This movie features the most ludicrous and absurd scientific concepts and the most pointless and annoying human characters in recent memory. That makes it the Godzilla movie that's the most faithful to the spirit of the Japanese originals, and I say that as a huge kaiju nerd.
Lots of satisfying fights makes this one an easy recommendation for Godzilla fans, though I have to admit I still highly prefer the rubber suit and the original Godzilla attack music. Something about the over-expressive Godzilla face and the small, beady eyes makes this one kind of disappointing to watch, though I love the way he moves.
A return to form after a few lackluster episodes. Some truly hilarious moments, as well as heaping scoop of twisted pathos as you can expect from a Harmon story.
The comparisons to John Wick are inevitable, and they're not in this movie's favor. John Wick is just a tighter, more stylish, more visceral version of this story. That being said, Bob Odenkirk is fantastic, and arguably better than Keanu Reeves. Not a bad way to spend a hour and a half.
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 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.
That was leagues ahead of the crappy zombie story last episode. The premise is intriguing, and the places the story go are fresh and unpredictable.
Unfortunately, the episode just kinda... ends. Like it ran out of time to tell its full story. Unless there's a second part coming that I missed?
That was... fine? Not amazing. Sure, the core message is cute and meaningful, but something about the execution leaves much to be desired. This is nowhere near the brilliance and depth of Coco, nor does it have anywhere near the emotional catharsis of Inside Out. Still better than most animation movies out there, clearly, but not one of Pixar's best.
It's definitely a batshit-crazy story for our times, and I enjoyed the mad ride. However, the producers really had an agenda going into this, and I find myself resentful of their overall editorial approach. A few points:
Joe Exotic is a bad guy. He's charismatic and fascinating to watch, but the show does a lot to gloss over his actions. The series does its best to gloss over what he did and let him express his own side of the story, but come on. The guy was being harassed by Carole Baskin for legitimate reasons (exploiting and breeding exotic animals) and reacted in the most insane way. This is a guy who manipulated straight guys into marrying him in exchange for a steady supply of drugs.
The series does a huge disservice to Carole Baskin. Is she insane? Hell yeah she is. But crazy isn't a reason to send someone to prison. Yeah, she's as obsessed with big cats as the rest of the cast of crazies, but the huge difference is that she RESCUES exploited animals. She doesn't breed them. She doesn't sell them for profit. That the big takeaway of the series is "Well, she is as insane as the rest of them" really does a huge disservice to a significant difference between Baskin and the exotic pet breeders.
The series really overplays the "Baskin killed her husband" angle to prop up Joe Exotic and for the shock of it. It presents a lot of "facts" as-is to support this without exploring the arguments against them. For instance, Don's Power of Attorney included the activation clause for disappearance because Don Baskin was legitimately concerned he might disappear without a trace in Costa Rica.
So. A cool story, overall, and a crazy cast of characters, but it's unfortunate that people are taking this series as definitive documentary truth when it's a well-spun fiction with amplified craziness for the sake of shock value.
Not as great as the first two episodes.
There just wasn't a lot of forward movement with characters and plot, and having Lily fake schizophrenia without the audience being clued in was a weird choice. I do like how they figured out that the flames were fake. It was obviously done in a rush, and it was not meant to be viewed repeatedly with the ability to pause, so I buy it.
The best and worst of Hollywood, all in one package: bombastic, over-the-top action scenes, famous actors chewing scenery like it's going out of style, but very little heart and truth in the characters and dialogues. None of the characters are especially sympathetic, except perhaps Hector and Odysseus (played by an underused Sean Bean).
The movie claims to be "inspired by" the Ilad, but it should be noted that it plays fast and loose with the events of the Trojan War as chronicled by the Greek Epics, of which the Iliad is but a small part. It's loosely based on the Epics at best (for instance, the Trojan War was said to have lasted ten years, but here it goes by in the space of a week or two), and it makes no real effort to convey Bronze Age warfare with any accuracy.
This was also peak Brad Pitt, so we get to see his naked ass a few times for good measure.
A decent film, but it doesn't rival Tarkovsky's 1972 adaptation.
This version benefits from a much cleaner emotional arc. The characters make more sense, and the relationship between Kelvin and Rheya is much easier to grasp. Emotionally, the story makes more sense and is more rewarding. Still a haunting meditation on memory, grief, and loss.
