Movie Reviews 2.0

[BRiT]

So, can someone who saw the new Terminator movie clear something up for me? In one ofthe early magazine publicity shots, they had actor Matt Smith (did a horrible stint of The Doctor on Doctor Who) in the poster. Is he in the movie? If so, What part does he play?

 

[London Geezer]

So, can someone who saw the new Terminator movie clear something up for me? In one ofthe early magazine publicity shots, they had actor Matt Smith (did a horrible stint of The Doctor on Doctor Who) in the poster. Is he in the movie? If so, What part does he play?

He [THIS POST WAS DELETED FOLLOWING A COPYRIGHT CLAIM BY PARAMOUNT PICTURES]

 

[pjbliverpool]

So, can someone who saw the new Terminator movie clear something up for me? In one ofthe early magazine publicity shots, they had actor Matt Smith (did a horrible stint of The Doctor on Doctor Who) in the poster. Is he in the movie? If so, What part does he play?

Spoiler

Yes, he has a very small role as Skynet

 

[Grall]

Its script had to have been written by Republicans, because it brings the stupid like no one's business.

Lal, having just seen it myself, I can easily understand why someone would feel this way about this movie. Some aspects of the script could have used more work.

I quite liked it on the whole though. Terminator movies have never been Shakespearian-level dramas, absolutely not even the first one, despite its comparatively much tighter, smoother-running script, so if you just disengage brain before starting to watch it, you should be able to enjoy it just as a summer blockbuster movie where tons of shit blows up. At least there's no Shia TheBeef running around looking like a complete eejit all the time, that's always something, right?!

Before I saw the movie, I read the header of a review pretty much slagging it like you do, with the addition that Arnold was the movie's saving grace. While I did enjoy Arnold's role, it was Miss Clarke as Sarah Connor who saved the movie for me. She was really great; great intensity, great authority, mixed with some of that fanatical edge the character had acquired in T2. A worthy successor to Linda Hamilton, I thought, and one of the best action heroines we've seen on the big screen in absolutely years and years. She looks younger than Linda did in the original Terminator though methinks, but that can't be if she was born in '82... *shrug*

Kind of missed that poor psychologist, Silberman or whatsisname, from the first movie though, but maybe they thought that would have been stretching the running gag a bit too thin... (Or maybe the actor simply retired, or died, heh. Rise of the Machines was a while ago now and he was oold even back then.)

Plotwise, Genisys was...confused. Heh. I didn't really enjoy the badguy; making the terminators so powerful forces scriptwriters to have to write increasingly more implausible endings, but all the nods to the original movie felt great I thought. The grizzled cop character, even though we don't really know who he is, was a nice touch.

It's a quite watchable 7/10 on my scale, if you just send your brain off on vacation as mentioned, and it probably won't stand up to the test of time like Cameron's movies, but it's decent enough on its own.

Not sure it's suited for an 8-year-old though, because even with fairly little blood and gore this time around and not too many apocalyptic shots of piles of human skulls being crushed by murder machines shooting up droves of humans, it's still pretty grim. Why not take the little rugrat to a Spongebob screening or something like that instead?

 

[pjbliverpool]

Lal, having just seen it myself, I can easily understand why someone would feel this way about this movie. Some aspects of the script could have used more work.

I quite liked it on the whole though. Terminator movies have never been Shakespearian-level dramas, absolutely not even the first one, despite its comparatively much tighter, smoother-running script, so if you just disengage brain before starting to watch it, you should be able to enjoy it just as a summer blockbuster movie where tons of shit blows up. At least there's no Shia TheBeef running around looking like a complete eejit all the time, that's always something, right?!

Before I saw the movie, I read the header of a review pretty much slagging it like you do, with the addition that Arnold was the movie's saving grace. While I did enjoy Arnold's role, it was Miss Clarke as Sarah Connor who saved the movie for me. She was really great; great intensity, great authority, mixed with some of that fanatical edge the character had acquired in T2. A worthy successor to Linda Hamilton, I thought, and one of the best action heroines we've seen on the big screen in absolutely years and years. She looks younger than Linda did in the original Terminator though methinks, but that can't be if she was born in '82... *shrug*

Kind of missed that poor psychologist, Silberman or whatsisname, from the first movie though, but maybe they thought that would have been stretching the running gag a bit too thin... (Or maybe the actor simply retired, or died, heh. Rise of the Machines was a while ago now and he was oold even back then.)

