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Reviews
Annihilation (2018)
Beautiful and thought provoking
The best horror is always the horror that examines our greatest fears - and faces the uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Annihilation is a movie like that. Like the best horror movies, the horror is incidental to the actual purpose of the movie - examining the characters, and the themes.
The monster in this movie is fascinating, because it's a monster that is hard to put in a horror movie. The horror of this movie is the same as cancer: that there's something in your body that's creating, that's changing wrong, that's deteriorating. The monster, of course, is cancer. Each of the five women manage it in different ways - whether they want to face it, fight it, or accept it. Cass's death to me I found very interesting. The bear that killed her now has her screams of her last moments. Radek reflects on it - that it's horrible that all that remains of you is when you were suffering and dying, and that she doesn't want that for her. It evokes terminal illness to me, as there's the fear that your family and friends strongest memories of you is your suffering as you die. So you try to face it peacefully. It's a fascinating portrait of mortality.
But the second focus of the movie is the uncomfortable truths we find about ourselves. Lena and Kane's relationship is a focus. It was difficult - he was only there a little bit of the year, and they clearly were an interesting match - she was a Johns Hopkins researcher and he was a classic American boy and a soldier. Lena cheated, and felt horrible about it, but it didn't change what she did. She destroyed her marriage and the person who loved her. Then, her husband died and she couldn't make it up to him. She also believes his death is her fault, that he accepted a suicide mission when he found out. So when she has a tiny chance to do something, even if it's very unlikely to help him, and more likely she'll die, she does, because she feels so guilty it's better to die trying to help him than spend his last moments with him. Because she's motivated by horrible guilt, not love.
When she finally reaches the lighthouse, it's a beautiful and fascinating scene. Dr. Ventress is consumed by the Shimmer. But as Lena faces the Shimmer, she sees truly what it is. Like cancer, the Shimmer wasn't trying to destroy, but rather create more of itself. Destruction was incidental. It tries to create a copy of her. But as it creates a copy of her, self destruction is human, so it learns her self destruction. Thus, Lena's own self destruction is what finally defeats the Shimmer.
Finally, Lena is back among others. She gets to see the Shimmer's copy of Kane. And this is her second chance: she gets what's left of Kane, but without the baggage of what she did to him. Lena and her relationship have been created anew.
The Mandalorian (2019)
Extremely flat - needs better writing
While this might please some Star Wars fans, I found this extremely flat. The writing is rather poor - I could not get invested in any of the characters - it just felt very wooden. There just doesn't feel to be any stakes in the show. The setting is cool, Baby Yoda (Grogu) is cute, but the show feels like it has absolutely no depth, as are the characters.
I'm baffled as to how it's so popular and its high ratings. In comparison to the Witcher, I expected it to be similar, given similar popularity and frequent comparisons. However, while witcher is a flawed show, it clearly has depth to the characters stories (the characters grow and develop), there are themes (oppression, imperialism, etc). This had none of that. It felt very artificial. Very disappointing.
Idi i smotri (1985)
Unforgettable portrait of war and genocide
Highly recommend - unforgettable portrait of war. More western audiences should experience it, both for the history, as well as very interesting messages about war.
Soul (2020)
A fantastic message, and hard to forget
While there are a few parts that were slow, this movie overall had such a powerful message that it's unforgettable. The message: "Your life doesn't have purpose. Life is just the good moments you are living." Is so powerful and something it takes a long time for people to understand. A beautiful picture of living.
Not sure how kids will sit through it because its message is really for adults but it's beautiful and unforgettable.
Encanto (2021)
Beautiful animation but missing a plot
Excellent that to have a Disney movie set in Colombia, and the animation was rich and beautiful. I think Mirabel's conflict is very identifiable for girls, not feeling like you have anything you're good at. I also liked that she felt like she was the "not pretty" sister, as most Disney princesses are very pretty and put a lot of pressure on girls. This emphasizes that that wasn't her most important feature.
However, the music felt pretty excessive and that it slowed the story down. There wasn't much of a plot. The resolution wasn't really explained, nor was the reason for the "conflict," (the magic going away), so the plot felt overall very unsatisfying.