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Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu (2016)
An isekai that sets it self apart in wrong ways
The premise of this show is simple and has been done many times before. You have your average otaku guy who gets suddenly transported into a generic fantasy world.
There is not much point in me talking about the world itself since, as I said, it's pretty generic fantasy we have seen many times before, and there isn't inherently anything wrong with this. It is possible to tell a compelling story without reinventing the whole fantasy wheel along the way.
This is going to be a long one, so strap in.
The supporting cast of characters is not great nor terrible; they are decent side characters, although none of them really stand out. The ones I liked most were the twins and Beatrice, it was nice to see that they weren't just typical bland "harem waifus" but had unique personalities.
My main problem is with the main character. He basically ruins the show, which is a problem since the protagonist is the one character that is in nearly every scene, so if he sucks, the show becomes hard to watch.
The protagonist, Subaru, is a flawed loser. He has been designed to not really be special; he isn't strong, fast, or smart, just an average guy tossed into a world where he is at the bottom of the hierarchy.
This by itself is not an issue. Instead of having a typical power fantasy where the hero becomes the strongest there is, we get to watch a somewhat more "realistic" depiction of what would happen if a typical "weeb" was tossed into a situation like this. An interesting story can be made out of this for certain.
But here comes the problem: the fact that the protagonist is the epitome of average also makes him very bland and uninteresting to watch. There is a reason why protagonists are usually special in some way; they are either very strong (Luffy, Goku) or very smart (Light Yagami, Lelouch) because it makes for a fun spectacle to watch them operate. But Subaru is an average guy doing average things, and it's not really fun to watch.
In these cases, this can be somewhat salvaged by the underdog effect, since he is so below everyone we would be rooting for him as the underdog, so when he does get a win, it feels rewarding. But this doesn't happen here because of the second problem with him.
Subaru is completely insufferable. While he is mostly a good guy at heart who wants to help people, he is also an overly emotional rage baby.
And yes, I have heard this before: "Well, you are missing the point; he is like that on purpose, he is deeply flawed and that is what makes him interesting." Well, not to me, not in the way the show presents it to us.
I actually really like flawed characters, since their flaws make them interesting, but Re:Zero just does it in an unfortunate way. I have seen both seasons, and this is what we get most of the time:
Subaru rages and screams at people when things don't go his way.
Subaru breaks down and cries.
Subaru gives someone a 10-minute pep talk/emotional dump dialogue.
Subaru receives a 10-minute pep talk from someone.
Rinse and repeat this over and over again.
Basically, most of the runtime in this show is filled by Subaru just screaming, raging, crying, talking about what a loser he is, etc. And I get it, he is a deeply flawed character, fine fine, but jeez, having to watch this over and over again in nearly every episode gets repetitive and boring very fast.
It felt as if I was the one stuck in a time loop, having to rewatch the same thing over and over again. Every time we got yet another 5 minute long ragefest/screamfest it made it harder to keep watching because of bored of it I was at that point. Was that the 10th time? 15th time I was seeing that by now? I have lost count by now. It was the same thing over and over again.
So to summarize, Subaru's problem isn't that he is weak and flawed; it's the fact that the way they are showing this and repeating this makes him boring and tiresome to watch. And a show simply cannot function with a bland and boring protagonist. Even if the protagonist was made unlikable on purpose, that doesn't change the fact that him being unlikable means you don't care about it, or what happens to him and thus aren't invested in the story.
So, can the rest of the show redeem itself in some other ways? Not really. As I said above, the fantasy world this takes place in is very generic and thus not very interesting. The plot line itself is split into several mostly self-contained arcs, which are various degrees of mediocre. Out of about six or so main ones we see in two seasons, I think I only enjoyed two of them; the rest were just... meh. In the second season, it's mostly one big arc split into two locations, but the interesting location gets a minimum of screen time, and the boring location gets most of it, sadly. And on top of that, because of the one special ability the protagonist does have, the stakes never feel very high.
I made myself sit through the whole 2 seasons, because of how popular and usually highly rated this show is, so I wanted to see if it gets better at any point, but it didn't.
Due to many other people giving it high marks it's clear they enjoyed watching the story being told in this way, which is fine, everyone's opinion is subjective, but even after giving it a fair chance I simply wasn't able to like it due to reasons I wrote above and that is the reason for the low rating I am giving this.
