[FILM REVIEW] Puss in Boots 2 : Last Wish

I was unreasonably excited to see this film. Luckily, I have kids and nephews and nieces, so I had ample excuses to see this movie "because the kids may like it". I think a lot of the reason I was so keen to see this film is that I am a cat owner and have been for my entire life. As in my first cat died at 22 when I was 14, so literally the entire time I have been alive I've lived with and loved cats.

It has always bugged me that, Hollywood especially, always casts cats in films as bad guys or mean and snobbish. It is a strange cliché in most American films as cats are a hugely popular and beloved pet. The perception of them as evil, snarky beasts is really not how most people see them, particularly cat owners. It seems so strange to me that Hollywood does not embrace the cat more as a heroic protagonist for that would appeal to literally millions and millions of people all across the globe. Also, if the internet has taught us anything, cats are really photogenic and expressive to look at. 

Anyway, this movie is a real step in the right direction for children's movies, reminding me of the glory days of Pixar. Back when Pixar films could make you cry and laugh in the same movie. Dreamworks has outdone themselves here in producing a kids film that is funny, exciting, scary and relatively deep in its themes and messages. 

The core of this film is about life. What makes life worth living? How does one live a full life? What makes someone truly happy? What is important? These type of questions are framed through the fear of death. Now these are heavy ideas, but kids are smarter and more interested in the world around them than many adults give them credit for. IMO, kids shouldn't be hidden from things. It does not protect them, it cripples them for life.

So while the ideas in this film are heavy in relation to the kind of light smultch coming from Disney recently, and it does have a genuinely terrifying villain. It is still an excellent kids' story. 

I do think this film is a little unsure of who it is made for. There is some bad language in this movie. All of it is beeped out in some way, and in literally you hear beep sounds over swearing and others instances are stopped midword.. like "Bullshit" is just "Bull..<interrupted>", stuff like that. Still, this seems like a symptom of the same thing Toy Story had "issues" with. Shrek is 21 years ago. The kids that saw that are now parents or grandparents. It is not a bad idea to cater to children, but also make sure that the Parents have fun and cater to their sensibilities as well. While I like the deeper meanings in this film and I also think it is about time kids got an actual scary villain for a change, I think the swearing was kinda out of place and makes the film unsuitable for many parents and puts the move into the range of teenagers more than kids. To be clear, this is a non-issue for me, but I can see why some parents may have an issue with the language.

Still, despite a few rocks this is a fantastic film from start to finish.  The animation is detailed and gorgeous. I'm not a huge fan of the jerky animation. I used to do 3D Animation for a living and do not be fooled. That animation style is simply done to reduce the cost of rendering as you render less frames. Which is why it is only used in the combat sequences. Even so, despite this artistic / economic choice, the film is really just fantastic looking. The expressions and details in the sets are amazing. Also, as an x-animator the power of modern lighting in these renderers is just astounding.

My only other gripe is that I would have liked Kitty Softpaws to be a more rounded character. Kitty is better at everything than anyone else in the movie, more fearless and smarter. Never makes mistakes and is basically perfect. While Puss spends most of his time doing slapstick comedy. I mean the film still works and there is a plot through line about Puss loosing confidence through fear, but even so, Kitty has no arc of any kind. Making her feel flat and uninteresting. Every other character besides Jack Horner has an arc. Jack btw, doesn't have an arc by design. This is part of the thematics of the over arch plot and metaphoric meanings of the movie. His lack of an arc is used as a counterpoint to the main villain, Wolf. So it is actually a plot point. I just think they missed a real opportunity for Kitty to experience an arc like all the other characters.

: Verdict : 

Easily one of if not the best animated film of 2022 and one of if not the best family movie of 2022. I might have changed a few things.

[FILM REVIEW] - MCU 31 : Black Panther 2 : Wakanda Forever

MCU 30 : Black Panther 2 : Wakanda Forever

To my great shock, this film is actually one of the better Disney-Marvel movies to come out in years.

