Category Archives: Film

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

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I’ve reviewed, let’s see, four of these movies before. All of them except the first one, which predates my presence here by a couple years. And I’ve mostly liked all of them! (At least, as far as I can remember. I didn’t actually check any of the reviews, but that time when I rewatched the whole series in advance of the most recent movie but this one is pretty fresh in my mind too. So, I liked them is what we’re saying. If you have time to prove me wrong, feel free!)

The nominally final chapter, though? Like, the bits and pieces of new world building were cool, and I don’t want to give them up. But the plot was so damn linear. Alice gets in a fight, she gets a mission. She gets in another fight, she moves toward her mission. She gets in another fight, she gets a little closer to her mission. And so on. None of them felt this bland before!

I’m sure I’ll give it another chance when it’s time to marathon the whole series, but until then, I’m pretty disappointed in a mediocre capper on such an otherwise reliable sequence. Cool graphic design on the poster though, right?

Assassin’s Creed

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Assassin’s Creed was a game with an incredible premise. Using an sfnal device called The Animus, you could connect yourself to display monitors and relive the genetic memories of your ancestors, with an audience of observers along for the ride. This was a tool to tell the story of a war down through the ages between the Knights Templar (on the side of order, thoroughly lawful evil) and the Assassins (on the side of freedom, thoroughly chaotic neutral) to determine the fate of humankind. See, there’s this differently sfnal device called the Apple of Eden which nobody seems to exactly know how it works or what it does, but which everyone agrees will allow their side to win once and for all.

It was, unfortunately, an incredibly flawed game in execution, but both the basic premise and the underlying modern and historical parallel stories that premise enabled were not among the problems the game faced. In the meantime, that series has blossomed into some dozen or so games now, the first third of which I’ve played.

Enter last month, in which a movie based on that series was released. Which makes sense! You have a pre-built plot that contains lots of lavish historical sets and an interesting conflict, not to mention all kinds of cool parkour and medieval weapons combat. What’s not to like? Only… I mean, it wasn’t bad. Those things I said about how rich the premise and conflict are, they are true and cannot just be erased unless you made a movie that was actually unrelated to anything the games had done. And they did not, this is definitely an Assassin’s Creed movie.

At the same time, the plot fell apart to such a drastic degree in the final act that I don’t actually know what character decisions were made or how I should feel about them, even though up until then I had liked the two main characters (the Assassin descendant and the Templar scientist) and their developed relationship. Plus, the lush historical settings? Were instead consistently crowded with so much dust and smoke that you couldn’t really sit back and enjoy them. I did not expect anything so immersive as a 60 hour game can provide, but, talk about missing the point. Especially since the historical setting and timeline (1490s Spain) are both unaddressed by the games.

I guess what I expect is that any potential sequel will fix all of the niggling flaws and turn into something brilliant, just like the second game did. The parallels are just too strong to ignore!

Passengers (2016)

It is functionally impossible to really talk about this movie without massive spoilers, because what the movie is actually about requires knowledge of character actions and motivations. This is… problematic, since spoilers suck. So, I’ll fill in the next paragraph with some kind of thumbnail thing, and put in a cut (that doesn’t work everywhere), and after that, you should probably have watched it first to go any further. Or, if you don’t care, that’s your lookout.

Passengers is, at the broadest level, the story of a colony ship headed outbound from Earth to new frontiers. At the next focus inward, it’s a story about hell and impossible choices. The next focus inward will have to go behind the cut.
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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

This is weird. First of all, yes, I saw Rogue One over the weekend. Of course I did! And I liked it. Yet, I have been avoiding this review like the dickens, and I don’t know exactly why. My best guess is, I liked it better than it probably deserves. The first act was scattered, and the second act was solid enough[1], but the third act was 100% predictable due to its inevitability. It’s hard to drum up much care about characters whose arcs you already know when you sit down in the theater, you know?

Nevertheless, I did care about them. I cared about all of the new characters[2] and I cared about watching the journey, and I didn’t mind the CGI faces very much, and basically everything that happened was good. Hell, even the music! Not composed by John Williams, and it still felt like a Star Wars score. Which is good, 2016 being the way it has been.

