Tag Archives: Prequel

Jun 08 2018
Leave a comment
Reviews

“SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY” Review (✫✫)

SOURCE: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Ron shot first.

There are two key problems with Solo: A Star Wars Story. First, nobody asked for nor wanted a Han Solo movie. Second, this isn’t a Han Solo movie. If it were, it would have the real Han Solo in it with Harrison Ford, or at the very least, somebody who looked like him. As it stands, all we have is the kid from Hail, Caesar! wearing a Han Solo costume playing pretend on a film set. A more accurate title for this film would have been Star Wars Cosplay: The Movie.

The plot follows a younger Han Solo (ish) played by Alden Ehrenreich, growing into the smuggler that we know of before the events of the original Star Wars. The film shows us everything that has made Han Solo (ish) become Han Solo, from how he got his name, to meeting Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), to where he got his signature blaster, to getting the Millennium Falcon. Because, you know, all of those were glaring questions we had from the first eight movies.

There are several things wrong with Solo: A Star Wars Story, but let’s start with its execution. Reportedly the biggest point of contention between producer Kathleen Kennedy and previous directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Solo was previously going to be handled in a loose, improvisational style similar to Thor: Ragnarok. After Kennedy got fed up with Lord and Miller’s direction and fired them, she brought on Academy Award-winner Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Rush) to finish production, sticking closer to the script and deviating less from what was on the page.

That’s a problem for Solo, because the script is monotonous at its best and insipid at its worst. Written by veteran Star Wars scribe Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan, Solo is a muddled, incoherent mess, forcing an explanation for every small, insignificant detail that never came into our minds. Some scenes were done well, like when Han met Chewie for the first time after the Wookies were forced out of Kashyyyk in Revenge of the Sith. Other scenes, however, are downright pompous and silly. For instance, were you ever curious how the Millennium Falcon got its iconic shape (besides being simply designed that way)? Did you know that a giant squid was chasing the Falcon during the Kessel Run, as if it wasn’t impressive enough that it ran it in 12 parasecs? And what about the biggest shocker: how Han Solo got his name? Hint: his parents didn’t give it to him.

All of this leads to the core issue here: who, in their right science-fiction fanboy mind, wanted a Han Solo prequel? I would think that out of all of the Star Wars characters, Solo is the least you would need backstory on next to the Skywalkers. What was the point of all of this? Was a prequel so desperately necessary that we needed an explanation for every single mundane detail surrounding Han Solo? Did this story really need to be told? Did Harrison Ford’s legacy really need to be brought back from the grave just so it could be tarnished at the box office?

Speaking of Harrison Ford, Ehrenreich is downright cringeworthy as the younger Han Solo. And to be fair, it isn’t his fault. Hell, it was damn near impossible from the get-go making a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford. But it wasn’t completely hopeless. Australian actor Anthony Ingruber gave a great Han Solo impression way back in 2008, and he even impeccably mimicked Harrison Ford’s mannerisms in 2015’s Age of Adaline. So a movie portraying a younger Han Solo wasn’t completely out of the question; only far-reaching at Galaxy length.

So what went wrong with Ehrenreich’s portrayal? Besides looking nothing like Harrison Ford, his mannerisms are completely wrong. When you look at the smooth, coy, inherently self-centered smugness of Ford’s Solo in the original trilogy and compare it side-by-side with this kid, you see a guy tripping over his blaster pretending to be a character he isn’t. Ford was cool and confident. Ehrenreich was clumsy and clueless. Ford was sharp and smooth. Ehrenreich was awkward and out of place. Ford has personality and attitude. Ehrenreich had no personality and wishes he had attitude.

Admittedly, not everything in Solo was terrible. The visual effects are impressive as always, and the action is fast, thrilling, and exciting to watch. The small Easter Eggs scattered are about as fun as they always are, with one cameo from the prequel trilogy in particular surprising me quite a bit. And the performances outside of Ehrenreich’s are mostly reliable, with Donald Glover shining in particular as he channels Billy Dee Williams into a younger, spunkier Lando Calrissian (although he had a romance with a droid character that felt, for a lack of a better word, artificial).

All of this just further reinforces how unnecessary Solo: A Star Wars Story was. Again, why was this movie made? A fan of the franchise could not give you an answer that would make any sense. Walt Disney Studios, meanwhile, could give you several reasons relating to the box office. Pray that the studio doesn’t decide to milk the franchise any further to the point where we’re getting a Jabba the Hutt movie. And before Kathleen Kennedy asks, no that was not an actual recommendation.

Tagged , , , , ,
Jun 10 2017
Leave a comment
Reviews

“ALIEN: COVENANT” Review (✫✫1/2)

SOURCE: 20th Century Fox

Alien Covenant, kinda.

Before going in to watch Alien: Covenant, I was confused as to whether it was intended as a sequel to the 2012 science-fiction epic Prometheus or just a newly rebooted prequel to the Alien franchise. After I left the theater, I was still confused on what Alien: Covenant was supposed to be, and I’m pretty sure director Ridley Scott was equally confused while making it as well. At different times, Alien: Covenant wants to be a Prometheus sequel, an Alien prequel, and an Alien reboot all at once. In spreading itself thin, it misses all three marks. Although it remains to be intriguing and mildly entertaining, Alien: Covenant fails to stick out much in our minds. The most positive thing I can say is that it isn’t Alien: Resurrection.

Taking place after the events of Prometheus, Alien: Covenant follows the crew aboard the colonization ship Covenant, looking to begin new life on a remote planet called Origae-6. As the crew are traveling, they are suddenly woken up to discover a new planet in the system; one much closer to them that has the same hemisphere and plant life as Earth does. Curious to see if they could safely colonize on this planet instead, the Covenant crew lands on the mysterious planet to investigate, only to discover something that might lead to their violent, blood-soaked ends rather than new beginnings.

With this being the sixth film in the Alien franchise now, it isn’t hard to see why the series is getting tired. Let’s walk through the plots of each of them:

Introduction: Human crew members are in cryogenic stasis on a spaceship heading somewhere, usually with an android accompanying them.

Setup: Something goes wrong, crew members wake up, travel to mysterious planet.

Complication: Crew members discover threatening alien after it kills a few of them, panic ensues.

