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Reviews
War Horse (2011)
Well made, but suffers from its own story
First off, nothing about this movie is below what we would expect from Steven Spielberg as director. The scenery, camera work and battles are perfectly executed. It has gripping and emotional moments. Still, it suffers from being a "horse movie" and really just an "animal movie". They all generally have the same storyline, but this one manages to not throw out anything unexpected. At times, this gave the movie a sentimental, nostalgic feel, but at others it makes scenes drag on in the midst of embarrassingly bad delivery from some of the cast. I'm really looking at Emily Watson (Rose) and Niels Arestrup (the French grandfather) here, but pretty much all the minor characters also suffer from this.
I enjoyed War Horse more than most of the other films I watched this year, but it's still not that memorable.
Star Trek: The Changeling (1967)
Suspenseful and (mostly) logical - one of my favorites
This easily makes the list of the most suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat Trek episodes ever. A malfunctioning space probe, Nomad, comes aboard the Enterprise, mistaking Kirk for its creator. The half-earth, half-alien probe thinks it has orders to sterilize imperfect life-forms, and the crew has to find a way to keep it under control before it kills them. A great climax - Kirk using logic to destroy Nomad - brings it to a great conclusion, and almost makes up for a very illogical element.
Nomad absorbs Uhura's memory , rendering her useless for most of the episode. Nomad is unable to restore it, so McCoy and his team reeducate her over a few weeks. Really? Could you be back to normal in a few weeks after having your brain wiped?
3 stars off for that silly bit, the rest are well-deserved for a great episode!
Inception (2010)
Excellent, but the people who didn't love it have a point
Inception is probably the best scifi since The Matrix. Maybe even better. There, I said it. The imagination and idea behind Inception are wonderful, and it was certainly executed near-flawlessly. However, it is a bit complex, especially with tons of different things going on at once. Personally, I didn't mind much, but it does get confusing. And there's an almost complete lack of an emotional plot. But that's what happens when scifi goes mainstream. People and critics used to brilliant conventional movies notice the plot holes, crave for the missing details, and sometimes find it all overwhelming.
While the hype is too much, Inception is the first movie I've seen in the theater that I recommended to everyone I knew. Avatar was fun, but it was easy to forget once I saw it twice. Inception was different, exciting, and just plain brilliant. But it's not changing movies with breakthrough VFX or new ideas (at least I hope people won't try to copy it), and it's not the best movie ever (Dr. Strangelove keeps that title in my book), but it did restore my hope that there are some great ideas ready to be made into a movie, whether Leo DiCaprio planted them or not.