Samurai Chanpurû (2004)
Does not live up to the hype at all
It's not great or terrible. Just super average. I just don't understand why it's being praised this much.
I enjoyed the final 2 or so episodes, but rest of them are just this sort of episodic content, where each episode is self contained with its on plot and honestly most of them aren't very interesting. I was actually straight up bored at times.
There is very little character development, everyone stays pretty much the same and as I said, most of episodic adventures they go on range from mid to boring, with very few exceptions. A lot of the episodes just felt like straight up filler, during some of them I wasn't even sure I will finish watching the show.
So in the end its a weak 5/10 for me.
Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Gives us what it promised
This movie doesn't over-complicate or tries to reinvent the typical evil dead story line .
It just starts off in the typical evil dead style we know from the other movies and then keeps the pace going. It manages to maintain constant suspension through the movie, where you feel like something can happen at any moment and it often does.
There were no boring parts, just a nice dark, creepy atmosphere with lots of blood and gore.
The main lead lady was bland I have to say, where I didn't really care that much if she ended up chomped up or not, rest of the cast weren't all that charismatic either, but I did enjoy the performance from the mom and the youngest daughter.
I went in to see an evil dead movie and that is exactly what I got.
Good Omens (2019)
Second season mucked things up
First season was great, it was fun to watch, had a nice engaging story line and good characters. It also wrapped up things quite nicely.
When I was scrolling through new tv shows and saw Good Omens season 2 I was surprised, since Good Omens was not the kind of show that really needs a second season. I was worried that that the second season will be just a pale shadow of the first one but gave it a watch. And sadly, I was correct.
First season followed the events in the book and the second has no book to follow and it shows. To me it felt almost as if I was watching Good Omens fan fiction. The storyline jumped all over the place and the main plot thread just flopped around and fizzled out at the end. Also the ending was not really satisfying and a clear setup for the season 3 which will probably be just as bad.
Plus the relationship between the two main characters is developed in a very strange way, it goes from these kinda reluctantly good friends in season 1, to, well as I mention above, bad fan fiction in season 2.
Season 1 was about 7.5/10
Season 2 is a weak 5/10 at most.
Twisted Metal (2023)
Not great, not terrible, sits in the middle.
The show has some fun moments in it, but also a lot of dull and empty moments where not much is happening so you are mostly sitting there waiting for the next interesting bit to drive by.
I'm not really gonna go into the world building itself, the way the world is setup in here wouldn't really work if we are talking any sort of realism, but since that isn't really the big focus here, we can just suspend our disbelieve on that and keep going.
But still some moments still do stand out like when cars drive around shooting each other with heavy machine guns, while taking basically no damage apart from a one broken window. It just takes you right out of it and it sort of lowers the stakes overall.
Character wise the main protagonist is.. just ok, his female co-lead 's character comes off as annoying and I kept hoping she would be just a temporary character, but looks like shes here to stay sadly. My favorite character by far was the clown, he was the only one I was actually invested in, with any other character there I didn't really care that much if they got killed off or not.
I think this show would be better as a movie so they could cut out all the boring bits and leave the fun ones in.
Let's see how the season 2 turns out, there is some potential here if they can pull of the tournament correctly, but season 1 was a luke-warm start to this franchise at best.
The Witcher (2019)
Toss a coin to some ohter show, because this one sucks.
Season 1 was okay, not great, not terrible just just kinda below average. I wasn't a fan of the pointless time skipping they did in there, it added needless confusion to the story for no reason at all (books didn't do that).
Season2: terrible. Writers forgot what this show is called: The Witcher. And there was almost no Geralt in season 2. I honestly can't say much about season 2 here since I watched it some time ago and it was so incredibly bland I struggle to remember anything that happened there, I just remember it was boring as hell.
Season 3: better than s2, worse than s1. It still sucked. We got few short good moments where we get to see geralt in action and it was fun, but sadly short and rest of the time was filled with this dreadfully slow story telling, where basically nearly nothing happens, or at least nothing interesting, so you keep hoping for the next fix like a junkie "Please give me Geralt fighting just one more monster, it's in the title of the show god damn it" but you almost never get that. The whole season had about 3 good combat scenes with Geralt in them lasting few minutes, and that is all you get. Rest of it was mostly just bland and boring progression of story lines you don't even care about anymore since they were established so poorly.
