THE MORNING LIST
Fortunately, Miss Marvel is there to brighten the mood. The new superheroine’s impulsive debut faces an accumulation of tragedy this week, in space, with the new season of AppleTV’s remarkable alternate history, at the Tudor court after the death of Henry VIII, and in the imaginary Birmingham of Steven Knight, where the apocalyptic trajectory of Tommy Shelby comes to an end.
“For All Mankind”: After the Moon, to Mars
Since its launch in 2019, at the same time as the Apple TV platform, which produces it, For All Mankind has given itself the mission of inventing an alternative history of the United States through the prism of space conquest. She does this on the basis of a crazy and brilliant premise: how would the Americans have reacted if the Russians had first set foot on the Moon? The creator of Battlestar Gallactica, Ronald D. Moore, draws from it a romantic and deeply political alternate history, spread over several decades and mirroring the opposing forces that crossed America in the second half of the 20th century.
The third season thus begins at the time of the 1992 presidential election, when the United States must choose between Bill Clinton and former astronaut Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour), a moderate Republican struggling with the most extreme fringe of the party. . The Moon conquered, the American and Soviet space agencies have their eyes riveted on Mars, whose underground resources arouse the greed of governments but also of private actors, who enter the race. It is therefore aboard a ship powered by the start-up Helios that the old space backpacker Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), dismissed from NASA, embarks for the Red Planet. Debates around inclusiveness, political polarization, the rise of conspiracy: those 1990s obviously speak to us of the present, and For All Mankind continues in this impeccable third season to bring the questions that concern us today to the past. Audrey Fournier
‘Becoming Elizabeth’: The Hard Walk to the Throne of Elizabeth Tudor
If we only know English history through the series, we are entitled to believe that the kingdom was only ruled by two dynasties, the Tudors and the Windsors. Becoming Elizabeth, which is added to the canon of the first of these lines (The Tudors, Anne Boleyn, In the shadow of the Tudors), invites us to follow the perilous journey that led the youngest daughter of Henry VIII to the throne. If we have practiced the series mentioned above, we will already have an idea of the narrative arc: daughter of the “whore” (Ann Boleyn), wedged between her older sister, Marie, who has the support of the Saint Empire, and a brother, Edward VI, who acceded to the throne, at the age of nine, on the death of his father, she must make her way between the inflexible Catholicism of the first and the reforming zeal of the second, between the erotic and dynastic appetites of courtiers and the grudges of her rivals.
The designer Anya Reiss elegantly highlights the architecture of the religious, political and moral labyrinth in which the teenager must orient herself. For Elizabeth (Alicia von Rittberg), the throne is less an object of desire than a refuge, the only one that can guarantee her life. According to the rules enacted under previous monarchs, from Richard II to Henry VIII, losers in the race for power had to give up not only their status but also their head. We may know that the young girl at the center of this drama will spend the rest of her life with a crown on her head and a scepter in her hand. very fluid staging. Thomas Sotinel
“Miss Marvel”: How do you say “superpower” in Urdu?
We have to wait until the end of the first episode of Miss Marvel (the only one we have seen) to discover a superhero using her powers. The rest, a good 40 minutes, consists of a comic chronicle of the daily life of a teenager from New Jersey, obsessed with Marvel comics, to the chagrin of her parents from Pakistan.
There is nothing realistic in this portrait, produced with a surprisingly light and tender touch by the duo Adil and Bilall (the Belgian directors of Black and Gangsta), rather the pleasure of injecting into the Marvel universe a culture and a story that has been missing until now. The dialogues switch from English to Urdu, the preoccupations of the protagonist (Iman Vellani, a newcomer of astonishing ease) oscillate between her participation in a cosplay and her school results. The next five episodes will tell if this step aside opens a new path for the Marvel series or if it is just that – a step aside – before joining the big battalions of superheroes. T.S.
“Peaky Blinders”, season 6: Tommy Shelby, towards redemption
This is the last time that Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and his cohort of gangsters in cloth caps will terrorize Birmingham and the surrounding area. After the death of actress Helen McCrory, who played Aunt Polly, conscience and sibyl of the Peaky Blinders gang, series creator Steven Knight decided to cut it short by one season, while promising a coda in feature film form.
In the meantime, we must be satisfied with this conclusion, located between 1934 and 1936. Thomas Shelby must settle his dispute with his cousin Michael (Finn Cole) who has teamed up with a Boston bootlegger of Irish origin, fictitious double of Joseph Kennedy, and hold off Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader. Steven Knight uses his favorite device – the screenplay coup – to give a semblance of coherence to the two sides of his tragedy: the Shakespearean, with its dynastic stakes and its Oedipal resentments, and the political in which redemption passes through the antifascism. The brilliance of the actors, the reassuring familiarity of the sets and situations (even if these are often bloody), give the illusion that he has succeeded. T.S.
