My move over to WordPress demands that I post my Ratings Scale, so my Review numbers make sense:
0 = This movie has no purpose and needs to be destroyed.
1 = I would not recommend this movie to anyone.
2 = This movie had redeeming qualities, but it just wasn’t for me.
3 = I would recommend this movie to those who think they might like it.
4 = I would recommend this movie to everyone.
5 = Not only would I recommend this movie, but I would watch it every day if I could.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Part Six of Three
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Perhaps the most funny/strangest/best book series I’ve ever read. Written by Douglas Adams, they tell the story of Arthur Dent, a British man who is whisked away from Earth just as it is being demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. His humorous adventures in the weird recesses of space and time were chronicled in The Hitchhiker’s Guide Trilogy (5 books written over 13 years), similar but contradictory events happening over 5 radio series (recorded over 28 years), another set of events happening in a 1981 BBC TV series, and yet another in a 2005 film. To add more confusion, Douglas Adams died in 2001, claiming that he didn’t mean to end the series the way he did in Book 5 as he was having personal problems that reflected in the downer ending.
For the 30th anniversary of the original book, Adams’ estate commissioned Eoin Colfer (author of the “Artemus Fowl” children’s series) to write a sixth book. I was excited to hear that The Guide would continue without Adams, but curious as how the ending of Book 5 was going to be undone and if Colfer could keep the same sense of humor going that Adams started 30 years ago.
It turns out that he can. After spending the first couple chapters undoing the ending of Book 5, he moves on to another ridiculous adventure around the Cosmos. Colfer has formatted the book a bit different, putting the Guide’s (who apparently is telling the story) tangents in brackets almost like footnotes, but the tangents remain just as weird and full of puns as the originals.
While it retains much of what makes the series great, including a lot of references to past/future incidents and creatures (such as the cows who are bred to want to be eaten), the story seems a bit short, like a teaser of what it could be. Maybe its just me. If it is a teaser, it works, because I want more.
Overall, I think its required reading for a Hitchhikers fan (which have probably already read it), but if you haven’t read any yet, start at the beginning. Relatively, of course, due to the time travel aspects present in most of the books. You’ll know what I mean.
Humans Only.
Summary: Aliens are on earth and have been here for 20 years, only because they can’t leave. Their ship is non-functional, left hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa and they’ve been kept in a government camp ever since. Most humans don’t like that they’re still here, while others try to take advantage of them and their technology.
Thoughts: That Summary was hard. I usually try not to give more plot away than the average trailer for the movie in the entire review, but the trailers were scenes specially filmed for the trailers or random scenes from the movie that give you no sense of the plot, which is great. I went in only with the knowledge I shared in the Summary and was able to watch this movie having no idea what was going to happen, which put me on the edge of my seat the whole time.
The movie is framed with a mock-documentary, including interviews, shots from security cameras, and camera crews following some of the characters around. Slowly it drops the documentary-style while the real plot starts (showing “what really happened”).
The plot is fast paced, with plenty of action, suspense, and some drama. The acting is very well done, and the fact that the cast is full of unknowns helps keep you in the movie. The aliens look real, which is impressive since they are almost 100% computer generated. They are designed with enough humanity that you feel for them even if you can’t understand what they’re saying (they are subtitled). The backstory is told well enough in the documentary part that everyone has an idea of what’s going on, but there’s still plenty of questions to be answered. Questions I’d love to see answered in a book or graphic novel, or even another movie. It’s not that this movie begs for a sequel or ends in a cliffhanger, its interesting enough on its own. However the movie makes you want to know more and see more and find out what else happens. And that’s the sign of a well-written movie.
I can’t wait to see what else is done with it.
Overall: Well written idea, well executed in a unique way.
4/5
I gave micro-reviews of the other three movies I saw this summer on my Twitter, but I’ll repost and expand them for your reading pleasure.
You feel it in the morning.
The Hangover
“Some laughs, but wrong and forgettable. And wrong.”
