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petelarrivee
Reviews
Beast Machines: Transformers (1999)
Less than Meets the Eye
Beast Wars was the first Transformers series in a long time, and it was much better than it had any right to be. While a retread of the original Transformers story at it's core, it very quickly evolved beyond that into a surprisingly well-written, and often rather impressive series. As the writing improved, so did the graphics, leading to some truly impressive visuals by the end of the series run.
It had great writing, likeable characters, solid voice acting, and fantastic action scenes.
So naturally, when Hasbro asked Mainframe to do a followup series for the Fox Network, they asked them to toss all of that garbage out the window.
The characters aren't even close to the same ones we grew to love in Beast Wars. Each one undergoes a very specific and embarrassing watering down.
Optimus Primal goes from a very strong, but flawed leader with confidence and intelligence to an uncertain, wishy-washy spiritualist whose inaction and lack of certainty was the ONLY reason there was even a plot to be had.
Cheetor goes from the 'Kid that grew up,' to the 'hotheaded emo teenager who thinks he knows everything better than the boss.'
Black Arachnea... I'm sorry, PINK Arachnea goes from a badass former Predacon ninja to a whiny stereotype trying to get her boyfriend back. I AM NOT KIDDING!!!!
Rattrap goes from being the cocky, fun, sneaky trapsmith to an R2D2 unit, for all intents and purposes. The only thing he can do is hack machines. That's it. He has no other use or purpose. He's not even funny.
But the biggest WTF character change is our lovable villain, Megatron. Once, a brilliant, manipulative, power-hungry megalomaniac with multi-layered plans to achieve his goals, now he's some sort of anti-organic fanatic with a hatred for all things natural and his ultimate goal is to... You know, I'm not really sure. He wants his to be the only intelligence guiding the planet Cybertron, but then he wants to absorb all the stolen sparks (which I thought couldn't exist outside of bodies for very long at all,) and become some kind of God... But mostly he just complains about still having a beast mode (which he went to great lengths to obtain, by the way,) and chews out his Vehicon Generals for losing over and over again.
The character designs are ugly with a capital UG. Our resident Pink Widow spider, the only female character in the show, looks more like a PINK cockroach hybrid in robot form, and as a spider, she looks like My Little Pony met H.R. Geiger in an alley.
Optimus Primal looks okay as a gorilla, but as a robot... He looks more like that little CGI NFL football robot in the corner of an NFL game during commercial breaks.
Cheetor looks like he should be playing Jai Ala in the Dr. Moreau Island Tournament.
Rattrap... Dear Gods, Rattrap... Rattrap looks like a partly vivisected member of the Mickey mouse Club with wheels instead of legs. Why does he have wheels instead of legs? Well, it's very simple, because you see - I'm kidding, it's never explained and is the single dumbest feature of the new designs.
But the all-time award for worst character design goes to the new character, their Bat-boy, "Nightscream." Good God, he looks like an emo anime kid got down with a nightmare version of Hermes that maybe cheated with a Go-Bot on the side. And his character is entirely useless. He adds nothing.
Oh, and let's talk about the Vehicons. Now, these are the only things that actually do look good. They look like Transformers as we know them, robots that turn into vehicles. Pity their personalities are as appealing as a dumpster fire behind a Chinese Restaurant.
Thrust is a bland, gravelly voiced idiot.
Jetstorm is like a game show host for a kid's game show. He tries to be all menacing, but his digs make Toby MacGuire's Spider-Man look like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
And Tankor... Our 'big-dumb-strong' archetype. Oh, but there's a twist! He's actually Rhinox! Remember Rhinox? Good, strong, practical Rhinox who was peaceful at heart but would dish out a whooping if you deserved it. A spiritual spark at heart, Rhinox was - Nope, just kidding, now he's just a cookie-cutter villain and nothing makes sense.
And remember all those great battles in Beast Wars? Yeah. Those were fun.
Beast Machines repeats this sequence endlessly:
Vehicons show up. Maximals throw energy, and run away. Vehicons show up. Maximals throw energy and run away. Repeat ad-nauseum. Add in the fact that the transformations themselves aren't even interesting or aesthetically pleasing to watch. Hell, when Pink Arachnea transforms, she actually looks like it's causing her pain to do so.
The story is beyond stupid. Cybertron apparently has an organic core, which has been dead silent for eons, but needed Optimus and pals to bring organic matter back to Cybertron to make techno-organic paradise rainbow-sunshine-I'm-puking.
Apparently the original transformers, their human allies, the other transformers based on animal designs, or millions of years of war between the factions never had a SINGLE opportunity to bring back a freaking fern.
The Maximals are now techno-organic, so...
They're no longer robots. They're not really in disguise. They don't even transform, really, they just kind of morph with a really cheap light show designed to hide the fact that they're not actually transforming at all.
On top of all of this, despite having next-gen graphics compared to Beast Wars, this show has a tendency to cut corners and re-use footage and animation constantly. No great scenic spectacles, or a diverse and interesting environment. The show takes place on three sets: Metal streets, underground tunnels, and caves. Nothing looks distinctive and there's no way to distinguish where anything is in geographic relation to anything else. I never thought an entire planet of steel and machines could even look so dull.
One of the things about this show that irked me in particular was how often it repeated itself. Not just the repetitive battles, but conversations would repeat, sometimes twice in the same episode, and then again in the next episode, and the one after that. The plot doesn't move along as much as it slowly meanders, like the writers had no direction for the story arc and just had to Madlibs the plot together from each other's scripts.
