Blade Runner 2049 (Review)

So I noticed that the wikipedia page for this movie doesn’t mention Ana de Armas’ character in the plot summary at all. Someone should fix that.

If someone asks you what cyberpunk is, you point them to Blade Runner. It was the film that defined what cyberpunk was, and always made one think about what exactly it means to be human. And like any true fan, I was wary of any supposed sequel to the classic film.

Well, fear not. This film is better than the original. Seriously. It takes what was so great about the original and expands on it. The world of Blade Runner feels more real and more fleshed out. Denis Villeneuve has such an eye for visuals that every shot is beautiful to look at. Ryan Gosling shines in his subdued acting that he excels at. The slow pacing is a style of movie that I enjoy greatly.

Which is why it pains me to say it but there are parts of the film that don’t work for me. For one thing, the film is overtly sexist. Women pretty much only serve as passengers for the men, to be used or ignored and aren’t really allowed to have their own story. Ana de Armas’ character Joi is quite literally a hologram that Ryan Gosling’s character has that becomes whoever he wants her to be.

I’m still struggling with this aspect because the sexism blends so neatly into the dystopian world of Blade Runner that its hard to separate the two. Of course this world is sexist. The replicants are only considered products to be bought and used as the humans wish. Property and slaves.

The major problem I have with the film concerns the third act and it’s complete lack of focus. There are stories that have a neat beginning, middle and end for this movie but for one storyline, they are definitely leaving it up in the air for a potential sequel and it made the ending extremely jarring for me. Build up with no pay off. Plus, Jared Leto, for all his part in the film, doesn’t really amount to anything.

Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy the movie immensely. It is by far one of the greatest films ever made, even with it’s flaws. It’s beautiful and thought provoking with many hours in the future going to be spent thinking about what exactly was watched.

It (Review)

God, I told myself I wouldn’t watch this film.

I generally don’t do horror movies. I don’t like feeling startled (not scared, startled), and I find most horror movies today relish in blood and gore instead of trying to make you feel scared. I typically don’t like jump scares since all they really do is startle you, not scare you. This in turn actually tends to hurt movies because since your heart is racing ahead of time during a jump scare, the next few parts that are supposed to be more terrifying aren’t that scary because you’re still coming down from the previous scare.

Enter It. A movie adaptation of a book that gave me nightmares belonging to a genre that I don’t go out of my way to watch. So, why did I like this It so much?

By all accounts, a great majority of the film is jump scare after jump scare. We follow a group of kids who are battling a clown-creature known only as Pennywise the Clown, the titular It. Before they can do battle, however, they each have to experience being terrified and hunted by It in their own way. What tends to follow is a one kid getting terrified by It, followed immediately by another kid getting terrified by It and then a few minutes of character development and then back to terrifying the next kid in line. It got to the point where, as I mentioned before, I was starting to feel numb to the scares. Don’t get me wrong, they are absolutely terrifying, but as I got used to the movie, I got used to the scares and they stopped scaring me so much.

Perhaps this was intentional in order for we the audience can follow the growth of the kids who learn to master their own fears. Ultimately, the main reason I liked this movie so much was the bond these kids have with each other. They are each played wonderfully and play off each other realistically. Each have their own story arc that the movie spends equal amounts of time with so that we know and care about these characters.

It is absolutely a horror movie; but, it’s a horror movie with a heart, something at it’s core that it’s actually about. And I think that is why I liked It so much.

Kong: Skull Island (Review)

Kong: Skull Island is the second movie of planned Monsterverse franchise because every movie has to be a franchise now. Unlike other would be movie franchises, this one isn’t half bad.

I love Godzilla, both the American reboot and the monster. It was because of that love that I saw Kong: Skull Island, since at some point in the future, they’re supposed to duke it out in a glorious fight for the ages. I probably shouldn’t have gone in with that mindset because these two movies couldn’t be more different.