Anyway, that’s my point. It was part hot mess, part incapable of surprising plot twist, and could easily be accused of leveraging nostalgia for everything left that was any good. But screw it, it felt like a Star Wars movie, and a thing that feels like a Star Wars movie is going to be unavoidably good. Hell, it was better than The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones. Also: I feel like they earned the title, and I was not confident I would feel that way.

[1] albeit with a missed plot hole that you could drive a Star Destroyer through[3]
[2] except maybe the insane terrorist guy on Jehda? I gather that maybe he’s in the Rebels cartoon that I haven’t watched any of, and maybe it would be easier to care about him if I had? But I did not, at all.
[3] Plot hole in comments, due to spoilers.

Thankskilling

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mv5botczmdy2njq5nl5bml5banbnxkftztcwnzeznzy5mg-_v1_Off of a dare[1] on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, I turned on Thankskilling while setting my fantasy football line-ups. I ended up watching all sixty-six minutes of the feature due to Mary falling asleep on the couch before I finished my research.

I had said, after watching the first 100 seconds, before the title drop, that they had accomplished pretty much the perfect iteration of that title in distilled movie form, and that I bet the rest of the movie could not stand up to it. It turns out, I was right.

[1] I was bet that it had worse dialogue than Troll 2. Nnnnnnnope.

Doctor Strange

mv5bnjgwnzaznjk1nl5bml5banbnxkftztgwmzq2nji1ote-_v1_sy1000_cr006741000_al_I know that Doctor Strange occasionally crosses over with other characters in the Marvel universe. I mean, maybe someday he’ll be at the heart of a big crossover event, but as of 15 years of Ultimate comics and 20 years of mainstream comics, he has only ever been at the fringes. And this is a thing that makes a lot of sense! Except for the artifact of history that Stan Lee decided to build a stable of shared characters in the early 1960s to compete with what DC had been doing, there’s no way anyone would say Strange fits into Marvel. Different genre than anything else they publish, and an entirely different style to boot. The only thing that comes close is Thor, and that’s only because they both share a love of stilted declamations.

Do I have a point, here? Maybe. See, as promised in a blink and you missed it scene in The Winter Soldier, Marvel Studios has dropped a Doctor Strange film onto an unsuspecting[1] public. And sure enough, there is no apparent connection between it and any other movie they’ve made, at first glance[2]. But this is fine, because unlike some Netflix series I could name, Avengers Tower is prominent in the midtown skyline. Even better, both the characters with names and dialogue and the pedestrians in the background are becoming more comfortable with the bizarre turns of events that occur with increasing regularity in their world, just as befits a maturing familiarity with superheroes. I would not have thought to be so appreciative of a touch like that, but I don’t think I would have thought to expect such a touch in advance, and yet here we are. Normalcy. I dig it.

Anyway, all that’s about the world and setting. The actual movie, though? See, Stephen Strange is the best neurosurgeon in the world, but after a series of unfortunate events related (mostly) to his personality, he finds himself seeking alternative answers about his place in the world. It took Stan Lee and Steve Ditko maybe three pages to establish all of this before turning Strange from a doctor into a sorcerer, and it took the movie a good 45 minutes. Now, don’t get me wrong, Lee has never written under the auspices of “show, don’t tell”. Man loves to tell approximately as much (and as floridly) as PT Barnum did. But at the same time, 45 minutes is a lot of celluloid to squeeze out of three pages. Maybe there is some kind of middle ground? Like, I would never say they should have skipped the origin story entirely, because who has heard of Doctor Strange?

The good news is, that’s the only bad thing I have to say about the movie. It is a feast for the eyes, and moreso in 3D (unless that kind of thing makes you ill), and if the plot is a little bit bog-standard good v evil for modern Marvel, to be fair fantasy and spellcraft kind of lends itself to that. And even so, it’s far more nuanced than you might think from what I’ve said. Not-apparently-a-Baron Mordo in particular is fully realized in a way that never would have been predictable based on his turn in that same initial Lee/Ditko comic I mentioned before.

