Omni's Random Video Noise

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
ChatGPT recommendation.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
This was a much better ChatGPT recommendation than Coherence, because while I'm always game for a psychological thriller, I'm relatively hard to impress in the drama department, and this was a movie that I think actually did pretty good in the drama department... up to a point.

Your premise of the hour is Main Girl is a space nerd recently accepted into MIT. While leaving a party intoxicated she looks up into the sky in response to the radio jockey announcing the discovery of another visible, habitable planet, which is later determined to be a copy of Earth, and gets into a car crash killing 3 and leaving a 4th in a coma.

She's sentenced to 5 years in prison, is let out in 4, and returns to her life thoroughly detached from the world around her, even as "Earth 2" descends upon them. She follows a shuttle journey lotto planned for Earth 2 but in taking a job as a high school janitor she decides to come clean to the man she put in a coma and killed the family of since we recently woke up... but she chickens out and instead agrees to "come clean" his house on a regular basis, which eventually stirs him out of his drunken stupor.

Eventually it's determined that Earth 2 not just looks like Earth but also consists of the same people and a theory is floated that it may be a "cracked mirror" in that Earth 2's reality is yet somehow different from Earth 1's and Main Guy's family may still be alive on that other planet. This leads Main Girl to give Main Guy the ticket she wins in the lotto and after he leaves with it we timeskip to the reveal that Main Girl 2 traveled to see Main Girl 1. Cut to credits.

Overall, I'd like to say that the presentation of this movie is very nice, it opens with a great head-boppin' beat, we establish the central conceit very quickly, the overall pace of the movie is very brisk and we still get plenty of solid establishing shots, with eerie sci-fi melodies, voiceover of various programs speculating about the Earth 2 phenomenon, all while we watch a relatively low dialog montage of Main Girl going through life day to day, either cleaning up student graffiti, trying to kill herself, or pursuing any number of other minor plot beats in the story.

I LOVE the presentation, and Main Girl's performance was decent enough to where I really didn't need her to say a whole lot to imagine what she must be going through. Making a friend of the man she otherwise ruined the life of is basically the only thing that keeps her going, but her understanding of the futility of keeping the context of their relationship a secret still drives her to want to escape to Earth 2, whatever it may be.




I cannot help but think though... that this movie took a fat ****ing nosedive into the ******* ground at the 50 minute mark.

At the 50 minute mark, Main Guy presents some terrible counterargument to going to Earth 2, citing Plato's Cave, arguing that ignorance is better than the unknown... which is the opposite reason just about anybody cites Plato's Cave.

He gets irrationally upset and drives her out of his home but later returns to apologize and creepily asks her to leave her Mom and come see something late at night. That something turns out to be a private performance in which he bows a handsaw, which creates some weird sounds and evokes images of astronauts in space, which are awkwardly superimposed over her face as she thinks about them. Easily the worst bit of editing in the whole movie.

Thinking about astronauts and some old guy you slaughtered the family of playing a handsaw for you apparent made her gushing wet because this scene immediately hardcuts to consensual sex which just RUINS this ****ing movie for me.

You secretly killed this man's wife, son, and unborn daughter and you're intentionally having sex with him?


I can honestly imagine a slightly alternate scenario where he pressures her into it, or even rapes her, or maybe there's actually some sort of romantic development, but no it goes from cleaning his house, to playing Wii Boxing, to snogging his face off. That absolutely WRECKS my opinion of this movie.

I can kind of appreciate the ending because the alternate reality outcome was only a possibility up until we see Main Girl 2, and the existence of Main Girl 2 implies the possibility of Main Guy's family still being alive.

But Main Guy's family getting killed was also presented as a motivation to go to the other Earth in the first place, and simply revealing Main Girl 2 and cutting to black without answering any questions is not the sort of cliffhanger I enjoy, and I do enjoy some cliffhanger endings.

If I could get this presentation in another movie, that'd be great, but apparently this movie was written, edited, produced and directed all by the same guy? And he's only done all of that for like 2 other movies? And at least one of them is a romance?

The worst part about this movie is the romance, I'd have given a much higher score if it didn't have the ****in' romance.

Anyway, this movie was 90% my style, but maybe 40% my writing. I may try watching it again at some point.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]

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"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've seen some exceptionally positive reviews for this movie from Western critics and trailer looks kinda cool. Godzilla looks way better in this one than he did in Shin Godzilla and it's a postwar period piece which is pretty different from what I've come to expect from these movies.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I've just come back from seeing this movie in-theater. It was being shown dubbed at a great time so I figured seeing a kaiju movie on the big screen would be a pretty good way to experience what seemed like a pretty promising movie. This is the first time I've seen a new movie in theaters since Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I am only now realizing was 8 years ago.

Sadly, movie theaters seem to have heavily fallen out of favor recently and I was 1 of only 3 people at my screening. I can't blame other people too much though, the tickets were twice what I thought I'd have to pay. I guess they were only showing this movie in the big cushy heated seats with footrests and a display the stretched the edges of the frame across the adjacent walls to feign an IMAX experience.

Frankly, I'd have settled for fewer features for cheaper tickets and the theater experience itself seemed a bit wasted in this case because this is not the epic monster slugfest of the Legendary Godzilla films.

Which reminds me, I feel like I have to caveat my opinions by stating that I have not seen the original Godzilla, let alone many of it's most popular installments. I grew up with a VHS copy of Godzilla 2000, which I personally assume to be a decent entry point into the series... while also being very aware that the Tri-Star Godzilla which I also had was popularly maligned both on release and for years to come.

It makes me feel like I haven't enough proper Toho Godzilla movies, which is funny because while I'm preoccupied with the fact that I've seen the last three Legendary Godzilla movies up to date, it hasn't really occurred to me that I've also seen the last three live-action Toho Godzillas; Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla, and... Godzilla Final Wars.

These three movies are so wildly disparate in their production quality, tone, and overall goals, it's weird to think that any one of them can really individually capture what Godzilla is as a series.

BUT, I'd like to open the review proper by offering a hypothesis of what I think an ideal Godzilla movie could be.

Now I have to preface this by conceding up front that there are at least two significantly different roles that Godzilla plays in the movies he features in.

The first is the VILLAIN, as he was originally portrayed, a monster-of-the-week, a vague incarnation of nuclear war visited upon Tokyo. The second is the HERO, or ANTI-HERO, in which Godzilla protects Tokyo by proxy through fighting and defeating an even greater threat, or even as an explicitly benevolent force.

In movies where Godzilla plays a hero, it's virtually always a monster vs. monster affair, and the intended appeal of the movie is the spectacle of the fight itself.

But what if we want to portray Godzilla as he originally was? By 50s standards, Godzilla may well have been a legitimately frightening presence on-screen, but that's just not going to fly today. Shin Godzilla also attempted this by redesigning him to look overtly evil and incorporating various forms of body horror, though eventually succumbed to presenting him as a very stiff upright creature, reminiscent of the range of motion costumed actors used to have.

You could present Godzilla similar to how he appears in the Legendary films, as a fully articulated CG giant, but seeing the devastation he can wreak in those films really only serves to thrill the audience, not demoralize them, or scare them, or otherwise associate Godzilla any of the oppressively negative feelings that the actual cast is supposed to be experiencing.

Perhaps the biggest weakness across all of the Godzilla movies I've watched is the throughline of a human arc, that there are human characters on the ground experiencing the disaster first-hand. It's difficult to reconcile that human-centric obligation with Godzilla just being ****ing cool.

THUS is my theory, and potentially the entire impetus for this movie:

Godzilla needs to represent something.

Suppose we follow Main Guy, it's the end of World War II, and he's deserted his duty as a kamikaze pilot. The war ends in a decisive defeat and he returns home to find his family dead, his home in ruins, and is haunted by his own cowardice.

During this time, Godzilla grows from a benign lizard into an ecological predator, and eventually mutates through exposure to America's nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll into the gargantuan living warhead that eventually attacks Japan.

Godzilla's attacks threaten the well-being of what family Main Guy's managed to assemble in the wake of the war and he finds himself once again confronted by his own cowardice.

The key here is that Godzilla isn't just a monster, but a living, persistent representation of the war itself. He's a literal product of weaponry and his growth, persistence, and oppression reflects the war's post-traumatic effects on Main Guy.

You could think of Godzilla as a sort of Paranoia Agent, which is also a (much more subtle) postwar commentary on human behavior. He's functionally a manifestation of human fallibility, and the destruction he causes is in some way karma for a mistakes we don't want to accept.


The problem is I don't like to headcanon out the flaws of the movies I see, so while I'm willing to accept that this may very well have been the intended read of the movie, I gotta admit they disappointed me.

My two biggest issues with this movie is that they don't take the time to let this idea simmer and build organically, and they just can't deliver on the emotional gutpunch they're trying so hard to evoke.

I appreciate that they give us a taste of Godzilla, by having him attack and slaughter an airbase in a smaller pre-nuclear form, wherein he is only known by locals. He also demonstrates a sort of violence that I really haven't seen from any of the Godzillas since the Tri-Star movie, wherein he's basically just a big dinosaur that will happily stomp and eat people.

The conventional Godzilla really only seems to kill people by proxy; either by destroying buildings or vehicles people are in or around, or by retaliating against military weapons, so it's strange to see him crushing swathes of humans underfoot and snapping up individual people like the T-Rexs from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

That said, this movie feels so much like they skimmed the Godzilla development I mentioned above that there really isn't even a third act. There's the very brief intro in which Main Guy deserts the war and fails to intervene in Godzilla destroying the airbase, then we fast forward to him getting a platonic family and Godzilla attacking shore for the first time post-nuclear tests, then the rest of the movie is just THE PLAN to kill Godzilla, and executing the plan.

I really think this movie could have benefited from more Godzilla earlier, before he develops his nuclear breath, perhaps he's a recurring menace to the shores and each time he appears Main Guy just falls deeper into hopelessness. By the time of Godzilla's first appearance on the mainland, he can already produce the functional equivalent of a nuclear warhead, so there really isn't that slow burn or threat build-up that a story like this really needs.

Also all the grief that the characters are supposed to be experiencing falls just shy of being believable. Main Guy has an annoying case of Anime Angst, where he's just unrealistically non-communicative and lashes out in what seem like breaks from his character.

There are also multiple scenes in which he and other characters are screaming or crying, but there isn't a single teardrop in sight. These are the driest cheeks in Japan and these are supposed to be sad moments, but the one child actor is very obviously acting, and the actual actors don't have the benefit of a simple ****ing eyedropper so they can fake some ******* tears.

The final twist of the movie is the reveal that Main Girl actually didn't die offscreen (which was one of multiple predictable plot points), and she looks perfectly fine and is just sitting upright in bed wearing unstained bandages and a sling. The movie teases some weird black thing creeping under her skin which relates to literally NOTHING that I'm aware of, so all this scene really does is take me out of the moment by presenting me three characters, who should all be weeping in each others arms, but for the fact that
one of them is a child is hasn't been directed to act sad,
one of them is a man who can't look convincingly sad on camera,
and one of them is an allegedly injured woman with no visible injuries who's been directed to sit perfectly still in bed instead of embracing her family which we've just implied will finally be reunited, married, and free of Godzilla.

The intended emotion just isn't there.

And it sucks because I thought Godzilla looked pretty cool in this too. They used his classic theme to good effect, and his classic roar, and an otherwise minimalistic score does a good job of evoking tension and sadness... It's just hard to appreciate the sad moments, and Godzilla kinda blows his load too early.

The plan to kill Godzilla comes down to a scheme to saddle him with freon gas canisters to sink him to a crushing ocean depth, which sounds plausible enough, but the "Plan B" is to use rapid inflatables to bring him back to surface and kill him with the bends, which doesn't make any ****ing sense to me.