The second season sees the ruination of yet more characters, like Silverbolt, who is now the ugliest bird this side of a turkey vulture and some kind of revenge-driven samurai. Not that I ever loved the character much myself, but what little appeal he did have is basically gone.
Then they introduce a new character, again. This time a plant-beast-bot who transforms from a fern with a face into a flower with a face, and I honest-to-god can't tell which mode is robot and which one is "beast."
Then there's the werewolf that turns into a dragon... Oh God, I just... I just can't.
There's also this weird tendency for the show to get very dark for apparently no reason, especially since nobody ever gets hurt in battle. It's one of those shows where the violence is all "Rated FV" and nobody ever actually gets hurt. There's no tension in the conflict because it's never really clear what's at stake or why these characters are doing what they're doing. The whole show could have been ended in the second episode, and at one point they even have the option of taking Megatron down once and for all... AND THEY GO THE EFFF HOME!!!!
Kind of lacks believability. I mean, Megatron basically committed genocide. He's not Team Rocket, he's a genuine threat. All they had to do was trash his fancy helmet and beat him down - boom. Problem solved. Show over.
This show took everything that made Beast Wars Great and stabbed it slowly with an ice pick.
The producers claim the show was only meant to run for 2 seasons, but I think they saw what a turd it was, especially in the ratings and toy sales, and decided to pull the plug.
I do give it 2 stars for the designs of the Vehicons and the still-great voice acting, even when reading lines of dialogue that sound like they were written by a fifth-grader for a school play. It's not easy to make bad dialogue sound good, ask anyone who worked with George Lucas.
All in all, this show took aim at it's own foot and kept pulling the trigger until the banging stopped. Then it reloaded and aimed for the other foot.
Don't waste your time. I certainly wish I never had.
Ghostbusters (2016)
Spoiler-free, but it is rather spoiled
We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's address the elephant in the room first. This is not a feminist movie. I am not a misogynist for disliking it. I can explain myself simply in this: The movie is bad because of the MALE DIRECTOR not the female cast.
With that out of the way, let's dive in.
This movie does have some genuinely funny moments, most notably Chris Hemsworth's Murray-worthy ad-libbing and Kate McKinnon is obviously the only other person having fun on-set. Oh, look, I liked the pretty ones, I must be a real misogynist. No. I'm not. I just recognize when actors are giving it their all and not just checking off the boxes on their 'emotion' checklist for a scene. Supposedly Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig both hated working on this movie, and it shows.
Now for the significant problems: The script is terrible. I mean, it's god awful. The plot is almost complete drivel, the villain is bland and cookie-cutter, the special effects are CGI cartoons (and an ACTUAL cartoon at one point, which made me literally groan out loud.) The entire movie isn't a real Ghostbusters movie, it's a spoof on Ghostbusters, and done without the heart or love that anyone who actually likes Ghostbusters would have. The jokes are a theme-less combination of slapstick, grossout humor, awkward pauses and occasional cerebral jabs. Much like the rest of this movie, which tonally, is completely all over the map. One of our first jokes is a fart joke (Or a queef joke. Good job, Paul. Gurl Power,) and yes, there is a scene where Melissa McCarthy straps on a proton pack and ends up falling on her butt. Oh, Paul Feig, master of wit, do show us the way. The story itself has major problems with tone, having two deaths come before a grand CGI finale with a giant cartoon ghost and crotch-shots with proton guns.
The entire third act is a green-screen nightmare of lunacy with parts apparently specifically shoe-horned in to irritate and infuriate the fans, including at one point Slimer and a female Slimer (you can tell because it has a beehive wig and lipstick. What gender-bending insight!)
Finally, the supposedly awesome Girl Power fight scene comes after an entire movie of the women being, basically, bumbling fools. It's almost blatantly manipulative, and underwhelming, very obviously trying to give us an epic scope and feel... for all of three minutes before the movie is back to dumb jokes about the mimbo secretary and cartoony special effects.
But here's where pretty much the entire movie, tone, premise, marketing, concept, defenders, and SJW ranters all fall apart. See, the mayor of New York and the Department of Homeland Security know the Ghostbusters are fully qualified and capable of handling the supernatural threat, and encourage them to do so, but their efforts are swept under the rug and the mayor's office officially labels them as frauds "so as not to cause a panic."
So let me get this straight... the supposedly feminist movie about four female characters features a powerful male figure condemning their efforts while, in secret, encouraging them to keep trying?
And I'm the misogynist for thinking that the world, and women specifically, deserve a better movie than this? Well, I've got one thing to say to Sony, the complicit mass media, the screaming defenders of this movie, and every idiot who tells me not supporting this movie is tantamount to misogyny:
Queef jokes.
That's what we've been brought. If I were a woman, I'd punch Paul Feig in his smug little face and shove a proton-gun shaped tampon up his... nose.
See, I can be civil.
The Hollow (2015)
If I wrote this movie, I'd be ashamed of myself
Ooookay. So, take three sisters, one of whom has oddly prophetic dreams, all are emotionally disturbed after the recent loss of their parents and strand them on an island where a supernatural entity is stalking them. Sounds like the greatest survival horror premise ever...
Sigh.
The entire movie is too bright, the monster shows up early and often, and the dialogue is terrible, the story makes no sense, there is no lighting change between night and day, the smartest of the sisters makes the dumbest move, and I'd almost be rooting for the monster if it weren't dumber than a sack of hammers itself. Despite looking like the greatest Metal album cover of all time, it's too stupid to kill three idiotic girls who spend the entire movie intentionally splitting up for stupid reasons.
The sad thing is that this movie had such great potential!