Project Hail Mary, Masters of the Universe and Sunsetting the Dark Knight w/Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells

0:01 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast. Episode number. Well, it doesn't matter what the episode number is. It's a bonus episode. This is a summer bonus episode. We're going to do a little. We're going to take a little focus. We're going to take a. Take a little jog down, down the world of, or down the road of movies, because there's a couple of different things I'd like to discuss. And you know, if you've listened to this show for any period of time, that, that Tom and I are huge movie guys.

0:39 We, we always find a way to insert assertions or illusions or ideas from film into our literary conversations. As a matter of fact, we've got several films coming up that are on the docket right now that we've already discussed on the show, including the Odyssey. And we will be discussing Neuromancer coming up in September. That's not going to be on Apple tv. That's gonna be an Apple TV show. Currently working my way through that book. And so there's a lot of different areas that Tom and I sort of discuss and, and film is one of those areas.

1:17 And there's some larger sort of cultural critiques that I'd like to make about film that I think are relevant for leaders. But I also think it'll just be a fun and exciting kind of little, little, I don't know, break from our usual July fair where we cover deep and serious topics like the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the anti Federalist Papers, and of course, our episode that we just did that we released on July 4 for the 250th birthday of the United States of America, where we talked with my friend De Rolo Nixon about the Declaration of Independence.

1:53 So this is a nice little break from that. So sit back and listen to Tom and I pull our best Siskel and Ebert muscles possible, if that is indeed possible. So I'm going to open, as I usually do when this is a. More of a literary pursuit, by. By reading something that I wrote. So Tom didn't know this, but I do have a substack that you can go and find. It's called A Voice Crying in the Wilderness. So can you. You can go on substack.com and look up a voice crying in the wilderness and you will see all of my writings.

2:28 No, you don't have to pay anything. I don't have enough subscribers to charge anybody anything. I think I have like 22, if I remember correctly. 22 subscribers on this substack because I'm not making it. I'm not making it popular. I'm not marketing it. I'm not trying to blow it up. I just use it to work out ideas and work out ideas in public and then watch other folks work out ideas. By the way, I think Substack is significantly better platform than Medium. So I would like to read from an essay that I do have published on substack, a variation of it called the Sun Setting of the Dark Night to open our show today.

3:05 And I quote from myself to well, all of you movies and superheroes have always gone together like peanut butter and jelly, starting in the 1970s, actually really the 1960s with a campy Adam West Batman, and then continuing into the 1970s with a serious Superman. Filmmaking has taken representing the secular gods of superheroes to the general public, to all new heights. Christopher Reeve, by virtue of being the first portrayal of Superman on the big screen, is thought to embody the iconic and virtuous image of what a superhero actually should be.

3:46 At least he was until the 1990s came along. And then you had Michael Keaton, who starred in Tim Burton's Batman. Again, by virtue of being the first non campy, quote, unquote serious actor to take on the mantle of Batman, Keaton's representation of Batman is considered by many in a particular generational cohort to be the iconic and darkest image of what a superhero. Here's that term again, should be. But times change and tastes change and movies evolve. The superhero movie, of course, has evolved, and now we live in a cinematic backwash in 2026 of the first Iron man movie, released in 2008, with all of its various and sundry offshoots and sequels.

4:31 Of course, with this evolution came the rise of the Dark Knight in film, with the three most iconic movies to ever accurately or realistically ground the character now played by the British actor Christian Bale in 2005, 2008, and 2012. Following those releases, it was 10 years and a multiplicity of Marvel movies later that the Batman was released in 2022 to little fanfare and low grosses. And this is how we will set the table today. I want to talk about Batman and Superman, but I also want to talk about Project Hail Mary.

5:12 And I want to talk about Masters of the Universe. And I want to talk about what all this means for heroics, what all this means for generational cohorts, and with all this means for all of you listening out there, because I think there's something here that we all should be paying attention to. Now, you may not know this. Actually, many of you don't know this. Just like many of you didn't know until I just said it that I had a substack. You might not know that a long time ago I used to write movie and cultural reviews for a website on the Internet.

5:44 No, I'm not going to give the name of the website. I've already looked for it. And the person who owned it, who I do know, he's done some other work with me on some other projects, has taken it down,

5:56 so it is no longer available. But I do have all the original writings because I write things on Microsoft Word and then I upload them to WordPress because as my mama used to say back in the day, God bless the child who holds onto his own ip. Now, I did this writing back when everyone was still captured by the mcu. The Irishman was being touted as the return of Scorsese, Pesci, De Niro, and Pacino. And I was a little bit younger. I learned in writing for this film and culture website, and I learned a lot by having to organize my thoughts about film and culture and even the prevailing winds of politics, how those all sort of interact in our modern world.

6:39 I also learned a lot about working with people who weren't nearly as organized or disciplined as I was in writing, much less in organization, time management, and how to scale a business. It turns out that you can learn a lot more from your failures than you can from whatever nascent successes might come your way. In the process of banging out 500 to a thousand words a day, every day, for weeks at a time, I had an epiphany, which I still hold on to to this day. No one in the film critic world ever examines the cultural trends behind why some movies work and why others do not.

7:14 And when the few critics who do seek to tie viewership, audience attention, and popular political positions to movies do right, they are almost universally ignored for not expressing the quote, unquote, right, whatever that may mean. Opinions. The last critic to even touch on this area whose name you would recognize was Roger Ebert. I mean, yeah, Leonard Maltin did try a little bit, but Roger Ebert was really the pioneer of this and the best one to ever write such larger cultural analysis. The the best critic to ever write such larger cultural analysis, whose name no one ever mentions anymore in any film conversation, was the very, very caustic writer who even pissed off Orson Welles, Pauline Kael.

7:59 She didn't care who you were. She was Just going to write the truth.

8:04 But today on the show, we are, Tom and I are going to go there as we've gone there before.

8:14 So like I said today we will talk about movies because leaders, culture, movies, books, music, these things matter. To paraphrase from the movie High Fidelity way back in the day, it's less about who you are sometimes than about what you like.

8:35 Of course, to talk about what we like. I've already mentioned him a couple times. Today is my usual

8:42 partner in crime, partner in cinematic crime, Tom Libby. How you doing today, Tom? How's it going? It's going, it's going well. I was so many times during your opening there, I was like, I was half tempted to just throw a couple of jabs in, you know, like, you know, I just wanted to because it's funny like that you say, I was thinking about Pauline Kale for a minute. I mean she died what, 2000-1999-2000-2001. It's been like 30 years. Yeah, it's been, it's been 25, 30 years. I often, you know, it's funny because I don't think of her until a really bad movie comes out.

9:19 And then I wonder what she would think of this because I know what Roger Ebert and Siskel, I know what those guys would think of it. Right. Like, but she, to your point, she was very vocal about poor cine, poor cinema. Like she was very vocal about. And, and I'm, I am not a Marvel fan, so I, you're talking about the whole Marvel super whatever. And I like, I wonder what she would think of all that, that all that sequentialness of the Marvel movies and the, the, the, the, the, the tie ins and the like all this stuff that, that Marvel requires for it to be classified as a Marvel movie or whatever.

10:01 Because I think she would have just ripped it apart. I really think she would have, yeah, she would have hated all of it. She would have called all of it trash. She would have had, had nothing to do with any of it. Maybe the first couple of movies like Iron man would have maybe caught her eye. Maybe. But, and partly because of that think about. Marvel didn't do anything. What the very, very first Marvel movie came out in 1944, 45, somewhere around there with Captain America. And then they did nothing after that for, until 2008, when.

10:31 Right, yeah, well, and I, when I say they, I don't think Marvel actually had anything to do with the original Captain America. It was just a, it was just a Marvel character that somebody made a movie out of But I'm not sure Marvel had anything to do with it until 2008 when Marvel decided they wanted to be in the movie business essentially. So. Well, well, Disney. Disney partially acquired Marvel. Right. And when Disney acquired Marvel Comics, they were going to mine all of that ip. Like it was just.

10:56 They were just going to do it. Right. And I remember. So the Marvel, the original Captain America movie. Yes, there was a very. So here's the thing about movies and like superheroes. And I start off with movies and superheroes because I didn't want to go into like radio and the other representations. But superheroes were on radio back in the 30s and 40s and 50s primarily. I mean, that's where you go from, you know, old time radio shows, which I'm also a huge fan of. That's another sort of thing that I like, like the Shadow, you know, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men all the way to the lives of Harry Lime, which starred Orson Welles, which was a spin off of the.

11:37 Spin off from the Third man. Book or not? But. Well, yeah, book and also movie with that zither music by Anton Karas. Oh my God. Incredible. But you go from that. Oh, the Lone Ranger. Lone Ranger and Tanto, which. Okay. But like you go from that in the 40s and 50s through to sort of the rise of television. And that's where Adam west shows up with Batman and. And George Reeves. I know people are going to object. They're gonna be like, well, what about George Reeves, you know, in the 50s on TV? Yeah, okay, sure, George Reeves, you know, Superman.

12:13 Some people will say he was the original Superman. But Marvel, I mean, so Marvel Comics started in the 60s, you know, under Stanley and Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and all those guys. And they didn't really start getting traction until the 80s. And they did some significant things in the 70s, don't get me wrong, with Gene Colon and oh gosh, Chris Claremont's entire run on X Men, which started in the 70s and all of that. But they didn't really pick up until the 80s when John Byrne was doing things on was.

