Change Your Image
ryanwwrd
Reviews
Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian: Making of Season 2 Finale (2021)
We're sorry YouTube did it better!!!
A fun, interesting and informative romp that quickly devolves into the show's creators trying to explain how that despite a bottomless money-pit, they were outdone by a handful of tech-savvy YouTubers in 1/100th of the time.
Loki: Lamentis (2021)
A Master-Class in Mediocrity
You guys... was that episode terrible? ...it felt terrible...
98% of that episode contributed NOTHING to the story. Other than the one revelation about the TVA agents being reassigned variants.. (which is cool and I assume will be an important bit of info in the future) everything else in the episode was aggressively unimportant.
Our protagonists appear on a doomed moon and need to charge the TVA tablet thing... so they opt to get to the "ark" via a train winding its way through the most lazily rendered, purple dessert-scape imaginable.
Holy crap.. this planet's version of "storm troopers" are literally wearing thick, "tactical" turtleneck sweaters. While I can see the desire to try something other than the rigid suits of plastic plate-armor, the sweater idea should have never made it to screen. If you are wondering what I'm talking about, look how goofy the soldiers look as they struggle to execute generic fight-choreography and the odd sweatersuits stretch and exaggerate their physical motions. The result has these hapless grunts flailing like rejected Power Rangers characters.
While on the train: Does anything important or anything that would resemble meaningful character development happen? NOPE! They sort of attempt to shoe-horn a meaningful moment about Loki's mother in there, only to find out that Sylvie has no frame of reference (as she only had fleeting memories of her mother). They then do a whole bit where Loki keeps asking Sylvie (who is Loki also) what it's like to "enchant" people... not that he hasn't been using this EXACT same power since at LEAST the first Avengers film.
Regardless of the topic, the dialogue between Loki and Sylvie was clunky and inorganic on a colossal scale. I'm having trouble picturing the last time I witnessed such poor onscreen chemistry.. though I'm willing to admit that it might be just extra-jarring considering how well Owen Wilson and Hiddleston work together.
Let's talk green screens. We all know that just about the entire MCU is filmed in front of gigantic blue or green voids (major props to the actors charged with selling performances while working this way) but HOLY CRAP I felt like the perspective was "off" constantly.. like when the characters were in the middle of this vast desert but the DP/director is playing Russian roulette with the F-stop and framing his subjects in a way that actively fights the visual of being out in the open.
Alright, now our characters are in this cool neon city-scape (why didn't we just have an adventure to board the ark HERE?! From a storytelling standpoint, the whole train bit is never remotely justified) ((speaking of which... you SORT OF see something that's implied to be the ark when they arrive in the city but it's blurry/off in the distance and not ever really acknowledged in any meaningful way... it feels like they forgot to settle on an actual design for the craft so the animators were forced to just put some big, goofy, red placeholder-shape juuuuuust out-of-focus at the city's center))
uh oh, here comes some sweater-soldiers from out of nowhere delivering their lines like they'd just been kicked in the head by a space-horse! -but that's alright.. because it's time for a big ridiculous escape sequence jam-packed with cartoonishly rigid tracking-shots that feel like clumsy insults to the Wachowskis. Its almost remarkable how the director/dp were able to so completely strip anything that could ever resemble dramatic tension with that love-letter to cinematic mediocrity.
Aaaaaand the Ark is destroyed. But then again I'm still not sure if our characters were even close to making it... because the show's creators seem to go out of their way to avoid giving us meaningful context.
Full disclosure: I LOVE the first two episodes of this series, and they rightfully deserve the praise they've received. With that in mind, I understand that there will always be "weaker" points in any story-arc... however, the poor directing/cinematography, pitiful and insulting visual effects, abhorrent dialogue, and abysmal storytelling here is heartbreaking.. I feel as though I've been tricked somehow with how competently the first two episodes were executed.. only to be suddenly assailed with this narrative stillbirth.
I sincerely hope that this episode was some sort of oversight and that the rest of the season won't be such an affront to fans of the show. :/
Im sure there are many that disagree with me on these points I've put forward... which is absolutely fine. Im moreso wondering if anyone else feels remotely similar/got any amount of similar disappointment from anything I've brought up here? Or am I completely missing the mark here?