Girl gets on a flight and sits next to a guy during a storm. In a drunk panic she starts spilling all her inner thoughts and secrets to him. Only to find out he's the big boss of the firm she works for. All this is in the trailer.
The leads are charming enough - Alexandra Daddario can do comedy, but when it comes to delivering lines about how ordinary she is... That doesn't quite make it. She's not remotely ordinary. But hey, that's a standard Hollywood flaw for these types of movies.
The film is short enough that it doesn't stick around and bore you. It never really surprises you either. Worth a watch if there's nothing nothing else.
Imagine lifting the single player story from Titanfall 2 - and then spaffing it up the wall.
Atlas is badly written, badly acted and a total mess. The FX are kind of well done, but you just don't care because it's so annoyingly awful in every other respect.
This movie had some potential. It's clearly low budget but with Colin Farrell it has a touch of class to it... but only while he is in it.
The story is a group of specially raised children who are intended to make a long voyage on a generation ship. Meaning they will live out their lives on a fairly smallish vessel, having children who will then have children, who will eventually colonise a new world.
Farrell's character volunteers to go along with the children as an older guide
About a quarter of the way in the children, now late teens, discover they have been drugged to quell their natural impulses. They come off the drug. The result: two of them decide to kill Farrell's character and things spin out of control.
Up until they bump him off, there is an interesting story about how the children will react as they slowly discover that Richard (Farrell) is lying... and in turn being lied to by mission control. Then... all gone and replaced with a dumb Lord of the Flies nonsense. With the teens finally realising at the end that what they really needed was a girlboss.
Starts with some promise and dies a horrible death. Avoid.
Detailed, obsessively. dedicated to the book.
If you haven't read the book (and I had not) then this series will need a second watch before it starts to make sense.
There is such a lot to take in, and it's told in a flashbacks jumping across time.
When I watched it the first time I missed so much detail - and still enjoyed most of it. Watching it again after a few months and so much slots into place this time.
It's well-acted (except for the western parts) and well-written... but it really does show that adapting a book for the screen does involve making changes. The written word allows you to go into more detail, slowly. The screen batters you with information at the same pace for all.
So either, read the books first or be prepared to watch the series again to get the full enjoyment of it.
As for its faults - it does feel like the timing is off. The series is very slow-paced until the 20+ episode and then seems to race for the finished.
Nevertheless it is worth the effort. They truly made the effort to pack everything in from the book (30 episodes of it).
This series is breathtakingly ambitious. The first season is science fiction as it should be done on TV. It didn't expect it to go even further in the second season.
The story begins, no spoilers, with the idea of the first humans who upload into computers and how this triggers the SF concept of "singularity". All I have told you so far is what you can read on a "premise" of the show.
The show is animated but don't let that pit you off. The voice talent is stellar. The story in season 1 takes its time to get going as it begins in the mundane and then launches into SF. Trust me when I tell you it's nothing compared to where season 2 is eventually going.
It's a well made and intelligent science fiction TV show and deserves your attention.
Zack Snyder's films are immensely frustrating. He clearly has bags of talent for striking visuals. He rarely seems able to turn that into a good film.
The same is, sadly, true of Rebel Moon.
OK, so it's clearly choosing to take The Magnificent Seven as an influence. Fine. That's a solid story to work with.
But this part 1 just blows it. It's annoying in almost every way - the constant slow motion, the lack of any logic. As you would expect, there are some really striking visual sequences, but they are just not enough to keep you engaged.
And it all ends in an empty sequence with characters you don't care about doing things you don't care about either.
And we've got part 2 coming - which you certainly aren't left eagerly anticipating.
Low budget. Contains mostly teens. That's not a good recipe... but... I have to say this is a small gem. The teens aren't annoying and the story is cleverly constructed - no-one is stupid or obnoxious.
The premise: A small group heads into a cave system only to find that it contains some very odd time effects.
I can't even remember why I ended up watching it, but it really took me by surprise and vastly exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations. Definitely worth a watch if you can find it.
This show is written by Orson Scott Card - if that puts you off because of the near-constant howling of outrage mobs - well shame on you.
It's made by Brigham Young University - The Mormons.
But don't let that distract you... as I did at first. This is a well made and interesting show. There's no religious lecturing in it... but it's quite unlike a lot of modern TV/movies. No gratuitous sex or violence... no crass woke... no LGBT inserts... but a lot of interesting SCIFI ideas.
The show really deserved a better fate than just one obscure season. It's perfectly enjoyable.
20 minutes.
That's how long I lasted. Twenty minutes into the first episode. Bad writing, bad acting, low quality FX. There's nothing at all to recommend it.
I want to give a show a chance, but I have my limits.
This shows a lot of promise. The tension builds as the mission progresses... and then suddenly it all ends. I understand there were major ructions at the studio and the director was fired. The result is a deeply unsatisfying ending - neither one thing nor the other.
