Reviews

From the same person that corrected Jin remarks on a neurologist's pronouns that make zero difference in any plot, or sub-plot, in the story, we now have her calling Wade a "fascist". Where exactly was Wade fascist in the story so far? I would understand if she called him a wanna-be dictator, or even a tyrant if you want to be more philosophical. Besides Netflix's agenda, Auggie has no reason to call Wade a fascist, there's just no elements shown so far for anyone make this comparison, unless you are a person that waters down the meaning of "fascist", rendering the meaning of the word also diluted, hence not "fascist" anymore.

Auggie, in her insufferableness, talks to Jin about Raj's work as if he is supposed to talk to her about classified matters, or better yet, as if Auggie is supposed to talk about those same classified matters with her. A classic example of a smart person being written by dumb people.

Also, can Will's character be anything better than just "oh no I have cancer" and "I love Jin, but I can't confess"?

It is a film that tried to copy Disney's style, but failed horribly. How can you screw your own formula so much that official releases seem like bootleg works?

The songs were mid, at best, nothing remarkable, but something really bad is when they change the stress on some syllables to force a rhyme and that happens more than once throughout the OST.

The art is "lacking", it feels like a poorly rendered work, as if they wanted to release a long-feature for Disney's 100th anniversary but kinda forgot so they rushed things out, into a soulless mess.

As for the story, it is just a reflex of how rushed things were. Asha, the protagonist, is shown as a tour guide, but it is never mentioned again in the story. Then she gets an opportunity to be the assistant of King Magnifico, soon-to-be-revealed antagonist, but why does she get this chance? Besides the obvious reason to quickly introduce her to the "wish spheres"? It is not because this is a - supposedly - child's film, that you let things happen "just because." That's a point where the audience gets confused: "are we supposed to side with Asha or Magnifico here?" Asha asks Magnifico about granting the wish of her relatives, isn't this corruption? She is trying to take advantage of a position - she didn't even get yet - so her relatives are benefited. Once again: "are we supposed to side with Asha here?" However, she then makes a good point "so why don't you return those wishes to the people you won't grant?" (every time I quote the film I am doing it loosely, I can't remember all the lines), fair point I would say, and Disney starts their intent to portray Magnifico as "evil", his reasoning to not grant Asha's grandpa's wishes is quite petty, he wants to be a musician to inspire the next generation, but Magnifico sees that as a possibility of revolution? Quite an overstretch.

By the way, there's a moment Asha asks "so all those wishes won't be granted?" - besides the moral debate of "should all wishes be granted?" -, Magnifico later on in a song mentioned that "last year I granted 14 wishes, isn't a high percentage?". Magnifico is probably the king of Rosas for at most 20 years, so if 14 seems to be a good number to him, lets assume he did that every year, that's 280 wishes granted and it is shown from the start that people move to Rosas because that can get their wishes granted, so there is no way Asha didn't know all wishes couldn't be granted.

Another thing that Disney should have considered, instead of a generic "you became boring", is how forgoing one's wishes could change how they are. Say, Asha's grandpa wanted to inspire the next generation through music, shouldn't he be uninspiring? But what about Simon, he wished to be a loyal knight to the king and betrayed his friend, didn't Disney use that? No, Simon betrayed his friends because his friends said he became boring, he felt like he needed to do something to feel complete, if his friends didn't mention how he changed, he wouldn't betray then.

So Disney tries to Magnifico look evil instead of making him evil, until they decide to have him use the wishes as a source of power. Well, shouldn't they have done this from the start? Shouldn't Magnifico pretend to be a good a lenient king, but actually he was harvesting his powers from people's dreams from the start?

The ending is quite weak too, we are shown that when Magnifico absorbs those wishes people feel grief, sadness, wouldn't this basically be hopelessness? So he captures every single citizen, destroy most, if not all, of the wishes and somehow, that emptiness that the film introduced before after having your wishes destroyed are abandoned because Asha started singing a song? And said song makes people able to wish again? Honestly, in tune with what Disney proposes usually, but nevertheless weak premise.

