Change Your Image
hevig
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Ahsoka (2023)
Acting is fine for teenage drama, not for Star Wars..
After enjoying "Obi-wan Kenobi", "The Mandalorian" and "Andor" it seemed like Disney had seen the light and embraced quality production. Sadly, this is not what we get with "Ashoka".
15 minutes in the first episode I hear Ahsoka saying, with a "moan" in her voice like a spoiled, fake american teenager (clearly the target audience) "right where Morgan said it would be" with an uptalk line ending. Which is totally fine if this was just a random drama show. However in Star Wars, this means another step into degeneration.
I truly dislike the Ahsoka character. Has a smug attitude, squints her eyes, moans while speaking, bobs her head, and can't run very fast from an explosion. That is quite a disappointing, unconvincing form and behavior, for a Jedi.
The second main female character is Sabine Wren. Young and rebellious like a teenager, wearing smokey eyes make-up, lip gloss, purple dyed hair and has a creature that sounds exactly like a cat but isn't. I'm put off by the make-up which doesn't seem to match her personality - she would hate make-up and have no incentive to put it on so ... no this doesn't work. I think she is supposed to look like the average defiant teenager who happens to do cool stuff like stunt with speeder bikes and wield a lightsaber.
Then General Syndulla, another incredibly poor acting performance bobbing her head and looking far too weak to be a general. Her light green makeup and blue lenses look exactly like that, make-up and lenses. There is something very off here. It all looks like it's coming straight out of a cosplay club.
I kinda like Irvina Shatko's performance as Shin Hati with hyper focused non blinking eyes that speak very little. I believe HER. Or does she simply remind me of Wednesday?
There's a lightsaber fight with a choreography so basic it made me yawn. I definitely saw that before.
The underdeveloped characters are missing depth and credibility, the writing is poor and overall the show displays a lack of talent.
There can't be any doubt here that this show is geared towards American girls, mirroring them in the female characters. Now understanding what this show is I can let it go. I will patiently wait for the upcoming Mandalorian movie.
The Collective (2023)
What makes this film still watchable after all
This movie has the hallmarks of a low budget production. And laughable goofs. Everything is pretty bad.
"The Collective" reminds me of an equally dumb tv show called "Citadel" with a vageley similar premisse and almost just as bad. The outline for both is a spy/mercenary/black ops organisation fighting some criminal organisation.
Let's do the good points first. To be fair the story isn't bad. It is just barely written. The acting and filming is surprisingly okay, unlike most of the cheap productions and mockbusters. The movie managed to keep me watching - though a few times I had to look away because my eyeballs were hurting.
There are some interesting and maybe even slightly original fighting sequences. And that's all the good points now.
A few of the many goofs:
This production is so cheap, that in a scene where the dead bodies are shown, you see one dead guy lift his head just before crossdissolving into the next scene. Nobody cared enough to fix that.
Another example is that the bad guys often wear a skimask, when there's no reason whatsoever for that (sitting in a backroom playing poker) other than perhaps to re-use actors that were killed earlier.
Hilarious is a scene where infrared optics are used, and to illustrate they took some random view and colored it green.
And of course, two good guys and two bad guys are shooting at each other - in different rooms. Somehow they all shift to knife- and fistfighting at the same time. Classic!
Some scenes are so silly that it MUST have been deliberate, sarcasm perhaps.
A prisoner is on a chain and needs to be brought from a to b, and people are waiting. But the prisoner is forced to crawl on hands and knees, while the captors tell them to move faster. Makes no sense, but is funny. But in a cheap and dumb way.
They must have had fun shooting this movie, and I think that just may be what makes this film still watchable after all.
The Ark (2023)
"Get out and push"
.. Is the title of episode 3, and it kind of speaks for the level of education the writers believe their audience has. So the idea is that somewhere the engines fail. "We're dead in the water!" someone cries. Hence the title, suggesting it's perhaps logical to go out and push.
