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The Expanse (2015)
Great worldbuilding / NO STORY
I was quite enticed by this. Great world building, and some very deft imagination of how technology will develop in the future. Some nodding references to religion as well, and a decently written overlay of political and social conflicts as well. I really like considerable sections of this show. Amos is one of my favourites, and the gritty hardcore tech is beautifully done. I watched every show of every series, but I must admit that I have a great reluctance to venture into S5.
BUT.
And this is a big BUT. There is an unspoken contract between movie maker and viewer: give me your time, and I will give you a story. The real problem with the Expanse is that, for the most part, it lacks a good old-fashioned story where the Hero seeks an Objective, against which stands the Villain.
Instead of a clean drive towards a seen goal, there is just a whole series of swirling mini-conflicts, none of which lead towards anything that looks like a Seen Goal. The movie makers appear not to know about this unspoken contract or not to care about it. It really is just a soap opera in spaceships with characters and their conflicts just swirling about, none of which cleanly resolve, and therefore which DO NOT give the viewer any satisfaction.
Why should I invest my time, Mr/s Movie Maker, if you do not appear to care about a story? Do better, please. You have a fantastic foundation. Now you need a STORY.
Stranger Things (2016)
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO disappointing!
So I watched of of Series 3 over a weekend (I also watched all of Series 1 and some of 2 earlier.) I can only say that I should have done something else because S3 was so awfully disappointing and boring. Here are my reasons.
1. Lack of a story.
So mysterious monster/s decide without any purpose to invade the small town of Hawkins through a subterranean gate. At the same time, Russians try to open the gate, despite knowing that monsters lie on the other side.
2. Sarcastic bickering.
In almost all character groupings, they bicker sarcastically, sometimes for minutes on end. I fast-forwarded many of these without any loss to the story. Since none of these bickering episodes add to the story, they are wasted time. It was almost as though the scriptwriters thought, "Oh! We have a conversation here! Let's have the characters not say anything important that might add to the story. Let's make them bicker instead!" In fact, one of the characters even says at one point (perhaps an ad lib?) "Please stop bickering!"
3. Random illogical story-slowing scenes.
There are several of these, but this is the most stupidly nonsensically random and unnecessary one. So two characters apparently have to sing a song to each other before one will give a vital bit of info that will save the world. Sorry?
4. Nostalgia vs Story.
Yes, the 80s nostalgia was good, but Story always comes first. Drive the story forward with straight, clear direction. Let the Nostalgia support the story, not the other way around.
5. Pacing.
I don't mind a slow start if I know it is going to be rewarded somehow. Yet S3 took two episodes before there was any hint of a story. TWO EPISODES! In screen time, that is almost two hours! Sorry, but a story should give its viewers/readers/listeners some idea of its direction and purpose MUCH earlier than that.
6. Ripoffs from other movies.
I have not seen many of the movies that other reviewers have mentioned, but it appears that there were several tropes and elements from 80s movies that ST drew from. That is all very well, but Story MUST at all times come first. ST had enough going for it in S1 to be original. It is very sad that it simply became a bland blancmange of other movies in S3 than a standout of its own.
7. Predictable
There was only one surprise in the whole series, and it came right at the end. Pretty well everything else was signposted. As a result, I skipped over considerable sections.
8. Stupidities
!Spoilers ahead!
* So why did Hopper just look at Joyce instead of running back inside the safe room where she was? It was only a few steps, and he had the time.
* So why didn't anyone check on Planck's Constant before they went on the rescue mission?
* So what was the purpose of My Little Pony? You sorta expect that characters will be fully focussed on saving the world, not bickering about why a kids backpack has this cartoon figure on it.
9. Cliches abound.
S1 was pretty good in terms of cliches, The scriptwriters restrained themselves and produced something pretty tightly scripted and directed. S3, on the other hand, wallowed in a glut of cliches, too many to list here.
Summary.
