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Reviews
Hellraiser: Judgment (2018)
Confused in all the worst ways
Gary Tunnicliffe seems to have taken a big derivative helping of Seven, mixed it in with some derivative stuff from a bad understanding of what makes the comic Constantine interesting, and then slapped some superficial Hellraiser stuff on top of it. The result is a film that has a few shining concepts that *might* have worked (the creation of a Cenobite bureaucracy, for instance, had a lot of potentail, and the director's performance as The Auditor had some really good parts) but that ultimately just ends up awash in too many things. The worst part of it is the simple way that the Cenobites are rendered. It's almost as bad as when Hellraiser 3 made Pinhead into a version of Freddy. What makes Hellraiser 1 so interesting is the way that it envisioned the Cenobites not as typical 'demons' but as beings who had pushed for the most sensual experiences they could and then reached into a level that connected to a hell-ish place, but not necessarily the Christian conception of hell. Here, the opening exposition speaks somewhat to that concept, but by the end, all of that is lost and we're instead looking at a bad version of Constantine mixed with Seven with skins from the Hellraiser films on characters. It's simply a waste of time.
Gods of Egypt (2016)
A well-executed dumb movie
No one should come to this film expecting an accurate representation of ancient Egypt or Egyptian mythology. It's completely not that. In all ways, this is a remarkably well-executed 'dumb' movie, in that it's a simple fantasy action epic that focuses on fun and escapism as its core. The critique of whitewashing would be a good critique of the film if it weren't so obviously a fantasy that has no concern with mimesis. Scottish accents? Fine, I don't care. Does he glower and seem like a bad guy in the classic bad guy sense? Sure does, so it works.
Judging this film to see if it's historically or mythologically accurate is the wrong way to go about it because that's not what the film is trying to do. It's trying to be fun, give you a classic Hollywood fantasy story arc, and give you reasonably good effects and performances and let you just enjoy something for two hours. On that level, it works.
Moreover, what it's really trying to is represent not Egypt as it was, but a version of how Egypt understood itself: not as a country on a globe or continent, but a narrow stripe of the 'world' with the life-giving Nile at core and the endless desert around it. Although this isn't true (the Egyptians clearly know about Greece and other areas), it's somewhat close to the vision they had (just as the Greeks thought they were the center of the world). If you approach the film generous to that idea, then you'll enjoy it as long as you enjoy the spectacle of the thing. If you approach it wanting reality and social justice in casting, you're critiquing via the wrong criteria.
Frankenstein (2015)
A smart, if flawed, Freudian retelling of the original story
The biggest mistake in this film is the final moment of the final scene, which is a bit too much like Darth Vader screaming "NOOooOOOooo!!" at the end of Episode III. Other than that, the film is remarkably restrained and allows mostly quality performances to link together this telling of the classic Frankenstein tale in modern LA. The newest wrinkle is the use of Elizabeth as a Freudian motivation for Adam, which mostly works and allows for an interesting psychoanalytic representation of the classic story.
Otherwise, Xavier Samuel is very good as Adam, providing a restrained but effective performance as the Monster/Adam and generating significant pathos for the poor but terribly violent soul.