Plotwise, Genisys was...confused. Heh. I didn't really enjoy the badguy; making the terminators so powerful forces scriptwriters to have to write increasingly more implausible endings, but all the nods to the original movie felt great I thought. The grizzled cop character, even though we don't really know who he is, was a nice touch.

It's a quite watchable 7/10 on my scale, if you just send your brain off on vacation as mentioned, and it probably won't stand up to the test of time like Cameron's movies, but it's decent enough on its own.

Not sure it's suited for an 8-year-old though, because even with fairly little blood and gore this time around and not too many apocalyptic shots of piles of human skulls being crushed by murder machines shooting up droves of humans, it's still pretty grim. Why not take the little rugrat to a Spongebob screening or something like that instead?

I agree with most of that but I'd give it a good 8.5 just for those awesome action sequences.

 

[Grall]

Went to see Jurassic World today. The production values of this movie is quite outstanding. Good cast, too. Plenty nods back to the original movie (although no navigating a 3D representation of a file system on a Silicon Graphics early '90s supercomputer, lol...), and I liked the young kid. Talented actor! Not sure if he's supposed to be mildly autistic or have some sort of hyperactivity abbreviation diagnose or a movie combination of the two.

Some interesting aspects of globalization is starting to creep into hollywood movies. Company CEOs in movies are no longer necessarily white american guys in suits, and the action doesn't necessarily take place exclusively on the US mainland. We've seen some examples of that in recent years, and here is another. While the scenery is "Isla Nublar" like in the original JP (with Hawaii apparantly standing in for the fictional island), the new company CEO is an Indian guy. Who likes to fly helicopters. And he's generally a quite nice guy, on the whole it would seem. As far as billionaires go anyway. We don't have time to learn to know this guy enough though, but he does have some memorable scenes, which is nice. The main InGen researcher is an Asian. ...Cuz, they're smart, I guess? Isn't that the long-standing trope? *shrug* Not so nice a guy this one perhaps, but also an interesting character.

Then there's Peter Quill, of Guardians... fame. Yeah. Same guy, same actor, same character. Even a joke about body odor (though no referral to masturbation this time around). Lots of testosterone in this movie! Female main character (note: singular) is your typical mostly useless chicklette in a business outfit initially, and has a small arc where she gets to develop some badassness towards the end. Feels very worn and dated. Movie could definitely have used some more women characters of importance and weight.

Plot... Uh. It's a summer action movie, nuff said about that, okay?!

Okay, lol. Well good news is it's definitely at least a little better than the original JP, which was famously thin in that department, in favor of its fancy newfangled high realism dinosaurs which were designed to distract us from the fact that other than a majestic soundtrack there was precious little else to that movie. Today, such special effects are old hat/dime a dozen, so I guess more work was needed with the script. It doesn't quite hold up when the action starts getting thick though, but such is often the fate of action movies. There's some ridiculous dialogue, and some bad decisions made by on-screen characters purely to set things up for further tension and drama (this is one of my favorite annoyances with hollywood blockbusters), but it's decently crafted on the whole, if fairly unimaginative. The good guys all survive, the unsympathetic bad man gets what's coming to him, the Big Bad is defeated, and T-Rex gets to roar triumphantly over the resulting mayhem and destruction, just as we expected would happen when walking into the movie theater. The End.*

Note: even though most of the grisly gruesome stuff is hidden by things like vegetation or alluded to by blood splatters on glass and such, it's still a quite violent movie. A woman sitting right next to me had what looked like a nine-year-old and a six-year-old with her - maybe that's allowed, I dunno what rating this movie has, but I still wouldn't bring kids that young. I'd wait until they're like twelve at least. There is people having their limbs and bodies chomped by big toothy dinosaur maws, and generally mauled, eaten and blood splattered around, and other such what I would call not-terribly-kid-friendly stuff too. Use parental discretion, I would like to recommend.

*

Spoiler

"Interesting" Godzilla/WWF tag-team wrestling mashup as an endboss fight! They ran out of other ideas I suppose, lol. Ridiculous, of course, but hey... It's a summer action movie, no need to complain. I knew what I signed up for when I bought the ticket...

Also, I would expect another follow-up in a couple years. The movie sets it all up before the endfight, even though the fat guy gets eaten. I suppose there's other, just as or even shadier characters behind him.

 

[Billy Idol]

Jurassic World was really stupid. The script seems to be written by a kid. Meh.

