Movies You've Seen Recently Thread

[Drowsy Emperor]

What we do in the shadows is really good as well.

 

In a big budget Hollywood movie, the director has little say over how the final product turns out so I wouldn't be expecting much of the next Thor film.

Then again, I think superhero films are a trashy, formulaic waste of money so for me Kubrick and Tarkovsky working together on the next Batman probably couldn't make it good. 

 

 

Incidentally I saw Dr. Strange recently.

 

Here's my take on it in two sentences.

 

So Cumberbach plays Dr. Sherlock House that gets his career ruined due to his arrogance and bad driving after which he departs to Kathmandu in the mystical east where in an asian temple, he meats a bald buddhist Englishwoman and a kung-fu black guy that instruct him in the ways of sorcery so he can combat a Mads Mikkelsen you wish you didn't recognize because his facial paint makes him look Avril Lavigne that's been crying for the past hour only with more purple, which is incidentally the third adjective applicable to the main antagonist, the other two being bald and wannabe-Cthulhu. He is defeated when they discover the rewind button on a mystical VCR, making the bad guy's whole gig neatly and ironically as pointless as the film itself.

Edited November 13, 2016 by Drowsy Emperor

[Gorgon]

I keep thinking of that really ****ty one with morgan feeman and some black goo that gave her superpowers.  Odds are they are going to screw it up. 

 

This could be the new resident evil series. I mean, it could be that bad, and they will keep making them because people will go see Scarlet like they did Mila, no matter what.

[algroth]

Incidentally, Alain Resnais was at one point in talks with Stan Lee to make an X-Men adaptation. One could only wonder...

 

Personally, I enjoy superhero films and I don't think any topic is inherently incapable of quality. I think Nolan's done a great job with the Batman films, as has Guillermo del Toro with Hellboy and Bryan Singer with his better X-Men films. Are they The Mirror? Not really, but still very solid pieces of work that also encapsulate a collective state of mind and period with commendable precision.

[Agiel]

Saw Arrival with some buds today.

 

I'd give it a 7 out of 10. Great cinematography from Villeneuve, but there was quite a few things I saw coming from miles away like the horse**** kangaroo story, the rogue soldiers, and the twist about Amy Adams' daughter.

[Agiel]

Have you read the comic? Valérian is a pretty weak character actually, he mostly survives on speed and charm (at least he thinks he's charming) - it's a fairly clear example of a feminist comic, where Laureline always comes in to save the day.. For reference:

 

 

It works though, for what it is- as they slowly build a working relationship where both of their strength come into play and they learn to respect their difference, once they put aside 20th societal notions.

 

 

If anything it seems they made him a bit more masculine and capable in the trailer (Mass Effect inspired it seems as well)

 

 

The writer of the original comic worked with Enki Bilal on some fantastic comics like <<La ville qui n'existait pas>> and <<Les phalanges de l'ordre noir>>, and also my favourite comic of all time, <<Partie de chasse>>:

 

 

Oh, and yeah, Valerian is a bit like Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China; despite appearances, he isn't actually the hero of the story.

Edited November 20, 2016 by Agiel

[Oerwinde]

Doctor Strange. I'd rate it up there with the original Iron Man as an origin movie. The Villain being weak as the main criticism is valid, but as he's basically a henchman, it doesn't hurt it all that much.

[Agiel]

 

Dropping a lot sooner than people were expecting. Hope it's awesome this time.

[algroth]

Saw Arrival with some buds today.

 

I'd give it a 7 out of 10. Great cinematography from Villeneuve, but there was quite a few things I saw coming from miles away like the horse**** kangaroo story, the rogue soldiers, and the twist about Amy Adams' daughter.

Mind putting things such as the existence of a twist in spoilers next time? I'm really looking forward to it myself but unfortunately it's not out where I live till february.

[Lexx]

 

Dropping a lot sooner than people were expecting. Hope it's awesome this time.

 

Is this for the new alien or the new prometheus movie? If for the first, then yay, if for the second, then meh.

[Amentep]

Is this for the new alien or the new prometheus movie? If for the first, then yay, if for the second, then meh.

The sequel to PROMETHEUS is ALIEN: COVENANT. So the answer is...yes?