In the end, Disney just tries too hard to appeal to nostalgia referencing "When You Wish Upon a Star"'s melody several times throughout the film, the Seven Dwarves, Blue Fairy, Magic Mirror, Peter Pan and many more.

Definitely not worth a watch.

This episode had a sequence of too convenient moments that I am not even shocked fans will let it slip.

1 - Talzin's Sword: We have never seen Morgan in combat, specially wielding a sword, isn't it so convenient that she manages to stay toe to toe with Ahsoka, destroy one of her lightsabers only so the Jedi can steal the sword, kill Morgan and keep dual wielding?

2 - Sabine's "gamble" only gets a slap on the wrist: The whole season was about how Thrawn shouldn't go back to their galaxy because how dangerous he is, but Ahsoka downplays the whole thing because she also did some difficult choices that only her Master sided with her, so she should do the same with Sabine. Makes you wonder how many "Thrawns" Ahsoka brought back.

3 - TIE Fighters as a minor hindrance: Thrawn sends only two ships because he considers those enough to stall the Jedi, not only he underestimate the TIE fighters, Ahsoka's ship suffered minimum damage when Sabine use the "wings" to destroy those two ships.

4 - Fortress of Convenience: With Ahsoka's ship "down", the Jedi have to reach the fortress by rat/horse creature, wasn't Ezra surprised when he saw Sabine with one? How come do they have a second one? Not only that, afterwards Thrawn calls a hellfire rain on them, they miss every shot. Then the three Jedi manage to escape by using the force to open a gate that was locked and they get inside despite the gate almost closing on them. They get to fight some Nightsisters' zombies that just take them where they are supposed to go, here we have the terrible Morgan X Ahsoka fight, while Sabine and Ezra go ahead. They fight some zombies and Ezra gets inside Thrawn's ship, Sabine goes back to help Ahsoka, the latter kills Morgan and Thrawn yet again calls for a hellfire that destroy everything except Sabine, Ahsoka and her ship.

5 - Ezra coming back was the only way: What's a better way to convince the Senate Thrawn is back by having the only person that was stuck in another galaxy with him to testify? Ahsoka and Sabine stayed behind so their Master/Padawan relation could resume

On a side note, I was not particularly fond to how Ezra treated Huyang, Ezra knows Ahsoka, why would he assume Huyang is a common droid and treat him like a lesser?

The worst episode if you logically consider the events, Ahsoka was a bad series and a lot of the high reviews are from nostalgic people that end up rating it subjectively based on previous works.

This film is filled with metaphors, as Haesung says "Korea would be a small country for you" and we can see that right before Nayoung's family immigrates, where Haesung keep walking a straight path, but Nayoung has to climb the stairs to the top.

Something else worth noticing is the use of the colours blue and yellow, referencing their "first date" back when they were 12 years old, he was wearing a blue jacket and she a yellow one. First time they meet in person after 24 years, when they are 36, we can see that both of them are wearing their colours again, him a blue dress shirt and her a yellow blouse, even the scenario will reference that the blue steps below and the yellow carousel on top in the last moment of their first day together. Curiously when she is back home talking about her day with Haesung to her husband, Arthur, she is wearing a blue t-shirt, and her husband is wearing tones of gray - which reinforces how Arthur doesn't put colour in Nayoung's life.

However, in the next day, Haesung is wearing another blue dress shirt, but this time it is black chequered, and Nayoung is wearing all black. Remember how Arthur wear gray tones? When Nayoung is showing her wearing pictures they are all black and white, except for the very last one which Haesung quickly zoom in on her.

Then we have a beautiful "what if..." discussion.

Fast forward to the end, once again we have this play with colours when Nayoung accompanies Haesung to his Uber, this time the background lights are inverted, blue colour on top, yellow on the floor and you can clearly see how both colours are mixing in between and there are even green plants to both sides, and they are there, for two minutes (actually only one in movie). And you can feel every second. Nayoung stands there, and much like how she did when she was 24 she expected him to make the first move and she wouldn't deny him. Haesung also wanted to do the first move, you can see how he fidgets, but in the end he constricts himself, as Nayoung said he is too idealistic, too Korean. Even after his Uber arrives, she was expecting him to make a move, anything, she didn't want him to leave. When she goes back to her place and sees Arthur, her clothing colour starts making sense, she mourns. And a small detail that might come to pass unnoticed is how Nayoung doesn't hug Arthur back when he is trying to comfort her.

