The Terminal List Review: Chris Pratt Embraces His Values in Exciting Action Thriller
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The Terminal List , a new eight-episode series from Prime Video, has been getting surprisingly negative reviews. Slash Film calls it "offensively bad," and Yahoo! and TV Line labeled it "terminally bad." While the series hardly breaks any new ground or perfects its genre, it's a consistently exciting, dark, and twisty action series that isn't any worse than the average revenge thriller, and is sometimes better. Art is obviously subjective, and there are definitely weak spots and problematic issues in The Terminal List , but it almost seems as if the hostility against the Amazon series is politically motivated.
The Terminal List follows Chris Pratt as James Reece, a Navy SEAL who becomes the only survivor of an ambushed platoon killed over faulty information. Reece begins to suspect foul play, with the military's claims contradicting his own memories, but is he suffering from war-related PTSD and a brain injury, or actually on the verge of discovering a massive conspiracy? The series, based on the book by former Navy SEAL Jack Carr, is a hybrid of revenge fantasies, political conspiracies, unreliable narrators, and an underused genre in television, the military drama.
The Terminal List Brings the Military to Television
While there are no shortage of war movies, especially movies about World War II , there's a surprising paucity of military-based shows on television. NCIS and JAG felt less about the military than they were just police procedural and legal drama shows, and M*A*S*H was its own thing (and 50 years old). Other than those, most TV shows about the military don't last very long; not many people remember The Unit, Valor, The Brave , or Six .
So it's a bit refreshing to see military themes presented so prominently in a television show like The Terminal List , although they play directly into the possible reason why the military isn't a popular topic for long-lasting television: politics. There's a lot of political baggage when portraying the American military, whether one believes it to be justified or not, which prevents some studios from even touching the subject, or from developing projects into something tenable. Both sides of the political aisle can easily criticize media that's military-based — on the political right, they might find that a television show simplifies, exploits, or unrealistically depicts the experiences of service members; on the political left, they might perceive a series to be glorifying combat or supporting wars they never wanted to wage.
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Thus, any reaction to The Terminal List will likely depend on one's ideologies and beliefs (which is probably applicable to most other media as well, but to a lesser extent). Beyond the politics, however, the series is a rush of adrenaline (and testosterone), filled with compelling action sequences and mostly great performances. Many have commented on Pratt's performance, again, negatively, but his vacancy and haunted emptiness in much of The Terminal List is actually very appropriate.
Chris Pratt Wants Revenge in The Terminal List
Pratt (who also served as a producer) plays Reece as a man who can only thrive when he's on a mission; the missions used to come from a trusted and respected source (military command and the U.S. government), but now Reece has been reduced to only one mission: revenge. The first episode, expertly directed by Antoine Fuqua , finds Reece set up in a tragic act that leaves him completely broken and hollow. The only thing he knows to do as a result is to pursue everyone who destroyed his and the men in his platoon's lives, crossing off perpetrator after perpetrator as he gets closer to the center of the conspiracy.
There's a reason that revenge thrillers are typically movies — it can get pretty redundant and exceedingly grim watching someone torture and kill people episode after episode. The Terminal List certainly suffers from that redundancy in places, requires some suspension of disbelief, and has also been accused of being overly serious as a result. While it's true that this series is incredibly gloomy, the darkness works. Pratt completely abandons all the charming comedy seen in his career, developed from Andy Dwyer in Parks and Recreation to Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy , and instead dives deep into the void of suffering. Reece is a man in immense pain, and his only mission left in life is to deal out that pain to those who are responsible for it.
The Terminal List is arguably at its best when the viewer isn't entirely sure if Reece is a vindicated protagonist or a mentally deteriorating madman with a reality-shattering brain tumor. That kind of gray area is interesting and makes the audience and other characters' relationship with Reece much more complex, and also sets Reece apart from the typical vengeance-thirsty heroes of John Wick, Kill Bill, and Taken. Having Reece be an unreliable narrator gives an added weight to the action sequences and (many) kill scenes; they become almost queasy with ambivalence, interrogating the murky ethics of revenge thrillers themselves. When the series finally veers into certainty, it loses that fascinating ambiguity.
