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Reviews
Mad God (2021)
Visually Interesting and Open to Interpretation
There's lots of things to love about Mad God. There's also plenty that will be off putting if you're averse to gore/filth.
It's hard to describe the movie. Post-apocalyptic would be an over simplification - what the movie portrays looks less like a society and more like a fever dream. You're not going to walk away from this movie with an understanding of the plot. Even the described plot line regarding the assassin... without that information in the plot description you likely wouldn't even know that the original protagonist was an assassin.
Even the concept of "world building" is interesting. By the end, you have no more understanding of the world, its layout, and the goals of those that inhabit it.
With all that said, the movie has an enormous amount of visual diversity. There's also lots of themes and motifs you can pick out from all the insanity. Some of them might even feel profound to you personally. There's also plenty of unsettling moments.
If you're ok with experimental films that don't necessarily have a point - Mad God is absolutely worth a watch. You could likely watch it a few times and pick out more of the message... but I'm certainly not going to. If you have any aversion to gore, need your movies to have a point, and expect some kind of payoff from the plot avoid this movie.
On a side note... there's almost no way to "spoil" this movie. A testament to how funky and weird it is. The journey of watching it is the destination.
Westworld: Que Será, Será (2022)
The Result of Poor Writing in Favor of Mediocre Visual Effects
Wow, what a doozy.
This entire season has felt like what would happen if you gave a bunch a bunch of freshman in a creative writing class the reins of an established SciFi show. Every episode seems to hinge on a concept some writer thought was "so cool" and "unique" - the only issue is these little departures do nothing for the story line (if you can even call it that at this point). Here are some of the themes the writers relied on being "super cool distractions" so you would hopefully ignore how incoherent everything was.
- The line between simulation and omniscience
- The Shepard Tone
- The question whether life can truly be called life in the absence of an eventual death
- Nihilism (except they just constantly repeated "I'm a Nihilist" for an entire episode but the guy saying it is edgy so it's like, super cool, right?)
The writers doubled down on the idiocy of season 3, a season that was already an enormous departure from the first two seasons' genuinely interesting plot. What began as a show about consciousness, the ability to overcome or succumb to our base programming, and accomplishing goals at all costs somehow devolved into an action movie where characters you have grown to love or hate are fodder feeding the growth of an amorphous blob of ideas.
Every episode I couldn't help but think... they recognized how bad season 3 was so they're just making "Westworld" in New York. Well, I was kind of right. On some subliminal level they recognize they have no idea what they're doing... so they just brought us back to the beginning at the end of Season 4.
The question now is simple. Do they have any idea why the first two seasons were good? Because based on what they have produced this go round, it doesn't seem they have a clue.