important piece of art that I’ve ever made.”

These comments led to a bunch of reaction videos, which is how I ended up in the YouTube rabbit hole. Each video I watched had lots of nuance, but one theme kept coming up that seems to be the heart of the problem: Reviewers aren’t bigots, they just think The Acolyte is garbage and “ not Star Wars ”; Disney’s ownership of Lucasfilm is ruining the franchise, and these pissed-off fans are posting reviews to point out the show’s many flaws.

Taking this at face value, I’d just like to say: Uh, OK? Putting aside personal feelings about the show’s quality (I am a bad queer person who hasn’t watched The Acolyte yet, despite the instructions that went out in this month’s Gay Agenda newsletter; after my YouTube jaunt I’m not sure if skipping this show makes me a bad Star Wars fan or a good one), there’s another argument to be made: Sometimes franchises have bad installments—or just installments not everyone enjoys—and that’s fine.

Star Wars, like all brilliant creations, derives its genius from its malleability. George Lucas’ world-building thrives on the fact that anyone can imagine what’s happening three star systems away. Lucas himself reinforced this by turning to different writers and directors to make The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi . Disney has maybe gone too overboard with the amount of content it’s made since its $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012—even CEO Bob Iger has copped to that —but trying to say that it’s an untouchable franchise that shouldn’t be iterated upon is ridiculous.

Every band makes one album their “true fans” don’t like. Every director misfires once or twice. Game of Thrones went off the rails in its last two seasons. The Walking Dead got boring. Dylan found Jesus. None of this discounts the value of the stuff fans do like. And it’s not as though everytime Disney+ drops an Acolyte or an Ahsoka , A New Hope magically disappears. Anyone stuck on Lucasfilm’s old shit can still watch it. (One of the YouTube reaction videos in this saga noted that if Lucasfilm continues “to give us Star Wars like this I will watch it burn to the ground, and we will celebrate that. The death of this franchise. Here’s the great thing: They can never touch George Lucas’ Star Wars; we always have it, and you can’t do nothing about it, Disney.” This was said without acknowledgement that Lucas occasionally touches his own work and that Disney could, theoretically, stop offering Star Wars on its streaming service.)

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Ultimately, it all comes down to time. Audiences hadn’t seen anything like Star Wars (the movie) when Lucas released it in 1977. It filled a void. Nearly 50 years later, they’ve seen perhaps too many things like it. The only way for Star Wars (the franchise) to stay relevant is to let other people do new things with it. What the world may need from sci-fi in 2024 isn’t what it needed from sci-fi in the '70s. Not every installment will appeal to every fan; some of them may not appeal to any fans. One show cannot ruin a franchise, especially not when it comes on the heels of excellence like Andor and The Mandalorian .

All of which to say, review-bombing is over. Not because people should stop doing it, or because no one was really doing it to begin with. Rather, it’s finished as a concept. Expressing displeasure via audience scores may seem like a good way to get Kathleen Kennedy’s attention, but now that everything she produces becomes subject of some fan debate about its authenticity, she likely doesn’t notice. Rotten Tomatoes isn’t Yelp, and Star Wars isn’t a local business trying to keep loyal customers. It’s a global franchise with space for lots of stories. Some of them just may not be for everyone.

Loose Threads

Maybe Stefon should review The Acolyte . This Thread makes a pretty compelling case: “The hottest show in the galaxy is The Acolyte . It’s got everything. Jedi Wookiee. Lesbian space witches. Conservative tear cocktails. Unhinged fanboys. Carrie-Anne Moss.”

“Distracted Boyfriend” is a video now. Enthusiasts have used a new artificial intelligence tool called Dream Machine to turn the image labeling meme into an animated clip . Is nothing sacred?

Charli XCX released a “Girl, so confusing” remix featuring Lorde, thus ending literal days of internet speculation about a feud that may or may not have actually been a thing.

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Rockstar Games Co-Founder Says Grand Theft Auto Movie 'Never Made Sense'

"they thought we’d be blinded by the lights.".

Rockstar Games co-founder and former head writer Dan Houser has said a Grand Theft Auto movie "never made sense."

As reported by GI.biz , Houser told The Ankler that making the film — which has faded in and out of obscurity over the years — was a "huge risk" considering the reputation of the GTA brand.

"Why would we do this?," Houser and the other Rockstar leads asked the film executives. "What you've described is you making a movie and us having no control and taking a huge risk, that we’re going to end up paying for with something that belongs to us."

