By Robert Scucci
| Published 27 seconds ago

When I was younger and still looking to make reckless decisions, there was a friend in my group who we referred to as the Hurricane. The reason we called him that was because when he had a few too many drinks, he’d start destroying things for fun. He was the kind of person who would bodyslam himself through a beer pong table or run full speed into a display at the convenience store while we were looking for a quick, late-night snack. We stopped hanging out with him because the collateral damage left in his wake was a blast radius we no longer felt like cleaning up.

Watching 2016’s Colossal brought back memories of those days because its protagonist is similarly destructive while drinking, though in ways that don’t mirror real life. Here, our hero Gloria (Anne Hathaway) finds her body controlling a Godzilla-like creature located in Seoul, South Korea whenever she gets wasted in her hometown of Mainhead, New Hampshire.

Splitting its narrative between both locations, Colossal tells a story about a woman coming to terms with her self-destructive behavior because she has to. Her actions have very real consequences on the other side of the world. Whenever she gets lost in the sauce, a single step in the wrong direction could destroy buildings and kill hundreds of people.

Unemployed Writer Turned Godzilla

When Colossal introduces us to Gloria, she’s an absolute wreck. An unemployed writer who’s hitting the bottle a little too hard, Gloria is kicked out of her New York City apartment by her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens), who’s had enough of her late-night blackouts and violent hangovers. With no job prospects or anywhere to live, Gloria moves back to her now-empty family home in Mainhead, New Hampshire to get her head on straight and figure out her next steps. There, she meets up with Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a childhood friend she hadn’t talked to in years.

Taking Oscar up on his offer to help out at the bar his late father left him, Gloria finally has work, but more often than not spends her time on the clock getting drunk with Oscar and his other employees, Joel (Austin Stowell) and Garth (Tim Blake Nelson). Closing up shop and stumbling home around the same time the school day starts for the neighborhood children, Gloria cuts through the local playground at 8:05 am, thinking nothing of it until she watches the news later that day.

When Gloria learns about the giant, Godzilla-like creature attacking Seoul, South Korea, she’s at first panicked by the global implications. Those worries shift when she notices the correlation between her presence on the playground and the monster’s appearance. Though it makes no logical sense, Gloria surmises that her body is remotely controlling the monster, and she has the power to destroy entire city blocks just by waving her arms around. This remote relationship with the creature is confirmed when the monster is attacked by the military, as Gloria also feels pain when helicopters and rockets crash into it.

After explaining this phenomenon to her friends, Oscar learns that the same thing happens to him when he enters the playground at the same time. In Oscar’s case, however, he turns into a giant robot. Gloria is horrified by the amount of damage she is capable of causing and vows to quit drinking so nobody else gets hurt. Oscar, on the other hand, gets a sick thrill out of the power that he possesses and turns it into a deadly game whenever he lets the booze take control.

An Anthropromorphized Allegory

While it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s happening in Colossal, it’s still a clever way to look at how Gloria’s self-destructive behavior affects more than just herself. Every time she steps onto the playground, hundreds of people are displaced or killed by the monster she controls. Just like for any person in your life who may not be able to control themselves when they party a little too hard, there are unintended, potentially wide-reaching consequences tied directly to their actions that could be avoided entirely if they just stopped doing what they’re doing.

In Gloria’s case, her drinking compromises her relationship with Tim, and her subsequent spiral causes a catastrophic amount of damage far away from where she’s located physically. While all she has to do is sleep off a hangover after stumbling home, other people have to deal with her mess, which rings true for anybody who’s ever been friends with this kind of person.

What separates Oscar from Gloria is that he’s totally fine with the way things are shaking out. Gloria feels remorse and vows to improve her situation by attempting to go sober. Oscar, on the other hand, likes the power he wields over the citizens of Seoul and loves to watch the world burn because he wants everybody to be as miserable as he is. These two personalities, constantly at odds with each other, make for a compelling drama on their own. Colossal takes this tension and turns it into a literal battle between a giant reptile and a robot, using Seoul as their battleground while the whole world watches on TV.

Colossal starts off feeling like two different movies, and in many ways it is. If you remove the monsters, you get a dramedy about a woman moving back to her hometown to face her personal demons. If you remove Gloria, you get a lizard fighting a robot with zero context.

Together, they make for an interesting allegory about substance abuse and facing yourself after your bad habits destroy your life. To experience both of these stories converging in a single place, all you need to do is stream Colossal on Netflix.

SAVE 20%: As of Feb. 18, you can get the 11-inch Apple iPad Pro (M5) for $799.99 at Amazon, down from $999. That’s $199.01 in savings. It’s also the best price we’ve seen on this model.

