I've rewatched this series 10 years after it aired, and boy did it not age well.
It's just a bunch of nothing happening to uninteresting characters and it goes on and on and on... Nothing happens for entire episodes, only for movement to take place in the last 10 seconds to set up the next episode. There's also a LOT of plot happening with religious factions fighting each other and I... don't... care...
I like some of the characters: Zoe is great, and I like Joseph Adama and Daniel Gladstone. The rest of the characters tend to be mired by boring plots that really don't move the story towards any kind of satisfying resolution.
Someone should re-edit the whole thing into a 2-hour movie and it would probably be fine. As it is, it's 100% skippable even if you're invested in the BSG universe.
Started with good momentum right out of the station, but by episode 4 it just started to go off the rails. The initial episodes were okay, with some intriguing potential, but flat, predictable writing means that promise was never realized.
If you've seen the movie, there's really no reason to watch this show.
Not great, not terrible.
The premise isn't bad, but comparisons to The Good Place are hard to avoid and not to the advantage of this show. The technology often makes no sense, which detracts from the drama, and the story gets bogged down by a pointless murder mystery. That being said, Andy Allo in the role of Nora oozes charm; she definitely carries the show on her shoulders, because her co-star is pretty forgettable.
Worth a quick binge, but I'm not sure I'm gonna stick around for a second season.
I saw this film as a kid when it came out, and again recently. Objectively it's not a good movie with a bad script and abysmal science, but there's just something so compelling about it to me.
Could be the strange mix of Disney-like robots and oppressive darkness of the story made a strong impression on me; all I know is that, for me, The Black Hole has this unique quality to SF that you can find, say, in Tarkovsky's Solaris: a mix of dread and awe at the unknown, a sense that the universe is more dangerous and vast and wondrous that you can possibly imagine.
That, plus Maximilian the robot is such a fantastic villain.
A movie that falls absymally short of its lofty ambitions. The script SERIOUSLY needed a polish pass to tighten everything and even correct typos and misused words. I think it's the first movie I've ever seen where that happens, and it did at least four times. Not sure why the actors couldn't tell the director his script was wrong, but I digress.
The film is wordy, and it features a lot of people talking at the camera as an exaggerated shaky cam films them at an odd angle. It feels like an episode of The Office without the jokes. Some of the acting is just godawful and on the nose, and the film's structure is a mess. What little tension there is at the beginning gets lost in the movie's own fascination with "Humans Two-Point-Zero" (come ON, people would say "Two-Point-Oh," for God's sake), then it devolves into a weird Cosmos pastiche without any proper payoff.
Too bad this script didn't get some more major polish time, because there were a few cool ideas and visuals in there.
Two hours of mind-numbing badness redeemed by 20 seconds of Nicolas Cage completely losing his sh*t at his car.
A return to form after two lackluster episodes. This was easily on the level of the first three episodes of the season.
Not much I can say, except I'm now incredibly excited for the finale.
That's what a "Short Trek" should be: fun, fast-paced, and memorable. Enjoyed it a lot.
The story doesn't win points for originality, but wow, this turned out pretty great. The use of Vovinam (Vietnam's martial art) makes the action sequences fluid and dynamic, and Veronica Ngo kills it as Hai Phuong, bringing a guilt-ridden desperation to her performance. (And yes, she was totally wasted on The Last Jedi.) Not a groundbreaking action movie, but it's fresh and interesting.
Oh, wow, that movie was truly terrible. Like John Wick's stupid, mean, and lecherous younger brother. Tries so hard to be cool yet just comes off as corny as hell.
I wanted to like this movie so much more than I did. The high concept is fantastic, but the execution just devolves into cliché after cliché. The cool moments happen because the script contrives to make them happen. (Worst offenders: the elevator scene and the cops mysteriously separating Liam and Rose.) It's really too bad.
After a compelling first season, season 2 offers more of the same. Except now there's a lot more weird homophobia with Orm and a whole lot of handjob jokes. But the season's biggest sin might be that it just feels like more of the same. The beats feel pretty much the same until the last two episodes where things heat up a bit.
Another weird thing the show does is its incapacity to kill any character. Even the guy Arvid kills in the first episode of the series kind of comes back as a twin. The sad exception to this rule is Frøya... I'm guessing the actress decided she had enough, because damn, she was the best thing about this show by far.
This episode was not as exciting to me as the previous two. The finale wasn't as emotional to me because it felt very derivative of the Doctor Who episode about Van Gogh, and not as well done.
A brilliant yet deeply flawed episode that at once stands out from the rest of season 3 yet painfully underlies its flaws.
The scene where Mia speaks before the Commission is the best one I've seen in the entire series, and the way event unfolds during and after was a true turning point for the story. Tragic, complex, personal yet global.
Then Laura's choice... The sequence was over-engineered and unrealistic. Why didn't Laura say "These are both living human beings and I choose neither"? It was crystal-clear Anatole's purpose was to show to Stanley that humans plaved synth lives below theirs, and still Laura played right into his hands. A badly-written scene that's all the most frustrating that it has massive consequences for the rest of the story.
Such a frustrating, brilliant episode.
Doesn't live up to its premise. Starts off as "time-travel-savvy nerds encounter time travel," which would make it Scream for SF, but honestly, they never show SF smarts and go through the exact same motions you've seen before.
Besides that, the humor is a bit grating at times, and the main characters are never truly sympathetic. Too bad, I liked the concept.
I really wanted to like this because Orcs! Elves! The truth is, the racial stuff was super on the nose, yet the plot was pretty average. I still enjoyed it, and I have hopes the sequel will transcend this installment, but as it stands, this was not as great as "End of Watch with orcs" makes it out to be.
Batman travels to feudal Japan where he fights the Joker who became a feudal lord. If you're thinking, "Cool, surely that means there'll be Japanese castles turning into giant robots and Robin befriending a cute talking monkey," then boy is this is the movie for you.
I gotta admit, this didn't turn out to be anything like what I had imagined. I thought we'd get an Elseworlds set in feudal Japan, but instead what we got is an insane anime-style nonsensical action sequence in the style of mid-'80s Japanese animation. Ten-year-old me would have dug this immensely. Adult me had to struggle through some of the nonsense, but overall it was enjoyable for the hot mess it was.
Turns out the accused witch was really a witch... What a middling ending.
Overall, the weakest season of "Black Mirror" so far. "USS Callister" is awesome and "Hang the DJ" has its moments, but the rest is pretty forgettable. The last episode, "Black Museum," is just downright mean-spirited.