12:50 Was writing and drawing on Superman over at dc. Marvel was trying to figure out how to best compete with them. And you're right, like one of the first superhero movies was Captain America that was in the late 80s. And then fantastic Four. Like there's. There is a version of Fantastic Four floating around that is horrible. From the 1980s, early 1990s. And. And then. Yeah, like nobody ever thought you could actually. And this is how. Because I was a comic book guy for 10,000 years, and I still love the medium.

13:22 I just don't buy them anymore because they're trash now. And we've wrecked the medium in America. Oh, my God, we've wrecked the medium in America. Don't get me started on that. But, but the,

13:35 as a comic book person, I didn't think there was any possibility of ever getting these, these, these characters on film. So when Iron man showed up, I was like, oh, this is good. They actually, like, have figured it out. This is good. And when, and then, of course, when Chris, what's his name, who played Captain America, when he showed up, I was like, oh, oh, Marvel's actually serious. Oh, they're actually going to try to put something together. Are they going to try to do the Avengers? And. And then they did a Hulk movie that didn't suck.

14:07 And I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, we're gonna do something. And, you know, and everybody who was a comic book person, like, really got really excited. And that, that drove a lot of the cultural zeitgeist, at least early. But now, 20 years, almost 20 years later on from Iron man, now there's. There's no, there's no more excitement. No. Well, again and again, I think, I think part of it is too, like, we talk a lot about the, like, does the writing, does the. When you, when you're watching a movie, as a, as a person who loves movies, is the writing worth it?

14:42 Like, is the writing actually worth the movie? And does the actor bring anything to the table? Right? Meaning, like, and I tell my friends and family all the time, if you watch a movie and you cannot envision any other actor playing that role playing, because that actor did such a good job. That's, that's the pinnacle. Like, that's what you want right there. And that just doesn't happen very often. Like, you just don't watch a movie and say, I cannot picture anybody else doing that role because that person, like, they made you believe that that role was written for them.

15:14 Right? That, that's like. And you, you see it every once in a while. And there's, there's, you know, there's examples of it all over cinema. And the genre doesn't matter either, by the way. No, in my opinion. But I think the superhero movies, it's work like, it's under a microscope even worse. Like, because you just look at it and go, like, the Hulk, for example. Just as an example, when we were kids, when we were kids, there was a TV show on about the Hulk. And by the way, folks, the. The big green guy was actually played by a guy.

15:48 This was not cgi, but the guy that they got to play. Bruce. Sorry, David. No, Bruce Banner. Bruce Banner. Sorry. Thank you. Bruce Banner. Like, he wasn't the stature of, like, the leading man roles that we think of today, right? Like the 6 foot 2, like, 225 pound, chiseled, whatever guy that you expect to be in that lead role. And again, by the way, I'm not suggesting that this has to be an action movie because we have the same kind of ideology. Regardless of whether it's a drama or whoever, we just want this imposing person.

16:24 And they picked the guy who played Bruce Banner in the original Hulk was like 5 foot 6 and like 140 pounds. Yes, right. Like, I forget the guy, I forget the actor's name, but he was not a big guy. He was not an imposing person on the screen. He was very. But then when they changed him. Bill Bixby. Bill Bixby. Bill Bixby. I actually liked it. I thought he was very good. I thought he did a really nice job at this. And, like. But when he changed into the Hulk, by the way, folks, it was a guy. It was Lou Ferrigno.

16:55 It was a bodybuilder that turned actor that was just a ginormous man. Like this mountain of a man in real life, by the way. Yes. And it just worked. I thought the whole. When I saw the very first Hulk movie that was like CGI and all that stuff, I was so. My heart actually hurt a little bit. I was like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing? We have. We have massive human beings on this planet that could have played that role. And you didn't have to because you were trying to make them larger than life.

17:28 And he was supposed to be. It was supposed to be like, like, we're recreating, like, a dinosaur or some garbage. Like, some.

17:39 Like, what are you doing? Like, he just needs to be freakishly big and freakishly strong and green because of the radiation. I get it. Like, you turned it. You turned it into, like a modern version of a diamond score. I mean, come on, stop. Well, and I think. I think to your point, that's why I have such a problem with them, with the Hulk ones, too, by the way. No, I. Well, I think to your point, like,

18:04 the. So superheroes have always been cartoonish. Let's just. Let's just acknowledge that for. Just. Just to say, right. And to your point about Lou Ferrigno, who, by the way, for those of you who don't know, you should look up, like the Mr. Olympia videos with him and Schwarzenegger going back and forth in the 80s. It was kind of ridiculous between the two of them. But. But I think you wind up in. You wind up in a weird spot with superheroics, right, because you're already being. You're already asking the audience to accept something about this person.

18:43 Right. That's beyond where they are already at. So even on. And this is why Bill Bixby. They weren't putting Bill Bixby in the gym. They were going out and getting Lou for Rick, though, because that was the best they could do. And if they'd had CGI in 1984 or 83 or whatever the show was on, they would have put. They would have built. They would have CGI the hell out of Bill Bixby. Right. They would have. If they'd had the capability to do that. So you're asking the audience to accept something larger than life.

19:14 And we're going to get to this, by the way, when we talk about Masters of the Universe, because my. My son and I went to go see this movie a couple of weeks ago, and he was. Well, let's just say his review was. Was very interesting, but

19:30 as a member of the Gen Alpha crowd, his. His review was very. He's nine. So it was like, okay, but you're asking the audience to accept something larger than life. You're asking them to accept a fantasy as reality. So you're asking two things of the audience right away. This isn't like Westerns. Like, I've heard people say that superhero movies have replaced Westerns as a genre of fantasy. But the Western was based on historical reality. Now we can argue about whether that historical reality was exaggerated or not.

19:59 I mean, you know, you could talk about John Wayne in the Searchers, or you can talk about Shane, or you can talk about Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Yeah. You know, or the High Plains Drifter. Or you could even talk about the pulling apart of the Western genre in what was quite possibly the last good Western ever made, Unforgiven by Clint Eastwood. You could talk about all that. You could talk about Native American representation. You could talk about black American representation.

20:29 You could talk about women. You could talk about environmental. Environmentalism. You talk about all these things. But the westward expansion of the United States actually happened. That's a historical fact. Right. We can argue over how that's represented and who got rooked where, but at the end of the day, you can't disagree with that.

20:52 There was never. At least to my knowledge. And I'm g. You know, I'm going to use Superman. There's never been an alien child sent to Earth from a dying planet.

21:05 And to save humanity from itself with Marlon Brando giving him, like, you know, instructions through crystals. That's never happened. That's a total fantasy element. By the way, Superman, one time I heard a quipped that Superman is the ultimate. The ultimate allegory for Jesus Christ written by two Jewish kids from Cleveland.

21:32 Which is amazing, actually. Yeah, Absolutely amazing. So I think, to your point, I understand the disappointment, but on the other hand, I'm like, we're already being asked to, like, we're being asked to accept all kinds of things in this. In this paradigm, like, so what the hell, why not? Why not cgi? And this is why, like, Guardians of the Galaxy works as a movie, you know, at least the first one does. The second and third one are kind of a nightmare. But the first Guardians of the Galaxy works because.

22:02 Well, I mean, I'm already like. You're already asking me to, like, float in space with nebulas and, and stuff. Like, okay, why not? Like, sure, go ahead. Why not have a talking raccoon? Yeah, why not have a talking trash can? By the way, where did the raccoon come from? They have raccoons on other planets. Yeah, of course they do. I always found that part of it fascinating. You couldn't just make up your own version of a creature. You had to pick a raccoon. It was the 70s. It was the 70s. Guardians of the Galaxy comes out of the 1970s.

22:32 It was. It was a rough time in America when they wrote that stuff. I'm just saying.

22:39 By the way, out of all the Marvel movies, I, I. Fun fact about me and you know how I feel about Marvel movies, by the way. Oh, yeah. Not really a big fan, but the Guardians of the Galaxy is probably one of the few that I can tolerate much. I. I tolerate it really well. So this gets back to that idea of Pauline Kael and what she would say about these kinds of movies. She would not take them seriously. I think we could probably agree on this. She would not take them seriously as high art. They're.

23:07 They're commercial, for lack of a better term. Nonsense. And she would, I think, like I said, I think she would be just fine with the first Iron man movie, but then after that, she would get off the. Off the table. I even think she would get off the. The. The. Or get off the train. I even think she would get off the train with. And this is, this is where I want to go with us today, because I don't really want to talk about the Marvel movies, although we have to, because they're just so dominant.

23:32 They're like the Jupiter in, like, the sky of like Marvel of, of superhero movies in the last 20 years. Because they had a formula and it worked and it's Disney. So, like, give me a break. But. Well, and to your point, about, about monitoring the cultural wave. Yeah, that's essentially what Disney did. They saw. They. They created that formula based on what they saw in the cultural atmosphere. And to your point, and they've made billions and billions and billions of dollars. Billions because they understood the cultural atmosphere and how the, how that cultural atmosphere responded to cinema, like, to cinema in general.