That pretty much sums it up. Not sure why Jess and I felt the need to see it in theaters, as its worth a rental but definitely doesn’t need to be seen on the big screen (there are several things in the movie that once seen cannot be unseen). It’s crass, immature, and vulgar, but you can’t deny it has some funny moments. It’s not exactly quotable like some comedies are, but its not a bad comedy either. Worth a rental if you’re into that sort of thing.
2/5
Heaven help us.
Year One
“Save your money, save yourselves. Avoid the movie at all costs.”
Besides being a modified quote from Star Trek IV, its a true statement. I went into the movie with high hopes: Harold Ramis, writers from “The Office”, Jack Black, Michael Cera, Biblical “road trip” comedy? What could go wrong? Apparently everything. Its as if there was no script or director and the camera was just left on as Black and Cera wander from Biblical poop joke to Biblical poop joke. It made no narrative sense, every scene seemed to linger as if to see if the actors did anything else funny, it was disgusting and most of all COMPLETELY UNFUNNY. This is the only movie I’ve seen where the group I was with we actually discussed about 30 minutes into the movie if we should just walk out because we hadn’t laughed yet. We decided to give it a fair chance. We shouldn’t have.
0/0
Mo' sequels, mo' problems
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
“At drive in. Transformers over. Did not enjoy. Tired of Michael Bay.”
I’ve been putting this off for a while. I’ve had this dilemma: I saw this movie at the drive in where many circumstances combined to make it difficult for me to fully take in this movie, however I didn’t enjoy what I saw enough to justify paying to see it again. I’ll write my thoughts anyway. They say that to make a successful sequel, you have to take what made the first movie good, but do it MORE. “MORE” just happens to be Michael Bay’s middle name (it comes before the “EXPLOSIONS!” part) and he does everything the first movie did, but MORE!
So it ends up being the same as the first, but with MORE. The problem is that some of those things needed LESS, not MORE. I enjoyed the first movie by ignoring some of the more outrageous stuff, but instead of lowering the outrageous to make a better movie, Bay made Transformers 2 into MORE of the same and I can’t go for that.
2/5
WIZARD!!!
Summary: Harry Potter returns for his penultimate year at Hogwarts, but this year is much darker than previous ones now that Voldemort has gathered enough followers to make even the normal world feel the danger. But all is not lost as Harry juggles being a teenager and finding out the secret to Voldemort’s undoing.
Thoughts: I don’t remember much of the book having read it only once a long time ago, so the movie can be mostly judged on its own merits. For being what might have been one of the darkest (and probably boring) movies in the saga, there is enough romance and humor found during the school year to balance everything out, making this movie one of the most cheerful since the first one. By adding a battle scene in the middle of the movie and taking away the one at the end, I think that a pretty good balance is found between light and dark. The movie is much less frustrating than any of the others due to the fact that Dumbledore doesn’t ignore Harry and actually keeps him informed about what is going on, and Harry doesn’t spend the whole time fighting with Ron and Hermione.
The acting is top notch. Chris Columbus (the director of the first two) got really lucky when he found the main three actors when they were only children. They’ve really grown as actors and can no longer be classified as “child actors”. The same goes for Tom Felton as Draco, who is great at the conflicted evil he needs to be in this film. This must be a rarity, because sadly I feel that poor Bonnie Wright as Ginny Weasley has been passed up, having not grown as an actor as much as everyone around her. She starts the movie alright, but as it progresses it seems she gets more wooden the more emotional she needs to be. The only new student this year to get much focus (even though theoretically none of them are “new” students, they just haven’t been brought the foreground yet) is Lavender Brown, played by new actress Jessie Cave. Sadly, her acting and character are pretty terrible and made me cringe. Every scene she was in she looked like a crazed fangirl who had broken onto the set. It would have to be hard to come into this series so late and NOT be a fangirl, but come on, show some restraint. This was especially disappointing to me as for the last movie the producers found Luna Lovegood who had come to life and changed her name to Evanna Lynch. Every scene with Luna this movie was brilliant.
