JohnnyIMHO

Once you understand the pacing and that this about subterfuge and strategy, then this is a truly wonderful series.

As mannered and subtle as the Japanese aristocracy it is portraying.

The standout is Anna Sawai, who is magical as Lady Mariko.

She has a porcelain-like beauty, incredibly beguiling, tough, intelligent and heartbreaking in her ongoing distress.

Her story arc is so powerful

And a refreshing and intelligent climax, forgoing the usual, exhaustingly overdone massive battle.

I'm almost hoping they don't make a Part 2 because it's hard to believe it could be as good

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

There truly seems to be a Nolan-effect. His messy illogical movies garnering a devotion not just for his impressive visuals, but also got some perceived intellectual weight.

Like many of Nolan's movies I was put off by the unlikely premise, a wilfully confused timeline, poorly explained 'facts' and, especially for a 'hard sci-Fi' movie, a woefully flawed logic.

The escape plan for the human race seems just ridiculous.

The mission seems random & purely a device to setup space scenery

The planets the astronauts land on seem magical rather than realistic. The tsunami planet is visually exciting, but a planet-wide knee-deep ocean seems daft. The ice planet with colossal self-supporting ice arches, even though the astronauts seem to walking about in 1G, is unrealistic.

Time-dilation effects because a planet is so close to the black hole is absurd. If you were that close the black hole you and the entire planet would have been fried by radiation.

The depiction of the black hole itself is undeniably impressive.

The acting amidst the nonsense is good (Apart from the tediously wooden, over-used Caine)

To conclude, Nolan's faux high-brow themes generally do not work for me.

Just becomes kinda boring

The black & white photography is intense and spectacular. The setting is moody and gothic

But it soon becomes plodding and drab. There is no dramatic tension.

Andrew Scott is fascinating, but too obviously psychopathic, the spectre of Moriarty looms over him, so there is little surprise where his character is headed

Flynn is lacking any charisma. Fanning is distant. No characters drew me in.

For me, it is severely lacking against the 'Talented Mr Ripley' movie. Matt Damon was twitchy, envious and desperate. Scott just seems robotic.

Got to episode 4. I will stick with it, but I feel it will be a slog.

** Further update. Half way through ep.4 I've given up. It's flat and lifeless and monotonous.

I've put my finger on what is wrong: why does Ripley envy such dull characters as Dickie and Marge? They are boring personality-free characters. In the movie Dickie was lively and charismatic, annoyingly so, and the location was dazzling and seductive. You could fully understand Ripley's envy. Also, Damon displayed far more range, far better acting than Andrew Scott does in this series. Unfortunately he plays it as a mediocre Moriarty.

Great start. The parts in communist China are interesting. The entire premise is intriguing.

The acting is mostly good.

I liked Rodriguez's non-glamorous role. Liam Cunningham is agreeably garrulous.

But then increasingly nonsensical elements begin. The sci-fi becomes unrealistic and magical

The virtual reality games are quite mundane & irrelevant

The attack on the ship, slicing it up, is spectacular but ridiculous.

The rocket sent to meet up with the aliens makes no sense.

The magical electrons that can do anything & envelope the whole world ... er

Even though the aliens can hack any tech all the good guys get onto a plane together.

And then series 1 just ends.

Nah. Won't be bothering with series 2, assuming it gets made.

It has a good start - I was genuinely surprised by the hero's past. The first fight on the bus is great - and is almost realistic

But then it quickly goes into superhero/ninja territory

He is unstoppable. As agile as Spider-Man. Takes any amount of beatings.

Then it just gets more improbable. The shootout at the end is generic and lacking any tension or realism.

The heroes plod around slowly, mostly standing in the centre of the room in full view, whilst dozens and dozens of bad guys miss them. The hero's 90 year old dad stumbles around with a dopey grin, moving even more slowly than the others, yet somehow also untouchable.

Then the hero moves smoothly from conflicted hero to action hero as his adoring wife beams at him.

I watched it. It finished. No biggy.

Lawrence of Arabia without the depth.

The pacing was the problem. It was far too slow for the first 3/4 then rushed at the end. It meandered with little sense of what the point was at times.

Chalamet just became a megalomaniac quite abruptly with very little development. And there was no surprise that he was going to become a messiah. His big challenge of riding a sand worm - "the biggest ever seen" (of course) - was predictably successful

Why was Jessica chosen to be the Fremen mother superior when outsiders were so distrusted?

Too little explanation, even though there was plenty of time to do so.

Baron Harkonnen became quite ineffectual.

The Emperor was just a feeble old man. Where did his power come from? His fighters seemed quite average. He landed on the Arakkis and was defeated easily.

