Hack-and-Slashrooms

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

Summer jobs, like any kind of temporary employment, can be rough.  You show up on your first day of work, you don’t know anybody, and you don’t know if it’s going to turn into a long term thing.  And if it’s your first day as a maid at the Virgil, an exclusive Manhattan co-op, you’re a mix of nervous and excited.  You’re on the precipice of something new, maybe even a new chapter in your life.  Things are changing, you have new opportunities, you’re about to be attacked in the middle of the night for use as a sacrificial lamb in a dark ritual.  Summer fun may be coming to an end soon, but that doesn’t mean these last few days are just for the kids.  Let’s get into 2026’s They Will Kill You.

We start ten years ago, with a young woman and her little sister on the run from their abusive father.  So close to getting away, their father finds them and an altercation occurs in the parking lot of a gas station in which she ends up shooting her father.  The police arrive, she runs.  After all, she’s young and she’s Black and she just shot a white guy.  Cops have come out blasting for far less than that, so I understand the impulse to run. Now, she’s starting a job as a maid at the Virgil and it’s her first day.  She tells them her name is Isabelle and they show her to her room and give her a quick onboarding.  Isabelle, played by Zazie Beetz (Atlanta, Deadpool 2), tries to go to sleep and get ready for her first full day, missing the chilling fog-activated message left on her bathroom mirror.  It simply said “They will kill you”.  Unfortunately, writing in a steam-based medium rarely leads to permanence, so it’s an easy message to miss.  But in the middle of the night, she’s visited by a masked and hooded figure.  And then another.  And then another.  It turns out the whole place is designed to be a death trap; if you’re the odd one out, anyway.  For those holding the keys, well, things are very different for them.  It’s a playground.

What follows is a bloody, breathless fight for survival, because it turns out that Isabelle isn’t exactly who she seems to be.  Which, to be fair, just about no one in this movie is who they seem to be, so I think it’s okay that she fudged a few details on her CV.  After 10 years in prison, who can blame her?  But no, Isabelle is no mere sacrificial lamb.  No, no, this lamb’s got chops.  And by chops, I mean she’s pretty damn handy with sharp objects.

The Virgil is an elaborate maze of dangers around every corner, designed very specifically to keep people like Isabelle from escaping.  But they never really expected one of their tributes to start fighting back.  But it turns out that Isabelle is much better with a machete than she is with a feather duster, so this is when things start to get interesting.  Hemoglobin starts spraying like a fountain and the night starts to go in a direction that nobody involved thought it would; not Isabelle, not the residents of the Virgil.  Creepy apartment buildings are getting their moment in the sun, it seems.  I’ve still not forgiven Netflix for cancelling Archive 81 and whatever ABC Family is called now (Freeform, I think) had a 2023 show The Watchful Eye.  I suppose Only Murders in the Building counts as well, but it’s thriving.  Perhaps it’s hard for a series to survive, but as a movie, you can get that hard, pulse-pounding action and keep it going for the duration of the movie without tiring the audience out or getting too bogged down in the lore and world-building.

They Will Kill You isn’t about the writing or the acting, but that’s not to say that there aren’t good acting performances in here.  As over the top as some of the acting might be, it’s in fitting with the whole conceit of the film and it all works just fine.  Zazie Beetz is a talented actress and manages her role well, and it’s also the meatiest role in the film.  The whole experience of the movie hinges on Beetz’s acting and her emotions in the moment are palpable.  The residents of the Virgil are played by Tom Felton (Fackham Hall, The Flash), Heather Graham (The Hangover, Arrested Development) playing very much against type, and Patricia Arquette (Severance, Medium), who has the biggest role of the antagonists.  Don’t get me wrong, she’s a chilling presence on screen and has been proving that since her role as Harmony Cobel in Severance, but, oh boy, was I distracted by her ever-changing accent.  I know change is a constant in life and we’re meant to go with the flow and roll with the punches, but I didn’t think that applied to accents.  I think she’s meant to be playing Irish, which seemed to be the dominant accent of the movie, but she also, at times, sounded British, southern American, and at one point I’m almost certain I heard a slight Dutch accent.  It’s a tad bit off-putting in the scenes where there’s a lot of dialogue, but luckily for the majority of the movie, you’re just in for some bloody, endless, over-the-top fun.