[Blarghagh]

I think the question is because there's some confusion on whether or not this is the Prometheus follow-up by Ridley Scott or the Aliens followup by Neil Blomkamp which are both in production. But yeah, this is Scott's Prometheus follow-up. I'm not holding my breath, Prometheus was one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. Intriguing plot ideas and fantastic visuals completely ruined by contrived coincidence, meaningless plot twists, random space-zombies that are never mentioned again and some of the dumbest characters in Sci-Fi.

[algroth]

I think the question is because there's some confusion on whether or not this is the Prometheus follow-up by Ridley Scott or the Aliens followup by Neil Blomkamp which are both in production. But yeah, this is Scott's Prometheus follow-up. I'm not holding my breath, Prometheus was one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. Intriguing plot ideas and fantastic visuals completely ruined by contrived coincidence, meaningless plot twists, random space-zombies that are never mentioned again and some of the dumbest characters in Sci-Fi.

Pretty much. You'll have to excuse some broken English in the following, but here is also a review I wrote back when I saw the film in theatres (spoilers ahoy, too):

 

 

 

In the early years of his career as a film director, Ridley Scott gave us two science fiction classics that would have thunderous effects on the genre in its cinematic form from then on. It's 2012, extactly thirty years since his last dive into this genre with Blade Runner, returning to the world that is greatly responsible for having placed him at such a prominent position in the industry and the popular conciousness, the Alien franchise. With a heavy, symbolically charged title and a stunning marketing campaign promising a journey that would turn mankind's history upside down and reveal its reason of existence, a new sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Prometheus was bound to be grand, ambitious, great, surprising, and eventful, the must-see film of the summer. However, as Noomi Rapace's character warned us in the trailer, "we were so wrong".

 

The story, quite simply, is the following: the film opens with a sequence where a humanoid creature, later named by the scientists as the "Engineers", drinks a strange fluid which causes him to spontaneously combust and its cells to mutate into new lifeforms, which presumably later evolve into at the very least human beings, at most every living being on Earth. We flash forward to 2089, with a group of archeologists in a cave, discovering a series of ancient runes depicting a cosmic map, and the location of those the scientists believe to be mankind's creators. We flash forward again to 2093, where we see the spaceship Prometheus (with a crew of seventeen on a journey which has already taken two years) arriving at a planet's moon called LV-223 in hopes to prove the existence of the Engineers and to be able to come in contact with them. As they enter the atmosphere and cross a mountain that would allegedly make Mt. Everest look like a hillock beside it (a reference to an aforementioned text) and beyond it their first evidence of intelligent life on this new planet (as mentioned by Charlie Holloway, played by Logan Marshall-Green, "God does not build in straight lines", yet another reference to Lovecraft's text). They land, they get off the ship, they enter the complex (likely derived from Giger's "Egg Silo"), and they find a place where only death resides and awaits.

 

I have already read a few reviews and spoken with a few people about it, and almost everywhere I look, the consensus seems about the same. Most of the criticisms I read seem to be split up between two issues. Firstly, there's the matter that the film finds itself incessantly emulating and referring to its predecessors. Yes, the film is a prequel and it's largely based upon trying to reveal the origins of the spaceship and the "Space Jockey" seen in the first film, and being part of a franchise certain elements will have to exist in this as they do in other films of its franchise, but the film seems constantly determined t copy and refer back to key scenes and aspect of its predecessors that have no actual need to be repeated or referred to here, either with the alien pregnancy referring openly to the chestburster scene, or the characer of David and his fate relating to Ash, or (especially) the extraordinarily dumb and unnecessary Xenomorph cameo at the very end. The film seems to spend a lot of time trying to revive old classic scenes and elements and never delivering new interesting ideas of its own.

 

