Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Last night I watched El Camino, the movie that's a postscript to the Breaking Bad TV series. I'm not sure what I expected of it but it... wasn't what I expected. I mean, I knew it's a follow-on to the TV series. I knew it focused on Jesse Pinkman's character as he tries to recover from the terrible things that happened to him in the last two episodes the series. I guess I expected it'd cover a longer span of time than basically two days. In that sense the movie was like two bonus episodes of Breaking Bad.

The movie gets its name from the model of a vehicle Todd Alquist owned that Jesse stole in the penultimate scene of Breaking Bad. The El Camino was produced by Chevy from the 1960s through the mid 1980s and is recognizable to anyone who lived in the US in that era because it was unique as a successful hybrid pickup truck/car.

Jesse parts with the movie's namesake car within the first few scenes. He drives it to Badger and Skinny Pete's house late at night. They take him in and hide the car. The next morning Jesse calls Old Joe, the guy who owns a junkyard and enjoys giving the middle finger to police, to dispose of it. But Old Joe first checks the car with a radio transponder and finds that its LoJack system has just been activated. He nopes out there quickly, warning the men that the cops are probably only minutes away. Skinny Pete quickly forms a plan to swap cars. Jesse narrowly escapes the cops arriving en masse.

I knew that Badger and Skinny Pete would be in the movie; the trailer that ran right after Breaking Bad showed them. I find them oddly lovable minor characters. They share a scene at the house trash-talking each other's video game driving skills that's downright hilarious. But just like the namesake El Camino disappears from the movie after the initial scenes at their house, so do Badger and Skinny Pete. The rest of the movie is Jesse trying to get out of Albuquerque, getting money and settling an old score on the way. In that sense it's kind of like what the final episode of Breaking Bad was for Walt, except instead of returning to Albuquerque, Jesse's trying to leave.

The movie includes a number of flashbacks to when Jesse was held captive by the Alquist gang. These show Todd Alquist, who was Jesse's primary jailer and the guy who was learning to manufacture meth from him, as a real monster. Forget his occasional I'm-a-polite-young-man-who's-socially-inept act; even though he is socially inept, that politeness is a sociopath's trick to disarm people.

In one of the flashbacks Todd shows Jesse he killed his housekeeper because she found his hidden money. She didn't steal the money; she merely saw it. He was nonchalant about killing her. He even left her dead body on his kitchen floor for days.

The flashbacks show that Todd broke Jesse's spirit, getting him into a Stockholm Syndrome type situation. Jesse had an opportunity to kill Todd— Jesse had a gun in his hand, and there were no witnesses within miles— but Todd sweet-talked him into surrendering with the promise of getting pizza and a beer together before returning him to his underground cage. Of course, by the final episode of Breaking Bad, Jesse was was ready to kill grievously injured Todd with his bare hands.

Jesse goes through some more stuff before getting out of Albuquerque. He needs money to pay Ed Galbraith, "the disappearer", so he goes hunting for Todd's hidden stash. He finds the money but gets crossed up with thieves who are also after Todd's stash. The thieves trigger another flashback. Jesse realizes he has a personal score to settle with them. Jesse says goodbye to his parents in a melancholy scene that shows they no longer care about him as a son, only as a dangerous fugitive who's best in police custody asap. And likewise he uses them only as a means to help his escape, misdirecting them as he knows they'll immediately tell police whatever he tells them.

In the end Jesse gets the money he needs to pay off Ed. Ed smuggles him off to Alaska. It's a place where, in a flashback at the start of the movie, Mike Ehrmantraut suggested Jesse go to start a new life. Ed echos Mike's words when he drops Jesse off in Alaska in the final scene, telling him he has an opportunity few people get to start fresh and become whatever new person he'd like to become.

Today actor Donald Sutherland passed away. He was 88.