Climax: Brave female protagonist convinces crew that alien is too dangerous to live and must be destroyed.

Resolution: Bloodshed ensues, alien is killed, at least one crewmember survives, usually the brave female.

In five sentences, I’ve essentially covered what happens in six two-hour movies. That alone should show you how repetitive the series is getting.

But just because all of the movies have the same plots, it doesn’t mean they’re automatically doomed from the start. Look at Prometheus. That film covers the same ground that every other Alien movie has before it, and yet, it feels like a different experience. That’s because it took a different approach to the series and its characters. Alien was a survival-horror experience set inside the claustrophobic setting of a spaceship. Prometheus was an exploration of our origins and how that ties in to greater ideas involving religion and creationism. While Alien: Covenant didn’t have to be as ambitious as Prometheus was, it did have to make itself unique to the rest of its cinematic counterparts. Instead, all it feels like is a retread, and the entertainment value is siphoned from seeing Aliens violently dismember human beings on-screen.

I know Prometheus also had its dissenters, but the strength that movie had going for it was its thought-provoking ideas and how they impacted the characters around them. If you were frustrated by Prometheus, chances are you will not be able to even stomach the implausibilities in Alien: Covenant.

Take, for instance, the first of this movie’s alien pregnancies. They were not done by the Facehuggers in Alien or the Engineers in Prometheus. No, here they are done by black flower pollen flying into one explorer’s nose and into another’s ears. That’s how it’s done now, I guess. Alien had Facehuggers, Prometheus had Engineers, and Alien: Covenant has ear and nose plant sex. At least the porn parody will have plenty of inspiration to pull from.

Some scenes like that are just silly and illogical, while others are just outright bad or laughable. In the first chestburst scene in this movie, an Alien pops out from a guys back and goes on to attack the other crew members on board. Yet, one girl is so bad at reacting that it felt like she belonged in a Looney Tunes cartoon rather than an Alien movie. First she opens the door to the infirmary where the alien was at, and it would have been simple enough to just leave it in there and starve it to death. Then she slips on a puddle of blood right before shooting, and missing, the alien. And just when the alien escapes and starts attacking her, she fires wildly in every which way and direction, eventually shooting a barrel of fuel, exploding and killing herself, her on-board companion, the alien, and destroying the crew’s only means of leaving the planet. The scene was meant to be scary, yet I couldn’t stop laughing from how terribly it was executed.

The conflicting thing about this movie is that while some scenes are done very poorly, others are done exceptionally. Katherine Waterston, for instance, is outstanding as the lead. Early on in her introduction, we grasp a sense of the tragedy the character is facing, and her tearful portrayal of a woman going through loss and anguish shows how hard Waterston tried for this film. Most other actresses would hear they’re being cast in a Alien movie and would just phone in the performance for the spectacle of the visual effects. Waterston put in the extra effort, and she deserves to be recognized as an action heroine alongside the likes of Ellen Ripley, even if the movie doesn’t deserve the same recognition.

I also really liked Michael Fassbender in the movie as well. In Prometheus, he played the manipulative android David, while in Alien: Covenant he plays another android named Walter. I can’t go too much into his character without fear of spoilers, but he shares an interesting relationship with another character that builds into a conflict of duality between the two. In my favorite scene from the film, Walter is speaking to another android and discussing the unorthodox nature of artificial intelligence. From the intelligent dialogue, to the intriguing points raised, to the steady camerawork, to the subliminal differences between the two character’s performances, this was a fantastic scene that demonstrated how great of an actor Fassbender really is. I’m excited to see what he brings in future installments, although I don’t know where exactly you can take the character from here.

The movie, of course, has the best visual effects out of any Alien movie so far. That, however, is slight praise since that’s also the case with any franchise film produced today. The problem is that Scott never centralizes all of the elements together to make a compelling Alien movie, making the series canon more muddled and confusing rather than streamlined and fluid. The script is incoherent and illogical. The editing makes for some disjointed sequences that fails to make the movie consistently scary or interesting. Even the alien, while looking more intimidating than its previous counterparts, fails to invoke the same sense of fear and dread from its previous installments.

In a strange way though, Alien: Covenant accurately reflects Ridley Scott’s career as a whole. Sometimes he hits home runs, like the original Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator. Other times his films are catastrophic, like The Counselor or Exodus: Gods and Kings. Alien: Covenant falls in the middle ground, and that’s the best way to describe Scott’s filmography: the middle ground. Not to mention Scott is planning on making four more Alien films after this. I’m sitting here wondering when we’re finally going to get to LV-426. Surely the round trip didn’t take this long to get there.

Tagged , , , , ,
Feb 21 2017
Leave a comment
Reviews

“X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE” Review (✫)

SOURCE: 20th Century Fox

Pop those claws back in, bub. 

The fatal mistake that X-Men Origins: Wolverine makes besides its God-awful title is focusing more on the “X-Men” part than the “Wolverine” part. We’ve seen three X-Men movies now, guys. We get it. Mankind fears and hates mutants. Mutants are the next stage in human evolution. Blah blah blah, all that jazz. But with a Wolverine-centered movie, I was hoping that they would focus less on the recurring themes of the series and make it a more personal narrative to everyone’s favorite X-Man. Unfortunately, the studio didn’t want the same thing. Instead, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is more focused on making comic book cameos than it is in making a compelling story for its key character. It’s more of an X-Men movie than it is a Wolverine movie, and it’s not a good one at that.

In this prequel to the X-Men trilogy, we discover the origins of Wolverine, A.K.A. James Howlett (Hugh Jackman). When his unusual mutant powers break out and James discovers the claws in his body, James goes on the run with his brother Victor Creed, A.K.A. Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber). After fighting in the Vietnam war together, the two brothers join a mutant task force called Team X that is led by Major William Stryker (Danny Huston). But after one too many violent genocides from the task force, James resigns from Team X and tries to live a normal life by himself and his lover Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Now Sabretooth and Team X have come back into James’ life, and he has to sink once again into his Wolverine alter-ego to free himself of his past forever.

Right off the bat, I need to point out the biggest flaw with this haphazard of a movie: it’s too much. X-Men Origins: Wolverine tries to do too many things all at once, and it does all of them badly. It tries to be a Wolverine origin story, an X-Men prequel, an introduction to new mutant characters, and a fun action movie on top of all of this.