24:11 So they saw shifts. They saw. I don't know how the hell they got ahead of some of these with predictive analytics and all that stuff, but they just did. And they understood it and they got it and they got ahead of it. So anyway, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, I mean, they've been, They've been owning. There's a quip about Disney. They've been owning culture since the 1920s in this country. Like, it's fine. And, and so when you think about it, you know, I think Pauline would have had a much more. She would have been much more open minded to, I think, the Dark Knight, not Batman again, she would have been like, what is Christopher Nolan doing?

24:47 But the Dark Knight, I think she would have liked that movie. Not. And not because of Heath Ledger's performance. I don't think she would have cared about that. I think she would have eviscerated that as overblown and too much fantasy, too much comic, too much whatever. Right. Nobody could. Her. Her critique would have been no one could possibly be that sociopathic and walking around in real life. Yeah, right. The problem is that Pauline came from a different sort of paradigm where we think about people.

25:15 I think of her sort of like a Joan Didion sort of type, where she's like, monitoring the unraveling, but in film. And she doesn't really know what she's seeing. She's just documenting it and just sort of like throwing it out there. And by the way, I'm saying this as a person who has a book. I have a book that's a collection of Pauline Kael essays. There's like 5,001 of them. It's ridiculous, like, the number of like. And I read her writing sometimes and I'm like, I'm Blown away. But. But dc. So Warner Brothers, you know, DC Comics, DC Studios went in a different direct.

25:49 They could go in a different direction because they have two of the most iconic characters, comic book characters ever created. They have Superman. Again, a Jesus allegory. But then you have Batman. And Batman is the character that I think that I want to focus on a little bit for right now that we can switch to Superman. But I think there is not enough cultural understanding around who Batman actually is as a character. There's just not. And I think that's because he's a very specific.

26:24 He's a very specific sort of animal. And I using that term on purpose.

26:32 So he's sure. He's a rich guy, okay? He lives in a house, a mansion, okay? His mommy and daddy got shot in the street in a robbery attempt, okay? And instead of going to therapy to deal with this, he decides he's going to dress up like a bat and beat people up

26:52 with. With no formalized training, no special serum or special powers,

27:02 all he's got is money, which could buy him toys. And so what is the differentiator? Why does Batman get to stand next to Wonder Woman and Superman inside of everybody's brain when they think about what the Justice League might be or. And the Flash and Green Lan Lantern. Why does he get to walk in that pantheon of heroes? Superman could break him in a heartbeat. The Flash can outrun him. Wonder Woman can tie him up with the Lasso of Truth. Green Lantern can get him with his ring and throw him off the top of a cliff.

27:32 Why does Batman get to stand in there? And I will be fully and completely transparent here. I'm a Batman guy. My nickname in college was Batman. I'm that guy. I know that guy's brain, right? But why does that guy get to stand there? And the reason he gets to stand there is not because of his money. It's not because he's a rich guy. It's not because of the toys. It's because he understands something about human nature that none of those other guys, none of those other characters get. Because he's down on the street.

28:01 He's with the people. He's. He's a part of the dark underbelly. Right. Of human society. He's willing to stare into the abyss and. And not let it stare back through him. Or. Or maybe he's fine with it staring back through him. You'll never really know because he's not going to be your friend. He's not there to be your friend. Like one of The. One of the greatest lines at the end of Batman Begins when a Gary Oldman who's playing Commissioner Gordon, he says to him, you know what? Hey, we never said thank you.

28:29 And Christian Bale in that stupid gravelly voice that got worse over the next two movies, he says, and you know what? You'll never have to. And he just leaps off the building into the night. And I like. I love that. And for me, Batman, and this is my whole thesis of today, Batman represents the entire Generation X cohort. That's our guy.

28:53 That's our guy. Never getting a thank you. Not getting any respect. No, you know what? I believe you. I believe you. That's our guy. Because like a lot of other Gen Xers, I'm sorry, I. I disagree with you a little bit here because that's. Okay. Good. He did. He does not. He's not in the. He's not on the ground floor with anybody. He's a wealthy guy. When he's not that man. He's sitting up at some penthouse somewhere with whatever. Any toy. He wants any drink. He wants any. No, he doesn't understand what I'm going through when I'm walking through the city.

29:22 But he's. By all of that. I'll stop. Like, listen, the problem is he's. But. But. So he tries. I agree with you that he's. He's kind of Gen X, his version of what our. Whatever our psyche. Because he tries to fix problems he knows is there without having the experience to go fix the problems and without asking for help. Without it. Without asking for help or permission. Yes. Yeah, that. You just define Gen X right there. That's exactly. We're. We see a problem, we're going to go fix it. Nobody asked us to fix it.

29:59 Doesn't matter. We're going to go fix it because it fixed. It needs to be fixed. Ask anybody's permission. And if. If nobody says thank you, we're just going to move on and do something else anyway, like understand what you're saying about this. But let's not. Let's not come up with the delusion that Batman understands the common man because he's part of the common or the underbelly. No, he's not. He's not part. Hold on, hold on. What's going on down there? Hold on, hold on. He doesn't live in that world.

30:26 Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me. Let me defend my boy here a little bit here. The only reason he is in that world in the first place is because he injected Himself in it. How else? Okay, how else is. And again, I'm talking about. I'm going to limit my comments. I'm going to live my comments purely to the film version of Batman. I'm not going to talk about the comic book version because the comic version is a totally different thing. There's all kinds of things happening in there. It's very confusing to follow the bouncing ball.

30:56 So. And by the way, in the comic book, just so that, you know, in the last, I would say, 20 years, they've stripped Bruce Wayne of all of his money. And by the way, he's still been Batman. Yeah. Because at the core of it, it's not about the money. But anyway, let me. Let me go just to film. Just the film version. I think Batman Begins did a great job of showing Bruce Wayne rejecting that status. Right. Which is the part of the. That drives us crazy is if you have all this money, why don't you just do what.

31:32 And by the way, this movie came out during a time of Occupy Wall Street. So, yeah, you know, Occupy Wall street was going. Going around. People were talking about income inequality. This was like back, what, 2005, we were talking about income inequality. Barack Obama hadn't quite run for president yet, but everybody was tired of the Iraq and Afghanistan war. And then in 2008, the Dark Knight came out. And it's like, oh, my gosh. I mean, that movie made a billion dollars. It was insane, you know, for a superhero movie.

32:01 But the reason why Batman Begins works is because to your point about cultural zeitgeist and Disney, Warner Brothers was able to tap into a certain level of cultural zeitgeist. And the cultural zeitgeist at the time was very much a Gen X cultural zeitgeist, which was these rich guys, we need to string them all up. That's why there's this great scene in the Dark Knight where the scarecrow from the original, from Batman Begins, who was the villain in Batman Begins, is doing like French Revolution type trials.

32:32 Yeah. Oh, no, that was in the Dark Knight. Sorry. No, that was the Dark Knight. That was in the third one, the Dark Knight Rises. That was the third one when Bane lets out all of the criminals or whatever and he's like running the trials because the scarecrow is crazy, of course, and he's running all the trials. And then he's pushing the rich guys and the bankers out on the. Out on the ice. They can walk across the ice. If they can walk across the ice, they live. But if not. Oh, well, sorry, that's when we're dead, banker.

32:56 That's the revenge of average people on, on, on, on rich guys. So I will defend Batman. I will defend Bruce Wayne in saying that when he rejects his status in Batman Begins and runs off and gives away the coat to the homeless guy, and he's like, just run. He just leaves, goes to the night, abandons all that, he has to go all the way across the world to find somebody who's never met him, but doesn't know that he has status. So he has to go to, like, you know, someplace in China or something. Right.

33:31 To meet Ray's Al Ghoul, played by Liam Neeson, and do his training and all that kind of stuff.

33:39 So, I mean, he's perfectly capable of rejecting all of that. And he does.

33:47 Just because. Just because you would be up there in the penthouse. And by the way, by the way, there is something in the movie, by the way, there is something in the movie because his, his, his. Liam Neeson actually says to him, you just need to do, like, what your father did. Just build another hospital. It'll be fine. Just go ahead, give away your money. It'll be fine. That's all you need to do. And the subtle dig there is, of course. Oh, just go be a socialist. Just go ahead, give away your money, and you'll suddenly fix everything.

34:15 How dare you remain a. Don't. Don't remain a capitalist. Just, you know, give away all your money. That's the way to show your show, your pure, show your show, your purity.

34:29 Anyway, I didn't sell that, folks. He's not buying that. No, it's fine. You don't have to buy. I ain't selling it.

34:42 But to your point, about, like. Like with no, you know, formal training, like, with all this money, you couldn't go get some martial arts lessons? Like, what the hell he did. He got. He went all the way across the world, though, to do that. Yeah.

35:01 All right. Anyway, I played all my cards on the table. I'm a Batman guy. I am. Oh, listen, if I had to pick one. So just for the record here, for the record, I. I host another podcast, as you know. Sure. Yep. It's in the. It's in the sales and marketing world. But during the interviews of these sales and marketing consultants that I have, I always ask every one of them, if you could be a superhero, which one would you be and tell me why? That's part of my interview process. And by the way, I also asked that question of interviewers, like, when I'm interviewing for actual business roles, Because I just, to be honest with you, it's a question that nobody ever asks.

