Change Your Image
et-89
Reviews
Eternals (2021)
DC Eternals
Somewhere in space there lives a Celestial called Arishem, whose only goal is to get planets to develop intelligent life that will eventually be consumed by Celestial babies in a last hurrah that destroys the planet. To support this cycle of birth and destruction Arishem created horrific apex predators in order to protect the people of these planets from local predators, because reasons. These apex predators surprisingly turn on people and hunt an old Bruce Willis, but that's a matter for a whole other 2021 movie that's actually (sad as it might be) better than this one.
In order to solve the problem of the runaway predators killing people before they can become food for emerging Celestials, Arishem creates a small army of robotic beings who internally are humourless simpletons and externally form a diverse representation of 21st century US actors. 9000 years ago, these robots were sent on a mission to guard the emerging people of Earth from the Decepticons. No, sorry, that's probably not it, but close enough.
These Eternals, in addition to being varied visually and flawed for no apparent reason, also have a range of powers for no apparent reason, except, it seems, to represent various DC heroes and villains. These powers can get strong enough in the presence of a Celestial to kill an emerging Celestial. Because of course Arishem would make them like this. It's not like any of its creations would turn against it or have before, right?
Just to complicate things a little further, the essence of these manufactured, unchanging Eternals can be absorbed by a living, evolving Deviant, probably via nanobots, which gives that predator not only their powers but their memories and intelligence (which luckily isn't much), as well as a totally explainable ability to physically change other Deviants. All obviously part of Arishem's grand design.
Chief amongst these DC Eternals is Super-Ivy, a guy who can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes. He's also super-strong, but that does get glanced over except in one scene where he casually breaks an Ikea table that just had it coming, in what would seem like a questionable product placement. Secretly though he's a super-villain, using nano-pheromones to control those around him to fall in love with him and do his bidding, including trying to kill his fellows.
Other notable characters include The Flash and Pinocchio, who just wants to be a real boy (or girl) and grow older, because grown-ups have all the fun. Yes, surprisingly it seems like these androids are fully functional, to use the words of Data (and this is actually shown in the movie, for some reason), yet bound by moral standards which say that a being many thousands of years old can't do it just because it looks like a teenager.
What's the plot, you say? I'm sure it exists somewhere. It's just bogged down in the kind of slow DC storytelling, boring characters, hitting viewers on the head with points and morals which were already clear to anyone watching, that kind of stuff. If you liked that other movie where Wonder Woman resurrected Captain Kirk, discovered she can fly and spent a long time boring us with it, then go watch that. It's better than this one.
If you've read this review all the way here, you've probably already watched the movie, so already have an opinion on it, but felt that this review was a worthwhile read even so. So thanks. I could go on, but I think I covered the salient points, so that's all, folks.
Love Is Blind (2020)
Proves that even beautiful people can find love
They're the cream of the crop: a bunch of beautiful, sensitive, shallow people looking for a soul mate for a life of meaningful sex. They will fall in love after a few conversations, get into bed, perhaps have some arguments while wearing revealing clothes, and also meet the parents and arrange a wedding.
Is this show worth watching? If you have nothing better to watch, or just want some eye candy. These people are more interesting when they bare their bodies than when they bare their souls. If the entertainment you crave is something with a minimal amount of drama but a decent enough amount of skin, this may be the show for you.
Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Incredibly fun just watching the actors play their roles
Regardless of the fun adventure, which is carried off nicely and lightheartedly, I found it totally enjoyable to watch the actors do the roles of other characters. For example having The Rock play Danny Devitto's character, and then having Awkwafina play that character, just felt great. The actors do a great job and it was easy to feel like these were people inhabiting characters bodies. I even found it easy to believe that the horse was the characters. Great work on part of the actors and director there.
The movie isn't perfect, but it's more a matter of nitpicking than anything. My family and I all enjoyed this movie a lot. Anyway, the nitpicks:
I generally hate the way movie writers incorporate STEM, and the 'geometry' talent was the usual. Having a person throw terms that nobody else understands and have little to do with what's happening gives it an 'it's a geek only thing; not cool' vibe. Really, 'linguistics' means that you can clearly explain to people what animals are saying while 'geometry' means you know where to go but can only describe it in a way nobody understands? Writers, if you can't actually respect it and understand it, don't put it in.
My son also commented that the bad guys might have been real people who got into the game, due to the way the NPCs actions at the end seemed a lot less scripted and more adaptive than would have been expected based on what we've been shown before on this movie and the previous one.
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Nice tour with feels and jokes
Avengers Endgame is a competent movie, which felt like the closing of a circle. It starts with the loss and how it's dealt with, and continues as a journey to past Marvel movies. It's fun as that, giving a nice glimpse to what happened after the end of the first Avengers movie, letting Thor meet his mother and Iron Man his father, and so on, all with the typical Marvel sense of homour. My son of course liked that Thor and his pals were playing Fortnite.
