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dsgrunwell
Reviews
Intensive Care (2018)
Needs a negative rating! Complete junk. A special forces agent who has no tactical skills.
A score of 3.8 is overly generous. It was clearly given by family members and those who funded this film.
The main character is a deadly, top-echelon special forces agent who has absolutely no tactical skills. If she had even a smidgen, the story would have been over in twenty minutes, including the opening and ending credits.
They called this an action-thriller and a comedy. Comedy is what you tack on when your action film's egregious plot errors can't be fixed in post.
The elements of the production were not terrible. The main actors show some skills, but they were given a mediocre script, pointless editing, and dreadful plot.
My imagining of the plot development team:
"The killers are looking for her and she is wounded, right? They see her staggering off on the property. So, later, she taunts them over the intercom letting them know she is still somewhere on the property, and, get this, it shows she is not a victim anymore. "
"Good! I like where this is going. A strong female lead."
"She is bleeding from a huge leg wound, right? Let's have her take a long bath in her underwear. That's hot, right?"
"Bingo! I think I hear Oscar buzz."
By the end of the film, we wanted every character to die. I have had far more enjoyable root canals.
I can write a better film script in an hour with more plot twists, fewer tactical holes, with far greater character development.
The New Legends of Monkey (2018)
First Season is fun! The second season is a mess, with conflicted goals and weaker writing.
TLDR: Watch the first season and avoid the second season.
We really enjoyed the first season - seven stars.
It was fun with aspects similar to the movie Big Trouble in Little China and the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with Kevin Sorbo. The main characters are fun and they have great comic timing. Sandy and Pigsy are standouts. At times, there is a bit of a Power Rangers vibe to the demon bad guys. Some of the demons are well done and scary.
The second season gets four out of ten stars and I am being kind.
It is slow and misses much of the charm of the first season, choosing the idiot bad guy approach found in the Power Rangers.
It felt as if the writers panicked that they were speeding through the quests and there may not be enough for several seasons. So, they moved to a crawl focusing on some really stupid bickering between the dumbest of demon lords.
I get that the writers were walking the fine line of comedy and a serious quest series, where killing off demons may come off as too violent and not family-friendly. A friendly reminder, these are the same evil demons who overthrew/killed off many of the gods and enslaved/killed humans, plunging the world into 500 years of darkness. Yet the heroes choose not to take them out when they have the ability to easily do so. I have no idea how any of these demons got to be the demon rulers unless the others demons are even more tragically stupid.
To be fair, I have this same complaint with the villians in most of the superhero films as well. You can kill henchmen for hours, but the evil behind all the mayhem has to stand trial or you let them slink off to plot again.
Too often they stand there listening to the bad guys while they were going on about their evil plans and reaching for their scrolls/weapons/trap triggers.
I don't know if they are going to do a season three, but if it is written like season two, I will not wait long hoping it gets better.
I am more than a bit tired of the heroes having no strategies when they have the element of surprise. Yeah, I get that Monkey is so sure of himself that he doesn't think that he needs a plan and he thinks that he is smart as well. He needs to mature past the hubris of a 14-year-old boy who matured faster than his friends. The gods are thousands of years old, you would think they have seen war before.
My suggestion is to write new bad guys as needed and don't be afraid to be ruthless with them. There has to be thousands of demons to take over the world. Don't make the characters become pastiche of bad guys.
Stop making the gods so weak or constantly put them into sleep or pile on some other limitations. "We can't let _________ do that or it will be too easy for them to win. I know, let's put him or her to sleep!"
The human being the smartest and weakest who constantly saves the party gets tired as well. The Sci-Fi series Farscape did this extremely well.
Blame! (2017)
Dramatic pauses where you want them all to die.
The visuals and the overall concept are great. The world is believable and explorable. I wanted this to be as wonderful a film as it looked.
Trope alert:
They took the basic villagers against an overwhelming outside threat from Seven Samurai or Princess Mononoke, and the "system" seeing humans as the problem, from basically every science fiction film or book.
Cliché anime characters fill the world. The tough, spirited young teen; the wise old leader; the guy who is afraid; the wimpy young teen that everyone protects even if they die to do it.
Add the handsome, battle-scared loner who has traveled the unsurvivable depths of the city. He doesn't blink, he doesn't emote, he says about ten words in the whole film, yet let him in with his superweapon and let him walk behind you. You can trust him, he has intense blue-eyes and hero hair.
What made me go ballistic were the endless dramatic pauses. They could have tightened it by fifteen minutes. The standard time is running out, war is here, people are dying in horrific explosions. Oh, I know, let's walk slowly to do the only thing that might save everyone from a gruesome death. Cue the extended standard hero fight.
Other characters stop to stare at each other or talk. If our base/home/village is being overrun and you stop and want to talk about your loss or tell each other about how much you love them, I am going to slap you until you wake up.
Hint: If you come to a vast factory that can make hundreds of football stadium-sized batches of anything in a few seconds, how about creating some automated weapons systems, powerpacks, weapons, vehicles, or hover tanks? I understand that is too easy. If your plot is destroyed by something simple, then your plot is too weak.
Here's my suggestion. These films take years of incredibly hard work by thousands of extremely talented people. Several months into the planning, ask some of your staff if the plot or characters reminds them of another film. If so, change it or you risk this becoming another cookie-cutter trope anime film.