Only, and every SF fan know this for sure, when a space vehicle's engine stops, it will just keep going until it hits a star, gets sucked in by a black hole or disintegrates after billions of years of radiation and collisions with gases and micro particles. But it makes no sense at all, to assume a spaceship would just decelerate and stop when the engine quits.
I can only infer the writers were just no really SF fans, and perhaps saw an analogy between spaceships and sea-ships.
That being said, the actors are working so hard to put up a performance of their stereotype characters. Five stars for effort. The CGI and sets are very nice. That must be true craft. But there where a story begins, where it is conceived and molded into a script, before it got produced into video - that's where things have gone horribly wrong.
It's not just that they have the science all wrong, down to where one must be truly ignorant or uninterested, to buy the narratives like "get out and push". It wasn't bad enough that the science here isn't even close to reality, the writers had to highlight their incompetence by making an episode about how a spaceship stops in space, when the engines stop. There must be a chain of uninterested, scientifically challenged people who called "The Ark" to life - writers, producers, the bosses, even the test public. Who cares and why should I?
Fortunately, I learned to view content like "The Ark" in a forgiving way. Of course the premises and writing suck. And the characters and direction are geared towards insipid viewers who's underdeveloped brains need not work at all to consume this light entertainment. But, it is a nice production with plenty of goodness to enjoy. That is reason enough to recommend "The Ark". I keep watching.
The Tomorrow War (2021)
Idiotic plot which insults me as a viewer
The plot tells us that soldiers form the future come back to the past to get droves of cannon fodder to help them try not to lose the hopeless all-out wore with - no doubt - far superior aliens.
Why is this idiotic?
1) the soldiers recruted in current time get slaugtered. Why not use the time, the years they still have, to prepare for the coming of the aliens? Sending soldiers to the future seems utterly pointless compared to prepairing to have an ample defence force ready by the time the aliens come.
2) since they have invented time travel, the future people should evacuate all remaining humans (500.000) to the past where they can devote their lives to create the so much needed defence force
3) I can only imagine what more stupidity is written in the story. I'm feeling insulted (because the movie producer presumes I (as the audience) am too dumb to see the obvious story failures) and stopped watching this movie. It seems to be made for profoundly stupid people. Appearently this is a big market (The US seems to have a lot of those) so, good job.
Three stars for the obvious production value. A lot of people delivered really good work (for example casting, actors, direction, cgi) but most certainly not the writers, nor the producer. Such a shame.
The Crossing (2018)
Mediocre Time Travel theme show with solid plot, but one needs to swallow some poor production choices
The story is almost good, the actors do their jobs well, but it has a has a "B-rating" written allover it. In stead of making us believe the characters, the production team chose for "cheesy" rather than "credible".
The series seems to be more focused on romantic sideplots than on getting the details right. For example, Hannah, who is supposedly fleeing from a time, centuries in the future, knows nothing of the - extremely well documented - early 21th century, but somehow speaks perfect American English which apparently has not changed in 200 years. How is that supposed to feel real? She should have been given a weird accent, some quirky ways of pronouncing words, and of course a selection of common 23rd century words for consistency. But, that would of course have posed the challenge for the story but I bet it hasn't even crossed the minds of the producer, to do it like that.
So sorry, no, for me this is awkwardly bad all the way - one of those kind of things I can't ignore or accept, like we all had to decades ago when movies and tv series producers did not have the resources they have now. So, no excuse, no blind eye. Just... ghaaah.
Now if the time travellers language had not been ignored, it would still be cheesy - but I'd be okay with cheesy if the rest was good enough.
Away (2020)
Well done but... lack of realism
It's clear this series has a lot of money pumped into it: good scripting, character depth, story, acting etc all really nice and entertaining. But, apparently there is sound in space - be it muffled sound. I get it, this is the classical choice. No sound in space is a bit cold, so filmmakers want sound to fill the void. Next: Phonecalls from the moon and beyond, seem to suffer no delay between send and receive. Meaning, it looks like NASA found a way to have faster-than-light communications. The reality is that there is a 1.25 second delay - times two when you get a response, which is very notable in a conversation. I wonder how the communication lag will develop as the show progresses. Besides those pesky details, I think this show is great and I'm binging it.
