In Captain Marvel, I didn’t like the main character, but I thought the movie around her was quite solid.
Black Widow is the exact opposite: I quite liked the two leads, but the movie surrounding them doesn’t really work.
Pros:
- Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh are easily the most entertaining part of the film.
- I liked the first act. It feels like Cate Shortland is trying to do an impression of a Jason Bourne movie. It’s fairly humourless, the cinematography is bleak, and the score is intense. It has a tone that no other MCU film has.
- The action (minus the final battle) is fairly well done. As per usual, less editing would’ve made it better, but at least it feels weighty.
Cons:
- The story itself isn’t that interesting. The themes and main mcguffin are oddly similar to Captain Marvel, though it’s not executed as well. The villains also fail to make an impression.
- This movie really loses its identity as it goes along, to the point where it turns more into a generic Marvel movie as it goes on, and eventually a generic action blockbuster by the third act. Everything gets way too big and bloated for its own good.
- Not a fan of the Russian accents, they sound very tacky. Just let everyone speak with a normal American accent, I can look past the fact they’re Russians. Besides, they even had a story based reason to ditch the Russian accents entirely.
- I found David Harbour quite cringeworthy in this.
- The main characters are protected by strong plot armour. Most characters should’ve been killed 3-4 times based on the things that happen during the action scenes. This isn’t even a ‘suspend your disbelief, it’s an action movie’ situation, it gets really ridiculous, to the point where it’s almost Fast and Furious level.
- The pacing is a bit inconsistent, you really feel it slowing down during the second act.
Finally, I want to address that I already find the use of Nirvana songs in movies like these quite distasteful, but the cover that's used during the credits literally sucked all the life out of the song.
4.5/10
The meanest thing I could say about this movie is ‘Has extreme Don’t Worry Darling energy’.
I have never seen a movie more desperate to justify itself. It’s trapped in this endless neurosis over what it is- a blockbuster Barbie movie in 2023 by an acclaimed art house director that is fun but also deep but also earnest but also self aware but also but also but also. Every point it raises it brings up a counterpoint to before the audience can, every frame is trying to prove it’s not just product but art. It’s never just Barbie. It’s never confident or even comfortable in its skin. You cannot for a second be immersed in Barbie because it’s not a story so much as a visual dissertation without a central thesis, it’s a student film riffing on the big dogs hoping it’s underdog audacity will carry it but given a budget in the millions. It so desperately wants you to like it, to know it’s in on the joke too.
Everythng is an ouroboros here: an endless loop of argument and counterarguement feeding itself. Isn’t it shitty how the Mattel boardroom is full of men? Ah, but isn’t it cool how Mattel’s acknowledged it with this niche? And it’ll mythologize Barbie’s creator but uh don’t worry she did tax evasion we know that, now let her impart into Barbie the experience of all women. Barbie helps women, Barbie hurts women, Barbie is told to be everything so isn’t she just like women, but it is better to be a creator than the idea, and in the end, hasn’t Barbie helped all these women? Oh uh why is this blonde white Barbie the centerpiece of it all and helping not only her diverse Barbie friends but a Hispanic woman and her daughter? Don’t worry we’ll have the daughter call her a white savior! But don’t worry we’ll have the mom say she’s not! It’s fascinating to watch, honestly. It’s a film that wants to prove to you so so bad that it works but it doesn’t and it knows it doesn’t and it knows you knows. It’s Gerta Gerwig wrestling with taking this job for an hour and a half.
The cast is more than game and able. Margot Robbie is doing her damndest to find the heart and soul in this role, and there’s one scene with an old lady near the end of the first act/beginning of the second that actually works, for just a moment, more than any of the big third act soliloquies or montages with emotional ballads. And as someone who’s seen Blade Runner 2049 and Drive, this is the best Ryan Gosling performance I’ve seen. The man commits and delivers a surprisingly compelling and entertaining antagonist. The movie can’t quite reconcile what he’s done with his ending, or tie it into the themes- is Ken letting go of Barbie and the need to define himself for or against her symbolizing the need for men to do the same, and if so, why play it so lightly and sympathetically?- but that’s not his fault. And the supporting cast are entertaining, but you just can’t have big laughs with a movie that feels like it’s constantly checking in the corner of its eye after every joke to see if you’re laughing, grin stuck in place. It’s not as funny or as smart as it wants to be, and the sad thing is, it feels like it knows that too.
There is some great set design, cinematography, dazzling choreography, popping colors, and some fun high points. But I can’t imagine many kids liking it. And we’ve seen how conservatives have taken this movie. And anyone’s who’s progressed beyond the politics of. Well. A feminist blockbuster Barbie movie will find it cloying or condescending or just incredibly basic. It’s aimed at a very specific crowd who will buy what it’s saying, the liberals who see corporate feminism as progress, who agree that it’s just about a little change sometimes, who are ready for something just a little more complex than a SNL sketch. I don’t regret seeing it, because I was deeply engaged the whole time seeing it struggle at war with itself, in pain for its whole existence. It’s not a boring movie by any means. It wants to say everything before the audience can say it first. It’s the endpoint of The Lego Movie and Enchanted- the corporations interrogating and justifying themselves, and the cracks in this formula are too large to ignore. It wants to be so much, and the attempt is as darkly mesmerizing as a fly thinking it can somehow and someway metamorphize into a butterfly and suffocating and struggling in its makeshift cocoon, but this is one Barbie that fundamentally just cannot break out of its box.