Then, there's everything related to the screenplay, be it the plot holes, the inconsistencies in already flat characters, their absurd behaviour, and the clunky, terribly expositional dialogue, the fact that it leaves more questions than answers, or else. Regarding the questions made by the film, I like the fact that, in terms of its themes, the film makes big questions about the nature of life, the meaning of existence, the desire to escape death, the meaning of being alive and possessing a soul or consciousness, and the reason behind the creation of life and, more to the point, the human impulse to search for a means to do so; I also like the fact that it never tries to answer them, and rather chooses to live the spectator wondering upon those matters instead. However, these are all questions raised verbally, and therein lies the problem: there is very little the film offers regarding its subjects, and rather than trying to give something to the viewer with which to approach these questions, the film seems content in uttering the questions and then pretending that's about as much as it needs to attain a certain depth or to get a philosophical discussion on the way. Worse than this is that, after the film has ended, the question in most viewers' minds has nothing to do with the themes, and everything to do with the narrative, which brings us to the rest of the problems in the screenplay. In my group we were seven people who watched the film, and the discussions that followed had everything to do with explaining the plot to one another, and we discussed it for literally over an hour. This is a film that narratively is all over the place, where character disappear and reappear and monsters crawl all over and everywhere for no reason that makes any sense whatsoever. How can the man responsible of mapping the Egg Silo, who's also in constant communication with the ship and leaves well before the rest of the crew is done with their work, get lost within the Egg Silo? Why does he freak out with the image of a 2000-year-old corpse and then tries to interact with a living phallic alien snake? Why does Weyland pretend to be dead, to what purpose are him and Vickers made kin? Why does everyone act as if a half-naked woman covered in blood with her abdomen sliced open and stapled shut comes barging through the door acting like a Doomsday prophet, who should have also been placed in quarantine, is perfectly normal? And what on Earth is going on with that black goo, how does it work? Supposedly in the first sequence we see it destabilizing DNA then reorganizing it, yet some disintegrate, others turn into strange zombie-like creatures with inhuman strength, if you're impregnated by an infected character you spawn a facehugger, who then can spawn Xenomorphs if they impregnate another being, and, also, if it does not come in contact with any living being, it start mutating into phallic snakes of some sort... I'm sorry, what?

 

I have to say right away that I have a particular reluctance to criticize films due to plot-holes, as many of these often are revealed when discussing the film to greater depth or upon repeated viewings of said film, but often many occur without you noticing because you are immersed in the film and in the story; The Dark Knight, for me, is a clear example of this, of a film filled with logical gaps which nevertheless never had me questioning what I was seeing at the time of viewing. However, with Prometheus I was constantly taken aback by the inconsistencies, I felt the film was really making the story and characters and rules up as it went. Despite knowing it was a Alien prequel, I kept asking myself why we had the need of seeing six different species of aliens which seemed to come and go with no reason and for no reason beyond picking out members of the crew. The aforementioned Xenomorph cameo is one particularly absurd moment: it can't leave the planet, what does it have to do with anything?

 

And, again, all this comes to a very important matter which the film, for me, utterly failed at: immersion. This is particularly a shame because the spends a lot of time and effort creating a world which looks wonderful and is filled with images and a history that could inspire dread and an overwhelming need to find out what is going on, but because it is constantly throwing stuff in for no good reason which inevitably muddles up a story which should not be too complicated to tell in the first place, whatever exists of interest in the world is ultimately diluted and, well, lost.

 

But the matter of immersion brings me to another point, which has to do with horror and tension, and how they are handled in this film particularly. In forcing a number of beasties and action-packed encounters into the film, everything becomes far too clear, obvious, exposed. In many ways it strikes me that what the means Lovecraft used in At the Mountains of Madness to deliberately decrease horror and dread, Scott tried to employ to create tension. By this I mean, in Lovecraft, the matters that are truly abominable and unholy are those which remain hidden or ambiguous, the piping sounds of the wind, the truths hidden beneath the irregularity of the mountains, the ever-changing appearance of the Shoggoths, Danfortht's horrible vision. The Old Ones, on the other hand, begin as horrible, enigmatic figures, but as they are worked more deeply upon, and given a history, a voice, and quite simply greater detail, they are in fact deliberately humanized. Scott, on the other hand, gives us more and more details and shows us everything up straight, seeing to create the horror through those means, through the graphic depiciton of Fifield and Millburn's fate, their later re-apparition, the constant detail given to the effects of the parasite, the crudeness of the creatures as they're shown onscreen, even the later holograms of Keith Emerson noodling at the keyboards as he makes galaxies appear and David dance among them, or the awakening of the Engineer and his sudden HULK SMASH reaction, all which also allows Scott to wallow in some crazy, amusing set-pieces as well, but here lies the film's biggest problem: in the end, he manages to create the occasional tension, but it is a tension driven entirely by the protagonists' survival. In turn, the other, far more important thread, which Scott also aimed at creating, is irrevocably severed: the tension driven by existential discovery and the threat of the unknown.

