Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series.
The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet. Malcolm Lee, its creator, makes poor arguments for human survival. Again hubris. If we were looking to enlist an artificial champion we would hope our most talented minds would engage with it to build our case. But no, here we have the heartbroken computer scientist who can’t muster enthusiasm for his own children. This is the man who thinks he can use philosophy and rhetoric to prevent the AI he has built from agreeing with the army of red-eyed metal skeleton killers on the way.
Is it better than season 1? Yes. Will it bring back the audience it lost after its meandering first season? No. The superchat farmers on YouTube say nothing has changed. But there are improvements. The issue is that this show’s story arc is set and has to build on the dull foundation of season 1. You are into it or you are not.
Any adaptation is not going to be the source material. For Lord of the Rings, the best adaptations borrowed from earlier ones. Accept that and watch the show as a piece of entertainment and you’ll have a better time. The show looks more expensive. The budget remains unchanged, but the production designer excels this time. The cinematography is more refined. More shots this season are spectacular, like in the later episodes of season 1.
Mount Doom’s eruption has shaken the continent of Middle Earth. Adar, the Orcs, and the humans that have sworn fealty to Mordor do not take the news of Sauron’s emergence well. With the Dark Lord's threat of subjugation, uneasy alliances form to stop him. I like Damrod the hill troll. He’s stupidly expensive CGI to create but he has this swagger of a long time shit kicker. Annoyed, he has to come down from the hills to deal with another problem.
Three episodes in and Galadriel no longer has the personality of splinter covered plank of wood. She has lost. She is unsure if Sauron influences her. She needs Elrond's reassurance that, despite ignoring his advice, she is still doing the right thing. Okay, Galadriel not listening to anyone and doing what she thinks is best isn’t that much of a change from season 1 but it seems like there’s character development to be had here.
Sauron’s character development is a move towards open manipulation. His problems are more interesting this season. Every other character is working against him. Sauron has no willing allies. He has no resources beyond his wits and the power he can muster. Even when the audience may think he’s having second thoughts about doing something terrible, he’s not. You, the viewer, are being manipulated like everyone else.
By episode three, everyone else is back. We also get some new characters to replace those who left. Yet, I found the story-line with the Stranger and the Harfoots uninspiring. The Stranger's story is a mystery box; those are lazy writing. The grey wizard was intriguing because he had knowledge others lacked. Now, he knows less than we do, making him unnecessary. I expect him to become Gandalf by season's end. But waiting two seasons for that is poor plotting. Bottom line, I liked the first three episodes and will finish out the season.
This movie is cinematic depression. Not that it makes the viewer feel hopeless, worthless and low in energy. But what the audience watches is a hopeless, worthless and low energy movie.
Putting aside Brandon Lee's ability to stir..feelings..in generations of teenage Goth girls who have discovered the 1994 movie every week since it came out, The Crow as a media property has a simple formula. It is a tale of vengeance, redemption and the supernatural told in a style that drips with atmosphere.
I liked it. This is a well-made popcorn horror movie. It is not interested in big ideas. It's about tension. Alien was a movie about skilled labour in a claustrophobic jump scare-filled small space with a monster. Aliens brings in corporatism, adds a larger space and more monsters. Prometheus is about the elite, their ideas and what it means to not be one of them in David's case. Set between Alien and Aliens, Alien Romulus is about the working poor and their life that is already horrific.
It isn't that this movie is terrible, it's that it gets boring. The Borderlands series is darkly irreverent. It's gory in a visceral "ewwwhhh" and laugh way. It's funny in a "well this will hurt" way. The movie has none of that. It's Borderlands with the life rung out of it.
Yes it has the colourful character design, eater eggs and the 1080p CGI makes Pandora look like the dusty trash pile it is. But just as the CGI falls apart if you look at it in 4K the characters and nods to games are shallow too.
An unfortunate miss. It looks too sharp in that Doctor Who/British children's TV way. The cast doesn't gel and it lacks the dark undertones of the original movie. The absence of delight and absurdity in humour drags the production down. Some of the jokes land. But this is a show about burglars with a cosmic map of time and space on the run from order and chaos. The ambition on screen here isn't enough.
Bruce Timm's Batman Caped Crusader is an iteration on the Dark Deco style of his work on Batman: The Animated Series. This like that show has a villain/monster of the week format but unlike that show Gotham itself is not a character. Bruce Wayne is good, but Hamish Linklater hasn't found Batman's menace yet.
The villains are..okay. I enjoyed the Boris Karloff spin on Clayface. Christina Ricci's Catwoman is an entertaining spend-thrift kleptomaniac. Even more entertaining was her long-suffering housekeeper. If they don't put both of them together again in a second season that would be an unforgivable crime. As for the rest? Forgettable. And in Harvey Dent's case, boring. It feels like we've seen Two Face's origin as often as Batman's.
Better than the ill thought out slop Marvel has been releasing but not close to the heights of the finest entries. There is no story to spoil and the villain is underwhelming. The only spoilers you need to beware of are cameos and pop culture jokes. This is a fan service movie on steroids for long-time fans. It builds on Deadpool 2's finale and then tucks itself into the Disney+ era of Marvel.
The good news is dumb big budget disaster movies are back. The bad news is the same as the good news. Twisters has a lot in common with the 1996 original. The plot is nonsense, the characters are paper thin and you'll never think about the movie again after seeing it.
Unlike the Jan de Bont movie with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton the leads here have no chemistry. Something I put on Daisy-Edgar Jones as Glen Powell had chemistry with several co-leads in past films. He has good chemistry with Maura Tirney in this movie. And she's onscreen for five minutes and plays Daisy's mother. The romance in this movie is undercooked and there isn't even a hint of comedy. After hours in the cinema I still did not understand why these two stay together at the conclusion.
