All posts in “Reviews”

Deja Vu

Posted 19 years ago · Tagged: denzel washington, tony scott · 3 Comments

[singlepic=1,left]

Two major inconsistencies:

There was one line in time, it originally went something like this (chronologically): Doug is revived at hospital, drives ambulance to Carroll, smashes through house, gets shot, saves Claire, goes to her house, she answers Beth, he moves magnets around on refrigerator (‘u can save her’), she tends his wounds, leaving the bloody gaze there. Now, he can’t have stopped the ferry from exploding, since this is the same line in time as we see in the present, because all of these things mentioned is there in the present, and therefore him stopping the ferry from exploding would also be there in the present. If there was more branches, there still wouldn’t be magnets and so on in the present, since they would be on a different branch in the time/space continuum (the one where the ferry doesn’t explode), which Doug would’ve created when going back into time and started changing significant things.

And the second one: He can’t possibly go back in time and prevent the ferry from blowing up, since, if it hasn’t blown up, why would he have any reason to go back in time? There’s one way to make this work, like they talked about, if he had created a new branch in time, a parellel universe, where the only change is the addition of him, which means there’ll be two of him, not connected. But they make that theory impossible from the first inconsistency, where some things have been changed in the past, and other things haven’t, which proves it’s not a different branch in time. The ferry blows up, but the magnets, ambulance and so on is also in the present, which means he must’ve done some of the things in the past, but not all, which doesn’t make sense since we know he saved Claire and the ferry in the past.

What I’m getting at is this: If the last part of the movie was a different branch in time we wouldn’t have seen stuff he changed in this branch, in the original branch, the present.

Just had to get that off my chest before I forgot it, I’ll write some more tomorrow. The movie went from a potentiel 7 or 8 out of 10 to a 6/10. Too bad.

Heroes Season 1

Posted 19 years ago · Tagged: heroes · 2 Comments

Season one of Heroes is over, I just watched the finale and I have some mixed feelings about it, and the entire series. It started out very nice, but in my opinion it’s been going a bit down hill since then. My main issue is the amount of errors, especially in the last episode, which is riddled with them. I’ll give you a couple of examples: Why didn’t Claire just shoot Peter when he was about to explode, they knew they could just pull out the bullet and revive him later. Why didn’t Hiro make sure Sylar was dead? Why didn’t Sylar do anything to stop Hiro when he charged him with the sword? And so on, and so on. Also, Nathan suddenly appearing to rescue Peter was ridiculous, he suddenly just changed his mind? Stupid.

And then there’s the problem with Peter not using any of his abilities to get out of sticky situations. For example, why didn’t he fly or teleport away when he was exploding? Obviously this is a problem for the writers, because he would litteraly be able to overcome all situations, he’s just too powerful, so they have to lose some integrity by ignoring his powers. This bothers me when they display scenes like he’s completely powerless, like the last, climatic one. I know this problem is unavoidable when you have a show like this, but it’s still annoying. Then there are stupid, more easily avoidable, errors like Hiro becoming a swordfighter in a few hours and Peter not even trying to get away from Ted when they meet. Wouldn’t the separation of Peter, Ted and Sylar be the easiest way to avoid the bomb? They don’t even think about that.

Two things got me worked up a bit in the last episode though, the girl talking about the unknown hero/villain, and Hiro going back to the 17th century. One thing is sure, I’m looking a lot more forward to the season finale of Lost.

Heroes Season 1: 7/10.

Slither

Posted 19 years ago · Tagged: nathan fillion · Comments Off

I’m beginning to like these new horror movies that don’t take themselves too seriously, but still have big enough budgets to include incredible special effects and make-up, for example the remake of Dawn of the Dead, the Tarantino/Rodriguez project Grindhouse (from the look of the trailers anyway) and now also Slither. The plotline is a classic; an alien lifeform lands on earth, starts turning people into mutants and zombies, who then have to be defeated by the local townsfolk.

Great mix of astonishing CGI and make-up makes the creatures seem incredibly lifelike, the humor is great, especially because of Nathan “Capt. Reynolds” Fillion, one of my new favorite actors, and then there are just a bunch of cool, gory scenes.

Well, instead of going into detail I though I’d just post some of the highlights with screenshots (click images for bigger ones):

Whiplash to the torso, auch.

Poor Brenda is being used as a vomb…

… and here she gives birth by exploding.

Small girls freak me out.

Slither – 7/10.

Spider-Man 3

Posted 19 years ago · Tagged: sam raimi, toby maguire · 8 Comments

If you read this blog you may know I tend to write more about movies I don’t like, and unfortunately, this is going to be a long entry. I watched Spider-Man 3 tonight, and I really looked forward to it. I’ve been waiting to see Venom since they announced the first movie. I’ll split the review into several sections covering the different parts of the movie. Spoilers ahead, of course.

Harry’s threat
After Peter and Harry’s initial battle, Harry suffers from amnesia, he regains his memory and resumes his vengeance trip against Parker by leaving Mary Jane with the dilemma of ending her relationship with Peter if she wants him to survive. This makes for a ridiculous scene in which MJ tear-eyed breaks up with Peter, and then continues working at a jazz bar like nothing has happened. Now, why the hell didn’t she just tell Peter about the threat, she knows he can look out for himself, and she doesn’t at all seem traumatized about the fact that her former boyfriend and long-time friend Harry is suddenly a psychotic fruitcake. Useless sub-story that isn’t even brought up later in the movie.

