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1899 (2022)
1899 is DARK Lite for the English-speaking Market
This show comes from the same people who made DARK, so expectations were high. DARK was so good in part due to its "Germanness", which sets it apart from most run-of-the-mill Hollywood productions. DARK had a wholly German cast, German setting and a complex/convoluted scifi/metaphysical story, which introduced the audience to something fresh that doesn't completely conform to Hollywood stereotypes, but this sort of authenticity predictably reduced DARK's mass appeal to some extent.
I think 1899 is an attempt to make an "American/Hollywood" adaptation of DARK for the English-speaking audience who just want to binge watch a thriller without having to thinking too much about what the heck is going on. There is nothing wrong with solid implementation of tried and true sci-fi tropes, 1899 is just that, it basically rehashes certain popular elements of DARK and mixes those up with a disappointing sci-fi ending.
Everyone's seen it before, it's all a simulation in the end. What a "twist" right?
Resident Evil (2022)
Absolute trash, even by already trashy Resident Evil sequel standards
This is not even a bad RE sequel, this is high school teen drama with the usual gratuitous social justice content. It's like what? Who thought this was a good idea?
Raised by Wolves: The Beginning (2020)
Prometheus the TV series
The biggest problem with both this show and Prometheus is that there isn't any kind of closure or proper setup for the next season/sequel whatsoever. The build-up was fantastic, the sci-fi world was intriguing, the drama was compelling.
But the big reveal turned out to be some vague sci-fi mumbo jumbo, namely, evil snakes and indigenous Neanderthals wiping each other out in a war? After which the humans somehow "devolved" into the creatures? Who are the telepathic voices? It certainly appears the Neanderthal remnants and snake remnants are both responsible for manipulating the arrivals from earth. How come humans were on Kepler B? Is Ridley Scott seriously rehashing his Engineers seeding the galaxy with life plotline? And the rag-tag Aitheist resistance movement somehow managed to build a bigger and more powerful spaceship than the Mithraic religious government? Then made their way to the planet almost as quick as the Mithraic ark? WTF?
So yes, the problem is that a whole season of fantastic build-up is only answered by implausible/dumb "mysteries" and plot holes, similar to the infamous "only run in a straight line" moment from Prometheus and still not telling us anything about the Engineers' backstory even in 2020.
Mulan (2020)
It's not a "live-action remake" of the original, but a failed re-imagining
Disney misled the audience with its marketing campaign, therefore all the outrage caused by mismatched expectations is justified. Unlike Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast which indeed were faithful re-creations of the original, Mulan is a failed re-imagining with a different story, different characters, different settings and basically different everything. To add insult to injury, Disney introduced "super powers," like WTF?
The biggest problem is perhaps the tone of the movie, what is it supposed to be? A charming mix of comedy, action, drama and musical like the original? Nope, this Mulan is pathetically trying to be a market-tested Marvel superhero blockbuster. It's doomed from the beginning.
I think the great cast has been completely wasted, but the portrayal of ancient China is quite interesting, the intriguing but I'm sure not at all historically correct costumes, beautiful architecture and scenery made an otherwise terrible movie visually stunning, but these are about the only nice things I could say about Mulan.
All in all, a lot of wasted potential here, this is what always happens when every decision is made corporate executives with MBAs rather than actual filmmakers.
Solar Opposites (2020)
This is not Rick & Morty, but it's still great!
People who expected a replica of Rick & Morty will be sorely disappointed. But this show is absolutely worth watching, why? Because it's basically all the dumb and fun Rick & Morty episodes rolled into one fantastic season with lots of action/gore/ridiculous puns/adult humour/entry-level existentialism that you can simply enjoy with minimal overthinking. Why not?
Altered Carbon (2018)
Season 2 has been ridiculously inconsistent!
I loved Season 1 of Altered Carbon. It was around a stereotypically flawed murder mystery, sure, but the Utopian sci-fi world and compelling characters made the show awesome and full of potential. Altered Carbon's unique take on immortality and inequality were the best aspects of the show.
Season 2 had basically thrown everything good (the world, the moral dilemma and exploration of human nature) about Season 1 out of the window and infinitely magnified everything bad. Like the all ridiculous pseudo-science, the gaping plot holes, and the ever increasing reliance on plot armour to fill said plot holes. What the hell, Season 2 essentially reduced Altered Carbon from what could have been a cult classic into your run-of-the-mill sci-fi garbage.