 

It's all made for the worse when one realizes that, to some extent, all the spectacle of the second half does is to dilute and evade the questions raised by the film, it chooses to divert the audience through the many encounters and conflicts with the alien beings instead. In a way, the greatest diappointment about this film is not that it doesn't make much sense, or that it often crosses the line into self-parody; it's that ultimately, for all its spoken intentions and overblown artistic aspirations, it offers very little insight and a very small experience in return.

[Agiel]

Not sure I'd necessarily look forward to a Neil Blomkamp Alien movie. After all, he did make Chappie, which was absolutely wretched, and that seems like a recipe for an utter disaster on the level of Alien: Resurrection.

 

I will say that the first half of Prometheus works harkening back to the first third of the first Alien movie (tied with the Thing for my 3rd favourite movie of all time) when they're exploring the derelict on LV-426, but after that it starts to go downhill. I alsoI got back some degree of confidence in Ridley Scott from the Martian, and it's been said that this one will be even more of a throwback to the first Alien.

Edited November 25, 2016 by Agiel

[Keyrock]

The cinematography in Prometheus was stunning.  Possibly Mr. Scott's best work since Blade Runner, in that regard.  The narrative, on the other hand...

 

[algroth]

I was personally not too big on The Martian. Though entertaining I can't really call it any more than enjoyable fluff, and by all means what it absolutely failed to generate in me was any form of tension.

 

 

There's a problem in Mars? No worries, Matt Damon will science the **** out of it and in five to ten minutes it'll be solved. He seemed to have it pretty easy, all things considered, to the point it was very jarring to see him at a later point in the film, when he's ready to start his extraction from the planet, coming out of his room all haggard and withered. When did all that harshness manifest itself? There was really very little that he didn't seem to have absolutely under control, or which did not go exactly as planned.

 

 

If anything the safeness in his approach to all his films of late, Prometheus included, is what worries me the most about Covenant. Horror has a way of working best when it's labouring on the fringes of formal convention and genre expectations, and it's in the cues it can take from the more avant-garde currents where it can find the most effective means to disorient and unsettle its audience. Giger's art was strange at the time, but it has since become the staple for the franchise's aesthetic. I'm not sure there was anything in Prometheus that deviated from this, and I doubt there'll be in Covenant either, and in turn I can't imagine it'll be more than just another workmanlike sequel to a popular and established franchise, no different than the recent MCU films are for their own.

 

With all that said, if the narrative is coherent it'll at least very likely turn out just fine. On the upside, Damon Lindelof is also stepping down from the screenwriter's seat for it. On the downside, the original draft was by Jack Paglen, whose previous film was possibly even dumber than Prometheus as well, that being Transcendence.

Edited November 25, 2016 by algroth

[Pidesco]

I think the question is because there's some confusion on whether or not this is the Prometheus follow-up by Ridley Scott or the Aliens followup by Neil Blomkamp which are both in production. But yeah, this is Scott's Prometheus follow-up. I'm not holding my breath, Prometheus was one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. Intriguing plot ideas and fantastic visuals completely ruined by contrived coincidence, meaningless plot twists, random space-zombies that are never mentioned again and some of the dumbest characters in Sci-Fi.

 

 

Th good news is that Lindelof has been kicked to the curb. The bad news is that Michael Green, the new writer, wrote Green Lantern. He has also written the new Blade Runner, and he is the show runner of American Gods, the upcoming adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel. I'm bracing myself for a lot of disappointment.

 

 

[Hurlshort]

I thought the most recent Predators with Adrian Brody was fantastic, so I'm bummed that Aliens gets all the attention over that.

[Bartimaeus]

I saw like ten minutes of that movie on TV once and turned it off thinking it was awful. I started watching right before a combat scene where they wasted probably literally a few thousand bullets on the monsters they were shooting at while somehow missing literally every single one it looked like, followed up by showing that only a couple of bullets were really necessary if they had an accuracy whatsoever, and then one person used a knife to cut off one of the monster's like...entire upper body clear through, and that's when I turned it off.

