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Bodies (2023)
Give it time
I didn't warm to this immediately. The characters didn't interest me much at first and some of the dialogue seemed quite anachronistic and out of place. I wish writers would trust the audience a bit more with period-correct lingo and attitudes. But I stuck with it and around episode 3 it started to click and by 4 I was hooked. In the end I binged all 8 episodes in one evening, not something I do much of.
It reminds me a lot of Dark (2017) which is a good thing. Unlike Dark, Bodies is a lot easier to follow and puts lots of effort into explaining the story. This takes away the mind-bending mystery and confusion that ultimately makes Dark so good and, well, so dark, but Bodies has its own unique charms too. It seems to be leading to its conclusion by the end of episode 6 but then keeps going with more really interesting twists which bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. Well worth staying the course. The actors do a great job with so many good performances that really carry the story and add multiple depths to each character.
65 (2023)
Bad luck, Adam.
You're born 65 million years ago on a planet of space Americans, perhaps living under space capitalism and without space healthcare, so you're forced to take a risky space job to earn money to cure your dying daughter. Bad luck, Adam.
You're ferrying cold-sleep space colonists through a distant star system when your space ship is damaged by asteroids and crash-lands on prehistoric Earth full of ravenous dinosaurs. Said dinos hunt you and the only other survivor as you try to get to your escape space ship. Oh, and your daughter died while you were travelling and your surrogate space daughter doesn't speak your language. That's a bit of bad luck, Adam.
You have lots of cool gadgets, guns and space water bottles, which is great, but it turns out those asteroids are in fact part of the meteorite that will kill all the dinosaurs, and you too, in just a few hours. You're forced to battle through caves, swamps, quicksand, and more for a chance to get off the planet in time. What bad luck, Adam!
But luck swings your way and you get to the miraculously intact escape space ship and lift off seconds before the extinction event. Luckily you put in a solid performance and are surrounded by decent special effects but unfortunately you're stuck with a terrible script, a cliched plot and a clueless director unable to make the audience care. Bad luck, Adam!
Last Light (2022)
Interesting but a little dissatisfying
Starts well with some interesting international settings and a premise that feels very topical. That it upsets reactionary viewers (anyone that uses the word "woke" in their reviews) is a pleasant bonus. The story unfolds well over the first four episodes but rushes to wrap up in the fifth. The moustache twirling antagonist is revealed but with actions that don't seem consistent with their motivations. There's some gratuitous argy baggy before an abrupt ending that tells rather than shows the outcome in a distinctly dissatisfying manner. Did they run out of budget for a planned sixth episode?
Incidentally Taylor Fay really nailed his scenes as the blind boy Sam. It's refreshing to see a level-headed child character.
The Lazarus Project (2022)
Remarkable
Starts out as a fairly straightforward time-travel romp and slowly unpeels its characters to become an intense, brilliantly written and acted story of good people twisted and broken by the burden of a world saving power.
Kill Mode (2020)
Generic SF actioner on every level
I absolutely love that the company man has the word 'COMPANY.' on his suit lapel because he works for 'Company.'. It doesn't get more generic than that and it goes all the way down in this movie, characters, plot, sets, soundtrack, action staging, lens flare, even a few Dutch angles, the lot. The production values are OK but everyone is right-the shakycam is ridiculous. In other words it's strictly by the numbers.
Altered Carbon: Resleeved (2020)
Superficially Altered Carbon, all the anime cliches
All the worst parts of the anime genre are present here. Cliched characters, ridiculous action, terrible script, wooden voice acting. The animation is technically OK and smoother than traditional anime but the staging and 'camera' angles bring nothing new. Stylistically it's all Ghost in the Shell which is to say Japanese Blade Runner. The plot is similarly derivative with portions copied from Season 1 of the Netflix live action series. Ultimately it's all rather boring.
See (2019)
Excellent world building, a solid story and great performances
Honestly I had low expectations, perhaps because I thought the premise would be hard to do well. I generally prefer my science fiction of the hard variety although I can suspend disbelief to enjoy science fantasy. I'd read a few highly critical reviews of See but, three episodes in, find them to be unfounded. I'm impressed.
The most obvious things first: production values are sumptuous. The costuming and set dressing is interesting and convincing with many subtle post-collapse touches. The story feels logically consistent and makes sense to me. What surprised me, though, was how good the performances are. I've been genuinely moved by the sincerity of the performances from just about everyone. To single out two, Jason Manoa, whom I've seen mostly deliver fairy one-note, muscular performances in other roles, delivers a nuanced performance as a fierce leader and caring father with a past he's ashamed of while Hira Milmar, too, is terrific.
I'm looking forward to watching the balance of the first season and pleased that a second has been confirmed.
After Life (2019)
To be or not to be, that is the question
This show is a remarkable achievement. It's powerful, touching, it goes places many would fear to tread. It's fearless, emotional, even brutal, but beautfullly acted and utterly convincing.
I downloaded this series on Netflix to while away a 2½ hour flight to Tasmania (thanks for not having an entertainment system, Jetstar) and watched five of the six episodes back-to-back. My partner tells me I was laughing out loud, much to the puzzlement of other passengers in the cabin; I had no idea. She didn't notice that I had to hold back tears a few times.
This show pulls no punches. The human condition. Finding a reason to live after life kicks you in the guts. It's a bit of an atheist's manifesto but that's fine-I've seen Ricky cover much of this material in various interviews and stand-up shows in recent years and I'm completely on his side. If you're a theist you may not be comfortable with all of it and thus this short series may be a little controversial in some conservative quarters. Good on Ricky and good on Netflix for having the courage to run with it.
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
For manga purists only
Tried hard to like this but its very derivative and formularistic.