I hope Season 3, if there is one, would turn things around, otherwise this awesome sci-fi franchise, like so many others, would be permanently ruined by bad writing, bad producers and bad studio execs.
Ad Astra (2019)
Daddy Issues in Space
There you go, that's basically the whole movie. No story, no character development, not even any cool sci-fi space stuff, which is you would expect from a space movie called "to the stars."
It's quite clear the amazingly shallow and pretentious writers, producers, and studio executives thought how deep and intelligent they were, so much so that they believed 2 hours of superficial force feeding of "daddy didn't love me" from Brad Pitt would be a huge hit.
We get it, life sucks. family is difficult to deal with, but we watch a "sci-fi blockbuster" to get entertained and temporarily distracted from real life, not to get annoyed by incessant ranting about "daddy didn't love me so now I can't love others," If you billed this thing as a space movie, just do a goddamn space movie.
Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne (2019)
Thanks for nothing.
All in all, I think the first 2 filler episodes turned out to be the "best" of the season. We got Edmure back at the very end, I guess it's worth the wait, but the showrunners even made him into a parody of his former self. So great, just so great. Why don't we all just pretend the show ended after Tyrion shot Tywin, and wait for GRRM to finish the books.
Game of Thrones: The Bells (2019)
What's even the point?
Almost everyone's dead, so haphazardly killed off, and for what? Shock value? Or are the show-runners so wrapped up in grandiose delusions that they thought sloppy writing, ignoring years of character development and throwing plausibility out of the window are going to fly because we the audience are too stupid to realize the show has become a shadow of its former self? Or did they think CGI explosions are indeed the essence of GOT?
What is even the point of "evening the odds" if everything happened in episode 4 is altogether disregarded since Drogon now wears the plot armour that poor Rhaegal must have forgotten to put on.
What little is left of GOT's in-world logic is shot in the head and dumped in a ditch. The scorpions which killed a dragon with ease are now useless, can't hit a thing, Drogon is now invincible, he can literally dodge every scorpion shot and blast rock with fire breath, I didn't realize he breathed dynamite too, Deus Ex Dragon, b**ch! Not to mention the Lannister army is now apparently a humanitarian force protecting civilians while the honourable Northern Army now mainly consists of rapists and pillagers who openly disobey Jon Snow's command, what?! What the heck turned Daenerys into Hitler overnight? 7 seasons of "benevolent dictator" suddenly takes a U-turn into genocide lane, because of what? The people of the North didn't "love" her like they love Jon Snow? Jaime survives 2 fatal stabbing wounds and kills Euron with 1 similar stab. Nothing makes sense, nothing is plausible, you know nothing Jon Snow.
Explosions man, they are what GOT's all about.
Game of Thrones: The Last of the Starks (2019)
The show's getting worse all the time, and finally dawning on the superfans.
After the Battle of Winterfell turned GOT into World War Z, and the White Walkers, who had been hyped for 7 freakin seaons into a giant nothing burger, as well as killing off beloved and well-developed characters in extremely lazy ways, the show-runners again demonstrated that our expectations can never be low enough. That being said, the general direction of this season isn't necessarily terrible, but the astoundingly sloppy execution made it way worse than it should be.
With episode 4, we got a very disappointing return to the terrible dialogue and zombie-like characters of episodes 1 and 2, with a few moments of good acting making an otherwise bad episode a tiny bit better.
First off, we have Jaime Lannister having maybe "pity sex" or maybe "true love sex" with Brienne. We know Brienne and Jaime have a special relationship, but "yeah let's bone" is so sloppy, rashed and has no emotional weight behind it. The only justification for this encounter seems to be Tyrion calling out Brienne's virginity and Tormund's "smooth moves." Oh how far has Jaime fallen. He transformed from the complex character in season 1 having an awesome conversation about family with Tywin while he skinned a real deer to "is it just me, or is it really hot in here?" in this episode. Jaime has been dead as a character for a while, but this really adds insult to injury.