I hate using terms like "Woke" or "M-she-U", but it is hard to ignore, that besides the bad guy, there are only 3 males in this movie. Apart from extras or minor parts that are not much more than extras. We have a faceless "top henchmen". An Odd-Job style dude. Arthur Dent who is in the film for not much more than 2 minutes and there is the big King guy that bashes his chest a lot, who is also in the movie for almost no time at all. The movie does revolves around old female characters, or new female ones. There are jokes about white cops, jokes about "colonials in chains", an entire subplot about the Spanish invasion of South America. Black Panther is of course a gender swap and it also, bafflingly, they chose to feature Iron Heart for some reason. Iron Heart was a Iron Man race / genre swap from the comics. Her comic series btw turned out to be the worst selling Marvel Comic in history of Marvel Comics at the time of release. So why did they bring over a failed hero into the MCU? Makes no sense to me. So the thing is, if that kind of stuff really annoys you, then there is plenty of fodder in this film to fuel a rant about it all. 

The thing is, while all that can be intrusive at times, surprisingly, most of this movie is actually solid. It is much darker than the average Disney movie. Darker in tone, and even in the pallet. This is so refreshing and much more aligned to what I want to see in a soup-movie. The story feels more sophisticated as well. I mean, sure, it's a comic film, do not expect too much. Still, this is not the typical Disney film with random out of place jokes all the time and people acting like sexless, dogooder Star Trek type people. Namor has been completely reimagined in the MCU and this version is actually excellent. I dig the new history and the look of the Atlanteans. All his scenes rock, the actor nails this role, and I think the entire way his plot was handled, just worked. The subplot of new Black Panther reconnecting to her spiritual roots, which she feels are at odds with her scientific mind, is done well and interesting.  And just when they could pull out the stinky Pont l’Eveque cheese, they switch it up with a boss camo scene that steels the entire movie. Her arc was just cool.

Still, this is an MCU film and it suffers from all the normal stuff that I despise about these movies. I know I gate watch them MCU a little, but as a life time comic book reader who has never not once bought comis every week since I was a little boy... I just can't not see a comic book movie. Though I do so at home now, I have not been to the cinema for a MCU movie since Infinity Wars.

The disappearing helmets are back and it is still the most fucking stupid shit ever, and it is beyond ridiculous in this particular film. Even worse than normal. In the final fight scene the characters fighting and chatting away mid fight, already dumb, but they have their helmets appearing and disappearing every camera change and practically every sentence. Zip away. Say line. Zip on. Punch. Zip away. Say another line. Zip, punch, etc. It really is the gold standard for this disappearing helmet, magic communication bullshit that has become a staple of this series. It felt like a visual strobe. This fucking hat turning off and on again. The strobing effects being exacerbated by this all these helmet vanishes happening in near full screen close up and in tandem with full screen close ups to inside Iron Hearts helmet. It was so ridiculous. 

Also the film tries to do to much. Nothing gets the time it needs. There is just to many things pulling focus. Also, the entire Iron Heart thing was a colossal fuck up. Every scene she was in sucked and she is completely unnecessary to this film. If I was less bored, or more busy, I might have bailed on this movie in the early Iron Heart scenes. They are that bad. The character sucked, not the actress herself I think, but her lines gave her nothing to work with. They should have done some minimal tweaking to remove Iron Heart and that entire fucking buckets of cunts could have been avoided and the film would have been better off. 

As expected nothing in the film really stands up to any application of logic. I mean the events in the film do not really make sense. World Nations do not interact like that, and wars are not fought by 10 dudes on a highway. I am not some tactical genius but if I was a fish man and someone attacked me in a massive boat, I would swim down under the waves and then away. 

Also with bringing in big guns like Namor the MCU is running into the Superman problem that DC has. When a guy can take a punch from Sentry, there always needs to be some kind of "kryptonite depower" scene. These scenes are as old and cliché as Batman's Origin Story. I am just sick of seeing it, and if you spent 5 mins reading comic you can see how you can have these superpowered people battle without powering them down. It is a soup-story. Them being ubr-powerful is the point. I do not want to see them depowered, I was to see other people powered up.

Still this film really surprised me. The trailers looked beyond terrible and if I started vomiting blood during this film, it would not have been totally unexpected. The big difference for me is that I didn't have that bone chilling boredom I had with the original Black Panther and much of this phase's films and tv shows. The fights while typically ridiculous, lacked that completely boring "time-wasting" feeling that so much of the MCU has.