If a sudden 1800 meter depth worth of pressure isn't enough to kill something, why would rapidly decompressing it do anything? Aren't you just applying the same amount of force in two different directions? The describe the effect this has on Godzilla as "damage" which kinda communicates how little thought actually went into this idea.

Great idea to bring your certain death back to the surface where it can kill you. At least it produced a kinda sick-looking visual when it results in a zombie-like Godzilla 'bout to fire muh lazer.

This movie ends by of course teasing that Godzilla's not actually dead before dropping title on us: "G: Minus One", which is such a dumb name for this movie especially once you've seen it and realize literally nothing in the movie explains the reason for the name.

I think it's poorly explained in a marketing blurb I've seen about how postwar Japan had been "reduced to zero" and therefor adding Godzilla makes it "MINUS ONE", which just so cheesy it sounds like something a child would think up.

Obviously it'd be much more forgivable if the movie was actually really good, but it ended up as just a capstone on what felt like 80% of the way to an actually solid movie.

At least the CG was way better than that Furiosa trailer.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been meaning to watch it for a long time. All I know about it is the hyper-exaggerated Minnesota accents and woodchipper memes.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

I have it on good authority that NOBODY speaks like the Minnesotan characters do in this movie, but I've met one or two people who casually dip into the "yeah, you betcha" stereotype a bit. I do find it amusing and it's kind of an adorable manner of speaking, but it's not an accurate portrayal of reality whatsoever and that's one of many things in the movie that undercuts the "THIS IS A TRUE STORY" blurb that it, like many other movies, cannot help but insist on at the beginning of blatant fiction.

I mean, the Coen Brothers themselves were both born in Minnesota, and neither of them speak that way, so that's kind of a ****in' shitty.

The movie kept me engaged, it seemed paced okay, but at the end of it all I simply didn't see a point to the movie. That seems to be my issue with each of the Coen Brothers movies I see. The Big Lebowski is such a purposeless movie and I get the same feeling here.

It'd be one thing if it was actually entertaining, let alone funny, throughout, but the majority of """comedy""" in this movie comes from the exaggerated, but not over-the-top accents. Like, it's mild quickiness at best. That just doesn't make me laugh.

It also doesn't do itself any favors by apparently presenting the Pregnant Cop as the protagonist, when she doesn't even show up in the movie for the first 30 minutes. You couldn't establish the conflict by then? We needed the long drawn out scenes of the bad guys staring daggers at each other?

The dude who kicks off the movie by organizing to have his wife kidnapped is rationalized as having money problems, but it's never established what those money problems even are. Why is he in debt? Who is he in debt to? Why does the movie consider this unimportant information?

Eventually his wife is killed, his dad is killed, and nothing at all comes of it. What was added to the story by killing them, other than to contrive some additional blood splatter into the scenes? What is lost by these characters surviving? These hardly feel like characters than they do disposable plot devices.

Yet somehow this movie gets some of the most ungodly ****ing praise, just like The Big Lebowski, and I'm just here have spent over 2 hours on something I'd have had a better time spending on literally anything else on my movie shelf.


It's bizarre to me, because I have to imagine the sort of person that loves this movie, but I can't imagine the person unless they have unrealistic cackling fits anytime a character opens their mouth, or some inexplicable headcanon that gives the story an actual ****in' point.

When I think of story progression and what they accomplish I judge what the difference in the characters is from start to finish, or what the difference in the world is from start to finish.

Pregnant Cop treats this movie like any other day. That's her character, she's entirely personally ambivalent towards the perpetrators and victims in this case up until she gives the killer a patronizing lecture about how "there's more to life" at the end.

There's no character development from the Husband character, just about everyone else dies, and the characters that died didn't have any character arc either.

So what's different about the world post-movie? There's a suitcase full of cash buried in the snow in rural nowhere now. Whoop-dee-****in'-doo.

The movie closes on Pregnant Cop's husband in bed remarking on how he got himself on a stamp or something? Who cares? Why should the audience care? This guy's had almost no screentime.

I genuinely just can't figure out what value there is in this movie, let alone the apparent incomparable value that landed it on a 100 Greatest Movies list and in the Library of Congress.

It got people to parrot "you betcha" memes for a few years, that's all it takes? ****ing Predator is more referenced, even to this day, and that movie's not in the Library of ****in' Congress. I hate this pretentious shit.

This is one of those movies I want to rate very very low because it is FAR below the expectations it's popularity has set for it, but it was just a "meh" movie to me.


Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

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I have added REWATCH UPDATES to both Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and The Dark Knight!

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The last movie I saw in theaters was a Toho Godzilla movie, and now there's a Legendary Godzilla in theaters.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

First, I want to comment on the theater experience. This was a smaller screening than Minus One and it didn't have the faux ultra-widescreen or fancy seats that movie had. There were maybe a dozen or more people in the theater this time around, so people actually turned out to see this one.

At first I had some audience members sitting pretty close to me who were already loudly commenting during the trailers which I thought might disrupt the movie a bit, but I quickly realized that my biggest issue was that the surround sound speakers on the left side of the theater were out of sync by a full second, so every single bass boom I would hear first from the main screen, and then again to my left.

It was so immediately irritating I actually walked out of the theater. I certainly didn't want to waste my $16 ticket and $6 ****ing bottled water, but I managed to find an employee who followed me back to listen to the speaker and gave me permission to change my seat (it was reserved seating).

I ended up sitting much closer to the screen which caused a lot of the action to blur together uncomfortably, but also revealed some of this movie's lackluster CG, but at least I didn't have to listen to that horrendous speaker desync.

The CG of this movie is of course in every possible scene, but the stuff that stuck out to me was when both Kong and Godzilla at the start of the movie felt the need to soak themselves in viscera. The "wet" texture that covers them, particularly on Kong, looked very weak and it was the most glaringly bad CG I saw throughout the whole movie.

I don't know why Kong is even shown to eat other monsters anyway. Not that gorillas wouldn't eat other animals if they had to, but gorillas are well known to be frugivores, they eat fruit, plants, and sometimes bugs.

It's particularly glaring to me because not only is Kong the least fantastical of the monsters in these movies, but by contrast, Godzilla is never shown eating anything, and he's a giant lizard that exists to kill everything. Sure he bites and will rip monsters apart, but only Kong, and the other giant apes in this movie, all originally frugivores, ever eat other monsters, so I just don't ****in' get it.

I've never seen Skull Island, so I don't know if his diet is established, but it thrills the pocket nerve of this vegan.

Not having seen Skull Island, I seemed to be missing a lot of backstory too cause this movie seems to want to present Skull Island as a surface-level colony of the human civilization that exists in Hollow Earth, which is only established in King of the Monsters.

So, even moreso than Godzilla vs. Kong, this movie really wants to unite the world lore of the Godzilla and Kong-exclusive movies.

The whole problem with that is:
1.) I don't give a shit, I'm here to see a kaiju movie.
2.) The story is beyond insignificant.

The story is really in two or three layers here.

The most important part is that Godzilla has either become aware of the human "Iwi" civilization in Hollow Earth, which is only established in the Kong movies, because they're suddenly sending out a distress signal now for no adequately explained reason. OR, he's become aware of "Scar King", which is another giant ape (who cares), which is controlling a kaiju called "Shimo" (who?), which is supposedly responsible for the first ice age.

I've never heard of either of these monsters and both of them seem entirely original to this movie. Scar, or "Skar", looks like a MonsterVerse Lanky Kong with whip, and Shimo just looks like an ice turtle with an ice beam that ices things.

I genuinely don't give a shit about these monsters. I at least recognized the baddies in King of the Monsters and Godzila vs. Kong, Gidorah and Mecha-Godzilla are iconic even if I've never seen their respective movies, but who the **** are these guys?

Their design also just presents them as an Inferior Kong and Inferior Godzilla. It's a monkey with a whip instead of an axe! It's a lizard with ice breath instead of atomic breath!


Who cares. The whole movie feels so much less important when these throwaway fanfiction kaiju are the baddies. OH NO! Scar is trying to get to Earth's surface! Only to get defeated by Godzilla anyway!

I don't even know how or why they threw Mothra back in here, I don't remember what happened to her in the previous movies, but her only meaningful role is to "convince" Godzilla to cooperate with Kong, and it really is as low-effort as it sounds.

There's another kaiju named Tiamat, which only exists for Godzilla to kill and it also appears to be a totally original kaiju.

The stakes have just never been so low as they were in this movie, and yet you can tell they tried. They rationalized giving Kong a Mecha-Godzilla-based robo fist which... really doesn't do anything except prevent that same arm from getting frostbite a second time.

Godzilla is "powering up" by absorbing other monsters for part of the movie until he turns neon pink which... never amounts to literally anything. The devastation he can cause never reaches the level of Minus One, but also the pink glow only ever serves to imply that his next atomic breath will be stronger. And then he more or less never hits anyone or anything of consequence with it.

Some Hollow Earth anti-gravity fight scenes really don't push the action to anywhere near the level of the previous movies either. None of it was terribly memorable.

I like the idea that Godzilla takes naps in Colosseum in Rome...
I like that Kong can set up traps to ambush enemies... but that's it.

The rest of the story surrounds the discovery of the Iwi people in Hollow Earth, who were apparently significant in Skull Island... but again I never saw that movie. They can read peoples' minds for literally no reason...

The one Mom character who I don't remember from the previous movies that can read Iwi is able to look at these large font hieroglyphics and just starts dumptrucking exposition about Scar this and Shimo that... and I seriously just tune out until the visual storytelling returns, which this movie actually does quite a bit of.

Perhaps too much of. I strongly believe the human stories in these movies are just huge slogs breaking up the action scenes you actually care about, but there was SO MUCH monster grunting, bellowing, and screaming in this movie. Extended scenes of Kong grunting and getting grunted at, it got a bit silly.

The worst part of the whole movie BY FAR is just the subplot involving the Mom character and the Daughter who's "the last of the Iwi tribe".

The Daughter is getting visions from the telepathic distress call the Hollow Earth Iwis are sending out and she feels like she doesn't fit in at school. There is exactly one substantive scene at the beginning of the movie establishing this, that she is the last of her kind, and she doesn't belong.

WELL GUESS WHAT, SHE'S NOT ALONE and they find the Iwi tribe in Hollow Earth and she suddenly fits in and can communicate with everyone with her find and she plays with the other kids and the Mom has a bunch of moments where she panics about having to leave her behind with what is essentially an uncontacted tribe on the most dangerous part of the whole planet... and guess how it ends?

"Whaaaa, you thought I wanted to stay here? Where you go, I go, just like we said at the start the movie!"

It was SO ****ing predictable, just a complete non-dilemma from start to finish, wholly unnecessary and insubstantial human drama getting in the way of my kaiju movie.

I recognized all of one 1 human character in this whole movie, and it was the Conspiracy Radio Jockey, because he's feels like an appropriate character in the universe, he's the only one with any funny lines, and he best represents the audience's perspective as just wanting to be present for the spectacle of things.

Everyone else I either completely forgot about or have never seen before because they were only in movies I hadn't seen.

The movie wasn't outright bad in any way, but there were no surprises, no stakes, and no new kaiju to get hyped for. I'd say this wasn't as boring as Godzilla (2014), but I also cared a lot less.


Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

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REWATCH UPDATE on Godzilla vs. Kong.

I also skimmed back through Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but I couldn't be bothered to add to it. It takes 40 minutes to get to the first fight, then 20 minutes, then another 40 minutes, and family/eco-terrorist subplots just suck up too much time.

Godzilla vs. Kong is definitely the best of the Legendary movies I've seen.

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Considering how many Godzilla movies I've been watching, I figured I'd see the original.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Fish.

Having never seen the original Godzilla, I was very curious to see what elements have stuck over the years and what has been discarded. Obviously the practical effects and man-in-a-suit aspects remained intact for a very long time, but so many people praise this movie specifically and act as though this movie did some part of the concept so right that other movies could never replicate.

