That was a well paced, well acted, decently CGI'd TV show that somehow I couldn't care less about. Supremely watchable but I just never invested. Somehow I was more invested in Season 1 and I think this might be a slight bump in quality. Maybe. Arguably. They're both very very solid seasons of TV. This one even has an excellent ending
There are some salvageable parts but the movie is a mess.
Upload Season 1 was fun. Upload Season 2 was interesting. It was so interesting even with that awful missing episode jump it still mostly worked. Upload Season 3 doesn't know if it wants to be a sequel to Season 1 or to Season 2. It tries to be both at the same time. It's like they saw Severance and really didn't want to hit that "oh man it's kinda dull what's even happening here?" tone for even a single moment so it just yo-yo's back and forth between light and heavy, high and low stakes, fun and serious. It has an identity crisis. And yet again it ramps up the stakes at the end and I'm invested on a moment to moment level. But the world building is just so incohesive. Is Lucy bad or Lucy good. Will anyone tell? Is there a conspiracy? Does it matter? What about the plight of the poor is this a serious thing or just a joke that we'll think about later? Hey remember rebels? That was a fun detour. The show is about the dynamic of a worker and a customer so Nora keeps being a worker regardless of if it makes sense for her character. Honestly I gotta give it to Allegra Edwards her Ingrid is somehow one of the most realized characters in the show. I don't like her character but she brings life to every scene. She's putting her heart and soul into this for whatever reason every scene no pauses. I kinda hate Ingrid for most of the show's run but she's a full person and I get her. In part because of how shallow and stunted her character is they don't need to do anything to her and so they don't and they let her character flourish and don't ruin her. Which is a wierd thing to admit they're doing to EVERY other characters. Nathan, Nora, Aleesha, Luke. They're all over the map this season. Highs and lows and askews.
I want a Season 4 but after this I'm not convinced it'll be worth the wait.
they had me in the first half. after the first wish it lost all steam
Watching this movie for the umpteenth time I'm still impressed at how cool it is. It's a movie that just works on so many levels and still has the pinache to stay cool. One of the strangest things is the number of people commenting on how the first thing he should have done was make his supply permanent. I kinda think somehow one of the most accessible movies I've ever seen went over a lot of people's head because that was literally the point.
30 minutes into the movie which is 15 minutes after he takes the first pill. Eddie says "Suddenly I knew what I needed to do[...] but it would take money to get there". I find that a really clever bit of foreshadowing because THAT is when he leapfrogs the idea of getting more pills all the way to making the pills permanent.
Is Limitless really interesting? maybe not. Is it all that original? Maybe not. But it's fun. It's power fantasy done well in way that feels satisfying and not cheesy. It doesn't overstay it's welcome and get crazy with it's scope (like Lucy for instance).
Limitless was a gas. So good I was ready to reject the TV show adaption but even that turned out pretty nice.
This episode feels like they set it up to be interesting but ended up reductive. But that's just storytelling. I'm not a fan of this particular story. Previously we were told that just because something looks like a monsters doesn't mean it is. It kinda felt specifically like a hint that Medusa was a victim (and she is) in need of sympathy for what happened to her and not revulsion for how she looks. And yet we have Medusa who saves the children and ends up with her head cut off. Almost like we could have just judged her by her monstrous appearance in the first place.
You know for what started as a simple crime procedural. This is spiraling again into some really ethically dark situations. I'm officially calling the pilot bad. It's just a bad episode because these are just fascinating stories.
Wait why would you drive so wrecklessly when you can't leave the car. Of course it would lead to road rage.
That hospital scene is a very different emotional dynamic. Very compelling simply because we never seen this. Our hero cops have to persuade someone to kill a narrative and the citizens are refusing because they understand the social dynamics and effective consequences. In any other cop show this would be focused on cops trying to take them down in spite of their status.
Another great interaction when the copper figures out the sting shouldn't go through and no one listens to him. It felt not full on The American.
An utterly nonsense opening but otherwise a great investigatory episode. Our protagonist Jack finds himself in genuine moral quagmires and makes difficult decisions. I'm honestly just impressed in the end. This show feels like it's "going there" in a way that procedures and fantasy shows just don't often do. Now this is dark. Making me care for someone and then watched them get destroyed. For no reason. No benefit. No cost analysis. Just because. A slow opening to a swiftly paced and compelling conclusion. Honestly this episode more than the previously is going to sell me on what's going on.
