Films The Official bit-tech Movie Thread - What have you seen lately?

Alien Romulus: hmm/10

Starts as Alien, continues as Aliens and ends as Prometheus, need a repeat viewing tbh but overall I liked what I saw, the 2 lead cast play their part well even if the rest are ultimately forgettable, defiantly a 4K/Atmos experience if you've the hardware for it.

The Wild Robot: 6.5/10

"this generations bambi" they say, god what a generation of pussies we've raised. how this is rated a whopping 8.5 on imdb is a mystery, don't get me wrong there was potential for a cracking story here but it plays it too safe, especially the last 30 mins.

 

I haven't seen it yet but the aesthetic, plot and themes kinda remind me of those John Lewis christmas ads. Aggressively positive and saccharine, you know?

Then again I liked Lilo & Stitch, so who knows. We'll see.

 

Transformers one: 8.5/10

I haven't followed transformers since I was kid in the 80's and even then I was too poor to own any. but this was surprisingly really good, I genuinely chuckled in places and it was fascinating how you could see the friendship between Prime and Megatron slowly break down throughout the film, I wonder if they'll make a sequel to it, maybe transformers the early years.

deffo going on the keep pile.

 

Joker 2: hmmmm.

This is such a hard film to review. I liked some of its raw materials - Gaga and Phoenix are fantastic, as is Brendan Gleeson (isn't he always?), the music is great. Some interesting ideas are laid out - the psycho-allure of unstable men, and the damaged women and dangerous copycats who gravitate towards them; the harms done to inmates by the prison system; the nature of personal identity in society, and the question of whether it's constructed or innate; celebrity, and the kernel of unstable narcissism at its centre; the televisual transformation of crime and punishment into spectacle and entertainment.

It's got pacing problems and a lack of shape, though. The film is very long and spends much of its runtime going nowhere, or going back on itself. Finally it rug-pulls and s u b v e r t s e x p e c t a t i o n s in a way bound to disappoint anyone who saw the first film. Like Star Wars ep8, it throws out the overall tone and direction of the first film's ending and backtracks, meanders and farts about. It neglects its characters, its story doesn't really go anywhere. It's just all round a bit unsatisfying. Interesting, but unsatisfying.

Something my mother and I both noticed was that the film has a sort of identity crisis (thematically appropriate, but I can't credit that the irony is deliberate). At times the city looks like modern 21st-century new york, at others like Gotham. At one point it is actually called New York, then 15 minuted later it is referred to as Gotham. Is Gotham a borough or district within NY in this universe? Or is it just a script goof? The sets in the first film were grimy 50s, all rotary phones and ceramic tiles and red brick. At times it still is in this film, but at other times modern NY looks exactly like modern NY. Allusions to 9/11, yellow cabs, modern celebrity trials, an abundance of daylight scenes and so on pervade the second half, undermining the Gotham sense of a grimy, seedy Noir metropolis. I actually wonder where the script writer/s originally imagined the story taking place.

I loved the first film but found its sometimes maudlin gloominess tedious. I enjoyed its dark delight, the tentative steps it took towards the joy of mania and psychosis - a common report of manic depressives is that the mania is breathtaking. The first film suggested Arthur Fleck was moving gradually towards that end of his psyche. Now he isn't. The whole of Joker 2 is sullen, depressive and navel-gazingly gloomy.

There's a place for this film. Stripped of the expectations summoned by the first film, stripped of the DC setting and character names, it is a good film on its own merits. But you can't strip those things away. Harley's character is wasted, Joker as he began to emerge in film 1 is wasted, the settings of Gotham and Arkham are here in name only. Film 1 lined up 10 ducks in a row and film 2 went "no, we shall not shoot those ducks. We shall aim at the duck that film 1 already shot. And then we won't shoot that, either."

Audience expectations and legacy IPs matter, and I can't fathom why this film put so much of that under the bus in favour of doing something nobody expected or asked for. It's like asking for one meal at a restaurant and being served something else. What is served may be perfectly fine. But it isn't what you asked for.

edit - this is a good synopsis of the shortcomings of this film. Although the internet narrative about how bad this film is has gotten seriously overblown; it isn't "really bad", it's just not that good.