Nonetheless, The Terminal List remains entertaining (in a morbid and somewhat depressing way) throughout. Taylor Kitsch is phenomenal as one of the few trusted friends Reece has left in the world, and even the bitter reviews that panned the show point out his soulfulness and magnetic appeal. Constance Wu is also excellent as a journalist who alternates between believing Reece's grand narrative of political conspiracies and fearing him as a mentally disturbed soldier on a killing spree. This very funny actor (from Fresh Off the Boat and Crazy Rich Asians ) also sheds all her comedic timing and instead sinks into the darkness of this show. However, it's fundamentally Pratt's platform.
The Conservative Politics of The Terminal List
The Terminal List manages to criticize aspects of corruption within the military and the government while also outright honoring and respecting them as American institutions. It almost exhaustively discusses 'brotherhood' and 'doing the right thing,' and is very concerned with moral values (violence, on the other hand, is treated as a necessity rather than an ethical problem). While its sensibilities may make more politically sensitive, liberal-minded viewers a bit uncomfortable, the series can simply appeal to fans of action and conspiracy thrillers. One doesn't need to show their party affiliation before watching this series, which is ultimately more about excitement and thrills than ideology.
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If The Terminal List is political, though, then it's resolutely conservative (family values, Second Amendment rights, supporting the troops, taking hunting trips, and so on), and might as well be packaged in camouflage. This might be the reason why The Terminal List has been the recipient of the heavily critical aforementioned reviews. Pratt, the face of the show, seems to be aligned with its themes, and the media has certainly painted him as a hardcore conservative (with many condescendingly labeling him as ' the worst Chris ' as a result).
Not the Worst Chris
There was social media 'outrage' over the fact that Pratt had allegedly attended what many have called a homophobic church, and the actor has been accosted for his (or what is perceived as his) conservative beliefs and spirituality, with Marvel fans wanting him removed from Guardians of the Galaxy . Many mocked him for his speech at the MTV Awards, in which he said, "God is real. God loves you. God wants the best for you.” The thing is, Pratt is much more considerate and thoughtful than he is made out to be, and a lot more three-dimensional than he is portrayed by the media. Pratt explained his religious beliefs to Men's Health in a candid, wonderful way:
Religion has been oppressive as f-ck for a long time. I didn’t know that I would kind of become the face of religion when really I’m not a religious person. I think there’s a distinction between being religious — adhering to the customs created by man, oftentimes appropriating the awe reserved for who I believe is a very real God — and using it to control people, to take money from people, to abuse children, to steal land, to justify hatred. Whatever it is. The evil that’s in the heart of every single man has glommed on to the back of religion and come along for the ride.
All this to say, Pratt, like The Terminal List itself, may erroneously seem extremely conservative and closed-minded to some (and "offensively bad" to Slash Film), but is actually more complicated and pensive than first appears, and pretty entertaining to boot. The Terminal List debuts July 1st on Prime Video.
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Chris Pratt’s New Show Is a Right-Wing Fantasy, but That’s Not the Worst Part
There are reasons to cross this line, but the terminal list ’s aren’t good..
This article contains spoilers for The Terminal List.
The Terminal List , starring Chris Pratt as James Reece, a badass SEAL with a recently-diagnosed brain tumor whose entire team was just killed in a suspicious operation gone wrong, is a visually murky, exceedingly grim revenge story, catnip for people who like to see these kinds of operators let loose on the world. As James Reece’s creator Jack Carr—himself a former SEAL with just the kind of bearded, gun-slinging author photo that you’d expect—described the story in the preface to the first book in his Terminal List series : “It is about what could happen when societal norms, laws, regulations, morals, and ethics give way for a man of extraordinary capability, hardened by war, and set on a course of reckoning; a man who is, for all practical purposes, already dead.” The answer to that question will not surprise you: That man, played drawn and weary by a grey-faced Pratt, travels far and wide, a motley crew of allies in tow, to interrogate and then murder gang members, lawyers, financiers, and military personnel in a variety of creative ways. The conspiracy that killed his team gets revealed by bloodshed, and plenty of it.
