Redshirt Cinema Club

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends.

With the MCU Phase One now behind us it’s time to delve into the hilariously named ‘Mjolbag’ and enjoy your excellent correspondence on all things Marvel.

We’ll also be revealing our personal rankings for all six phase one movies, please feel free to agree with us in the patreon chat.

Controversial hot takes, assemble!

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Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends.

So when you’ve just finished watching a massive series of superhero movies, and it’s nearly Halloween, and one of your three hosts hasn’t seen a particular beloved 80s classic, who you gonna call?

The cadence of that was all wrong but, yes, we watched Ghostbusters this week, the 1984 smash hit comedy starring Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Sigourney Weaver. Can it make a new fan out of me? Let’s find out!

Hosted o...

We've arrived! But where?

At the muster station for wayward Marvel superheroes, also known as (genuinely) the biggest thing to happen to cinema since Star Wars. The Avengers is the culmination of an ever-evolving plan for the comic book publisher to make it's own movies, to control its own stable of characters, to give Stan Lee as many screen credits as possible, and to make gigantic stacks of money. It just happens to be really, really good as well.

Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, and arrows guy better watch out...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends.

Now the film we’re watching this week is called Captain America: The First Avenger, despite the fact he’s actually the last one to be introduced before Marvel’s superhero superteam assemble.

Chris Evans stars as the titular Cap, breaking free of his Fantastic Four shackles and establishing himself as a true leading man. Can he win over the Redshirts? Let’s find out!

Join the Redshirt Cinema Club! Support us at patreon.com/reds...

Film number four in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Thor, and we've come a long way from Tony Stark's cave in Afghanistan.

All the way to Asgard, in fact, as the bounds of the MCU expand even at this early stage to embrace other worlds, mythical beings, and stuff happening somewhere in the gap between endless space and affordable CG.

THERE IS A LOT GOING ON. The MCU gets its first supervillain, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddlestone launch mega careers, a blue box turns up, and Marvel seems to prove once and for...

Three episodes into our MCU series and we’ve already got our first sequel - 2010’s Iron Man 2 - which Marvel couldn’t resist making after the success of the original. Robert Downey Jr returns as Tony Stark, facing off against both Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash and the age-old conundrum of what do you do with a superhero after their origin story? You talk about them on a podcast, that’s what. Let’s go!

Join the Redshirt Cinema Club! Support us at patreon.com/redshirtcinemaclub to receive two bonus episodes every month as well as our newslett...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. We’re doing it! We’re getting through Phase One of the MCU, and today that means our opinion lens is focused on 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, a complicated entry in that it came out mere months after Iron Man, features a star in Edward Norton who never returns to the franchise, and is a sort of sequel but not really to 2003’s Hulk directed by Ang Lee. What do we make of it? Let’s find out!

Join the Redshirt C...

The truth is, we are watching Iron Man...

Listeners, it's time for a reboot. For Edward Norton to become Mark Ruffalo. For Andrew Garfield to become Tom Holland. For us to have a vision, a quest for the podcast once again.

It's time for Redshirt versus the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In what we're enigmatically calling Phase Three of the podcast, we’ll be rewatching the biggest movie phenomenon of all time from its inception to the Avengers’ first Assembling. Get ready for tons of cultural context, egregious Stan-Splaining, lots of real...

Welcome Redshirt team, to the final pre-MCU comic book episode before we dive into the world of The Avengers, singularly and collectively.

This week, it's Dave's pick, and he has chosen Constantine - although it proves to be more of a case of Constantin-terruptions as Nath and Rob lead us astray (or should that be ashtray?).

Don't hold your breath for this one (though weirdly, we do. Really). 

Join the Redshirt Cinema Club! Support us at patreon.com/redshirtcinemaclub to receive two bonus episodes every month as well as our newsletter, T...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a weekly podcast Bat-transmitting from the Batcave.

That’s right, a few short episodes after our trip to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City, we’re back with the Dark Knight thanks to Rob’s choice for pre-MCU superhero viewing. Which is… Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, featuring a rogue’s gallery of Catwoman, The Penguin, and some guy making a reverse power station? How dare they?

Join the Redshirt Cinema Club! Support us at patreon.com/redshirtcinemaclub to receive two bonus episodes every month as well as our newslet...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. We’re about to tackle the big one - the MCU.