One of the things I see mentioned a lot is that the practical effects are somewhat hidden by the fact that Godzilla is often in shadow, given that he attacks at night and it's a black and white movie. This would lend some credibility to why later entries in the series would be a bit harder to take seriously given you can see all the flaws of the practical effects in broad daylight, but this idea that "Godzilla should return to it's horror roots" completely flies out the door when we literally get a face-shot of Godzilla in broad daylight it all of it's horrible prosthetic glory at the very start of the movie.

I seriously thought this was going to be the sort of movie that actually hid Godzilla for much of it, that sort of horror principle that was actually honored in the TriStar Godzilla movie that everyone hates, but no, we pretty much immediately get derpy awful practical effects right out of the gate and it doesn't get any better as the movie goes on.

We get 3 Godzilla encounters, at the 20, 40, and 55 minute mark, with the third encounter being a whole 15-minute rampage sequence.

It's somewhat impressive that stretched the "action" out for so long, but as you can imagine, considering it's just a guy slowly walking through a bunch of props, it's not that exciting.

The movie isn't even scary either. Obviously.

While I'm on the topic of visuals, allow me to come right out and say, this movie looks like shit. Now I'm not a huge CGI fan, and I really do appreciate the practical effects such as in movies like Star Wars and Mad Max: Fury Road, but the practical effects and editing in this movie really aren't done tastefully.

As I said, the Godzilla suit is ugly and very obviously just some rubber shell around the actor. Godzilla's atomic breath has never looked so weak as it does here, where you really only get a visible breath effect then we cut to some melting or set on fire... the cuts in general are weird in this movie, there's an actual shot of one of the human characters standing up to leave the room and there's this super glaring cut between her standing up and having stood up that seems entirely unnecessary. Could they not just do a second take of that?

There are boatloads of miniatures, as you might imagine, include miniature boats. One scene of a speeding train that crashes into Godzilla was handled decently well because when I first saw it I was questioning whether it was a real train or not... which is good, because causing me to question whether an effect is real is the best a movie like this can expect, but then later there's a car crash that VERY OBVIOUSLY involves miniature cars and I was instantly reminded of Gumby.

The bad practical effects unfortunately also affects the action in this movie too, gatling guns and cannons both seem to either never produce an impact effect, or only result in only a flash in the air, indicating they never even collided with Godzilla.

It was surprising to see all of one scene in which two tanks stare down Godzilla and blast him repeatedly, which actually produced visible impacts on the suit and coated him in smoke. But that's literally the only scene in which the Japanese ever seem to hit Godzilla with anything.

Following this scene there's a stand-down order and Godzilla returns to the sea, only for a bunch of fighter jets to turn up last minute and the Japanese all go crazy, rooting for the jets. Then what proceeds is a hilariously drawn out sequence of every single jet repeatedly firing missiles at this barely moving monster and missing every single possible shot.

And yet the human characters and even Godzilla are reacting as though he's being hit, and they're very clearly just flying past him. Awful awful awful awful scene. Genuinely one of the worst practical effects I've ever seen taken seriously in any movie.

And people seem to take this movie seriously? Why?


I did find some things interesting about how Godzilla is presented in this movie. Just like Minus One, Godzilla is pre-established as a known myth local to a small island before attacking Tokyo. He's rather explicitly described as an ancient dinosaur that was "awoken" by the H-Bomb tests, rather than a lizard mutated by them.

A somewhat decent excuse is given for not requesting foreign aid to deal with Godzilla because of the postwar political climate and Godzilla's supposed origins.

It was also a pleasant surprise to see the old guy from Seven Samurai as the obligatory Godzilla-sympathizer.

Of course, as always, my biggest problem with these movies is that the human drama cannot simply help itself and genuinely **** off the screen and this movie is no exception. There's a subplot, albeit brief, involving two character trying to get their relatives' permission to marry. I don't know either of their names, I don't ****ing care, they waste enough of the movie onscreen actually talking about Godzilla.

Another thing this movie shares with Minus One, which I'm beginning to think is why Minus One was so well received, is that they develop a similar technology to kill Godzilla in the end. In this movie, some mad scientist character develops an "oxygen destroyer" which they dump on him in the ocean and laughably dissolves him into nothing.

It's not only humorous in the moment, but amusing to think about because virtually every single Wikipedia entry for just about every single Toho Godzilla movie you could search mentions that it "breaks continuity except for the '54 movie".

But in the '54 movie Godzilla is more dead than he's ever been! We literally see his skeleton and his skeleton even disappears! I haven't seen a single Godzilla movie that deserves a sequel less, and yet this one has the most of them! What the ****!?

I guess this movie must have found some unexpected success and they decided to turn a standalone film into a franchise, but all of these "sequel" movies I've seen make virtually no reference to this one, other than acknowledging the existence of Godzilla, so what is the point of insisting on a continuity where none exists?

How come nobody goes, "Hey whoa, didn't we reduce that guy to literally nothing?"

I had a feeling the "oxygen destroyer" in Minus One was a callback because it's such a strangely specific solution to killing Godzilla. At least in this movie more thought is contributed to the realism of such a weapon in postwar Japan, although when they talk about it being misused in this movie I can't help but think... bro, you live in Japan, you are one of the most marine-dependent countries on the planet, you're talking about the Japanese people weaponizing something than would best used against themselves.

Unquestionably, if we're treating Minus One as an actual franchise reboot, and not just a relapsed continuity, then it's certainly a better movie... but I really can't say the acting has improved much. A lot of dry cheeks in this one, even on the king of the monsters himself.


Final Verdict:

[Weak]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Despite not being in love with the Mad Max series, or even of any the actors that played in it, Mad Max: Fury Road was ****ing great, it was Road Warrior and Speed coming together to make a beautiful little half-life baby. It pretty much immediately landed a spot on my shelf of favorites and since then I've seen it several times and it's reaffirmed that it deserves it's place there. It even won 4th place in the MoFo 2015 Action Movie Countdown I ran, so it clearly left an impression.

I've always said that Furiosa was the real protagonist of that movie, so it'd be great if we got a similar movie but focused more on that character.

Well now we have.


WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Real horses. Fake dogs. Fake lizards. Fake insects.

If there's one movie I wish I'd seen in theaters, it's probably Fury Road, so this time I intended to rectify that mistake by seeing Furiosa in theaters. I'm not going to comment on my experience this time since it was unremarkable, but I will admit upfront that I came into this movie absolutely SEETHING after an astoundingly shitty day.

All I'll say is that the United States Postal Service is run by INCOMPETENT STUPID ********.
They earn a rating of , Irredeemably Awful.

Anyway, shock and awe; Furiosa is not as good as Fury Road. In fact I would say that Furiosa is nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Now, on paper, the idea of this movie is perfectly fine; it's a prequel, so there are opportunities to world-build, you know, flesh out the universe that made the previous movie so interesting, right?

However, in practice, this movie, at least to me, is FAR too concerned with the fact that it's a prequel, rather than interested in living up to the literally high octane standards of the movie before it.

The biggest reason anyone has to see Fury Road is the fact that it's basically ONE BIG CAR CHASE, just a constant climbing intensity through virtually the entire movie with a great brutal and emotional payoff by the end.

That moment where Furiosa gets stabbed in stomach while she's driving and everything is looking grim, the orchestra is goin' ham, and you just want to see how they could possibly get out of the situation? ****in' excellent climax of the movie.

This movie doesn't even try to reach that level though. It's not even a constant car chase, or even a similar format of movie. In this movie, we basically see Furiosa growing up into the character she is at the start of Fury Road, and it's strangely cut up into titled chapters. I don't know how else to say it, but this is practically the opposite of how you presented and paced the action in the previous movie, so I'm rather perplexed by this decision.

This badass character is supposed to be played by Anya Taylor-Joy (unfortunately), and I admit she does a decent job of mimicking Charlize Theron's appearance and manner of speaking, but she literally does not even appear until an HOUR into the movie. Until then we're following a third child actor who resembles Furiosa even less and pitting her against Chris Hemsworth, who's another incredibly bizarre casting choice.

Point being that the Furiosa you showed up to see takes a while to appear and the action scenes she's apart of don't blend together in the same escalation of stylish chaos we got in the movie she was introduced in and would therefor be compared to.

Speaking of comparisons, Chris Hemsworth as the antagonist... I'll credit him for not constantly reminding me of Thor, he does manage to get into character... what little there is. The problem with "Dementus" is that he's a woefully underwhelming and non-compelling threat compared to Immortan Joe and his family. In the scene in which Dementus first faces down Immortan Joe and his cavalcade of twisted associates and sexually-inspired family members, it's just VERY glaring that there's so much more personality on the Immortan Joe side.

You got Joe himself (who's strangely played by a much younger, much less gruff-sounding actor, but he still has white hair and wears the life support armor) who this time is portrayed as even more clever and insightful than before, his sons "Rectus" and "Scrotus" (who I was waiting to die for the entire movie and it never happened), the Bullet Farm man dressing in ammo belts, and the Gastown guy who's constantly playing with his nipples...

And then you got Chris Hemsworth, wearing parachute as a cape, which is a nice touch, but also has a teddy bear chained to his crotch with zero context. It just seems like they wanted him to be mildly quirky, but he really doesn't have all that many amusing lines.

There's a moment at the beginning of the movie when Dementus comforts Furiosa and pulls a whole nice guy routine with her, which suggests that he could have been one of those likable villains, where they're just abashedly evil, but they're so polite and accommodating at the same time, like Long John Silver in Treasure Island. That's a great character, but this pretense is immediately dropped when he tortures Furiosa's mom to death and forces her to watch, literally drinking her tears.

OKAY, no subtlety, GOT IT.

So, the whole movie just becomes a revenge plot against this guy, we expand on the origins of a handful of characters, we visit the Bullet Farm, we visit Gastown, we establish how Furiosa became a War Rig driver and even how she lost her arm.

Now let's talk about her arm, because her arm is unironically some of the WORST CG in this entire movie.

Another big feather in the cap of Fury Road is that there was very minimal computer-generated imagery, and what little there was, was used very sparingly. Most notably, was Furiosa's arm, which is missing the entire movie, but you never really notice it because it's not in focus, the actor is clearly wearing an ACTUAL prosthetic arm, and it's just a neat little bit of movie magic that Charlize Theron is not in fact missing an arm in real life, because her skin is being digitally removed in post. The effect is great because it's subtle, you don't notice it, and it's not a 3D object noticeably superimposed over the movie.

Furiosa takes that achievement, that gold standard, that "look! modern movies can make great use of practical effects and minimal CGI" and shits ALL OVER IT.

I suspected that this would be an issue because it was already noticeable in the ****ing trailers, but there is gratuitous CGI all throughout this movie. In fact, I was intensely aware of when there WASN'T CGI onscreen for a period of time because of how prevalent it was.

This movie opens on a shot of Furiosa picking a fruit off a tree, and it looks fake. This movie had a comparable budget to Fury Road, and yet it looks so much worse. You couldn't afford to buy a ****ing apple at the supermarket for a ******* opening shot? Are you kidding me?

So many shots in this movie look like shit, and I'm sure it's do with the fact that they wanted more elaborate backdrops in certain scenes because the composite wide shots of fictional locations are very noticeable. Ironically, there is still an over-abundance of blank desert scenery.

It's also very noticeable multiple times when actors are superimposed into the shot of a vehicle, as if they are in the vehicle, even though they and the vehicle are not moving synchronously, so you can tell that Chris Hemsworth or Anya Taylor-Joy have just been shopped into the footage in post-production.

There are fake CGI dogs in this movie, but they felt the need to force a real horse into one scene for some reason (and then to leave it out in the desert to die). Is it because it's difficult to mimic the movement of an actor on a moving mode of transportation? Cause I've kinda picked up on that.