I enjoyed Part 1 more because the characters were fresh and were more engaging. In Part 2 they seemed a little empty and caricatured. Part 2 seemed more of a grind.

The exploration of religion, fanaticism, freedom fighting vs terrorism, was interesting and unusual for a sci-fi movie. It does stand head and shoulders above most blockbusters.

Of course, the visuals were stunning, as was the teeth-rattling sound.

Although I admire the Director's more measured approach, i.e. Not just churning out a sequel, I'm not sure I'm excited enough for a part 3.

ADDENDUM: On reflection I am even less impressed by this movie. The pacing would have been ok - I thought it was ok at the time - EXCEPT it was all ruined by the last 30 mins.

The big climactic fight is a dud. The soldiers waving their teeny swords at the sand worms is ludicrous. Why all the sword fights when lasers and machine guns have been used earlier? Paul just marches into the Emperor's super-tech ship. The guards are impotent. The suddenly pathetic Harkonnen is just stabbed. The Emperor looks bewildered and tired. The big knife fight is predictable and quite pointless.

And then ... Paul sends his ragtag Taliban desert warriors, who have never been off-planet, off to fight space armies in part 3. But I guess if they're all as ineffectual as the Emperor and his elite guard and the entire Harkonnen clan, then I'm sure they'll do just fine.

I won't be watching.

So bad. So bad.

Bad acting. Really bad.

Absolue time wasting trash.

Not thrilling. Not funny. Not interesting.

Terrible dialogue.

Action scenes so unrealistic that there is zero sense of jeopardy.

Everything looks new and artificial.

Did I mention the acting? So wooden & unnatural that you can't take any of the characters remotely seriously.

Or maybe it was supposed to be a comedy? But it isn't funny.

And even though the hero finally manages to work out the convoluted clues that leads to some treasure or whatever (it really doesn't matter), everyone else just turns up anyway for a big laboured fight at the end.

I would have stopped watching after 1/2 hour but my wife wanted to see what happened - then said "well that was cr*p"

Tom's goofy charm is simply not enough.

The only decent thing is Tati Gabrielle - not her character though. That's awful. No, she is so beautiful I could just watch her. But with the sound off & fast forward through the rest of the movie.

Just re-watch National Treasure or an Indiana Jones or a Pirates or a Mission Impossible. All of which this movie tries to copy in a feeble ham-fisted way.

AVOID.

Unfortunately and inevitably the majority of this documentary is smug flat-earthers spouting their idiotic beliefs.

They are all more interested in 'being part of something' or sticking it to science to have any real theories about how the earth could be flat or why anyone would bother to cover it up.

The closest we got to a reason for the conspiracy was 'after keeping a secret for 450 years they aren't going to start telling the truth now'.

But who started that secret ? And why? No answer. Not even a theory.

Mark Sargent was insufferable. A misfit living with his mother, who clearly revelled in his inadvertent fame. A mediocre mind who is trying to validate himself by trying to be cleverer than science.

Flat-Earth is obviously a fledgling religion and that was clearly seen in some of its faithful. In spite of their failed scientific experiments, they resolved to carry on - because they already know they are right. Faith in the face of evidence. A cult mentality at work.

Their desperation to 'win' against the scientists was infantile.

Why don't they simply charter a plane and fly to the South Pole, witnessing that there isn't an ice wall with NASA troops guarding it?

Even easier, why not sail across the South Atlantic and measure the distance?

Even easier, they could consider how their Satnav is working (given there can't be any GPS satellites in orbit, according to their logic)?

But they don't want truth. They want a fiction they can share with their reality-challenged buddies.

They want to feel like somebodies.

The final debunking with the laser experiment was delicious. But it was in about the last minute of the movie & no flat-earther was asked to respond to it.

It just rather subtly exposed flat-earth was wrong. But far too subtly, given we've sat through 1.5 hours of pseudo-science.

The documentary seemed to neither explore in depth the flat-earthers beliefs or clearly present the orthodox scientific reasons for refuting them.

I think it merely wanted to poke gentle fun at some desperately insecure mavericks.

Not awful. Likeable in parts.

But some silly cringe moments, the further ruining of the Nick Fury character, another lacklustre villain, a string of different locales and fights lacking any tension or excitement.

The 3 main characters started to become friends, but then the movie ended. Not really developed. It just happened, then stopped. Unconvincing

It's just ok. Nothing in it character-wise, idea-wise or visually that is new or exciting.

Post-Endgame Marvel really has lost its way. Most of the movies, with a few exceptions, have been either pointless or truly dreadful.

And they seem to be leading nowhere.

To Kang? Who cares? His appearances so far have been mediocre.

And any build up to him has been so tediously drawn out I am simply bored with it.

