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Man of Steel (2013)
Okay, but very flawed. Ultimately a disappointment.
I've read reviews praising Cavill's performance as Superman, but honestly it's not that hard to get Superman right. The very least you have to do is just be generally likable. Too bad Tom Welling never quite managed it.
Some of the best moments in the film are earlier on when we see him rescue some workers from a burning oil rig. And when Clark first dons the suit and starts flying, there's a wonderful scene where he first starts leaping higher and higher in the air, testing the limits of his powers until he finally begins to soar, with an exhilarated expression on his face.
Michael Shannon's Zod is really good. Not only is he intense and threatening, but he's genuinely sympathetic. This Zod isn't just interested in having people kneel before him, he's trying to save Krypton. It's his entire motivation. It's literally the thing he was born to do, and he can do nothing else.
There's a central theme in this film of choice. Kal-el is a special child because he's the first Kryptonian born in centuries who isn't genetically engineered specifically for one purpose. His life is filled with choice. Growing up on the Kent farm his father in one scene lectures him on the importance of choice, and choosing who he'll be. Later he's faced with two difficult choices, first to choose between himself and the Earth, and later between his entire race and that of his adoptive home. And in the end, it's Zod's lack of choice that is his tragic downfall.
Then we have Jonathan Kent, the first of my major complaints with the film. This film's Jonathan Kent is a loving father with some tender moments, but he's also a cold-hearted cynic who, rather than instill his son with a deep sense of morality and the importance of the value of life, he encourages him to disregard lives, to put himself ahead of others. There was a great controversy made over the "maybe" line in the trailers, where young Clark asks his father "What was I supposed to do, just let them die?" and his father answers with "maybe." I was okay with that line in the trailer, but in the actual film the line is delivered with more conviction. Jonathan is scolding Clark for saving a bus-load of children and never actually acknowledges that it was ultimately the right thing to do. He believes so much in humanity's worst nature that he would rather let a bus-load of children die than risk Clark's exposure to our undeserving world.
Most of my problems with the film actually come after Clark finally puts on the suit. It was at this point I began to notice at this point the odd pacing of this film. A lot of scenes are short and lack any sense of transition. Characters will just be having a conversation and then suddenly they're in a different scene and a different location. At one point Meloni and Richard Schiff are discussing a plan to fight Zod with a missile, and it seems like moments later they were just suddenly on the plane. The entire film is like this.
And then there's the big spoiler, Zod's death scene.
This was the thing that turned me off to the film completely when I read it in a review. I was going to skip the film were it not for getting a free preview screening. Superman doesn't kill. Superman never kills.
So Superman kills Zod at the end.
And it wasn't that bad. It was well handled. I mean, as important as it is that Superman values all life and would never kill, I can also accept that this is a contrivance of the stories and the situations he's in. Any man put into the right situation could be forced to kill, and that's what happens in the end. Zod puts him in a situation where his ONLY choice is to either kill Zod or allow innocent humans to be killed by him. Again it all comes down to choice. And in the end Superman chooses to kill Zod. He begs him to stop, pleads with him not to make him do it, and then is broken by the act of taking a life. It was a powerful scene.
And here's my problem with it: this movie didn't earn it.
This Superman is never shown to have such a profound sense of the value of life. His primary moral figure was a man that encouraged him to let people die. And the first thing he does after putting on the cape, the very first thing, is a prolonged non-stop fight with Zod and co., ultimately ending in his killing of Zod. He never spends any time AS Superman before Zod shows up. He never spends time being the hero, saving lives, inspiring hope. He just puts on the cape and then Zod happens. So, essentially, Superman's first act as Superman is to kill someone.
Ultimately my disappointment was that I never felt like this Superman cared, truly cared, about the lives he was saving.
Sure, we do see him perform some rescues, the aforementioned oil rig and bus-load of children, but all of that is before he becomes Superman, before he becomes that symbol of hope. The only thing we see him do as Superman is just fight Zod and his minions in a series of long, drawn-out action sequences.
So yes, Zod's death scene was well-handled and it doesn't bother me as a scene, but I don't think that it was earned.
Finally, as a parting thought, while I was leaving the cinema I went into the bathroom and overheard a small boy of nine or ten exclaiming excitedly to his friend about how "Superman killed General Zod Mortal Kombat style!" Our hero, the Man of Steel.