An interesting pilot. Not to attack it but most pilots go for flashing and attention grabbing. This is much more methodically paced. A criminally underused Idris I hope gets more personable later. There's some iffy blocking in some places but it mostly works. It doesn't break credulity or anything.
Strong opening for the inheritor of the Percy Jackson curse.
I don't even know if there's a curse or anything but yeah solid solid work. Great adventure vibes and most importantly it manages to stand up on it's own distinct from the previous adaption. I do feel like Percy's mom is getting undersold but the two episode premiere give great confidence that this will be another successful adaption.
If I wanted to be trite I'd compare this to the infamous Pixar scene that opens up their movie Up but if instead of like 7 minutes it was 30 minutes. Maya and Fred make an interesting couple.
I think there was a lot of potential in this. I think this movie took bad choices (as a film) but even with the choices they took there was potential. For instance I actually think it's kinda brilliant how they pull out of the time loop with a change in weather unexpectedly. I think it was performed WELL. I think it was kinda pointless but as a function of the story it works.
I was hoping that Michael would be redeemed. I think this could have been an interesting variation on the time loop genre where you're stuck in a time loop with someone you don't like. Not like an enemies to lovers situation which has been done to death but someone you actively don't like. It could have been fun it could have explored social responsibility. They could have taken this ostensibly evil character and turned him good using a morality that only applies to people who are functionally above the law.
But the movie didn't really do much. It didn't really SIT in the time loop. Like Groundhog Day for instance really saturates itself into the loop. Even fun goofy romps like Boss Level really luxuriate IN the loop really having a good time. Letting you feel the character in the loop. Here we don't spend much time exploring the loop. Maybe they want to argue we already understand the potential of the loop so we don't need to see it. Heck even the characters already understand the concept and jump two chapters ahead. Honestly they figure it out way too fast in my opinion.
But it could have been more. It could have been something special instead contrary to the description this is the story of one dude trapped in a loop with his love interest and his id manifest into a fellow addict.
A fun little short
In the end we have a good show. A focused show with a story to tell and I can't understate how much that's appreciated. Buuuuut, there are issues. My first issue is our main character Darby Hart the "Gen Z amateur sleuth" and as I expected she's only "amateur" in the sense that she is literally not getting paid. I wasn't sure they were going to do that but they did. Darby isn't interesting as a sleuth. When you think about the great detectives Darby doesn't really do much detecting. She's not obsessed with deduction like Holmes. She's not obsessed with details like Monk. She doesn't create stories like Sean Spencer or Richard Castle. They try to mask it a bit but her thing is that she cares ("The dead speak to me"). To the exclusion of everything else most specifically to the exclusion of the relationships she has with the living. That's not bad per se. It's just not the character of a Gen Z amateur sleuth main character.
Then there's the tech. I mean it started off good. I'll say that. But the longer the show went the more I had to squint to ignore all the tech issues in this show. From awkward conversations ("Vee Eye or emacs") because somehow no one told them you pronounce it "V-eye" or that vim is a thing. The concept isn't just that eight guests are invited by a reclusive billionaire. It's eight hackers. Which makes Darby as a tech savvy hacker less interesting. I mean they do try to frame her as the "computer hacker" and everyone else as just in the sphere of various general hacking but nah everyone here is a level of computer hacker and they do make it a point to say that a few times. So when Darby hacks, it's like why? Why do I care about this? That combined with the flubs in tech representation both big and small kinda damage this tech-happy murder mystery.
What the show does do well is all the none screenplay bits. The acting, the filmwork, even the soundtrack that I recall. I wanted to keep watching. I expected to hate Darby and find her awkward but she's not. She's understandable. She's relatable. I care for her and wanted to see her struggle though even when she was making bad bad impulsive decisions. Emma Corrin just kinda shines even when the writing doesn't. Honestly she's not alone the entire cast was excellent. Especially looking back.
The murder mystery, like the show, started off well. I cared about the characters. I cared about the victim. I didn't lean anyway towards the suspects. Plenty of room and scary situations for Darby to navigate. It was a great recipe. No idea how the cake ended up tasting so bad though. The back end kinda flops. I don't think there were enough breadcrumbs for the killer's reveal. Ironically enough I just finished A Haunting in Venice after this so they actually have something in common. But Haunting is just better. Which is unfair because it's leaning on the tower that is Agatha Christie. Still this could have ended a lot better if they had a more interesting endgame. The pacing was there. the characters were ready it just..... didn't.
