A disappointment after two strong episodes.
It's got nice performances and a few funny moments peppered here and there, but most of it is a messy pile of noise that's not half as clever as it thinks it is. The over-reliance on coincidences kills any semblance of a story.
This is very much a one-joke indie SF film that doesn't really end. I thought the girl's performance was great, and some of the writing around two clueless Millennials trying to disconnect was fun, but overall the movie was a big waste of time. One thing that stands out to me, though, is how genuine the relationship between the leads felt. It really felt like they loved each other despite their mutual limitations.
Can't say I recommend it, though.
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 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.
Turns out the accused witch was really a witch... What a middling ending.
Ugh. After last week's excellent episode, this was a major step down and makes me reconsider following this series. The writing was atrocious, with every other character quipping at the worst of times. (Worst offender: Sharon Carter quipping "Blam" after blowing Happy's head off.) Not only that, but the third act turn hangs on a supremely illogical and shitty character decision.
This, to me, is an example of what happens when the MCU "formula" is handled by bad writers. You get this illogical mess that thinks it's way funnier than it is. Hope this is the low point of the series and not a sign of things to come.
As a big fan of both the games and the novels, I was quite disappointed in this attempt at adapting the world of the Witcher.
This is a world that is vast and filled with ancient history, which makes it a huge endeavor to make people care for it on a TV show. In that specific regard, I regard the show as a huge failure. We're thrown into the world knowing very little, which leaves us with characters emoting about places and events we have no emotional connection to.
It doesn't help that the chronology is a total bloody mess. Why the creators decided it was a good idea to tell three different stories stretched across 50+ years without clearly informing the viewer, I'll never know. I could follow because I read the novels, but as an introduction for someone unfamiliar with the world, it's an awful decision.
Compare this to two massive fantasy adaptations that succeeded at making us care:
Game of Thrones started small, showing us the people of Winterfell, then introducing the visiting Baratheons and Lannisters. It made us care about the world of Westeros by first showing us compelling characters, then slowly expanding the stakes to encompass the entire world.
Lord of the Rings had the most epic world-building in arguably the whole genre's history, but again it started small. It made us care about a quaint Hobbit village long before it was time to venture into the greater world.
The Witcher does nothing of this. As a result, when we're shown the massive battle for Cithra in the first episode, it's hard to care even if you're familiar with the setting. It's all just noise and pointless gore.
This tragic misfire carries on throughout the rest of the show. Before we get to experience how awesome Yennefer is, we get to experience her as a misfit whose only apparent redeeming quality is her hunger for power. Geralt himself is interesting from the get-go, but he's all too serious to be sympathetic, at least until Jaskier shows up.
And so, we're left with characters emoting and chewing scenery. It's pretty scenery, sure: the VFX is nice, and the fight scenes are pretty great. But none of this feels lived-in and compelling the way Lord of the Rings was from its very first minutes. The dialogues tend to be arch and clichéd, and the whole affair lacks the subtle realism of Game of Thrones.
And so, as much as I love the characters of the Witcher, I'll continue to look to the novels and the games as the more definitive versions. This is a brave attempt, but as much as it aspires to be top-shelf fantasy TV, it's second-rate at best.
There's one moment where the TV series shone bright: the striga fight. This had all the markings of what made the Witcher stories great, and it was genuinely terrifying and exhilarating. This makes me think that the first season would have been much, much better if it didn't try to build the entire world across a century of conflict, and instead focused on the adventures of Geralt of Rivia as he hunts monsters. Ciri and Yennefer could have been introduced a bit later, and their backgrounds explored in season 2, when we would all be on board for the ride.
As much as it deviates from the novels, I'd recommend The Witcher 3 as the ultimate interpretation of that world. surpsassing even the novels.
Okay, I'm out. The idea of showing us an alien invasion through multiple POVs around the world is fantastic, but they clearly didn't have enough material to fill a season, because all we get are tired character moments with little tidbits of alien action. To call it a "slow burn" is to overlook just how wet and slow things are. You'll find yourself wishing the aliens would kill the main cast already because there's no reason to watch otherwise.
It's too bad, because performances and cinematography are pretty good. But this show is an expensive nothingburger.
A lot of people here seem to hate Trish... I don't, but I still hate this episode. The problem isn't that it's Trish-centric... It's that it's so goddamn boring and pointless. Pretty much everything we see here can be inferred from the first episode, or when it can't, it doesn't add anything at all to the story. There's no dramatic tension to it. NONE.
A 100% skippable episode. Incidentally, this is Krysten Ritter's directorial debut... Big oops there. Better luck next time!
I know Black Mirror is all about grim futurism, but goddamn, that episode went hard at it. Too hard, in my opinion: instead of making us think about the perils and moral implications of technology, this episode was a weird horror vengeance porn with some really dark behavior that would never for one second be considered a good idea in the real world.
I mean, episodes like "White Christmas" had their existential horror, absolutely; but this just felt mean-spirited.
"USS Callister" was amazing and "Hang the DJ" was cute, but the rest of this season has been very disappointing.
Familiar story that didn't need scifi to be told. The ending was dumb, unsatisfying and over the top.
Very cool concept, halfway between Matrix and Inception. Cool visuals. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't know what to do with its setting and ends up in a very disappointing place.
This is very much the most boring and predictable story you can tell about the Singularity. Big meh.
What a weird, incoherent movie that was. Starts off great with great characters and a sense of mystery, devolves into a pseudo-Lynchian laboratory affair, and ends with a poor man's X-Men ripoff. Pacing is all over the place, story makes no sense, the twists (Area 51 and NOMAD/Damon) were dumb as hell.
Ending was kind of cool but felt out of a different movie altogether.
Second season-four dud in a row for me. The story was clichéd and could have been told without the SF tech.
