Reviews

Never have I been so uncomfortable so long a period of time. Normally movies have a scene that shifts into the distressing/uncomfortable and you're like "wow, what a great scene."

That's the whole movie. Except for about 3 light moments scattered throughout the subject matter of conversion therapy and the environment our protagonist Jared is literally TRAPPED in is awful. The homophobia and control that the Love In Action conversion program enforces over the poor souls inducted into this brainwashing camp becomes increasingly extreme. The way it causes distress and breaks people is shown differently through the various side characters and none of it is good. This is a tragic story of the real abuse of LGBT people happening in the US (and gay conversion therapy isn't explicitly banned everywhere in Aus either).

I was on the edge of my seat, deeply breathing, sighing, putting my hands to my face in awe and distress, the whole way through. Just when I thought this movie couldn't get more uncomfortable it finds a new height.

It achieves all this through plot and intimate performances. Everything else is so stripped back and naturalistic. There's barely any music, or at least not very noticeable background music (with the exception of the song Revelation by Troye Sivan/Jonsi, which will likely vie for a nomination for best original song). It looks like they almost didn't have a lighting crew for more of the film, instead relying on house lighting for a dark, moody, or contrasting aesthetic. The whole thing feels not like a stylistic piece of cinema, but a realistic look at a person's life. Which is the point given it is inspired by the real experiences of someone who suffered through the abuse of conversion therapy. This film is so well put together.

I never want to watch it again. Which is weird for a film I love so much. But this movie is harrowing. It haunts me. I don't get very emotional over film but this subject and execution was just so deeply uncomfortable for such a long period of time that I don't feel the need to ever subject myself to that again. Which is a great recommendation if you want something to make you feel sad/distressed for nearly 2 hours straight.

This film is bleak and ultimately pretty boring. Unfortunately. Because I like the premise and the take on the zombie genre.

The premise is simple: Arnie plays Wade, a farmer/father just trying to look after his daughter after she gets bitten by a zombie and begins the multiple week transformation into a zombie. This creates the chance for the nuance of the zombie genre to really flex its metaphorical undertones and really have a slow paced and personal look at the ramifications of dehumanising someone into a monster. I dig the hell out of that. Zombies are more than just flesh eating creatures and this takes a dig at trying to explore how transformations destroy relationships, the community, and even the person dealing with their inevitable loss of personhood. It becomes a story analogous to knowing your loved one will die of a terminal illness in two weeks and the hardship that causes.

Unfortunately this brilliant idea gets bogged down in utterly dull banality. It's. Just. So. Dull. It took me I think 15 minutes before the thought occurred to me: this must be a first time director. And it is! The pacing is so off. I decided to watch it because it was only an hour and a half (and not including credits it's less than that) so figured hey, nice quick movie to enjoy at the end of the day. Nah. What ensues is a director more focused on silent inconsistently shaky shots of characters (mostly Arnie) brooding and having some kind of internal struggle over some super important element of the story but after the hundredth artsy cut away shot or silent 20 second scene it feels like this just didn't have enough content for a full length film. It's soooo sllooowwww. I checked MULTIPLE TIMES to see how much time I had left until the end because I just wanted this to be over but I'd invested too much time to give up on it. I wanted it to redeem itself. I wanted it to lift itself up out of the bland drudge through the slow decay of Abigail Breslin's character (the titular Maggie) into something more poignant, or at least... interesting. But it doesn't. Any tension by the end and replaced with frustration. You know where this is going the moment it starts.

The characters aren't interesting. Arnie plays a father figure. That's... about it. What does he like? He likes keeping his daughter around. There's a scene where they actually seem to bond with each other and are a proper father/daughter duo. The rest I don't care. All the other characters? Well I have the cast list open in a separate tab in case I feel like checking names because I don't know a single one. I can't think of any defining traits about these people besides the archetypes they're meant to fit into for the sake of narrative elements. There's the... (switches tab) step-mother? Oh I thought she was her aunt. Caroline. Who... is just present for someone to be uncomfortable about the whole situation. There's the two cops (who Arnie clumsily reveals he is close friends with through heavy handed expositionary dialogue) who warn Arnie that they'll intervene if Maggie goes too far. They're interchangeable nobodies who exist to serve a single purpose and I feel no reason why who they are affects the plot in any way.