Let me leisurely break down why it fails in every one of these goals:

1) The screenplay is too by-the-books. Skip Woods, who wrote Hitman prior to this, focuses too much on explaining Wolverine’s history and not enough on how it impacts him as a character. There’s no teeth in it, no grit or compelling force that makes his story worthwhile or meaningful to us. It feels more like fanfiction written for discussion rather than an established continuity for the X-Men universe.

2) Speaking of the X-Men, there are two X-Men here in the movie besides Wolverine. They are the younger Scott Summers/Cyclops, portrayed by Tim Pocock, and Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier, here with the use of his legs. There is absolutely zero reason to have them in this movie. They contribute nothing to the story, nothing to Wolverine’s origin, and nothing that makes any worthwhile impact on the film. They’re only there as forced cameos so that viewers can point at them and be like “Uh Look! That’s them before the X-Men movies! Huh huh.” Except that this now creates a massive plot hole, once you question how they could be so close to the action, yet not remember him years later.

3) So we already have three characters we don’t care about in the movie. Want to add 15 more just for fun? No? Well too bad, here they are anyway. In most of the X-Men movies, its hard to keep up with the full roster because of how many characters are jam-packed into them. But now it’s getting ridiculous. Besides the aforementioned characters, there are a slew of other mutants here that are not memorable, or useful, in any of their scenes. We have will.i.am as a teleporter, Kevin Durand whose mutant power is literally being fat, Dominic Monaghan as a living battery, Taylor Kitsch as someone who can light cards on fire, and Ryan Reynolds with his mouth sewn shut who has blades coming out of his arms. The logic of that one just baffles me completely. If you have literal swords in your arms, how do you plan to even move them around? One wrong move, and you have a giant blade sticking out of your elbow. Imagine how inconvenient that would be at the dinner table.

4) There’s no excuse for this one. No excuse that in even in a Wolverine movie, the visual effects and the fight scenes are garbage. In X2, we had a great demonstration of Wolverine’s savagery as he ripped, stabbed, and mercilessly shredded people in the mansion raid scene. Here, that grit and violence is gone as Wolverine blows up helicopters, topples over buildings, and even gets into boxing fist-fights just like any other stock action hero would. Some of the fight scenes are so ridiculous that having Arnold Schwarzenegger in them would make more sense than Hugh Jackman. I can’t make this up. It’s so cartoonish and stupid that I was left wondering if this is why Stan Lee didn’t film a cameo for this movie. I wouldn’t put it past him if that were the case.

Does it sound like I’m spreading myself thin here? That’s probably because I’m writing about a movie that is spreading itself thin. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not only the worst title out of the X-Men movies so far: it is also its unequivocal worst film. I detested every moronic minute of this insipid, idiotic, pretend-thriller. Nothing landed in this movie. The characters, the acting, the writing, the choppy editing, the fights, everything falls apart and fails to deliver anything of any value. Fans complained about X-Men: The Last Stand, but at least that one expressed some interesting ideas. X-Men Origins: Wolverine fails to even be stupidly fun. It just reaches stupid.

I give this film one point, and one point only, and that is that Hugh Jackman, as always, makes a great Wolverine. His snarl, his ferocity, his fierce presence commands the role. He is perhaps one of the greatest superhero casting decisions ever made, next to Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man or Wesley Snipes as Blade. The problem isn’t Jackman’s performance. The problem is the movie doesn’t know what to do with his performance. Because of this, Jackman’s efforts are in vain as he’s thrown through a silly script and an even sillier movie, downplaying his emotions and his efforts in the role. Say what you will about the previous X-Men movies, but Wolverine deserves better treatment than that.

By the end of the film, Wolverine’s story concludes exactly as you expect it to: with his memory wiped, forgetting everything he just went through. I wish I were in his position.

Tagged , , , , , ,
Dec 27 2016
3 Comments
Reviews

“ROGUE ONE” Review (✫✫✫)

With a sequel titled ‘A New Hope.’

If anyone ever tells you that making a prequel is lazy filmmaking, show them Rogue One as evidence to the contrary. This is an exciting, riveting, action-packed Star Wars prequel, filled to the brim with nostalgia and passionate love for the originals. With a few quick rewrites and some tighter editing on the action, this could’ve turned from a good prequel to a great one. Maybe even comparable to the originals.

Taking place directly before the events of Star Wars: A New Hope, Rogue One follows the rag-tag team of rebels who discover the Death Star plans and are committed to bringing them to the rebel army, henceforth setting up the events for the original trilogy. These rebels include newcomer Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), whose father had a direct hand in creating the Death Star, rebel Cassian (Diego Luna), defected empire pilot Bodhi (Riz Ahmed), heavy arms aficionado Baze (Jiang Wen), temple guardian Chirrut (Donnie Yen), and defected empire droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk).

This team of misfits are expected to go up against the empire, Darth Vader himself, and commander Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) to steal the Death Star plans and send them on a rendezvous mission to the rebel army. So. You know. No pressure.

Right off of the bat, I need to praise the film for its buildup. Since this is a prequel and we already know how the original Star Wars begins, we can safely assume that most of the characters don’t make it out alive by the end of the film. While Rogue One more or less follows the route that you expect it to take, what’s surprising is that we’re actively engaged and invested in the action while it’s happening on screen. That’s because these are fully fleshed out and realized characters, their personalities and motivations established early on and following through until the movie’s inevitable conclusion.

When you watched the original Star Wars movies, weren’t the characters the best part in every scene? Didn’t you fall in love with Luke’s sense of adventure, Han’s rebellious swagger, Obi-Wans quips of wisdom, Darth Vader’s foreboding presence, and C-3PO’s clunky awkwardness? Here we have a new lineup of characters to admire and appreciate, and while they may borrow some qualities from other characters, their appeal is their own and it stands strong alongside the rest of the Star Wars cast.

Jyn, for instance, is another strong heroine type, a go-getter kind of woman not unlike Rey from The Force Awakens. Chirrut is a character as quirky and wise as Yoda himself is, and even though he isn’t a jedi, his conversation regardless lends to the film’s more fun and thoughtful moments. My favorite character easily lies in the quippy and sardonic K-2SO, who can be seen as a more condescending version of C-3PO. His entire character can be summed up in one line that he utters: “I will fight with you. The captain said I had to.”