Yes, this is, as the Daily Beast’s review’s headline called the show, “an unhinged right-wing revenge fantasy.” Yes, it’s yet another invitation to worship at the altar of the Navy SEALs, who have become, in the decades after 9/11, our culture industries’ warrior saints, which isn’t good . And if you think the show is bad, the book, which is fast-paced and bloody and replete with descriptions of weaponry and gear, is worse. Pratt and showrunner David Digilio toned this thing way down for (Amazon) Prime time. Carr tells you right off the bat that his book is about a “consolidation of power at the federal level” that he sees as a danger to “freedom.” He writes Reece’s main antagonist inside the military command structure as a general with “liberal leanings” who “was clearly more concerned with force diversity and the push to open the SEAL teams to females than he was with crushing America’s enemies.” Reece’s ally in journalism is trustworthy because of her work “exposing the lies and cover-ups that followed the Benghazi fiasco.” Reece even drinks Black Rifle Coffee in the morning, “tempered with some honey and cream.” (That last part sounds good, and I’m going to try it.)
But I’m not here to critique those aspects of the show’s worldview. I’m here to talk about the deaths of Lauren and Lucy, Reece’s wife and elementary-school-aged daughter, played on the show by Riley Keough and Arlo Mertz. The two, brunette and beautiful—the wife, a professional runner and running coach; the daughter, an avid artist—welcome Reece home partway through the first episode. We get some sweet family flashbacks, with Reece on the couch strumming a guitar while the three hang out on a rainy day. I watched the show before reading the book, but I should have known from the fact that those flashbacks also feature a bird fatally slamming into their window that something bad was going to happen to these two. But I didn’t guess it, and so was blindsided when Reece, alerted to possible danger when he’s attacked while getting an MRI, races home to find Lauren and Lucy lying between the island and the counter in their beautiful kitchen, both shot to death. Lauren’s arm is draped over Lucy, as if she was trying to protect her in their last moments.
I don’t think zero shows, ever, should kill children. If you look at the “does a kid die?” category on the website Does the Dog Die?, which catalogs other “trigger” events in entertainment besides the canine ones, you find a few examples of shows and movies that earn it. Consider the episode of The Walking Dead when the sisters Lizzie and Mika die—Mika, because Lizzie, understandably fucked in the head due to living through a zombie apocalypse, kills her to make her into a walker; Lizzie, because the adults taking care of her decide she is too far gone, and they don’t have the time, safe harbor, and psychological expertise necessary to bring her back. I’ll never forget those scenes, but I don’t resent the writers for including them. It was an effective way to show how this situation might impact children and the people who take care of them, and a very persuasive argument that living through an apocalypse as a child or a parent would freaking suck .
In comparison to this, a random child death like Lucy Reece’s is a sacrifice: to plot, to momentum, to heighten Reece’s sense of outrage. We barely get to know Lucy at all, except to hear that she likes to draw and loves Reece—the minimum necessary, really, to justify his mission of vengeance. The book’s daughter is only three, and the show has retained her penchant for art while making her much older, around nine or ten, avoiding the sticky problem of showing the body of a murdered toddler. But the show’s Lucy still draws like a baby—the Lucy picture that Reece uses as scratch paper to write out his “terminal list” of revenge targets is a childish image, three figures in front of a house. I don’t point this out to mock this murdered tween’s artistic acumen, but because the show seems to have barely considered her at all. Her death, and her mother’s, have to happen so that Reece can be finally freed from “societal norms, laws, regulations, morals, and ethics.” If your kid gets murdered, after all, you can be forgiven almost anything. Just ask the Punisher .
“I believe God always has a plan. Life is short, no matter what it is,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in May, when asked what he would say to the families of murdered Uvalde elementary-schoolers. How, we ask one another, could a nation regard the random, violent deaths of children in mass shootings and just move on? Shows like The Terminal List represent parental grief as explosive, but also somehow fulfilling—mission-driven, purposive, meaning something. The show holds Lucy at arm’s length in part due to clunky writing, but also to give us just enough of that taste of grief to justify Reece going supernova, without really making you think too hard about how permanently debilitating experiencing such a thing might be for your average, non-operator parent. The Terminal List is a classic American fantasy about the goodness of the SEALs, the corruption of high-level government officials and corporate shills, and the purifying quality of righteous violence. Lucy’s death adds just one more: the fantasy that if your child was the one killed, you could, somehow, shoot your way out of it.
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