Whereas Godzilla was a dark and gritty monster movie set in the modern day, Kong: Skull Island is a movie set in the 70s or at least, a version of the 70s that’s been greatly exaggerated to the point of near parody. This film is more of an adventure film right down to a handsome, rugged man who must save their lives while trapped on the island. I say man because I honestly don’t know any of their names.

There are multiple characters throughout this film but they’re all very shallow characters. What you see is what you get from these people. You never learn anything deeper about them because you’re not really supposed to. There’s just a group of people trapped on an island with a giant ape. And I was perfectly okay with that.

This movie does not take itself seriously at all, it is simply a movie meant to entertain the audience, which is exactly what monster movies were supposed to do. Sure, there is always room to tell a deep and meaningful movie, but I’m not gonna fault a monster movie for being stupid. This film is stupid but in the fun perfect way. It’s a film that knows what it’s trying to do and it does it very well. And I had a good time with it.

John Wick (Review)

Yeah, I’ve only just recently watched this movie. Sue me.

There are two things about this movie that I think makes it stand out from other action movies. It’s ability for you to sympathize with the main character and its world building. On the surface, it seems to be a movie about a man who’s going to kill the people who killed his dog and stole his car. And you’d be right, that’s exactly what it is. The film takes it’s time in introducing these elements, however. It doesn’t begin with a loud opening meant to grab your attention. It begins with the funeral of the main character’s wife and the days of grief that followed. In fact, we don’t even learn that John used to be a feared hitman until 30 min into the movie.

And this is where the world building really shines. Everywhere John goes, people seem to know who he is and what he does. As John reenters his old life, we see the places he used to go, the tools he used to have and the underworld lifestyle that seems to blend with the rest of the world. The world of assassins that exists in this film seems to be just behind the layer of civilization, hidden in plain sight, making John’s trek into his old life an interesting journey.

The only complaint I have is that the action sequences, while impressive in their own right, doesn’t seem to have the same punch that’s seen in Atomic Blonde (also by David Leitch) or The Raid. Though I’m willing to forgive this due to the film’s low budget and it’s other strengths.

So, in conclusion, yeah the film is pretty good. Shame that I hadn’t seen it earlier.

Dunkirk (Review)

Do you remember the docking sequence from Interstellar? Well, this movie is like that all the way through.

This film is easily the best film I’ve seen this year and it’s not a traditional film. It’s weird to say that since the movie looks like your typical war movie in the vein of Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge. It is anything but a typical war movie. Why? Well, it’s all in the editing.

Dunkirk tells the story of the Dunkirk evacuation; specifically, it’s three different stories showing three different views of the evacuation from three different locations. There’s the story of a British soldier on the beach trying to get on a boat by any means necessary to leave, the story of a father, son and their hand using their personal sail boat to help ferry soldiers to safety and the story of two pilots protecting the beach from German bombs.

The twist (because it’s Christopher Nolan and there has to be a twist): The story on the beach takes place over a week, the story at sea takes place over a day and the story in the air takes place over an hour. Sounds weird on paper, but the execution is a thing of beauty.

When I say “it’s all in the editing,” I mean it’s all in the editing. The story is told nonlinearly and is given the impression that the events are happening all at the same time, linked together through similar emotions or events. At certain points, you can start to see where they events link up in terms of time. In fact, in one story, you can actually see what’s going to happen at the end of another story.

It sounds confusing but it really isn’t, because most of the time, you’re not paying attention to how the stories link up, you’re paying attention to the action. Not just the action of warfare but the decisions that characters make. This film is incredibly silent with barely any dialogue among the main cast unless it’s necessary. This film is primarily visual. You don’t need to hear the cast talk about their plans, you just watch as they carry them out, fighting against the ticking clock (and I’m serious, there is the sound a ticking clock ticking throughout the entirety of the film. Literally. No joke. If you listen, you can hear that maddening ticking sound, telling the characters that they are running out of time).