So what we have here, despite my initial conceptions, is a cool action film. Mostly cool characters I enjoyed watching. A awesome set of baddies. A main character with a cool and interesting arc that actually showed change and dilemmas she had to over come, both physical and spiritual. Also, it is a Disney film, and these guys know how to make a great looking blockbuster. It is a slick film in many ways.

Verdict : The darker tone, the film having actual emotional motivations and stuff that I enjoyed and a surprising lack of cheese (there is still plenty of cheese, I guess it is all relative)... This film is easily the best of the recent movies and TV Shows. It is a good MCU film, up there in the upper-middle of the stack.

[Film Reviews] - Krampus, Violent Night and Christmas, Bloody Christmas

 # T'is the Season

I have been watching "Xmas" films last few days. Not sure if I will review them all but I will be posting thoughts on some....

(The next few posts on this blog are being moved from another one I started but decided I did not like)

Krampus (2015)

A lot of people told me this was a really great movie, but I just don't see it.

I know that the kind of films I've been watching this Christmas require a certain level of "going with it" and there are some cool things in this movie that I felt did work. Still, overall this is a Creep Show story that takes 1/2 and episode... not a feature length film. As a film, it just runs out of stuff to do. Way way before the end. Resulting in some bafflingly long sequences. I mean we are not talking the fight scene in **They Live** but we are talking that kind of thing.

Like I said though the film has some good stuff in it. The cast is surprisingly awesome in this one, and surprising because of the type of movie it is. Usually these sort of films are pretty low bar, but there are some actors with serious comedy chops in this and they are funny much of the time. I think it is the considerable charm of these actors that is inflating this films rep. Also this film has some really neat practical effects. I particularly liked the spooky teddy bear which reminds me, in a good way, of **Critters** (a film I deeply love), and the entire "lost in the blizzard" bit near the start is a great example of doing so much with so little.

The problem with this movie is the film maker didn't follow the "Jaws" principle. Krampus looks awesome, but not after he is in full shot for 15 mins. Some sneaker camera angles to hide him, bit of smoke or something, would have really elevated the ending of this movie. I know it is low budget, but check out **Errementari : The Devils Blacksmith** for how creative thinking can make an outstanding over the top ending without needing Disney to fund you. This film wanted an out there ending but imo failed, as we basically have a shot of a bunch of muppets standing around a pot.

The real issue I had with this film is that I wanted to like it. My viewing experience suffered from expectations. It didn't help that people have been trying to get me to watch it every Xmas for years now and kept telling me how great it was.

This is another one of those movies that I feel is just missing the mark. These films can be bad, these films can take themselves seriously, but a comedy horror christmas film, imo, needs to be fun. That is the key element missing here. I was just bored by the end.

(Film Review) - Godzilla 35: Monarch 03 - King of the Monsters (2019)

*** SPOILERS ***

Godzilla is a strange beast in that the character is beloved, for it is a classic pop culture icon known throughout the world, as in Superman levels of penetration into the culture and yet only a tiny fraction of the people that instantly recognise the character have ever seen his films. You could ask an 80 year old granny, you could ask a 6 year old child, and you could ask them on nearly any continent on earth and they would know who Godzilla is, but have they ever seen a single film? Those that have seen the films generally considered them to be B-Movies. Even diehard fans accept the fact that the movies have always kinda sucked. That does not mean they're not films people like, even love, but I do not think that any serious filmgoers can sit there and tell me that the Godzilla films are amazing stories or incredibly well made films, beyond the original.

I have always been a huge Godzilla fan and have watched the movies a ton of times when I was small and again as an adult. It was that exposure, particularly as a child that I think is the key to my experience with this new film.

