Film Reviews

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Gavin Hood): 20, What can I say, the movie was just bad. Opening title sequence fell completely flat, every piece of dialogue was plot driven, the CGI wasn’t even that good, everything looked like a cheap set, every character was wasted (including the title character), and the list goes on but I’m not going to spend longer on this then they obviously spent making it. Oh, they let Ryan Reynolds be Ryan Reynolds but I understand I’m wwwaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy in the minority on that one.

Earth (Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield): 50, Just a greatest hits of the BBC show Planet Earth, but that didn’t bother me since I haven’t seen any episodes anyways (which makes one think how it will do on DVD when you can just rent/buy the original). Nice try on not one but two global warming warnings. Standouts were slow-mo of cheetah catching its prey, the jumping shark, and any establishing shot.

Resident Evil: Extinction (Russel Mulcahy): 58, Three reasons why this is worth your time, 1. This might only apply to people who play video games but the pacing between action sequences and exposition is exactly right, ex. right before Alice is going to fight the ‘final boss’ the little hologram girl spells out all the unanswered questions about Alice’s identity and gives her final motivation to defeat her enemy. Classic RPG 2. Having the film set in mo-mans-land America is pretty good. Points to the fact that human life is scarce and civilization is more or less lost, but having the deserted gradually being buried under sand Las Vegas raises the bar. With all of Vegas’ fake geographical landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, pyramids, etc.) really pushes this idea that the entire world over is destroyed, and in a weird way this is the center of it right now. 3. At 95mins you don’t get overloaded with action movie bang!, the perfect run time.

Terminator Salvation (McG): 44, John Connor moves to the background both in terms of screen time and position, in Salvation he is made out to be just some upper level soldier. Bale basically just collecting a paycheck with nothing to do but shout occasional dialogue and look fierce. Marcus (Worthington) is the star of this thing also getting the only good action sequence, starting from the 7-11 outpost and ending with him in the river, in the film. But above all that, the film itself is unsatisfying. It makes it out that all they need to do is take out the SF base and the humans win, then at the very end a voice-over comes on a says that the problem is still global and in need of sequels. Remember when films were singular and still part of a series, (Rocky, Back to the Furture, Indiana Jones, hell even the Harry Potters and the new Batmans can do this) that was nice. Speaking of series, why the fuck did Fox cancel The Sarah Connor Chronicles!?! It was one of the few shows working with complex temporal structures and personal internal conflict moving the story forward rather than just some baddie of the week. Why does every show I follow get cancelled?