Kong: Skull Island (PG-13)
"Ape-ocalypse Now"
1973: A mysterious organization wishes to explore an unknown island in the South Pacific, a recently discharged US Vietnam Helicopter strike team is enlisted to escort them there, and upon arrival are met with more than they bargained for in the re-imagined relaunch of the King Kong legacy, Kong: Skull Island.
Firstly, lets get it on the table that the casting is great; John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, and Brie Larson all populate the movie well. But for every Shea Whigham as a quirky grizzled veteran there is someone like Hiddleston who is left without much to do or act except to be pretty for the camera, or like most of the cast just be unnamed expendable Kong fodder (and boy are they expendable!). The only exception is venerable character actor John C. Reilly (Boogie Nights) as a WW2 flyboy marooned on the island. He steals almost every scene, which isn't to say everything John does is solid improv gold, but it IS to say that the majority of the movie's scenes are stiff bores without him, and since he featured so prominently in marketing for the film the producers probably agreed. The star left to mention is Kong, and he is definitively the strongest version of himself since the golden age. Well rendered and animated without a hint cartooniness, Kong comes off well but he also doesn't have much to do. Stripped of his classically unPC romance with the human female to motivate him, with no urban landscape to show off his gigantism and prowess, he is present just to growl, shout and pound the diminutive jungle around him.
Plot holes are as big as the cracks in Kong's CG nose. Is this an action-comedy or a Monster movie? Can this be called a remake if major plot points of 1933 Kong are ignored? Gone is any romance or sense of adventure. From the get go it's a "let's just see who gets eaten next," instead of a dark mystery. And every character's motivation to go into a potentially deadly unknown situation without proper training or preparation is the movie's biggest weakness, not only by civilians but followed blindly by a squadron of battle hardened Helicopter-jockeys and gunmen just off the front line in 'Nam. It just reeks of the sandbox "because it is cool" reason for film making without a hint of the real politics, ramifications, or artistry of the Vietnam 70s era.
The director Jordan Vogt-Roberts seems to be juggling things that aren't his forte. What was sold by WB marketing as Apocalypse Now with giant apes seems to not even understand what makes a good Vietnam movie, let alone a good Kaiju one. And while the CG monsters and production design hold up well and look great on screen (much improved over Jackson's 2005 remake), there are many scenes of the humans with overly obvious green screening or framed just for the 3d effect and it is jarring. Add to that Zack Snyder's slow-motion heavy DP handling the lens, and you have a slog through digital jungles and pointless fake giant things smacking each other dramatically. Sometimes it looks pretty, but most often than not it looks created. As does the 1970s setting, never once does it ring true. It feels like everyone, both behind and in front of the camera, are making their best bet what the decade was and ending up with a pale imitation.
Now imagine the existential dread of Coppolla's Apocalypse Now, but instead of Kurtz at the end of the river there is a 60 foot tall Ape-like creature fighting skull monsters, with PTSD'ed men refusing to follow orders or civilians turning out to be the true evil or something along those lines, and it could have been epic (and a unique spin on a classic). Instead it ends up "we found giant monsters, they eat us, lets escape or kill them", the end. Sure there are hints that the next movies are going to be crazy; Rodan, Mothra, even King Ghidora is mentioned in the credits and the inevitable Kong vs. Godzilla is just a stones throw away, but what about the movie now, the one you just watched? Comparatively Skull Island falls well short of the experience of the 1933 classic, maybe even of the 1976 version. It turns out to be just as many empty calories as the tub of popcorn you bought, and about as much forethought and love went into it's making.
4.5 Chest Rockwells Saying "WeeWee" out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
Showing posts with label PG-13. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PG-13. Show all posts
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Captain America: Civil War (PG-13)
"A House of M divided against itself cannot stand"
After surviving the Age of Ultron, Captain America must now find and keep his friend from being hunted down and killed as the rest of the world's bureaucracies are cracking down on unfettered Superheros (aided by the one and only Iron Man) in the Russo brother's newest follow up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The Russo brothers proved themselves with CA:Winter Soldier. That film had pure, clean action and lots of it, all seen through it's hero and his friends against a worldwide conspiracy that threatened the democracy and freedom they love. Seeing these two movies back to back is a whiplash of culture shock. Civil war instead has high instances of shaky cameras, action scenes that for all the world look unplanned and formed instead in the edit room, grandiose cameos from other parts of the MCU just to sell future films, and just an overall inability to focus on the narrative and draw the necessary lines in the dirt to justify it's own title. These are the ying and yang of Captain America films.
First off the aesthetic and production design is fantastic, the fleetingness of the world hopping almost feels Bond-ish (though perhaps unneeded, almost like they were chasing tax credits and filming wherever was most glamorously least expensive). New addition to the MCU Black Panther is not only wonderfully realized and portrayed, he looks cool and is a harbinger of good things to come from the FilmHouse of M. The special effects are solid and features the Russo's return to the franchise after their strongest MCU film to date, so what could go wrong?
Mostly it's wrong in calling it a Captain America film, it's primarily an Ironman film, and slightly an Avengers film. The return of Robert Downey Jr., his recruitment of the new Spider-man, his turn towards becoming a tool of the state are all allowed to overshadow Chris Evan's Captain's single-minded and strictly illegal devotion to a comrade come hell or high water. It's the Ironman show, he gets the best lines, the most gravitas, he's the bigger star (which isn't shocking when you consider RDJr's Ironman first launched the MCU). The movie feels motivated towards easy profits instead of cutting edge story. But the movie is called Captain America, and features this figure running around Europe breaking all manner of international laws which must be said would be somewhat against his character. There is a prevailing sense of Marvel not being willing to paint either hero in a bad light, especially RDJr, and it is a sign of the MCU's possible slow descent into suit-funded mediocrity (or at least the slump they've had going, especially with large cast blockbusters). It all leaves the center encounter, Cap vs Ironman, oddly empty and devoid of the passions needed to pull it off a Civil War.
Speaking of villain, the ones here are not only again wholly expendable, they are depressingly unmotivated and with master plan plot holes the size of Tony's ego. And if this movie stops and makes you ask "why would he?" and "why doesn't he...?," then the whole house of cards about the purpose of this movie falls hard. It becomes what some critics have described, an unmemorable cookie cutter "betcha can't wait to watch the next movies we make" money factory instead of the rock-solid best action movie that you could take your kid brother to go see, as American as apple pie and the stars and stripes.
6.5 Gi-Ant Man out of 10 (GOOD)
"A House of M divided against itself cannot stand"
After surviving the Age of Ultron, Captain America must now find and keep his friend from being hunted down and killed as the rest of the world's bureaucracies are cracking down on unfettered Superheros (aided by the one and only Iron Man) in the Russo brother's newest follow up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The Russo brothers proved themselves with CA:Winter Soldier. That film had pure, clean action and lots of it, all seen through it's hero and his friends against a worldwide conspiracy that threatened the democracy and freedom they love. Seeing these two movies back to back is a whiplash of culture shock. Civil war instead has high instances of shaky cameras, action scenes that for all the world look unplanned and formed instead in the edit room, grandiose cameos from other parts of the MCU just to sell future films, and just an overall inability to focus on the narrative and draw the necessary lines in the dirt to justify it's own title. These are the ying and yang of Captain America films.
First off the aesthetic and production design is fantastic, the fleetingness of the world hopping almost feels Bond-ish (though perhaps unneeded, almost like they were chasing tax credits and filming wherever was most glamorously least expensive). New addition to the MCU Black Panther is not only wonderfully realized and portrayed, he looks cool and is a harbinger of good things to come from the FilmHouse of M. The special effects are solid and features the Russo's return to the franchise after their strongest MCU film to date, so what could go wrong?
Mostly it's wrong in calling it a Captain America film, it's primarily an Ironman film, and slightly an Avengers film. The return of Robert Downey Jr., his recruitment of the new Spider-man, his turn towards becoming a tool of the state are all allowed to overshadow Chris Evan's Captain's single-minded and strictly illegal devotion to a comrade come hell or high water. It's the Ironman show, he gets the best lines, the most gravitas, he's the bigger star (which isn't shocking when you consider RDJr's Ironman first launched the MCU). The movie feels motivated towards easy profits instead of cutting edge story. But the movie is called Captain America, and features this figure running around Europe breaking all manner of international laws which must be said would be somewhat against his character. There is a prevailing sense of Marvel not being willing to paint either hero in a bad light, especially RDJr, and it is a sign of the MCU's possible slow descent into suit-funded mediocrity (or at least the slump they've had going, especially with large cast blockbusters). It all leaves the center encounter, Cap vs Ironman, oddly empty and devoid of the passions needed to pull it off a Civil War.
Speaking of villain, the ones here are not only again wholly expendable, they are depressingly unmotivated and with master plan plot holes the size of Tony's ego. And if this movie stops and makes you ask "why would he?" and "why doesn't he...?," then the whole house of cards about the purpose of this movie falls hard. It becomes what some critics have described, an unmemorable cookie cutter "betcha can't wait to watch the next movies we make" money factory instead of the rock-solid best action movie that you could take your kid brother to go see, as American as apple pie and the stars and stripes.
6.5 Gi-Ant Man out of 10 (GOOD)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (PG-13)
"I've got a bad feeling about this." - Every Han Solo
"The Force! Man, that's your answer to everything." - Clerks
"Millennium Falcon? More like Millennium Pandering." - Me.
Sitting in a darkened theater with a dawning internal awareness that you might be the only one twisting in your seat, uncomfortable with the low-risk plot, the awkward references and dismal acting. The popcorn is gone, the soda dull, and in your head rings the awful words "It's just an another modern remake, they spent all that time and effort just to remake it, and its a bad counterfeit Picasso, a copy, a fake" while everyone else claps and thanks god for George Lucas' non-involvement. The trailers were a bill of goods, sold by the aggressively pandering suits at Disney Corp., pap made by a director who's made a career of swerving from expectations, and it's as well made as it is creatively bankrupt, a soulless zombie in an expensive knock-off Armani shambling forever towards higher returns. At least those terrible prequels TRIED to do something new and failed spectacularly. Awakens just regurgitates what worked before with a wet, money hungry plop.
Meanwhile Awakens looks like it was wholly constructed in the edit suite, scenes come and go at a breakneck pace just so they happen and not in anyway conductive to the pacing. A scene will end abruptly, cross wipe to a completely different part of the universe, then back to the first without rhyme or reason except for story reasons the 2nd had to be put somewhere. It doesn't feel thought out or meticulously planned unlike real SWs, it feels cobbled together good enough, and considering the plot is just "girls and guys with force and cute droids and xwings and star destroyers and deathstars again" there very little excuse for it. And there are soooo many conveniences of illogic, the new crew just stumbling upon the abandoned Falcon being the most egregious and unnecessary, apparently the Force can and will do that kind of thing now.
So it's a remake, let's treat it as such. The scope and feel, the "Lawrence of Arabia in Space" tone of Star Wars is completely missing from Awakens. There are few calm, slow moments of world building here; even the obligatory scene-wipes seem somehow forced and overly fast; you don't inhabit this world only glimpse it. The only exposition we get is from the fanfictiony text crawl and one very stilted and strangely unemotional conversation between a craggled Han Solo and a stone faced General Leia Organa (who looks for all the world like they tightened her girdle so much she can't move let alone act). Between her strange head tilting and his half hearted swagger it more resembles the cringey "I love you" scene from CrystalSkull than the one from Empire Strikes Back, instead of a stroke of genius its an actual figurative cinematic stroke. It's all punctuated by that "it's mysterious because we are keeping you out of the loop" thing that is the oldest of JJ Abrams' tricks, and we need more answers than action. Why would the Republic be in this ramshackle state, never mind the mention in the opening or the reams of comics Disney has put out, the underdog yet again? This is a movie, explain it! And John Williams, where are you? The only time the music is noticed is when it was once again rehashing the themes from the first trilogy, there is no new piece that stands out and marches around the theater announcing it's greatness. Then there is all the fan service, the god damned fan service. Capt. Phasma is a marketing dream and fanboy joke. The "No look shot" is as bad as Greedo shooting first, and you want your new bad-ass Jedi girl, who can do all these things without training cuz you say so, to inherit the beloved fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy? Then earn it guys, because otherwise its just another lame fan wish-fulfillment without the politically incorrect metal bikini. Awakens suffers from the worst case of big budget sequelitis ever seen, literally Jump22's ethos of "People want you to do the same thing, Again. Just a bit bigger. Same lines, same jokes, same action, everything."