Parker and the symbiote
So, Peter gets infected with the symbiote and his behaviour starts changing. How can you see this? He gets a fucking emo hair-due. It’s true, if you look up ’emo’ at WikiPedia, this is what you get:

See that hair? That’s how Peter Parker looks when he’s a bad guy. Also, he doesn’t act like the arrogant, spiteful asshole you would expect, yeah sure, he tries to kill Harry and Marko, but what then? He strolls down the street like some over-confident schmuck waving at girls and dancing, then he takes Gwen Stacy to the bar where Mary Jane works, to make her jealous, and dances some more, after playing a perfect piece on a piano (yes, a ‘wtf’ is in place). The scenes are retarded, and end with Peter suddenly realizing he’s acting like an idiot, when he accidently shoves Mary Jane. Oh really, shoving her did the trick, but breaking her heart by dancing with Gwen and trying to kill his best friend didn’t? Right.

Also, there’s a minor detail about the symbiot that bugged me; in the movie it’s portrayed as if the symbiot has taken over the suit, since it’s become black, and not Peter, since he’s able to take it off. But why does he have to struggle with it in the church? I know it has gripped onto him, it’s just poorly presented.

Harry’s retarded butler and the ending
Apparently the Osborns have a butler in their mansion, I’ve never seen him in any of the movies, and as you find out in the end, he’s just in the movie to make Harry realize that Peter didn’t kill his father, because the idiotic butler apparently noticed cut marks from the glider (Parker couldn’t have used the glider to kill Norman? Oh well, nevermind) on Harry’s father’s corpse! WELL, MAYBE YOU SHOULD’VE TOLD HIM THAT BEFORE HE FUCKING WENT ON A KILLING SPREE YOU! Goddamnit, it’s so stupid I can’t even explain it.

Naturally Harry goes to help Peter in the final battle against Sandman and Venom, eventually ending up saving Peter and dying himself by jumping in front of his glider, thrown by Venom at Peter. Aftwards you have the typical sunset scene in which Mary Jane and Peter are kneeling at Harry as he dies, and then Sandman explains that his killing of Ben was an accident, and Peter forgives him. ‘ClichÃ©’ doesn’t even cover it.

Coincidences
There are a lot of weird coincidences in Spider-Man 3, it seems like they couldn’t really figure out a proper way to explain some parts, or maybe they just didn’t have enough time, the movie is pretty cramped together as it is. Anyway, we have the symbiot conviniently landing (with no further explanation) right next to Peter and Mary Jane, and Flint Marko just so happens to stumble upon an unguarded and unmonitored particle accelerator (happens all the time), the scientists do notice some changes to the contents of the reactor, but “it’s probably just a bird”. Now, come on. Not only would a particle accelerator be locked up, INSIDE, it would also be guarded by something more than a damn fence. And it doesn’t even have any cameras near it. What are they doing with it anyway? Lastly we have Eddie Brock walking into the exact same church as Peter, pff.

Villains
As mentioned I looked forward to Venom, and he looks cool, but they should’ve changed his voice, maybe not all the time, but definitely when he’s transformed all the way, Topher Grace’s skinny voice doesn’t really make the evil appearance terrifying enough, especially if you remember it from ‘That ’70s Show’. Sandman was cool as well, incredible CGI, cool battles, but my prefered villain in Spider-Man 3 is the New Goblin. Nice outfit, exciting fights, and, contrary to Eddie’s motives, you can understand why Harry wants Peter dead.

Misc
If the clichÃ© ending wasn’t enough; we also have a scene of Spidey jumping past a huge American flag before entering the final battle. Similar scenes (in the endings) almost ruined the previous movies for me, and it’s repulsive in this movie as well. Why do they have to compare Peter’s fight to some sort of American patriotism in such an obvious, disgusting way? Like we don’t see enough over-patriotic Americans already.

Lastly, the pace of the movie is simply too fast, three villains with seperate stories in top of Parker’s own battle with Mary Jane and the suit, it’s just too much, and unfortunately, it makes the stories seem rushed with missing details. The final battle is over way too quick, Sandman just stops fighting when Harry fires missiles at him and Venom is easily destroyed by a pumpkin grenade while it’s vunerable because of Peter making a lot of noise.

5/10.

Crackdown will crack you up

Posted 19 years ago · Tagged: crackdown, xbox 360 · Comments Off

Look, he’s gonna step on your face! He’s THAT cool.

I never liked the Grand Theft Auto series that much, great games, but I found them boring pretty quickly. They lacked a couple of things that would’ve kept me interested: no co-op mode, nothing to do other than driving around killing stuff and doing missions and none of the games had any cool physics, when it comes to human bodies and explosions. Crackdown has it all: the co-op mode is extremely well incorporated, friends can join ongoing singleplayer campaigns, you can enhance skills in various categories (and not boring ones like in San Andres, but stuff like throwing busses and jumping over building) and lastly the explosions look fricking cool! Throw a bunch of cars together, flick a grenade into the mess and KABOOM the entire thing erupts, littering the area with debris, just take a look at this:

[youtube]eaWqseH2A60[/youtube]