Rick Perlstein:

My first impression of them came of their response to my small-talk description of my delightful afternoon [walking in San Francisco]. Jaws practically dropped, like I had dared an unaccompanied, unarmed stroll through Baghdad's Sadr City in the spring of 2004. [...]

One participant was a British former journalist become computer tycoon who had been awarded a lordship. He proclaimed that the Chinese middle class doesn't care about democracy or civil liberties. I was treated as a sentimental naïf for questioning his blanket confidence.

Another attendee seemed to see politics as a collection of engineering problems. He kept setting up strange thought experiments, which I did not understand. I recall thinking it was like talking to a creature visiting from another solar system that did not have humans in it. [...]

I knew from the New Yorker that Andreessen had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered. [...]

And that's when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.

"I'm glad there's OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."

I'm taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I can't be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you're reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said "quiescent," or "docile," or maybe "powerless." Something, certainly, along those lines.

He was joking, sort of; but he was serious -- definitely. "Kidding on the square," jokes like those are called. All that talk about human potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with, for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.

There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

The long-prophesied fourth Riddick movie is actually coming. Star Vin Diesel and writer-director David Twohy have been teasing this new installment since the last film (Riddick) in 2013, so you may be forgiven for thinking that it might never come to fruition over the decade that has since passed. But last year Twohy…

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It's Star Wars Day, and to mark the occasion, Disney+ has dropped a new trailer for Star Wars: The Acolyte. As previously reported, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Galactic Republic and its Jedi masters symbolized the epitome of enlightenment and peace. Then came the inevitable downfall and outbreak of war as the Sith, who embraced the Dark Side of the Force, came to power. Star Wars: The Acolyte will explore those final days of the Republic as the seeds of its destruction were sown.

The eight-episode series was created by Leslye Headland. It's set at the end of the High Republic Era, about a century before the events of The Phantom Menace. Apparently Headland rather cheekily pitched The Acolyte as "Frozen meets Kill Bill." She drew on wuxia martial arts films for inspiration, much like George Lucas was originally inspired by Westerns and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. Per the official premise:

The first trailer dropped in March, in which we saw young padawans in training; Indara battling a mysterious masked figure; learned that somebody is out there killing Jedi; and were told that there is a growing sense of darkness. This latest trailer reinforces those themes. The assassin, Mae (Stenberg), once trained with Master Sol (Lee), and he thinks he should be the one to bring her in—although Master Vernestra correctly suspects Mae's killings are a small part a larger plan, i.e, the eventual return of the Sith.

Qimir doesn't seem to be a Jedi fan, claiming that their "peace is a lie." Meanwhile, Mae receives encouragement from Mother Aniseya and her coven of witches, who look like they are draining the life of a young Padawan at one point.  "Destiny is not decided for you by an anonymous force," Mother Aniseya tells Mae. "If you want to pull the thread and change everything, then pull it."

The first two episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte debut on Disney+ on June 4, 2024.

(credit: Disney+)

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Last summer's Hollywood strikes delayed a number of releases, among them the fourth season of Prime Video's The Boys. We're longtime fans of this incredibly violent, darkly funny anti-homage to superheroes, and thus are thrilled to see there's finally an official trailer for S4. It's filled with the bloody mayhem we've come to expect from the show, as well as a tantalizing glimpse of the chief villain, Homelander (Antony Starr), performing in what appears to be an ice skating extravaganza.

(Spoilers for prior seasons below, especially S3.)

As I've written previously, the show is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The Boys is set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but are corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. The most elite superhero group is called the Seven, operated by the Vought Corporation, which created the supes with a substance called Compound V. The Seven is headed up by Homelander, a violent and unstable psychopath disguised as the All-American hero. Homelander's counterpart as the head of the titular "Boys" is Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a self-appointed vigilante intent on checking the bad behavior of the Seven—especially Homelander, who brutally raped Butcher's wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten), unknowingly fathering a son, Ryan, in the process..

Having discovered he had a son, Homelander turned Ryan against Butcher in S2, which ended with a bloody showdown that saw the demise of Becca as well as the mutilation of Homelander's supe squeeze, Stormfront (Aya Cash), who turned out to be a Nazi disguised as a "patriot." (She committed suicide in S3.) Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott) and Starlight (Annie Moriarty) successfully blackmailed Homelander into loosening his bullying stranglehold on the Seven. Meanwhile, the government cleared the Boys of all wrongdoing after they were publicly smeared as terrorists. A disillusioned Hughie (Jack Quaid) decided to try to fight the Seven through politics rather than violence and went to work for Congressperson Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit)—but he didn't know she's actually a super-powered assassin with her own murderous agenda.

