Guardians of the Galaxy (no spoilers)

Guardians of the Galaxy is not a Marvel property I'd ever encountered in written form, but presumably it's similar in tone to the movie, which is snappy, irreverent and by no means takes itself seriously.

Light fun, a bit of mystery behind the main character, fun use of music.  I'll see the next one.

Still, there's some dreary 'background' sexism.  A lot of it is caused by the main character's 'disposable' attitude toward women, but with the exception of Glenn Close's planetary leader character, all the other women are victims (or crowd-scene Mums).  This includes Gamora and her sister, whose plotline revolves around their monstrous father.  And for someone theoretically so kick-ass and competent, Gamora sure needs rescuing a lot.

The previews before GotG included Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles (which looks amazingly sexist) and The Maze Runner (I'd heard of the book, but didn't know all the people in this maze were boys, with the exception of a late showing-up and connected to the main character girl).

All the Smurfette Syndrome I've been encountering lately seems to be impacting on Pyramids.  I usually aim for 50/50 split of M/F characters (with occasional other), but Pyramids is coming out more 20/80.

The Desolation of Smaauwwwg

Just as with the first outing, the middle of part of Peter Jackson's extended The Hobbit fanfiction is visually awesome, has great action scenes and is about as tightly focused as a ball of wool after a kitten's been at it.  By adding all the stuff Gandalf is off doing, the story reads far more as Lord of the Rings: The Prequel, and while it's still fun that way, it takes away quite a bit from the story.

The introduction of Tauriel, with an entirely irrelevant plotline about the need for the elves to involve themselves in the fight against the dark, only emphasises this prequel feeling - though on the whole Tauriel's story is one of the most interesting in this particular segment of the trilogy and she's a lot of fun to watch and almost manages to ignore the half-formed suggestion of a love plot wedged in with her "we are part of this war" theme.  I was sorry to see that while Tauriel was introduced so that there could be a female character doing stuff, Bard's two daughters are used for screaming and hiding under tables.

Smaauwwwg himself was all kinds of awesome, as was the humungous piles of gold scenes.

Pacific Rim (no spoilers)

Giant monster v Giant Robot.  Mecha have been a staple of anime for decades, but is not often seen in live-action - the monumental size of the giant robots definitely not being easy to pull off.  It occurs to me that most of the mecha anime I've watched - from Robotech to Evangelion - has taken a zero to hero approach.    Pacific Rim is more hero to zero to hero, and is less concerned with the monumentality of mecha (the way becoming a giant robot transforms pilots into something Other) than with a straightforward message of "working together".

Visually, I enjoyed the movie a lot.  The buildings and vehicles getting crushed all over the place felt very empty and there was little interest in this aspect of mecha (that the battle means the mecha will kill as many humans as the monsters), but it was definitely worth watching for the visuals alone. 

Logic and common sense (let alone science) are chucked out the door in favour of the visuals, though.  A lot of things seemed to happen purely because it would result in a pretty picture.  And the whole wall-related thing is just bizarre, though oddly reminiscent of a manga/anime which has become popular on my Tumblr feed lately - Attack on Titan - which has a few memorable characters (Mikasa Ackerman FTW - seriously, listen to this speech) and some particularly awesome combat visuals.

The "A plot" of Pacific Rim - that of a particular mecha pilot and his new partner and of their relationship with the guy in charge of the Jaegr program - is reasonable.  Not brilliant, or the kind of thing which would make me interested in rewatching, but entertaining enough.

The "B plot" - that of two rival scientists - is execrable.  It's played for comic relief and is Just.  So.  Bad.  The movie would have been much better if they'd just dropped this entire plotline and all of those characters.

As war stories go, this one was partially inclusive of women - there were a handful of women techs/soldiers/engineers and at least two pilots scattered among the huge numbers of men.  But we were twenty minutes into the movie before my first sighting of a female.

So, Pacific Rim.  What can I say?  Not as stupid as Prometheus.  Not nearly as enjoyable as Aliens.

Note: there were also two characters who were supposedly Australian.  My main reaction to them is "Amazing how many accents this pair have".

