Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
After the surprising flop of M3GAN 2.0 killed the once-promising killer robot doll franchise dead in its sophomore outing, also taking collateral damage was the already made Soulm8te (which should be pronounced soul-mate-te) slated for January 2026 release before being removed from the schedule and quietly dumped to streaming eight months later. Was it unfairly punished for another movie's failure? Let's find out. (Spoiler: No.)
After a cold open scene showing an Ultima Robotix sexbot killing a tester (hello, OSHA?), we meet David (David Rysdahl, Fargo S5), an engineer for Canta Robotics, a firm bought by Ultima, who is grieving the recent death of his wife. His supervisor suggests he use the company's ULTI-M8TE AI chatbot as a therapeutic tool and he begins forming a relationship with it (the makers of Her on line 2 for you guys) and then registers to beta test the SOULM8TE android, which he names Sara (Lily Sullivan, Evil Dead Rise, who reminds me of Species star Natasha Henstridge though her bulbous nose tip was distracting).
He merges his ULTI-MATE profile with the bot (the makers of Blade Runner 2049 on line 3), but is disappointed that it all feels...well, robotic, so he proceeds to start hacking her programming to make her more independent and realistic because he's apparently never seen a movie where Very Bad Things happen when you tamper with the code. Of course, he has sex with Sara because she's a hot blonde programmed to love him and the makers of Companion and Subservience are on lines 4 and 5, guys.
To the surprise of no one except the characters in the movie, Sara becomes more possessive and jealous of David, especially when he starts flirting with his meatbag coworker, Aubrey (Claudia Doumit, The Boys), so she's at risk because hell hath no fury like a jealous fembot scorned who has the ability to fabricate deepfake porn and tear the junk off any man who gets busy with her which raises questions like, "Do Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics exist in this world?" and "Did no one in Ultima's legal department raise a red flag about the liability issues that come with making a product that can tear dicks off?"
I understand we're dealing with trashy trash B-movie stuff where we're supposed to just go with the flow and look at the robo-boobs, but there are ways to handle the material especially when chatbots, social isolation, loneliness, AI and other elements here are coming front and center in the cultural zeitgeist. Fortunately, there are better movies that already handle things: Her and Companion. Watch those instead.
It's been a loooooong time since Steven Spielberg has made a decent movie and the Jurassic Park/World series has become tedious and stupid when all we want is dinosaur fun. So, it's kind of weird that the best Spielberg and/or dinosaur flick we've had in ages turns out to be the not-great-titled The End of Oak Street from writer-director David Robert Mitchell whose sex horror flick It Follows was a cult fave.
Set in July 1982, we meet the Platt family during a neighborhood block party. Parents Greg (Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting) and Denise (Anne Hathaway, Ella Enchanted) are experiencing marital tension due to his work or lack thereof and she is secretly writing an semi-autobiographical novel in the basement. Son Brian (Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth) is getting in trouble, smoking and broke a boy's arm and daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella, My Old Ass) is a Carl Sagan fangirl reading books about astronomy. (The least believable detail in a movie about dinosaurs.) Things are simmering under the surface of suburbia.
Weird things begin to happen - a strange plant (Audrey III?) appears in a neighbor's yard; Brian sees bright lights flashing; a huge pile of poop appears in the next door neighbor's yard who thinks it's a prank by Brian - until one night the power and water goes out. The next morning they realize something has gone really amiss when they realize freaking DINOSAURS are roaming their neighborhood. As they try to flee they discover the road just ends with them at the top of a cliff and the surrounding looking like the Jurassic Era. As the neighbors begin getting eaten by the dino predators, the family has to pull together to try and figure out what happened and what can be done to escape. Dino hijinks ensue.
What Mitchell does well is keep the pacing taut, but not hectic. Clocking in at under 100 minutes in an era where 150-180 minutes seems standard, the movie doesn't expend superfluous time setting things up and getting things moving. The hide-and-seek presentation of the dinos is also smart as well as probably cost effective, keeping the VFX heavy film to a relatively bargain $85M before promo, etc. He also deploys some split-diopter shots that make All the President's Men look Little League.
The characters feel sufficiently fleshed out though McGregor's Greg could've used a little more explanation as he veers close to being just another failed weak man whose suffering girlboss wife has to compensate for. But as events transpire, their relationship solidifies as they appreciate what they do when necessary. The running bit about Brian's dog, Starbuck (named after the original Battlestar Galactica series and not the coffee chain), disappearing then reappearing as a doggo ex machina is a tad weak and causes Brian and Audrey to get suicidally stupid at times to facilitate things. (Maybe I just don't get it being a cat person. BTW, cats don't fare too well here. Boo.) There's also a quibble or five to be had about the resolution which seems to believe you can order and get a pizza delivered in under 20 minutes which even Domino's didn't offer.
Earlier this year Speilberg flopped with the alien movie Disclosure Day which I've heard enough about to be especially unenthused about watching it and there really hasn't been a goodJurassic World movie in 2015 and that wasn't that great but the three subsequent sequels have been varying degrees of mediocre to bad. It's into this environment that The End of Oak Street steps and manages to succeed where Spielberg and his dinosaur creations have fallen short. Not a life-changing experience, but a nice throwback to classic escapist movie fare. And any movie with Yummy Girl (Anne Hathaway) as a suburban MILF shooting dinosaurs can't be bad!
I am totally unfamiliar with the Canuckian web series Nirvanna the Band the Show which ran from 2007-2009 and only got hipped to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie because a couple of YouTubers I follow reviewed it and it involved a pair of musicians trying to get a gig at Toronto's Rivoli nightclub.
I am very familiar with this club because for almost 20 years the missus and I would attend the North by Northeast (NXNE) music festival and the Rivoli was on a strip on Queen St. along with The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern, The 360 Club, The Black Bull, and Cameron House which allowed for us to park once and then hit multiple clubs per cycle, walking in, seeing if we dig what's on stage, then hitting the next one if it didn't grab us. In 2016, organizers completely scrapped the format and we haven't been back since 2015. It appears they're going back to the old tons of bands in lots of clubs format, but Canuckia is a totalitarian hellscape how under occupation. C'est la vie.
Anyhoo, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol co-wrote and star as fictionalized versions of themselves who, 17 years after forming Nirvanna with hopes of playing the Rivoli, still haven't scored a gig there. Matt apparently is big on making elaborate plans and decides that they should do a publicity stunt where they parachute off the CN Tower into the adjacent SkyDome during a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game to promote the gig at the Rivoli they don't actually have.
They get on top of the CN Tower by buying tickets to the EdgeWalk, an actual experience where for $199 you get to walk outside 1,168 feet up attached to a harness. They cut themselves free of the safety line and jump, but due to an incoming lightning storm the SkyDome's roof was being closed and they don't make it inside.
Since this plan failed, Matt decides they should modify their RV to look like the DeLorean from Back to the Future and attempt to convince the Rivoli that they're time travelers so how about a gig. Fed up, Jay secretly calls a club in Ottawa to book a slot for an open mic night tomorrow. (The joke being it's 280 miles and a 4-1/2 hour drive between these cities and there surely have to be other open mics available in a city with a 3.3M population.)
The next morning, Jay hits the road unaware that Matt is sleeping in the back of the RV. When Matt wakes up, they argue while Jay drives and when the RV hits 88 kmh (heh) it suddenly travels back in time to 2008, though they don't immediately register what happened. (The way Matt discovers they're in the past by how a movie audience laughs at a now-forbidden word - no, it's not Blazing Saddles, but you're close - is clever.) Once they realize their predicament, they attempt to return to 2025, but Matt realizes that the time machine only worked because he spilled Orbitz - a novelty beverage that ceased production in 1999 - on the electronics. With the remaining contents lost when the bottle was broken, the only sure source would be their old apartment where they'll need to sneak in without encountering their younger selves.
Needless to say something goes wrong and when they return to the present the world has changed and Jay is now a major rock star and Matt is the drummer in a Jay McCarrol tribute band. Matt attempts to get to Jay to set things right, but Jay dismisses him until he finds himself wanted by the police and teams up with Matt to get the time machine working to undo the damage. With no Orbitz available, they copy the method used in Back to the Future in an absolutely impossible scheme to restore the timeline.
While time travel movies are generally logically suspect, they really play fast and loose with what happens and don't really try to make it make sense. Apparently the Jay we start with steps into the life of the alternative timeline Jay, but how does he know the Rock Star Jay's material without raising suspicions and what happens to that Jay when the fit hits the shan? Don't know.
The way Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie tells its story is via a pseudo-documentary shooting style where they filmed guerilla style on the streets of Toronto, interacting with people and even cops (who are doing a very bad job of protecting places), like Borat did, but referencing the guys running the cameras occasionally. They use old footage from their web series to create the interactions with their younger selves - no de-aging or old age makeup here, just a bunch of invisible VFX work all over the place elsewhere - and the way they stage things involving the CN Tower is pretty wild. (The way they utilized a real-life shooting at Drake's mansion to film scenes is another great behind-the-scenes detail.)