The cinematography, much like my experience for an hour and a half, is bleak. The colour grading is overdone. It doesn't so much set the tone as demand you feel sad. We get it dude, you were a scene kid when a teenager. You're very excited to show us your latest film school project. It genuinely just feels like if someone slowed down a heavy metal music video but then removed all the music, sporadically added dialogue, then slowed it down way too much. It hurts me. It hurts me so bad.

This movie is meant to have a soul. It really should and I know it wants to be a deep examination of a little girl losing her humanity before her eyes and the pain it's causing her father but he just comes off as distant and flat. This was a good draft that just never got rewritten to really hit the nail of all the ideas it was going for on the head.

This movie is fun. It's just ridiculously fun. There are so many jokes crammed in one after the other that people of all ages will enjoy. That's the great things about family movies is their layers of jokes. There are so many moments where it makes fun of the source material throughout the ages and creates this self reflective jaunt through nostalgia and pop culture. The film has taken the increasingly dim, dark, and serious figure of Batman and flipped the gritty in reverse for a chance of some comics related media that children can consume without being horrified at the violence or the boring plot (sorry DC but your movies suuuuuuccckk).

It tackles something other Batman films are Too Serious to tackle and that's Batman's isolationist attitudes, cold heart, and inability to reach out and trust others. It's really refreshing to see someone tackle toxic masculinity and unhealthy coping mechanisms - and even stranger to see it in a light hearted children's movie. Batman spends most of the movie resisting the idea that others are people he can let into his heart instead of obstacles or (at best) tools for his own purposes. His ego prevents him from helping himself. It's a good message and a central flaw of the Batman mythos we've all seemed to embrace (and spun as a heroic feature?).

The movie is both absurd and moving. Two tonally different things that are difficult to mesh together but it manages it. There's so much in it to love and the Lego franchise is an unexpected gem in contemporary cinema. Just like the building blocks the movie takes inspiration from this will capture all the joy and imagination of childhood and creating a magical silly world where silly things happen, the stakes are ridiculous, the characters are all hyper and over saturated, and it's a nonstop rollercoaster of laughter.

Great for all ages, even the bitter old fan boy who has been reading gritty Batman comics for decades.

The hate this movie gets for not being like Star Wars or doing disappointing things with its leads is misguided desire for depthless action. The criticism that this isn't a Star Wars movie is a willing denial of what Star Wars has embodied for the past 40 years.

This movie takes a lot of elements of the other two trilogies are spins them together into what isn't just a visually stunning sequence of action/adventure but a deeply nuanced look at grief, loss, and desire - all central themes we've seen explored to varying degrees before. We all see that Kylo is a more nuanced version of how Anakin SHOULD have been. We can see the struggle and conflict within him far more realistically and nuanced than Anakin's whingey emo tantrums and that's expanded so well in this movie. Kylo and Rey's conflict goes into shades of grey instead of polar black and white like the prequels.

Now I've seen a lot of issues with how Luke is portrayed. When we last see him in the end of The Force Awakens he's banished himself to an island to mope and be hidden from everyone. You may have heard the criticism that his character is misused, not interesting enough, blah blah blah. No. That's like if you watched Star Wars in numerical order, got really impressed by Yoda's badass lightsaber flips in 2 and 3 then in 5 and 6 when we see him again you revolt at this swamp frog that makes jokes and doesn't do anything interesting (though without getting into detail: Luke is actually shown as being very powerful so where's the issue?). When we see Obi Wan in #4 he seems to be relatively unhaunted by how he went against the will of the jedi and demanded to train Anakin, thus leading to the downfall of the jedi. Yet he's banished himself. Yoda and Obi are Luke's rolemodels. What were people expecting? We find out more about why Luke has banished himself and it's haunting. It's terrifying and saddening. It's more realistically tormented than Obi Wan. We see angst and loss in a far more real and nuanced way than we've ever seen in the previous shoot-em-up action of the previous Star Wars.

And then there's more. This movie is brilliantly introspective. It takes a critical eye to the universe it exists in and the tropes it has contributed to in the genre and popular culture at large. The director hasn't only taken all the themes of Star Wars and revisited them in more depth, but he's put Star Wars under a microscope and demanded to know what makes it tick. What do we expect? Perhaps the criticism is that it turns a few tropes on its head. But that's good! We got annoyed that TFA was too much of a rehash of A New Hope. This movie still retains a lot of what we know and love about Star Wars but mixes around the pieces, plays around with the jigsaw puzzle of audience expectation, and creates a fluid yet coherent series of surprises, trope reversals, and important character growth for all of our central characters. We break down the sexism of male heroism (a reason for misogynistic fan boys to hate it but not a real fan), we break down the illusion of a distinct black and white world of morality, and it's just amazing. I love it. I love how it challenges the form yet is still familiar enough to not feel completely different. It what was Star Wars needs to be to survive a new generation of viewers with new codes and social contexts.