What it lacks from the 1972 version, though, is this sense of utter alienness and dread. The planet Solaris feels a much smaller concern here, and the world itself is distant, not really a looming presence in the story. That was the one thing that made Tarkovsky's version so powerful, and it was truer to Stanislaw Lem's novel because of it.
Stone and Crenn were robbed. They clearly had the superior dishes (that forest floor one was out of this world), but the point of this episode was to give a boost to Samuelsson because he got his butt handed to him over the course of his episode.
Seriously... Every one of Samuelsson's takes on medieval food was so out of left field. "Medieval food was all about being soft"?!
(Yes, I take Iron Chef way too seriously.)
This was... fine, I guess? I think I would have preferred more of a "Death of Stalin" treatment than outright satire, because when you see characters like the POTUS act like outright idiots, it takes away some of the bite. Although, the idea that they could have averted disaster but decided not to because there was a business opportunity was really excellent.
I thought the central moment of the "Don't Look Up" political movement, was sadly poorly executed. I think maybe because the idea was WAY too outrageous. It's one thing to hurt yourself and your country because you feel it will hurt the other side more, but it's another to, like, not look up at the sky.
Ultimately, with this film, either the satire doesn't land, or it lands with a crowd that already believes in climate change, and thus, people for whom the satire is facile. It also avoided very clearly exploring political lines (for instance, by making the POTUS some kind of female Clinton but with Trump-like nepotism) so it lost a lot of its verisimilitude by trying to not take political sides.
I don't know if there's a better way to explore this idea. Perhaps this was the best story possible for this exact idea.
Alison Brie was good as Planetina, but nothing about this episode felt surprising or new. Just a run-of-the-mill R&M episode, I guess... I can't think of a single element that I find memorable. Hmm, maybe the fight scene.
A solid premise marred by an overlong runtime and illogical events and characters. I like that the characters are flawed and messed up, but this took it just a bit too far, and their decisions were often frustratingly illogical even with the goal of self-preservation in mind. Performances were pretty solid, though.
Commenters here calling this movie "woke" are making me scratch my head. Apparently, "woke" now means any movie featuring Black people even in a supporting role where skin color plays any role at all. In the end it was a human story about people overcoming differences and showing each other compassion.
Most exciting part for me is that I fell asleep watching this movie and dreamed of Nicolas Cage.
Cool premise, but nowhere to really take it. A missed opportunity.
I rewatched this in 2020 as I gear up for a BSG rewatch, and I gotta say, it held up nicely. It's not groundbreaking in any sense, and I wouldn't call it essential viewing for BSG fans... But it's a nice SF action adventure with some cool moments. Not as good as BSG itself, but it doesn't diminish anything about BSG, contrary to Caprica...
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.
I watched episode 7 of the Mandalorian today, so "The Rise of Skywalker" isn't even the best Star Wars I've watched in the last 24 hours.
This is the first episode for me when the show has lost its shine. I adored the first three episodes and thought episodes 4 and 5 were okay, but man, this one was just terrible.
There are a few reasons I can think of:
The overarching plot has taken a backseat. Episodes 1-4 felt connected by the Mandalorian's quest for redemption through his care for the Child. Episode 4 still felt connected to that overarching goal, but with the last two episodes, we're just watching a "job of the week" conceit that neither moves the characters nor the plot forward. It's basically filler at this point.
Bad Western tropes. While I loved the initial "Western in space" feel of the early episodes, the show was still coming up with its own genre conventions and telling an original story. With episode 6, we're getting a pretty crappy heist gone bad story whose only claim to originality is being set in the Star Wars universe. All the turns were painfully predictable and dictated by the tropes of the genre rather than the characters themselves.
Bad acting. The Twi'leks and the horned guy were just awful. The dialogue was bad, but the way they hammed it up was just painful to watch. Watching the Twi'lek girl hiss at the horned guy felt like watching D&D players hamming it up on game night.
Bad writing. The whole thing was just so unbelievable, from the predictable turns to the way Mando eventually betrays his employer using the beacon to somehow trick a bunch of X-Wings from murdering the station. Not a lot of it made any sense. There's, like, six different shots of the droid hunting down Baby Yoda on the ship that add absolutely NOTHING to the story and just go on forever.