I'll grant that majority of vehicles in this movie were probably real, but there were a frustrating number of times when they use CGI stand-ins for wideshots or when the vehicle is driving over rough terrain. There are CGI shots of the prototype War Rig, of Dementus's monster truck, and even of Furiosa just driving on a motorcycle.

Other gratuitous and inexcusable CGI includes tires laying on the ground. This is a movie centered around vehicle combat and they can't afford tires. TIRES. TIRES!

But nothing really puts the CGI in this movie to shame more than the scene in which Furiosa loses her arm. I've already explained that this was a really good effect in Fury Road, but it's BAFFLINGLY bad in Furiosa.

So here's the deal: Furiosa gets her arm crushed between a car door and Dementus's monster truck tires. This does not visibly sever her arm, but it clearly injures her. She soon after survives a crash and is dragged out of the wreck to be hung, by her arm, just off the ground. Her War Rig mentor, whose name I don't remember, is tortured to death (presumably) in a cloud of dust and when we eventually cut back to Furiosa, she's escaped, with only her arm left dangling.

Now, based on that description, where do you think they ****ed up the CGI?

Did the arm look like baby's first Blender tutorial?
Was the dripping blood just really fake looking?
Maybe the cloud of dust was manufactured?

No. The really obvious, blatant, and pointless CGI... was HER ARM... WHILE IT WAS STILL ATTACHED TO HER.

Obviously, if you've seen Fury Road, you know this is the scene she loses her arm, so you're going to pay attention to her arm.

Did she lose it when it got crushed between the tires? Nope.
Did she lose it in the car crash? Nope.
In fact she's just standing there, and her arm is... moving asynchronously with her body???

I'm not kidding, there are multiple shots in which you can catch glimpses of Furiosa's injured arm, but it just looks bloody... as it should. Because it's injured.

So WHY the **** is it CGI?

You couldn't put prop blood on her bare ****ing skin in these scene??? It's not like it's obviously broken or anything either, and even if it was, why wouldn't you make a prosthetic broken arm, or put injury prosethetics on her arm? Why is her arm free-floating irrespective of her shoulder? It's really obvious that they're trying to conceal this effect too because Furiosa is bladed toward the camera and the arm mingles with her clothing and the bad guys surrounding her, but I still couldn't help but notice that gave her a CGI real arm.

Not a CGI fake arm, not the prosthetic she wears later which is ALSO rendered in CG (even though you established that this wasn't necessary in 2015...), no they needed to digitally replace her real arm with a different real arm because REASONS.

And the whole kick in the teeth to make it extra stupid is you don't even see her arm get torn off, which might actually afford you some excuse to digitally render her arm, but no, we just cut away and cut back to the arm just hanging there. Entirely pointless CG, my only guess is they weren't sure how they wanted her to lose her arm until they'd already done post-production on the shot having cut it out and then hastily edited it back in.

There's other shit I could complain about; there are far fewer memorable lines. "Remember me" is a weak callback and "make it epic" just didn't land the way you'd hope it would. Certainly no "witness me!" or "it's a lovely day!".

Furiosa, by the end of things, comes off as a strangely sadistic character. It's suggested that she modded her prosthetic arm into a cutting tool to surgically plant a tree into Dementus's pelvis so he turns into Harold from Fallout? Somehow that's just a little bit less "epic" than tearing Immortan Joe's ****ing face off with his own car wheel.

That shit came way outta left field, I don't think anyone guessed that was the ultimate payoff for Dementus and Furiosa's tree nut that never seemed to deteriorate from age.

The music was also noticeably inferior to Fury Road. Fury Road had at least 4 memorable tracks on it's soundtrack, which is more than most movies manage, but I barely noticed the music at all this time other than when it briefly echoes tones from the previous movie.

I'm also in strong agreement with the few comments I've seen so far about the variety of post-apocalyptic vehicles. Other than Dementus's motorcycle chariot, and the handful of neat flying vehicles that the "Fire Water" guys (or whatever they're called) attack the main cast with, there really weren't too many crazy vehicle combinations that stuck out. I didn't see a car with tank treads, or two Cadillacs stacked together, or some batshit crazy amp tower on wheels carrying an entire percussion section and a dude with a flamethrowing guitar...

You know, that's kinda the sum of the problem with this movie. Fury Road wasn't just a matter of "constant action", or "good music", or "more fictional vehicles"; the whole idea of a society built around a Cult of the V8 Engine mobilized by paint-huffing irradiated sociopaths out to "die historic on the Fury Road" all lends itself to an escalating glorification of cars and violence. And they gotta "make it epic".

I gotta agree with Miss Vicky on this one, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is




Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

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This comment makes me weirdly sad. It's just a movie, but damn I know how much you love it and I know how incredible the experience was for me the four times I saw it in the theater.

Furiosa could've been so much more than it was. So much wasted potential.

__________________

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I randomly found myself in the mood to watch a horror movie. Also I've been blissfully unaware that A Quiet Place got a sequel, let alone a prequel soon to release, and is apparently one of the highest rated horror franchises on iMDb?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Usually, before I watch a sequel, I tend to read up on my review of the previous movie to put myself in the headspace I was in immediately following that movie.

In this case I decided not to do that because A Quiet Place isn't a bad concept for a movie, but I do not have fond memories of the original, largely because the Apocalypse Mom thing just irritates me so much.

For this movie, I decided to put that whole trope aside because what's done is done, it technically still occurred in the chronology of this movie, but it's offscreen and now we're just left to dwell in the aftermath.

I would say overall my attitude towards Part II is definitely better than the first movie, I feel like there were fewer obvious things to complain about and apart from presenting an expanded "Day One" flashback opening, it quickly enough settles in the somewhat slow-burn that almost too quickly turns into all-out chaos.

On the positive side of things, Cillian Murphy gets retconned into a family friend that Apocalypse Mom and kids run into. They play around with the idea that he's become cold-hearted person and will turn them away, but thankfully they spare us that drama and he manages to play New Dad essentially. I'm not normally a big fan of Murphy, maybe because I'm sick of seeing his face in every Nolan movie, but he was okay in this.

There was one scene where it seemed like his character was resigned to dying, but also thankfully he managed to badass his way out of the situation and the trademark Father Figure character didn't have to die a second movie in a row.

Having said that, certain characters just seem to have plot armor. Even though Deaf Girl is at a distinct disadvantage compared to everyone else, she is also basically the main character and the contrast of her disability with these monsters' superpowers really does remove a lot of suspense from the scenes she's in.

I would easily admit that the CG is pretty solid in this, far more so than Furiosa, depressingly. The monsters are portrayed as so absurdly fast that for most of the time they're onscreen, they're barely rendered so almost never stand out as CG. There is I think one shot near the end of the movie where you get a close-up of a dead monster that does look pretty artificial, but it's hardly worth fussing over.

The story mostly works on it's own, but at least in the first third of the movie it does like to dwell on the characters and events of the previous movie just enough that you'd be missing some details if you hadn't seen it the first time. The cut from the flashback to the present is also super abrupt and it clearly expects you to remember the ending of the previous movie.

I feel like this movie tries to retread a bit more post-apocalypse cliches, particularly with regard to the whole "humanity is not worth saving anymore" trope, but at least it manages to subvert that a bit by following up that whole scene with eventually discovering island of peaceful humans happily coexisting without any monsters.

That scene also bothers me because it just felt lazy. Virtually no dialog is exchanged between Daddy Murphy, Deaf Girl, and the sudden new faction of humans with non-specific ill-intent. They just kinda glare at each other a bit before shit hits the fan, so there's absolutely nothing new here narratively, just the bare minimum of "It's the post-apocalype, time to play the THERE'S MORE THAN MONSTERS TO WORRY ABOUT BEYOND THE SAND TRAIL" bullshit, which I read just prior to watching this.


Now that I'm less fixated on stupid decisions made by the main characters and we see more of the monsters' patterns of behavior, the logic of the world once again starts to raise some questions.

WHAT is the point of killing humans? At no point whatsoever are the monsters portrayed to be eating humans, so there's zero case to make that they are hunting humans. This is reinforced by the fact that the monsters CONSISTENTLY move to attack humans making noises, rather than stopping at their kill and eating it. So when introduced into a crowd, the expected behavior is that the monster will move to strike everyone until nobody is making any noise.

I have to specify "nobody" because the monsters rarely seem to attack noisy objects, despite numerous non-human sources of noise throughout the world. Which doesn't make any sense either because the monsters are almost never attracted to human noises, they're attracted to noises made by something humans are interacting with.

Another thing I don't understand is why the hearing aid is a sonic weapon. It's awful nice to have an anti-monster device attached to your head, but why does it work? Surely you can't just crank up a hearing aid to an absurd volume, so is it a frequency they hate? If that's the case then why would the humans ever need to blow their eardrums out as they seem to every time they create audio feedback?

Yet ANOTHER thing that didn't make any sense is that Daddy Murphy takes Deaf Girl's hearing aid while she's sleeping in one scene and she has an emotional breakdown over it. Why did he do that? Especially if he was just going to return it when she woke up? It's usefulness against the monsters isn't even established to him prior to this scene.

What's even more baffling is that when he falls into the water later on, he manages to steal back the hearing aid and keep it in his mouth until he can reveal later that he managed to save it... only he doesn't return it then and there, he holds onto it for literally no reason at all, even as he and Deaf Girl are sneaking onto the island where the humans could be ENEMIES... and then even after she's introduced to them and they're getting along, he just still has this ****ing hearing aid for seemingly no other reason than for it to be a prop for him to show off to Black Guy.

Black Guy also dies in the most telegraphed way you'd expect in a horror movie. Dude manages to flee inside a building from one of the monsters and instantly goes "But what about my family!?" goes all wide-eyed starts backing up towards the opening behind him and shock and awe, he dies. It's so predictable that they're about to kill someone off when the randomly just loses all sense of self-preservation out of nowhere.

Definitely the most disappointing part of the whole movie is the ending. The whole movie essentially has the cast split up early and frequently and then get into different situations where they need to be quiet to avoid the monsters. There's two separate scenes involving the Mom at base and Murphy and Deaf Girl on the island where they're both trying to survive and eventually manage to kill the minimum of one monster that's after them... but then it cuts to credits.

That seems like such a hasty cut to credits. Bear in mind that there are potentially two tragic dilemmas facing both parties now; 1.) is that the Islanders may now be hostile to Murphy and Deaf Girl because they brought the first monster to their island in over a year and it resulted in numerous deaths. 2.) The island is supposedly 2 days away from base, which is ostensibly far less habitable now due to monsters breaking into it and water flooding in.

Murphy and Deaf Girl will have been gone for at least 4 days by the time they return, and Mom has already burned through 1 of the 2 oxygen tanks she just picked up and has been relying on to keep the baby quiet in a box.

Overall, the movie wasn't terrible, and the things I could grip about weren't really big gripes. Just a pretty standard horror movie with decent effects and a few wicked rampage scenes.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Never seen it. There's a movie I want to watch called Late Night with the Devil that looks like it may take some inspiration from The Exorcist, so let's watch this first.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

To get my first and greatest complaint out of the way, this movie takes much too long to get started. The actual exorcism is only like the last 30 minutes of the movie. The first 15 minutes could be cut out and nothing would be lost, and the possession doesn't even really begin until 45 minutes in.

All in all, it's just too slow, and there are more than enough scenes throughout the movie that add literally nothing of substance to the plot.

Even Lee J. Cobb makes a surprise appearance as a detective whose only contribution is to communicate to Mom that Regan killed Burke. Beyond that, all of his screentime is wasted on smalltalk and insinuations that he wants to bribe the other characters for information.

I obviously give zero shits about the religious angles of this movie and that probably doesn't help my opinion, especially knowing that the director has gone on to make a clown of himself, asserting that exorcisms are real, but even setting that aside, there's a lot of little issues with this movie, apart from the tedium between scenes involving Regan.