It's not all rehash. JJ does some new things with the camera (but why god, why keep does he keep using the lens flares, it must be an injoke?). There are some fun ideas, new uses of the Force that seem a bit questionable, but the reformed Stormtrooper story idea is the best of the bunch (but who's character is involved in countless bumbly spoken word comic relief just enough to ruin it). He doesn't say "Yeah that's what I'm talking about!" once, but they probably did do a take and it's laying on the cutting room floor after checking TVTropes for relevancy and deciding against running it. Yet some of the attempts of new stuff are as bad as any prequel, Solo's side business is simply just busy work, eating up screen time and adding nothing to the affair but bad jokes and a lot of CG monsters. There is just enough practical effects thrown in to kill the "curse of the prequels" stink list for the fans, but the rest is all remake-orama, and none of it improves on the original. The fighter pilots all look wrong, and besides main ace Poe (well played by Oscar Issac, star of Inside Llewyn Davis), the Resistance seems to be staffed by fanboys-and-girls pulled from the ranks of Deviantart who don't yet have drivers licenses let alone a pilot's one. The bad guy is no Vader, he is a twink with a temper tantrum, the Emperor has been replaced with a pale CGI creature who looks like should be spitting out "GOLLUM GOLLUM". The Nazi Youth has taken over the Empire from the elder British statesmen because... box office? Old Men no longer start Star Wars it seems. The Rebels don't meticulously plan how to blow up the DeathStar 3.0, or send a crack team of top commandos and their entire fleet and barely scrape out a victory. No, they stand around a readout of the plans point at a spot and say "we blow this up, right?" and then Han Solo winks and says "I got this, you don't wanna know how" because his plan is stupidly self sacrificing; instead of bringing the Army he just flies over to infiltrate the planet with 3 people (2 he just met) and of course saves the day, obviously! There is no sense of urgency, the big kill-weapon has to charge up for like a day, but the Rebellion is so confident in Han getting the shields down (AGAIN!) that they don't even bother EVACUATING the planet that will eventually be blown up, maybe, "waiting to be killed, waiting to be killed".
In the end big things get exploded good, people hug, and yet it still doesn't end. The final oddity, the mapquest montage, the overdone out of place LOTR spinning helicopter shot with a stupid nospeak Skywalker cliffhanger, cementing that SWTFA seems more inclined to be the New Harry Potter YA film franchise than a true new Star Wars film in a finite universe.
Star Wars, we meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.
4 Chubby C3P0's Unexplained Self-Referential Red Arms out of 10 (BAD)
PS - Kids will never understand the sweet tension build and release of the 20th Century Fox fanfare, LucasFilm Logo, and sudden burst of StarField and music on the silver screen. Sad.
PPS - Alternative Title: SW - An Old Hype
"I've got a bad feeling about this." - Every Han Solo
"The Force! Man, that's your answer to everything." - Clerks
"Millennium Falcon? More like Millennium Pandering." - Me.
Sitting in a darkened theater with a dawning internal awareness that you might be the only one twisting in your seat, uncomfortable with the low-risk plot, the awkward references and dismal acting. The popcorn is gone, the soda dull, and in your head rings the awful words "It's just an another modern remake, they spent all that time and effort just to remake it, and its a bad counterfeit Picasso, a copy, a fake" while everyone else claps and thanks god for George Lucas' non-involvement. The trailers were a bill of goods, sold by the aggressively pandering suits at Disney Corp., pap made by a director who's made a career of swerving from expectations, and it's as well made as it is creatively bankrupt, a soulless zombie in an expensive knock-off Armani shambling forever towards higher returns. At least those terrible prequels TRIED to do something new and failed spectacularly. Awakens just regurgitates what worked before with a wet, money hungry plop.
Meanwhile Awakens looks like it was wholly constructed in the edit suite, scenes come and go at a breakneck pace just so they happen and not in anyway conductive to the pacing. A scene will end abruptly, cross wipe to a completely different part of the universe, then back to the first without rhyme or reason except for story reasons the 2nd had to be put somewhere. It doesn't feel thought out or meticulously planned unlike real SWs, it feels cobbled together good enough, and considering the plot is just "girls and guys with force and cute droids and xwings and star destroyers and deathstars again" there very little excuse for it. And there are soooo many conveniences of illogic, the new crew just stumbling upon the abandoned Falcon being the most egregious and unnecessary, apparently the Force can and will do that kind of thing now.
So it's a remake, let's treat it as such. The scope and feel, the "Lawrence of Arabia in Space" tone of Star Wars is completely missing from Awakens. There are few calm, slow moments of world building here; even the obligatory scene-wipes seem somehow forced and overly fast; you don't inhabit this world only glimpse it. The only exposition we get is from the fanfictiony text crawl and one very stilted and strangely unemotional conversation between a craggled Han Solo and a stone faced General Leia Organa (who looks for all the world like they tightened her girdle so much she can't move let alone act). Between her strange head tilting and his half hearted swagger it more resembles the cringey "I love you" scene from CrystalSkull than the one from Empire Strikes Back, instead of a stroke of genius its an actual figurative cinematic stroke. It's all punctuated by that "it's mysterious because we are keeping you out of the loop" thing that is the oldest of JJ Abrams' tricks, and we need more answers than action. Why would the Republic be in this ramshackle state, never mind the mention in the opening or the reams of comics Disney has put out, the underdog yet again? This is a movie, explain it! And John Williams, where are you? The only time the music is noticed is when it was once again rehashing the themes from the first trilogy, there is no new piece that stands out and marches around the theater announcing it's greatness. Then there is all the fan service, the god damned fan service. Capt. Phasma is a marketing dream and fanboy joke. The "No look shot" is as bad as Greedo shooting first, and you want your new bad-ass Jedi girl, who can do all these things without training cuz you say so, to inherit the beloved fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy? Then earn it guys, because otherwise its just another lame fan wish-fulfillment without the politically incorrect metal bikini. Awakens suffers from the worst case of big budget sequelitis ever seen, literally Jump22's ethos of "People want you to do the same thing, Again. Just a bit bigger. Same lines, same jokes, same action, everything."
It's not all rehash. JJ does some new things with the camera (but why god, why keep does he keep using the lens flares, it must be an injoke?). There are some fun ideas, new uses of the Force that seem a bit questionable, but the reformed Stormtrooper story idea is the best of the bunch (but who's character is involved in countless bumbly spoken word comic relief just enough to ruin it). He doesn't say "Yeah that's what I'm talking about!" once, but they probably did do a take and it's laying on the cutting room floor after checking TVTropes for relevancy and deciding against running it. Yet some of the attempts of new stuff are as bad as any prequel, Solo's side business is simply just busy work, eating up screen time and adding nothing to the affair but bad jokes and a lot of CG monsters. There is just enough practical effects thrown in to kill the "curse of the prequels" stink list for the fans, but the rest is all remake-orama, and none of it improves on the original. The fighter pilots all look wrong, and besides main ace Poe (well played by Oscar Issac, star of Inside Llewyn Davis), the Resistance seems to be staffed by fanboys-and-girls pulled from the ranks of Deviantart who don't yet have drivers licenses let alone a pilot's one. The bad guy is no Vader, he is a twink with a temper tantrum, the Emperor has been replaced with a pale CGI creature who looks like should be spitting out "GOLLUM GOLLUM". The Nazi Youth has taken over the Empire from the elder British statesmen because... box office? Old Men no longer start Star Wars it seems. The Rebels don't meticulously plan how to blow up the DeathStar 3.0, or send a crack team of top commandos and their entire fleet and barely scrape out a victory. No, they stand around a readout of the plans point at a spot and say "we blow this up, right?" and then Han Solo winks and says "I got this, you don't wanna know how" because his plan is stupidly self sacrificing; instead of bringing the Army he just flies over to infiltrate the planet with 3 people (2 he just met) and of course saves the day, obviously! There is no sense of urgency, the big kill-weapon has to charge up for like a day, but the Rebellion is so confident in Han getting the shields down (AGAIN!) that they don't even bother EVACUATING the planet that will eventually be blown up, maybe, "waiting to be killed, waiting to be killed".
In the end big things get exploded good, people hug, and yet it still doesn't end. The final oddity, the mapquest montage, the overdone out of place LOTR spinning helicopter shot with a stupid nospeak Skywalker cliffhanger, cementing that SWTFA seems more inclined to be the New Harry Potter YA film franchise than a true new Star Wars film in a finite universe.
Star Wars, we meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.
4 Chubby C3P0's Unexplained Self-Referential Red Arms out of 10 (BAD)
PS - Kids will never understand the sweet tension build and release of the 20th Century Fox fanfare, LucasFilm Logo, and sudden burst of StarField and music on the silver screen. Sad.
PPS - Alternative Title: SW - An Old Hype
Ant-Man (2015)
Ant-Man (PG-13)
"Talk Loudly and carry a miniaturized stick"
Sneaking into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of it's smallest and underwhelming heroes as Ant-Man makes his unlikely screen debut. Doubly so when it ran into production trouble as long-time project gestator Simon Wright (director/screenwriter of Shaun of the Dead, who gets writing credit here) left Marvel over creative differences. However director Payton Reed (Bring it On) and the Marvel suits have made an entertaining sausage yet again, even if the ghost of "What If?" lingers off screen.
Paul Rudd (Fantana in Anchorman) pals around with Micheal Douglas as Ant-Man old and new. He's an ex-con thief who is trying to go the straight and narrow for his 3yo daughters sake. However he soon becomes embroiled in corporate espionage which somehow involves Douglas' Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man) and his daughter Hope aka Love Interest To Be Woman, aka Evangeline Lilly. It's kind of Ironman light with more diverse comedy, the crew is out to stop Pym's old intern from selling Yellowjacket to the government, which would then use it to drone-strike everyone on the planet or something BigBusiness and Government are bad or whatever the kids on the internet are saying at this moment, hey they are our demographic right guys? The interesting tidbit of Ant-Man being the first comic book movie to deal with a second iteration of a character, a comic book staple of a mentor training his protege to don and take over a super hero identity, isn't really focused on because hey, Rudd is pretty charming and the whole movie is kind of filler for the next MCU super blockbuster that he can then appear in, right?
The missed opportunities and nuance be damned, because Marvel once again just makes a fun movie to sit back and watch. And hoooh boy, is this that type of movie. Training montages? Origin stories? Nostalgic looks back and the Soviet Cold war? Vaguely threatening slippery slope government types? This movie encapsulates everything that worked in those other MCU movies and boils it down to it's audience-friendly most. However it is the non-standard flairs that actually stand out and make Ant-Man fun. When the plot goes away from all the white people problems and gets a little colorful the humor enters into it's own. A fight early on with the Falcon is a diverse breath of fresh air (or is it? Captain America would have been a stronger cameo but no where near as fun either) but Lang's crew of wacky ethnic sidekicks give the film a funny kick in the shorts that Rudd plays off of wonderfully. When its Douglas' show all you can wonder is if the old Wolf of Wallstreet is just hoping his Pym stock price doesn't fall. But the movie's humor shines when Luis gives Stan Lee his best cameo yet. Added to that an exciting finale that takes too long to come (but since it involves a fight inside a crowded briefcase and on a Thomas the Train toy train set it's forgiven), and Ant-Man provides enough laughs and action to prevent 2 hours from crawling by.
The questions aren't all answered unfortunately. Wright's version, would it have been more humor driven, more Scott Pilgrim-like and idiosyncratic than Scott Lang pathos and melodramatic? What if Pym had invented Ultron instead of Stark like the comics foretold, it was just a couple months ago after all, would have a cameo in Avengers 2 been that hard (it would have at least provided more backstory and interest to both films, and Ant-Man was a founding Avenger after all)? And why merrily skip by the science without even attempting to explain the gobbedygoop, its fraught with unspoken SciFi mcguffins? How did this movie achieve the feat of making creepy crawly bugs cute sidekicks that aren't grossing every woman man and child out? Why earn the PG13 with a lot of out of place cursing? How long can MCU go without making a terrible film? And how did one of the biggest inside jokes in comic-dom, the infamously unfamous Ant-Man, get his own blockbuster comic book film that kids and adults adore? Let's see DC pull that off with The Atom.
7.5 Tales to Astonish out of 10 (GOOD)
"Talk Loudly and carry a miniaturized stick"
Sneaking into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of it's smallest and underwhelming heroes as Ant-Man makes his unlikely screen debut. Doubly so when it ran into production trouble as long-time project gestator Simon Wright (director/screenwriter of Shaun of the Dead, who gets writing credit here) left Marvel over creative differences. However director Payton Reed (Bring it On) and the Marvel suits have made an entertaining sausage yet again, even if the ghost of "What If?" lingers off screen.
Paul Rudd (Fantana in Anchorman) pals around with Micheal Douglas as Ant-Man old and new. He's an ex-con thief who is trying to go the straight and narrow for his 3yo daughters sake. However he soon becomes embroiled in corporate espionage which somehow involves Douglas' Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man) and his daughter Hope aka Love Interest To Be Woman, aka Evangeline Lilly. It's kind of Ironman light with more diverse comedy, the crew is out to stop Pym's old intern from selling Yellowjacket to the government, which would then use it to drone-strike everyone on the planet or something BigBusiness and Government are bad or whatever the kids on the internet are saying at this moment, hey they are our demographic right guys? The interesting tidbit of Ant-Man being the first comic book movie to deal with a second iteration of a character, a comic book staple of a mentor training his protege to don and take over a super hero identity, isn't really focused on because hey, Rudd is pretty charming and the whole movie is kind of filler for the next MCU super blockbuster that he can then appear in, right?