Probably worth a watch as a historical curiosity.
The Offer is one of the best TV series I've seen for years.
It's a dramatisation of how The Godfather (1972) got made, told from Albert Ruddy's point of view. Ruddy starts out as a bored employee of Rand Corp and somehow gets himself a job as a producer after a pitching a highly successful TV show (Hogan's Heroes) and then through sheer cheek turns this into a shot as a film producer on a prospective book - The Godfather.
It grabbed me from the first few moments and held my attention through the entire 10 episode run. By episode 5 I was genuinely beginning to feel sad because I was now on the last half of the show - and it was coming to end. Not kidding.
It manages to be enthralling, scary and touching while dealing with gangsters, and even worse - Hollywood people. Outstanding moments include the odd couple bond between Coppola and Puzo. Puzo wrote the novel and worked with Coppola to turn it into a script. Ruddy putting them up in a house to work intensively on the script together is a source of genuine laugh-out-loud moments. It's no spoiler to say the film gets made, but all the twists and turns along the way might be.
It's a fabulous series and seems to have slipped under many people's radar too.
If you haven't seen it yet, I can highly recommend it.
The drug trials run by the US government are a potentially interesting subject.
This documentary largely fails to capitalise on the subject.
It has the same failing as many modern documentaries. It's only very tangentially about the Edgewood experiments. It's actually about the female journalist and her team of intrepid investigators. It's a "personal journey".
They even cut away from an interview with the doctor who was there to focus on the female journalist as she writes in her notebook while watching the interview.
It's such a rotten style of documentary and betrays the material.
Great stuff. I went into this with few expectations. The first episode looked good and it just kept on getting better.
Beautifully shot, well acted (use the Japanese audio and English subtitles)... it keeps you guessing. The only criticism I can actually think of is occasionally overdoing the extreme emotional close up (esp the end of the first hearts game)... but this is minor and probably personal taste.
This is a great series and it seems it's been renewed too. Nice.
MK Ultra was a top secret government program to test mind control techniques on people.
The words secret and test are the key there.
Lots of the MK Ultra program was voluntary, but this film focuses on something that always happens when you make things secret and throw money at it. You get abuses by those attracted to the idea of acting out their worst fantasies and doing so under the guise of fighting the enemy.
Without giving away spoilers, Dr Strauss (Anson Mount) is genuine in his desire to research whether LSD can help those with mental illness, addictions etc. He struggles to get funding. A benefactor shows up and Strauss slowly begins to realise his mistake.
Thankfully the film relies on showing not telling. It lets you try to work out what's happening. The result is an intense, grubby and depressing look at the darker parts of the MK Ultra story.
One criticism: the beginning has a scene linking the program to race. The rest of the film is obvious that it wasn't about race. No-one was spared - MK Ultra even preyed on their own CIA agents. It's a cheap addition and the film is better than that. Also, the film kind of skips over the role Doctors played in it.
The doctor here tries to correct his mistake. However like many of the worst excesses in human history, doctors (who should know better) were complicit and involved themselves in the MK Ultra abuses in full knowledge of what was being done.
Should you watch it? Yes. While you're at it... look up the facts of MK Ultra. It's not a conspiracy theory. When let loose and given secrecy large organisations like the state are extremely dangerous.
I'm old enough to remember the original Hellraiser (1987). That was a true horror film. There were horrible people, doing horrible things. It left you feeling really quite disturbed about the worst aspects of human nature.
The follow-up Hellraiser 2 (1988) managed to recapture a small part of that. But after that it was downhill fast. The sequels were nothing but parodies.
Well, for some reason, Hulu decided to remake it.
Shamefully, the film fails on nearly every level. It's not well written (terrible dialogue) and poorly acted. There's little horror and you simply do not care about anyone or anything happening in it. It doesn't give you a reason to care either. The Cenobites are not scary, or grotesque looking... they just look like cheap make-up and some bad CGI.
Like the later Hellraiser films It has more in common with trashy slasher flicks than anything else. Poorly done ones at that.
As is common today they gender-switched the main role. Did it add anything? Nope. In fact, I keep hearing about what a good performance Jamie Clayton was as The Priest. I don't know what they were watching. There isn't a performance, it's literally all make up and some lines read out flat. Look at the originals: Pinhead's character is all about small, slow movements and looming dread. He's literally an overwhelming threat and you are the prey. Not in this one though.
Or look at the secondary villain. In the original it's Uncle Frank, who is an awful person who fully deserves his fate. Even in the end as he's pulled apart by the Cenobites... he's drawn to it, and much as he tried to run he still wants what the Cenobites offer. In this new version... there's none of that same grimy, disturbing look into subcultures. It's all clean, boring and badly acted.