There are two things that stand out exceptionally in Rogue One: the visual effects, and the cameos. Any time my jaw dropped in the film, it was from one of those two things. We expect the visuals to be impressive in the action scenes alone, and rest assured, they don’t disappoint. The blaster fights, the AT-AT’s, and the space battles are as grand as they ever were, and they flash you back to the first time you saw the iconic Death Star battle in the original Star Wars movie.

But that’s not even the full display of this film’s visual effects. With certain cameos, CGI is layered over the actor’s faces to make older characters look younger. This has been done to many actors before, including Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Salvation. Here though, the CGI is so detailed that it doesn’t even look like computer imagery. It looks like actors who are 60 years or older have suddenly reappeared as their younger selves, giving the same performance they gave 30 years ago. Try to imagine, for instance, if Han Solo were in this movie. We saw Harrison Ford’s 70-year old self in The Force Awakens last year. Imagine your surprise if he reappeared here 30 years younger, back to his original self at the start of the trilogy.

That is how impressive the visual effects are in this movie. If you don’t believe me, wait until this film’s last cameo near the end. Their appearance was so mind-blowing that I had to rub my eyes and be sure that I was seeing correctly. I was.

I like a lot of things about this movie. The characters, the action scenes, how the film intelligently relates itself to the original trilogy. There’s a lot to admire here both as a Star Wars fan and as a movie fan. In that regard, I was impressed.

There are, however, a few slip-ups that count against Rogue One’s achievement. For one thing, there’s the pacing. While Rogue One has a good buildup in its second and third acts, it takes too long to get there. The first act specifically drags on for too long and takes too much time to introduce these characters, feeling more like a setup than a story.

I understand that setup is needed to introduce these characters and understand their motivations for being there. Still, couldn’t you have cut corners in appropriate areas to make the story more concise? At the beginning of the film, only two of the Rogue One members are rebels. The rest are either recruited into the cause, or defect from the Empire into the rebellion. Wouldn’t it have been simpler if they all just started off as rebels, weary and exhausted from years of resisting the empire? It would have set the conflict up quicker, and we wouldn’t have to waste so much time on why each individual member joins the cause. The fact that most of the Rogue One members are new recruits slows the film down immensely, and the film never really picks up speed until much, much later than is necessary.

And the final battle sequence, while impressive, is also too long. Simply put, there’s too much going on in this scene. First, there’s Jyn and Cassian’s race against time to get the Death Star plans. Then there’s the beach battle on the ground against rebels and stormtroopers. Then there’s K-2SO’s firefight, then there’s Chirrut’s fight, then Baze’s fight, then Bodhi’s fight, then there’s what’s going on at rebel control, and blah blah blah blah blah. It’s too much. I understand there’s a lot building up to this point in the film, but you could have safely shaved off 15 minutes from this sequence and have a more exciting, and efficient, climax. This movie is two hours and 10 minutes long. With all of the added material in it, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be an hour and 50 minutes.

Still, Rogue One is a blast, and it adds plenty of mythology for the expanded universe and for the joy of any Star Wars fan out there. In the past, the word “prequel” made fans shudder at the thought of the earlier films, including The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. I think Star Wars fans can breathe easier knowing that Rogue One is out there.

Tagged , , , , ,
Oct 01 2016
Leave a comment
Reviews

“STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE” Review (✫)

Yousa in big doo-doo dis time.

Never again. Don’t ever let this happen to Star Wars ever again. When Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was announced, George Lucas’ fan base exploded with excitement, preparing themselves to witness the beginning of Anakin Skywalker’s story before he became Darth Vader. Oh, are they going to be disappointed. This movie is every bit as stupid as the title sounds and then some.

Dating back 32 years before the events of the original Star Wars, The Phantom Menace finds the elder Ben Kenobi as the young padawan understudy Obi Wan (Ewan McGregor), serving under his master Qui Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson). They are assigned by the jedi order to defend Queen Amidala of Naboo (Natalie Portman) from the vicious Trade Federation, a group of long-necked, bulgy-eyed aliens that are so bloated and ugly that a Jim Henson puppet would be mortified.

The Jedi meet an assortment of characters along their journey. A younger, more polished R2-D2 sits aboard a Naboo space ship. A C-3PO without any outer plating (or as he likes to call it, being “naked”) wobbles around in a tiny Tatooine hut. A clumsy, idiotic gungan named Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) bumbles and falls everywhere like a ragdoll. And, of course, a young boy named Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) wanders around the dusty sands of Tatooine, illustrated here as a messiah-like figure to the force and the galaxy.

When I watched Star Wars many years ago as a small boy in Brownsville, TX, the thing I fell most in love with was its characters. The adventurous bounty hunters and princesses, the wise jedi, the noisy droids, the sinister sith, all of them enchanted me with their uniqueness and peculiarity. So many sci-fi epics rely too much on special effects to provide their spectacle. With Star Wars, the humans, aliens, and droids were the spectacle, and the groundbreaking visual effects complimented their presence without taking away focus from the story.

The characters were the best thing to come out of the original Star Wars trilogy. They’re the worst thing here. Oh my God, are they the worst thing. These characters are so bland, dull, and uninteresting that they could have all been replaced by droids and we wouldn’t have noticed the difference.

Take Liam Neeson as one victim, err, example. Here we have a fine actor, demonstrating his finesse in performances for movies including Darkman, Michael Collins, and Schindler’s List, the last of which earned him an Oscar nomination. In all of those movies, he has demonstrated an ability to express fear, anger, disappointment, courage, heroism, and earnest in both big, showy scenes and small, personal ones. Yet here, his ability as an actor is almost completely erased, being asked to throw on robes and swing around a lightsaber in the place of a performance. We have nothing from his character to make us remember or even care about him. He has one, cold-hard emotion throughout the film, and that emotion is serious. There is nothing else about him to make him either fun or fascinating, not in comparison with the charisma and calmness we got from Alec Guinness in the original series.

