For me, this forth installment is the best Tranformers movie to date. While I watched and even re-watched the three previous movies (which means I liked them quite a bit) I could never get past the fact that the original movie had some laughable moments (e.g. the NSA-Kiddies from college who just happen to detect the security breach? Or the black "Hacker"? I mean, come on, you could have done better then THAT, right?! Additionally I found the US army guys very incredulous!) and that the third and especially the second movie were not much more than very entertaining propaganda movies for the U.S. army with a lot of skin from Megan Fox and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
Therefore it was very welcome for me that in this forth installment of the series:
a) the Autobots did all the fighting with a little help from the humans, and not the humans with the help of the Autobots as in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd movie.
b) that the human help came in the form of a "normal Joe" (and his daughter and boyfriend) instead of some U.S. soldiers.
c) the "skin" in the form of Nicola Peltz is not as obviously just there because "sex sells".
Additionally, the 3D as well as the special effects are the best in the series which make this installment very fun to watch. However, there still are some shortcomings: for example the ending where the Yeagers and Shane hug each other and Joshua says "I can help with that [you do not have a home anymore]" is just laughable. I mean come one, Mr. Bay, could you not have come up with something a little more original for a happy ending? Or what about the short scene where Megatron a.k.a. Galvatron says "We will meet again, Prime... for I am reborn!"? I did not see or hear anything as laughable in a long time and as obviously just to state that there will be a sequel! And then there is the one problem that all the Transformers movie share: during the movie, the "bad guys" (here the man-mad Transformers created by Joshua's company KSI and the Decepticons) are depicted much strong than Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and co. but in the end, the "original" Transformers and the humans can defeat them quite easly.
All in all I would give Transformers 4 an 7.5 / 10 but since that is not possible on Trakt I round it up to an 8 / 10.
As a big fan of Legos as well as action movies and after reading / hearing only positive things about it, I was sure that I would love "The Lego Movie". However, after actually watching it, I was a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I think its a good animated action movie and I had fun watching it. None the less I had higher expectations for it, which I cannot put into words. Something was just wrong (or missing?) for me to give it more than a 7 / 10 or call it a great movie...
While arguable the worst "Die Hard" movie to date, I sill enjoyed this fifth installment of the series quite a lot: more in the way 2013 "Live free or Die Hard" than the first three flicks from the eighties and nineties of the last millennium, "A Good Day to Die Hard" sees John McClane for the first time in some kind of cooperation (instead of just blowing up everything mostly on his own) and on Russian and Easter European soil. The initial goal of John (freeing his son Jack from Russian imprisonment) soon turns into a battle to the death with the Russian mob because together with his son a Russian prisoner (Yuri Komarov, an ex-billionaire involved in some shady nuclear deals) escapes and is thereafter on the run with John.
The fast paced action flick features two major plot twists: the first occurs when Komarov is betrayed by his own daughter, who sells him to his former partner and now mortal enemy, Viktor Chagarin, to get a rich reward. The second one is the revelation that father and daughter have been in cahoots from the start to fool Chagarin into helping getting Komarov into a secret vault in the melted-down Chernobyl atom reactor.
As always with Die Hard movies, the good guys, in the form of the two McClanes, win and safe the world in the end (and, of course, all the bad guys, Yuri Komarov, his daughter, Chagarin and a whole army of Russian gangsters, are killed in the process).
I did not expect all too much from this movie and bought the BluRay mainly because of all the good things I kept on reading about it. But boy, was I in for a surprise: the story is told in a saracastic way and with some very black humour, but at the some time with so much emotions that I just have to love it.
The characters (from the drug addict grand father, over the overworked mother, the suicidal uncle and the mute-by-choice teenage son to the jobless father, who tries to get a new career as a motivational speaker started) are absolutely hilarious, the criticism on kid beauty contests as one example of what is wrong with this world and its beauty mania very pointed and the plot so entertaining that I just regret not having watched this comedy earlier.
For me, Pacific Rim was a huge disappointment: I mainly bought the BluRay because the flick was directed by Guillermo del Toro (I really liked his first Hellboy movie) and because it had good ratings across all review sites (e.g. currently 74% at Trakt). However, my excited anticipation vanished in no time: I THINK del Toro wanted the Kaiju to be seen as evil monsters that inspire fear and rage in the audience and therefore their slaughter by the Jaegers to be seen as just and noble. However, I never had mercy with mankind being attacked by the Kaiju and therefore never could identify with the glorified pilots of the Jaegers as the saviors of mankind. Additionally, after 15-30 minutes one knows exactly how the flick will end (the world is saved by a odd combination of two pilots in an old and decommissioned Jaeger based on a discovery by "Kaiju hippie" scientist). The sometimes laughable dialogs do not help either.
All in all this makes Pacific Rim an uninspired action flick I cannot recommend to anyone, even though the special effects are decent and their is a quite some action to be had. Why this movie is getting such good reviews I cannot understand: a German magazine wrote that Pacific Rim is an "exiting mixture of Transformers, Godzilla and Inception". And while the references are not altogether wrong, it lacks in many ways because Transformers and Inception are both out of league for Pacific Rim and the word "exiting" is just wrong when talking about this flick!