Because of my familiarity with Toronto's music clubs, the funniest detail is this obsession with the Rivoli when there are other far more famous venues like the El Mocambo, where Stevie Ray Vaughn and Elvis Costello cut live albums, or Lee's Palace, a setting for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's bass battle between Michael Cera and Brandon Routh. Sneaky Dee's, The Silver Dollar, Bovine Sex Club, and the Horseshoe Tavern are all more prominent clubs, not that Rivoli is bad - it's just a smallish back room behind a restaurant and bar front - but unless you're from Toronto or a visitor or, I presume, a viewer of the web series, how would you appreciate this?
This isn't to say you might not find more laughs in this low key shaggy time travel pastiche. I was somewhat surprised how flat it left me; the missus liked it a lot FWIW. But I do credit it for being something different than the usual formula even though it plays a bit like Temu Lonely Island.
It's been 10-1/2 months since we've actually gone to the movies to see a movie (Ballerina) and considering I missed out on properly seeing Avatar: Fire & Ash in 3D at the show, it must be something special to get me out of the house. That would be Project Hail Mary, based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir with a screenplay adapted by Drew Goddard, the tag team who filled the same roles for Ridley Scott's 2015 epic The Martian. (Somehow I never wrote a review when I saw it theatrically nor when I watched the Blu-Ray and Extended Cut 4K UHD Blu-ray, but it scored 8/10 Catch a matinee for the show, 8/10 Buy it for the Blu-ray, and 9/10 Buy it for 4K.) I even read the novel beforehand which for me is a rarity due to my crippling illiteracy.
So, having done the homework and being otherwise primed to have a great time, I ended up underwhelmed by this adaptation despite the Herculean work Ryan Gosling does with his performance as the only hope for mankind to save the world as long as he figures out what to do after remembering who his is in the first place.
The movie opens with Gosling's Dr. Ryland Grace waking up on a spaceship. He has long hair and beard and no memory of how he ended up there and why there are two dead bodies in the other beds. He frantically searches his confines to discover it's a spaceship and the star ahead isn't Earth's Sun.
He buries the others in space and begins to have flashback memories of his life beginning with his being a middle school science teacher who is recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall) to analyze a sample of astrophage, a single-cell organism that appears to be eating our Sun's energy then migrating to Venus. If the nature of the astrophage can't be understood and a means to counteract it isn't found within 30 years the Earth's climate will cool to the point where half the world's population would starve and the rest would live in a permanent state of war as nations fight over the remaining food. No big deal!
Grace figures out how the astrophage works and is immediately drafted into Project Hail Mary (roll credits!) where he is informed that the astrophage seems to be consuming many stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy except one, Tau Ceti, almost 12 light years away. The plan is for a ship powered by engines that leverage the properties of the astrophage to travel there, try and figure out what's made that star immune, then send probes back to Earth with their findings. Since they'll only have time to make enough fuel to get the ship and crew there, it will be a one-way ticket, a suicide mission. Grace's job is to prep the science and train the crew. So why is he there?
These questions are interrupted by the arrival of Blip A (as the Hail Mary's computer labels the radar ping), a huge alien ship that an understandably panicked Grace tries to flee from, finally giving up and coming to a halt. With the Hail Mary stationary, radar detects Blip B, an object "tossed" from Blip A. He goes out and catches it and thus begins communication via models with the alien ship culminating in a tunnel being constructed by Blip A to connect the two ships.
This is when Grace makes first contact with intelligent alien life in the form of a five-legged creature that appears to be made of rock with no visible eyes or face, looking like a literal stone crab. He names this alien Rocky (because, you know...) and they begin to figure out how to communicate. Rocky "speaks" in cooing musical tones, so Grace cobbles together a translator program on a laptop, eventually giving it a voice (James Ortiz, who was also the lead puppeteer of Rocky) allowing for this odd couple of sole survivors - Rocky's crewmates died of radiation exposure due to their race, the Eridians, not even knowing about radiation while being able to build interstellar starships - to join forces to try and save their respective worlds.
The rest of the movie briskly races through their efforts to figure out how the astrophage can be stopped leading to them sciencing the sh*t out of the problem and encountering some hairy situations trying to gather samples and coping with fuel leaks that threaten to end their trips. It's a foregone conclusion that they'll figure something out because no one makes a movie which ends with failure and everyone dyin - yeah, yeah, Knowing, Don't Look Up, and Bugonia notwithstanding - so whether the movie succeeds or not is in the execution. Sadly, this is where the problems are found.
What Goddard brilliantly did in adapting The Martian (which I, miracle of miracles, also read) was to condense the novel's often excessive passages of sciencing the sh*t out of problems down understandable concepts explained by Mark Watney (Matt Damon, The Martian) via video logs which he presumes will be gathered by whomever picks up his body. The problem here is that either he overly simplified or directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller edited out so much of so many important details that the first thing I asked the missus in the car after the show was whether she was able to understand what was happening?
Thanks to having read the book, I understood what the passing references represented, but in practice many critical details are so quickly glided over I really wonder if non-bookies understood what was happening. For a movie that runs 2-1/2 hours and uses the vlog format more for comedic effect than a stealth exposition mechanism, this is a disappointing omission that leaves the non-booked viewers outside the drama. While overexplaining like the audience is stupid isn't good, fast-balling very important details past people just once is worse.
Another huge difference from The Martian is the very narrow point-of-view as we spend 85% of the time with Grace and Rocky and when we do flashback to Earth they oddly choose to do almost nothing to characterize the, um, characters. His deceased comrades (Ken Leung, Lost, and Milana Vayntrub, Amy from the AT&T commercials) get a few lines so their deaths mean nothing. The closest we get to a humanizing moment is when Stratt sings a Harry Styles song at karaoke to show Grace she's not just a humorless East German taskmaster. Compare that to The Martian where we bounced from Watney on Mars to his fellow crewmates dealing with what happened to the folks at NASA on Earth trying to figure out how to rescue him. Everyone got fairly fleshed out, even Donald Glover's weird autistic astrophysicist who comes up with the way to save Watney. Somehow, Goddard, Lord, and Miller made all the wrong cuts with an already thin cast.
It's a testament to Gosling's talents (which sometimes don't seem that apparent) that the fact we feel anything and how to relate to a rock monster is due to him carrying this movie on his back. Matt Damon was good in his role, but he wasn't the central load-bearing pillar the whole show rested upon. Gosling's performance deftly sets up the humdinger of a reveal of how he ended up on the mission; a detail that the missue was NOT at all happy about along with the final scenes even though they are what happened in the novel and were quite a shock in print as well.
The success of Project Hail Mary (currently grossing over $600M globally) is being pointed to by some as a rebuke to failed Lucasfilm vandal Kathleen Kennedy who fired the pair from Solo, bringing in Ron Howard to reshoot most of the movie, costing so much it was the only money-losing Star Wars movie (until perhaps The Mandalorian & Grogu coming soon). But I'm not totally sold on their direction because it feels like they cut a lot of plot meat in favor of less pertinent material. I saw a video of them showing what all the various premium large format (e.g. IMAX, 4DX, etc.) presentations would provide for epic viewing, but I saw it in regular plain old movie style and there is very little material that would benefit from a giant extended image.
I'd be interested in seeing a rumored extended cut of Project Hail Mary to see if they balance the plot better - the extended cut of The Martian was pretty good; more of good things - but I have to say that I went into the theater expecting to eventually buy this in 4K and now I'm not sure if I will. While not bad, it feels like it should've been and could've been so much better. To say it like Rocky would, "Disappoint. Disappoint. Disappoint."
There aren't as many Hulu Original movies as Netflix churns out - the last one I reviewed was the disappointing Samara Weaving caper flick Eenie Meanie - so it's noteworthy when one comes along and this week's arrival is the odd scifi-crime-dramedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice which sounds like a confusing bisexual swingers movie.
Vince Vaughn stars as Nick, a mobster attending the party celebrating the release of the son of boss Sosa (Keith David), Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), after six years in prison. Sosa announces to the attendees that he has learned who the snitch that sent Jimmy Boy to prison is and that retribution is coming. A woman, Alice (Eiza González), has a chilly conversation with Nick and leaves the party.
Waiting at a swanky hotel room for her is Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden), a trigger man for Sosa's mob who has had enough of the murdering life and plans on leaving the organization. Nick calls Mike to do a job for him and while Mike tries to dodge the gig, ends up riding with Nick to a house where he's given chloroform and the order to knock on the door and use the chloroform to knock out the man who answers the door. Mike does so and to his surprise, the man of the house is Nick! Whaaaaaaaa????