Now let's talk about action. Oh boy. Can I pin down my favourite action sequence? No. Not even close. This is perhaps the most visually stunning Star Wars I've ever seen. No. It definitely is. From (redacted) to (redacted) to (redacted) you'll have rewarding after rewarding moment of either just plain epic action to a deeply satisfying conclusion to a metaphor about good vs evil. If you have seen it you'll understand.

Admittedly there are a flew flaws in this movie but rarely do we get a perfect movie. Still, it's such a thrilling movie I cannot help but give it 9 out of 10. Hot damn! This movie will be one that our children will watch over and over. It's finally a trilogy for a new generation to grow up watching and fall in love with. And that's the most important thing to me. It proves that Star Wars is for everyone.

So see it again and again and again until every layer rubs off onto you and you can fully appreciate its brilliant.

There's a certain struggle when it comes to adapting children's media for an audience that has all grown up and willing to indulge in some updated nostalgia. This film will satisfy some and annoy others because of how it tries to capture this nostalgia.

My favourite part of this film is Billy - the black autistic Blue Power Ranger. His autistic tendencies aren't shown as a burden, he's accepted by his team, and overall he's a loveable and endearing character. It's so good to see such positive representation in a blockbuster film.

Let me say that the initial set up of the film is a good reason to force a writer to think about characterisation. The film forces the characters to reveal things about each other to overcome their inability to function as a team and we see them flesh them out a little - but only a little. This is a good idea done poorly.

Now there are moments that are genuinely really fun. You need to go into this movie expecting some silly action adventure because... well it's Power Rangers. This isn't art cinema. This is people in suits attack faceless monsters. And that's part of where it also dips down in enjoyability. The villain has all the same corny two-dimensional silliness of the children's show origins. That's what I meant by nostalgia dragging it down. The first act seems to all about putting a modern look and feel to the main characters and setting, setting up plot and characterisation, and then the subsequent acts go "eh, whatever" and it devolves into this increasingly poorly written mess of bad dialogue, uninteresting villain, and over simplistic conflict resolution. It plays out how you'd expect it to play out: like a Power Rangers episode stretched out over 2 hours. In trying to remain faithful to the corny feel of the original it splits itself tonally between the serious first act where troubled teens are conflicted about being thrust together and the final stages of a maniacal cartoon villain (who the actress I'm sure is thankful her face is covered in prosthetics so she isn't so easily recognised and won't have her career dragged down by a ridiculous performance).

That's the issue with this film: it has sporadic moments of fun and good ideas but gets progressively worse the further into it you go. For some fans it is a worthwhile watch. But I feel the amount of fans who think its worth a 2nd watch are noticeably fewer.

Look, when you're condensing a 37 episode anime (or 12 volume manga) into an hour 40ish movie things will get lost. That's OK. But ultimately there are ways to effectively summarise concepts or ideas in short periods of time that they've just failed to do.

We're introduced to the basic idea of the Death Note we're all familiar with just sped up for time. Then about mid-way the plot starts trying to be its own thing. I commend it for that. I wouldn't want to watch a boring condensed retelling of something that relied so well on pacing and cliffhanger moments in the original. There are points this actually starts to look interesting and there are some nice moments as the tension starts to climb. The third act falls apart though. There are some strange directorial choices where the emotions don't hit right for the tone. When Ryuk is first encountered he's meant to be this terrifying unknown dark force coming from nowhere. Light's reaction is just... bad. There's also some really obnoxious and on the nose music choices during key moments that really ruin the moment. It brings you out of it and you go "OK, I get it. I know you're INSTRUCTING me to feel a certain way but that's not how emotions work."

