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Movie review rant 2019

Discussion in 'Zoo Cafe' started by littleRedPanda, 31 Dec 2018.

  1. Batto

    Batto Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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  2. ThylacineAlive

    ThylacineAlive Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Looks to be just about the same flashy, story-less "please just look at the visuals and turn your brain off to everything else" garbage they gave us in the last two films. I especially enjoy how that little girl, already an expert in everything exposition, manages to rapid fire two arrows with pinpoint precision into the dino's eye using her single fire crossbow while trained soldierswith military-grade weaponry haven't done sh*t to these guys for five movies (except for when FK needed Blue to be incapacitated for most of the movie).

    ~Thylo
     
  3. Yi Qi

    Yi Qi Well-Known Member

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    Didn't really like it. For one thing, the plot was so cliched and predictable. The Nasutoceratops being portrayed as friendly and good because they're the herbivores? Check? The Allosaurus being a carnivore and thus the antagonistic role? Check. Infants survive? Check. I would have made the Nasutoceratops the more antagonistic, being an aggressive bull in a sort of musth, and the Allosaur is just a sort of Accidental hero in that scenario, still portrayed as a dangerous if normal animal. I would also show some of the consequences of the dinosaurs in the ecosystem, maybe showing the Nasutoceratops leaving the forest barren and scaring the native animals off.

    That said, the cinematography and atmosphere is nice, and I like how the Allosaurus at least had inwards-facing palms .
     
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  4. Brum

    Brum Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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  5. TZDugong

    TZDugong Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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  6. ThylacineAlive

    ThylacineAlive Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Anyone else have a feeling that the one more MCU Spider-Man film is just to finish up the current ark and then that's it?

    ~Thylo
     
  7. TZDugong

    TZDugong Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    I hope not. It would seem a little bit odd considering Spider-Man is probably the most popular character that Marvel has and he figures to be a big player in whatever the MCU does next. I wouldn't be totally shocked, but I'd be more than a little surprised.
     
  8. Brum

    Brum Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Apparently the new deal includes one more solo film and one event film, so it looks like he'll get a proper send off.
     
  9. ThylacineAlive

    ThylacineAlive Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Yeah but here's the thing, does Sony care? Unfortunately it's not up to Marvel whether he stays or goes.

    Hard to imagine he'd die in Avenger 4 or whatever they end up doing. But we'll have to wait and see regardless. I'd still love to get to watch this Peter Parker grow up and actually age through the years, but it seems we might not ever get that.

    ~Thylo
     
  10. Brum

    Brum Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Tonight I went and saw a movie that wasn't based on a comic or wasn't a kids film! :eek: I watched Rambo: Last Blood and it was awesome! Quite possibly the best Rambo movie to date, mainly because the effects were up to par and the story was as compelling as First Blood. I went in with a sense of trepidation at first and kept thinking back to the mess that was The Expendables franchise, but what I forgot was that, when push comes to shove, Stallone is a genuinely good actor.
    There's obviously some fan service and callbacks but they're not over done. there's even a montage (because it's a Stallone movie) which doesn't come across as cheesy. If you're a fan of Sly, the franchise, or just action movies in general then this is the movie for you. A well deserved 9/10 from me, and if there hadn't already been so many good actors this year then I'd be tipping Sly for an Oscar.
     
  11. Brum

    Brum Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    New Star Wars trailer. My opinion is... Meh!
     
  12. Ebirah766

    Ebirah766 Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    Disney is like: stor wa
     
  13. ThylacineAlive

    ThylacineAlive Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Th-they're... they're riding HORSES on the top of a Star Destroyer which just rose out of the ice of a space iceberg...........................................................

    ~Thylo
     
  14. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    Worst part - the CGI tear falling from her eye at 1.35. How do you make even a falling tear look so fake?!


    They're not horses - they have tusks. They are alien animals which just happen to look and move exactly like horses. But with tusks. :p
     
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  15. Batto

    Batto Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    "We're Horses, Horses with Tusks! We may look like aliens, but we are Horses, Horses with Tusks!"

     
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  16. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    Terminator: Dark Fate

    Terminator movies. They take and they take, man. This next one will be the one which sets things right, won't it? This next one won't suck, right?