This had the potential to really shine. However, it is best suited to those who want a mindless, poorly written, unoriginal time-waster. For those looking for a decent, original, thought-provoking, tense, surprising series, look elsewhere. This is most certainly NOT what you are looking for.
A River Runs Through It (1992)
A Beautiful Non-Story.
Watch this movie if you want to see the mountains of Montana, or the lifestyle, clothing, vehicles, relationships and thinking of that time.
However, don't watch it if you want a story or any conflict. There is none. Forget the fast cars, guns, violence of modern action movies, but just understand that this movie tends to avoid any kind of conflict or goal achievement of any kind. There are no deadlines, no villains, no antagonism (save an unseen event at the end) and therefore very little interest.
If we accept that STORY = CONFLICT, this is not a story. It is simply about a father, mother and two sons doing life together, including fly-fishing, drinking, romancing, growing up and driving cars on train tracks. It is beautifully filmed, but it is NOT A STORY. It is more like a still life of the time, with Redford and his set designers, wardrobe directors and others using the movie as a chance to do some research into the fridges, phones, cars, clothing, hairstyles and relationships of the time.
As such, I was impressed, but also deeply disappointed. It gets two stars for the cinematography and zero for the story.
Here's a preview of the movie.
1. Two brothers grow up.
2. They go fly-fishing.
3. One completes a degree in another city. One becomes a reporter at home.
4. The first comes home.
5. They do more fly-fishing.
6. One falls in love.
7. They do more fly-fishing.
8. The movie ends.
Unbroken (2014)
AVOID.
The timeless contract between director and cinema-goer is to make us care about the movie, to change our thinking in some way, to transport us, to make our lives better. Unbroken does none of these. In some ways, it is similar to Scorsese's Silence, which is two hours of unremitting medieval torture, or Iñárritu's Revenant, which was diCaprio grunting through snow for 2+ hours.
Jolie's Unbroken is a litany of Japanese cruelty and brutality. Up to a certain point, it shows how realistic WWII POW camps were, but this is not a documentary but a movie. It is meant, according to the unspoken contract mentioned above, to take the viewer on a journey, make him care about a character, see a character grow (even despite tremendous adversity), and give the viewer some kind of emotional cathartic satisfaction at the end.
In Unbroken, though, Jolie minimalises any character growth in a rather spartan "show the viewers and let them figure out what is going on" methodology. As a result, Zamperini, our lead character, simply exists from one scene to the next. He does not show any emotional growth arc whatsoever. He simply takes all the multifarious beatings his captors give him as though that were enough. Ms Jolie, it is NOT. We need to see a character move as an active participant in the story, as a maker of events, not a passive recipient.
To put it bluntly, here is the storyline (spoiler alert.)
Zamperini gets captured. He gets beaten often and mistreated. The End.
Sure there is a brief storyboard at the conclusion of the movie which fleshed out the character a little, but it is NOT ENOUGH. I suspect that Ms Jolie believed that the various scenes that she so treasured would trigger the same emotional responses in her audience as her, a sadly mistaken belief. Towards the end of the movie, I was badly needing Zamperini to DO something instead of just accept further beatings. We saw NOTHING of his internal journey, NOTHING of any form of resistance, NOTHING but an endless series of beatings and Watanabe, his tormentor, saying the same things over and over and beating him without any point at all.
The end, when it came, was a glorious relief, and I say that in a negative sense. Count this a failure, Ms Jolie. Do better next time, if there is a next time.
Cloud Atlas (2012)
Too confusing, too long, too confusing, too long, too confusing . . .
I am an intelligent man. I enjoy movies that make me think, movies that I can enjoy repeatedly, movies that I recommend heartily, and movies that make me a better person.
This was none of those. It was just too long and too confusing, with several different plotlines at different times and different places, not to mention different genres, all trying to weave together. I watched half of it one night and went to bed wondering, "What on earth is this? Where is it going? What does the director expect of me? Why is there no clear direction in the movie? How do all these different threads link up?"
