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jason2012-142-687325
Reviews
Terminator Genisys (2015)
Terminators as far as the eye can see
I knew from the trailers this was going to be bad. I went along more for morbid curiosity, as perhaps people might have done in the 19th century to see the bearded lady or the deformed midget.
I can't say this is dreadful, because it isn't. This film is in fact the true epitome of mediocre. Its like it was made for TV. I find myself comparing this movie to the likes of Terminator 2 and all I see are Hollywood dollar signs everywhere.
What happened to story telling? It's just gone out the window, along with believable science, physics, character development, suspense, and any kind of moral message or theme.
so what about the script and characters? I honestly believe the script for this movie was written in one afternoon by a small group of 9 year old boys who were also playing xbox at the same time.
What about the effects of this movie? well, they are as good as any. Actually, this movie is one long CGI showcase for whatever special effects studio was contracted to do all the action scenes. But I don't really go to the cinema and see a movie and then say "wow, the effects were so good, that I didn't care at all about the story".
and what about the plot? You could easily just write down on paper random phrases like "travels back in time to 1984" "John Conner" "Skynet" "memetic alloy super robot" and "escapes from the explosion unharmed" jumble them all up and then assemble them in any order, and it would be the exact same movie. Everything is explained away with science fiction buzzwords and deus ex machinas.
the music is nothing special. hans zimmer was involved in some way, but I suspect his involvement was mostly to have his name on the credits and get a load of money, and not much else. The classic terminator score is no-where to be seen (or heard).
By the end of the 120 minutes I couldn't care less whether skynet destroyed the planet or not. I just wanted to leave the cinema and go do something else.
The saddest part of all is that I can foresee a sequel to this, possibly without Schwarzenegger. They have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and just gone along with the "well, its time travel so we can do anything we like" justification. Its become like Lost. In the end, nothing made sense and the explanation was always "well, its because it is the island".
This movie could have been called "time travelling robots versus the humans" and it would have been the exact same nonsense.
That's why it gets 5/10. This movie isn't even bad, it's too mediocre to deserve to be called bad.
Project Almanac (2015)
painful to watch
The title and premise of this movie, as well as its more than reasonable budget of 12 million dollars, might give you the idea that this is a movie that was reasonably acceptable. However, MTV is involved, so they might as well have taken the 12 million and made a big money bonfire, because the world is now slightly worse off for the existence of this film.
I tried watching it once and failed. The second time, I had to skip past the boring "getting the time machine to work" bits (the first 45 minutes of the film). I made it to the end but only just.
There's so many things wrong with this movie. I'm not sure where to start but let's try to rank them in order.
1) cinematography) So, I haven't seen camera-work worse than this since I watched (or tried to watch) that bonkers scientology movie with Travolta in it. This movie looks like it was filmed by the Japanese cameraman in Gremlins 2 (remember him?). Found footage style is entirely redundant in this movie. It adds nothing except nausea.
2) Science) the science in this movie is nothing more than a plot device to justify the main story arc of the film which is essentially "what would a bunch of horrid teenage Americans do if they could do whatever they wanted." And boy it shows, because they didn't bother to do any technical research whatsoever and presumed that the MTV target audience would be too dumb to realise or too dumb to care. Lazy.
3) Characters) do they live? do they die? who gives a damn. Its just bratty American teenagers indulging their own desires and selfish fantasies. That's almost all the do throughout the entire film. Yawn. This movie has been made 10 trillion times already.
4) Its been done before. This is like the 1,000th time travel movie now, and of all the time travel movies I've seen, this one is the worst.
I won't spoil the ending, because, the movie is so shallow and content-less you won't care about it by the time it comes around.
Poltergeist (2015)
are there no classic movies that are safe?
Yet another movie that has been remade to squeeze a few extra dollars out of the pockets of the unfortunate public.
This movie is the pits. This movie is like they didn't even try to do a good remake. You've got all your boring, predictable, modern family in there... i'm just surprised there wasn't a gay one or a transvestite or whatever, but let's add them up for good measure.
Heroic father who is down on his luck or something. Check Wife who is a brilliant genius in some way and also attractive and thin, but also unbelievably loving and caring about the kids. Check. Nerdy little glasses kid who saves the day like always. Check Sassy teenage b*tch who is just full of attitude. Check Cute little girl as the object of the fetch quest. Check Narly old experienced ghost hunter that everyone still thinks is a bit cooky, despite all the ridiculous things going on in their house. Check.
So, that's the roll call of predictable characters out of the way, but who really cares about any of them? not me. I wanted them all to get sucked into CG world just so the movie could end quicker.
This is join the dots the same as the original, almost no innovations at all, apart from the drone that apparently can send video feeds across dimensional boundaries.
Except there is one thing that is different.... the back-story and characters and exposition is unbelievably boring. And there is no villain either, just a boring space vortex thing. or whatever it is, in fact nobody really bothers to ask what the hell is that in the closet, and why don't we call the government to investigate.
I got to about 20 minutes before the end and couldn't be bothered to see the ending after the woman started hysterically over-acting when she got the smaller kid back from the space vortex.
I don't need to watch it. I already know what happens. The house blows up or vanishes, they discover some human bones, give them all a proper burial and the subsequently the family is all still alive and happy and well and singing kumbaya round the camp fire as though nothing ever happened, instead of being all separated and half of them institutionalised, as would more likely be the case.
Outpost 37 (2014)
good movie - not a bad sci-fi B movie
So its obvious from the lack of big name stars and the not so great CGI (it's not terrible at least), that this movie has a low budget. Shot in documentary style, we get to chase the antics of a bunch of what are essentially US marines, defending a remote backwater outpost from aliens.