35:39 It's kind of off the cut. Like, it surprises people. It doesn't give them a lot of time to think and they have to react to it. Which to me, as a really good tool to have if you're a salesperson, right. Like somebody asks you a question, you have no idea how to answer, how quickly do you think on your feet and like, yeah, is the answer actually a thoughtful answer, even though you only had 30 seconds to think of it? Like, so there's certain characteristics in there I'm looking for. But anyway, but on the podcast, I ask all these, these sales and marketing consultants and they come up with everything under the sun.

36:10 Superman, Batman, you know, whatever. Wolverine. I've actually had people say, can I create my own? Because I wish I had a superpower like this. Whatever, fine. But the Batman one, when people ask me, they say, well, you know, what would you do? And I go, well, I would pick Batman for the reasons that you've pointed out, which is they consider him a superhero, yet has no superpowers. He uses every advantage he has to solve problems, whether it's himself, his brain, technology, the counter into the counter intuitiveness it takes to think like your opponent, the whole, you know, senzu kind of thing.

36:55 Like, so he leverages all the right things also for all the right reasons. So as much as I give you crap about the. The Batman thing, like in. In. I still find it be partly because we're talking about the actual movies. And I find flaws in the movies, not necessarily in the character that the movie is supposed to be portraying to a certain level, which they don't ever do, in my opinion. I always just think they fall short and what, yeah. What Batman is to me and what we. And to be quite honest with you, growing up and watching the reruns of Adam West's version of it, I. I gotta be honest, I don't think any of them have come to his.

37:39 To the way that that TV series was written and the way that, like, it was like that, that's what I, the movies have fallen short for. Of that. Interesting. Okay, so, like, if you think about how Adam west was portrayed, what his, what his version of Batman stood for, the justice the. And again, the, you know, and the Adam west version, because it was a TV series, he had a different villain every week, like somebody different every week. But he never wavered on what, what was important throughout any of those battles and in all the movies since a lot of those Messages are hidden and they're like, they're like, they're not up front, they're not forward facing.

38:23 And you said something earlier about Superman, which to me, Superman did a better job with what the, what the superhero stood for. Ultimately, throughout the course of the movies, whether the movie was good or bad, you still understood what Superman stood for all the time. Now you could say that there was come some crappy versions of Superman. Sure. Yeah. I'm not gonna argue that there's been some pretty crappy Superman movies. This last one was not good. I'm sorry. I know it earned a lot of money.

38:52 I did not like it. I did not think it was very good. The story was heinous. And the only thing good about that movie was the kid who played Lex Luthor was amazing. Like his acting was good. He was right for that role. But that's about it. Like that, that is the only thing. I mean, come on, the, the Iwo Jima thing with the kid in the flag. Come on. The movie was bad. But anyway, go ahead. So I'm not going to defend the most recent Superman movie. Instead what I'm going to say is this. There's a reason that.

39:24 Remember man of Steel with Henry Cavill? Cavill, yes. Okay. Man of Steel failed to work. And it's, and it's amazing to me. It's absolutely stunning to me. The man of Steel didn't work, but I think I know why. So let's go through sort of the, Let me read through sort of the analysis here. That way we can. Because I want to talk about Superman now because these are our two poles, right? Batman and Superman. Yeah. So the first Superman film. And again I'm reading from my sub stack article called Sunsetting the Dark Knight.

39:53 You should go check that out on a voice crying of the wilderness. Or you just type my name, Hasan Sorrell's in substack and you'll find it the first Superman film, and I quote from myself, the first Superman film since Superman 4. The Quest for Peace. Superman Returns was released in 2006. By the way, that starred Brandon Ruth, who was not a terrible Superman. He was not a terrible representation of the character. And while it went on to gross $320 $392 million worldwide, it was considered to be a dud against a 270 million dollar budget.

40:26 Warner Brothers went back to the well again on Superman in 2013 with man of Steel. That one starred Henry Cavill in an attempt to jump start a shared universe without committing to doing the hard work of Audience capture. Man of Steel did much better, probably because Henry Cavill looks more superheroic. He looks more like a Superman character than Brandon Ruth, grossing $670 million worldwide against a $225 million budget. Unlike Superman Returns, man of Steel was unapologetically an appeal to the older Gen X audiences who wanted a grounded, quote, unquote, realistic Superman of their own.

41:06 Now, man of Steel didn't work because I think we live in a late stage decadent America. And I think the reason why man of Steel didn't work for Gen X is because no matter how dark you make Superman, he's still quite frankly, a heroic archetype and Gen X. And I'm saying this as part of this generation. Tom's part of this generation. We are not part of the heroic archetype. We're part of the Nomad archetype, which is much more of a Batman sort of archetype. And I'm getting these archetypical kind of ideas from Strauss and Howe's generational theory around the fourth turning.

41:53 And I sort of explain all of this in the substack article. I don't want to go into a whole lot of depth with this, but just know there are certain archetypes that, that exist and survive and thrive during certain historical cycles. And we have lived in the last 25 years. Some would say we're not even out of it yet. I think we're coming out of it. But we've lived for the last 25 years in a state of historical chaos, cultural chaos, moral chaos, political chaos. And the Nomad archetype survives really, really well in chaotic times and after an unraveling.

42:27 But typically after a Nomad archetype, you get a heroic archetype. Most millennials were born between 1984 or so and 1997. Anyone born between 84 and 97 is now either in their 40s or mid-40s or in getting into their. Into their. Into their mid-30s. Right. And so that archetype, that heroic archetype, they are crying out cinematically for a hero, which is why to double back to the MCU for just a second. Marvel movies work so well because it hit them during a time when they were looking for that archetype.

43:08 But I think at the end of the day, they need a Superman, and that's why Henry Cavill didn't work. So let's talk about Superman for just a minute. Superman is.

43:20 Yeah, well, you know, truth, justice in the American way. Right. He's a child of the light. He's not a child of the dark. He's even powered by the sun. He's literally a child of the light, right? Yes. Sent to Earth from a dying planet to save all of us from ourselves. Yes. Okay. That's the Jesus Christ sort of framework there by parents that he's never met. And now he's got this adopted, you know, Mon PA Kent, who, by the way, taught him different lessons about the world than Thomas and Martha Wayne taught.

43:53 Bruce Wayne bleeding out in the street. Right. And this is something, by the way, that's important to note. Just bringing the comic books for just a second. There's a great scene in the Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller from back in the day. We actually covered the Dark Knight Returns when we did our comic book episodes. Oh, gosh. It's like episode number six or something. We also covered Watchmen on this show. And there's a great bit in there where Superman remembers. Well, Clark Kent actually remembers how Bruce Wayne showed up to a Senate subcommittee when the US Government in the comic book is trying to.

44:28 Is trying to get all the superheroes to register for a superhero registry. And Bruce Wayne shows up and basically he laughs at all the parents and he laughs at the senators and. Because they ask him, like, what's the difference between you and a criminal? And basically, Bruce Wayne says, and Clark remembers it this way, says, oh, you laugh that scary laugh. And all the parents groups and the senators, and you could have just gone along, but you didn't. Because this is Bruce Wayne, too. This is classic Gen X. You know, he said the truth to the subcommittee.

44:57 Bruce Wayne goes, we're always criminals. We've always been criminals. We're always going to be criminals. All of us who are. We're all vigilantes. Like, what's your problem? And then much like Tony Stark in. In like, was it Iron Man 2? Where he like, like, goes off from the subcommittee and then just leaves, like, I've privatized world peace. You all should be thanking me. And then just leaves.

45:23 Bruce Wayne did basically the exact same thing. It's like, we're always criminals. We've always been criminals. The hell's your problem? And then just leaves.

45:32 Clark Kent will never do that. That will never come out of Clark Kent's mouth. And this is part of the reason I think man of Steel didn't work. No matter how dark you make Clark Superman's costume, the guy in there is a child of Iowa. He's a child of the light. He's a hero.

45:53 Thoughts on Superman? Yeah. So I was never Like, I was never a big Superman fan, honestly. Like, I, I mean, I've seen, I've seen the movies, don't get me wrong. Yeah, yeah. Again, because I, I mean my, my wife makes fun of me constantly because she has stopped asking me, hey, have you seen this? Whatever Enter movie, TV show, whatever, like, and she's like, you know, have you seen this episode of what? I'm like, yes, you know, whatever. Anyway, so, so I still will watch them partly because I just want to pick on them.

46:26 Like, I just want to rip them apart. Right? But to your point about Superman, I think, and again, I, I think if you, if you want to put it in some real layman's terms, right, Superman is the, the home cooked meal, warm apple pie, dessert after dinner kind of environment. And, and Batman is down and dirty. I'm gonna, I'll eat on, I'll eat on the run. Like, I, I can be alone by myself, doing my own thing and like the loner archetype, like, I, I don't need anybody's help, right? And Superman wants, even though he doesn't need it because he's Superman, he wants everybody's buy in.

47:04 Like, he wants the world, he wants the Kumbaya, right? So to your point, you can't really make that dark. And, and when you do it, it seems comical. Almost half the movie I was laughing, I was like, what am I watching here? What are we doing? What are we doing, folks? Like, what are we doing? Like Superman, warm apple pie in the American way, right? Like, well, and this is, and this is the thing that I saw in the most recent Superman film, you know, which grossed significantly less. I think it grossed, it grossed like the Brandon Ruth Superman Returns numbers.

