I agree with JorisA. It focusses on the main politics at the start and ending of the war, but it is mostly about the events that happened during the war itself, and how it unfolded. They sacrificed chronology and jumped back and forth in time between episodes to focus on 1 front at a time.
It used some images multiple times, maybe because it is unclear when they were shot, but this distracted only slightly. The images are impressive and depict an impressive view of the war. At some point I started to get overwhelmed by all the gun fire, but the fact I binged this might have something to do with it. It makes you imagine the horrors the soldiers went through a bit better though.
I would say this is a must-see for those interested in (modern) history, but I would recommend it to the more casual viewer too because of the good job they did in presenting the images and sounds.
'The circle' aims high, manages to perform well until about halfway, then it crashes in a rather lackluster and unresolved ending.
I did not know much about this movie before going in, except for it having a stellar cast with Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, Karen Gillan (someone I always like seeing), Bill Paxton and Patton Oswalt. After watching the movie I was very surprised by discovering the utter trash reviews it got from both critics and fans. I can see its flaws, but I do not agree this amount of low-balling is something the movie deserves in my humble opinion.
Warning: Light spoilers ahead. (Heavy spoilers are hidden.)
Let's start at the beginning; Mae (played by Emma Watson) is a 20-something girl living somewhere in the near future in the San Fransisco area. She has a dead-end job at a customer service company, and she isn't happy. Her life goes nowhere, and she feels bad for not being able to help her dad, who suffers from MS. The story kick starts when her friend sets her up for an interview with a high-profile tech company. From this point onwards things start to snowball, and Mae gets pulled deeper and deeper into her work until she becomes like a social media, pop star-like, mascot for the company.
'The circle' follows a conventional third person storytelling with 3 tightly structured acts. It is based on the book with the same name written by Dave Eggers. The story revolves around a fictional company called 'The circle' which is an obvious possible future mirror of Apple, but can also represent Google, Facebook, Samsung, Amazon or other tech giants we know today. The main dilemma is about the discussion of privacy vs. transparency, a question notably relevant in today's world concerning tech companies and public surveillance. It also touches upon the value of friendship, family, self confidence and a late coming-of-age story of a 20-something year old.
The initial set up is done well, but nothing special. We get introduced to the main character her life; her family, most important friends, her first days at 'the circle' and its community. The first signs of trouble arrive when Mae is confronted by not having set up her social media profile at the company after a week of being there. After this the stakes slowly get higher and higher, something that is subtly (but a bit too obviously) paced. The most intriguing thing that the movie does is taking that initial dilemma, and move the line that needs to be crossed slightly further every time. It reminded me a bit of the 1981 film 'The Wave' which was based on a real life experiment by a teacher in Germany. A teacher showed the dangers of populism and fascism by slowly setting a more extreme boundary, so he avoided a 'shock effect' and the people (students) kept following him. The difference is that the jumps are sometimes a bit too big in 'The Circle'. It looks like the movie wants to make you think about the questions it asks its characters more than giving an in-world experience. My guess is that this is why the movie bombed with both critics and audience.
This also goes for the ending; when Mae turns the tables on the bosses of the company (played by Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt) it is unclear if she wants to continue the direction the company is heading in and even widen it, or is actually out on stopping it but knows it is already too late and the end result will be inevitable at this point. Again I think the movie rather wants to hold up a mirror to our current society and not make a finished product with all the answers. Even though I sympathise with this, it is not executed well enough and the ending might be either too ambiguous or not ambiguous enough with Mae sitting in her kajak surrounded by drones. Could this be a result from her choice? Or was it an inevitable thing?
The actors portraying the main characters are performing ok overall. Nobody really gave a bad performance, but there were no little moments where they actually shine either. The chemistry between characters was lacking sometimes because of clunky dialogue, most notably the chemistry between Mae (Emma Watson) and Annie (Karen Gillan) was rather lacking, and it made the toilet scene rather dull. Also the public fight between Mae and Mercer (Ellar Coltrane) was a bit cringy and lacked common sense. The best scenes were in the beginning of the movie, with Mae seeing her dad (played by Bill Paxton) having problems and Mae being thankful for Annie helping her and her parents. The characters and performances shined best on itself, with Karen Gillan being the highlight in the non-verbal acting.