A recurring complaint is that the doctors in this movie ale just genuinely ****ing retarded, and considering the director has since gone on to misrepresent the professional opinions of scientists on this topic, it feels rather deliberate.

For one, the doctor Mom first talks to asserts that the possession is a "nerve disorder", whatever the **** that is, and recommends Ritalin, while fully acknowledging that it's a stimulant, and then claims that "we don't know why it works, but it works". Spoiler: It doesn't work.

Wonderful to hear that medical education is getting put to good use.

Mom eventually gets a room full of medical staff to herself to scream at, which seems like the sort of meeting that would never take place, and to really seal the realism; three separate doctors knowingly advocate she see an exorcist.

We don't even ever find out when or why Regan is possessed. It's suggested multiple times that Regan "did something" or would feel sufficient guilt over something to make her vulnerable to The Devil, but we're never told what. The "onset" of the possession is also very sudden. We have some weird events going on around the house here and there, but the sudden shift to Regan speaking in a different voice or spinning their head, or floating, or vomiting, or crawling backwards all comes on very sudden.

There's also a recurring issue with scene transitions not clearly communication passage of time, it'll often just hard cut to another shot and we're just supposed to be jumpscared with the news that days have passed. Not-Exorcist Guy's mom is scene transitioned into a psychiatric ward and then scene transitioned into a grave offscreen. We only learn about this information secondhand from a third-party delivering it to a fourth-party, what the ****? It was just a few minutes ago this woman was alive and she just randomly died offscreen of chronic Old Person Disease?


I do get the impression that this movie was intended to be shocking for the time period. The sort of stuff Regan does and says is pretty extreme... but fairly tame by the standards of a Post-Saw Universe. There's a bunch of jumpscares, but really nothing in this movie spooked me.

I'm sure some people view the characters' protagonistic Christianity as a plus, or the vivid curses, slime, and blood as cool or something, but not me.

There's a line in this movie where The Exorcist tells Non-Exorcist Guy not to speak to The Devil, because he'll try to deceive them.

I think that's shooting down the most interesting thing you can do with a Devil character. The Devil conventionally works through people, he's supposed to be manipulative and tricky, and that's why talking to him would make for interesting material! It's not so different to the premise of movies like The Seventh Seal, where trying to outwit Death (or The Devil) is the entire point.

You don't need him gagging Nickelodeon gack on you or doing his best impression of an owl, or just ****ing ranting Bible verses at him... that's just not interesting, and the lead up to the whole ordeal wasn't terribly interesting either.

I've recently been listened to Pantera and learned that their album, Vulgar Display of Power is a direct reference to a line in this movie, where Regan states that they won't free themselves of the bedstraps because it's "too showy", essentially. I feel like that naturally begs the question of whether that's true, and if it is true, what's to be gained by possessing people, but not exorcising (pun unintended) your full powers?

It's probably just a cop-out line in the writing department, but I'd like to think that there's a greater reason for it that the movie simply fails to explore.

Also let's ignore the fact that by the end of the movie 3 separate people have died just from being alone in the room with Regan. Nice to see nobody learned from anyone else's mistakes.


Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Sounded interesting. Saw brief clips of it that looked cool.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Worms.

Whereas I don't feel the need to explain what The Exorcist is about, I feel I should this time.

Late Night with the Devil is treated as a found footage movie of a live television recording of a 70's late night talk show in which The Devil increasingly pervades over it's runtime.

I thought that was a pretty neat idea, and fortunately, it turned out to be a pretty neat movie.

Late Night blends a handful of obvious influences in amusing and creative ways. The talk show is a pretty stereotypical format with the host opening with a bunch of weak jokes and a sidekick to play off of followed by a handful of interviews and demonstrations of talent.

The first guest, we'll soon find, is effectively a fictional version of Uri Geller. You may know Uri Geller as one of those psychic scam artists who would profess to speak to the dead by probing an audience with general questions like "Did anybody know a Jack? Maybe a John? I'm hearing a name from beyond starting with a 'J'." You may also know Uri Geller as the scumbag who's DMCA'd Youtubers and sued Nintendo because they used his name and likeness for Kadabra.


His performance in Late Night is a pretty faithful recreation of what a televised "psychic reading" would look like, and other characters on the show even draw attention to the dubious credibility of the power.

In particular is the next guest, a fictionalized James Randi character, who they portray as especially pompous, very 200 IQ Redditor energy, which I feel is doing him a bit of a disservice, but he really is essentially note-for-note James Randi.

He's a former magician turned advocate for skepticism, he walks around with a check in his pocket on offer to anyone who can prove supernatural ability to him, and at one point he even questions the audience leading him to confirm that certain audience members were even screened ahead of time, which references how James Randi exposed Peter Popoff's faith healing.

Uri Geller dies mysteriously and Randi's character sticks around through the remainder of the show, namely during an interview with a "parapsychologist" who is raising and researching a child survivor of a fictionalized Waco Incident, which more or less culminates in the demonic possession which noticeably borrows from The Exorcist.

Over the course of the show, the host, Jack Delroy, whose alleged to have been involved in a cult for the rich and powerful, presents each guest and becomes increasingly argumentative with each of them, especially as the show becomes more and more dangerous, but naturally, ratings are through the roof so they have to keep going.

Geller spews black sludge, Randi hypnotizes the audience to see wormy body horror, and naturally we get pretty much what you'd expect from a girl being possessed by the devil to talk some shit. Eventually it all culminates in all of the main characters getting slaughtered and Jack falling into a dream sequence which seems to affirm that he sacrificed his former wife to the cult he was apart of to achieve fame.

It definitely rounds out much better than the last two movies I saw, although I'm really not big on the prologue. The beginning of the movie is frontloaded with a corny movie trailer voiceover guy narrating the events of Jack's life before the start of the show. Other than establishing that his wife recently died of cancer and that he was involved in some sort of cult, this really doesn't hook as well as the movie does when it actually starts.


The whole vibe of the show is steeped in 70's television aesthetic, it almost reminds me of Looker and how that movie portrayed television. It immediately sinks into that familiar feeling of watching an old TV show, but I kinda feel like it didn't need the "backstage" footage.

During every commercial break, we switch to black & white hand-cam and follow the characters on and off the set as they discuss and learn about things offscreen. I'm honestly inclined to believe that this was super unnecessary and breaks the flow and immersion of the movie.

First off, even off set the movie still switches between multiple camera angles, which immediately destroys the authenticity of this being genuine B-roll recorded for behind-the-scenes purposes. Not only would this have to be edited into the commercial breaks in post, but the different camera angles would have to be edited in as well and that just doesn't seem at all realistic given how the show ends.

I would have much preferred the Producer character and all of the drama over whether or not employees are threatening to leave be left out of the movie and a bunch of fake commercials be inserted instead.

You could have so much fun making up bullshit 70's commercials, especially if the idea is that The Devil is increasingly influencing what you see on TV. Instead of being some implausible cutting-room-floor type found footage, this could literally just be a VHS recording of the airing of the TV show. I used to have early 2000s Digimon episodes recorded on VHS and watching that shit with all of the commercials still baked in takes you back like few things ever do. I really wish they'd have done that.

I also wish the movie went for something a bit more poignant at the end. I don't know if they should have gone for a different ending or presented the ending they had differently... I'm inclined to think that if we already knew that Jack killed his wife at the start of the show that it might provoke a more emotional response since he feels increasingly guilty as The Devil manifests the reward for his sacrifice. It'd probably feel a bit more like a Twilight Zone episode in that case, which it genuinely could have been.

Late Night with the Devil was pretty good, but it made some decisions that held it back a bit.


Final Verdict:

[Good]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Not that I really play Dead by Daylight, but Chucky somewhat recently got added to Dead by Dayight and I've never seen Child's Play.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Because Chucky was introduced to the world after Twilight Zone's Talky Tina, before Goosebumps' Slappy, and well before Annabelle, it's very easy to imagine all of the stereotypical tropes to expect from a movie about a children's doll coming to life and killing people.

Thankfully, Child's Play doesn't suffer the same way Friday the 13th does with it's characters insufferably boring ignorance of the threat in their midst. We're also treated to an increasing amount of practical effects early on, much more and much better effects than I really expected.

The movie opens with the death of Charles Lee Ray, portrayed by Grima Wormtongue himself, Brad Dourif (which seems like such a great casting choice), a serial strangler who for some reason has some occult knowledge to implant his soul in a toystore doll as he dies.

I'm really not a fan of this idea, I understand that the occult rationalization excuses the "he's becoming more human" concept and reason why he can be killed later in the movie, but I'd personally have preferred they left the cause of his possession to be dubious. Part of why I feel that way is because while I can suspend disbelief for one supernatural phenomenon to justify the movie's premise, when Charles literally just has magic powers from the start of things for no reason then you really just leave the door open for just about any kind of bullshit writing.

Chucky, at least from the outset, is a convincing doll design that would probably sell, and the movie does a decent job of fabricating some marketing and a TV show to bring realism to "The Good Guys" as a believable franchise.

One BIG missed opportunity I noticed is that in the commercial it's mentioned that the Good Guy doll can speak "up to three sentences". I was sure that this was a Chekhov's Gun moment wherein Chucky's possession would be revealed by the fact that he's not constrained to only 3 lines of dialog, but alas this movie earns a Sad Chekhov.

Instead, after a reasonable amount of suspicion around the doll and a couple murders, Chucky is revealed to be talking without batteries, which is a good reveal too, but the giveaway about the 3 sentences would have been a nice inclusion.


The main thing commendable here is that the human characters are mostly pretty reasonable regarding their suspicions towards Chucky. Everyone is immediately disbelieving, as they should be, and it takes some pretty damning evidence, or being outright attacked, for them to become at least skeptical.

The detective character is SO skeptical that he almost becomes annoying by the end, but thankfully he doesn't. It is strange though that he's so intensely suspicious of Andy's ability to hurl a grown woman out a ****ing window.

How odd is it that the toys in Toy Story also secretly come to life and belong to a child named Andy?

Certainly the best part of the movie is the practical effects. Chucky is noticeably played by either a puppet, a stationary animatronic, or a child actor in a suit in various shots. Consequently, it's pretty noticeable when these methods of portraying Chucky switch, but they switch so often and conscious effort seems to have been made to obscure the transition.

One such shot has Chucky thrown bodily across the room, as an obvious puppet, landing in the next shot, and then quickly standing up in a manner that can only be accomplished with an actor. The thing is, Chucky landing and rolling on the floor seemed completely believable if it were a puppet, so it was surprising to see him smoothly stand up, so much so that I had to pause the movie to make sure they hadn't made a cut in the middle of the shot to switch the puppet with the actor.

The best shot in the movie by far is the burnt Chucky stalking Andy in the foreground with the knife over his head. The backlighting, the smoke coming off of his skin, the just-enough shadow to conceal most of the details of his face but the eyes, it's a really great shot and definitely as creepy as it needed to be in the climax.

This movie really just ended up being a lot better than I expected it to be. Not amazing or exceptional by any stretch, but it is a solid pre-2000's popcorn flik and I'm interested in seeing what the sequels do, particularly if they want to lean in the direction of an Evil Dead II type of thing.


Final Verdict:

[Good]

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Saw Child's Play 2 and Lone Wolf McQuade, but didn't really find the energy to review them.

Child's Play 2 wasn't as good as the first movie and Lone Wolf McQuade was as laughably awful as it was pitched to me.

WHY'D I WATCH IT?

And I thought, "Well shit, this looks legit as ****. Let's see it in theaters."


WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
At least 1 dog, and numerous other obviously computer generated animals.

