Author: Paul Bradshaw

NME

Shōgun is over. No more obsessive rules of loyalty and honour to follow. No more epic matcha tea ceremonies and 17th century poetry slams and endless beheadings. No more of Toranaga’s subtle nods, Buntaro’s mad eye twitches and Blackthorne’s posh insults (“fuck smear” really needs to make a comeback).

The miniseries ended with a bang, and then it went on for another episode and ended properly – giving James Clavell’s classic novel a new adaptation that felt definitive; an authentic, romantic, violent old-school epic that made everyone want to book a holiday to Japan (even though it was all filmed in Canada). What are we supposed to do now, sit down and stare at the rain for a few hours?

How did Shōgun end?

Quietly. The show’s only big explosion happened at the end of episode nine, when Mariko was blown up by ninjas, but her noble death was the one that spared everyone a far bloodier ending; all part of Toranaga’s perfect plan for peace.

‘Crimson Sky’ was over before we realised it had even started, giving Shōgun a soft, contemplative exit that might have felt like an anti-climax if it wasn’t all so beautifully put together. Of course Toranago knew what he was doing the whole time, and of course Mariko did too – not just forcing Ishido’s hand to release his prisoners, and his leverage, but also forging a secret alliance with Ochiba that would eventually leave Ishido without enough men to win a war.

The battle itself comes fleetingly, in an imagined epilogue (just as does in the book), and it’s won without anyone having to lift a finger. Blackthorne gets his own flash-forward dream sequence – imagining himself as an old man – but we know that’s not his fate when he symbolically drops Mariko’s crucifix into the sea. Now fighting for something beyond his own survival, and devastated by Mariko’s loss, his own story reaches something of an epiphany – and all that after 10 episodes of penance for whatever life he left behind in England.

The best of the finale, though, is saved for Toranaga and Yabushige. Learning the hard way that you can never play both sides and still win, Yabushige is ordered to kill himself at sunset. Parting with the best poem in the whole series (“With my body, don’t burn it, don’t bury it. Just leave it in the field. And with it, fill the belly of some hungry dog”), Yabushige shares his last moments with Toranaga, overlooking the sea, and the future he’ll never get to witness. Did Toranaga just want peace? Or did he do it all to help pave his way to the throne?

“It’s what you’ve always wanted isn’t it? In your secret heart?” asks Yabushige. “Why tell a dead man the future?” responds Toranaga, neatly lopping off his head. What an ending.

Will there be a second season of Shōgun?

According to the showrunners, Shōgun was always meant to be a standalone miniseries, with no sequels planned. As Mariko said, “a flower is only a flower because it falls”. Then again, as Blackthorne said, probably along with the studio executives who financed the show, “Which comes first, God or your purse strings?”. Shōgun has been a smash hit, and wherever there’s money, there’s always someone who wants more of it.

Clavell’s novel was the third part of his Asian Saga, although none of the other books in the series directly follow on from the events in Shōgun (the next, chronologically, Tai-Pan, skips forward more than 200 years). There’s a chance one of the other books could be picked up for an adaptation, but it wouldn’t be about any of the same characters.

If the showrunners did want to carry on telling the same story though, they only need to look to history. Shōgun is actually based on real events, with Toranaga a fictional swap for Tokugawa Ieyasu – the daimyō who fought the Battle Of Sekigahara in 1600 and established a shogunate that lasted more than 250 years (turns out Yabushige was right after all…)

Blackthorne, too, was based on a real English sailor (William Adams) who washed up on Kyushu and eventually became a key military advisor to Tokugawa. There are plenty of real stories to be told about the historic figures the characters of Shōgun are based on, and plenty of scope for future seasons if there’s an appetite for it.

The legacy of Shōgun

Hopefully though, none of that will happen. The series was great for a lot of reasons – a rare gift of writing, acting, cinematography and atmosphere – but none more so than not outstaying its welcome. The comparisons to Game Of Thrones were inevitable as soon as the heads started flying, but Shōgun would surely be ruined by another seven seasons. Not every story needs sequels, and not every ending needs to feel like there’s more to come.

