Brave

Pixar, Pixar, Pixar. I have a strange relationship with that company. That is to say, I don't really see what the big fuss is about.

I mean, all the Pixar movies I've seen have been good, but none of them have really been fantastic. And I can't really even list any notable flaws and faults in them: I just can't get into 'em for some reason.

With that said: Brave. It's a movie about the red-haired Scottish princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald), who strives to be a warrior like all the menfolk around her, picking a special affinity for archery. This puts her in conflict with her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), who wants a proper daughter who minds her manners and marries a dashing prince.

Those who expect Brave to be an adventure with a you-go-girl protagonist will be disappointed. It's actually a pretty serious character piece focused on the relationship between Merida and her mother. I was actually surprised by how few locations the movie has, fooled by how proudly they were flaunting highland vistas early on.

I love how the movie looks and sounds. I mean, when I saw Tangled, my mind was blown by the fact that Disney managed to animate Rapunzel's hair. Now comes Merida and her red locks, and daumn, that's some pretty hair. As alluded above, the environments are really beautiful too. The music is fine on the ears (aside from the somewhat bland halfway-through song), and I can't help but adore everyone's Scottish accents.

Usually in animated movies, I tend to be annoyed by the comedy side cast, and gravitate more strongly to the protagonists and antagonists, but Brave provides an exception to the rule. The menfolk and their clan politics and boisterous noise were the highlight of the film to me. King Fergus (Billy Connolly) is a perfection of what Disney attempted with their characterisation of Zeus in Hercules: a loud, dumb, but lovable father figure. The chieftains and heirs of clans MacGuffin, MacIntosh and Dingwall are all funny and memorable characters too.

The film's plot is kind of formulaic, but it only gets predictable once you figure which formulaic plot they're going for. As soon as the movie starts in earnest, I feel it starts to get weaker. Despite the very strong start, it just didn't hold up my interest for the second half.

Overall, it's a good movie that's definitely worth checking out for all fans of Pixar, animation in general, Scottish history, and Celtic music. It's not a masterpiece, and aside from the advances in animating curled hair, I don't think it's a milestone in anything, but it's a good way to spend ninety or so minutes.

Summer Wrap-up (Spider-Man and Batman)

A dramatic re-enactment of this post

It's been two and a half months since my last update. Lots of stuff has happened in my life during the summer (a trip to Malta and being approved for college, for example), but I've only seen two movies in the cinema. I didn't write reviews because the first one I saw was so bad I couldn't make myself review it, and then I felt like I couldn't review the second until I'd reviewed the first.

To catch up and get started with the autumn season, here's my thoughts on them:

The Amazing Spider-Man:

A wretched pile of shit, and the worst kind of superhero movie. The Amazing Spider-Man is a tale of Peter Parker as you've never seen him before: a bland non-character with no defining traits, whose role in the story and overall personality are whatever the writer feels like making them at any given moment. His stalker-crush Gwen Stacy falls in love with him for no adequate reason, other than because [insert your own Twilight comparison here].

The Lizard looks like crap and has motives almost as vaguely explored as Peter's. The story is bloated with way too many subplots, some of which never get any kind of resolution since this is assured to get a sequel due to the presence of Spider-Man in the title. Awkward pacing and dialogue, lame performances and so-so action scenes finish the unholy combination of elements which make up a movie that manages to only be the second-worst film I've seen this year because I happened to see This Means War.

Also, Peter Parker skateboards. Seriously, fuck this movie. Seeing Spider-Man raped like this, I can finally understand people who get really personally upset about Michael Bay's Transformers.

The Dark Knight Rises:

A worthy, if a bit shoddy, end to the trilogy, with surprisingly large ties to the Batman comics which the previous two movies seemed to be afraid of associating themselves with. The villains work damn well, the directing and dialogue are awesome, and the music is fantastic. The film drags a lot, though: it feels like it's two scripts mashed into one.

There are some minor plot holes that I only realised afterwards, and Batman still sounds really funny. The final twist about Bane is really unnecessary, and seems to only exist to please comic nerds. It was a really poor choice to undermine the climax of the film with that move. I really liked the ending, even if it was a bit cheesy and predictable.

Batman Begins ends up being my favourite of this series, because I really liked the Gotham in it, and it felt the most like a Batman movie.

The Avengers was my favourite superhero film of the summer, but it's such a different movie than The Dark Knight Rises that I don't think you can really compare them on any objective level. Apples and oranges.

Snow White and the Huntsman (rant)

I'm a bit late on this one, but I guess it's better late than never. As far as I know, the general word on the street about this movie is that it's "not as bad as it seems". I respectfully disagree.

Well, not so respectfully. By the way, this review is going to be considerably more spoilery than what I usually write, so if you possibly believe your "enjoyment" will be hampered by knowing plot details, turn back now. Know, though, that I have little positive to say about the movie.

Snow White and the Huntsman is damn bad. Really bad. Laughably bad. It's a two-hour fantasy spectacle with next to nothing fantastical or spectacular about it, with some of the worst casting I've ever seen in my life. I don't think I've ever before complained about casting as a part of a movie. Sure, I've done it about individual characters, but never as a whole. I don't think there's a single character in this film who's cast well.

Where do I start? The name of the film is completely misleading. Did you know that the Prince Charming character still exists in this retelling? There's actually a love triangle. The huntsman (who is never given another name in the film, in some sort of attempt at "deep and meaningful"), played by Chris Hemsworth, is really arbitrary to the movie. His relationship with Snow White is barely developed at all, and in the end he just leaves when she's crowned Queen.

Snow White (Kristen Stewart) herself is one of the blandest, least interesting heroines I've seen in a movie in a long time. Her character is so inconsistent it's almost impossible to name any sort of qualities about her personality. They try to paint her as the Super-Good Holy Mega-Pure Maiden of Destiny, but she doesn't really come off as especially pure in spirit at all. She acts like any person who's being first imprisoned and then pursued. Later, before the laughably bad action finale, she suddenly becomes this fierce military leader just because, with no kind of explanation other than "it's her destiny to win". If you're trying to go for the Pure Maiden Who Can Ride the Unicorn and Is Flocked Around By Animals archetype, you are not allowed to make that character a military leader who rides a horse into battle and swings a sword to kill people. Read The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren sometime. In it, the characters discuss this dilemma.

The Queen (Charlize Theron) is one of the few enjoyable things about the movie, in the same sense that Bruce Payne is the most enjoyable thing about Dungeons and Dragons (playing the respectful role of That Blue-Lipped Guy): she is unintentionally hilarious. I couldn't stop laughing almost every time she was on-screen. The completely original character of the Queen's brother Finn is also really funny, which is partly because the character isn't the least bit threatening and partly because he sports the funniest haircut I've ever seen. That hairdo is so silly that there are no pictures of it online. I guess the actor demanded to be kept out of the marketing.

After Snow White escapes into the forest, the bad guys hire the Huntsman to track her. He immediately chooses to save her instead and they run from one horribad action scene to another. The movie tries to justify the Huntsman's presence by saying that he is the only man who has ever went to the Black Forest and returned. Yet, when he guides the villains into the forest, he basically just says: "Wait here, I'll go get her." And then he follows her tracks and finds her nearby. The Queen's men didn't need him at all, it seems, because it's later established they have a tracker of their own. The titular characters then escape through the forest and find this hidden village. The Queen's minions show up there within hours. They followed the heroes' tracks through the forest? I thought only the Huntsman was able to navigate through! Why do you lie to me, movie?