47:37 I think it did somewhere around 600 million worldwide, so somewhere close to that. But it's been green lit for a sequel. So James Gunn is going to do another one after the Supergirl flop, which is, don't get me started on that. But he's going to do another one. And I haven't seen that one yet, by the way, and I'm not sure I'm going to bother. I honestly, it's like a train wreck you have to watch, right? Like I probably will once it comes out on streaming, that I don't have to pay for it. Like, because I'll probably watch it when I don't have to pay for it.

48:08 And then I'll make fun of it. But

48:13 my kids went to see it and my daughter, my daughter came back, she goes, I just watched a superhero movie about A dog. And I was like, wait, what? She's like, yeah, spectacular. Half the movie was about the dog. And I was like, oh, maybe I do want to see this. Maybe I do want to see this movie. No. So I. The. The prob. There's several problems with Supergirl. The biggest problem is Supergirl has always been a second tier, God help you, third tier character for sure, because you don't need her. There was even a Supergirl movie that was released in the 1980s that everybody forgets about.

48:50 I think 86, maybe 85. 86, somewhere in the mid-80s. And it didn't even do big numbers because she's always been a second tier character. Unfortunately, we live in cultural times where. And Tommy disagree with me on this, but we live in cultural times where equal representation has to be had by everybody. So, like, you can't have a. Now, let me be very clear. Superman is an immigrant. So he's from an alien from another planet, which I would think all the millennials would get on board with that. And don't worry, he could take on ice agents.

49:27 It's fine. Like, fine. It's not a problem. He's got laser vision. What's the issue? So you don't really need a black Superman, you don't need a female Superman, you don't need a Latino Superman, and you don't need. I've got to step on the toe here. I'm gonna go ahead and do it. You don't need an LGBTQ Superman either. He's already an alien. The waterfront's covered. Yeah, yeah, he's got pink skin and he fits in with the Caucasian people. So what? He's still from another planet. Okay. So, like, you don't need all those multiple representations of Superman,

50:06 and with that being said,

50:10 you need him to represent an archetype that fundamentally, I think has to have a cultural resonance, which is why they're getting a sequel, because the cultural resonance of the millennial audience. And this is my core point today, the cultural relevance of the millennial audience. I have two more film examples to bring to this project, Hail Mary and Masters of the Universe, which I think also tie up my idea here. You have to have cultural relevance, not cultural, sorry, heroic archetypes for the millennial audience.

50:44 And I think they have to ascend past the superhero. But I think it all starts with Superman. By the way, this is the reason why the 2022 Batman movie with Robert Pattinson didn't work and why they've been struggling a sequel out for that. And that won't work either. Because the millennial audience, the Gen Gen X is Gen Xers have aged out of Batman. I don't need to see another Batman movie as I approach 50. Yeah, right. I'm kind of good with that. I, I kind of. I'm set. And the generations behind me, the two generations behind, actually three generations behind me, the millennials, Gen Z and then the profit types were going to be Gen Alpha who are like my nine year old son, right?

51:27 Those three, Batman ain't going to work for them. But Superman, Superman will work for at least a couple of generations. And so as much as you didn't enjoy that Superman movie and by the way, I saw it on a plane just to be, you know, to tell you I watched it on a plane. This is my Superman review. Superman by James Gunn review. So bad. I think it holds. So the internal logic of the film holds up, which is really hard by the way these days to get internal logic to hold up in a film because there's people doing all kinds of characters violating all kinds of internal logic.

52:06 And you're like, why are you doing that? And it's because it's for, let me put this in air quotes, the message, whatever that may be, that we have to get across to modern audiences. Okay, fine, but Superman didn't do any of that. James Gunn actually tried to do a pure, straightforward, millennial

52:28 archetypical hero who floats above everything, tries to get people to work together, is still an immigrant, will come in and lecture the bad guy, but at the end of the day doesn't want to be too tethered or too tied down. It works. It works at that level. And it's just. And just like Project Hail Mary and just like Masters of the Universe. It doesn't need to work for me. And that's where I'm okay with it. It doesn't need to work for me. This movie is not for me. And it's okay.

53:03 And I watched it with my 9 year old son and his review of Superman was, well, that was interesting. Dad, can we watch something else?

53:18 Which was amazing. We're on a plane, like flying back home or whatever from someplace I can't remember where might have been, Florida or something. It was like a four hour flight and we watched it for half of it. And he goes, well, okay. I don't know. I just started laughing. And yes, I was annoyed by the dog, by the way, the dog crypto. It's not a terrier mutt. It's supposed to be a golden retriever, James Gunn. But I understand you have a terrier mutt, so you had to put your dog in the movie. Come on.

53:50 Yeah. It was so stupid. But it's not for us. It's not for us. About. About half. No. Maybe. All right, maybe half of what the dog did. You could have used a real dog. Why are you using the CGI garbage? Because. Because it's. It's for a different audience. We have to put our brain. This is genuine empathy, Tom. We have to have genuine everything. We have to put our heads. We have to say that what we want and what we desire doesn't matter. Put that aside and understand that there are other people who have other desires and those desires might matter.

54:21 And that's genuine empathy. Sure. So we're going to make bad movies for people who don't understand how movies are supposed to work. Exactly. All right, I understand now. I get it. Okay. Yeah. And the whole thing will just continue to roll on and it'll be fine. And some. The alpha generation will come by and say, what is this garbage? Let's make better movies. There you go. That's right. That's exactly. I'm playing a long game here.

54:49 Speaking of playing the long game. So you and I talked about Project Hail Mary. Yes. I want folks to go back, not go back. I want folks to know that we're going to switch and I'm going to sort of rerun what I said about Project Hail Mary at this spot right here. So if you. Hold on. We're going to rerun it at this spot right here.

55:15 All right. And we're back. So you just heard my pro. Our Project Hail Mary review that we did a. Oh, gosh, probably about a month and a half ago maybe when the film first came out.

55:27 I watched it again this weekend, this time with my kids because now it's on Amazon because MGM owns Amazon or whatever or Amazon owns MGM now and they produce the movie and so it's been released to streaming. So I watched it this weekend with my 16 year old daughter and my 9 year old son, the aforementioned 9 year old son who we also saw Masters of the Universe and

55:51 watching it again. I was watching it not for my reactions or responses or my wife's. My. My wife and I's reactions or responses to that. To it. Because I already kind of knew what I needed to know about the movie. And actually the ending is a lot. It was a lot more palatable for me because I actually saw how it all like tied together. It actually made a lot more sense. So I was like, oh, okay. It doesn't violate its own internal logic as much as I thought it did, but still, it's not. It's fundamentally not for me.

56:20 But my 16 year old thought the film was brilliant.

56:27 Interesting. And my 9 year old was like, huh. So. So they just went to another plant. He just went to another planet with the rock people. So funny thing. So my youngest, my, like my 24 year old looked at me and said, oh, it's. It's basically our, our generation's version of ET

56:52 And I went, oh, my God, you're right. Like, I mean, the reversal was like. I mean, E.T. was here on Earth. I get it. And he wanted to go home. In Project Hail Mary, they're out in space and both of them just want to go home. Just want to go home. Yeah, it was like. It was one of those things that, like, it hit me. I was like, oh my God, why can't we just come up with a new idea? It is easy. I gave that movie some credit, by the way, for being a fresh new idea, and my kid just squashed that for me.

57:24 Well, okay, so I could see the ET Parallels. I could absolutely see that at. In reverse.

57:33 I think the emotional beats are fundamentally different. And the Sandra Hooler character, the. The chief scientist or whatever, who like shanghais him off, you know, gets his ass on the. On the rocket.

57:53 There's no parallel for that in E. T.

58:00 Even the male scientist that comes to the house, the scientist that comes to the house and like, tries to convince them to, like, give up ET and all this other kind of. Maybe you could, maybe, but. But it's not. And there's a. I think there's a clear reason why that's not a one to one parallel, but go ahead. Sorry, I was just gonna say that. I was gonna say like, I think the idea too, the concept or the difference here is like ET Was essentially made for kids. Right, you're right. Yeah, that was, that was written for kids.

58:26 They wanted. They wanted kids to love the movie so they had no choice but to not have her character in the movie. Right, right. Whereas Project Hail Mary, to our point before, there's bits and pieces. It. It, it's like, it's like Disney movies. Like when you go to watch a Disney movie with your kid, there's humor in it that you get that your kid doesn't get. Right. Like this. I think Project Hail Mary, that's the same kind of environment where it. There's pieces of Project Hail Mary that are like, for everybody.

58:53 They did a really nice Job making. Like, not every bit of the movie was for us. Not every bit of the movie was for your son. Not every bit of the movie was for my daughter. But we can all sit there and watch it and still enjoy the movie at different pieces and components for the same. For. For different reasons. We all enjoy that movie for different reasons, which ET Wasn't trying to do. So. Right. I do agree. I think her statement still holds true in a sense that, like, think about. Think about this way.

59:20 What other movie depicts aliens in a positive light like that? In a warm and fuzzy light in a car, an actual character light, where it's somebody that you want to associate yourself with. Like, think about all the other Alien movies that are available to us, whether it's Aliens, Predator, some of the. Even Guardians of the Galaxy to a certain degree. Like, there's only some of those aliens you want to be around. Not all of them. Some of them are bad. Like, it's like, there's no other movie. The movie did a nice job trying to make it, like, relatable, even though it was Alien, so to speak.

