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My Top Ten favorite films (in no particular order except #1):
1. Princess Mononoke
2. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
3. Apocalypse Now (Redux)
4. Akira
5. Terminator 2
6. Nausicaa Of The Valley of the Wind
7. Appleseed (2004)
8. Brotherhood of the Wolf
9. Starship Troopers
10. Wicked City
My Top Ten Favorite Directors (no particular order, except #1):
1. Hayao Miyazaki
2. Peter Jackson
3. Steven Spielberg
4. James Cameron
5. J.J Abrams
6. Guillermo del Toro
7. Mel Brooks
8. Don Bluth
9. Gore Verbinksi
10. Yoshiaki Kawajiri
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Tomb Raider (2018)
Just Another Underwhelming Video Game Adaptation.
Tomb Raider has got to be one of the most boring and by-the-numbers action/adventure films I have ever seen a long while. I don't think I came this close to falling asleep during a movie since The Last Witch Hunter.
The main actress was good but not great, I'll admit, but everyone else was serviceable at best and nothing to write home about. Except Nick Frost as the Pawn shop clerk. He was pretty cool.
However, the characters were utterly uninteresting and boring. Lara is every boring missing-parent protagonist rolled into one bland package. When I first heard that the mother died, I nearly facepalmed, in utter disbelief that it is 2018 and we are still putting the bare minimum effort into our video game adaptations. Both the Father and villain feel like they just took character templates from better movies and made no effort to flesh them out or make them unique.
The story was, you guessed it, a bore. Everything up until they reach the island felt like generic filler that was lifted from better movies and really should have been cut down. It did not help make me any more invested in this character. The rest of the movie plays out like a EXTREMELY watered down and childishly predictable Indiana Jones side quest with none of the charm, wit, or intrigue.
The action was unremarkable. Not good, but not bad either. Nothing memorable or noteworthy. Ditto for the soundtrack.
The only aspect of this film that even remotely caught my interest was the revelation that Himiko's "death powers" was actually a very fatal disease for which she was a carrier, and that she actually sacrificed herself to protect her people (contrary to the myth where she was an evil witch who was entombed by her own generals). Plot points involving the supernatural having rational explanations in grounded-in-reality films do interest me. This feels like the only element in the movie that had any effort or thought put into it.
But upon learning that this was NOT the case in the video game this movie was based on, but rather from an entirely separate franchise altogether, I could not help but laugh at the irony. I guess the actual concept from the video game was too "original and risky" for these filmmakers?
All and all, Tomb Raider was a boring and cliche-ridden chore of a film that plays it completely safe and makes no effort to set itself apart from any number of adventure films and video game adaptions. It's literally a bunch of cookie-cutter template characters taking part in a cookie-cutter template adventure without an original bone in its limp body. I have never played the game that this film is based on, but if it really is as bad as this film, then it will probably stay that way.
3/10.
Walking with Dinosaurs 3D (2013)
A disgrace to the "Walking with Dinosaurs" name.
Disclaimer: I marked my review as having spoilers, despite the fact that the plot is as predicable as the phases of the moon, because I "revealed" plot details even though you will undoubtedly know them the instant the story begins.
I caught the original "Walking with Dinosaurs" documentary when it first aired in 2000. It was a truly groundbreaking experience, combing state-of-the-art CGI with nature documentary-style storytelling in a television program. It has held up over the years quite well, and was followed by equally-good sequels including "Prehistoric Beasts" and "Monsters".
Fast forward 13 years later, and we now have a motion picture based on the name. A brand new "Walking with Dinosaurs", set on following the life of a Pachyrhinosaurus as he braves the Prehistoric Alaskan wilderness, encountering other dinosaurs such as the predatory Gorgosaurus and the giant, but gentle, Edmontonia, all told with beautiful cinematography and top-notch CGI.
That sounds great, right? Well, what happened BBC? What the hell happened? I feel like I've been treated like an idiot. Walking With Dinosaurs: The Movie has zero charm, annoying and atrocious voice overs, a bare bones plot straight out of The Land Before Time, except without the emotion or drama, and a completely pointless frame story about a kid, his sister, and his uncle (as modern day humans, annoyingly) digging for fossils.
It seems the filmmakers were originally intending on making this film a docudrama in the style of the original, and this would have been great. We would have really been invested in the individual dinosaurs as we followed them through their lives, and it would have been really immersive and engaging.
But nope. Someone somewhere down the line decided that we needed half-assed, and rushed, voice overs to be able to know what the dinosaurs are thinking/doing, because apparently the studio executives think that audiences cannot understand body language, or the fact that film is a visual medium first and foremost. But given all the flak aimed at films like Avatar and Pacific Rim, they might be justified in that assumption. But the fact is is that we are smarter than that, and there was no reason to add these voice overs other than the pander to the lowest common denominator.
And the fact that the voice overs sound like they were added late in production only serves to drive the point home. It sounds like the voice actors were not reading off of script, but rather watching the film and trying to do their dialogue in real time, like a bunch of 12-year old youtube commentators trying to be funny by adding voices to silent characters or animals. Then there is the fact that their is no lip-synching whatsoever. None.
The story is a shadow of the plot used in Land Before Time. Main character hatches from egg and is raised by parent, his dad dies protecting him from a predator in the midst of a natural disaster (a wildfire this time around), he grows up, deals with hardships, falls in love, and comes back to beat those pesky predators, while winning the girl of his dreams. That is all there is to the plot. You cannot get any more by-the-numbers than that in this day and age.
