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imcfadyen
Reviews
Away (2020)
Lasted as long as I could
Started this with high hopes. which were slowly destroyed as the series got stupider and stupider. From people making personal cell phone calls to family on earth from 20 million miles away, to a Houston Control room that seems to have no actual scientists in it. (Every time they have a problem they turn to the husband of commander Hillary Swank who is a former astronaut). The space craft has a centrifuge to create artificial gravity and yet the crew are floating weightless through the rooms. And although people fly by weightlessly, others stand around and objects sit securely on tables. Then there is the tedious parallel story of the Commander's irritating daughter who seems to think that everything is about her and insists on troubling her mother with her personal problems while she trying to deal with emergencies in the ship. I finally gave up in the episode where their water recycler has broken down (of course there are no duplicate systems in this billion dollar vessel) and they decide they can access what which is in the hollow hull of the ship (What ????) The danger is, if they drill into the wall, they might go through to the outside shell and their air will escape. So they drill a quarter inch hole and hear the terrifying hiss of escaping air. (Presumably they've never heard of putting a stop on a drill bit). Immediately the Commander screams "everyone out" and they evacuate the module and seal it off. Even a five year old watching this would say "Just block the hole with something. It's only a 1/4 inch hole. There is nothing worse than writers who make up really stupid crises and have characters acting stupidly just to create drama. It's just annoying.
London Spy (2015)
Create vision and acting spoiled by flawed story
I completely agree with markfranh's review. A great (though very slow) first few episodes which degenerates into the cliché "OMG the intelligence agencies can get to everyone everywhere anytime" plot. Danny, a young lonely former drug-user meets and falls in love with Alex, a shy mathematical genius who, it turns out (THIS IS NOT A SPOILER BECAUSE IT'S IN THE TITLE OF THE SERIES) is a spy. Of course we're immediately wondering what use an unsociable maths savant would be to the intelligence service. The obvious answer would be in relation to cryptography.
WE ARE NOW GONG INTO SPOILER TERRITORY
When Alex is killed and Danny is framed as the killer the first assumption would be that he found some mathematical way to crack the most secure codes leading to a decision by not one, but almost all, of the world's spy agencies to get rid of him. Instead it turns out to be an advanced polygraph system that can tell whether anyone is lying - the very thing that spy agencies would WANT. They even use his own program against him thus proving it works. So why would they want to get rid of it? There's no logic in the plot.
The rest of the series is basically Danny's efforts to clear his name and expose the truth about Alex's death, which he cannot do because the spy agencies control the police, the press, the Internet and even the mail so his emails are censored, documents sent to the newspapers are returned unopened etc. In other words, it's the old familiar Three Days of the Condor - Enemy of the State situation where the secret agencies magically control everything. (It's never explained why they don't just kill him.) The whole plot is complicated by unnecessary and often unexplained plot twists which often go nowhere, and in the end we see Danny, and Alex's foster-mother (a psychopath who suddenly goes through an inexplicable personality change) declaring that, although they'll probably be killed, they're still going to try and tell the truth. Great visual quality and acting let down by terrible plotting.
Arrival (2016)
How has everyone missed the actual story here?
I am amazed no one is commenting on the actual story of this film, that is to say the OTHER story. HUGE SPOILER ALERT. Louise, the linguist, is plagued by (what we think) are memories of her beautiful daughter who died of cancer. She seems to be carrying this huge grief. Then, about 90 minutes in she says "Who is this child?" The aliens solve the mystery. They tell her she can see the future: the child is the one she is GOING to have with Jeremy Renner. And he is going to leave her when he finds out she knew that their child would die but chose to have the child anyway. The big "Sixth Sense" surprise is that they were not memories, they were premonitions. So, are we to believe that Louise could see that she was going to have a child that would die but couldn't predict an ALIEN INVASION? And how did she know the last words of the General's wife. Did she also become psychic? The movie isn't about aliens at all, it's about what you would do if you could see the future. By the way, if she could see the future, does that mean she could not choose NOT to have the baby. And if the aliens can see the future, how did they not know about the explosives planted in their ship. The whole movie is a pretentious and utterly confused piece of garbage.
Hulk (2003)
A giant green waste of time
If "hulk" also refers to a once great ship now drifting uselessly, rotten and leaky, then it fits this movie well. As many viewers have pointed out, the sequences when the jolly green giant actually appears are magic. They are full of superb action, humor and wit. The characterisation of the Hulk is sensitive and complex - more than can be said of performances by human actors. The problem is that these three sequences make up about 15 minutes in the whole 2 hour+ movie. The rest is taken up with the most boring, meanderine, illogical, irrelevant drama, conveyed by often laughably bad dialogue and acting, that I have seen in any movie for a long time, let alone a comic-book action-flick. The plot requires us to make Hulk-sized credibility leaps. Are we to believe that never in 30 years did Bruce once get angry and wonder why his skin turned mottled green? Or that he just coincidentally ends up in love with the daughter of the Gruff Authoritarian Army Officer who arrested his father. Or that a guy can be thrown through a window, across a street, bounced off a police car and then thrown another forty feet onto onto a concrete road and turn up three scenes later with a just sling on his arm? And when said GAAO declares that Bruce must be locked up because he is danger to society how come in the next scene Daughter is taking Bruce on a tour of his old house out in the desert without a guard in sight? None of this seems to worry Ang Lee who would rather pan his camera over some driftwood or a patch of lichen than cut thirty minutes of out of this tedious script. One can only hope that a HULK II will be produced which is 80% Hulk and 20% Banner, instead of the 5/95 ratio we have in this mess. And Ang Lee should never be allowed near a popcorn movie again. Possibly any movie.
Fight Club (1999)
Many fans seem to miss the real point of this movie
Two points. Firstly, it's slightly worrying how many people like or at least identify with this movie. There seem to be a disturbing number of Narrator/Tylers out there. Many of these however miss the point of the Third Act. Like many movements which appear to liberate the (male) persona and offer fulfilment to those who dare, Fight Club ultimately becomes a menace - an army of automatons that not even their leader can control. Tyler thus represents not just the power of the unleashed male psyche but the dark side of that power, the blind obedience that leads to a nightmare world of terrorism, Nazism, the Klan, Oklahoma etc. The movie is, in the end, an indictment, not an endorsement of the macho ethos. Secondly, the story contains one major plot problem. "Tyler" has knowledge and skills (making soap, nitroglycerine) that the Narrator doesn't. In order for him to develop these skills without the Narrator's knowledge, he needed substantial lengths of time when the Narrator was asleep. The Narrator therefore could not be insomniac; he should have been a narcoleptic, falling asleep unaccountably - or being unable to account for long periods of time - when "Tyler" was developing.