Reviews

Poor writing, directing and cinematography. I cannot for the life of me imagine why this film has such a high score. The camera work and editing look like they were the result of cocaine induced seizure, the writing pivots between laughably implausible to ridiculously contrived. Expect everything from the first two films to be cranked up to eleven. From the nausea inducing shaky cam, to the 50 cuts per minute fight scenes that are impossible to follow.

The most egregious example of the dramatic decrease in writing is where Bourne purposefully gives his position away for the sake of a one liner, then spends the next 20 minutes being just a few seconds ahead of his pursuers for no other reason. In the previous two films the bad guys motivation was pretty clear and believable however here they introduce new characters who were not even hinted at before and are just there for the sake of making more money from the franchise.

Another example of the poor writing is to make the character of Nicki now a potential love interest with no setup whatso ever.

If you really are a fan of switching your brain off and expect nothing from your action films, this is for you. If however you expect the plot to make sense and characters to follow reasonable behaviour with setup and pay off then give this a miss. An appallingly bad end to the trilogy and obviously a quick cash grab with no creativity or thought put into it.

Excellent plot, script, well shot acted and directed. Nothing is wasted and certainty worth a watch.

Positives:

Great acting from everyone involved. Portman does a decent English accent while Weavings accent and performance is impeccable.

The plot is excellent, well paced and grabs you from the outset. A few flashbacks fill in some much needed back story. The only missteps are probably included in the original graphic novel.

The script with a few notable exceptions keeps you glued to the screen throughout.

The cinematography is fine, the plot doesn't require much and the few actions scenes are handled very well.

Cons

A couple of shots looked more like they belonged in a TV show than a film.

The script and plot have a few plot holes, the most notable being the idea that the British people would allow human experimentation at the Larkhill facility before the national outrage of the terror attacks but this has to be the timeline as the story describes it as such. V is portrayed by a news report as having a hand in the attack "14 years ago". - Later in the film, V poses as an informant and implies that the current regime rose to power after the terror attack. He confirms this by stating the virus was created by the experiments on V himself. Therefore meaning that the Larkill experiments occurred years before.

Political inconsistencies:

Regardless of how much you dislike the Conservative government, believing that they would be behind an operation of such horrifying purpose denies everything we know about both ideologies currently at work in modern western politics.

On one hand you have Conservative who believe in small government, as made obvious by their wish for low taxes and privatising most of the services and infrastructure of this or any other country. Hard to have large government without money. Also Conservatives believe in individual identity and rights.

On the other liberals believe in high taxes, nationalisation of infrastructure and services. They constantly tell us about their plans for over arching control of our lives. Speech laws, speech crimes, hate laws, hate crimes. They believe in group identity and group rights. Much like the Communists they emulate with their speech at every Labour party conference. They protest the existence of the Tory party, the reverse never happens. The intolerance of rival belief.

Then the matter of portraying Christians oppressing British Muslim citizens, the reverse is true in every Muslim majority country. I'm sure the tens of thousands of white British girls assaulted and forgotten by both parties on the basis of diversity is our strength would argue they were the ones being oppressed. The Protestant church isn't perfect but it was them burning gays in cages or throwing them off roof tops in keeping with the teachings and actions of their prophet.

I wish that just once, the liberal dominated arts would read a history book, or at the very least the Bible and Koran so when they describe these two very different ideologies, they at least came close to reality.

In an age where the media is constantly bombarding us with catastrophe predictions with zero evidence, Godzilla: King of the Monsters comes across equally clueless. Mostly because the film tries to make the antagonist of the film also the heroine.

The effects are great and with a rational plot, it could have been another good entry in the Godzilla franchise. Where the antagonist isn't rewritten by the end into the selfless heroine, it might have been an enjoyable romp. Unfortunately Hollywood seems to lost the art of fine story telling and nowadays relies on special effects and preachy moralising. I'm not sure who is making the important decisions in these board meetings but they don't seem to understand their audience. Very few people care or believe Grete Thunberg's parents and even fewer want this rubbish inserted into their entertainment.