The humor is awful, because the 10-year old that wrote this script must have had some fascination with butt jokes and derivatives. Our main character has a hole in his head where the hole in the skull is, on the right side (left side in the promotional materials, for some reason). Gaze in amazement as every joke about his "nice hole" comes out as sounding like forced innuendo in a script that makes Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen look like a Christopher Nolan masterpiece.
The music is a mixed bag. On one hand, the music used for the first Pachy migration sequence and the Edmontosaurus migration were pretty decent and fitting, and then there pop songs. In a dinosaur film. Why.
Enough ranting already. The visuals are nothing short of spectacular, featuring gorgeous photography of the Alaskan geography as brilliantly-rendered dinosaurs and pterosaurs frolic amongst the landscape, with attention to detail paid in footprints and the animation.
Unfortunately, anything the film gets right is immediately drown out by the ear-grating voice overs and juvenile script that serves only to pander to the youngest portion of the viewer base. Walking With Dinosaurs may be a treat for the youngsters, but older viewers who actually posses a legitimate interest in paleontology will be turned off and left confused and enraged.
Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 (1998)
Starts off slow and steady, Cascades into a mindscrew
What happens if you take Iron Man, I Robot, and Left 4 Dead, and make an anime out of it with a title that has absolutely nothing to do with the show? If you answered "Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040", then thank you for just figuring out that I am reviewing Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040.
-----------In a Nutshell------------
----The Good----
-Pretty solid story
-The Characters are somewhat likable
-The overall design is actually pretty good, especially the boomers
-Galatea was somewhat of a creepy villain
-The voice-acting wasn't overly annoying, but still not great
-The Ending was decent, save for one major flaw
----The Bad-----
-MAJOR pacing issues
-Bland action scenes
-Nene and Linna's voices where annoying, especially when they scream
-The ending would have been perfect if it didn't leave Linna, Nene, and Priss in an impossible-to-get-out-of situation.
-As solid as the story is, it still attempts to confuse the viewer towards the end with very drawn-out, almost philosophical, lectures about man and machines.
Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 takes place in, you guessed it, 2040, where Tokyo has been rebuilt into a sprawling metropolis after a massive earthquake destroyed the old one (we're off to a realistic start here). A company named GENOM produces robots known as boomers (they are not fat nor do they puke on people) to serve as workers. However, the boomers can go rogue, which they seem to mutate and attack people. Boomers aren't entirely robotic; they have a biological component to them. The AD Police is tasked with dealing with rogue boomers. As you would expect from my mention of Iron Man above, the AD Police completely fail at their jobs. So it is up to the Knight Sabers to stop the rogue boomers. These, Iron Women, if you will, are the main protagonists of Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040. The team consists of Sylia, the team leader; Priss, the team blitzer; Nene, the team impossibly awesome hacker; and Linna, the team's freshmeat.
That forms the basic outline for the first half of the show. The second half of the show descends into madness. Sylia's father created two organisms by growing them in her brain. One of them is Sylia's "brother", Mackey. The other is Galatea, who becomes the main antagonist. Galatea causes all boomers to go rogue in Tokyo, and soon wants the whole world to do the same. The Knight Sabers must join forces to put a stop to her.
The show starts off slow. It does a good job establishing the characters and the setting. However, it doesn't seem like much is happening. The story goes almost nowhere. This forms the base of the show's biggest flaw; its inconsistent pacing. THEN, when we are halfway through, the main story, with Galatea as the antagonist, kicks in and carries for the rest of the 26 episodes. And when it kicks in, it hits you out of nowhere like a bullet train. There was very little building up to this conflict outside of the subplot concerning Sylia's past. Then, it cascades into a mindscrew as Galatea turns into a giant metal statue-of-liberty that floats into space to spread her influence all over the world. Along the way, you can enjoy long, nonsensical, lectures about man and machines that even the Wachowski brothers couldn't comprehend.
As for the characters, they could have been better. They were just interesting enough that I could like them, but they still have that blandness to them. The Character designs aren't the best. Only Sylia and Nene were distinguished. Linna, Priss, and Leon had really generic designs, especially Linna, who I kept confusing for a generic office lady.
One great thing that can be said about this show is the design. Some boomers, especially the large ones that the Knight Sabers fight, show really good design (one of them reminded me of Devastator from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). The Knight Saber's hard suits are very well designed. The show displays many interesting technologies, like the Skyhook and the Umbrella Satellite system.
Unfortunately, as good as the design is, the action scenes are really dull. There are a lot of stand-there-and-do-nothing-while-your-friends-are-getting-owned moments. They just sit there and do nothing while their friends get assimilated by the boomers.
Overall, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 is a show that had a lot of good ideas that it didn't put to full use. The very inconsistent pacing and dull action will put off certain viewers. The characters aren't interesting enough to warrant attention of their own, but they get the job done. The story is actually pretty sound and consistent; it is those stupid lectures from Galatea that throw people off. Overall, it's a good watch if you are not too picky about action or characterization. The show has a solid story, but that alone will not warrant a watch.
As for how it lives up to the original, I have not seen the original, nor do I intend to because of its incomplete status. Therefore, I have no comment on the matter, and have reviewed this anime as a standalone anime.