Tl;dr go see it, they’re not out of juice yet.

[1] I mean, if you discount years of announcements and months of previews. Look, nobody asked you.
[2] At second glance, this is completely untrue, but only because the writers made an effort to relevance that I cannot decide if I appreciate or oppose. That is in full on spoiler territory, however, so I shall say no more.

Blair Witch

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mv5bmji0nteymja3nv5bml5banbnxkftztgwodk5otu4ote-_v1_sy1000_cr006481000_al_Did you know that The Blair Witch Project came out seventeen years ago? That is a long time! And yet, here we are with a sequel[1]. And, uh… that’s kind of all I have? Which is bad. But the thing is, you saw the first one, right? Blair Witch is that movie, seventeen years later. Is there a documentary? Yep. Do they go into the woods? You betcha! Are there weird stick figures and creepy little piles of rocks? I think you know.

I mean, this is how you make a horror movie sequel. Same people[2], same plot. (This, I maintain, is why people didn’t like the other sequel. Different people, different plot. Also: Halloween 3.) But then they did the other thing that good horror movie sequels manage, which is to bring in more information and make things make more sense than they did before. So, long story short: if you liked the first one, you’ll like this one. If you hated the first one (which I know a lot of people did, especially people who get motion sickness), you will still hate this one. So, y’know. Check in with the 1999 version of you and see what’s up.

[1] Technically, there was also a sequel sixteen years ago, but a) a lot of people incorrectly dislike it and b) more relevantly, this sequel ignores the one from 2000, so I will too.
[2] Okay, it’s Heather’s younger brother, who always wanted to know what happened to her, but same family basically counts as same people.

I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

mv5bmja4nzaxodi2of5bml5banbnxkftztcwnzqzmjq0mw-_v1_sy1000_cr006741000_al_Many and more years ago, I saw a screening of the original I Spit on Your Grave at the Alamo Drafthouse, hosted by my personal movie review hero, Joe Bob Briggs. It was one of the original 35mm prints that got passed from town to town because there wasn’t a budget to make enough for simultaneous wide release of most movies, in those days, and especially for drive-in features such as this. One historical artifact of this distribution method is that individual localities would decide to censor the print at various points of which they did not approve; I remember that his live commentary was thrown for a loop when an entire scene he intended to dissect was missing.

The problem, of course, is that I thought I had this as a review, but apparently it was from earlier days, and maybe exists on Livejournal or even Opendiary instead; in any event, it is to be considered unfindable for my sad purposes, and that is a pity because I intended my review of the 2010 remake to be largely comparative, instead of needing to stand on its own. Nevertheless, here we are, and I must persevere.

In short, then, a young woman on her own in a rural town (this time: to write a book; I don’t remember why in the original) is stalked by a group of men on the flimsiest of pretexts[1], raped repeatedly, and here the stories diverge: a) in 1978, left senseless in the woods, b) in 2010 accidentally escaped into a river before the men could kill her, criminal science (and not incidentally, rape prosecutions in general) having improved in the intervening 30 years. Then, after a little time has passed, she enacts her bloody revenge.

I’m not sure what the problem with the remake actually is. Maybe simply that it’s a remake, and this is a thing I’ve seen before? Maybe something fundamental was missing instead, I don’t know. The impetus for her revenge felt no less horrific, but the revenge itself was hollow and meaningless in a way I did not feel about the original movie: visceral and gut-wrenching, but also entirely earned and effective. This time, like I said, it felt like she was just going through the motions, doing what was expected of her. So maybe it’s just the remake part after all. Especially because the last 10 minutes, involving a new character with a family to fear for that did not exist in the original[2] became immediately gripping and tense again.

In the unlikely event that you want to watch this movie, the first one is better, I guess is most of what I’m trying to say.

[1] Not to imply that a pretext is required; quite the opposite, in fact, and one thing I appreciate about the whole thing is how intentionally senseless it is.
[2] Original: four townies, one of them mentally deficient and almost sympathetic as a result; remake: ditto, plus an older man smart enough to leave fewer things to chance than the original four.