Do yourself a favour and give it a miss.

Apparently despite Dr Quinzel torching her career, willing to be in an abusive often dangerous relationship, all to be with the love of her life - Joker, now she's a lesbian, because reasons. I'm sure the edgy writers believe this makes sense but given the level of research they obviously didn't do, this is one in a sea of universe breaking gaffs. However for those writers who actually saw the original series and still believes this makes sense, should not have a job in writing, waiting tables yes but writing no. And no I don't consider the comics cannon, the character was written for the series not the comics and the comics are as deluded as this show.

There are plenty of jokes but they, like the characters, are a superficial attempt to mimic the much better, original series. It's not all bad, while Arleen Sorkin's voice was the inspiration for Harley, Kaley does a good enough job. All the voice actors do well enough with what they are given, which isn't much.

This is another example of a well written character being fundamentally changed for the sake of diversity and if you're ok with that then you are a well trained dog and I offer you a biscuit for obeying your diversity and inclusion masters.

The special effects, cinematography and costumes are great but everything else is terrible. The plot and screen play are both laughably bad. Its as if the people responsible have never watched an episode of Star Trek, have no idea who Picard was and are filling in the massive blanks with Arguments on Twitter. If you enjoyed the any of the original series you will find this contrived and out of place in the star Trek universe.

The Federation are apparently now Xenophobic, all 100 planets and dozens of races. The Romulan Star Empire is apparently incapable of evacuating their own homeworld without support from start Fleet and Picard and every other male character is apparently a weak passive shadow of what men in the real world act like. Why name a show after a character you plan to assassinate? Why bother to base the show around someone you obviously have zero respect for?

In short give it a miss, it suffers from the same gender and race based motivated identity politics that drove Start Trek discovery, Starwars and Dr Who into the ground.

This film completely ignores all the lore of the previous three films. So much so, I can imagine this was written and ready to start filming when they got the rights to call it an Underworld film.

The sheer number of plot holes, lazy writing and contrivance is mind blowing. The first three weren't Shakespear but at least they made sense and stuck mostly to the established rules.

Her are some examples of how little the film makers cared.

The opening scene has Selene talking about avenging her families death at the hands of the Lycans, when they were killed by vampires and she knows this.

Selene, previously a hero who goes out of her way not to kill humans start killing humans in the most brutal way she can right from the start.

Selene runs out of ammo then manages to use her butthole to reload, I'm not kidding.

The big bad monster at the end is killed with silver despite the film clearly stating he was no immune to it.

Selene runs into the one cop in the world who not only is sympathetic to the vampires but has also been researching the possibility of a conspiracy against them.

The world suddenly is happy to see men, women and children dragged into the streets to be immolated and shot in the face by armed police.

I could go on but suffice to say, anyone giving this film a pass isn't paying any attention.

Stick to the first three.

I'm only going to talk about one aspect of this film, because in all honesty it isn't worth a discussion on any level other than its hypocrisy.

The two main leads are boy friend and girlfriend. She's an emotional wreck and he feels compelled to stay with her. He organises a trip which is part research and part a break from her and she decides to tag along.

After a very lengthy series of events any sane person would have run screaming from, the the boyfriend gets drugged and sleeps with someone else. The girl friend finds out and is given the opportunity to take revenge on him or a complete stranger. Rather than forgive him and get a stranger horribly tortured to death, she chooses to kill the person who stuck around in a miserable relationship for her.

I get this is supposed to be an allegory of the main female leads life but it isn't good enough to pull that off.

Finally, imagine in the current climate of 2019, with the horrible double standards of racism and sexism flying around both politically and socially. Now imagine the genders are reversed and it was the jealous unstable boyfriend who had his girlfriend tied up in a bear carcass while she gets burned alive for the crime of getting drugged and having sex with some dude. Can anyone who at this point honestly say they think there is a single reviewer out their who would still be singing this films praises?

