Tag: Sci-Fi

I don’t get it. I don’t know why it is called Z for Zachariah. None of the main characters are named it. I could have easily missed it if someone said their brother/dad/whatever was named Zachariah.

It sounds biblical in a way, and there was a Zechariah in the Bible AND Quran, making him a big deal. But he was just the father of John the Baptist, and I have no idea why that matters.

Damn it. Someone smarter than me should eventually comment why. It might be more obvious in the book version, but I will definitely never read it.

They are watching where the TV would be. You know, if channels worked. 🙁

Guess what, everyone is dead! Boooo! Nuclear war fucked everything up and radiation is a bitch.

But guess what. Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) is alive! Her farm was located in a small area that the radiation was able to avoid. You know, in the mountains in a valley and stuff like that. In fact, her whole family survived, their church and all.

But the parents felt it was their duty to go look for survivors, and they never returned. So her brother also left to look for them. So she is all alone, with her dog, running a farm and struggling to survive.

However, she comes upon a man in a radiation suit and a cart, Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He has been searching for a radiation free zone for a long time, being in a bunker when all the bombs went off. She saves his life, and they learn to live and love each other. Even if he isn’t religious.

That would be too convenient. Him helping her get gas for vehicles, design a water wheel, and all that stuff. Life cannot be easy. Which is why a third person joins the group, Caleb (Chris Pine). He is just stopping through, but Loomis gets jealous. Caleb is a religious boy and Ann likes him too.

When you only know that three people exist, it just seems natural for a love triangle to form. Are one of the guys evil? Are both of them good people? Who knows. Maybe Jesus?

Jesus killed for your sins. So don’t kill one of the three people on Earth.

Seriously. What the fuck does the title mean? Argghhh.

When you have a movie with only three characters, not even background people, you have to hope they are all great actors or else your movie will suffer because of them. Margot Robbie is the assumed weakest link right off the bat, because she doesn’t have as significant of lines of work as the other two gentlemen. She was made famous from The Wolf of Wall Street, she was terrible in Focus, barely in About Time, and was average in Pan Am. Yes, I watched all of Pan Am.

Despite her average film history, that hasn’t stopped people from over hyping her role as Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad Movie that is roughly a year away still. Just from trailers, the things meant to overhype things! I assume someone won’t be fantastic in a movie until they prove to me they can act great in said movies. Thankfully, Robbie is fantastic and this is easily her best work to date.

Ejiofor, as always gives it his all and gives a wondrous performance. But we expect that from him. Pine might be the only actor I had an issue with. He is supposed to be suspect, being the last to join the group. But he seemed to overdo it and didn’t always act like a normal person. He overacted the role, while Robbie and Ejiofor felt more natural and subtle.

The best part of the film outside of the acting is just the general atmosphere and world they created. No one was ever really happy, everyone they knew was likely dead. Life sucks, but they were making the best of it and trying to create something sustainable. That is great.

The film does seem to lack enough events to really keep the viewer interested still. I am not saying I have ADHD, but damn, let’s get some more important things to occur, outside of working montages and glaring. The ending is also a bit vague, and in this case pretty annoying. This is a simple movie and interpretation is stupid. Just let me know what happened, damn it. It is probably the book’s fault. Boo, books. Just give me fantastic movies, damn it.

Strange as it may sound, to properly start this review I need to talk about The ABCs of Death. If you have never heard of it, it is a horror anthology movie (all the rage these days) with 26 shorts, one for each letter of the alphabet. They have free reign to do basically whatever they want, to match up any word they want to a particular letter. It is an easy way to make a movie, as each director is only involved for a short while and can be done on almost any schedule.

So what does that have to do with Turbo Kid, a retro inspired sci-fi adventure horror (eh) movie?

Well, it turns out that this was inspired by a short made for the anthology that was eventually not used: T is for Turbo. Although it didn’t make it in the film, one of the producers decided that it would be even better as a full feature length film. So they brought Jason Eisener, who directed Hobo with a Shotgun (a movie I still have never watched, sadly), to be executive producer and Turbo Kid was born! And yes, you can watch the short if you click on the title link above.

See kids, dreams really do come true!

You see that? That is a GnomeStick, and it is truly wonderful.

The world is in shambles. The land they live in is now referred to as The Wasteland, and of course it is a post apocalyptic world. The future is a scary place, the year is 1997.

Our hero is named…well, no idea, so let’s call him The Kid (Munro Chambers). He is alone, a scavenger, just him and his bike. He is also a lover of comic books! Who isn’t though, right?

Well, this Kid meets a girl, despite trying to avoid strangers. Her name is Apple (Laurence Laboeuf), she has pink here, is very eccentric, and doesn’t seem like the type of person who could survive in The Wasteland alone. She just wants a friend, and the Kid reluctantly lets her tag along — only if she follows his rules and gets a weapon!