His passing today is ironic to me, at least, because just yesterday I watched a few episodes of a 2023 TV series he acted in. He played the recurring (minor) character Judge Isaac Parker in Lawmen: Bass Reeves (link: IMDb page). That show seems to me like a spinoff, at least in concept, of an episode in the TV series Timeless from several years ago that featured the character Bass Reeves. I'm several months behind on writing about Timeless so I haven't addressed that episode yet. It was one of the best of the series. I'll write about Lawmen: Bass Reeves after I catch up on blogging about Timeless... which I'll do sometime after catching up on blogging about my trip to Alaska... which is currently falling even further behind because I've been busy with work today. Wow, is the common thread of this blog entry my blog backlog or Donald Sutherland? 🤣

I've got to say I'm not familiar with Sutherland's earlier work. He starred in 1970's M*A*S*H, the movie, though his portrayal of Hawkeye Pierce never registered with me like Alan Alda's enduring TV portrayal of that character did. When I watched 1967's The Dirty Dozen his character there wasn't memorable like Lee Marvin's hard-boiled lead, Charles Bronson's earnest convict seeking redemption, or Telly Savalas's bulging-eyed psychopath. And the movie that many critics say cemented his early career, 1980's Ordinary People, is one I was never aware of until I read about it in obituaries today.

To me, Sutherland was always old— and played old characters. And he did it amazingly well. His white hair and beard surrounded his face like a lion's mane, amplifying his presence as a person of stature and wisdom... and danger. Sutherland seemed to excel at portraying characters who could be warm on the surface while planning something terrible underneath.

Bringing that back full circle to his Judge Parker character in Bass Reeves, it makes me wonder what horrible villainy he's plotting. I've only seen the first 4 episodes so far, so I don't know if he turns out to be the master villain of series. Though now with his passing and only a single, 8-episode season of the show made, I wonder if the showrunners will recast the character.

As I wrote in a recent blog, we had plans to hike four waterfall trails on our day-trip to Tongariro National Park in New Zealand a few weeks ago. After we took a rain delay on hiking the first falls and then found a bonus falls instead we moved on to the second falls on our original list, Mangawhero Falls.

If nothing else the trail to Mangwhero Falls was short, maybe 5 minutes of hiking each way. Thus we didn't mind hiking it in the drizzling rain. (Again, it's a two hour hike that's no fun in the rain.)



Mangawhero Falls is dubbed "Gollum's Pool" for its use as a location scene in the Lord of the Rings movies. Apparently this was the grotto used in the scene where Gollum has a soliloquy with a dead fish. I say apparently for two reasons. First, because there is another falls in Tongariro National Park that also claims to be "Gollum's Pool". Second, because this canyon would be extremely difficult for a film crew to get into. There's no trail down from the rim. Equipment, crew, and actors would have to be lowered in from above, whcih is dangerous in a narrow canyon like this.



Well, Gollum soliloquy or no, it's a pretty falls.

In fact it's much nicer without Gollum around.

New Zealand Travelog #29
Whakapapa, NZ - Tue, 16 Apr 2024, 4pm

Today we've visited Tongariro National Park in New Zealand. I'm writing a summary of the day right now rather than a trail-by-trail blog because with us having managed 3 hikes plus numerous hop-out-and-take-pictures stops today the latter would span at least 5 journals with photos and would take a few days to publish.

We visited two areas Tongariro. For lack of better obvious names I'll call them the Turoa area and the Whakapapa area. First along the road to Turoa we:

• Started from The Hobbit Motor Lodge in Ohakune
• Got to the trailhead for Waitonga Falls but it was already cloudy and started raining and decided not to do this 4km hike... yet.
• Saw a falls from the roadside we initially thought was Waitonga Falls but wasn't.
• Drove to the top of the road at Turoa, where we got above one layer of clouds and caught a few glimpses through the upper cloud layer of 2,797 m (9,177 ft) tall Mount Ruapehu, an active volcano and the tallest mountain on New Zealand's North Island. We also saw a bonus waterfalls near road's end.
• Came back down the road into the cloud layer and hiked Mangawhero Falls (Golem’s pool).
• Thought again about hiking Waitonga Falls but when the rain intensified as we reached the trailhead decided instead to try our luck elsewhere.