It doesn't have the desperation of Infinity War, which made it so strong for me, or even many other superhero movies where there's an enemy to be defeated. At this level, I feel that it's weaker than many previous movies. A lot of the movie shows off alternate versions of past movies or extensions of them, which, while somewhat boring plot-wise, is a treat for fans. I did enjoy all of it, but still, at this level the movie felt more like a homage to previous movies and a way to provide closure than a movie of it own.
I won't go into too much further detail, but I'll discuss one small part that felt off to me, because I felt it weakened the ending, and that was Captain Marvel. Even at the end of her own movie (which was pretty good), it was clear to me that she became so overpowered that'd she'd be hard to write into anything. Endgame proved it. She was kept out of the game for most of the movie (obviously because she's overpowered), then arrived at the end flying unharmed through a barrage of missiles and plowing through a spaceship. Then she took the Infinity Gauntlet from Spiderman.
And then things went south. Spiderman asked her how she'd get through the battlefield and then all the female heroes stopped the battle to pose and say they'd help her. Come on, this woman just flew through a starship like it wasn't there. She could probably destroy Thanos' entire army in a matter of minutes. And she needs help? And she loses to Thanos in a few seconds only to give Iron Man his chance to die? I think the writers would have done better to simply keep her out. A Deus Ex Machina is a bad plot device. One which fails for 'reasons' is even worse.
Castlevania (2017)
Bait and switch
I loved the first season, and waited anxiously for the second. Saw three episodes of that and had enough.
The first season had a reluctant hero doing good and battling insurmountable odds. He found some allies, and that seemed to be a good starting point for continuing the fight.
The second season (3 episodes in) is just two camps of bickering, unsympathetic characters, who mostly talk and do very little. Showing the vampire side made the threat feel a lot weaker.
I no longer care about this conflict or the characters in it, so I decided to stop watching. I had expected an action packed series with a story of character redemption, instead I got one about political backstabbing. Not my thing.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)
Weird messages in this movie
I saw this movie with my 10 year old daughter, who thought it was bad, and I had to agree. This movie's script is terrible, and I'm tempted to go into this and discuss how I think it could have been improved, but I won't. I just want to highlight some of the strange messages one can get from it. (Spoilers ahead.)
- If someone kidnaps you and assaults you, they may still be a good person and you need to listen to them. (Mother Ginger uses the mice to kidnap Clara, then her frightening clowns to bully her into her presence. Clara naturally runs away, but in the end it turns out that Mother Ginger is actually good and the movie implies that Clara should have listened to her.)
- If someone tells you to trust them and immediately show you that you can't, you should still trust them and everything will be okay in the end. (Clara sends Captain Phillip away, then almost slips to her death, being saved by him at the last moment. He then leaves her anyway, trusting that everything will be okay as she traverses the slippery cliffs.)
- Regardless of how accomplished a woman is, her greatest accomplishment is having kids. (Clara's mother, who was an incredible inventor, called Clara her greatest invention, and apparently not only stopped inventing things after she was born but also never mentioned that she invented a machine that could breath life into toys. Because apparently, once you're a mother, all that invention nonsense no longer matters.)
This is not a comprehensive list. Really, someone should have looked at that script with a critical eye. While Disney movies often have messages which aren't that great (like the whole princesses thing), they don't often scrape the bottom of the barrel like this one.
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Disappointed because the name set up expectations
I tend to enjoy the Marvel movies and animated movies / TV series when I can catch them. Unfortunately I caught Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow on TV once, and that, coupled with the name Age of Ultron, led me to expect something like that animated movie or Days of Future Past: that Ultron takes over and there's a desperate struggle to overthrow him. One early trailer I saw also seemed to enforce such an impression.
Unfortunately Ultron turned out to be a rather impotent villain. He's full of potential danger, but doesn't manage to realise any of that potential. The trailers made the movie look like the threat is a lot bigger than it was. Pretty much every danger in this movie is short term and thwarted without too much problem. I kept waiting for something truly dramatic to happen, but it never did. There's no Age of Ultron in this movie, not even a glimpse of it, and for me that was disappointing enough that I didn't enjoy the movie much.
There's decent action, drama and humour, it's not a badly made movie, but the villain is weak, and even the ultimate danger, the death of the human race, is less dramatic than potential subjugation, which is what most villains go for.
Cinderella (2015)
Bland and beautiful
The movie is a simple retelling of the Disney version of the Cinderella fairy tale. It tries to make the story make more sense, and largely succeeds. Problem is, there's not much humour or drama, so the story ends up being pretty dry. Ella's mother dies, and a moment later time passed enough for Ella to be over it and the father to have found a new wife. Then the father died, and that's pretty much glanced over too. The step mother's cruelty is also understated, more told than shown.