See (2019)
The only acceptable way to watch this is blindfolded.
Like the characters are blind, you should cover your eyes and only listen. Then you will miss everything that's visually completely wrong in this series.
Left with only the audio to enjoy, it gets real funny. Oh this dialog! The writer should be sued for malpractice. Or, perhaps he was only being profoundly sarcastic. I guess this was made strictly for airhead Momoa fans.
Chernobyl (2019)
Denial of a nuclear catastrophe
If you think you are too comfortable, too optimistic or happy, this new HBO series is just the cure you need. We know the Chernobyl accident was bad, but this puts the viewer awfully close to the graphic horror, the vomit and radiation burns, the denial of the core explosion, and lots of sickening detail. Best not to watch just before sleep.
I cannot advise anyone to watch "Chernobyl", unless you have an appetite for this kind of bleak horror, or perhaps appreciate the better made series like this one, regardless the theme or atmosphere. Yes I'm one of those. I paused the first episode several times when I got too uncomfortable. Enjoy.
I gave it 8 stars. The language should have been Russian. Now, Russians will have to do a voice-over in Russian, hah that will be fun to watch.
Secret City (2016)
Nicely paced, intriguing political thriller
I'm not a great fan of Australian productions, but there are some exceptions like The Flying Doctors en now Secret City. The lead actress Anna Torv made a lasting impression in "Fringe". That's the main reason I took up the challenge to watch an aussie series.
It has been done well, this is clear in the first 10 minutes. Very promising, quite intriguing. The international elements shown in E1 are enough to connect the land down under to the known world (my known world). One thing keeps putting me off though, that is the recurring atmospheric music by David Bridie which is a shameless copy of Vangelis' Antarctica (E1), which happens to be one of my most cherished favorits ever. I just hope that's a one-off goof in this series, but I presume there will be plenty enjoyment to make up for it.
Dragon Kingdom (2018)
Low budget mockbuster
The opening scene is an awful long sequence of shots of the protagonist group, entering a newly built and unused, but seemingly abandoned small village, and then in slow motion come a bunch of zombies running - quite clean, non-sentient but agile zombies, that apparently were waiting to ambush the heroes. Of course I noticed that everything was very new and pristine; the set, the props, the weapons, the costumes, the leather, even the rags . But when I saw the terrible poorly portrayed zombies, right there it was clear they botched this movie big time.
The rest of the movie is just as good as the zombies. Nothing makes sense, everything is so far off, that I fail to believe any of it. It's much like a LARP, with the difference that I would believe a good LARP but not this thin and soulless drivel in "Dark Kingdom".
Meanwhile I notice the background, bobbing up, down and sideways. Ah, so they were using lightweight handheld camera's, mounted on a gimbal. Much like you would use one to stabilise your phone when shooting video. They didn't use phones did they? OR DID THEY?
A bit later they encounter a dragon, looking kind of okay really. But wait, do I see grass flickering in and out of existence, at his toes? Fairly big goof here. The dragon reminds me much of those android apps, with which you can make a dinosaur walk across the table using AR. Must be something similar, at least no CGI like we are used to see in real movies.
At this point I find it very strange, that this was done - according to the movie poster - by the special effects team of Harry Potter and the executive producer of Game Of Thrones. I mean, really? REALLY? Man, they baited me good to want to watch this amateur, oversold mockbuster.
Next scene: they leave the village and the scout finds an army of zombies, nicely lined up side by side, waiting orderly but agitated, for the heroes to cross their path. Goof: a modern wire fence, topped with barbwire. Quite out of place. It seems that my estimate of the movie budget, should be adjusted downwards quite a bit here.
