Empire July 2022

WE’VE BEEN THERE. Now it’s time to go back again. Ever since Amazon announced its grand quest, to bring a Lord Of The Rings prequel to our TVs, our brains have been boggling, trying to figure out what a return trip to Middle-earth might involve. With Tolkien’s appendices stuffed with swathes of information (Appendix E, Part I: Pronunciation Of Words And Names is a particular banger), but precious little in the way of narrative throughlines, anything seemed possible. Which new heroes will rise? What monsters will be unleashed? Will we see Saruman apply for a building permit for Orthanc? Now, finally, answers are at hand. For within this issue is a deep dive into the most ambitious series ever made, containing world-first interviews with the key cast of The Lord…

GOOD LIEUTENANT, BAD LIEUTENANT Thank you so much for indulging me with the Nicolas Cage Ranking! It says something about his remarkable career that a five-star film like Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans fails to get even a mention — personally I think it’s one of his best (and Cageist!) movies. I hope he finds an excuse to work with Werner Herzog again soon, it’s a match made in heaven. Keep up the good work! STUART MASTERSON, VIA EMAIL Thanks, Stuart! No room to mention it in print, but we did give it a nod in the full discussion, which can be heard on the Empire Podcast feed. Enjoy a Picturehouse membership on us. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for…

THIS MONTH’S FILM MOMENTS THAT MATTER REMEMBER THE LAST time a season of Stranger Things ended? When a secret Soviet base exploded, a key character was seemingly vapourised and the enormous Starcourt shopping mall was burnt to embers during a fight with a 50-foot ‘Mind Flayer’, escaped from the Upside Down? Well, the climax of Stranger Things: Season 4 is about to make that finale look like a quiet episode of Countryfile. “The final episode has more FX shots than the entirety of Season 3,” grins Matt Duffer, who created the Netflix phenomenon, about a gang of 1980s kids navigating supernatural horrors, with his twin brother Ross. “There’s an hour-long chunk in the final episode that just doesn’t stop,” adds Ross. “It’s the most complicated thing we’ve ever attempted to…

AS A MAN who once rode into a river on horseback to save someone’s life, Baltasar Kormákur knows a thing or two about facing danger. “It sounds a little macho,” the Icelandic filmmaker tells Empire, “but I rode out and fetched a girl who had lost control of her horse. It was really dangerous, so I do think I have this instinct in life.” That instinct sure comes through in his films’ characters, from the band of mountaineers scaling gargantuan heights in Everest, to a couple stranded out at sea in Adrift. The threat in the director’s latest, Beast, is a little more on the furry side. The film stars Idris Elba as a recent widower, who must fend off a marauding lion to protect his daughters while on a…

AS TIME-TRAVELLING DC SERIES LEGENDS OF TOMORROW COMES TO AN END, EMPIRE CELEBRATES ITS WACKIEST STORYLINES GORILLA VS OBAMA! Perhaps the most talked-about event in the show’s spectrum of daftness. The Legends travel back to 1979 to stop a telepathic ape, Gorilla Grodd, from assassinating a young Barack Obama in order to, in his words, “make America Grodd again”. METAVERSE OF MADNESS! Going meta before the likes of WandaVision, this episode followed the Legends as they scattered into parodies of different popular shows, like a New York-set sitcom called Ultimate Buds, British period drama Highcastle Abbey and sci-fi series Star Trip. SHAKESPEAREAN SUPERHEROES! The Legends run into William Shakespeare while on a mission in the 16th century. Feeling a fresh wave of inspiration, the playwright revamps Romeo And Juliet as…

ATTEMPTING A FACE/ OFF follow-up isn’t necessarily a sensible idea. But then, sensible ideas were never part of Face/ Off’s appeal — a high-concept (Nicolas Cage’s psychotic criminal swaps faces with John Travolta’s FBI agent!) sci-fi action freakout from John Woo that vibrates on its own insane frequency. Step in The Guest and Godzilla Vs. Kong director Adam Wingard, currently scripting a new Face/Off with regular collaborator Simon Barrett. Their take is, he says, “an absolute sequel” with Cage at its heart — despite his villainous Castor Troy being fatally harpooned in the first film’s finale (albeit while still wearing Travolta’s face). “He’s just having such a moment. Even before Pig came out, we saw this as a Nicolas Cage movie,” says Wingard. “That’s become totally the obvious way to…