I haven't read the source material but from other comments it seems like this is quite a faithful adaptation. Unfortunately this just makes clear how juvenile and 1st non-sensical most manga is. Old blokes swinging ridiculous rocket-assisted hammers, pretty boy rogues. Alita's eyes are a perfect example of this. They're directly derived from manga and anime tradition but when rendered photorealistically they're gastly. At a distance they're OK but every close up of Alita plunges the viewer deep into the uncanny valley.
The dialogue is often really bad. Many of the protagonists are unlikable-it's not a good sign when you're happy to see the main character's love interest die. Both times.
In the end I wanted to like it but it's just so boring.
Extraction (2015)
Extracts the joy out of life
Surprisingly not a movie about dental procedures but about as much fun as a visit to the dentist.
As many have said, Bruce Willis has very little screen time. Apparently he shot all his scenes in one day and it shows. It looks like they didn't pay him enough for more than one facial expression ('serious') and I hate to say it but this reminds me of many recent Steven Segal, outings, specifically the execrable 'Sniper: Spec Ops', i.e. the great man shares little or no screen time with other actors so they can easily add him into scenes during editing. How sad.
It's not that this is a by-the-numbers action flick which adds nothing to the genre, it's that it's so boring. The actors are going through the motions. The dialogue is tedious, the characters uninteresting. The colour grading is 'edgy' and exaggerated much like the title sequence (which really put me off from the start). I imagine the inexperienced cast members were excited to appear in a Bruce Willis movie but it's hard to see how this will help their careers.
Ultimately it's the kind of movie you fast forward through primarily to avoid the pain of seeing it in your 'continue watching' queue on Netflix.
Geostorm (2017)
Monkeys and Typewriters
So apparently if you had an infinite number of monkeys bashing randomly on typewriters at least one of them would produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. An unfortunate byproduct of such an exercise is that many, many of them would turn out the script for Geostorm.
Geostorm insults the taste and intelligence of its audience at every turn. The acting is terrible though not surprising given the appallingly cliched dialogue and nonsensical character motivations.
I survived watching this through sheer bloody-mindedness and fast-forwarding through the later scenes featuring the two brothers.
Just awful.
The 5th Wave (2016)
Carved from a solid block of stale cliché
This movie doesn't have an original bone in its body. Now there's nothing wrong with combining familiar elements into a new work but the finished product needs to have something to add to the conversation, a style all its own or a new way of looking at the subject matter. This just feels like a cynical, by-the-numbers exercise with nothing to say. In fact the whole thing is so clichéd that it rapidly becomes unintentionally hilarious. My 15 yr old son, surely well within the target demographic, lost it at the lake bathing scene and from there on in we sniggered through the rest of the movie. The 5th Wave only needs a tiny nudge to become a full-blown parody of the alien invasion, end-of-the- world sub-genre.
The plot is predictable and you'll see every twist coming. Every character is a stereotype and none of them, excuse the pun, feel human. The handsome/beautiful leads are never less than immaculately presented regardless of the circumstances although Chloë Grace Moretz is sometimes artfully dishevelled while living in the woods. Apparently there is no shortage of mascara and eyeliner in the apocalypse.
The special effects, though extremely limited, are acceptable but never impressive; there's no spectacle of destruction to enjoy here. The only people who will get anything out of this are those that already regard adults as aliens and who can enjoy watching attractive actors with no concerns for a coherent plot.
One bonus star for reminding me of John Carpenter's classic, They Live (1988).
Chappie (2015)
Pinocchio with an assault rifle
Chappie is the story of a reject police droid given consciousness by a brilliant but foolish cybernetics engineer working for an arms manufacturer that uses the honour system in place of internal security. In an improbably series of events the fast-learning droid with the mind of a child falls into the hands of a gang of drug dealing mature age arts students with a penchant for graffiti and pastel colours. Before long Chappie is at the centre of office politics turned urban warfare but manages to harness the power of product placement to make a breakthrough in the nature of consciousness, mind transference and resurrection. Chappie remains completely untroubled by the weighty implications of such matters instead preferring to leave room for a sequel.
Ultimately it's good fun as long as you fight the urge to think about it.
Looking back at his movies it's clear that Blomkamp is mostly interested in telling stories driven by emotion and visual impact. He's quite happy to shed logic and take any shortcuts to do this. This isn't that evident in District 9 but it makes Elysium and Chappie harder to swallow. The gritty settings look realistic but the plots don't. Once you give up on trying to have them make sense and think of them as fairy tales they're easier to enjoy. Certainly Chappie is more Pinocchio than Robocop.
World War Z (2013)
Not a traditional zombie flick
Just saw World War Z. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it after the bad early reviews but I thought it was really pretty good.
It's not a traditional zombie movie at all—the zombies are more like an unstoppable, crashing wave and there's very little gore at all—it's distant or implied. The diving, leaping zombies require a little suspension of disbelief to be scary. My son said it looked like they'd been infected with CGI which is quite a good way to put it. That said, if you accept the basic silliness of gravity defying, climbing zombies (if you've seen the trailer you know what I mean) then you can enjoy it. There's plenty of suspense and the up-close-and-personal zombie encounters are rather creepy without being too horrifying. If you like zombies with mouths full of flesh and sinew, or chewing on handfuls of intestines you should go somewhere else for your gore fix. This is an *almost* family friendly zombie flick. If you to strap in for a bit of an action adventure ride with some well done, large-scale "battle scenes" then you might enjoy this.
*mild spoilers*
If you've read the excellent book be warned that this movie bears very little resemblance to it. They clearly intend to make a sequel (or sequels) and if they do (box office willing) then it might approach some of the scale of the novel. I hope they do because I'd rather like to see some of the stuff they hint at right at the end (Muscovites with flame throwers—yeah!)