The only redeeming part of this whole train wreck is Henry Cavil. His acting as Geralt is excellent, which makes it all that much sadder he was forced to work under such terrible writers.
Right now Cavil left the show which is good, he was the only thing keeping it afloat and without him it's getting cancelled for sure.
Why is that good? Well, maybe in few years the studio will decide to reboot the show with actually competent writers, who don't actively hate the source material and gives us the Witcher, which we actually want to see. The one from the books.
Inside (2023)
Boring.. not much more to say.
The movie starts off great, we have this attempted heist gone wrong and we get the setup for the rest of the movie. The problem is that after the first 10 minutes the movie slows down to a crawl and it never picks back up. Basically nothing happens the whole time, you keep waiting and waiting for something to happen, anything at all at this point, but it never does. And the ending is extremely anticlimactic as well.
Dafoe's acting is good, and the concept of the movie is interesting, but it simply isn't executed well. Even though Dafoe did a good job, he wasn't really given anything to work with here.
Halloween Ends (2022)
Just bad.
What a terrible way to end a franchise. This movie was just bad. It's almost two hours long, but you can basically skip the first hour because almost nothing happens. Michael Myers is barely even in the movie, and when he is , he's just a pale shadow of himself, barely recognizable.
The plot focuses on characters nobody really cares about, because this is a Halloween movie, we are watching it for a specific reason, and bland side characters ain't it.
This movie shouldn't even be called Halloween. Were they running out of money and time, while having a contract obligation to put out one last Halloween movie or something? Because that is the only way I can imagine this getting green lit. Just bad.
You can safely skip this one.
Hellraiser (2022)
Bland
The old Hellraisers had their flaws, so it wouldn't be too hard for this reboot to surpass them, but it failed at it. It's just bland and boring with no original ideas to boot.
The protagonists are very uninteresting, so you don't really care what happens to them either.
The movie is too slow, but the slowness isn't utilized well, by some suspenseful build up or anything, it's just the check your watch for time kind of slow.
Most of the time you just spend sitting there waiting for something to happen and then when it finally does, it feels underwhelming. There just isn't enough hell to raise in this one sadly.
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
what are you doing Marvel?
Was this meant to be a comedy? Because if yes, then it failed at that. It is full of unfunny jokes, but whatever, i can just ignore those. But what i can't ignore is the bad writing. We get our typical dose of woke cringe that comes with most of these Hollywood movies lately, nothing surprising here, (do they really hate making money this much?) with the two main female characters, although luckily it's not as bad as in different movies.
It never feels like there are any real stakes. (Constant fakeouts "Oh no they are dying." And they they are fine a minute later, just removes any sort of tension. You never worry about anything bad happening to anyone here. ) Plot and any serious buildup often gets sidelined to make a space for an unfunny comedic moment. (And I'm not trying to be jaded here, I love me some funny jokes, but I think most of the jokes in this movie were objectively bad). And in the end you just end up with a very generic watery sauce of a movie. Marvel used to be good at this superhero thing. What happened?
Christian bale and his character were wasted and out of place in this movie, he deserved better.
Fall (2022)
Average
Not a bad movie. Worth a one time watch.
But one thing that kept annoying me was how stupid the main characters acted. There were some ways to resolve some situations that even someone not very smart would think of, but these characters just didn't for some strange reason. And characters acting dumb for no reason is just immersion breaking for me. I understand that the writers wanted to do a thing differently, but you don't achieve that by having characters ignore a much easier solution, instead simply change the environment a little where the solution you want to use is the only one viable to remove these annoying plot holes.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
Boring
The first movie wasn't great, but this one was just terrible.
Not only is it terrible idea to make venom PG13 instead of MA rated - let there be carnage without a single drop of blood somehow, but you could also jump in in the second half of the movie and miss nothing, since that is exactly what happens during the first half.. nothing.
As far as story goes, nothing amazing to be found here either, it's just sort of boring and not very engaging.
Just disappointing.
Finch (2021)
Missed oportunity
There is not much to write about as almost nothing happens in the movie the whole time.
With a movie like this, you need to either have high action like mad max, or good character development and this has neither. The character of Finch was realistic, but not very interesting, and the robot was better but not by much, the two of them simply weren't enough to fill this mostly storyless movie.
Basically it's just average all the way through.