To skip ahead a bit, there's the part with the apple about half an hour before the end. It's established that Snow White is the only one who can kill the Queen, and the Queen can gain eternal youth by killing Snow White. So she poisons the girl and then proceeds to incredibly slowly drain her soul or whatever. The other good guys show up, and the Queen flees. Why? They can't kill her! The only person in the world who can kill her is comatose in the ground! JUST KILL HER FRIENDS AND THEN TAKE YOUR TIME IN FULFILLING YOUR PLANS! AAAARGHBAGFHG!

So here's the very short list of good things: I kinda like the concept of women committing self-mutilation to stay under the Queen's "fairness radar". That was clever, and actually carried dark ideas that could have been explored more if the movie wasn't preoccupied with trying to be super-hip for the young-uns or whatnot. Secondly, the visuals for the fairy forest are initially really cool, and I like the design of most of the stuff. Though that changes quickly with some of the worst CGI magpies I've ever seen. They look like something out of a 90s educational feature with a special effects budget of fuck all. Thirdly, the Queen's glass-shard minion would have been really cool if basically all of its screen-time hadn't been in the trailers already (and if it wasn't basically stolen from Medi-Evil).

It's just a really bland and dumb movie. I only got this upset about it in retrospect, when I realised it had initially fooled me into thinking it was average. Don't go see Snow White and the Huntsman. It has horrible performances (both bland and overblown in nature), incredibly large plot holes, very weak drama and suspense, and insults the intelligence of its audience.

Also, there's eight dwarves. Why?

Prometheus

Welcome back to Sci-fi (and horror, I guess), Ridley Scott! We missed you very much!

Prometheus is a prequel to 1979's Alien, though only in the sense that it's set in the same universe. Don't expect facehuggers and chestbursters, or for Ellen Ripley to show up. The film is intimately tied with the Alien mythos, but still works as a standalone story. The best thing is that it completely and utterly exiles the two Alien vs. Predator films from continuity by giving Wayland Industries an origin that's completely inconsistent with the one told in them. Yaaaay.

In the late 21st century, an archeologist couple find cave paintings from Scotland and compare them with carvings and pictures from half a dozen other parts of the world. All seem to depict the same constellation in the sky, along with Ancient Astronaut fuel. Wayland Industries funds a trillion-dollar expedition to an Earth-like moon revolving around a planet found near one of these depicted stars, with the belief that humanity's creators ("Architects") can be found there. After a few years of stasis, the crew wakes up and sets to explore this world, but the scientists discover that the company may have ulterior motives for funding the trip...

The film has a really interesting cast of characters, aside from a couple of extras with no lines, who are kind of distracting because they don't show up for most of the movie and when they do, you've most likely forgotten them. The main characters are really memorable, though. You've got the archeologist couple (played by Logan Marshall-Green and Noomi Rapace), who are kind of naïve and optimistic, which is why the most horrible things happen to them. Charlize Theron plays the cold-hearted Wayland representative, while Michael Fassbender does a stunning job as David, the Synthetic crew-member.

Prometheus is a horror movie, but thankfully doesn't have many jump scares. It's the atmosphere of desolation and uncertain doom that hangs over the setting that makes it eerie. What made Alien so scary in the first place was how, well, alien the threat was. Over time, we've learned exactly how Xenomorphs work, which is why they work better for action than horror nowadays. Prometheus throws a curve ball by featuring original monsters that work by their own rules. I really hope that other directors take a hint and start relying more on this kind of horror instead of cheap scares.

The design for the movie is great, with fantastic sets, props and costumes. It's obvious the creative team has spent a lot of time thinking about how everything works on the spaceship and the alien structures the crew explores. Not all of it is crammed in as exposition, mind you. The film raises way more questions than it answers, and it deliberately mysterious regarding things such as whether David has real emotions and many things about the aliens.

Prometheus isn't perfect, though. There's one action scene near the end which feels like it's taken from a completely different movie, the dialogue has some really awkward moments (most of them with Theron's character), and the film maybe goes a bit too fast near the end and doesn't stop to catch its breath before the climax. Also, pointless 3D that adds nothing. Oh, and the trailer spoils a huge detail about the film. If you've managed to either avoid the trailer or forget it, don't watch it!

Nevertheless, I really recommend it. This is the perfect way to pitch an original sci-fi movie to Hollywood today: have it be tangentially related to a really famous film for marketing purposes, but have the main plot be completely standalone. I've heard talks about Prometheus 2 being a possibility, and I'm kinda torn about that. In my opinion, the Alien saga can end here, but if they can think of a really good plot for another picture... why not?

(Mini-review) A Dangerous Method

Characters in reverse order of importance.

Hey kids! Do you like David Cronenberg? (The correct answer is yes.) Do you like Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen? (Also yes.) Do you like Keira Knightley? (Ehh...) Do you think psychology is interesting? (Hell no.) Whatever answers you gave, maybe you ought to go see A Dangerous Method.

It's a movie about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein (Fassbender, Mortensen and Knightley, respectively), whose personalities clash all over early 20th century Europe. Friendships turn to rivalry, sharing of thoughts becomes theft of ideas, and love is tainted by envy and guilt. Deep discussions about sexuality, the nature of science, Wagner, and ethics are had.

The actors are fantastic. I never knew Keira Knightley had this much range, and Fassbender is quickly climbing his way up among my favourite contemporary actors. Mortensen is almost unrecogniseable from Lord of the Rings, but damn he does a good Freud. He's like this passive-aggressive douchebag father figure, and I found it very easy to relate whenever Jung ranted about how obnoxious the man is.

The film's weak part is the editing and story structure. There's way too few characters, in my opinion. We don't really see the psychologists interact with that many patients, so in the end they talk about psychotherapy way more than they actually practice psychotherapy. The transitions from scene to scene are way too sudden, and sometimes it'd hard to keep track where the characters are, currently, and how long it's been since the last scene.

What else... it's got beautiful scenery and really good Wagner-inspired music. Not much else to say than that. It's an artsy movie, and yet, I think it may be David Cronenberg's most mainstream production since The Fly. By the way, Cronenberg, I'm sorely disappointed by the lack of psychedelic mindfuck dream sequences in this film. Even Dead Ringers had one. Don't be afraid to be you!

The Avengers

The huge crossover film which the Marvel movie continuity has been building up to, The Avengers is a Joss Whedon blockbuster about Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) teaming up to fight Thor's evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is poised to take over Earth. However, "teaming up" is easier said that done, and Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to do a lot of managing to keep the team from tearing itself apart before Loki and his allies from another dimension can.

Finally, we get a movie that depicts superhero comics accurately: you need to know the central characters and premises of about half a dozen different stories to understand anything that's going on. Yay!