    Quick question. Have you seen Terminator 2? Yes? Then you've seen Terminator: Dark Fate. The movie is (almost literally) just T2 made again. Of course all the Terminator movies have the same basic plot - bad terminator from the future is trying to terminate a present-day person while good guy/terminator from the future is sent back to stop it - but Dark Fate is not just that plot outline, it is T2 remade except with John replaced with a girl and Arnold replaced with a girl.

    This movie is getting absolutely savaged by the critics and (apparently) is bombing at the box office. But ... I liked it. I do get why it is being lambasted and I agree with a lot of it. Yet I still liked it. I think that if this was just any old action movie it would be widely hailed as being pretty great. But it isn't just any old action movie, it is a Terminator movie, so you do have to compare it to the originals. Firstly, it does feel (and look) much more like a real Terminator movies than any of the post-T2 sequels. Probably this is because they are just remaking T2, but it still looks really good on the whole. Most of the actors are good in their roles. The action scenes are really well done and most of the CGI is great (not all of it - there is a lot of ropey stuff in there, but also a lot of great CGI, in particular the de-aging of Sarah, John and the T-800 at the beginning of the movie). The movie really is a whole lot better than the trailers would lead you to believe.

    My main criticism of the casting is the guy that plays the liquid metal terminator. He is just bland. I get that the terminators are for infiltration - they have to blend seemlessly into the crowds, like the T-800 does - but all of them still exuded menace. They can't help it, that's just the way killer cyborgs are. The T-800, the T-1000, even the T-X, they all looked like they were a second away from killing everyone around them. This new guy, though, he's about as menacing as an unplugged toaster. He looks like a puppy who wants to come in out of the rain. He looks like he should be the solo dad on some sitcom where he is trying to raise three adorable girl-babies and his name is Teddy Bear and the name of the sitcom is Bear With Me.

    First up, the main reasons that it seems this movie is getting ripped to shreds by critics:

    1) John Connor dies. As a kid. At the very start of the movie. Doubleyou Tee Eff, James Cameron. What the hell is wrong with you? It's 1998, Judgement Day has been stopped because of T2, John and Sarah are relaxing at a beach bar in Guatemala, drinking mojitos or whatever, and then some random T-800 walks up and shoots John in the chest, point-blank, kills him dead. Mission accomplished, he walks off and renders the whole of T2 just utterly pointless. As so many critics have pointed out, this is exactly what happened with Aliens 3 where they just killed off Newt and Hicks and gave the middle finger to anyone who cared about the previous movie. Total dick move. The stupidest part of this is that it was completely unnecessary from the stand-point of telling this movie's story. But they had to get him out of the picture so they could turn the movie into point 2 below...

    2) {deleted by mods}

    Nevertheless, as I said, I liked the movie overall. I thought Mackenzie Davis was good as the "enhanced human", Natalia Reyes was serviceable as "the new John Connor", Linda Hamilton was okay - she really didn't do much except act snarky - and Arnold Schwarzenegger played a much better aged T-800 than was portrayed in Terminator: Genisys.

    So the movie starts out with an almost-pre-credit-scene where young John Connor is killed in an offhand manner. The de-aging here is great. Arnold looked a bit off - I think because I'm just so familiar with how 80s Arnold looked - but Sarah and John looked spot-on. Then the T-800 walks off and (as is explained later in the movie) he has no purpose now that John is dead and he's not getting any orders from Skynet, so he just goes off and rescues a woman and her kid from an abusive relationship (unspoken: I presume he brutally slaughtered the husband) and shacks up with them because having a family gives him purpose, and apparently killing John made him sad and gave him a conscience. This ... was weird. It really goes against everything we knew about T-800s from previous movies. They can learn things to make them better infiltrators, but would a terminator just go off and become a family-man and start a drapery business when his mission is complete? Maybe, I guess. Seems not something that a killer cyborg would actually do though.

    But that's not all - he wanted to give Sarah purpose because he had killed her son, so he started sending her text messages (yes, yes, that sounds creepy but let me finish) .. he started sending her text messages with coordinates of incoming terminators. Something-something about disturbances in the time-something-something meant that he would know in advance when and where they would be arriving. So Sarah packs up her weapons and frags the new terminator when it arrives. She's been doing this for twenty years by the time Grace (the enhanced human) and the teddy-bear terminator arrive.

