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Death Note (2017)
What the ever living f?
There's a difference in making creative choices for an adaptaion and flipping everything upside down until there is nothing left of the original work. For example changing the location makes sense: the story being set in Japan is in no way integral to the plot, many characters were American anyway, there's no language issue and production for an American company is gonna be a lot easier in America. Makes perfect sense.
Taking the main characters and flipping their personalities to their polar opposites for no reason is not a creative choice, it's just a complete refusal to try to do an adaptation of preexisting material. It's themeing a vastly inferior story with the veneer of the most external characteristics of the "original". Quotation marks because at this point it's not even an adaptation, just a farce.
Everybody who participated in putting this script together is fatally stupid and should never be allowed to write screenplays again.
Mortal Kombat (2021)
Pathetic
If the aim was to take a dump on the IP and alienate the existing fanbase, good job. If it was to turn people who never engaged with the franchise in any way before, probably even better.
Shame on whoever wrote this lazily put together nonsense that has nothing to do with any established storylines, nor manages to tell a sane, internally coherent story if we discount the first, and frankly main issue. I'd say this cliché riddled, phoned in pile of **** manages to find the perfect balance between facepalm and cringe, but no, somehow it breaks both of those scales at the same time.
The story starts at roughly the right place, though watching the Shirai Ryu get exterminated by the Lin Kuei feels sort of like Batman's or Spiderman's origin story: overtold. Then the unnecessary "main character" is shoehorned in, and you know what, I'd be borderline willing to step past that if he was not a character with no traits. I don't mean he's boring, or vanilla, I literally think that when the character was "developed" the writer(s) forgot to come up with a personality.
And let's not forget about this ridiculous "arcana" concept, that allows iconic characters to do what they do without their established gear or cybernetic implants, or in the most extreme case allow them to magically manifest high-tech cybernetic prostetics. The sheer level of laziness in the writing here is detestable.
Shame on the director too, who deserves the same kind of props, I never realized you could get performances out of otherwise talented actors that are stiff, over the top and boring at the same time. "Give me your best crotchity grandpa with kids on his lawn and dial it up to 12" must have been a sentence heard daily on set. And when the cast and crew were finally free of this "genius" and post production finally started, the sound team suddenly had to start putting up with the daily instruction: "Now put a sci-fi noise in for that magic event", while the editors had to work with this: "Okay, so we dirped hard on the fight coreography, so just chip-chop this scene into sub-second pieces so nobody notices that."
The dumb, campy 90'-ies Mortal Kombat was 12 times better than this lazily slapped together. The one good thing about this being so bad, is that the next reboot (however many decades we might need to wait for it) will have to be a home run. It's a simple recipe: get an iconic cast of characters together, get them to Shang Tsung's island by minute 20 and then do the tournament. Nail the fights, the characters, put in some appropriate character devlopment, a dash of humor and crank the epic to 11 at the end. A blind hamster could do it ;)
Deception (2018)
Episodic...
I randomly found this show and watched the first part coming away feeling excited about the rest until the second came out and it turned out that this is going to be an episodic waste of everyone's time. We live in a golden age of serials and the basic premise of the show, Cameron looking for the woman with the different eye colors lent itself beautifully to a large story of the two illusionists going after each other in a Death Note like way, wit against wit, with a build to a season long magic trick with large reveals of how many dramatic events down the road were not what they seemed...
Instead we got this.
The failure of the premise of the show in an episodic structure is two-fold. First, when solving random crimes and looking for standard issue criminals a magician has 0 utility on an investigative team. In terms of actually finding culprits it's useless unless the writers go into nonsensical stretches about Russian mobsters tricking kids from Wyoming on Times Square into thinking they are on a reality show to kill people with poison, only so later a showman would be able to identify showmanship in the killer's behavior. Crime naturally invites stealthy, secretive conduct, so a magician's experience in solving it is irrelevant.
Second, magic is only entertaining as long as the audience is being tricked. In an episodic structure the bad guy has to go down at the end of the 40 minutes, so whatever is happening in the last 10 is the trick and everybody in the audience knows it. There is no surprise, no reveal of anything they didn't know. Not to mention that magic is not a reliable way to capture bad guys, In a serial the illusionist/deception trickery could have worked out well with the audience always guessing if something is a trick and if so who is pulling it on whom, and each could have had a sensible setup, but doing one per episode on the bad guy with a perfect success rate is not a believable concept.
I highly doubt this nonsense will go longer than a season.
Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible (2010)
This is an hour long ad, not a documentary
Score: 2/5 What earned the film this score: Overall it doesn't provide the informative look at this company and the VFX industry what one would expect from a documentary, focusing on what ILM accomplished over how it was achieved. Yet a few interesting facts are scattered over its run time.
Comments: Lack of the most important details: This film is a propaganda piece focused on how ILM is the shining front runner of the VFX industry. It shows off their achievements in a chronological order, but barely gets into the technical details of the work they do. Any time they explain how one job or another was a major technical challenge at the time the best they do for the viewer is breeze through the names of the technologies they developed to accomplish the task without explaining what specifically the difficulty was or how they overcame it.