Eventually the Kid finds a cool suit that is straight out of comic books, and when he puts it on he gets super powers! Okay, he just gets a laser cannon gun thing on his arm, that has a timer after a few uses that lets him recharge. But at least it looks cool and snazzy. More importantly, it gives him the confidence to start fighting back.

Fighting back against Zeus (Michael Ironside), self proclaimed ruler of The Wasteland. He has an army of warriors, including Skeletron (Edwin Wright), who shoots out rotating saw blades, and Female Guard (Orphée Ladouceur), who is a woman!

But the Kid isn’t alone, no. He has the help of Frederic (Aaron Jeffery), an Indiana Jones looking mother fucker who arm wrestlers, until he loses his hand early on. And also there is Bagu (Romano Orzani), a trader who was the only friend the Kid had before this mess gets started.

When Metal Man and Skeletor have a baby, you get this lovely killing machine.

I feel like I was transported back into my 1980’s going to see sweet B movies live for the first time. This is of course ridiculous, because I was born in 1989 (Like Taylor Swift. We are both successful people), and I have no memories of being zero or watching movies. It is a ridiculous statement for me to make, and this entire paragraph is down right nonsensical, which makes it a perfect description for Turbo Kid.

I joke a bit, of course. There are character motives, a plot, everything that is necessary for a movie to be comprehensive. The world created is just over the top and very Mad Max-ian. It can easily be pictured as a movie in the franchise, just with a much smaller budget and a kid with lasers as the hero. Fuck it. George Miller needs to just somehow make it canon and everyone would win out in the future if they can eventually crossover.

There was a lot great with this movie, outside of its intentionally bad graphics for the death scenes. The soundtrack is straight out of the 80’s and gives the best vibes possible when watching this movie. And they were very creative when it came to costume (and hair!) designs, weapons, deaths, and sets. It was a visual rainbow explosion, despite the bleak landscape.

The cheese is high with this film and it runs with it. This is why I hate the bad on purpose films like Sharknado so much. Because there can be actual movies that are bad in a good way, like Turbo Kid, or Black Dynamite, that serve as genre parodies while also entertaining people without the use of alcohol.

This review deserves a third picture just to showcase some great costume design or something.

Yes. This will do.

Is there a more universally hated super hero franchise right now than Fantastic Four? Specifically films with more than one movie. Catwoman, Elektra, Green Lantern are all bad but at least they stopped, and Daredevil redeemed itself with the Netflix series.

But Fantastic Four had two very mediocre films with big name actors, so they had to reboot it many years later or else they would lose the movie rights. Not unlike how the 1994 Fantastic Four movie came to existence. As expected, because people were already angry, the internet did not give Fantastic Four a chance. Every casting decision was scrutinized (The Human Torch being the most famous example), every time they didn’t appear at a con was noted, and when they finally came to a few, they were criticized for their trailer or being later.

It is a sad fate that no matter how good or bad this movie is, it is almost determined to fail because the internet has decided to hate it before giving it a chance. A lot like what happened to The Lone Ranger movie of a few years ago.

“What, do they not know what to do with their arms? This movie sucks based on a picture!” – The Internet

Sometimes when you are a kid, you have a dream for when you get older and it actually comes true. Like when Reed was in 5th grade (in 2007. Yes, the math works out and it indeed was that long ago), he wanted to be the first person to teleport and was already working on a device! He also befriended the slower Ben through his elementary experiments. Now, 7 years later, for his senior year science project, Reed (Miles Teller) has successfully built the device and is able to teleport something away and back! He doesn’t know where, but darn it, it works! And Ben (Jamie Bell) is still there, helping out by lifting things or buying supplies or something.

Needless to say, it draws at least some interest, namely from Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), who wants to offer Reed (yes just reed) a full scholarship to NYC as part of the Baxter foundation. A giant building where he can school, do science, and live. Yay! Apparently Reed had solved an issue they were having for years, so Franklin gets his old team back together, including Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), who is a bit chaotic. He also adds in his adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara) who will build suits for them and his son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) who has gotten into some trouble and can “build anything.” This is all important, because what Reed has actually done is created a portal to another dimension and another world!

They should totally try to go there. That’d be fun. Hopefully nothing would go wrong, affecting the structural DNA of any of these right out of high school aged individuals. That would be terrible. Also Tim Blake Nelson as our government bad guy, because you need one when science is involved.

“And knowing is half the battle.” – Cobra Commander or whoever is in this picture.

I won’t say the hate on the internet for this film is justified, because most of it came before anyone had a chance to see it. However, they ended up being correct in that the final product was anything but fantastic.

Don’t want to get into source material comparisons, so I will still note that I am bit disappointed that they used a lot of the “Negative Zone” but called it Planet Zero or something, and not by its comic name.