But Neeson is not the worst part of the movie. Indeed, he is only one victim among an entire assembly line of failures. Portman is plastic and looks like she doesn’t know why she’s on the set. McGregor is functional, but doesn’t demonstrate much purpose beyond linking this movie together with the original. I’ll cut Jake Lloyd some slack since he’s only a child actor at 10 years old, but I will say he did nothing to service his role and make me believe he’s supposed to become the most feared force in the galaxy. That’s not as much his fault as it is others though. I’ll come back around to that in a bit.

The biggest catastrophe in this movie is Jar Jar Binks, and he’s so damaging to the picture that I have to dedicate two paragraphs to his stupidity. He’s supposed to serve as the comedic relief, but believe me when I say there’s nothing comedic about this cretin. He bumbles and trips everywhere like a drunken idiot, speaking in nonsensical English so distorted that it would make Yoda want to take grammar lessons. “Ooey mooey”, “mesa” and “yousa” are not beyond his flawed vocabulary, and his voice is so whiny and high-pitched that it makes me want to strangle him by his flappy ears.

Compare Jar Jar to 3PO, a successful attempt at comedic relief in the series. 3PO is funny because he tries to be serious and fails. Jar Jar tries to be funny and comes off as annoying. If 3PO tripped and fell on himself as often as Jar Jar did, he would dent up his entire body plating and probably damage his processing core. Maybe that’s what happened to Jar Jar: he fell on his head so many times that he forgot how to use it.

Despite my hatred of all of these characters, I don’t blame the actors for their representation. I blame writer-director-creator George Lucas, who arguably had the most involvement in this film as opposed to the previous ones. How could he have misfired with this film so badly? 20 years ago, he gave cinema some of its most cherished characters, and now, he’s given cinema some of its most hated. With the imagination and the ambition he’s committed to the sci-fi genre for years now, I cannot explain how badly he’s written and directed this cast except for sheer lapse of judgement. There’s no other reason to explain how dull and uninteresting these characters are, or how moronic and insipid Jar Jar is.

What of the visual effects? The cinematography? The editing? The score? Read my previous reviews. You know what I think of them. A potentially good movie can be produced poorly, but likewise, a bad movie can also be produced wonderfully. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is some of the best-looking garbage you’ll ever see. To quote one of Jar Jar’s companions in the movie: “Yousa in big doo-doo dis time.” In English, that means you’re in deep… well, you know.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Jun 16 2016
1 Comment
Reviews

“ANNABELLE” Review (✫)

Barbie is scarier than this. 

Remember how I wrote in my review for The Conjuring that the Annabelle doll was one of the creepiest elements of the movie? I take it all back. Annabelle is not creepy. Silence is creepy. Moving objects are creepy. Unexplainable sounds, noises, or occurrences are creepy. The unexpected is creepy. A rotted doll turning its head around to stare at you is not creepy, and it doesn’t get creepier as you repeat it 15 more times in a movie.

I realized this while watching Annabelle, a terrible prequel that is the complete antithesis of its predecessor. The Conjuring was masterfully orchestrated in its suspense. Annabelle is haphazardly assembled. The Conjuring knew how to exercise its elements conservatively. Annabelle throws them at the screen like a toddler with temper tantrums. The Conjuring understood the importance of silence and subtlety. Annabelle scoffs at these as it vomits out flashy effects and useless images that do nothing to intensify the plot or its stakes. If The Conjuring advanced the horror genre a few steps forward, Annabelle slowed it down to a baby crawl.

How boring is this movie? So boring that even attempting to write a synopsis for it nearly drifted me to sleep. Dear reader, I tried. I truly did. But what do you need from me? What do you need to know besides that this movie is a prequel? You already know there’s a family, a demented spirit, a doll, and too many jump scares to count. Where else have we seen this before besides in The Conjuring, The Exorcist, The Last Exorcism, The Amityville Horror, The Shining, and every other horror movie in existence, ever?

Talking about the characters is a waste of column space. Why waste talking about them, when the writers make them so plain and dull? In The Conjuring, we cared about Ed and Lorraine Warren because they were so different from the typical horror protagonists. They’re paranormal investigators, arguably the most equipped to handle demonic threats, and yet, they’re still fearful of the forces against them in that movie. The fact that they were strong characters and were still afraid made The Conjuring all the more potent in its dread. These characters, in comparison, are just lining up for the slaughter. You have the made-for-TV housewife, the ignorant father, a helpless priest, and a clueless child, all of whom you don’t care about or even feel slightly interested in. Actually, I retcon my statement: they’re all clueless, helpless, ignorant, and made-for-TV.

The pacing is as sluggish as its cast is. The score, stock and overused. In a movie like this, you would expect its only strength to lie in its visual effects, but even those are garbage. In one laughable scene, the heroine is running down the stairs from… lightning. Yes, dear reader, blue lightning. We go from dolls to demons to lightning, and it looks just as cheesy as it sounds. It looked so bad on the screen that the film’s editor might as well just have drawn blue crayon over the frames. It would have looked just as unconvincing, but at least you wouldn’t be wasting the budget. 

And then we get down to the movie’s biggest offense: poisoning the chilling nature of Annabelle. In The Conjuring, she provided the movie’s more unexpectedly scary moments. That’s because director James Wan knew how to save her, use her, conceal her, then reveal her in shocking moments that surprised you. Wan understood, more than anything else, that the doll by herself was unsettling, but with the right moment when the audience’s guard was down, she would pop out and frighten you with her mysterious and malicious nature.

Our guard is down when we watch Annabelle too, and it stays down after we see her tricks repeat over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. Director John Leonetti took a great element from The Conjuring and thought that copying and pasting it would have the same effect. It didn’t. Leonetti even worked as the cinematographer for The Conjuring. Couldn’t he see through the camera lense that it wasn’t Annabelle that made the film scary, but rather its deliberate pacing and dreary mood? Couldn’t he see that the film didn’t frighten its audiences because of one doll, but rather, because of all of the elements in the picture? Wan understood his cohesion of lighting, editing, and timing and how it delivered the movie’s biggest thrills. Leonetti, in comparison, is a one-trick phony.

