Iron Lung (spoilers)

Created 1 Feb 2026 5:47 PM

I cannot stop thinking about Iron Lung.

It's good. I think it might be great. I think a lot of things about it, actually, and I figured that this blog might be a decent place to just blast out a bunch of things I think about it without trying to make it all fit together as a single cohesive article. So here's a grab-bag of random thoughts about Iron Lung, some bit, some small.

(Before I get to that; if you are for some reason reading this, haven't seen it yet, and have ignored the spoiler warning; I think it's definitely worth seeing, if you're at all interested in slow-burn horror.)

1. Progression.

   I love how we slowly see things everything change as the film progresses. The quiet, subtle way that the ship slowly transforms is probably the one most people notice (and one of the things I want to specifically pay attention to on a rewatch), but... I want to talk clothes.

   An ongoing thing in this film is the convict gradually undressing, peeling away the layers around him, becoming less covered visually as the character themself becomes revealed to us. That's all good, and also not that unique, a lot of films do this same thing.

   But I love that Iron Lung takes this and twists it by going just one extra step. He peels off a layer of clothing, then another, then another... and towards the end, we get that same idea play out with him peeling off those bandages, but this time it's not to reveal more clothes, or even skin, but the mutating flesh beneath.

2. Reframing.

   I thought this was pretty obvious, but when I mentioned it to my partner she hadn't considered it, so; in Iron Lung the game, the camera is (as far as I remember) never explained as anything but a camera, and the skeletons (and skeletal creatures) you see are seemingly just that.

   In the film, you start thinking the same thing... But then you find out the "camera" is functionally an x-ray machine.

   The Convict, and possibly the viewer, doesn't seem to put 2-and-2 together, but; this means that he can't tell if what he's seeing are bare skeletons, or living organisms with skeletons in. It also hits on horror imagery in two different ways at the same time; if the monster attacking at that time is a skeletal beast, that's horrific. If it actually looks different, but we don't know what, our minds can conjure all types of horrible things it may look like.

3. Hitting the beats.

   The music in this film is great. Movie soundtracks have to walk a 3-dimensional tightrope, where they have to be noticeable enough to appreciate them, unique enough to stick in mind, and yet (for the most part) meld into the background of the film so you don't notice how weird it is for music to be playing over everything.

   The Iron Lung soundtrack hits all this. The friends I went with all agreed the soundtrack was great. And it does, for the most part, avoid being invasive or distracting... except for one very deliberate, and quite awesome, moment near the end, where the main tracks in the music are, for a bar or two, replaced with the diagetic beeping of the sub, in perfect timing. Memorable in all the right ways.

4. Markiplier.

   My biggest concern about this film going in was; would I be able to suspend my disbelief, and see the character Mark was playing, instead of Mark playing a character? Aaaaaand... umm, mostly, no.

   But.

   Towards the end, I did realise that it was something I'd managed to get past (I guess until that thought); I had managed to stop seeing him as the Youtuber. It... didn't work all the way. I'm going to be charitable and just put this down to my familiarity with him rather than acting deficiencies on his part.

   Hmm. Actually, while I'm on that;

5. Markiplier, the actor.

   Man, I enjoyed Mark's acting so much more here than in The Edge Of Sleep.

   The premise of that show, and his character in it, did him no favours. Turns out, when you're portraying a character who's depressed and incredibly sleep-deprived, it's not a recipe for an energetic, stylistic performance.

   Iron Lung gave him a lot more to do, more range to explore, and I think he used it well. It definitely feels like a better expression of what he's capable of, and how he's moving past the "Markiplier" characters; you can see how he's improving when it comes to doing actual dramatic roles.

   There are still some bits (especially right at the start) where I think, if I had a magic film-making wand, I'd wave it to get them to do maybe a couple more takes. But, again; I'm way more familiar with Mark The Person than I am with basically any other Actor The Person, perhaps I'd feel similar if I'd watched hundreds of hours of, say, Robert Downey Junior hanging out before the MCU with friends and playing videogames before I saw him in Iron Man, y'know?

Superman's best scene

Created 18 Jul 2025 4:00 PM

I just went to watch the new Superman and, hey, it's pretty good, did not regret going. Definitely enjoyed it more than any of the Snyderverse movies, I'll say that much.

I want to talk about my favourite scene in the film, and I cannot do that with spoiling some of it. I will say that the scene in question is maybe a quarter of the way in, and it's most about interpersonal stuff rather than the nitty-gritty of the film's main plot, so; if you're happy to accept that, read on, otherwise, thanks for coming this far.

Onwards!

In this continuity, Clark and Lois have been dating for a few months, and Lois knows Clark's secret identity. In the scene, Clark agrees to have an interview with Lois as Superman... a promise he immediately regrets when she asks to have it right then. What follows is a very clever, well written, perfectly paced scene that is so multi-dimensional that I wanted to focus on all the layers of this very complex discussion (and I mean complex here in regards to the circumstances around it, not the topics being discussed). I am working from memory here, I obviously don't have a recording of the scene, so this is going to be broad-strokes.

So, why is this discussion so complicated? Let us count the ways...

1. Clark and Lois are in a personal relationship.
2. Clark and Lois are in a relatively new personal relationship.
3. Clark and Lois are in a secret personal relationship.
4. Clark and Lois have a professional relationship, but Superman and Lois do not.
5. Clark and Superman are secretly the same person.
6. Clark is being asked genuinely difficult questions about his actions as Superman.
7. Lois and Clark do not have entirely compatible stances on Clark's actions.
8. Lois's personal views and professional responsibilities are not completely compatible.

