Winter 2026 – Week 12 in Review - Ai Animes 🤖

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. While waiting for Slay the Spire 2 to make its way to consoles, this week we picked up fellow roguelike deckbuilder Monster Train, which has proven exceedingly diverting in its own right. Drafting choices feel a bit more obviously correct or incorrect than in Slay the Spire, but I’m quite impressed with how the game essentially simulates “modern Magic the Gathering” (creature-based, direct card advantage is limited, commanders define decks), in contrast with Slay the Spire’s emulation of old-fashioned magic (spell slinging is encouraged, broken combos are rampant, storm builds occur frequently). I’m definitely more of an old fashioned Magic enthusiast myself, but it’s fun to see another take on this extremely me-coded subgenre. Aside from that, we also ran down our requisite pile of films, so let’s see what we’ve got on tap for the Week in Review!

First up this week, we continued the surprisingly resilient Sonic film franchise with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, featuring the addition of Sonic universe mainstays Tails and Knuckles. Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik is back, this time allied with Knuckles in their pursuit of those rascally chaos emeralds. With both a mad scientist and supernatural warrior on his heels, Sonic will need to run pretty darn fast to stay ahead of the pack – fortunately, that’s kind of basically his whole thing.

Sonic 2 sadly lacks a lot of the buddy comedy appeal of its predecessor, as Tails is simply less interesting of a counterpoint to Sonic’s antics than James Marsden. Tails is too obsequious to really bounce off Sonic, while Marsden is left floundering in go-nowhere side errands just to give Tails time to define himself. The film feels unfocused in general, suspended between its predecessor’s fish-out-of-water narrative and the increasingly convoluted original Sonic lore; Sonic as a character is relatively easy to transpose to an original film narrative, but Sonic as a universe is much creakier.

As such, Sonic 2 isn’t particularly satisfying as a story, but is nonetheless reasonably enjoyable purely as a vehicle for Jim Carrey and Idris Elba to each play characters they were apparently born for. Elba in particular is just outstanding as Knuckles, offering a stoic straight man routine that bounces perfectly off Ben Schwartz’s Sonic. Perhaps an inevitable step down from its predecessor given its overloaded priorities, but still a charming enough family film.

Our next viewing was Superstition, a nasty little feature from the slasher glory days. The film centers on a house that is all sorts of cursed, having been the venue for an attempted witch-drowning back when such activities were fashionable. Essentially quarantined as a protectorate of the local church, the house’s propensity for killing anything that moves is given fresh fuel when a family moves in, with predictably gruesome results.

Superstition isn’t the first, fifth, or fifteenth slasher I’d recommend to the uninitiated, but as far as films it took me multiple years to discover while vigorously trawling every horror movie list imaginable, it’s actually a pretty good time. The film has higher ambitions and less restraint than many of its contemporaries; I was impressed by the set design texture of its medieval flashback sequences, and equally impressed by its willingness to have a dude get bisected by an improbably sharp-silled window, the messy consequences of which are captured fully on-screen. Pair all that with a core family drama that is both understated and convincing, and you end up with an altogether agreeable slasher, one that should at least rank highly on “slasher where the killer is a witch’s curse” lists.

Looking to expand our kaiju investigations beyond the general Godzilla canon, we then screened The Magic Serpent, a ‘66 feature set in the fantastical kingdom of Oumi. When the king and his wife are killed by a duplicitous general and a ninja named Orochimaru, the young prince Ikazuchi-Maru is secreted away, ultimately learning the arts of ninjutsu and toad magic. Returning as the mysterious ninja Jiraiya, Ikazuchi-Maru must face off with the treacherous Orochimaru, and restore justice to the kingdom.

So yeah, we didn’t actually know this going in, but The Magic Serpent is clearly a retelling of the classic tale of Jiraiya, the story that Masashi Kishimoto would adapt into the Sannin trio of Naruto. As a kaiju feature, The Magic Serpent holds its monsters too close to the vest, only letting them run wild for brief sequences at the very beginning and end. But as an introduction to the legend that inspired Kishimoto, it proved a welcome education, demonstrating the tale of heroic destiny and ultimate romantic bliss that Naruto’s Jiraiya and Tsunade could only dream of experiencing. Also a big fan of Ryutaro Otomo’s flamboyant take on Orochimaru, which has convinced me Tim Curry would make an incredible ninja snake lord.

Last up for the week was Outland, an ‘81 scifi feature starring Sean Connery as Federal Marshal William O’Neil, assigned to keep the peace at a titanium ore mining facility on Jupiter’s moon Io. Though the facility’s output appears exceptional, a series of mysterious deaths point towards a malevolent conspiracy lurking beneath the service. Investigating these deaths will set O’Neil against his companions, forcing him to face both the cold void of space and the malevolence of his fellow man.

Outland is an unabashedly post-Alien film that genuinely, successfully embodies all of its inspiration’s strengths, saving of course the presence of an outright xenomorph. But Alien is not special just because it features a cool monster. Its subtler strengths are even more essential: that immediate sense of absolute isolation, the intricate yet forbidding design of deep-space machinery (clearly designed for corporate convenience rather than human occupants), the paranoia, the tactile retro-futurist interfaces, the profound coldness of the abyss, and the underlying truth that our capitalist overlords will always be more inhuman than any creatures spawned in the dark.

All of those elements are effectively conjured in Outland, all handsomely furnishing a sturdy tale of corruption, betrayal, and manic, potentially misguided moral ambition. Like High Noon, Outland steers the conventions of the western towards a grim fundamental question – does humanity deserve guardians who embody the best aspects of our nature, when the vast majority of us are content to wallow in our worst? That feeling is ultimately more isolating than space itself – are we alone in our humanity, even among our fellow humans?

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