While I didn't hate it, it certainly had nothing worthy of the 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic ratings it got, or being nominated for 6 Oscars including best picture. Anyone with an ounce of integrity watched this and said meh. It is definitely not a stand out MCU film, There are far better and far more engaging. It works best as a stand alone as nothing within it really impacts on the MCU in any meaningful way.

I found the CGI in parts to be laughably bad, especially the fight between the two Black Panthers towards the end. There was some very cringey lines and nonsensical plot threads but overall it works. There were parts that were purely inserted political statements and a super hero action film is hardly the place for Hollywood to try and make some grand social statement but that doesn't seem to stop them these days. Acting was fine for the most part.

All in all it was thoroughly forgettable and I can't imagine me going back for a second watch. If you haven't seen it yet go in with low expectations as the critics are so out of touch on this one. No film could achieve the lofty heights their reviews would lead you to expect.

This show has a very cheap feel from episode one on, and it doesn't improve. Amanda Tapping, who was great in Stargate, does an appalling English accent, which if your British, you will never get over or stop noticing. Her acting is ok, but the script...

The writing is where the true horror lies, cardboard characters, ridiculous plots and lines that feel so out of place and almost painful to listen to at times make this an uncomfortable experience to say the least.

I can only speak for the first series as it was all I could manage. In the past other sci-fi shows I have enjoyed, had poor starts but always had something about them that kept me interested, not so with Sanctuary. Perhaps if at least one of those issues, had improved over the course of the first series I could have brought myself to give it second chance but nothing improved.

The one and only character I felt had any substance and depth to him was John Watson played by one of many ex Stargate actors who make appearances, Peter Wingfield. Unfortunately Sanctuary decided that unlike several other characters who die and are resurrected, Wingfield was obviously not considered important enough.

If you enjoy some soul and intelligence with your entertainment, look elsewhere. If you enjoy turning your brain off, as the expression goes, this may be for you. Just don't expect to be surprised or challenged by anything you see.

This film was a painfully slow exercise in self indulgence. It had none of the bombastic stupidity of films like Independence day and it's even worse sequel, but equally failed to be even slightly engaging. Watching it I felt like an advertisement for globalisation, mixed with lithium.

While the acting was fine, it was in no way great, because it's hard to over or under act in dialogue this boring. The story was told through the perspective of the main protagonist which was a good choice, but was insufficient to overcome my lack of interest. It reminded me in certain ways like Apollo 13, in as much as it was trying to tell a first contact story in a way that is technically as realistic as we could imagine, given no one has met aliens yet. However this approach only goes so far, and my biggest issue with the film is the lack of pacing.

There is a subtle twist at the end which refers to numerous scenes throughout the film which if I was still interested, I would have found clever, but by that point I has ceased to care.

I can see why some people appreciated it, but cannot understand the waves of overwhelmingly high scores it has garnered thus far.

The film has so many plot twists, that I stopped caring about the characters 20 mins in. The writers have no concept of what a game is and apparently did no research into gaming community. The confusion which was probably intentional, does not help the constant plot twists and double crossing. While an argument could be made that the confusion, plot twists and complete lack of logic was attributable to the minds of the killers, this does not excuse an over poorly written film. It is possible to tell a story like this without loosing your audiences interest or empathy for the characters. The final 5 mins of the film, which is the only part of the film to occur outside the actual game, does make sense now. Given that the deranged killers are out of the decision making process, this makes sense, to the movies credit, but many will see the final twist coming.

The plot is a mess, the characters all over the place and visuals, while intensionally disturbing are not amazing but simply adequate. That said, elements of the film are very well done. The fact that I came away hating the protagonists is understandable given that in reality they were the antagonists. The disjointed plot, and constant illogical decisions of the characters, as well as the constant backstabbing are all explainable by the psyche's of the killers. Despite this eXistenZ is probably a film you will only watch once, which is a pity because it is also the type of film that reveals more of itself with more viewings.