Walle did the same concept much better.
Gemini Man (2019)
Very average
Pretty average all around.
The premise was really cool, an assassin going against a clone of himself? Hell yeah, but the execution was lack luster.
The story just wasn't overly interesting and pretty predictable as well, although some of the action scenes were pretty decent.
And for some reason the movie was terrified of showing any actual guts and bits you would expect from an action assassin movie. Every time, just before someone got killed, the camera cut away from it or jumped to an angle where you couldn't really see anything. Were they trying to make like a ... family friendly Hitman movie or something?
Bumblebee (2018)
Very bland
No idea why this has such high ratings everywhere. This movie is basically a more boring clone of the Transformers 1 movie (they basically copypasted large parts of the T1 plot in some scenes in a way), except with way fewer cool robot fights and way more deaf spots, where the characters just stand around and do nothing.
Unoriginal plot, not enough Transforms stuff, this was just a cash-in on the franchise and the definition of mediocre.
Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)
Decent sequel but not quite as good as the first movie
I really loved the first movie and the sequel wasn't too bad, but it wasn't nowhere near as good as the first Wreck it Ralph.
The CGI, voice acting and the animation style were all top notch and I have no complaints there.
The main issue is with the plot itself, which was all over the place. The whole thing was basically a bunch of smaller mostly unrelated subplots glued together to create the main story. And the subplots themselves weren't.. bad I guess.. but not all that overly entertaining either. They were just average at best. The movie as a whole still comes out as slightly above average, but it could have been so much better in my opinion.
The first movie I could just watch over and over again, I have seen it many times. This one I watched once and maybe I will watch it again sometime, in couple of years perhaps, when I mostly forget what it was about, but that is about it.
Also, the ending was a little bit too depressing for my taste. Ok, technically it wasn't, but also it was a little a bit. You see what I mean after you watch the movie. (This isn't reflected in my rating of course)
Gojira: hoshi wo kû mono (2018)
Too much thinking, not enough shooting.
I liked the first two films, but the third one was way too much "omg so deep, such heavy concepts" for my liking. When I watch a movie trilogy about mechas going against Godzilla, I want to see mechas going against Godzilla and not the main characters sitting around for two hours pondering "whats the point of this all anyway". For some reason a lot of animes just love to do this, where you get a wild ride of arrows, bullets and tight stories and then most of the grand finale is literally the main character just hovering in a "brain space" followed by heavy abstract pseudoimagery that is supposed to be grand and thought provoking, but it just makes me go like "Please can you just go back to shooting stuff?"
Of course, you can't be all action and no brain, that would get boring fast. But with this movie, the went way too heavy on the brain (and in the wrong direction as well) and the action is almost nonexistent.
Very disappointing finale. The previous two movies got 6/10 from me, so it sucks that I have to give this a 3/10, since I was really looking forward to a kick ass ride to finish things up.
And the ending itself, I can't really say much without spoilers, but it was very unsatisfying.
The Orville (2017)
Could be so much better.
I like the humor, the characters and the acting is good as well.
The problem is the story lines.
We have this episodic content, which is fine I suppose, overreaching plot throught the season would be better, but fine, as we seen in other shows, 45 min is enough to get a decent plot line going, original star trek did it and it was pretty decent. But the problem is that plot in Orville episodes is just too simplistic, too predictable, too... boring. Most of the episodes revolve about stuff we have seen many times before in other shows, to the point where it wouldn't be considered original even if this was a 90s show.
In addition to that, nothing even changes between episodes, you could easily watch the season in random order and you wouldn't be able to tell that there is anything amiss since nothing ever changes. Any overall developlment simply isn't there.
It's a shame, with a proper story line writer on the team, this could be a great show.
Backtrace (2018)
Bland
Pretty generic plot with no real surprises, nothing we haven't seen many times before and even though the runtime is pretty short, less than 1h30m, nothing very interesting or engaging is really happening most of the time. The bulk of the interesting action happens in the first 10 minutes and then the last 10 minutes the rest simply felt like a padding.
I am surprised Stallone chose to appear in this.
A Discovery of Witches (2018)
Quite nice
Based on the first episode which was a nice slow build up with no real big reveals, which is understandable, I am giving this 7/10 and am looking forward to the next episode. A very promising start in one of my favorite genres, I hope they won't ruin it.
