Tag: Oscar Issac

The Last Jedi (Review)

The Last Jedi (Review)

This movie did not go the way I thought it was going to.

I’m a nerd, if that wasn’t clear enough.  I love Star Wars.  I’m always quick to point out the prequel’s faults but I’m just as quick to point out the prequels strengths and what they did right (which are few but they are there if you pay attention).  I remember my heart soaring when I heard the John Williams score booming in my ears when The Force Awakens started.  While I enjoyed that movie, I also recognized that it tried too hard to stay close to the Original Trilogy instead of trying to be something new.  I could understand the reasoning – after all, the last time someone did something new with Star Wars we got Jar Jar Binks –  but at the same time, this was a brand new trilogy of Star Wars films.  They needed to be different.

The Last Jedi is a very different film.  At the beginning, it starts to feel like The Empire Strikes Back, portraying the Resistance as on the run and on their last legs trying to regroup from an unending force of destruction.  Towards the second act, though, it starts to feel different.  Emphasis on emotion and loss become more prevalent as Daisy Ridley’s character Rey explores why Luke Skywalker went into exile.  Then John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran have to go to a planet seemingly ripped straight from the prequels to move the plot along.  Things get more desperate as Oscar Issac disagrees with Laura Dern with how to run the Resistance.

As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but feel like the film was meandering around from plot line to plot line.  Even when the film finished, I left the theater still thinking about the film.  There was so much about the film that felt familiar but turned on its head and sent in a different direction.  This is ultimately what has divided fans so much about the film.  It’s a film that knows your expectations and then willingly subverts them.

Questions that were raised in The Force Awakens are not only left unanswered but also made to feel unimportant, like they were not the questions you should be asking.  So I left the film wondering what questions should I have been asking?  Eventually, I stopped wondering what questions I should have been asking and instead wondered what exactly was the film trying to say.  I could go on about my thoughts on the film but in the end, this is a review so I should step away from spoiler territory.

The film does meander but it all comes together in the third act.  The seemingly multiple themes spread throughout do merge into one idea that the film does portray rather well.  It is a very well put together film, but it is definitely a film that is intentionally subversive.  Rian Johnson knew fan’s expectations going in and decided to toss them on their heads in order to force the audience to think.  To think about what, well that’s up to you.  All I know is that this is a very amazing but very different Star Wars film than I was expecting.

X-Men: Apocalypse (Film Review)

X-Men: Apocalypse (Film Review)

Directed by Bryan Singer, X-Men: Apocalypse is the newest film in the X-Men franchise that follows the alternate timeline X-Men series that began in 2011 with X-Men: First Class.  It follows the past iterations major characters such as Professor Charles Xavier aka Professor X (James McAvoy), Eric Lehnsherr aka Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Raven Darkholme aka Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), En Sabah Nur aka Apocalypse (Oscar Issac), Hank McCoy aka Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne), Scott Summers aka Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Jean Grey aka Phoenix (Sophie Turner), Elizabeth Braddock aka Psylocke (Olivia Munn), Alex Summers aka Havok (Lucas Till), Peter Maximoff aka Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Kurt Wagner aka Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-Mcphee), Ororo Munroe aka Storm (Alexandra Shipp), William Stryker (Josh Helman), Warren Worthington III aka Angel/Archangel (Ben Hardy) and Jubilation Lee aka Jubilee (Lana Condor).

Good god that’s a lot of people.

This time around, an ancient mutant from the past awakens in the form of Apocalypse, who sets out to remake the world again the way he thinks it should be.  Typical villain stuff.  Again, its up to the X-Men to stop them.  This time around, the X-Men are pretty much scattered around the world in the 80’s trying.  Professor Xavier and Hank McCoy are teaching mutant children how to control their powers at a special campus.  Mystique is rescuing mutants from oppressive humans.  Magneto is living in Poland with a wife and daughter.  And, of course, Apocalypse eventually brings them back together.

The problem with having an ensemble cast, especially one of this size (I mean look that first paragraph), is that you need to spend time making sure that each character get a satisfying arc that makes sense for their character.  This is the root of the problem with the film.  If I were to watch this movie by itself without having watched the previous eight films, I would think these characters have no arc.  In fact, I think the only one that seems to have any kind of an arc would be Magneto and maybe Jean Grey.  And even then, they’re arcs aren’t that satisfying because time is taken away from them in order to accommodate the other people.

This film requires that you have seen the past three movies of this timeline (First Class and Days of Future Past), in order to feel as if this is a satisfying conclusion.  If you’re interested in watching the X-Men movies, this is not the movie to start with.  It does not stand on its own and requires too much of my memory of the past films to make it emotionally engaging.

Oscar Isaac plays the part of Apocalypse well, even if he reminds me a lot of Ronan the Accuser from Guardians of the Galaxy.  He is not a villain that is very interesting to me.  He does his whole “this world must be cleansed” spiel and we’re just expected to go with it.  Magneto ends up as the character with the most depth as a man who believes that war and destruction is all he will have in his life.

He’s not the only one who plays his part well.  Every actor and actress in the film plays their role admirably, but again, not enough time is spent on the characters that matter to make me feel emotionally invested in their struggle.  In the end, I was just watching for the action, which was disappointing.  I came for an X-Men movie, not a Michael Bay movie.

In the end, it’s a competent summer blockbuster.  It does the job it set out to do even if you won’t really spend a lot of time talking or thinking about it once you’ve left the theater.  It just doesn’t feel as polished as previous films.  It’s no X-Men: The Last Stand by any means but it’s not Days of Future Past.  If you’re looking for fun X-Men action, there are worse options, but this won’t be the film you immediately turn to if you want to watch an X-Men movie.  It’ll just be the third movie of the trilogy that you’ll have to watch because you might as well because you’ve seen the other two.