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marx-hendrik
Reviews
Ahsoka (2023)
Acting mid, writing bad, action ok
There are some bad things about this show that really stand out to me.
Every scene in this show seems to be for us - the viewers. There is just a lot that makes no sense whatsoever from an in-world perspective.
I do not have a picture of who Ahsoka is. What makes her interesting or important? In most scenes she is just barely moving or talking and slightly smirking like she knows something no one else does but ultimately she is boring. I guess she can fight well, but also the fights are not really good.
I am so confused why light sabre fights suck so much when they really should be awesome. Other shows can make good sword fights. In most of modern star wars it is just twirling and holding your sword the wrong way around because that is somehow advantageous (?).
The lore was interesting at its roots but very little fleshed out and too timid maybe.
Tribes of Europa (2021)
Bad writing
Pretty annoying dialog and writing. People talk unrealistically. Information that is common knowledge among the characters is withheld from the viewer to create mysteries that do not exist for the other characters.
Lucy (2014)
On paper this would be exactly my kind of movie
The first time I watched this I was so disappointed that I forgot everything about this movie. I watched it again just now and I can appreciate some of it. The action is great. I find it very hard to suspend my disbelief because they focus way too much on the "humans use only 10 percent of the brain" myth and its not just "fake science" like I would let every movie get away with. It's bad fake science. If they just cut all the scenes with Morgan Freeman or toned down the focus on the percentage thing this movie might actually have been great. It's a missed opportunity to make a smart movie I think.
Westworld (2016)
Brilliant
I started watching season 3 and found it incredible, but was a bit confused until I realized that I never finished season 2,so I binged season 2 and my current opinion is that this is just brilliant. You have to be ready to maybe read some wiki entries or watch some YouTube videos but so far I can not find any obvious plot holes or blunders. The production quality and acting is incredible and there is so many cool details and interesting references.
I see some people here saying the second season lost the plot but I really can't see it. There is an incredible eye to detail in making it all clear in the end. I have to agree that it's kinda ballsy to make the show like this and to be quite honest I don't get why the story is told out of chronological order anyway (I mean I get why it is done but not why it had to be done if this makes sense) but you can figure it out. It's kinda a show with a puzzle on top which I can totally understand might be devisive. But unlike many other "mystery" shows all the information is there and the puzzle can be solved. References to lost make no sense because that was jumbled nonsense at some point which is like giving you 3 half puzzles and not one hard one.
So if you like mystery in a sci fi setting and don't mind watching this with full attention and then watching episode breakdowns on YouTube then this show is perfect (I am writing this at release of s03e04, so might change later).
Altered Carbon (2018)
First season very good, second meh
I liked the first season (8 or 9). My issues were basically just a few things related to the changes to the books:
* Takeshi was too nice and likeable
* envoys were the revolutionaries and not the protectorate forces which makes no sense at all (why then is everyone saying that they were the best fighters in the world when they lost and were living in a jungle on a single planet)
* Quell was basically taking the role of 4 different people in the books (lover, his trainer, real quell, inventor of stacks) which made her very unbelievable
* the whole fight against immortality. The books left this criticism up to the reader. Takeshi was the last guy who had a problem with switching sleeves or being revived. Meths and the protectorate were the problem
The second season just leaves me completely confused. It seems like a lot of the changes for season 1 to the books came back to haunt them here:
* quell is already 5 people, in the books the girl takeshi is searching for is a completely different one
* they took poe with them but it's just awkward almost anachronisticly advanced technology to have him in a Keychain sized device
* everybody has weird abilities that make no technological sense
* they tried to cram a lot of the topics of the third book in here but it just doesn't fit together because of the changes which makes this just confusing
* in the first season everybody missed Trepp, so they bring Trepp for the second season (which is based on the 3rd book where Trepp did not exist) and combine her with another character from the books who in the book is connected with quell somehow but not in the series..... Sooo confusing and the character basically takes no important part in the story.