Ending Spoilers:
an Christ almighty the less said about "AI that's going to kill someone" the better. It's a stupid plot point. Just when you think everyone's finally realizing that all these AI tools are moronic and useless suddenly these shows come out and make AI out to be this magnanimous force. Here the AI is the killer. In The Creator the AI is the savoir. It's all so stupid and dumb and shows you haven't been paying attention to what AI is and what it can do. It's like all the robotics nerds obsessed with sex dolls that can tell the weather and laugh at your jokes like that's going to replace women in Asia where there are too many men and not enough single women to support them emotionally. The "AI did it" is going to become "the butler did it" very soon and that's unfortunate because it doesn't deserve that level of trope support. AI will help you cheat on an essay but it does so so poorly the idea that it's nearly sentient and almost capable of erasing humanity pains me to hear people say out lout with their mouths. The only way AI could be dangerous is if people give it too much authority. Like making AI the CEO of your company is a bad idea. (Or to take another example from real life: Using AI to decide whose claim gets accepted. The AI had an 80% failure rate) I maintain they're only doing it on paper and that's a GOOD idea because it gives you a perfect scapegoat. Unethical and evil but an effectively "good" idea.
Classic cop throwing garbage charges on someone to get information out of them but the cop in that situation is a HERO. She does this in spite of the fact that he's fighting custody battle and would lose custody of his kids. BECAUSE he could lose custody of his kids. Cops will separate children and parents just for funsies. And they portray this as heroic.
What the?
There's a C-plot line that has Kylie who was working three jobs suddenly define her happiness as finding one job that she can be loyal to. It's so hilariously a transparent anti-"Quiet Quitting" message. They inserted the whole plot line to say that people who work multiple jobs can't find happiness even though they're making more money and so they should quit the jobs and just find one job and be loyal to it.
That is an unexpected level of Copaganda.
No seat belt, no helmet and I've never heard anyone pronounce Vi that way. What about Vim?
A few other things than this show is have done the same sort of weird tech. I think we're in this weird age where tech issues are represented more accurately, but tech is still represented Awfully. I remember earlier one of the big kings of tech still picks his password to be a date that personally significant to him. No one does that.. especially not the tech elite. I mean men that especially not people who are actually technically literate. The tech elite are a bunch of morons who just have money but anyone who knows any technology know if you don't put your birthday as a password
It's goofy enough. It's just not fun enough. It'll probably get more fun with a second watch. The plot is a mess. Barely comprehensible. I mean there are three different antagonists. The nepo baby kids are... well fine. Johnny Depp's daughter and Kevin Smith's daughter are entertaining enough. Smith's direction is on point. I really like the visual style of the movie in some part (character vignettes) and less so in other (the Bratzi explosions) but with a net positive.
I think the movie just needed to trim off some of the fat and stick with one primary antagonist and really minimize the other two to shadows of what they are now. and even for a goofy throwaway film this could have been something interesting.
one of the funniest murder of the show. I mean there have been some fun murders this season. Real 'final seasons' stuff. But the one here is just so chuckle free.
That said Carie-Anne Moss's development has been excellent.
Solid episode with a muted but effective guest star in Carrie-Anne Moss. Morgan develops nicely here.
Oh dear the plates are really spinning now. Honestly for a real conspiracy everything's a little too close. Everyone is a little too incestuously related everyone else. It's what's driving the tension here that there's no room to breathe. But for a TV program that's all right.
Solid setup. Eccleston was better than I remember. The scale is pretty small which I appreciate. I watch a lot of shows about the world ending. This isn't that. It didn't blow me away even for a small scale show but it enough to reel me in.
It's a shame because the voice talent is pretty serviceable. The animation above the tolerable line. But the writing and art design were just awful. The first thing I noticed was that for a movie about a human girl who finds out she's a Kraken I'm confused why this was ever a mystery. She looks like a sea creature. Which could have been "a choice" if everyone looked crazy but they don't. It's an odd style and one I don't like but everyone else looks very distinctively human.