 

Gladiator 2.

Not much different from the original to be honest. Fight scenes seem wooden and it all gets a bit silly later on when the arena is filled with water and sharks and the battle takes place on two ships.

Same plot as original, Maximus's son grows up and during an epic battle loses his bird to an arrow and he gets enslaved and has to fight in the arena like before.

The CGI is ok, like in the baboon scenes etc but as the film goes on it all becomes very predictable and the finalé is "I knew that was coming".

5/10

 

Just saw it, found it underwhelming. I appreciated all the historical accuracy and detail, and the production values, and that. But the actual plot?

It does that Episode 9 thing of just opening with a text crawl that tells you what the stakes and villain are. Welcome, audience! There are two emperors. They are bad. Rome is ****ed. Will anyone be able to save it? [cut to handsome caucasian man with strong jaw who, spoiler alert, will be able to save Rome.]

I dunno, it was very shallow. The emperors were silly and underdeveloped. You're just told they're evil emperors in the text crawl and then there they are, being evil and imperial and crazy. They demand blood, they defy the crowds, they are abritary and cruel.

Film 1 did it with magnitudes more subtlety and character development.

The protagonist's loved ones perish, setting the stakes for his quest for vengeance. But unlike in film 1, it's just all a bit...sudden, and rushed? His wife has 3 lines of dialogue and then is dead. He is a slave 10 minutes into the film. It doesn't really have the same arc, the same weight, as when Maximus fell from his position of calm greatness to sudden turmoil and peril.

The early martial arts scenes are brilliant, probably the best produced thing in the film. The fight choreography is superb. But later on, once it's CGI sharks and 20-30 on-screen fighters, and armies, and all that - it just dilutes the audience's personal investment in the action.

The first film had a very subtle, almost undefinable quality of slowness, studiousness, pace about it. It took its time getting to the action and when it did, the action had dramatic tension. Here, the plot is fine on paper but something about the pacing and exposition is off. Nothing felt serious or realistic.

The elephant in the room is the number of 'homages' to film 1: dialogue quotes, relics, props, settings, actors, flashbacks. They mitigate the obnoxiousness of this quite well with a 'heritage' subplot: our protagonist is discovering, remembering, inheriting the legacy of Maximus. But this doesn't totally mitigate the cringe factor of so many clumsy nods to film 1. It grates, like a younger sibling breathlessly repeating the jokes of their older sibling.

Denzel is the best thing about the film, in my opinion. A great performance and a really interesting villain whose horrible schemings I could watch for a whole HBO season. The emperors are extremely one-dimensional and a waste of the casted talent. Paul Mescal is actually pretty good in his own right, but cast in a 'be like Maximus' role, overshadowed by Russell Crowe's amazing performance in film 1, and given very little to work with by the script, he is forgettable in this.

The script is probably the weakest link in all of it. Film 1 is popularly remembered for its action and its visual splendour, but what elevated it from the fierce competiton on those points was its heavy, philosophical, political, ponderous script. It unironically turned big, sad concepts over in its hands - the death of a city, the idealism and sins of an empire, the satisfaction and misery of war - and somehow, through excellent writing and editing, managed to not seem pompous or pretentious. This film, unfortunately, does feel pompous and pretentious, like it's doing a clumsy impersonation of its predecessor's poetic and philosophical aspirations.

I came out of it wanting very much to watch more Denzel Washington films, and wanting to rewatch the original Gladiator. But not wanting to ever rewatch Gladiator 2.

edit -
Unrelated, but Godzilla -1.0

Straight 10, I can't believe how good this film was. Saw it a while back but forgot to write it up. I could write 5,000 words about how interesting and unusual it is on today's cinematic landscape, but suffice to say - it's a black-and-white Godzilla film featuring a goofy, kids-toy-dinosaur origin-accurate Godzilla model straight out of the early films. And it made me cry.