We then drove back down through Ohakune and looped around the west side of the park to reenter via the Whakapapa road. Then we:

• Happily caught clear weather on western flank of the mountain. We could see clouds were still hanging heavily over its southern flank.
• Hiked Taranaki Falls.
• Drove all the way up to road's end at Whakapapa, catching several glimpses of the mountain's triple peak and seeing a bonus waterfalls along the way.
• Came back down the road and hiked Tawhai Falls— which is also called Gollum's Pool. I swear, if they try to stick Gollum's name on one more thing in this park they should just rename the damn park to Nasty Hobbitses, We Hates Them National Park.

Yes, it's been a busy day! More blogs with photos will come once I'm caught up with the rest of the trip.

Update: And after all this we still had time for a soak in a natural spring hot tub at our hotel before dinner!

Update 2: added links to other journal entries as I posted them.

Yesterday I wrote about how comparing things to memorable dates can make you feel old. For example, do you remember the Apple Macintosh? (I do.) Well, the Apple Macintosh launched closer to WWII than to today. 😳

That's a form of comparison I described as "X happened closer to Y than to today." Another type of comparison that can make you feel old is to consider what would happen if memorable TV shows or movies about times past were remade today.

Back to the Future, 2024 edition

For example, Back to the Future was released in 1985. If it were remade today (2024), it would feature hero Marty McFly traveling back in time to... 1994.



Marty would be like, "Hey, where can I get on the Internet?"

And he'd cringe when old-time Doc Brown says, "Oh, you mean AOL?"

Then he'd meet his parents at a high school dance listening to oldies music from Ace of Base and Salt-n-Pepa.

Okay, let's try another one.

That '00s Show

If they remade That 70s Show today it'd be That 00s Show. The teen nostalgia show that aired from 1998 to 2006 portrayed the years 1976-1979. So today it'd premier with teens living in 2002.



Teens in That 00s Show would be sitting in someone's parents' basement together after school sharing their fears about more 9-11 style attacks, lockdown drills, the war in Afghanistan, and whether the US would invade other countries, too, like Iraq.

They'd be trash-talking about which movie, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, each of which had just been released months earlier, was better.

The kids would likely have internet access to help pass the time... but it would be slow because it'd be a dial-up connection. The warble of the modem connecting would be a regular sound effect indicating what was happening. And somebody's mom picking up the phone and breaking the connection while downloading music illegally would be a regular trope. Oh, and in later seasons the kids would discover this great new teens-focused service, MySpace. 🤣

Here are a few more thoughts about S2E1 of the Wheel of Time series streaming on Amazon Prime. The episode is entitled "A Taste of Solitude", not "The Darkfriend Social" like you might have thought from my previous blog. That's just a fun sobriquet that a friend of mine created over 30 years ago that's since become common in the fandom! Following that the bulk of the episode aligns to its name, showing how the main characters are split up and dealing with things on their own. Here are Five Things:

1. Moiraine Labors Without the One Power

In the next scene we see Moiraine at Tifan's Well, a remote villa owned by fellow Aes Sedai Verin Mathwin. She's laboring to carry water drawn from a well up the hill to the manor. She's doing this as part of her... exercises, for lack of a better term... to keep herself focused while cut off from the One Power.

Yes, Moiraine's still cut off— Ishamael did that to her in S1E8— even though it's apparently been several months now. I think the writers intend this as Moiraine being Stilled, as it was called in the books, rather than merely temporarily shielded. In the books both things can happen, though being Stilled is far more powerful and punishing. It seems the show writers do not differentiate the two.

Of course, in terms of divergence from the books, the show writers also made up Moiraine being exiled from the White Tower earlier in S1 and being out here with Verin in S2. In the books Verin was in the Tower at this point. The show writers are definitely writing their own story at this point.