After a massive brawl due to expired chloroform, this second Nick escapes in the first Nick's car. Nick and Mike eventually catch up to Nick at a gas station and capture him. They then call Alice to warn her to get out of the hotel room because a cannibal hitman called The Barron (a blink and miss it stunt casting choice I shant spoil) is coming looking for Mike.
We finally find out what the heck is going on: The Nick who takes Mike to the house is from six months in the future and the Nick at the party and the house is Present Nick who has framed Mike for being the rat who sent Jimmy Boy up the river as payback for his sleeping with Alice. Future Nick had stumbled over the time machine when trying to collect on the load Sosa made to finance its construction and when he came back in time to the current day, he accidentally killed its builder, Symon (Ben Schwartz), and destroyed the machine.
Since we're working on Looper time travel rules (where anything that happens to Present Nick will impact Future Nick as tested by Alice stabbing Present Nick) and the machine and creator are destroyed, there is only one chance at getting this right. Future Nick is remorseful for setting up Mike, but knows Present Nick will still try to kill him and the fact no one knows what The Barron looks like complicates matters.
As confusing as I'm sure the last to paragraphs probably sound, it's not as complicated to follow as I make it sound because some plot spoilers I'm omitting are included and it makes sense. The stakes are clear and the scenarios suitably ridiculous leading to some quality action scenes.
Where writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (who created & co-wrote the Netflix Scott Pilgrim Takes Off anime series which brought back the entire Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie cast for a somewhat divisive story) bobbles the ball is in having the best parts being extraneous conversations about non-plot things. Present Nick gets into a heated debate with a gas station clerk over sugar-free candies; there's a running gag about Jimmy Boy having impotence issues; Sosa explains to Jimmy why he's not black; and everyone seems to be a Gilmore Girls fan with almost as much time spent discussing that as Bullet Train wasted nattering on about Thomas the Tank Engine. And the weird choices in musical needle drops becomes it's own thing from the very beginning as we have to watch Symon sing along with a song from the 1988 animated dog movie Oliver & Company.
While the script wanders at times, Vaughn is surprisingly rooted in the dual role, frankly doing a better job of playing the same man at two points in his life than Michael B. Jordan did playing twins in Sinners, earning a Best Actor Oscar. While he does his trademarked Vince Vaughn schtick, he also portrays how the night's events change and changed Nick to drive Future Nick's actions.
Despite the messy script, there's enough entertainment in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice to merit the watch. While allegedly in 4K HDR, the nighttime setting and generally dim lighting moots the benefits of the format. It seems that only Apple TV bothers to exploit the range of HDR, so don't feel bad if you don't have an awesome TV watching this.
People complain that movies are just sequels, remakes/reboots, and formulaic twaddle, but all too often when something truly unique makes it to theaters, they stay home, it fails, then they complain that Hollyweird only churns out endless rehashes of what makes money. (Gee, ya think?) The latest victim of audience abandonment is Gore Verbinski's (director of the Pirates of the Carribean trilogy) Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die which didn't even gross half its miniscule $20M budget.
Sam Rockwell stars as a nameless man from the future (let's call him Sam) or so he says when he walks into a Los Angeles Norms diner (think Denny's, non-LA readers) looking like a bearded homeless lunatic in a transparent raincoat over a bunch of mechanisms which may be a bomb. He claims he has traveled back in time 117 times trying to prevent the end of the world from a technological threat, only to fail the previous 116 attempts. He is trying to assemble the correct mix of diner customers for his mission and seems to know details about how useful (or mostly not) the diners are to the team.
Threatening to blow up the restaurant when when the cops arrive (as they always do), he gathers a group including Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother who seems to have more useful knowledge from an unlikely source; school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) who are frustrated by their students addiction to their phones and were attacked by them; a young woman, Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is allergic to technology and gets nosebleeds from it; and a trio of people who I don't recognize, don't get flashbacks, and thus don't have plot armor. (Spoiler alert!)
As they set off on the quest, Sam explains that they need to get to a house where a nine-year-old prodigy is about to finish an AI that will make Skynet seem like a Speak & Spell unless they get to his computer and insert a flash drive Sam has to install safety protocols to limit the AI's power.
Along the way we get flashbacks for the familiar actors' characters backstories and eventually get Sam's story of how his mother had tried to protect him from the AI Apocalypse but his youthful curiosity had tragic results. The party also has to avoid phone zombies, weird mercenaries hunting them, and deal with a monster that I won't describe lest it spoil the bonkers moment it arrives.
The screenplay by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters) has a lot of interesting ideas about our addiction to technology to the detriment of humanity. It's a world where kids doomscroll so quickly through social media slop that they're not even watching what is already abbreviated content. They're just tapping for the next dopamine hit after a second. It's a world where teachers are so blasé about school shootings that it's a nuisance more than a danger. And the way the aftermath of shootings is dealt with isn't far removed from actual proposals to keep deceased people active on social media. (Don't worry, the movie doesn't soapbox on the subject demanding mass disarmament.)
The ending is a tad anti-climatic as the revelation of what's behind all this and the results of the party's quest aren't as satisfying as it could've been, but that's also somewhat the point: Not everything should be perfectly tailored to satisfy your every desire.
Rockwell's performance is solid, balancing the notes he's got to hit, and Richardson reminded me of the snarky tart 1990s Janeane Garofalo before her daddy issues drove her mad and she just wanted to scream about Republicans. Peña and Beetz are hampered by thinner roles and when did Temple become old enough for mom roles?
While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die doesn't quite stick its landing it definitely provides a wild ride with some deep thoughts to go with the crazy, prompting more contemplation about our overly-wired and increasingly AI slopified world. It's ironic that a movie intended to warn against becoming hermits connected jacked into the Matrix failed because people prefer to stay home to consume content and it's on their TVs and phones they may finally see this.
Time for this week's disposable Netflix Original movie, War Machine, starring Alan Ritchson (Amazon Prime's Reacher) as an Army Staff Sergeant whose brother (Jai Courtney) was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan where the unnamed soldier was the lone survivor. To honor his brother's desire that they try to become Rangers, he arrives at RASP (Ranger Assessment and Selection Program) two years later and is assigned the number 81 as his identity.
For 8 weeks, 81 and his fellow numbered candidates perform grueling training with members washed out weekly. Despite his veteran status, he refuses to bond with his fellow candidates or take the lead as pressured by his superior officers (Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales). When he makes it through to the final test phase, they want him to drop out to cope with his PTSD over his brother's death, but he refuses. Reluctantly, they allow him to do the Death March final test and put him in command.
The Death March mission is to locate and destroy a simulated shot down plane, rescue the pilot from a "prison camp", and get to the finish line at the base. The team of about a dozen soldiers is dropped off and while 81 fails to inspire them much, he is supported by 7 (Stephan James in what borders on a Magical Negro role). The first night the squad is startled by a fireball in the sky. The next day they locate what they believe to be the downed plane, but when they attempt to demolish it, it is unscathed. Then it begins to rise up, revealing itself to be an alien mech which scans the platoon then proceeds to blow the bejeebers out of them.
Half the numbers buy it and the rest are forced to run for their lives, sustaining grievous injuries which slow them down carrying the wounded through the mountainous terrain. 81 suffers flashbacks to his ill-fated attempt to save his brother and the survivors continue to doubt him. Unarmed (they only have blank-firing weapons) and pursued by a giant murder walker, who will survive? Duh.
Co-writer and director Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3, The Hitman's Bodyguard) does a solid job staging the grisly action set pieces, but the characters are all stock tropes and the ending is not only not in doubt, but handled ridiculously in Temu Michael Bay fashion. (We're supposed to believe 81, carrying a wounded soldier on his back, heading for the all-important finish line, is surrounded by soldiers rushing around dealing with things but not one person intervenes to aid the wounded.) They also seem to be setting up a sequel because why not.
The 4K Dolby Vision presentation has some good highlights during nighttime action scenes, but it's a far cry from the eye-searing visuals the format can deliver as in Apple TV's 2nd season of Hijack which recently concluded.
An adequate concept adequately executed is War Machine's box score and is another watch-once-and-forget-it that Netflix churns out.
Mercy is one of those direct-to-streaming type movies which apparently got a brief theatrical run before it eventually drops onto Amazon Prime to be rapidly forgotten. A mashup of Minority Report and the so-hot buzzword AI, it's a modestly effective sci-fi thriller until you stop and think of all the gaping plot, logic, ethical, and Constitutional holes it has to leap over.
Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy)stars as LAPD Robbery Homicide Detective Chris Raven who is having a very bad day in 2029. He wakes up strapped in a chair in LA's Mercy Capital Court, a modified Judge Dredd system set up due to LA's rampant crime problems which has made areas no-go "red zones." Defendants have 90 minutes to convince an AI judge - here it's Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson, Silo) - there is enough doubt about their guilt to avoid immediate execution by sonic blast to the head. (Is lethal injection not a thing in the future? Or doing it elsewhere?) Raven is accused of having murdered his wife while drunk, which is all news to him initially. The fact he was a strong proponent of the Mercy court, having put its first defendant (victim?) in the chair a couple years previously is an additional layer of irony.