A big reason why this adaptation fails is its poor handling (or outright butchering) of the characters. For example: L and Light are both originally geniuses in their own right. Driven, determined, masterminds, whose unending quest to get what they want causes them to have a high stakes battle of wit, quick thinking, and clever gambles. In this movie the two aren't very bright. Light isn't a genius. He's an edgelord loner teen with an inexplicable crush on the ~edgy goth-lite~ girl. Admittedly he does have some brilliant moments but he's still a pale comparison. L shows one moment of deductive brilliance and then is reduced to an emotionally ineffective antagonist. Mia's character lacks motivation. Mia in the original was a terrible character and drastically changing her could have been a great improvement from the original's sexist handling of women as pawns and side pieces for the men to use as servants to their bidding (seriously, the women in the original are SO STUPID it's painful). But at least Mia's motivations made sense. In this movie she has no backstory, all we know is that she's EDGY (and smoked a cigarette that one time in a montage and then never again but YOU KNOW SHE DOES IT), and she ultimately serves as this bizarre 2D mirror to Light. Light admittedly has more of a conflicted moral compass in this film compared to the original single-minded arrogance which is perhaps the only good thing about him.

So yeah. Depth. The characters are different and that'd be forgivable if they had more depth to them.

In short: a few good moments but in the end hits below average overall.

This is a prime example of what NOT to do when it comes to making a movie. Everything about this is mind numbingly boring. The team from Smosh decide to explore the foray of cinema after attaining success in online skit making but the issue is whatever talent you think they have doesn't translate over. The premise of this movie is a skit idea. That's it. It's a 2 minute skit stretched out to feature length run time and it isn't even a good skit idea to begin with. It has a lot of youtuber cameos and narrative choices that are so incredibly dated and unoriginal. It's a skit idea done to death far better by someone else years before this movie ever got made. We were bored before it existed. There's no laughs, there's no thought put into it, it's just two youtubers unable to creatively break free of their origins. Without going into spoilers this movie is baffling. It's stupid. It's inane. It's painful to watch. There are clear moments where you understand that there's MEANT to be a joke but you stare at it blank faced, the colour draining from your skin as you find yourself inexplicably aging faster than usual. Something is draining your very life force. You realise it is this movie. This movie is slowly trying to kill you with banality. You remember when you were 15 and found Smosh funny but all the nostalgia is suddenly destroyed and what should've been a relatively harmless legacy of early youtube is now tarnished and the name of Smosh has been cemented into history as synonymous with "unfunny." Sad. Dear God please don't watch this movie. It's not so bad it's good. It's just bad. The resolution will make you angry and unfulfilled and the only response I can imagine to someone having finished this is "god, why did I waste my time?"

It started off with an incredible stylistic opening that was a feast for the eyes. Zack Snyder was busy showing him being brilliant visually and dramatically. Ah that was a great opening scene...

Then there's a little bit of plot and then BAM! Time for some quick hallucinating a whole new world. We're introduced to our pretty uninteresting and simple characters, none of which have any depth to them. What they do have is massive sex appeal, which distracted me momentarily for a while as I patiently waited for the plot to happen.

Though eventually oggling Emily Browning was insufficient for my film student self to passively enjoy the film. No, it just kept going. Action sequences were broken up with the calmer scenes. The pretense was really just an excuse to have completely unrealistic violence in various artist landscapes. The problem was that there wasn't much of a challenge, or progression in plot... it was "I need to do something. Cue fight scene. Fight scene means something is achieved. Dialogue saying we need to do another thing. Cue bizarre fight scene." Where's the challenges? Where's the progression? Things just happen... because.

Though there was a little bit of an attempt to give depth to Sweet Pea and Rocket by giving them a little bit of a backstory which then FINALLY became a bit of a center for the "plot" to revolve around besides Baby doll.

It was a steady downhill descent into mindless pointless plot less violence. I started off being wowed by it, then got bored, then it brought it back to the plot at the end (almost as if there wasn't any gap between the start and the end, like the middle and all the violence was pointless filler - which it was) and I thought that was good... Then the absolute end attempted to be some kind of trippy mind-messing twist which came off poorly.

It is the worst Zack Snyder film I have ever seen, mindless drivel. though not without some redemption. It was a very stylistically well done mindless drivel.

I liked the character of Alice. She was a very interesting character and did really seem more like Alice when watching the film than she did when viewing the trailer. The red Queen also seemed very much queen like.

Other characters felt either empty or not as interesting or right to me. Something about the Cheshire cat just didn't seem quite right, and it was weird as they all ended up having names. Also, characters (such as the white queen) seem to appear to have some form of personality, but just don't seem real or full which wouldn't be a problem if it was the original story of Alice in Wonderland but Burton tries to turn everyone into more believable characters and it didn't work too well in some cases. Not a total disaster, the Mad Hatter turned into more than just a raving lunatic obsessed with tea.