As I explained in my previous blog, that's not bad per se. It is a bit disorienting to us viewers familiar with the books. But ultimately this show will have to stand on its own as good TV. I think they're making good TV here by pushing Moiraine into the background, showing what a plotter she still is, and leaving the younger folks from the Two Rivers to have to fend more for themselves. That part at least is true to the spirit of the books.

2. Novices in the Tower

The third major scene shows Egwene and Nynaeve studying as Novices in the Tower. We see the degradation of the scut work they're given (novices scrub plates and pots in the kitchen) and the harsh way the Aes Sedai frame their lessons in channeling the One Power. Each of the girls is given a glass of dirty water and told they must drink it— after passing it through a magic weave they're being taught to purify it. The harshness is "Learn this thing fast or you swallow mud," which the teacher is very direct about.

This is an enjoyably vivid way of showing these two aspects of Egwene's and Nynaeve's life in the tower compared to the page, and pages, and pages of, frankly, dull prose in the books describing it. That's often the case with visual media, though. Showrunners can show a scene that conveys in 2 minutes what 100 pages struggle to say. Oh, and Nynaeve's stubbornness and difficulty channeling are beautifully shown in a quick scene where ( Tiny spoiler )

There's still the books-vs-TV issue that Nynaeve is a novice. In the books she was admitted as Accepted right away because of her strength in the power. I'm not sure this really matters. Frankly I like it better with the two women from the Two Rivers continuing to bond as there was time for little of that character development in season 1.

3. Loial's Not Dead!

The next arc of the episode follows Perrin as the viewpoint character. He's traveling with a band of Shienaran soldiers pursuing the dastardly darkfriend Padan Fain. Fain snuck into Fal Dara (in Shienar), killed a bunch of people, and stole the Horn of Valere. (That was S1E8 in the TV series but early 2nd book.) The horn is a magical artifact that summons heroes of legend and is storied to be important in winning the looming battle against the Dark One.

The TV writers change up the plotlines here. Mat and Rand are not with Perrin here. Nor is Verin; she's off at her private ranch with Moiraine, as noted above. In the books they're on this mission together. But one person I was surprised to see here is Loial— he's not dead!

The showrunners left it vague at the end of S1 whether Loial had died when had Padan Fain stabbed him (and Uno, and others) with a cursed dagger in Fal Dara. I assumed they meant to kill off Loial because they'd obviously spent so little money on FX for portraying him as an 8 to 9 foot tall quasi-human with tufted ears and hands. I mean, it only makes sense to cheap out so badly with a low-budget Loial in S1E5 if they've rewritten him as a throw-away minor character going who only has a few brief appearances.

4. Is that Idris Elba?

Another juggle in "Who's where, and when?" between books and TV involves the Shienarans' new tracker. In the books it's a long-term minor character, Hurin. In the TV series there's mumbling between soldier extras about "some new tracker". In a big reveal we see it's Elyas Machera— an interesting minor character from book 1 who was sadly cut out of season 1 to condense the story. While he's minor in the story as a whole he's actually really important to helping develop Perrin's character, so I'm glad they worked him in here.

For those not familiar with the books— and, okay, for us fans of the books, too— part of what makes this is a big reveal is probably, "Wait, is that Idris Elba?!" Haha, no, it's actor Gary Beadle. The showrunners aren't willing to spend the kind of money it would take to cast a big-screen star like Elba, especially for a minor character. Though Beadle's makeup and costuming with glowing, golden eyes sure recall Elba's portrayal of Heimdall in various Marvel movies.

5. Ingtar Admonishes Perrin: "They had a reason"

As Perrin and the Shienarans survey a slaughter scene left behind by Padan Fain and his band of darkfriends and evil monsters, Perrin frets about how he may not be able to contain his rage when they catch the darkfriends.

The group's leader, Ingtar, cautions Perrin about the perils of revenge as a mindset. He explains that if Shienarans sought revenge for all wrongs, there'd be no Shienarans left. He notes that people who do seemingly bad things must've had some reason to do what they did, and admonishes Perrin to pause to consider what that reason might be before assuming the worst and killing them for retribution.