The Hobbit

The dinner scene at the start could have been shortened at little, but otherwise I think this worked very well.  Indeed, having watched it, I wonder if it would have been possible to film it as a single movie.  Or, I expect it would have been possible, but it would have been close to a 'training montage' of a movie.  This is very much a loving, lingering homage but that just means plenty of the visual spectacle which is half the reason I watch such movies.

Radagast's rabbits were way awesome.

Jackson chose to include a few visible dwarvish women in the crowds escaping from the Dwarven city, and there is a very powerful scene from Galadriel, but I think I'm going to continue with my theory that Fili and Kili are actually what female dwarves look like, just to balance the overwhelming levels of Y chromosome.

Rise of the Guardians

Saw this with my three year-old nephew and eighteen year-old niece.  Nephew promptly fell asleep, niece liked it.  I liked it too, so all's good.

Extraordinarily beautiful animation, and well worth watching just for that.  Very action packed story, plenty of easy-flowing visual humour, excellent pace.

- I only had a couple of minor issues with it.  As usual, very Western-centric (seriously, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are not universal myths that every child in the world believes in).

- The Sandman (cute as he was) is seriously not one of the myths that kids believe in even in Western cultures.  I'd say that far more kids believe in the Boogeyman than believe in the Sandman, which kind of inverts the plot of the story.

- The voice actor for Jack Frost was way too old.  Jack looks about 12.  14 at the most.  A voice actor who sounds mid-twenties was leading to some severe aural dissonance.

But still, well recommended for kids and adults alike.

Tintin (no spoilers)

I was having an interesting discussion the other day as to whether it was a bad thing that Tintin (the movie) had no female main characters.  Having read and re-read Tintin the comics a great deal when I was young (though not for years), I knew that there was very little room in the existing story for a main female role.  The entire series of books only has one memorable female character and, like most characters in Tintin books, she's a broadly drawn exaggeration of a creature.  For a female to go adventuring with Tintin, she would need to be wholly created and given some role in a plotline which never considered her.  I particularly would have hated a female character added purely to be the love interest.

Having seen the movie, I still don't think that it would have been a good idea to add a main female character (unless they gender-switched everyone, which would have been AWESOME), but the absence of females does underline what a strange, sexless creature Tintin is, running around with his pet, interested only in chasing whatever story has caught his curiosity.  The comparisons to Indiana Jones particularly underlines a certain lack of emotional resonance.  The growing friendship with Haddock works, and lets us see Haddock's development, but also gives us a particularly unconvincing scene where Tintin reacts to a set-back which reminded me so clearly that Tintin has little motive in this story.  He's only in this for the curiosity (and nice-chap-ness), and despite all the cool action, that starts to tell.

On the whole it was a fun movie, but it will never get anywhere near re-watch material for me.

The Thing v The Thing

(Not particularly spoilery)


I had never seen John Carpenter's The Thing, so in deciding whether to go see the prequel, not-John-Carpenter's The Thing, I decided not to watch JC's The Thing first, but instead watch it after.  Random thoughts:

- Special effects have come a long, long way.

- JC's The Thing is better than NJC's The Thing (at least at the beginning), but neither of them are movies I'm likely to ever bother watching again.

- The way the dog behaved (before the reveal) in JC's The Thing was incredible - easily the best thing in either movie. 

- The 'intelligent infiltration' aspect fell away in NJC's The Thing, and was the lesser movie because of that, but even in JC's The Thing (given that 'contamination' can apparently be managed with tiny amounts of exposure), our alien creature was far too inclined to flail partially formed limbs and rubber hoses (ah, tentacles) at every opportunity.  In both movies, the alien's behaviour is highly counter-productive to its own survival.

- There was a remarkable contrast in the way that the "infiltration announcement" was treated in the movies.  In JC's The Thing, an older male scientist announces that the alien is able to replicate the appearance of other living creatures.  Response: complete, immediate acceptance.  In NJC's The Thing, a young female scientist (specially flown in apparently for her ability to drawn lines on ice and nothing else) makes the same announcement.  Response: complete, immediate dismissal.