When I watched the second half the next day, it became slightly more understandable, but my enjoyment was seriously diminished by the director's insistence on using the same actors to play different characters over different time periods in different places. WHY? WHY? WHY? This just confused me and made me wonder whether these characters were linked in some strange way that I should be able to see but couldn't. As a result, I only watched the movie with half my attention in parts.
To its credit, I must say that the movie is beautifully filmed, costumed, set and acted. I just wish I knew what it means.
In the end, I can only say that the movie is a grossly over-long, over-complex testament to the very simple idea of cause and effect. This action causes that action. There are elements of the struggle for freedom in there as well but they are overshadowed by this very simple idea. Three hours of screen time to basically say, "This action caused that action."
You have been warned. Watch it and get your brain scrambled. Three hours of beautiful confusion.
Darkest Hour (2017)
Cracker of a movie!
It is rare that I give a perfect score to any movie, but this one fully deserves it. Indeed, it is so good that I was fully engaged and engrossed throughout and, when the final credits came up, I was rather surprised and actually could have sat another hour quite happily.
Gary Oldman was never on my list of top actors, but he is now. So too is Mendelssohn for his regal portrayal and Scott Thompson for her Clemmie. The young secretary (Miss Layton) also must receive high praise for her carefully composed face, which carried so much emotion and message.
I was also delighted at the humour and humanity. Oldman does Churchillian wit very well indeed and, whether or not it was historical, the unexpected visit by the King was just brilliant. Of course, the subway scene was entirely confected but it made little difference. Wright added it simply to show both the humanity of Churchill as well as, and this is important, the enormous respect the British people held for him.
For the key figure of WWII, possibly the iconic leader of the free world at the time, and certainly one of the most remembered, I was keenly alert to anything in the movie which would degrade or pollute this. Yet both Oldman and Wright portrayed Churchill as cantankerous, quite individually bold, quirky, gentle, witty, alert, decisive, hard-working, and just the leader the Western world needed in that darkest hour.
Casting Oldman as Churchill seemed to me to be like casting Winne the Pooh to play Batman. Yet it worked! Indeed, it worked so wonderfully well that, by the end of the movie, I was IN the Parliament, in Number 10, in the underground War Cabinet rooms and in 1940s Britain so much that the actor Oldman disappeared and the character Churchill emerged in all his bold, cigarish, waistcoated glory.
Brilliant! One for the ages.
Red Dog: True Blue (2016)
Scenery: Yes / Plot: No
I adored the original Red Dog. It was Aussie, spirited, funny, genuine, human and just a great movie. It had a story to it. It WENT somewhere. It took the viewers on a journey.
Red Dog Two, on the other hand, is a meandering set of images, snapshots and scenes that can be summarised as this: Boy leaves the city to live on an outback station. Boy meets a dog. Boy lives on the station. Boy goes back to the city. Of course, there are other events (meets a girl, gets involved in Aboriginal mysticism etc) but NO central narrative tying everything together.
As a result, I felt cheated. The scenery and the careful framing of the movie in the sixties were the winners in this movie, but NOT the story. If you want Red Dog 2 to be similar to Red Dog 1, think again.
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
Star Bores
I've seen all the Star Wars movies and I must admit that my favourites were the first three, Episodes IV, V and VI. They were new, inventive, fresh and they linked technology with something deeper.
Episode VIII, on the other hand, is a shallow copy of these. It uses the same universe, but lacks any depth at all, uses a ton of cliches, is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO predictable, lacks any central plot, jumps unendingly from crisis to crisis, and is in parts just plain boring. The only two real genuine interests in the movie are Ren and Luke Skywalker, with a delightful twist at the end.
This appears to be a money-making effort solely. The scriptwriters should be ashamed of themselves for such a puerile effort, pulling Deux ex Machina when things got tough, copying scenes almost exactly from earlier episodes, using inane and suicidal battle 'tactics,' leaving things unexplained, jumping without transitions, and including an ending worthier of Disney than the greatest space opera classic ever created.