 

[London Geezer]

Shut up.

Chris Pratt.

That's all.

 

[Billy Idol]

Who is this guy?

 

[Rurouni]

Btw, my parents absolutely love JW! Basically this is a "ride" movie where you switch the brain off and enjoy the spectacle. I think as a ride, they got the balance just right. Compare this to the latest Transformer, where the ride is basically a mess.
Also I just watch Terminator, which is again a "ride" movie. It got more plot than JW, but with more plot also came more holes. Just switch off your brain and enjoy the ride.

 

[Grall]

It's a ride, yeah, but with some issues to it. The Big Bad has that magical movie ability to just show up wherever the characters currently on the screen happen to be, cause some ruckus, and then

Spoiler

simply stomp off without eating them.

The middle of the original Jurassic Park had that weird and really slow section where Hammond and that woman paleontologist whatsername were eating melting ice cream, him remeniscing about his youth. A real killer as far as tempo goes and basically uninteresting. JW's midsection on the other hand is some crazy action scenes that - to me - feel implausible and overexaggerated. The movie was simply astoundingly good IMO, until all the nutso action scenes started. There's a point where more simply is too much, heh...

 

[Rurouni]

It's a ride, yeah, but with some issues to it. The Big Bad has that magical movie ability to just show up wherever the characters currently on the screen happen to be, cause some ruckus, and then

Spoiler

simply stomp off without eating them.

The middle of the original Jurassic Park had that weird and really slow section where Hammond and that woman paleontologist whatsername were eating melting ice cream, him remeniscing about his youth. A real killer as far as tempo goes and basically uninteresting. JW's midsection on the other hand is some crazy action scenes that - to me - feel implausible and overexaggerated. The movie was simply astoundingly good IMO, until all the nutso action scenes started. There's a point where more simply is too much, heh...

After seeing all of the Transformer movies, nothing is overexaggerated. The only movie that can topple Transformer is the next Transformer. JW doesn't even come close. In comparison with Transformer, I think JW got it just right for the majority of their audience.
All movie silliness can be tolerated after I saw Optimus Prime suddenly fly at the end of the last Transformer movie.... I already turned off my brain and I still think that was too much of a nonsense.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Watched Spongebob: A Sponge out of Water on Saturday. Really cannot say much about it. Once more it's the missing/stolen crabby paddy formula that's driving the plot, but who gives a shit, right? It's basically a 90 minutes long sensory overload of disjointed nonsense, and surprisingly enough, it works really, really well. Its pop culture literacy will fly right over the heads of its principal demographic, but it put a shit eating grin on my face all the way through. What's definitely worth mentioning is that the movie is a traditional cartoon for the majority of its running time and not the blend of real-life photography and CGI the trailers are peddling. That, said, the 3d stuff works really well too.

 

[Arwin]

My wife agrees with you on this part: "It's basically a 90 minutes long sensory overload of disjointed nonsense" ... but thought that didn't work so well protracted from the normal episode length. I got a few BluRays

the Lego Movie
liked it a lot, though the game holds up suprisingly well as an experience of that story, even without completely spoiling it! In some ways almost better. And looked great. Watched part of it again in 3D the day after, and really enjoyed that too, was very tempted to watch it completely again.

Big Hero 6
Also very good, lots of good humor in it and nice visuals too. Some characters were a little bland, but mostly really enjoyed it.

Gravity
Liked it a lot. Wasn't perfect (some bits of pacing were a bit strange, some things were a bit of a stretch of the imagination), but enjoyed it nonetheless.

 

[Mariner]

Went to see Minions with the wife last night (she loves high-brow cinema).

They should have called it Despicable Meh because it was pretty rubbish in comparison to the first two films. Quite how it currently has a 7/10 rating on IMDB, I don't know.

Poor attempt at a plot, paper thin characterisation and a weak attempt all round. The fact that the cinema had plenty of young kids in there and they barely uttered a peep shows how badly lacking in jokes it was. Felt like an excuse for selling more merchandise and a real disappointment, especially in comparison to Big Hero 6 and the Lego movie which were both very good in comparison.

Hopefully, Inside Out will prove to be a return to form for animated movies this summer. Certainly looks like a clever concept from Pixar and initial reviews look to be good.

 

[London Geezer]

Yes I saw Minions too last night and although it had a few laugh out loud moments, it felt quite empty.

