It holds some interesting ideas, neatly expands on the Alien “universe” and is absolutely gorgeous in its visual design. However, it also has some serious plot holes, just like its direct predecessor Prometheus.
I love the book by Neil Gaiman, and this adaptation is very good indeed. The main characters are casted superbly, especially Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday. Unfortunately the smaller budget is sometimes very apparent and the more “cosmic” sequences can therefore fall apart. Apart from that, not all the many storylines are present in the adaptation, making for a more straightforward tale.
Note that this is not yet the complete story, and we’re going to need at least another season to tell it as it is told in the book. I wonder if the plot line I’m currently really missing will show up?
Baby Driver (2017)
Heist movie with a warm human heart in its centre. Great use of sound to support the story: the conceit is that Baby, who is the driver for a criminal (Kevin Spacey), has tinnitus. He uses music from several iPods to overpower the ringing in his ears (and to power his superhuman driving skills). We hear what he’s hearing, so the soundtrack is his soundtrack.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016, Ultimate Edition)
Yes, it’s about as bad as everybody told me beforehand. Afterwards I saw MovieBob’s dissection and that actually gave me more fun than watching the movie — apart from Wonder Woman’s scenes.
The 1982 original (specifically the 2007 Final Cut) is one of my favourite movies ever, and since it’s a self-contained story, I was unsure of why we needed a sequel. While it can’t reach the lofty heights of its predecessor, 2049 is a very interesting movie. Its use of visual and sound design is stunning, and its cinematography is Oscar-worthy. A lot of the original’s themes are present again, but unfortunately they’re much more overt here, presented in an almost blunt fashion which detracts from them. The plot is lacks coherence and could do with some trimming. And while I thought you don’t need to have seen the original, judging from a friend who went in blank, it certainly helps as the movie assumes you did.
This year I also saw Ex Machina and Her, two other movies where the question “could a human love an artificial intelligence” is explored, although in very different ways.
Bright (2017)
The basic premise of “buddy cop movie in an alternate world where fantasy races exist” should be a sure-fire hit so it’s easy to see why this was greenlit. However, the critics decimated the movie and to be honest, there are good reasons for that. Apparently there were disagreements between the scriptwriter and the director, and this shows. Characterization is inconsistent and plotlines are introduced and dropped with sudden quickness. The race politics commentary is so on-the-nose it’s not even funny anymore. Then again, this is probably as close to a Shadowrun movie as we’ll ever get, and the world-building is great. I think Netflix overdid this effort by making it a movie, and should’ve made a TV-series instead: CSI mashed up with fantasy races and some racial awareness.
I have no idea whether this depiction of the American frontier in the 18th century is anywhere near authentic. Probably as authentic as the game Colonization was? In any case, it has pace and verve and a great performance by Jason Momoa as a half-blood carving out his place in the New World, amidst the native population, the immigrants, and the various colonial governments. Note: sometimes there’s literal carving happening, as the series is rather bloody and violent.
Game of Thrones (2011, Season 7)
As I said before, it’s a mess, but it’s a glorious mess indeed. Game of Thrones gave us 6 seasons where storylines were diverging, crossing, and diverging again. It has so many characters that even fans of the series couldn’t tell you all their names. Some of it felt, if not necessarily like “filler”, at least like “slow-burning” or “indulgent”. With Season 7 GoT shed the last of its shackles (trying to adapt the books by G.R.R. Martin) and is now spreading its wings. That gave us a lot of glorious, long-awaited scenes (battle scenes with the White Walkers, Jon meeting Daenerys, proper dragon warfare), and with it a lot of plot armour, ridiculous coincidences, fast-forwarded character growth and logistical impossibilities. If you can ignore the latter and focus on the former, Season 7 is for you.
I’m getting to the point where the deluge of superhero movies (and series) is getting a bit too much. That said, I’ve been approaching that point for years now and every year I see more of them and I (mostly) like them. It’s no longer a surprise if superhero movies are decent (like the first X-Men movie all those years ago) or even great (X-Men 2, Spider-Man 2). They’re not as fresh as the first Iron Man, or the first Avengers. The bar has been raised and we’re getting jaded, and to be honest there have been some Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies that were less than stellar (Thor 2, for example). Nevertheless, as long as they’re somewhat decent and bring smiles to my face, I’ll continue watching them.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 wasn’t as much of a surprise hit as its predecessor but that was impossible anyway: you can’t pull the same surprise twice in a row. However, we still received a highly entertaining ensemble superhero movie with a killer soundtrack, neon visuals and a crazy amount of charm. It also had a lot of proper feelings amidst all the crazy high-fantasy stuff going on. Lindsay Ellis goes into that in her video “The Complex Feels of Guardians of the Galaxy v.2”:
La La Land (2016)
Not sure if it deserved all the hype but it feels fresh and is utterly charming, and I’d would watch anything with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in it anyway so I guess I’m an easy target.