The adults, being the all-star British actors that they are, are all brilliant. Alan Rickman is awesome as he is no matter what he does, and the “new” addition of Jim Broadbent as Professor Slughorn is just as good. He steals the show even, I would say. Michael Gambon gets to finally do things as Dumbledore, showing that he actually was a really good replacement for the late Richard Harris.
Sure the movie ends on a slightly different note than the book, but being a slave to the book is what makes the first two movies so much less enjoyable than these more recent ones. These last few stand as really good movies, this one probably the most so. Personally, my top is still Prisoner of Azkaban mostly due to the fact that it was the last one I saw before I started reading the books and I was completely caught on every twist and turn. Thankfully I read the books really fast so only Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix were “ruined” by my book knowledge. I think Half-Blood Prince stands as a good movie, not just a good adaptation.
Overall: Goes to show what a good adaptation can do to a decent book.
4/5
Why couldn't she have chosen "neither"?
Went to Holiday Drive-In last night with some free tickets. This is the second movie we saw. The first movie was much better.
The following review contains SPOILERS, not like you care.
Summary: Miley Stewart has it all, a normal teenage life and a rock star celebrity life. Witness the hijinks as keeping her celebrity life a secret interferes with her personal life!
Thoughts: If you think this sounds familiar, that’s because its the plot to Miley and Billy Ray Cyrus’ show on The Disney Channel, “Hannah Montana”. This is the movie version, so not much changes. For those of you who don’t know, let me sum up what the deal is.
Miley Stewart is a normal teenaged girl who (thinks she) can sing really well. Someone (her father, played by her father, I guess) comes up with the idea that she can live a normal life (go to high school, not be mobbed everywhere she goes), but having her create an alter-ego whose ONLY difference is that she wears a blonde wig. Apparently the Hannah Wig’s power is only matched by Clark Kent’s Glasses in that no one can figure it out unless she tells them. I mean, they’re never in the same room together even though they claim to be friends (unless her best friend has the wig on and they only see “Hannah” from the back), they have the same best friend (played by Haley Joel Osment’s little sister which is obvious), the same publicist follows them around (played by Vanessa Williams, poor soul), they both hang around Billy Ray Cyrus for some reason. Odd that no one can figure this out. You’d think the movie would be about someone finally figuring it out, but it still takes her taking off her wig and saying who she actually is for anyone to see it, though someone trying to figure it out is part of a really stupid subplot.
So in The Movie, Miley being Hannah ruins her friends birthday party and she misses something about her brother going to college. This apparently pushes her dad over the edge and he kidnaps her and takes her back to their hometown in Tennessee. Meanwhile, her best friend who was mad at her just happens to reveal to a British gossip journalist where “Hannah’s” hometown is, which is the same as Miley’s, obviously.
Miley is upset at being kidnapped and taken to Tennesse, but her dad says they’ve had enough “Hannah” and she needs to take two weeks off to find herself, then he might let her continue her dangerous double life. They stay at Miley’s grandmother’s house (whose mother it is was unclear to me, since she bosses Billy Ray around like her son and tries to hook him up, but she has a room in her house with wallpaper picked out by Miley’s dead mother and a necklace belonging to her; guessing she’s a controlling mother-in-law?), where Miley meets one of her friends from childhood, a guy who of course has grown up to be screamingly adorable. He almost immediately admits that he had a crush on her when they were young, but he’s over it now. She just gives him googely eyes. If you guessed that they’re going to start an awkward teenage relationship that supposedly drives the movie, you’ve guessed right! Miley pretends to enjoy Tennessee, and ends up hanging around her boy crush a lot, but he doesn’t know she’s Hannah Montana either.