The first TV adaptation of Shõgun came out in 1980, and has since become a touchstone for other prestige small screen productions. Still cited as a classic, it was the reason the 2024 remake happened at all – even if the writers and producers did want to move a long way from that version’s slightly whitewashed script. Made far better and bolder, with a delicate sense of duty to both the novel and to real history, this generation’s Shōgun stands as something special – and there’s every chance it’ll keep standing for a long time to come.

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If Die Hard is a Christmas film, so is All Of Us Strangers – a festive story that surely only wasn’t released a month ago because it would have ruined the holidays by leaving everyone in floods of tears. A cold late January is far better timing for the saddest film of the year though (if anything manages to beat it, 2024 is going to be tough one…), if only to let the flashes of warmth feel all the more important to cling onto when you walk out of the cinema. In All Of Us Strangers, indie director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) makes a film to be treasured – wounding and healing like a traumatic memory – and an early contender for the best of the year.

Here’s Adam (Andrew Scott), hanging decorations with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy); sat on the floor like a child as if any of this is normal. As if he’s not a grown man coping with loneliness and depression, and as if his parents didn’t both die in a car crash 30 years ago. Real ghost stories are more about the unfinished business of those left behind, and Adam’s pain lies in everything he never managed to say to his family after the age of 12 – now somehow given the chance after he revisits his old childhood home and finds his mum and dad still alive, exactly as they were the night before they died.

Growing up gay but robbed of his own coming out story, Adam has all the conversations he might have had as a teenager – finally dealing with everything he left buried back in the past. And it works. Now sparking a relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), the only other man in his block, Adam’s life starts to find hope and meaning the more time he spends back in his perfect 1980s Christmas.

Blending bits of It’s A Wonderful Life, Tom’s Midnight Garden and 2021’s Petite Maman in reverse, All Of Us Strangers is the kind of ghost story that frightens with feeling; coming back at night to hollow you out and make you hug the people closest. There’s a flicker of Aftersun, too, in the way Haigh deals with memories: Paul Mescal somehow managing to pick two of the best British indie scripts in years inside the same 12 months for two of his finest roles to date.

It’s Scott, though, that really carries the heart of the whole film. Hiding his childhood vulnerability under the flimsiest shreds of adulthood, Scott gives the kind of honest, emotional, deeply personal performance that could only be cheapened by an armful of awards. Haigh, too, will undoubtedly spend the next few months making well-deserved acceptance speeches, but there’s something about All Of Us Strangers that elevates it above all of that.

It might be brutally upsetting at times, but Haigh’s film disarms you with its tenderness – leaving you with something much more profound to say about the connections we make and break along the way. Less a tragic nightmare than a beautiful, melancholic dream, All Of Us Strangers is one to keep close.

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Band Of Brothers is still pretty tough to beat. Coming out in 2001, sandwiched between The Sopranos and The Wire, it helped usher in the ‘Golden Age Of TV‘ with a 10-hour WWII epic that made Saving Private Ryan look like a trailer. If that wasn’t enough, it was the launchpad for a dozen careers, including Damian Lewis, Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. The Pacific followed in 2010 (enter Jon Bernthal and Rami Malek) and now, finally, we have the follow-up, this time centred around the bomber crews of the American Air Force.

Just as worthy, twice as expensive, and equally full of all-tomorrow’s A-listers, Masters Of The Air is another essential slice of old-school prestige television that completes Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ blockbuster boxset trilogy with serious style and violence.

Not that you can tell who the hell anyone is for the first couple of hours. Half-hidden behind full-face masks in the cramped cockpits of identical B-17 bombers, all dressed the same, it’s only the most distinctive eyebrows that stand out at first. For the most part, that’s Austin Butler, Callum Turner and Barry Keoghan – the pilots in command of the American crews stationed in Suffolk that spent their war running increasingly dangerous bombing raids over northern Europe between 1942 and 1945.

