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wlfithen
Reviews
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
Made it 20 minutes.
Love Idris. Love Dwayne. Love Jason. A great trio.
But not here. The story is so d...d stupid, it can't be ignored. Super bad guy? What is this? Batman?
Oh. Wait. It *can* be ignored, if you push ⏹. Problem solved.
Angel Has Fallen (2019)
Made it 15 minutes
Good guy framed for assassination attempt. What an original premise. No one has done that is what ... 15 minutes?
What a waste of money, buying this piece of s**t.
Triple Frontier (2019)
Bad story, the end
This film offers many more things to criticize than to compliment. Others here have pointed many of them out. So, I won't repeat them.
I will say that the climax of the story came way, way too early, or alternatively, the film was too long, padded with a depressingly meaningless wind-down.
There were some contrived ironies. The biggest: the group wanting so bad to get the one character on board they thought was necessary to pull this off, only to have him (and only him) making fatal mistakes that ended up crashing the entire venture. Repeatedly. But if the irony was supposed to be subtle, it wasn't. And it soured the character that we all thought we were supposed to be identifying with and rooting for. But when the bullet came, I found myself surprised at my relief, I'd come to hate him so much by then. I kept thinking he'd redeem himself somehow. But no, he turned out to be the weakest, basest of the group. And that was a really dirty trick on the audience because there was no hint of such fundamental weakness until it burst out in spades. He lost situational awareness and cracked--retired soldiers just don't do that. Period. Bad writing.
By that point, it took to much energy to switch identification/allegiance/rooting to another character; they hadn't been developed enough to invest in. I really didn't care if any of them made it back or not.
All in all, a rather disappointing ride, the last third of which I spent frequently clicking the skip ahead 10 seconds button. Did I really need to see them trudging through jungle, crossing rivers, and climbing mountains? During which the least boring thing that happened was watching a poor defenseless mule bounce down a mountainside. Seriously? Click, click, click. Move along. Nothing to see here.
I will pick one nit:
Who were those two loan gunmen on the ridge anyway? I say, a plot device to relieve us of our misery at that point. At least, that's how I chose to take it. They take $250M, burn up that much more, kill the head honcho, and they send 2 guys? Right. I expected it to be the yellow shirt boy from the village--at least that would have made sense. So, I say we ignore who they were and just go right on. Who was supposed to be watching their 6. They'd just crossed a peak; I trivial look back over the shoulder at the top would have revealed them easily. Soldiers don't forget their 6. Not living ones anyway.
Curvature (2017)
Everybody's a critic
As a rule, critics hate everything. And the few exceptions that prove that rule, show conclusively that art's general audience and the art critics are rarely on the same page. This movie is a good case in point. The critics categorically hated it. And lots of viewers who either never knew or forgot the point of what the general public calls sci-fi hated it, too. Unfortunate.
It's of note, that within the writing community (and I means books, not screenplays) sci-fi is usually regarded as an insult. For them, it evokes trite stories of little thought, frequently involving large lizards stomping on cardboard towns in Japan. Among serious writers, the term sci-fi has been replaced with s.f., and it's not just a rebranding. s.f., almost always lower case, stands for speculative fiction. The use of the term is intended to remind writers that if a story isn't genuinely speculative, it's probably just sci-fi (meaning crap, usually). s.f. is fundamentally about speculation, not about sets, actors, directors, budgets, or any of the other things that "critics" like to harp on, perhaps just to sound smart. To be sure, those things do matter, just like the production quality of any art does. Just not as much as the speculation.
This movie contains two core aspects of speculation, one well-known and frequently used, and the other fairly original. The first, of course, is time travel. And it's used in this story in the usual way, to travel back and change the past. Arguments abound in s.f. and in science about that possibility, as well as the practicality. The second is the use of nested time travel. Though it's appeared in a few stories over the years, it's not common. It's very difficult to plan and plot. Planning is the process of designing what happens and why. Plotting is how you tell the audience what happened and through which character's eyes. One of the interesting things here, though not explained, is the amnesia in the subjects. Without that apparently trivial thing, there would have been no story because she would have known everything in the moment she woke.
Think through the plan with me. Wells dies, she finds him. A month later she goes back, as Alex said, and this time, decodes his clue and watch's the video. What's unclear is that if she decides to kill Thomas, why did she need to travel back in time? She could have just killed him in the present. Instead, she protects the video, puts the camera back, buys a rifle and leaves it under her bed. Then she waits several days and sneaks in (somehow) and jumps back a few days, never intending to come back. So did she ever intend to kill Thomas, or just to make her other self *think* she had? Then she hides out giving her other self warnings and clues. What "other self" you ask? You'll see shortly. She waits for her other self to go to Thomas and get taken into the lab. In the confusion she sneaks in again with her bomb to blow up the time machine while her other self watches her from Thomas's office. She jumps back, the machine blows up, and she *becomes* her other self with amnesia in the June 2 wake up scene. A straightforward plan.
But the *story* is only of her other self. And it all works, not because of time travel as much as the amnesia. No, wait. The amnesia, as far as we know, happens after you come back. And she never did come back. Or, did she do another jump, in between, *just* to come back and cause the amnesia. Or, perhaps she ...
See? Isn't that fun? And speculative, even a bit of science (sort of) thrown in. The real measure of s.f. is how long you keep speculating after you finish the story. And, contrary to the critics, this movie delivers. Are there paradoxes? You bet. Are there mistakes? Yes. And finding those inconsistencies is the other half of the fun.
There's plenty here to speculate on here.