I was kind of wary about this film because of two things: The trailers mostly focused on a huge metropolitan battle that was cut so that it looked like it was taken right out of Transformers 3, as well as Robert Downey Jr. doing his thing, which I feel is starting to get old. Well, screw marketing, because once again it has done a great job at making a good movie look bad. Not only is that action scene they hyped way better when you don't have to butcher it to keep the invading army from appearing on screen, but they picked the worst jokes in the movie for their adverts. Not only does Downey get a lot of good lines, but everyone does. There's a surprising lot of comedy, and every character gets to crack jokes, not just the clown.

Thor and Captain America both had pacing as their biggest issue. Cap had way too little stuff happen in between his becoming a superhero and the final battle. Thor took its sweet time starting, and then had way too much build-up to a way too small climax. Avengers gets this just right. We already know these characters, there's no need to establish them any more. Let's just start off with the crisis presenting itself, then get the characters together, and then see what we can make happen with them. I'll admit I was getting worried about a quarter way in that the movie is going to suffer from having too many subplots, but thankfully most of them are resolved by the way the final action climax hits home. The movie is two hours and a third, but it accomplishes so much that you'll swear there's no way they fit all that in one hundred and forty minutes.

The performances are really good. I never saw Ed Norton's Hulk for comparison, but Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic Bruce Banner. He has the body language of a person who's trying really hard to keep themselves in check. All the returning cast keep up the high quality up, but to my surprise the standout star of the film was Tom Hiddleston. I was kind of indifferent toward Loki in Thor, because he was way too obviously evil but they tried to play him as this tragic character. Here, he's past being sympathetic, so Hiddleston gets to be a straight-up villain, and it works greatly. He does his slimy villain speeches, he addresses the people he wants to rule, he gets arrogant and he gets furious. It's just a really good basic evil villain, who is still kept fresh with expert writing.

The action is really well-done. All the characters get to shine, and their individual superpowers are used well together and never conveniently discarded to fit a scene better. The big battle scenes flow well, and you can keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. There's this really great sweeping battle shot that I can't really describe to you all: it has to be seen to be believed. I think that Loki's evil army allies are maybe a little bit too... Stormtroopery, though at least unlike Stormtroopers, they don't get taken down by teddy bears (who would be the New York police department in this allegory, I guess).

The 3D was... okay, I guess. There was one scene early on where I had trouble telling what was happening because it was so dark, but other than that I was never bothered. There were a couple of cool 3D shots, mostly having to do with Hawkeye's crazy arrow skills, but I doubt you'll be missing much if you see it in regular 2D.

Overall, it's just a damn good film, with a tightly packed and well-crafted plot, lots of interesting and memorable characters, some good humour, great action and superhero goodness. Dark Knight Rising has to work its ass off to surpass this for the best superhero film of the summer.

Iron Sky

You guys saw Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, right? I hope you did. That movie kicked ass, considering it was made for practically no money during the makers' free time.

So, what if the same guys made a movie with a budget of 7.5 million €, and decided to skip the specific parody and instead focus on a more broad sci-fi concept?

You'd get Iron Sky, a movie about space nazis who escaped WW2 to the moon, and now decide to bring the fight back to an Earth that forgot about them.

And it is fucking awesome.

I'll admit, I'm not impartial about this film: it's a Finnish production, and I'm a huge fan of Star Wreck. However, I think Iron Sky has a lot going for itself in addition to the freaking awesome concept. The C-list actors they got to play in the movie are really good, the script is unconventional and has some really clever satire, the music is fantastic and the special effects are almost perfect. I really hope this film gets any kind of proper distribution around the world.

Okay, but in an attempt to be a bit more objective: The main plot of the film is about an astronaut named James Washington, who gets sent to the Moon as a publicity stunt to get the president of the USA reelected, and to snoop around for a sci-fi fuel called Helium 3. There, he runs into the aforementioned nazis, and gets taken prisoner. The two people in charge of his captivity are Klaus Adler, the second-in-command of the Moon-Führer, and his fiancé Renate Richter (no relation to the vampire-hunter family). Once they discover Washington's iPod, they find out it has enough processing power to run their ultimate doomsday weapon, and demand him to take them back Earth and show them where they can acquire a new palm-sized supercomputer (one with a full battery).

The movie's pacing and structure are interesting. Even somewhat troublesome. The first act of the film takes its time, making sure the audience understands the whole deal with the moon nazis as well as they should. However, when the characters arrive on earth the film suddenly jumps up in pace tremendously, and the transition to the final much-advertised battle is almost jarringly sudden. The structure makes it feel unlike almost any Hollywood movie, even though the production values are as good as a proper blockbuster's, and it's written so as to appeal to worldwide audiences. Star Wreck was originally just a bunch of silly internet videos made by a guy on his computer in the 90s, and a part of its parody was that Tampere, Finland is the central hub of all civilisation in the galaxy. In Iron Sky, Finland is only mentioned once, in what I consider the best joke of the film.

The most famous actor in the film is Udo Kier, who plays the Moon-Führer. Though he's been in Ace Ventura, Blade and Armageddon, to me he will always be Yuri from Red Alert 2. And really, when he commences der meteorblitzkrieg, the silly-yet-awesome craziness is like something right out of the Red Alert series (and RA3 had parachute bear troopers, so that's saying something). No one else present has any kind of cred I'm aware of, but I think the performances are really good overall. I respect that the creators of the film kept themselves out of the screen, lest they break disbelief with their accents.

The comedy is somewhat hit-and-miss. There's a couple of low-hanging-fruit gags here and there, and I know some people have criticised the film for making the president of the USA a Sarah Palin parody. However, I really liked a lot of the gags, even though they represent a kind of humour that may not work so well to audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. My main problem, though, is that the main characters aren't that interesting or well-developed. I didn't really care whether they survive in the end.

If this film is shown anywhere near you, go see it. The guys who made it deserve the success, and big Hollywood studios need to be made aware that there's an audience for over-the-top silly sci-fi fun.

Wrath of the Titans

The 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans was one of the most lame, clichéd, boring blockbusters of the past few years. It consisted of hard-to-follow action scenes, glued together by contrived exposition scenes and a plot that I want to nominate for most predictable of all time.

Wrath of the Titans is the fresh-out-of-the-oven sequel, and I can't believe they managed to outdo the original in badness.

Sam Worthington returns as Perseus, the demigod son of Zeus (Liam Neeson). In the end of the last movie, Zeus resurrected Perseus' love interest Io (despite Hades being the lord of the dead) so the two can live happily and mortally for all their years. In the beginning of the sequel, Io has died again, and left Perseus with a twelve(ish)-year-old son. Now that the gods are losing their power, the walls of Tartarus are... actually, none of this matters. They go and fight a bunch of monsters, as well as Ares and Hades, to save Zeus from being used as a catalyst to resurrect Kronos (SUPER BIG LAVA MAN). There's your plot.

None of the characters are consistent between movies. Zeus has suddenly turned into Jesus Christ, apparently so overwhelmed by his character development in the first movie that now he's become a xerox of the human-loving Zeus in Immortals. Also, his war with Hades at the end of Clash is handwaved away, so that Hades' "betrayal" at the beginning of Wrath can be made shocking. Perseus apparently got over his hatred of the gods so well that now he thinks he's "not worthy" because he's not a full god. Andromeda, damsel in distress of the first film, is now the Queen of Greece (what?) instead of being the Princess of Argos.

