Topical Streaming Entertainments: the interesting case of Rian Johnson's GLASS ONION (2022, wri/dir by Rian Johnson, Netflix, USA, 2hrs 19mns)

NOTE: Beware. A hella ton of spoilers.

When you google Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery , Rian Johnson’s wonderful and entertaining follow up to his 2019 whodunit Knives Out one factoid jumps out:

The movie’s budget was $40million. Its reported box office $15 million. And yet Netflix has greenlit a third in the series: Wake Up Dead Man due in 2025.

The mystery here is not so mysterious. Netflix gave Glass Onion a limited theatrical release then saved most of its marketing mojo for the movie’s debut on its streaming platform. One imagines most of the revenues came from subscriptions generated partially by the movie. Also multi-picture deals like filmmaker Rian Johnson and his team got must help attract other high quality talent to Netflix. And while Netflix now appears to be in a re-calibration phase (no longer giving out hundreds of millions of dollars and final cut to auteur moviemakers), this period certainly brought a lot of moviemakers into the streaming fold.

And who can blame them? When studios are double downing in more and more dispiriting ways on expanded universes, IP properties, sequels, prequels, requels, where’s a poor moviemaker to go but to the streamers? Scorsese has made his last two movies under streamer banners. David Fincher has been with the streamers since MindHunters and Mank. Alfonso Cuaron got Roma made via Netflix and so on.

Glass Onion itself is another supreme confection of an entertainment just like its older sibling Knives Out. Both are whodunits in the Agatha Christie style with some topical subtext on race, class, politics, culture and a new super sleuth in Daniel Craig’s southern gentleman super detective Benoit Blanc.

Just as with other movies that blossom into series, one can see a recipe at work when watching the two movies. A good recipe with variations is worth its weight in gold. In Knives Out, Blanc solved a mystery where a spoiled money grubbing (and white) family tried to cheat a working class Latina nurse (Ana de Armas) out of an inheritance she received from her mystery novelist patient (Christopher Plummer in what turned out to be one of his final roles). The movie was labyrinthine in its cleverness but fairly straightforward in its message: the oppressed and marginalized deserve their due against the entitled, rich, and spoiled. And Benoit Blanc, in his detective way, is a kind of spiritual assistant to that end.

The Haves. The framing of this shot should leave little doubt on where director Rian Johnson’s sympathies lie.

While the style and story of Glass Onion are, on the surface, different, this essential recipe holds. Here, we get a group of influencers/disruptors/friends who all get invited, at the height of the Covid pandemic, to their billionaire leader friend Miles Bron’s private Greek island for a murder mystery weekend. But when Miles’ screwed over partner, Andi Brand (Janelle Monae), and detective Benoit Blanc, also show up, something is clearly amiss.

Here instead of a rich, spoiled, entitled, patronizing white family, we get a group of rich, spoiled, entitled social media influencer types who are controlled, because of their need for money and funding, by Edward Norton’s Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos/Mark Zuckerberg plus Coen Brothers’ idiot tech billionaire Miles Bron. The plotting isn’t quite as baroque as Knives Out. In fact, the central mystery can be figured out fairly early into the movie. BUT. . .Rian Johnson does a different trick in this movie (which cinematically is rich, fun, enjoyable) where we essentially get to see many of the same scenes twice with added information.

Glass Onion also has incredible production design (courtesy of Rick Heinrichs and an amazing CGI team) in the form of Miles’ temple to himself filled with glass, crystal, paintings, pools, ocean vistas, etc.

The amazing production design by Rick Heinrichs prepares us for the third act in obvious and subtle ways.

Moviemaker Johnson deserves tremendous credit, ever since his striking 2005 high school as noir debut Brick , for forging a body of work equally committed to classic Hollywood entertainment AND meaning. This writer is actually a very big fan of Johnson’s Star Wars directed entry The Last Jedi that had the good sense to try to return the entire space opera to its roots where anyone could be a jedi. The first Star Wars was an American democratic hope play about how even a farm boy on a distant planet could help save the universe. But by Return of the Jedi , Star Wars became more about royal bloodlines and clunky political metaphors.