The movie has a comforting use of lightning, and there are some beautiful set pieces and location shots and/or photography. It sets a consistent colour palet and tone for its settings, which is usually agreeing with a positive Silicon valley kind of mentality. This contrasts the dark undertone the movie has, and to me that was something I really enjoyed. It mimics reality where the positivity of technology often outshines (or simply ignores) the risks. Also the implementation of the technology was rather seamless. It was obviously there, but it was never too surreal or too much. Music was rather minimalistic and fitting, but except for a handful of scenes never more than just some complimentary background music.
Even though this movie has many flaws, I enjoyed watching it thoroughly. It hinges between a documentary of social decay and a satire comedy drama. Even though it fails to be any of those perfectly, it does well as a society commentary and only drops the ball in being a bit too obvious and never delivering on it's hinted solution.
I was very intrigued by one of the comments Mae received, which stated "No one at the circle has kids." This insinuated that the circle has no future, and even though the questions this movie asks are relevant, I doubt this movie will stay relevant for very long considering its bad reception.
I don't know what happened here in the editing room, but some people need to get their salary retracted xD
Poorly written and edited, shots i completely did not understand or add anything to a scene, incredibly pale musical score, nonsensical situations, anticlimactic, badly paced, a lot of slow action scenes, rushed storyline, strange tone shifts that didn't give the decent acting by Serkis and Harrelson any payoff, no real character development except for the 'bad' guy (kinda?) Yes, what is that about? xD. And I tried to avoid a rant here and just sum up my complaints, because I didn't really hate it that much (just 5/10.)
The worst is the movie is actually not even bad enough to be remembered for it being actually bad. And that is probably the worst thing you can achieve as a movie.
Ok ok ok, they got a point for CGI.
I wish it had a better score, because those 10 seconds of 'go go' just wasn't enough for me. For the rest, it has the same cringeworthy bad storylines (what story?) as the 90s series, the same dumb line delivery and stupid writing and the same bad acting. If I had to rate this movie based as a standalone, it would have scored much lower than the 5 it gets now. Because you do not make a good and realistic Power Rangers movie that has high standards. That would just be stupid.
There is a reason why I don't write movies, it is because it would result in movies like this.
Not a bad movie, but not very original either nor does it really challenge the viewer. Even though it has an original source material, you always have the feeling you've seen this one before. It doesn't help either it is so closely comparable to Intouchables (which is a way better film imho and not as predictable.)
Decent acting, decent script, decent camera work, decent story. Everything is just a little bit too run of the mill and average for it to really get to shine. But then again, it isn't a waste of time either.
An out of the box character driven movie with amazing performances all over. The movie is carried by the philosophical debate about (the hypocrisy of) how society is raising and viewing kids, so for the ones not interested in some deeper themes this movie will fall flat or could even be misunderstood. It is not so much a critique on society as it is thought provoking, and you might end up somewhere in the middle of the two positions of the argument. You could argue both against and in favour of the main character (played by the always amazing Viggo Mortensen) where every character in this movie has been written and portrayed as realistic as they can be.
At its core the movie is about parenting, education and the way society places itself superior to the outcast, and how the outcast always has to fight these conformist systems. Since (western) education and way of life has almost become a religion in itself, it isn't easy to live in (or raise your kids in) when you disagree. Something this movie illustrates the best in its more extreme moments.
Its runtime is a bit longer than you'd think necessary, however the slow pacing of the movie makes room for the rather big cast to breathe a little and not hastily skip over the decision points or thought process of the characters. It rotates intense emotional moments with moments of light heartedness and world building. This makes time for actually taking the audience along with the thoughts of the people that have the most development.
Oh and the cinematography is surprisingly well done too. I found myself both laughing and almost tearing up in 1 single shot. The emotions are very well captured and the use of light, costumes and props is exceptional.