I always love Christopher Nolan films because he always challenges you to think about what you’re seeing. You’re not just a passive observer, you’re supposed to be thinking as you view the film. You’re supposed to participate. Dunkirk is probably his most challenging film because unlike Inception, he doesn’t explain everything that’s going on three times. In Dunkirk, you know what’s happening because you’re thinking about it and you’re seeing it happen in front of you. You feel the emotions that are linked across space and time. Dunkirk is purely and simply a true viewing experience.

Atomic Blonde (Review)

I was lucky enough to view an advanced screening of this movie with my friend Mason from Reel Dude Reviews. So thanks to him for letting me see this mind boggling movie.

Set in Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, Atomic Blonde is a movie about Charlize Theron kicking butt with anything and everything she can get her hands on. Also there’s spy stuff.

This movie is pretty much all action all the time, which is both a gift and a curse. It’s a good thing because the action is amazingly choreographed and sold by the actors very well. They don’t try to hide the action by shaking the camera all over the place in the name of “making it more intense” (we all know you’re doing it because the actors are very good at action scenes). The camera is steady at all times so you see every punch and feel every blow.

The bad part of it is that for the first half of the movie, Charlize Theron doesn’t really do much. It sounds weird but hear me out. An action film should have a plot that forces the character to always move the plot forward. Speed is a perfect example of this. There’s a bomb on a bus and if the bus slows down, it explodes. This forces Keanu Reeves to continually be on the move and to keep moving forward if he wants to save the people on the bus.

In Atomic Blonde, however, Charlize Theron just kind of meanders from set piece to set piece while trying to do her job. And sure, the plot is the kind which forces her to try and move the plot forward, but I never felt like she was. For the first half hour or so, she’s just going around the city and then people try and beat her up and then she beats them up in awesome ways.

I can’t fault the movie too harshly for this because I get the sense that I was missing key aspects of the film. It’s also a spy thriller and a good spy thriller leaves things hidden for the viewer in plain sight for you to catch in the next viewing. On the other hand, I feel like I shouldn’t worry to much about the intricacies of the plot because I found that the more I thought about what was going on, the more plot holes there were.

Atomic Blonde is an action film with style and its own identity. A mixture of hardcore action, spray paint and 80s pop music give it it’s own distinct flair that makes it stand out as one of the most unique action films of the year (though I am noticing that after Guardians of the Galaxy, people have started adding 80s music to action films to spice it up). So, it’s an enjoyable action movie acted wonderfully by Charlize Theron and James McAvoy with ridiculously delicious action scenes.

Storks (Review)

So I know this movie came out in 2016 but I saw it a few days ago for the first time. Since I want to give my opinion of it, I don’t see why I shouldn’t write a review. I’d probably write a review of Sanjuro when I watch it for the first time and that movie came out in 1962. Basically, just because the movie isn’t recent doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be allowed to write my thoughts about it. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

So what exactly do I have to say about a film set in a world where babies aren’t born the natural way, they are delivered by storks. And now, those storks have decided to instead deliver packages. Which I assume means no babies have been born for the past…years?

Honestly, this is a movie where you can’t use logic to understand it. In fact, I would say that using logic on this movie would be a big disservice to it. It’s not that kind of a movie. What it is is a film where the creators try to cram as much humor into each scene as possible, regardless of whether or not it made sense. And honestly, that’s probably why I ended up enjoying myself.

A lot of this movie isn’t perfect. It feels more like this movie goes from scene to scene, checking off boxes to make sure that they have every piece of a typical animated movie. Two main characters who want nothing to do with each other but bond over shared experience? Check. Secret bad guy? Check. Two main characters separate because of a secret? Check. All the way down the list, even to the point where it doesn’t make sense and character motivations suffer.