I guess if you are able to look past the amateur level of everything, and fantasy is your game, then you may well enjoy this. Or not.
Timeless (2016)
Entertaining but flawed - time travel theory
I've been binging through 3 episodes now so yes I guess I'm having a good time watching this series. It has some nice points.
The theory is that the time machine uses gravity to bend timespace onto itself and then move from one pont to another. not only through time, but also through space. Very similar to Doctor Who's Tardis. However, I'm curious how the spatial displacement is driven. Also, by gravity? I'm a bit on the fence about that.
In the show there is this funny thing that you cannot run into yourself in another point in time. This is not really a scientific of philosophical idea but a simple rule to avoid having to write scripts that are a bit too complicated for the target audience.
To try to understand this show's premisse, we need to look at time travel theory - which is hard and known for paradoxes.
(from here it is only time travel theory)
There are three main temporal paradoxes.
The causal loop: an event caused by a future event resulting in the same future event. No cause can be established so it is a paradox.
The grandfather paradox: one can only interact with past events, a long as they do not change the future. If one would succeed into changing the future this would create an incompatible conflict between your present time from which you originate, introduced into the past, effecting the very same present time in unpredictable ways.
Time travel is so powerful, it would allow a species to populate the universe completely virtually instantly, and we would know of it. Or, if we were the species to invent time travel, we would be very much aware of the fact that our history is riddled with time travellers meddling with us, leaving behind future tech - we would have "futurology" as a branch of archaeology, the study of relics from the future. At a point time travel would become affordable and available, people will use it for recreation - like the Chinese visiting Europe - something which we would probably notice happening in our present day. This is the Fermi paradox: if time travel were possible, time travellers would be everywhere we look, but we don't see any, so where are they?
But hold on it can get much weirder than that.
To me physical time travel to the past seems inherently impossible. You would create temporal conflict, resulting in something like a feedback-causal loop between past and present. It doesn't matter whether or not your interactions with the past branch out into your personal present day: by time travelling to the past you literally are a conduit beween past and future, creating a feedback loop like microphone - speaker audio feedback, oscillating and destabilising the universe.
Unless the universe is actually quite unstable due to an infinite number of time travels and interactions with the past, but because the universe would mutate completely with every future-past contact, and our memory of the past would mutate along with the universe, we would not be aware of this. We would be stretched across infinite possible "timelines". Or perhaps you could say that any interaction with the past creates infinite parallel universes or timelines (which to us are a bit of the same. Or, a time traveller would only navigate across the infinite multiverse by engaging the past, not in fact changing our present but just his or her own. So time travel could be possible - would we not have thought of the Fermi paradox, that is.
The Good Cop (2018)
enjoyable hyperbolic
This show is all about the main actors:
Tony Danza is not really acting - it's just the plain old Tony Danza personality you may know from "Who's the boss?" and possibly other shows from his younger years. Generally being a charming pain, giggling over his own wise-ass cracks, lying all the time.
Singer Josh Groban seems to be new to TV shows as an actor, but he handles it well. His character TJ is way over the top honest and clean, and what they make him do is just not realistic at times, like a parody of himself and that's just a shame. Hadn't the writer resorted to these character fallacies, in my opinion the show would have been a lot better. I guess they wanted to recreate a nineties family show feel, with humor that can be enjoyed by even the youngest or dumbest family members.
The stories of the episodes are the same: hyperbolic deviations from reality. But that is not the main attraction in this show, it is the charming but lying trickster Tony sr., the innocent and naïeve Tony jr., the female partner Cora (and the unspoken attraction between them), and the sidekick detective Burl that make the show. And, to be fair, that is enjoyable.
Salvation (2017)
average drama series with speed; a sad rape of science.
A high rated SF thriller series, of course I had to watch.
The story, as it develops, has a lot of "24" in it - they are making good progress on fixing the threat, when something pops up to sabotage them. Then they get to fix that something, and another thing goes wrong.