It's not clear what Ruby sees in herself. At one point she mentions they're hiding from monsters. Is that just an angry rant or was there something serious behind it? She mentions hiding her gills but she never goes in the water why does she think she has gills? Why does she have tentacle hair? Why is she blue so very very obviously blue when everyone else is skin-toned. There's a degree to which she moves like a squid but that might be just cartoonish embellishment.
Eventually when you get over this and try to understand the story. Very quickly you realize this feels like an Asylum version of Turning Red. A young girl turns into a giant monster that only females in their family turn into something that she wasn't told about or warned about and happens right about the age some girls in real life get their period. Oh but this monster is Blue so... suck it. Unfortunately where as Turning Red really leans into the metaphor and focuses on the character maturing and growing while being seen as an agent in her own life. RGTK decides well in that movie there wasn't really a bad guy so we should have a bad guy. The problem with inserting a bad guy into this story is that you don't have enough room for one.
The story has three musical montage breakdowns and rather than feeling magical or interesting they just feel like oh they didn't want to write anything they just wanted to skip over this part and move to the next.
The real problem is the missed opportunity to make this something less traditional. Rather than making it a coming of age young girl movie but now with a boring generic bad guy. Why not make this Turning Red but mean girls. Heck ALL the ingredients are there. Ruby could have been a new student running from monsters. or crazy theory flip the dynamic. Ruby is the townie and the mermaid is the new girl but still have Ruby be Katy. Rather than the story of a new girl who invades the popular clique. It's the story of a new girl who forms a popular clique with the outsider girl. You lose a lot of "Regina has been bullying me since 2nd grade" stuff but whatever MG already did that. That could have been interesting. Enough to make this movie stand on it's own. I mean they even have a boy toy love interest setup. The boy Ruby likes that the mermaid gets credit for saving while looking beautiful. They start a friendship over being sea creatures. I mean it's just sitting there on the storyboards. It just needed someone to actually write it. Instead we have something that is as empty and lame as it's animation style. Congrats on making curly hair look good and literally nothing else.
Edit: Also the Gilmore Girls was sitting right there. Rudy, her mom and her grandmother the queen. I mean it's RIGHT. THERE.
The first two episodes had a point and direction. This one doesn't. What happened to the narrative momentum we were building? As a straight up sitcom it was perfectly fine, but as an episode in serialized TV show, even a comedy, this was lacking. Not even a casual nod towards what we're working on. I thought we were trying to shut down Freon but after this episode there's been no movement on that front. Are we still returning uploads? Are we working on locating the server farm? What's going on? The entire episode happened and we have no idea where we're going. The show really doesn't know if we should take it seriously or not and it's things like this that really give you tonal whiplash.
This is when the Season 2 editing crisis hits. It's a very weird episode where you have to infer a lot of what's going on. Ingrid gets a digital baby that seems to age every time she sleeps but it's never explained why. You have to presume she DID agree to do the trial period on an accelerated period but it's never explained. Luke is having his sex dreams of Aleesha stolen from his head and there's some resolution but it doesn't link up to what's going to happen in later episodes.
Ugh. I didn't want to watch this. I thought it was a movie when the trailer started but I hit play by accident and it was effective. I got sucked in. A nice bob and weave with the story telling. Obviously a lot of mystery to come up with and a murder that might or might not be.
I can't say know to a locked room mystery. One of us did it is just my jam so hard. I don't have a handle on Darby yet what kind of detective she is going to be but I do have a rough grasp on what kind of person she's going to be and I like her intensity. I think it's going to serve her well though out the series.
Keeping the emotional investment high here i see. I liked this episodes. Got some great hacking scenes. All of this of course was ruined by stupid TV things. First of all finding an SSID isn't hard. The idea that a hacker would need to know the name and not say the MAC address feels incorrect. But whatever. Then we find a password and it's eight digits. To which we ask the AI? if that "number sequence" has any meaning? Why wouldn't you immediately jump to "Is it a date?" because clearly it's a date. And of course it's a birthday. So lame. So boring. So breaking my immersion.
I heard someone suggest that maybe story tellers are flipping on AI. It used to be stories like Terminator where AI was going to kill us now we have The Marvels where destroying the AI was bad and The Creator where not all AI is the bad guy and then we have this episode where writers introduce AI like chatGPT isn't so common place it's got 30 different knock-offs. "It's writing this story based on a prompt in real time? I Don't believe it. Must be a party trick" and "Hey I've read tons of books but this has read ALLLLLLL of shakespeare". It's weird to think maybe they were right. Maybe there is a changing of the stories to embrace AI. which is ugly and wrong. First of all the AI that reads shakespear is pointless. It has to read millions of books and it's not getting by on just public domain. It's stealing books from people and appropriating them. But here we get the "it's just a tool and the prompter is the real artist" argument.
