The American commercial film industry as it exists today is a slouching behemoth that seems to exist solely to throw up the most vivid, self-satirizing farces at its own expense, distilling not just in economic practice, but also in narrative and spectacle, the psychotic and parasitic obesity of late-stage capitalism. Without rival, the most entertaining of these farces in the last ten years has to have been Universal Picture's "Dark Universe" project, a proposed franchise of tentpole blockbusters that would have rebooted the studio's roster of classic monster I.P.s as interconnected serials in the vein of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The misguided commitment of taking decades-old "B" movie staples based on century-old romanticist literature, and trying to revive them as slightly more gothic variations on standard action-adventure fare, obviously goes back slightly further, particularly to the success of Stephen Sommers' The Mummy and The Mum...