Starts off really strong and fun.
The sets look incredible and its immersive. They had a really great message about body positivity and unrealistic expectations on women & I was all the way behind it.... Then rapidly spirals into a pure man hate / Women supremacy. Its obvious the writers have a huge chip on their shoulders.. It's messaging is so heavy handed it completely took me out of the movie & brings it from enjoyable to a drab 2 hour rant by an angry twitter blue user who think's women's rights is still in the 1800's.
They have this unreal take that you're set for life if you're a man and just get instant success. They think everything's better if you're a man (Guess what, it doesn't work that way. I'm told every day how I'm a bad person because I'm a man, and for only that.... Just like this movie does)...
Being preached at about why being a man is so bad for 2 hours does not make for a fun viewing experience.
It shows the glaring double standards of the current mainstream talking points.
This movie blindly preaches that "the world would be better if the shoe was on the other foot" and it comes across as tone deaf.
Its BAD all one gender "rules the world" but if its women, its A-OK!... which defeats the purpose of feminism.
Women getting equality, not supremacy.
call this a hot take but I think men and women should be equal..... but this movie thinks men don't even deserve a seat on Barbie world's court - that's insane.
Why is Patriarchy bad but Matriarchy good....????
Its either all bad or none of it is, and this man hating director needs to make up her mind.
A show notorious for an awful ending comes back from the dead and has an even worse second ending.
An ending which wasn't earned at all:
- Dexter is acting sloppy and idiotic the whole time. This is a man who got away with hundreds of murders.
- Angela, who hasn't been able to solve a series of missing persons cases in her own town for 10+ years, solves the BHB case thanks to a series of plot contrivances, a google search and a freaking retcon (the M99/ketamine inconsistency, that made all of this possible). Her conversation with Batista in the final episode makes no sense either.
- The writing for Harrison is all over the place. After ten episodes I barely know who this kid is and what he wants. He keeps running away from conversations until the final couple of episodes and then we get barely 45 min of father-son bonding out of the whole season. His 180° turn in the next and final episode feels incredibly rushed.
- The show completely falls apart when Dexter kills Logan and he didn’t have to. All the evidence they had on Dexter was circumstantial at best, they had nothing solid to tie him to any of the murders. Any capable lawyer would have got him out of this. So his decision to attack a cop and prove himself a killer is the most illogical and out of character action he could have taken at the time. It was all downhill from there.
I am not upset Dexter died. His death could’ve happened in any number of fulfilling ways that honored the journey and the themes of humanity, morality, consequences, personal growth, development of empathy, justice/vengeance, the lasting effects of trauma the show explored in its' original run.
I’m upset they instead had his own son put him down like an animal while undermining years of character development to tell us he was just a psychopath incapable of feeling all along. Vilifying him entirely at the last second to force this outcome feels like weird moralistic bullshit punishing and mocking us for caring. Miss me with that bullshit.
Didn't have high hopes, and thank god. Still sad to see yet another fan favourite video game character be ruined by the adaption to film.
It's bad, and mostly because of the script. The story is awful and is very inconsistent. Sonic can run around loops and jump on missiles in mid-air but can't run up a slightly tilted wall? Also the amount of force-feeding of exposition they give in the first third is so bad. Not to mention the non-original and unneeded "Ya, that's me, how did I get here?" trope at the very beginning. The writers clearly didn't care how their story would be so generic and fall into the background because Sonic would draw people in. Like, in the action scenes, people should be dead. But, when you look around the streets, there's no one there. It honestly feels very empty throughout.
It feels like a rushed and cheap way to give a character that has been prevalent in the gaming community for almost 30 years a film. It really seems like they found someone's fanfiction and made it into a motion picture. Because if the first trailer was anything to go off of, they probably saw Sonic fanart on DeviantArt and thought that's what he looked like.
But speaking of looks, some positives. The colours work well, the art direction is okay and cinematography ain't half bad. The production design is pretty good and we all know Sonic looks much like himself again. As for a score, I don't remember it. Flat sad music is all that comes to mind.
I truly believe hardly anyone cared about this project, and that goes for the actors as well. I was kinda intrigued by how Jim Carrey would play the role here. After his great show Kidding where he used his over the top acting in a profound way. I was hoping to see it continue with this weird eccentric character. But no, it's just the old Jim Carrey again. His ability to move the way he does did seem to fit right in my mind, but when he spoke it just didn't work. Plus, the way he was written is so lazy.
I laughed once, right near the end at that damn Fitbit joke. The tonal shift of that character and her delivery honestly caught me off-guard. The best part of the movie.
Not the worst video game movie, but certainly not improving the general view on them either.
3/10
Something in me tells me this could have been so much more and better.
It's a good tv show don't get me wrong, it's enjoyable and there's some nice ideas in there.
But the whole oh we have to just follow the tram lines cause we have no choice so now I'm going to say this and you're going to say that and we're going to walk that door just like the machine told us we'll do, and then the big turnaround when Lilly threw away the gun, disobeying the predetermined nature of our universe etc. I mean come on, I suspect that people who watch and enjoy these kind of shows need a little bit more than that.
Also, what? In the machine? What does that even mean you live in the machine? Physically? The machine doesn't even create atoms, it just projects what it predicts so it's not even a simulation. In code as part of a program? That wouldn't be less weird either. So I gave up and just looked at the tv show more like an abstract kind of piece of art and I can live with that. And it's a great show. But F this could have been so much more interesting in my opinion.
