Why are all the dates messed up?
The movie takes the first half of it to the world-building, and it does that successfully. With a series of events--only minimal dialogue--it shows the kind of apocalyptic world Max lives in. The plot is fairly simple, but the world which plot rests on it is convincing. The war boys culture, resource monopoly, woman objectification, etc. The rest of the movie jams the audience with action-packed scenes while slipping insight into the world through several lines of dialogue and character's behavior.
Some relationship/character-building seem to happen off-screen and seem to be implied, but the progress seems natural that you know something has been going on between them. You can see the development of one of the character where he went from a brash, rash youth to a soft-spoken guy. The last scene seems to put off the suspension of disbelief for a while (on how easy they made the final decision after going on for that long), but it is remedied by the action and the last drama involving one of the supporting character. Very solid composition for a fantasy-action movie.
Michael B Jordan! I could sit through a two hour movie of him tying his shoelaces <3
And I dare you to watch the scene where he's training and the music is pumping and then he goes running down the street with the bikes circling him without wanting to jump up and punch something. That song and sequence got me pumped! I've never seen any of the other Rocky movies, but I definitely enjoyed this flick.
I was dis-interested the whole way :[
Pros:
* The first ten minutes
* The Redhead (when she doesn't talk)
Cons:
* Virtually anything else
The overdid everything with this movie, not a single actor is convincing, CGI looks pretty bad and kills all the tricks (what's the point of tricks if you have to resort to FX anyway ?).
The storyline isn't great either, AFAIK I can't say the ending was very surprising. At any rate the acting was so emotionless that I didn't really care anyway.
Action scenes are average but at least this movie won't make you fell asleep
You'd think the failures of M. Night Shyamalan would have taught filmmakers that a plot twist at the end of a movie isn't enough to compensate for a meandering and unconvincing plot. And, isn't the entire reason we, as a society, enjoy magic tricks the idea that they're physically plausible?
I have mixed feelings on this. I mostly agree with @ketu except for the Blonde scientist (played by Catherine Lemieux); I find her abrasive and thoroughly unwatchable. When the monkey got her in the face I thought 'excellent, she's out' but no, not even a scratch (wtf, come on!)
Fringe was mentioned and I've heard elsewhere this compared to and touted as the next Fringe. It will never be Fringe. Fringe was lightning in a bottle. There is simply no potential chemistry here like it, and Walter is so unique in both character and performance. These characters are very flat and the nature of the contained environment leaves little development for our 'heroes' that won't slip into soap opera territory.
There was some good dialogue, the exposition wasn't grating, though the 'working with the ex-wife' is amongst the handful of clichés here. I like the main guy (played by Billy Campbell), I think his performance is quite good. I think the make up effects are good, the CGI monkeys were cool though some of the other CGI is a little wonky (the shot where they were walking from the helicopter to the complex was bad).
I'm hoping this show develops into something with some balls. It's seeded enough interesting points that it may, but stretching this out beyond a season (13 episodes?) seems like a push to stay interesting.