Magellans at the Movies: the Blog

     American historian Thomas Kuhn's most influential theory holds that when we chart the developmental course of science we aren't tracing a steadily rising line of progress, but rather that we are chronicling a series of paradigm shifts. Essentially, the story of scientific thought is the story of an evolving set of models against which all science is judged. For example, the current paradigm of science is the theory of relativity. I won't pretend to understand that theory, and you don't really need to in order to grasp Kuhn's ideas, you just need to know that if a scientific hypothesis or test or experiment doesn't conform to relativity, the test is discarded rather than the paradigm.       There's more to this theory, and I'd encourage you to read more about it yourself if you're interested, but I've recently become increasingly convinced that a similar kind of view could be applied to the evolution of narrative, stylistic, and technologica...

EXTRACTION 2 Genre: Action thriller Director: Sam Hargrave Released: 2023     The first Extraction movie, released in 2020 on Netflix, was a pretty popular film. It didn't exactly hit with critics, but audiences hungry for simple, unpretentious, blockbusting fun (that didn't involve capes or laser-eyes) devoured it and made it one of Netflix's biggest hits of the year. This inevitably led to a sequel, which I heard about whilst perusing Rotten Tomatoes and, having nothing better to do on a quiet Tuesday night, compelled me to take in both movies in one sitting.      The first movie can only be described as Call of Duty: the Movie. It features a gruff, stony-faced military man as our protagonist, he fights through the grimy streets of a foreign city against wave upon wave of faceless NPCs, and most injuries can be recovered from by hunkering down for a bit until the screen clears of all the bloody splotches and the sound of a beating heart fades away. The action ...

                                                                      UPDATE      Recently Vanity Fair published an article detailing a decades long infatuation and frequently romantic relationship Cormac McCarthy had with a girl who was sixteen at the time of their first meeting and seventeen when they became intimately involved. McCarthy himself was forty two. I have only read this article and a handful of reactions to it, but there currently seems to be no reason to doubt the veracity of its account. Responses seem to have been generally negative, seeing as how the article itself was bizarrely favorable towards this relationship and the relationship itself was illegal and ethically dubious. This is the article , which I encourage everyone to read and thereby conclude for themselves their feelings ...