For some reason, half the town is being sold and the guy with enough money to buy it wants to tear it down and build a mall (you can just smell the symbolism!). The town has a benefit concert, and even though they have Rascal Flatts, Taylor Swift, and Billy Ray Cyrus (it’s unclear if they play themselves though and if they are, why don’t they have screaming fans like whenever anyone mentions “Hannah Montana”?). Miley’s crush calls her up on stage and she sings some well coregraphed dance song she just made up that the band immediately knows and the entire crowd can dance to after watching her do it twice. The concert isn’t making them the money they need, and as the guy who wants to build the mall taunts an entire Tennessee town, Miley’s boy crush says that they’ll make the money if Miley’s friend Hannah Montana comes! Oh no! What will Miley do? If you guessed that she’ll have her best friend come disguised as Hannah along with her publist who both immediately forgive her for ruining their lives, you’ve guessed right!
The (black!) mayor of this small Tennessee town is really excited to have Hannah Montana sing at the benefit, so he invites her to a lobster dinner downtown that night, but oh no! Miley’s boy crush asked her out on a date! What will she do? If you guessed that she’ll make up excuses to run and change, going back and forth down the street trying to make both parties happy, forgetting to change some parts of her disguise (even leaving on a lobster bib when she changed her clothes underneath it!), and eventually getting both parties upset at her, you’ve guessed right!
Her boy crush sees her dressed as Hannah without her Wig and finally sees through the disguise. He’s upset that she lied to him and they break up! That night, she tries to make it up to him by finishing painting a chicken coop he wanted to use to sell eggs (stupid sub-plot), but then she has to rush off to be Hannah for the benefit concert. She sings some song, then sees that her boy crush showed up the concert because he saw the coop and apparetnly instantly forgave her. This breaks Miley, as she says that she can’t do this anymore and takes off her Hannah Wig, revealing the obvious. Everyone in the town and everyone from miles around now knows the truth (including the Britsh gossip journalist). Miley apologizes for lying and living this double life that is ruining everyone’s life. She sings a song she wrote based on a phrase her boy crush told her and everyone is sad. What happens next? If you guessed that Miley has learned her lesson and resigns to either being a celebrity everywhere she goes or not being a celebrity at all and stop hurting her friends and family with her every action, you’ve guessed WRONG!
You see, one little girl (who had witnessed Miley trying to be at the dinner and with her date) asks her to put her Hannah Wig back on, that everyone present will keep her secret. The crowd agrees, and starts chanting for her to do it. But before she can, the British journalist snaps a picture on his cell phone! But before he can push send, Hannah’s publisit reveals that she flew in his daughters, who are huge Hannah fans. Faced with destroying his daughters’ idol right in front of them, he chooses instead to quit his job. So that plot is wrapped up in a few seconds. So how does the movie end? If you guessed that she puts her Hannah Wig back on and sings another song to her cheering crowd, you’ve guessed absolutely right! And then it ends. The only closure you get on the mall plot was a guy filling in the illustration of how much money they made. Why it took Hannah Montana revealing herself to be Miley, and then undo it make the residents of the town finally decide to donate money to save it? How can you convince an entire town to keep your secret? I’m sure there was other press besides the British guy if this is supposed to be one of the biggest stars in the world! Questions, questions, never answered. It just ends, undoing the whole plot of the movie.
And I guess that’s the problem with almost every movie based on a TV show that’s still on the air: a return of the status quo. Miley didn’t learn anything from being in Tennessee that she didn’t already know. She didn’t reveal her secret to the world, or change anything about her character. What was the moral of the story? That lying to the world about who you are is OK as long as they ask you to do it? What are kids supposed to get out of this?
I know this movie wasn’t made for me, but still, it was cliched, badly edited, horriblely acted, had songs inserted at random points by random stars just to sell CDs, with an ambigious moral message at the end.
Overall: All kinds of bad.
0/5
The answer to the immortal question: "Where do these stairs go?"
Went to Holiday Drive-In last night with some free tickets. Here is the first movie we saw, Up.