And I do mean bloody; They Will Kill You definitely earns its R rating.  Generally speaking, gore in movies does nothing for me.  It usually doesn’t add anything to a movie for me unless it’s done poignantly, but it has to be fairly gross and truly excessive for me to wince at it and I don’t care for body horror.  So while this movie’s level of gore doesn’t bother me, I feel like I should give a warning.  It’s not a strictly scary movie as far as horror goes, though the first act does have some genuinely creepy moments, the tension is lifted largely in the second act by the sheer amount of action and frequent dark comic relief.  If you thought Abigail was bloody, They Will Kill You takes it to another level and injects some body horror to it.  It never did quite reach the level of bothering me, but I would recommend some caution over this movie if that’s not your thing. The entire second and third acts of the movie are spent covered in blood and viscera, so consider yourself warned.

Stylistically, They Will Kill You is very striking.  There are moments where it feels eerily like I’m watching a Wes Anderson film; ornate gothic settings that feel out of place in the modern world, characters moving through static spaces, spaces moving around static characters, and of course, some of that lovely symmetrical shot framing that Anderson is so well known for.  But then things shift out of a Wes Anderson film and into a Tarantino one, but with less focus on misogyny, women’s feet, and white people casually using the N-word.  They Will Kill You marries these two very dichotomous styles really well, lending a surreality to the proceedings without the pretense or baggage that comes with it.  Director Kirill Sokolov does a commendable job of paying homage to his influences without feeling like a copy by comparison, especially considering this is only his third feature film and the first one in English for American audiences.  Apparently, he lists his influences as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Evil Dead 2, and Kill Bill, which, well, is evident when you watch the movie.  None of that takes away from how good the movie feels to watch; it just feels like it flows naturally visually and the storytelling, while not complicated, is aided by the strange combination of highly stylized shots.  As a film nerd, it’s a fun movie to watch.

And if you’re a normal, well-adjusted person who lives primarily in the real world, it’s also very fun to watch.  If you like to sit down and watch a movie that entertains you for 94 minutes of nearly nonstop action, They Will Kill You is undoubtedly something worth checking out.  It’s not earth-shattering, it’s not groundbreaking, and it’s unlikely to be a movie that blows you away.  But summer fun isn’t about that.  The bad guys are really bad, the good guys are on the path to redemption, and there’s a lot of hacking and slashing in between.  If chaotic and bloody sounds like fun to you, They Will Kill You is right up your alley.  That’s not to say there isn’t anything lurking beneath the surface, but I wouldn’t go into this movie particularly looking for depth of storytelling.  I don’t think it will touch you emotionally the way that Abigail could in moments, but that’s not a negative.  Sometimes you don’t want watch a 2 hour long or longer movie that makes you feel all the feelings.  Sometimes you just want a route one, over-the-plate action-horror comedy with a straightforward story.  So yes, it lacks depth, but that’s kind of the point.  There is something to be said about redemption, yes, family, yes, and even a commentary on how out of touch with humanity the ultra-rich are, but that’s hardly the point of They Will Kill You.  The point is to entertain you for about an hour and a half, and I can say fairly confidently that it’s mission accomplished.  The film also has a great soundtrack, with eclectic song choices that span a variety of genres.  I don’t think I’ve watched a film and been as into its soundtrack since I saw Birds of Prey or Into the Spider-Verse (well, Yesterday’s all Beatles soundtrack is compelling too, but I think that’s kind of cheating, since it is a movie about the Beatles’ music).  While They Will Kill You only boasts a 65% RT score, it’s an insane ride that doesn’t overstay its welcome thanks to that short runtime; had it been a 2+ hour epic, it most definitely would have worn thin, but the credits roll before you have a chance to get worn out by the action and just in time for you to catch your breath.  They Will Kill You is rated R and runs 1 hour and 34 minutes, streaming exclusively on HBO Max.