59:57 So I think this is part of. I think what you're sensing is part of a sea shift that's beginning to occur, and this is why. This is. This is part of our thing today. Right. I think there's a cultural shift occurring where we are moving away from, and this is why Disclosure Day didn't work. Like, Disclosure Day should have worked. I didn't see that yet. I want. I do want to see that. Okay. So the I. And by the way, I haven't seen it either. But when I say work, I don't mean work in terms of the film or in terms of the subject matter.

1:00:32 I mean work in terms of box office numbers. The box office numbers are reflective of the cultural shift that has occurred. But Hollywood is, like, two to three years behind the curve on this one. So there's a movie out right now called Upset. It's a. Either Obsession. No, Back rooms. Backrooms, which is based off I saw Obsession. I didn't see Back Rooms yet either. Okay. Or it might be Obsessions. I don't know. Anyway, I think it is obsessions based off of some YouTube short about back rooms or whatever.

1:01:06 It doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter. I don't know. So the first time I saw the trailer for Whatever this Thing Is, it's, like, blowing it away. I was like, this is like Blair Witch Project. Why do I need to watch this again? And I moved on, and that was my first initial, like blush on it. Right. But it represents again that shift where we're going to go the business of Hollywood. We're going to go grab an original idea from YouTube, which they should have been doing 15 years ago in Hollywood.

1:01:40 And we're going to give these YouTubers who don't have a SAG card and don't know what unionization is, we're going to give them $100 million and tell them to go make a movie. And actually 100 million. We're going to give them 15 million. They did that movie for 1 million. They did a movie for 1 million. Oh, even better. Well, if, if we're talking about obsessions, yeah, that movie was made for about a million bucks. One million bucks. Million bucks. We're going to give a YouTuber a million dollars.

1:02:07 We're gonna make back. How much money is that movie made? It's in the hundreds of millions at this point. Insane. Insane. We work with startups in our regular lives. That's an insane roi. That's. That's a unicorn, as we say in the startup world. That is a unicorn. That is a unicorn, but it's a unicorn from YouTube. Well, who is the predominant audience for YouTube who grew up with cutting their eye teeth visually on YouTube? It was the millennials. It wasn't us. You know, our generation created the platform that is YouTube, but we didn't cut our eye teeth on the content.

1:02:43 And taking that thing to the next level, that's the millennials and the gen zers. And so the cultural shift that's occurring in film is away from our generation and by the way, away from the boomers too. Like a movie like, honestly, a movie like Disclosure should have never been made. Spielberg should be making small, intimate arts types films with like Dame Judi Dench and like, you know, some other old male actor, Sam Neill, I mean, he passed away this weekend, but Sam Neill, like Sam Neill and Dame Judi Dench showing up, talking in hushed tones about, you know, some existential, ordinary people crisis.

1:03:27 Like those are the kinds of movies that. But he can't get that movie made. He can't get that movie made because the economics of movies have been so warped by Marvel and everything else. He can't get that movie made. But that's the kind of movie he should be making for the boomer crowd. That's what they want us as Gen Xers. We're gonna get skipped over. It's fine. It's the usual. It's fine. Don't bother talking to us because we have A higher tolerance level for all of this garbage. That's why. Because they know they can just pump out whatever they want.

1:03:58 We'll be like, ah, whatever. We'll just go see it. Yeah, whatever. I'll go watching a romancer on Apple tv. It'll be fine.

1:04:07 But the millennial audiences are different. They're. And now the Hollywood culture is moving more and more towards them. And I think Project Hail Mary is, along with obsessions or backrooms or whatever the hell it's called, is a canary in the coal mine kind of film. This is going to tell you where things are going. And by the way, Ryan Gosling in that. In that movie. And I see this now more in the second viewing of it than I do even did in the first viewing, because I kind of got in the first viewing, but now it's really solidified with the second viewing.

1:04:37 Ryan Gosling is your new archetype for a hero with no superpowers.

1:04:43 Maybe. Yeah, maybe he's the ultimate archetype. Like, you're going to see a ton of, like, archetypical Ryan Gosling type character acting going on in millennial heroic movies moving forward over the next five to 10 years. Right. Because it just works. Their version of a hero is. Is smaller scale. Right. It's minor. It's. You did this one thing that had this huge impact. Like, I'm not saying their impact isn't big. I'm saying the. The millennials have this, like, I'm gonna control what's in front of me.

1:05:12 I'm not gonna look, I'm gonna have blinders on. I'm gonna solve this. I'm gonna solve this one problem in front of me in hopes that this one problem has a ripple effect and has a big impact. And don't ask me to do any deep blue hero stuff. I'm not a boomer. Don't ask me to do any deep blue hero stuff. I'm not jumping on the grenade. Right. Like, I'm not gonna jump on the grave grenade. I'll try to find a piece of metal to st over the grenade so that we save everybody, including myself. Yeah. Because I can't.

1:05:39 There's the great. The great scene in there. The great scene in there where he's, like, sitting there and they, like, Sandra Hooler is, like, gonna give Ryan Gosling the choice to get on the thing. Yeah. Yeah. And she already knew, by the way. When I saw this again, I thought, oh, my God, she's a Gen Xer. Oh, my God, that's a gen Xer, move right there. We're just going. Since it's come out on streaming, I've watched this for three additional times. So four times total. I've watched this movie now four times.

1:06:04 Okay, so you know exactly, so you know exactly what I'm talking about. She did such a good job in that movie. You could see it in her eye. And she was just acting. It wasn't real, but I, I swear to God, I think she thought it was real.

1:06:19 Switch. That happens on her face. You know how, like, you know, like in, in the real world, we have these micro expressions that you have no control over. I don't know how she did it, but I'm telling you, she believed what she was doing was real. At some point, the micro expressions on her face, you could see the click and you're like, whoa. She's, I'm telling you, Sandra has some millennial in her life that she has had to shanghai into doing something, and they didn't want to do it. And she just went, well, okay, this is going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt me.

1:06:52 Exactly. I, I, I saw it as I watched that movie on the, I don't know, whatever, the third or fourth time, and I'm sitting there going, dude, she believes, I swear to God, she believes this. Like, I don't think, you know, like, they talk about method actors sometimes where they get so engulfed in their character that they become that character for that period of time. And then like, and you, you'll hear this about really good performances, right? Like people, I'm trying to remember. Well, the Heath Ledger one that you talk, specifically that we're talking about right now in the Dark Knight, supposedly he never got out of that, which is what was his demise, right?

1:07:25 Like, he was never able to get himself out of character. So that was part of what happened with him in his death. And there have been several other people. Robin Williams have, has done it, and there are people, Dustin Hoffman and Rain Man. He talks about how long it took him to stop acting like that because they get so engulfed in this. I think she did that without knowing she did it. But yeah, I'm just to your point, she must have had some vision in her mind of some millennial that she had to deal with in her personal life.

1:07:52 And it just took over. She was just like, now, now I see. Well, and, and, and, and you're not going to ask. This is the thing. Heroics. Right?

1:08:07 And this is why, this is again, this is why Superman works. So the new Superman works the Superman to Ryan Gosling link is it. Click, it's there. And then the other movie that I see recently, that sort of. Because. Because for me, one movie, okay, that's a one off, whatever, two movies. Now, there might be something, but three movies is a pattern. That's. That's. That's basic fundamentals of the rules of math, right? It is correct. One could be an anomaly. Two is a coincidence. Three is a pattern.

1:08:38 Three is a pattern. So my third movie that I would like to submit to a orderly film world or disorderly one, like the one we've set up here so far is Masters of the Universe. So I don't know if you've seen Masters of the Universe. You're gonna have to do some of the talk because I did not see this yet. And I really, really, really, really wanted to. And again, so something that I think that you alluded to in. In our correspondence about this episode that, you know, we grew up with. Super. With. With.

1:09:08 Sorry. We grew up with He Man. Right. Like, we grew up with the Mattel version of he man. The cartoon version of he mail. He Man. Sorry. I'm sorry. And Dolph Lundgren, right? So Dolph under played he man in the movie when we were kids, so I had to see this. I have to see this movie because I want to compare it to all of that, and I know that you can, so I'm curious to what you're thinking about it. And I don't care if you ruined Plotter, but I'm gonna watch it anyways. Don't worry about it. Okay?

1:09:36 I'm not gonna ruin plot. I'm not gonna reply. I. What I will say is this. All the beats are there. So Dolph Lundgren shows up in a great bit in the gym. It's spectacular. So Dolph Lundgren shows up. Jared Leto absolutely kills it as Skeletor. Oh, my God. Kills it. If there were an award for, like, Villain of the Year, beyond, like, Razzie, if there were Oscars given out for villains other than to, like, keep ledger, they should give one to Jared Leto, number one. You never see his face. You never see his facial expressions, but he totally, completely embodies Skeletor.

1:10:14 And you don't need to see his face. Like, you believe it. You're like, oh, yeah, that's. Yep. Even down to the sarcasm, the wit, the.

1:10:26 The. Like, this is ridiculous and stupid. What are we doing here? Look, that all of that Leto embodies that character. He crushed it.