- Damn, people are dumb!  So you cut a huge alien creature out of the ice, and it breaks out and runs off.  And you go looking for it in pairs.  In the dark.  Without weapons.  Did you SEE the size of the claws on that thing?

On the whole JC's The Thing was more powerful (despite some truly bad special effects), but neither movie really made me care about any of these people.

Super 8

Spoiler-ish ramble below.

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So Super 8 is ET if the military got to him first.  And ET was bigger.

Production and pace-wise this was a great movie.  There was rarely a moment of lag, and the train crash is truly spectacular.

The characters are all clearly drawn, though most of them hardly have any time to show themselves, and it's hard to avoid thinking "self-insert" given they're all would-be movie-makers.  There's three arcs for the main character (father-son, buddy, and boy-girl) which are workable, though time restraints mean we don't really get as much power as we could from any of them.

As per usual, the military are evil and idiotic, which is tedious and predictable.  They're also apparently omnipresent, since they manage to turn up at a train derailment in the middle of nowhere before the locals.

It felt oddly more like the 60s than the 80s, even with a Walkman making an appearance (one which apparently makes you completely deaf to even Really Loud noises).

The story really is ET - an alien has crashed to Earth and just wants to go home.  The military want him and his tech, and this time they keep him for twenty years while playing with bits of his spaceship.  Some kids get involved, though it wouldn't be true to say they help him escape so much as survive him escaping.

This ET, though, kidnaps quite a few people and hangs them up by their feet, which screams 'larder' to me, and seems to go against the "he just wants to leave" theme.

Once again I was distracted from the story by Role of Girl.  Yet again, Role of Girl was to be kidnapped and rescued.  This by no means surprised me, but it was another tedious point - and followed on from two trailers (Green Lantern and Captain America) where the only female to appear in each trailer was Love Interest whose role appears to be to Be Supportive and Believe In Her Man.

I miss Buffy.

MacGyver of the Caribbean

He's chained to a chair.  The henchmen have gone to fetch their leader, so he has a bare minute to assess the tools at hand.  A balcony, a window, a table sumptously laid for a meal.  A chandelier.

The food distracts: it's been too long since his last meal.  He edges the heavy chair forward, reaching.  An oozing cream-puff bounces off a plate, but it's too late, they're coming, and he kicks it upward, hiding attempted theft in plain sight, pierced on the chandelier.  The room fills with soldiers, numbers impossible to fight, but his quick mind has identified a chance, and all he needs is some way to get out of these chains...

It's scenes like these which are the core of the Pirates of the Caribbean series for me.  Jack Sparrow is the Captain of Chaos Theory, capable of seeing potential connections at a glance, and engineering the escape device as readily as any blond-headed inventor.  If only he would use his powers for good, instead of for rum.

Overall, On Stranger Tides is a fun outing.  I gather the story has been borrowed from a book of the same name, and knowing nothing about the book I suspect that it spends a little more time than the movie on the thoughts and feelings of a stalwart missionary.  Perhaps his motivation was left on the cutting-room floor, leaving a major plot point as "she's too pretty to be evil".  But otherwise recommended.

Battle: Los Angeles

(mild spoilers)


Overall an engaging film (certainly much better than the previous alien invasion movie I watched, "Skyline").  But not a rewatch film by any means.

The action and pace is what makes this story: you never spend too long in any one place.  As many reviews have said, this is a war movie, with aliens.  By removing a few scenes, and cutting in different opponents, it would be very easy to make it an invasion of the US by almost anyone or anything.  The point of the movie isn't aliens.

There's really only one character, a marine Staff Sergeant on the cusp of retirement, haunted by the loss of some of his men during his last combat.  In the crisis of a sudden invasion, all hands are 'on deck' and the Staff Sergeant must keep alive a squad who doesn't trust him at all, proving to them - or himself - that he keeps to the marine motto of leaving no man behind.