One last play with colours is Haesung, in a blue car, leaving behind the yellow sky into gray buildings.

How can Sabine sit up after being impaled on episode 1? Can droids even understand non-verbal communication, like the nod Hera gives to Huyang? What about Morgan's magic, why doesn't she use the characteristic green hue magic inherent to Nightsisters when she is handling that orb? Notice that the green thing that lifts the orb isn't coming from Morgan, hence it isn't her magic, or it isn't how Nightsister magic work. Back again to Sabine's wound, why is her wound no where close to where she was stabbed? Her injury was supposed to be closer to her chest rather than her lower abdomen. Why is Ahsoka's fight so poorly choreographed? For instance, there is the usual 2 vs 1 trope "let me wait you pay attention to me so I can attack you" or how her robes keep on touching her lightsaber and they are intact or how she just let her enemy escape, why not force pull him? Or force push so he misses a step?

My biggest concern surrounding this episode are two moments that are just terrible, for distinct reasons: Rhodes using footage of "Fury" killing Maria Hill two episodes in a row and the "man is bad" trope that has been recurrent in Marvel recently.

It is not hard to consider the first issue as bad writing, in the last episode we were already told by Rhodes that he had footage of "Fury" killing Maria Hill and in today's episode we see Rhodes using that same leverage again? Fury knows about that, so why did he act like Rhodes got nothing on him, so only we are shown the evidence again, for (at least) the third time? Or do they think the audience is ignorant?

As for the second issue, we have Sonya capturing two Skrulls, following one of them threatens to kill the scientist Skrull, then Sonya implies that the "male" Skrull is going to kill the "female" Skrull because that's what males do. This whole "man is bad" thing has been recurrent in Marvel's productions in these recent years, sometimes it seems like they go out of their way to write a scene like this. However, this very same series in the last episode is a huge criticism to this thing: how does Sonya know that Skrull is even a male? We know for a fact from the last episode that Rhodes, despite being a human male, is actually a female Skrull, so did Sonya just assume that Skrulls gender for how they look? Wow...

I was very curious on why this episode had its low rating and it takes some time to understand why, because at first you would think the episode would be only about how paparazzi are leeches, but, as some other people have said, this episode is a good definition of jumping the shark.

There is only a handful of episodes of Black Mirror that have such questionable writing involved, but at least those - or at least most of them - were still developing core ideas of the series. At first, the idea isn't bad, she was a paparazzi and one of her pictures resulted in an actor taking his own life so she dropped that life, but when bills started piling she decided to go back to her previous lifestyle. The core idea might have been something that they could have developed better for the show, but there are some questionable scenes that were pointless, for instance why is the roommate complaining about frying garlic and ginger? What's the point in showing that paparazzi are "vultures", when we could assume that from the very first scene and when they find Mazey Day? Also, talking about her, why is Bo's character so buoyant? First she is a paparazzi, then she feels guilty about that actor's suicide, I understand when she comes back to being a paparazzi, but she "saves" Mazey, only to take her picture stone-cold like she wasn't shocked with that other actor? Not only that, she has that fat guy's camera that have pictures "worth a million bucks". Why didn't the cop ask that staff "why is there a car in the parking lot when there is only me here? (the couple we see in the later scene isn't shown then)"? Even the staff, dude fetches a knife and dies from a misfire? That's goofy.

This episode could have been written better, its story, its characters, have a more Black Mirror feel to it than what it was.

The episodes starts with the Imperial troopers' armour conveniently protecting them from the same blasts that took them out in the previous episode. Din Djarin manages to escape and is saved, in the last moment, by Grogu in IG-12, that somehow evaded Bo-Katan and managed to find Mando somehow.