Big Bang Dreary

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

Every once in a while, something comes along that’s so good, it makes you stop in your tracks, put down what you’re doing, and just stare, slack-jawed in amazement.  Sometimes, the opposite happens, and something is so bad that it elicits the same response.  Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is the second case.  So I’m going to put a momentary pause on summer fun, because there’s nothing fun about this show.  Let’s get into it.

If you’ve never seen or heard of The Big Bang Theory, in many ways, I envy you.  I wouldn’t lie and say that I never got a laugh out of the show, but I can honestly say that I didn’t enjoy the series.  Whatever laughs it did manage to drag out of me were fleeting and cheap, and while it fit the definition of a sitcom, like a meal at a dodgy fast food joint, it left me feeling full and just a bit queasy.  But now that it’s over and Young Sheldon is all grown up, Chuck Lorre and co. are returning to that once overflowing well to squeeze handfuls of mud to get the very last drops of revenue out of it.  This time, Leonard and Sheldon have finally ripped a hole in the fabric of space and time and created a bunch of rifts that led to a multiversal crisis and somehow Stuart, the comic store owner, is the only one who can save the multiverse.  Now, sure, in practice, all the characters in The Big Bang Theory are pretty stupid, but they at least have the trappings of being intelligent with all those degrees and superhero t-shirts.  Considering that Leonard and Sheldon were the ones who created the rifts, why aren’t they the ones trying to solve it, being, you know, physicists?  The answer, of course, is budget, and therefore we’re left with Stuart, the only recurring who has zero science knowledge.  But I have to imagine his quote is low by comparison.

Budget is the word that comes to mind when watching this show.  Clearly a large portion of it went to paying for cameos to remind you that this show is part of the TBBT universe.  It doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to bring in much along the way of writing or characters, but they love a one episode feature.  Kunal Nayyar returns as Raj for the pilot episode before he gets the multiverse treatment of a shock death, then Kaley Cuoco and Brian Thomas Smith return in the second as Penny and Zack for a few minutes.  Christine Baranski gets a cameo that seemed like it could have been filmed on Cameo, playing herself.  Third episode sees Melissa Rauch return as Bernadette and Wil Wheaton as himself.  It’s usually nice to see Wheaton pop up in any sort of project and I hope to see him in the upcoming The Guild film that was funded on Kickstarter.  I’m just happy he’s still going after all those years being the subject of jokes about Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG.  As for the rest of them, I don’t know.  I suppose that if you have a great deal of affection for these characters, it might be some sort of thrill to see that no matter the universe, the brown guy still can’t find happiness before meeting his tragic demise, or that Penny has become the extremely ineffectual leader of a resistance movement in a universe where everyone has behavior-correcting implants, or maybe you just like seeing your beloved characters killed in predictable ways.  But for me, all I can see in this kind of stunt casting is where all the money went.

Because it definitely didn’t go into the rest of the show.  The opening sequence is trying hard to be meta and self-deprecating, but when you’re putting out a product as bad as this one is, pointing out how lazy everything you do seems doesn’t mitigate how bad it is, the way Deadpool writers hope it does.  It doesn’t even do the opposite and shine a light on how shoddily made the show is either; rather, all it does is serve to annoy because it means that they know how poor of a job they’ve done with this show and and they’re taking their terrible jokes and laughing all the way to the bank.  And if the first three episodes are any indication, they’ll be the only ones doing any laughing.  Not to mention that there is heavy and credible suspicion that the intro sequence is AI generated, which, well, is almost comforting to think that a real human wasn’t the one coming up with something so bad, but also very annoying because certainly a real human could have been paid to come up with something much better.  Or even a little better.  Or even just as bad, but made by people would be an improvement.  Generative AI is an ailment that humanity is inflicting on itself; burn the drinking water to save a few bucks at the top.  I don’t know if you know this about me, but I am staunchly against the use of generative AI for many, many reasons.  Not least the environmental impact, the intellectual property theft, the way it discourages people from thinking, the way that it’s being used to eliminate jobs so those at the top of corporations can make even more money until this ouroboros finally eats its own tail and there’s no one left with a job to spend the money on products and services that these folks made their fortune on, the abuse of gen AI to make nonconsensual explicit images, the fact that I can’t use an em dash anymore; I could go on.