Saw this movie in theaters again, which must be a theater-going record for me at this rate. Not much to comment on regarding the experience beyond the fact that the big screen makes even distant CGI very apparent and $26 is far too ****ing much.

I'm gonna refer to this movie as "B2", rather than the annoying over-syllabic title they gave it.

So B2, where to start? I think firstly and most importantly, I have to state that there are a lot of things working against this movie, in terms of my prospective appreciation for it. I was not a big fan of the original Beetlejuice, although it did have the charm that was expected from Tim Burton movies at the time, like Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands, both of which are movies I've rated very highly.

It's been a long time since I've seen the movie and now having seen the sequel it's apparent to me that I'm not really the target audience, in that it seems very interested in appealing to a new generation of teenage girls who many years ago would have been massive Winona Ryder stans.

To compound things even further, I have been VERY negative towards the last few Tim Burton movies I've seen. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one of the worst remakes I've ever seen, Sweeney Todd was overrated, and Alice in Wonderland was nothing like the American McGee adaptation I had so desperately wanted it to be.

Those are literally the last 3 Tim Burton directed features I've seen and my experience was so poor I've been completely turned off of anything he's been involved with since and have largely been of the opinion that Henry Selick deserves a lot of the credit Burton's received over the years.

However, when it comes to B2, despite my waning memory of the original movie, I have to admit it knocks it out of the park in one singular and not unimportant respect; and that's that it FEELS like a genuine follow-up to the original.

To clarify, I've at this point seen quite a few franchise resurrections, and too often they feel like completely different movies or games:

Mad Max: Fury Road is great, but it's a very different vibe than before,
2011's The Thing, while faithful, felt nothing like a John Carpenter movie,
and even Kingdom Hearts 3, a series that hadn't had a major installment in 14 years just clearly did not have the same design aspirations as Kingdom Hearts 2.

B2, in terms of capturing the experience of the original movie, puts all of these other series to shame. It's not just Tim Burton directing again, but they brought back Danny Elfman to score, and both Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton are reprising nearly 30-year-old roles as though no time has passed at all, AND the story is centered around a conflict that is natural and organic to the narrative that began in the first movie.

That is a PERFECT place to be in when your primary goal is to do justice to the original movie, which unfortunately, after so much time, really can't be taken for granted.

What franchise corpse shall we dig out of the grave today to shake a few dimes out of?

It helps B2's credibility as well that a sequel has been rumored for ages and it's just been in development hell for one reason or another.

Anyway, from the start, B2 is spot-on in terms of tone, it is 100% what anyone should expect from a Beetlejuice sequel and that alone I feel is extremely commendable, especially considering other returning performances like the one James Earl Jones turned in one of the increasingly innumerable and equally unwanted ****awful CGI Disney remakes...

I heard he died this week. That sucks.

To speak of B2 though, I'm gonna have to pull the ******* Card and end my positivity there. Please refer to the above as my crediting Burton's overall direction, Ryder and Keaton's portrayal and performances, and Elfman's involvement, but from here on I'm going to be more critical.


It makes a lot of sense from a narrative perspective that Ryder's daughter Astrid cuts against her mom in a lot of ways.

Ryder's role in Beetlejuice really came into popularity in a big way because she was a counter-cultural outcast, a goth, who was a totally independent female character, and ultimately presented as "desirable" in some charming way by a dangerous supernatural character, Beetlejuice.

That movie did Twilight better than Twilight did Twilight.

So in this movie, it's totally logical that, being enlightened to the existence of an actual afterlife, that Astrid, in a painfully New Age-y Artiste 2024, winds up as a huge skeptic of anything supernatural. She plays the Rebellious Counterculture Girl character in her own way and it works.

As I said, this feels like a natural extension of the plot from the previous movie, but I have some real issues with how they went about some, if not all, of the smaller arcs they weave in here.

For one, the overall irreverent tone towards "New Age" or progressive type crap initially comes off as adequately self-aware, the New Dad character is clearly intended to be deliberately obnoxious, and eventually killing off one of the other returning characters just for her to essentially ask to speak to the manager of the afterlife is of course intended to make fun of her personality.

This is all fine... up until you unironically, with nary a wink or comedic pause in the soundtrack, state that one of the characters has dressed up as a "feminist astrophysicist"... as though we, as the audience, or literally anyone in-universe, is supposed to recognize that from a generic dress.

We are also expected to believe that two completely random teenagers happen to meet each other by chance, and both have read and can quote Dostoevsky. No. That's not a thing. Shut the **** up.

It's especially painful when the reference is used to aggressively reaffirm Astrid's already well-telegraphed worldview and to dovetail into a BRUTALLY CRINGE Overnight Romance with this random neighbor boy.

I appreciate that his role is subverted into revealing that he's actually a ghost and a murderer, ultimately exposing Astrid to the supernatural while providing a sufficient justification for Ryder to reluctantly recruit Beetlejuice's help... and Beetlejuice is a great character for that purpose.

But that's like... at least 50 minutes into the movie. Once Astrid gets pulled into the underworld, the movie becomes the scenery-chewing clownworld Keaton fest it was meant to be, but before that, the cringe is unreal.

Apart from that, at least two character-centric subplots get a ton of build up for an absolutely dismal payoff.

One such subplot involves Beetlejuice's "ex-wife" which is a cute idea on paper; she's hunting him down over the course of the movie and it serves as motivation for Beetlejuice to cooperate with Ryder and make him a bit more sympathetic... however when she finally finds Beetlejuice, she just gets eaten by a sandworm on the spot.

So that's cool.

Similarly, a lot of time is spent agonizing over Astrid's dad who had a kid with Ryder and died offscreen, yet mysteriously he's never appeared to Ryder in her visions. What happened? Is he truly dead? Is he tied up with Beetlejuice somehow? Some other elaborate explanation?

No, he's just some dude working in the afterlife because reasons. He exists to save Astrid once, fails to deliver any sort of emotional reunion, and then immediately returns to being a background character. What an underwhelming non-payoff for someone we've referenced so many times since the start of the movie.

Orlando Bloom's character finding his dad enslaved to Davy Jones in Dead Man's Chest was SO MUCH BETTER and they didn't even really do all that much with him.

You'd also think a reunion like this would meaningfully restore the relationship between Astrid and her mom, who she's had so much venom for up until this point in the movie... but no, they just hug it out.

It really isn't that Ryder and Keaton are just so ****IN' AWESOME that they put all the other actors' performances to shame or anything, these two side characters are given a massive amount of attention throughout the movie and they really just amount to piss all by the end of things.

Willem Dafoe gets a similar treatment as an afterlife actor/police investigator. He gets a bunch of screentime so they can contrive a reason for him to also go after Beetlejuice, but then they are entirely sidelined at the climax of the movie. Dafoe's character was so crowbarred into this movie that his absence would cost it nothing, and that sucks because I like Willem Dafoe.

What is debateably an even bigger slap in the face is how they resolve Juice and Ryder's marriage, which he ropes her into agreeing to contractually.

Astrid literally just says, "Hang on, I just read this book and it says your contract is bullshit" and the contract just bursts into flames. What a COMPLETE Deus Ex Machina copout. She could be lying for all of what the audience sees, but that's played completely straight, which is especially frustrating because this is the second and longer of two sequences in which Beetlejuice is "comedically" dubbed over for a ****ing song that overstays it's welcome.

Dude's got the entire cast singing about a giant cake and they reuse this effect that pours green slime down the sides of this cake multiple times, as though they didn't have a shot of the whole cake getting drenched and by the time you notice lines getting repeated, the movie basically ends, and all of the conflict is laughably resolved.

And I use "laughably" generously because despite being a comedy I think this movie got a single solitary chuckle out of me, and that was just over some throwaway line where Ryder walks into a shot huffing up a storm and another character says it sounded like she about to be attacked by a moose.

As I said, this movie wasn't really made for me, but at the same time, what a tremendous waste of multiple characters and subplots. It also sucks that basically all of the best gags were wasted on the trailer I saw above.

Classic example of a trailer delivering a better overall experience than the actual movie.

If the movie wasn't a comedy and I was intended to be significantly more invested into the story and characters than I was, then I'd have rated this much more harshly, but as it is, I think I'd be well within my right to have expected far far worse than what we got.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've fed a bunch of movie ratings into ChatGPT and had it spit out a ton of recommendations. So far it's provided some pretty interesting movie fodder like Another Earth and A Ghost Story.

Among them was Donnie Darko, which I've seen before, but it's been a very long time and I don't remember it well. All I do remember is that it was weird and interesting, but also the ending was confusing.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Sooo, rapidfire summary of the plot: Donnie is an actor masquerading as a socially awkward and possibly mentally ill young man. One day he sleepwalks out onto a golf course at the bidding of a mysterious man in a creepy rabbit costume, named "Frank", as a jet engine crashes through his bedroom ceiling, and would have killed him had he been there.

What follows is his continual degradation into destructive activity where at Frank's bidding he floods his school, burns down out a public speaker's home, and breaks into an old woman's cellar, all for literally no reason.

As a consequence of these actions, he gets a girlfriend, he exposes a pedophile, and... he gets said girlfriend run over by a car driven by the REAL Frank (just some dude in a Halloween costume), whom he shoots with a gun he's lured towards by his ability to see the path of his destiny or whatever.

The movie ends with a month having elapsed... over which no apparent time has actually elapsed and he just dies from the jet engine for realsies.

Supposedly this is a time travel movie, but there really isn't any time travel in it, just a bunch of anachronistic information. Donnie doesn't have any reason to hallucinate Frank because he's never seen Frank, up until he kills Frank. Donnie also doesn't have any reason to hallucinate Frank taking off his mask to reveal a gunshot wound to his face... up until he kills Frank.

He only kills Frank because Frank mistakenly runs over his girlfriend as she's recovering from a gentle push to the ground from The World's Most Stock Bully characters, who have no motivation to jump him, but do so anyway, because why not? I guess the implication is that they were there to rob the old woman's cellar, because it was suggested that kids have tried to rob her? And Donnie was also coincidentally there because his English teacher randomly states that some pretentious ****wit said "Cellar Door" is the most beautiful phrase, as she was getting fired for reasons that are also never explained? And Donnie is upset about this even though in the literal last scene they shared together he was being a stubborn sociopathic dick about the obvious allegory in Watership Down?

There's just so many questions this movie raises and it just irritates me when it makes such little effort to answer them. I know a lot of people love shit like this, Lynchian type stuff, but here's my issue:

It takes very little effort to make up a bunch of random shit, throw it together, and flash cryptic messages and imagery at the audience to get them to speculate on their possible meaning.

It takes much MORE effort to produce the same mystery, but actually have a coherent point to it at the end of the day.

Movies like Ink and Inception and Imaginaerum are precisely that type of surrealism I enjoy; the fine details don't need to be explored, instead the movie obfuscates those things in favor of slowly painting a picture in broad strokes. They communicate a clear message, even if it takes the entire runtime of the movie to communicate that message, and hopefully, the movie provides you an adequate reason to be invested by then.

This movie is the Jackson Pollock approach, the Being John Malkovich approach, where it just feels like a bunch of shit is thrown at the wall and we're supposed to divine meaning from it cause go **** yourself.


Admittedly that's overly harsh, but this movie really can't really decide how it wants to present it's narrative. On one hand, it gets very deep into the weeds of conventional human drama, more than enough moments of characters standing around talking at the busstop, or dwelling on the relationship between Mom and the typecast Insufferable Karen character (who I'm sure is the woman leading the pageant in Little Miss Sunshine), or some other random shit that if it were missing from the movie would take away nothing of importance...

But at the same time, it wants to bombard you with creepy imagery, cryptic messages, extreme close-ups of eyes, slowed and sped-up footage, and all sorts of stuff to make you question reality, and even open-ended dialog about agnosticism, and loneliness, and whatever other buzzwords you'd want to show up in a "Themes" section on the Wikipedia page.