The end really left me wondering if the kids could fly out and become these promising people their parents set them out to be, but something tells me that it won't be that simple.
Bad script, great special effects!
Considering this movie had a tiny budget of only 1.4 million dollars it is way more value for it's money than you'd normally expect. Even the acting is not something to complain over, if only it had a more interesting script and it probably would've been in my top list of 2016.
Even if this movie was twice as good, its ending ruined it and is just plain lazy.
It is easily better than the Maze Runner series (which doesn't say that much) and it has its high points. But it simply doesn't dare to be unique enough. I hoped for a more ' Skyline' or 'Super 8' kind of approach, which weren't amazingly good movies but are very memorable because of some very strong selling points. Unfortunately it is more like an upgraded version of 'Red Dawn'/'Tomorrow When The War Begins', but with this time the invading party is alien.
One of the best Scrubs episodes
Terrible screenplay where the same setup is repeated in every act, without really changing anything. Dialogue is good, even though it is more a couple of long conversations with time jums mashed together, but it becomes boring pretty fast if you aren't interested in the history of tech companies and/or Jobs. Thank god for Fassbender, Daniels and Rogen's great performances, otherwise it would have been even more of a pain to watch.
A very bland story that could have been way more interesting if they dared to add some depth to the story. It never shows us something new (and I am sceptical about the few details I didn't know) and doesn't have the courage to make it a sports movie, a drama or a controversy. It looks more like a dramatised documentary made by the USADA. A stage in the beginning of the tour de france where nothing happens but a sprinters final at the end is more interesting.
As someone who didn't read the books but did watch the original animated Disney movie a lot, this movie left me a bit divided.
On the one side it is a beautiful, well designed and neatly worked out movie, with astonishing CGI, visuals, (voice) acting and a modernised more appropriately paced story. On the other hand some of the characters contradicted themselves or felt unnatural to me, and some of them became obsolete to a point.
Since it is easier to whine, I will mostly do that during this review :P
To start off with Mowgli, first he offers to leave (something that felt very unnatural to me for a boy that age) and moments later he doesn't want to anymore. This could have been handled much more smoothly. Baloo is a lazy, blackmailing assh*le at first, and never really recovers from that character damage. I also did not particular liked the God-like image of the elephants, nor the grumpy Louie that didn't seem to have any sense of humour in him. And then we have Kaa, who makes 1 appearance in the movie and does not add anything at all to the progression of the story.
It also mirrored a lot of scenes from other (famous) movies. The most prominent ones: In the end Shere Khan tries to get Mowgli to turn to the dark side like a real emperor of Star Wars, but before this happens the 'Disney factor' swings in, and suddenly every single animal jumps in (sigh) to help Mowgli. There is no Baloo near-tragedy (one of the strongest parts of the animation) and it makes you wonder why those pricks (the jungle animals) let Khan kill Akela in the first place... And with the death of Shere Khan we go full on Lion King when Scar kills Mufasa. Maybe it was a failed attempt to make an 'homage' to the reuse of stock images in the original animated jungle book by Disney, but it was horrible to watch.
Last but not least they added 2 deaths to the movie, something I didn't really think is necessary in a movie like this, which has more than enough emotional and moral themes to build on.
Even though the animated Disney movie (apparently) did change a lot about the original story, I thought the animated story was very straightforward and without errors, even though a bit comedic and slow at places. The live action version successfully transports the story into a new century, but it does trade in some of its strengths because of that.
It became and IS a great movie to watch in the end, but I will much rather recommend the almost 50 year old earlier version.
A below average movie with some interesting stuff mixed in which will disappoint in the end.
I am not sure I can say it is worth the watch, maybe only for the last few minutes and Ana de Armas. I was so distracted (and maybe lulled to sleep) by the predictive and incoherent initial storyline that the ending completely surprised me. It had me go: "haha oh sh*t, how did I not see that one coming?." Because the last twist wasn't that surprising if you think of it. Since the movie didn't really trigger the viewer to think for himself, nor does it have a very coherent storyline (it rather jumped from one scene to the other) there wasn't much to think of, therefore surprising me in the end haha.