The first half of Ingtar's lesson is standard fare for speeches about revenge, but the second half seems a bit off. Knowing what's revealed later in the books makes it way off. ( Spoiler from later in the second book )

It's my 3 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 12 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 2089 blogs in 3 years and 768 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 2.1 posts per day this past year (1.9 over 3 years). I can also see which tags I've used most frequently in that time:

Most Used Tags, Past 3 Years

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	354
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	241
3	Coronavirus	212
4	TV	160
5	Waterfalls	159

What does it mean that these tags are the top 5? Well, first, I'm happy that "In Beauty I Walk" remains my most used tag. It's the tag I use with all my posts about hiking. It's also my all-time top tag from 12+ years of blogging.

I'm happy, as well, to see "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles", about the trials and tribulations of travel (the name's an obvious reference to the classic 1987 Steve Martin/John Candy comedy) rise to the #2 spot. Along with that goes Coronavirus dropping to #3, and I'm happy about that, too. Good riddance!

Notice, as well, that a new tag has pushed its way into the Top 5: Waterfalls! Indeed I have written a lot about waterfalls in the past year. That shows up when I filter tag usage by the past 12 months:

Most Used Tags, Past 12 Months

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	129
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	94
3	Waterfalls	78
4	No Rest for the Wicked	63
5	Weather	62
6	TV	51
7	Politics	49
8	Taking it Easy	48
9	SF Bay Area	46
10	Current Events	44

Waterfalls was my #3 tag this past year with a whopping 76 uses. Yes, we've visited a lot of waterfalls!

No Rest for the Wicked nudged up into the Top 5 this year. It even nudged out Weather to reach #4. That aligns as No Rest for the Wicked is my #4 tag over my full history of blogging.

I enumerated this table out to 10 places to show what happened to some of the other tags. You can see that while TV dropped out of the top 5 for the year, it didn't drop far. It came in 6th. My TV watching is down this year from the year before, when I watched the whole Game of Thrones series. Earlier this year I did watch a few miniseries and the current season of various shows, which is how I found 51 things to write about. Though even that seems like a long time ago as I've barely watched any TV the past 6 months.

What happened to Coronavirus? On the basis of the past 12 months it not only dropped out of the top 5, it did not make the top 10 or even top 25. It came in at 40th place, in a 3-way tie with Beer Tasting and Family, each with 20 blogs.

A few weeks ago I watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut. My impetus was reading an article about it. I saw the original Blade Runner (1982) back in about 1989 and enjoyed it a lot at the time. The article promised that this second director's cut, released in 2007 after years of wrangling over legal rights, was the truest to filmmaker Ridley Scott's vision. It was on one of our stream services, so I gave it a watch.

A 1980s Vision of the Future

The thing I enjoyed most about the original Blade Runner was its vision of the future. The movie imagines a world where technology is more advanced but society is still gritty. There are flying cars and interstellar space ships, yet the big city of Los Angeles on Earth is crowded, disorganized with people speaking multiple different languages, and still has poverty and homelessness.

The filmmakers' choice to imagine the future that way was a fresh break from the predominant trope in SF through the 1970s and into the early 1980s that technological progress would create a gleaming future of material abundance. Blade Runner clearly had dystopian elements... but without going full-on dystopia. Especially as I watched it in 1989, toward the end of a decade that had seen real-world cities become increasingly plagued with drugs and crime, it struck me as the most realistic extrapolation of what the future 20 years out might look like.

The Final Cut keeps all of the atmosphere of the original theatrical release. Possibly it even goes longer on it, telling the story at a slower pace than I seem to remember from 34 years ago. I didn't re-watch the original back-to-back with this version so I can't say for sure.