The good: interesting, decent developing characters. Actors are above mediocre. The story is playing in a huge setting, being the - possible - end of mankind.
The bad:
This storyline could have been so much better if only it was not riddled with bs. The list of which, if I were to sum it all up, would be quite long. I have tried to find some details coherent with science and reality, but sadly that was utterly fruitless.
The first thing that really disappointed me, was the real-time telemetry with a probe in the vicinity of... Jupiter. This is about as bad as having sound in the vacuum of space.
This grand mistake on science, left only the fiction part of SF to colour and carry the story. Alas.
The human behaviour is quite reasonable, for a drama series. I read in another review this was a bit of a study of man, facing the apocalypse. I disagree. It is a sloppy conspiracy story, with a classic partition of the ones resorting to mass destruction to increase their/the nations power, and the true heroes/patriots combating this evil. A third party makes its way as the bigger evil, but this is left open at the end.
I was fascinated to see how it played out, but I didn't like the constant rape of reality, science and common sense, and especially not the pendulum swinging good/bad/good/bad which in my book is a really bad way to write a story. I would not call this a thriller, I found not much suspense here.
So, a drama series, and an average one.
The Healer (2016)
uninspired attempt to make a cheesy family movie
So a guy who is interested in nothing, suddenly gets healing powers in a small Canadian town. Spoiler: confusion, wining, aaaand he refuses to accept this gift. Then a dying girl who seems very much full of energy, comes to change his mind. Let me guess, the lesbian vet isn't lesbian at all and all ends well at the end of the movie? Let's find out.
I bet those actors were disappointed when they watched the end cut. I just saw the imprisonment scene and it was so .... well let's say it was clear what it was supposed to be (a cheesy 90ties feel slapstick scene) but it just couldn't even cut that. The scene was embarrassingly unimaginative, as if it was leaning heavily on either an established funny atmosphere or movie mojo - which is simply not there. The "home alone" kind of punch line music was there, but the funny bits weren't. That kind of describes this movie. The actors are mediocre, but everything else is profoundly unable to deliver. Lice the directing which looks the part at first sight, but the director allowed for flat, dull performances without pushing the actors to do better. Perhaps in the mind of a 10 year old - a simple one, to be specific - this movie totally makes sense and is quite amusing. To me, sadly, the intended fun, and the entire movie, is like a cheap Chinese electronic gadget - a poor quality copy that can't hold a candle to the real thing, and makes you sorry for wasting your money.
I can't wait - no, I actually I can wait to see the other half of the movie (watched an episode of Rick and Morty just now because I was at risk of boring out), and nothing remotely interesting has happened yet - aside from seeing the delightful Camilla Luddington on my screen, which is a bit of a treat.
Then the revelation scene. Random shots of a beach, dragonfly and birds, and then the lead actor struggling to find some credibility while refusing the gift which was bestowed upon him (by God, no less). He has exactly one day to decide if he wants it or not. Sigh. The back story is razor thin, and the nice looking Camilla Luddington can't prevent the viewer from experiencing a massive downer, when the last hope for betterment is shattered now that it is clear this movie is only getting worse.
This opens the door for a new sport: how bad will it get? Will it be in fact bad enough to be a "So Bad, It's Good" movie? So I put my hopes into that folly, and maybe Camilla Luddington will lose some clothes, or do something hot, if only to try to compensate for this idiot of a movie.
Everything is badly underdeveloped. The story, the characters, even the animals. There was ample opportunity though, had there been brought some brightness, some creativity to the table. By timing the cuts just slightly witty, directing the actors for better expressions, it would have been a much better movie. But it isn't.
The editing is so bad it makes me carsick.
The film hits a new low when Amelia is having fun on a farm, and "Faith" from George Michael is playing. "Well I guess it would be nice, if I could touch your body" - suggesting the underage, dying girl should be touched or touching a body, at least introducing a sexual motive to this scene... it felt very wrong, the director must have forcibly rejected all of the warnings that kind people gave him, to let this one through. He probably intended to have the audience only hear the phrase "I gotta have faith" in a non-sexual way but hey, the song is what it is.