But then also, literally halfway through the movie Donnie is just given a book that basically spoils the overarching plot of the movie.

Which is apparently:

This movie exists in a branching timeline that is doomed to collapse, Donnie is the "Living Receiver" to bring "the Artifact" to "the Vortex" because reasons.

OKAY, so you actually just never get the plot of the movie unless you watch the Director's Cut and pause to read the text they flash on screen, ****ing wow.

Alright, I would have guessed the "Artifact" could be referring to the jet engine, but then why is it suggested as though this is an item that Donnie has to carry with him to the end of the "Tangent Universe"?

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. How is Donnie "sending" it anywhere by being physically crushed by the thing? By not being crushed by the jet engine, he risks destroying the REAL universe? Why?

None of that makes any sense either, Donnie is never demonstrated to have improved strength or elemental powers, and the people around him don't "encourage him" to get killed by the jet engine, and neither do the people around him that die do anything to force him to get killed by the jet engine.

Also how is any character in Donnie's position supposed to understand that he will be killed by the jet engine that already specifically didn't kill him? On a day that's already passed?

Is the foresight he's supposed to have in fact hindsight? I know that in month a certain day will repeat and I have to die? Nothing even remotely close to this is communicated by the movie. Even the blatant ****ing spoilers they superimposed over the movie and put on the Wikipedia page don't make any sense.

It's nearly implied that Donnie deliberately avoids getting killed by the engine again because he's shown the hillside where he avoids it at the beginning of the movie, but then they just smash cut to him in bed.

So, overall, the story's kinda shit. It gets too bogged down with petty drama, then can't get it's head out of it's ass long enough come off as anything but pretentious and meaningless.

What even is the meaning of the movie? What is the dramatic weight behind Donnie's death? That no matter what the man in the bunny suit tells him he'll still be butt****ed by some random force of the universe that has it out for him? I don't get it. I don't care.

I especially don't care when this movie drags it's ass around with unwelcome 80s-90s jukebox montages and the forces an incredibly painful romance between Donnie and his love interest, whom both have zero chemistry whatsoever.

I also don't appreciate that their teacher invites the Girlfriend into the classroom by putting her on the spot and telling her to "sit next to the boy you think is cutest", like THAT isn't the sort of shit that gets you fired.

And in fact she was fired, but the movie couldn't be ****ing asked to explain why, or why we should care about this character who's had zero meaningful screentime other than to namedrop a bunch of literature.

Donnie also is just a shitty character. He is just not a credible teenager, let alone a credible socially awkward teenager. Apparently saying very alarming things at random moments is what passed for "socially awkward" back in 2001. Hurrhurr, a joke about 8th graders having sex, oh BTW I burned down a house once, BRO THE RABBITS DYING IN THIS CARTOON JUST REMIND ME HOW MUCH I WANT TO MAKE BABIES WITH YOU RIGHT NOW

He just has bouts of being a very lucid and rational character and then sometimes he just says some really messed up shit and gets super unreasonable out of nowhere.

Perhaps the most glaringly inappropriate thing he does is the creepy grin he frequently stares into the camera with, he just hoods his eyes and then curls his lips like he's just been let in on a dastardly secret, and he does it again and again and again.

It wouldn't feel so out of place if the entire plot of the movie wasn't conspiring to ****ing kill him, or Frank had anything actually amusing to say to warrant to goofy grinning. Hell, his therapist hypnotizes him (oh yeah, we definitely needed to go there and play that trope absolutely straight) and he starts speaking like a giggly child as though he's been caught in a naughty lie.

It just feels wrong. It's probably one of the worst main character performances I've seen in a while, and I know Jake Gyllenhaal can act, so I'm inclined to imagine this is just how his character was written.

I believe Jake is also in another of my movie recommendations, Enemy, so we'll see how that goes, but this dud is going to be a...


Final Verdict:

[Weak]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another ChatGPT recommendation, our future AI overlord insists that this is one of the ones I'd like the best.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

This time we have a real time travel movie and HOLY **** is it a mindbender.

When you think about time travel movies it's often fun to think about weird twists you could incorporate, but usually movies just use one or two of them. This movie feels like it wanted ALL the twists.

The basic premise is that there's a secret government organization tasked with stopping crime before it happens, like in Minority Report, however in this case they are mainly concerned with a prolific bomber called The Fizzle Bomber.

The movie begins with The Agent becoming physically scarred by a partially contained explosion and undergoing reconstructive surgery, we then seem to flash back to him as a barkeep where he picks up a conversation with a rando named "John" who promises the best story he's ever heard in exchange for a bottle and then we proceed to flash back again where in John explains that he was actually born as Jane.

Jane grew up in an orphanage and was nearly recruited into said government organization before she fell in love with a faceless man and became pregnant. Not only did this man mysteriously leave her, but her baby is mysteriously kidnapped as well, and as a result of her giving birth, it is revealed that she is intersex, and she's essentially forced into a "sex change" after which she lives as a man before meeting the barkeep.

The single worst part about this movie is simply the fact that all of this comes across as a flashback within a flashback, all narrated exposition, and this genuinely takes the entire first half of the runtime.

If by the halfway mark you were disappointed that you'd signed up for a time travel thriller and got this meandering life story about some intersex person instead well BELIEVE YOU ME, it does it's absolute best to make up for it.

In response to Jane's wish to kill the love interest that left her with a baby and forced her into a sex change, the Agent offers to help her kill him and introduces her to time travel. He gives her a gun, tells her where he'll be, and in short order "John" finds that they are in fact the love interest and they fall in love with themselves.

ALREADY that's a super hard left-turn in the plot, but it doesn't stop there. So Jane becomes John, John impregnates Jane, Jane gives birth to a baby which the Agent kidnaps and time travels to her orphanage, revealing that Jane's baby is in fact herself.

Which I don't even know that's supposed to work, inbreeding doesn't work like that, does it?

Anyway, John is ultimately lured away by the Agent who somehow convinces him to essentially take up his mantle at the organization which wants him for real this time. This is following dialog which suggests that the Agent will be forced to retire soon, I'm not sure why exactly, I thought the comments about "too many jumps" were about time traveling in succession, but maybe it's just time traveling overall.

Either way, in finally retiring, John chooses to retire to a timeline close to the big bombing target that's been overshadowing the whole movie, presumably in case he finds he has a last-ditch opportunity to stop it. It's revealed that his time travel device doesn't self-decommission as it's intended to, but regardless he goes about his life and seems(?) to notice a pattern of his own behavior which matches with the Fizzle Bomber's known whereabouts prior to the detonation.

This is possibly the biggest plot hole in the movie, if we just had a time and location where we knew where this guy was, why didn't we just time travel there and end it? I'm sure the movie's trying to communicate something different, but I couldn't figure it out even by rewatching this section.

Low and behold, not super surprising after everything else so far, the Agent IS in the fact The Fizzle Bomber, he's apparently continued to use the device and gone time travel drunk, reasoning that by bombing an increasing numbers of civilians he can prevent even deadlier disasters from happening such as a chemical spill and a heist.

The Agent ultimately shoots The Fizzle Bomber, asserting that he'll never become him, BUT THEN we're shown he has sex change scars and I just lost my shit.


You mean to tell me... that Jane, Jane's love interest, Jane's baby, the Agent, and the Fizzle Bomber are ALL the same person?

That means there's literally like 2 whole characters in this movie, Robertson, this guy's "handler", and Jane, every other character is Jane. Jane is Xehanort. What the ****.

So after the botched attempt to stop the explosion at the beginning of the movie, Jane (who we don't know that it's actually Jane at this point), gets facial reconstructive surgery to eventually appear as the Agent.

This means that Jane's life is a closed loop; she both gives birth to herself and kills herself.

So...
Agent John leaves Baby Jane at an orphanage,
Baby Jane becomes Jane,
Jane has sex with John,
John leaves Jane with Agent John to stop Bomber John,
so Jane wants to kill John,
Jane conceives Baby Jane,
Agent John kidnaps Baby Jane,
Jane becomes John,
John meets Agent John,
Agent John brings John to meet Jane,
Bomber John injures John turning them into Agent John,
Agent John becomes Bomber John.

I THINK that's what happens, and my god, was it a skull****.

Even if this movie starts to feel predictable, because some of these twists have some pretty strong foreshadowing, it's STILL weirder than you think it'll get.

This is definitely a movie that begs a rewatch and I'm inclined it'll probably fair a lot better than The Game did, once you know how it ends.

This movie 100% scratched that same sort of itch that Whodunnits give me, where I'm constantly speculating who everyone is and, and similar to the "everyone was the killer!" trope, this movie just winds up being "every character was every character!"

I appreciate that the entire theme of the movie is laser-focused on the idea of predestination, it's implied that Agent John will become Bomber John in more ways than one, but it's never certain and so the open-ending leaves room for a potential happy ending, where Agent John successfully stopped Bomber John and lives out his life in peace, but also the "bad ending", where he continues his time traveling crusade to kill everyone to save themselves.

I definitely like this movie, the theme of predestination also kinda covers it's ass a bit with regards to time travel plot holes because, for example, if Agent John never delivers Jane to the orphanage, then Jane can't eventually become Agent John to deliver herself to the orphanage, so in some way Agent John must do that because it's a prerequisite for his existence.


In Back to the Future we defer to the "Tangent Universe" idea, where timelines can skew along an alternate path, resulting in branching outcomes that can be abandoned or averted. Predestination doesn't do this and consistently maintains that the events are all one continuity, which helps avert the sorts of plotholes of other time travel movies that want to have it both ways, like in Looper.

Either/Or is probably the best way to approach a time travel movie.

I still have questions, like in Donnie Darko, but unlike Donnie Darko, I feel like I have the answers and am just having fun speculating about further what-ifs.

Again, this first half of the movie is a real slog, "My Intersex Life Story" and all that, and I'm relieved that this movie didn't get all social-justicey on me, when it easily could have pulled some real In the Shadow of the Moon type shit, and then I would have just hated it.

Instead it's just a whole lot of exposition for a whole lot of payoff and I can easily see myself wanting to show this movie to someone to see them lose their mind at what happens in it.

That may well be a good enough reason to own it, honestly. I'll have a stronger idea of what to rate it after a rewatch.

Another slamdunk ChatGPT recommendation.


Final Verdict:

[Good]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another strong recommendation by ChatGPT, despite my expressed disinterest in "horror" movies.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
This time we have much tighter "time travel" story, although more along the lines of Groundhog Day, if the the day didn't merely reset, but the events of the day accumulated.

Basically 3 women and 3 men come together to board a boat called the Triangle for a stint on the water, a freak storm hits and capsizes their boat, killing one of the women. When a cruise ship called the Aeolus shows up out of nowhere to save them they board it to find it inexplicably empty.

It takes a little over 15 minutes for the conflict to begin (the storm), and a bit over half an hour in everyone has died at the hands of a mysterious killer on the ship alleged to be Main Girl.

Main Girl survives the killer's attack on her and throws the killer overboard at which point the Triangle reappears with the 5 original survivors attempting to board the ship again as if nothing happened and Main Girl is established to be a future (past?) version of herself already on the ship.

Obviously, along with some other clues, it's implied that Main Girl is the mysterious killer and this is revealed about 40 minutes in.

This is already what passes for a big twist ending in any other movie, but Triangle's just getting started. It is only in attempting to escape detection from her doppelganger and divert the events that unfold does she find herself eventually replaying the events over and over until she ultimately becomes the killer, because it is only when everyone dies that the boat reappears.


There are some great impact visuals in this movie to emphasize just how much time has passed with her following through the same sequence of events, loose crumpled paper where she's compared her own handwriting, a drain with numerous copies of her one of a kind locket, and of course the corner of the ship where one of the victims has been repeatedly chased to and died at multiple times among the corpses of all of her previous incarnations.