The biggest movies, the most fervent fandoms, opinions so divisive they could probably splint a continent in half and sink the entire West coast of America. Which, coincidentally, is Lex Luthor’s plan in Superman: The Movie - the film we’re watching today to kick off our three-part mini series of pre-MCU superhero flicks before we take on the main event.

Is it a bird? Is it...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. We’ve done it! We’ve watched ALL the Christopher Nolan films apartfromTheFollowing, and now we’re going full white guy podcast by RANKING THEM ALL. Will you agree with us? We don’t even agree with ourselves! Before we get to that however, it’s time to read out YOUR excellent opinions in our end of season mailbag special. Enjoy!

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Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about fandom and watching movies with friends. Today, it’s Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s multi-award-winning 2023 biopic of the man who made the bomb. Best Picture. Best actor for Cillian Murphy, Best Director for Nolan himself. But can it win the less-prestigious but harder-to-obtain award for entertaining all three of the Redshirt Cinema Club hosts? Let’s find out!

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The end of our Nolan series approaches, as you can tell by the fact we've reached a film that doesn't care about beginnings, or endings, or - more than one of us might argue - what happens in the middle, either.

This week we're watching/have watched/will have been about to be watching Tenet, which is like a time-based counterpart to the globe-spanning, dream-plumbing action of Inception. Not content with simply folding Paris back upon itself, Tenet goes one further and folds all of reality, with a war of annihilation moving back along the timeline...

We’re nearing the end of our Nolan run now, and we’re heading for the stars - or at least a handful of uninhabitable planets and a wormhole or two - with 2014’s Interstellar. A movie less about space and rockets than it is about love, regret, parenthood and just how much of a dick Matt Damon can be if the script is right. Does it get the Redshirt seal of approval? Time to find out!

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Check out our Nolan-esque use of non-linear plotting as we interrupt our chronological journey through the films of Christopher N to take in the director's newly released epic, The Odyssey.

Praise Zeus, we did it! We got Rob to the cinema, and he stayed there until the film was over. But what did he - and Nath, and Dave - make of this take on Homer's epic tale?

Even more crucially, how did Dave - a man who runs a social media agency specialising in the entertainment industry - manage to watch this...

Inception is the next film under the Redshirt Cinema Club spotlight, the cerebral 2010 sci-fi action movie Christopher Nolan somehow made in-between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. It’s generated memes and hot takes galore since then, with audiences loving to hate it as much as they love to… love it. On which side of the fence do we fall? It’s time to find out!

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Most people would probably have a break between making two blockbusting superhero movies, especially when they're as brilliant and ambitious as Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).

Not Christopher Nolan. Instead he teamed up with Christian Bale and knocked out The Prestige (2006), a cerebral character drama following two feuding magicians and their shared obsession with outdoing the other. Stylistically it's an outlier when looked at in the context of his wider catalogue, but there's a reason Nolan connoisseurs often cite this as their favourite.

What will we make of it however? Let's find...

Hello and welcome to Redshirt Cinema Club, a podcast about - finally - BATMAN movies. Well it is for today anyway, as we tackle Christopher Nolan’s 2005 comic book blockbuster Batman Begins, the film that arguably made both him and lead-actor Christian Bale household names and kickstarted a superhero trilogy still regarded by many as the greatest ever. How does it hold up 21 years later? It’s time to find out. Podcast Begin.

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Today we continue our journey through the movies of Christopher Nolan with 2002's Insomnia, the comparatively little-known film he made between Memento (cult favourite, liking it makes you sound clever) and Batman Begins (the first chapter of everyone's favourite superhero trilogy).

The cast is stacked with A-list talent - Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank will get your movie noticed - and yet Insomnia rarely gets talked about with the same fervour as Nolan's other work. We'll explore why in this episode, alongside chat about how smoking and telephones are cool and Matt Damon isn't...

It's finally happened. We're giving the world not the podcast it deserves but the one it needs right now. And what the world needs is a movie podcast where three early-middle-aged straight, white guys talk about Christopher Nolan films.

First up is Memento, Nolan's critically-acclaimed mainstream debut from 2000 that - despite its raw, indie feel - carries itself with the artistic swagger of a surefire summer hit. Within it you can already see a few Nolan trademarks: a non-traditional narrative structure and a preoccupation with time (and how we always seem to be running out of...

