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.

Beauty and the Beast (Review)

The live action Cinderella was better.

The 1991 animated classic Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite animated films ever. When I heard that Disney was adapting the animated film into a live-action film, as they’ve been doing recently, I was excited but also skeptical. Previous live-action remakes of classic Disney films have been hit or miss for me. Maleficent was all kinds of bizarre though it had it’s moments and the same could be said about Cinderella. So I went in expecting the film to be average at best.

I was wrong. All this film did was appreciate how much of a masterpiece the original animated film was, which is saying something since this film is pretty much a shot for shot remake of that one.

Something positive first. Many of the casting choices were very enjoyable. Kevin Kline as Maurice brings something unique to the movie. While eccentric, there’s a sensitivity to him as well as a hidden sorrow that makes him a sympathetic and intriguing character. Though his French (?) accent is…questionable, Ewan McGregor really shines as Lumiere, the charismatic candlestick. In fact, my favorite characters in the film were all the side characters, who performed their roles splendidly, if underused.

Unfortunately, this is not enough to save the film from it’s main problem: it’s adherence to the original animated film. Everything that happens in the film happens because it happened in the animated film to the point that when they do change something, it no longer makes any sense as a whole. For instance, when Belle is singing about how she wants more in life, she’s sings the final part on a wide open hill behind her house. In the film, her house is within the town limits, so when she goes to the wide open hill, it’s literally looks like it’s 5 miles away from her home.

It got to the point where I honestly felt like I was just watching the original animated movie all over again. I didn’t pay money for a theater ticket just to watch a movie I own on blu-ray at home. For all it’s faults, at least Cinderella actually did something different with the film adaptation.

Speaking of, they even pulled the same stunt they did with Cinderella in a way. Whereas in Cinderella, the milked the dress shot for all it’s worth, in Beauty and the Beast, they milk the songs for all their worth to the point where I actually think they slowed down the beats of the song to really get their money’s worth and left me getting bored. Sure it’s the songs that I love but they’re sung so poorly that I just didn’t care. Plus, it didn’t help that the first song that Emma Watson sings was just so auto-tuned that I couldn’t not hear it throughout. And I knew that they were only singing/miming the songs because that’s what was in the original.

Which is a shame, because when the film deviates from the source material, it starts to become interesting. I will say that the brand new song, “Evermore” is by far the best and most heartwrenching song in the film. They added a small plotline talking about Belle and the Beast’s parents that I hoped would go somewhere. A shared experience is a great way to get two people to understand each other. Alas, it goes nowhere because they need to get to the dress (which reminded me of a plastic Barbie doll dress) and the dance.

I really wanted something new and different with this film. A different take on the classic story that I love. What I got was a shot-for-shot remake of the classic story that just left me sad. None of the scenes had any impact on me because I had seen it done better before in the original. I wasn’t singing along to any of the songs because they were all done better in the original. I know I should try to judge a film on it’s own merits, but it’s so hard to do so when this film relies so hard on nostalgia from the original. I know I’m in the minority (if Rotten Tomatoes is to be believed) and if you think you’ll enjoy this film, then go ahead and watch it. I hope you do enjoy it more than I did.

The Fate of the Furious (Review)

Binge watch The Fast and the Furious franchise and take a shot every time someone mentions “family.”

I haven’t been keeping up with the “Fast and the Furious” franchise. The last movie I actually watched all the way through was the first one back in 2001. I saw a few moments of 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift but had no real interest in continuing to watch the series. It seemed to be a generic popcorn franchise that studios continued to pop out for easy money.

Around the time the fifth one came out, I started hearing people say that the films were actually good. Still, I didn’t pay them any attention, even when Dwayne Johnson joined the franchise and they stopped being about street racing and started saving the world in elaborate ways involving cars. Eventually, my buddy Mason from ReelDudeReviews asked me to join him opening night and since I had no other plans, we went and watched it.

One thing I appreciated from the movie was it’s tongue in cheek nature. Nothing ever seems to be done with any real seriousness. Being chased by police? Send a wrecking ball through them. No reason how or why that happens, it just does. It’s one of those movies where cool things happen with a the slightest of reasons given as to why they happen. Normally this would be a criticism, but for this film, I have a hard time criticizing it for that. It’s a film that knows exactly why people came to watch it. They didn’t come for the logic, they came for cool action and set pieces.