The movie isn't even consistent with itself. It's established early on that the Gods are becoming mortal because humanity doesn't pray to them anymore, but later on a big plot point is made about how the soldiers Perseus is saddled with have a reflex-like habit of praying to Ares, and if they do he'll know where they are. And here's another: At the end, the Redshirt army stays back to "hold the line" while Perseus finds the means to kill Kronos. ...except that they're not really defending anything. They're just camped out in a valley. What are they trying to keep Kronos' army from reaching, the stone wall behind themselves?

I mean, I can see why they just gave up: The first film had a terrible plot, and other than "Zeus vs. Hades", it didn't have much material to work on in a sequel. But at least it tried. I can't believe I'm giving Clash of the Titans this admission: it tried.

But okay, a worthless story can be forgiven for other strengths. Wrath's trailers showed some cool stuff with the Titans coming and killing people and stuff. Well, I guess they would be cool if the action scenes didn't suffer from some of the worst Too-Rapid-Editing-Syndrome I've ever seen, as well as really bad scripting. Perseus kills like three monsters by choking them. Come on, the least this movie can do is have some imaginative kills. And by "imaginative", I do not mean "Perseus suplexes Ares".

Oh yeah. Perseus suplexes Ares. There's professional wrestling in this movie about Greek Mythology.

There are only two good things about this film. Bill Nighy gets a fifteen-minute role as Hephasteus, whom he plays as "Davy Jones with an even thicker Scottish accent trying to act like Jack Sparrow". That's some of the funniest shit I've seen in a while. Also, Sam Worthington no longer has a buzzcut.

Don't see this film. It's shit. If you decide to ignore my warnings, then at least don't see it in 3D. The 3D is pointless and doesn't add anything to the movie. You'll just be wasting even more of your money.

John Carter (of Mars)

Neither of the Martian moons are that big.

I recently saw The Artist. However, I didn't end up writing a review, because really, what can I say about a movie that already won Best Picture and thus became the official target for all "OVERRATED OSCARBAIT" accusations in the world? In the same way, reviewing John Carter is kind of hard now that it's turned out to be the biggest box office bomb in the history of cinema. Disney is losing 200 000 000$ on this film. Now that's a statistic, which is hard to wrap your head around, so let's put it in perspective: Chronicle and The Artist (films far superior to John Carter) both cost fifteen million to make. In 1994, True Lies was the most expensive film ever made. It cost somewhere between 100 million and 120 million. With just the money Disney lost on John Carter, you could make True lies, Chronicle, The Artist and still have tens of millions to spend.

And this movie isn't even doing badly, per se. It has made plenty of money (most of it in the "foreign" market). It's just that when your movie costs a quarter billion to make, it has to be miraculously good or it bombs. Simple math.

But yeah, aside from preferring Chronicle and The Artist over it, what did I think of John Carter? Now that's another tough nut to crack. My brother pointed out that while I said it was "pretty okay" when I came from the cinema, I've been talking about it very excitedly since. The thing is, the movie isn't really good, so much as it's interesting. It's based on a series of books by the author of Tarzan, which premiered a hundred years ago. The books influenced the sci-fi and fantasy genres so much it's not even funny. Everything from Superman to Super Mario Bros lives in this franchise's shadow.

So when you're adapting something so archetypical to a movie in present day, you've got two choices. Either leave the plot as it was, and thus suffer accusations of unoriginality and clichédness, or change it around to make it more fresh, and thus suffer the wrath of purists. I don't have any answer to this dilemma, and I'm not sure if the choices to pick Answer #1 worked for Carter or not. Make no mistake: this plot is very predictable and bland, but what did you except from something a hundred years old? I went in to see interesting visual designs and cool action scenes, and I kind of got what I went in for. It's hard to be disappointed by the film that lost 200 million to its makers.

Oh, I assume you want to know what it's about, then? Well, I can't blame you. It's not like I knew the books that well until a month ago, and the marketing for this film has been atrocious. John Carter is a former cavalryman of the Confederate army of the United States. He tries to find gold in Arizona, but instead finds a strange bald man who tries to kill him. During a brawl between the two, John gets zapped to Mars. There, he gets tangled in a crazy-ass civil war where shadowy figures are manipulating one side. Also, since Mars has lower gravity than Earth, John can jump super-high and is super-strong. So he saves a princess and becomes a hero and settles down on a world that feels more like home than Earth does.

Now whether you can handle the clichéd plot like I can, that's up to you. But what I can criticise in a less subjective light is the script. The comedy is really bad (in fact, the more light-hearted beginning set on Earth is so out of tone that thinking back on it after the movie has ended feels like you're remembering a different film altogether). The romance comes off as annoying. I also think that the altered framing device they use, instead of the book's "he died and then he woke back on Earth" thing, is a really bad move. The last ten minutes of the movie are really bad and rushed.

The action works well most of the time. It succumbs to Too-Rapid-Editing-Syndrome (TRES) at times, but I have to say that the scene where John is jumping from airship to airship during a mid-air skirmish is damn impressive. Other than that, it's the basic good action-adventure thing you'd expect from a Disney blockbuster. The effects are really good, and all the Martian species look damn impressive, but there isn't really any jaw-dropping scene you'd expect from a quarter-billion film. As for the 3D... I actually forgot this film was in 3D until just now. It added jack shit to the movie, but at least it didn't harm it because most of it takes place in bright environments.

Yeah, overall John Carter is a pretty average film. I liked the mythology and the design of everything, and I didn't really get bored at any point. I'm not sure whether I can actually recommend it to anyone. As I said, it's more interesting than it is good. Take it for what it's worth.

Chronicle

The film isn't nearly this gray.

Chronicle is another attempt to "grittify" the superhero genre. No costumes, no epic secret origins, no secret identities. It's even shot in a "found footage" style (y'know, like Cloverfield, except from the POVs of several different cameras instead of just one) to tap into the spirit of the modern time. I don't think it's really revolutionary or anything, but I did like it.

The film's about three high schoolers (Andrew, Matt and Steve) who get telekinetic superpowers from exposure to a mysterious crystal in an underground cave. Andrew is the quiet, friendless geek who has a really hard life at home and has coincidentally decided to start filming everything with a camcorder. Steve is the party animal whom everyone in the school likes, and who tends to act impulsively when he gets excited. Matt is... uh, Andrew's cousin. Who likes philosophy, I guess.

The teens start to explore different uses for their powers. Much of the middle of the movie is like a youtube video of a bunch of idiots doing really reckless stuff, but only with superpowers instead of booze. However, things heat up and the guys' new-found friendship breaks apart in a conflict where each combatant has the power to rip through buildings with just a thought.

The characters and plot are an interesting thing to me: I tend to be really averse to stories (both real and fictional) where a bunch of idiots mess something up and act like jackasses while filming everything. However, Chronicle makes it work... most of the time. Even though the "training phase" takes place over several weeks of in-universe time, the three protagonists don't really seem to put "not being discovered" very high on their list of priorities. A lot of the time, their antics are actually kind of amusing, but every now and then there's a scene that makes me groan.