Summary: An old man who always dreamed of adventure finally gets to have one, taking his house (and a stowaway) to South America via balloons.
Thoughts: Who thinks of this stuff? Save for Cars (which reminds me of Doc Hollywood for several reasons), I’ve found every Pixar movie to be wildly unique and incredible (pardon the pun). This movie is no different, even though it goes down emotional alleys I didn’t think kids’ movies would go into. It’s deep, it’s sad, it’s heartwarming, it’s goofy, it’s beautiful, it’s funny, and the heroes are the most unlikely heroes in a movie probably of all time (unless you count Bubba Ho-tep, which I’ve not seen yet).
The voice acting is perfect, the visuals are amazing, and everything about it was truly unique, something I feel Disney lost a long time ago (if they ever had it to begin with). I’m glad Pixar is not being suppressed by being bought out by Disney, although the idea of a third Toy Story worries me.
I can’t say enough about Up’s uniqueness and its combination of elements are perfect. There were parts where I almost cried, and not because it was the climax of the movie, but because it was so heartwarming. It’s a great movie, for real.
Overall: Unique and heartwarming, something every other movie wishes it could be.
4.5/5
Sorry for the shortness, the trailers were so vague its hard not to spoil things about it. I will not be so kind to the second movie we saw: Hannah Montana.
I’m proud of my screenname. I really am. I picked it out around 1998 or so and have never failed to get it for any website: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Xbox LIVE, MySpace, Twitter, WordPress, tons of forums… If you see the name doubleofive, you can be assured its me.
Except for Facebook.
As of midnight EST this morning, you could pick screennames so that people could search and find you by username and not just your real name. I was up at 3am and thought I should save my “doubleofive”, but figured it would be OK for me to get some sleep, who would take it after almost 12 years of getting it every time? Apparently I was wrong. Some kid in Minnesota took it before I could.
It’s stupid, but I feel like my identity has been stolen. I actually submitted a “Violiation of Intellectual Property” to Facebook about it! Figured being able to prove that every other doubleofive is me would gain me back the one I lost.
I was so proud that if you searched “doubleofive” on Google, every result pointed to me. Now I’m afraid that the top result will be some kid I’ve never met before in my life.
I hope Facebook agrees with my sentiments…
UPDATE: As I wake up more, I’m calming down. Its not like using http://www.facebook.com/drew.stewart will kill me (it’s actually really cool), or that he’s funnelling potential clients or money away from me (for which I have nothing to offer but this blog). It would have been nice to have “doubleofive” everywhere, but I had to start losing somewhere. I mean, Robot Chicken had to take “CyborgTurkey” on Twitter, and I’m sure they actually have a copyright!
Exactly What It Says On The Tin
Summary: A young, smart, trying to be successful woman refuses a loan extension to an old lady, who is upset at what she perceives to be callousness and proceeds to attack and curse her. The next few days the young woman is visited by a demon, who wants to do Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
Thoughts: First off, you have to understand where I’m coming from here: I don’t like scary movies. They stress me out. I’m sure that’s what a lot of people like about them, but I spend the whole time so tense that its uncomfortable. And its embarrassing for me to have to admit that I didn’t see something because I had my eyes closed. So even though the trailer looked pretty cool, I didn’t want to see Drag Me To Hell because I figured it would be more of the same (a la The Grudge, The Ring, etc.) Even though it was Sam Raimi, who did the Evil Dead movies (which I love), I still figured it would be the generic scary movie they show in the trailers.
It took my friend Desiree who went to see it to truly sell it to me. Despite what the trailers show, its more Evil Dead than The Grudge. Not quite as ridiculous and over the top as Evil Dead, but definitely funnier than most horror movies I’ve heard of. I spent most of the time on the edge of my seat waiting for the Jump Moment, but after it arrived most of the time I ended up laughing. It’s not that it was funny because it was stupid, it was funny because it was so over the top. And its designed to be just that, a perfect balance between horror and funny.
