Full Spoilers for Secrets of the Octopus, the three-part documentary series streaming on Disney+. I’m not going to avoid spoiling a documentary, am I?

Secrets of the Octopus(2024) is narrated by the smooth, calming voice of Paul Stephen Rudd, and stars octopus expert Dr. Alex Schnell. It was produced by famous ocean lover James Cameron.

Paul Rudd’s birthday was on the 6th of April! Happy 55th, Paul! I dedicate this review to you. This might be on the shorter side of the reviews, it is just a documentary about the octopus after all, it’s not like I’ll be talking through plot and character motivations or anything I usually would. But who doesn’t like a shorter review, eh? Or a bundle of miscellaneous reactions loosely tied together, I guess I’ll say. Let’s learn about the octopus!

• You couldn’t ask for a more beautifully shot documentary, and the scenes in the Great Barrier Reef are wonderful.
• Perhaps because it’s Paul Rudd, I find myself unable to take his narration fully seriously. He does so many things in his life with irony and shades of sarcasm that it can sound a bit like him playing a funny nature documentarian.
• The octopus is color-blind yet able to disguise one’s self to their surroundings within seconds. “She doesn’t need to see the color to be the color.” Nice one, Paul.
• Dr. Roger Hanlon, Camouflage Expert: “I call this [Female octopus] the king of camouflage.”
  Paul Rudd, Hater of Sexism: “Or in this case, the Queen.”
  [Five minutes later]
  Paul Rudd: “It seems that Roger has been accepted too.”
  He does not like Doctor Rog.
• These Doctors spend a lot of time underwater with bare hands, imagine how pruney they get. Yucky.
• “Scarlett’s now just over a year old. She may have already mated with several males and stored packets of their sperm inside her. She can even choose to mix the packets to fertilize her eggs. If a better-suited male comes along, she’ll get rid of her packets and use his alone.”
  So you’re just carrying sperm with you for fun then, Scarlett? In your weird brain/tongue/finger tentacles? Cool.
• It seems the octopus mating ritual is “I’m gonna run around and attract a predator and then shapeshift real quick so you know I’m legit.” What an alpha male move.
• Doctor Rog: “I’ve got to tell you, I’ve never seen what I saw today. We’ve learned something scientifically.”
  What are you talking about, you weird pervert?
• The sounds of a coconut octopus eating a crab are so crunchy and disturbing and matter of fact, I feel like I’m just opening myself up to new nightmare avenues as I watch it stumble away with a partially digested crab in its mouth.
• Spoken like he’s dead behind the eyes: “Fresh algae. Mmmmm. So mouth-watering.”
  Never change, Paul.
• “She liquifies the crabs inside, making crab soup.” Unnerving indeed. What if an octopus did that to me? I’d be John soup!
• A doctor speaking about octopus sleep: “After about 40 minutes she’ll experience R.E.M. sleep.” It’s REM, right? You pronounce it as a word? It just sounds like she’s talking about the band. “I wonder sometimes if the octopus is dreaming about me.” Alright, bit egotistical. You have a camera in her cave, that doesn’t make you close.
• “The octopus would gladly eat her tiny new neighbor.” Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching Broadchurch, but that sounds sinister and worthy of a David Tennant investigation.
• “It’s brains VS prawn.” I love that he’s making the octopus fighting a shrimp sound like a cage fight.
• It’s hard for me to get excited when they get so hyped about octopi using tools and being brilliant and doing things never before seen on camera, because I don’t have much context. I guess I just always figured they were fairly sophisticated because they have to survive under stressful conditions. Like when I worked at Best Buy and realized I had basic capabilities I didn’t know existed. Big deal, man.
• “The weird thing about day octopuses is they have to touch each other to figure out what they want.” And how does that make an octopus sophisticated? That’s a basic lack of social awareness. “The day octopus wants to mate. Scarlett’s not interested. But he won’t give up. Scarlett’s in trouble. If he gets his arms tight around her, she could be suffocated.” Classic toxic masculinity. Also Scarlett just got new sperm, she doesn’t want you, man. She wants to hang out with her friend, Dr. Alex Schnell.
• “It’s octopus speed dating.” I’m just picturing that scene from 40 Year Old Virgin.
• “He extends his specialized mating arm.” Dating still sounds hard in the world of octopi, but wouldn’t it be easier if we all had extra arms we could put out to say “Hey, I’m lonely! Want to date?” Like those old ads where guys had a third stomach arm holding a sandwich.
• It’s taken me a while to finish this three-part documentary, but it is honestly pretty interesting. They’re talking about a new species of octopus called the Dorado which is so new it doesn’t even have an official scientific name! Isn’t that cool? No? Alright, sorry.
• “Great real estate may have attracted so many octopuses here.” See, they’re just like us! They have frustrating sex lives, they try to fight each other completely unprovoked, they’re annoyingly protective of their kids, they’re messy eaters, and they all flock to popular new areas to gentrify the shit out of untouched real estate.
• “This thriving octopolis…” What a wonderful word, Paul.
• “What more secrets are yet to be revealed? Only time will tell.” What an ending. Wait, no, there’s ten minutes of behind the scenes so they can show James Cameron. Hi, James! I’ll never watch your Avatar sequels!
• “But you know, Avatar was based on dream imagery, Terminator was based on dream imagery, scenes in Aliens were based on dream imagery.” We get it, James, you directed movies and you think that’s relevant to the octopus. What about that bit in Titanic where Billy Zane traps Leo in a sinking ship and the third act went on for seven years? Was that based on dream imagery? Did you dream that up in your submarine? “I’ve gone deeper than this.” Stop bragging, James Cameron! “I’ve got some creatures in the upcoming Avatar films that are inspired by deep creatures, deep cephalopods. Can’t say anything more about that right now.” Ugh. Alex Schnell was already impressed. We get it, you think you’re cool.
• I actually have no beef with James Cameron. I hate Avatar though.
• I mean, what more is there to say? It was a fun watch.