These are the men of “The Bloody Hundredth”, earning their grim nickname after taking some of the worst aerial casualties of the war – shown here as young, cocky, terrified kids forced to squeeze into a thin metal tube and drift slowly over Germany while a million guns ripped them to shreds from below. Where Band Of Brothers and The Pacific started their episodes on emotional interviews with the real veterans involved, Masters Of The Air sadly arrives too late for many of them to be left alive, not that most made it out of the war in the first place.

By episode three, the show looks like a meat grinder. By episode nine, it’s hard to leave the series behind without a profound sense of respect for the nightmare endured by a whole generation. Prisoner of war stories, escape stories, romance stories and stories of extraordinary kinship and courage and trauma overfill nine hours with sharp, fierce drama as Masters Of The Air gradually moves out of the cockpit and onto the ground, but it never strays far from a deep sense of responsibility to history.

Director Cary Fukunaga (No Time To Die) and creators John Shiban and John Orloff set the tone from the first few episodes but the misty-eyed, cinematic sheen comes straight from producer Steven Spielberg, bathing every hero shot in holy light – and lending the extraordinary aerial action scenes the kind of weight (and budget) that wins Oscars. But maybe it’s the casting director who deserves the credit here, assembling what feels like the class of ’24 in Butler (bleeding movie-star charisma in every frame), Turner and Keoghan, plus rising stars Darragh Cowley, Anthony Boyle, Branden Cook, Nate Mann and more.

When Band Of Brothers first came out, it was the kind of show that sold new television sets. Two decades later, Masters Of The Air is only selling Apple TV+ subscriptions, but it feels like no less of an event. This kind of thing doesn’t come around too often.

‘Masters Of The Air’ streams on Apple TV+ from January 26

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As the galaxy far, far away gets far, far bigger, everything is starting to feel a little bit small. Almost 50 years after Star Wars started, we’re still getting told the same story – every main character only a few steps removed from each other by family, fraternity or by guest-starring in each other’s own spin-off series. As fresh and fun as Ahsoka often is, there’s a slight staleness starting to creep in with what has to be the deepest cut of the franchise so far.

• Read more: What time is Ahsoka on Disney+?

Technically an off-shoot of The Mandalorian (not to be confused with The Book Of Boba Fett), Ahsoka is also a continuation of the story left off in the 2017 animated show, Rebels – itself a sequel to The Clone Wars cartoon series that started back in 2008. It’s that far back you have to go, too, to find the origin story of alien Jedi badass Ahsoka Tano – one-time apprentice to Anakin Skywalker (soon to become Darth Vader).

If you want to skip all the backstory and jump straight in, you can’t. Casual Star Wars fans will likely be a bit lost from the outset as Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) raids the lair of a space witch to steal an orb that’s actually a map that maybe leads to the hidden location of historical baddie Grand Admiral Thrawn. Vanished Rebels hero Ezra Bridger is also rumoured to be hiding out in the same spot, which brings Mandalorian punk Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Twi’lek general Hera (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and beloved cartoon droid Chopper back into the fold as well.

Throw in a rogue ex-Jedi (played by the late Ray Stevenson, in his last on-screen role), an evil Sith apprentice (Ivanna Sakhno) and Vader himself (Hayden Christensen) and you have a series that bridges all the widest gaps in the Star Wars canon – preparing the timeline for the upcoming Skeleton Crew show, and setting the stage for showrunner Dave Filoni’s planned feature film that’s apparently going to tie everything together in a few years.

That all sounds slightly exhausting, but it rarely is. Ahsoka might lose its cinematic edge in a tangle of plot threads and side characters, but it swaps grandeur for snappiness. More like a live-action Rebels than a small-screen movie, the show rattles along with the same low-stakes, high-energy vibes of Filoni’s cracking cartoon series, giving it a pleasant lightness that’s been missing in Star Wars recently.

All the weight the show does have comes from Ahsoka herself. Pushed slightly to the background in the first few episodes, Dawson still gives the complex, jaded, driven character all the gravitas she deserves – more than doing justice to the best under-served tentacle-headed hero in the universe. Bordizzo, too, does a great job of bringing Sabine’s spikiness to life, turning a fan-favourite character into what feels like a whole new hero.