The missed opportunities and nuance be damned, because Marvel once again just makes a fun movie to sit back and watch. And hoooh boy, is this that type of movie. Training montages? Origin stories? Nostalgic looks back and the Soviet Cold war? Vaguely threatening slippery slope government types? This movie encapsulates everything that worked in those other MCU movies and boils it down to it's audience-friendly most. However it is the non-standard flairs that actually stand out and make Ant-Man fun. When the plot goes away from all the white people problems and gets a little colorful the humor enters into it's own. A fight early on with the Falcon is a diverse breath of fresh air (or is it? Captain America would have been a stronger cameo but no where near as fun either) but Lang's crew of wacky ethnic sidekicks give the film a funny kick in the shorts that Rudd plays off of wonderfully. When its Douglas' show all you can wonder is if the old Wolf of Wallstreet is just hoping his Pym stock price doesn't fall. But the movie's humor shines when Luis gives Stan Lee his best cameo yet. Added to that an exciting finale that takes too long to come (but since it involves a fight inside a crowded briefcase and on a Thomas the Train toy train set it's forgiven), and Ant-Man provides enough laughs and action to prevent 2 hours from crawling by.
The questions aren't all answered unfortunately. Wright's version, would it have been more humor driven, more Scott Pilgrim-like and idiosyncratic than Scott Lang pathos and melodramatic? What if Pym had invented Ultron instead of Stark like the comics foretold, it was just a couple months ago after all, would have a cameo in Avengers 2 been that hard (it would have at least provided more backstory and interest to both films, and Ant-Man was a founding Avenger after all)? And why merrily skip by the science without even attempting to explain the gobbedygoop, its fraught with unspoken SciFi mcguffins? How did this movie achieve the feat of making creepy crawly bugs cute sidekicks that aren't grossing every woman man and child out? Why earn the PG13 with a lot of out of place cursing? How long can MCU go without making a terrible film? And how did one of the biggest inside jokes in comic-dom, the infamously unfamous Ant-Man, get his own blockbuster comic book film that kids and adults adore? Let's see DC pull that off with The Atom.
7.5 Tales to Astonish out of 10 (GOOD)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (PG-13)
"Got no strings, so whats holding it down?"
The heroically rag-tag team from past Marvel films are once again united against a single enemy, this time one accidentally created by their resident tech genius Tony Stark in Joss Whedon's middling follow-up to 2012's Avengers.
Beyond the changes to the convoluted characters from page to screen, the biggest grievances to be leveled at AAOU is the absolutely hackneyed writing. Nearly every action moment comes with a quip of some kind, or a re-quip, or a quip about an earlier quip. It really gets tedious and clunky, Whedon's flippant attitude towards tension really strains the credibility of whether or not anything is in peril. Meanwhile, like most huge sequels, the CGI has become more prevalent and overloaded, while the color palette has been oddly drained. Whole moments of action are obviously stitched together in the computer, but somehow still remain unclear, confused and jumpy. Much is simply unsatisfying to watch.
This is in "stark" (haha) contrast to the original Avengers, where Whedon's writing and structure issues were eventually uplifted by an epic sized brawl in New York where every character had moments of heroicism and bravery, they gelled as a team against a living breathing maniac hell-bent on enslaving humanity. In Age, Ultron is a smart-ass mega-robot voiced by James Spader (with a rather un-robot like attitude), who's evil motivations behind his evil plot are pretty much a shrug "cuz we said so" kind of thing. Spader does lend something to the sinister yet somehow ambiguously malign character (perhaps too much), but his robot army are a rather lame foe and his CGI presence just feels weak. At no time does Ultron seem a threat, and yet the new additions to the team do feel outmatched. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are introduced on Ultron's side (being X-Foe's Magneto's children and perpetual fence-sitters makes this an alright choice, even if Marvel can't utilize this part of the lore due to Fox's owning the X-Men licence), and yet are somehow easily able to defeat 90% of the team double-handed! Then they are offered up as lame-duck sacrifices by movie's end, for the feels that just don't manifest. Meanwhile Black Widow is irritating fan-boys to even more extremes. Now her femininity and allure can calm down the Hulk because, shipping!!!, and she is now the Avengers den mother, ugh. Now her ultimate spy-stealthiness includes a glowing outfit and matching glowsticks she does kung fu with (!?!?!) because... action figures sell?
Okay, so does anything save this film? Unfortunately this movie is just a baby step for other MCU movies, and is more obvious about it than previous releases. It is less satisfying within the Universe and on it's own than its predecessors, and we can hope that those films it (again) hints at as coming will actually deliver. Despite being excited by mentions of Wakanda or the Vision's wasted potential, we already have been teased to death about the Infinity War and now we need Thor taking his shirt off and jumping in a lake to preview his next film (Ragnarock)? The film is already overlong and underwhelmed with truly great moments, with an anemic amount of amusement and severe lack of immersion, the long runtime for these kind of inclusions could have really been reeled back. As much as I enjoyed the Hulk's rampage or how insufferable Stark is becoming, those kind of moments are few and far between.
The invisible strings from the Disney Exec's indeed seem long. The cult figure of Whedon and his fandom aren't immune to them, pulling this way and demanding that, ending up a puppet for mass-market appeal and humdrum committee decisions. In a world where comic-book movies are now common place and people in capes are socially accepted the MCU has finally shown a chink in it's bright blue armor.
4.5 "The Internet?" "The Internet." out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
"Got no strings, so whats holding it down?"
The heroically rag-tag team from past Marvel films are once again united against a single enemy, this time one accidentally created by their resident tech genius Tony Stark in Joss Whedon's middling follow-up to 2012's Avengers.
Beyond the changes to the convoluted characters from page to screen, the biggest grievances to be leveled at AAOU is the absolutely hackneyed writing. Nearly every action moment comes with a quip of some kind, or a re-quip, or a quip about an earlier quip. It really gets tedious and clunky, Whedon's flippant attitude towards tension really strains the credibility of whether or not anything is in peril. Meanwhile, like most huge sequels, the CGI has become more prevalent and overloaded, while the color palette has been oddly drained. Whole moments of action are obviously stitched together in the computer, but somehow still remain unclear, confused and jumpy. Much is simply unsatisfying to watch.
This is in "stark" (haha) contrast to the original Avengers, where Whedon's writing and structure issues were eventually uplifted by an epic sized brawl in New York where every character had moments of heroicism and bravery, they gelled as a team against a living breathing maniac hell-bent on enslaving humanity. In Age, Ultron is a smart-ass mega-robot voiced by James Spader (with a rather un-robot like attitude), who's evil motivations behind his evil plot are pretty much a shrug "cuz we said so" kind of thing. Spader does lend something to the sinister yet somehow ambiguously malign character (perhaps too much), but his robot army are a rather lame foe and his CGI presence just feels weak. At no time does Ultron seem a threat, and yet the new additions to the team do feel outmatched. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are introduced on Ultron's side (being X-Foe's Magneto's children and perpetual fence-sitters makes this an alright choice, even if Marvel can't utilize this part of the lore due to Fox's owning the X-Men licence), and yet are somehow easily able to defeat 90% of the team double-handed! Then they are offered up as lame-duck sacrifices by movie's end, for the feels that just don't manifest. Meanwhile Black Widow is irritating fan-boys to even more extremes. Now her femininity and allure can calm down the Hulk because, shipping!!!, and she is now the Avengers den mother, ugh. Now her ultimate spy-stealthiness includes a glowing outfit and matching glowsticks she does kung fu with (!?!?!) because... action figures sell?
Okay, so does anything save this film? Unfortunately this movie is just a baby step for other MCU movies, and is more obvious about it than previous releases. It is less satisfying within the Universe and on it's own than its predecessors, and we can hope that those films it (again) hints at as coming will actually deliver. Despite being excited by mentions of Wakanda or the Vision's wasted potential, we already have been teased to death about the Infinity War and now we need Thor taking his shirt off and jumping in a lake to preview his next film (Ragnarock)? The film is already overlong and underwhelmed with truly great moments, with an anemic amount of amusement and severe lack of immersion, the long runtime for these kind of inclusions could have really been reeled back. As much as I enjoyed the Hulk's rampage or how insufferable Stark is becoming, those kind of moments are few and far between.
The invisible strings from the Disney Exec's indeed seem long. The cult figure of Whedon and his fandom aren't immune to them, pulling this way and demanding that, ending up a puppet for mass-market appeal and humdrum committee decisions. In a world where comic-book movies are now common place and people in capes are socially accepted the MCU has finally shown a chink in it's bright blue armor.
4.5 "The Internet?" "The Internet." out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Jupiter Ascending (PG-13)
"Stupider is as Jupiter does"
The poor daughter of an immigrant house cleaner is sucked into a sci-fi vortex of space ships and soap operas in the Wachowski sibling's newest effort, Jupiter Ascending.
Mila Kunis is Jupiter, the female protagonist so gullible and worthless even her villain points out the overwhelming evidence of her own idiotic naivete to her face. Apparently she is the accidental gene double of the former Queen of the galaxy (humans have spread farther and ascended higher than us lowly Earthlings know), and the reigning Royalty is out to silence Jupiter before she lays claim to her Throne by birth right (and their Soylent Green-ish business model). A confusing mish-mash of Science Fiction tropes is awaiting her ladyship, the damsel in distress. Foremost is her Prince in shining armor, or in this case Channing Tatum with elf ears and glowing inline gravity space skates. The ridiculousness of that sentence was apparently lost on no-one but the filmmakers. The Wachowski siblings may be attempting to flaunt their new found feminine sides but Jupiter Ascending is nothing but a badly disguised romance novel with lasers and space princesses, the kind of fanfic usually reserved for the laziest alleys of the internet.
The CG is pretty but ineffective, the actors they squeezed into it just wave their arms around and grit their teeth and hope they look like they are piloting a star fighter. The production design is glossy but derivative and sadly you can't help but laugh every time Tatum's rocket shoes try to look cool, and meanwhile the jumpy exposition attempts to tie the story to real life UFOs on Earth and is slipshod and wildly uneven, Men in Black did a better job at covering plot holes through memory loss than does JA, and it was an action comedy!. Well thought out isn't Jupiter's strong suit, and neither is it's plot or heroine. Apparently audiences were supposed to feel for a poor, Russian migrant girl who inherits the planet and then gets to dress pretty for 2 hours while making the stupidest of decisions like a cinematic 1950s airhead. Eddie Redmayne (as one of the evil Abraxas siblings out to stop Jupiter) has now gone the gamut of Oscar winner one year to squealing over-acting scenery chewer the next, and being in this bomb may cut down on his appeal. Meanwhile Mila shows even less acting chops than normal, Channing is a mopey and uncharismatic bore who just goes PEW PEW while glowering. Even a Sean Bean cameo adds nothing to the proceedings, nothing! and there needs to be a whole lot more.
In short, Jupiter Ascending is a trip down, way down, descending to the level of a Harry Potter/Hungergames/Young Adult Book cash grab wanna be with no purpose or source material to support its many weaknesses and eccentricities. The movie Cloud Atlas could have been without an excellent writer in other words.
2 Must Love Dogs out of 10 (AWFUL)
"Stupider is as Jupiter does"
The poor daughter of an immigrant house cleaner is sucked into a sci-fi vortex of space ships and soap operas in the Wachowski sibling's newest effort, Jupiter Ascending.
Mila Kunis is Jupiter, the female protagonist so gullible and worthless even her villain points out the overwhelming evidence of her own idiotic naivete to her face. Apparently she is the accidental gene double of the former Queen of the galaxy (humans have spread farther and ascended higher than us lowly Earthlings know), and the reigning Royalty is out to silence Jupiter before she lays claim to her Throne by birth right (and their Soylent Green-ish business model). A confusing mish-mash of Science Fiction tropes is awaiting her ladyship, the damsel in distress. Foremost is her Prince in shining armor, or in this case Channing Tatum with elf ears and glowing inline gravity space skates. The ridiculousness of that sentence was apparently lost on no-one but the filmmakers. The Wachowski siblings may be attempting to flaunt their new found feminine sides but Jupiter Ascending is nothing but a badly disguised romance novel with lasers and space princesses, the kind of fanfic usually reserved for the laziest alleys of the internet.
The CG is pretty but ineffective, the actors they squeezed into it just wave their arms around and grit their teeth and hope they look like they are piloting a star fighter. The production design is glossy but derivative and sadly you can't help but laugh every time Tatum's rocket shoes try to look cool, and meanwhile the jumpy exposition attempts to tie the story to real life UFOs on Earth and is slipshod and wildly uneven, Men in Black did a better job at covering plot holes through memory loss than does JA, and it was an action comedy!. Well thought out isn't Jupiter's strong suit, and neither is it's plot or heroine. Apparently audiences were supposed to feel for a poor, Russian migrant girl who inherits the planet and then gets to dress pretty for 2 hours while making the stupidest of decisions like a cinematic 1950s airhead. Eddie Redmayne (as one of the evil Abraxas siblings out to stop Jupiter) has now gone the gamut of Oscar winner one year to squealing over-acting scenery chewer the next, and being in this bomb may cut down on his appeal. Meanwhile Mila shows even less acting chops than normal, Channing is a mopey and uncharismatic bore who just goes PEW PEW while glowering. Even a Sean Bean cameo adds nothing to the proceedings, nothing! and there needs to be a whole lot more.
In short, Jupiter Ascending is a trip down, way down, descending to the level of a Harry Potter/Hungergames/Young Adult Book cash grab wanna be with no purpose or source material to support its many weaknesses and eccentricities. The movie Cloud Atlas could have been without an excellent writer in other words.
