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Leave the World Behind (2023)
Faux-edgy nonsense.
I only finished watching this to see how they would tie up all of the loose ends, but all you get is a meme-level pointless cliffhanger ending that's not even funny. This movie was an utter mess that draws you in on an interesting premise, tortures you with lazy sound design tropes, unnecessary tension-building cliches, and multiple plot devices which turn into storyline dead ends. Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon and Ethan Hawke are veteran actors who are way better than this and it's weird to see them debase themselves on such an amateurish production that is thinly-veiled activism. Avoid.
Violent Night (2022)
A mindless guilty pleasure
This was a dumb movie and it makes zero apologies for being one. It's Home Alone meets Die Hard and zero explanations are offered or required because sometimes you just want to sit down and be entertained without being lectured to. In fact, that's what we all want all of the time, but it seems they're a little slow at catching onto that. Yes, there are loose ends and plot holes along with a laundry list of used tropes in terms of characters and plot devices and in this context you just don't care because this movie is simply an amusement park ride with blood, guts, guns and Santa Claus drunkenly puking over the side of his sleigh. 9/10 will watch again.
Troll (2022)
I Really Wanted To Like This
This movie needs to be held up as an example of what happens when you take a genuinely original idea with deep potential along with a whole bunch of other quality ingredients for a solid movie and just squander it on terrible writing and unoriginal film making.
What you have here is a checklist of almost every worn-out action movie trope from the last few decades, endlessly assaulting the viewer from opening to closing credits. They even copied the glass of water shaking with footsteps thing from Jurassic Park. Sigh.
As for the characters, they're just off-the-shelf cardboard cutouts with their only layers being the amount of one-dimensional character they've compounded into one. Take the main protagonist, the brilliant girlboss archaeologist as an example.
She's seen as a maverick amongst her peers and has no personal life outside of her work. She has a damaged relationship with her rather eccentric father, but this wasn't always the case as is explained in the opening scene. She rebels against his obsession with Norse folklore by becoming a scientist, although how and why this happened is never actually explained in the movie. Fast forward to The Troll being unleashed and, like magic, the Big Government quickly mobilises everything they have to get the best and most competent experts in basically everything into a secret command centre to deal with said crisis. Now if the last couple of years have shown us anything at all, is that when the proverbial bum fruit his the proverbial air mover, the idea of that kind of efficiency and competency from our elected leaders is just laughable, but here we are still recycling that old trope along with many others.
Our heroic archaeologist has just made a find out in the field that her colleagues said was impossible and suddenly choppers arrive to abduct her because National Security or whatever. Never seen that before. From here on her role is to do nothing other than talk down to, be condescending and just generally unlikeable towards all of the other assembled experts, including the Prime Minister herself, while courting an ambiguous "friendship" with her generic pencil-neck handler in a suit as well as the obligatory Tough Army Guy who just shoots stuff. Fast forward and yes of course she's going to reach out to her eccentric old daddy who was right about this crazy folklore stuff all along. They reconcile and then he dies. Oh, and there's a giant CGI troll stomping around that looks absolutely nothing like the one pictured on the movie poster. The end.
This movie was bait and I'd love to see it remade by competent writers and filmmakers.
Andor (2022)
Star Wars Is Back!
That old school Star Wars energy is certainly alive and well in the series ecosystem.
What I found unique here was seeing the story of the Empire's rise through the eyes of the proverbial man in the street and how an oppressive and totalitarian regime can insert itself into society at a slow enough pace that most people will just integrate it into their New Normal. It's refreshing to see and feel the impact of this beyond it just being a story of the Jedi and politicians, but as a story of real and relatable people who don't have resources like Jedi Masters, The Force and fleets of starships at their disposal (yet), and how all that it takes is for someone to go first. I didn't think I'd see a series in the Star Wars universe that makes even The Mandalorian look a bit clunky, but here we are with a gritty, cyberpunk, gimmick-free and honest story that eclipses pretty much all other recent efforts.
The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
Unnecessary and forgettable
Coming in a close second behind Ghostbusters 2016, this is one of the most pointless self-owns of an IP for a while.
A shameless cash-grab poorly-disguised as sequel that takes more away from canon than it adds to it, this pointless movie ironically elevates the less-flawed sequels to a point where they're no longer the worst Matrix movies, so at least there's some positivity lurking in there.
