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Wake Up From The Global Nightmare in Morpheus From Humanoids

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Graphic Policy Team

Humanoids has announced Morpheus, a post-apocalyptic sci fi horror graphic novel from writer Yann Bécu and illustrator Francesco Trifogli about a near future where a mysterious sleeping sickness ravages the planet, paralyzing humanity’s institutions and plunging the world into chaos. Amidst the wreckage, one woman fights to save her comatose daughter from the terrifying condition known as Morpheus. Available in April 2024.

Five years after a mysterious sleeping sickness known as Morpheus destroys life as we know it, survivors huddle in cities, each cobbled together around the shortened waking hours of their inhabitants.

Juliette, a young mother, is willing to do anything to “wake up” her daughter, even if it means betraying everything she knows. When a geneticist named Yuri tells her the cure may lie outside of Prague, they embark on a desperate journey, pursued by threats unimaginable, with none more dangerous than the invisible Morpheus… which gains ground every day.

The Five Most Compelling Supporting Characters in The Sandman Season 1

Posted on August 29, 2022 by Logan Dalton

One of the The Sandman‘s biggest strengths as both a show and a comic is its panoply of unique and well-developed characters, both in the Dreaming and the Waking World. Some might say it has a “deep bench”. This is because its lead character Morpheus/Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge) represents the collective unconscious and has been around since the beginning of time so the show can easily slot in historical time periods as well as our current world and beyond it. There’s room for the anthropomorphic personifications of death, desire, and despair as well as William Shakespeare, a knock-off Aleister Crowley, and a diner waitress, who wants everyone to have a happy ending in The Sandman saga to just name a few. This wide range of characters and settings keeps the show fresh just like the comic where readers could go from a performance of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream to the depths of Hell or from the reign of Augustus Caesar to a park bench in New York City all thanks to the imagination of Neil Gaiman and some of the most talented artists in comics at the time.

Without further ado, here are a few of Sandman‘s best side characters, who either showcase its strength as show or who I personally connected to through actors’ (or in one case) and visual effects artists’ performances.

5. Goldie

The Sandman floored me in its first ten minutes with its full realization of The Dreaming at its peak courtesy of director Mike Barker and a host of set designer and visual effects artists. The aerial shots coupled with close-up’s established a fleshed out fantasy world while also having an air of familiarity because dreaming is something that some of us do every night. There’s also wonderful nods to mythology like the gates of horn and ivory that first appeared in Homer’s Odyssey to signify true and false dreams.

However, The Dreaming isn’t just splendor and budget flexing. It has its own sense of humanity and community even though it’s solely inhabited by dreams, nightmares, and other fantastic beings. Sandman‘s second episode “Imperfect Hosts” gives the most in-depth look at day to day life in The Dreaming as Morpheus and his librarian/major domo Lucienne (A dapper Vivienne Acheampong) take stock of how the realm has change since he was imprisoned for over a century by the magician Roderick Burgess. Morpheus sacrifices the gargoyle Gregory to summon the Three Fates to help find the missing instruments of his power. But he also gives Abel (Asim Chaudhry) an egg that hatches into a Goldie, a new gargoyle that is the first thing created in The Dreaming since Morpheus’ return.

Goldie barely appears in the show, but his cuteness rivals Grogu, and he represents The Sandman‘s recurring theme of change and shifting away from old narratives to build new ones. Cain (Sanjeev Bhaskar) might continue to replay the “oldest story” and kill his brother Abel over and over again, but there’s an adorable little gargoyle waiting for Abel when he comes out of his grave showing that there’s still life and vibrancy in The Dreaming. Also, kudos must be given to Chaudhry’s emotional connection with both Goldie and Gregory, and I could feel his pain when he lost the latter and the joy when the former’s egg hatched. All in all, Goldie is a great little creature who doesn’t wear out his welcome.

4. Hal Carter (John Cameron Mitchell)

The second part of The Sandman Season One adapts the “Doll’s House” arc from the comics where mortal Rose Walker (Kyo Ra) becomes a dream vortex and threatens both The Dreaming and the waking world. Along the way, she looks for her missing brother Jed (Eddie Karanja) where she stays at Hal Carter’s bed and breakfast that features an eccentric range of lodgers, including a couple named Ken and Barbie and a polite gentleman, who loves his books, especially G.K. Chesterton (More about him later.)