Sam Raimi used to live for this kind of movie and perfected it years ago. He definitely knows how to push the audience’s buttons, like some kind of scary movie conductor. There are some things you can see coming, and you say to yourself “they can’t do that”, then it’ll happen, and even though you’re grossed out, you’re still laughing. So even though I was scared the whole time, I enjoyed it immensely. If you like the generic scary movies and are looking for a change of pace, go see it. If you don’t like scary movies, I’d tell you to see it anyway. It’s definitely not more of the same.
Overall: Evenly scary and funny, with perfect pacing and just enough character to make it interesting.
3.5/5
I’m sure no one really cares what blogs I check on a daily basis, but each of them deserves to be read by more people. I’ll try to classify them for you:
Visual Effects Guys
Darth Mojo: Adam ‘Mojo’ Lebowitz. Visual Effects Supervisor for “Star Trek: Voyager”, “Babylon 5″ and Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Director’s Edition. Visual Effects Designer for the new “Battlestar Galactica” and worked on Serenity. Shares some behind-the-scenes stuff, but its mostly his thoughts on other work (the new Star Trek most recently).
Drex Files: Doug Drexler. Former Make-Up Artist (won an Oscar for Dick Tracy). Visual Effects Supervisor for the new “Battlestar Galactica”. Artist/Production Designer for all things Trek since 1993. Usually shares CG ships he’s worked on.
Eavesdropping with Johnny: John Eaves. Concept Artist for all things Trek since 1993. Shares his concept drawings, sometimes corresponding with what Drexler has posted, or vice versa.
DarenDoc’s Slightly Nifty Musings: Darren Dochterman. Concept Artist for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, X-Men: The Last Stand, Get Smart, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Dragonball: Evolution, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, and Iron Man 2. Visual Effects Supervisor for Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Director’s Edition. Also pitched the idea for “Star Trek: TOS: Remastered”, only better.
Actors
WilWheaton.net: Wil Wheaton. Played Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me. Grew up to be a nostolgic writer, a voice-over actor, and a professional nerd.
Dispatches From The Island: Jorge Garcia. Plays Hugo on “Lost”.
RiffTrax Blog: Michael J Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett. The stars of the Sci-Fi Channel seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 who now do RiffTrax, downloadable MP3s of them making fun of movies you own on DVD.
Strange Reviews
Cake Wrecks: A blog showcasing “When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.” It’s sad what some people receive on their cakes…
X-Entertainment: A blog that needs to be updated, but when it is, it has hilarious reviews of toys and shows from our childhood.
Slacktivist: Left Behind: A weekly updated, ongoing review pointing out the terrible writing and theology that comes from the Left Behind series, both books and movies. It took him almost 5 years and 190 posts just to tear apart the first book. Fun reads, and really makes you think about what life would really be like after over half the planet disappeared. (Link goes to the Index)
Eleven Foot Pole: A daily review of each part of the premade 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons adventures that I’m running, with criticism and how to improve it for your players. Very helpful to me, at least.
Not A Blog, But You Should Read It
Not Always Right: Hilarious stories of stupid customers, submitted by Readers Like You.
They came back.
Summary: The year is 2018. It’s been 14 years since, Judgment Day occurred at the end of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. John Connor is a leader in the Resistance against the machines, fulfilling his destiny, looking for his future dad. But then he meets a guy named Marcus, who was put to death in 2003, but not before signing his body away to be experimented on by Cyberdyne Systems. What could this mystery man be? What does this mean for John Connor?
Thoughts: I love the Terminator movies. From the first low-budget sci-fi film, to the blockbuster T2, and I even appreciate elements of the cheesy Rise of the Machines (how many movies have the guts to end with the end of life as you know it? They LOSE for goodness sake!). I even had a comparison of the timelines of the different futures created by the events in each movie and the TV series, Sarah Connor Chronicles (may it rest in peace).
