Production design is outstanding, the cast is charismatic and strange. It’s a tight six episodes too, which is a real sweet spot for these series. Feels like the best parts of a Dr Who adventure mashed together with a big budget behind it.
There’s SO MUCH fan service drawing from the deepest, more ridiculous and obscure depths of Marvel Comics’ silliness.
Ultimately the story ends up servicing the next big phase of MCU projects, but it does so with style and the characters are fun. I mean, they weren’t exactly going to let Tom Hiddleston off the hook easily, were they?
Solid follow up, keeps the tension high while adding some new variables to the mix.
Not much to say — if you enjoyed the first one you’ll find this a great extension of the story that grows the world just enough to fill in some questions lingering from the original without bloating.
Emily Blunt has less to do than trailers might suggest, but the switch to having the daughter shoulder narrative responsibilty is a good one.
Action’s fun, new wrinkles and characters work well together.
Sony Animation has really been knocking it out of the park lately!
Kinetic, hyperactive and full up with heart, this is the very definition of a modern family film run through a Gen Z TikTok filter and imbued with strong, colourful energy.
Hits all the usual beats of this sort of fare and does so with infectious enthusiasm and personality.
The animation style is brilliant, the voice cast is A-grade, the dog is hysterical.
An alternate history drama where the Russians landed on the moon first, kicking off a prolonged, multi-generational space race of one-upmanship sustained by the wounded pride of the United States.
It’s bloody great.
Moreover, it’s a fascinating exploration of human motivations to greatness and high ambition as well as being a very grounded look at the hardships of space travel and what might have been but only for a few key moments of our own history going slightly one way or another.
It’s tough to really discuss what sets this apart from any other coming-of-age superpowered story without utterly spoiling the thing that sets it apart.
So more generally I can say that it has fun takes on a lot of well-worn tropes and has a couple of refreshing things to say on the way these sorts of stories play out.
The voice cast is incredible and the action is visceral, even if the animation outside of the grand set pieces can tend to sway on the cheaper side. Still, it didn’t detract.
You’ll know if you’re on board by the time the credits on the first episode finish rolling.
Less the Cthulhu mythos elements of Lovecraft’s stories, but rather taking small, weird tales of scifi, cosmic horror, occult organisations, time/space travel and wrapping them all in post-Korean wartime black United States.
So of course, all the supernatural darkness and horror that comes with the magical side of things is frequently less terrifying, threatening and horrible than the everyday racism the protagonists face in their ordinary lives.
It’s brilliantly done. Each episode takes this lens and focuses it through the tone and genre of classic pulp novels — one time a haunted house, one time an artefact heist adventure, one time a body-swapping life-in-their-shoes story, one time a time-travelling historical lesson, one time a mythological fable crossed with a wartime romance.
The cast and their performances are fantastic, the VFX are cinematic quality (not to mention impressively visceral and disgusting) while the choices to use anachronistic modern elements of black culture only serve to further elevate and enhance the experience.
There’s just so, so much packed into only ten episodes that it puts many other shows to shame with both its ambition and execution.
It’s kinda funny how this franchise went from the tonally grounded, disaster movie feel of Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla to the high-tech Hollow Earth kaiju showdown extravaganza here.
It’s a big step up from King of the Monsters (2019), partly because the runtime is pared back and because they finally worked out that nobody cares about the human elements beyond serving to string the giant monster battles together.
And that’s more or less it for the plot. Something something energy source, something something Hollow Earth, something something Big Corporation biting off more than it can chew.
Cue the modern take on the most famous giant monster showdown in cinematic history complete with neon lighting, handwavey science and so much destruction you’ll wonder why anyone would ever risk living near a city in this cinematic universe.
It’s big, schlocky blockbuster spectacle and it does a fine job of delivering exactly what it promises on the box.
It also has a surprisingly bangin’ synth soundtrack in parts which is always welcome.
Probably closest to Kong: Skull Island (2017), if you enjoyed that you’ll have a good time here.
I’ve been learning 3D software in my spare time the past few months and it’s been awesome to be able to start producing concept pieces so fast and have them look so awesome!
I build the models in Blender, then export to Substance Painter for texturing, then back into Blender with the Botaniq add-on to populate trees/grass and to compose, light and render, then final touches are done with Procreate.
More to come, I’m just excited to have work to share that came purely from my imagination!
You can follow me on Instagram @_nervesquidpilot for updates.
A decent enough sci-fi drama trapped in an identity crisis.
There’s two tales happening in parallel and it takes a long time to become apparent how they’re linked, and only in the final ten minutes or so do the two threads really twine together. Problem is, George Clooney’s story is where we open the story and spend significant time before swapping to Felicity Jones’ imperiled space mission.
Something certainly got messed up in the edit here, and to some extent it seems like a marketing problem. Clooney is the bankable star and a decision was made to put his part of the story at the forefront of scene sequencing and this damages the story by relegating Jones’ arc to a B plot when it’s arguably the more important of the two.
And this is a shame! There some solid drama and well-executed action sequences that are overall held back by the story being told out of a better order.
You could still find plenty to enjoy here, but don’t be surprised if you find your attention flagging because the focus is scrambled.
Solidly medium movie, could have been very good with a few changes.
Ok, positive first: The soundtrack slaps. The performances are all excellent. The execution of the practical effects and the stunts are great.
But…
The sound mixing is, BY FAR, the worst I’ve heard in a blockbuster, possibly ever. Action scenes are thunderously loud even with the volume turned way down, and the dialogue is so quiet we needed subtitles so we weren’t yo-yoing the volume constantly with the remote.
The editing and pacing are an absolute mess. A basic two-shot can cut back and forth to the point where it’s distracting from the dialogue. Which is often a mercy because there’s zero wit or subtext to anything anyone says. The dialogue is mostly flat and purely functional. It’s not fun or engaging.
The first 45min could easily be cut and the same information much more effectively and interestingly disseminated in the rest of the film. Even still the plot moves at a breakneck pace: out of the gate four characters dump five bursts of exposition on you from six locations, none of which especially clarify anything, and things don’t improve from there.
We jump from location to location so fast and characters make decisions that change direction within a sentence of one another with no clear purpose. Nothing breathes, nothing coheres, it feels like someone trying to talk so fast that you won’t notice the huge gaps in the logic of what they’re saying and all the while you’re being told “Keep up! This is very smart!”.
The so-called mechanics of time inversion are wildly inconsistent and unclear. It’s a cool hook of an idea drunkenly explained on the back of a coaster. It’s like someone saw the Hong Kong reverse-time battle in Doctor Strange and thought “Let’s do that but louder, less fun and deliberately much more confusing for some reason”.
There are some good gimmicks here but there’s never any tension to anything. The stakes vary wildly from scene to scene, sometimes even within a single sequence, and at a certain point it’s hard to care because all the cool flashy stuff doesn’t really serve the clever narrative trick Nolan thinks he’s playing. There are MUCH better ways to use all its better elements and not have it feel like a jumbled, convoluted mess.
Hard to tell exactly where in the production line this went off the rails, but at two hours long and absolutely failing to convey anything meaningful besides a few cool shots you can spend your time better elsewhere.
Definitely not worth potentially getting Covid at a cinema for, barely worth sitting through at home.
NERVE.SQUID.PILOT 