Annabelle is a reaffirmation of why I hate horror movies. In good horror movies, like the original Halloween or The Conjuring, they use their premises as a springboard to build up to bigger moments of suspense and eeriness. Annabelle’s mistake was thinking that it’s flimsy premise was the suspense and eeriness. The result is a movie that is long, overbearing, tedious, tiring, and boring. I hope Annabelle stays in the glass jar that the Warrens trapped her in. Putting her in a woodchipper isn’t a bad idea either, along with this movie’s film stock.

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Jun 01 2016
Leave a comment
Reviews

“X-MEN: APOCALYPSE” Review (✫✫1/2)

En Sabah No.

The biggest problem X-Men: Apocalypse faces is one it isn’t even responsible for. X-Men: Days of Future Past was and will always be one of the most definitive superhero experiences at the movies. Asking for follow-up to that is unreasonable, let alone damn near impossible, and to its credit, X-Men Apocalypse tries. It tries too hard, but at least it tries.

Taking place ten years after the events of Days of Future Past, Apocalypse shows an ancient threat that reawakens deep within the pyramids of Egypt. The first known mutant to ever historically exist, En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) awakens to a world ran amuck in chaos and disorder. Political corruption. Poverty. War. Violence. En Sabah Nur sees all that’s wrong with the world and decides that, in order to save it, it must be destroyed and rebuilt.

Back in Westchester, at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) awakens from a horrible nightmare. Witnessing horrible visions of the end of the world, Jean is convinced that these visions are real and that they will come to pass. Her professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) thinks these are just dreams. Yet, as one thing happens after another, he begins to think there is something devestating going on that even the X-Men might not be able to stop.

The third movie for the newly rebooted X-Men universe, X-Men: Apocalypse boasts a lot of the strengths that its predecessors have. For one thing, the performances are superb, and the actors exemplify their characters down to the molecule. McAvoy is earnest and well-intentioned as Xavier, while Jennifer Lawrence is motivated and sharp-shooting as Mystique. The actor I noticed most, however, was Michael Fassbender, once again adopting the role of Magneto. Every time I watch him, I am reminded of this character’s tragic history and how other people’s cruelty has driven him towards violence and extremism. Without giving too much away, there is one moment where Magneto sustain a crippling loss that comes to define his character the most throughout the picture. These moments remind us that Magneto is not a villain, but rather a tragic hero who fell through grace, and Fassbender is brilliant in capturing both the character’s regret, penance, and guilt throughout the movie.

The action is also incredibly polished, especially for an X-Men film. En Sabah Nur himself is the most omnipotent, wiping enemies away with a dash of his hand or the white glow of his eyes. Havok (Lucas Till) reappears alongside his brother Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) for the first time, and their red energies run amuck obliterating anything in their path. The most fun X-Man to make a return, however, is Evan Peters as the speedster mutant Peter Maximoff. You remember his signature scene at the Pentagon in X-Men: Days of Future Past. His scene in this movie blows that one out of the water. I won’t give much away, but saving over 30 people at superspeed is much more impressive than taking out six security guards in a kitchen. This sequence was funny, exciting, and most importantly, entertaining. His scenes were easily my favorite from the film.

The action and the characters culminate together fluidly, similar to the other X-Men films. The differences lie in its story, or more specifically, in its lack of focus. There are about five different stories packed into one in X-Men: Apocalypse, and most of them are unnecessary. You have so many unraveled narratives trying to weave together into one that quickly falls apart once the plot starts picking up speed. 

Take, for instance, the plight of Magneto. His story is pure tragedy. His hearbreak, his pain, his loss, it echoes of Magneto’s earlier history and builds into a climactic moment between himself and his transgressors. The scene should have been a moment of suspense and satisfaction, but then all of a sudden, En Sabah Nur appears on the scene and completely disjoints the narrative.

The whole film is like that, building up to big moments and then suddenly switching to other ones. There’s Xavier’s arc, then there’s Mystique’s, then Magneto’s, then Jean’s, and then Cyclops’. The most dissapointing to me is Peter. His story has to deal with his true parentage, but it never even leads anywhere. Screenwriter Simon Kinberg and director Bryan Singer build all of this effort up for nothing. No conclusion. No resolution. No payoff. That’s because they don’t have a focus, and the picture ends up losing our interest, despite all of its spectacular action.

X2 and X-Men: Days of Future Past remain to be the best entries of the franchise, while X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the unoquivocal worst. This movie falls in the middle ground. Like its predecessors, X-Men: Apocalypse has great action pieces and performances, but it collapses under the weight of its narrative while simultaneously lacking in depth and development. As Jean Grey observes after seeing Return of the Jedi, “At least we can all agree that the third one is always the worst.” You read my mind, sister.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
May 02 2016
Leave a comment
Reviews

“CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER” Review (✫✫✫)

I pledge allegiance to the first Avenger. 

If Iron Man is the best film out of this expanding Marvel universe, let Captain America: The First Avenger be the second best. It is exciting, stylish, suspenseful, dramatic, and has a patriotic energy to boot. If Captain America were any more American, he would stop being a captain and would become a bald eagle.

Based on the Marvel comic of the same name, Captain America: The First Avenger flashes back to the 1940’s to Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a frail young man who wants to enlist in the military, despite his bone-thin figure. Everyone around Steve tells him he should give up on enlisting, including his best friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who himself is a U.S. Sergeant. But Steve doesn’t see himself doing anything else. He loves his country and what it stands for, and is willing to throw himself onto a live grenade for it if he has to. Despite his patriotic passion, every military inspection officer denies his eligibility to enlist due to his health.

Enter Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci). Erskine has created a chemical called the super soldier serum, which amplifies a person’s physical stature as well as their personality. Seeing Steve for his heart and not for his size, Erskine enlists him in the super soldier program and sees him grow: literally and figuratively. No longer the weak and passive man known as Steve Rogers, he has now become the powerful, noble super soldier known as Captain America.

Does the premise sound a little silly? Well, that’s because it is, and it’s supposed to be. Captain America: The First Avengers feels and breathes like a comic book, a fast-paced and energetic thrill ride that pops off the screen like the panels in those old pulp fiction comic books. It feels reasonably old-fashioned. It doesn’t project itself as a superhero movie as much as it does a swashbuckling action-adventure, and our main hero Captain America is its grandiose hero, not unlike Zorro or James Bond.