However, Terminator Salvation is none of these things. It’s the first movie to take place solely in the post-Judgment Day future, which actually makes it a prequel. It tries to be serious the whole time, which shouldn’t be hard when something like 90% of mankind is dead and actively being hunted by nearly-unstoppable machines designed specifically to kill them. But you know what kills this movie?
Editing. I’m not sure if it was to keep it PG-13 (I know one bad edit was), but this movie is sloppily edited, with no sense of scenes, pacing, or coherence. Just as you get into a scene it hard cuts to the next one, taking place with different characters on a different day. The aforementioned “let’s keep this PG-13″ edit sticks out (a girl is about to change her shirt in the rain with Marcus nearby, she’s in motion and the scene hard cuts to her picking something up, dry as a bone with no one around) along with a random one that irked me (it’s rainy, humans are being herded into a building like cattle, the camera cuts to a T-600 turning his head for less than a second, then hard cuts to a completely different indoor scene).
Editing is not the only problem. The action sequences are well done, but most of them could be cut out and no one would be the wiser. They have absolutely no point, and no real since of danger since in all reality its a prequel (of course Kyle Reece can’t die! Even the Terminator series wouldn’t end a movie with all reality being erased due to a temporal paradox). The Terminators also seem to have a problem killing people. I mean, hand-to-hand, a certain Terminator versus John Connor. Instead of ripping off his arms, crushing his head like a watermelon, or just breaking his neck, John is constantly being thrown around. Ouch, that hurts, but its far from deadly (at least in an action movie).
The plot is minimal, but it tries to have a message tacked on to it (What makes us human? Our heart! Literally!). The plot involving Marcus doesn’t make sense (hard to talk about it without spoilers). Let’s just say that Skynet makes some obvious mistakes. And the ending… I’m glad they changed it from the original one, but it was still pretty stupid. Sets us up for a sequel of course, but the next one is supposed to take place before this one!
The acting is pretty bad. I think Anton Yelchin (New Chekov) is great as Kyle Reece, but everyone else, from the Claire Danes replacement, to Marcus, to Christian Bale are pretty terrible. Bale seems to have two settings in this movie: bat-growl or shout. (side note: Why would anyone want to follow John Connor? This guy claims to have information about the future because he’s going to send someone to the past to sleep with his mom, who leaves him tapes about the future, but its a different future now that he knows about it. And if you disagree with him “WE ARE DEAD! WE ARE ALL DEAD!”) The guy who plays Marcus (Sam Worthington) is Australian, who fakes a pretty good American accent except when he says random lines with his Australian one. Moon Bloodgood, who plays the girl who falls for Marcus for no reason at all and nearly takes her shirt off, is terrible. Just terrible.
All this being said, there were parts I liked. The special effects were great for the most part, but I really liked the references to the other Terminator movies. From lines being quoted word-for-word (so that’s where they learned it!), to visual cues, to complete action sequences. But that’s the problem. I found myself wanting to watch the originals instead of the new movie I was watching! It’s one thing to have clever references to other movies, but try to make your movie good enough that the viewers aren’t taken out of the one they’re watching.
I’m going to lay the blame for everything solely on one person: McG, the director (I can’t blame it on the editor, Conrad Buff, who was nominated for an Oscar for T2 and won for Titanic). “McG” (which apparently he has been called since childhood) had previous directed both Charlie’s Angels movies for Drew Barrymore and We Are Marshall, being a famous music video director before that. He was also going to be responsible for the American remake of the British Simon Pegg series “Spaced”, which was created without the knowledge of any of the original creators. It seems he brough his poor choices to the editing room. He killed a franchise that admittedly should have stopped at the second one.
Overall: Poorly edited, badly directed misfire.
2/5
UPDATE: It took me a while, but I finally figured out what this movie reminded me of: a bad fan edit. But cuts, scenes that just end, obviously missing plot and character development… It’s like McG didn’t like parts of his own movie and just chopped them out at will.