Even though he plays a secondary role in Rose’s storyline, Hal has interests and dreams of his own. He performs as the drag queen Dolly and opens up to Rose about wanting to become a Broadway actor, but ending up opening his parents’ old house in Florida as a bed and breakfast. This conversation is quite ironic because Mitchell is a legendary stage actor probably best known for playing and creating genderqueer rock star Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Dolly’s drag show is the first time that Rose really experiences the boundaries breaking between the Dreaming and the waking world.

This sequence and other ones featuring Dolly are lit and shot in a similar way to scenes featuring Dream’s sibling Desire of the Endless (Played by nonbinary actor Mason Alexander Park) and subtextually show that the Dreaming is a metaphor for gender fluidity with Morpheus’ realm acting as a place where folks can experience new sides of their identities. (This in spite of Morpheus being a curmudgeon who doesn’t change.) In addition to this fluidity, Hal also acts as a grounding support for Rose and her friend Lyta as they search for Jed and even gets his own little happy ending towards the conclusion of the season. Hal could very much be that cool old nonbinary person you chat with at the local gay bar, but also is full of inspiration, light, and beauty. (P.S. John Cameron Mitchell seriously needs to be involved in an Invisibles TV show.)

3. Rosemary (Sarah Niles)

Rosemary is only in a single, solitary episode of Sandman and isn’t a god, gargoyle, or even a drag queen. She’s a regular person who gives John Dee (David Thewlis) a ride to pick up his ruby as the B-plot of “A Hope in Hell” after seeing him stumble around in a robe and slippers on a dark, wet night. Rosemary brings a listening ear and sense of kindness to the murderer and arsonist and even opens up about how her husband lied to her and her daughters about having another family in another city. When Dee reveals his crimes, she does end up trying to get a gas station clerk to call the police. However, after Dee’s protection amulet causes the clerk’s gun to ricochet, Rosemary completes the ride, and in a rare moment of humanity for the murderer, gets the amulet from Dee for getting him to the ruby.

One of Sandman‘s strengths as a story is how it centers ordinary, decent people in a fantastical world. Until he talks about murder and arson, Rosemary empathizes with John Dee and is the first person to do so after he’s abandoned by his father and moved from town to town by his mother Ethel, who uses Morpheus’ ruby and protective amulet to make money. Sarah Niles’ performance embodies “Good Samaritan”, and her body language displays active listening until she feels fear and subtly tries to call the police. (Her phone on the GPS mount makes this tricky in an incredibly relatable small sequence.) You can see the look of danger in her eye, and there’s no relief until the end of the episode when Dee gives her the protective amulet and runs off into the night.

Although she only appears in this one episode, Rosemary and actress Niles embody the perils and rewards of being a good person in an often inhospitable world. In the comic, Rosemary is shot and killed by John Dee, but writer Austin Guzman goes for a more hopeful ending with her before the utter nihilism and inhumanity of the following episode “24/7”.

2. Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kingsley)

Hob Gadling is a character, who makes a single appearance in The Sandman Season One in what is easily the best episode of the show, “The Sound of Her Wings”. He is introduced as a confident soldier in a tavern, who claims that “Death is stupid”, and something that one can opt out of. Unbeknownst to him, Death of the Endless (A perfect Kirby Howell-Baptiste) is at the bar with her brother Dream and grants his wish with Dream visiting him at the same tavern every century to check in on him.

The meetings show how the world has changed over hundreds of years with Gadling going into the printing business and the slave trade, gaining and losing fortunes as well as families. Especially in regards to the slave trade, Gadling isn’t a good person, but he’s a human being, who refuses to die no matter if he’s a Tudor noble or a starving beggar. The costume designers, director Mairzee Almas, and writer Lauren Bello captures the changes that humanity has experience between each meeting as well as the similarities with the point being that people will always complain about poor people instead of rich exploiters and will always enjoy dirty jokes and alcohol.