The action cuts fast and loose (apparently you can be stabbed through the guts with a lightsaber now and hop out of bed the next morning), but it’s all slickly served up and polished to a Disney+ sheen. This isn’t the grounded grit of Andor and it isn’t the stripped-back sweep of The Mandalorian nor the multiplex ambition of Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Ahoska has more than enough of its own charm and electricity to be something greater than filler.

‘Ahsoka’ streams on Disney+ from August 23

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He’s won seven Grammys, two Brits and an Oscar. He’s one of the most successful record producers of all time – counting hits with Lady Gaga, Adele and Paul McCartney in his discography. He’s played the Super Bowl. Amy Winehouse was his muse. Meryl Streep is his mother-in-law. But at 4am, unable to sleep, Mark Ronson was nervously checking his phone to see if he’d written a good enough demo to make it onto the Barbie soundtrack.

“I wanted to get the job, but I also didn’t want to just give them some generic dance shit. I wanted to do something I’ve never done before.” Talking via Zoom from his New York apartment, fresh from Cannes, Ronson still seems in awe of Barbie director Greta Gerwig – and from getting the opportunity to work on the biggest movie of the year.

“The minute I knew Greta Gerwig was directing… I signed up”

“The minute I knew Greta was directing the film, that she was writing it with her partner Noah [Baumbach], and that it was Barbie… I signed up. I mean, I did read the script. And the script was incredible. But honestly, if it had been bad I still would have said yes.”

Asked to write something quick for Barbie’s first big musical number (a sparkly dance party in the disco-fied Dreamhouse), Ronson only had a week before choreography began to come up with something to fit the scene. “It felt like if I did a good job on that track there might be a chance to do more,” he remembers. “But it was getting close to the deadline and I didn’t have anything. Finally, at the last minute, I had this track that I liked. I named it ‘Tastes Like Barbie’ and sent it in overnight. I knew it was already mid-morning in England, where they were filming. I always turn my phone off before I go to bed but I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t resist checking my email. Greta loved it. She said she’d already listened to it 100 times on the way to set. It felt like I could breathe again.”

Later, he asked Dua Lipa to work on the vocals (“I always felt like it had a Future Nostalgia feel to it”), and the track developed into ‘Dance The Night’. Ronson’s single contribution to Barbie had grown into one of the most ambitious projects he’d ever worked on. Lizzo followed. As did Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Charli XCX, Sam Smith, Billie Eilish, Haim, PinkPantheress, Karol G and FIFTY FIFTY. Assembling 17 original tracks with every one of the biggest names in pop, Ronson turned a movie soundtrack into the hottest album of 2023.

“You know, I’ve been asked to do songs for movies before,” he says, talking slowly in a transatlantic slur, hanging every sentence off a long pause and the word “like”. “And they just say, like, ‘hey, we’re doing a Ghostbusters reboot! Just make a song!’ Like, sure, you can go make a song but your brain goes 1000 different ways. No offence to the Ghostbusters reboot, but they ended up with, like, 11 interpolations of the original Ghostbusters song on that movie…”

Ah yes, the Ghostbusters reboot (not that one, the other one, with Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, in 2016…). Ronson’s ‘Get Ghost’, with Passion Pit and A$AP Ferg, marked a turning point in his work on film. By then, he’d already contributed tracks to a dozen movies – but they’d mostly been songs he’d already released elsewhere.

“My first single, [2003 funk hip-hop mash-up] ‘Ooh Wee’, did pretty well in England when it came out, but the main reason people know it in America is because it was in the [2003 Jessica Alba romcom] Honey, right in the opening scene,” he says, still slightly bemused by the fact that his biggest hits have had such a shelf-life on adverts, end-credits and cartoon chipmunk dances. “Even though a lot of my solo records haven’t done so great, for some reason filmmakers seem to like them. And they still use ‘Ooh Wee’ as the bumper for insurance ads. I’m like, ‘why the fuck didn’t you guys play it when it was actually out?!”