The only real criticism I can even think of is that the film has about seven films worth of backstory that go right over my head. I had to guess that Paul Walker’s character’s name in the movie was Brian (again, I had only seen him in the film back in 2001) when they mention him in passing. I didn’t know who was who or how they related to each other. I didn’t know when Kurt Russel joined the franchise or why. I was really surprised with Nathalie Emmanuel showed up in the film as a hacker, having only seen her in Game of Thrones.

The film is so over the top at times that it almost takes away from the impact of the more serious scenes. The premise is that Vin Diesel’s character is being forced to work for Charlize Theron thus betraying his family (shot). It’s a emotional situation that lends itself to good drama but at the same time, it has a hard time reconciling itself with how ridiculous the action scenes become.

Again, I can’t really fault the movie too harshly. It’s a movie that did exactly what it set out to do. It’s an action movie that entertains with the bare minimum of effort given to plot, character development and scripting and the maximum of effort given to intense action sequences. All of this is held together with a cast that is surprisingly strong together even when I don’t have the experiences that I assume most people had watching all the movies previously.

Family (shot).

The Belko Experiment (Review)

For a film touted as being “Office Space meets Battle Royale,” I had trouble finding any amount of humor in this movie.

The Belko Experiment offers an interesting premise: 80 office workers are trapped in a building and told to kill each other or else the bombs implanted in their heads will explode. It’s a twist on the Battle Royale-type horror genre that’s found a niche within the market, probably made more famous to American audiences with The Hunger Games series. To it’s credit, the genre lends itself to interesting characterization. How would normal people react when put into this situation? Would they try to work together to survive or would they try to kill everyone? The philosophical questioning alone makes for interesting scenes where people try to discuss whether or not it’s moral to kill people so you can survive.

The setting also lends itself to interesting comedy. The typical office setting means people having to get creative with how they kill people. Lamps, scissors or even tape dispensers are used as potential weapons, with the humor coming from the creativity of the weapons. Unfortunately, the potential humor is never used. Instead, guns are introduced early on and with that, it becomes a fight between people with guns and people without.

There’s a lot to be said about hype and expectations. The trailers for the movie made it out to be a black comedy movie in the vein of The Cabin in the Woods. It was probably billed that way because of James Gunn’s success with Guardians of the Galaxy. Watching the movie, however, told a different story. While there are humorous moments, there aren’t enough of them and the moments aren’t funny enough that I would call this a horror-comedy at all.

I shouldn’t make this a point against the film, however. A film should be judged on it’s own merits and not on how it was sold to me through trailers. Drive taught me that much, a film billed as a The Fast and the Furious-style action film but was actually a character study of a getaway driver trying to be a good person. So, The Belko Experiment is not a comedy. What it is is a horror movie without thrills.

The downside of a Battle Royale style horror movie is that in the back of the audience’s mind, you know that eventually, people are going to start killing each other. No matter how much people try to work to save each other, when it comes down to the wire, they’re going to start killing each other. There’s a sense of inevitability when watching a movie like this and when watching a movie with a built-in expectation, nothing really surprises you. Instead, you spend the entire movie simply watching things happen.

The Belko Experiment is a movie where I watched things happen. People died and I sat there, a little tense and on edge, but never really shocked when people died. Only one death shocked me but instead of thrilling me, it angered me because of built up expectations that were dashed with an unfulfilling payoff. This is definitely a point in the movie’s favor, though, that I was actually invested in the characters.

Within the first ten-minutes of the film, we are introduced to a wide-variety of characters and instantly, we identify with them. We understand them and we like them. In fact, I’m not sure if there was one character that I didn’t like. It’s saddening then that I didn’t feel like any character had any sort of fulfilling character arc, except maybe John Gallagher Jr.’s character.

The Belko Experiment was a film of expectations that just aren’t met. I was expecting a comedy but I didn’t laugh. I was expecting a horror movie, but I wasn’t that thrilled by it. There wasn’t even a moment that I could call my favorite. I was simply sitting in the theater and things were happening before my eyes. When the movie was over, I went to a taco restaurant, sure that I had wasted my time.

Tim Lilly

Film Aficionado, Gamer, Book Lover

Tag: Review