Glass Onion
directed by Rian Johnson
written by Rian Johnson
2022
Glass Onion opens in the midst of early 2020 pandemic doldrums, and almost immediately travels to an isolated dreamland on an island of the ultra-rich. The transition is a little rocky, but I applaud anyone willing to acknowledge the existence of the Covid pandemic in fiction. It seems most writers prefer to pretend that it never happened.
The first half of Glass Onion is just okay, but the real fun begins in the second half, when Janelle Monae emerges as a force of nature in flashbacks that recontextualize everything we've seen so far. There's something amusingly meta-textual about an actual murder happening at one of those murder mystery dinner parties, although that premise doesn't mesh very neatly with all the characters being easy-to-hate right-wing celebrity grifters.
The solution to the mystery is an enjoyable expansion on the old Purloined Letter idea of truth hiding in plain sight, and the conclusion to the film is a satisfying explosion of unleashed resentments, plus one of the best Chekov's Gun payoffs I've ever seen. If the actual Mona Lisa, on loan from the Louvre, is introduced in the first act...
Overall though, I liked Knives Out better. I thought the way it played with time and the tropes of cozy mystery were more interesting. And I found the conceit - that all the characters in this one had been friends since the old days when only one of them was rich, and none were yet famous - implausible based on what I think I know about celebrity friendships.
The fact that this is a sequel also robs it of some of its dramatic tension. Knives Out is structured as much like a monster movie as it is like a mystery, and Benoit Blanc is the monster stalking poor Marta. Most of the suspense and a lot of the humor in that film comes from the open question of what kind of detective Blanc really is. Is he actually good at solving mysteries, or is he a bumbling incompetent? Is he a letter-of-the-law sort of man, or does he work toward some larger vision of justice? But the nature of a sequel is that those questions are already resolved before Glass Onion even starts. It's entertaining to watch Blanc do what he does, but half the fun of the original was wondering what does he do?
I'll also applaud Rian Johnson for anticipating the real Elon Musk's declining public reputation. Iron Man 2 and Star Trek: Discovery both reference Musk positively, even fawningly. Rian Johnson bet (correctly) that he's no longer as beloved as he once was, and fortunately for Johnson, the actual Musk has spent the last few months before the premier proving correct the film's thesis about what kind of man 'Miles Bron' is, and making his character even more unsympathetic and enjoyable to watch suffer.
Originally watched December 2022.