    Teddy-bear terminator is a new kind of terminator which has a metal skeleton and a liquid metal outer coating. Like a chocolate-covered candy bar, except it will kill you. The liquid metal part can form a "human" by itself, in effect making two terminators (the liquid metal one and the metal skeleton one). Why has this kind of terminator not been seen before - indeed, why does Skynet keep sending T-800s back when it has models like the T-1000 and T-X? Weeeeeell.... turns out that John and Sarah did stop Skynet after all. Judgement Day never happened. Instead a totally different evil AI arose, called Legion, and there was a totally different Judgement Day. (And, yes, you can quite legitimately read the "totally different"s in that sentence in a completely sarcastic way).

    How does the T-800 still exist if Skynet was never created ? How did anything in the first two movies even happen? Shut up, that's how.

    Teddy-bear terminator tracks down Dani's home and copies her father (i.e. kills him, off-screen), then goes to her workplace which is a factory where she is just the best worker there because she is a girl and the hero and better than any of the men. That's just how the real world should be, all right! Grace also arrives at the factory, just in time, and saves Dani... sigh, look, just go watch Terminator 2 again so that I don't have to write out the entire plot of that movie. It's the same. Nothing is different except the sexes of the heroes.

    The first thirty or forty minutes of the movie have great action scenes, but they are just a little bit too familiar, like half-remembered action scenes from a better movie, but certainly they are still enjoyable. Where the movie does differ somewhat is that Sarah Connor is reintroduced to save Grace and Dani from the teddy-bear terminator on a bridge. How did she know to go there? I dunno. If she'd got a text about coordinates she should have gone to where they first arrived from the future, not some bridge in the middle of nowhere. She manages to blurt out a bored-sounding "I'll be back", of course, because Terminator, before Grace and Dani steal her truck and take off. Sarah tracks them down again because Grace has crashed hard (she needs constant meds to keep her enhanced body functioning) and they team up. Grace uses, um, magic (?) to find out where the text messages are coming from and reveals that that location is also tattooed on her midriff. Again, just why ever not? Shut up again.

    They go to the location which is a cabin in the woods and find, dun dun DUN, the T-800 which killed John Connor! What!? I was so surprised and ... oh, who am I kidding, they had it in the trailer. Idiots.

    That's the end of anything different. The rest of the movie continues on as T2, same scenes, same action set-pieces, just that instead of a good T-800, a lady and teenager fighting a liquid metal terminator, now it is a good T-800, a lady, another lady, and a teenager fighting a liquid metal terminator. But at the very end, instead of dropping the bad terminator into molten steel they (weirdly) go the T3 route - taking the power source out of Grace's body and shoving it into the skull of the teddy-bear terminator, killing him, the T-800, and also Grace dies in the process. Why exactly does Grace the enhanced human have some sort of nuclear power cell inside her body? SHUT UP!!

    Summary: not as good as the original two Terminator movies, better than any of the other Terminator movies. It is basically a straight remake of T2. The acting and action are fine (even good). There are all sorts of plotholes and stupid things I can pick at but on the whole I liked it - but I do get why the critics are roasting it.
     
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  17. TeaLovingDave

    TeaLovingDave Moderator Staff Member 10+ year member

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    Other than Salvation, which I respected for trying something different even if I didn't particularly enjoy it.... although I would have respected it a lot less had they gone with the original ending which was scrapped and re-filmed at the last minute due to the negative reception from test audiences ;) an ending which funnily enough has more-or-less the same issues as the beginning of this one.
     
  18. Ebirah766

    Ebirah766 Well-Known Member 5+ year member

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    Well then you're lucky :/
     
  19. Brum

    Brum Well-Known Member 10+ year member

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    Well I saw this earlier and, as much as I hate to admit it, this really appeals to me. I'm going to blame it on nostalgia...
     
  20. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    I know what you mean. I think it looks really dumb, but at the same time I kinda want to see it. This trailer is better than the first trailer too. The whole "we're family" and "one last time" has unfortunate Fast and Furious vibes though...



    Here's the latest Jumanji trailer. I really want to see this, it looks great. Bethany is a horse! Guffaw. It comes out in New Zealand on 26 December, which is a weird release date.

     
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