As for the characters, the entire team seemed to lack any real personality. Before the specifics, I should note that I really like Teller and Jordan in most of their movies and Mara was great in House of Cards and Happythankyoumoreplease.

However, for The Human Torch they made him whiny, even having him utter “I’m an adult, I’m old enough to make my own decisions!” to his dad. The few times The Thing/Ben was on the screen, it felt like he was just awkwardly standing off to the side, never understanding what was going on. Reasons to bring him along on the trip were silly and the friendship that was supposed to exist between him and Reed didn’t show up well in the film. Additionally, his voice when he was full on The Thing didn’t seem to fit his mouth well and always seemed jarring.

It feels like they forgot to do anything with The Invisible Girl, outside of having her like music and patterns with some cringe inducing scenes. And Reed never felt like the genius he was hyped up to be, just a kid with lame powers and lame motivations. Dr. Doom himself was rushed near the end. The fight didn’t make a whole lot of sense, because the film had a problem explaining anything that occurred, hoping the audience wouldn’t think too hard by rushing through all the science talk.

The only real chemistry I found believable was between Johnny and Sue storm as adopted brother and sister, which is probably the hardest thing to pull off. Makes one wonder if they forgot about everything else and focused just on their relationship. Somewhat related, their dad also called Victor and Reed “son” at various points in the movie, so at some point he just became everyone’s daddy.

Stretching out this review with a third picture, much like how Miles Teller can stretch out a conversation with witty retort.

The film can be broken down into three parts. A long introduction, which includes getting the powers and training (which also almost put me to sleep). One scene that is more akin to a horror film. Then a short rushed final CGI fueled fight.

Outside of the weak characters, the biggest problem seems to come from the tone. The Fantastic Four group is inherently cheesy. My favorite story about them is actually a short Norm MacDonald sketch talking about how ridiculous their names are. But the tone of the film is going for a darker more serious approach that is popular nowadays. However it never feels dark, it just forced. It is still cheesy outside of the “horror” scene with none of the grittiness seeming to work. It doesn’t help that the film is almost void of any action until the final fight scene, leaving just poor character development science montages to pick up the majority of the run time.

The Fantastic Four reboot might have actually been what we all feared, a cheap and quick film to maintain film rights. I maintain that if they had just brought in Zac Efron as Dr. Doom, this could have been better as a spiritual successor to That Awkward Moment.

Buy It! – This movie is available now on {Blu-Ray} and {DVD}.

There is no Deus here, no, we just got the Ex Machina.

In case you didn’t know, Deus Ex Machina (god from the machine) is a plot device where some outside force just kind of appears, fixes the issue, and leaves. It is usually a badly written plot device, Greece/Roman plays are full of these types of things where literally the gods came down and did some stuff.

And just to reiterate, this movie is the phrase without the god part. So just “From the Machine”. A movie about robots.

Maybe even robots kind of just appearing, fixing the issue, and leaving. That’d be swell.

I don’t think I can bore up this intro anymore so I should just get right to it!

Put on your thinking face and get to movie watching.

To err is human. To compute is robot.

Humans and robots don’t really interact nowadays on any level that isn’t a slave/owner relationship. Right now, robots have it rough.

Related, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) totally just won a prize. He is a coder for Bluebook, the Google of this movie, and he has won a week to spend with their reclusive CEO on his giant resort island thing. Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the CEO, has turned his home into a secret underground facility, to test out new technologies and prepare for the next big technical revolution and he is very secretive.

Nathan wants Caleb to perform the Turing test on something he is working on. In the test, a human asks a robot questions, without knowing whether they are talking to a human or a robot. And if the human cannot determine what it is, the robot/AI passes the test! But err, knowing you are doing that kind of ruins the point you would think. Hell, being introduce to Ava (Alicia Vikander), and seeing her in a robot body also probably puts a hamper on the basics for the test.

Maybe. JUST MAYBE. There is more going on in this facility that Nathan isn’t telling Caleb. Maybe things are more than just the Turing test. Maybe! Who knows? That Asian maid, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) who doesn’t know English and is the only other person in the whole facility? Yeah, probably. Bet she has seen some shit.

If you thought the elevator scene from Captain America was bad ass, wait til you see this action fest!

I think Ex Machina is the type of movie you just want to watch with someone else. There are a lot of themes present, and since I watch the majority of my movies alone, the only people I can talk about those themes with are you guys.

But then I’d be a silly spoil sport.

Instead, let me instead make sure you realize this is a sci-fi drama. That means we are going to have a lot of talking and not a lot of action, and I wouldn’t want you to go into this thinking otherwise (like a dumb ass).