The performances are okay, but nothing spectacular, and the overall story is pretty well done, except for a weird character arc thing. I felt like the "training phase" in the movie stopped all character development on its tracks for about half an hour, and when the third act nears, Andrew and Matt suddenly get traits that were never there before. The film suddenly feels it needs to have a hero and a villain, and the characterisation shift just feels forced. Also, Andrew gets a scene with his mother where she gives him his big motto (which is used a grand total of twice in the film), but the dialogue makes no sense. Why is she saying "You are stronger than this"? Stronger than what?

The "found footage"-style is done well, in my opinion. I felt a little dizzy early in the movie (though that may have been hunger), but once the heroes start levitating the camera steadily around themselves, it gets less disorienting. The final fight scene uses a lot of different cameras, including security footage and news footage, for different angles. It doesn't feel gimmicky, and the characters rarely talk to the camera.

Overall, I think it's a damn fine film. It has great effects, nice comedy and a somewhat thought-provoking story. It's worth seeing, unless you get motion sickness really easily or can't stand high school drama.



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There's something I want to talk about in this movie, but which requires me to spoil the film. I'm putting it here, after the review proper. SPOILERS ARE BELOW THIS PARAGRAPH.

The movie ends up making Andrew the bad guy. He loses his shit, accidentally kills Steve and goes on a rampage so Matt has to stop him. As I mentioned above, the writers added random evilness to Andrew in the late second act, which come out of nowhere. Conversely, Matt's random love interest feels really intrusive and plays almost no role in the film other than underlining this guy is good for the audience.

Personally, I really identified with Andrew for most of the film. Almost to a worrying extent. When he starts going nuts, I was totally with him. He tears three teeth off the mouth of one of his bullies. I don't know what it speaks about me, but I can totally get behind that, though I'd think it would be wrong if the story had Andrew use non-fantastic means to achieve this feat. If he kicked the shit out of his bully, I couldn't root for him. When he uses telekinetic powers, I cheer.

Andrew's father is one of the worst monsters I've seen in a film. Period. One of my main issues with Chronicle is that the character survives. He deserved to die a thousand times over, and Hell would have been too good for him. In the end, they do a scene where it looks like the father is about to get sympathetic, which made me groan, but to my relief he actually gets even worse. If they'd tried to do a "he's not so bad" turn for him, I'd have been seriously pissed off.

The writers probably weren't intending anything by making the awkward nerd turn into a psychopath, but some of the parts of the story are a bit unfortunate. Andrew's bullies are all jock idiots, but later he gives into peer pressure and tries to conform. He fails, and that's when his big turn to evil happens. I think the movie tries to put the good old "peer pressure makes you evil" thing, but it ends up feeling more like "he's so bad at this that he can't even be the cool guy everyone likes! Obviously there's something wrong with him."

I dunno. I like a movie that makes me think. Hope this rant makes any sense.

The Grey

The premise for The Grey is very simple, and kind of familiar. That is to say, the same movie basically already exists in the form of 1997's The Edge. Only, in that case it's Anthony Hopkins instead of Liam Neeson, a bear instead of a pack of wolves, and if I recall correctly, that movie was way less good.

Liam Neeson plays a hunter who works for an oil refinery to keep the wildlife at bay in Alaska (apparently they can't afford fences). He is depressed and finds no purpose in his life, only to have things shaken up when his plane crashes into the snowy wilderness. He has to rally the survivors and try to make it back to civilisation. Unnaturally persistent wolves hunt for them, picking the group apart one by one.

Right, so it's a survival drama movie. What's it got going for itself? Well, I'm a fan of Neeson, though that's mostly because he looks uncannily like my dad. He's a good actor, though, and I can't recall a movie where he'd been bad per se. The other actors are also good, and the side characters are written well enough that they don't come off as stereotypes who are only there to be killed. The wolves are really well executed, and come off as really menacing, their presence hanging over the film throughout.

Now here's something the marketing really lied about: There's way less action in the film than the trailers would let you believe. It's a more about suspense and the characters. I prefer it this way, but I can see if some people are put off by the difference. The ending may also disappoint some people, but I liked it.

Now here's something I rarely comment on or notice in a film: The Grey has excellent sound effects and sound editing. When the plane crashes, the film does its best to deafen half the audience, and it really feels like a huge hunk of metal is ripping apart. Every impact in the film is accompanied with a violent sound that makes the viewer feel the blow. The howling of the wolves is damn scary. I actually think that watching this outside the cinema will be way less impressive due to the lowered sound fidelity.

The directing and editing are top-notch: in the beginning, the main character's depression is portrayed more through camera angles and muted sounds than Neeson's melodramatic monologue. Throughout the journey, the cameraman and composer are playing with the viewer's expectations to make it as hard to tell as possible when a wolf is going to show up.

I really liked it. Aside from some pacing issues, faulty marketing and an over-reliance on Liam Neeson, it's an A-grade drama/suspense/action flick. And though this is really ridiculous, I have to add in the fact that Ridley Scott is the producer and they had someone wear a Weyland-Yutani baseball cap. I'm way too easily amused.

This Means War

The film is as dull as this poster.

This movie suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

I don't usually put things that bluntly. I mean, I gave Transformers 3 and freaking Immortals a fair treatment, but this film was just so bad. I went in knowing it would suck ("you gotta see one shitty movie a year to appreciate the good ones" was my mantra that day), only to be thoroughly surprised by the depths of suckitude contained within.

This Means War is a romantic comedy/action film about two CIA agents who are grounded after they fail a mission. To pass off the time, they decide to get back into dating, and accidentally both hit it off with the same girl. They decide to let her choose which one to keep, but slowly start to utilise their CIA equipment and resources to spy on her and sabotage each others' dates.

It's basically "True Lies meets There's Something About Mary". Except without the fantastic action of the former and the genuine amusement of the latter.

The three lead characters are played by Chris Pine (as the slick, super-arrogant ladies man), Tom Hardy (as the safer divorcee) and Reese Witherspoon (as a love interest whose only real personality is her wacky job and even wackier best friend). All of them at least try, but none are given good enough material to make their characters likeable. The guys come off as creepy and obsessed, and never get punished for probably wasting millions of dollars on their childish antics, and the girl only exists to present new challenges for them to overcome.

The script is annoying and really bad. There are "running gags" which only happen twice in the whole movie, and thus make no freaking sense and are not funny. The different "romantic" scenarios are badly planned and make little to no sense. The subplot with a vengeful gangster trying to get revenge of the CIA agents is so thin it might as well not exist. What's more, the film is really badly paced, with an over-reliance on montages to pad itself out.

The action is badly shot, and it's hard to tell what's happening a lot of the time. None of the chase scenes or shootouts are memorable at all. The few jokes that could have been good are all shown in the trailer. The cinematography is bad. The music is forgettable, other than the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" when the guys are ruining each others' dates (GET IT?). The resolution at the end is so predictable and unimaginative, it's bad even by romantic comedy standards. It's just an all-around bad movie...

And I had a blast watching it. Me and my friends were laughing so hard at how bad this was, and at how most of the audience seemed to eat it up (or maybe they were being as ironic as we were). We had a great time in the cinema, that day, but the movie is still shit, plain and simple.

Carnage

This poster sums up the movie perfectly.