As bumbling as Matrix Revolutions was at times, it at least tied up the story with a convincing conclusion, leaving just enough to the imagination to feel that everything was going to be all right, leaving the story as a trilogy...a Trinity even.
But no, let's just unbalance the whole thing with a fourth instalment that requires mountains of exposition to crudely shoehorn it into something that feels like a giant parody of itself.
The brief cameo of the Merovingian returning as a disheveled, barely-coherent shadow of his former elegant self doing nothing but standing in the corner shouting profanities at everyone while a obligatory yawnfest of wireline fight sequences plays out and then vanishing without adding any narrative to the movie is the perfect analogy to how this fits into the original trilogy.
Avoid.
Soul (2020)
Pixar is back!
Here's the swan song of 2020.
Grab your kids, your friends and even your parents, and sit down to watch a beautiful story of self-discovery that is the emotional back rub that we all could use right now.
Wholesome food for the...soul. (sigh)
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
Cheetahs never win
The Last time my kids got up and walked out of the room in a movie was during Fantastic4 or Fant4stic...or whatever they were trying to do with that title.
We were all pretty interested to see this for two reasons:
1 - The first one was actually pretty decent, even with the poor CGI for the villain.
2 - Gal Gadot is both a badass and an engaging actor.
10 mins in and my teenage son turned to look at me with that "really" expression on his face. I think at this stage she was doing her Spiderman routine with her whip, something not even hinted at in all her previous screen appearances.
Don't worry, but the end of the movie she's full on Supermanning all over the sky, you just have to endure TWO AND A HALF HOURS to get there.
Two and a half hours of bottom shelf special effects, dialog, worn out tropes and a plot conclusion my younger son called 20 mins into the movie before he walked out to go play Minecraft.
I mentioned dialog, because line after line, we're in the same territory of "I don't like sand".
Then there are the two proverbial elephants in the room...
1 . The villain. No, not that Pedro Pascal sideshow, but the real villain who she ends up battling in the inevitable final showdown: Catwoman ordered off Wish.
It's 90s Batman's Catwoman all over again. The mild, geeky and meek-yet-hot lady who's everyone's punchbag gets pushed too far and becomes the overcompensated polar opposite of her personality because magic or something.
But wait, let's make it extra deep and tack on a reference to that long-winded and unnecessary opening sequence about winning with integrity which could have been a 25 second flashback...and make her mysteriously transform into a literal cheetah-like thing because she wished to become an "apex predator". Did anyone tell the writers that cheetahs in the wild are not apex predators and spend most of their time hiding because of their fragility having been built for speed? Maybe they thought that whole look from Cats was a good idea, because that movie did so well, Right?
But I guess at least somebody thought it would be clever writing, because "cheaters never win" and the final battle is with a cheetah mutant thing who gets beaten. It's a metaphor. Bravo.
2. Then there's the second elephant, and it's turning out to be rather controversial. Remember, WW is who you want young girls to look up to. At some stage, every parent has to have a discussion with their child, both boys and girls, about the issue of consent. Her wish to be reunited with her dead boyfriend results in his "spirit possessing" some random chap who, after said possession, remembers nothing of what he has just been through. Those events included very intimate contact with WW as well as being constantly put in mortal danger. This is a massive oversight on the writers of this movie and good luck to them explaining their way out of this.
Lastly, there's the who desperately-forced 80's vibe. After Stranger Things, Guardians of The Galaxy and other movies trying to ride that cozy 80's train, it feels so tacked-on, incongruent and contrived, it's almost as if it was the result of a market research team rather than actual screenwriting.
Poor Gal, I know 2020 has been tough and you gotta do what you gotta do for the next paycheque, but this garbled mess of a movie may have done more damage to all her excellent previous work on that character than it was worth.
Snowpiercer (2013)
Poor execution of a great idea
Full disclosure: I only heard about this movie because I stumbled upon the Netflix series version and saw in the credits it was based on a movie, so I made an effort to get hold of a copy and give it a go.
It's practically impossible to not compare the two, and I will be doing so. This may have given me a preconceived idea on how the movie would be, but knowing this I did my best to try and watch it from a frame of seeing this concept for the first time and trying to let it hold it's own.
It didn't work.
Before I get into that, here's what I liked.