Red Riding Hood (2011)
From someone who absolutely despises Twilight and everything it represents
I was totally expecting this movie to be every bit as awful as the Twilight films/books that clearly inspired it. I wanted to hate this just as much as I hate that other franchise, so it is with significant reluctance that I have to admit that, ultimately, it's not that bad. In fact, it's pretty darn good. The premise certainly solid, a Gothic horror re-imagining of the Little Red Riding Hood as a werewolf story. This has been done many times before, most notably in the film The Company of Wolves by Neil Jordan, so it's a proved idea. And while Company of Wolves is an excellent film, it's also one that doesn't follow a conventional narrative structure. The visuals of the film are striking, though the sound stage sets couldn't possibly be more obvious. Everything about the sets look too bright, too colorful, to pristine, to planned and staged, which takes some of the credibility away from the medieval village setting. Sometimes you can even see where the floor of the studio meets the wall that they've added a matte painting onto in post production. But despite this, after some time it becomes sort of quaint, as if you're watching a stage performance, which may just have been the director's intent. The characters are fairly bland archetypes, but unlike that other franchise, Amanda Seyfried at least has some acting talent and the two young men pining after her are generally likable. I've heard a lot of complaints about the CG werewolf, but I thought it was as good as a CG wolf can possibly get and definitely better than the ones in Twilight. Most importantly, the romance is not the only plot driving the movie, and the mystery of who the werewolf is actually takes center stage and manages to remain compelling until the big reveal. Overall, it's certainly not as good as it could have been, but so much better than I had expected it to be.
The Dark Knight (2008)
I'm sold.
So I just saw The Dark Knight. In a word, awesome. But where to begin?
First of all, I'm not going to say that this is the best movie ever like most reviews have done (it's actually ousted The Godfather as number one of all time on IMDb's top 250). Having yet to see The Godfather, I can't comment there, and I'm hard pressed to give any film the label of Best Ever.
I love the new design for Batman, and I love that it explains why he changes the design.
I'm finally starting to love Christian Bale as Batman. I didn't think Begins was as great as everyone says, and even though he's easily the best Batman in film so far, I still didn't like the film that much. Although it has been growing on me more. I never liked how insistent Hollywood is that everything has to be believable and explained. Batman Begins attempted to take Batman into the real world and make it totally believable, and I prefer the superhero movies that just embrace the characters and designs of the comics. I was weary of the way the Joker would be handled, again because I wanted to see the comics fully embraced.
Now, having seen Dark Knight, I'm sold. This film series may not embrace all the look and style of the comics (I would have loved to see an Alex Ross or Jim Lee style of thing with Batman big and epic and agile), but what they do embrace, and whole-heartedly is the essence of Batman, the character, the ambiance.
This film is dark.
Batman is a detective, a crusader, a vigilante. That's the Batman of this film. This isn't so much a superhero movie as a dark and deeply engaging crime drama. There are mob bosses, dirty cops, idealistic attorneys, a psychotic serial killer and in the middle of it all: Batman. And considering that, I loved it.
As to the Joker. This is what all the buzz is really about. Everyone is raving about how great Heath Ledger is as the joker and I think that this is due in part to the tragedy of his death. But that aside, the truth is that yes, Joker makes this movie. He is definitely the best part of the film. The Joker in this film is a villain easily on par with Hannibal Lecter in the sense that he is both evil, sadistic and yet strangely lovable as a character. You don't want to see him win, you just want to see more of him and his crazy, evil antics. As a character, Heath Ledger is to the Joker what Johnny Depp was to Jack Sparrow. He's funny, crazy, unpredictable. He has no origin story here, no explanation. He has no motive. He is a pure and glorious anarchist and a magnificent bastard. His introduction to the mafia bosses is arguably the best scene in the entire film. Also the scene with the infamous "Why so serious" tag line.
Gary Oldman continues in this film as the best Jim Gordon ever, and I'm really falling in love with Michael Caine as Alfred, especially toward the middle of the film.
Also great is the introduction of Harvey Dent. This film gives us Harvey Dent/Two-Face as a real character with an arc rather than just throwing him in arbitrarily. As the slogan says, you will believe in Harvey Dent.
As to the bad. There are a few moments that just can't work, specifically Batman jumping out of a penthouse window ten stories up without doing anything to slow his fall, yet somehow surviving after he lands on a car. I think they want you to believe that Batman just knows how to properly take a fall, but he takes some ridiculously impossible ones.