Two eleven-year-olds have a fight. Zachary hits Ethan in the face with a stick, causing him to lose two teeth. The parents of the kids meet up to have a civil discussion about the matter, and talk about what needs to be done over espresso and cake.

Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster), Ethan's mother, is an artistic soul who believes in humanitarianism and strives to help the peoples of Africa by writing a book about their suffering. Her husband Michael (John C. Reilly) is a rough and honest man's man who sells kitchen and toilet apparel for a living. Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet), Zachary's mother, is a sophisticated, calm woman who wants to get this all over with, while her spouse Alan (Christoph Waltz) is a lawyer who can't go ten minutes without answering a phone call about "the most important case in his life", and who believes his son is a lunatic who'll never learn to not hit people.

As the four characters talk, their civility starts to erode, their conflicts start to heat up, and eventually they get drunk off some scotch and have violent arguments about increasingly irrelevant topics.

It's readily apparent that Roman Polanski's Carnage is based on a stage play: for 95% of the movie, there are only four characters and only one locale. It happens in real time: it's a 75-minute film about a 75-minute argument between four people. Due to the minimalistic approach, the quality of the movie depends solely on two things: the writing and the acting. And those two things are great. I love how flawed these characters are. They're all scumbags in their own way, and all their character flaws get critiqued and examined by the others. The various shouting matches between them see all kinds of alliances: at several times, the spouses are arguing amongst themselves and the other couple splits up on their view of the matter.

The actors all do a great job. Christoph Waltz manages to be so very, very arrogant and annoying. Almost every time he opens his mouth, you can't help but laugh and shake your head at his delivery. Jodie Foster has one of the best on-screen nervous breakdowns I've seen in a film, Kate Winslet does a fantastic job at portraying a character who becomes a completely different person when drunk, and John C. Reilly sells his role so well, I'm having a hard time believing he acted at all.

There isn't much else to say. The editing and shooting are both done in a minimalistic style, where you don't notice them. It fits the style of the movie. The only real criticism I have is that it ends too suddenly. It was just the right length, but I wish there had been more denouement for the characters.

I definitely recommend this film, if you're the sort that likes talky, character-focused movies. Movie year 2012 started out strong for me, with a film I first heard of two days before I saw it.

Attack the Block

This is going to be a short review. I saw this movie a few days back, and honestly it didn't raise enough thoughts in my to make a full-length review, which is why I've been considering skipping it entirely. I'll just say what little I have to say.

Attack the Block is a British comedy film about a bunch of teenaged South London gansta-wannabies. It's Guy Fawkes Night, and the kids' robbery of a bypasser is interrupted by an alien invasion. The movie balances between developing the characters, having them chased around by monsters and having them deliver pretty well-written humour.

The film's greatest triumph is that it takes character types who are normally very, very, very annoying and makes the audience like them. Or at least the attempt worked on me. The accents, the attitudes, the actions, all of it is the sort of stuff I normally loathe in a film. At first, the boys seem like they've escaped out of Michael Bay's secret Transformers In London project, but in the end they earn their status as protagonists. The performances aren't anything too special, but they're fine. Nick Frost appears as a drug dealer, but honestly he's not that special without his best buddy Simon Pegg to play off of.

The aliens are designed interestingly, with a very minimalistic look aside from one visual detail that is used effectively in the cinematography. The action scenes get a bit too hectic at times, but for the most part they're fine. The climax of the movie is surprisingly tense, if a bit pretentious in its attempt to ethically redeem the main gangmember.

I liked it okay. It's an above-average alien-invasion spoof. Unfortunately, the distribution for it is kinda screwed up, so at some markets it may already have passed. Give it a watch if you've got the chance.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

For those who missed it, 2009's Sherlock Holmes ended with a cliffhanger wherein Irene Adler's mysterious employer Professor Moriarty, who was only seen in shadow, stole a radio-trasmitter from the chemical weapon of that film's main villain. Holmes concluded that this enigmatic Moriarty must be planning something big indeed!

So, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows picks up from that by having Moriarty be a well-known scientist of many fields as well as a politician, and having him show his face every five minutes on screen. What's more, his sinister plans never use the radio-transmitter sequelbait.

I dunno, something about this weird disconnect between the setup and the film that it spawned just bothers me.

But anyways, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law return as Holmes and Watson in A Game of Shadows, which is a very, very, very loose adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem, also known as "the story Doyle wrote to kill off Sherlock Holmes, since he was tired of writing him", or "the one with Moriarty". It mostly treads on familiar territory, though with every aspect (character quirks, comic relief, action) supercharged. It's very reminiscent of Pirates 2 at times, actually; Jack Sparrow was turned into a human shishkabob, while Sherlock Holmes dresses as a prostitute. You can get a pretty good impression of what the movie is like from its trailers, though the trailers also spoil a lot of the jokes, so I'd advice not watching them.

And speaking of the jokes, most of them missed me. I guess I must either be turning into a grump or developing actual taste, but I don't find the sort of humour most of this film went for funny. The girls one row behind me were rolling on their seats from the hilarity of it, but I'd prefer for the comedy to focus on the characters of Holmes and Watson. Watching Downey and Law play off each other is very satisfying, which just serves to make it more grating when the film goes for lowest-common-denominator humour like the above-mentioned crossdressing and other such things.

The performances on the main leads are as good as in the 2009 picture, which is the main thing that saved the sequel to me. However, I found Jared Harris as Moriarty very dull. He's kind of wicked, but not on the same caricature level of ridiculousness as the rest of the movie, and thus feels out of place. A cartoonish, hammy villain would have worked in the film's advantage, like it did with Davy Jones in Pirates. Also, Stephen Fry plays Mycroft Holmes as an exaggerated version of himself.

The action scenes are pretty good, most of the time. I really liked the use of "Sherlock-vision", though the climax of the film proves that you can take even that too far. The scene ends up being really unintentionally hilarious, and basically turns Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty into Cameron Vale and Darryl Revok. Aside from that time, though, the action is well planned and executed.

The plot... is just there. It's thin and kind of hole-y, but none of the plot holes are really glaring enough to get in the way of enjoying the film. Don't expect a detective story or mystery out of a movie about the world's greatest detective (outside of Batman, of course), though.

Overall, it's fine. It's a hypercharged version of the first one. If you're into that sort of thing, go see it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I don't think this movie should have been made. The only reason it exists is because North-Americans are too lazy to read subtitles, and need an English-spoken remake of a (reputedly) perfectly serviceable Swedish movie. HOWEVER, I will not count that against The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Just like I reviewed Conan by its own merits, I'll review this movie as a stand-alone work.

Based on the Stieg Larsson book Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men Who Hate Women"), David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ("Unnecessary Retitle") is a mystery/detective/drama film about Mikael Blomkvist, played by Daniel Craig, a journalist who has been found guilty for libel and witnesses his career falling apart around himself. To his surprise, he receives an invitation from reclusive ex-CEO Henrik Vanger, played by Christopher effing Plummer, along with a job proposal: Vanger wants Blomkvist to investigate his family and find out who killed his great-niece Harriet in the sixties.

Meanwhile, young deliquent Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara, who was hired to do the background check on Blomkvist before he got the job, goes through trouble with the social services, and strives to survive in a society that she has a hard time fitting into. At first her subplot seems needless, but it ends up uniting with the main story halfway through the movie... which is a bit too late for my tastes.