2 Must Love Dogs out of 10 (AWFUL)
Noah (2014)
Noah (PG-13)
"When it rains it pours"
Director Darren Aaronofsky's (Requiem For A Dream) life long ambition of putting the Bible parable Noah on screen comes to fruition, but comes through quite waterlogged with modern ideas and structure. While not as atheist-centric as some had feared, the tale of Noah is filled with fantasy sci fi trappings along with the strongly mythical ones.
For an epic the story feels quite small, with just a few sets (ash land, rock land, grassy mountain, ark). For an epic there are very few characters, just Noah and his family and the evil Tubal-Cain (played by Ray Winstone), whose armies are just nameless background cannon(golem)fodder. The lack of racial diversity is an eerie throwback to Ten Commandments whitewashing, the fantastical rock giants evoke the LOTR trilogy more than the Holy Bible, the CGI driven time lapse photography that is quite jarring as it promotes evolutionary creationism, human bad guys shoot rocket launchers at those giant golems, and the fauna of the Earth that are saved two by two are strangely unevolved (dogs with armadillo scales?). The casting too lacks a certain finesse, with no performances besides Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah generating much interest. The choices are odd, and when considering the market for a straight laced Bible story is probably dwindling, the cynical might scream that these add-ons are mere tricks to spice up the potential box office gloom.
Yet when the movie plays upon and toys with the themes of this ancient mythology it actually hits some strong (if too modernized) philosophical chords and proves it's artistic forethought. The nature of the relationship between Creator and creations, the fight of good vs evil, sinful human nature versus his wished for ideals, these are inborn to the story of the flood. Stepping then as it does into the sciences of ecology, environmentalism, and conservationism makes the movie more palatable to modern audiences while still keeping its morals, or most of them, intact. When the Earth is being wiped out due to humanity's strip mining and pollution (the evil king is very unPC and therefore very pro-Earth exploitation) it skews it more towards self righteous liberalism. Add that to the mix the freakish rock-creatures and rough old testament miracles, Noah survives the flood of new and old. The added action scenes and family strife pad the overlong runtime to over 2 hours, but really could it be that entertaining of a story without them? Putting at its forefront the idea that mankind was once so technologically advanced and neglectful of the Earth and had to be completely wiped-out doomsday style is a side of the story often unexplored, and is probably just what 9 year old Aaronofsky was attracted to in the first place. Noah then has to wrestle with letting all of humanity die or let it begin again, which does the Creator want and what is it saying about us, the descendants of these men? Interesting ideas, but Noah just interests more than flat out entertains. However if you can forgive the deluge of eccentricity there are worse ways to spend an rainy afternoon.
5 Noah the Hatchet Man out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
"When it rains it pours"
Director Darren Aaronofsky's (Requiem For A Dream) life long ambition of putting the Bible parable Noah on screen comes to fruition, but comes through quite waterlogged with modern ideas and structure. While not as atheist-centric as some had feared, the tale of Noah is filled with fantasy sci fi trappings along with the strongly mythical ones.
For an epic the story feels quite small, with just a few sets (ash land, rock land, grassy mountain, ark). For an epic there are very few characters, just Noah and his family and the evil Tubal-Cain (played by Ray Winstone), whose armies are just nameless background cannon(golem)fodder. The lack of racial diversity is an eerie throwback to Ten Commandments whitewashing, the fantastical rock giants evoke the LOTR trilogy more than the Holy Bible, the CGI driven time lapse photography that is quite jarring as it promotes evolutionary creationism, human bad guys shoot rocket launchers at those giant golems, and the fauna of the Earth that are saved two by two are strangely unevolved (dogs with armadillo scales?). The casting too lacks a certain finesse, with no performances besides Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah generating much interest. The choices are odd, and when considering the market for a straight laced Bible story is probably dwindling, the cynical might scream that these add-ons are mere tricks to spice up the potential box office gloom.
Yet when the movie plays upon and toys with the themes of this ancient mythology it actually hits some strong (if too modernized) philosophical chords and proves it's artistic forethought. The nature of the relationship between Creator and creations, the fight of good vs evil, sinful human nature versus his wished for ideals, these are inborn to the story of the flood. Stepping then as it does into the sciences of ecology, environmentalism, and conservationism makes the movie more palatable to modern audiences while still keeping its morals, or most of them, intact. When the Earth is being wiped out due to humanity's strip mining and pollution (the evil king is very unPC and therefore very pro-Earth exploitation) it skews it more towards self righteous liberalism. Add that to the mix the freakish rock-creatures and rough old testament miracles, Noah survives the flood of new and old. The added action scenes and family strife pad the overlong runtime to over 2 hours, but really could it be that entertaining of a story without them? Putting at its forefront the idea that mankind was once so technologically advanced and neglectful of the Earth and had to be completely wiped-out doomsday style is a side of the story often unexplored, and is probably just what 9 year old Aaronofsky was attracted to in the first place. Noah then has to wrestle with letting all of humanity die or let it begin again, which does the Creator want and what is it saying about us, the descendants of these men? Interesting ideas, but Noah just interests more than flat out entertains. However if you can forgive the deluge of eccentricity there are worse ways to spend an rainy afternoon.
5 Noah the Hatchet Man out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
I, Frankenstein (2014)
I, Frankenstein (PG 13)
"Descend in pain"
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein has been a SciFi zeitgeist from the beginnings of modern media, and her magnum opus is quickly discarded then exploited for a pretentiously slick Action/CGI-laden good vs evil parable from the makers of the Underworld franchise (which are other pretentiously slick Action/CGI-laden good vs evil parables).
What is the story? Typical cookie cutter devils vs angels end-of-humanity story, the twist being instead of angels the good guys are hideous gargoyles, who actually just transform into fashion models in cheap, cheesy Ren Faire costumes.
Frankenstein's monster has had many iterations, from Boris Karloff in clodhoppers to Robert De Niro in furious agony. Most appearances have been hulking wretches with a sympathetic core, misunderstood and menacing. The monster in this update, underplayed by Aaron Eckhardt (Thank You For Smoking), is neither hulking (he's barely taller than most of the actresses) nor a sniveling wretch (he's more of an emo car wreck victim in a hoodie and jeans). While his choices (Batman voice?) and action movie adequacy are certainly up for debate, he is by no means the weakest link here. The entire film is weak links latched to the ghosts of better ideas done better (famous character turned into evil action movie, modern world with a hidden supernatural war, Frankenstein has the name Adam and dresses like a martial arts street skater, oh wait that's I, Frankenstein's one idea and probably it's worst).
If you ever desired to unironically see ol' Vick Frank's Monster in a kung fu training montage, perhaps this is your movie. If you'd rather see writers who create instead of lifting wholesale from the classics with stupid annotations, cinematographers that don't just copy other genre mistakes like Van Helsing, studios that don't rubber stamp dreck after dreck release, then you should stay away from this unanimated corpse of a film. For a movie about a recently dead guy fighting a bedeviled and Bill Nighy (Sean of the Dead) in shoddy prosthetic makeup, there are precious few signs of life and almost zero electricity.
3 Capital Fs out of 10 (BAD)
Need for Speed (2014)
Need For Speed (PG-13)
"The Need for Editing"
Adaption of mid-90s racing videogame staple "The Need for Speed" finds Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame behind the wheel of exceedingly expensive muscle cars in a bid to take revenge on his rival for the demise of his ex-girlfriends brother and coworker, whose death he was blamed for. He goes on parole, breaks parole and calls his soon-to-be-British-girlfriend who owns a 3 million dollar Shelby Mustang and proceeds to illegally drive across the country from NY to SF in his bid for vengance against former highschool rival now turned underground racing millionaire celebrity. That's about all the plot that exists in this overlong, over-plot-holed and over-pot-holed road flick.
The film is a hodge podge of everything that could be wrong with a film that will be scrutinized by gear-heads, film-heads or video game fans. Examples include badly scripted characters, including the quirky foriegn accented woman who can recite car statistics like a middle schooler quoting a wikipedia car on horsepower, ooo so empowered! Lighting schemes more distracting than useful with many scenes where the light is extremely artificial looking tied with multiple long closeups during tense driving moments just to spoil the mood! Car physics that defy the laws of, well, you know. Urban driving in souped up EuroUber-cars that is so reckless it would make even the late Ryan Dunn spin in his grave, may he rest in Jack-Ass peace. A thoroughly false sense of reality punctuated by the backfiring blast of unfunny bro-ish hipsterism (both in front and behind the camera), making NFS an exercise in overlong exposure to exhaust fumes with a complete poser at the wheel.
Not that its all skid marks. Aaron Paul's noble attempt at leading man stardom might forever be stunted by Need failure to light up the box office (not as stunted as his facial and vocal range chops, we hope), but he has a certain charm when he's not hoping he looks as cool as Steve McQueen. Then there is the laughably long "emotional" scene of Paul emoting to his "friend"'s fiery death; an emotionally bereft, head grasping, mouth gaping affair. Who is at fault for such a awful film breaking scene, the actor who pulls that face or the director who shoots it in slow motion (or the editor who allows it to linger on screen)? Let's give Paul the benefit of the doubt, he is likable when he is being his natural self. That goes double for the stunts and driving; NFS eschews other racing franchises crutch of CGI car stunts (looking at you recent Fast & Furious') and does it all in camera with real cars to a great grounded effect. The races themselves look good and move well, even if you don't care for those doing it. In fact, besides Paul and his rich co-pilotess played by Imogen Poots (no way that's a stage name!), the cast of actors all have somethings in common. They are all supposed to appeal to a young demographic, are written like stupid frat boys and all have faces that you wouldn't mind see included in a 3-car pile up.
If this movie had trimmed down 15-20 minutes of junk by removing the extraneous "comedy" or "wow cool" bits, focusing instead on the realistic adrenaline junky aspect of speeding down the highway, the movie and its star could have avoided a blowout. Need for Speed even bows to its influences with a nice opening homage to Bullit (1968), one of the most iconic car chases in film history. Unfortunately it soon proceeds a wholesale theft of ideas from decades of other, better car movies (the chained axle cop car from American Graffiti, the evangelical radio DJ from Vanishing Point (with Micheal Keaton, really???), the cross country deadlines and scenery), makes NFS a movie that knows at heart it's unworthy of the legacy, with precious few miles per gallon to show for all the noxious rubber it burns.
4 Refueling with the Car running is a fire hazard guys, especially while going 110 on a highway out of 10 (BAD)
The Hobbit - The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
The Hobbit - The Battle of the Five Armies (PG-13)
Much like Peter Jackson's previous Tolkien trilogy, the final Hobbit film redeems some of the mistakes and missteps of it's plodding middle chapter. However, unlike closing-trilogy counterpart and Oscar winner Return of the King, Battle of the Five Armies only tries to satisfy the general public's thirst for mindless fantasy action and avoids both critical and fan acclaim. Unfortunately it also grossed over a Billion at the box office, and sadly that is the only measure of success that the studio heads will really pay attention to.
The loose pace-killing threads from the last film are wrapped up early. The burning of Lake Town and the extinguishing of Smaug are quickly (and loosely) wrapped up, leaving the rest of the 2 hours on the eponymous Battle of the Five armies. It is filled with cringe inducing CGI (poor Billy Connolly) over-wrought and misdirected emotions (the evil comedic relief Wormtongue Jr. has a lot to answer for, as does the made-up cliche-yet-still-under-written dwarf/elf romance) However the thing this Hobbit has to answer for most is the prolonged and yawn inducing, Legolas-stuffed battle scenes. Thousands of elves who robotically move in sync are not impressive when they are CG models simply using the same animations.
For the sake of argument lets compare two fight scenes from the two trilogies. Aragorn vs Lurtz from Fellowship and Thorin vs Azog in this one. In the former, a fantastically paced delightfully violent throw down that takes place in a real wooded glen between two actual actors (one in layers of prosthetic makeup), with desperately thrown weapons and thrown punches, a fight that is as brief as it is realistic with a quick yet satisfying conclusion that ranks as one of cinema's greatest fight scenes. Peter Jackson shot that, wrote that, thought it out before hand. Compare that to the video-game-boss level that is Thorin dodging a CG Orc's rock on a chain weapon on top of a frozen waterfall. The prolonged tedious back and forth, the "surprising" twists and turns, the unsatisfying CGI green screening and whimper of a finish. Peter Jackson decided to do it this way, to figure it out later in the computer, and is as completely devoid of realism as it is of satisfaction. While Five Armies does this sort of thing less often than Desolation, it still shows the differences between the two trilogies, and how The Hobbit has amplified those LOTR problems three-fold. Overabundant use of of CG, ego-fueled changes to Tolkien's children's story that perpetuate even more ridiculous changes, and an apparently flimsy grasp on what made the source material so special. And just like Fellowship before it, the first Hobbit was derided as boring since it hewed closest to the book and embraced singing and dancing over more action scenes, a bold faced lie about future faithfulness to the source material.
Disappointing that this is the last cinematic glimpse into the epic world of J.R.R;s master life-work. It has almost no emotional closure beyond "Well That Happened and can't be undone." Where is the sad longing for more like a the end of King? Replacing it is the profound feeling of "Thank god they can't screw this up any further." Of course, with dangling potential ticket sales and the untapped novel The Silmarillion, who knows what middling film Middle Earth could vaguely inspire next.