It's not that I don't still look forward to new episodes, but with episode 6, The Mandalorian has gone from "must-watch" to "flawed but watchable." It's the kind of drop you'd expect between seasons 1 and 4, not across a short self-contained season, and it's a damn shame.
I think this is the first episode where the high concept just didn't feel original or interesting. There have been boring episodes before (season 4 has been pretty weak so far), but this one just feels so skippable. Some nice jokes, but otherwise pretty flat.
As with Quantumania,Kang's appearance here does nothing to make the character more compelling. Majors is a great actor, but his performance here was just so weird and off-putting.
The main actress and the actor playing the crime boss are really phenomenal and carry this show. That being said, this series' quality just went down and down from the very high point of the first episode. It went from a hard-hitting exploration of a grief-stricken woman on a path of vengeance, to a middling cop show, to bloody but very melodramatic soap opera with emotions turned to 11 and flashbacks every five minutes.
Also, while the music was fantastic in the first episode, by the time I had heard it 50 times I was very much done with it.
A killer concept with a very bland execution. Featuring Ryan Reynolds in the daring role of Ryan Reynolds.
What really hurts this movie is the way the real-world game concepts take second seat whenever the plot needs something to happen, and no amount of stupid Twitch streamer reaction shots can save the verisimilitude. There's also a really bland romance subplot shoehorned in that brings nothing to the story and is so blindingly obvious its resolution feels more like relief than payoff.
Also, those Disney "Easter eggs" were dinosaur-sized. Disney really, REALLY didn't want you to miss them.
That being said, Taika Waititi makes a really excellent Disney villain, even when his material kind of sucks.
The idea is cute: a boy of mixed Jewish/Muslim heritage reconciles the two sides of his family with food. Unfortunately, the story is very much paint-by-numbers, and the beats are ultra-predictable. The cultural conflict is also presented in a pretty patronizing way. Additionally, the entire movie rests on Abe's parents being extremely tone-deaf to the interests of their kid, and said kid unabashedly lying to them about going to work for an adult on the other side of town.
Noah Schnapp was pretty good, though, aside from the forced teenager lingo. #FellowKids
This episode is starting to lose some of the good will the first two episodes built. 99% of the conflict in this episode was completely contrived, from United Earth not ever talking to Wen, to Burnham AGAIN doing something without telling Saru.
I also wish future-future Earth didn't feel so much like Federation Earth. The crew of the Discovery should be the equivalent of a 12th-century Viking ship landing in modern-day New York Harbor. Instead all we get is a big tree.
If you've ever wondered what part of Rick and Morty is Roiland's and which is Harmond's, just watch this show. While it showcases Roiland's manic improv, it lacks the character introspection and pathos that made Rick and Morty a success.
Without Harmond's guidance, there's just not much to root for about the alien family. Typically some random shit happens, then things go from bad to worse because aliens. None of them are particularly likable. Some gags are fine but on the whole it all feels pretty skippable.
Rarely have I ever watched a show that has provoked such a lack of reaction on my part. It's the fat-free vanilla yogurt of SF TV. It's not poorly done, and the acting is okay, but there's nothing interesting to connect with.
Plus, the VFX is too clean, so it lacks the kind of pastoral, grounded yet whimsical quality that Stålenhag's amazing art evokes.
I was intrigued by the concept of this show, but while the first episode wasn't atrocious, I'm gonna pass on the rest. The idea of the entire story being told in an interrogation room ends up limiting the dramatic possibilities way too much for my tastes. Think about it: there's no chance the person being interrogated is innocent, because then you have no episode. So we're left with guilty people, and the only tension we get is whether they'll confess or not, which we know will happen because otherwise the bad guys win.
And honestly, if this first episode is any illustration of the overall quality of the rest, I'm not interested. The episode is built as if they're racing against the clock and brilliantly lure Edgar into revealing a significant detail, but... the key detail is the patterns of the trunk mat on the victim's cast. A detail which they had from the get-go and for which they didn't need Edgar's admission to implicate him!
So yeah, no. Pass for me. Nice try, but the concept doesn't carry the show at all.