I think the 3rd book was my favorite one. The story was not as great as the first book, but the atmosphere and the world building were amazing. Takeshi was completely messed up. Hunting down cult members who had something to do with the death of an old lover in disturbing ways. Jungles with self replicating tech left over from the quellist war and surfers, climbers and other extreme sport enthusiasts (due to lower gravity and giant waves in the planet), and Yakuza, Takeshi with a legendary discontinued designer sleeve made for climbing. It had so much charm and character that was completely absent from the second season. Really disappointed. Also the fighting scenes were kinda lame.
The Mandalorian (2019)
I'm Impressed
I'm often disappointed with star wars movies but this looks and feels great. The music is also very good. I hope they keep it up!
The Predator (2018)
Better than I thought
Was never a big predator fan, but I expected nothing from this and found it rather enjoyable. Don't expect a lot of sci fi. It's an action comedy with quirky characters and a ridiculous story. But I think the movie strikes a tone which makes it feel consistent and I wasn't bored at any time.
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Of course a must watch, but....
Acting, CGI, quality is all great in this movie but I honestly expected a better script.
The time travel was better handled than I feared but they still create at least 2 situations which they claimed themselves in the movie were to be avoided: cap stayed behind and must have changed the future considerably and Gomorrha was not returned to the past, so Quill could never meet her (?). Sloppy in my opinion. When they suggested bringing the stones back to when they took them this made sense to me (even though Banners/sorceresses explanation sucked. "the stones are time?" shouldn't matter if you take an infinity stone or a rock, you have to bring it back before anyone notices if you want to avoid changing timelines)
Other things that annoyed me: I expected 3 hours of movie because they must have so much story to tell, but the beginning and the end were heavily padded with uninteresting stuff.
Everybody was kind of OP sometimes and then weak at other times because I guess this is a team and they did not want anyone stick out as unimportant or too powerful.
The movie is too "funny". This was kind of supposed to be a desperate situation yet every scene had to end with a joke and often the jokes were not worth ruining the mood of the scene. We get it Thor is fat now, how absurd!
Which brings me to the next point: the emotional pulling. Apparently a lot of people like it but this movies can not make me cry. Especially because it's always pretty arbitrary who dies and not some inevitable cosmic destiny, so I feel just played by the movie makers. A good death should seem inevitable (They had to kill him to make this work!). None of the deaths in this movie worked this way. In fact they literally played with the viewer by making you guess who is gonna die. Tony sacrificing himself bringing back or saving Spider Man for example would have felt meaningful to me. They did not need to make the gauntlet kill somebody, they made it work this way because they wanted to kill Tony. It just disappoints me sometimes because it seems like movie making 101 to me.
On top of that you get the normal comic book nonsense I guess you can not be mad about at this point: Tony figuring out time travel within an afternoon, Nonsensical tech and the fact that you literally need to snap your fingers to make the stones work (who designed that thing this way?), people with spears fighting space ships, space ships bombing an armored compound to rubble but literally missing every living person and the time machine van, Bucky looking like he's on a bender with his band shooting a dang old machine gun at armored super aliens...
I also kind of disliked the smart hulk. The idea was okay but he was too silly. And for some reason the acting seemed off there, Ruffalo sounded like he was reading the lines sometimes.
Titans (2018)
Very watchable
I had much lower expectations to this show. But except for some cringe worthy dialog and stupid powers I liked the show. All in all the pacing was a bit weird and it felt more like they are setting up the world for the future and not actually telling the story. But the action scenes were okay and it made it easy to enjoy the show despite the flaws.
Nightflyers (2018)
All over the place
The show starts okay and the general themes are interesting, but as it goes on it gets worse and worse. The crew makes no sense at all. People don't communicate with each other or act logically and of course everything goes wrong because of it.
Later there is a lot of filler. Lots of logical inconsistencies where the show breaks rules it had established before. Sometimes characters tell others what happened wrong. This just seems like scenes were filmed out of order and messed up in editing or something.
The way computers work of course makes no sense either, but I guess this is a minor gripe at this point.
So why still 6 stars? Because I think for all its flaws it was still extremely watchable. If only to get the solutions to the mysteries. I do not regret watching it, though I will not watch it ever again or a season 2 of it.