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Reviews
Alien: Covenant (2017)
A touch of Star Trek. Exercises in Futility
I did not think it was possible, but Covenant is even weaker than its predecessor and has little to do with the original Alien concept. The original story focused on the xenomorph as a symbol for deadly and almost invincible human greed. It was based on solid storytelling, good dialogue and character development, innovative set design etc. Remember: the first and still best movie in the series was made on a budget. It was craftsmanship and art that made it what it is.
Everything went over board with Prometheus, where the xenomorph became a meaningless extra while the film really was about man trying to find his creator. Storytelling and dialogues went further downhill (I did not think it was possible after Alien IV) and all attempts by Scott to plagiarize positive elements of his own movies failed miserably: instead of craftsmanship there were loads of expensive VFX. Money, however, cannot make a good film, let alone write a good plot.
Covenant is a disaster. Here you go: more expensive VFX which, alas, still look what they are and hence *pale* in comparison to 1979 hand modeling. A plot that - again - is about man looking for his creator. Is this a plot to be presented in a sci-fi format by a director who scored big time some 40 years ago but has produced nothing but sub- par flicks ever since? Yes, there is a great danger: the whole thing can easily get very pathetic. Quoting Wagner and Byron does not help, on the contrary. Throwing in the xenomorph, slightly remodeled, does not help either.
Why has Scott abandoned the original Alien concept? Maybe he felt that it had become outdated and decided to replace it with this pseudo-philosophical creation mumbo-jumbo instead. A touch of Star Trek. Ridley, it is sci-fi horror, and you have to do a hell of a better job to present such a subject in such a format without looking like a total half-wit. Tarkovsky could pull that off, or Kubrick... and without all the shitty VFX.
I refuse to believe that the original Alien concept is an anachronism. We just need someone who can tell the story the right way. No need for a huge budget, no need for hollow effects. Oh, btw: since the xenomorph is nothing but an extra and since the story is very predictable and the storytelling poor, it's not scary at all. I remember having read about jump scares. Really? Yawn. Alien I-IV are way more scary than this... dunno what to call it. Desperate attempt of an aging director to treat subjects that he deems important maybe. Creation. Ugh.
Queen of the Desert (2015)
Kinski was right
For quite a while I kept wondering if Herzog is able to make at least one good movie without Klaus Kinski. Kinski loathed Herzog. In one of his books, he described him as completely clueless, arrogant and as a ruthless, dumb and incompetent creep. Herzog, on the other hand, called Kinski a mad egomaniac. Well, both were right, but while the madness made Kinski a genius actor, the cluelessness made Herzog an insufferably bad director.
This movie proves it. There is no storytelling whatsoever, just abysmally bad, cheesy dialogue (book: Werner Herzog) and nothing even remotely interesting. The photography is average at best. The story is about non-existing.
On top of it all you have Nicole Kidman who moves like she got something up her spine and who apparently has disimproved her formerly nice features with botox.
To summarize: wooden acting, poor dialogues, no story, no storytelling and average photography. It looks and feels like the work of an incompetent director and writer.
Avoid at all costs.
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Impressively unimpressive
This is not a good movie, and here are the reasons why:
1. It seems that showing fast action sequences in 3D was the main purpose of the movie, not storytelling. The movie is loaded with action while the storytelling is poor.
2. You need to know the characters from the first reboot movie or the classic Star Trek movies. If you don't, you are lost. The storytelling is so neglected that you hardly will identify with or care for any of the characters in the movie.
3. There is too much action - impressive action, yes, but action. After the third action scene, it gets OTT. The action has to get more and more spectacular to impress. And it's so damn repetitive that it tends to get boring - and in the end, it leaves you indifferent.
4. The dramaturgy is really bad. While the interesting core of the story is well put, there are way too many twists during the last 30 minutes - to justify even more action scenes I suppose. They're totally unnecessary (as much as all the action) and wreck whatever good could have been said about the movie.
5. The story itself is deficient, maybe also due to the dramaturgy that raped the story with all its twists - hard to tell what came first. Anyway, the movie comes with a huge packing of action-crying-action- crying. Hard men fight, one minute later they cry for each other, then the next attack comes, then more crying. It's quite ridiculous and very cheesy.
6. The movie looks like plastic. The classic Star Trek movies had a certain weight, a dark touch to them. This one is called "Into darkness" but looks like bubble gum, with a captain who makes you think of Barbie's Ken rather than of James T. Kirk.
Conclusion: too much of everything, especially repetitive action, poor storytelling, a basically good core-story wrapped in too much slay-cry- slay-cry. Trekkies won't like that movie, people with no clue about Star Trek won't either. I'm not a Trekkie, and I know the classic Start Trek movies. Still, I found this effort impressively unimpressive.
Trolljegeren (2010)
Rather annoying - not only to foreigners
When I had a look at the "hated-it"-reviews, it was evident that non-Norwegians liked this movie much less than Norwegians. And yes, there were many allusions to Norwegian customs and culture. This, however, is a first big minus. The movie doesn't work for an international audience.
Secondly, even if you are Norwegian, the movie does not get much better. I am kind of half-Norwegian and got the allusions but they weren't very entertaining, funny of witty or whatever they were supposed to be.