Digging further into his early inspirations, Ronson names Footloose and Top Gun as the soundtracks that first made an impression when his mum moved him from London to New York as an eight-year-old. “In the ‘80s, they were the records you just saw everywhere. Every kid had ‘Thriller’, and every kid had those two movie soundtracks.”

Waxing about his love for Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Danger Zone’ and Steve Steven’s guitar riff (and the time he slipped the Top Gun theme into a DJ set at Tom Cruise’s wedding, getting him to shoot finger guns on the dance floor), Ronson talks about soundtracks the way he talks about all music. As obsessed with Carter Burwell’s Fargo score as he is with Eric B. & Rakim’s ‘Know The Ledge’ on Tupac’s classic Juice hip hop compilation, his own first movie credit is harder to place.

“Sometimes with movie music, you just need to get the fuck out of the way”

“I think I did a song for Zoolander?”, he asks, after a pause. “They were just having people cover songs, and I did ‘Call Me’ by Blondie with Nikka Costa. But the first time I was asked to actually write music for a film was Mortdecai, with Johnny Depp.” The 2015 flop isn’t remembered that fondly, if at all, and Ronson has his own issues with his retro jazz score. “I hate to say it now, but… I didn’t know as much then. And I didn’t think about things like serving the picture. When I watch that film, the music is far too funky, all of the time. I think that’s something I was definitely struggling with around that time too, after [his second album] ‘Version’. Like, ‘oh is that what people want from me?’

“The thing I learned very, very quickly doing the score for Barbie is that you’re always serving the picture. You’re always serving the emotion. You have to turn off all the things you know about making pop and rock and soul music for the last 30 years. Yes, it needs to be beautiful, but sometimes you just need to get the fuck out the way.”

By 2016, Ronson was starting to realise exactly what that meant. First there was the track on the Ghostbusters reboot, then work on Scarlett Johannsson’s singing snake solo in The Jungle Book and a song with Queens rapper Action Bronson for Suicide Squad. “This was right when ‘Uptown Funk’ was still kind of crazy,” he says. “Even though it’d been out for over a year, we were rehearsing for the Super Bowl, and we had all this stuff going on, I started getting drawn to these different projects. Swingers is one of my favourite movies of all time, so when I ran into [director] Jon Favreau and he asked me about The Jungle Book I said I’d love to do it. I was there in the studio with Homer [Steinweiss] and Tommy [Elmhirst] and all these amazing musicians that I’ve worked with since [Amy Winehouse’s classic 2006 album] Back To Black, and we had two hours with Scarlett, who had this great, crazy, super-throaty New York rasp. She was great.”

Finding his way towards more mature film writing, the next biggest milestone came in 2018 with A Star Is Born – and with that, an Oscar.

“We were working on Gaga’s album ‘Joanne’ and Bradley Cooper stopped by the studio one afternoon. I like his films. He showed up looking like a movie star. So we hung out,” Ronson smiles. “He was really sweet, talking about this new script that they were both doing. I played him the song called ‘Joanne’ and he’s like, ‘that’s great, can I have it?’. I know he’s a big star and everything, but I really liked that song. And I kind of needed it for Gaga’s record.”

Agreeing to take some time out of the schedule to work on something new for the film with Gaga, Ronson remembers the exact moment ‘Shallow’ clicked – after days spent trying to nail the chorus. “We were working in this incredible studio in Malibu, [Los Angeles] – Rick Rubin’s studio, Shangri La – and it had this really long echoey hallway. I have this very distinct memory of Gaga’s voice coming from 30 feet away, sounding so excited about something as she came in. She sat down at the piano and started singing ‘I’m off the deep end…’”

“Where else am I going to find someone to sing ‘I’m Just Ken’?”

Noticing that something had changed after A Star Is Born – and now adding an Academy Award to his mantlepiece – more movie projects started turning up, but none of them felt like Ronson was throwing everything he had at the screen. “I think it was fun to just make some feel-good shit around then,” he says, looking back on the tracks he made with Anderson. Paak and DJ Shadow for cartoon pigeon comedy Spies In Disguise. “That was coming off the back of ‘Late Night Feelings’, which was just an immensely personal record and a little bit more melancholic, so it was nice to have some licence to make something totally different.”