Burton almost seems to give a sense of order and logic to wonderland. It's weird seeing a Tim Burton film that seems to be trying to be NORMAL instead of weird! Wonderland becomes a linear and ordered place where you can go from one spot to another with no trouble of things changing dramatically or getting lost if you turn around. It lacks the imagination and surrealist absurdity of Alice in Wonderland that it should. It starts off the same as the original and then diverges quite drastically.

But it's not a failure of a film. It still had an interesting plot, a few laughs and some imagination. It's still entertaining to watch and visually was quite vivid and interesting. The CGI was not groundbreaking, but it had style. I liked the specific look that they went for and it didn't look camp or unrealistic (well yes, unrealistic as it's wonderland, but you don't go "that's just stupid"). The ending was happy. It was good. But Burton really didn't hit the mark on this one like his previous films.

Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper wanted to make "a completely separate, third entity" for the Stargate franchise and "to produce a stylistically and tonally different TV series with a more mature and fresh story approach so as not to get too repetitive." Well, they certainly have succeeded! I too was a bit apprehensive at first when I saw the previews and thought that it basically was Lost meets Battlestar Galactica but I got over that when I watched the first episode. I think people's big problem with the series is it's NOT STARGATE. Well of course it's not Stargate! It's Stargate Universe! Why should it be exactly the same? If it was exactly the same you might as well have made a season 11 of SG-1 or 6 of Atlantis. It's new, it's different, and as a show by itself it is an absolutely brilliant drama.

The show focuses a lot on the characters and the sudden change to their lives by being thrust trillions of light years away. Most interesting of all is Rush, whom I absolutely love as a character. I cannot wait to April when the show returns because the suspense of waiting for what Rush does next is so much! Yes, this show may not be the most action packed Sci-fi with a large gunfight every episode but it is suspenseful at times. It is thoroughly entertaining as a piece of DRAMA. It's also not as sci-fi-esquire as it's predecessors and there's been more focus on the power struggle with the IOA, Rush and Young and the effect of being stranded has on the passengers. I don't mind this at all. I don't think it's reached the melodrama of a soap at all.

I cannot wait until it comes back in April and I will be incredibly disappointed if it's ratings continue to decline and the show gets canceled! It deserves it's own fan base that isn't so narrow minded as to reject it because it's stylistically and visually different from the other 15 accumulated years of the Stargate Franchise shows. The original Movie was quite different from the series yet we still enjoy it don't we? But also the current fan base should definitely accept it as it is. I love it. I'm ecstatic to hear that it's already got a 2nd season planned :D

I don't really believe that it counts as this generations "The Exorcist" but that doesn't matter, it's still quite good. It's not a series of screeching heads popping up to get cheap shocks out of the audience. The audience is in the dark and the screen is dark. You sit, and wait, and wonder what's going to happen next, and sometimes it's just really bizarre. It was incredibly suspenseful and the pauses are larger than some other movies which would've made it boring if it didn't capture your attention so simply and effectively. At first it seems like the entity is a serious lightweight with such spooky tricks as moving someones keys to the middle of the room at night and only making one thing go thud in the night but it manages to escalate to the point where it's not so subtle, but not so grand and amazing, but still really freaky. It's pretty clever n that respect and just goes to prove that budget isn't needed to make a film good.

When Katie screeches it's really kind chilling. It's not got the whole generic teenager in slasher film sort of screaming. It was awfully chilling and freaky. As for Mika, he was an idiot. He was an absolute idiot who kept saying that he could handle it, he was in control and that he was making progress when really he just made things a lot worse. Thankfully his tool-like nature was not so extreme to be apparent instantly or ruin the movie.

The relationship breakdown between the two as the movie progresses was very realistic and that part of the story was actually filmed more believably than in Cloverfield. In Cloverfield the "OMG A MONSTER LETS FILM IT!" aspect made sense but the "hey just ignore the camera I'm holding to the side as I film your reactions to me flirting with you" was just there because it needed to be for the story. The bits between the nights when it's filmed are realistic. It's believable that Mika would film some of it because it doesn't appear to be propped up as a reality TV show.

So it's pretty freaky. It didn't leave me cautious to open doors or make me a little tense as I turned the lights off and went to sleep but it certainly spooked me while I was watching it. The person next to me was covering their eyes and freaking out though!