Also, even though I said I'm starting to love Bale as Batman, the way he does the voice is kind of silly at times. Specifically in a scene near the end, where he's supposed to be giving this touching soliloquy, but it just comes out comical (to the point that I really almost began to laugh) when . . . he just . . . can't . . . say more . . . than a . . . couple . . . of words in . . . a strangely . . . broken . . . sentence filled with . . . odd gaps of labored . . . breathing. It's like seeing a parody of William Shatner doing Batman, not even the actual Shatner, but the over-exaggerated parody of Shatner. Sure he's taken some damage by this point and would be out of breath, but he doesn't look hurt at all, and he's been doing this to some degree the entire movie.
Those are really my only complaints with an otherwise flawless Batman movie. Like I said before, I never thought Begins was as perfect as everyone else seems to, but this time around I'm sold and looking forward to what comes next. Here's hoping they bring the Joker back. Some people may call it disrespectful to Ledger to replace him after such stunning work, but the character lives on. I would love to see someone else take up the mantle and carry on the character in Ledger's style in the next film.
Eragon (2006)
Not that terrible
When I first heard about this movie I was really disappointed to hear that such an undeserving book was getting the film treatment. But given it's popularity I tried to read some of the book for a couple chapters before realizing there were better things to do with my time. So yeah I haven't actually read the book but I got the general idea. I think one of the reasons why this movie gets so much hate is because it's source material really didn't deserve the attention it got. The book is nothing special or new. It's some of the most generic fantasy ever written and the only reason it became popular was because it was written by a teenager and was sold right next to Harry Potter. Since most Harry Potter fans haven't otherwise read fantasy when bookstores pushed it on them they were taken in by the similar cover art. Now, I don't think the book is terrible, just generic. It doesn't bring anything new at all to fantasy, but there is a lot of generic fantasy, hence the term, and there's no reason to hate this more than the rest. Except that Eragon became wildly popular for no reason and they made a movie about it when there are a lot of other great fantasy books that could have made great movies instead of this. Anyway, I went to see the movie, with some fans of the book, just because there were dragons in it and there are so few dragon movies. So from the start I expected this movie to be terrible. I wasn't very disappointed. It is a bad movie but it's not completely bad. I've seen much worse. Overall this movie is pretty decent. The biggest flaw I found in it is that there aren't any characters, just people. No one in this entire movie has a personality. There all just people dressed up as stereotypes with nowhere to go. There's the peaceful but serious farm boy, the serious but peaceful mentor, the dangerous but kind rogue, the strong but feminine princess, and the kind but aggressive dragon. Even the villains were bland. If they had been over-the-top maniacal laughter villains it would have been stupid but at least it would have been something. These characters go through the whole movie as though they jut don't care what's going on. Also the pacing goes a lot faster than it should with a story that, if you were interested enough to follow, would be a little difficult to do so. Anyway, with all that it's still not absolutely terrible. It's just plain. If you like dragons and fantasy and are in the mood for something generic with some decent effects sequences than this movie's okay.
George and the Dragon (2004)
Some of the worst Sci-Fi Channel garbage ever
I saw this on the Sci-Fi Channel so I knew it would be bad to start with but I was surprised at how much worse it was than expected. The CG effects on the dragon were terrible, even for the Sci-Fi channel and the writing was pathetic. I couldn't tell if this was supposed to be that stupid as a joke or if it just came out that way. The only redeeming quality of this movie is that it's so terrible it's almost funny, especially the part where Patrick Swayze's knight character goes home to his Knight father who has retired after losing his legs and is now bed-ridden in his armor for the sole purpose of letting the audience know he was a knight. The majority of the movie focuses around an enormous dragon egg that hatches into a not-so-enormous baby dragon with some of the worst CGI I've ever seen. This was just awful.
'Salem's Lot (2004)
The closest thing to a scary vampire movie
This was a great movie for fans of vampire films who are sick of the recent trend of Gothic tragedy films inspired by Anne Rice. I like Anne Rice but every now and then I want to see a movie where the vampires are evil and frightening. The interesting thing about this movie was that it actually succeeds in making vampires scary and ominous. Modern cinema has become so obsessed with the idea of vampires as a sexual metaphor that they've forgotten that they were originally meant to be figures of fear. This movie goes back to that in a great way. It's hard to think of vampires as being scary when you consider all the weaknesses they have and the fact that everyone knows what those weaknesses are, but this film takes that into account and still keeps them more frightening than any other vampire film ever has. This isn't a perfect movie though. It's incredibly long and the small town it's set in is filled with every depressing small town cliché you could think of. And although it makes vampires scary that doesn't mean it's a really terrifying movie, it's just as scary as a vampire movie can get. So if you want to see a movie that shows how frightening vampires can be check this one out.
Hogfather (2006)
This could not have been better!