Still, despite all of that, I still laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. And in the end, I suppose that’s all this movie is trying to do. Would I recommend it? Only if it’s the last thing you possibly have to watch.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Review)

Ah, Star Wars. One of two iconic sci-fi properties to ever grace our cultural mind. Regardless of how you view the Prequels or the changes made to originals, you can’t deny that Star Wars, as a phenomenon, is here to say. And now with the return of Star Wars last year with Episode VII: The Force Awakens, it seems we are going to be getting more and more Star Wars in the years to come. This year, we got Rogue One, the first of the Anthology series of Star Wars films, covering side stories and the backgrounds of famous characters.

Rogue One is the story of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), a career criminal who is taken and forced to join the Rebel Alliance to find her father, the unwilling architect for the Death Star. She is forced to accompany career Rebel Alliance Soldier Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and repurposed Imperial droid, K-2SO. Along their journey, they are joined by recently defected Imperial Pilot, Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), blind warrior and believer in the Force, Chirrut Imwe, (Donnie Yen) and his partner, Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen).

The first thing I have to give props for is the diversity of the cast. Not just diverse in the sense of their racial background (I’m still very happy about their casting choices), but also in how different the characters are. Although I was not able to remember their names (not because they were unmemorable but because they were in no ways as easy to remember as Han, Luke or Leia, this being set in a galaxy far, far away), I could instantly recognize each character. When the camera flashed to a shot of one of the characters, there was no way I was going to confuse who it was. I knew exactly who it was.

This just makes it even more of a shame that character development really took a back seat to the plot. There is a lot of pathos going on for these characters that doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. Things do come to a head in the film between two characters, but it never really feels resolved. It just happens and then you’re off to the next set piece. This happens to Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera, an extremist who has been broken by the war. His whole character appears to be to show just what a war can do to a person but in the end, we can’t spend too much time on this without sacrificing the rest of the movie so what we’re left with is a character with a weird rasping voice.

Speaking of, there are quite a lot of references to previous films. Either characters that appeared in previous films (like Grand Moff Tarkin in a CGI role that is a little hard to get used to for the first few minutes), or places that are revisited (one location actually made me go “oh, hey, we’re back here again” in the theater). There are so many references that I started to wonder if any of them were actually necessary. Where do you draw the line between a reference that is there because it would make sense story-wise for them to be there, and a reference that is there just for the sake of a reference?

One thing that I will appreciate is that this film is by far the darkest Star Wars film of the franchise, because this is absolutely a war film. People die, sometimes not for victory but for the chance of victory. This is not the time frame of A New Hope because in this time frame, hope doesn’t exist yet. This is the edgier side of Star Wars that hasn’t really been seen in a while, and I appreciate that. It makes the franchise feel more alive.

I truly enjoyed the film. From start to finish, I really did enjoy it. With that said, I can’t help the more I think about it, the more problems I find. The characters aren’t as developed as I would have liked, though this is a much larger cast than in previous films. Everything just moves from set piece to next set piece. Having said all of that, at the end of the day, it was truly a story worth telling and I’m still glad I went to see it. Plus, the final scene with Darth Vader (it’s not a spoiler to know that Darth Vader is in this movie, the trailers showed that he was) was well worth the price of admission.

Ghostbusters (Film Review)

Ghostbusters, directed by Paul Feig and starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Chris Hemsworth, is a reboot of the classic franchise of the same name. It features four women who through a series of events, open a business catching ghosts. And that’s pretty much it.

For a film that inspired so much controversy and hate (the trailer was one of the most disliked videos on youtube), there was nothing in the film itself that I felt was absolutely wrong. Nothing in this film seemed to justify the hate surrounding it. Sure, the film is by no means perfect, but it was relatively harmless when compared to other complete travesties.

For all the hate surrounding the fact that the movie stars four women, I was actually watching the movie not for the ghost-busting, but for these women. I liked watching their antics and found myself laughing. Which is what a comedy is supposed to do. I was also surprised that there was no moment in the film where the women are forced to fall apart through the actions of one of the group or an outside force. Everytime they’re knocked down, they just keep going, which I found refreshing.

