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victorsalisgrave
Reviews
2012 (2009)
So wrong, on so many levels...
Let us start with the basic idea, here: who gets to live? One average American family and a big bunch of FILTHY RICH PEOPLE WHO PAID THE TICKET!!!! Yes, you heard it right! For once, the message is clear: you got the money, you get to be saved! I found it so damn HILARIOUS when Cusak started his monologue about 'saving the innocents', as if he was actually talking about poor people who got randomly selected to carry on the human legacy, like in 'Deep Impact'. NO! These are RICH GUYS who paid for the privilege of being saved, like 1st class Titanic passengers who got to climb on the lifeboats and leaving the others to drown!!! Well, at least for once Emmerich was honest: he hates the poor guys, world will be better without them.
Ad now for the science... Well, the most notable monstrosity being the fact that the world is...whoops, dead, and there should be no happy ending (complete with corny faux social message of Africa being the new fatherland for the rich white guys). Do you think I am overreacting? Think again. Think 'volcano'. Now think ALL VOLCANOES. And I mean EVERY SINGLE EFFING VOLCANO IN THE WORLD. Campi Flegrei, Yellowstone, Vesuvio, Hawaii, Japan, Island... All the places from which lava could spill cracked open in the most violent eruptions you can think. Like, Krakatoa x 1,000 in one day. now think about the sheer amount of greenhouse gases and dust projected into the atmosphere. And you'll have HALF an idea of what happens to the global ecosystem when the atmosphere is saturated in the worst nuclear winter since the dinosaur-killer asteroid. Congratulations, you had a nice cruise and you saved your butt...and you also inherited a world where it will take DECADES just for the ice age to stop and plants to start grow again (oh, yes, any useful infrastructure useful to rebuild civilization was annihilated in the geological upheaval). Cannibalism and savagery, anyone?
Sunshine (2007)
Houston we have a problem: the PREMISES
To put it simply, the whole plot was doomed along with the poor planet Earth! Why? Easy: when the nuclear fusion process that keeps our star 'alive' starts going down the drain, the Sun does not start 'cooling off': rather, gravity wins the fiery battle and it causes a temporary collapse of its external strata. This in turn generates a renewed peak of nuclear fusion, and at that point our beloved Sun abandons the main sequence of the HR diagram and turns into a GOD-DARNED RED GIANT!!! Get it? By then our planet is destined to be turned into one single molten lava ball tidally locked to the fiery stellar cadaver! Then, after the fusion processes are long exhausted and the iron core cannot turn into heavier elements, our Sun becomes a small and 'cold' white dwarf, and what is left of Earth will solidify again into a barren, endless icy desert. Oh, yes, this means that humanity has long perished before attempting their daring rescue!
PS - and if they are using ALL THEIR FISSILE MATERIAL (switching off your brain and taking for granted you could 'ignite' your star by using what is, in cosmic terms, a grain of plutonium) for the second mission, what did they use in the first? Methane bombs or all the flames from the Internet?
Space Battleship Yamato (2010)
Wrong gender.... This is a PARODY!
THE GOOD (And the reason it gets this vote): good CGI. The Yamato crew has the right looks, those who watched Japanese movies surely recognized many faces. The uniforms are cool. A couple of nice scenes.
THE BAD: I watched the whole production, serial and movies, and I can say that they took the WORST of the first two seasons and mashed it up in an incomprehensible garbage. The acting is totally lame, considering the actors: I've seen more emotions conveyed by Michael bay's TRANSFORMERS 3 (need to say more?!). The battle scenes are unbelievable: the Cosmo Tigers had to fight for dear life, and those were great-looking battles, while here a couple of fighters can take down a whole Gamilas fleet?!? Where were those pilots during the war for Earth????? The voyage to Iskandar took the better half of one year, here it looks like it took barely a week. What made the first season so emotional was the sense of this countdown to doomsday. 'Hurry up, Yamato, it's only 265 days before the Earth is doomed!' Abraham's Enterprise had it harder, guys! Though of course the astronomy has evolved since 1974, and Pluto couldn't be considered a full-sized planet as depicted 40 years ago, the lack of the battle to end the Gamilas base in the solar system dulls up the movie. I like the idea of Yuki being a more hard-ass babe, it's more modern, but seriously! The gal in this movie is cardboard-cut! her so-called 'love story' with Godai/Wildstar is something made for the sake of it, it has no premises and no development at all. The budget was poor and it shows: is that a battleship or a cramped submarine? Not to mention that they used THE SAME SET for Okita's first ship of earth defense and the Yamato's command bridge. Sheesh!
THE UGLY: Nothing could have been more spectacular than showing the binary system of Gamilas and Iskandar. Take that away and you rape half of the original script. there is no Starsha: She's the beautiful queen of Iskandar who gives the Earthmen the Cosmo DNA to clean Earth...and only NOW, at the end of the movie, we discover the cleaner is a sort of superpower hidden inside Godai?!?!? Why do all this voyage then?? Oh, yes, to die en masse like on the finale of season II, and in even a more ridiculous way. and finally (because I got not enough room to list the horror in its fullest details), The Gamilas... ARE. YOU. SERIOUSLY. KIDDING?!?!?!? Dessler was the archetype of the 'honorable enemy', witty, cruel, but capable of complimenting its adversaries, stubborn but never crazy, loyal to an ideal. A tragic figure that fought a war to find a new home, a creature like us (despite the blue skin), forced to fight for survival...and there is NOTHING of that in this pale excuse of a movie! Heck, even Prince Zodar was an interesting character in season II, while we have a 'Dessler' who is a funny-looking, dull hologram, and the gamilas as faceless 'Aliens' drones.
yes, total destruction of the ship at the end was the best solution, and the song that came with the credits will make us remember NEVER to go beyond renting this horror. Long live Yamato (the anime!)