Why is R5-D4 Din Djarin's "buddy"? Aren't the writers aware how Din Djarin treats droids (with the exception of IG-11)?

When Din Djarin is fighting those Imperial troopers their armour are once again not as protecting.

I am not big on Star Wars lore, but even I know about midi-chlorians from "Phantom Menace", where they did shy away from using terms. They could even use Season 1 as reference, Moff Gideon would mention how midi-chlorians are related to The Force and that would have been better, pleasing both Star Wars fans and casual watchers.

Once again we have a jetpack-Grogu dilemma, why doesn't Din Djarin uses his jetpack to reach Grogu before the Praetorian Guards?

Why did Bo-Katan slam Moff Gideon when she could have used her sabre to cut his head in one clean sweep?

Praetorian Guards versus Din Djarin's choreography was nowhere as good to the previous episode. Paz Vizsla was attacked by them in sequence, as for this episode, they were waiting to attack in turns.

THEY BROKE THE DARKSABRE? What about the whole "the ruler of Madalore must wield it"? Will the Children of the Watch conveniently forget about that?

Well, at least IG-11 is back, I'm not sure if I liked that outcome but whatever.

And what a cartoonish ending, simply terrible.

It seems like the writers wanted to do something of the lines of The Book of Boba Fett instead of continuing the great writing they did for seasons 1 and 2. I might be wrong, but since Ahsoka's series will premiere soon, maybe sabotaging this season was a way to avoid people from comparing both series or even decreasing people's expectations for that series for we would expect something as good as The Mandalorian used to be.

So the episode is called "Spies" and to the surprise of no one Elia Kane isn't a reformed Imperial, but an Imperial Spy, but the episode is plural so does it mean there is another spy with the Mandalorians? Or is it just "there are spies in the New Republic"? Which, again, would be obvious and less interesting than a Mandalorian spy.

What is the point in bringing up IG-11 only to have him replaced by something else? There was a clear opportunity in the last episode to find the memory circuit Din Djarin was looking for the droid, but instead we get something of lesser importance.

"Remember, kid, never trust a pirate" and yet the ruler of Mandalore deemed wise to trust the words of Moff Gideon.

It seems like even Din Djarin agrees that the show isn't about him anymore, hang his jetpack and change the name of the show to "Bo-Katan". I understand the Children of the Watch and the Nite Owls being allies, but Din Djarin's allegiance places him under the Nite Owls. Mandalorian factions should be all treated as equals, but once again writers propose that the Children of the Watch are inferior the Nite Owls, and I recall from last episode Bo-Katan holds her own creed on a higher esteem when compared to Din Djarin's creed.

Look how absurd this dialogue is: Axe Woves: "these primitives make up their own rules for everything" Din Djarin: "should I step in?" Bo-Katan: "Neither side can step in, it was bound to happen sooner or later". Bo-Katan is aware her own fleet is racist towards another tribe and shrugged her shoulders about it, and she still says how unsure she is in being a leader.

So those outcasts were living in Mandalore for whatever how long, and they couldn't identify a creature of that size from that distance? And did they really have to sacrifice their ship?

"They're wearing Beskar armour" and 1 minute later the Mandalorians manage to take down most of those enemies and most of those weren't on the joints where there isn't any armour, meanwhile Din Djarin, also wearing Beskar armour, gets shot multiple times and nothing happens to him, there are even Mandalorian with their usual amour that nothing happens to them.

"It's an ambush!" it was so obvious it was an ambush, what are they on about? And why did it take so long for Bo-Katan to use the Dark Sabre to open the door? Did she have to wait for Moff Gideon's dialogue? Or was she waiting for Din Djarin be moved to the Debriefing room?

Back to the first paragraph, it seems like the most obvious answer would be that the Mandalorian Outcasts are most likely the spies, they lead the other Mandalorians to the place where they were ambushed, they said they were on the ship and never, not even once, came across any Imperials?

Overall, it was a better episode than the rest of this mediocre season, but people are exaggerating with the rating they are giving it.