All of which led to Barbie. As much fun as Ronson had with the film (“I can be as serious as I need to be sitting in a studio with Miley Cyrus working on a track… but [Barbie is the only place] I’m going to find someone to sing ‘I’m Just Ken’), the soundtrack was also a chance to hone the film skills he’d been working on throughout his whole career. This was going to be a compilation record – his biggest yet – but one that was always only there to serve the story.

“There were some great songs that just didn’t feel tonally right at the end of the day, so they didn’t end up in the film,” he says, not naming any names. “Everything had to serve the movie. It had to push the picture. There was never any idea of just putting in a ‘hot track’, as they call it, or a ‘needle drop’.”

Feeling like a snapshot of pop’s global reach in 2023, as well as of how varied its sub-genres really are, the album found its sound by accident. Ronson and Gerwig decided to approach their favourite artists and see who was keen to get involved. To their surprise, everyone was.

“Everybody is the best in their lane. And we went after them all,” he says. “I would have been over the moon to have gotten a quarter of these artists, but they all just kept coming back saying yes. We showed [Colombian superstar] KAROL G the scene on Venice Beach Boardwalk, and Charli XCX got the chase sequence. Everyone was just like, ‘I got it. Let me send you something in a week.’”

Dua Lipa turned in a summer anthem. Lizzo wrote the opening number like she was on Broadway (“Greta loved it so much that she ran out of the room and played it for Margot over the phone”). Billie Eilish got a “secret” track. Haim nailed the big retro tearjerker. Ryan Gosling smashed a Meat Loaf-inspired ballad that’s the highlight of the whole film.

“I was never a big musical theatre buff growing up, and that’s not ever something I felt like I’d go into,” says Ronson. “But as I’ve gotten older, I love [musical theatre legend] Stephen Sondheim and I appreciate all of it. Barbie’s really given me licence to make stuff I’ll never get to make. I mean, someone like Johnny Marr is my musical hero, but to work with people who come from this other art form feels more magical to me. Films have more fairy dust. I don’t know, it was just very… gratifying to be a part of this.”

Clearly still slightly star-struck, Ronson seems more at home talking about Barbie than he does anything else he’s ever worked on. He’s proud. And he’s obviously also where he wants to be – finding a way to mesh his skills making super-singles with his passion for movies in a way that finally makes sense. A way that turns pop soundtracks into something genuinely new and exciting.

“Listen, my instincts aren’t always right. They’ve definitely been wrong before. I don’t want to use any, like, trite adjectives, but this one really did feel… special.”

‘Barbie The Album’, executive produced by Mark Ronson, is out now on Atlantic Records

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The atom bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 reportedly killed up to 226,000 people. The war they ended killed up to 85 million. The weight of humanity was put on the scales 78 years ago and one man decided which way they tipped – a scientist whose work in theoretical physics held the power to end wars, to start them, and to change the whole course of history.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning book, American Prometheus, is known as the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer – and it’s easy to see why director Christopher Nolan picked it up in the first place. Obsessively researched, dense with detail and immaculately structured, it’s the perfect subject for Nolan – and for what might be his best film so far.

Here he makes his biggest and smallest movie in one – something eclipsing the scale of Inception and the intimacy of The Prestige – a dense three-hour drama set in cramped rooms filled with men talking about particle physics and political depositions that feels more thrilling and explosive than any summer blockbuster.

If you’re not too hot on your nuclear fission, don’t worry. Complex theories are explained with fishbowls and marbles and dazzling visual effects, but Oppenheimer isn’t about science, it’s about a man. Painting a delicate character portrait on the largest canvas imaginable, Nolan casts Cillian Murphy as the flawed, brilliant doctor at the centre of his history – and then pushes pretty nearly everything else out of the way.

