This article was originally published in Watch The Skies fanzine – September 2020

I gave sincere consideration to putting the Netflix movie Project Power in here this month. It seemed like pandering to me. Diversity is extremely important. Representation in science fiction, fantasy and comic book based stories matters. Project Power is a great science fiction action movie – go watch it – but it’s not what I’m going to emphasize today. Today we talk about the Spanish movie Unknown Origins.

Unknown Origins is the story of a detective who must find a serial killer. The serial killer is recreating comic book origin stories as his murder scenes. The detective’s best hope in cracking the case comes from the nerdy comic book loving son of a fellow officer. It’s part buddy cop film and part love letter to comics and cosplay. As the story unfolds we get to dig deeper in to the lives and relationships that drive each of the people involved in this case while trying to solve the mystery.

This movie has a lot of very fun moments in it. I’m not going to give any specific examples as I don’t want to give any of the best lines away – and there are a couple of very good lines in there. It’s not a long movie, clocking in just around an hour and a half, but it packs a lot of stuff into a very short time. The creators have a few bits that land in the area of stereotype, but then they knock the edges off of them and give a few touching moments in the film. It definitely has a viewpoint that could be called ‘defensive’ as far as comics and cosplay goes.

The mystery itself is very, very well written. I thought I had it all figured out and was completely wrong. I had used some of the clues laid out in the movie, but I didn’t pick the right ones. I asked my wife to tell me her theory as soon as she thought she had it figured out. She used a different set of clues that were laid out in the background and came up with an incorrect answer as well. I have seen at least one other review out there that said they’d figured out the mystery right away, essentially as soon as they saw that one character. Perhaps I need to watch more mysteries, but to me it was refreshing to have a mystery that kept us guessing right up to the big reveal.

I recommend watching this movie in the original Spanish with subtitles. I watched the trailer with English dub and it just lost something in the translation. I also recommend hanging around until the very end. There’s a post credits scene, just as there is with any good comic book film!