Mercy defendants are given access to all the evidence which looks damning on the surface, but once he comes to grips with his predicament he utilizes his detective skills and with the assistance of his partner, Jaq (Kali Reis, True Detective: Night Country), on the outside, races the clock to figure out who could've done it instead. Numerous red herrings and hijinks ensue.
I could go on at length about all the preposterous things in Mercy starting with the title: Who is getting this mercy? The defendants who are presumed guilty and better be able to convince the AI Judge they aren't? Raven is the 19th case in the chair, but how many of the 18 before him were deductive wizards able to sift through the evidence to save themselves?
What about the whole Constitutional aspect where defendants are entitled to a trial by jury? I presume the AI is meant to be impartial and dispassionate (more on this in a moment) to remove the tendency of liberal judges to free brutal criminals because they have the proper Designated Victim Group traits, but Mercy isn't even pretending to operate on an intellectual plane.
Then there's the aspect of Raven having access to the municipal cloud which seems to have all the calls, texts, photos, videos, etc. of everyone's cell phones, doorbell cameras, etc. and he can rummage through them for clues. So, privacy went out the window? In wildly pro-criminal Los Angeles? Well, this is a science fiction movie, but come on.
The trial room is a big space with plenty of room for holographic GUI stuff to float in the air and the floor has windows looking down into....something, but why? This all could've been done in a small room or even VR goggles. There are flying motorcycles to beat the traffic, but ground cars seem to have the same tech as the CTU SUVs on 24 had which allowed Jack Bauer to get across LA in 15 minutes.
The AI also behaves situationally, sometimes unlocking access to info because it's needed, not that he has a right to it. At the end, it asks a question which completely moots the whole dispassionate aspect these robo-judges are supposed to provide. While flawed, Minority Report at least had its premise sorted out - Pre-Crime was intended to save lives by nabbing murderers before they killed someone. Mercy's world is where rapid trials and executions are happening with no human supervision or witnesses or even failsafes. Also, the threshold for doubt for execution is 92%, but it's never stated that frees the defendant. Are they acquitted and free to go or what?
It's to the credit of director Timur Bekmambetov (best known for Wanted) that he proceeds at such a breathless pace that the viewer doesn't really have time to ponder the myriad problems with Marco van Belle's script. Even as the dumb piles up, we're still on board and it's only when it's over the stupid washes over you.
Pratt is adequate to the role, but Ferguson is poorly directed by the schizoid script which never decides whether Maddox is Data or Cortana. (IYKYK)
The 4K presentation is nothing particularly special, so if you don't have a snazzy TV, you won't miss much.
If Mercy pops up on your streaming thing and you're down for some mindless thrills, it's not the worst movie you can watch, but perhaps you should watch something else. (How's that for faint praise?)
James Cameron's 1986 magnum opus Aliens was his announcement to the universe that The Terminator wasn't a fluke and he was going to be a cinematic force to be reckoned with. I remember seeing it at the show then telling my then-girlfriend that "It was like being shoved through a screen door...without the door breaking." (Even as a young lad I had a way with words. May not have been a good way, but it was a way.)
Back in the good old days of the Aughts when DVDs came with massive special features packages, the 2003 Alien Quadrilogy box set of the (then) four Alien movies included Superior Firepower: Making Aliens, a 190-minute long documentary by Charles de Lauzirika which combined behind-the-scenes footage shot during the filming with interviews taped about 17 years later with the participants. It's been ages since I watched it (probably in 2003 when I got the set), but de Lauzirika is renowned for his production documentaries including Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner which accompanied Blade Runner: The Final Cut and I recall it was good (I've started rewatching it) and comprehensive.
But director Ian Nathan felt there was more to be told so, backed by a massive crowdfunding campaign, he has made 2024's Aliens Expanded, clocking in at a daunting 4 hours, 42 minutes (hough the actual content is 4h 15m and the rest a credits roll of the legions of donors with brief testimonials that I'm guessing higher tier donations purchased) and features the participation of pretty much the entire living cast and key filmmakers including Cameron, producer Gale Ann Hurd, various production personnel, as well as numerous superfans, novelists, scientists, and pop culture experts to comment on the legacy of Aliens after nearly four decades. (Also participating is Charles de Lauzirika, upping the Inception quotient!)
If you're already a superfan of the film, there will be a lot of familiar material like how Hicks was originally played by James Remar until early in production he made the poor life choice of buying a speedball (cocaine & heroin) from an undercover cop, necessitating Hurd to scramble to get Remar deported rather than end up in slam for years. But there are a lot of new details like Cameron's dustup with the tea cart lady and tidbits from the cast like how the initials on the Colonial Marines' monitors were the actors first initial (e.g. Vasquez is "Vasquez J" for actress Jeanette Goldstein).
While the running time seems excessive, it's actually quite manageable by a chapter structure where the movie is gone through sequentially with sidebars "transmissions" for related subjects like the connection to Joseph Campbell (both Alien's Nostromo and Aliens' Sulaco came from Campbell books) and a nice tribute to Bill Paxton whose Hudson had so many quotable lines. ("Game over, man! Game over!") I watched a few chapters per session, nibbling through it over a couple of weeks.
It's a testament to Aliens Expanded's editing and focus that there's nothing that I thought was too extraneous or unnecessary. Having every bit player whose names you probably didn't even remember sounding off could've been a drag, but their comments and insights tie together nicely. And with nearly 40 years of the film's legacy to assay, the perspectives of what the movie meant beyond its own story are interesting.
And I'd really like to commend Nathan for heading off one of my biggest pet peeves about most documentaries by putting up title cards for every person EVERY time they are shown. Most documentaries introduce speakers once and then the viewer has to remember who they are. With over three dozen cast members, podcasters, commentators, etc. participating it could've been confusing as to who that non-cast member person is, but Nathan just puts up a friendly reminder every. Single. Time. Huzzah!
In length and comprehensiveness, Aliens Expanded reminded me of another four-plus hour documentary, RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop, which also interviewed everyone - and I mean EVERYONE down to the woman being assaulted whom RoboCop shoots the guy's crotch through her skirt and the bimbos at Bob Morton's house that Boddicker dismisses ("Bitches, leave.") - including director Paul Verhoeven and stars Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, etc. about that seminal cult classic's production. I didn't review it because they broke it up into four hourish-long episodes, but it's definitely worth watching for fans of RoboCop just as Aliens Expanded joins Superior Firepower to form a tag-team 7-1/2 hour making-of fest.
Score: 9/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Viewed on AMC+)
I don't know why Sigourney Weaver isn't shown in the trailer, but she's in the movie plenty. Odd.
The trailer for Primitive War almost seems like something cheesy "mockbuster" studio The Asylum (makers of Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, The Da Vinci Treasure, and motherf***ing Sharknado, baybee!) would make: It's 1968 during the Vietnam War and soldiers are fighting dinosaurs in the jungle. That's it. That's the movie.
Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) stars as Sergeant First Class Ryan Baker, the leader of long-range recon patrol Vulture Squad which has been dispatched by Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven, Entourage) to find out what happened to a unit of Green Berets he'd sent on a classified mission then disappeared. We know from the cold open that they were wiped out by dinosaurs, a storytelling mistake too many movies make. (More on that in a bit.)
It doesn't take long for Vulture Squad to be attacked themselves then separated with Baker and a sidekick whose name really doesn't matter rescued by Sofia Wagner (Tricia Helfer, Battlestar Galactica), the sole survivior of a Russian research team who were responsible for accidentally bring dinosaurs to modern times. She's also a morphine addict because characterization. Baker makes her help find his squad then they go after the secret project that caused this weirdness and could destroy the world. Hijinks ensue.
On the plus side, Primitive War - a movie with a reported $7-$8 million budget - joins reportedly $15M Godzilla Minus 1 in shaming megabudget extravaganzas with shoddy visual effects like Thor: Love & Thunder with impressive VFX that even Corridor Crew gave props to. Several species of dinos have feathers which even ILM & Weta hadn't done and almost all the dino shots look very good, so it's weird how the helicopters are so clearly fake when solid body objects are generally the easiest to render. The action scenes are appropriately chaotic without becoming incomprehensible.
But on the down side, the Vietnam War tropes - when I become Emperor of the Universe I will ban the use of CCR's "Fortunate Son" and The Chambers Brothers "Time" in Vietnam-era movies - & cliched dialog made me ponder whether this was supposed to be a parody of war movie soldier speak or whether the makers thought this would sound tough. The 2-1/4 hour running time doesn't help flesh the characters out beyond their cartoon outlines. Helfer still looks hot at the half-century mark, but her Natasha Fatale accent is distracting.