That's a contradiction in terms, and a magic trick of film-making. If you haven't seen it, see it. Please.

 

The Virgin Suicides

"We set to the impossible task of trying to forget them."

I was too young to understand and appreciate what this film was doing, first time around. Now it hits like a train. Had the same problem with Sofia Coppola's other big film, Lost in Translation. Both very subtle, very sad and really important.

TVS is preoccupied with the moral panic of the Christian middle class in America in the 80s - the Mothers Against groups, the hearings, the book and music burnings, the boycotts and protests at horror films, rock music and fantasy media like D&D. TVS studies how this well-meaning conservative movement - like the women's rights situation in the middle east, like arranged marriages in India - is advanced by parents claiming to act in the best interests of their children, but has perverse outcomes and does terrible damage to the people it's supposed to be protecting, ultimately driving them to self-destruction.

It shows depression, listlessness, neuroticism, sensitivity and angst as natural parts of the adolescent experience - both male and female. But where the film's boys are allowed to more or less run free and do as they like, the girls are jealously, fearfully protected and locked away by their parents, who see corruption and danger everywhere outside their own home. The boys do alright, in the end, while the girls implode completely. The parents' inability to understand their children, their relentless war on the very nature of adolescence (its sex, its late nights, its music, its parties, its alcohol), is punctuated at the last by a rage-inducing voice-over from the girls' mother, claiming: "they never wanted for love, those girls. There was so much love in our home. I have no idea why they did it." Even confronted with the final damnation of her values by a quadruple suicide in response to her atrocious parenting, the mother clings to her delusional self-image as a good Christian. In her mind, she tried her best to build walls against the sin of the world, but the sin got in anyway and destroyed her daughters. The possibility that they wasted away and died because of her wall-building is an insight of which she is not capable.

A further perfectly calculated rage-inducing moment near the film's end sees middle aged, wealthy party-goers mocking the girls post mortem, as a man in a tuxedo feigns suicide by throwing himself into a swimming pool, exclaiming "Goodbye cruel world! No, no, I'm a teenager, you don't understand, I have real problems." The running theme is crystallized in this moment: a generation of adults who refused to take their children seriously, who credited them with no agency or capacity for responsibility, who coddled and stifled them and imposed a pitifully out-of-touch religious value set on them despite bountiful evidence that it was doing them real, lasting harm. And then, when the children broke, they were scorned for their weakness.

This attitude still crops up, a lot. The teenage suicide epidemic alluded to in TVS never went away: it got worse. It continues to this day. And every time a teenager, pushed beyond their endurance by societal pressure, parental control and the total deprivation of agency, chooses to quit, a lot of people still roll out this scornful tone: they don't have real problems, how silly. Peter Marin said of homeless and at-risk men: "an irony asserts itself: by being in need of help, men forfeit the right to it." A similar contradiction expresses itself in our attitude to teenagers. They cannot be trusted, they cannot be given independence or control, because they're too immature and lack reason and perspective. So we must control their lives for their own good. But when they kill themselves, that is not our fault as their self-appointed guardians and authority figures: it is their own fault, for making a stupid decision.

In reality, we can't have it both ways. Either (1) teenagers are responsible and mature enough to be given control of their lives and freedom to muck about with their peers unsupervised, and therefore can also be to any extent blamed for choosing to kill themselves; or (2) they are not responsible or mature enough, must be denied control and locked in the home safe and warm, and it's our fault when they kill themselves.

Other notes: the cinematography and use of colour is sublime. The soundtrack is an old favourite and meshes perfectly with the subject matter. The acting is spot on across the board.

It's weird how I just couldn't get this film when I was, myself, an adolescent. It did nothing for me. In a parallel case, I tried to introduce my kid cousins many years ago to Studio Ghibli via Spirited Away and they were nonplussed, finding it boring and simple. These films are both about developmental ages but are not aimed at those age groups.

edit - the script (which apparently borrows very directly from the novel) is absolutely fantastic, I kept trying to memorise quotes as I heard them.

edit 2 - I want to share this comment from a guy on YT, it's so sad yet affirming of the film's artistic integrity to hear how true to life it was:

 

Bad Boys Ride or Die

I wasn't expecting much going in but, jesus christ, that was ****ing bad.