How something bad can hide something obvious and make you think it is good :P You could say that's art in itself, but it isn't.
Not as funny as I hoped it would be. The ending was a (good) slap in the face though, nicely done.
If you expect a film like 'The Other Guys' you will be quite disappointed. Even though the main characters are played by the same actors, the script is more focussed on bad jokes and a really bad script in stead of clever crazy jokes (with a basic script) the cop film had. The jokes are mainly just bad language with kids and competitive humiliation, something that is not even that absurd in such a situation (they took it too far though, and not in a funny way.) And there are no decent side characters to back them up, just a few passive ones to fill up the screen and character sheet. Even the chemistry between Mark and Will is a bit forced.
And no desk-pops!
I've been waiting a long long time for this one.
The worst in the movie series. Even surpassed by the first season of the TV show. too bad.
The first film was the ultimate example of a failed film adaptation, this one is the opposite. I had very low expectations, so I was quite surprised that the result of Hitman: Agent 47 was actually a very good sit-through. Of course it won't make any arthouse fan fall in love with it nor will it rake in loads of Oscars, but it sets up a decent action movie that could even be watched more than once. It lacks some depth on the drama part, but that is something Hitman will never achieve due to the character itself. It does not achieve greatness like 'John Wick' or 'The Punisher' could do last year, but it keeps you entertained for a good and fun evening. I would rate this a solid "watch it? oh well, why the hell not" 6/10
What an amazing movie. This movie lacks a lot of media attention probably because of its subject. Chess doesn't get a lot of attention these days because a lot of people find it boring. Calling this movie boring would be the biggest lie of 2015 though.
It is one of the best performances, if not the best, from Tobey Maguire I have seen so far. And he has a phenomenal adversary in Liev Schreiber. The movie did not get very creative in its story, but chose a more literal setup from the actual events. This makes for a straight on drama movie without any melodramatic or emotional depth exaggerating the facts, but that is certainly for the best.
May the spoiler be always in your favour (this review contains spoilers.)
A great ending has come to the legendary hunger games series. A most welcome ending because we now finally will discover how the creators handled the death of Prim and the bittersweet ending of the book. Those were the two parts of this film I was curious about the most. My judgement is a 50/50 split between praise and expected disappointment.
After 3 movies and covering 2,5 book we have arrived at the endgame. The rebellion is on the capitols doorstep, and the climax of the story has arrived. During this build up there was a decent lack of focus on Katniss her sister Prim (as I mentioned in an earlier hunger games review too.) The importance Prim has to Katniss is shown a few times, but she did not get the appropriate attention for the average watcher to accept and understand that. Therefore the 'big explosion' didn't hit me as hard as it should have (and it didn't look like it hit many of the rest of the audience in the cinema.) But this was an expected point of criticism, and the actual execution of the big scene was done fairly well and a visual treat.
They did left the ending completely intact, with the harsh reality of a post traumatic stress syndrome after a war and poking around in someone's brain. It is an emotionally, nerve-racking but realistic ending, and I loved the books for it. I am thankful the writers had the gut to not change it.
Performance
Performances are once again fabulous. Effie (Elizabeth Banks) her role was mostly played out, so we sadly didn't get to see much of her. Neither did we of Haymitch (Woody Harrelson.) But it wouldn't be the Hunger Games without some of the chart emotional outburst by Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence.) She proves to the world that her fellow generation actresses are miles away from her level of performance. I even dare to say she is the best we've got currently have in all of Hollywood.
Donald Sutherland finally steps it up as president Snow and leaves the franchise with a great final act, giving the evil sceptre to the ever anticipating Coin (Julianne Moore) whome I have yet to see doing a weak performance. Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) are just as great as they always were, even though we do not see enough of Gale to give his character a proper development. They just managed to do enough. Jena Malone as Johanna Mason was a delight, even though fairly irrelevant. The acts of Natalie Dromer as Cressida and the rest of the camera crew & squat underwent the same faith: Fairly irrelevant, but decent nonetheless. Most of the soldiers deaths were less shocking due to their lack of screen time, but there simply isn't enough time to set there character up in this stage of the story, so it couldn't be handled any other way.