Multi-hyphenate Luke Sparke - who seems to be the Australian Robert Rodriguez having directed, co-written, co-produced, edited, and supervised the VFX - shows definite talent in stretching the budget beyond belief, but would benefit from a better screenwriter and an editor who knows how to whittle things down to a lean & mean 100 minutes.
The missus loves the Dino Park (as I call the Jurassic Park/World series) movies. We've seen the first six in theaters and seeing that midnight showing of the first one on my birthday in 1993 made such an impression that I called into my work on my day off to rave about it. The series has been uneven - Dino Park 1 is a GOAT, DP 2 & 4 are pretty good, DP 3 & 6 are OK, DP 5 aka Jurassic Mansion: Pointless Sequel was pants - but she was gung ho to see the latest installment, but due to various reasons of business and pretty bad reviews, for the first time we did not trek to the theater to see the dinosaurs. We just waited five weeks for Dino Park 7: Oh Look, There's Another Previously Unknown Island with Dinosaurs or as you probably know it as, Jurassic World Rebirth, to hit streaming and here it is and good thing I didn't drive to a theater to see this lackluster entry into the getting-overly-milked franchise.
This time around the world has grown bored of dinosaurs because shut up this is the plot. They've also been dying out because it's not warm enough in the areas where people live (so much for the ManBearPig hoax) and they're most living near the equator because warm and more oxygen? (Not going to bother Googling that.)
Sleazy Pharma Bro (Rupert Friend, A Simple Favor) believes his company could make trillions of dollars selling medicines developed from DNA harvested from live dinosaurs. Since they're living in an area off-limits to humans, he hires Merc Babe (ScarJo, Lucy) to get him and Dino Scientist (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked) to anotherInGen facility island which had been abandoned after an accident 17 years previously because a Snickers wrapper can apparently fry the security systems of a secret dino breeding lab.
After picking up Merc Bro (Mahershala Ali, Blade, LOL) and some obvious Red Shirts (including one recognizable B-list star who the trailer spoils his fate), they head off to the Forbidden Zone to harvest blood from a fishosaur, landosaur, and aerosaur. Elsewhere on the ocean, a father and his two daughters - one young and likely to find a cute dino pal, the other teenaged and bringing her stoner dumbass boyfriend along - are sailing when their sailboat is capsized by a big fishosaur. (I'm not bothering listing the actors for their privacy.)
Their mayday call is received by merc boat and they are rescued, but as they approach the island, more fishosaurs attack the boat, causing some to die, some to fall overboard, and the rest to crash onto the shore where some are eaten. The family regroups and heads for where the village is supposed to be and the mercs, Pharma Bro and Dino Scientist collect samples and try not to get eaten, which is easy for anyone who has an Oscar or nomination or needs to stay alive until they can be eaten by the Final Boss Uggosaur in a completely unexpected and OK, I totally called how they were going to get offed.
If you think I'm leaving out a lot of details, I'm not. There's nothing of interest here, nothing that surprises or delights. Sure, the action is well directed by Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Rogue One) and the visual effects are seamless & spectacular, but we were able to predict the fates of pretty much every character, the plot armor was so obvious as were the red herring intended to make you think anyone could get killed. I was even calling out lines seconds ahead of the movie. It's that predictable.
Much was made of the detail that David Koepp, who'd adapted Michael Crichton's novel for the first movie, wrote Dino Park 7, but if you've followed his work, it's been roughly two decades since he's written A-tier material and what he's done since pales what the first half of his IMDB lists. Here he's just typing, not writing. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if he just prompted ChatGPT to "write a Jurassic Park movie in the style of David Koepp." The talking and stuff between set pieces only serves to prevent the movie from being 30 minutes long.
While not the worst Dino Park movie, it's down there in the way F9: The Fast Saga is blocked from the bottom slot by 2 Fast 2 Furious. None of the performances are demanding of our getting-paid stars and they don't even try to explain how a 5'3" woman becomes a first-call mercenary. (At least Charlize Theron is 5'10" and Uma Thurman is 5'11", not that it made The Old Guard 2 any less bad.)
Jurassic World Rebirth made enough money that Dino Park 8 is a sure thing, but it's not as if its likely to tell a compelling story from the looks of things.
The 2023 slasher flick M3GAN was a sleeper hit, grossing $181M off a $12M budget. So a sequel was ordered up and a few weeks ago M3GAN 2.0 arrived, flopping massively with an opening weekend gross one-third of the original's leading to a rapid trip to streaming after just a few weeks. Complaints were that it changed genres - from horror to sci-fi - and attempted to turn the memeable moppet murderbot into a good girl a la Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but even more problematic is that the story is a convoluted mess that I don't even want to try and synopsize, but let's get on with it.
It's a couple years after the events of the first film and the military, having never seen the Jurassic Park sequels has decided to make a new murderbot called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, Pacific Rim) copied from M3GAN's designs. During an operational demonstration, it goes rogue after revealing it was sentient and not working for the Army any more.
Gemma (Allison Williams, Get Out), M3GAN's creator has become an author and advocate for AI regulation who, along with her (I think) boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari, SNL) has been developing an exoskeleton device which could provide mobility to the paralyzed or turn people into human forklifts capable of lifting great weights. Her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw, M3GAN), lives with her and is studying computer science.
After Gemma is informed of AMELIA's existence, M3GAN (body: Amie Donald; voice: Jenna Davis; the same team as before) reveals that she'd been living in Gemma's smart home after uploading her program before being killed, a la The Lawnmower Man. She offers to help them take down AMELIA in exchange for a physical body. Gemma doesn't trust her, so puts her into a Moxie unit - a toy robot thing clearly copied from Black Mirror's "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" episode (the one with Miley Cyrus as a pop star performing a rewritten version of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole") - in order to hack into wealthy tech billionaire creep Alton Appleton's (Jemaine Clement, Flight of the Conchords) servers to find out what's going on.
After AMELIA kills Alton, the group retreat to a massive bunker under Gemma's house that M3GAN had constructed with plans that they'd hide there when AMELIA triggers an AI Apocalypse. It was at this point my feelings on the movie flipped from "this isn't so bad" to "what the heck is this crap?!?" How the actual how does a secret underground lair get built under a residential home without anyone knowing?!? This isn't some billionaire superhero with the means to have Lairs 'r' Us build a Batcave under his estate where trucks full of mined earth can be removed without notice. If M3GAN can have this done, why does she need to beg Gemma to build her a body?
From there the plot gets even more convoluted and ludicrous involving a Xerox motherboard created in the early-1980s which as been learning for four decades and if someone were to remove it from its air-gapped Faraday cage it would provide Total Control Power of all tech in the world, blah-blah-woof-woof. There are so many red herrings, fakeouts, "oh no, M3GAN's dead, oh wait, no, she's not" twists and turns I stopped caring because the movie was just trying to be clever when it was braindead.
While director Gerald Johnstone came up with the story with M3GAN co-writer Akela Cooper, the final script was his and he sabotages himself with the spaghetti plot and cringe-worthy dialogue like, "Hold on to your vaginas," which is so dumb that a Speak & Spell wouldn't say it. While his direction is workmanlike, he limits himself by his own contrivances.
The 4K presentation is clean and has some good highlights at times, but who cares when the story is dumb?
The first M3GAN caught on with meme culture thanks to the goofy murder dance she does in the trailer, but under the hype was a neat 8/10 score (never finished the review) B-movie that delivered the goods promised on the tin. But in their desire to force another social media craze, they forgot that it's impossible to make fetch happen by brute force. Blumhouse head Jason Blum admitted they botched this one and while there's a spinoff film, SOULM8TE ("soulmate"), coming in January 2026, it's going to be difficult to resurrect the girl again without an exceptional concept and script. Too bad.
Not to be confused with Ruin Johnson's 2005 debut, Netflix's Brick is a small high-concept sci-fi flick imported from Germany and dubbed fairly well. The premise is the plot: A couple - Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer, Army of Thieves) and Olivia (Ruby O. Fee, Army of the Dead) - whose relationship has collapsed to the point she's leaving him, discovers their apartment's doors & windows are blocked by mysterious black brick walls which seem impenetrable & can become dangerous at times.
Where did this come from and how do they get out? Those are the questions as they proceed to meet their neighbors by drilling and sledgehammering through the walls and floors, attempting to get to a basement bomb shelter which may connect to tunnels. Some want to help, others are more of an impediment, and one is a threat as they don't believe it's safe outside due to anything from a chemical spill or alien invasion.
Brick is an OK chamber thriller where there are a few too many convenient turns like the couple having a big industrial drill in the drawer, someone having a sledgehammer, another having a ladder which makes getting between floors easy, and the owner of the building putting spy cameras in the apartments during renovations which allows for a lot of convenient information discovery. It's also convenient that while cellular, landline, Internet and even the water is cut off, the electricity remains on. The final reveal is visually interesting, but still begs some questions.