Bright (2017)
Much better than I expected
I went in with low expectations thinking this will be just an average flick from a genre i enjoy, but i was wrong.
I loved the combination of the LOTR themes and a modern day society and technology, it was very original and fun to watch.
The characters were presented very well too, both main protags and bad guys were entertaining and you ended up rooting for the good guys without any issues.
The pacing was decent as well, the first third of the movie was a bit slow, but then it gained pace and it was a smooth ride with no real deaf spots.
It would be nice, if they uncovered a bit more from the lore related to the plot, but luckily since the sequel was already ordered we will get answers to those questions there hopefully.
I quite enjoyed the movie and am looking forward to the second part.
I wonder for whom are the professional critics who are bashing movies like this with low scores even rate them anymore?
Upgrade (2018)
A big surprise
Since I love this genre, I decided to give upgrade a shot, expecting it to be kind of middle of the road flick, not too bad, not too good, just average. Oh boy, was I wrong. I loved it. The story flows very well, the acting is pretty solid and I was never bored. The movie kept me engaged and entertained the entire time. It mixes the themes it picked, sci-fi, action, drama, very well together into a neat package.
I was also surprised to find out this was a semi low budget movie, because I wasn't able to tell at all, the choregraphy, special effects, scenes and camera work are all top notch.
If you can make this kind of movie, with that kind of money, then the A list movie makers have zero excuses for the crap they often put out.
A solid 8.5/10. I would absolutely love to see Upgrade 2.
Hagane no renkinjutsushi (2017)
Weak sauce, compared to the original
Although the anime version of FMA is far from perfect, it is much better than this movie and I recommend watching it instead.
Now, I of course understand that the movie had to cut out a big part the plot from the anime, since it has limited runtime, but the problem is what the movie did with the time it had.
The actual alchemy in action is few and far between, which is a shame, but fine, I suppose I will give them that, since they had a limited CGI budget. So what shall you be watching most of the time? Not much, the characters who talk about nothing interesting, plot that isn't moving, or is crawling at a snail's pace and you will find yourself looking at your watch. Would be nice if they filled this time with at least talking about alchemy, since they are doing so little of it, so we could learn some interesting facts about it, or perhaps uncovered some more of the conspiracy that was going on... but nope.. pretty much nothing all that interesting going on a lot of the time (or moving very slowly).
Since the main storyline ended up not fully resolved, it means this is supposed to be a trilogy, so let's hope the sequel will do much better job that this meh movie.
The acting was fine, but unless you are an anime fan, then the overreacting the characters do will seem strange to you.
So even though the movie was not terrible, it was just a pale shadow of the original.
Gojira: Kaijû Wakusei (2017)
Average
Placing the Godzilla into future was a good idea, since it has been done to death in the present.
But this movie has two main flaws.
The first half of it is pretty boring, people just walk around and talk about nothing worth wasting the screen time on. The second part, where the action happens, is nice and fun to watch. But would be nice if the spent more time on that instead of the first part.
The second problem is that the characters are bland and boring. During the movie I haven't cheered for any of the characters to survive, because I was never given a reason to care about them. They are just forgettable. The only thing that stands out about the main hero is that he has a short fuse and is obnoxiously angry about stuff all the time.
The animation itself is also nothing to write home about, one thing anime was always great at was conveying emotions through facial expressions of the characters. None of that here, they feel like if they had one too many botox injections.
So even though the second half of the movie somewhat redeems it, it still only reaches the average.
The Gateway (2018)
Wasted potential
Interesting premise, but the execution fails. They wasted too much time on pointless interactions between characters and not enough time on the actual scifi aspect. We see very little from the alternate dimensions, when the character actually ventures there, nothing really interesting happens, before she pops back. It's an alternate dimensions gimmick, they could get away with anything and they decided to pick kind of cliché and not very interesting direction of the plot to go in. It made the whole dimensional plot device feel flat with wasted potential. I understand that this is an indie movie and their budget was zero to none, but still, even with that they could spin the dimensional narrative in more interesting ways.
Then there are some plotholes too, where the movie breaks its own made up rules.
And there is also the quite silly and pointless twist right at the end. What exactly was the purpose of that? It was a huge cliffhanger that made this movie look like an episode from a tv show, except there will be no sequel, so the cliffhanger felt very annoying, pointless and pulled out of thin air.