Overall Rating: 7/10(The octopus is a cool animal. This isn’t the kind of thing I normally talk about, so it’s hard to review and my ADHD wouldn’t let me stick with it consistently, but it’s good training for the two season documentary series on Apple he did about tiny animals.)
Rudd Rating: 8.1/10(He has a very smooth voice, but it’s hard to take him seriously sometimes. I keep expecting a layer of irony or him playing the Mac & Me clip he harassed Conan with.)

What’s this? The review has ended but there’s still much more to read, why’s that? Because this isn’t just your ordinary octopus documentary review. And it’s the 30th Ruddtrospective and it was his 55th birthday a bit ago, so there’s a surprise here for you. You thought this was only about octopi. Wrong. Welcome to a very rough, rudimentary discussion of the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer that came out three weeks ago. Why here and now? Because I’m hyped and I can. And I had finals and packing and delayed this because documentaries are boring. What does Paul Rudd have to do with this? You’ll see. Full spoilers for this trailer. If you don’t want to know too much about the facts and possible plots of this movie that isn’t out yet, leave this documentary review.

Deadpool & Wolverine(2024) will have been directed by Shawn Levy. It will star Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Deadpool’s friends, TVA people, and lots of cameos from Fox X-Men characters.

• Why am I reviewing the trailer? It looks awesome and I have many thoughts.
• Wolverine is in a bar, of course, and probably killed all the X-Men, of course, (We trying to adapt Old Man Logan again, guys? Or at least use some iconography?) but my favorite part is how mean and particularly vicious the dynamic between him and Wade is.
  “Unless you want to take a deep breath through your fucking forehead, I suggest you reconsider.”
  To which Logan responds by smiling grimly and pressing his head against the barrel of the gun. What a great moment.
• Alright, this is why we’re here. In the beloved but really creepy and sad Mark Millar comic Old Man Logan, most of the heroes are dead and the world’s a desert. Something they pulled from that is Giant-Man’s gigantic corpse just lying around in the sand. But in this, it’s revealed through Cassandra Nova’s descent from a giant skull with an Ant-Man helmet, that an Ant-Man died in the void and his skeleton was crafted into a giant villain headquarters. So Paul Rudd’s not in this, but his giant CGI bones are, and boy if I don’t think this is an incredible concept. This is exactly the kind of weird creepy thing I want in my superhero movies, but anyone on the internet saying it’s a dig at Quantumania just because this is an irreverent movie should shush. That’s not what this is. It’s just cool.
• We can see at least four old Fox characters surrounding Paul’s corpse, including Toad, Pyro, Lady Deathstrike, and Azazel, Nightcrawler’s dad. We’re getting a lot of old miscellaneous X-Men actors back, it seems.
• Cassandra Nova is now officially the main villain in this, besides maybe the TVA. In the comics, Cassandra is Professor Xavier’s evil twin who he tried to kill in utero I believe? Because he could tell psychically how rotten she was. She’s a genocidal sociopath. In this she’s played by Emma Corrin, and she’s got a bored, tea drinking, creepy Alice in Wonderland vibe to her. She seems to use her telepathy mostly to make people fight in the wasteland or puppeteer Hugh Jackman into stabbing himself. And Wade fought Juggernaut in the last movie, so with all these Professor X family members about, maybe the rumors of a Legion cameo are true.
• Much of the action in this trailer seems to take place in the Void from Loki, which is how we’ll get to see all these cameos and variants. We see Alioth, the Void monster, approaching dead Paul. My theory is that the TVA recruit Wade to “work” for them under the pretense of him being an ultimate savior who can reclaim his glory days so they can feed into his ego, and once he rounds up some variants for them, specifically a very difficult to handle Wolverine, they both get pruned and dropped into the void with the Fox logo. And that’s why we see Wade killing TVA agents.