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Presidents’ Day is technically over, but Amazon still has a few good deals lingering on the site.

Right now, the 11-inch Apple iPad Pro (M5) is down to $799.99. That’s a $199 price cut from the usual $999 sticker — a solid 20% off. It’s also the lowest we’ve seen this model go for, which is pretty cool considering it just launched back in October.

We called this tablet a “victory lap” for Apple in our review, and honestly, I get it. It’s impossibly thin (somehow thinner than the new iPhone Air, which we dubbed the “sexiest phone ever made”) and features a “drool-worthy” Ultra Retina XDR OLED display. Plus, that M5 chip makes it faster than 92% of the laptops we’ve tested.

At $799.99, it’s still a splurge, but if you want the absolute best tablet Apple makes, this is the time to grab it.

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 22 seconds ago

Stargate SG-1 is back on Netflix, and there’s never been a better time to binge one of the best sci-fi series of all time. It’s always a good time to experience the adventures of Stargate Command (SGC), which has aged like a fine wine since the series first debuted in 1997.

Compared to Star Wars and Star Trek, the series lacked decades of lore and had to build a fanbase while also crafting its own sci-fi universe. It quickly proved itself with a colorful cast of characters, embracing the light-hearted adventure side of sci-fi, and slowly unfolding a wide universe so rich with mystery and excitement that three series and three decades later, it feels like there’s more to explore. 

The SGC Team Is Among Sci-Fi’s Best

When Roland Emmerich’s Stargate film hit theaters in 1994, no one could have imagined it would lay the foundation for a 30-year sci-fi franchise, and no one could have guessed that Richard Dean Anderson would eclipse his fame as MacGyver, playing Colonel Jack O’Neill, the SGC field leader. The mega-sized pilot episode “Children of the Gods” was a Showtime original movie, and no one cared who Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping, or Christopher Judge were at the time; it was MacGyver in Space that drew in those first 4 million viewers. Only a few episodes later, fans realized that Stargate SG-1 was going to be an ensemble series, and every single member of the team had something to add. 

Michael Shanks takes over the role of Dr. Daniel Jackson, played by James Spader in the movie, and he knocks it out of the park, going from the new guy, woefully unprepared for being part of a military unit, to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Amanda Tapping’s Samantha Carter is both an astrophysicist and an accomplished pilot. As Stargate SG-1 goes on, she gets to demonstrate both sides of her diverse skillset and hasn’t met a piece of technology or scientific theory she can’t babble about, but if she’s not your favorite character during Season 1, don’t worry, she will be later. 

Rounding out the main team is Christopher Judge, now the voice of Kratos in Sony’s God of War, as Teal’c, the alien member of the team, he’s a Jaffa, a host of a Goa’uld parasite, on a mission to save his people. It’s disingenuous to say he’s the “Worf” of SGC, but that’s how he starts. As with the rest of the cast, it’s not where he ends up. Everyone gets to grow and develop over the course of 10 seasons, where the only constant is the Stargate itself, bringing them to new worlds, new adventures, and new cultures. 

Stargate Remembers Sci-Fi Is Fun

A large part of Stargate SG-1’s initial charm is that after the movie-level pilot, the budget was cut to the point that every alien world looks a lot like Vancouver. A few episodes in, and you won’t care about the production budget because the aliens of the Stargate universe are allowed to be truly alien, and the adventure of the week usually results in another piece of the larger cosmic puzzle coming into focus.

For example, the Asgardians, who, as the name implies, were the Norse gods, as the Goa’uld were the Egyptians, also bear a striking resemblance to the alien “Greys.” There’s a lot of “Forehead aliens” to be found, but Stargate isn’t afraid to get weird. 

Throughout it all, even as the war against the Goa’uld heats up and the robotic Replicators arrive to torment SGC, Stargate SG-1 doesn’t lose its sense of humor. Different episodes include Teal’c knocking out a man with an avocado, O’Neil playing golf through a Stargate, and Carter getting way into space racing, and that’s not including the side characters you’ll love to hate. Star Trek Voyager’s Robert Picardo brings to life Richard Woolsey, the bureaucrat from hell, and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Ronny Cox (he played Captain Jellico in “Chain of Command”) is Senator Kinsey, the man you’ll hate more than a guy named Baal. 

Stargate SG-1 has never received the respect it deserves, despite kicking off a franchise still going today with a new entry on the way, thanks to Amazon. Even without the two sequel series or the DVD movies, the series is one of the best sci-fi shows on Netflix. If you’ve been longing for the days of fun sci-fi with a colorful cast of characters allowed to grow and change over time as they explore a universe filled with possibilities, it’s a must-watch.