Octavia Spencer – Memphis Flyer

It’s strange to contemplate how Dungeons & Dragons has conquered the world. The game began in the early 1970s in a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hobby shop. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and the shop’s owner, Jeff Perren, were avid wargamers who created sets of rules to govern battles between brigades of miniature army men. During one game set in medieval times, someone (exactly who is the source of much controversy and a few lawsuits) had the idea that, instead of controlling whole armies, they could try playing as individual heroes. Gygax added rules for using magic and fantastic monsters to fight and published the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

For a game that has been described as combining “the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping,” the nerdy hobby spread like wildfire. By 2017, after the game’s fifth edition was released, there were an estimated 15 million players in the United States. But D&D’s legacy goes far beyond the tabletop. The basic concepts introduced by the game — characters defined by a set of skills and statistics whose success or failure is based on random rolls of the dice, and who gather treasure and useful items as they gain experience and advance in level — underlies video games from The Legend of Zelda to Call Of Duty to Grand Theft Auto. But I think D&D’s greatest cultural contribution was the creation of the “generic fantasy setting.”

Tom Holland and Chris Pratt voice the Lightfoot brothers.

J.R.R. Tolkien had taken a scholarly approach to creating Middle Earth, using elements of myth and legend from Northern European antiquity. His numerous imitators were much less rigorous about who they stole from, and Gygax read all of them, gleaning their best ideas and combining them into one syncretic setting. Everything from Shrek to Game of Thrones to Skyrim seems to take place in variants of the D&D world.

Pixar’s newest picture Onward takes the generic fantasy setting as its jumping-off point. “Long ago, the world was full of wonder!” the opening narration exclaims. Bearded wizards in pointy hats palled around with pegasus-unicorns. But magic is famously not user-friendly, so some spoilsport had to go and invent technology, and now the elves and trolls and centaurs live in a world that looks like a Northern California suburb. It’s elf Ian Lightfoot’s (voiced by Tom Holland) 16th birthday, and he’s an awkward nerd who can’t get anyone to come to his party except his big brother Barley (Chris Pratt) and his mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). The boys’ father died when they were very young, but Laurel reveals that he left a gift for them to be delivered when Ian turned 16. It turns out that accountant dad was secretly a wizard, and his legacy is a magic staff, a Phoenix jewel, and a spell that would bring him back to life for one day only, so he could meet the children he left behind.

Barley is an avid player of Quests of Yore, a D&D-equivalent game that, in this world, is strictly historically accurate. He tries and fails to make the spell work. But when Ian tries, his latent magical powers activate, and he succeeds. Well, he partially succeeds — meaning he brings back just the lower half of his father. The brothers have 24 hours to complete the spell and materialize the rest of dad.

Directed by Dan Scanlon, a longtime Pixar staffer who wrote and directed 2013’s Monsters University, Onward never fails to be fun and engaging. But I think the Pixar label actually hurts Onward. Had this come from any other creative team, it would be hailed as a fantastic film. But since it’s Pixar, it invites comparisons to masterpieces such as Toy Story 2.

Onward is a beautiful piece of animation, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Coco. It features a relationship between two brothers that feels deep and real, even if it doesn’t reach Inside Out‘s depths of psychological insight. Its action sequences are thrilling, particularly the climax where our heroes fight a magic dragon assembled from the rubble of technological society, but they never touch the complexity of The Incredibles.

Onward does have one element superior to its Pixar equivalents: Guinevere, Barley’s custom van airbrushed with a fantasy scene of a pegasus, has more personality than the cars from Cars, and even though it never talks, it still gets a heroic moment inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road.

Like Corey (Octavia Spencer), the manticore restaurateur who has to answer to her investors, we’ve become jaded to Pixar’s techno-magic and worn down by Disney’s domination. But don’t let that discourage you from taking up Onward‘s magic quest.

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Taraji deserves better.

Hidden Figures is about a lot of things. It’s the story of three African-American women: Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), and Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who played integral roles in getting NASA off the ground in the early 1960s. It’s about women overcoming sexism and black people overcoming racism by proving that they are just as good as, or better than, those who doubt and look down on them. It’s about how working toward a difficult, shared goal creates community and puts our differences in perspective. But mostly, it’s about Taraji P. Henson being a badass.

Here is a fact: Everyone loves Taraji. Craig Brewer loved her when he saw her in 2001’s Baby Boy and cast her as the lead in his 2005 classic Hustle & Flow, which would prove to be her breakout role. Now, 11 years later, she and Hustle costar Terrence Howard lead one of the most popular shows on television, Empire. The major appeal of the prime-time, music-industry soap opera is watching Taraji unleash free form badassery onto a world of men who underestimate her. (My dream is that one day Taraji will take up Tina Turner’s chainmail mantle and appear as Auntie Entity in a Mad Max film. But I digress.)

Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson, and Octavia Spencer (above, left to right)

In Hidden Figures, Taraji’s not running Bartertown, but her character, Katherine, is the smartest computer at NASA Langley. The film is set at the very dawn of the digital age, when NASA had just bought their first mainframe from IBM, and a “computer” is a person, usually a woman, who specializes in the fiendishly difficult math involved in putting a man in space and returning him safely to the earth. Though they may work at the most forward-looking organization on the planet, Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary are still in 1960 Virginia. Even though they are among the small band of black women who get paid a middle-class wage to sweat the numbers all day, they still have to walk all the way across the vast research campus to use the colored women’s bathroom. This becomes a major plot point when Katherine is called up to the big leagues to work with the Space Task Group, the elite NASA engineers who planned the lunar landing campaign. Katherine’s new boss is Al Harrison, a slice of ham and cheese played by Kevin Costner.

In my dark imaginings, I envision director Theodore Melfi instructing Costner to give a terrible performance in order to make our lead trio look better. But believing that would mean ignoring many other signs, such as the chunks of gobbledygoop dialogue that neither the screenwriter, the director, nor the actors actually understand, or the bits lifted wholesale from The Right Stuff, or howlers like John Glenn blurting out “Let’s learn to fly into space!”; or Costner’s “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color!”

That last bit is a victorious moment for our heroes, symbolizing the victory of the NASA meritocracy over base racial bigotry. Being a film critic has taught me that a movie can be deeply flawed and still achieve its goals. Hidden Figures is aimed at an underserved audience. I imagine that educated African-American women who see the film will empathize strongly with Dorothy’s quest for a promotion, and find Costner’s character, a blowhard white boss who yells at them to work harder and not expect any extra pay, very familiar. This is a film about extremely smart women, but they are carefully presented as very ordinary and relatable vessels for wish fulfillment. Katherine Coleman calculated Neil Armstrong’s trajectory to the moon, but a large chunk of her screen story is about her chaste romance with Air Force officer Jim Johnson (Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali). This is not The Black Right Stuff, it’s The Help at NASA, only Octavia Spencer doesn’t bake a crap pie.

The performances of the three leads range from solid (Monáe) to good (Spencer) to outstanding (Henson). When Henson delivers a fiery mid-film speech educating her white male superiors on the unimaginable difficulties she faces every day, we get a glimpse of what could have been. Hidden Figures will likely satisfy on the actress’ strength, but Taraji—and her audience—deserve better than focus-grouped pablum.