Furthermore, it appears that the vast majority of the show has been made without physical sets.  I have a hard time recalling a physical set until near the end of the pilot episode.  Look, I’m not saying you have to film on 35mm and go analogue for me to respect the craft or anything like that; technology has come a long way in enhancing and aiding storytelling.  But we’re not talking about the huge airplane hangar with a giant curved screen and video game engine like Disney uses when filming The Mandalorian; I’m talking about run of the mill, green screen technology that dates back to the 1930s (back then it was primarily blue screens until green started to become more common as filming changed over to digital).  And it shows.  The camera angles are strange, often utilizing tight, waist-up or even chest-up shots to try to obscure the fact that they’re standing on a soundstage.  And in the wider shots, backgrounds appear flat and out of scale with the characters in shot.  And for a show that loves to use special effects, they look more at home on a pre-SyFy branding Sci-Fi channel original movie than on the same network that made Doom Patrol and The Last of Us.  There appears to be very little care given to how this show looks or feels.  And the addition of occasional swearing does little to help the writing, which, in three episodes has failed to make me even smile.  Nor is the story compelling because, well, I watched Sliders the first time around, which this show has completely cribbed its format from and I’ve listened to the excellent podcast Fullmetal Bazinga, where four video game podcasters posit their own multiversal adventure using the world of TBBT and actual human creativity to tell a surprisingly wonderful story.

None of that is here.  It’s not only not funny, there are some things about this show that I find patently offensive and wildly tone deaf in this day and age.  I talk about how it’s hard to go back and watch comedy from other eras sometimes because the things that aren’t acceptable now were acceptable then and if you’re a person with any level of compassion or empathy, it can become uncomfortable to see that kind of comedy from bygone eras.  Stuart Fails is a show from 2026, but it feels like it relies on the same kind of comedy from TBBT, which felt stale when it was new, because it was right out of the 90s eras of “can men and women really be friends?” before emphatically saying no and pairing them all off by the end of the series.  Except it was “can men and women really be friends if the men are sexless nerds who are desperate for human contact?” and the answer is still no.  But when we find out that Barry Kripke, the character whose speech impediment was played for laughs at a time when only presidential candidates could get away with it, has become a Negan-like tiny despot, complete with a harem of women who have to sleep with him or die, he becomes the third protagonist in the series.  That’s right.  Here in 2026, the creators of The Big Bang Theory want me to root for the rapist murderer.  I thought this was a TV show, not Fox News.  Again, it’s thrown away for laughs.  When Lauren Lapkus’s Denise refuses to sleep with him, he orders her executed.  He’s the tertiary hero in this series.  And it’s not like he even realizes that what he’s done is wrong; he goes along for the ride all while bemoaning the loss of his little fiefdom.  Unrepentant is the word a judge would use, hopefully, at his sentencing.  Now maybe he’ll have a heel turn later in the series and become a true villain, but when you’re this shit as a protagonist, how could you even tell when he’s turning into a villain?