So the movie ends up feeling watered down, yet at the same time it's reasonably well told and beautifully rendered. It's also still a heartwarming tale of how a woman of simple origins can end up marrying a prince with just a bit of help from magic and how a prince gets to choose a wife he loves due to her kindness and not one that's appointed to him. It's kind of like Aladdin with gender reversal and a lot less interesting stuff happening.
RoboCop (2014)
A sterile movie which takes the worst aspects of 2000s American cinema
Warning: mild spoilers (it's hard to really spoil this blandness).
Take a cliché, couple it with ham-fisted messages, couple it with a clean, actor-model style cinema, take it way too seriously, and you got Robocop.
Robocop isn't a terrible movie, and it's reasonably interesting, but it fails to deliver on its promise, to provide any manner of emotional engagement with its characters, or to provide any enjoyable action scenes.
The disappointing thing about it is that it feels that it has potential. Robocop's character starts interesting, but quickly turns into zombie-robo, and once he magically starts "regaining his humanity" he immediately goes off to kill his killer, then gets deactivated. Nothing anywhere has any real consequences. Wiring his brain to give him the illusion of control is an interesting idea, but has no effect whatsoever on anything. Zombifying him -- life carries on as usual. His never-a-hair-out-of-place wife makes some noises, that's about it. Where are the emotions, from anyone?
Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers (2010)
Humorous geeky fun that needs a sequel
I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. It's very lighthearted and full of staples of the genres, in this case adventure, science fiction and fantasy. From the moment Clutch uttered "rock monsters, why does it have to be rock monsters?" I knew I was going to like this movie, although the highlight for me was "it was a dark and stormy knight". The movie is full of homages to other movies and to fantasy tropes.
The story moves quickly between adventure, superspy and futuristic (prison planet) until it settles on fantasy. I found this unexpected, and for the remainder of the movie continued to think it would move on from this. Unfortunately the movie ends with a definite "to be continued" feeling. With one villain of three apprehended it looks like this is supposed to be a trilogy. Will it be continued? I certainly hope so.
I enjoyed the animation, and the way the lego world was built. Nothing amazing in terms of visuals, but there was good humorous use of the fact that the world is built from legos.
Is it worth going out to the movie theatre to see this? I'd say it's borderline. Give me 3D and I'm sold. Still, I'm definitely hoping the sequels will appear.
Watchmen (2009)
I just didn't care
I'll start by saying that I didn't read the comics. I understand that those familiar with the comics find the movie a lot better, and I can appreciate a movie that works for fans. I don't think it works well for creating new fans.
I don't remember the last time I saw such a bunch of bland heroes. The movie didn't make me care for any of them, and the only one who was interesting (or at least fun to watch) was Rorschach. Live, die, save the world, destroy the world, I just didn't care.
The movie started slowly, and dragged for about an hour, until I almost wanted to stop watching. It did pick up once Rorschach got arrested, and the plot started moving towards a conclusion. Even then, the conclusion didn't have much of an emotional impact.
I'm giving this movie a 6 because the Rorschach part and action sequences are decent, but in my opinion that's not a good enough reason to watch this otherwise uninteresting movie.
Constantine (2005)
Very nice imagery
The movie particularly impressed me in how it depicted its subject visually. People say the special effects are great, but that's the implementation. It's the vision behind the effects that makes the movie look good. It's also clear that there's a background to this movie, that it builds on something, and this adds to its impact. I haven't read the comics, but I assume this background comes from there.
The downside for me was the character Angela. I think it's partly Rachel Weisz not fitting the role of a police detective with some killings behind her, and partly because the premise of the character just didn't work. Keanu Reeves' usual wooden acting fitted his role rather well, on the other hand.
All in all, the movie was never boring, wasn't too annoying, and had some visually impressive moments. I'd give it 7.5, but will round it to 8.
The Golden Compass (2007)
Badly abbreviated
I haven't read the books before seeing this movie, and yet it was obvious to me that the book had been cut. This had been done amateurishly. The movie felt disjoint, with some parts making little sense (like why Lyra would sit alone in a market holding the compass after sailing with the Gyptians), and most parts feeling like they were rushing things.
I ended up not getting attached to any of the characters. The only one I felt I cared somewhat about was Lord Asriel, but he had a very small part. Some parts, like the witch visiting Lyra on the boat, felt like a character dropping in for plot's sake, then dropping out. In fact, it was more or less so with most of the characters.
The movie did make me want to read the books, if only to see what's been cut. Having started reading the book (and I'm just a few chapters in), I see that the movie has not only cut but also altered the book quite a bit. I also see that it has failed to give any idea of what the world is like. The Magisterium turned into some generic threat I didn't really understand (though that may partly be because I'm not Christian), and the world felt far from ours, kind of a generic fantasy world, while in the book it feels like an alternate universe close to ours.
The movie wasn't really bad, as it did provide a plot and decent visuals, but it was largely disappointing, compared to some other fantasy movies.