4.5 Weeping Dwarfs Tearing their own Beards out of 10 (MEDICORE)
Much like Peter Jackson's previous Tolkien trilogy, the final Hobbit film redeems some of the mistakes and missteps of it's plodding middle chapter. However, unlike closing-trilogy counterpart and Oscar winner Return of the King, Battle of the Five Armies only tries to satisfy the general public's thirst for mindless fantasy action and avoids both critical and fan acclaim. Unfortunately it also grossed over a Billion at the box office, and sadly that is the only measure of success that the studio heads will really pay attention to.
The loose pace-killing threads from the last film are wrapped up early. The burning of Lake Town and the extinguishing of Smaug are quickly (and loosely) wrapped up, leaving the rest of the 2 hours on the eponymous Battle of the Five armies. It is filled with cringe inducing CGI (poor Billy Connolly) over-wrought and misdirected emotions (the evil comedic relief Wormtongue Jr. has a lot to answer for, as does the made-up cliche-yet-still-under-written dwarf/elf romance) However the thing this Hobbit has to answer for most is the prolonged and yawn inducing, Legolas-stuffed battle scenes. Thousands of elves who robotically move in sync are not impressive when they are CG models simply using the same animations.
For the sake of argument lets compare two fight scenes from the two trilogies. Aragorn vs Lurtz from Fellowship and Thorin vs Azog in this one. In the former, a fantastically paced delightfully violent throw down that takes place in a real wooded glen between two actual actors (one in layers of prosthetic makeup), with desperately thrown weapons and thrown punches, a fight that is as brief as it is realistic with a quick yet satisfying conclusion that ranks as one of cinema's greatest fight scenes. Peter Jackson shot that, wrote that, thought it out before hand. Compare that to the video-game-boss level that is Thorin dodging a CG Orc's rock on a chain weapon on top of a frozen waterfall. The prolonged tedious back and forth, the "surprising" twists and turns, the unsatisfying CGI green screening and whimper of a finish. Peter Jackson decided to do it this way, to figure it out later in the computer, and is as completely devoid of realism as it is of satisfaction. While Five Armies does this sort of thing less often than Desolation, it still shows the differences between the two trilogies, and how The Hobbit has amplified those LOTR problems three-fold. Overabundant use of of CG, ego-fueled changes to Tolkien's children's story that perpetuate even more ridiculous changes, and an apparently flimsy grasp on what made the source material so special. And just like Fellowship before it, the first Hobbit was derided as boring since it hewed closest to the book and embraced singing and dancing over more action scenes, a bold faced lie about future faithfulness to the source material.
Disappointing that this is the last cinematic glimpse into the epic world of J.R.R;s master life-work. It has almost no emotional closure beyond "Well That Happened and can't be undone." Where is the sad longing for more like a the end of King? Replacing it is the profound feeling of "Thank god they can't screw this up any further." Of course, with dangling potential ticket sales and the untapped novel The Silmarillion, who knows what middling film Middle Earth could vaguely inspire next.
4.5 Weeping Dwarfs Tearing their own Beards out of 10 (MEDICORE)
Guardians Of The Galaxy (2014)
Guardians Of The Galaxy (PG-13)
"Hooked on a feeling"
The MCU dives into its funky cosmic side with a swaggering explosion filled romp that is as irreverent as it is irrelevant, raucously audacious enough to break its own molds and yet offering only simple lower class pleasures with a cast so utterly charming that audiences will have to shrug off any misgivings, even though they are watching a Marvel stepping stone to the great film that may someday come.
Chris Pratt's (The Lego Movie) patented brand of doe-eyed mischievousness fills the role of Star-Lord Peter Quill to the brim, creating a sensational addition to the archetype SciFi oversexed treasure-hunting rouge, overflowing with snarktastic bon mots and anachronisms from his departed Earthly mother's love of 70s pop music mixtapes The rest of the crew is stocked with unusual weirdos-banding-together types; Bradley Cooper (The Hangover) is a CGI Space-Raccoon with a violent love of firearms, his close companion is a space tree voiced by Vin Diesel (Riddick) who can only utter the words "I am Groot", Drax the Destroyer is a musclebound straight-shooter without an ounce of irony played by former WWE champion Bautista, and the adopted daughter of the villainous Thanos (remember him from the Avengers post credit sequence?), the soon-to-be-girlfriended assassin Gamora played by Zoe Saldana (2009 Star Trek).
The runtime of GOTG entails the finding of a mysterious orb, infighting over the orb, having to escape from space prison with orb, try to sell the orb without pirate intrusion, having the orb stolen by the bad guy Ronan the Accuser who intends to blow up a planet with the orb only to have the Guardians try to guard against it. It's really not Shakespeare or Asimov, but its filled with improvisational humor and rowdy fun that is greatly increased by a sunny musicality that overpowers the film's often brutally grim vibe. GOTG's largest saving grace is that ragtag crew; their banter is naturalistic and wonderfully contains a solid dose of the PG13 bad words. It's the best SciFi spaceopera ship and it's crew since the original Star Wars 1977, but hold onto your space horses buckaroos. Everything isn't all Attack Ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, even if the open-shirted Han Solo swagger cons you into starry eyed distraction.
The action doesn't come through with much impact or heft, sad to say the fight scenes feel almost unrehearsed (that was attempted to be glossed over with CG that overall also wasn't of the highest grade). The Collector (first seen in Thor 2) is once again played by the incomparable Benicio del Toro (Way of the Gun), whose over the top performance and alien mannerisms are sadly underused with little screen time, what there is is great stuff. Same goes for the incredible casting of ensemble comedian John C. Reilly (Boogie Nights) as a Nova Corps officer who briefly gets a moment to shine. Ok, so the film really just wants to point the lazer-spotlight on Quill and company (understandable), but meanwhile the cardboard villain Ronan gets almost zero backstory and so little motivation for his genocidal quest that he is one easily upped by the all-to-brief appearance of Thanos (who all Marvelites know to be the overall heavy in some faroff film that will be made...later). There is just so much underused material from the Cosmic Marvel Universe (encompassing all the biggest and most creative stories from the books, especially those by Jim Starling), that to throw the audience into it without explanation is understandable yet still a shame. While this is obviously a specific choice to avoid the morass of that insane big picture, completely leaving it unsaid leaves the film one of the lightest piece in the Marvel Film Puzzle. There's nothing wrong with light entertainment, but those seeking even a little Space Odyssey in their Cosmos won't find any.
Still, without hesitation it is a very fun romp in a Galaxy far far away, the first real spiritual successor of the original Star Wars film married with the whimsical tone and aesthetic of the Original Star Trek palette (dayglo skin tones mixed with candy colored backgrounds). They caught a special magic lightning in the bottle with this crew (except for overall blankness of Zoe's portrayal and role), but the adventure is a straightforward affair that offers almost nothing surprising (the spaceprison escape, for example, can be found in any number of pulp SciFi paperbacks rotting away in your brothers basement). However the biggest detractor, for this critic, would be that in the overall series that comprises the entire MCU, Guardians can only be considered a filler or time killer episode. Bereft of the the enormous Cosmic events that Marvel has been hinting at and fans have been slavering for, it onl teases yet again at the epic things to come (The Infinity Gems!). This too is understandable, Disney/Marvel are biding their time and dreaming of the cash that Avengers 2 or 3 or 4 (or Thor3, The Defenders, WHEN???) will make, as opposed to betting on the noname also-run like GOTG. As admirable as it is for Marv and team to even consider releasing a Guardians film at all (it's source material is the stuff of bargain bins and heavy-nerd cult followings), the buildup for something REALLY big and overarching is over 6 years old now. Perhaps this is expecting too much from a studio that has consistently overdelivered on almost all of their films (the boxoffice returns and lack of a critical bomb is supremely impressive in this day and age), but it is Marvel/Disney's fault if we are left wanting more, better and now, especially considering the stories are there, foreshadowed and ripe for the harvesting. Instead we get baby steps, now we know there is another gem and Thanos wants them supposedly.
Director James Gunn (also of 2010s Super, a much unappreciated indy satire of the comicbook medium) cribs a plethora of shortcuts from SciFi Space Operas that have come before, but is sorely lacking in actual action direction experience. The banter though, is sublime and works as well as any recent bro-comedy action film, like Channing/Hill except in space. Gunn squeezes so much fun and humor onto the screen that the zipping lazers and spaceship dying fireballs are not what you leave the film with an impression of. It is Pratt, dialing up his middle finger to his b-character typecasting, kicking up his heels with his walkman to retro tunes as he picks our pockets for popcorn money. All thanks to the Spirit In The Sky.
7.5 Big Blue Wrinkled Chins out of 10 (GOOD)
"Hooked on a feeling"
The MCU dives into its funky cosmic side with a swaggering explosion filled romp that is as irreverent as it is irrelevant, raucously audacious enough to break its own molds and yet offering only simple lower class pleasures with a cast so utterly charming that audiences will have to shrug off any misgivings, even though they are watching a Marvel stepping stone to the great film that may someday come.
Chris Pratt's (The Lego Movie) patented brand of doe-eyed mischievousness fills the role of Star-Lord Peter Quill to the brim, creating a sensational addition to the archetype SciFi oversexed treasure-hunting rouge, overflowing with snarktastic bon mots and anachronisms from his departed Earthly mother's love of 70s pop music mixtapes The rest of the crew is stocked with unusual weirdos-banding-together types; Bradley Cooper (The Hangover) is a CGI Space-Raccoon with a violent love of firearms, his close companion is a space tree voiced by Vin Diesel (Riddick) who can only utter the words "I am Groot", Drax the Destroyer is a musclebound straight-shooter without an ounce of irony played by former WWE champion Bautista, and the adopted daughter of the villainous Thanos (remember him from the Avengers post credit sequence?), the soon-to-be-girlfriended assassin Gamora played by Zoe Saldana (2009 Star Trek).
The runtime of GOTG entails the finding of a mysterious orb, infighting over the orb, having to escape from space prison with orb, try to sell the orb without pirate intrusion, having the orb stolen by the bad guy Ronan the Accuser who intends to blow up a planet with the orb only to have the Guardians try to guard against it. It's really not Shakespeare or Asimov, but its filled with improvisational humor and rowdy fun that is greatly increased by a sunny musicality that overpowers the film's often brutally grim vibe. GOTG's largest saving grace is that ragtag crew; their banter is naturalistic and wonderfully contains a solid dose of the PG13 bad words. It's the best SciFi spaceopera ship and it's crew since the original Star Wars 1977, but hold onto your space horses buckaroos. Everything isn't all Attack Ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, even if the open-shirted Han Solo swagger cons you into starry eyed distraction.
The action doesn't come through with much impact or heft, sad to say the fight scenes feel almost unrehearsed (that was attempted to be glossed over with CG that overall also wasn't of the highest grade). The Collector (first seen in Thor 2) is once again played by the incomparable Benicio del Toro (Way of the Gun), whose over the top performance and alien mannerisms are sadly underused with little screen time, what there is is great stuff. Same goes for the incredible casting of ensemble comedian John C. Reilly (Boogie Nights) as a Nova Corps officer who briefly gets a moment to shine. Ok, so the film really just wants to point the lazer-spotlight on Quill and company (understandable), but meanwhile the cardboard villain Ronan gets almost zero backstory and so little motivation for his genocidal quest that he is one easily upped by the all-to-brief appearance of Thanos (who all Marvelites know to be the overall heavy in some faroff film that will be made...later). There is just so much underused material from the Cosmic Marvel Universe (encompassing all the biggest and most creative stories from the books, especially those by Jim Starling), that to throw the audience into it without explanation is understandable yet still a shame. While this is obviously a specific choice to avoid the morass of that insane big picture, completely leaving it unsaid leaves the film one of the lightest piece in the Marvel Film Puzzle. There's nothing wrong with light entertainment, but those seeking even a little Space Odyssey in their Cosmos won't find any.
Still, without hesitation it is a very fun romp in a Galaxy far far away, the first real spiritual successor of the original Star Wars film married with the whimsical tone and aesthetic of the Original Star Trek palette (dayglo skin tones mixed with candy colored backgrounds). They caught a special magic lightning in the bottle with this crew (except for overall blankness of Zoe's portrayal and role), but the adventure is a straightforward affair that offers almost nothing surprising (the spaceprison escape, for example, can be found in any number of pulp SciFi paperbacks rotting away in your brothers basement). However the biggest detractor, for this critic, would be that in the overall series that comprises the entire MCU, Guardians can only be considered a filler or time killer episode. Bereft of the the enormous Cosmic events that Marvel has been hinting at and fans have been slavering for, it onl teases yet again at the epic things to come (The Infinity Gems!). This too is understandable, Disney/Marvel are biding their time and dreaming of the cash that Avengers 2 or 3 or 4 (or Thor3, The Defenders, WHEN???) will make, as opposed to betting on the noname also-run like GOTG. As admirable as it is for Marv and team to even consider releasing a Guardians film at all (it's source material is the stuff of bargain bins and heavy-nerd cult followings), the buildup for something REALLY big and overarching is over 6 years old now. Perhaps this is expecting too much from a studio that has consistently overdelivered on almost all of their films (the boxoffice returns and lack of a critical bomb is supremely impressive in this day and age), but it is Marvel/Disney's fault if we are left wanting more, better and now, especially considering the stories are there, foreshadowed and ripe for the harvesting. Instead we get baby steps, now we know there is another gem and Thanos wants them supposedly.
