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Wacky Reviews: Various Movies 2016

CaptainWacky

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Various movies I've watched recently which everyone else saw and formed opinion on months ago.

Jurassic World - Nostalgia was a big thing in 2015. This movie made a shitload of money seemingly by reminding people how good Jurassic Park is. It certainly made me think "Steven Spielberg is a really good director" which I already knew but I guess I don't think it too often. Just watch any scene from Jurassic Park (it's on tv all the time) and it'll be much better than anything in Jurassic World. None of the characters here are likable or interesting. Chris Pratt's character is just a dick, the woman just needs to stop worrying about business so much and get a boyfriend (or so the movie thinks) and I wanted the kids to die (Tim and Lex, on the other hand, are good movie kids.) The dinosaurs don't look as good as the dinosaurs 22 years earlier did.. The whole think seems to exist just to set up the ending where you think "oh it's the t-rex frmo the first movie!" and it's cool for a while but basically it's just a fight scene between three CGI characters. Also there's that bit where Katie McGrath dies horribly and it feels really out of place. And a scene where an evil dinosaur talks four other dinosaurs into turning evil and teaming up with her. And the music was really bad. It was just "play fifty different versions of the original Jurassic Park theme!" Anyway this wasn't very good.

Max Max: Fury Road - This, on the other hand, was very very good! I know everyone already knows that. But it was. It looked great and the world was believable while being completely over the top. Tom Hardy was good but Charlize Theron was the real star. The action is insanely crazy. And it annoyed stupid sexist people on the internet. So yeah, watch it!

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation - It's another fun action movie! I know Eggs will be along to say he hates Tom Cruise and I did find his character annoyingly invincible in the previous movie in the series, but the guy is good at action movies. He is. And they smartly add a new character here (played by Rebecca Ferguson, who is excellent) who's just as good at things as Ethan Hunt. Also the actors doing many of their own stunts and the lack of noticable CGI (I'm sure there's some) makes the action seem more satisfying? Watch it!

Ex Machina - We don't get many movies like this (unless you count episodes of Black Mirror which you shouldn't because they're not movies, silly!) so I appreciated the smart science fiction. I'm not sure about the ending, but it was supposed to be disturbing and it did disturb me (you'll know what I mean if you've seen it.) Alicia Vikander was great as the robot (shame no one put her on the top 100) and "ginger guy who's in everything now" was in it and Oscar Isaac made a good dickhead so yeah watch it!
 
Katie McGrath's horrific and drawn out death scene was so bizarre and unnecessary that it pretty much ruined the rest of the movie for me. Maybe they were trying to make it like the lawyer's death in the original, or that nice driver guy in the Lost World who gets torn in half, but it went way too far with a character we had no real opinion of. We didn't know enough about her to be devastated at losing a favourite, or glad to see a villain get their comeuppance. It was just weird and vindictive, as if Katie McGrath herself had pissed off the casting director.

Incidentally, Cracked has an article about how she was the best character:
6 Reasons 'Jurassic World' Brutally Killed Its Biggest Hero | Cracked.com
 
Her death scene was longer than her total screentime prior to that point! All we'd seen her do was look at her phone once. Whereas when evil army guy died it cut away, as if it would be too horrible to watch him suffer.

I never noticed she was reading Malcolm's book.
 
I really enjoyed Jurassic world, yes it was pretty much designed to remind you of the first one, but it did it well, and I like Chris Pratt in everything I have seen him in so far, he even manages to get a few jokes in Zero Dark Thirty, and god knows that needed some.
The girls death was bad, I hate seeing people drown in films, or even swimming underwater for long amounts of time, which neatly brings me too...

Rogue Nation, I don't mind Tom Cruise at all, he makes a lot of films that probably wouldnt be made at all without him attached to them, they aren't all great, looking at you Jack Preacher, Night and Day, but I always like a good mission impossible film, and this is, it just didn't feel as good as some of the others, I think they made a mistake having the plane sequence so early in the film, the car chase with Simon Pegg in the car was good, but the biggest hindrance for me was how much the bad guy looked like the team captain on 8 out of 10 cats.

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I looked that actor up and was surprised he was the ginger guy in Prometheus. He was unrecognisable.
 
I looked up that guy after watching it and was surprised he was Ginger Guy too. I'd been wondering how such a key role had gone to someone I didn't recognise.
 
I came out of Jurassic World thinking it was "okay", but in hindsight I think that was mainly because of the sheer ridiculousness of the T-Rex/Raptor fight at the end. The rest of the film ranged from "okay" to "actually bad", with Chris Pratt's character being probably the worst thing in the film. It's so obvious they were aiming for a Han Solo / Indiana Jones style lovable rogue character, but they totally missed exactly what made those characters work and instead you have this annoying asshole who everyone keeps saying is the best person ever for really no reason.

Colin Trevorrow did not direct this film well and I am not looking forward to him directing Episode IX.
 
Not as good, but still very funny.

Its better than a million ways to die in the west.

Plus probably the last time you will ever see Micheal Dorn dressed as Worf.
 
I never watched A Million Ways To Die In The West despite it having three attractive women in it. That's how bad it looked.
 
Its not a bad film in itself, its just not as good as Ted, starting a film career with a film like Ted is just asking for trouble, because it set such a high bar.
 
Bump in case Wacky has seen more films.

Today I saw the martian and the hateful 8.

The martian was ok, it benefited from not being 3 hours long, but lost points for a LOTR reference in a scene that had Sean Bean in. Sceince goes out the window for entertainment, but thats ok if its entertaining, which it mostly was.

Hateful 8 did not benefit from being three hours long, the film could have been over at 2 and been all the better for it, thankfully the Tarentino cameo was nothing more than a voiceover this time, but the film is not as good as it clearly wants to be, and what is meant to be the edgy scene, just comes across as a bit meh, I won't go into too much detail in case I am the only MFer to have seen it, but you'll know it when you see it.

I have seen shorter films that were truely epic, someone tell Quentin, that not everything needs to be three hours, the only worthy thing this film has going for it, is that Walton Coggins might finally start getting some respect for his work.

Well once he does a role that isnt some agressive hillbilly anyway.
 
The Martian - Yes, I watched it! It was good! I liked how much science was in it, even if some of it was probably a bit inaccurate (like the rescue scene felt suspiciously like something that wouldn't work, but it was emotional.) Matt Damon is good at playing a likable character stranded on Mars. In fact I'd say my only complaint is that at one point it seemed to go away from his character for a really long time which felt a bit jarring since we'd spent so much time getting to know him. But the other characters were good too and I laughed when Donald Glover showed up. I wonder if the LOTR reference was in the book and casting Sean Bean was a coincidence. They should make a sequel where all the potatoes he left behind have mutated into alien potato people and they attack Earth (they shouldn't really.)
 
I felt the same about The Martian. Very entertaining and I liked that there was a lot of science, without it ever feeling bogged down by it. They built up a lot of faith in the realism of the science all the way through, but the end totally blew it IMO. Maybe that's possible, but it just seemed stupid and shark jumpy to me. It didn't ruin the movie or anything, it was a good, exciting ending, but it made me call into question how realistic any of the rest of it had been.

Elysium was boring and dumb, so thank god it had really nice design work. Seeing the space station so extensively was a treat.
 
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