fatpie42 Reviews

Resident Evil (2022)

Best Resident Evil adaptation

[10/10 · 24 July 2022]

So we already saw the "faithful" adaptation in Welcome To Raccoon City and how boring that was. This tv series keeps the exciting sci-fi of the W. S. Anderson movies, but really grounds it with some solid characters and a genuine mystery. We have some of it set in the past with Wesker looking after 2 daughters (whose blood he injects into himself, and one of whom broke someone's leg when she was just 9, so there's something odd going on there). And we also see a future where the virus has completely destroyed all semblance of normal society, zombies are everywhere and Umbrella are dominating the world with their superior technology.

The series both recognises that you need the larger than life sci-fi aspects of the movies to make this exciting, but also recognises that you need the story to be driven by the characters. I reckon this takes some inspiration from Orphan Black. The result is the most genuinely dramatically engaging adaptation of Resident Evil ever.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Even people who thought they hated Harry Potter will love it!

[9/10 · 1 June 2004]

Put it this way....

I HATE the harry potter books. I find them boringly written and despise the way they insult the reading ability of Children everywhere. Unlike Pullman who writes complex and descriptive books, Dahl whose imagery constantly surprises and thrills and Lewis whose Narnia books contain beautiful imagery, Rowling's books uses only very simplistic expressions.

What Rowling's books do have though, it seems, is great stories. However, as always with novels, you can fit a lot more plot into a book than you can into a movie. The previous movies have kept very much to the plot of the book and as a result they have ended up leaving an awful lot of the story out. In this movie the director is not afraid to shift things about a bit in order to make the story work better as a movie.

The director is a very important reason for the quality of this movie. Unlike previous directors the only place this director could be called an 'unknown' is in Hollywood. This director is critically acclaimed for his film "Y Tu Mama Tambien" ("And your mother too"). In the Harry Potter movie he has taken some of his cues from the imaginative directing style of Terry Gilliam. As such he has added wonderful personal touches such as the shrunken voodoo heads (look out for them - they're great).

This is the best Harry Potter movie yet, and by that I mean it is the FIRST good Harry Potter movie so far. Let's hope the next movie can provide more of the same because this movie was awesome!