 When you are a kid you do not see the men in suits running around a glorified train set. You see Godzilla. You see a wild monster crushing cities but you also see that particular Japanese aesthetic, in their modern storytelling where mankind is completely out of control of the events around them. I kind of fatalism of endurance where the is no response to the disaster, a disaster more often than not we have caused ourselves. We are ineffectual and unimportant, the only option is to hide, to hope and to survive from a roll of a die. We are nearly superfluous, you can imagine the stories of these films carrying on without us, despite our pathetic and wretched meddling that ultimately leads to nought. It is Godzilla that saves the day, as inevitable as the dawn. But Godzilla's is selfish in a way, like us his concern is for his planet. Our planet. A beast that fights for Earth, not humanity, not for morality, not for gain and who is unable to be controlled. Yet as we live on Earth he is kinda the good guy, one we rely on as we live on Earth too. This focus moved Godzilla slowly from a hideous bad guy to what I consider as a representation of Gia itself. A force of nature, Earth personified, and who could in their right mind not want to cheer for the Earth itself.

These are powerful ideas for a kid and this film more than any before it is showing us the monsters as we imagined them. I never saw a guy in a suit with visible strings holding up 3 sock puppet heads. I saw a golden dragon. This movie shows us the monsters as they lived in our imagination, not as they lived on celluloid. This film is about how Godzilla is perceived, more than about what it actually has been.

It is also an American production and it loses some of those deep-rooted cultural concepts about our place as a human race in relation to the planet itself. In an effort to make the story more "realistic" the Gods themselves are reduced to dumb animals, easily commanded by a magic box. A switch to make them rage, a switch to make them docile, a switch to call them, to drive them away. Having humans attempt to control Godzilla and his ilk is not a bad thing in itself, in fact, it is a common theme through the series, but ultimately I feel that it should always fail utterly and be ultimately unimportant.

Godzilla for me is at its best in the way western film audiences were introduced to him in the last 2015 film by that Monsters guy. They should basically not even notice us. This is what made that scene Godzilla vs King Ghidorah in '91 so powerful for Godzilla fans, as Godzilla stood there and looked directly at the dude, feelings of acknowledgement and understanding pass through the audience at the gravity of the idea that Godzilla was noticing us at all let alone singling him out for retribution. This scene worked so well as it was so unusual. In this film, the monsters all act more like King Kong. They are letting people touch them, bending down to snort on them Jurassic Park style and chasing little girls who can somehow outrun them. For how I personally relate to Godzilla, there seems to be what I consider a definite misunderstanding of the writers and director about some pretty basic concepts of what Godzilla is all about, concepts that the 2014 film, flawed as it was, nailed.

Even so, I immensely enjoyed this film. The film looks fantastic. Some of the shots could be screen capped from the Blu-Ray, printed out and hang on my wall. I mean it is absolutely gorgeous and if you are after giant monster battles, this film has you covered. The action is fantastic. I loved it. There was a lot of chatter from the trailers about the film looking dark, but I call bullshit on that. The film is extremely easy to read, even during the ground level, humans dodging exploding cars and toppling buildings I never felt like my eye was lost on the screen or that the action was obscured from view. The film is loud though. Do not go to this film if you have a headache. It is basically 2 hours of screaming monsters.

I also liked how they delved deep into the lore of the beasts. While I am a huge advocate of not explaining shit in films, nothing sucks more than crappy pseudoscience and technobabble, which this film has a decent share of. Still, it is things like Monster Zero causing hurricanes all around him from beating his wings and his electric charge or Rodan rising from a volcano and how ancient man translated these sights and how the monsters themselves are part of human collective consciousness, filtered into our legends. I thought a lot of that was really cool. I felt this film really pushed the lore and I loved that.

That is not to say the film is not fucking dumb.

The biggest nitpick I have is that apparently water pressure is not a thing, but I can forgive a submarine form just cruising about at the bottom of the ocean or a helicopter flying in a tornado. Having hero characters conveniently picked up by some kind of transport that comes from nowhere as they need to be at the next scenes location or even the killing off of the Japanese scientist's female assistant, just to replace her with the exact same character, this time Chinese to allow the sale of the film in the Chinese market are just things that niggle me but are not deal breakers. If you make a 200million dollar film that is trying to do so much there are concessions you have to make, to make it at all.

There are also the increasingly common pacing problems that event cinema is having. With so much going on there is no time for the story to "boil". Mothra wakes up and spends all of 10 mins in the film before it cocoons itself. Rodan is born and fighting before it even takes flight form the Volcano. Everything feels rushed, we as an audience need time to see the monsters and understand what they can do. Seeing Godzilla sucker punch Rodan isn't as cool unless we have seen Rodan be a badass himself. These monsters need actual arcs. I think they could take some lessons from martial arts cinema.