 

My extremely loose and unresearched theory is that if the marketing for a film is ugly as sin and has hideous colour palettes, it's probably crap. It held true for Thor: Love & Thunder.

War of the Rohirrim

This was actually fine. Really serviceable film, not stand-out memorable but nothing wrong with it. Basically the only problems it has are (1) it being a LotR IP and having tie-in obligations means lots of eye-roll-inducing plugs of familiar places, music, characters, motifs; and (2) the script (specifically dialogue) is pretty weak. It's a weird combo: the screenplay is good, the story is good, but the dialogue mostly sucks. Thankfully most of the film's storytelling is visual, and the visuals are really nice. Great visual design and artwork. Some really effective moments, particularly in the second half when it gets going properly (and your brain has had time to adjust to the fact that you're watching saturday afternoon animé style animation on a cinema screen).

The character design of the female lead left me cold, though. I never quite escaped thinking that she just looked kinda dumb. Bright outfits, bright red hair, shiny big eyes. Basic waifu. Redeemed by being well written, well voiced and well used, but still a bit cringe on the face of it.

The cinema was practically empty, which is sad. I think, paradoxically, that being a LotR IP has actually hurt this film more than it's helped. If it were an independent story in its own setting, it probably would have attracted curious alt-culture people. As it is, it neither attracted curious alt-culture people (who saw a soulless corporate cash-grab) or Lord of the Rings fans (who saw an embarrassing animé tie-in). And it's a pity, because it's actually a good film on its own merits.

 

I recently rewatched *The Virgin Suicides*, and it definitely hits differently as you get older. The haunting vibe and how it focuses on memory, loss, and longing are so impactful now. I think it’s one of those films that gets more powerful the more life experience you have.

Sometimes, I’ll stream films like this on free platforms like 123movie. It’s super convenient because you can dive into personal favorites or classics without jumping through hoops to find them. Perfect for random movie nights at home.

 

I agree. I found it boring in my 20s and existentially terrifying in my 30s. It's a bit like how teens can look at grisly horror and laugh and joke - because, of course, they have no real-world experience of such things for the gore and dread to interact with. But in my 30s, having seen and heard a few things, I find myself ever-more sensitized and unable to cope with a lot of it. It's different knowing what really happens in the world. And understanding your own mortality properly, too - I remember, as a teen, having a serious case of main character syndrome, feeling like things wouldn't happen to me, or if they did, I'd definitely recover and it'd just be another twist in the story of my life. This surely influences how close to the flames of suicide and self-endangerment we often danced as teens, not properly cognisant of our own vulnerability.

Legend (1986)

"One unicorn still lives, my lord. But she's a female; she has no power."
"Only the power of creation! Find her."

I thought this was great, honestly.

The contemporary reviews were damning. They scorned it as nonsensical, trashy, indulgent, confused, you name it. And that's a valuable object lesson in the extent to which, at different moments in cultural evolution, we have different tolerances and appetites. There was no appetite for this film at the time. I suspect a lot of people would like it now. It nails the bizarre, alien, otherworldly, dream-like quality you'd hope to capture with a really good Feywild setting in D&D - so often missing in a lot of fantasy, which puts on the costumes of fantasy but then just delivers straight adventure.

This ****ing film, though! It's definitely saccharine and cheesy, but it's also confident and unapologetic. No hedging their bets, Marvel style, with self-aware irony or weak humour. It just goes balls-to-the-wall on classic fantasy and fairytale tropes and dares to be simultaneously adult and whimsical about it. Princesses, unicorns, goblins, huge horned devils, swamps, banshees. The lack of irony or cynicism is precisely what must have doomed it in the 80s, when everything had to be gritty cyberpunk and cynical dystopia.