The discussions and the twists that went into the film were pretty enjoyable. I went in assuming I would be able to see everything coming a mile away and I think that most of my predictions did not end up coming true. So it is great to see it not go down the obvious path.

The three main actors involved all did an excellent job. It is now expected of Isaac to provide quality, but Gleeson is still not super tested and Vikander of course is out of nowhere (in comparison). The story the film tells can be interpreted in several different ways, depending on who is watching the film, which will provide excellent discussions.

At the end, I felt as though it was still a bit too slow and not as grandiose as I had expected. That is of course my fault, not the films. Ex Machina is a wonderful addition to the Sci-Fi genre and one loves of that and drama should definitely seek out.

Welcome to the world of Tomorrow!…land!

Today!

Or whenever this movie comes out in relation to when you read this review. If you are reading this right away, you have to wait two days until Tomorrowland, which sounds silly. The best thing about any of this is that I have absolutely no friggan idea what this is about.

I know Disney. I know the main star. I know that the director has done a lot of good movies. And that is all I have going into it.

By the looks of things, this movie takes place in Nebraska.

The future is scary. Global Warming, terrorism, protests, oil spills, all of that. But what if the future could be better?

Your dreamers and inventors and all of those wonderful people? What if they formed their own society free from the masses and government influence? Why, then we’d probably get a repeat of Bioshock. But this is Disney, so it instead was a wonderful place where young Frank Walker (Thomas Richardson) got to live in awe and wonder. Until he was kicked out, for reasons.

Now, many years later, our star obsessed Casey (Britt Robertson) has seen glimpses of this wonderful place, Tomorrowland. And it was exciting. And she wants to go to there! Everyone else just thinks she is crazy. But with the help of a mysterious young girl Athena (Raffey Cassidy) and older Frank Walker (George Clooney), she might finally get her wish.

The rest of the people, in order of importance with no details at all include: Hugh Lauire, Tim McGraw, Keegan-Michael Key, Kathryn Hahn, and Matthew MacCaull.

When did Hugh Laurie get such a young boy face?

The premise behind Tomorrowland I was purposefully vague about, I hope, because it just happens to be one of those movies that is hard to describe without describing EVERYTHING. So I won’t.

However, I can say that the beginning of this movie was wonderful. We had playful banter, wonderful imagery, and a decent story going. Heck, we even had robots. Clooney and Robertson were a delight! But as the plot took a more doomsday turn, something else started to turn as well. My ability to understand the movie.

Once they got to the part of the story where the Eureka! moment occurs, it all goes down hill from there. Mostly because they rush so quickly through the explanation, it is hard to make sure you understand before they start doing something about it. But that was the most common tactic in the movie. Explain quickly and move on, so you won’t think about it and won’t realize it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But it happened and the ending was kind of terrible and very anything goes by the end.

Which is a real shame, because I was enjoying it a lot before it got to that point. I am kind of SUPER disappointed that it didn’t end spectacularly. I don’t want to be hand held, I just want things to make sense. The movie was long and allowed for a lot to happen before they even made it to Tomorrowland. So it is a shame the end had to feel so rushed. Personally, I was left trying to discuss why certain things occurred with other movie viewers, and frankly, we kind of just gave up.

So, Tomorrowland. You were so close. If I had to compare, you were almost a Friday, but you fell flat and turned into Tuesday.

Day 5 of Yay Women Week! Wait, what. This is about MAD MAX. And how FURY the ROAD is. That doesn’t sound go power women ya ya ya at all. But hey, what do you know. You probably haven’t even seen it yet.

After all, early reports about Mad Max: Fury Road is that it actually passes the Bechdel test. So take that haters. Let’s say it fits the theme.

I admit my experience with Mad Max is slim to none. I haven’t been able to see any of the previous three movies (and apparently they don’t matter to this one either).

No, my experience with the franchise are the obvious pop culture quotes, and the NES video game. It involved driving around a barren landscape, looking for gas I think, and getting shot at by cars. In reality, it was about me playing it for like, a minute and dying and stopping. That game was hard.

“Calm down, viewer! Now’s not the time for fear. That comes later.”

Max (Tom Hardy) is pretty crazy. Mad you might say. A loner, roaming the Australian barren plains on his own just trying to survive. He lost everyone close to him. His only care in the world is his survival. You see, the world sucks now. Oil became scarce. Wars, environment, all of that collapsed society. Shit, even water is hard to find.

But you don’t need to know a lot about Max. You just need to know that he has been captured by King Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his army of skin head pale War Boys. He has his own huge water supply, so he rules the world. The only reason Max is able to escape is thanks to Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). She has decided to do the right thing and smuggle the Five Wives (Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Courtney Eaton) away from Joe, who wants to breed future war leaders.