I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett and I've always wished to see a live action movie of any of the Discworld books, particularly of either of my two favorite books, Witches Abroad and Hogfather. Those are my two favorite books of all time...ever! I read somewhere that Sam Raimi was in negotiations to make The Wee Free Men, and, while incredibly excited, I was a little disappointed because as great as that book is it's somewhat removed from the rest of the Discworld series. And then when I was telling a friend about this he mentioned to me he had heard something about a Hogfather movie. I had heard nothing of this myself and I doubted that what he heard was true but I hurriedly looked it up on IMDb. My jaw dropped when I discovered that there wasn't just going to be a Hogfather movie but that it had already been done. Getting to watch it was blissful. This was a perfect adaptation. The casting was perfect, the effects were excellent, the designs were spot on. Everything about this was great! The best part of the film is Death who was even better than I imagined him. Marc Warren's performance as Teatime gave a wonderful new sense of madness to the character. And Susan looked as if she had walked right out of one of Paul Kidby's illustrations. I can't wait to get this movie on DVD, although it doesn't seem as though there will be a region 1 version, but I can hope.
AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)
A great movie for fans of the Alien and Predator films and AvP comics and games
As a fan of both the Aliens and Predator films, and especially the Alien vs Predator PC games, I thought AVP was a great movie. It wasn't perfect but it's far from the over-exaggerated garbage that most reviews seem to feel it is. Ideally, the Alien Vs Predator movie should have been set in the Aliens timeline, on some colonial world with the marines in the center of the conflict. When I first heard that AVP would be set in present day Antarctica, I thought that would be the biggest mistake of the film. But I think it worked out great. I especially love how the film establishes the beginning of the powerful and ominous entity later known only as "The Company." I've heard a lot of people complain about Lance Henriksen being in this film as though it breaks continuity with the previous films, but I think it works to establish continuity as it was intended to. Henriksen plays Charles Bishop Weyland, the founder of the Weyland corporation and the person that the Bishop android would later be modeled after and whose descendant would try to coerce Ripley into helping the company. The film begins with Weyland's company discovering a pyramid in Antarctica and building a team of scientists to go be the first to discover it. Meanwhile the predators are on their way to begin a hunt. They show up and resurrect a queen alien that's been kept frozen inside the pyramid. The queen starts producing eggs for the unsuspecting explorers walking into the pyramid. The characters are all pretty forgettable canon-fodder that get killed faster than they should. To the credit of the director, some effort is clearly made to develop the characters, but the very nature of the film restricts the amount to which one could do so. This movie is Alien Vs Predator after all, so a lot of it is going to be about them. My biggest complaint with the characters is that the one woman who brings a gun, which is pointed out in a great scene, never gets a chance to use it before being arbitrarily killed. The aliens look great in this movie and I love the idea of the hero alien with the cross-hatch markings on its head. Now the problem with the aliens is that they grow from facehugger to chestburster to full grown xenomorph in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days as in the previous films. This fact is made even more prominent by the fact that the pyramid changes every ten minutes, so it only takes about twenty minutes for the entire xenomorph life cycle. But the length of the alien life cycle is never really specified in any other film so one could assume that it varies depending on conditions. And, even though twenty minutes is a bit ridiculous considering the amount of growth they go through, it's a movie; it doesn't have to be perfectly believable. If this is the only complaint one could have with the aliens, then it's not enough to ruin the movie, unless you're the kind of person who wants to hate this movie. Then there's the predators. I'm not sure what's wrong with them exactly. They just seem to be too big. I don't think they're really much bigger than in the other predator films but they just seem bigger. It especially seems that they are too thin at the waist and too wide at the shoulders. But this is a minor complaint and barely noticeable if you're not obsessing over it. Now we come to the meat of the film: the fights. The big problem with the fights is that they happen to fast with the camera too close and shaking. This is something that's become all too common in a lot of action movies lately. Every new action movie has to be faster and more intense than the last. So to make it more intense, let's put the camera right into the action, so now you can only see an arm or a leg flailing about. But that's not intense enough, so let's shake the camera so it seems like there's more happening. All these things combined together make for a bit of a mess. But, again, I don't want to over-exaggerate this. It's not as though the entirety of the fights do this, just some parts of them. The rest of the fights are great, and there are some really clever things that we've never seen before (I especially love the slow motion facehugger scene). And that's about the extent of complaints one could have with this film. As I said, overall, this is a great movie for fans of the Alien and Predator franchises, unless you're the kind of obsessive fan who wants to hate the film before you even see it and who is going to get hung up on some small issues.