Welcome back to Redshirt Cinema Club!

We’re done with videogame adaptations for now, but before we move onto the next big thing it’s time to read your excellent and hilarious emails in an episode we’re calling Super Mailbag Bros. We didn’t come up with that, Shani Fox did on our Patreon chat. Well done, Shani. You’re better than us.

Let us know what you think of this episode by emailing us at [email protected] and support us on Patreon at patreon.com/redshirtcinemaclub for access to two bonus epis...

This week on Redshirt Cinema Club it’s the turn of 2002’s Resident Evil, an adaptation of the survival horror videogame that spawned a series of actually quite successful films despite never really being that good. Kind of like Fast and the Furious but with zombies instead of cars. Did the first movie convince US, however? Is the Licker scary? And just who is Milla Jovovich supposed to be? We’ll answer at least two of those questions in this episode.

Let us know what you think of this episode by emailing us at [email protected] an...

Today we continue our videogame adaptation season by tackling 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, an early-noughties action flick starring megastar Angelina Jolie in the lead role, alongside pre-Bond Daniel Craig, a very young and very handsome Iain Glen and also Chris Barrie from Red Dwarf. Can it be the first videogame movie we’ve watched that isn’t terrible?

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This week it's time for Pokémon: The First Movie.

Rob is a lifelong is a lifelong Pokéfan while Nath and Dave are bemused onlookers ready to receive a heartwarming introduction to the world of collecting, training, and trying your best. Which is a shame because what they actually get is an existential nightmare dressed as a children's adventure. What does it mean to be alive? What is the purpose of existing? And what would you do if you have to fight yourself to the death?

Join us as we find out!

For you, the day our episode on Street Fighter graced your village was the most important day in your life. But for us? It was Monday.

Welcome back to our continuing series on video game movies, where this week we have reached the garish, often nonsensical, somehow still wonderfully entertaining Street Fighter from 1994. Several pillars of the game have been turned upside down - Guile is the main character, Ken and Ryu are low-level conmen, and Blanka wasn't even raised by eels - but thankfully Raoul Julia's M Bison is staggeringly good fun, and we have...

Kicking off our season on videogame adaptation we've got the notoriously awful Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993. Yes, the one that doesn't look anything like the Mario games and instead feels like if Blade Runner had dinosaurs and was directed by an idiot (or two idiots as it turns out).

It does star Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper though, and despite the critical and commercial failure is still a film remembered fondly by many. How will it fare in the Redshirt opinion cauldron? Listen on to find out!

Here's how our schedule is...

This week we’re delving into our mailbag to mark the end of our series on 80s fantasy movies (you can tell because people only “delve” in fantasy settings) and to share your nostalgia, nit-picks, and at least one bit of trivia - about David Bowie in Labyrinth - that blew our tiny goblin minds.

If you've been listening along to our journey through this decade's unique haul of fantasy films - Time Bandits, Highlander, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, Willow - then listen in as we sort through your comments and criticisms.

...

This week - we’re falling through holes in the universe and landing in Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam’s visually cacophonous 1981 adventure about a small boy careening through time with a band of thieves pursued by God and evil itself. There’s… a lot going on.

It's possible that Time Bandits features the best backstory to a heist ever conceived (a band of God's minor manufacturers are sent to the repairs department for creating a very unusual tree, and use the map of all the holes in the universe ("it was a rush job, seven days...") to steal...

A curious phenomenon emerges this week as we watch 1984's The Neverending Story.

It's a favourite from Dave's childhood which Nath and Rob were convinced they'd never seen. The evidence in fact points to them both having watched the film previously and entirely forgotten what happens, which is unfortunately also true of this latest rewatch (something to do with a sad horse and a flying dog, the details are lost to us).

Which is all to say that The Neverending Story has a strange energy - a tinge of Euro-weirdness, the half-logic of...

This week we’re losing ourselves again in the delightful maze of 80s fantasy, with Jim Henson’s extraordinary Labyrinth (which, like our very own Rob, turns 40 this year...)

Think of it less like a museum of childhood traumas, and more like a fun adventure with cool puppets and a brilliant - nay, magical - dance number. Now if we only figure out how to get inside…

Let us know what you think of this episode by emailing us at [email protected] and support us on Patreon at patreon.com/redshirtcinemaclub for access...