And that’s all you need to know! Women get stolen, Max and Furiosa on the run throughout a wasteland, trying to get the ladies and themselves to safety. On their tail is several large war bands, with guns, flame throwers, bombs, and crazed thugs who are basically all suicide bombers. Here you might find some high octane dudes, like, Nicholas Hoult, Josh Heman, and Nathan Jones.

Metal as fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck. The hype train is real. The. Hype. Is. Real.

I didn’t believe it and I didn’t want to believe it. This was my second choice to see this week after Pitch Perfect 2, and if I didn’t go to a screening I would have waited until DVD release. But I am glad I saw it on a giant screen. It helped blow my mind. Here is the thing. The acting? It is pretty darn good. Hardy and Theron were excellent as always and they were completely believable in their roles. Hoult was like an entirely different person and I would have never expected him to do so much. And hell, some of the actresses I saw associated with the film, namely the Five Wives, I felt very questionable towards but even they did a good job. It turns out that with a majority of our escape party being women, this actually fits the theme pretty well.

The plot also is a very decent one. Miller does a fantastic job at world building and creating so many unique elements to really make you realize how much effort went into this movie.

And the action. Hot damn. Most of the action of course takes place on dusty roads with armored dudes chasing each other on cars, but it doesn’t ever feel repetitive. The final chase/action sequence goes on for so long, it is probably longer than the final train scene in The Lone Ranger. And it just keeps on coming at you. Action, explosions, fighting, great choreography. I was amazed. Don’t worry, the film isn’t 100% action, there are quieter times. So let’s just say 85% action. When the action is going, it is going to 11.

I can’t even describe that enough. This is so far the best action movie of the year and one of the best of the last few years. I would say in terms of pure action, The Raid 2 is better, but in terms of extreme brutal violence, Mad Max: Fury Road is miles ahead of the competition. Man, all this bro talk, I feel like the dudes on Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. I’m gonna go listen to Wilson Phillips.

The Divergent series has the honor of being the next Hunger Games series, movie wise. Even if The Hunger Games still has one more movie yet to come out. You know. Successful trilogy, third one split into two boring as fuck movies to milk more money out of teenagers. Whatever.

I wanted to like Divergent a lot more than I did. But, TL;DR, it wasn’t a completely original dystopian plot line like it made it look like. It was kind of nonsensical at points, left a lot of questions, and it ended up just being a damn high school clique movie, in its most basic form.

HOWEVER. Insurgent can be something completely different. If the ending of Divergent is any indication, Insurgent shouldn’t be a shitty high school clique movie. It should be a smarter sci-fi dystopian action movie. Class warfare shouldn’t be an issue. Just rebels vs the government. Good. This one can be a huge improvement.

Pls don’t let me down. Plsssss.

I was just as surprised as everyone else over the erotic lunch based three way scene.

The last movie ended with our heroes, Tris (Shailene Woodley), Four (Theo James), Peter (Miles Teller) and Caleb (Ansel Elgort) escaping out of Chicago and heading past the wall into the magical world of the unknown. After all, the wall was put up to protect them from the dangerous outside that had monsters and bad people and shit.

Wait a minute. Sorry. No. They just go into the forests outside of the city? Not outside of the wall? Oh…well then…okay. I guess they are just hiding out from the hippies, trying to figure out what the hell Jeanine (Kate Winslet) wants to do, now that she took out all the working class selfless people. That’s right, only four factions now fuckers. The nerds, the jocks (which are scattered and small), the student government, and the hippies. Because it is still a high school in Chicago. Speaking of those factions, we get to see things from the hippies and the student government finally. The hippies are lead by Johanna (Octavia Spencer) and the SGA is lead by Jack Kang (Daniel Dae Kim, of Lost fame!).

Either way, the plot of this movie is our heroes on the run. Not physically, because apparently it is super easy to hide from almost everyone in Chicago, despite them only using like 5 buildings for most of the population. Their GPS systems must all be out of wack. Also, Jeanine found this mystical box under Tris’ old house that her parents were hiding. That is why she killed them by the way, looking for the box. Didn’t you know that they wanted it from the first movie? (I literally don’t remember it, but it may have been hinted or mentioned). The thing is, this box has a message in it, written by the founders of the caste system. It will let them know how to deal with all these Divergent assfaces. They just need a really strong divergent to open it. Hmm, wonder who that could be…

This movie has a huge number of other people of course. We get the return of Jai Courtney, Mekhi Phifer, Ray Stevenson, Maggie Q, Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwyn, and Zoe Kravitz. But we also have new people, like Naomi Watts and Keiynan Lonsdale! Woo~

Oh, and didn’t you hear that this one featured Bieber?*

As soon as I finished this movie, I was immediately asked by people what I thought about it. And I shrugged. I didn’t know. It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I liked, disliked, and how I thought about the film as a whole.