This leads me to the biggest problem I have with this film. The monsters are just that. Monsters. These films over the years have produced definite and realised characters for these creatures. When you see a King Kong film, there is no doubt about his personality. You see it in his actions and expressions. The monsters in this film, despite some legit attempts, fail to have any feeling of character. We as an audience want to love these guys, to emotionally bond to them, even the bad guys but what we get are just creatures. Look at Aliens. Just tiny moments of showing intelligence and that scene with the Queen issuing direct commands and understanding Ripley's threat gave those monsters such depth and the ability for the audience to connect to them. This film needed those kinds of moments and it just doesn't have them.

Also, this films lacks the conviction to have an actual bad guy. In an age of understanding, it is no longer acceptable to just have a crazy scientist dude nearly cause Armageddon. The audience is deprived of the classic and always satisfyingly cathartic experience of the bad guy getting her comeuppance, as it is obfuscated in touchy feely bullshit. The eco terrorist and the doctor should really have been one character, and she shouldn't have a redemptive arc of any kind, imo. Why is a film asking me to identify with a woman that has literally murdered millions? Fuck that. Have her stepped on my Monster Zero or a building fall on her or something.

All in all this film is one I really enjoyed and I have already seen it twice at the cinema. Once with friends and once alone in iMax. I may even see it again as my brother wants to go see it. Even so, I am not going to sit here and tell you it is a great film. It is great because it is a Godzilla film, it isn't a great film. Even with all the monster action, the final fight is concluded in a super fast sequence that feels a little anticlimactic after such epic and awesome fighting. In Dragonball Z they don't suddenly end it once everyone is juiced up. That is when the real battle begins. This film, for all its good work, fails to tap into that mythic feeling that I so desperately wanted it to have.

And that mugffin magic briefcase thing was fucking retarded.

Verdict : All hail the rise of the King, lets hope this is one of many.

[Film Review] - Brick (2006)

Brick (2006)

Every now and then a film comes along that makes you wonder exactly what the makers were thinking when they produced it. What possessed them to do something this way, when that way would do. Brick is one such film.

It is written and directed Rian Johnson whom I found because I read an article that he had been given one of the upcoming Star Wars films to direct and after looking at his IMDB profile I got interested in "Brick" becasue it was his first outing in feature film. There is a trend in Hollywood at the moment, one of which I approve, for the most part, of major studios hiring young talented indie directors to cover their super-mega projects. Monsters -> Godzilla... Super / Slither -> Guardians of the Galaxy... Chronicle -> Fantastic 4... that kind of thing.

It is hard to talk about Brick because at it's heart it's a mystery film, a well written and convoluted one though not exactly a baffling one. So there is very little you can really discuss without ruining the mystery. Though the interesting part is that the mystery isn't the point. This is more of a ride, it's main purpose is the experience delivered through the films style, this is what is important. So while the mystery and the discovery about it drives the story, the mystery is almost irrelevant to the films real focus. Nostalgia.

This entire film is throw back to the film noir. In some ways it is even more of a recreation of the classic black and whites that form the Golden Age of Cinema than China Town, before it. All the familiar cliches form the fem fatal, to rebellious tough guy shamus, the underbelly of crime stretching from fancy parties to criminal masterminds and the language.

The entire film is written as if it came directly from an Edward Robinson or Humphry Bogart film. "You set that poor kid up! You held Dode like a card 'till you could play him.".. this is an actual line from the film. Now, you could be mistaken in thinking that sounds really corny, because it kinda dose. Yet the film's director, who is also the writer fully commits to this. It is 100% deadpan, no mocking, no cynicism. It is presented as the reality of the world and as the reality is held true through out, it just works. So like when watching a Shakespeare play the use of unusual language in this film fades into normalcy going undetected, even become... well, just cool.

Still the most audacious thing is this is not a film set in the mean streets of Chicago but set on the campus of a high school staring high school children. This is the baffling part.  Imagine if White Heat was set in a highschool and it was the exact same film just that setting change. This is what Brick is trying to be.