This gets me to my third point. What is this movie supposed to be? Funny? Scary? Or just entertaining? At least to me, it wasn't very funny or scary or entertaining. The jokes are mostly bad, repetitive and the story predictable.
What's all the fuss about the effects? They are computer effects and look like computer effects. That's not a great achievement in my humble opinion. I give it a few stars for creating a truly Norwegian atmosphere: cold, rainy, uncomfortable.
But sure, if you are Norwegian and find it funny that you go on a supposedly real troll-hunt where you have to smear yourself with stinking troll smell to cover your own and where you must be careful not to believe in Jesus because that will attract trolls, and if you don't mind that for the 100th time, there is a movie filmed with a hand-camera to create authenticity, this movie is for you.
Black Hawk Down (2001)
Kicking ass for a good cause - no kidding
This movie is fascinating and interesting for two reasons. It is fascinating because it is a 100% pro-war, pro-American propaganda movie in the style of Dr. Goebbels, and it is interesting because it is obvious that that kind of bold propaganda still finds an audience.
This movie tells the story of some American soldiers who are trying "to kick some ass" in Mogadishu - for a good cause as the movie tells us, leaving an uninformed audience with a wrong premise and doing an excellent propaganda job for all those who believe in what they are being told. On top of that, the intro tells us, that it all is based on a true story. False premises and alleged authenticity are mixed into a dangerous cocktail, typical for propaganda.
Then, the movie develops into a bold good-guys-against-bad-guys-story. All the American soldiers are shown as good people, they all have hobbies, play chess, basketball or draw children's books (no kidding). They make jokes and laugh, they are happy, good people who happen to be in the army because they want to fight a war for the good. The bad black guys all look gloomy, pray to Allah and shoot their machine guns for fun. The do not smile unless they do something nasty. When the Americans move out, rock music is played in the background. When we see the "enemy", you can hear some weird Arab music or threatening noises.
And so on. The reason for why the Americans actually are there is never questioned. They are there, apparently for shooting the bad guys in order to teach them that shooting is bad. Interesting.
Some reviewers claim that this is a good war movie. Well, there are two kinds of war movies: pro-war movies and anti-war movies. This is a pro-war movie. It shows glossy, beautiful fighting scenes with rock music in the background. It does not show what war does to the people. It does not show mushed heads, brains, bones, pus and horror. It shows fair, chivalrous and over all heroic American soldiers who remain fair no matter how unfair the enemy might be. It shows a clean war, where not too many civilians are hurt and where the US Army only hits those who "deserve" it.
I despise movies that propagate war like this one does. "Black Hawk Down" is a prime example of how the US film industry creates bold propaganda in a time when the US government needs it. It is a shame that a director like Ridley Scott does such stuff. And now I have to correct myself: it is not propaganda à la Goebbels, because even the propaganda made by the Nazis was a great deal more subtle than this homage to American imperialism.
If you want a good anti-war movie, pick "Das Boot" or "Full Metal Jacket". Even "Platoon" shows you more of the cruelty of war. This movie shows nothing of it, on the contrary. It should be banned for lying so hard about such serious issues. A shame.
Inception (2010)
A hardcore action movie in disguise
After reading a few of the reviews on this site, we decided to watch "Inception", and we went with great expectations. Unfortunately, the movie was a big disappointment.
The impression "Inception" leaves is that the director tried to squeeze as much action as possible into one movie, and it seems that it was therefore that the story was split into reality and four additional "unreal" dreamworlds which are displayed almost simultaneously. There is hardcore-action with aggressive special effects, fighting, killing, excessive shooting, explosions, car-chases, snowmobile-chases and the liking in every layer, and the permanent hopping from one layer to another makes this a non-stop-action-flick while the story behind all this seems to take a back seat.
If one likes action and special effects, the movie might be interesting - the storytelling is poor. The plot and the technology involved are so complicated that, after a while, one gets indifferent. There is almost no identification with the main characters. In this movie, almost anything can happen, and the audience will accept it because it can't follow the story. Like this, no suspension can be built, and over two hours full of action without suspense and bad storytelling can be rather tiring.
The story itself is not very clever. The setup reminds of the "Matrix" - the old question of what is really real. However, the idea of an powerful Asian industrial boss who hires a crew to secretly invade his competitor's brain in order to increase his own profit (and who deliberately risks his own life during the operation) is very far fetched. He could just as well shoot all of his competitors, because according to the story, the Asian boss is so powerful that he does not have to fear any governmental action. So, why invading brains, risking the own life and the life of others instead of just getting rid of the trouble by shooting it? Then, there is a weird aspect about the dreaming itself. I can imagine that everything happens inside my own dream, but to have many people dream the same dream simultaneously because they are plugged to a special device... I don't know. I am not someone who screams for logic in movies, but this was hard to take.
This movie is just an action movie disguised as clever science-fiction which it is absolutely not. There are great special effects, but there are too many of them and after a while they seem to become an end in themselves. The story is badly told, and the movie leaves you with nothing to think about.
Halloween (1978)
How many clichés can you take...?
