Army of the Dead

First up, at 148 minutes this movie is too damn long. Not that there's any arbitrary ideal length for a movie, every movie should be as long as it takes to tell its story. But one easy way to check if it's too damn long is to ask yourself, after each scene, "What was the point of this?" If you can't answer the question on half the scenes, then guess what, the movie is too damn long.

The premise of this Ocean's-11-meets-I-am-Legend movie is achingly simple: crew break into a Vegas casino infested with zombies. This is not a story that takes 148 minutes to tell.

Not that it isn't fun in places. The middle stretch, once the team is actually in the casino and things slowly start to unwind, has some charming team-building and genuine tension. But the first third drags on for too long and sets up things with no payoff, and the last third is just people slow-motion running and shooting things.

Dave Bautista, getting a leading man role here, is the leader of the crew. He's hired by Hiroyuki Sanada to retrieve money from the zombie casino before the US government nukes it. He's supported by a Hispanic mechanic (Ana de la Reguera), dude with a chainsaw (Omari Hardwick), a German safecracker (Matthias Schweighofer), a pilot (Tig Notaro CGIed in after the previous actor was accused of sexual misconduct), a guide (Nora Arnezeder), a CoD Zombies Twitch streamer (Raul Castillo) and his redshirt I mean buddy (Samantha Win), plus a slimy camp guard and Dave's daughter (Ella Purnell) also tag along, PLUS there's Sanada's shifty right-hand-man who is played by an actor who could be David Hasselhoff, but isn't (it's Garret Dillahunt).

Is that too many characters? Yep. It's overcrowded, and trying to stuff it all in leads to scenes that either drag on for too long, or else have no reason to exist at all.

For example, the Twitch streamer brings along another friend, who immediately chickens out when he learns the details of the mission. This contributes nothing. 

We learn that there are some "alpha" zombies led by some kind of super-smart king zombie, and in a really icky scene, learn one of the lady zombies is/was pregnant. This contributes nothing.

Notaro gets a bunch of unfunny scenes trying to fix a damaged chopper. There could have been tension in the will-the-chopper-actually-fly scene, but she fixes everything in advance and the lift off no problems. Contribution: Zero.

Dave has a heart-to-heart with his daughter where we see he is motivated not by greed but by guilt and desire to be a better father--good!--this is shortly followed by ANOTHER heart-to-heart with the mechanic where SHE reveals she is not motivated by greed but by her love for Dave and no, we don't need everyone's in-depth motivations and this literally repeats the emotional beats we just had. Also, the Mechanic is immediately killed after. So yeah. Negative one contribution.

There is, of course, a double-cross, but honestly the reasoning behind it so ludicrous and manages to makes the entire premise of the movie dumb, like, zombie dumb.

The other things that drag the movie out are Snyder's evident affinity for slow-mo gunfights and having things be out of focus. Used sparingly, either might be effective, but sheer repetition kind of drains the energy here.

I said it was fun though, didn't I, and it is in the middle-stretch. Matthias Schweighofer in particular absolutely steals the movie as the German safecracker. He's the only character with any kind of arc (goes from scared of zombies to able to fight zombies), and his relationship with Omari Hardwick's hard-ass merc is the only one that shows any development or genuine warmth as Hardwick goes from despising the deadweight to genuine comradeship. Plus Matthias is an absolute hoot as a physical actor. 

In fits and starts there's also some genuine tension. Like redshirt Samantha Win is predictably offed early on due to the double-cross, but the movie still gets tension out of this: As she fights through swarms of zombies, we wonder not whether she will survive, but if she will live long enough to reveal the double-cross.

More of that kind of smart writing could really have come in handy but instead we're back to slow-mo bullet fests. Cue sequel hook. Roll credits.

Venom One, No, Not "There Will Be Carnage"

This was a bit of a dog’s breakfast, wasn’t it? I’m trying to figure out where this went wrong and it’s weird because none of the individual parts, taken in isolation, sound all that bad, it’s just they never quite combine into a coherent whole. Basically, I think the movie tries to do too many things, and as a result does nothing particularly well.

I didn’t write it so I’m kind of trying to read minds and guess what happened here, but it does feel like a good idea butchered through rewrites or edits in an attempt to check certain boxes that didn’t need to be checked.

What is this movie even about? The minimalist, bare-bones outline of the plot is: “Down-on his luck reporter Tom Hardy gets infected with an alien being that gives him superpowers. The two must prevent a tech-bro tycoon/mad scientist who wants to bring more of the aliens to Earth for Reasons.”

You look at that, and you realize that the first sentence has almost nothing to do with the second.

How does Hardy being down on his luck move the plot forward?

Well, gives him a reason to dislike the tycoon. Check that box. What, you mean a reason other than the whole “infect the entire human race with alien spores” thing? Uh, yeah, well, that doesn’t come up until the final act, in a scene where a space shuttle is readied for launch in five minutes.

Why does the alien symbiote agree to help Hardy prevent this from happening?

Well, it likes him for, um, reasons. I don’t know, there’s a throwaway line about them both being losers, whatever that means. Check that box.