Is it a calculated move to get a film done at a much reduced cost? Is their a metaphor about school kids and their melodramatic problems, as the Golden Age films seam almost naive and silly to many now? Is it a commentary on how ideas recycle, and only the very young can truly believe that love is forever and that an idea is ever original? Is it because the setting takes some of the edge off the realism allowing the viewer to accept this strange fantasy version of how people behave more readily?

I'm not really sure, behind the reasoning of why this setting is chosen, this is why the film is so odd. Though I am absolutely sure this film could have been done with adults, even set in 40s Chicago and it would work, with nothing more than changing some of the names in the script. Like VP (Vice Principle) to PC (Police Chief) and the like.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. What it shows is that even with young adult actors not quite being able to pull off the requirements of the script, that a story purely character and plot driven can still be very enjoyable. This is more than a nostalgic look at scripting and characters. It is a comment on films. On what we have lost and what kids may never know.

Highly Recommend

[Film Review] - Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Jupiter Ascending is a odd film. I find myself torn between my desire to speak about what I consider to be some interesting facets of the film and the fact that this film which in many ways requires no thought at all on the part of the viewer.

On the surface this film appears to be a overproduced melodrama that stumbles over its own feet trying desperately to wrangle some meaning from the threads
of what I'll kindly choose to call; it's plot. Yet there is a far more important aspect to this film that is rooted in the sheer audacity of vision that the film makers have tried to assemble onto our screens.

This is an age when audiences are champing at the bit for original content amid the vast ever flowing downpour of reboots, remakes, re-imaginings, sequels and the seemingly endless deluge of repurposed media in the form of books, TV shows, comics, games and the like. So Jupiter Ascending stands as a ambitious attempt to bring a truly original fantasy adventure to the silver screen. A film created from scratch, specifically for the movies. We should have all loved it. After all, this is what we asked for, wasn't it?

The problem is that original stories are pretty darn hard to think up. So while this is not something that has existed before, the writers were unable to make it stand alone without it being a hodgepodge of half remembered scifi concepts form a myriad of old books and movies that most media junkies can instantly recognise and many non-geeks know through a kind of storytelling osmoses.

So in a time when this film should be lauded for giving us what we claim to want, original storytelling, the film comes off as a unoriginal mess that is less coherent than the most tentatively "based on" type film of an already established IP.  

One thing though. The film looks fantastic.

As computer graphics have improved over the years we have been approaching a time where they fail to impress us.  When I was a small child, I went to see Star Wars and my brain exploded in awe as the Star Destroyer slowly moved across the screen. This was an effect that simply had never been dreamed of and the very real physical experience of simply not believing what I was seeing was a gift from those film makers to the world. It was a spectacle, like seeing the Aurora Borealis or an eclipse. An event like no other. The visual experience itself had entertainment value.

Audiences have spent decades absorbing the growth of special effects, and I am using the term "special effects" as a catch all for make up, sound and the like when creating a visual sequence. That growth has lead us to the point where literally anything a writer can communicate in sufficient detail can appear on the screen. The opening of Star Wars and the audience reaction to it can never be recaptured as the power of it and other early films effects were not in what the effect was showing us in relation to the narrative, but in the effect itself. The effect, just as a spectacle was entertaining.

Now of course we are no longer hindered by reality in the production of large scale films and the effects have gotten to the point where they are so common and at such a universally high quality that we absorb them as part of the narrative with little excitement. Special effects are an expected reality for film audiences. We have seen building explode, planets crumble to dust, men grow small, robots form out of water, cars drive up the side of buildings; ad nauseam. There is a real fatigue overcoming movie goers in regards to special effects. As the visual event itself is no longer entertaining. We now require meaning to justify the effects existence.

Yet there is still one type of film coincidentally of the same genre as Star War, fantasy; that can capture some of that jaw dropping excitement that comes from simply seeing something. Most films and therefore their effects are rooted in the mundane. If you set a film in our world our time, not only is the visual an extension of something we have most likely seen in our real lives, there is a very real chance that we have seen a very similar shot in another film already. It doesn't matter how good your effects are of that car jumping across a river spinning in circles while the hero is hanging onto the roof. We have all seen cars before, we understand crashing and there are a million films with people hanging off things.