There's a sequence when everyone watches an "AI" film but ironically because the show isn't focused on it.. . NOTHING HAPPENS. All you hear is random sounds for few minutes. I thought that was an ironic commentary on AI art. It's art that you get literally nothing out of it.
This episode didn't get me to cry over Bill and Darby but darn if it didn't get me to understand why Darby might cry. Not that she did the poor broken little thing she is.
It's a fun movie. You just really have to work hard to get past Zawe Ashton being so much more attractive than everyone else in the cast. Like she's distractingly attractive. Which isn't the say anything about the rest of the cast. Iman is adorable as her character continues the arc from her show of being a fan-girl meeting her fav. One thing that stands out to me is I think Teyonah and/or her stunt double are the worst at stage fighting. She's fine for everything else but watching her fight she felt different. I didn't care though because the choreography felt purposeful in a way that most choreo hasn't lately. Movies forget this that the fights don't have to look good if the fight tells it's own story and The Marvels makes good use of it's fight scenes. It's not perfect but it feels less obligatory. I kinda would have liked to see Captain Marvel let her hair down in a way that showed she can be the most powerful solo character we've seen and still like just be sometimes. I was anticipating a Gomez style infatuated alien husband/boyfriend. But what we got was fine.
A lot of the story just flowed like they had time to work out what it was supposed to be and that made the whole thing just go down easy. Nobody felt out of character or excessive. There weren't too many wild cameros and wink-nods. I'm pretty sure we got close to Monica's codename a few times but I'm not comic-nerd enough to be certain. The Flerkins though were over done I though. Even with the context. The idea of this creature being a cat that can randomly grow tentacles and consume was interesting. It didn't look bad or anything but I do think they were a little too happy to give us Flerkin action. Heck they invented a whole subplot just to have it happen.
I am curious about the leftover plot.
There are two planets being siphoned. One of atmosphere, one of water. Neither were "saved" but the process definitely appears to take time to complete. The first planet was still being sucked when they left the second. So in the end did they use the bracelets to close the hole? Was it too late? did the planet that was 96% water now have to survive with 80% and explore all the new land? Were the Skrulls that got left behind.. did they life? Since they didn't fully suffocate? I just don't think this drama is important enough to show up in another movie but I'm curious in a way I'm not normally curious about MCU cliffhangers. it feels significantly big for an unanswered question. I don't need necessarily a whole arc where they go back and close the worm hole but something like Kamala saying they got delayed because they had to use the bracelets to fix the two wormholes would have just closed that off for me.
While the film-work is clearly advanced. And the changes are.... ehh fine. I think the reveal and the mystery itself was better in the original. I did like the telegraphing captures though. Every time Poirot said "The killer is among us" the camera would briefly cut a shot of the killer. Hilarious because it happened like three times. Knowing what I knew it wasn't subtle but I wonder how it would look if I was unawares.
Russell Brand has never looked better. Like physically he looks amazing and my sister says he should look like this in all of his roles.
Oh I get the appeal. It's fun. Watching this back to back with The School for Good and Evil was an interesting experience because that movie is based on a surprisingly interesting and good narrative about female relationships but the movie was trash. THIS movie is a much better film about that. It's got gore. It's got depth. It's got subtlety. It's got great chemistry between the two lead girls. It explores their sexuality without being a movie that exploits their sexuality. Yeah I'll say it.. it's feminist as heck. It looks inexpensive but it doesn't look cheap. TLC went into this movie and it shows. Heck these are girls who DRESS like they think they're unattractive. It's something movies kinda suck at sometimes. They hire all these traditionally attractive actresses and the character has to be "ugly" or start from the point where they think they're ugly but they're dressing like anyone else. These girls dress down like their suburban goth kids who just want to leave. I respect the costuming so hard. Almost as much as I respect the practical effects. They don't hide the monster but they also don't overexpose it. Watching Ginger transform step by step was interesting and fun.
It's also darker than I anticipated. It's grim all said and done. But yeah I could watch this again and again on an annual basis.