The beauty of the scene is that these are just abstract elements that a viewer might think about, they're all things the film thinks about. Lois and Clark have clearly not yet set strong boundaries around all these things, or at least haven't consistently built them into how they act in the relationship.

Throughout the scene, both characters are repeatedly arguing over what are and aren't valid questions. They stop and start the recorder, fighting over it at least once. They argue about what is and isn't on- and off-record. It's not clear how much of the doubt Lois' questions point to are just a reporter interrogating a subject for a meaty story, and how much is personal doubt she has about the things Superman has done.

Every single one of the things on that list above is important to this scene at some point, and as far as I remember, none are directly stated out loud. The scene just trusts you as the audience to understand how many directions both characters are being pulled in at once... and you do.

Looks, it's cool to see Superman fight a monster or hurl a meteor out of orbit or do cool super-stuff, but scenes like this are what really build a character, a scene, a film. I really hope I get to watch someone do a deep-dive on it once this hits homes.

Bad AI isn't good

Created 7 Nov 2024 3:12 PM

Enter the Oasis

Hey, look, I love a good bad movie. The Room is a famously awful piece of cinema, full of bizarre choices at every level, a hilarious piece all the funnier for how serious it thinks it's being, and I am here for that. But what we can't do is pretend that, because we can get that enjoyment from how bad it is, that it then is actually good, or is close to being good. It's fun, but it is still bad.

AI is bad.

(And, disclaimer; not all AI etc. There's a big difference between someone setting up a neural network to work on some specific task, and the kind of big tech this-will-solve-all-your-problem "AI" bullshit that's the more well know. I'm talking about the latter.)

But a chief strategy amongst those people tasked with selling it to us is to take the inherent flaws in it, the abject shittiness of it all, and tell us that that's the feature, the fact it can be so wrong is what's so good about it, and it's only going to get even better (meaning, paradoxically, both that it's good and will improve, and that it's bad and will stop being bad.) And that's bullshit.

Let's talk about Oasis.decart.ai.

Oasis is AI-generated Minecraft. You are dumped in a Minecraft world, and can move around, break blocks, manage your inventory etc etc, all functionally an AI-generated video being influenced by your inputs. And, look, on a basic level, it does feel slightly impressive, to be able to do all those Minecrafty things without actually running Minecraft. It just has two tiny, inter-related problems.

1. It's utterly terrible at being Minecraft

Look, all this system is doing is examining a screenshot of Minecraft, checking if the player is looking around or moving or clicking the mouse, and then generating a new screenshot that looks like what might happen if an actual player playing the actual game did that thing. And, sure, like I said, that is slightly impressive, but it means the system doesn't actually have any idea what's going on.

For example; the world is constantly changing around you. Turn around? The world changes. Look too closely at a block? The world changes. Get in an area where the terrain is too indistinct or repetitive? The world changes. The AI doesn't actually have any model of a world it's drawing from, so any time it's tasked with showing you something that wasn't already on screen, it just makes something up. Often, that thing won't even look like anything in Minecraft, at which point the AI will just assume you're seeing something indistinct in the distance (even if it's also clearly right next to you), and slowly morph it into something recognisable as you "move" "closer".

This extends to your inventory. Open the screen, close it, then come back later, and it's likely your items will have completely changed.. along with your character model. This even extends to things that never leave the screen; I notice the items in my toolbar kept slowly morphing, or tools disappearing or reappearing, because the AI doesn't actually know what you have, just that it should look a bit like it looked in the last few frames, and that tends to let it drift.

At one point, I faced a hill, rotated 180 degrees, and walked backwards. The game allowed me to do this, but devoid of any information to work from, it just generated a flat endless plain, extended further and further as I walked back without end. This is the true imagination of AI; non-existant.

Even putting all this aside, what the game does generate is nonsense. The environments are mishmash of weird terrain, with blocks and objects put around completely haphazardly. There's no concessions made to a fun, enjoyable world; it's only goal is to justify what was on screen before.

2. Minecraft exists.

Let's imagined a "fixed" version of this app. They've figured out how to keep the world around you persistent. Your inventory no longer changes when you're not looking it it. It runs faster, as fast as your computer allows, and at a much higher resolution. The world that generates is coherent, fun and wide. Maybe they add multiplayer so you can explore the world with your friends, and save them permanently to return to again and again.

...That's just Minecraft. That already exists.

They're using AI to create a faded shadow of a thing that already exists, with all of the societal, environmental and moral costs that entails.

Oh no, it was a mirage

The eventual promise of this is that we can have entire games that play out without actually making a game; if you can create a screenshot, the AI will figure out how it actually plays. But it's a false promise, like the idea that ChatGPT will suddenly stop making things up if they can just get more funding. This tech is only ever going to let you play vastly worse versions of things that already exist.

In the meantime, they play up the worth of the flaws. The fact this thing is garbage is a feature, actually, look how fun it is to play Minecraft in a world that is constantly shifting around you! Isn't it funny! Please pay us.

Please do not pay them. Not this company, nor anyone else that pushes how humorously bad their "AI" is as an interim stumbling block on the way to the perfection that they're definitely less than a year from, honest. Don't pay OpenAI, don't pay Tesla, don't pay anyone pushing this stuff.

Just go play Minecraft. It's fun. We can play together, if you want.