And if there isnt really an arc then the post-Endgame movies really do not hold up as standalone efforts.

And when it hints at the Young Avengers and an X-Men crossover, I really don't believe that Marvel can pull it off anymore.

If it can make such an appalling mess of Thor, Secret Invasion, Guardians, then I am more fearful than excited at what it will do to Fantastic Four , etc.

Marvel's decision to reduce its output has unfortunately not replaced quantity with quality.

They are now just releasing fewer poor movies rather than lots of poor movies.

After all the hype I was pretty much underwhelmed by this mess of a movie.

Unfortunately Nolan seemed to have forgotten this is a biopic and directed it like it was one of his 'puzzle' movies, like Inception or Memento, or god help us, Tenet.

So, rather than telling us what should have been a fascinating story, he jumps backwards and forwards relentlessly, never give us time to learn much at all.

I think now Nolan's time-hopping gimmick is an attempt to hide that he can't tell a coherent story.

In fact, in 3 hours what do we learn ?

Do we learn why Oppenheimer was anxious all the time? Why his wife was angry and despairing all the time? How he could charm people (utterly absent from Murphy's portrayal)? Why he was chosen to lead the nuclear programme (in spite of his potential communist sympathies) ? Why he accepted the job? What his feelings were about creating the bomb? Whether he was actually a communist?

No. We learn none of the above. What we get is a jumpy string of scenes like an overlong advert.

The sex scene is porn-level ludicrous . The nude scene during the hearing is painfully heavy-handed.

His part was so disjointed I really can't tell if Cillian Murphy played it well or not.

Robert Downey Jr played a great part, but in a boring & inconsequential sub-plot (which actually becomes the main plot)

No one else got much of a look-in

What should have been the significant core of the story - I.e. How they created the bomb - is breezed over. The science is negligible ( I contrast this with how effectively and engagingly the complex science was handled in the TV series 'Chernobyl' ).

The tension leading up to the first detonation is genuinely exciting... but the explosion itself is pitiful. And then without further ado we're back to the boring security clearance hearing.

We're supposed to feel anxiety about the nuclear bomb, but we don't see its effects.

Was Oppenheimer, the man, genuinely such an enigma? Or did Nolan simply make an unnecessarily confused movie?

I've loved so many Wes Anderson movies but this one is dire.

I couldn't finish it.

There are no relatable characters at all. None of them seem human at all. Good actors acting like bad actors.

It seems to a parody of his own movies.

Cartoonish but without the fun.

He was starting to lose it with French Dispatch, but this movie is significantly worse.

With the setting so artificial he needed to ground it with some reality, but the characters are like emotionless puppets. They seem to just read the lines without meaning any of them.

And there is no plot to compensate, just gimmicks which are clumsy and irritating.

Surprisingly disappointing.

As a lifelong Marvel fan & a worshipper of the Infinity Arc, most MCU movies since then have become a painful experience.

I stopped going to see every marvel movie in the cinema because it was too painful to be trapped watching a bad movie. At least at home I can take a break and drink a beer

Thor: Love and Thunder was the absolute low point so far.

GOTG 3 is not as bad as that, because the humour is not quite as infantile - and I was not expecting much from it, having seen Gunn's decline since GOTG 1

Vol.2 was already fraying - what was quirky & funny about the characters was already feeling a little forced & repetitive. Their cameo in Love & Thunder showed that decline - they were dull, dim-witted & irritating.

I stopped watching the Xmas special after 15 mins, appalled by the combination of sickly sentimentality & moronic 'humour'.

Vol.3 is a 2 1/2 hour version of that...

The great value of Vol.1 was its characters, but these characters have not developed or grown - they have only become degraded & caricatured (with the possible exception of Nebula)

Quill - like Thor, he has become less self-aware, and less funny (but boy, he keeps trying anyway). Apathetic, a permanent blank expression.

Gamora - just seems annoyed to be there. I know how she feels.

Drax - he was once funny because of his literalness. Now he is literally called stupid in this movie. Which you can't argue with (in fights, as a supposed expert, he stands still & waits to be shot)

Mantis - now an irritating brat.

Rocket - sad raccoon/snarky raccoon. That's about it, in spite of the pile-it-on-thick backstory.

The villain - a poor man's Kang with weirdly the same glowing-blue suit & similar powers (In fact, this is unfair - from what I've seen of Kang so far, he is nothing to get excited about either). No believable motive.

Warlock - crammed in to excite the fans. But unfortunately just there for comic relief. Not that he's actually funny, of course.

(Like so many of Gunn's characters he takes things literally, e.g. He is told to threaten a character, but he kills them. Ayesha then has to explain she didn't mean that - just in case we don't get the 'joke'. Gunn does this a lot)

The movie manages to be both tedious and irritating. By the time we reach the 'touching' scenes at the end, my patience had long gone.