Watch Hellraiser (1987) and Hellraiser 2 (1988) and stop there. They did it better on much smaller budgets.
The film deserves more credit.
The original novel was well ahead of its time. The use of gifted children, train them, prepare them, shape them into exceptionally skilled players in what they believe is a video game.
You're seeing this happen all around you. Weapons are becoming remotely controlled... and even AI controlled. You need a very different set of skills from previous conflicts
This movie adaptation tries to cram a lot in to its running time and the result is not much breathing time.
Also, don't confuse Ender's Game (movie or book) this with YA fiction. This about young adults, but it's not just for young adults. It's far better than that. The novel originates from well before the tedious YA trend.
*** WARNING MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***
At the end you see the desperation of the formics... madly throwing themselves at the approaching ship that will end their planet if it makes it through. Sacrificing everything. They are doing the same thing Earth did at the beginning of the story as it was being "invaded" by the formics. The difference from then and now... Ender. Those who realised what was needed... found him, trained and prepared him and his friends. They lied to them... made them think it was all game preparing for the real thing. So he would sacrifice not-real people without a second thought to win the game. Those all made the difference. Were they wrong to do this? That's a question to answer for yourself. Should they have negotiated first, or taken a more measured approach rather than the "them or us" approach. Was it worth co-opting Ender and his team with lies to commit a genocide. An extended running time would have allowed it more time to breath and include the impact on the other children too.
As it stands, it is a good film and one that deserves more credit than it got.
This is clearly a well-budgeted and well-made show.
However, I was left feeling out of place with it constantly. Maybe it's my fault - I did watch it sporadically so I kept having to catch up with the thread of the story.
Nevertheless I just didn't connect with it and didn't feel the sense of danger that (I presume) I was supposed to feel.
The acting is fine and it's full of nice shots and cinematography. But it all felt very clinical - even with the subtitles (I find dubbing often puts me off) and left me baffled why I should care.
Absolutely spot-on sequel.
There's really nothing bad to say about this film. It hits every bit of fan service without being gratuitous and the story beats are pretty much perfect.
It hits the mid-point and everything is going wrong... and without spoiling things, Mav rescues the situation and it all plays out awesomely.
Into the final act... which again is almost perfect. It stretches a little with one attempt at fan service (those who've seen it will know what I mean), but at this point I didn't care. I was just enjoying the thrill ride.
I'm sure there's an element of rose-tinted glasses here. So many films have been disastrously bad in the last few years. This one represents a major return to form.
Thankfully the money it's raked in is demonstrating that real film-making is still needed. It's been an enormous hit. It should be pretty embarrassing that a return to a style of film from 30+ years ago was needed to show filmmakers the way forward. The money men are watching... get back to crowed pleasing.
Make films that people want to watch. Not full of politics you want to preach.
Ok, Morbius is not a great film... but honestly it's not quite as bad as people claimed.
Lehto isn't that bad and has to work with a pretty poor script.
The action sequences are pretty poor - confusing, poorly lit and with a slow-mo/pause to give you time to see what's going on. But it doesn't help much. It's all a blurry mess.
It's mostly crass, predictable and dull... but it's better than Venom.
I know, "better than Venom" is a very low bar. I actually did watch Morbius all the way through and even liked small parts. Venom (and its sequel) just had me fast forwarding chunks of it.
So... I suppose if you have some time to kill and it's on a service you already have, then it might be worth a watch. But it's not worth going out of your way to watch it.
This was supposedly based on the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov. Those novels were a retelling of "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon - with an SF setting.
However, this adaption has little or nothing in common with those novels.
You can basically split the series into two main threads. It's almost as if these two threads are written by different people - they differ so much in quality.
The Empire story actually works. The creators of the show added an new section about a genetic dynasty of clones ... it actually works. The segments about the empire and its decline are quite watchable. Machinations of power etc. The Emperors are well-acted, compelling even.
The Foundation story is awful. I mean really badly written and shockingly badly acted. It's also laced with woke drivel. I don't know how better to express how bad these parts are written and acted than to say... I actually ended up laughing at some of the lines and how they were delivered. It ditches the idea of psychohistory (or rather it pays it lip service) and in its place is a kind of silly story about uploaded consciousness and coin tosses.
But the main takeaway is this: the series has virtually nothing in common with the books. It's completely and utterly missing the grandeur and shocks of the original Foundation novels. This is mega-budgeted nonsense.
The entire industry of film and TV seems to have plumbed the dregs to fill up the acres of space needed for content these days. It's embarrassing.
Avoiding spoilers:
Unreliable narrator story
It begins quite effectively as the countryside where Harper stays get weirder and weirder.
It has some truly grotesque moments... but in the end it is deeply unsatisfying and really rather shallow.
Should you watch it? Well, if you're a fan of highly stylised film-making... sure. If you're looking for an intriguing or interesting film... no.