It did, however, inherit and accept the darkness and morbidity of the 80s, which for a modern viewer has the effect of elevating it above much fantasy of the time. Most of the 80s fantasy I've seen is aimed squarely at children and teens, and patronisingly assumes that the most terrifying thing a fantasy audience can handle is David Bowie's crotch. The combination of classic fantasy/fairytale sensibilities and 80s darkness results in some of the best moments: a unicorn hunted and attacked by grey-black goblins in a sunlit clearing full of bright pink cherry blossom, for example. Or a monstrous Silent Hill style gaoler who butchers, bakes and eats those unlucky enough to fall into his kitchen-dungeon. Or the classic gigantic red devil, cloven-hoofed and built like Gregor Clegane, charging at people with a manic smile and a giant sword.

I don't know, I suppose it is all very cheesy and cliché. Every moving piece in the film is borrowed from somewhere, and it especially borrows from Alien, Lord of the Rings and 1E D&D literature (to name the ones I spotted - there are undoubtedly dozens more). But so what? The longer I spend in the fantasy ecosystem, the less I even consider plagiarism a valid concept, because absolutely every fantasy IP in existence borrows the hell out of everything. Tolkein arguably founded the genre as we know it now, and he quite openly and wilfully borrowed most of his major concepts from classical literature and fairytales, setting the precedent that fantasy fiction will always be an ourobouros, mashing together every cool concept in reach to see what might happen. In that regard, Legend is a totally solid fantasy film.

Apparently the version now widely circulated is a 2002 Directors Cut which puts back in a lot of stuff taken out for the theatrical release, so I can imagine that the theatrical cut might have been kinda lame and tame. The darkest, scariest material is - not coincidentally - the most important stuff in the film. There's a moment in the final act where the heroes are sneaking around the gaoler's kitchen and Jack accidentally places his hand on a perfectly real-looking broken skull covered in fresh gore, and it burns his skin - because, we infer, the gaoler's spittle (which flies visibly from his tusks every time he exhales) is acidic. And I went "yeeeeesh" and winced. Very early on in the film, in the set-up, a magical blizzard unleashed by the attack on the unicorn tears through the land, flash-freezing innocent locals. The opening shot of the devastation passes over a baby, arms outstretched, frozen in its crib, and later when the goblins are picking delightedly through the ruins, they joke at its expense. I bet these moments didn't make the theatrical cut, and they're vital in establishing stakes and setting tone. It's really not a kid's film.

It's uncontroversial that the sets, costumes and visual design generally are fantastic. Even the detractors of the time admitted it looked amazing, and it was an Oscar nominee for best makeup. Tim Curry as The Darkness, and the banshee in the swamp, are two monster costumes that I could watch all day, they're just so good. There's also some really good animal handling; I know unicorns are gay, lame etc. but I don't care, the unicorn scenes are a wonder to behold. Animal handling and set design come together there, with huge, lush forest scenes - which are a mixture of studio and location - bursting with real and SFX plant life, streams and huge trees, packed with detail (mice hanging from branches, real songbirds sitting on actors' shoulders) - and mature horses with unicorn horns stuck to their faces, running at full gallop through the whole lot of it. I'm not sure you'd be able to even make a practical scene like that now. It probably didn't meet modern animal welfare standards.

Acting wise, the good guys are boring as **** and the bad guys are fantastic. Tim Curry steals the show. He's just a scary-ass dude when he wants to be, and he's perfect for hammy, over-the-top roles like this. I'd watch it again tomorrow, just for him - and the unicorns.

 

I remember that movie, the trauma of it's still with me 3 decades later.

 

Aye, I put it along with such films as Watership Down for giving me nightmares. I always remember the bit when the cyclops gets crushed in the door/access point thing for some reason.

 

Wasn't that Krull?

 

You may be right...

 

<adds Krull to the list>

 

Star Trek : Section 31.
Dear sweet baby jesus, please make them stop.

 

It's this awful? I haven't watched New Trek since hmmm Discovery season 3.

 

IMHO Yes, and so far I think I've enjoyed all of the recent spin offs