The cast. Chris Evans, John Hurt, Ed Harris and Tilda Swinton are some pretty big names, the latter three in particular. Just having the likes of them onboard made me go into this movie with a fair amount of optimism and their characters offered a bit of buoyancy to this sinking ship. Or train.
The train. The Netflix train comes across as twice the height and width of the movie version, and while it does offer some better explanations of their food supply, it doesn't feel as "trainy" as the movie train. Long shots down the carts showing the alignment shifts between carriages and the tighter shots of the trains interior showing the curved ceilings give you both a sense of movement and claustrophobia. The Netflix train is more like a bunch of ocean liners running on tracks.
Now for what I didn't like.
The pacing. Somehow after only the first episode of the TV series, you know more about each section's culture, people and class differences than you do in the entire movie. It's achingly slow, despite it being an action movie with lots of shooting, punching, kicking, chopping, stabbing, etc. By the time the rebels from the tail eventually make it to the front of the train, you're just numb from the drawn-out attempts are creating tension before a fight, the fight itself and then the aftermath. Time froze (yes, I did that) while watching this.
Directing. This felt like a bad fan fiction to Paul Verhoven's and Quentin Tarrantino's directing styles. Starship Troopers meets Kill Bill, but if you ordered it from Wish. Epic stunt sequences come across as circus-like. Intensely hardcore tough guys come across as parodies. Deeply profound character expositions come across as running the clock and mind-blowing plot reveals come across as tiresome and obvious.
As I type this, only three episodes of the series are available to watch, with the fourth due for release very soon. I feel much more of a connection to the characters and have a better understanding of the train, it's culture, the cult of Wilford and the hardships endured in the tail than the movie could ever have hoped to convey.
As far as I'm concerned, for actors of the caliber of Harris, Swinton, Hurt and Evans, this was their Green Lantern.
Bloodshot (2020)
A good bad movie
You have to go into something like this with realistic expectations. From the preview alone, you'll see that there's pretty much not one single original idea here, and it's an obvious clumsy mashup of Robocop and Transcendence.
Vin Diesel is definitely looking a bit frayed around the edges to play this character, but he's pretty much just there to give the lineup a bit of credibility as aside from Guy Pearce, it's clear that this is just a 'foot in the door" for the rest of the cast.
Despite being a proverbial fruit salad of movie clichés, as well as very underwhelming attempts at plot twists, it's still watchable and well-polished.
Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Wrapping-up the sequel trilogy with a final insult
So now a Jedi can magically "Force-Heal" people, making the deaths of many key characters such as Anakin,Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn and Queen Amidala completely irrelevant. Set decades after the Rebel Alliance won, thereby being 100% responsible for the mess that the galaxy is in, one where the Emperor and Snoke can just magically reappear at any time due to being clones....because reasons, one has to wonder why the rebels even exist any more. Oh, and when did Leia find the time to become a not only a Jedi, but a Master as well? You know what? Don't bother asking too many questions. The timeline and story continuity was broken so many times in episode 8 that the only way they could take it up a notch now was to do exactly what they did - make everything before the sequel trilogy irrelevant. The only consistent character through the entire saga has been C-3PO and Rey's character is just wooden with no nuance at all. At least we still have Mandalorian...for now.
Arrow (2012)
Watchable, but just barely
As much as I can easily watch this, there are two things which stand out for me: Shameless product placement (we're looking at you Microsoft) and the unbelievable amount of makeup that the women on the show seem to be staggering around under. Makeup is something that I never really notice, but this is the first time I've ever leaned forward in my seat and gone "Holy cow, how long does does it take to do that?" Oh yeah, then there's the premise of the billionaire kid who become a martial arts superhero in only 5 years, the IT girl who can "hack" FBI encryption in two keystrokes and the mindless dialog... Yes it's a "superhero" series, but to me it just feels horribly awkward and clunky. Somehow though, it's still watchable...
Crusoe (2008)
Geat locations
Pity about the utter lemon that was shot here That treehouse sure was quite an accomplishment, but it seriosuly...how would he build that? Seems to me that they pushed the boundaries a little with what Robinson Crusoe could build and maintain. I read the original book, and while in the story he achieved quite a lot in terms of subsistence farming, the peak of his technological accomplishments was a pointed stick and a door for his cave. I know that movie adaptations of books are open to a certain amount of interpretation and artistic license, but this just insulting to the source material. They stopped one step short of him building a space shuttle to fly back home.