Ferdinand Kingsley gives an earthy, yet wide-ranging performance as Hob Gadling as he can go from the depths of sorrow (When he loses all his money in 1689, when he thinks Morpheus snubs him.) to utter swagger when he buys racks of lamb and pints of ale and ignores the struggling writer Will Shaxberd, who gets a touch of inspiration from Dream of the Endless. It’s beautiful to see an immortal being like Dream cultivate a relationship with a regular mortal over the years, and there’s a cathartic feel to the last drink they share in the pub that Gadling has bought to save it from developers and gentrifiers. Gadling has gone from a curiosity to a true friend of Morpheus.

1. Fiddler’s Green/Gilbert (Stephen Fry)

In the back-half of The Sandman Season One, Morpheus plays less of an active role in the plot instead using Rose Walker’s dream vortex to track down three citizens of the Dreaming, namely, the shapeshifter Gault, the nightmare Corinthian, and the enigmatic Fiddler’s Green. However, the reveal of the Fiddler’s Green isn’t until later, and instead, we get to meet a chivalrous and well-read gentleman named Gilbert, who is basically a less trad version of British author G.K. Chesterton known for his Father Brown detective stories, The Man Who Was Thursday, and a fixation on paradoxes. While on his way to Hal’s drag show, he rescues Rose Walker from attackers in an alleys with a sword-stick. He acts as a guardian to her and ends up driving her to the hotel where Jed is using his Father Brown-esque ability to see through appearances and innuendoes to deduce that there’s a serial killer convention in town and calling in Morpheus to rescue his charge and her brother.

Gilbert act as a foil to the Corinthian in The Sandman Season One as he finds the best in humanity unlike the Corinthian, who inspires their basest impulses. Every action he takes during the season is for the good of people, and Fiddler’s Green finds people and their ideas so inspiring that he lives in a boarding house and dresses and acts like his favorite writer, Chesterton. Also, Stephen Fry is a spot-on Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier/Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark casting pick for this role capturing the intelligence, eccentricity, and empathy of this dream/man, who ends up becoming the hero at the end while reminding Morpheus that without humans dreaming, his realm wouldn’t exist. Also, kudos to the visual effects team for lovely work showing him transform back into the Fiddler’s Green, which wraps up Sandman‘s second arc in a refreshing way. Gilbert is a loving homage to Neil Gaiman’s influences, while also having his own character arc brilliantly brought to life by Fry.

Like the inhabitants of our own dreams, The Sandman has an enormous ensemble cast that explore the different aspects of being human or immortal as well as storytelling, change, and dozens of other lofty and relatable themes in settings as diverse as the pits of Hell to Cape Kennedy, Florida. The rich, wide-ranging cast of characters is what makes the comic, and now the show, worth revisiting to bask in their arcs, personalities, and the nuances of performances by talented performers.

Television

Review: The Matrix Resurrections

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Logan Dalton

18 years after the previous installment, director, producer, and co-writer Lana Wachowski returns to a world of choices, hacking, philosophical monologues, and yes, kung fu in The Matrix Resurrections. Writers David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon help her shape a script that treads a narrow line between a J.J. Abrams-esque remake, or the approach George Miller took in Mad Max Fury Road where he took familiar iconography and characters and used them to explore new themes and turn the set pieces up to eleven. The basic premise of the film is that Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) are somehow still alive after the event of The Matrix Revolutions where they still died. However, Thomas Anderson and “Tiffany” are a video game developer and soccer mom who have never even spoken and see the events of the previous trilogy as a video game developed by Anderson. But the appearance of the enigmatic and energetic Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and a new take on a couple familiar faces from the original films cast this reality into doubt…

From the opening scene of The Matrix Resurrections, which is a shot by shot recreation of the opening fight sequence in The Matrix until Bugs and the new look Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) shake things up, this is a film that is in deep conversation with its predecessors as well as Hollywood’s propensity for reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, and expanded universes. Wachowski, Mitchell, and Hemon take potshots at the studio that has been trying to make this film since 2004 with or without the Wachowskis in a pitch perfect parody of focus groups and the committee approach taken to most tentpole films in 2021. However, The Matrix Resurrections doesn’t drown in metafiction and uses these early scenes to set up Reeves’ more forelorn approach to an aging Neo that is tired and haunted as well as Jonathan Groff‘s new-look Smith, who is Anderson’s business partner and is generally doing the most during both his condescending monologues and physicality-filled fight scenes. Honestly, I was fatigued with Neo and Smith’s relationship after the Burly Brawl in The Matrix Reloaded, but Lana Wachowski breathes new life into the rivalry by making it a metaphor for binary thinking versus fluidity, safety versus risks, and nostalgia versus something new.