"They thought we’d be blinded by the lights and that just wasn't the case. We had what we considered to be multi billion dollar IP, and the economics never made sense. The risk never made sense. In those days, the perception was that games made poor-quality movies."

Various concepts for a GTA film have risen and fallen over the years, including one reportedly starring Eminem , though Rockstar has remained firmly against it. This comes despite films stars like Jack Black unable to believe the likes of GTA and Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption franchise haven't been made into films amid the rise if video game adaptations such as Sonic the Hedgehog , Minecraft , Borderlands , and more.

The CEO of Rockstar parent company, Take-Two Interactive's Strauss Zelnick, made a similar comment to Houser in 2019 . "Part of it is, if we were to do something like that, we’d want to have complete creative control to make sure we expressed [GTA] in the way we wanted — and that would mean we’d need to finance that motion picture,” Zelnick said at the time.

Every Celebrity in GTA 5 and GTA Online

GTA makes plenty of money sticking to its video game roots, of course. Grand Theft Auto 5 generated more than $1 billion within three days of launch in 2013 , a number which will likely be blown out of the water when Grand Theft Auto 6 is released in fall 2025.

The GTA 6 trailer — which reintroduced fans to Rockstar's take on Miami, Vice City — featured a ton of intricate details ( here are 99 things IGN spotted ) and plenty of references to wild and wacky real life events too . While the game was revealed as a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S game , PC players were left frustrated, though not necessarily surprised, that their platform was left off the list .

They weren't the ones a little peeved though, as several developers from Rockstar itself took to social media to express their frustration at the trailer leaking early. In fact, the entire industry shared their disappointment that the exciting moment was dampened. Several streamers were also hit with content strikes and takedowns in the wake of the leak.

Regardless, it still surpassed Minecraft to become the second most-watched video game trailer of all time with more than 168 million views in the first three months.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

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‘Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1’ Review: The Beauty, and the Bloodshed

In the first of a projected four-film cycle, Kevin Costner revisits the western genre and U.S. history in a big, busy drama.

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By Manohla Dargis

Midway through Kevin Costner’s big, busy, decentered western “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” the actor Danny Huston delivers a brief speech. The year is 1863 — two years into the Civil War — and his character, a colonel in charge of a military fort in the southwest, is discoursing on a nearby settlement called Horizon. Apaches have recently burned the hamlet to the ground, killing scores of settlers. You simply need look at the land, the colonel says, to see why the newcomers will keep coming.

“You may recall that’s what drove us across the ocean to this country in the first place.”

Huston, an imposing presence with a rich, sepulchral voice that can suggest depths, delivers this nod at Manifest Destiny with arid sobriety. His words certainly sound meaningful yet this reference to American expansionism just hangs in the air, untethered from history or ideology. Given this nod as well as the film’s large scale, crowded cast, multiple story lines and nearly three-hour run time, it’s reasonable to assume that Costner will add context, commentary or, really, anything . Yet all that’s clear from “Chapter 1,” the lead-in for his splashily publicized four-film cycle , is that the land was vast and beautiful, and everyone wanted a piece.

“Chapter 1” is the first movie that Costner has directed since his 2003 western “Open Range,” an earnest period drama about free-grazing cattlemen facing down a wealthy rancher. What’s striking about that film, beyond how Costner draws from so many different genre touchstones — John Ford, Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah, among others — is how he tries to honor old-fashioned westerns that he so clearly loves while also complicating the myth of the American West through his character, a violence-haunted gunfighter.

A version of that same man — tough, terse, good with a gun, not bad with the little ladies and now named Hayes Ellison — rides into “Chapter 1” about an hour in, handsomely framed against a bright blue sky. What takes him so long? Given how the movie plays like an extended prologue, I suspect that Costner timed his entrance for a four-part project rather than for a stand-alone film. That makes it tough to get a handle on precisely what he’s up to here, other than gesturing at history, re-engaging with an archetypically American genre and readying the foundation for an epic that will continue when “Chapter 2” opens in August.