Somehow Johnson trying to reintroduce free will and democracy into the series drove too many people crazy. And the next movie, The Rise of Skywalker, returned to the royal bloodline narrative.

With the Knives Out series, Johnson has forged his very own James Bond, Indiana Jones, Mad Max series where he can make future movies with tremendous creative control. Everyone always seems like they’re having a blast in these movies. And Johnson does some very funny work weaving in his ensemble regular Noah Segan into the proceedings here as Derol, a guy totally outside the story who just happens to be staying at Miles’ island because “he’s got some issues and needs some time”.

The star studded ensemble which includes Ed Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Madelyn Cline , Kate Hudson, Dave Batista among others are now as much a part of the recipe as the mystery itself.

The movie really does boil down to a key relationship between Craig’s Blanc and Monae’s Brand and the reveal behind this forged relationship yields the movie’s greatest cinematic enjoyment.

The great innovation/difference of Glass Onion from its equally enjoyable predecessor Knives Out lies in the relationship between Craig’s detective Blanc and Janelle Monae’s mysterious screwed over entrepreneur Andi Brand,. Rian Johnson uses this relationship for a formal technique that provides much of the movie’s enjoyment.

And, to Johnson’s credit, even though the Knives Out series moved from movie studo Lionsgate to streamer Netflix and will presumably remain at Netflix for the time being, he has made both movies so far cinematic treats that feel like real movies with his regular collaborator, DP Steve Yedlin.

The question at the heart of this article for this writer is an open-ended one. Johnson has worked to be both topical and entertaining in both movies. And he is. But ultimately the scales tip towards entertaining. One of the points of Glass Onion is that billionaire Miles is actually a plagiarizing self-serving mediocrity. While that reveal might be momentarily satisfying in a movie, it’s just not the reality all of us have to deal with. Folks like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Kanye West, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other “disruptors” are far more complicated. They often have a savant-like talent for something and huge blind spots/short comings in other areas. But because they have a sh@t ton of money and power, we all have to suffer the winds of their whims, political maneuvers, etc. If they were just easily written off idiots, someone, somewhere would be able to handle them. But instead, our world is being shaped (or deformed) by these folks and it feels like we’d all better be served being humble, realizing the danger of their narcissism mixed with intelligence, and finding a way to collectively push back.

Glass Onion doesn’t go that deep. And it doesn’t have to. It has no obligation to address this writer’s point of view anymore than anyone else’s. But it does run the risk of giving the feeling that some of the issues it wants to address-race/class iniquity, the trauma and abuse inflicted on folks by the rich/powerful, etc-are capable of being resolved with justice within two+ hours.

The Have-Nots. But. . .not for long.

This has always been the challenge/paradox of the cinematic form. Many able moviemakers have ultimately decided the form is a form of entertainment not message. And those who season their entertainment with message do so with more sugar than anything else.

But some moviemakers-Kubrick, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, Renoir, Bunuel, Fellini, Scorsese, or even Sean Baker more recently-to name just a few quickly have found ways to explore complex ideas in an entertaining way in a few hours time.

This isn’t to hold Johnson to that standard. That’s neither right nor fair. Johnson is succeeding wildly and at the top of his game and clearly one of the more talented moviemakers working today.

It just pokes at this writer’s own nagging questions about how cinema retains its specialness in the age of streaming and subscriptions. Even a great offering like Glass Onion appears as just one rectangular image among thousands on Netflix’s home page if you get to it at all.

Streaming starts to feel like that last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark where one of God’s holy objects is stored in a warehouse FULL of thousands of other boxes to be forgotten by time.

We have to solve this somehow. The specialness of cinema needs a new renaissance. This is the challenge and call to all moviemakers who want to write the next chapter of cinema.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.