I just looked at his profile and damn, this guy put a white line on the inside of his lower eyelids for dramatic effect. Also I see he has been doing mainly acting, then managing (all in Spanish), and now directing and writing this film. That explains.
The movie ended as was anticipated, and then a mentioning of children's camps and Paul Newman kind of leaves me feeling like a dick for dishing this movie. But then again, it seems kind of cruel to raise hope in terminally ill children, like this film appears to target.
End credits.The entire production crew has Spanish names. Okay, that was it, adios.
Synchronicity (2015)
What parallel universe is this?
After reading some reviews here, I decided to go see this movie. What if you could create a wormhole, connecting the present with the future? What if you'd hop through such a wormhole? What if .... Those were, no doubt, some of the questions which led to the creation of this movie.
So that is pretty much where the story starts: three scientists open a wormhole - or so they say. It doesn't take long or proof that it worked, presents itself.
And there is a girl - the lead scientist follows her into his own doom, risking it all. Yeah, women.
The 80's synthesizer soundtrack is really nice. It adds a familiar strangeness to the movie, it almost places it in the 80's. But no, the real setting is present day, with an eerie skyline with drones projecting swooping searchlights. An alternate universe, perhaps?
A rich dude provides the highly dangerous and expensive radioactive spheres (fuel?) which are crucial to the experiments. Then the machine is situated in a plastic tent, or at least they have to go through a tunnel which looks like a plastic tube greenhouse. But why? To contain radioactive particles? Now that's a laugh.
And then the rich dude cheats because the object going through the wormhole, is owned by his company and he lays claim om half the machine? I just don't buy it.
At the end, the mind-warping time-travel / parallel universe hopping theories leave you baffled. It's OK to try, but no one ever really succeeds in ending such a story, without leaving the viewer with more questions than answers. Maybe, that is not a bad thing. But, for me, things didn't add up.
Angie Tribeca (2016)
A far cry from "Police Squad!".
If you liked the 1982 series "Police Squad!", you might like Angie Tribeca's gags, literal jokes and extreme exaggerations. It doesn't have the great Leslie Nielsen but eyebrows actor Jere Burns gets 7/10 for trying to make up for that.
Actors aren't bad but not very good either. The lead actress Rashida Jones is nice to watch, makes me think of a ballsy Jennifer Love Hewitt. Who is a goddess. (drifts away dreaming) The best actor is indubitably the dog.
Episodes are rather short with about 21 minutes a peace, though that's probably for the best to leave you with a "what the f did I just watch?" instead of boredom.
The stories are nonsense, proverbs taken literally and acted out to scratch a laugh. However, this easily gets too much and after watching 3 shows, I'm no longer interested. Turning to watch "Police Squad!" in stead.
Leslie Nielsen once said in an interview, that "Police Squad!" scored high in the screenings (they used big projection screens) but didn't work on TV - the reason of which according to Leslie was that you have to poor so much of attention into a relatively small screen in order to get all the humor, it is too easy to wonder off. A big screen is much more immersive, so that would explain why this kind of humour didn't work on TV. Nowadays our TV screens have gotten twice as big as they were in 1982, so ... Netflix might do good with this one. We'll see, I guess.
Second Chance (2016)
hasty, underdeveloped, spoonfed - but not bad.
As said before, the pattern isn't new. However, this does not define a bad show. I'll give it a chance.
For a pilot, a hell of a lot was crammed into one episode. It seems it's all been done in a bit of a hurry. It would have been a lot better had they stretched it into a double sized pilot :) The pace is fast, you will not get that bored. The downside is for me that the story is underdeveloped, as are the characters. Also, there is no mystery either. Nothing is left to imagination, there's no subtle suggestion but the viewer is spoonfed the story, without having to think of anything at all.
Visuals are okay, acting is not bad at all: if this is your genre it will probably do.