I simply cannot wait for Inside Out!! It's being praised as a new Pixar classic left right and centre by everyone.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I've seen 5 movies in theaters in the last month or so.

San Andreas
I felt it was much better than what the reviews were saying. Didn't find any major problems here to be honest. A catastrophe movie. Looked nice and the story was ok. I seem to pretty much always like the movies Rock is in, haha sue me.

Tomorrowland
Watchable and entertaining at times, but I felt there were many things just off here and not making any sense, like the robot agents and how they were so eager to murder people...Still I've seen a lot worse than this.

Spy
I really enjoyed this one. Thought the humour was pretty spot on m0st of the time. Had fun watching this for sure.

Jurassic World
I don't know... it was ok in the theater, but ultimately I felt that only the Guardians of the Galaxy guy's role was good. Action in the end of the movie was fun to watch, but as a whole nothing special. Some of the humour in the beginning was terrible in this one and the bad guy and his whole idea... just retarded.

Terminator Genisys
Saw this today. I liked it, most of it anyway. Imo quite a solid action movie. Actors did a good job, most of the humour was at least decent and the action scenes delivered. Good stuff.

And Bonus I watched the Interview on the plane. I thought it was really funny. The scene with James Franco and Kim Jong Ung hanging out was priceless.

 

[Mariner]

Finally watched Interstellar last night.

Meh. Typical overblown Nolan guff.

Spoiler

The whole premise is such utter nonsense from the start - some unspecified ecological disaster ('blight'?) is leading to crops dying out and the inevitable starvation of the human race.

The solution? Fly through a wormhole in the hope that we can find a planet with an ecology in which our plants can grow!

Yeah, that's really, really likely to be easy, isn't it? Even assuming that the helpful wormhole people have set it up next to a suitable planet.

What would actually occur would be the creation of vast bunkers with hydroponics and nuclear power to ensure the survival of the human race, not some anti-science culture which rewrites history to keep everyone farming. I laughed at the bit where the teacher says to Coop, "Why would we need engineers?" Ludicrous. It must be said, for an almost post-apocalyptic civilisation just scraping by, they seemed to be well-furnished with consumer goods (including robot harvesters operating using GPS!) even though they had apparently forgotten how to create MRIs (but not artificially sentient robots or interstellar spacecraft).

Some cringeworthy dialogue in there and I surely can't have been the only one unimpressed by many of the special effects? I thought the robots were particularly amusing for the non-CGI'd scenes - they were wobbling around like something from the set of Dr Who back in the 1970s!

My favourite part of the film? The comical and utterly pointless death of the bearded bloke on the tsunami planet. He made absolutely no attempt to get back to the ship until Hathaway had been rescued (even though he was pretty close to it) and even when he got to the ship he didn't try to jump into the open airlock! We laughed a lot at that scene.

Oh, also, WTF is Michael Caine doing reading them the Dylan Thomas poem about death as they set off on their mission!?! That's not exactly sending them off with a happy wave, is it?

As so many love his movies, I think I perhaps just don't 'get' a lot of them myself. I really liked Inception and Memento however and the batman films weren't bad. Just don't see the supposed brilliance most of the time.

 

[London Geezer]

Sorry but the premise of the movie is that

Spoiler

some super advanced beings created the wormhole and put it within reach of us humans so that we could go through and explore space to find a new place to live in. And the paradox of the end, where Matthew MacPainfullyHot sent a 'message' to the past, through a tesseract also created by these uber-advanced beings, which made it possible for his daughter to come up with the equations that made mass space travel possible, and save the human race.

Just sayin'.

 

[homerdog]

Some interesting aspects of globalization is starting to creep into hollywood movies. Company CEOs in movies are no longer necessarily white american guys in suits, and the action doesn't necessarily take place exclusively on the US mainland. We've seen some examples of that in recent years, and here is another. While the scenery is "Isla Nublar" like in the original JP (with Hawaii apparantly standing in for the fictional island), the new company CEO is an Indian guy. Who likes to fly helicopters. And he's generally a quite nice guy, on the whole it would seem. As far as billionaires go anyway. We don't have time to learn to know this guy enough though, but he does have some memorable scenes, which is nice. The main InGen researcher is an Asian. ...Cuz, they're smart, I guess? Isn't that the long-standing trope? *shrug* Not so nice a guy this one perhaps, but also an interesting character.

The Asian researcher guy is the only returning character from the original Jurassic Park IIRC.