• The action scenes teased in this look incredibly brutal. Logan stabs Wade in the crotch, Wade shoots him in the sides. It’s like a violent game of chess. I think one or two of these fight scenes will be mentally influenced by Cassandra’s telepathy, but at least one will just be them arguing. Either way, it does seem like they’re taking advantage of having two psychopaths who can regenerate go all out, no holds barred.
• We get a slo-mo cool guy walk set to a wonderful Madonna song with a suddenly sleeveless Wolverine. One of the abandoned stores they’re in front of is “Liefeld’s Just Feet” because the “creator” of Deadpool, Rob Liefeld, who drew the costume and named him Wade Wilson (Ripoff of Deathstroke, AKA Slade Wilson) before someone else gave him the traits people like, famously could not draw feet. He was one of the most popular artists of the 90’s even though he just created knock-offs of other characters who were either big dudes with pouches and big guns that looked like VCR’s or women with tiny wastes and massive breasts and butts. He’s an egomaniac and a hack who called himself “The Michael Jordan of comic books” and I’m sure this is a loving joke, but I’ll read it as spiteful because fuck that guy, he’s annoying and inexplicably successful.
• Dogpool is shown licking Wade’s face while Logan grimaces in the background. There are theories that Dogpool is only the beginning, there have been set photos of a Zen, unblemished Wade with long hair and theories Blake Lively will cameo as Lady Deadpool. I don’t love the idea that this movie is also doing Deadpool Corps in the middle of all of this void stuff, but hey, who knows.
• Hopefully we don’t just get mopey sad Wolverine the whole time, I assume the guy in the white tux in the first trailer will be Daniel Radcliffe or something and we’ll see our Logan get more unhinged and less sad as the plot unfolds.
• Before Wade and Blind Al mourn the days their studio would let them do cocaine, we see him and Logan jump into a Dr. Strange portal. Is that Dr. Strange opening that, are they going to edit them into the portal scene in Endgame? Or is that a fakeout and in the movie that’s a time door and they jump back into the TVA and kill Matthew McFadyen? I know Cassandra Nova is the villain in the Void, but I suspect she’s just having weird Mad Max desert death tournaments with all the other Fox X-Men characters for fun because she’s bored, and the real threat is the TVA erasing Wade’s timeline. Maybe she can open magic portals, and they’ve won her tournament to get back to Deadpool’s world, where the Liefeld store and TVA agent killing occurs. And the TVA isn’t erasing his timeline, but taking him off the table so an incursion or some other multiversal shenanigans can destroy it for them. Does any of this make sense?
• Since the trailer was released a TV spot was put out where Deadpool and Logan approach the skeleton and Wade says “Huh! Paul Rudd finally aged.” Wonderful. Let’s fucking go.

Overall Rating: 11/10(I was having a really bad week when this came out, which is maybe why I’ve seen it roughly 50 times. But 8 out of 10 doctors say that watching a trailer too much and then blogging about it can help stave off soul-crushing depression and hopelessness. It could still end up being a bad movie, but in times of such cynicism and nitpickery, it’s nice to just have something I can be 100% fully excited for like I was when I was a kid, something with cool-looking action and characters I love.)
Rudd Rating: 8/10(In the documentary we hear him but don’t see him, in this we see his bones but don’t hear him, probably because he won’t really be in it. But he still gets kudos for his corpse being used in a cool, weird way.)

Quick update on the Rudd Radar. In addition to The Invite, Death Of A Unicorn, and Friendship (With Tim Robinson.), Paul Rudd’s upcoming films list on IMDb now includes a film called Power Ballad about a wedding singer played by Paul Rudd and a pop star played by Nick Jonas who’s fading in popularity who decide to write a song together. It will be directed by the guy who made Sing Street, which I haven’t seen, and it’s filming in Dublin currently. It’s billed as a musical, and would be the first Paul Rudd has acted in. Sounds fun, huh? In the meantime, we look to next time, when I’ll cover a love story people won’t stop telling.