For the true Star Wars fan, see it out of duty. For the rest, AVOID.
The 5th Wave (2016)
Dire nonsense. Avoid at all costs.
At the 'end' of this movie, I threw up my hands and thought, "That's it? You made me sit through two hours of rubbish only not to finish it?" It's rare that I write reviews of movies, but this one deserves your careful and thorough rejection. There is no real reason to watch this movie at all, and I am astonished that Liev Schreiber agreed to act in it. It is unmitigated, illogical garbage.
The main objection I have to this movie is very simple: If you are a bunch of enormously powerful aliens who have the power to wreak terrible destruction on the earth, why set up an elaborate and quite unnecessary scheme of recruiting and training child soldiers to kill off the last survivors(with all the ghastly patriotic / rebel / freedom fighter nonsense that goes with it) when you have all the technology and tools to do it yourselves? If you shut that thought out of your mind and still choose to watch it, it is still diabolically awful on so many counts, fit only for pre-teens with very low expectations and nothing better to do.
I have numerous other objections, but I won't bore you with them.
Avoid. You'll thank me for it.
Silence (2016)
High hopes but it left me cold
In brief, this movie to ENDURE, not ENJOY.
It is just WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. TOO. LONG. Three hours of relentless torture, persecution, despair, poverty, brutality, murder, betrayal, and then more of the same, was just too much, and Scorsese really should have made a 60 minute documentary rather than a movie. Yes, there are moments of lightness (two, we counted), and a brief sequence of hope and purposes where one of the padres felt like he was making a difference to the bleak poverty of the lives of Japanese villagers. Other than that, this movie is one inevitable, ghastly, slow slide to apostasy. On occasions, Mr Scorsese, I want my movies to give hope, humour, courage and good things, and your movie gave none of those.
I had high hopes for this: Neeson, Garfield and Scorsese made it an attractive proposition. However, an hour into the movie and I was ready to leave. The plot was muddy and laborious, and Scorsese insisted on showing us short imagistic fragments that led nowhere.
Two last gripes. Firstly, the idea that medieval rural Japanese villagers would be able to speak English (or Portuguese as the narrative language) is ridiculous. Secondly, why oh why did Scorsese make us sit through the credits before the house lights came on? A few more minutes of tedium? Whatever you wanted, it didn't work.
It gets 2/10 for the cinematography and nothing else.
Unless you are a fan of medieval Japanese torture and murder techniques, don't both watching this. Some movies stay with you for days, weeks, months, a lifetime. This one you will want to forget asap and move quickly to something more edifying.
The Maze Runner (2014)
Seriously?????
Mr Hall, what were you thinking? So, let me get this straight. After a terrible holocaust in which a great number of the world's population perished, some people decided to go to great lengths to create and maintain an secretive, complex, difficult, costly, and GIGANTIC concrete maze with enormous moving walls and populated with gigantic malevolent monsters in order to . . . sorry. In order to test the brains of 2 dozen boys? Seriously? You couldn't think of an easier way to do it? Why not just test them in a lab? And why oh why, and this was never explained at any point . . . why create and then insert a bunch of hostile monsters to kill said boys? What would happen if these monsters killed ALL the boys? Pointless. Illogical. Self-defeating. Paper-thin. A. Complete. Waste. Of. Time.
Avoid at all costs.
Now You See Me 2 (2016)
Turgid
Fortunately, I saw this on a plane so didn't pay for it. After the illogical and characterless first NYSM, I swore I would never watch a sequel. But it was late at night on a long haul flight, I was bored, and there it was on my screen. So I watched it, hoping for some improvement.
It never came. Instead, we were subjected to the same old illogical 'plot' sequences, the same old smug explanations of characters to the clearly stupid audience about how they pulled off the stunts, the same old nonsensical actions, the same two dimensional characters apparently pulling off a giant heist but, in reality, confusing us and boring us senseless. I desperately wanted something to be logical, but nothing was.