This tone is fitting for Captain America, and especially for director Joe Johnston, who previous directing experience included Jumanji and The Rocketeer. The fact that he was able to tap into those movies instead of Jurassic Park III and The Wolfman is a very good thing for Johnston, as it has allowed him to make a meaningful, action-packed blockbuster that has just as much fun with its characters as it does with its action. Just look at the cast’s diversity. Besides its leads, you have a supporting cast including Tommy Lee Jones, Hayley Atwell, Dominic Cooper, Neal McDonough, Toby Jones, and of course, Stanley Tucci. All of these characters are entertaining not because of the action sequences they go through, but because of their unique personalities, with Jones’ snark being the most entertaining out of the bunch.  One of my favorite scenes of him in the film involved a cliche shot where our hero passionately kissed his love interest before sweeping into battle. Jones takes advantage of the cliche as best he can: “I’m not kissing you,” he bluntly tells the Cap.

But the shining performances surprisingly comes from Evans and his antagonist, a Nazi general named Johann Schmidt, brilliantly played up by Hugo Weaving. Evans, whose most notable role before this was as the Human Torch in the incredibly campy 2005 film Fantastic Four, demonstrates a surprising level of versatility here. He exemplifies the ultimate underdog, displaying earnest and nobility whether he’s small and skinny or strong and stoic. He never displays an obvious external sense of emotion, but consistently expresses an internal one. You get a sense of purpose and motivation with this character, a man who desperately wants to be a part of something that everyone tells him he can’t be a part of. Evans personifies the character both physically and emotionally, and Weaving is effective in the villain’s role with appropriate grandiose and theatrics, serving as an appropriate foil for the Captain America character.

All the same, I’m most disappointed with the fact that we’re once again playing up this whole Avengers cinematic universe thing. The Avengers is right around the corner, and with studio heads knowing that, I think they tried too hard to tie in both movies at the climax, which features a twist so absurd and ridiculous that I want to compare it to the Ape Lincoln twist at the end of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake. Can’t Captain America just be allowed to breathe and live in his own story, much like Iron Man did in his own movie? Apparently that’s too much to ask for. We’re at the event now that everything has to build up to The Avengers. Even if the events in this movie had to happen, did they have to happen like this? Couldn’t it have been a post-credits scene, or maybe saved for The Avengers movie altogether? The way it is now, the resolution feels too forced and hammy. It takes away from the meaning of the rest of the story, and the sacrifice that Cap gives at the end of the film.

I know that Captain America sounds like a silly and ridiculous superhero. Before I went into this movie, that’s what I thought myself. Then again though, wasn’t Iron Man working against those same perceptions when his movie was released? Here is another superhero epic that is, at it’s heart, a fun, capable, and entertaining story that makes us believe in the skinny kid from Brooklyn. Red, white, and blue never looked so good on another superhero.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 18 2015
Leave a comment
Reviews

“FANTASTIC FOUR” Review (✫)

Not so fantastic.

That’s it. I give up. We will never have a good Fantastic Four movie in this lifetime that will do Marvel’s first superhero family justice. We have had four live-action bouts with the Fantastic Four now. The first one was never theatrically released. The next two installments was campy melodrama that should have premiered on SyFy. Now we have the newest reboot, and it’s safe to say this movie deserved the fate that the first movie suffered from.

The Fantastic Four team consists of Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) and his adopted sister Sue (Kate Mara), with the third wheel being Latverian computer whiz Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), who is an anti-social douchebag that is spoiled, rotten, selfish, privileged, and self-obsessed. King Joffrey from “Game of Thrones” is more well-mannered than this POS.

If you know anything ever about Marvel movies, you know the formula. Person X gets caught in an accident. Person X gains super powers. Person X struggles with said powers. Person X eventually learns to control them, fight the obviously-labeled baddie, and then commits himself to a life of fighting crime. The only difference between Fantastic Four and the other Marvel formula movies is that it’s more obvious with this film. And it’s persons instead of person.

In hindsight, Fantastic Four is not easy to adapt into film. For one thing, their powers are so complacent. A rubber man, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a rocky troll is not the ideal superhero team I would line up to see. The other problem, though, is their comic book origins. Compared to other heroes such as Spider-Man, Daredevil, Iron Man, and Captain America, the tone with the Fantastic Four comics is much more lighthearted and even comical. Be honest: can you even keep a straight face with a name as silly as “Fantastic Four”?

All the same though, the concept doesn’t matter as much as the payoff. This movie could have worked. The members of the Fantastic Four have vibrant personalities and character traits that make them both memorable and likable. That’s the reason why Marvel’s first family has survived all these years: it’s because they’re enduring. People relate to them, and despite their meta-human circumstances, their problems and emotions with each other are all human.

We didn’t relate to them as superheroes. We related to them as characters.

That’s a problem for this movie, though, because this movie neither has personality or character. Good lord, where do I begin? When the lineup for this movie’s cast was announced, I was skeptical at first, and I was right to be. Not only can none of the actors hold the screen presence on their own: their chemistry with each other was disastrously non-existent. The cast didn’t even seem to really care about their roles. Every half-hearted expression, every line of dialogue and every motion seems disinterested and bland. Nothing works when these actors are on the screen together.

Teller, for instance, is an atypical and complacent scientist character, a step down from his bravado performance full of passion and drive in last year’s Whiplash. Kebbell is just as forgettable as Teller is, except he’s more of an asshole about it. Mara is beautiful but witless, her character cluelessly wandering about as if she’s there just so the studio can say they’re gender diverse. Michael B. Jordan, who is a standout in movies like Chronicle and Fruitvale Station, appears here just so the studio can say they’re racial diverse.

Side-note: I’m all about racial diversity in movies, but if you’re going to cast two actors as siblings, at least have them be the same race. Saying Mara’s character is adopted doesn’t count as being diverse. It’s an obviously cheap effort to be labeled “racially diverse.” If you genuinely want to be racially diverse, recast everyone as African Americans. Don’t put in a half effort.