Just, so many scenes and beats don’t seem to have a reason for existing in this movie.

After he’s infected, there’s an extended sequence where Hardy/Venom break into a news corp office tower so he can plant evidence that the tycoon is up to no good. After his escape from a SWAT team whose rules of engagement are apparently shoot to kill for offences like breaking & entering (hey, this is America, so… maybe?) this never comes up again. Cool action scene (even though we already had one), check.

Immediately after, we discover that the alien goo thing is slowly killing Hardy. Second Act hurdle, check. At the end of the movie, Hardy is reunited with his alien goo. The health problems are never mentioned again and Hardy looks quite chipper.

Well into the third Act, the tycoon is ALSO infected with an alien spore thing. Before he is infected, the tycoon plans to find more alien spore things because he thinks human-alien hybrids are the next stage in evolution (idk man I don’t write this stuff). After he is infected, the tycoon plans to… find more alien spore things. Huh. Okay. Third Act twist, check.

In all this mess I think what should have been the heart of the movie, a kind of odd couple slash buddy cop action-comedy with Hardy and the alien sharing his body kind of gets lost. You can kind of see glimpses of it in the first chase scene where the tycoon’s goons try to capture the pair (starting by attempting to ram them with explosive kamikaze drones, look I really didn’t write this thing) with Hardy playing the oceanically out of his depth reporter unwittingly and unwillingly turned superpowered killing machine.

Hardy is good in these scenes though eccentric and uneven in others. Eddie Brock is a tough character to make likeable, a charming but self-centered asshole who lacks the brains of a Tony Stark or Stephen Strange to balance it out, and the part feels like it was written for a much younger actor. With Hardy, he seems more arrogant man-child than headstrong kid. What does Brock want? I don’t really know. What does Venom want? I… don’t know. What are Brock and Venom trying to achieve? Mainly to stay out of the bad guy’s clutches—it’s only at the very end that their motivation switches to stopping the bad guy’s plan, but then again the bad guy only came up with the plan 10 minutes before the ending so you can’t really blame them there. 

Still, being unable to answer those questions makes these guys to relate to.

Same goes for the rest of the cast. Riz Ahmed as the big bad spews a couple of lines about how awful the Earth is and how humanity needs to migrate to the stars, so I guess he’s a kind of Elon Musk not-quite-parody, but quite why he thinks bonding with aliens is the way to go is all a bit say-wat-ish. And then he gets infected with the alien which changes his goals and motivations… in no way whatsoever. Huh.

There’s also an ex-fiancée and her new boyfriend in there. Yup. They exist in this universe. There’s a kind of funny moment between Hardy and the no-longer-ladyfriend about her pet cat mainly notable because the joke actually lands. Otherwise, they’re just plot devices.

All of these issues could, I think, maybe have been resolved if there was greater focus on what this movie was going to be about. Odd couple learn to appreciate each other? Okay, gotta give each of them something worth appreciating. Then show how their adventures drive the realization. Dramatic climax where they finally learn to work together to stop the bad guy. Boom. Roll credits.

I did write that, so you can blame me for that one.

 

 

 

Jupiter's Legacy

This one is very rough about its pasted-on beard edges. The eight episodes are pretty slow paced for what actually happens: Ageing superhero dad confronts rebellious kids who feel big daddy J's values are old-fashioned and out of date, while in flashback scenes set in the late 1920’s we see how Pops and others originally got their superpowers. Season 1 is all setup and no payoff, introducing a whole mess of conflicts, old vs young, good vs evil, brother vs brother, without really developing them much.

There was one brief flicker of original thought, when the protagonists “The Utopian” (another Superman knockoff a la Omni-Man and Homelander) goes to visit a former supervillain turned shrink for a chat, and the shrink essentially calls bullshit on the premise that our times are now somehow more complicated than they were 90 years ago. Life has always been complicated and filled with compromise, he explains.

(What has changed, from a meta perspective, is we expect greater psychological realism from superhero stories than we did in the past.)

The CG is “Doom being played on a pregnancy test” poor and the fight scenes consequently more silly than satisfying and the hair & beard prosthetics are, hm, distractingly unconvincing. The actress who plays Chloe, the protag’s daughter, is just awful, never looking not miserable in all situations. The flashback scenes by contrast were stylishly done, though as mentioned above the plot development creeps along like one of them newfangled automatic horseless carriage things.

Still, I thought the bones of the story weren’t bad—superhero families behaving, like, you know, families—though maybe a touch overdone in recent years, or hell in recent months, with Invincible and The Boys and whatnot. Given the sluggish and slightly dreary delivery of season one though, I’m not sure we’re ever going to find out what they planned to do with it.

Love Death and Reboots 2

Season two of the Netflix's animated SF short story anthology. Comes in much shorter than season 1, with eight episodes as opposed to 18 in the first batch, and many of the ideas feel similarly truncated, all setup and no payoff. Noticeably less bloodthirsty and boobthirsty than the initial outing, perhaps as a result of viewers asking them to tone it down a bit? 