Then, Euron's magic fleet does it again. At this point, I think we can say with absolute certainty that Euron and his fleet are the single most powerful force in Westeros. He could have destroyed the White Walkers on his own if given the opportunity. First, he built the magic fleet of "1,000 ships" with non-existent trees and non-existent labour (the Iron Islands are barren rocks) in a matter of weeks or months, which isn't even possible with modern industry, then, Euron teleports all over the place with pin point accuracy (he must have GPS) to take out the main Iron Fleet loyal to Yara, which supposedly had the "fastest" and "best" ships, yeah right. Now, Euron strikes again with his amazing teleportation ability further aided by Qyburn's magic crossbow, kills a dragon and destroys what remains of Daenerys' fleet, but somehow only takes Missandei hostage while letting the rest of Daenerys' retinue go, I guess they had plot armour. That's some top-notch writing for sure.
And what's the deal with Qyburn's magic anti-dragon crossbow? As shown in season 7, the crossbow was capable of injuring Drogon when the bolt hit his unarmoured shoulder at close range, sure fair enough, it's plausible, but now the crossbow all of a sudden behaves like highly accurate modern artillery, not only straight up kills Rheagal by piercing his armoured chest like butter, but also sinks ships like they are made of paper, are you kidding me? A large crossbow bolt more powerful than a Napoleonic era cannon ball, are we supposed to simply believe that? Consistent realism is what made the early seasons so great.
Lastly there is Tyrion, it's simply sad to see that the show has reduced him to basically a zombie in service of Daenerys' "awesomeness." And I guess we are just expected to accept that Tyrion, the guy who pulled off Blackwater Bay and played KIng's Landing like a fiddle is now nothing more than another incompetent courtier? Varys went through a similar transformation.
Now it's clear how the show will end. It won't get any better than World War Z.
Liu lang di qiu (2019)
A great sci-fi movie overall
Without spoiling anything, the premise of the film is quite original. The story is a refreshing change from Hollywood's typical and predictable "white saviour" or "America saves the world" cliches, instead, the Wandering Earth is selling the message of hope and overcoming adversity through both individual sacrifice and working together, values that transcend shallow nationalism and the "me, me, me" attitude popular in Hollywood.
The visuals are overall great, with some bad CGI moments which don't overly impact the experience. The acting is at times cringy, but acceptable considering the film being a sci-fi blockbuster. The film also pays homage to some classic sci-fi tropes by employ an evil AI, a hail Marry "venting the reactor" move, and many others.
As a whole, this is a very good sci-fi movie, keeps the audience engaged, great visuals, corny but enjoyable story, if you aren't a China-hater and like sci-fi, this is a must watch.
Game of Thrones (2011)
What the hell were they thinking? A "recap episode???"
This is episode 2 out of 6. The first episode was kinda meh, the show-runners wasted a lot of time on stereotypical Hollywood fillers you would expect from a second-tier police procedural, but sure, a little reunion here and there wasn't totally superfluous.
However, episode 2 is like a badly written version of episode 1, and unexpectedly took the use of fillers to a whole new level, a level unacceptable for GOT. The writers must have really run of ideas to do what is essentially a clip show. Again, this is something you would expect from the last season of Friends or the Office when the main characters would sit around and reminisce about "remember when you did this and I did that, those were the days, and we've all grown so much since then." And Arya, are you kidding me? Even though it was foreshadowed like crazy in episode 1, I still had some hope they wouldn't completely destroy years of character development with one gratuitous scene. My god, what a waste of an episode, the Sand Snakes don't look so bad now.
Well, at least we can expect a CGI battle next week, I guess we'll see how it goes, but I honestly didn't expect the show to deteriorate to such an extent this season.
Game of Thrones: Winterfell (2019)
Underwhelming, bordering on disappointing
We got a very tepid start for the last season of one of the greatest shows of the decade, and it seems this season will suffer from the same deficiencies of Season 7, namely, absolutely terrible pacing, mediocre writing and predictability. I think the magic of the earlier seasons are definitively gone at this point.
All those problems stem from the fact that there is no longer any source material. Instead of condensing an already fantastic series of books, now the writing team is tasked with filling gaps and turning an outline into a coherent narrative. And thus, all the deficiencies (such as tropes, gaping plot holes, and predictability) of standard Hollywood screenwriting became apparent the in last couple of seasons.
Many central characters such as Tyrion, the Hound, Daenerys and Jon Snow have progressively lost key aspects of their personality and become run-of-the-mill tropes. The terrible pacing simply exacerbates this issue as the show-runners attempt to go through a "check list" and juggle so many different arcs in a 45-50 min episode. The result is a complete lack of depth, character development, and very short scenes, and we the audience simply can't get as emotionally invested in the characters as before.
But, we can expect some key revelations tying up the story and fantastic CGI dragons and battles, so this will definitely be entertaining just not on par with earlier seasons.