I didn’t like Logan when I had just seen it. That was mostly the result of the differences between my expectations for the movie (an easy action movie with familiar faces) and what I watched: a grim deconstruction of the superhero movie genre, and a farewell to those familiar faces. Yeah, that certainly was not something I needed at that time, but that doesn’t make the flick bad. Indeed, in retrospect I can say that Logan is a bold movie which isn’t afraid of totally tearing down everything we’ve come to expect of an X-Men / Wolverine movie. It is good to see that Fox tries to carve its own piece of the superhero pie with tonally different takes on the genre, like it did before Logan with the irreverent Deadpool.
You can learn more about Logan and what it does, in the excellent video essay by the Nerd Writer, Logan: Superhero Movies Get Old:
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Beautiful, energetic, relentless, vibrant, but ultimately not my movie. I know, heresy! The blind “Doof Warrior” playing a double-necked, flamethrowing guitar was pretty amazing, though:
The first two seasons of Narcos focused on the fight against the Medellín drug cartel. It had a grandiose villain, the larger-than-life Pablo Escobar, and was told from the point of view of Steve Murphy, an American DEA agent working in Colombia. So could the series keep its strength when both its villain and its main protagonist were gone?
We needn’t have worried, as Season 3 delivers the goods with new villains (the leaders of the Cali cartel), more intrigue and a more compelling protagonist. I always thought Javier Peña was a more interesting character than Steve Murphy anyway, and Pedro Pascal is a great, charismatic actor.
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Yet another reboot of the franchise and in this iteration, Peter Parker is a young high-school student again. This time the super-heroics are mingled with a high-school comedy, into something that feels like it came straight out of the Ultimate Spider-Man comics. Hilarious, breezy, but ultimately (hah!) it feels like fast food.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Maybe The Force Awakens was intended as a love-letter to the original trilogy in general, and A New Hope in particular, to reassure the fans. “Yes, we here at Disney know how to make Star Wars! This is better than the prequels, right? So please forget about those.” If so, I guess it worked, but there was a lot of complaining about it being a point for point rehash of A New Hope.
The Last Jedi, in contrast, seems to get a lot of hate because it did not stay close enough to that old-school Star Wars vibe. Instead, it seems to deliberately break with the past. Indeed, that was one of its big themes. (That, and failure. Pretty much everybody fails in this movie, all the time.)
Aside from all this meta-analysis: The Last Jedi is a very enjoyable movie with some old characters showing up (Mark Hamill demonstrating that he actually can act, something I was never sure of after the original trilogy), some existing characters getting more depth (Rey, Kylo, Poe), and some new faces added to the cast (like Rose). There are lightsaber battles, planetary battles, and dogfights in space. Unfortunately the middle sags and the movie is, partially because of that, too long.
With the slate more or less clean, I’m looking forward to what Episode IX will bring.
Stranger Things (2016, Season 2)
Yes, it’s as good as everybody says. Yes, I even liked episode 7, as it reminds us that there’s a world outside of Hawkins, and provides some world building that hopefully gets followed up upon in the next season.
The set-up might not inspire much confidence: a young woman (Blake Lively) has a car crash when she’s 29 years old, in 1937. Instead of dying, she lives but does not physically age. Everybody else does, though, so she sees her loved ones grow old while staying young. This is a theme discussed at length in vampire stories, so why would we need to watch it again? For one thing, the movie plays the fantastical premise absolutely straight. Secondly, because Blake Lively and Harrison Ford give absolutely great performances.
The Fate of the Furious (2017)
(Slight SPOILER warning for the movie.)