1. Automated Customer Service: Robots + Death. Cleaning robot goes bad and attempts to murder its exceptionally ugly owner and her irritating dog. The customer service line she attempts to call is mildly amusing.

2. Ice: Brotherly love + Death. Oddly-proportioned people go ice-whale watching. Not a lot happens, but I liked the understatedness of the ending, the way they just tell it with a look and a smile rather than spelling it out.

3. Pop Squad: Death. A middle-aged Anakin Skywalker does a 50's art deco Blade Runner. Easily the darkest of the stories here, and one of maybe two that are even remotely thought-provoking.

4. Snow in the Desert: Love + Robots + Death. Old Man Logan, er, Kenobi. Immortal desert hermit gets attacked by bounty hunters. Impressive cg but not a lot else going on here. Twist ending was entirely predictable, despite coming at the end of an almost comical series of reverses.

5. The Tall Grass: Death. Polar Express, but evil.

6. All Through the House: Death (Potentially). Santa Claus, but alien.

7. Life Hutch: Robots + Death. Michael B Jordan defeats a robot evidently implanted with the brain of a cat by using a laser pointer. 

8. The Drowned Giant: Death. A dead whale washes ashore but our David Attenborough narrator reimagines it as a gigantic human corpse in order to underline our blasé attitude to death in nature and the indignities to which we subject dead animal bodies.

So you have have love and death without the robots, or robots and death without the love, or all three together, but there's always death. Death is mandatory. 

WandaVersion

I give it's "Lost but Suburbs" vibe in the early episodes credit for fully committing to the bit, if nothing else. The imitation of sitcoms over the decades was pretty thorough, including everything from the laugh track to story lines and dialog and humor styles. That said, it was a bit like the no-cut cinematography in 1917, a gimmick whose gimmickiness overshadowed the point of the gimmick. Actually, in the end there wasn't much of a point to the gimmick, except to entertain the viewer with the gimmick. Like the sitcom situations don't actually serve the plot in any way, it's just established that Wanda is living in this woo-woo land of make-believe. The show just drops the whole shtick in the last few episodes and no more is ever heard of it.

I also think the danger of a show within a show, a layer of fiction within your fiction, is that your IRL fiction has to be very, very grounded otherwise the lines between your real fiction and fiction fiction start to blur and the viewer gets confused about what's real fiction and what's fiction fiction. You get me? The "reality" of your fictional universe kind of gets worn away and it gets harder to empathize with your characters since they're all fiction. 

So, and this is just an example, just spitballing here, just a f'rinstance, just say, making your main villain a literal witch would be a bad idea. Hypothetically speaking.

Good god that was dumb.

Attention writers: Wanda is the villain. She is also the victim. This is interesting, do not run away from that and insert some boring ass white dude and a literal fucking witch.

Also thought there were a whole bunch of extraneous characters in this, a show which could have been a pretty tight focus on dealing with grief. Like the writers or showrunners or Marvel or Disney got a little scared of how dark they were getting and threw in a slightly irritating Millennial youtuber type personality and the relative of some character I've never heard of from a movie I haven't seen.

Falcon Appearing in Conjunction With The Winter Soldier

I finally caved and got a Disney+ subscription and the first thing I watched was the Mandalorian but I have nothing to say about it so moving right along to other things I have nothing to say about, but will anyway: Not Only Falcon But Also Winter Soldier.

Confession time, the few MCU movies that I watched have almost all been blasted into my brain from the back of airplane seats at 30,000 feet above the Pacific, so nothing has really stuck. Needless to say, everything I know about this world has come second or third hand from social media but luckily we all know what a reliable source of information that is.

That said, I kind of liked this.

The opening and set up in particular were solid, especially the Bucky stuff with his psychologist and Sam's stuff with Isaiah. The whole question of whether a Black man could or should become the symbol of America was well-handled I thought, acknowledging both history and present issues, but also making the case for people to define for themselves what their national identity is.

That said, this was Subway sandwich overstuffed. I really wish Bucky had more airtime, because that's another fascinating subject they could have tackled--guilt, forgiveness and redemption. How do you make amends when "Sorry" does not even begin to cover it? 

But nope, no time for that because in addition to race in America, we've also got immigration and the refugee crisis to deal with, and the dark side of being treated like a hero, and the radicalization of youth, and political accountability, and and and and it's all too much. The bad guy aims are vague and unconvincing and Bucky's redemption arc gets wrapped up off-screen.

Random thoughts:

1. More Bucky and Yori and the cute waitress from the sushi place. 

2. It was just bizarre to me that they had Nubian women in full tribal regalia wandering around Latvia or Lithuania oh come on like you can tell the difference, you'd think that would have drawn more attention

3. Didn't know who Sharon was so the whole "Power Broker" subplot was a bit ?

4. Karli was in the Han Solo movie that nobody watched, too

5. Mackie going from practicing with the shield with Bucky in one scene, to not being able to catch it the next was just an odd bit of editing

6. More Zemo. Yes I know everybody loved his dance. More villains with comprehensible backstories and identifiable goals, please.

7. Is "USAgent" supposed to be significant? And who is Seinfeld lady? Don't make me google essential plot details please, shows.