The third season introduced us to "Payback," the name of an earlier Vought group of superheroes, loosely based on Marvel's Avengers. Payback members include Eagle the Archer (Langston Kerman), who appeared in S2 of The Boys . He's the one who recruited the Deep (Chace Crawford) and A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) to the Church of the Collective before the cult turned against him. By S3 he'd quit the superhero gig and was trying to become a rapper. We also met Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden), and an entire episode was devoted to one of the comic's most shocking storylines: Herogasm, in which the Boys infiltrated Vought's annual superhero party, which turned out to be just one long weekend of kinky sex and drug use on a secluded island.

The third season ended with Homelander killing one of Starlight's supporters who attacked Ryan during a rally—and rather than being roundly condemned, the crowd cheered wildly, and Homelander realized just how few constraints there were on his psychopathic behavior. Soldier Boy (who turned out to be Homelander's biological father) ended up in government custody, Maeve was presumed dead but actually just lost her powers, and Annie/Starlight left the Seven to join forces with The Boys. As for Butcher, he had been juicing with V24, a version of Compound V that temporarily gave humans super powers—at a price. By season's end, Butcher realized he was dying.

That brings us to the fourth season. Per the official premise:

The world is on the brink. Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power. Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca’s son and his job as The Boys’ leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it’s too late.

The trailer opens with a presumably doomed Butcher doing some soul-searching about how he's lived his life. "All I see are the messes I've made," he says while we're shown the scene where Ryan leaves with a smirking Homelander. "And I ain't got time to fix it."  He figures he has a chance to do one thing right but he needs The Boys' help to succeed.

Meanwhile, Homelander is flaunting his power, insisting that the country "is corrupt beyond repair." His plans for the country's "salvation" naturally involve violence: doing terrible things "for the greater good." So the Seven must now stop being beloved celebrities and instead become "wrathful gods." Not everyone is on board with Homelander's strategy, notably A-Train and Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie), but there's not much they can do to stop the Supes from rounding up any recalcitrant humans and putting them in camps—or declaring "hunting season on Starlighters."

Humanity's only hope appears to rest in Butcher's discovery of a virus that can kill Supes, first introduced in the spinoff series, Gen V. But first they'll have to fight off violent superpowered chickens and livestock that have been injected with Compound V—and somehow avoid turning into the very evil they're trying to defeat.

The first three episodes of The Boys S4 premieres on June 13, 2024, on Prime Video, with subsequent episodes airing each week until the finale on July 18, 2024.

(credit: Prime Video)

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Enlarge / FX/Hulu's Shōgun is a stunning new adaptation of the bestselling 1975 novel by James Clavell. (credit: FX/Hulu)

FX/Hulu's new historical epic series, Shōgun, based on the bestselling 1975 novel by James Clavell, has met with both popular and critical acclaim since its February premiere, drawing over 9 million views across all platforms in the first six days alone. The storytelling, the characters, the stellar performances, the expert pacing all contribute to that success. But it's also a visually stunning achievement that brings 17th-century feudal Japan to vivid life, thanks to masterful special effects that have been woven in so seamlessly, it can be challenging to distinguish between the CGI and the real footage.

The novel is a fictionalized account of the key players and events in 17th-century feudal Japan that ultimately led to the naming of a new shōgun (central ruler), Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the advent of the Edo period. The climactic event was the October 21, 1600, Battle of Sekigahara, in which Tokugawa defeated a coalition of clans led by Ishida Mitsunari. Clavell's novel also includes a fictionalized version of an English navigator named William Adams, aka Miura Anjiin ("the pilot of Miura"), who was the first of his nation to reach Japan in 1600, eventually becoming a samurai and one of Tokugawa's key advisers.

Clavell's epic saga was a blockbuster success, selling over 6 million copies by 1980. The author changed the names of all the main characters, purportedly to "add narrative deniability," and despite some inevitable inaccuracies and authorial liberties, the novel is breathtaking in scope, chock-full of encyclopedic period details. In fact, Shōgun is often credited with introducing an entire generation of Western readers to Japanese history and culture. "In sheer quantity, Shōgun has probably conveyed more information about Japan to more people than all the combined writings of scholars, journalists, and novelists since the Pacific War," an editor named Henry Smith wrote in 1980.

It was also just a cracking good read and perfect fodder for the miniseries craze that hit broadcast TV in the late 1970s and early 1980s, driven by the runaway success of 1977's Roots. A nine-hour miniseries adaptation of Shōgun ran over five nights in September 1980, starring Richard Chamberlain as John Blackthorne and Toshiro Mifune as Lord Yoshii Toranaga, the fictional characters based on Adams and Tokugawa, respectively. It, too, was a massive success, driving even more sales of Clavell's novel, although the reception in Japan was far more negative.