The setting of the movie is a delicate matter, but I am happy to report that Dragon Tattoo manages to feel like it's set in Sweden, rather than being obviously American. The street signs, the candy wrappers, the nature... it never broke my suspension of disbelief. The langauge is an interesting thing: the actors speak English with very slight Swedish accents, which reinforce the feeling perfectly. The one exception is a TV-host heard early and late in the film, who goes for the most exaggerated Swedish accent ever, and made me giggle out loud both times she spoke.

The performances are top-notch. Plummer shines especially, but Stellan Skarsgård as Vanger's great-nephew Martin manages to also be extremely convincing and kind of impressive in his big scenes. Daniel Craig, whom I've always been ambivalent toward in the past, makes a really good everyman protagonist. Rooney Mara is kind of weird: the character she plays is so obviously messed up that at times it's hard to tell if the actress is doing a bad job or if it's all a part of the movie.

David Fincher's touch is felt throughout the project: the weather is used effectively to establish atmosphere, the camera angles are really impressive without being distracting... the different elements are all sewn together with expertese.

The movie suffers from those old, well-known pacing issues that are almost inevitable when adapting a book into a motion picture. As mentioned above, the two plotlines seem really inconsequential toward each other for most of the movie, and the movie takes way too long to wrap itself up at the end. The final scene is great, but the five or so scenes before that could have been cut with almost no impact.

The weird thing about Dragon Tattoo is that it inherits certain elements from the source material, which make it at times feel like a European detective story in the trappings of a Hollywood blockbuster. This is especially visible in the research montage: it's exactly the sort of thing that is used to drive the plot forward in The Old Fox and other German detective shows my parents used to watch, but it's edited and shot in such an exciting and efficient way, it almost becomes a music video at times. So yeah, best research montage ever.

I recommend this movie to everyone, and especially people who like detective stories. It's not too American for Europeans, and it definitely isn't too European for Americans. I still have two weeks left to make up my mind, but this may be my "movie of the year".

In Time

"For a few to be immortal, many must die."

In a dystopic future, aging has been cured. When people turn 25, they stop getting any older. However, to stop overpopulation everyone has an artificial limit to their lifespans. Everyone has a green, glowy counter tattooed to their wrist, allowing them to see their life tick away before their eyes. When someone runs out of time, they fall over, dead. Time can be exchanged, and has replaced money as the effective currency of the world. Working-class people have to earn time every day just to keep themselves alive. Beggars walk the street, asking people for a minute. Robbers, referred to as "minutemen", literally steal people's lives in back alleys. In the rich parts of town, the privileged gamble away decades, have been 25 for hundreds of years, and have the same biological age as their own grandchildren.

If that isn't an awesome premise for a film, I have no idea what is! This is exactly what science fiction is supposed to be: talking about issues with our own world by using fantastic allegories. In this case, the subject is the increasing income gap. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer, and in this allegory, the poor have to literally give away their lives to pay the rent, or put food on the table.

In Time stars Justin Timberlake (who's actually a good actor, if you can be adult enough to not hate him because he was in a boy band) as Will Salas, a young manual labourer with a chip on his shoulder. Amanda Seyfried plays Sylvia Weis, the daughter of an immensely rich banker, bored with a life of dull safety. Cillian Murhpy is Reymond Leon, a zealous policeman tasked with making sure the time-system remains intact. However, the real star of the movie is the setting; real effort was put into communicating the sense of urgency people live in, and trying to change even the little details to fit the difference their ways of thinking and doing. Poor people do things fast, and mostly run from place to place, while the rich have time to spare. Likewise, those who are low on time tend to wear clothes that make it convenient to check their wrists almost twice a minute, while those who don't need to worry keep their arms covered. My favourite little touch is that killing someone by stealing away all their time is referred to as "cleaning their clock".

The actual plot is not quite as good as the premise would promise, however. In Time is all about raging for this very real issue, but at times it gets dangerously close to becoming a power fantasy: "Will Salas is the man who can fix everything, because he knows what's right and he's got the balls to do it!" The protagonist's solutions are actually pretty simple, but we're left to assume nobody else has ever tried them before. The film does question whether one man can change anything several times, but in the end seems to ignore all that. It's not quite as extreme as Surrogates (which was about people living out their lives with robotic bodies so they never have to leave their rooms), where the end had Bruce Willis shut everything down and the implication is that everything worked out fine, but I could have used a more subtle resolution nonetheless.

Though In Time is an action movie, its action mostly focuses on chases, whether they be on foot or in cars. Most of it is well-executed, except for one really fake-looking CGI car in a crash scene. It may bug you that nobody uses any future-weaponry, or has a flying car, but in truth such details would only have distracted from the main gimmick of the setting.

I don't have much else to say. Mostly, In Time is just a pretty good movie with pretty good acting, pretty good action and a pretty good script. To me, it's the imaginative premise that elevates it to something special. It's a fine way to spend 100 minutes of your precious time, if you've got any to spare, but becomes a must-see if you're into that sort of thing. Director/writer Andrew Niccol already had my approval from his masterpiece Lord of War, and I now look forward to seeing his future projects as well.

Immortals

A few years back, the Clash of the Titans remake shook the world with its blandness and predictability. Now, a suspiciously similar film titled Immortals has arrived in the cinema near you. Do you dare risk it and go see this movie? Could it actually be better than Clash was?

As far as I'm concerned, it's not. Not only is it shit, but it's shit that tries to be something really epic, and looks doubly bad due to reaching for the skies.

Immortals is about Theseus (no relation to the Greek mythic character), played by Henry Cavill, who'll be Superman in the upcoming Man of Steel film. He's a bastard borne of rape, brought up by his mother and taught combat and ethics by the only really good thing about the film, John Hurt. Why does John Hurt teach him combat and ethics? Well, because he's Zeus (no relation to the Greek pagan god) in disguise and wants a mortal warrior who can save humanity from itself. So why does Theseus' mother let John Hurt teach her son? Theseus very aggressively declines an invitation to join the army early on in the movie, so why is he learning how to fight? I have no idea! I guess it's not important to know the basic premise of the plot very well.

Meanwhile, King Hyperion (no relation to the Greek mythic character), played by Mickey Rourke, is conquering the world, set on releasing the mythic Titans and thus reigning supreme over god and man alike. You see, when gods discovered they could kill each other, they started killing each other, and the losers were locked away in a little cage underground. Hyperion wants to free these imprisoned gods because... uhh... umm... then he'll have dozens of gods running around, killing everyone, instead of like five of them sitting in Olympus and staying out of humanity's way?

These aren't even spoilers. All these plot holes happen in the first twenty minutes of the movie.

So yeah, it's stupid and nonsensical, but is it entertaining? Yes and no. The performances are okay, the action scenes are good (really good when gods are involved), the special effects aren't half bad, and even the 3D is pretty cool when it's noticeable, but somehow the story and pacing manage to kill all of this. I was entertained for more than half of the movie's running time, but I still left out feeling disappointed (which is saying something, considering I was expecting this film to blow), because all it adds up to is nonsense. The Three Musketeers may have been dumb, but at least it never shied away from having fun. This film tries to be serious and meaningful, in denial about its own nature.