I should give a plot summary: Argument - let's go somewhere - boom! - argument - let's go somewhere- boom! - argument ... ad nauseam

There is of course some 'drama' - cute animals with widdle baby voices being tortured for no logical reason. The super-tech High Evolutionary seems to think bolting some wheels on a walrus or spindly robot arms on an otter might produce the perfect species ... ?

Anything that was original in Vol.1 is now just clichéd - another zero-g floaty scene; several slow-mo walks; the spaceship sliding along the ground; songs jammed in - in fact, pointless scenes included just so a song can be played.

What was witty banter before is now forced, clunky & a terrible lack of comic timing

There is simply no jeopardy.

After severe injuries or a beating characters are fine moments later.

After a seeming death in the vacuum of space with frozen eyeballs & swollen head, with no medical treatment, the character is saying he's fine.

A fall from thousands of feet? No problem. Groot can fly now with wings made of twigs. Head cut off? No problem. Groot can do anything now.

Don't worry kids, nobody important dies. Even though the film and the characters are tired of the whole thing, we must leave the option open for another sequel.

2 good things: 1. Nebula - probably unintentional, but she treats the Guardians as the cretins they are 2. DC - having seen Gunn's work on this & the Suicide Squad, I can quite safely avoid anything he's involved in with the DCEU

Time to grow up, I think (me, that is - it's too late for Marvel)

I dithered about seeing this at the cinema. I have seen all 29 preceding movies there, but after the pathetic Thor movie & the general unevenness of Phase 4, I thought about breaking the habit.

But I'm glad I went. I genuinely enjoyed it & appreciated the more serious tone.

It gave the previously supporting characters a chance to shine - especially Shuri, who graduated from spunky sidekick - and Queen Ramonda, who was impressively majestic.

And great to see more of Okoye (although her costume at the end is ghastly)

Namor made a credible villain who was ruthless and aggressive for understandable reasons.

And, surprisingly, I did not miss the actual Black Panther role. I enjoyed the aspect of others working together.

It is too long though. A few too many conversations. Although not because I was impatient to get to the action.

Also, Namor seems a little too powerful. And strolls into Wakanda twice, bypassing their supposedly super-advanced defences without any trouble at all.

Also the theory that Shuri is working on to weaken Namor's troops is promptly forgotten & we have the obligatory mass hand to hand combat at the end. That was too obvious and quite tedious, lifted by some good individual combat.

Why does Marvel constantly fall back onto mass fight scenes? Individual fights are far more engaging.

In all, I hope this is MCU getting back on track.

Great story and engaging actors. Rachel Stirling and Keeley Hawes are gorgeous.

But it was like it was directed by a drunkard. Camera angles all over the place. Abrupt editing. Strange close ups. All quite erratic.

Maybe it is meant to convey Nan's inner feelings?

And the anachronistic music is awful. Like 80s synth music. Jarring.

The acting is quite hammy but I expect that is a deliberate melodramatic style.

It's hard to tell if it's meant to be so delirious. The whole thing is rather like the music hall world it portrays.

Nevertheless I enjoyed it ! The erotic sex scenes certainly help.

I really enjoyed this.

I was expecting just a fun kids horror thing, but it was pretty heavy at times due to the characters were terminally I'll teens.

It gave an edge.

Great acting.

Ruth Codd was especially terrific.

Iman Benson was great.

Most of the stories within the story were entertaining & varied.

My favourite character dying added a real poignancy

It also explored occult vs Christianity in an interesting way. That subject is typically avoided

HOWEVER I wished it had been self-contained & finished in 10 episodes.

I feel that a 2nd series could drag & the worry is always that a 2nd series will get cancelled anyway.

A terrible jumpy mess of a film.

Austin Butler plays Elvis well but we learn nothing of the man. Simply set pieces and recreations.

We learn nothing of how he was inspired other than scenes of him as a kid watching black artists. Was that it? Who knows?

It's not deep. But then neither was Elvis.

Tom Hanks character is appalling. A cartoon villain.

But then the movie is like a live-action cartoon.

The creepy carnival scenes. The hall of mirrors. It ruins any sense of reality. It may as well have been a musical.

I wasn't expecting much - not after the similarly awful Great Gatsby

No more Baz Luhrmann for me.

Far too long & too many strands in this episode, meaning it never got going. Every time some action started it had to cut to another thread.

Stop-start stop-start. Very frustrating.

Too many climaxes in one episode. Too many false endings. Every scene a little too long.

It became a slog rather than a satisfying send off.

But, a great series. All the characters excellent. Great villain & great origin story.