To be honest I flirted with the fast forward button several times.
Love, death and Robots gets off to a rocky start. The first episode "Sonnie's Edge" has beautiful imagery, but rapidly becomes crass. The second episode is annoying. I found myself fast forwarding through them. However... episode 7 is great. Then it's back to fast forwarding through episodes again... until episode 14 "Zima Blue", which is another good one.
So season 1 has 2 or 3 out of 18 episodes worth watching.
Season 2 has 8 episodes... with a few worth watching. So a higher hit rate.
Season 3 though... really seems to raise the game. Most of the episodes are worth the effort with some very entertaining and creepy efforts. "Night of the mini-dead" and "Swarm" being two standouts for me - episode 2 "Bad travelling" is also extremely well-made.
So stick with it. The quality is variable, but the 3 season seems to have much higher quality control, and the entire shows is a demonstration of how good computer graphics have become.
The bad:
The good:
Honestly I'm left kinda empty after watching it. The cameos fly past... the box ticking. It's all vacuous in the end and mostly doesn't make sense. I get it. Sometimes directors want to do go for a cool visual and ditch logic, but at least make an effort. This is mostly tiring to watch. Sam Raimi is a talented director (he made the 2002 Spider-Man) - and before any of that he made The Evil Dead movies - full of comedy horror. Lots of references to that show up in here.
Should you see it? I'd recommend giving it a miss to be honest, or catch it when it hits a streaming service.
The MCU hit its peak with Infinity War and tied that up with End Game.
But the movies and TV shows you are seeing now are long after Disney sunk its claws in and infected the movies/shows from the start. It's not worth saving now.
Remember it as it was.
Each episode is short - between about 35-45 minutes.
And honestly, that's it's only saving grace. The show starts well, with a NATO solider hijacking a plane and demanding it fly West immediately to avoid the sun. Ok... but that's about the only interesting thing in the show.
The rest is just some unlikely coincidences and a lot of manufactured interpersonal drama between the passengers and silly logic. The show is extremely low budget... and it shows by rarely if ever leaving the plane interior. There are some very rudimentary occasional FX.
That said, low budget isn't really a bad thing - see the movie Cube for example.
But Into The Night starts to become annoying as you realise that the story doesn't seem to be really going anywhere beyond the sun becoming lethal. There's no real expansion on the mystery and in my case I started fast forwarding through the episodes towards the end of S1.
And then you realise that S2 has just moved from one interior micro-budget set to another.
I honestly don't know whether I can pluck up the stamina for S2. Maybe I will fast-forward through it.
Wow... episode 5 goes wrong. Episodes 1-4 are pretty smartly written. They build the tension and intrigue - and have genuinely scary moments.
Episode 5 rams this into reverse, the episode bores you to death... and you suddenly have a flash of insight when the woke insert arrives. Who were the writers on this... well... 1-4 were written by men. Can you guess who wrote 5? Tip: it wasn't a man. It was a writer from the atrocious Cowboy Bebop adaptation.
Now to be fair, the middle part of seasons tend to be slower as they try to establish the characters more and save up money for a blow out at the end of the season... but even allowing for this, the episode is just childishly written and annoying.
I really hope the rest get back to 1-4 quality and they send the writer of 5 out to write greetings cards or something.
Bad. Basically unwatchable. I fast forwarded through most of it despite its relatively short run time.
The dialog is atrocious and the storyline is paper thin. None of the jokes land. It's just annoying and loud.
The original film has a dumb premise. A perpetual motion train engine that keeps running around the world on the oddly still maintained single global track - despite a global catastrophe freezing the entire world.
It never made a lick of sense.
But ok... the film used this conceit to tell a fairly tight story about class.
So why turn it into a TV series? Desperation for content perhaps.
The result is a boring mess that after a reasonably competent opening then follows it up by showing how infected with "modern" writing it is.
I managed to get three episodes in before I just couldn't bring myself to invest any more time or effort in it.
Great stuff. I went into this with few expectations. The first episode looked good and it just kept on getting better.
Beautifully shot, well acted (use the Japanese audio and English subtitles)... it keeps you guessing. The only criticism I can actually think of is occasionally overdoing the extreme emotional close up (esp the end of the first hearts game)... but this is minor and probably personal taste.
This is a great series and it seems it's been renewed too. Nice.
Are you looking for:
A Star War documentary about how things went down at Elstree in 1976... forget it. Well... this isn't for you.
On the other hand, if you are person who goes to cons and likes to meet people who were there as extras and minor roles (or major in the case of David Prowse), well then you'll probably enjoy it.
I'm the former. I wanted to watch a doc about what went on in 1976 so it wasn't much fun to watch really.
Still, it's well made and if you are interested in that subject probably worth a watch.
Clancy Brown is decent. The stories let him down... weak and silly for the most part.