We're back! Sort of.

After a week's hiatus we're crawling out from the darkness of our plague cave with this impromptu mailbag episode - which we've decided is a good thing as there were LOTS of wonderful emails to get through. Thanks for your continuing correspondence - please keep the messages coming.

Thanks for bearing with us while we've been ill - normal service will be resumed next week once we're back to full strength. Updated schedule for our 80s fantasy series below if you fancy watching along!

- Labyrinth (1986...

A new season begins, and we transition from our favourite genre (sci-fi) into our other favourite genre (fantasy) quicker than turning the corner in Waterstones' basement.

Moving from Star Wars into 1988's Willow felt like the most natural step - it's directed by Ron Howard (of Solo fame), stars Warwick Davies (Wicket the ewok) and has a story dreamed up by George Lucas himself.

There are other parallels, most notably the roguishly handsome Han Solo-esque swordsman Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and wonderfully crafted stop-motion monsters, but really who needs an excuse to sit through...

...of course it did.

We've completed Star Wars (shut up, Ewok movies) and that can only mean one thing - an episode dedicated to listener thoughts about the series, the discussions we've had about it, and tangents that have their own root system of subtangents.

Also ALSO the three of us give our personal rankings of all 11 Star Wars movies watched on the pod. Are there some surprises in there? Rob has made sure that there are.

Join us!

Become a member of Redshirt Cinema Club! Support...

We conclude our Star Wars season with 2019's The Rise of Skywalker, J.J. Abrams' second stab at the franchise having kicked off the sequel trilogy with The Force Awakens 4 years prior.

Where the latter was an exercise in replaying familiar hits, Episode IX was all about course correction after the split fan reaction to The Last Jedi. Kylo Ren has his mask back, force ghost Luke likes his light sabre again and Palpatine is back. Somehow.

But is the magic back? Contrary to Luke's declaration in The Last Jedi, I'm afraid this...

The Last Jedi is almost certainly the most divisive Star Wars movie ever made. A brave attempt by writer/director Rian Johnson to subvert audience expectations and take the franchise in a new direction, it's a film that impressed critics with its brave narrative choices but alienated huge sections of the fan base at the same time.

The three of us watched this together at the cinema - Rob enjoyed it, Dave and Nath not so much. Will the subsequent 9 years have softened or sharpened those initial opinions? How do we all feel about that Princess...

"This will begin to make things right."

As first lines go, this is powerful stuff. An acknowledgement that what came before wasn't up to scratch. A promise that what you're about to see will bring back the old magic. But does The Force Awakens deliver where it counts?

J. J. Abrams is the man with the seemingly impossible task, fresh from reviving (and then killing?) the Star Trek movie franchise, his first film in the new trilogy introduces new characters, revisits old ones, and has an evil base the size of 10 Death Stars...

The second episode of our mid-season Star Wars break sees Dave finally get his wish of making Rob watch The Green Knight - a dark fantasy retelling of a 14th-century chivalric romance directed by David Lowery and starring Dev Patel.

This is unlike any Arthurian legend you've seen before - a twisted, unsettling exploration of honour and the slow, inevitable, irresistible power of nature. It features a bunch of brilliant performances from some of our favourite British actors, from Sean Harris and Ralph Ineson to Kate Dickie and the aforementioned Dev Patel.

A...

In a change to our scheduled programming, this week Rob has forced Dave to watch Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the straight-to-DVD movie sequel to one of the greatest videogames of all time.

When it released in 2005 this was an explosion of cutting-edge CG, an all-action burst of fan service fed to an audience ravenous for more Final Fantasy VII. More Cloud, more Sephiroth, more cool fights set to even cooler music.

Watching it in 2026 those visuals are starting to creak, which means unfortunately we're actually going to have to judge this film...

We've reached the end of the prequel trilogy with 2005's Revenge of the Sith, a relentless 2.5-hour explosion of lightsabre duels, Palatine one-liners and, well, actual explosions.

A film many consider the best of a bad bunch, has the 21 years since its release quietened our misgivings or does the hate still flow through us?

We also discuss the very important issues of whether or not The Force works in space and if Anakin's power level would drop once all his arms and legs have come off.

So take a seat...