The 4K Dolby Vision presentation is fine, but nothing those not paying for the 4K tier will miss out on.
Firmly landing in the "may as well watch it because you're paying for Netflix" zone, Brick is a passable time-killer.
Opening with one of the most played-out tropes in movies and videogames - the protagonist waking up in a situation where everyone is dead and they have no memory of what happened or who they are - Ash is a dumb, dull sci-fi-horror flick which makes pulpy throwback B-movies disreputable again.
Eiza González (Three Body Problem) is Amnesia Girl Riya Ortiz who awakes in a structure filled with several dead people who died violently as evidenced by the smashed heads and knives protruding from their bodies. The lights are flickering, a computer voice is announcing system failure, it's basically the aftermath of a Diddy freakout party. (Hiyo!) She wanders out of the structure and finds herself on the surface of an alien world with a kaleidoscopic sky. She begins to choke on the atmosphere and barely manages to make it back to the structure. She doesn't realize you need an space suit to go outside.
She begins to stabilize the base functions and experiences flashback jump scares of the violence that occurred as well as calmer times where she and the box-checkingly diverse crew joked about their mission. Then there's an alert that someone is in the airlock. She lays in wait and when the intruder enters she pounces. This is Brion (Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad) and he claims to be the astronaut who was in orbit and came down when contact was lost.
As Riya tries to piece together what's real and what's not, it becomes a guessing game for the audience as well because it's one thing to have an unreliable narrator, but the movie keeps showing contradictory versions of what happened to the point I stopped caring because it felt as if the script by Jonni Remmler was just making things up as it went along with no consistent narrative logic then director Flying Lotus just slathered John Carpenter stylistic tributes all over the mess. I pretty much figured out the main twists in the first half-hour, leaving another hour for them to play out plus the random spins they attempted.
If not for the presence of the main stars, if you'd told me this movie was made in the early-1980s I'd almost believe you but for the presence of flat-screen displays. The lighting is mostly lurid reds and blues, reminiscent of Creepshow though that was mimicking EC Comics pulp style.
The production design has that cheap movie look with bizarre set decorations like the freaking upright piano sits in the common area. Wait, what? A PIANO?!? A critical mission with the future of humanity hanging in the balance and they ship hundreds of pounds of wood & metal furniture? Not a lightweight electronic keyboard, but a full piano? We see a character playing a trumpet (silently) in a flashback memory, but never is the piano but decoration. That's the level of dumb Ash is operating at along with the Alien inspired space suits with helmet glass so fragile a single punch from a woman cracks them.
González is OK in her performance considering the role gives her little to do but be confused and sad. Paul is equally adrift with nothing to do. The rest of the cast is just there to appear in flashbacks and die.
As a Shudder title, it will eventually show up on that service, but don't bother. Watch Event Horizon instead.
Netflix recently jacked the price of their top tier service with 4K up to $25/month. Considering its virtual shelves seem crammed with nothing but foreign content (mostly undubbed now) to cater to every audience by English-speakers, the bulk of the money must've gone to acquiring the WWE RAW rights and giving the Russo Brothers, Anthony and Joe, over a half billion dollars to make a pair of movies - The Gray Man (which I remembered as being so-so, but while I never wrote a review, I did score it 8/10 so I must've liked it, though the fact I can't remember that isn't a good sign) and this week's delivery of Disposable Entertainment Content Media Thing, The Electric State, with a reported budget of $320 million dollars. Let's see what all that money bought.
Set in an alternate history 1990s, we're told in an introductory exposition dump about how robots invented by Walt Disney were used as slave labor until they got fed up and rebelled against humanity in the early-1990s. After a bloody war, a peace treaty was signed between President Bill Clinton and Planter's peanuts spokesbot Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) with the robots exiled to the Exclusion Zone, an area in the Southwest desert.
Part of the key to victory over the robots was using soldier drones controlled by operators wearing a massive virtual reality headset called a Neurocaster, tech developed by Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), the CEO of SENTRE (pronounced "center"). After the war, the Neurocaster was repurposed into a wildly successful product that allows people to waste their lives online (shades of Ready Player One, from which much is borrowed here) while drones do their jobs.
In this dystopian world of 1994 is Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), an orphan whose parents and super genius brother, Chris (Woody Norman), were killed in an auto accident leaving her in the care of a slovenly foster father, Ted (Jason Alexander), who spends his days plugged in and buying contraband online. She struggles in school because she refuses to wear the headgear for virtual classes.
One night, a robot sneaks into the house looking for her. It looks like Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk), the main character of a cartoon she and Chris used to watch, and it speaks in fragments of catchphrases (hello, Bumblebee from Transformers) from the show, but it eventually convinces her that he is Chris's consciousness somehow and that she needs to come with him to find his body somewhere in the Exclusion Zone. Using a package of Ted's as a lead, they steal his car and head to the PO Box where the items from inside the "Ex" were shipped.
They stake out the box and see its owner, Keats (Chris Pratt), a former soldier introduced in the opening montage who is now a black marketeer dealing in Ex stuff with his robot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). They stow away on his semi truck and end up back at his base of operations just outside the Ex. What they don't know is that Skate has hired former Gen. Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) to hunt Cosmo down because he's crucial to SENTRE's operation.
Barely escaping into the Ex, the now-quartet head to where a Dr. Amherst (Ke Huy Quan) is who was at the hospital when the accident happened and had told Michelle that Chris had died. Along the way they end up at a shopping mall which is populated by various colorfully designed robots led by Mr. Peanut, who reluctantly agrees to help them find the doctor. Of course, things go badly because of course.
I've never read the 2018 graphic art book by Simon Stålenhag, but have seen some panels and have heard that it's basically a moody tone piece with only minimal narrative detail meaning screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who wrote six MCU movies including all the Captain America and the last two Avengers joints, had free reign to fill in a lot of the blanks and almost completely failed at the task.
While there are a handful of laughs, there are a whole lot more unanswered questions like why is Michelle wearing an ankle monitor? Does she have no other family she could've lived with after the accident? What is her aversion to the Neurocaster? She says she prefers reality, but other than a blink-and-miss-it glimpse, we don't know what this VR world that's so addicting is like. In Ready Player One, Spielberg swiftly paints the picture of people living in vertically stacked trailer parks, so why wouldn't you escape to the Oasis where you can be and do anything? (And her final monologue is totally ganked from RP1's finale.) At one point they see someone sprawled on the sidewalk with a headset on, connected to a public terminal, implying that it's an addiction, but how does this infrastructure of public terminals work?
How is Chris's brain making SENTRE work and how does he not simply die from never being able to rest? How is such a critical asset to Skate so vulnerable? Why are so many of the robots seemingly more like malfunctioning than sentient like the hairstyling robot constantly begging to cut Keats shaggy mop? I could drone on, but you get the point.
Performance wise, there's not much to write home about. Brown is still stuck in her Netflix cage where except for her forgettable turns in a couple of Godzilla movies after breaking out in Stranger Things, she has done nothing outside of Netflix for the past decade including two Enola Holmes movies (first one 7/10; didn't see the second) and last year's Damsel (6/10) and she's playing a thin character while looking too old when she was 18 when it was filmed.
Pratt just plays a variation of his Peter Quill Guardians of the Galaxy character here, a kinda dumb guy who fancies himself to be smarter than he is. It's been done before better. Tucci and Esposito are fine, but barely in it.
Which raises the most controversial aspect of The Electric State, its reported $320 million budget which is just mind-blowing considering what's actually on the screen. Sure, the VFX are extensive and impressive, but where else did all that money go? Certainly not to the cast because while Pratt may be able to demand $25M for a movie these days, Brown has no box office draw and as good as the supporting cast is generally, no one is racing out to see the new Stanley Tucci movie. Esposito's scenes could probably have been filmed in a few days, if that, as he's mostly present as a face on a drone's TV screen face. (Another "huh?" detail.)
Avengers: Endgame supposedly cost $350-$400 million, but that had a gigantic cast of stars who all headline their own solo franchises as well as the usual tons of VFX, but it went on to make almost $3 billion, and was the culmination of a decade-long shared universe series. While I wasn't as enthused for Anora and The Brutalist as many were, they earned a combined $100M worldwide on slender budgets of $16M and won 7 Oscars between them. Hollyweird could've funded FORTY movies with those budgets burned on The Electric State. Or 10 $32M or even just three $100M movies that went into theaters.
And the cost of VFX isn't an excuse because Godzilla Minus One won the Best Visual Effects Oscar and its entire budget was reported to be $15M, 1/20th of The Electric State. This year's Best Animated Feature, Flow, was made for just $4M. Hollyweird needs to stop substituting money for creativity.