Oppenheimer’s most famous words (“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”, taken directly from Hindu scripture) are repeated twice in the film, years apart. First in a flash of arrogance, then in horror, everything that happens in between is Oppenheimer’s own fall from grace, finding a haunting moral worminess for Murphy, and only Murphy, to live in.

For a film so long and so crammed with great performances, the laser focus of the script is astonishing. Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr are all exceptional (as is Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh and pretty much every other A-lister in Hollywood), but they’re all playing parts that Nolan deliberately places as far in the background as he can.

“You’re not just self-important, you’re actually important!” Damon’s General Groves (Oppenheimer’s boss) barks at the rail-thin protagonist, something his long-suffering wife (Blunt) could easily have yelled the other way around. Cocky, obsessive and often unlikeable, Oppenheimer is a complicated man, but Murphy brings him brilliantly to life; cold and contradictory in a film that roars with fire. Literally.

It might not have the flashiest action set-pieces of the summer, but some of the scenes in Oppenheimer are dazzling enough to be genuinely frightening. See it in IMAX, if you can, to really experience it – not just the wall-shaking violence of the explosions but also Nolan’s giant 70mm camera pushed right up into the film’s heart and soul in even the smallest of talky boardroom scenes.

Not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb, Oppenheimer is a monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking. For years, Nolan has been perfecting the art of the serious blockbuster – crafting smart, finely-tuned multiplex epics that demand attention; that can’t be watched anywhere other than in a cinema, uninterrupted, without distractions. But this, somehow, feels bigger.

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As the MCU turns 15, it’s time to start growing up. If not yet fully adult, Marvel’s latest series at least feels a bit more mature in design and ambition – a teenage franchise stepping out into the real world for the first time.

The inspirations here are clear from the off. Calling back the relative grittiness of the second two Captain America movies, and the films and shows that influenced them both (’70s political classics like Three Days Of The Condor and The Parallax View, modern spy shows like Homeland and The Americans), Secret Invasion opens like every good thriller – with someone running away down a shadowy side street.

This is Martin Freeman’s Everett Ross (last seen in Wakanda Forever), jumping off a rooftop in the first few minutes to end up in a puddle of blood on the pavement below. Except it isn’t really him. His face transforms back into a green alien elf – one of the shapeshifting Skrulls who are trying to bring us down from the inside with their magic powers of impersonation.

With a million Skrulls at large, and all walking around looking and sounding like humans (even the British Prime Minister, according to episode two), the threat here is one that can’t be punched or zapped or blown up like most of Marvel’s usual bad guys. Nuance, negotiation and espionage are the only superpowers at play here.

On one side we have Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury (older, more jaded, now walking with a limp as he stalks through the series like an old-timey detective), Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill, and Ben Mendelsohn’s defected Skrull double agent, Talos. The aliens have Kingsley Ben-Adir’s rebel leader Gravik and Emilia Clarke’s firebrand revolutionary G’iah. Then there’s Olivia Coleman’s grinning MI6 agent (cutting off fingers with secateurs and making wanking jokes) and Don Cheadle’s politico Avenger in a suit, James Rhodes. All double and triple crossing each other by the end of the first episode, there are no good guys and bad guys in Secret Invasion – just a lot of blurred lines and shady motives.

Setting the series in modern day Russia feels like the most pointed political jab Marvel have made to date – deliberately reigniting old Cold War sentiments at a time when real-world politics are starting to heat them back up again. It might be a stretch to directly compare Secret Invasion to the ’70s classics it clearly loves, but the ambition is there; and so is the gear shift. Burning slowly without any of the trademark banter that keeps the MCU light, the change of pace feels odd for a franchise built on flashiness, but it works. Clicking nicely after the first hour, the show’s real blockbuster strength is in its cast.

Arguably wasting the talents of half of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters for the last 32 films, Marvel here finally gives the likes of Jackson and Cheadle something to really bite into. Already looking to be to the MCU what Andor was to Star Wars, Secret Invasion is less of a sea change for Phase Five than it is a hint of growing maturity – a sign that Marvel can grow up with its audience if it chooses to.

‘Secret Invasion’ streams on Disney+ from June 21

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