Edited November 26, 2016 by Bartimaeus

[Hurlshort]

I saw like ten minutes of that movie on TV once and turned it off thinking it was awful. I started watching right before a combat scene where they wasted probably literally a few thousand bullets on the monsters they were shooting at while somehow missing literally every single one it looked like, followed up by showing that only a couple of bullets were really necessary if they had an accuracy whatsoever, and then one person used a knife to cut off one of the monster's like...entire upper body clear through, and that's when I turned it off.

 

Well, only one of the guys is actually a soldier, the rest are psychopaths.  But all the Predator films are a bit campy, I still think they are fun.

[Orogun01]

 

I saw like ten minutes of that movie on TV once and turned it off thinking it was awful. I started watching right before a combat scene where they wasted probably literally a few thousand bullets on the monsters they were shooting at while somehow missing literally every single one it looked like, followed up by showing that only a couple of bullets were really necessary if they had an accuracy whatsoever, and then one person used a knife to cut off one of the monster's like...entire upper body clear through, and that's when I turned it off.

 

Well, only one of the guys is actually a soldier, the rest are psychopaths.  But all the Predator films are a bit campy, I still think they are fun.

 

Hurl I got news for you, soldiers tend to be psychopaths.

[Blarghagh]

Apparently Shane Black, who directed among others The Nice Guys and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but also was Joker in the original Predator film ("why'd you say it twice?"), is remaking Predator. We'll see how that goes.

[algroth]

As a huge Shane Black fan I'm very much looking forward to that. Granted, I've liked him the most in the context of 'buddy cop' affairs the likes of the two films you mentioned as well as the first two Lethal Weapon films, so we'll have to see how this turns out since it isn't exactly a genre he has directorial experience with. Certainly an interesting choice for the project all the same.

Edited November 26, 2016 by algroth

[Lexx]

I was personally not too big on The Martian. Though entertaining I can't really call it any more than enjoyable fluff, and by all means what it absolutely failed to generate in me was any form of tension.

 

 

There's a problem in Mars? No worries, Matt Damon will science the **** out of it and in five to ten minutes it'll be solved. He seemed to have it pretty easy, all things considered, to the point it was very jarring to see him at a later point in the film, when he's ready to start his extraction from the planet, coming out of his room all haggard and withered. When did all that harshness manifest itself? There was really very little that he didn't seem to have absolutely under control, or which did not go exactly as planned.

 

 

If anything the safeness in his approach to all his films of late, Prometheus included, is what worries me the most about Covenant. Horror has a way of working best when it's labouring on the fringes of formal convention and genre expectations, and it's in the cues it can take from the more avant-garde currents where it can find the most effective means to disorient and unsettle its audience. Giger's art was strange at the time, but it has since become the staple for the franchise's aesthetic. I'm not sure there was anything in Prometheus that deviated from this, and I doubt there'll be in Covenant either, and in turn I can't imagine it'll be more than just another workmanlike sequel to a popular and established franchise, no different than the recent MCU films are for their own.

 

With all that said, if the narrative is coherent it'll at least very likely turn out just fine. On the upside, Damon Lindelof is also stepping down from the screenwriter's seat for it. On the downside, the original draft was by Jack Paglen, whose previous film was possibly even dumber than Prometheus as well, that being Transcendence.

 

Now I know what people think if I write "the book was a lot better", but it's true. In the book you can feel how he tries to survive and how it gets harder for him, while in the movie it's like... nope, no problem. Got them potatoes, got them explosions, all is fine and dandy. They had to cut a lot from the book to make the movie run in time, and it totally shows. It's not like in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter where stuff from the book is missing in the movies-- the movies still work nontheless. For the Martian on the other hand, it really does not work.

 

Maybe they should have made the book into a 6 episodes tv show instead. That probably would have turned out a lot better.

[Gorgon]

I really, really hope this won't suck but I'm not optimistic.

 

 

http://youtu.be/PxH45ivUomw

was that beyonce. 

 

 

pffffft.

[Keyrock]

 

I really, really hope this won't suck but I'm not optimistic.

 

 

http://youtu.be/PxH45ivUomw

was that beyonce. 

 

 

pffffft.

 

Maybe she'll be playing a Ruby Rhod type role?  I'm not sure if Beyonce has the acting chops to nail that type of role as perfectly as Chris Tucker did, though, despite her decades of experience in the entertainment industry.

 

I can't say the trailer leaves me inspired, apart from the visuals, but I'll hold out a tiny flicker of hope based on how freakin' awesome The 5th Element was.