Hiroyuki Sanada stars as Lord Yoshii Toranaga, a character based on the historical figure Tokugawa Ieyasu. (credit: FX/Hulu)

Fast-forward to 2018, when FX announced that it had made a straight-to-series order for a new adaptation of the novel, created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo. This time around, Cosmo Jarvis (Peaky Blinders, Raised by Wolves) stars as Blackthorne, while Hiroyuki Sanada (The Last Samurai, John Wick: Chapter 4) plays Toranaga. It's been described as "a Game of Thrones set in 17th century Japan," although calling it a 17th century Japanese Godfather also captures the essence of the new series.

This new incarnation of Shōgun opens in 1600. Japan's Taikō died the year before, leaving five regents equally responsible for protecting his heir until the child comes of age. Toranaga is one such regent, but his rival, Lord Ishido (Takehiro Hira), conspires with the other three to have Toranaga impeached, with the ultimate goal of double-crossing his co-conspirators, killing the child, and ruling himself. Meanwhile, Blackthorne's ship, Erasmus, wrecks on the shore of the coastal village Ajiiro, where Portuguese Catholic priests try to turn the local samurai against the Protestant survivors.

Blackthorne finds himself embroiled in this hotbed of political intrigue when Toranaga takes a shine to him, envisioning a key role for the English pilot in Toranaga's own secret machinations. There is a scheming local lord, Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) trying to play both sides; a charming Spanish sailor named Vasco Rodrigues (Nestor Carbonell, Lost) who befriends Blackthorne; and the alluring translator, Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), who finds herself torn between her loyalty to Toranaga and her Catholic faith—not to mention a growing attraction to the foreign Anjin.

The responsibility for putting together all those seamless special effects fell to VFX supervisor Michael Cliett, whose extensive credits include Falling Skies, iZombie, Arrow, The 100, and Serenity. Cliett and his team spent a grueling three years agonizing over every historical detail. "It was all worth it, all the blood, sweat, and tears," Cliett told Ars. "I'm so proud of the show and I'm so grateful at the reception that it's gotten, the recognition of our hard work. I'm grateful to have been part of it."

Ars caught up with Cliett to learn more.

(WARNING: Some spoilers below.)

John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) is based on 17th-century English navigator William Adams. (credit: FX/Hulu)

Ars Technica: Hiroyuki Sanada is both a lead actor and producer on Shōgun and has stressed how important it was to him for the series to be authentic to Japanese history. How did that impact the VFX?  

Michael Cliett: Everything had to be accurate from a historical standpoint. The buildings and the environments we built had to be accurate, down to the tile work, the patterns, down to the last detail. It was a tremendous collaboration effort between us and numerous Japanese historians and advisers that we brought over.

That carried into even the crowds and the armies—the digital people that we built and the animation cycles we had to do for the armies. In Episode Five, Toranaga comes to the beach with 100,000 soldiers; we had 100 real people there. The army, the townspeople for the set extensions through the cities and the towns, they walked differently than the peasants in Ajiro, the little village. We did motion capture shoots with Japanese people and experts in the gestures of it all. We really strove to present an authentic version of the feudal Sengoku era in Japan. And I think we achieved that. I hope that our audience is fully immersed in that world.

Ars Technica:  What was your guiding philosophy behind the VFX? 

Michael Cliett: We wanted the visual effects to be as invisible and as seamless as possible, all in service of the story and in an effort to fully immerse our audience into 1600 feudal Japan. For me, there's no greater compliment when you're able to watch a show and you know that there must have been visual effects, but you're immersed in the story, and you're not thinking about whether they are bad or good special effects. You shouldn't be thinking about the fact that those are visual effects.

Anna Sawai plays Toda Mariko, torn between her loyalty to Toranaga and her Catholic faith. (credit: FX/Hulu)

When we did the earthquake sequence in Episode Five, for instance, we had our immediate practical location right there. Everything around that immediate practical location became a full 3D environment, and I don't think you can tell. In Episode Four when they're doing the cannon training, we filmed that out in a place with no mountains. It's supposed to be in a field near Ajiro, surrounded by a mountainous region, because that's the same field that Toranaga is going to put his army and build their encampment. It's the same field that the landslides happen in Episode Five, when there is an earthquake; all the mountains collapse and bury the army. So any of those mountains you see in Episode Four, around that training field, those were added by visual effects.

When we did the storm sequence in Episode One, with the ship going from shot to shot, we had to make sure that the boat's orientation matched where it was going from the CG shot to the practical shot on deck. The ocean, the waves, that had to match from cut to cut. So great care was taken to make sure that everything was as invisible and as seamless as possible.

Ars Technica: This was a brutal period, and the series doesn't shy away from occasionally depicting violence, whether it's beheadings, seppuku, or one memorable scene in the pilot in which a sailor is quite literally boiled alive. How did you handle those elements?

Michael Cliett: Visual effects had a big hand in all of that, even the one shot of the poor guy getting boiled in the pot. That was the full digital head, even the hair. There was an actor there, but we replaced the actor with a digital double, completely CG. It gets hard to a degree if you're emotionally attached to what's happening. You have to detach from it a little bit and focus more on the technical aspects and think about that rather than the horror of what's actually happening in the moment. Later you can sit back and be like, "Oh, wow."