Director James Gunn (also of 2010s Super, a much unappreciated indy satire of the comicbook medium) cribs a plethora of shortcuts from SciFi Space Operas that have come before, but is sorely lacking in actual action direction experience. The banter though, is sublime and works as well as any recent bro-comedy action film, like Channing/Hill except in space. Gunn squeezes so much fun and humor onto the screen that the zipping lazers and spaceship dying fireballs are not what you leave the film with an impression of. It is Pratt, dialing up his middle finger to his b-character typecasting, kicking up his heels with his walkman to retro tunes as he picks our pockets for popcorn money. All thanks to the Spirit In The Sky.
7.5 Big Blue Wrinkled Chins out of 10 (GOOD)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (PG13) Review
“Fleece with Honor”
Loosely based on the Marvel comics franchise and the issues
by the same name, this entry tells the story of the X-Teams in two separate
time lines. One is the X-ElderstatesMen,
a team lead by an elderly Professor X and Magneto in a grim cataclysmic future
where their only hope is to send back Wolverine’s (Hugh Jackman, natch) spirit
to the past to prevent their downfall.
The other are a young team of X-Babies (from 2011’s Xmen: First Class), now
living in an idyllic 1970s America that has just lost the Vietnam war and
retained a President Nixon.
Taking what worked from First Class (the fresh brood of
actors and fresh story ideas/period pieces) and mixing it with the best of rest
of the X-Franchise (Director Singer, high quality CGI, rock solid casting and
lack of Brett Ratner influence) results in a movie with unfortunately more good
ideas than good action. Highlights
include an underused Quicksilver’s rakish youth zipping through a room of guards
all the while listening to 70s arena rock, a surprising amount of death by
robot dismemberment and a rich tapestry of X-history enabling call backs to
nearly every film entry in the series, but most tellingly the biggest highlight
of the film is the blessed lack of a lowlight. However the Fox X-Men Cinematic Universe is a far shade of grey from the excellently treated and carefully planned Marvel Universe, even the bumpers here don't properly lead into the next movie.
Singer himself once again paves over plot holes with pageantry, over
explains with flash backs but nails the Funky 70s while also avoiding tired
clichés. Yet an undercurrent of
unfocused narrative and studio-driven emphasis pervade the picture. For instance the obvious fetishisation and
idolization of blue-meanie Mystique (a continuance from previous films) rises
to strange new heights. Now superstar
Jennifer Lawrence’s blood is the perfect weapon to be used against her own kind,
and all her amazing kung fu and near-onscreen nakedness aren't going to stop
both sides from fighting over her (just as we, the basement dwelling comic
geeks, surely must wipe our chins over her).
We are treated to even more true blue glimpses of Mystique’s physique, slightly
tempered by slipping in a sly Zapruder-film reference. This reliance on Star Power T&A trumps any
real plot development and feels like a real speed bump for the film’s ability
to evolve into something at the top of the food chain.
The X-Gang’s all here, both versions with good chemistry,
both anchored by Hugh Jackman’s fan favorite Wolverine. Yet all these metaphysical beings end up
doing is sitting on airplanes or darkened rooms and discussing the “well, whats
next?” exposition. They look good, they
feel good in the roles, and the action when it happens looks good. Yet where is the gravitas of the situation, the
tension should be a fear of extinction yet the only emotion the Old Team seem
to be able to drum up is an apparent fear of razors. The future is just a world that blew a fuse
and no one can find the flashlight, a dusty abandoned temple is 90% of our view
into this supposed “nightmare future”.
The past says it’s the 70s (remember ‘Nam and JFK???), but how about
showing the actual racial tensions that were rampant in that day and age, that
actually inspired creator Stan Lee to write this silly comic book that addressed
the taboo topic of racial prejudice by wrapping it in goofy mutated genes and
unlimited super powers yarn.
XM:DOFP ends up a completely unchallenging viewing
experience, slurped through a straw by an audience so thirsty for any decent
X-related material that it will gladly smack its lips at the treacle-y
high-fructose aftertaste, completely unperturbed by its empty caloric content. Mostly Adequate Soap Operatic Sci-Fi with
flashes of brilliance is built into its X-genes, being present in decades of
Marvel Comics continuity paradoxes, and it doesn't look like the studios are
going to break that mold anytime soon, even if they did just rewrite its entire universe a la the Star Trek reboot.
7 Where’s My Stan Lee Walk On??? out of 10 (GOOD)
Godzilla (2014)
Godzilla (PG-13) - Review
"You have a right to know!"
When Giant Radioactive Monsters devastate the East and West Pacific Rim, where does humanity turn to rescue it from the threat? Why none other than the King of Monsters, Godzilla, a prehistoric mutant of enormous proportions whose only rhyme or reason is wrestling with other nuclear fueled tyrants.
Finally washing away the stink of Emmerich's unwise 1998 version, Godzilla 2014 stays almost too true to the Japanese Kaiju mythos as it combines an authentic Godzilla movie elevated above the man-in-rubber-suit constraints of the Toho regime thanks to Hollywood blockbuster status. While it doesn't all add up to perfection and may not please everyone, long term Godzilla fans can breath a collective radioactive sigh of relief at this solidly entertaining outing.
The beginning of the film is almost a retcon of 1999s version, finding a scientific team headed by Ken Watanabe in the Philippines discovering ancient enormous fossils (the bones of a Godzilla relative and a pair of it's parasites). A short time later, the family of Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) faces tragedy when the Japanese Nuclear Power Plant he works for melts down under mysterious circumstances. 15 years later and his son (Aaron Taylor Johnson from Kick Ass) must plunge back into the monstrous mystery as he plays a crucial role in the epic events unfolding, this time on US soil. His family and country try to survive the epic clash as Monsters once again roam the Earth.
The film is at its heart an epic-level human disaster movie and derives its terror from references to both the 2011 Fukushima reactor explosion and the 2004 Indonesian Tsunami tragedy. Human life is a frail thing compared to these ancient primordial life forms who can swat us aside like gnats, feed off our worst radioactive bi-products and wrestle 50 stories above us. When the final confrontation occurs (and be patient it does occur), a San Francisco leveling brawl takes place with us tiny humans scrambling to save as many of ourselves as possible. Director Gareth Edwards excels, previously made the full-of-potential low budget indie film "Monsters", and here he is liberated from his penny pinching but not from the groundings of simple entertainment desires.
The American touches are mostly complementary. The film's audio design is outstanding and yet referential to the originals, the score is perfectly dark and smokey (so happy to have a touch of Requiem from 2001 ASO in there), the monsters look and feel very traditional to the old Toho design and yet without its cartoonishness or lack of mass. There is a moment in the film where pudgy CGI Godzilla looks into the camera and lets out one long continuous roar that goes on for much longer than is comfortable, announcing his intentions to finally kick monster ass. It is a delightfully self aware touch to a movie that for most people just needs to be about giant rubber monsters flailing about, and that is perhaps where it falls shortest. There are many instances of teasing the audience ala Cloverfield, cutting away from Monster action in an effort to prolong tension (something the Japanese could never be accused of). It delays and delays until it can't delay any further and must allow the beasts full screen mayhem. While moderately successful at creating anticipation, the technique may leave some audiences feeling slighted leaving as it does most of the action in the hands of its human actors. However, the humans having a larger role than anticipated is a staple of most Japanese Godzilla films and can be forgiven, and if only the filmmakers had found some wonderful middle ground between featuring humans/monsters then this could have been the perfect Godzilla. In fact the entire film reads like a Godzilla fans almost wet dream, with all the military "toys" and their dumb as a rock military plans, all the small children in peril, without the need to get gory or talk down to its audience. It all adds up to a Godzilla that we have never seen before, with an Indy sensibility behind the camera and an efficient intelligence behind its script, leaving us with an experience that is an uninterrupted echo of monsters through a darkened theater, reverberating off the ruined skyscrapers and felt curtains as they grind civilization to dust in their lumbering awake.
8 Godjira's out of 10 (GREAT)
"You have a right to know!"
When Giant Radioactive Monsters devastate the East and West Pacific Rim, where does humanity turn to rescue it from the threat? Why none other than the King of Monsters, Godzilla, a prehistoric mutant of enormous proportions whose only rhyme or reason is wrestling with other nuclear fueled tyrants.
Finally washing away the stink of Emmerich's unwise 1998 version, Godzilla 2014 stays almost too true to the Japanese Kaiju mythos as it combines an authentic Godzilla movie elevated above the man-in-rubber-suit constraints of the Toho regime thanks to Hollywood blockbuster status. While it doesn't all add up to perfection and may not please everyone, long term Godzilla fans can breath a collective radioactive sigh of relief at this solidly entertaining outing.
The beginning of the film is almost a retcon of 1999s version, finding a scientific team headed by Ken Watanabe in the Philippines discovering ancient enormous fossils (the bones of a Godzilla relative and a pair of it's parasites). A short time later, the family of Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) faces tragedy when the Japanese Nuclear Power Plant he works for melts down under mysterious circumstances. 15 years later and his son (Aaron Taylor Johnson from Kick Ass) must plunge back into the monstrous mystery as he plays a crucial role in the epic events unfolding, this time on US soil. His family and country try to survive the epic clash as Monsters once again roam the Earth.
The film is at its heart an epic-level human disaster movie and derives its terror from references to both the 2011 Fukushima reactor explosion and the 2004 Indonesian Tsunami tragedy. Human life is a frail thing compared to these ancient primordial life forms who can swat us aside like gnats, feed off our worst radioactive bi-products and wrestle 50 stories above us. When the final confrontation occurs (and be patient it does occur), a San Francisco leveling brawl takes place with us tiny humans scrambling to save as many of ourselves as possible. Director Gareth Edwards excels, previously made the full-of-potential low budget indie film "Monsters", and here he is liberated from his penny pinching but not from the groundings of simple entertainment desires.
The American touches are mostly complementary. The film's audio design is outstanding and yet referential to the originals, the score is perfectly dark and smokey (so happy to have a touch of Requiem from 2001 ASO in there), the monsters look and feel very traditional to the old Toho design and yet without its cartoonishness or lack of mass. There is a moment in the film where pudgy CGI Godzilla looks into the camera and lets out one long continuous roar that goes on for much longer than is comfortable, announcing his intentions to finally kick monster ass. It is a delightfully self aware touch to a movie that for most people just needs to be about giant rubber monsters flailing about, and that is perhaps where it falls shortest. There are many instances of teasing the audience ala Cloverfield, cutting away from Monster action in an effort to prolong tension (something the Japanese could never be accused of). It delays and delays until it can't delay any further and must allow the beasts full screen mayhem. While moderately successful at creating anticipation, the technique may leave some audiences feeling slighted leaving as it does most of the action in the hands of its human actors. However, the humans having a larger role than anticipated is a staple of most Japanese Godzilla films and can be forgiven, and if only the filmmakers had found some wonderful middle ground between featuring humans/monsters then this could have been the perfect Godzilla. In fact the entire film reads like a Godzilla fans almost wet dream, with all the military "toys" and their dumb as a rock military plans, all the small children in peril, without the need to get gory or talk down to its audience. It all adds up to a Godzilla that we have never seen before, with an Indy sensibility behind the camera and an efficient intelligence behind its script, leaving us with an experience that is an uninterrupted echo of monsters through a darkened theater, reverberating off the ruined skyscrapers and felt curtains as they grind civilization to dust in their lumbering awake.
8 Godjira's out of 10 (GREAT)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (PG-13) Review
"A-Head of the Class"
The Marvel Studios again outshine their Comic Book film brethren by churning out an astonishingly entertaining and action packed movie starring one of its squarest Super Heroes, Captain America. Not only must Cap and his SHIELD cohorts once again battle the corruptive forces of Hydra but also their own shadowy pasts in this much improved sequel.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is already overflowing with success, an achievement all the more impressive in that it is still arguably without its most famous licenses (rival Studios all hold the reigns for Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the X-Men). Yet, here is Captain America, well-known and respected Nazi-Smasher from the 40's succeeding beyond all reasonable expectations in our here and now (both on and off the screen). A man who wears a big capital "A" in the middle of his forehead as a fashion statement has no business being accepted in today's fickle pop culture. But here is the Big Blue Bomber, with his creaky old stoicism and unfashionable patriotism, embraced as a genuine Box Office Blockbuster and the true American hero he's always been. Epic explosions, spy movie tropes, hand to hand combat combine with non-stereotypical Ethnic characters and a compassionate touch on PTSD and the brotherhood of soldiers, this is one amazingly accessible, yet progressive American film.