Here is one thing I know for certain: Insurgent is better than Divergent. For sure. I had a lot to complain about Divergent. You might have heard about me doing so in my review of Divergent. But I still thought it was at least okay. So here is another thing I know: Insurgent is not good enough for me to give it a 3 out of 5, the like it category. It is a 2 out of 4 like Divergent, just a better 2 out of 4.

I was able to see this movie in IMAX, only my second movie to do so after Edge of Tomorrow, and it did feel good on the gigantic 3D screen. It had a lot of CGI based special effects going through these tests or whatever they were called and for the most part the looked pretty decent. It had more action than the first film. Real action, not bullshit “dangerous training”.

On the other hand, the plot was pretty basic. It was very predictable, especially when it came to reality versus simulation. The only wild card was Miles teller. We mostly just had teenage angst carrying the rest of the plot, so it was pretty linear. Major plot points seemed like they were added on as an afterthought (read: that box thing that wasn’t mentioned in the first film at all). And of course, this film still doesn’t feature outside Chicago, which to every one that isn’t a book reader, was pretty sure how this one would start. But whatever.

The film also still features a huge amount of confusing plot decisions and material. Maybe reading the books would fill the gaps, maybe they are shitty in the book too. Who knows. I know this is still entertaining enough to warrant a watch, but not enough for me to want to buy any of the series still or read the books. And the last movie being another shitty two parter means the franchise is probably at its high point right now. So sad. Please go back to Spiderman, Shailene.

* – Bieber jokes are still funny, right?

First off, no, I still haven’t seen Primer. Stop asking me. I will get to it eventually. My mind is ready for a mind fucking this early in 2015.

Time travel. A fun subject and one that is ridiculously hard to get right. Again, I am not saying I understand time travel and know how it should be. No. I just hate seeing a time travel movie that features it, then has inconsistencies within its own version of time travel, making it a bit confusing. The last movie to do that was Project Almanac. So close.

So, fingers crossed. Because now I am going to tackle Predestination, which hit theaters earlier this year. I didn’t hear a lot about it when it came out, but recently it has been gathering steam. And I really want to see a good time travel movie that isn’t Primer. So, extreme fingers crossed.

What’s this? A woman? In a movie about time travel! How surprisingly rare! But they only showed us Ethan!

Here’s the issue. The Fizzle Bomber. That dude is the issue. He is an American terrorist living in the United States. He is hard to catch. He makes bombs. He blows the bombs up. People get hurt and he has been hard to catch.

In fact, he blew up maybe ten blocks in NYC. Yeah.

So we should stop him, before he blows up NYC. With time travel! And thus, the Temporal Bureau is born! These Temporal Agents travel through time, in a limited range, to prevent major disasters and make our timelines a better place. There are many issues and problems of course. Things might change a little bit.

They have been slowly getting closer and closer to the Fizzle Bomber too. Each time jump they get closer to finding his identity and hopefully stopping NYC from getting wrecked. This should be the final time jump they need for their best agent (Ethan Hawke), disguised as a barkeep. But first, everything has to be perfect…

Also featuring Sarah Snook and much less featuring Noah Taylor.

The second time traveling movie I have seen to mostly take place in a bar. Coincidence? Or alcohol?

Looking at my astrological charts, we are due for a great Ethan Hawke movie again, and, yes, this indeed gets to be the one! Hooray! Don’t let Sarah Snook confuse you either. She was in the not so great Jessabelle recently, and is much much better in this movie.

By nature of it being a mystery and a bit of a thriller, Predestination obviously has some twists and turns. Some you can see a mile away, some that blew my mind. I loved it. And I loved even more than this wasn’t an action cop movie. It was a straight up Sci-Fi Drama with some mystery aspects about time travel. Excellent.

And from what I can tell, it covered up all of the loose ends. Literally everything. It was super careful about what it said and did in every scene, and the level of attention that went into it is impressive.

On another note, Hawke wasn’t that great in it. Not bad, not great, just decent or expected. He was the lead though and his character didn’t have to do a lot to excel. Snook is the one with all the acting and development and she does a fantastic job.

And well, its a movie that is a mystery. Stop asking for more details and just watch the dang thing.

Alright, Neill Blomkamp, let’s do it.

You blew us away with District 9. Elysium had some mixed reviews, but clearly wasn’t as good as your first movie.

And now we have Chappie. Some part Short Circuit, some part robot apocalypse AI shit. But we are bound to get some Sharlto Copley. You guys are BFFs.

But listen here Neill. Should you let me down, we are done. Forget my number, give me back my spare key, and we will negotiate over Fido later.

“You wot, Robo-mate? I’ll cap ur fookin’ head in I swear on me maker!”

Chappie is set in the ridiculously far future of 2016. And it is set in South Africa again, because why not. Director likes it there.