We'll spare you a closer look at that poor sailor being boiled alive. (credit: FX/Hulu)

Case in point, the beheading in Episode One. That's a perfect example of what I mean by having the VFX be in service of the story. That was a really important shot for us, because that moment was meant to show the audience that Blackthorne might as well be on an alien planet—a shocking moment to show how much of a fish out of water he is. What is this world he has stepped into? I remember going down to LA in early February and sitting in the Academy Theater with 1,000 other people watching the premiere. That moment happened and there was a collective gasp. I was, like, "Yes!"

But when we were working on it, we were thinking about, okay, the average weight of a human head is 10 pounds. Once it's separated from the body, that inertia will carry it so far. Once the blade hits, it's going to spin fast and then gravity is going to take over. We probably went through 100 iterations of that animation of the head coming off before we said, "Okay, that looks real. That's right."

The original shot was just the actor standing there. When we cued him, he slumped down and dropped to his knees out of frame. We did a digital scan of his head, and then we made a CG version of it. The moment the CG blade comes through and separates his head, in one frame and the next, it's swapped with the CG head that starts spinning. The blood is added, and then we have that head drop out of frame with a headless digital prosthetic body. The physics are always important, just like with the chain cannon shots going through Jozen and his men at the end of Episode Four. We ran multiple physics simulations on all of that to see what would really happen, in order to get that right before we even started the actual shots.

Blackthorne trains Toranaga's men in the art of the English cannon. (credit: FX/Hulu)

Ars Technica: What were the biggest challenges for the VFX team? 

Michael Cliett: Ensuring the authenticity factor throughout the process was easily the most challenging thing. Everything we did, there had to be a story behind it as far as why. We couldn't just do something because it looked cool. That scene in Episode Seven with Saeki bringing his ships in to surround Ajiro, to block all the exits off—we did a tremendous amount of research around those ships. Those were actually the ships used by General Ishida, the real Ishida, not our [fictional] Ishido. He invaded Korea with those boats in 1597, three years before our story takes place. So that's where we got all those designs.

In Episode Three, for the ship race out of Osaka, we didn't really have that story figured out when we shot it. We still shot a bunch of things, and I had a good idea myself of what we needed to do as far as specific shots. But it wasn't until we really got into the post end that everything came together. I went down to LA for three months trying to lock down that edit, and I think it worked pretty well in the end. But that was the biggest specific challenge.

Ars Technica: The special effects here are so much better than what was available for the 1980 adaptation of Clavell's novel. How has the attitude toward VFX changed in the era of streaming television? 

Michael Cliett: Certainly, the access to the technology has changed. You used to need computers half the size of a house to run some of the software that we have, and now, anybody's personal computer can do it. And I think there's more money in some of these TV shows now than there was prior. There's been a big investment into streaming, and they've recognized that the budgets need to be bigger for the visual effects as well. It's always been a very labor-intensive process. You don't just press some buttons. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of people to get it right. It doesn't just happen; it's an art. Studios have come to understand that better. The technology's always evolving and getting better. And I think in the future, we'll be able to do more with less.

Historical accuracy was a top priority for everyone, from the writers and set designers to the VFX team. (credit: FX/Hulu)

Ars Technica: Do you envision AI being used in VFX in the future?

Michael Cliett: I think there's a small conglomerate that hopes AI can replace a lot of jobs. I think it'll enable studios to do more and to take on more work. There's going to be a bit of a consolidation of visual effects houses, which I think is going to be good for the business. There's a lot of visual effects houses competing for a lot of work and undercutting each other. It's like a race to the bottom. So AI is going to force some level of consolidation across the board. We'll have to wait around and see what happens.

I don't think AI is going to replace the need for artists. If people start producing things strictly using AI, eventually society will be turned off by that. People are going to want to see human-created art and entertainment, with AI-assisted, because AI is just echoing humans anyway. For me, when these AI images first started coming out, I was like, "Whoa, those look really good. That's cool." When I look into it now, the shine's wearing thin. Yeah, it might look good, but I would much rather go to a museum and stare at a Van Gogh for three hours. There's so much more meaning behind that, and there's nothing behind that AI image.

I hope we, as a society, demand that things continue to be created by humans. There's so much more value and interest in that. For me, I always want to know how things were created. What was in the writer's head, what was in the cinematographer's head? And I'm not the only one. There are a lot of people interested in the behind-the-scenes process. If it's just AI, there's not going to be any of that, and it's just going to be hollow and empty. So I think AI will be a tool that will enable us to get better and faster and more productive and more streamlined, but it will never replace people.

All episodes of Shōgun are now streaming on Hulu.

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