The theme of humans and machines (Now called “synthients”) working together was explored in The Matrix sequels to mixed reviews with Chingy Nea nailing the contemporary audience reaction by saying “Perhaps audiences [at the time] were more attuned to sequels like Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which was just as full of Judeo-Christian imagery but was a more obvious story of fantasy heroes and didn’t tend as much toward existential philosophy and horny latex vignettes.” In The Matrix Resurrections, synthients have made getting in and out of The Matrix and real world much easier with a couple of them playing a key role in Neo’s second unplugging. They also are crucial to the ecosystem of Io, the new human city, that is more garden oasis than warzone. Old age makeup sporting Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) fights to protect the status quo at all costs, and she barely sees the irony of putting Neo in house arrest after his mind was freed from a simulation as her soldiers geek out at a man, who has inspired them so much. After all she’s been through, no one will begrudge Niobe a bit of piece and quiet (The sound mix and score are tamped down during the Io sequences.), but freeing minds has started to play second fiddle to caring for plants, which is why she is in conflict with Bugs and her crew.

Breaking the binary and playing with well-established formulas is always on the margins of The Matrix Resurrections from dialogue about the red and blue pills to a new context for the famous sparring program. Wachowski, Mitchell, and Hemon weave in tons of callbacks and motifs from the original both visually, verbally, and even sonically in Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer‘s score that melds orchestral and electronic music. It can be annoying at times, and I’m not a big fan with the film’s actual ending. However, where it works best isn’t Henwick or Abdul-Mateen mugging at the camera, but when the film puts meat on the bones of an idea or plotline that didn’t land in the first three films like Neil Patrick Harris‘ The Analyst, who replaces the Architect’s math and metaphysics for psychology. And this is where I say the best part of The Matrix Resurrections isn’t its expertly choreographed fight scenes (You can follow Neo’s character arc through the way he fights.), cool chases, or even that it abandoned Christianity for The Invisibles as its spiritual mentor: it’s the romance and relationship between Neo and Trinity.

On paper, Neo and Trinity’s love for each other was the lynchpin of The Matrix trilogy, but their on-screen relationship seemed stiff and clinical (See Trinity’s overlong death monologue in The Matrix Revolutions.) although Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss are fine performers. The Matrix Resurrections makes spark fly between them by sneaking in a romantic film under the guise of an action/science fiction one in addition to making Neo and Trinity saving each other the main crux of the plot instead of extra nonsense with the Oracle, Architect, or side characters from a video game. Neo and Trinity get to have full adult conversations about being dissatisfied with their jobs or marriages, and how they deal with these issues through therapy or repairing motorcycles. (Some things never change.) Because they have lived full lives over the past decades, getting out of The Matrix is a much tougher road, and The Matrix Resurrections spends a decent about of time showing the pods where Neo and Trinity are plus the pain to get them unplugged. Finally, there are new dimensions to Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss’ performances of these characters with Reeves getting to be sweet and charming while Moss gets to hide that she’s a total badass for about two hours before cutting loose in what is sure to be several crowd pleasing moments.

The Matrix Resurrections isn’t a pop culture shifting blockbuster and may rely on grace notes from its predecessors a little too heavily. However, it uses action to build tension and shape character relationships, which also extends to the special effects and production design. Let’s just say the old dog of bullet time might have one last trick. Reeves and Moss also explore growth, love, and aging in a tender way through the characters of Neo and Trinity, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen and Jonathan Groff add humor and physical brutality to the iconic characters of Morpheus and Smith respectively. Lana Wachowski has crafted a film that is an engaging work of cultural criticism, a showcase for setpieces and worldbuilding, and also happens to be romantic as hell.

Overall Verdict: 8.0