With the trashed audience scores you'd be forgiven for thinking something has changed with The Boys. But the only thing that has changed is the show runner trying to distance himself from a part of his audience for his career.
Here's a Stan Edgar moment. No one wearing a red hat can damage that career. However, those in the entertainment industry unsophisticated enough to believe the show runner wrote this show for "undesirable people" can. So, in that position, you produce the work you always have, reaffirm your support for...whatever, and move on.
This is one of the better fiction series currently airing. A reworking of the novel of the same name, and drawing from Anne Rice's body of work, a wonderful sense of unease flows from the screen. This isn't a show that tries to be clever, it is clever. It can also be funny, dreadful, supernatural and humane.
The dialogue crackles as an older Daniel Molloy, his body failing him, trades venomous barbs with art world magnate Louis de Pointe du Lac. Louis might be immortal but his psyche hasn't aged well. There are cracks in the foundations and this second interview is Louis' attempt at a talking cure. The hostility flows in equal measure to the hypocrisy as both men excavate Louis' past of blood and fire.
This is a kids show. The plot nor the characters have any sophistication and the story operates on a level just above a 90s television sitcom. Instead of twin sisters separated at birth and reunited as teenagers it's twin sisters separated as children and reconciled in their early twenties. Neither set of reunited siblings can wield a lightsaber so it's not that far away from the TV show Sister, Sister. It's Sister, Sister: A Star Wars Young Adult series.
A stunt show movie as flimsy as an empty bucket of popcorn but it has a summer romantic comedy charm. It's very early 2000s in its Hollywood commentary. That kills the momentum after the first hour as it is not presented well enough to hold interest.
For what the producers were looking to do it needed action, humor and adventure. It has plenty of action, with bone-crunching stunt work. Gosling and Blunt deliver humour with skill, but there's a large sucking void on screen where adventure should be. The lack of adventure comes from a weak script. With several different elements crammed into the second half of the movie it feels like it was the product of several rounds of studio notes and reshoots. If there was an adventure here it was overwritten in later drafts and edited out in post production.
What do you want and how much do you want it? That's the question faced by the horrified guests on "Night Owls with Jack Delroy." Delroy (David Dastmalchian) has everything a successful talk show host needs. He's articulate, comfortable bantering with the audience and has a comfortable rapport with his celebrity guests. He does the shallow opening monologue, makes jokes at the expense of the band leader/sidekick, gets into the audience, and conducts interviews. This is the work done by every talk show host night in and night out. The difference between success and failure is how many viewers like the host as a person.
The spaghetti western turns post-apocalyptic in this high-budget production of a gritty tale. We have cringe-worthy but endearing optimists. Antiheroes whose cruelty disfigures them more on the inside than radiation has on the outside. Striving zealots of gleaming order and anarchic savages who'll wipe themselves on the drapes. And that's just the first two episodes.
The show's burnt out 2150s are mirrored by an alternate 1950s. Bing Crosby croons as one of our protagonists walks across endless scorched dust. Johnny Cash sets the pace for a bone-crunching fight. Violence here can be comical, but it's always bloody.
This is the dumbest movie in a franchise that includes the brainless Godzilla: King of The Monsters. Kaiju fights are awesome. Everybody knows this. Even if you don't know it you do. But this movie is so dumbly dense it's a Saturday morning cartoon playing in the heart of a neutron star.
When we meet Kong, we see how clever he is. The Hollow Earth is a lurid and dangerous Playstation 2 CGI environment. The prime ape has mastered tactics and tools. Local wildlife doesn't know what's hitting them. He's Kratos from Sony's God Of War, no family no home and a big axe but for the first hour there are no stakes. It takes more than 60 minutes before the driving force of the story appears.
Road House is stupid and enjoyable. I'd watch a sequel. When we first see a ripped Jake Gyllenhaal his character comes across as one of life's losers. Why this man, Elwood Dalton, with his warrior's physique is so unmoored from existence is the mystery in the early part of the film.
He is not doing well though in body and attitude he appears solid. His life is squalid, his choices are careless, and we see he's in the grip of suicidal ideation. Warriors without a purpose don't do well, but there is more to this than that. Transplanting himself to the sun blasted Glass Keys, Dalton, guitar strumming theme music and all, slips into the role of the bouncer for the Road House of the title.
This is a streaming movie. It didn't start out as a streaming movie but that's what made it to the screen. While I enjoyed its prequel, Afterlife, this doesn't build on its strengths.
If there is a third movie, I fear the performance of this movie may not justify that expense, the cast needs to return to the teenage team of Phoebe, Trevor, Podcast, and Lucky. During the earlier movie, teens were in over their heads and solved problems using grit and Zoomer technology. Frozen Empire lacks most of that and is a movie where too many characters balance on a narrow plot.
Is this an exciting movie to see on a cinema screen? Yes. Is the movie and the actors' performances overhyped? Also yes. Dune Part 2 is exactly what you need from the second half of a story but it feels less...grand.
The universe building was in the first movie and besides a glance at Kaitian, home of the Emperor, and a brief visit to the monochrome seat of Harkonnen power, Gedi Prime, this movie focuses on life in the desert. That's how it is in the novel too, but the novel gives you access to the characters' rich inner monologues. The first movie substituted spectacle for that and I became aware of the absence of spectacle and inner monologues when it became all about hours of sand.
A luscious-looking adaptation of Clavell's 1975 novel FX's Shōgun is a worthwhile watch. You can tell there's money on the screen when the doomed ship Erasmus emerges from the fog. It looks like an oil on canvas painting. While the Samurai tropes are long exhausted, 17th century Japan at this scale may be an alien world to a Western audience. It feels substantial when you see it roll out in front of you and there is detail everywhere you turn your eyes.