Fantasy though, is unique as it offers artists a way to depict things that we have no frame of reference for. Things that are beyond our own imaginings. Things that we look upon and feel enjoyment simply though the act of seeing it. Fantasy is the last bastion for pure special effects. Effects that have their existence only justified by their beauty of design and imaginative innovation.

This is where Jupiter Ascending excels. The fantasy elements of this film look fantastic and the fantasy concepts are detailed and imaginative. The effects are effortlessly incorporated to produce a truly stunning visual feast were I was entranced by the very scope and detail presented of the universe was a dense textured layer of ideas. The internal logic of the film is tight and they really pushed the visual design towards what I would consider to be some of the best science fiction art I have seen on the silver screen. When was the last time you were just blown away by a space ship at the movies, just by looking at it? 

Unfortunately, this is just not enough. In a fantasy of this scope the complex plot feels disjointed and even worse unoriginal due to similarities to some of the scifi greats. I have heard a lot of people say the plot dose not make sense but this is not true. The film's plot is in fact coherent if you are paying attention, it is convoluted but it follows its internal logic closely and all the threads tie up.

So, this film is a hard lesson for the studio and for film goers. While we claim to want original programming on the scale of famous known IPs, the only attempt in decades to make a truly original blockbuster fantasy has failed in all the important ways. This could be the last time a studio tries this for another 30 years. In the narratives need to present so much information due to the viewer not having any pre-existing knowledge of the universe slows everything down to a series of setups and expositions that wear down on our patience. I feel the real problem this film has is the scale.

Yet, I personally did not hate this film. I found it far more entertaining than many of the large blockbusters it was in competition with. When you have films like Transformers or Fast and Furious stinking up the screen how can this film attract such scorn? It is an ambitious, even an audacious film and in my book that is a huge plus in its column. As a voracious consumer of fantasy and science fiction this film is right in my wheel house and the jumps of imaginative acceptance it asks of the viewer are easy for me to make.

I can't call this a good film with a strait face but I've already bought the blu-ray and getting the physical disk on my shelf is a badge of honour I reserve for only the selected few. 

If only this was a better film.

VERDICT: Give it a try, but be warned.

[Film Review] MCU 11: Avengers and the Age of Ultron (2015)

It is no secret to those that know me that I have a bias towards DC, but that isn't to say I am into that whole DC vs Marvel thing. One is not inherently better than the other on any real measurable level. The only thing that really separates DC and Marvel in a comparative sense is how the comics resonate with the readers on a personal level and in my case almost universally, it is DC that far outshines Marvel. I think this is important to disclose before I continue.

When MCU 6: Avengers Assemble hit theatres in 2012 I went to see it with very low expectations, partly due to my relatively unenthused interest in the source material and was really blow away with how immensely enjoyable the film was. Age of Ultron on the other hand gave me the exact opposite experience. I went in with high expectations and found a flat, lifeless tale lacking in almost all the areas that made the Avengers Assemble so great.

I think a lot of reviewers and possibly even the film makers themselves have completely missed the point as to why Avengers Assemble was so successful. This failure to understand the reasons for their own brand popularity has lead them to focus on the wrong aspects in Age of Ultron and pull focus from the very things that would assure them of retaining the audience they have cultivated. The most interesting part of all this is that between Avengers Assemble and Age of Ultron we had Guardians of the Galaxy, a film that got nearly everything right and seamed to show they understood completely why Avengers Assemble was so successful.

Avengers Assemble and Guardians of the Galaxy where so popular and so widely accepted that comic fandom can simply not account for their astounding success. For these films popularity was born through a cross appeal that struck home to not just comic fans but all film goers, that enjoy spectacle cinema. These films were record breakers despite being comic book films, not because they were comic book films. This is the crux of the problem with Age of Ultron and it is a problem I am worried Marvel will compound as the MCU continues into the future.

One of the most glaring faults of Age of Ultron stems from this misunderstanding. This lead to an indulgence of the film makers on the individual characters, banking on the appeal of the characters themselves rather than on how the characters behave. The fun interplay is nearly lost in this film, apart form some all to brief fleeting moments at the start. This film is more interested in showing us the comic book icons than in providing a actual story for them to exist in.