Don’t Breathe

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MV5BMTg5ODA3MDkyMF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjU5MzczOTE@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,674,1000_AL_Often, I am loath to say that you should go into a movie not knowing anything, especially if it is a genre film. Once you warn people not to know anything, it’s a short jump to “there must be a big twist!” and an even shorter jump to “oh, I know what the twist is, sigh.” Luckily, the nature of the one line synopsis of Don’t Breathe and its particular horror genre[1] conspire to make it possible for me to get away with ignoring my own advice.

So, in one two lines: a girl, her thuggish boyfriend, and the nice guy who wants to take her away from all this have formed an intimate crime ring, committing small-time burglaries in and around a Detroit that has not yet gotten the memo that Detroit is being rebuilt. They think they’ve found one last big score, enough to actually take [them] away from all this, in the form of a blind veteran sitting on top of a huge lawsuit settlement; except, this being a horror movie, it is inevitable that something will go wrong. There, that gets you through the first ten minutes and into the meat of the story.

It’s impossible not to think of It Follows[3], and equally impossible not to wonder if Michigan is trying to make itself a horror film production mecca or instead is really frustrated that nobody is taking their attempts to rebuild Detroit seriously, and they keep taking advantage of what urban decay remains, instead. Plus, thinking about things like that acts a pressure valve, because remember the ratcheting tension I mentioned in the footnote? This is one hell of a movie, and you might find yourself in need of occasional relief.

There is a feminist angle to the movie that I wish I could talk about without it being a massive spoiler, but it is, and I can’t. I mean, unless someone were to ask me about it in person or in the comments here, because those are fair game for spoilers.

[1] I quibble with the advertising here, though. This is definitely a thriller type movie way more than horror. Horror movies are a) usually supernatural in nature or at the minimum obsessed with a high body count and b) regularly break tension with jokes or misleads[2]. Thrillers, contrariwise, are allowed to ratchet the tension tighter and tighter with no obligation towards a release before someone (audience or cast, doesn’t often matter which) breaks.
[2] Like the cat in the cabinet. Whew, it was just a cat! You know the one I mean.
[3] Without bothering to compare plots, you should know that while the score for Don’t Breathe isn’t even in the same league, the sound editing is amazing; it won’t get an Oscar nod, but it might deserve one.

Ringu

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MV5BMTIyMDEyMjY3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTg3NDEzMQ@@._V1_A thing I had never gotten around to watching is the Japanese movie that inspired The Ring. I was pretty much saving it, maybe for a marathon? I don’t know. See, I’ve got this box filled with horror movies on DVD that I collected over the course of the Oughts, and for a good chunk of that time it sat in my car so I’d have it with me when I went places. Mostly the only person who would put up with the kinds of movies that went into the box was my oldest friend, Jeff. So, occasionally movies would be watched (Mulva: Zombie Ass-Kicker, anyone?) and removed from the box, only to be replaced by others. And then I managed to lose the box for most of a decade, as a consequence of a move in late 2006. (Or I lost it later than that in my garage of doom, because of all the other boxes that really did languish there for most of said decade? Either way.)

But I found it during last year’s move, hooray! Only, most of the time since then, Jeff was in and out of hospital rooms until, y’know, he stopped being in and out of hospitals, so the box has languished in a storage closet once again, Ringu and its many sequels (not to mention dozens of other, mostly worse movies) still unwatched. But for some reason, I thought of it after we watched As Above, So Below last weekend, and we made a double feature of it.

Anyway, it was pretty much exactly the same as my memory of The Ring, so there’s not a lot to say in terms of review. In case you don’t know, there’s a VHS tape that, when you watch it, you die seven days later. And nobody knows why! I could digress on the laughability of VHS being applicable to modern life, but a) I’ve done this before, b) the movie is nearly 20 years old, and mostly c) my heart’s just not in it. Too busy being sad about how full the horror movie box is, and how long it sat there, thinking it had all the time in the world.