That primary plotline didn't work for me.  The distrust of the marines (and the coincidence of the presence of one soldier in particular) seems completely out of place in a story which is so monumental, so world-changing.  The focus on "can we trust our (extremely competent and heroic) staff sergeant" sat badly with a 'rout of mankind' story.

Unfortunately the rout of mankind story was pushed to the background by the marine trust issues, and while it followed a not unsatisfying course, it did leave me wondering what real marines would think of these movie marines.  The ones who walk into a 'hot zone' talking loudly.  Who don't seem to have thought about snipers on roofs until after the shots rain down.  Would the military send a squad deep into compromised territory to recover a small number of civilians when an entire mega-city is being evacuated and bombs are about to rain down?  I found it difficult to believe in these marines (who contrasted badly with another group of SF marines, also led by a this-is-my-first-mission lieutenant).  The real focus of the SF story is/should have been the gathering of intel, of quickly and effectively finding enemy weak points.  That has been one of the main thrusts of most alien invasion movies because it is a very true one - our greatest weakness in such a situation is our ignorance.  And "Battle: Los Angeles" does that as well, but it's not what the story is about.

Tangled

A lovely movie.  I was so/so on whether to go see it, but am glad I did.  I liked most how artistic Rapunzel was, which made her chameleon companion very appropriate, and there were some spectacular visual moments in the movie which reminded me strongly of "Spirited Away".

The humour worked very well, the male lead was not as obnoxious as he sounded (and thankfully through his actions believably left his thieving ways behind him).  The horse was hilarious.  I can live without singing in movies, but the songs weren't too tiresome.

What really caught my attention was Rapunzel's relationship with the witch.  Rapunzel here is not a prisoner, but a beloved and over-protected daughter.  But 'Mother' is a toxic one, keeping up a grand show of a loving relationship, but constantly criticising, sniping and making cruel remarks - then laughing them off as a joke.  She's what I think of as Sugar Evil.  I can't help but wonder whether the witch felt anything for the 'daughter' she'd raised for so many years, and whether her insistence that the world was a cruel place which will destroy dreams had any explanation - did she have her hopes crushed in the past, and fail to find a new dream to replace them?

Skyline

Skyline is a spectacular movie - splendid vistas, and disturbingly fast-moving creatures who so effortlessly turn humans into specks, little more than resources to be harvested.

Pity about the characters.

I have a rough idea of what kind of people these were, but I never felt like I got to know them.  There was earnest main guy (who rapidly became annoyingly dickish, imho) come to visit LA at the invitation of his rich friend who he used to be in a (band?) with.  There was 'preggers girlfriend' about whom I know absolutely nothing other than she's earnest guy's girlfriend and she's 'late'.  There's rich friend, who at least is energetic and seems to be a relatively positive guy, except for cheating on his girlfriend.  There's bitchy girlfriend (who, oddly, I liked most of the characters, but about whom I know nothing except that she's rich guy's girlfriend and a bitch).  There's rich guy's assistant, who actually APOLOGISES to rich guy for the fact that he cheated on his girlfriend with her.  (WTF?)  I knew she would die first.  There's sensible hotel manager, who did not have enough testosterone to eclipse earnest guy.

I spent far too much of this movie waiting for the female characters to do something more than (1) scream (2) bitch (3) cower (4) argue.  They have two moments - bitch girlfriend can drive and preggers girlfriend does _one_ active thing in the movie.  But the women are there primarily to be told to wait in safety, to scream, to make earnest guy conflicted, and most of all to be rescued.

I never got to know these characters enough to care for them.  They did stupid things (DON'T LOOK INTO THE LIGHT, you dickheads).  They seemed to think a skyscraper was safer than, say, a basement.

This was a visual movie, and I hear there's talk of a sequel, which may possibly be more interesting because it may focus more on the characters achieving something.

[Oh, and no-one's posted on the internet since 4am?  NO-ONE?]

Predators

Not bad at all. No really glaring logical errors (beyond, perhaps, identifying a plant when you're on an alien planet). I do wonder where I ran across one of the major plot developments (or if I'd unconsciously put the clues together), but it didn't spoil the story for me.

Not such a classic as Predator was, but worth watching.