Gone is the large group dramatic arcs from the last outing and instead we have a number of dramas involving individuals. Of course in a film this size with so many characters and with so much time devoted to action, this collection of dramatic threads can only be sketched out in a rudimentary way. In this case the attempt is absolutely puerile, leading to ridicules mellow drama that makes the audience groan and check their watches for these sequences feel, and are, completely tacked on.

This is no more evident than the manufactured family connection given to Hawkeye where he suddenly gains a house complete with wife, kids and unfinished home improvement projects. A few thrown away lines and we as a audience are supposed to feel a human connection to the fantastic events of the film. This entire idea to ground the movie a little with some good old fashioned family values is one of the most bizarre and randomly out of context things I have seen in a blockbuster for a long while.

Yet this film is full of this same error, through admittedly less pronounced, I mean this family thing was just bizarre on a epic level. Action sequences are stopped in mid battle for brief conversational drama between to characters, the film is literally put on hold. They do not even try to contrive to have the characters in the same location, they can just speak to each other though magic communication devices. The audience feels this dead stop in the flow of the film and the rolling of eyes start as we just want them to get back to the action we were enjoying. You could fan edit out these conversations and what you would be left with would be a single long uninterrupted action sequence, these small dramas would not be missed.

Avengers Assemble got around this type of cheese ball mellow drama by having the Avengers experience a dramatic curve as a group. The main theme being about coming together in unity, as well as finding ones place and personal voice. As all the characters were experiencing the same group arc, rather than all these individual ones, any time spent on the arc affected all the leads. This gave depth to the story, as each "time out" for drama built on the last, rather than each "time out" being a small, separate and self contained.

One of its most exciting sequences in Avengers Assemble was during the main fight at the end of the film. There was a glory shot of all the Avengers on screen at once in a single dynamic action shot showing them all working together in perfect harmony framed by powerful music. This exact shot though done with more complexity, is in Age of Ultron, but without the emotional backing it completely fails to be anything more than a cluttered special effect shot.

This is Age of Ultron in a nutshell. We have more of everything in that increasing of scale that comes in blockbuster squeals, but that "everything" comes at the cost of storytelling. Drama and more importantly for these films humour is lost for exposition and action and we are left with all the sights but none of the soul, ultimately leaving us feeling hollow and unfulfilled.

You note I am talking about drama a lot, but if you ask most people about Avengers Assemble what they talk about is the humour. This is the thing that everyone seams to get wrong about why Avenges Assemble and Guardians of the Galaxy were so popular. It was that they were fun, adventure films.  There was humour, action and light themes that produced a true roller coaster of amusement. The comic angle was not the draw. I suspect that if Guardians of the Galaxy was a completely non comic related IP it would have still been as popular, as it was the "fun adventure" nature of the film that made it cross cultural boundaries.The fun is lost in this film, instead we had a focus on the comic characters at the expense of what I feel was the very thing, the style of the film, that drew the much larger non-comic reader crowd.


That is not to say there isn't a lot of good parts in this film. The action is competent, and the plot itself while rushed is decent enough for this type of film. I would have loved Ultron to have more of a arc to evil badguy mode, but there simply wasn't time to have him start good and go bad. He just appears, and is evil. Why? Well that is the soul discussion of his motivation.

Ultron in fact was sort of schizophrenically written.  He at times talks in a very casual way, other times he monologues like a James Bond villain and at other times he speaks like the Starship Enterprise computer. It seams his dialogue was tooled specifically for the scene rather than him have any real defined voice. This is unfortunate as James Spader was a real delight and for me by far, the best bits in the film was Ultron when he spoke and acted the most human.

So, this film has a lot of problems. Ones I think will compound as the MCU continues and more and more characters are crammed into the universe. Less time will be spent on anything other than action and the most superficial characterisation.

We have seen the future of the MCU and it is Transformers 3.

Yet the cast is extremely charismatic, the production values are off the chain amazing and there are moments that pepper the show which remind us of why these kind of films can be so fun. So even with its faults it is still one of the better super hero comic films and will be a strong contender as a top blockbuster of the year. I just feel that this is a clear decline in not just quality of what was produced, but the quality of what they even tried to produce.

Verdict

Recommend, with a warning.