Red Sparrow (2018)
Dull, predictable politically charged and wasteful of a great cast
The plot is so formulaic to the extent of torturous. The characters, while performed by great actors, all behave like stoic robots going through the motion, not to mention the atrocious "Russian" accents, they are so bad that even a comedic stereotype would be better by bounds and leaps.
The biggest flaw is perhaps brazenly force feeding so many Cold War Soviet stereotypes down our throats. Examples include going on and on about "serving the state", "the state owns your body", "survival at all costs" and "only powerful men matter". I get it, the movie wants me to equate Russia with the totalitarian evil empire.that was the Soviet Union.
Simply a huge waste of opportunity. This could have been a decent movie if there were an engaging story and the politics more tastefully handled.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
At least we got Jacob and Queenie, and Niffler!
The story is honestly anything but interesting. We got the good guys, the bad guys, the collateral, the good guys win and save the day. There is nothing compelling or unpredictable plot-wise.
The biggest downfall is perhaps how bland and outright boring the main characters are, except for the Queenie-Jacob romance subplot. They had chemistry and comedy, as a result managed to spice up an otherwise totally generic blockbuster. As for the creatures, Niffler successfully fulfills the same kind of comedy-relief role as Queenie and Jacob.
The secondary downfall is TOO MUCH CGI! If Hollywood is good at one thing, it is spending tens of millions on absolutely terrible special effects. The climax battle is so overblown and confusing that I couldn't care less what is going on because the good guys will inevitably win.
Passengers (2016)
What a fantastic idea combining sci-fi space survival thriller with rom-com
Yep, Passengers is like 2 completely different films carelessly stitched together. It not only failed to add comedy to a serious space sci-fi survival premise, but also failed to even be a half-decent sci- fi movie, which is what it's supposed to be in the first place.
The space sci-fi portion is so formulaic that anyone who has watched a few movies or played a few video games of the genre can predict the entire plot at the very beginning without much effort, because Passengers utilized every single trope the writers could think of, from space mental illness to a few people fixing a vast spaceship to venting the reactor.
Moreover, Passengers blatantly copied very specific stylistic elements of movies/games of the genre. The opening is almost identical to Pandorum, the spaceship is the same as WALL-E's Axiom, the survival element is very similar to Alien and Dead Space minus the monsters, the infirmary med-pod is lifted directly from Prometheus, the sun slingshot scene reminds me of Sunshine, not to mention the bar from the Shinning. In addition, Laurence Fishburne may just be reference to Event Horizon. These were completely beyond "paying homage" as they are central to the movie's story, rather than a passing cameo or an innocuous Easter Egg hidden in the background.
All in all, Passengers packaged banal and trite spaceship sci-fi clichés with a romantic comedy and tried to pass it off as something fresh. Instead, they could have tried to bring some life into the trapped on a spaceship premise through a compelling story.
Arrival (2016)
Ambiguous, unfulfilled, riddled with idealistic/philosophical messages, and tries too hard to be thought-provoking.
If you didn't like Villeneuve's critically acclaimed Enemy, chances are you didn't like Arrival either. For something packaged as a Sci-fi blockbuster, Arrival is really good at building up the audience's expectation for a satisfying climax using established alien-invasion tropes. However, the movie then proceeds to completely shatter this expectation with an anti-climactic and overtly philosophical ending.
The recent trend toward a more realistic, darker and philosophical take of the Sci-fi genre is welcoming, but this doesn't mean philosophical abstractions and not-so-obvious political and social commentaries are good substitutes for a fulfilling story. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Arrival is. The movie's premise is good, the mysterious atmosphere in its first half is fantastic, but a climax composed mostly of rather forced philosophical messages simply left me disappointed. Similarly, I imagine some Sci-fi fans who went into the theatre expecting to be entertained and thrilled came out confused and unfulfilled.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Just a bunch of gunfire and explosion!!
There is nothing more to say about this awesome but also awful film. No logic, no plot. However, the special effects are amazing and extremely vivid.
But the action sequences are way too intense which gave the audiences a headache!
Gunfire, explosions, and the plot that doesn't make sense at all. This is a typical Micheal Bay film that I believe to be commercially successful.
Basically, this film follows the general course of the last Transformer movie. I am just wondering, why can't Micheal Bay be more intelligent on the plot rather than the over fired guns and explosives.