Written by Costner and Jon Baird, “Chapter 1” features uneven lines of action that jump across the map, from the southwest to the Territory of Wyoming. In one section, bad men with good cheekbones, their dusters trimmed with animals skins à la Gladiatorial Rome, chase after a righteously violent woman (Jena Malone in a lively, credible turn). In time, they end up in one of those frontier towns with muddy streets and desperate characters, a sinkhole where Hayes rides in with some gold and exits with Marigold (Abbey Lee), a lady of the evening (and afternoon). In another section, Luke Wilson leads a wagon train peopled with tough Americans, Laplander goons and two British twits itching for some punishment.

The story line that revs up the action centers on the settlement, a riverfront hamlet on a ribbon of green that winds through the desert and has attracted the attention of a tribe of White Mountain Apache led by Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz). Soon after the movie opens, the settlers are swinging their partners to fiddles like good John Ford folk; not long after, many are dead, cut down by Apaches. Among the survivors are the newly widowed, impeccably manicured Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail), who take refuge in the fort. There, they meet a first lieutenant, Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington), a thoughtful soul who refers to Native Americans as Indigenous.

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‘my lady jane’ review: emily bader reinvents a luckless royal in prime video’s amusing if insubstantial historical romp.

Everyone knows Jane Grey was beheaded for claiming the throne after the death of King Edward VI. This alt-history fantasy presupposes: Maybe she wasn't?

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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Amazon prime video's new releases coming in july 2024, 'the night manager' season 2 production team brings hangtime international pictures aboard, my lady jane.

Really, “different” doesn’t begin to describe it. A few minutes later, My Lady Jane reveals that it is less an alt-history than a full-on fantasy. The biggest split in 16th century England is not between Catholics and Protestants, but Verities, i.e., regular humans, and Ethians, a violently persecuted underclass of people who — pause for dramatic effect — have the ability to shapeshift into animals . While Jane is a Verity, her increasing sympathy for the Ethians’ cause will prove to be especially dangerous during her sudden and unexpected rise to power, especially once she lands in the crosshairs of the virulently anti-Ethian Mary.

My Lady Jane leans hard on the idea of Jane as an “intellectual rebel” who bucks against the conventions of her era (which really just means she falls right in line with the more recent stereotype of a Strong Female Character).

Alas, her mother, Frances (Anna Chancellor), has other ideas, and quickly marries her off to Guildford (Edward Bluemel), the rakish son of a prominent lord ( Rob Brydon ‘s Dudley). Though she demands a divorce basically from day one — “How modern,” retorts Guildford — it hardly takes a diehard romantic to guess that their obvious mutual attraction might complicate those plans.

But Jane isn’t the only part of My Lady Jane that eschews stuffy period-piece cliches. Its storytelling is puckish and irreverent, and eager to remind you that it’s puckish and irreverent.

An Alan Cumming-lite narrator (Ollie Chris) comments on every plot beat with slang-infused snark. The soundtrack is stuffed with female-led covers of iconic rock songs like “Rebel Rebel” and “Tainted Love.” The courtly intrigue frequently takes on a goofy, vulgar bent. Mary is portrayed as a vicious brat whose entire bid for power rests on the fact that Edward’s adviser Seymour ( Dominic Cooper ) can’t get enough of ye olde S&M play, while Frances gets all her best intel from younger noblemen who pop boners at the sight of her.

And while the narration is overused, the unnamed voice does get in some good cracks. “If therapists were invented in 1553, our brooding tortured hero would be a different man and this would be a different story,” he sighs in mock sympathy as Guildford mopes about a formative childhood trauma. “But they weren’t. And he isn’t. And it can’t be. So here we are.”

For all the talk of how uniquely brave and brilliant and empathetic Jane is, however, My Lady Jane lacks the substance to match. Jane and Guildford’s delicious sexual tension aside — Bader and Bluemel give great annoyed-but-turned-on face — none of the relationships run deep enough to provoke real emotion. At times, it’s difficult to tell if they’re even meant to be sincere.

Jane’s social justice mission rings hollow as well. Unlike, say, its Prime Video sibling The Boys , My Lady Jane has no interest in drawing direct parallels to our world. But it has little interest in the Ethians as their own culture or community, either, give or take a few supporting individuals like Jane’s erstwhile friend Susannah ( Extraordinary ‘s Máiréad Tyers). Jane plays the part of the righteous freedom fighter without any of the pesky complications of real history, but also without the gravitas that a more richly developed fictional universe might have provided.

But somewhere in all this breathless reinterpreting, Jane Grey herself gets lost. Rather than expand on a life that could have been, My Lady Jane shoves her instead into someone else’s idea of a cheeky little fairy tale.

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