Story
The story couldn't have been more relevant to current times. With a massive overlap with the refugees in Europe, the war in Syria and the political pre-election games in the USA, the accidental timing of the movie is perfect. Sometimes it felt like I was watching a speech they took right out of Donald Trump his program, used images from actual war zones and this made it frighteningly applicable to reality for me. The whole story is a fair warning to the current world situation, and one that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Having said that, the script did drop some stitches. Especially with the pacing. The middle part of the movie is going from one event to another lacking some proper motivation besides getting to the end of the movie. It did deepen the drama and gave room for great action scenes, but they had to sacrifice the strategic coherence we saw in the last film. It results in an ending that became fairly predictable, and a feeling that some (major) events were rushed (a weird feeling when you have over 9 hours of film in total.) Using shots during the execution scene, where Snow and Coin are in the same line of sight on multiple occasions, could have been handled differently too. I guess only a few people were surprised by the arrow's direction.
Visual & Music
I can be brief about this, it was phenomenal. The music was a tad less interesting than in the former movies, but still greatly timed and chosen. CGI and SFX was stunning. I was never a big fan of the the underground part, but the mutts were done amazingly well with so much detail and wrath it rightuously felt absolutely threatening. As they truely are one of the capitols most deadly weapons. Even though I knew something would happen in seconds, I still jumped by surprise a few times.
Overall
After all it is a movie with many perks and some tiny flaws that are very understandable. A worthy ending to one of the most important series of its genre.
I am fairly disappointed by this pilot episode. It had a lot of bad dialogue, even worse script writing and the acting was just horribly overdone at some points. And I am not even talking about it being rushed or the completely out of character Jimmy Olsen. But since it is superhero themed, I will of course be following it anyway xD
At least it wasn't as bad as the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (first part of) season 1.
I didn't get what this movie was about at all. And I understood ' Primer'....
After looking online for explanations everything fell into place. This movie is going to be on my rewatch lists for at least a couple of more views. It is quite ingenious, and if you don't want to look up what exactly is going on, you will probably need at least 3 views before you get it. It might be more.
It is a true Lynch movie, so the educated movie fan could understand this movie better than me, from all the hints and clues Lynch scattered throughout the film. The fact that there are 10 clues added to the DVD release cover (who are as cryptic as Egyptian hieroglyphs as well by the way) screams 'overcomplicated' more than Mell Gibson screams for freedom. So this is not a movie for when you are drunk with friends, or when you are looking for just a fun family movie. This is also not a good date-night movie, nor one to play in a pub. It is only and solely meant to be watched with all your 110% undivided attention while you pluck your brain what exactly is going on.
The movie was a disaster at the box office (grossing only half of what it cost) and it is perfectly understandable why. The average movie goer would write it off as the most confusing and nonsensical movie ever, and even a large part of the more experienced viewers, but without a more extensive knowledge about movie esthetics's, would probably be too confused to appreciate it to its complete potential. I will most likely fall in that latter group, and I am a bit disappointed about that.
The fact it was still nominated for an Oscar clearly shows its value (that is, if you believe those nominations are worth anything of course.) I can only wish to fully understand this movie, but I'm afraid I never completely will.
For the ones who want to get some help in understanding the story, you can check out this website: http://www.mulholland-drive.net But I would strongly advice against going there before watching the movie at least once. It will take away some of the magic.
To be Continued...?
This movie is a good watch. It has good performances by the 2 kids and the mother (Saldana.) There is some debate about Ruffalo his role, but I definitely enjoyed it. I have to be honest that I am not that familiar with bipolar disorder in real life, so I am probably not the best to ask if he overacted or did or did not display the full palet of manic depression, but I didn't see that. To me he displayed the various parts of manic depression and gloom, energetic moments and hyper-activeness and also the calm and happy moments where he can just enjoy everything as it is. So as far I can say he was subtle and covered all the aspects in his act.