Somehow, South Africa is the leading front on robotics now. They have a huge weapons company, and they have developed a police robot! Yay! Now humans don’t have to worry about getting hurt as a police officer. Instead, indestructible robots, unhackable, perfect, are running the streets with a few cops. Crime is down, life is good, but the criminals that exist seem to be hyper crazy criminals. I guess.

Their creator, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) seems to still be pretty poor and not even an executive in his company. He has developed an AI software to represent “consciousness” and give a robot the ability to learn and become even greater than a normal robot! It will make him real! Company head (Sigourney Weaver) doesn’t care, so he takes a broken robot about to get scrapped (has an unchargable battery) to do his own secret testing, damn it!

Then he gets kidnapped, van and all, after leaving the facility. Huh, so much for lesser crime rate. He is captured by some people named Ninja (Ninja), Yolandi (Yo-Landi Visser), and Yankie/Amerika (Jose Pablo Cantillo). These guys owe 20 million to some criminal lord, Hippo (Brandon Auret), and it is all their fault. They wanted to take Deon’s money, but he is broke. So instead they want to get a robot to do some crimes.

Well, thanks to gun violence and his own desires, he activates the robot with his program, and Chappie (Sharlto Copley) is born! Anyways. Shenanigans, theft, guns, violence, and a jealous coworker (Hugh Jackman) who wanted to really create the ED-209’s from RoboCop.

What is this? A scene from Far Cry: Robo?

Damn it Neill. What did I tell you. What did I tell you like, 2 hours and 15 minutes ago? I said don’t let me down, Neill. I said I trusted you, Neill. I thought you were supposed to be the chosen one, Neill.

I should start with the good, before I start ranting accidentally. Chappie was delightful. The robot, not the movie. He was a beauty to watch, the CGI was really top notch and it fit so well in the real world. His voice got on my nerves early on, but it got better. Of course most of the jokes and great scenes involved him just learning and being a “kid” robot, ever trusting.

And that’s all I got.

Every single human in this movie is poorly written. Weaver is barely in the movie. Jackman is some polo wearing dude who tucks it into shorts, running around with a gun in an office, that no one gives a single fuck about for some reason. He is a bad villain annoyance with no great motivation, outside of maybe some psychopathic tendencies.

Deon is our smart character, so he is the most infuriating person everytime he does something stupid. Like, you know, not doing something about getting his robot back or stolen property or anything when it would be the easiest thing in the world. So many bad things happen, almost all of them his fault and he doesn’t seem to get it. None of this is addressed in the movie either, he is just very badly written as a plot device.

The trio of thugs? Well, first of all, they are violent criminals, rough enough to still be doing crime despite the robots. Ninja, a character played by a guy actually named Ninja, is insufferable on purpose, so I don’t have any sympathy despite any changes of heart he might have later. The other two are more sympathetic, but at the same time, still dicks.

The ending is super rushed, and kind of awkward. The big robots end up being a piece of shit, that just stall out some of the final action scenes.

And as a side note, the Hippo dude? Subtitles the entire film, outside of like three lines. And of all his lines, maybe 2 are in not-English, so I don’t get it.

And also the sound editing early on in the film was shit. And also again, I am really fucking disappointed this film wasn’t a masterpiece.

Hyping up these things is getting hard. But mostly because the next few are pretty meh, until I hit 1500.

What? Yes, what I am saying is welcome to my 1300th review, bitches. Time for a Milestone Review.

I think I have the next few figured out too. I am continuing with my theme of mid-2000s movies that I heard were terrible, never saw before, and want to give them a chance.

I remember seeing trailers for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Even my 10-12 year ago self thought the film looked too CGI and weird. But now it is a decade later. Maybe it was one of those films ahead of its time, like Speed Racer?

Or, maybe it is just terribad and perfect for the mid 2000’s.

One man’s CGI fest explosion is another mans CGI fest explosion.

Alternative history. And not just a history where I watched this movie 11 years ago. I’m talkin’ 1930’s. I don’t know the exact differences, but technology is a lot better in this timeline. We got Zeppelins. We got scientists. We got shenanigans.

Specifically, some famous scientists are disappearing and and no one knows why. Also not a lot of people care. So there is that. Some dude disappears at the start of the film even!

It’s amazing they could land (perch? float next to?) so well in that weather (snow storm? smog gas? volcano explosion?).

Wait, one person might care! Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) who is playing another character with the initials PP. She is a journalist and she just so happens to be looking into the missing scientists! Crazy! She is the one who cares.

She gets a secret message to meet up for information on who the next scientist to go missing will be. After heading out, she is surprised to find Dr. Walter Jennings (Trevor Baxter)! Some Dr. Totenkopf is getting all of the scientists, and Walter thinks he is next because he is the last of the group who worked on a secret project. SUDDENLY! GIANT ROBOTS ATTACK THE CITY.