How that Vision Looks Today

Watching it today, of course, the movies' vision of the future is laughably quaint. "Los Angeles - November 2019" reads the subtitle over the opening scenes. That's now 3½ years ago, and we don't have flying cars, let alone interstellar space travel. Oh, and why is it constantly raining in Los Angeles? I've lived in LA. It gets, like, two rainfalls a year, and everyone loses their minds when it happens.

Here are several more things I chuckled about as terrible guesses from the 1980s of what 2019 would look like:

• Billboards for Pan Am airlines. Oops, they went bankrupt in 1991.


• At least the billboards for Coca-Cola aren't obsolete. Though the movie does predate the whole New Coke fiasco of 1985.


• The head of Tyrel Corp. is making a replicant that's "more human than human" but hasn't invented Lasik to get rid of his need for Coke bottle-bottom trifocal glasses? (Probs because Coke is an ad placement; see above. 🤣)


• Soundtrack by Vangelis.... Wow, there's a name— and a body of music— I haven't heard since about 1993!


• 37 years in the future and they imagine everyone still using crappy little picture-tube TVs?


• In the club scene everyone's smoking. Haha, we (California) fixed that futuristic problem in 1998!

Original Theatrical Release vs. The Final Cut

The main difference between the versions is that 2007's Final Cut tells a more cerebral story. In particular, it strongly implies that Deckard (Harrison Ford), the blade runner himself, is a replicant. A few key scenes that I think were not included in 1982's theatrical version show him doubting himself.

Of course, "Is he or isn't he?" is a hotly debated topic. I've read stories that Harrison Ford outright demanded to know, Is Deckard a replicant? to portray him accurately. The same stories indicate that Ridley Scott initially wanted the answer to be Yes but was pushed to No by the producers. The Final Cut changes the calculus.

In making the story more cerebral it seems to get more ponderous. I was surprised that there was basically no action until halfway through the movie's full run time. Again, I haven't re-watched the original so I can't say for sure, but I feel like the original had more action earlier on. Either way, The Final Cut is definitely a slow boiler. But at least it doesn't suffer the bloating problem of most director's cuts stretching toward 3 hours (or more). It clocks in at a trim 1 hour 57 minutes.

Recently I watched the 1981 movie Scanners. It's something of a cult classic, and it's been on my list of old movies to watch for a while. The movie spans the categories of science fiction and horror flicks. It's written and directed by David Cronenberg, who later directed (and has a screenplay writing credit for) scifi-horror crossover The Fly (1986). Scanners stars Patrick McGoohan, Steven Lack, Michael Ironside, and Jennifer O'Neill.

BTW, yes, this is the movie with the infamous exploding head scene. That one scene, shown in, like, every trailer for the movie, is a large part of its status as a cult classic.

The Premise

The premise of Scanners is that a small number of people, called Scanners, have telepathic power. When they "scan" a person it causes a bit of pain, like a headache and a nosebleed. But they can also use their power to control other people, forcing them to inflict harm on themselves, or cause physical harm directly through the telepathic link.

Scientists at one shadowy company are cultivating scanners to use as spies. When their best scanner is killed by another, more powerful scanner they realize that some other shadowy organization is working against them— and plans to take over the world with scanners. They recruit a troubled young man with scanner powers, Cameron Vale (played by Steven Lack), to infiltrate the rival organization and stop it.

What Works: The Mood

Watching Scanners reminded me, this is very much what movies looked like in 1981. It's not just the very-late 1970s fashion nor even the vaguely sinister architecture of new buildings at the time (the community college campus built near my childhood home around the time totally looked like one of those this-is-a-sinister-quasi-governmental-secret-lab places) but it's also the construction of how horror movies were horror.

The threat here is a combination of scientific research and mystical power. "Evil scientist" was a horror staple of the early 1980s as science was advancing rapidly compared to popular understanding. Basically, everything Boomer adults of the time had learned in high school was being rendered obsolete by the cutting edge of science and technology, and that scared them.