What it lacks in Hollywood names and big budget effects, it makes up for with its consistent story, REALISTIC characters, an enemy that nobody likes, and a well considered world that is convincing and believable. Yes folks, this is a real movie, with real people.
There's no forced and trite dialogue about how one of the soldiers is gay or transsexual or whatever. There's no tough female soldier who single handedly punches an alien to death because all women are tough and because the men that went with her are useless and got killed straight away. There's no stupid Eddie Murphy comedic black guy that seems to be present in every single Hollywood movie ever. There's no annoying kid that everyone is supposed to want to get saved but in reality just gets in the way of the story at every opportunity.
This movie is a lesson in what movies can be like when you don't have big name Hollywood directors pandering to the whim of every bleeding heart liberal for fear of being accused of being racist, sexist, mysoginistic, transphobic, homophobic or whatever BS social justice nonsense.
This movie is Das Boot with aliens in a desert. It's Stargate with less budget. It gets you from A to B and when you arrive at B you find yourself thinking "well that was alright. I thought it would be worse than that for the abysmal rating IMDb gave it."
I hope they make a sequel, and I hope the director puts whatever damn characters and stories he feels like putting into it, so the sequel can be just as good. I love this movie, because clearly this is what the writer and director wanted to tell, not what they thought would gain approval from the endlessly whining LGBTQXYZ groups.
Robot Overlords (2014)
Snorinator 3
Oh my Goodness was this movie dull. It looks like it had some amount of money thrown at it, but I assure you, every penny was wasted. It's like the kind of movie you would get if you asked a 9 year old boy to come up with a movie idea, and just did exactly everything they wrote.
So, let's put aside the superficial things and focus on the *AHEM* story to begin with.
The intro tells us there has been a war with robots (who just appeared from no-where) and we lost. We don't get to see any of that war, just hear a bunch of screaming and so on, but that's just as well because most of the movie takes place in a town that looks like it hasn't been touched at all. I guess it was a war where we didn't fight all that hard, or launch any nukes. You would think there would be a few burned out cars, craters, and smashed up buildings, but nope, it's like nothing happened at all.
OK, so assuming that unlikely premise, now we find out that every person who is left has had some sort of LED shower faucet illuminater placed just on the side of their heads. The occupation follows the main "rule" of the robots which is that nobody can go out of the house. Its a kind of curfew and we are shown from the markings on the wall that it must have been many months since the robots arrived and imposed it. Even though no-one can go outside, somehow people haven't all starved to death yet or died from the radiation of the melting down nuclear plants, or from lack of water, or disease, all of which would quickly kill a population interred in their own homes all day long. So back to the faucet LED. This thing allows the robots to track where all the humans are at any time, because the giant flaming robot cubes and interstellar robot war fleet is not able to do that on its own. We are shown some "baddies" who have thrown their lot in with the robots, who have the ability to wander around as they please and also turn off robots when they want to. Again, since the robots have already overtaken the whole world, there isn't really a need for those people, but they are necessary for the "story" so whatever.
The "story" focuses on a family of boys trying to find their father. They are able to leave their house after they find out they can de- activate the LED faucets with electricity, (because no-one in the sciences, army or government thought of that yet.)
You would think this would lead them on an exciting adventure through the war-torn streets, encountering the desperate plight of a subjugated people, hiding at every corner from robot planes and the giant walking robots, and trying to basically survive.
No, that doesn't happen, instead, they just wander from implausible plot point to even more implausible plot point, such as an English pub where a boxing match is going on and everyone is drinking and having fun (apparently the don't leave your home curfew doesn't affect beer).It's as if following a happy meal pirate treasure map than trying to survive in occupied territory. Trying to find their lost father in the world's most boring fetch quest. Of course none of these weak children get killed or hurt along the way as they encounter the numerous hyper-advanced robotic forces that defeated everything on Earth in 11 days. Not so much as a plaster was needed because the heroes have impenetrable main character armour.
This isn't really a spoiler to reveal what happens in the end, because I am in fact saving you the 120 minutes or so of your life you would lose from watching this miserable piece of trash.
So, i'm just going to reveal it.
One of the boys has unexplained magic that lets him control robots nearby. He uses this to command the robots to do their "shut down" animation sequence and turn into cubes and boxes. Eventually he is able to destroy the bigger ones, such as the flying fortresses and the cubes, because things like the flying fortress conveniently has a shower LED access point directly on the front prong so he can stand on it and look cool as they play the heroic music in the background. So, through his unexplainable magic he is able to defeat the robots in about 5 minutes that took over the whole of the planet without resistance during 11 days versus all the worlds armies. And yay, everyone's happy because he re-united with his father in the end, who helped out in a world war 1 era plane that was inexplicably impervious to futuristic robot plasma cannons. The robots found it interesting that the boy could capture and control other robot systems, but didn't consider it a high enough priority to send every single robot to exterminate him. I think they put out a memo or something, but by then it was too late.
So, to wrap up the other things:
the music... it's OK I guess.
the special effects... well, I personally know animators who have done better, but its not the worst either. It's not the thing that lets down this movie. They are slightly better than the tripods from the BBC, but only slightly.
The cast.. apparently the woman from x files was in this movie, go figure.
All in all... i would only recommend this if there was no other movie on the planet left to watch, and that includes the ones where Eddie Murphy pretends to be fat people.
Under the Dome (2013)
huh?
this show was dull as dishwater. boring predictable characters. boring predictable story. boring predictable events. none of it made any sense. i can't believe that stephen king gave the go-ahead to have the black and white lesbians with a daughter injected into there as well. shame on you!
i watched 3 episodes and the lesbians thing irked me so much i just couldn't watch any more. Yes i understand that 1 person in 1 million fills that demographic but i couldn't care less about "socially relevant" political messages being injected into my TV shows. its annoying. STOP IT Hollywood.