Oh, my gooooood, that episode nearly killed my interest for this show. A long, tedious flashback that's completely against the tone of the rest of the series, concerning characters I care nothing about, wrapped in cheap sets, poor writing, and an attempt at '80s sitcom aesthetic that falls flat on its face. The only thing that got me through was practicing my Mandarin listening skills, and seeing the Monkey King himself in action.
I've just gone through the synopses for the rest of the season to make sure that was the last flashback. Whew.
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.
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.
This is more "Hell no" than "Halo."
So the first Wonder Woman movie was a fluke and DC is back to making mediocre movies. Good to know.
I love Jon Stewart and I'm definitely a Liberal, but this movie was just awful. It's Democrat America lost in the wilderness of the Trump years, looking for where they've gone wrong and unable to figure it out. Preachy, tone-deaf, and condescending.
Well, damn.The reviews for this were good, but even by keeping my expectations in check I still ended up disappointed.
It's really a kids' movie, and not a very good one at that. It's not, say, The Incredibles where you can indulge in the fantasy as an adult and stll enjoy it... It's the kind of kids' movie that condescends to its audience. The Wizard and the bad guys are just terrible, barely on the level of a Scooby-Doo villain, and the entire conflict at the heart of the movie makes no sense.
There's a bit of humor in having a teenager in an adult superhero body, but most of those jokes were shown in the trailer or don't amount to much more than predictable humor. Worst, there's no attempt at all by Levi to act as if he's Billy Batson in Shazam's body... The two characters may as well be completely different people. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle this ain't.
A hard pass as far as I'm concerned.
This may very well be the quintessential "so bad it's good" movie. It's over the top, cheesy, and filled with moments that will make you gape in disbelief. Plus, it's got a smoking-hot Denise Richards showing just how much she wanted a Hollywood career by giving the best performance she possibly could under the circumstances, and a young Paul Walker who quickly gets replaced by a robot dinosaur once a lion mauls him. It's also got stuff like a T-rex doing charades, so yeah.
Honestly, it's absolutely a B movie, but its plot moves at 100 mph and is never boring. I've watched recent Hollywood blockbusters that held my attention far less.
I do NOT get why this movie gets so much love.
I get that it's not meant to be a historical movie. It's a revenge exploitation flick set in WWII, and the bad guys being the target of revenge here are the Nazis. I get that. At the same time, there's something so utterly morally corrupt about creating an unrealistic fantasy where badass Jews torture Nazis. It's the kind of thinking that has led to America using torture on captives: ultimate evil requires an equal response. It's so much against the ethos of the survivors of the Holocaust that it's embarrassing to watch. It's misguided revenge porn.
Ah, but if only the story that was being told was better. As it is, it's not so much a story as much as a sequence of masturbatory dialogues where Tarantino gets to feel clever about himself. People talk and talk and talk, and although there is an overlying sense of tension, it's so predictable every time it becomes tedious. There's just so many times we can watch a Nazi being passive aggressive with an undercover Jew before the shtick becomes boring, and each of these last so damn long... You get twenty whole minutes of a Nazi talking racist shit until the inevitable violence happens and Tarantino gets his money shot. We're talking porn-levels of sophistication, here, except it's about murdering evil Nazis.
It's well-directed for sure, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent do an amazing job, but man, that script is a big pile of self-indulgent crap. And I say this as someone who loves early Tarantino.
Season 2 of Casa de papel is a textbook example of what happens when a show gets too popular for its own good. Gone is the careful balancing act of season 1, where we empathized with both the robbers and the hostages; instead, the robbers are now international superstars who are taking the fight to The Man.
The writing has taken a nosedive, and the show now feels like poor fanfiction. Just watch season 1 and leave it at that. You'll be better for it.
Two hours of mind-numbing badness redeemed by 20 seconds of Nicolas Cage completely losing his sh*t at his car.
"What if Thor had reality-bending dumbness powers?"
A failed attempt at humor and a complete waste of time. Special shout-out to this episode's Darcy for being the most painfully unfunny character in the history of the MCU.
I give up. Everyone here is raving about this episode, but that's more a statement on how terrible the previous episode was. Honestly, though, this episode had all the flaws that made the previous one so bad.
I could go on and on about why this is terrible, but it all boils down to the fact that the creators seem to care less about this show than the fans. Take, for instance, the moment when the Doctor and Tesla bond over being inventors. It was the most generic, uninspired tripe you could imagine, and fifteen minutes of googling about the psychology of inventors by the scripwriter would have have made this moment pop. But no such luck because the writer obviously didn't care.
It's even worse when you compare this episode with Vincent and the Doctor, with which it shares a lot of themes, albeit in science rather than art. All they had to do was follow the blueprint, but no. This episode could have been extraordinary; instead it's just extraordinarily bad.
Others here have already addressed a lot of the issues I had with this episode, but I just wanna say:
This episode made me feel how I felt watching some classic Doctor Who episodes that were bad, but which I felt I had to get through to get to the good parts. I've never felt like this in the modern era (except perhaps a few bad episodes in Capaldi's first series), but this... The previous Chibnall series were bad, but this just takes the cake.
And can I say? I really don't care for Whittaker's Doctor. I've been watching some clips with the previous modern Doctors, and they all had that magical energy about them, like they were excited about life and wanted to take us on a grand tour of all time and space. Whittaker has nothing of this energy. The writing's largely to blame, but there is something about her performance, too, that lacks a certain depth and quality. I was hoping that, like Capaldi, she would find her footing after a season or two, but her character is actually regressing as we head out into her last appearance.
I like to think that in a few years, when RTD has steered the ship right again, I'll be thinking back to this episode as another one of the dark periods of Who fandom.