But out of all of the actors, I feel the most bad for Jamie Bell. He’s not even on the screen for most of the film: he’s replaced with this ugly gargoyle reject that looks like a combination of John Cena with a pile of rocks. I’m not even kidding, he looks freggin’ horrendous. What were the visual effects artists thinking with this? I get that Ben Grimm is supposed to be this big, ugly figure, but not this ugly. Not the kind of ugly that makes your vomit turn inside out, then go back into your stomach. It offends me to think that Bell was basically thrown into the tracking suit and have his performance replaced by this ugly CGI creation. With the other cast members, they at least have the opportunity to give a convincing performance before they fail. Bell isn’t even given the opportunity to fail. His performance is canned the minute the visual effects artists placed a 3D model over him. You could have cast a stunt double in this same role and get the same result from it: a big, bulky figure that just stiffly sits and stands like he has to go to the bathroom really bad. I haven’t seen a CGI creation this putrid since the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from last year.

The movie’s flimsy, indistinct plot is just as bad as anything else is. What is the plot of this movie? Four people get superpowers, mope about it for a few hours, then have their final battle 20 minutes before the movie ends. That’s it. There’s no character building here, no heart, no humor, no unique elements or surprises to this film that makes it stand out from the standard superhero fare. The Avengers was just as fun, if not more so, for its characterizations and dialogue as it was with its action. Guardians of the Galaxy was wacky, clever, in-cheek fun that had a blast roasting itself. Shoot, even the original Fantastic Four movies had more charisma than this. This movie was so downtrodden, so serious, and so stupidly depressing that I felt like I was watching gothic fan fiction of the Fantastic Four. If you thought Man of Steel was too dark for a superhero movie, you haven’t seen Fantastic Four.

This is a disinteresting, joyless, illogical, poorly acted, written, produced, and directed experience. The cast must have heard the film’s whimsical title and wondered if they were on the wrong set.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dec 25 2014
Leave a comment
Reviews

“THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES” Review (✫✫✫)

And the Dwarf King: The Battle for Himself. 

Here it is, at last: the end of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. It hasn’t arrived without it’s challenges. Originally, the series was supposed to be directed by Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro before he dropped out and let Peter Jackson hop back in the director’s chair. Then, Jackson decided to turn it from two movies into three because he wanted to “expand the story.” Then in April, he decided to retitle the third film from There and Back Again to The Battle of the Five Armies. Every indication from the production of this film has shown that the movie was going to be either the weakest entry or the most unnecessary film out of the series. Jackson, however, has overcome every obstacle in his path and made a film that is just as exciting, enduring, and memorable as any other film in the series. Jackson’s persistence is something to be admired.

Picking up after that horrible cliffhanger of an ending we got from The Desolation of Smaug, The Battle of the Five Armies opens with Smaug the Dragon (Benedict Cumberbatch) laying waste to the village of Laketown shortly after he was set free by Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage). After setting the village on fire and killing many of the villagers, Bard the bowman (Luke Evans) escapes from prison, climbs the highest tower he can find, and kills the dragon with the black arrow he inherited from his father.

With Smaug dead, the dwarves have taken possession of the Lonely Mountain. However, something strange is happening to Thorin. He has become more greedy, violent, and eager to find the Arkenstone in the chamber and become the next king of the mountain. Bilbo has noticed his new attitude, and finds it disturbingly similar to that of Smaug’s personality. As tensions grow inside the mountains, things heat up with elven, eagle, orc, and human armies assembling outside of the mountains as well. Now with the four armies gathering to take the mountain from the dwarves, Thorin gathers his own dwarf (and hobbit) army to protect their inheritance and keep it from unworthy hands.

The third movie in any trilogy is always the most crucial. It either makes or breaks the series, making it just as memorable as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or as half-baked as the Matrix trilogy. Part of me wonders why they even had to make a third movie at all, and why they couldn’t just combine this with The Desolation of Smaug. That was originally the plan, after all, but I guess if they did that, they would run the risk of shoehorning two plots into one film.

Honestly though, I don’t know if it would have been that big of an issue. The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies offers exactly what the title suggests: a battle which is bigger and bolder than any other fight in the Lord of the Rings movies. Yes, that includes the final siege on Sauron in Return of the King and the fight against Smaug in Desolation of Smaug. The scale and scope is bigger here than any other Lord of the Rings movie, with elves, dwarves, eagles, orcs, villagers, trolls, wizards, spirits, and a hobbit crashing, slashing, and colliding into each other like nobody’s business. This is the most action-packed Lord of the Rings movie yet, with it’s final lengthy action sequence clocking in at about over an hour.

Some of the action runs rampant and gets repetitive now and then. In one scene, for instance, Legolas the elf fights against an orc on a tumbling castle. The scene ran for well over 20 minutes, with them clashing swords and fists against each other, and I sat there wondering to myself “Why couldn’t he just trip him off and be done with it?”

But here’s the interesting thing: no matter how long the action ran, it kept me engaged. If this were a Michael Bay or a John Woo picture, the action would have ran wild and I would have gotten bored about 10 minutes into it. But Jackson is more talented than most filmmakers. He understands that in order for your audience to be invested in the action, they need to be invested in the characters first, because what’s the point of having characters go through these epic fights if you don’t care about them?

With this movie, I noticed that the character I cared most for was not Bilbo Baggins, but Thorin Oakenshield. He has the most interesting arc out of any other character in the movie, spending one half of the film fighting orcs, and the other half fighting himself. His character in the film reminds me a lot of Gollum: his conflict isn’t so much with others trying to take the things precious to him, but with himself in how the things he values most changes him. He especially serves a crucial part in the film’s final climatic battle scene, which is so nerve-wrecking and heart-pounding that it brought me just as much excitement as the climax in Return of the King did. The impressive part? Return of the King’s climax featured an entire armada of warriors, while The Battle of the Five Armies’ climax only needed two.

All in all, The Battle of the Five Armies did to The Hobbit what The Return of the King did to The Lord of the Rings: it wrapped it up nicely into a tight, satisfying conclusion, bringing excitement, emotion, and resolution to these characters that we’ve cared so much for so long now. Granted, it didn’t do as well as The Return of the King did with this, and I personally would have wished that Jackson would have made it less messy and cluttered than it already was. Does that ultimately matter, though, if I had fun watching it? Let’s just be glad that Bilbo made it there and back again in one piece.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
← Older posts