Disappointing as it is to lose the original source's Cold War era Russia origins or to saddle Cap with an overpowered Black Widow (who is apparently the only female willing to cross franchise lines to add unnecessary sex appeal to any Male driven MarvelU film), if the constant fighting and shield flinging all kind of look the same by the end of its 2+ hours, if the politics are very conveniently pro-Snowden/post-Anon when the past entries were all pro-PatriotAct/post-911, well we can still all sigh a big sigh of relief that Disney hasn't muddled the waters and have let Marvel do what Marvel does best. Envelop into their stories a tapestry of current events while a multitude of different writers preserve its diverse history and mythology. Oh, and give Stan Lee a line or two in every film. Excelsior!
8 Unexplained Big Red Stars out of 10 (GREAT)
"A-Head of the Class"
The Marvel Studios again outshine their Comic Book film brethren by churning out an astonishingly entertaining and action packed movie starring one of its squarest Super Heroes, Captain America. Not only must Cap and his SHIELD cohorts once again battle the corruptive forces of Hydra but also their own shadowy pasts in this much improved sequel.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is already overflowing with success, an achievement all the more impressive in that it is still arguably without its most famous licenses (rival Studios all hold the reigns for Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the X-Men). Yet, here is Captain America, well-known and respected Nazi-Smasher from the 40's succeeding beyond all reasonable expectations in our here and now (both on and off the screen). A man who wears a big capital "A" in the middle of his forehead as a fashion statement has no business being accepted in today's fickle pop culture. But here is the Big Blue Bomber, with his creaky old stoicism and unfashionable patriotism, embraced as a genuine Box Office Blockbuster and the true American hero he's always been. Epic explosions, spy movie tropes, hand to hand combat combine with non-stereotypical Ethnic characters and a compassionate touch on PTSD and the brotherhood of soldiers, this is one amazingly accessible, yet progressive American film.
Disappointing as it is to lose the original source's Cold War era Russia origins or to saddle Cap with an overpowered Black Widow (who is apparently the only female willing to cross franchise lines to add unnecessary sex appeal to any Male driven MarvelU film), if the constant fighting and shield flinging all kind of look the same by the end of its 2+ hours, if the politics are very conveniently pro-Snowden/post-Anon when the past entries were all pro-PatriotAct/post-911, well we can still all sigh a big sigh of relief that Disney hasn't muddled the waters and have let Marvel do what Marvel does best. Envelop into their stories a tapestry of current events while a multitude of different writers preserve its diverse history and mythology. Oh, and give Stan Lee a line or two in every film. Excelsior!
8 Unexplained Big Red Stars out of 10 (GREAT)
Dumb & Dumber To (2014)
Dumb & Dumber To (R)
The Farrelly brothers' Harry and Lloyd return with another dumb adventure set on the road to a tech conference in search of a replacement kidney from a long-lost daughter. Laughs are fewer and farther between, as the leads (Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels) now classic characters have lost their characterizations in favor of just acting like 10 year olds. The troubled production can only be compared to the original, and yes it is dumber than the first, but the aging cast and the creaking dialog can't outrun the few puns (and nutshots) that hit home, not to mention the sequelitis of the plot (hit men, bird boys and *yawn* road trip). You'll soon zip by the prerequisite nods to the original and find some genuine chuckles here, but the fresh/manic energy of the original (wheres the improv?) has not lasted these 20 years and has instead dried up like yesterday's diapers.
5 Appropriate Usage of the Mutt Cut Mobile out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
The Farrelly brothers' Harry and Lloyd return with another dumb adventure set on the road to a tech conference in search of a replacement kidney from a long-lost daughter. Laughs are fewer and farther between, as the leads (Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels) now classic characters have lost their characterizations in favor of just acting like 10 year olds. The troubled production can only be compared to the original, and yes it is dumber than the first, but the aging cast and the creaking dialog can't outrun the few puns (and nutshots) that hit home, not to mention the sequelitis of the plot (hit men, bird boys and *yawn* road trip). You'll soon zip by the prerequisite nods to the original and find some genuine chuckles here, but the fresh/manic energy of the original (wheres the improv?) has not lasted these 20 years and has instead dried up like yesterday's diapers.
5 Appropriate Usage of the Mutt Cut Mobile out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Edge of Tomorrow (PG-13)
"Steal From Groundhog. Crib From Aliens. Repeat"
Tom Cruise stars as a cowardly Major who is thrown unwittingly unto the front line of a final assault against a time-manipulating alien menace in a overtaken Europe. In a twist of fate (and a plot wholly borrowed from the Bill Murray classic Groundhog's Day) he finds himself waking up to the exact same day every time he dies, a time loop caused by the alien invaders which was apparently based on a Japanese novel called "All You Need Is Kill".
Soundly unoriginal yet entertaining, Edge of Tomorrow is made by professionals like writer Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), starring a talented cast headed by Cruise, Emily Blunt and Brendan Gleeson, no wonder EOT is tightly made, acted and produced (yet blandly titled) blockbuster. However, burdened with a quite wimpy PG-13 rating, Tomorrow drags itself back again and again to the past. Generously helping itself to the squad dynamic of James Cameron's Aliens (even plagiarizing Bill "Game Over Man" Paxton), leaves the movie's well groomed hands caught red handed in the cookie jar.. The overly macho "Metal Bitch" played by Blunt is, to put it bluntly, tiresome (even more so is the eye-rolling insistence on a romantic angle between the leads), a product of the film's need to differentiate and lean on modern tropes to distract from it's source.
The reason the original Groundhog wasn't itself repeated by other films despite it's enormous success is that the formula is so uniquely tell-tale that if you copy it you'll have no where to hide. Hire the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still every critic will mention Groundhog's Day.
Shoot, Die, Rewrite. Lure the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still EVERY critic will mention Groundhog's Day, even though applying it to an action film can be quite satisfying (any genre in fact it would work on, its a fantastic idea that Harold Ramis came up with), Bing!
5.5 Leave the Helmet on Tom out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
"Steal From Groundhog. Crib From Aliens. Repeat"
Tom Cruise stars as a cowardly Major who is thrown unwittingly unto the front line of a final assault against a time-manipulating alien menace in a overtaken Europe. In a twist of fate (and a plot wholly borrowed from the Bill Murray classic Groundhog's Day) he finds himself waking up to the exact same day every time he dies, a time loop caused by the alien invaders which was apparently based on a Japanese novel called "All You Need Is Kill".
Soundly unoriginal yet entertaining, Edge of Tomorrow is made by professionals like writer Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), starring a talented cast headed by Cruise, Emily Blunt and Brendan Gleeson, no wonder EOT is tightly made, acted and produced (yet blandly titled) blockbuster. However, burdened with a quite wimpy PG-13 rating, Tomorrow drags itself back again and again to the past. Generously helping itself to the squad dynamic of James Cameron's Aliens (even plagiarizing Bill "Game Over Man" Paxton), leaves the movie's well groomed hands caught red handed in the cookie jar.. The overly macho "Metal Bitch" played by Blunt is, to put it bluntly, tiresome (even more so is the eye-rolling insistence on a romantic angle between the leads), a product of the film's need to differentiate and lean on modern tropes to distract from it's source.
The reason the original Groundhog wasn't itself repeated by other films despite it's enormous success is that the formula is so uniquely tell-tale that if you copy it you'll have no where to hide. Hire the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still every critic will mention Groundhog's Day.
Shoot, Die, Rewrite. Lure the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still EVERY critic will mention Groundhog's Day, even though applying it to an action film can be quite satisfying (any genre in fact it would work on, its a fantastic idea that Harold Ramis came up with), Bing!
5.5 Leave the Helmet on Tom out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)
Robocop (2014)
Robocop (PG-13) - Review
"Go Robo! (And Don't Come Back)"
A police officer wounded in the line of duty is given a second chance at his would-be killers when a large corporation cybernetically resurrects him for their own ends in this room-temperatured remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1986 cyber-grind classic.
Robocop has been drearily updated for our extremely near future, a world of faddy touchscreens and hand swiping stolen directly from our current News Cycle along with glowing cell phones, politically motivated News Hosts and gerrymandering Big Business. Basically the film didn't look so much to the possible future as to last years headlines, leaving us with a future so bereft of SciFi ideas and ideals that it speaks volumes to the design and creation of this film. The script is so shallow in scope that it predetermines nothing not already discussed on yesteryear's internet message boards.
There is a little that works. A dig at Asia's near-monopoly/slavetrade of techjobs works with depth while remaining understated; no one in the film bats an eye that Murphy must be sent to the China to be constructed into Robocop just like a new iteration of an iPhone, a fun and interesting departure from the original's Detroit-centric motorcity-construction. Micheal Keaton's OCP CEO runs his corporation more like a driven inventor "take no prisoners" type like Apple's Steve Jobs, surrounded by market research and yes men (very unlike the self-cannibalizing piranahs from the original). Yet Robocop's remaining husk of a great story has been stripped of its grand linking components in the name of change just for change's sake.
Nearly everything has been shifted from the hard hitting original, most likely in the great law of the remake, the requirement to separate oneself from the source material. Somehow Detroit is said to be a crime-ridden slum yet all we see are sunny clean streets and expensive suburbs bereft of crime. Emphasis has gone away from stellar action, shocking gore, black comedy and likeable characters of all creeds. This new film instead focuses on teary eyed family issues, puts a stungun in its hero's hand in the name of a PG13 rating, provides its gore shocks only from amputees and body horror, provides zero humor or characterization to its players, and its political messages are overlong and simplistic in its views of both America and its Corporations.
While Verhoeven's original 80's film could never be praised for its subtlety it never the less operates like a well oiled machine in comparison to the remake's clunky machinations. While one deftly lampooned both the mass media and the political/Capitalistic society of it's decade (while still maintaining entertainment value for all audiences), this new film can only ruin its own action by holding onto straight faced stoicism while spoiling any valid political criticism it has generated by allowing Sam "My Own Cliche" Jackson to basically scream into the camera "THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT MOTHER F*BLEEP*ING OBAMA'S DRONES" just in case anyone in the audience had missed the filmmakers big point (we got it, thanks). And how can a title that features the words ROBO and COP end up so drearily boring? When you focus on the ROBO and not the COP, thats when.
4.5 Why Did They Leave The Hand? out of 10 (BAD)
"Go Robo! (And Don't Come Back)"
A police officer wounded in the line of duty is given a second chance at his would-be killers when a large corporation cybernetically resurrects him for their own ends in this room-temperatured remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1986 cyber-grind classic.
Robocop has been drearily updated for our extremely near future, a world of faddy touchscreens and hand swiping stolen directly from our current News Cycle along with glowing cell phones, politically motivated News Hosts and gerrymandering Big Business. Basically the film didn't look so much to the possible future as to last years headlines, leaving us with a future so bereft of SciFi ideas and ideals that it speaks volumes to the design and creation of this film. The script is so shallow in scope that it predetermines nothing not already discussed on yesteryear's internet message boards.
There is a little that works. A dig at Asia's near-monopoly/slavetrade of techjobs works with depth while remaining understated; no one in the film bats an eye that Murphy must be sent to the China to be constructed into Robocop just like a new iteration of an iPhone, a fun and interesting departure from the original's Detroit-centric motorcity-construction. Micheal Keaton's OCP CEO runs his corporation more like a driven inventor "take no prisoners" type like Apple's Steve Jobs, surrounded by market research and yes men (very unlike the self-cannibalizing piranahs from the original). Yet Robocop's remaining husk of a great story has been stripped of its grand linking components in the name of change just for change's sake.
Nearly everything has been shifted from the hard hitting original, most likely in the great law of the remake, the requirement to separate oneself from the source material. Somehow Detroit is said to be a crime-ridden slum yet all we see are sunny clean streets and expensive suburbs bereft of crime. Emphasis has gone away from stellar action, shocking gore, black comedy and likeable characters of all creeds. This new film instead focuses on teary eyed family issues, puts a stungun in its hero's hand in the name of a PG13 rating, provides its gore shocks only from amputees and body horror, provides zero humor or characterization to its players, and its political messages are overlong and simplistic in its views of both America and its Corporations.
While Verhoeven's original 80's film could never be praised for its subtlety it never the less operates like a well oiled machine in comparison to the remake's clunky machinations. While one deftly lampooned both the mass media and the political/Capitalistic society of it's decade (while still maintaining entertainment value for all audiences), this new film can only ruin its own action by holding onto straight faced stoicism while spoiling any valid political criticism it has generated by allowing Sam "My Own Cliche" Jackson to basically scream into the camera "THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT MOTHER F*BLEEP*ING OBAMA'S DRONES" just in case anyone in the audience had missed the filmmakers big point (we got it, thanks). And how can a title that features the words ROBO and COP end up so drearily boring? When you focus on the ROBO and not the COP, thats when.
4.5 Why Did They Leave The Hand? out of 10 (BAD)
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Thor: The Dark World (PG-13) - Review
"Star Wars with Hammers"
The Marvel Universe attempts to shave off some of the Fantasy Sci/Fi craze, and somewhat succeeds, in the newest solo outing of the God of Thunder after his stint in the blockbuster Avengers. More inner-family strife rocks the royal family of Asgard as an old threat of Space Elves with a weapon from another dimension of cliche. Unlike the other franchises, Marvel has steeped the Thor films in romantic interest, pushing Chris Hemsworth loves Natalie Portman on the audience when really all anyone wants to see is more Tom Hiddleston as halfbrother Loki (this time sans horny helmet but still able to steal scenes like nobodies business). The Space Elves come straight from a bad hellboy sequel, their weapon is true doomsday cheese, the Star Wars like vehicles and lazer fights, the awkward romance and wacky sidekicks tacked on for female audiences, it all still adds up to a better film that builds upon the mediocrity of the first while retaining what worked (Heimdall, Hopkins and a general Shakespearean air) and churns up some grade "A" spectacle that with the proper blinders can be enjoyed like a more meatheaded step by Marvel towards a LOTR sized market and Box Office Share.