Spin-offs aren’t all bad.  There have been some great ones in the past, even from shows I didn’t like.  Take Better Call Saul, for example.  Spun off from show about a science teacher who makes increasingly bad decisions that are mostly all his fault that I didn’t like, Better Call Saul is a masterpiece.  Frasier was smarter and better written than Cheers and funnier too.  Pinky and the Brain benefitted from standing on its own away from Animaniacs and has far more creditable science behind it than Stuart Fails.  And we wouldn’t have the The X-Files had Fox Mulder never found the file about a mysterious island that trapped the survivors of a three-hour tour aboard the S.S. Minnow (okay, this one is a joke, The X-Files wasn’t a Gilligan’s Island spin-off, but if Stuart Fails isn’t going to be funny, I at least had to try).  But this spin-off is very, very bad.  I don’t like to trash something without giving you viable alternatives because it’s cheap and hollow to just hurl insults from the sidelines.  There’s the aforementioned Sliders, which may not have aged that well, but it’s aged better than this show, which is brand new.  I will never stop recommending that people listen to Fullmetal Bazinga, which is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.  HBO Max’s own Avenue 5 is a far superior science-fiction comedy series.  I can even recommend watching The Orville over Stuart Fails because at least that show had some capacity for improvement and did something through its run.  Futurama is a great alternative to this if you want wacky storytelling in a fantastical science fiction setting, but still with the ability to tug at the heartstrings (go watch S4E7 “Jurassic Bark” and come back to me if that one doesn’t get you).  Resident Alien and Doom Patrol are shows that are so much better than this on every conceivable level that it feels like an insult to the amazing work done by everyone on those shows to even mention them in the same breath as Stuart Fails.  Good god, even Rick and Morty is better than this and I find that show largely insufferable.

Episodes release every Thursday at 9PM on HBO Max, but don’t watch it.  It’s not worth your time.  This is a skip.  And not in a “Well, maybe you’ll find something in it that I didn’t” kind of way.  I always try to give a show three episodes before I start to pass judgment and because of a packed schedule and a severely delayed post, I was able to watch three of these.  And I can now confidently say that Stuart doesn’t just fail at saving the universe.  Stuart Fails at absolutely everything.  Watch it run for 10 seasons.  Summer fun to return shortly.

Residential Alien

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

[I was deeply saddened to hear of the untimely passing of Daveigh Chase, the voice of Lilo in the animated film.  She brought to life a beloved character for an entire generation and she will be sorely missed.]

We’re back in Rebootland, this time on Live Action Remake Street, for a trip to Hawaii, a place of intense natural beauty and perpetual summer.  Now, readers, I was lucky enough to have vacationed in Hawaii once and it was truly magical.  I don’t think my blood pressure has ever been lower than when I sat on my lanai reading a book and listening to the waves lapping at the beach below.  But to be fair, I wasn’t an illegal alien experiment that just made an intergalactic escape from my own execution.  I mean, the TSA is bad, but it’s not that bad.  Let’s get into the live action remake of Lilo & Stitch.

Smarter than an average bear and with more arms, too

Now, I know what you’re thinking; we just watched as Moana’s live action remake crashed and burned with critics and audiences alike, so why are we talking about another Disney live action remake?  Sure, I could go see Moana, but the schadenfreude of criticizing that isn’t worth sitting through Dwayne Johnson’s singing again.  You know I’m quite the cynic about these sorts of things, so I did drag my heels on checking Lilo & Stitch out again, even though I really do like Stitch.  I mean, I keep a LEGO set of him sitting on my coffee table as I write this.  I’m a fan even though I didn’t watch the movie as a kid; I only saw it for the first time a few years ago.  I’m not going to pretend that live action remakes of animated films aren’t a nostalgia-themed cash grab for a property that already exists in a relatively timeless medium, but I do think there’s a fundamental difference between a movie like Lilo & Stitch, which came out in 2002, nearly a quarter century ago, and Moana, which came out about half an hour ago.  There are certainly ways to justify the Stitch remake from more than a business perspective, but I think the best justification for the thing to exist is the thing itself,  Of course, if you’ve seen the animated film, then very little here is going to be new, but sometimes a cover song can be better than the original, so it’s worth getting into it to find out whether Stitch is Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” or if it’s the How to Train Your Dragon live action remake (I don’t even know what to call the Lion King remake; best forgotten altogether, I imagine).  Luckily, Lilo & Stitch is such a strong animated film that it translates well into live action.