I remember my first attempt to watch this movie, it was about 5 years ago and ended after about 10 minutes. I remember the impression the opening scene made on me. I thought: "What a cheap, cheesy and bad movie this must be, no thanks." After a while I decided to give it another shot, also based on the 8.0 rating on this website. I rented it again, and I deeply regret it.
I love horror movies, I love to get scared, and I do not need blood, gore, splatter and the liking. I need an intelligent plot, a good, creepy atmosphere and a capable director who can tell the story well. "Halloween" has nothing of that.
"Halloween" has a really poor plot (a madman escapes from prison and kills people), a low-budget set that looks low-budget, an incredibly cheesy screenplay (the doctor about the madman: "I have worked with him for 15 years and he is pure evil" or something like that), a lousy, lousy soundtrack that should win an award for the worst movie score (composed by Carpenter himself btw.) and so on and on.
"Halloween" is a typical teenage low-budget horror cliché, full of bad dialogue and bad story telling. Since the sceneries are so dumb and hence so predictable, the movie is not scary at all. Actually, it is boring. I had a hard time not to close my eyes or do something else.
For my taste, this movie shows how not to make a horror movie. It is not scary, not intelligent and (on top of it) takes itself dead serious. Again, I have to say no thanks.
John Carpenter has become a "no no" to me. As a teenager I was kind of fascinated by "The Thing", but having seen it again as an adult, I'd have to say that it probably was because it was so disgusting. "Assault on Prencict 13" was one of the worst movies I have seen so far, and "Halloween" was not so much better than that. I will never watch a Carpenter movie again.
Anyway, 2 stars for not being as bad as "Assault" and for having Lee Curtis and Pleasance in the cast - the latter though with dialogues that make your mind boggle.
Spoorloos (1988)
The banality of Evil
Horror is probably my favourite genre, and I have seen a lot of horror movies. There were only a few movies that really left me as paralyzed and disturbed as this one.
In the very beginning, the director masterfully lets you know that something is wrong, but you don't know exactly what and how bad it really is. You are left as clueless as the main character and through your own uncertainty you might get involved more than you think you would. The story is simple and the evil in it is banal, everything is so normal and so horrible at the same time. And it surely is the banality of evil and the tormenting uncertainty that make this movie almost unbearably creepy. The ending is absolutely, absolutely shocking and I still really don't like to think about it.
If you don't like monsters, blood and pornographic violence and if you are looking for a smart, really creepy psycho-horror movie, this movie is for you. In my opinion, Spoorloos is what good horror is all about.
Event Horizon (1997)
Plagiarism and clichés
This is not a good movie. The plot simply is the frame of the first Alien movie (rescue-crew finds a ghost-ship that has been in hitherto unknown areas of space - crew of ghost-ship is found dead - rescue-crew gets trapped on ghost-ship - some evil force starts killing the rescue-team - the inevitable scientist who accompanies the rescue-team turns evil etc.).
When Alien presented this story line, it was new, made sense, the movie had a great pace and was genuinely disturbing. The same storyline, about 18 years after the original was out, is a farce. Event Horizon simply does not even remotely create the dense atmosphere of horror that was created in Alien. The turning-evil of the scientist is very predictable. None of the characters (they all resemble the cool marines from Aliens by the way, including a couple of the typical "weak" women) is described well, and one hardly cares for them. And when you don't care for the characters, you are not afraid that something might happen to them. A great defect for a horror movie, because if you don't care, the movie is not scary. The movie is full of pathetic clichés. When the rescuers hear from the ghost-ship, they get an audio-message with the usual distorted screaming on it. They filter it, and voilà, one of the cool marines finds out that it actually is *Latin* and translates it immediately. Latin sounds spooky to some people, and that's probably why someone in deep space has nothing better to do then sending messages in Latin while he is being massacred. Incredible. The idea to give the ghost-ship an evil consciousness is ridiculous: the ship is a haunted house in space.
If you expect a good horror-movie, avoid this one. YOu will be disappointed.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
A waste of time and money
This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
What is the purpose of this movie? A bunch of Americans enters Nazi-occupied France and starts slaughtering Germans. You see them scalping their enemies and beating them to death with baseball bats. While making jokes, of course.
Some will say that this movie is a parody of a certain genre. For a parody, it is neither witty nor funny. The contents is zero. It is exceptionally brutal and disgusting. Underneath lies a subtle political message, because it is again "the good guys" killing "bad Nazis". The whole plot is unthinkable if you turn it around. Could you imagine a storyline where Nazis (while making jokes) kill everybody in the Warsaw ghetto with flamethrowers? Probably not, but this movie is exactly about that, with the exception that is satisfies the weird moral expectations of a certain audience: slaughtering people is so cool when done by the right people.
This movie only works because of the hidden Nazi-ideology underneath. It does not regard the enemy as people. And if the latter is supposed to be an element of the fun, I am happy to say that this kind of fun will always remain a mystery to me.
Another mystery is how such violence can fascinate the American crowd while a bit of nudity will freak them out. But if a naked body is pornography, this movie with all its brutality is pure pornography at its very worst.
Inglorious Basterds is a pointless, boring and tasteless waste of time and money.