Basically Hide & Seek: The Movie with a dark sense of humour and rapid ramp up into a grand and bloody crescendo.
Never once takes itself seriously, the cast is great, the plot’s a rolling good time right through and Samara Weaving makes for an iconic figure, splattered with blood in a torn wedding dress and bright yellow sneakers.
If horror comedies are your jam at all, this one comes highly recommended.
Yeah, it’s fine.
Much more promising at the start with good characters old and new, some absolutely belting fight sequences and a legitimately great evolution of the Terminators into the new REV-9 model.
Gabriel Luna is pitch perfect as a faster, meaner twin machine, and the physicality of the role makes for some awesome battles with Mackenzie Davis’ augmented protector that feel right out of a kids’ imaginary action figure showdown.
Honestly, the main problem is that it goes so big so fast and then doesn’t really have anywhere to go — the stakes have been so protracted and epic action fatigue sets in. There was at least two points where I thought we were at the end only to keep on rolling on again into something more huge and bombastic but the stakes hadn’t upped to reflect it.
For example: Did we really need the whole crashing plane bit? It really desensitised me to the ACTUAL peak of the film some 30min later. Like, I get that everyone played UNCHARTED 3 and that part of the game was fantastic, but I think we’ve done all we can with planes falling out of the sky as a dramatic setpiece now.
Overall, chop out at least one action sequence or condense their more creative parts into one of the other scenes, remove flashbacks so you’re 25+ min shorter and you’d have a much more satisfying ride.
Still, FX are great, it’s an interesting parallel (alternate?) timeline and it’s better than about half of the other TERMINATOR films.
Worth a watch, even if it does drag a bit in the back half.
The most fascinating thing about this documentary is that going into it you likely have these very entrenched cultural ideas about what Satanism is, and you very quickly learn that none of it is in alignment with what The Satanic Temple actually practices or stands for.
In fact, many of those who regard themselves as defacto Christians might actually be surprised to know that they have much more in common with a bunch of secular trolls who formed their religion on the principles of humour, postmodernism, performance, absurdism, community, transparency and the time-honoured tradition of Keeping The Bastards Honest.
Aside from a brief history lesson on the modern interpretations of Satanism and the formation of a fledgling religious organisation, the bulk of the film follows the group as they go about petitioning for the installation of a statue of Baphomet alongside a motif of the Ten Commandments that is being built in a public space — their argument running along the lines of religious freedom that no single ideology should take dominance over others, and should the Commandments be removed then they will withdraw their statue in accordance with their own principle.
It’s funny, in a seriously comical way that belies a mischevious streak to those who would call themselves Satanists while advocating for the right of others to call them out on their own bullshit. They don’t want to convert anybody, they just want everyone have the freedom to be themselves.
It’s a complicated worldview and well worth the watch because as strange as a foreign ritual can appear to someone on the outside, it’s actually far less challenging to grasp than you might think.
It’s on Netflix now. Recommended.
In some ways more charming than the first, in others less inspired.
Kind of a mixed bag — half the songs were forgettable and the overall story felt like a bridging episode between a strong first film and a bigger, more creative third one.
But the visual design is wonderful, painted on an autumnal Scandinavian pallette and the colonialist narrative touched on some darker concepts without really confronting them, which I suppose is understandable as this is still ostensibly a film for kids.
Doesn’t really transform the franchise in any meaningful way despite heaping on new elemental mythology and expanding the world, something that plays more like the setup to a more interesting trilogy rather than a really solid standalone in its own right.
That said, Kristoff’s 80s power ballad backed by imaginary reindeer harmonies is a brilliant bit of tonal anachronism and I like that the fundamental messages are of community support and reparations.
Overall not bad but I assume the next one will be better.
I took a while getting around to this largely because the hyperbole was exhausting, and look, having literally just watched it, I still don’t really see the need for an origin story for a fundamentally enigmatic character, even if this is the best version of that story we were ever going to get.
It’s incredibly well shot and put together, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is fantastic and there are real moments of greatness… but it didn’t really elevate into some magical realm of reverence for me like so much of the conversation about it was trying to convince me that it was.
It’s good, worth a watch, especially if you’re a fan of TAXI DRIVER. It’s a film that people are bound to take the wrong messages away from – every generation has a FIGHT CLUB except this is not quite as dark or brilliant as it wants to be.
SIDE NOTE: I’m interested to see if Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson’s THE BATMAN is going to pick up in the continuity given this box office success.
A post-goldrush story on a micro budget that makes use of every dollar — the spacesuits and tech are charmingly analogue and cumbersome, medical treatment is harsh, the people are cruel and brutal and happy to kill for the possibility of a fortune.
Held aloft by the boundless charisma of a morally ambiguous Pedro Pascal and finding a resourceful lead in Sophie Thatcher, this is a frontier tale with a minimalist scifi angle.
Enjoyed it, worth a watch.
Obnoxious naming of the decade aside, this was tough to trim to only ten (see: honourable mentions) and impossible to then place in any sort of order. So instead here they are, unsorted, with my reasoning for each choice:
It’s fine.
Certainly not the best STAR WARS film, still not the worst.
Mostly felt like a series of loose ends and by-committee decisions dressed up in some of the most impressive, cool visuals of the whole franchise. The pacing is a mess, especially the first 45min, but eventually it levels out and becomes… fine.
Wastes too much time trying to backtrack over plot points from THE LAST JEDI (a movie which is also just fine, hyberbole aside) and doesn’t flesh out any of the interesting possibilities of The Force which that movie raised.
Adam Driver is great, everyone else does what they can at a breakneck speed through pinballing plot points and inconsequential Macguffins. But hey, it looks mostly fantastic even if everything amounts to a very medium scramble without any real tension or stakes.
People want this to be either amazing or awful and it’s really not either of those. Lucasfilm really should have planned the arc much more, but they did stick the landing even if they fractured an ankle doing so.
THE MANDALORIAN is doing much better, and now that I’m back from vacation I’ll have to get to get back to finishing that one up.
Part CONTACT, part GRAVITY, part 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, part SOLARIS, part INTERSTELLAR… and that’s kind of the problem.
Because for all its ambition to be a Terrance Malick-like space movie it doesn’t have anything to offer that hasn’t already been covered in more arresting fashion elsewhere.
The visuals are great and would have likely been impressive as hell on a big screen, but at the end of it all we’re left with a perfectly mechanical character performance from Brad Pitt that only ever threatens to become transcendent and ultimately doesn’t serve anything especially interesting.
Underwhelming.
Strange, surreal, beautifully animated — a winding, dreamlike and often darkly fatalistic trip.
Worth jumping into blind, it’s up on Netflix now. Highly recommended.
NERVE.SQUID.PILOT 