It’s Disney, so of course we start off with some dead parents.  Lilo and her college-aged sister Nani are left orphaned and struggling when their parents suddenly pass away.  And I mean struggling in every sense of the word.  I’d say Nani can barely make ends meet, but I think that’s being pretty generous to the stack of unpaid bills she has piling up.  And Lilo is having a very hard time, which you expect of a child who just lost their parents.  What doesn’t help is that the kids around her are pretty terrible; Lilo has no friends and the girls in her age group ridicule and tease her mercilessly, to the point that Lilo lashes out.  This is the first difference I spotted between the two movies and this, I think, was a good one.  Lilo shoves a mean girl in her dance class pretty hard and she takes a rather nasty fall as the camera cuts away.  By comparison, the animated film here is much more violent, with Lilo pinning the poor girl before pummeling her with her fists.  Look, kids get into fistfights all the time (I was in more than my fair share, growing up as the only brown kid in an overwhelmingly white area), but I think it’s fine if that’s something that doesn’t make the final cut of a kids’ movie.  Lilo, played by youngster Maia Kealoha, feels so much like the character in the animated movie that she embodied Lilo in a way I wasn’t expecting.  I watched the two movies not too far apart in time and I think she did a great job.   

Apparently this decision faced backlash, but I thought it was a great update for the film’s setting

Nani, Lilo’s overworked, overstressed, and in-over-her-head sister, played by relative newcomer Sydney Agudong, is doing the best she can and Agudong does very well portraying the perpetually exasperated Nani.  Tia Carrere (Wayne’s World, True Lies), the original voice of Nani, is back and this time playing Mrs. Kekoa, the CPS officer who is, legitimately, trying to look out for Lilo and Nani’s best interests.  Unfortunately that takes the form of Nani relinquishing custody of Lilo, which Nani is desperate to avoid.  The two biggest swings I think they took with the casting here were Billy Magnussen (Game Night, No Time to Die) as Pleakley, the alien Earth-fanboy tasked to retrieve Stitch and Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover, Bob’s Burgers) as Jumba, the mad scientist who created Stitch in the first place and now must capture him alongside Pleakley.  And frankly, they tore the leather off it with this move.  Even the change to having them take human form instead of just donning disguises was a big choice to make and I think it worked really well.  In addition to that, the extra runtime on the live action gives us a little more time with Pleakley and Jumba and the comedy dynamic between Magnussen and Galifianakis is great.  Most of the laugh out loud moments I had in the film came from the two of them fumbling around, with Pleakley trying his best to remain unseen by human eyes and Jumba not really caring about being seen, taking Stitch alive, collateral damage, etc. 

Zero thoughts, all vibes. And I’m okay with that

Courtney B. Vance (The Hunt for Red October), is a fantastic actor and I think he manages the role of Cobra Bubbles well enough, but I can’t help feeling that he’s a bit miscast.  Bubbles was an imposing, intimidating Ving Rhames-like presence, voiced by Ving Rhames, and Vance never seems able to match that screen presence.  There’s nothing technically wrong with his performance, but whenever the animated Bubbles showed up, there was a sense of apprehension relieved by the juxtaposition of his silly name.  Vance, more often than not, looks like a guy who’s grumpy because his Hawaiian vacation got cut short by work.  My dream casting for this would be Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta), but I also admit to wanting to see Paper Boi cast in everything.  Rounding out the cast is Amy Hill (returning from the original again in a different role) as Tutu and Kaipo Dudoit as lovable-surfer-dude-with-a-crush-on-Nani David.  Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso, The Fall Guy) also lends her voice to the film as the Grand Councilwoman of the Galactic Federation.