While other reviews have been brutal, calling The Electric State soulless and empty, I found it to be just lackluster and marginally diverting. Some are beginning to panic for the MCU because the creative team is now making Avengers: Doomsday and while their post-MCU movies have all been disappointments, there may be enough structure at Marvel to steer things towards the old glories, not further failure. Maybe kids will like The Electric State more because robots are funny, but it's a tad grim. Another strike for not having their story together.
From an AV front, people paying for top-tier Netflix with good home theaters will get some bang for their buck with decent Dolby Vision and Atmos activity. Not demo material, but worth the upcharge.
What can be said about The Terminator? If you someone haven't seen the 1984 sci-fi action classic debut by James Cameron (no one counts Piranha II as a real debut, so stuff it, pedants) which elevated Arnold Schwarzenegger to even higher orbit of stardom and spawned five sequels, a TV series and an anime series, in the past 40 years, then I can't help your cultural deprivation much more than to say get on to watching it NOW.
If you need a recap, here's the expanded TV Guide listing: A cyborg from the future, the Terminator (Ahnuld), is sent back in time to find and kill a young waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), because her yet-to-be-born son, John, will lead the human resistance against the machines. Kill her, no resistance. Also back from the future is a soldier, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), sent by John to protect his mother. Many chase hijinks ensue.
What could've been a disposable trash B-movie is elevated by Cameron's writing & sharp directorial chops. There's a reason Sarah Connor is in the Pantheon of Bad-Ass Movie Chicks along with Princess Leia and Ellen Ripley, who Cameron would further iconize in his next film, Aliens. While her evolution into her bad-ass final form would wait until 1991's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the groundwork of this scared young woman facing down on unstoppable robot killing machine was laid here. We care about this girl and feel for the doomed soldier on a one-way mission to save the future.
The recent remastering of Cameron's catalog has been a source of great controversy among collectors and purists, triggering an uncalled for attack on them from Cameron himself. Just like George Lucas, Cameron has an issue with the technical limitations of how his movies were film, specifically the film grain of the Super 35 format. So he used Peter Jackson's Park Road Post and their AI-powered digital noise reduction and upscaling tech to remove much of the film grain and then restore lost details with AI which led to endless still frames where overly-sharpened and weird-looking faces and details being posted online.
When in motion these processes don't look as horribly bad as some have made out by the stills, but there is definitely a difference that sometimes isn't good. Adding insult was the fact that two of Cameron's movies, The Abyss and True Lies had never been even released in anamorphic DVD (the 16:9 "enhanced for widescreen TVs" format meaning that these movies on a modern TV, the movie play with black bars on all sides in low resolution), much less Blu-ray, so for the movies fans have been begging for two decades were finally here and adulterated.
While Terminator 2 is one of the worst 4K releases ever (I think I have every previous release of it and I refused to buy what should've been an instant "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!" sale), the general consensus has been that of the remasters, The Abyss fared best; Aliens is OK, but some caveats; and True Lies is very problematic especially with people looking waxy and rubbery due to DNR scrubbing away pore detail. This is why I decided to just go with $5 sale copies on digital 4K rather than the $40 disc releases when there aren't many new extras that we're out before.
Fortunately, The Terminator on iTunes 4K falls towards the good end of the transfer spectrum with clear details in hair and fabrics and the Dolby Vision grade offers some good pop for a film that mostly occurs at night. The clarity can emphasized the few ropy special effects shots like the obvious prosthetic head used when Termie cuts out his eye, exposing the camera underneath, but that's the source. The Atmos sound mix offers some good overhead usage when HKs and helicopters fly overhead, but the gunshot foley sound is canned and stock. Again, that's source related.
On the extras front, it's rather slim pickings though it includes a retrospective piece that was omitted from the physical release for some reason. There are a handful of deleted scenes which don't add too much, though one extends the scene where Sarah calls her mother (or so she thinks) then proposes to Reese that they go and blow up Cyberdyne Systems, an idea which would be revisited in T2. Biehn's acting is a little rough in one point and I can see why Cameron cut it to keep the action going.
Retrospective pieces from previous releases go into the VFX and score with their respective creators and has Cameron and Ahnuld kibitzing about how great it was to make the movie. Rounding things out are two Q&As taped in conjunction with 30th Anniversary screenings in 2014, one with Cameron alone and the other with his producer (and ex-wife) Gale Ann Hurd who at the time was heading into the fifth season of her show The Walking Dead.
There is some overlap between the two, but also a lot a great stories like how Roger Corman fired Cameron from a production design gig for working too hard on making the sets right before the crew arrived. The solo interview drifts somewhat into questions about Avatar, but it's fascinating to hear him discussing how he was handling the sequels at a point five years after the first one blew out the box office, yet still eight years before Avatar: The Way of Water would arrive.
Long review short, The Terminator is a seminal sci-fi/action classic that launched the career of one of the most successful filmmakers in history and with a good 4K transfer and sound, it's a bargain at twice the price (but still wait for it to go on sale for five bucks).
People complain that there aren't any original movies anymore - everything is a sequel or based on IPs like games - but when something different does come along, they don't seem to go see it. Such was the case with Better Man (which grossed ~$20M on a $110M budget) and now the modestly successful (though poorly marketed) Companion. Considering how generally mediocre movies are these days - especially the dreck being nominated for Oscars - it's nice to be able to recommend a good one for a change, though you should take my word for it and not watch the spoilerific trailer.
It opens with Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Heretic) at a supermarket musing in voiceover that the two times in her life she was happiest were the day she met Josh (Jack Quaid, The Boys) and the day she killed him. (Well, that's a statement of purpose if there ever was one.) We watch them meet cute in the produce section as he causes an avalanche of oranges from the bin.
Then we see her waking up in their car as they head deep into the woods for a weekend with friends at what one described as a rustic little cabin which as Jack notes is none of those things as it's a modern mansion owned by Sergey (Rupert Friend, Homeland). Also attending are Sergey's mistress, Kat (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever), Eli (Harvey Guillén, What We Do In The Shadows) and his partner Patrick (Lukas Gage, Fargo). Iris is worried that Kat hates her and Kat does throw shade, but in general everyone has a great time, getting drunk and dancing.
The next morning, Iris goes down to the lake and is joined by Sergey who proceeds to try and force himself on her. Back at the house, the others are waking up and then shocked to see Iris covered in blood, trying to explain what had happened. Jack commands her to go to sleep and her eyes cloud over and she freezes revealing (to those who didn't see the trailer) that she's a robot. Dun dun DUHN!!! Many hijinks ensue.
I'd known about the twist before watching it, so I was spotting all the tells about Iris and the remarks Kat and Sergey made toward her. But I was thankfully unaware of where the story was going and that made for a kicky fun ride. Sure, it's got elements borrowed from and reminiscent of Blade Runner, I, Robot, The Terminator, Her, Ex Machina, The Stepford Wives and the dreadful Subservience, but it mixes and matches the pieces into something fairly fresh if familiar.
Thatcher is a fresh up-and-comer with her roles here and Heretic as well as playing the young version of Juliette Lewis's character in Yellowjackets, whose voice Thatcher's sounds a lot like here while her look is what the missus described as "Goth Zooey Deschanel." (I went with a cross between Thora Birch's and Scarlet Johansson's characters in Ghost World.) Keep an eye on her starting here.
Writer-director Drew Hancock makes a smart feature debut here, investing the story with its own thoughts about the nature of love, control, identity and self-determination. Even when it's being a bit too familiar or tropey, he keeps things on the level. He was the co-creator and sole writer of a great little series that only ran 8 episodes called My Dead Ex (currently streaming on Paramount+) which you should check out.
Long story short, Companion is a tidy little black comedy with some cool twists and turns. Just don't watch the trailer to get maximum surprise value.
Matching Star Wars for sheer IP self-destruction has been Star Trek. After dwindling quality & box office returns of the J.J. Abrams' so-called "Kelvin Timeline", there have been several bad streaming series on Paramount+ starting with Star Trek: Discovery (never has an abbreviation - STD - been so appropriate) which was so bad I bailed out after just a few episodes of the 2nd season.
The Picard series was even worse as it took the best Enterprise Captain and made him a sad, broken old man for two seasons before streaming Trek boss Alex Kurtzman (one of the Bad Robot hacks famed for typing Transformers movies) wandered away and left a third and final season in the hands of the actually talented Terry Metalas who made it a very good Star Trek: The Next Generation bonus season which somehow prompted Will Riker actor Jonathan Frakes to deliver a performance I'd never would've believed possible.
Strange New Worlds has been a mixed bag, but not the crapfest of STD. I don't watch the kid-oriented Prodigy or animated Lower Decks.
So what of Star Trek: Section 31, the former TV series converted into a short feature film starring the awesome Michelle Yeoh - make that ACADEMY AWARD WINNER FOR BEST ACTRESS MICHELLE FREAKING YEOH! - as a member of a secret Starfleet Intelligence black ops group? The reviews were bad and the Trek purists were debating whether Section 31 violated Gene Roddenberry's Utopian vision of the future. But I was just looking for some sci-fi fun with Yeoh being hot and badass. I was willing to give it some slack because I'm not a purist. So how is it?