6 By The Beards of Odin out of 10 (GOOD)
"Star Wars with Hammers"
The Marvel Universe attempts to shave off some of the Fantasy Sci/Fi craze, and somewhat succeeds, in the newest solo outing of the God of Thunder after his stint in the blockbuster Avengers. More inner-family strife rocks the royal family of Asgard as an old threat of Space Elves with a weapon from another dimension of cliche. Unlike the other franchises, Marvel has steeped the Thor films in romantic interest, pushing Chris Hemsworth loves Natalie Portman on the audience when really all anyone wants to see is more Tom Hiddleston as halfbrother Loki (this time sans horny helmet but still able to steal scenes like nobodies business). The Space Elves come straight from a bad hellboy sequel, their weapon is true doomsday cheese, the Star Wars like vehicles and lazer fights, the awkward romance and wacky sidekicks tacked on for female audiences, it all still adds up to a better film that builds upon the mediocrity of the first while retaining what worked (Heimdall, Hopkins and a general Shakespearean air) and churns up some grade "A" spectacle that with the proper blinders can be enjoyed like a more meatheaded step by Marvel towards a LOTR sized market and Box Office Share.
6 By The Beards of Odin out of 10 (GOOD)
Gravity (2013)
Gravity (PG-13) - Review
"In Space no one can hear you squeam"
On a mission to repair the Hubble Space telescope, dashing veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and civilian medical engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) must overcome the dangers of the laws of physics in the vaccum of space as they try to survive a collision with space debris and must cling to each other for support as they freefall hundreds of miles above the planet.
Director Alfonso Cuaron (who also directed the superbly crafted Children of Men) revels in the 3D medium, producing his trademarked lengthy shots that zoom in and out of the scenes as the characters attempt to cling to their lives high above mother Earth. The acting is obviously upper echelon, though this is a role that Clooney can and does float through without batting a baby blue. Bullock's Ryan is the vulnerable one here, she is barely trained and has emotional baggage stemming from the death of her only child. However, in a nod to a genuine staple of Sci-Fi heroinism, she takes little time in stripping to her underwear and bettering her male peers as she returns to the womb of weightlessness. This is her story, a fantastic yet mostly realistic horror-in-space tale that will leave you reeling again and again as she spins, drops, floats, flails and burns her way forward in an attempt to escape. Hopefully your sense of vertigo is up to the task of watching.
The pace is one of the best to be seen on the silver screen, the swelling of soundtrack music often standing in for the lack of sound effects that are the mark of the attempt of true science fiction. However, it must be said that Gravity features as much (if not more) CGI than Life of Pi, and like that film about a character surviving in an inhospitable environment with only themselves to depend on, it fills the frame with the uncanny valley, that sensation that nothing you are seeing is quite real. The astronauts look to be mere floating faces on computer generated bodies, going about their tasks while the materials and animations of their suits never look quite solidified and real. The telescopic 3D use is excellent, but also highlights the overall fad of the medium. Cuaron has fashioned a wonderfully crowd pleasing treat and the 3D is so well used it mostly fades into the background and brings you, in a darkened theater where it is most effective, closer to the danger. Yet how many great artists have been able to do that, and how many have the talent or the ability to make the next (or have made one that compares to) Gravity? In the many years of 3D film making there have not been any, and doubtless few more as home/mobile media continues to overtake the theatrical market.
The plot sometimes careens into the obvious, but that's ok as snappy references to Dark Star twang by and Sandra scrambles on another space platform fraught with peril. Its the best constantly on the edge of your seat SciFi film since The Abyss and the best film about space survival since Apollo 13 or 2001 A Space Odyssey. There no overt political agendas or themes to be had here, just pure high altitude entertainment with a pleasantly adroit message of "it's not enough just to survive, you have to live". That's something us Terrans can always hear more of.
8.5 Dreamy Clooneys out of 10 (GREAT)
"In Space no one can hear you squeam"
On a mission to repair the Hubble Space telescope, dashing veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and civilian medical engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) must overcome the dangers of the laws of physics in the vaccum of space as they try to survive a collision with space debris and must cling to each other for support as they freefall hundreds of miles above the planet.
Director Alfonso Cuaron (who also directed the superbly crafted Children of Men) revels in the 3D medium, producing his trademarked lengthy shots that zoom in and out of the scenes as the characters attempt to cling to their lives high above mother Earth. The acting is obviously upper echelon, though this is a role that Clooney can and does float through without batting a baby blue. Bullock's Ryan is the vulnerable one here, she is barely trained and has emotional baggage stemming from the death of her only child. However, in a nod to a genuine staple of Sci-Fi heroinism, she takes little time in stripping to her underwear and bettering her male peers as she returns to the womb of weightlessness. This is her story, a fantastic yet mostly realistic horror-in-space tale that will leave you reeling again and again as she spins, drops, floats, flails and burns her way forward in an attempt to escape. Hopefully your sense of vertigo is up to the task of watching.
The pace is one of the best to be seen on the silver screen, the swelling of soundtrack music often standing in for the lack of sound effects that are the mark of the attempt of true science fiction. However, it must be said that Gravity features as much (if not more) CGI than Life of Pi, and like that film about a character surviving in an inhospitable environment with only themselves to depend on, it fills the frame with the uncanny valley, that sensation that nothing you are seeing is quite real. The astronauts look to be mere floating faces on computer generated bodies, going about their tasks while the materials and animations of their suits never look quite solidified and real. The telescopic 3D use is excellent, but also highlights the overall fad of the medium. Cuaron has fashioned a wonderfully crowd pleasing treat and the 3D is so well used it mostly fades into the background and brings you, in a darkened theater where it is most effective, closer to the danger. Yet how many great artists have been able to do that, and how many have the talent or the ability to make the next (or have made one that compares to) Gravity? In the many years of 3D film making there have not been any, and doubtless few more as home/mobile media continues to overtake the theatrical market.
The plot sometimes careens into the obvious, but that's ok as snappy references to Dark Star twang by and Sandra scrambles on another space platform fraught with peril. Its the best constantly on the edge of your seat SciFi film since The Abyss and the best film about space survival since Apollo 13 or 2001 A Space Odyssey. There no overt political agendas or themes to be had here, just pure high altitude entertainment with a pleasantly adroit message of "it's not enough just to survive, you have to live". That's something us Terrans can always hear more of.
8.5 Dreamy Clooneys out of 10 (GREAT)
Elysium (2013)
Elysium (PG-13) - Review
"More Cyber-Junk than Cyber-Punk"
Not content with the Racial equality parable of District 9, director Neill Blomkamp turns his sites on Mexican-American immigration reform for this overwhelmingly underwhelming SciFi snoozer starring Mat Damon as Max, a misunderstood misanthrope in a brown man's world with only days to live and interplanetary habitats to reach and get magically healed by.
Blomkamp sticks with the bluecollar ethos that made D9 so successful, albeit this time with a Hollywood megastar and a bunch of thinly veiled stabs at US foreign policy, immigration policy, Blackwater soldiering and corporational politics. You see everyone up in the Orbital station known as Elysium gets free unlimited magical health care pods (wasn't that also in Prometheus, and what the GOP doesn't want?), and only the richest get to buy a ticket to live there. Everyone on Earth lives and works and gets cancer in Big Mexico (whats left of SoCal), the Elysium people just send down robots and shuttle pods to keep the Have Nots under control. Then comes Max, a former car thief now reformed factory worker who dreams of one day taking the ride up to Elysium but when Max gets filled with radiation at work due to workplace neglicence (Workman's comp apparently also is only available on Elysium) he must now reach the station and maybe change the situations of millions of his Earthbound brethern.
Every on Earth speaks Spanish and English, while everyone in orbit speaks English and French and attends lawn parties all day and don't work. How this economy is sustained, what is the basis of law and order and the constitution, why humans (rich and poor) would totally submit to robotic computer control that can be changed with a couple of lines of C++ are all questions that go unanswered in Elysium. The film is a very thin premise stretched to only an hour and a half, with no big action movie payoffs to stave off the eye rolling shmaltz. Jodie Foster retains the current Queen of SciFi status with her role as Space Margret Thatcher, who explodes refugee boats with impunity and will implement a coup if anyone argues with her strangely over acted weirdly dubbed space accent. She hires Kruger (Sharlto Copley, the hero of District 9) as her blackops monster, and his miscasting in the role is just outright terrible. Sharlto's bad guy wears a exoskeleton, wears fur blankets, sneers and bumbles along waving a samurai sword in the worst kind of SyFy Tv special cliche (use a gun jack hole!). It's not his fault, its the script, written by Blomkamp, which is such a drastic reversal from District 9's hopeful breakout. The story is so filled with holes (like the Spider character however), so many wretchedly nauseating flash backs to the golden years of youth, so many "why would he do that, why would that happen" moments, so much promise of Cyber-punk body modification and human/computer scientific theory so mishandled and without gravitas it feels the scriptwriter doesn't even understand the basics of the genre and also so without the clear clean visuals of D9 that are instead replaced with a shaky action cam so shoddy as to make the late great Tony Scott snort in derision. Mostly the script is so narrow minded, it so sorely lacks a large enough scope, the film's promise so sadly unfulfilled and the entire film such a large step down from his fresh faced freshman film that Blomkamp's Elysium appears to have made the Sophomore mistake of waking up late with a face full of zits, not combing it's hair and blinking for its school picture in comparison (don't expect a nomination for best dressed or most likely to succeed for either of them).
3 Did I Really Believe Lockout's SciFi More? out of 10 (BAD)
"More Cyber-Junk than Cyber-Punk"
Not content with the Racial equality parable of District 9, director Neill Blomkamp turns his sites on Mexican-American immigration reform for this overwhelmingly underwhelming SciFi snoozer starring Mat Damon as Max, a misunderstood misanthrope in a brown man's world with only days to live and interplanetary habitats to reach and get magically healed by.
Blomkamp sticks with the bluecollar ethos that made D9 so successful, albeit this time with a Hollywood megastar and a bunch of thinly veiled stabs at US foreign policy, immigration policy, Blackwater soldiering and corporational politics. You see everyone up in the Orbital station known as Elysium gets free unlimited magical health care pods (wasn't that also in Prometheus, and what the GOP doesn't want?), and only the richest get to buy a ticket to live there. Everyone on Earth lives and works and gets cancer in Big Mexico (whats left of SoCal), the Elysium people just send down robots and shuttle pods to keep the Have Nots under control. Then comes Max, a former car thief now reformed factory worker who dreams of one day taking the ride up to Elysium but when Max gets filled with radiation at work due to workplace neglicence (Workman's comp apparently also is only available on Elysium) he must now reach the station and maybe change the situations of millions of his Earthbound brethern.
Every on Earth speaks Spanish and English, while everyone in orbit speaks English and French and attends lawn parties all day and don't work. How this economy is sustained, what is the basis of law and order and the constitution, why humans (rich and poor) would totally submit to robotic computer control that can be changed with a couple of lines of C++ are all questions that go unanswered in Elysium. The film is a very thin premise stretched to only an hour and a half, with no big action movie payoffs to stave off the eye rolling shmaltz. Jodie Foster retains the current Queen of SciFi status with her role as Space Margret Thatcher, who explodes refugee boats with impunity and will implement a coup if anyone argues with her strangely over acted weirdly dubbed space accent. She hires Kruger (Sharlto Copley, the hero of District 9) as her blackops monster, and his miscasting in the role is just outright terrible. Sharlto's bad guy wears a exoskeleton, wears fur blankets, sneers and bumbles along waving a samurai sword in the worst kind of SyFy Tv special cliche (use a gun jack hole!). It's not his fault, its the script, written by Blomkamp, which is such a drastic reversal from District 9's hopeful breakout. The story is so filled with holes (like the Spider character however), so many wretchedly nauseating flash backs to the golden years of youth, so many "why would he do that, why would that happen" moments, so much promise of Cyber-punk body modification and human/computer scientific theory so mishandled and without gravitas it feels the scriptwriter doesn't even understand the basics of the genre and also so without the clear clean visuals of D9 that are instead replaced with a shaky action cam so shoddy as to make the late great Tony Scott snort in derision. Mostly the script is so narrow minded, it so sorely lacks a large enough scope, the film's promise so sadly unfulfilled and the entire film such a large step down from his fresh faced freshman film that Blomkamp's Elysium appears to have made the Sophomore mistake of waking up late with a face full of zits, not combing it's hair and blinking for its school picture in comparison (don't expect a nomination for best dressed or most likely to succeed for either of them).
3 Did I Really Believe Lockout's SciFi More? out of 10 (BAD)
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About Me
- Kevin Gasaway via HardDrawn
- Turlock, California, United States
- Media and Reviews by Kevin Gasaway