Also very early 1980s in feel is that the perpetrators of the threat are shadowy, quasi-governmental organizations. Today we'd say, Oh, those are DARPA funded labs and private military contractors (PMCs). Back then such affiliations were not well understood and seemed sinister. Plus, the use of such companies as bad guys was a common thing in film for several years after the Nixon Watergate scandal. In fictional stories, companies did evil things with government money while the government pretended not to know.

What Sucks: The Writing

The writing fell apart in the last third of the film. The plotting was okay through the beginning and the middle— not great, but okay especially for the standards of the time. Then in the third reel I was like, "WTF is this? WTF is that? How could those characters know X and not also know Y? Did the SFX people actually read the script before shooting that scene?"

As the credits rolled I said to myself, "It's like the writers couldn't quite figure out how to complete the story they started, so they all got high on cocaine then wrote whatever came to mind." Remember, this was 1981. Doing coke was totally a thing creatives in New York and LA did. Unfortunately coke-heads are wont to crap out a turd and convince themselves it's art.

The reality of the situation is that "the writers" was just one person, director/writer David Cronenberg. And he noted that he was on a very rushed schedule. For financial reasons they had to start filming before he finished the story. So it seems like there probably was an "Oh, shit" moment where he realized he needed to just write something to finish the story on time. And he was probably snorting coke, too. That's just the times.

Last night I watched the movie Sicario. It was released in 2015 and has been on my to-see list since then. ...Not very high on my list, obviously, as it's taken me 7½ years to get to it. 😅 This is a non-spoiler review.

Going in to the movie I expected it to be a shoot-'em-up, cops-and-robbers action flick, drug cartel hit men vs. the DEA or FBI. That's the impression I got from seeing the trailer in theaters 7½ years ago, anyway. That's not what it's about. BTW, I recommend against watching the trailer if you haven't seen the movie yet. Various reviews caution that the trailer gives away all the action scenes. That's because Sicario is not fundamentally an action movie. Yes, there are guns-out action scenes. Violence comes hard and fast. But it comes in discrete pieces. The movie is more of a cloak-and-dagger thriller, where the main character is trying to figure out what's really going on in this murky plot she's been hooked into, and we (the audience) are trying to figure it out along with her. It's also a dark story that conveys grim morals.



Sicario stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro. Blunt is the aforementioned main character, a young FBI agent who agrees to serve on an inter-agency project after her team discovers the bodies of several dozen victims murdered by a drug cartel. Brolin is the leader of the inter-agency team, and Del Toro is a mysterious operative with a personal stake in the outcome.

Sicario, the film tells us in an overlay at the beginning, is a word that comes from the Latin word sicarius. It was coined 2,000 years ago when insurgents in Judea fought Roman invaders. A sicarius was a hunter who murdered Roman officers. In Spanish sicario means assassin.

The film was directed by Denis Villeneuve with cinematographer Roger Deakins and audio director Jóhann Jóhannsson. I mentioned these three directors because they made the film so much more than just an action flick. Deakins's visuals are beautiful, combining visuals of the desert landscape with helicopter overheads and views through night-vision goggles and infrared cameras in ways that aren't gimmicky. Jóhannsson's orchestration helps set the mood of tension without drawing attention to itself.

The visual work of the movie, and its telling of a story with grim morals, reminded me of the 2000 movie Traffic. That was directed by Steven Soderburgh, though both movies have Benicio Del Toro as one of the leads. Del Toro's characters are not the same person, though it's possible to imagine one is like the other but 15 years later. That's because Del Toro carefully underplays both of them, portraying characters who are surprisingly capable yet believably underestimated by their opponents.

Del Toro's acting in Sicario is better because the character is in some ways more challenging. In Traffic his character was a police officer who wanted to stop chasing drug kingpins and get back to some semblance of normal, watching neighborhood kids play baseball. In Sicario his character burns with an understated intensity because he's resigned himself that there is no other way. Curiously one of the last scenes in the movie is a neighborhood kids' baseball game— I'm not sure to what degree that's an intentional homage— but instead of watching and enjoying the game, Del Toro admonishes one of the other leads, "You should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now."