That’s no dog, it’s the Death Star! And he’s cute as a damn button

Now on to the big blue guy.  Well, the little blue guy.  Experiment 626 himself, the cute, fuzzy ball of destruction called Stitch.  Now trapped in Hawaii because water causes his density to increase to levels that would drag him to the bottom of the ocean and it happens to surround this picturesque island, Stitch is distraught.  Chris Sanders returns to voice the titular alien and with as much time has passed, he sounds absolutely perfect as Stitch still.  And I have to say, the move to 3D CGI in a real world space hasn’t harmed the cuteness at all.  Disney really learned from the initial disaster that was Sonic the Hedgehog when he was first revealed and definitely made sure to get it right the first time so they didn’t face the same kind of backlash.  Just like Kealoha embodies Lilo, this Stitch just looks and feels like Stitch to me, with little to no interpretation or gap filling needed.  The new Stitch model looks incredibly faithful to the animated film and blends reasonably well into the real world setting.  And he’s as rude and violent and troublesome as you remember.  If there’s something to break or a mess to make, he’s ready to do it.  I mean, he was bred for destruction as an invincible killing machine, so by comparison, spraying a kid with a soda gun isn’t exactly the end of the world.  But adults don’t like that and he does cause a small, minor, largely inconsequential inferno and really puts Nani in dire straits when it comes to keeping custody of Lilo.   

Soda gun coming as paid DLC to Call of Duty any day now, I’m sure

These are two deeply wounded kids.  I’m not sure the children in the audience are equipped to understand the amount of pain Lilo and Nani are going through, but I am.  All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the strings are cut and they’re on their own.  It wasn’t the plan, that’s for sure.  And their struggle is the struggle of a lot of people; they’re trying to get by and stay together.  Then pops in this blue ball of terror and everything changes.  Lilo immediately identifies with Stitch because she’s been labeled a problem child as well, even though she’s just a kid coping with something she should never have had to.  Other people lose their parents and become Batman, people deal with grief differently and you can’t expect a small child to have the tools to process this easily.  Their brains are the size of a walnut, as I said last week.  Watching Lilo struggle with the idea of being bad, of being written off by the people around her who don’t take the time to understand her struggles or can’t find empathy for a little girl who suddenly finds herself orphaned, is absolutely heartbreaking.  But seeing her come to the realization that she’s not bad just because she gets into trouble is very touching.  No one is perfect, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t deserving of love or empathy.  And she takes this lesson and imparts it to Stitch when he wonders if he’s just bad to the core.  I admit that even watching this azure furball struggle to reconcile his nature was similarly heartbreaking, which I think speaks to the strength of not only Lilo & Stitch’s narrative that was laid out in the original film, but also how well this remake was executed.  It would have been so easy for it to fall flat and feel like a hollow exercise in cashing in on nostalgia.  But care was put into this movie and it shows.

I know live action remakes are a hard sell.  As much as I did enjoy this movie, I’m dealing with the feeling that this movie didn’t need to exist.  There are enough changes to the film that it feels pretty much mostly like its own thing, while still telling largely the same story, so it still begs the question.  What is the point of the remake?  It’s still hard to say in any phrase that doesn’t mention a business justification, but there’s something about this movie that makes me not mind that it’s a remake.  At the end of the day, I loved this movie because I loved the original and this does it justice.  Did it need to be made?  No.  If you’ve seen and loved the original, do you need to see this one?  No.  But there’s a lot of really wonderful stuff here, regardless of the fact that it’s wonderful because the original is wonderful.  Maia Kealoha puts in a moving performance as Lilo and that’s worth seeing, even if the movie doesn’t really do anything new.  What Lilo & Stitch does do is a lot like what the original does; it’s a testament to the power of nurture in the push-pull with nature.  Stitch was designed to be evil, to be a monster.  But it was the love and kindness of Lilo, declaring him part of their ohana and fighting for him to be a part of their family that changed him.  The movie still shows how powerful caring can be and tells a beautiful story of found family and acceptance of people as they are, however imperfect they may be.  This is where the movie really shines; Stitch describes the family as little and broken, and doesn’t that just feel universal?  Whose family is perfect?  Who hasn’t had to weather hardship and who hasn’t been changed by it?  But here’s this movie saying that no matter what happens, if people stand by each other, they can get through it and that no one deserves to be thrown away.  And remake or not, that’s a pretty timeless message.  It may not be the lightest of light summer fun, but it’s a great film for adults and children alike, as is the original.  Lilo & Stitch is rated PG, has a runtime of 1 hour, 48 minutes, and streams on Disney+.