It's moments like that really make this concept really cool and scary, because, and it's used quite deliberately, if you thought you had escaped from the loop and turn around just to be faced with a mound of evidence that you've tried and failed this exact thing multiple times, that's super intimidating, and almost suggests a sort of predestination.

It makes sense that upon learning that the boat, her perceived only means of escape, reappears each time everyone dies, that she would resort to killing everyone. The main issue with this is that there is no established progenitor killer. She only starts killing the other characters because they wind up dying anyway, and by killing them the events restart and she has an opportunity to prevent them from happening.

As it eventually settles in, however, she has no natural conclusion to her own continuity, because she always ultimately has to kill herself, which restarts the day.

Even when she manages to escape the boat and finds herself even further back in time, her old self is still there, and she's revealed to be quite an abusive mother, which gives her motivation to kill and replace herself... but even this sequence of events is shown to have taken place multiple times.

Finally, she resigns herself to boarding the Triangle again, knowing full well of the storm that waits and the loop she still has to break.

There's no happy ending to this story, unfortunately, and according to Wikipedia this movie was a huge box office flop, which is disappointing because I actually thought this movie was quite good.

I like the empty cruise ship as the setting for a slasher movie and I like that it was quite brisk to get to the central conceit and then just allowing the audience to absorb all of what Main Girl tries to do to escape the loop, including the mounting different versions of herself all observing and interfering with her various goals in the moment.

It seems like the sort of movie that could make an interesting video game, and I would not be surprised if I tapped this movie for inspiration for my own projects.

All said, it wasn't terribly surprising, I got one jumpscare out of it, and my preference is generally to have an actual conclusion to the story, but it was still quite interesting and being paced as well as it is, it's a very easy watch, which I appreciate. Too often I feel like I'm sitting down for a chore when I watch these movies and this wasn't one of them.

Yet again, ChatGPT comes through with a good recommendation.


Final Verdict:

[Good]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
ChatGPT suggested revisiting it, which I've intended on doing for a while. It's been a few years since seeing it and I remember it being good.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Dogs, mice, maggots.

The premise of this movie is much simpler than the previous few time travel movies, and believe it or not, I have not intentionally sought out time travel movies to binge, but it goes as follows:

Evan, played by Ashton Kutcher (and two other younger actors), grows up with a dysfunctional friend group and experiences a series of traumatic incidents, including unintentionally killing a mother and child in an act of petty vandalism, burning a dog alive, and being forced to perform sexual acts together by the father of two of three friends.

These events are initially experienced as prolonged blackouts because Evan represses the experience, however the cause is attributed to a genetic brain disorder which his father had and was later committed for.

In an effort to retain memory, he's encouraged to journal his experiences and eventually when he's older he discovers that by reading his journals he can recall the periods of blackout and even affect them with his current consciousness, changing the outcome of his past.

His various attempts to undo the different things that went wrong in his life result in finding himself in entirely new alternate realities, some with very big differences, some with very small differences, but all of them with unintended consequences.

I find this concept very appealing because I imagine, despite how much it appears to pain and damage him, that I would probably do the same. It's such a weird feeling to see established characters who are happy, healthy, and successful lose all of that and often as a result of decisions that were made downstream of a single choice you made differently.

This is the entire point of the movie of course, but I think the point is well made. Evan running to stop the mailbox explosion incentivizes Tommy to feign saving the mother and baby, the outcome of these incidents are that Tommy fancies himself divinely inspired and turns to Christ, and Lenny never develops PTSD, and Kayleigh fall for him.

It's not a very happy ending for Evan who loses his arms and ability to walk (which is a better effect than Furiosa losing her ****ing arm 20 ******* years later), but it's possibly the best outcome he could have hoped for if he wanted the best for all of his friends.

Unfortunately, his decision that confines him into a wheelchair also drives his mother to chainsmoking and by this point in life she has terminal lung cancer, so once again Evan is driven to try and fix things.

But how can you read back journals you never wrote with hands you never had?

I watched the Director's Cut of this movie and checked out all of the alternative endings and I'm inclined to say the Director's Cut ending is best, where he travels back to his birth and strangles himself in the womb.

My main issue with this ending, other than it being sad, is that... it's not super clear that this even resolves all of the traumatic incidents that he was involved in; it's suggested that Kayleigh leaves her father if he wasn't around, so that solves the CP issue, provided we're okay with him molesting Tommy instead, and we already saw the result of that timeline.

Does Evan and Kayleigh's absence somehow also remove Lenny from the picture? Tommy could still have pushed Lenny to try to bomb the mailbox, but I suppose Evan did give him the last pat on the back that convinced him to do it. And even after that, Lenny would have never left his house had Evan and Kayleigh not shown up and brought him to where Tommy was killing the dog.

So I dunno, maybe it wraps up all loose ends, but I'm not sure.


I do have to say there are some REALLY dumb moments in this movie.

For one, hypnosis is a recurring theme, just like in Donnie Darko, and it's played completely straight which irritates me because hypnosis, as far as I'm aware, is pseudo-scientific bullshit. I'm confident that nobody in the cast has ever been hypnotized or even witnessed someone be hypnotized, it just doesn't happen. It's as genuine as an exorcism.

There are also some ultra cringe moments of dialog like when Evan travels back to the basement where Kayleigh's dad wants to film them having sex and he just busts out by calling him a "****bag" and threatening him.

The response from the dad is "How are you doing this?"

Doing what? Talking? In a threatening manner? Is that beyond the capabilities of a child to call you a ****bag and say he'll castrate you if you ever touch her? What a completely nonsensical thing to say for an actual character in-universe. Is he watching the same movie we are???

Elsewhere, just as Evan discovers physical abuse on Kayleigh's body in a movie theater, when she's clearly uncomfortable and isn't enjoying the film just belts out with "You really have no clue how beautiful you are, do you?".

Like ohmygod I just want to curl up into a ball and die when I hear that.

Also, Tommy's reaction to Evan expressing any sort of interest, or even forced sexual interaction with his sister is to behave as though he's violently jealous? Like, he's an evil little freak and all, but do we really need him sneering at Evan as though he's saying "YO THAT'S MY SISTER, MY SISTERS COOTCH IS MINE".

Another character interaction I hate is Kayleigh when Evan shows up with a smile one night and she's all happy to see him and then suddenly bursts into tears and becomes an unreasonable bitch to him, when he asks questions about their experience being sexually exploited... when she knows he suffers from blackouts, repressed the whole thing, and was asking questions about it years ago!

Like what the hell? Okay, maybe from the way he phrased it it might come off as him not actually being there for her and just needling a soft spot, but come the **** on, the dude's kept his promise to come back, he's got a memory problem, and is just asking questions.

If you cared about him so much, you'd have a bit of empathy.

Finally, I just don't get why Evan was in prison when it sounds like he wasn't even convicted yet. They throw people into the skinhead rape prisons before you can even present a self defense case? Alright then.

This movie has issues, but there's a lot of neat ideas between them and it's more emotionally impactful than most of the movies I've seen in this recent stint. Ashton Kutcher pulls his own Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind performance in this movie which is a big credit to him.

That said, provided this is a rewatch, I'm going to be a bit harsher this time around.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]

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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
ChatGPT suggestion, let's go.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I'm labeling this review a "Psychological Drama" because despite having a lot of loud scary noises for no reason, it's not much of a thriller.

In fact, just to get my biggest issue out of the way, the audio leveling in this movie is ****ing dogshit.

The premise is that a war veteran is discharged with a head wound and consequently can't remember the events of an incident in which he gets picked up as a hitchhiker and the driver kills a cop. The driver frames him for the murder and he's later committed to an insane asylum, which is just ****ing stupid and nonsensical on it's face. Is "I can't remember, I have a traumatic brain injury" grounds to commit him for "insanity"? ****in' clownshoes.

In the asylum, it's the traditional trope of all of the hospital staff being irredeemably evil, vindictive, and sadistic people, and one of them regularly subjects Main Guy to an illegal experiment wherein he's forced into a straight jacket, drugged with an unknown substance, and trapped in a morgue cabinet for hours on end.

That'd be a bad enough experience, but Main Guy discovers that he can, and say it with me now, time travel to 2007 where he learns of his eventual death.

These drug trips are accompanied by an extremely loud and aggressive battery of pads and crackling white noise, so much so that I had to turn my volume down. However this movie also features some very very quiet whispering so that I repeatedly had to pause, back up, and replay the movie with subtitles. It was very annoying.

The movie also focuses on a plot revolving around meeting a girl he came across in her youth, but in 2007 she's all grown up and has adopted some of her mother's bad habits.

The first time they meet, despite apparently trying to keep Main Guy at arm's reach, Main Girl casually just invites him into her apartment, let's her explore the fridge, and even takes a bath while he's there, even acknowledging that he could steal something if he wanted.

That's a lot more trust than I would give to some total spook standing outside my workplace.

When he eventually realizes she's the girl he once gave his old dog tags to, he tells her and she reacts in such a goofily "drunk" performance. Not just irrationally angry anything, but Keira Knightley just screws up her face and looks like she trying to play some sort of comedy psycho instead of an ordinary drunk woman.


The second time they meet I facepalm so hard because it's the literal definition of an Overnight Romance, one of my all-time most hated movie tropes. Main Guy is in the cabinet for "3 hours" the first time and "overnight" the second time, so literally not even a full day has elapsed before Main Guy & Girl are snogging and having sex and she's saying she can't live without him now.

It's not like they didn't try to create some chemistry, but I just flatout do not accept this relationship in so short a time. Would it have KILLED the writers to write in some passage of time sequence so that maybe these "jacket sessions" communicate that they've had longer to know each other than half a day?

I don't know why that's so ****ing difficulty for these Hollywood writers, have they never been in a relationship? Is there just a caste of horny virgins that the industry has on standby any time they want a plot for a movie so that every single movie that doesn't need romance or a sex scene in it has romance and a sex scene and it's always so ****ing sudden?

The first kiss jumpscare is real. That shit hit me in this movie and I immediately went, "NOOOO!!! WHHHYYYYY AAAAUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!"

It felt like there were at least 3 different scenes where Main Guy is clearly demonstrating that he has access to information he shouldn't have and he's just flatly dismissed with the same line, "these ideas are part of your delusions", "these ideas are part of your delusions", "these ideas are part of your delusions", like jesus ****ing christ, you stupid ****s are a disgrace to science.

Some random kid gets shocked out of a catatonic state with electro-convulsive therapy, one time. Didn't realize you could just cure that with a zap to the brain, guess we've had it wrong all along, thank you doctor for performing this procedure in secret and illegally upon my child.

Also when Main Guy cracks his head on the ice at the end of the movie, they just shove his ass back in the morgue to die. They drug him, put a straightjacket on him, and leave him to bleed out.

Granted, he asked for it, but HOLY SHIT does the neverending failure of these doctors know no bounds? Not a single shot of any effort whatsoever to perform first aid on this man, nothing to even stop the bleeding.

You know it might have been a bad enough scandal that he was fatally injured on the ice because a doctor smuggled him off of hospital property, but you know what's probably worse than that? Following up that same career-ending ****up by doing absolutely nothing to save his life and immediately subjecting him to the chemical abuse and sensory deprivation you were already torturing him with, so that he could 100% die in your custody AND it looks like you ****ing murdered him AND hid the body, yeah that looks great.

This ****ing bitch keeps her job after this, and Main Guy is indefinitely committed because he was ****ing shot twice.

Go **** yourself.

I know I've had a lot of negativity to say in this one, but I will commend Daniel Craig's performance as one of the asylum patients, he's a much more entertaining character than Brad Pitt was in Twelve Monkeys, and he's honestly the highlight performance of this movie.

I could 100% see myself having this would-be killer talk my ear off about the Organization for Organizing.


Final Verdict:

[Weak]

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