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viddyd33
Reviews
Tau (2018)
Ex Machina as done by tweens
Feels like Ex Machina if it was written by a twelve year-old who read one Isaac Asimov short story and was like, "Ooo! I want to write sci-fi!"
I can see how this movie would seem smart and original to people who haven't experienced good sci-fi. It would be like taking candy corn to a remote tribe untouched by mankind and them loving it for its exquisite sweetness. However, anyone who has read more than a couple quality sci-fi books or has adequate experience with the genre will see how weak, unintelligent, contradictory, and overall amateur the screenplay is. Direction is fine, acting is fine, CG is decent, it's just the script that sucks. Here's an example...
The main girl's relationship with the AI and her journey of convincing it that it's human and giving it emotions is extremely flawed and doesn't follow any logical or meaningful route to how AI would go from point A to B. It's pretty much, "I'm going to inflict pain on you!" "Wait! You're a person and we're friends!" "Oh, really? Let me break all my instructions and parameters and believe everything you say now." That's just lazy. The security holes in the "AI" would be so bad that they're not even sensible in any stretch of the imagination. Good sci-fi would establish its learning parameters and let her use them to curve it to her will. Instead she just teaches it flatly like a child who takes her every word at face value (with several cutesy montages of then buddying up). Mind you, she knows nothing about it or how it learns while the man who DESIGNED it has absolutely no success in training it back despite his thorough understanding of how it thinks, learns, and operates. Like I said, crappy sci-fi.
Lost in Space (2018)
Pretty but pathetic
Full disclosure, I never finished episode 2. I almost quit when the lake froze within seconds (from the bottom up) yet somehow the people didn't flash freeze above the surface. Any C-grade high school kid can tell you that violates every aspect of how water freezes. Okay, so it's terrible science fiction, but is it a good story? I soldier on. (Note: by the other comments/reviews I can see this show is apparently a never-ending stream of third-grade intelligence regarding science).
Then there's an awesome robot creature with four arms and claws and animal-like and yeah! Okay, it's getting cool. Wait, oh, within two minutes of screen time it transforms into a guy in a dime-a-dozen robot suit so they can save money on CGI. Sorry, sci-fi, you fail at robots too.
Then, in another scheme to maximize profits they turn episode 2 into a forced, shameless Oreo commercial that's just embarrassing and honestly insulting to watch. I was literally so upset I stopped eating breakfast and stopped the video. I can't, I just can't. Goodbye storytelling, goodbye talent, hello cold, calculated money machine.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
I could have watched Norbit
I swear this was written by a 10 year-old. A few quick examples roughly in order of occurence:
1) "The world is almost out of oil and everyone is going to die if we don't find this theoretical energy." I guess solar, geothermal, wind, and hydro-electric solutions don't exist in this universe. Plus it's the future, these technologies would almost certainly be much further developed/implemented by then to boot.
2) Within 10 minutes some random dude pretty much says, "If we conduct this experiment we could have monsters rise from the sea in the past!" Uh...kinda specific there, buddy. Almost like you've seen Cloverfield.
3) After the experiment goes awry and all the station's systems shut down, they can't detect Earth...and half if not most of the crew of scientists automatically assume it's because Earth disappeared. Not because, you know, the systems are down.
4) After confirming the Earth was gone they didn't think to use the stars to find their location until way, way later. Maybe I just don't know what scientists are.
5) When the Russian is thrown on a table and immediately dies, you hear a flatline. He was never connected to any equipment. This is one of the only enjoyable scenes.
6) Many drug trip-esque random events that have nothing to do with anything and don't even jive with the "different realities smashing together" theory. Example: a guy for some reason gets his arm sucked into a nonsensically morphing wall, the wall takes it off painlessly and spits it out, then the arm comes alive with a mind of its own ala The Addams Family (or Evil Dead 2), writes down "Check the dead Russian's stomach!" and in his stomach they find the exact battery they needed to do something.
7) Example 2: a tank full of worms loses only all the worms and they suddenly appear inside the Russian, killing him as mentioned from before. This, and many other stupid things, aren't "random events" but would take intelligence (or stupidity) and coordination to pull off. Though the woman appearing in the wall was kinda cool.
8) Wall Girl, who suddenly appeared from another universe, has to wear another dude's uniform because hers got chopped up in the wall's wiring. Good thing it's fitted perfectly for her size and shape. Future clothes rocks.
9) Wall Girl doesn't know Asian Girl because SHE (Wall Girl) is the alternate universe's Shepherd (experiment name) engineer. But later she (Wall Girl) says that Main Girl was never on the ship in her alternate universe because she (Wall Girl) went on the mission in Main Girl's place. Main Girl and Asian Girl have completely different jobs. This one's a thinker but it's a nice fat plot contradiction, even in a movie with alternate universes.
10) Favorite line: "Shepherd smashed a Higgs Boson, overloaded, somehow ended up here." I bet they just looked up trending science topics on Twitter and injected them randomly in dialogue, because these are just words.
11) So why did the metal glue grab the guy and stick him to the wall? And don't say the unexplained magnetism because that was pulling consistently in one direction and to achieve what happened it had to succumb to the magnetism then (after grabbing him) somehow completely resist the intense magnetic field and suck him to the wall like a monster, even though all the other metal did not experience this effect.
12) A room filled with water is instantly completely frozen when exposed to space, but a room filled with air exposed to space doesn't see as much as a speck of frost although water's thermal conductivity is way, WAY less than air's. Go science!
13) A group has to manually eject a giant spinny thing so the ship doesn't explode. The commander heroically seals himself in with it to eject it easier. A crew mate yells, "No! We can do this remotely!" I love it.
14) The miscalculated Shepherd experiment makes a bunch of random chaotic things happen including sending their ship to a different universe. How do we get back? Press the button again, make more more random chaotic things happen and of course it'll perfectly transport us back to the spot we came from but change nothing else.
15) Main Girl, before transporting back to her original universe/Earth, sends a message with constructional and operational plans for the Shepherd machine (what they're in space experimenting with) to hopefully save that alternate Earth's fuel supply. Though Wall Girl from that alternate universe/Earth is there to begin with because she's on the same mission, in the same space station, with the same device that malfunctioned. I think they forgot.
16) And best for last: They never say what "The Cloverfield Paradox" is. Do they mean the chance of multiple universes colliding? Because that's not a paradox, it's an effect. This supports my hypothesis that they just picked fun science words to scatter about.