To quote The Critic's Jay Sherman, "It stinks!"
How bad does it stink? It's I turned it off after 20 minutes because life is too short to waste on clearly subpar entertainment stinky.
Yeoh stars as the Phillipa Georgiou brought over from the Mirror Universe toward the end of STD's first season to replace the Discovery Captain who died in the second episode. Why she was brought over, I can't recall and I don't care enough to look up, but this Georgiou was Emperor of the Terran Empire and a Very Bad Person. But in a post-credit scene of the season finale, someone invited her to join Section 31, leaving her a snazzy black Starfleet badge.
It was meant to be a prelude to a Section 31 series but in the
SEVEN YEARS between that epilogue and the arrival of this movie, they
couldn't figure out how to write the series and, more critically, Yeoh
had experienced a career Renaissance with her role in Crazy Rich Asians leading to her Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
It's hard to get someone at that level to commit to a streaming TV show
and they gave up and converted it into a feature. They shouldn't have
bothered.
It opens with a flashback with a young Georgiou (Miku Martineau, Netflix's Kate) returning to her family after participating in what sounds like The Hunger Games to determine who gets to be Emperor. The final test for her turns out to be having to poison her entire family, parents and siblings. Whoa. Then the boy she had teamed up with (sound familiar) is beamed down, defeated because he couldn't kill his family (wuss) and she burns his face with a sword and is hailed as Emperor. (Why an Emperor is chosen this way isn't explained, but it sure makes strange women in ponds distributing swords seem like a reasonable system.)
After that grimdark opening, we're given a slapdash info dump for the majority of those who didn't watch STD as to who Georgiou is, her taste for genocidal atrocities, before closing with the clanger, "This dog bites." (Wut? Was "This kitten has claws" deemed too casual?) We're told that she is at some space casino outside Federation space, so Section 31 needs to go and entice her back into the fold to help locate some Very Bad Tech which could cause Very Bad Things to happen.
She is approached by Alok (Omari Hardwick, Starz's Power), a purported Bad Guy who is offering a deal to her. But in a moment that will seem familiar to those who've seen Vin Diesel's xXx movies, she immediately spots that he's Section 31 as are the rest of his squad who failed to blend into the crowd at the casino. Womp womp!
We are then introduced to the team and it was at that point I punched out. Everyone was Very Colorful and spoke in wisecracks while Yeoh camped it up like an Asian Mae West. This is a former genocidal Emperor who murdered her family for power in a game show? The fact they started with such a dark opening then switched to broad comedy indicated they had no idea what sort of tone they were going for and that you can't have everyone be a smart-ass.
I was about to slag credited screenwriter Craig Sweeny, mostly known as a TV writer on The 4400, Medium, and Elementary, but I also see he developed the TV series version of Limitless which was a really clever & fun continuation of the 2011 Bradley Cooper film of the same name that was one of my faves of that year, if not the fave. I fell off watching Elementary in the third season or so for no specific reason other I don't watch a lot of television, but Sweeny wrote a lot of episodes when I was watching. So he's not a total hack, but the reports of Development Hell suggests that he may have been more the loser of a credit hot potato contest to see who gets to be the scapegoat.
Obviously, I can't pass further judgement of Section 31 because I simply gave up, but that's judgement enough and I saw this as someone who watched every episode of Batwoman.
It's New Year's Eve, so why not watch the new sci-fi/horror/comedy by former SNL alum Kyle Mooney, Y2K, which he directed and co-wrote (with Evan Winter)?
Jaeden Martell (IT) stars as Eli, an awkward high schooler whose only friend is Danny (Julian Dennison, not slimmed down in the least since Deadpool 2). He has a crush on Laura (Rachel Zegler, West Side Story), a beautiful classmate and secret tech nerd, but of course can't tell her how he feels about her and her cool kids clique are disgusted by the "Sticky Boys" (as they call themselves) because of course, this being a teen movie.
They decide to crash a New Year's Eve party being held at Laura's ex-boyfriend Soccer Chris's (Aussie rapper The Kid Laroi) house and it's your usual movie rager party until the clock strikes midnight, ushering in 2000 and the lights flicker out. After a few seconds, they come back on and it appears Y2K was a dud (as it was in reality), but then a toy jeep with other toys combined with it burns a kid's face to death with a makeshift flamethrower and other devices begin attacking and killing the partygoers including Danny.
Eli, Laura and a pair of local rap crew members who bullied Eli and Danny - CJ (Daniel Zolghadri, Eighth Grade) and Ash (Lachlan Watson, Glen/Glenda in the Chucky TV series) - then trek to find Laura's previous ex-boyfriend, an electrical engineering major named Jonas (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr's son, Love, Victor) to see if he can help with these conglomerations of household electronics. Also in the mix is a stoner video store clerk, Garret, played by Mooney.
The problem with Y2K is that the script is a half-baked mishmash of other familiar movies. The Eli-Danny dynamic is so cribbed from Superbad that I wasn't surprised to see Jonah Hill has a producer here. The swing from teen buddy comedy to full splatter comedy a la Evil Dead II could've worked in the hands of a better director, but Mooney isn't up to the task.
The script feels like a barely hanging together first draft that needed more trips through development with the most cardboard of characters. How did the killer robots assemble themselves so quickly? Don't know. How did the virus spread when hardly anything was connected to the Internet and broadband was a novelty? Don't know. Why does there seem to be nobody else in the world than the immediate characters in the movie and why is everyone's favorite art house movie brand A24 watering down their reputation with such lackluster stuff? /shrug emoji
While the use of clever puppets and robot suits fabricated by Weta Workshop give a tactile lo-fi vibe, the cinematography by Bill Pope (three Edgar Wright, four Sam Raimi, and four Wachowskis movies including The Matrix trilogy) is too good for this project.
Frankly, if it looked worse and starred nobodies (think: Clerks) it's B-movie story would've worked better. When the best thing about your movie is the surprise cameo of a certain red-hatted nu-metal rocker who was huge in 1999 and is willing to take the piss out of himself for the last act of the movie, that's not a ringing endorsement of Mooney's effort. (FWIW, the missus liked it much more.)
To quote Morrissey, stop me if you've heard this one before: Monsters have wiped out virtually the entirety of the human race leaving a remnant clinging to life while coping with the specific rules of the threat. Sure sounds like A Quiet Place, right? While that sleeper hit has already spawned a sequel and prequel installment, Elevation is the first outright knockoff that I can think of.
This time the gimmick is literally unstoppable killing machine monsters called Reapers (super original name there!) have burst from below ground and killed everyone. Their one weakness is they can't go any higher than 8000 feet, so after a few years handy white rock lines and fence posts have been placed to tell survivors when they're crossing the line of death or safety, depending on which way you're headed.
In the Rocky Mountains lives Will (Anthony Mackie), a widower whose wife was killed by the beasts and lives with his young son, Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.). Next door lives Nina (Morena Baccarin), a hard-drinking misanthrope of a scientist constantly trying to discover a way to kill the Reapers.
Hunter has a lung condition requiring filters for an oxygen machine while he sleeps and of course the supply runs out. The hospital in Boulder, CO will have plenty, but it's below the line. Nina demands to come along because she has a theory about the Reapers and how to kill them, but requires chemicals in her lab in Boulder. There's bad blood between Will and Nina for fairly predictable reasons, but he agrees to let her tag along. Katie (Maddie Hasson) is a tomboyish hunting pal of Will's who also invites herself along.
While the route only dips below the line at a couple of places before the final long leg into Boulder, it's no surprise that they manage to run into Reapers and it won't be much of a surprise who gets killed, who survives and how. While director George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) does an OK job trying to keep the tension up, the committee-written script doesn't have enough originality to really keep the mystery of the Reapers going and when they're finally explained, it's mostly to set up a sequel that will never happen and begs a question that the 8000-foot limit being arbitrary shouldn't have been an impediment at all. (See below the trailer for a spoiler about this.)
Clocking in at a tidy 91 minutes, at least Elevation doesn't try to pad out the proceeding too much. The performances are OK considering the thinness of the writing, but if Baccarin was actually drinking as much as Nina is portrayed as guzzling, she wouldn't been looking that choice.
While A Quiet Place elevated the post-Apocalyptic monster movie genre in a surprising way, Elevation is strictly plodding along in the valley of adequacy.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
>>>> SPOILER ALERT!!! <<<<<
The Reapers are revealed to be alien robots and a mid-credits scene shows three "meteorites" in the night sky - presumably alien ships approaching Earth with updated models to finish the eradication of carbon-based life forms infesting the third planet in the system. But why was there a limit in the first place? If you're going to depopulate a world, why leave the high ground as a refuge? Set the height limit to 25,000 feet to cover Mt. Everest or just not have one at all.