This franchise has always been a “guilty pleasure” to me. Part 5 and 6 reinvented the movies into ensemble action movies with cars (instead of car movies with action) and were genuine treats. However, after this eight (!) instalment I felt exhausted. The plot has to turn itself into a pretzel to get the main conflict set up, and an additional pretzel needs to be made to turn all the previous antagonists into good guys. There are just too many people running around in it these days. It’s by no means bad (if you watch the Furious movies for the credibility and the plot you’ve lost before you started) but this one misses a certain spark.
(Although I did love the opening scene in La Habana!)
The Good Place (2016, Season 1)
I really wanted to like this. The premise is intriguing: an amoral, selfish woman finds herself erroneously in Heaven after her demise. The casting of Kristen Bell as the lead is solid. She certainly has the requisite comedic skills, and enough charm to make me root for her character even though she’s a “bad person”.
Unfortunately, it didn’t grab me enough. Part of it might be because the American-style comedy seems a bit weak. There are laughs, to be sure, and actually quite a lot of them, but few of them are big, and the rhythm seems off. I also think there’s too much filler in the episodes, which rely a lot on the cliffhangers to make sure that the audience sticks around for the next one. Indeed, that happens on a higher level as well as the big plot twist at the end of the season is almost enough to stick around for the second season. Almost, but not quite.
The Thor movies were always some of my favourite entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe version, but they lacked something so far. The first one was a good introduction to the character and the concept that there is a whole pantheon of gods who are (very) loosely based on Norse mythology in the MCU, and this Asgard has a weird mash-up of science fiction and fantasy as its aesthetics. It introduced us to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, the Thunder God’s mischievous trickster brother and fan favourite, while director Kenneth Branagh injected some Shakespearean gravitas to it all.
The second entry, Thor: The Dark World, was a bit of a dud with a convoluted story and… seriously, I can’t remember what happened there. Something with giants and dark elves.
Third time’s the charm, and Thor: Ragnarok finally pulled it all together and made it gel. In seems that the trick was creating a road movie that emphasised the comedic skills of Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo, and the inherent goofiness of a literal god mingling with a rage-fueled hulk. Director Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows) also gave everything a much more ’80s retro-future look and then went all-in with a synthesizer-heavy score. Along the way, we still got some good character arcs, Cate Blanchett was gloriously chewing scenery as the Goddess of Death, and there was a condemnation of imperialism. Kind of.
Thor: Ragnarok also has a scene that gave me honest-to-thunder-god goosebumps from sheer Awesomeness when I watched it. Go and watch the movie, you’ll know it when you see it. “Ahaaaaaaah-haaaaa! We come from the land of the ice and snow!”
Vikings (2013, Season 2-3)
Moving from one kind of viking to the other, Vikings was pretty much made for me. It has history, mythology, politics, strong but morally ambiguous characters and some great battlefield action. Unfortunately, it also misses some urgency at times. Seasons tend to drag a bit, weighed down with side plots. This was especially apparent in Season 3. I had my mind made up halfway through, to not continue with the fourth season. But then the last two episodes finally hit the gas again and I now really want to know what will happen with Ragnar Lothbrook, Lagertha, and their people. So I’m asking advice from the people who have seen the later seasons: Is it worth it?
Now that all the hype and discussion around the movie has died down, maybe I can deliver a more balanced appraisal. The bad: the “climactic” end fight is terrible, as is the villain “reveal”. Seriously, the audience and the movie deserve better.
The good: pretty much everything else. Obviously it’s a superhero origin story and we’ve seen so many of these in the last few years. I guess it helped that I know very little of Wonder Woman: I’ve pretty much only read The Legend of Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: Origins and that was to “prepare” for this movie. It has some mythology (of the Greek kind, this time) and that’s always a plus in my book. The action sequences and supporting cast are good, as is the “fish-out-of-water” humour (although it can be a bit precious).
But in the end, it’s all about Gal Gadot. I always liked the Israeli actress in the Fast and the Furious movies where her character is portrayed as a tough girl, aware of her supermodel looks and a “everything a guy can, I can do at least as well” attitude. So yeah, you can see why they cast her for this role.
Complete list
Abstract: The Art of Design (2017, Season 1)
Agent Carter (2015, Season 2)
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013, Season 3)
Alien: Covenant (2017)
American Gods (2017, Season 1)
Appleseed (Appurushîdo, 2004)
Baby Driver (2017)
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016, Ultimate Edition)
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Bright (2017)
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (2016, Season 1)