A constant stream of praise: On the other hand they take a great deal of time just stating how amazing one accomplishment or the other was, describing the awesomeness of ILM in great verbal detail. If the filmmakers cut the instances of Tom Cruise just exclaiming how this or that was revolutionary or seemed impossible at the time they would have time left for actual information about computer graphics.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
The laziest, most nonsensical CGI-porn of the year.
Rating: 1/5 What earned the film the rating: Completely nonsensical story line, characters ranging from undeveloped blank slates to ridiculous caricatures, a lack of any internal logic.
Comments: The craft the space Indians escape in: It gets damaged so much that it falls into the gravitational pull of Mül and crashing through the atmosphere smashes into the surface. That's battle damage, atmospheric reentry damage and a major impact. Then a collision and a blast so devastating that it destroys the entire planet occurs within visible distance from this vessel and somehow it proves sturdier than the planet that gets cracked to bits under it, because not only does it keep floating in space in one piece with no decompression anywhere, its life support systems remain perfectly functional. Which leaves the question: if this thing is so indestructible, what the hell did the humans' enemies use to blow it out of the sky in the first place? Ranks and military discipline: Let's see, the main bad guy is a commander, yet he seems comfortable issuing orders to generals. Valerian is a major, that's an officer 3 ranks below a general, yet he is inexplicably young and goes on tactical operations where he is ordered around by local guerrilla types, rather than taking command. Laureline routinely disobeys direct orders from Valerian, even though she is a lowly sergeant. And one of my favorite moments in the film is in the end when Valerian refuses to hand over the world breaking beast on account of his orders and the lawfulness of this act, right after disobeying a direct order from his commanding officer and then striking said officer so hard he collapses unconscious. Was he unable to identify this course of action as direct rebellion that will land him in jail for the rest of forever? The unstoppability suits: What do we learn of these? The commander considers these overkill for the protection job. Then Valerian displays their capabilities: extreme acceleration, an ability to bust through thick metal bulkheads and environmental support for underwater and other settings. And once established what these suits are good for, neither of the main characters uses them ever again. Laureline gets arrested, she kung-fus the two officers responsible for her instead of just running off unstoppably. She gets captured by the bulge-eye people, instead of just running off unstoppably she takes it off and switches into a dress. Valerian just straight up takes it off after the rescue mission.
The kidnapping of the bulge-eyes plot line: This takes up a solid 20 minutes of the run time of the movie, adds nothing to the main plot and makes no sense from the perspective of any of the participants: Laureline allows herself to be captured, chooses not to escape for some reason and just straight up complies to whatever the bug-eyes tell her to do. Valerian chooses to act with diplomatic sensitivity, and to avoid inter-political issues gets a disguise alien, and then assassinates the bug-eyes' leader and reveals his identity in the process. The aliens, living in a space station as one of the multitudinous sentient species present there have a tribal community (despite the film going to great lengths to show that only space faring people were welcomed to the station), and fully understanding the potential consequences of killing an intelligent being of another species, not only do they try to do so, but the method they use to capture Laureline seems to suggest that they routinely hunt and kills others, for sport, which for some reason is apparently tolerated by the communities that supply their prey.
Mr. Big Bad Commander's plan: His goal is simple: find and eliminate the space Indians. If they generate a communication jamming field, that should help him locate them, since this marks the area they are in, with a likely indication that they should be near its center. So logically he should just tell a squad of his kill-bots to grid search the area and eliminate anything that lives and is blue. Instead he pretends that the com-block zone is some deadly, spreading effect by an enemy, diverts everyone's attention to it, does whatever the hell he needs to do simulate its deadliness (which based on what we heard had to have involved deliberately ambushing and killing at least 1 squad of his own people) and while he tries to keep all other people and organizations he has no direct control over from peeping and prodding into the area he seeks to pinpoint the space Indians' location by torturing a prisoner. At the same time he arranges for the two items his targets need to complete their plan to not only be brought to the station, but directly to him, painting a target on his own forehead.
The Valerian-Laureline relationship: Take two characters who have no chemistry. Let's make one of them an orbital man-slut and the superior officer of the other. Now let's have this person randomly and without an explanation as to why seek a monogamous, long term relationship with the other, whose objection isn't along the lines of fraternizing between fellow soldiers, nor is it due to the other being her commanding officer, but some cliché rom-com nonsense about commitment. Present this in a manner so chemistry free it might as well be a lecture on the various reactions of inert gases. Then progress this to a random nonsensical marriage proposal in the middle of a mission, then move on to a random and nonsensical acceptance of that proposal for no other reason than the movie ending. Sounds like a fun recipe for a romantic subplot, right?
Power Rangers (2017)
Not worth the time it takes to watch
Rating: 1/5 What earned the film the rating: Absolute lack of any originality, banal story-line, a conflict built on unbelievable coincidence and 0 effort in trying to make any sense.
