The Hyperions

FYI, a quick note: I watched this film and wrote this review before I found out the movie was bought, after completion, by the white supremacist scumbags at the Daily Wire for distribution. The movie doesn’t seem to have any particularly-overt political slant, it doesn’t feed into the noxious Daily Wire orthodoxy, and this appears to have been a strictly commercial transaction. I am aware that by discussing this film, I am giving attention and bandwidth to a property owned by the Daily Wire. My dislike of those jackbooted scumsuckers is outweighed by my love for movies, but I thought it was relevant to let you know this information. “The Hyperions” is streaming on a number of services not related to the Daily Wire, so if you’re so inclined, they will have to find a way to monetize your attention through a third party.

One of the more well-known superhero tropes says a lot about how we’ve changed as a society. There used to be so many comics– and cartoons – based around younger characters recruited by a kindly older mentor who can be trusted to provide the moral lessons a child wouldn’t normally absorb at a young age. As decades passed, the attitudes towards leaving kids with wealthy male guardians who are not their parents have… shifted, let’s say. This is built into a large cultural emphasis on psychoanalysis as well as a growing distrust of authority, to the point where when we see this trope, the audience can’t help but react with a jaundiced eye.

“The Hyperions” smartly recognizes this trope as based in cultural mores, which is why the story begins in the early sixties and then shifts to the cusp of the eighties. Comic book fans understand the difference between these eras, as the sixties brought us, among other groups, Professor Xavier and the X-Men. He was a bald white man with questionable wealth who ran a private school, and the children of this school used their abilities to go into war against the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under the Professor’s tutelage. The tenor of this relationship was altered by the time the eighties rolled around, particularly as new X-Men were added to temper the brief tragedy of the original group dying on a mission earlier in the seventies. Now, of course, the current comics continuity recognizes how Xavier was a complicated man who made sometimes selfish decisions that jeopardized his students. And yes, where did he get all that money?

Enter Professor Ruckus Mandulbaum, a name so nice I‘ll say it twice, Professor Ruckus Mandelbaum. He’s a dapper older gentleman of a certain largesse. Like Xavier teaching students how to use their gifts in a show of benevolence, so too has Mandulbaum opted to give exclusive abilities to a handful of children. They are supposedly children of a different social class, so this is depicted as self-conscious altruism. It’s also the beginning of Mandulbaum building his own superhero team, the Hyperions, to battle the forces of evil in increasingly violent circumstances.

Of course, the kids have lost their relevance – in the comics, flagging sales meant those initial X-Men had to be swapped out by the likes of Wolverine, Storm and Colossus, an increasingly powerful and dangerous troupe. In “The Hyperions”, they simply age out. So even if, beyond the realm of consent, these PTSD-riddled kids wanted to stay on, they were nonetheless dubbed irrelevant to the current circumstances. The Titan Badges Mandulbaum created for the original Hyperions to enhance their powers are, naturally, now confined to a museum.

This feeling of irrelevance now defies the adult-age Hyperions, who have squandered away their potential. Not only has the world left them penniless and anonymous, but it has made them nostalgic for a time when they operated as weapons for Mandulbaum to fire. Their only hope is to steal those same Titan Badges and reclaim their abilities. The bulk of “The Hyperions”, a decades-spanning superhero saga, takes place in that museum, where the older Hyperions bicker and protest with each other in regards to how they’re going to commit a crime when they know nothing about a crime. It’s a testament to how this movie glides by with a minimal budget despite fairly expensive-sounding storytelling.

Mandulbaum sounds like a combination of a few comic characters like Professor X, but there’s also an unmistakable air of Reed Richards to him. Cary Elwes plays Ruckus with his usual debonair loquaciousness. Elwes is a veteran actor, of course, but for years I thought his British accent was a put-on, a parody of old-world wisdom – I was stunned to find out it was real. He has that pipe-smoking paternalism that was often given to the Dad-coded Mr. Fantastic, as many issues of “Fantastic Four” featured three characters bickering while a partially-gray Richards would be in the lab, mixing equations and doing “Dad Work”, explaining science to the others in as patronizing a way as possible. Elwes plays it exactly right, with the proper amount of believable warmth and just a smidgen of acid.

The movie doesn’t commit very hard to the late-seventies Mandulbaum, who is forced to acknowledge the damage he’s caused to his charges with clear-eyed sentimentality. Elwes finds the proper balance, though the movie could have gone farther in making the case against the guy who is also the movie’s most interesting character. Because you’ve been made aware of the budget constantly – no one is hiding this is a small movie – it’s clear the climax is not a big action clash as much as it’s an emotional catharsis and Elwes plays each note perfectly without the film descending into the usual pop-psychology cynicism that comes with this sort of genre deconstructions – particularly not the kind in comics, when Cyclops ended up burning Xavier’s face off with his optic blasts after decades of manipulation. Not my canon, dammit!

Jon McDonald wrote and directed this neat movie. What’s interesting is that he’s devoted to this sixties superhero aesthetic – fans of Matt Shakman’s “Fantastic Four: First Steps” should definitely find time for this. But McDonald’s style is very much reminiscent of Wes Anderson, in that several shots have that immaculately-ordered mise en scene. McDonald is a fan of the infamous Anderson two-shot where characters face each other theatrically on opposite sides of the symmetrical frame as they argue. He’s also not shy about bright colors and ornate homemade doohickeys, trademarks of sixties films but also overly fetishized by Anderson’s own style. With its emphasis on adult children forced into arrested development by a harmful father figure, one can’t help but be reminded of “The Royal Tenenbaums” in the movie’s sweet, intentionally-clumsy attempt from grown-up characters to reckon with the normalized abuse of an earlier era. I don’t want to speak on your behalf, reader. But the idea of a superhero film in the vein of “The Royal Tenenbaums” is something I think I’ve always wanted, and it’s really nice that I got to have it.

A “separation” is a common element of imprisonment. It’s usually the case that you have a “separation” against another inmate, either because you have a known criminal association with one, or it’s someone with whom you have previously-established conflict. Sometimes, a “separation” can get you sent away to another institution, and sometimes even a different district, far away from your home and family. When I was hospitalized after a prison fight, I was told I was being sent to another institution because I had a separation against me. They never identified who I was being separated from, as I never told them I was in a fight with anyone. I do remember they showed me photos of two men when they interrogated me, one of which was involved with the violence, and one that was not. Maybe that was it.

In the short-term, however, they have to separate inmates using solitary confinement. If you get into any altercation, you go to the SHU, and in the files it’s an immediate separation. Such a policy reminds you that separations, and solitary, are less about your safety and more about isolating the institutions from liability. Which is why you have circumstances like this, where such separations have led to an over-reliance on solitary, enough that it has invited lawsuits. I would tell guys all the time, the staff is looking for you to start fighting each other, the staff wants an excuse to separate you from the yard, separate you from your people. Takes only one punch to send you to solitary. As the article mentions, the prisons know what solitary does to men. And they’ll always use it as a first and last resort, and justify it later with flimsy excuses like the “need” for separations.