I was disappointed about the ending though. The story steadily progresses, but it never fully got to that conclusion you are waiting for. It just stops at some point, which is a bit anticlimactic. This might be intended to make a message that there is no end to his struggle, but it did left me feeling a bit out of the loop. A 'to be continued' that will never be followed up.
I put off watching this animated film for a while since It felt very overrated to me at the time, but it was really very good and it surprised me.
Animation is pretty well done and they've got some good voice acting in there. It actually is a real magical Disney movie but in stead of magic it has code (which sounds nerdy, but it's just used as a witty tool to get that magic into a movie without magic.)
The only down side was the 'love' interest. There wasn't much time for any real focus in that part, but that's just nitpicking.
Well done!
Nb. Highly recommended as a re-watchable movie.
Came for Elisha Cuthbert and I was disappointed it only had 6 episodes.
After the pilot I understood why, and I think 6 episodes is even too many. Really bad writing and situational sketching, I feel sorry for the actors who played in this sham.
In stead of it getting more interesting, it got less interesting. It lost the magic that Divergent had, maybe it was in her hair?
Following is a short combined review of the first 5 X-men movies, with the focus (of course) on this last one.
I just did a rewatch of the 5 X-Men movies released so far, this one easily tops all the previous ones.
Even though continuity is something they just don't seem to be able to manage properly in the X-men (cinematic) universe, and this movie also has its issues with that, it does not wreck this movie and is more of a sidenote than anything else. Mostly because the movie in itself (besides some smaller plot holes made for entertainment purposes) is very well worked out.
While the first 3 movies had some superior actors to the last 2, the stories are a lot better thought out. Popularity of the franchise with the mainstream cinema goer has gained a lot too since then, therefore its budget is much bigger as well (except for the 2006 'The Last Stand' which also had a massive budget.) This means bigger and more intense special effects.
I am of the opinion that Avoy and Fassbender are doing a great job on screen with their respectable character, but they do not top the iconic McKellen and Stewart, who are also present in this movie btw. It is hard to compare though, since the former have to play them at a younger age when the characters had a lot less experience than their older versions in the first 3 movies.
Talking about a recast; Mystique/Raven also got a new actress in the previous movie. Where it was first Rebecca Romijn who took up her role, she is now replaced with the (now massively popular) Jennifer Lawrence. I am a big fan of her work, and she does very well in X-Men too. It is only a massive compliment to Romijn that I think of her performance of Mystique as even better.
I found it sad that those 3 older (to me better) performances needed to work with way weaker movies and scripts.
With saying all that I also need to say that with supporting roles from Ellen Page, Evan Peters and Peter Dinklage this cast is without a doubt the better one overall.
The 2 newer movies, and especially this one, get more time in setting up a story and take time in character development and better timed dialogues. The movies are about 30 minutes longer than the first and the third one, but the rushed feeling in the second one proved that this is not a guarantee for a better movie. There seem to be more sets, more changing situations and every shot, scene and setting seems better worked out with more attention to detail. And all this without getting hopelessly lost in a confusing back and forth plot. Which is quite the accomplishment considering it contains time travel!
With a 3rd instalment on the way (2016) I can only imagine what they have in store with us. Apocalypse and his 4 horsemen are coming (already giving us a glimpse of them after the credits) and we will get Jubilee!
A very original fairy tale. The unique animation might be off-putting for some, but it is something that makes the movie all the more magical. This is a lovely work of art for both young and old.
Update after the '2nd season' has finished (and therefore the series.)
Previous comment still stands, but after a while the need for explanation for first-time watchers dwindles (as would be logical) so we end up with an amazing series with some massive animation skill and top of your chair action.
If you liked this series, also check:
Fate/Zero (prequel)
Fate/Prototype (1 ep special about the original story, too bad this will never get a full story/series.)
Kara no Kyoukai/The Garden of sinners (Movie series)
And keep an eye open for (If ever released in the future):
Fate/Heavens Feel (confirmed for a movie.)
Fate/hollow ataraxia (sequel, no confirmation of a movie or TV show.)