Comments The characters: There is 1 character in the film, Billy. He is a shallow character whose interestingness is derived from his mental condition which is never used by the writers in any meaningful way, but at least he can pass for what we would call a character. The rest of the people in the story are vanilla clichés with less depth than graphine. The other four rangers are attempts to pander to age/gender/racial demographics, Zordon is the stereotypical pretends-to-be-a-hard-ass-but-he-really-cares mentor stereotype and Rita's entire personality begins and ends with her quest for world domination through the destruction of Earth.
The performances: As you can infer from the types of characters in the film, there weren't much room given to the actors to shine the mastery of their craft, but there are two notes worth mentioning: RJ Cyler's performance of Billy pretty much single handedly made it possible to bear through this thing while surprisingly enough Elizabeth Banks's attempts at being menacing came off as comical.
The plot: It starts with a pile of coincidences where Rita happens to be discovered just as exactly 5 people randomly pop upon the 5 magic ranger crystals. Then it has a flat and almost conflict free build to the final battle which is a straight up face off with no tactical nuance that ends with an giant robot pulled straight from the writer's ass. Granted, bitch slapping the villain into space could have been a bad-ass end, but the amount of randomness, silliness and emotional emptiness that surrounds that moment takes away its edge.
The lack of any sense: Just a few of the major plot points that are left completely unexplained: Where do the rangers and their magic stones come from? Are there more like them in distant quadrants of space? If so, when Zordon's group disappeared, why didn't anybody come looking for the magic crystals? If not, then are the 6 of them responsible to guard every life crystal in every inhabited planet in the galaxy? If Rita can come back to life then how does being sunk in the ocean prevent her from doing so? Why did she sink in the first place? If she sank how could she have been caught up in a fishing net submerged to a depth where schools of fish swim? If Rita is the green ranger turned evil, then why are her powers completely and radically different from the others'? Why would the rangers morphing allow Zordon to come back to life? Why does it allow Billy to come back to life? Why is there a limit of 1 on coming back to life if the rangers can morph more than once? What are all the mundane authorities of the USA doing while a weird looking alien is killing people and blowing stuff up in small town America? When Rita captures the rangers what makes her spare the life of 4? How does the robots combining increase their power rather than simply limiting their mobility? If pulling the crystal unleashes a devastation of multitudinous nuclear explosions, and Rita is happy to stand in the epicenter of all that does it mean she could withstand that force?
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Good movie, could have been great
Rating: 4/5 (Worth watching multiple times.)
What earned the film the rating: Interesting characters, interesting themes, fantastic CGI work
Comments
The two stories: The problem with trying to tell two stories at the same time is that there will be no time left to properly explore either. On one hand this film is an adventure story about a wizard trying to recapture his lost creatures in a city hostile not just to him but all his "seriously misunderstood" beastly companions. The conflict here is between Newt and the magical authorities of New York and the focus are the creatures. In this story the main antagonist needs to be a creature hunter trying to get rid of Newt's magical friends by whatever means necessary. This is a somewhat clichéd story with not too much depth or room for drama besides maybe the death of a cute creature, but it's a light adventure for the whole family, it has no room for abusive anti-wizard orphanages or the obscurus. The other story is a deeper look at the problems stemming from the hidden nature of magical society. This story is about how one wizard is attempting to expose the wizarding world to those lacking magic by using an obscurus within a young man. Here the roles are Graves trying to use Credence as a means to expose the wizarding world, the MACUSA trying to kill him because he is a threat and Newt, seeing Credence treated with the same hostility as his creatures are and coming to empathize with the boy trying to save him. This story has no room for lengthy scenes of creature capturing or an end of the movie reveal of Credence being the obscura. Graves and Newt both need to be actively engaging with Credence long before the finale. Mushing up the two stories deprives this movie of its full potential. One example of how this happens is the death of Cadence at the hand of the MACUSA aurors. All this event needed to be a heart wrenching, teary tragedy that audiences would have remembered for the rest of their lives as a memorable film experience is for Credence's character to be more fully explored and after being engaged by both Graves and Newt, to be on the verge of casting aside his dark side at the time of his death.
The big twist reveal: This is the worst moment of the film for several reasons: the number one reason is that it cheapens the villain's character. An auror trying to expose the wizarding world because a potential war between the magical and non-magical societies is still preferable to wasting his vast talents on obliviating no-majs day after day is a character with light and dark sides, created by the imperfection of the system in place. His motivations a well defined, clear and stem from the established background of the story. This character is interesting. "He was an evil dark wizard all along" Secondly, this twist was so telegraphed that, honestly, I'm only guessing it was intended to be one. The Grindelwald character is introduced early, then fails to show up as part of the conflict signaling that one of the characters is in fact him in hiding, then the single villainous characters is shown doing literal back alley deals, clearly manipulating an innocent. Anybody who ever watched a movie before knew this was coming.
Kowalski: I'm not a fan of tourist characters in any story. While, IMHO, Dan Fogler's performance was the best in the film, his character was completely extraneous. As a veteran and the only no-maj of the main cast he could have been more proactive as the member of the protagonist's group who can provide non magical solutions to problems the wizarding characters are unable to solve with the magical tools at their disposal.