*spoilers* One such event was the capture of the four leads where they apparently escape down a long rooftop pipe in the US only to end up in Macau. Apparently the bad guy set it all up so that they would escape down the US slide, get hypnotised by the swirling shapes inside the pipe and fall asleep (while sliding down), then get taken at the bottom of the slide by the bad guy's men, put on a plane to Macau (all without waking), then put into an identical pipe in Macau (still unconscious) then wake while sliding down the pipe to find themselves in a restaurant in Macau. Seriously, Mr Scriptwriter? Seriously?
But the worst was this. *spoilers ahead* Towards the end of the movie, in a series of highly improbable events, the four main characters get themselves caught in order to get onto the bad guy's plane in order to get themselves thrown out of the plane in order to end up in the middle of the Thames on a pre-placed barge with huge lights and cameras that no-one spotted ahead of time in order to reveal who the real crooks were. Seriously? They planned the whole thing???? SERIOUSLY? Does the scriptwriter think we are all moronic?
And then we are subjected to a long and illogical 'resolution' which makes no sense and where the mysterious 'Eye' is waved in our faces as a highly unlikely deux ex machina.
Avoid this like the plague. As Shakespeare said (about better things) full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Now You See Me (2013)
Pretty but empty and pointless
This started out with promise and ended flat, lame, hollow and just pointless. Rather than list the MANY awful gaping holes in the plot, the awful errors of continuity, the nothing attempt at romance, I will summarise my feelings about this movie simply.
Unlike the Prestige, The Illusionist and Oceans Eleven, which remain some of the best magic / heist movies ever made, and which this director possibly hoped to emulate (and failed abysmally), the NYSM director takes a lot of fairly decent ideas about magic and heists, waves them about tantalisingly in front of the audience with flashing lights, sound effects and lasers, and then sits down and says, "OK. It's over now. You can go home." There is no decent, fulfilling conclusion. The movie just ends with a limp attempt at resolution that fails utterly.
All of the stupidly impossible plot twists, the simply ridiculous car chase and coming back from the dead, the absurd misdirection, the lame romance, and the directorial hand-waving end with nothing more than a puddle on the floor.
The characters are flat. The plot absurd. No-one cares.
Don't waste your time.
The Revenant (2015)
Revenant = Empty shell
I went to this movie with high hopes. The trailers looked awesome and, after such classics as Inception, I would see anything with Hardy and Di Caprio. I left at the end of the movie, though, terribly terribly disappointed.
Don't get me wrong; much of the movie is very strong: the sound design, the visuals, the strong sense of realism. As a travelogue for the wild mountains, it is superb.
However, when I enter a cinema to watch a movie, I enter a contract with the director: I will give you my attention, reactions and engagement if you give me the opportunities to engage. I therefore expect that a director will give me character development, mystery, surprise, plot development, unexpected twists or one of the basic (and ancient - decent story telling is not a modern thing) elements of good stories. Engage me, Mister Director! Give me a reason to care! Make me remember - and rave about and love! - your movie for years to come! Let me know that part of your craft is a desire to please the audience! However, Revenant gives me none of that. Apart from one delightful, terribly short - and brutally terminated - moment of humour, there is nothing in this movie to engage me. There are no human connections, no surprises with the plot, no character development, no suspense, nothing that asks me to care.
The characters remain flat and unchanging throughout and the end is obvious from early stages. The movie is a brutal, hyper-realistic and bleak exercise in portraying a series of events without ANY concern for the audience. It is, ultimately and sadly, tedious. It should really have finished after 1.5 hours, but dragged on for many dull minutes of Di Caprio being forced (by the director ultimately) into one life-threatening situation after another.
As a technical exercise, this movie is superb. As a human story, it is empty and without heart.
Avoid.