Immortals is made with a certain aesthetic vibe to it, an artistic cinematography, costuming and directing which at times gives it a feeling of otherworldly beauty. However, most of the time it just looks ridiculous. I might look at the gods' ridiculous outfits without sniggering if their "dramatic" dialogue wasn't overblown and melodramatic. I might not roll my eyes at the bright red robes and veils of the oracles if they had an actual reason for wearing those things they never wear in any other scene. I'll admit that the locations are pretty cool most of the time, but I'd have preferred to get a good look of that big city near the end, instead of just seeing it in the horizon.

By the way, if you saw the trailer for this and thought: "That magic bow looks really cool! I bet this movie will do all kinds of cool stuff with it", DO NOT BE FOOLED. Every single scene where anyone fires the magic bow is in the trailer. It's not the hero's signature weapon. It's a MacGuffin.

I can't recommend this movie for anyone. It's just no worth seeing. Simple as that.

The Three Musketeers

Is it me or do they look like vampires?

It baffles me to think that of all the Pirates of the Caribbean rip-offs and cash-ins of the past few years, Pirates 4 has been the least good. Oh well...

So yeah, Paul W. S. Anderson's The Three Musketeers is an action-adventure movie with snarky characters set in a historical period, vaguely based on some previously existing intellectual property (I think there will be seen as their own genre when we look back twenty years from now). The work being loosely adapted this time is Alexandre Dumas' novel by the same name.

Not having (yet) read the book, I can't say how faithful the movie is to it, though the Wikipedia summary of the novel's plot does look vaguely familiar. I was going to keep a mental count on all the anachronisms, but I gave up ten minutes into the movie. It wasn't the underwater crossbows and 17th century scuba gear that broke me, though. You see, the opening action scene is set in Venice, where the heroes are sent to steal the archives of Leonardo da Vinci. If you, dear reader, ever decide to involve da Vinci in your story in some way, please note that he lived in Florence. Italy has more cities than Rome and Venice, you see.

Most of the plot revolves around political intrigue between King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox), Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), Queen Anne (Juno Temple) and The Count of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom). Richelieu and Buckingham want to take over France (even though Richelieu rules in all but name, as he did in real history) and chew scenery, and keep scheming against each other and the French royal couple to accomplish that. They employ the director's wife a seductive spy and agent called Milady (Milla Jovovich, who is much hotter here than in The Fifth Element) to accomplish their tasks.

Did you notice that I didn't mention the main characters in that last paragraph? There's a reason for that. The Three Musketeers (and d'Artagnan) themselves are just pawns for the plot, and are basically bribed to take part in it at all. In the second act of the story, they're cast out of their own movie for half an hour so the important characters can advance the story for a change. I'd list the actors for the four, but they honestly left so little impression on me I might as well not. Most of the time, the characters aren't even given much to do, and don't partake in almost any character development. In fact, d'Artagnan is the only one to get an arc, and it doesn't really go anywhere. He starts out as a hot-headed, cocky asshole, bound to get himself killed if he doesn't grow up, and he just kind of... becomes a dashing hero in the finale for no reason.

The other actors are great, though, and the funniest moments of the movie come from performances rather than writing. Freddie Fox manages to be ridiculous, and yet very sympathetic and honest, as the bumbling King. Jovovich oozes charisma and wittiness. And the villains... how do I put this? Orlando Bloom is a more entertaining villain than Christoph Waltz. That's right. Legolas just beat Hans Landa. You see, Bloom's previous resumé is filled with boring, straight-laced, nullodramatic heroes. Now we have him playing the cackling, villainous foreigner with a wacky accent and an even wackier mustache. It's gloriously amusing. Waltz is good as well, though he doesn't ham it up as much as a movie of this... campiness, would justify.

The action is so over-the-top I don't blame the guy two seats right from me for giggling like a lunatic for most of the film. Now, the sword-fights are actually well coreographed and shot, and look pretty restrained as far as swordfights in action-adventure movies go. The other action scenes are basically whatever the writers could think up at any given moment. There's scenes where Jovovich is basically redoing her fights from the Resident Evil films, except now she's wearing a dress, and near the end the movie turns into a rip-off of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I'm not even making that up.

Ridiculous, dumb, simplistic, hyperactive, anachronistic, shallow... yeah, this is a blockbuster, all right. I liked it, though I have this itch its charm won't persist on a second viewing. They're obviously setting up a sequel, and they can count me in.

Oh yeah, and this movie was this 3D. Wait, it was? I could hardly tell...

Drive

Drive is a movie about the Driver (Ryan Gosling), a man without a name or a past. He works as a stuntman in Hollywood films, a mechanic in a garage and a getaway driver for mobsters and robbers. By coincidence, the Driver happens to befriend the girl next door and her young son, and is motivated to pull off a gig to help them out in a tight spot. One thing leads to another, and he finds himself in deep shit, being chased after by hitmen and gangsters aplenty.

I want to stress something out for you: This is not an action movie. There are chase scenes in cars, and gory executions outside them, but they are not the focus of the plot, and if you're only going in to see cars and violence, you'll be let down. In fact, I'd be willing to say that the second-biggest problem with the film is that it does many things well, but doesn't focus on any one aspect of itself well enough. It doesn't go "all the way" with the action, the drama, the crime plot or the characterisations, but feels like all the different subplots were intentionally left half-finished.

Here are the things that Drive has going for it: the Driver is a well-crafted enigma, whose true nature will be up to debate for years to come (my money's on him being autistic); the cinematography, directing and editing are top-notch, and manage to really imprint emotion into scenes and shots where almost nothing is happening; the setting somehow manages to be triumphantly eighties while actually setting place in the modern day; the driving and violence, while short-lived, is fantastically executed (no pun intended); and finally, the soundtrack is really good, though most of the music genres presented aren't really my bag.

Aside from the great main performance, the actors are kind of hit-and-miss. Carey Mulligan as the love interest is very underplayed and ordinary, which is kind of the point, but I don't think her character just has chemistry with the Driver because he's underplayed for completely different, better, reasons. Ron Perlman is the world's most bitter 59-year-old mobster, who's trying very hard to act like a twenty-something gangsta. It is glorious. Albert Brooks (who played the villain in The Simpsons Movie) is the straight-laced businessman gangster, who won't lose his cool until it's really effective to do so. I swear I've seen the exact same character somewhere, but I can't tell where...

To give my main criticism for Drive, I'm going to have to break my own rule and go into spoiler territory. Therefore, SLIGHT NON PLOT-RELATED SPOILER-ISH MATERIAL EXISTS BEYOND THIS SENTENCE. The film doesn't have a climax. It kind of slows down for the final twenty minutes, and then stops. End credits. There was no way to actually fit it into the plot, but I really could have used another chase scene somewhere in there...

SPOILERS END HERE.

I can't really give a definite "go see this" or "don't" about this movie. It depends so much on what you're in the mood for, and whether you can tolerate a little slower and more atmospheric moviemaking. If you can actually enjoy how a movie is shot and edited... this'll be a treat! It's the closest thing to a Grand Theft Auto: Vice City movie we'll ever see.