1:10:40 The supporting characters around he man are Interesting. So

1:10:49 I'm. They had to set up the backstory, right. For all the people that don't know the show. And so they spent a lot of time on setting up the backstory. And it was a good setup. Like, the first 15 minutes is just good backstory setup.

1:11:04 The guy who plays he man. Let me bring up his name for just a second here, because I always forget it. By the way, he's also in a movie called. Which we watched in my house recently, called Sheep Detectives. I love that movie. Come on. That movie's great.

1:11:25 It's a movie that I didn't. I didn't think they were gonna. It was possible to be made, just put it that way. So, yeah, Nicholas Galitzine. That's right. Nicholas Galitzine plays. Plays. Plays he man. Right? And

1:11:45 Prince Adam, right. Separated from his sword. And he plays it with such. He plays Prince Adam with such sincerity and believability, and he plays it genuinely, honestly, like he's genuinely trying to be he man. So there's no. Like. And this is. So this is the link from Superman to Ryan Gosling and project Hail Mary Ryland Grace. So from Superman to Ryland Grace to Prince Adam, here's the link. Sincerity, that's the link. Not cynicism. Not. Sarcasm. Not. I'm trying to look for something deeper. Matter of fact, there's this whole sequence with Skeletor where, like, one of the characters is trying to find something deeper, and.

1:12:31 Or no, I know it is. Yeah. Prince Adam's trying to find something deeper in Skeletor. And Skeletor's like, I'm just evil. Nothing. There's nothing deeper than that.

1:12:40 Like, I'm just right. I'm just evil. But you have to understand, Millennials came up in an environment set for them by Gen Xers where we,

1:12:52 quite frankly, had to see the gray in the world, which is why Batman works for us, because we really wanted black and white, where, like, the evil was really like, there's evil and there's good, and there's this. Unfortunately, if you are a child of divorce, if you grow up in a culture of unraveling, there's a lot of nuances and grays, and you have to figure out how to navigate that. You also wind up with a species of. And I've said this on the show before, you wind up in a species of

1:13:21 cynicism and sort of a lack of. Not even lack of sincerity becomes a weapon to be used against you rather than a tool of heroism. And what you see from Ryland Grace through To Superman, through now to Prince Adam and Masters of the Universe is absolute total sincerity. Like, that was one of the things in he Man. Like, you actually believe he's he man because he believes he's he Man. And he's not faking. He's not pretending, he's not sarcastic. He's not cynical. He's not going to, like, see the gray in the villain at the end.

1:14:01 There's none of that. And it's weird,

1:14:11 I hate to say this, this. And you're gonna. You're gonna take away my Gen X bona fights on this. But it's fine. It's weirdly refreshing. It's weirdly refreshing. And so Masters of the Universe is built for a Gen X audience with all the throwbacks and everything to things we remember. But it's. It's built on. That's the structure that it's built on top of. But what's inside that structure is millennial sincerity.

1:14:43 And this is why it hasn't done well, because it's trying to bifurcate an audience. Rather than going full in one direction or full in another, it's trying to bifurcate an audience and have it both ways. And you can't have it both ways. Well, do you think that's partly. Partly in. In part because the characters can't do that? Like, think about. Think about what you're saying, right? Like, yeah, the. The characters weren't written like that originally. They weren't designed for that. They were designed for what they were.

1:15:13 And like, you're trying to now. So you're doing the opposite. You're trying to enforce a. A system or. Or you're trying to project onto the characters what you want them to be instead of who they are. Like, that's. Yeah. So. So Gen Xers are probably watching this, going, cut the crap. Yeah. Like, just let him be he man. Right? Like, yeah. Where's Battle Cat? That's all. Like, I really. I want to see what they did with Battle Cat. I want to see how they did that. Like, that's. That's one of my major things.

1:15:41 So Battle Cat is in there. I won't spoil the surprise, but what. Battle Cat is in there. What's the guy? Sergeant. The sergeant guy. What's his name? Oh, yeah, he's in there, too. But they. Did they try to wussify him at all? Like, because, like, if they. If they do. If they try to make. If they try to make. That's what I'm saying, though. Like, where you're. You've Got these very. By the way, even the women in he man. In the he man universe and Masters of the Universe, the women were like, macho for.

1:16:10 Oh, yeah, yeah. And if they, if they try to change that, then no wonder why it's failing. Like, you can't do that. Well, so part of the other millennial sort of stroking in there is. There's a whole bit in there and it's a running bit about HR are and girl bosses. Yeah. But it's not. It's not a bit. It's not. It's a bit that's designed to. To.

1:16:39 So there's Gen X cynicism and sarcasm, and there's millennial cynicism and sarcasm, and it's definitely millennial cynicism and sarcasm. So there's still this sincerity of like, I want to do well at work. And there's a whole. There's a whole sequence where he's in prison. Prince Adam gets thrown into prison, and he's in prison with all of the other character. Well, all the other. The pop. Well, not all, but a lot of the population of Eternia. And he has to. He has to rally them to. To be heroic.

1:17:07 And he's like, well, if there's one thing I learned in hr, it's. It's how to have a meeting.

1:17:19 Okay. Yeah. And I'm like, that's okay. Yeah, That's. That is what the millennials have learned. They've learned how to have a meeting.

1:17:29 And it's. So it was one of those moments where, sure, they know what to do from meeting that meeting. Right. They can run the meeting. They can run the meeting and they know what everybody's role should be in the meeting meaning. And so it was one of those, like, pokes in the eye a little bit. And it works in the context again, of the internal logic of the film. All sticks together. It all loops together. It all holds even the more ridiculous elements of it hold. So I think you'll enjoy Masters of the Universe.

1:18:02 I don't know that you'll give it an A. My. So now, now I will say this. This. You and I grew up with one version of Masters of Universe. Kevin Smith created Mall Rats and Clerks, and that guy created a version of Masters of the Universe for Netflix a couple years ago. That's the version my nine year old knows. And I think that's the version that most folks between five and nine, if they're watching it at all or know. And he was. So he gave Masters of the Universe a big thumbs down because it Wasn't like what he's seen in the Kevin Smith version.

1:18:42 And I had to tell him, listen, kid, what you're watching on Netflix isn't. That's not the real thing. That's something that like this guy named Kevin Smith made. And you don't need to know who Kevin Smith is. You don't need to know how, to use a millennial term, how problematic he actually is. You don't know any of that. You don't even know any of that. My point is, that's not the real thing. You're watching a reboot. So you're basing your idea of what you think is original off of a reboot. But yeah, he was, he was out.

1:19:13 He was like, well, this isn't this and this isn't that. And they do this. And I'm like, that doesn't. That's not the thing you're watching. This is based off of the original thing, the OG thing. And he's like, well, all right, fine. Where can I get more popcorn? So is the Kevin Smith version actually called Masters of the Universe? Yeah, it's called he Man. The Masters of the Universe. Yeah. Okay, all right. I don't know why. Yeah, you can find it on Netflix. Yeah, I'm going to go look for it, actually, because I don't remember this.

1:19:38 I'm probably going to watch one episode and go, oh, that's right, I've seen this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch with your 20. Watch with your 24 year old. Be prepared to be disappointed. Anyway,

1:19:52 To sum up today, so we talked about these four movies, right? We talked about. Well, not really four movies. We talked about. Well, yeah, we did. We talked about Superman and the Dark Knight and we talked about Masters of the Universe and Project Hail Mary. And I do think that, I do think we are, I do think we're experiencing a sea change in heroics on film. And I think that that's fundamentally a thing that whether it's good or bad, will time will tell. But I think it's, it's, it's been growing for a while and I think, I think the wave is starting to crash into the shore because people do need to see heroic archetypes on film.

1:20:31 And we have gone through a season or a 25 year crisis period where heroics have been tarnished. Sincerity has been tarnished. Like the biggest sin that you can have is to be sincere, right? To genuinely believe something. And actually it goes along with something that I've said on this show before when I talk about restoration. Right. I do think that if Gen X doesn't get its act together, we will be left behind in a restoration period. I do think we will be as a generation. And I think the way you're going to be able to tell this is in the next presidential election, because the people who are going to be running for president, at least as of this, you know, recording, the obvious candidates to run for president right now are Marco Rubio, who's a Gen Xer, he's 57, I think.

1:21:22 Or 54. Gavin Newsom, who's 57, he's a Gen Xer. I know we're weird to think about it. The joker crossed with Patrick Bateman is 57, but that's him. Kamala Harris is 60. She's on the cusp of. Of being a Gen Xer. Okay. And then the next candidates down from them are JD Vance and aoc. That's your top five, folks. And JD Vance and AOC are both an older millennial, that's JD Vance. And a younger millennial. That's aoc. She's not Gen Z, She's a millennial. Yeah, she's a millennial. If the Gen Xers don't get their crap together, the presidency will skip us and go right to the millennials.

1:22:09 That's okay, though, because what'll happen is the millennials will do something so dumb that the Gen X will have, like, you will vote the Gen X in just out of principle at that point.

1:22:20 Well, this gets to something else that I've. That I've been thinking for a while, which is we will be asked, I think as a generation,

1:22:30 we'll be pulled out of a hole sometime like 30, 40 years from now when we're all in our 70s and everybody's forgotten us. We pulled out of a hole somewhere to solve a problem that Gen Z can't solve. And Gen Alpha won't have the education or the ability because, like, they'll be. They'll be just critical thinking. They like critical thinking. Right. Well, and they're just. And they're just going to be like, the cusp of, like, coming into their adulthood at that point. So they just won't have the life experience right.