The special effects are by far the least attractive part of the film. Nothing can beat the practical effects of the original. The overall designs of the ghost were interesting but as I watched, I knew it was nothing more than computer magic.

But despite that, the four leading ladies carry the movie, including Kate McKinnon, who I felt was the surprise star of the film. She’s crazy and fearless and everything that I can enjoy in a character.

What this movie is is harmless. Nothing about this film deserves the hatred aimed at it. Sure, it’s not the greatest movie in the world. The plot is pretty predictable and safe. The movie is simply fun and I would recommend it to anyone who has an evening to kill.

WarCraft (Film Review)

Directed by Duncan Jones and based on the bestselling video game series from Blizzard Entertainment, WarCraft is the action fantasy movie that tells the story of the beginning of the war between the Humans of Azeroth and the Orcish Horde. It stars Travis Fimmel, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper and Ben Schnetzer as members of the humans and Toby Kebbell, Robert Kazinsky, and Daniel Wu as members of the Orcs with Paula Patton playing the half-human, half-orc outcast.

This is…an interesting movie to say the least. I have long been a fan of Blizzard Entertainment, though I have to say StarCraft’s sci-fi setting appealed to me more. I didn’t even play WarCraft III until I got to college. So, suffice it to say, I had absolutely no idea of the story I was getting into when I went to see WarCraft, since the movie is based around the events of the first WarCraft game that was released back in 1994. Or at least, the time period of the events take place in the first WarCraft game, while the actual events have been expanded upon in the multitudes of books and World of WarCraft expansions that have since been released.

I have to say, to this film’s credit, it was by far the most unique movie I’ve seen in a while. It could have been easy to just be a dumb action movie, but more time is actually spent on the characters involved and their motivations. Well, at least on the Orc side. The humans are just kind of…around. I’m not sure what it is, but the Orcs’ story was just more interesting than the Humans. You have Travis Fimmel playing Anduin Lothar, a commander of Azeroth’s armies, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what he’s doing. Is he drunk 24/7? He might be trying to be a witty and snarky character but it’s hard to understand him with him doing his Ragnar Lothbrok thing.

That said, there were humans that I ended up rooting for. Ben Schnetzer plays a mage in training by the name of Khadgar who at first, I thought I would hate (with his wide eyes and pretty face), but as the show went one, he slowly became something of an interesting character. Annoying but somewhat lovable.

It just seems like more time was spent working on the characterization and story of the Orcs than there was with the humans. Everything about the Orcs I just enjoyed, from the characters to the story. Toby Kebbell really shines as Durotan, an orc who is unsure of the warlock who now leads the horde. At his core, he wants nothing more than to protect his family, even if it means betraying his kind.

The most interesting inclusion to the story is Paula Patton as Garona, a half-orc, half-human woman who grew up as a slave among the orcs. Sadly, she is underused in my opinion and seems only to be there to provide a baffling love interest for Lothat because reasons.

This is a movie that is less focused on the visuals and the pretty special effects and more focused on the characters, and because of this, the world-building suffers a little. We’re given pretty shots of locations that seem more catered to the hardcore WarCraft fans but we’re never given any sort of explanation about what these places are and why they’re important. For example, I know from the games that Dalaran is a city-state run by the Kirin-Tor mages, but nowhere in the movie is that really mentioned. Nor is it mentioned that Stormwind is the capital city of the human empire. I’m just saying an explanation of the world we’re supposed to be watching for the next 2 hours would be nice.

For all its faults, this movie does have heart. I found myself invested in the movie even though everything about would make it seem like a bad movie. As for myself, I have seen truly awful movies and WarCraft is not one of those. It is a movie with flaws but it tries. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes if fails. In the end, it is something different and I can never fault it for that. Which is why it is probably one of my favorite movies based on a video game, if not my favorite.

Tim Lilly

Film Aficionado, Gamer, Book Lover

Tag: Film Review