Marching two by two, just like Moses said they would.

The robots seem to be indestructible. I don’t think they are technically attacking, they are more just walking the streets and looking like an army. The police collectively shrug and realize they can’t win, so they call on “Sky Captain,” a dude who owns his own private air force in New York called the Flying Legion. The Sky Captain is just Joe Sullivan (Jude Law). He is able to take out one of the robots using a bomb and making it fall down. I guess that is good enough for them.

The rest of the robots GTFO of town, back to outer space or who knows what. Joe saves Polly and takes the broken robot back to his base. Turns out Joe and Polly have a past together. They used to date, but Joe blames Polly for interfering too much and almost getting him killed. But she has information, so she can tag a long for now.

The Flying Legion head of science expert (Giovanni Ribisi) starts looking into the robot, while Joe and Polly go to investigate Dr. Jennings again!

If you came here for this like everyone else, then I have some disappointing news.

So, Jennings is almost dead. Damn. Too late. But before he croaks, he gives Polly two vials. Very secret these vials. They are apparently what Dr. Totenkopf is after. Joe don’t know ’bout the vials either, how sneaky. So that sucks, scientist is dead. Oh well, YOLO, back to the base, they find out science guy has found out secret information!

Oh no, the base is also now under attack, but by drone robots! But that means the scientist might not be able to tell us the news he found out! Yep, he gets taken during the defense. Oh noes!

Turns out he found out the origin of the robot control signal, so they know where to go to stop them. And it is on Earth! And hey, before he was taken he left them a map. Pretty sweet. So they head down to Tibet and the Himalayas!

What a relaxing plane ride!

Over in the mountains, Joe meets up with his old friend Kaji (Omid Djalili) and they all laugh and have good times. They get double crossed by some peeps, and almost blow up! Next thing they know, they are in Shangri-La. The evil doctor used monks to mine uranium. K. But the doctor is in another castle, so they have to go find him again.

And nowwwwwwww we finally get to meet Commander Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie), who commands her own Royal Navy flying force thing. They help Joe find the secret island of Dr. Totenkopf. Using submarine boats, they break in and find it inhabited with weird dinosaur like creatures. Shit, they also find robots hoarding animals into capsules. Two by two, a whole lot of different species.

Oh shit, they are going to Noah the Earth!

Did you guys notice me say Moses earlier?

Looks like the evil Dr. wants to reset the world. He is loading all the animals into a rocket. The rocket will blast off, blow up a lot of the world, then eventually return and repopulate. The World Of Tomorrow. In case you are wondering about the vials, as you should be, they actually contain the “perfect human” DNA. A new Adam and Eve.

So does that mean the doctor wants to kill himself? Not at all. He died twenty years ago. OHHHH SNAP.

That’s right. But the robots he made have been continuing with the plan, doing shenanigans, killing people, and all that jazz. Fucking robots.

Look at them. Always fucking shit up.

Needless to say, our heroes get stuck on the rocket going up into outer space. Full of animals, angry robots, and dead scientists. Oh no!

So Joe figures, hey, he is a captain of the SKIES. He should save everyone and blow up the rocket alone on the ship. Well, Polly doesn’t listen. Again. They free all the animals and also fuck up the ship. Thankfully, there is just one escape pod left.

And do they reach it? Do they?

Not if Zordon’s son has anything to say about it.

Mannnnnn. I can’t believe this movie got so many great reviews.

SCatWoT was one of the first movies ever to use CGI like this. To give us an old timey, futuristic, retro feel. Everything was intentionally done with a specific style in mind. And that style could have not felt more boring to me.

Fuck. This movie dragged on. First of all, it was only rated PG. So the action was only PG levels of exciting. This probably a false complaint.

The real issue is they were going for this super old feel. Maybe specifically a 60s/70s sci-fi b-movie feel. But it was incredibly dull the entire time. I just wanted it to end. Paltrow was down right terrible in this movie. I don’t know if it was her or the director, but there was close to zero emotion the entire film.

Angelina Jolie is obviously barely in this movie, despite most of the advertisements featuring her and her eye patch. I really assumed she was the sky captain.

BUT IT WAS JUST SO SLOW. Which obviously is my main complaint. The entire movie just felt brown and grey, very unexciting colors. I was hoping with that much CGI it would be a bit flashier and exciting, especially on Blu-Ray. But no. Slow. Dreadfully boring. And fuck, this is one of the worst movies I have had to review for a milestone review.

Which is the issue here. I found it hard to be funny, because I had to type out the whole plot outline, and found it a struggle just to remember what in the fuck happened.

I dunno if anyone ever watched this movie. But re-watch it. If you liked it, let me know why. If you still like it and can ignore nostalgia, I just. Just help me out here.