1:22:56 For it. Right. And the millennials will be, like, flummoxed as to how to solve the problem with all their sincerity. They'll be very sincere about what the problem is. They will know what the problem is. They will have a meeting about the problem, but they won't actually know how to solve the problem. And I think of the bit in. In Armageddon when. And this is a deep cut, but I think of the bit in Armageddon where Bruce Willis goes up to the. And the crew go up to the Russian cosmonauts and they rescue the cosmonauts from the space station and they can't make the whole thing work.

1:23:28 And the Russian cosmonaut pulls out a wrench and he starts hitting things and finally it works. And he goes, made in Russia, made in America, all parts made in China.

1:23:41 And that's. That's Gen X. That's it. We're just gonna hit it with a wrench when we're like 80 and then just, peace out. Just. Just leave us alone. Put us back in the hole. Like, we're fine. We're done. Put me back in the retirement home. Let me listen to Metallica in the. In the retirement home. Or like, oh, whatever your flavor was. Whatever. DMC in the. In the retirement home. Because I'm telling that music is not playing in there right now. No, we ain't playing there right now. When we get there, we're gonna have NWA and Run DMC or Bon Jovi and Metallica, whatever your flavor is at that time.

1:24:16 But I need poison on repeat. Pour some sugar on me and I'll be like 90.

1:24:25 But my point is that if we don't get our act together around sincerity, if we don't get our act together as a generation, I. I think we're gonna miss something culturally that's actually really important. And we've kind of. We've kind of spoken in broad terms, broad cultural terms about archetypes and about generations on this podcast. And I. This is supposed to be a light hearted. It is. It's a light hearted, you know, episode. Because it's mid summer. It's just a nice little break for us. So I don't want anybody to take this as, like, what do you call it?

1:24:57 Rock? Ribbed, you know, whatever. We're not vilifying America here. We're not vilifying generations here. We're making broad stroke generalizations and tying them to movies. And I think it's important to recognize patterns when you see them happening in culture. And I do think that Hollywood is finally trying to figure out how the hell to deal with a bifurcated audience. That is bifurcated, quite frankly, along generational lines, as it always has been. But it was easier when there were only three champs.

1:25:28 Divide is bigger now. Yeah, I would agree with that. Like, so, like, the difference between the boomers and the generation ahead of them, The World War II generation, that gap was not wide. And then from the boomers to the Gen X, it widened a bit more, but it wasn't wide enough that we had to develop completely different structures because of it. I think the millennials were the first ones that made that generational divide wide enough that they wanted to be treated different because they were different than we were.

1:25:55 Right, right. Like now we still felt, I think every generation thinks that they're different than everybody. Like, that's, that's not what I'm arguing here. But I think, like Gen X, when we first got into the workforce and we were being treated the same way the boomers were, when they got into the workforce, we found that normal. We're like, okay, fine, we'll pay our dues and then we'll make our changes from the inside out. Yeah, Millennials came along, they said, no, we're not doing that. We're not allowing you to treat us like that.

1:26:20 We want to be treated the way we want to be treated, and you're going to like it. So they widen that generational gap. And I think Gen Z did it even more. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. So that's, that's what I think is happening. The generations are kind of getting, they're getting a grip on their own, their own selves, and they don't allow other generations to treat them differently. They force, they are forcing people to treat them the way they, they think they ought to be treated, not the way that the world thinks they should be treated now.

1:26:51 Well, this is what they're bad. I, I don't know if it's good or bad. We can make arguments for both. I would imagine people would say good, bad and ugly, whatever. That's just the fact that's what's happening is all I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, well, and I think that there has to be some kind of representation of that on film. I still think film as a medium is. Look, I'm passionate about film. I'll frame it this way. I'm passionate about film. I think film is a great medium. I could talk film all day, for God's sakes.

1:27:19 I was going to do a show called Leadership Lessons from the Great Films. There was going to be like a TCM level plot thickens type, you know, show. By the way, I just for the record, folks, I voted yes for that. He did vote yes for that. And then I, then I found out that, like, you know, the licensing fees were too much. And I'm not, you know, freaking Warner Brothers anyway.

1:27:40 I'm not hbo, I can't afford, I can't afford that. But, but I, I think that film is one of the greatest visual mediums that human beings have ever come up with. I still think that. No, I think that even in an era of small screens and a hyper visually addicted society that we live in in the United States of America, I don't know about other places, but here, heavily visually addicted society, I still think that film is the best tool we have to get across and to unite people to dreams. And I think that every generation wants to.

1:28:24 To your point about generation separating, Every generation wants to have its own dreams and they want to have those dreams that, that are meaningful and to your point, that work for them. And I think the boomers dreams were, walked out very much in protesting the Vietnam War and protesting for civil rights. I think that was huge for them. For Gen X, our dreams were, well, our dream. We were the first generation where our dreams were sort of curdled in the, curdled in the cradle a little bit because of societal conditions that happened to us that we had no control over.

1:28:59 And then we just made our, made the best possible thing that we could and that. And when the Internet came along, we were like, oh my God, we're gonna go ahead and make money off of this thing. Because there was just, no, it was an open territory. There was just stopping us. There was no stopping us at that point. And, and by the way, even if they wanted to stop us, they couldn't. They didn't know what the hell was happening. Millennials came along in the backwash of that and had to deal with not only the bifurcated culture and the results of that, but they also had to deal with the fact that this Internet thing had radically shifted how we visually communicate and how we communicate heroic archetypes, which is why it's taken so long for them to sort of make that push into, into the larger cultural medium of film.

1:29:41 And then Gen Zers and Gen Alpha, like again, my youngest boy, I think they will be predominantly, well, Gen Z first, but then afterwards Gen Alpha will be the predominant driver on AI. And it's going to be ridiculous what they're going to produce, but it will be specifically to your point, Tom, for them. And I think that that's, I think they need those archetypes, they need those dreams for them. And I think that's a good thing. Speaking of which, did you see recently, I don't remember if it was Tribeca or Sundance or one of the film festivals just allowed a 100% AI produced film.

1:30:22 I can't remember what. I should have looked this up before we get on today, but I'm sure you can look it up. It's about something. It's about something to do. The film is about. I think it's about, like, growing up or dealing with or living through something going on in Iran. I don't know. Like, it's. It's not necessarily about what's going on in Iran right this minute, but I'm saying, like, a. There's some sort of component to. Of how Iran is. Is. Was. How it has evolved into what it is. And living through that and trying to get out of that.

1:30:59 Out from underneath that. That thumb. I haven't seen it yet because, again, I think it's still at Tribeca or Sundance or one of those film festivals, but I'm a little curious about it. I saw a trailer for it.

1:31:13 I'm interested. I'm. It. It's. It caught my attention. I'll put it that way. Next summer, we will do another one of these special episodes on film, and maybe. And we'll have a year of data. Yeah. I'm curious because I had not heard about this, but I'll go and look this up because. So we do have an AI actress named Tilly, quote, unquote, that has been, you know, signed up to do film or whatever.

1:31:44 We also have the Hollywood writer strike and the Hollywood creative strike that happened a couple years ago, where they were screaming about the existential threat of AI to their. To. To creativity. But then you had. I think it was Jody Foster that sat up at some conference recently, some film conference recently, and basically said the movie F1 was basically an AI movie. Now, I loved F1. I thought it was amazing. I thought Brad Pitt was incredible in that. And I'm a huge fan of. Well, not a huge fan, but I'm a fan of F1 racing.

1:32:18 So for me, it was a fine film, but there was no. I mean, there might have been some AI used in the editing, for sure. Oh, yeah, yeah. But, like, those were real cars driving around a real track. Jody. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. And by the way, whether it's AI or cgi. Cgi. What's the difference? Because CGI has been used in editing forever. Right. What are we objecting to? What exactly? What are you objecting to if you're using that? By the way, the name of the movie is called Dreams of Violets.

1:32:51 Okay. And it's at Tribeca. So I was right. It is Tribeca. Okay. Dreams of violets. At Tribeca, we will have to. We're going to watch this all very closely, because I do. I mean, I play with AI every day. Tom does, too. And much like a typical Gen Xer, I can either be afraid of it, or I can go and try to hijack it. Yeah, we're going to run it. What are you talking about? You're either afraid of it or you're going to try to run it. You're going to try to run it.

1:33:22 Listen, I've been telling people my entire life, you should control what you can control and manage the rest. Hey, there you go. That's what Gen X does. We. We control whatever we can get our hands on that will allow us to control it. And if we can't, we try to manage the relationship between it, since from that point on. That's right. What we do. Well, I think that's it for today.

1:33:47 This is a good conversation. We normally don't talk about film this extensively. I think you should go out and watch all through those. Those movies. I don't know if you are. Four of those movies. I don't know if I would watch Project Hail Mary a third or fourth time. I'm not. I. I think I'm good. I think I got the message. I think I'm. I got the joke. I think I'm good. Rocky's my spirit animal. Okay. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Damn. I didn't know we were going that far, but all right, fine.

1:34:15 And with that, folks, well, we're out.