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Lynch changed a lot of things. The Baron was probably the biggest problem, in this 84 film he is just a loudmouth, covered in sores -somewhat correct because in the book he does collect diseases for the hell of it, but he is also described as "baby smooth". In the new version he's back to being hugely fat, smooth, and again, buoyed up by suspensors.

And then there's the acting and script. God, damn, awful. All the performances are atrocious. Except for Sting - his Feyd Rautha is the only acting highlight, and it's a tiny role. All the inner thoughts, all the odd decisions about what gets exposited and what doesn't.

And then ....

Everything else is PERFECT. The hardware, the styling, the costumes, the planets.

That HEIGHLINER SCENE has yet to be equalled!

Lots of people, myself included, still quote Pieter's thought-mantra.

The scene on Geidi Prime with the heart-plugs is Lynch's horror side in all its disturbing briliance!

The Sardukar kick MAJOR ass in Lynch's version and are genuinely strange and terrifying. Villeneuve's ... are not.

This is a very 80s "thing", an object that survives in time through it's sheer oddity. Lovers of Lynch, like myself, sympathise with him and how much of a struggle its birth was, but David ... it lives on its own merits.

This is just a mass of spoilers, getting stuff off my chest. This will be "Unhelpfulled" into the stone age by Netflix PR staff, so it will be interesting to see how many points of agreement it actually accumulates.

There are some books that just appear at the right time, in the right place, and become famous regardless of what they contain. I'll never know what the 3 Body volumes contain because I've read enough goodreads reviews to fill me with horror.

In any case, this isn't "hard" science fiction.

This isn't "Primer", "Person Of Interest" or "Severance".

It's space opera.

For a start the technology mix is absurd:

The aliens have FTL comms, and are able to work "atto-tech" programming of sub-atomic particles.

Yet, their home environment still gives them problems, and they want to bring a fleet to a 100% biologically incompatible planet?

And then, they have the manners and sensibilities of spoiled teenagers?

Um, yeah, no.

That's not hard-SF. That's sci-fantasy. That's stuff from yesteryear. That's Huge Gernsback, is what that is.

Politely, we term it space opera these days.

And in this case the nano-tech and VR stuff is pure stuffing to make the science seem "harder".

Now I have no problem with space opera, not if it's entertaining. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Dark Matter, the high points of Star Wars (like Andor). Etc.

But I do have a problem, regardless of genre, with being bored by boring characters. And my word, these are boring characters.

The only people I didn't want to die were Liam Cunningham's intelligence chief, and Benedict Wong's police detective turned operative. Everybody else deserved a severe wiffle-batting to their smug faces.

Also I don't believe the script even once passes the Bechdel Test? Maybe on top of Dish Mountain when the Incredibly Annoying Inexplicably (2nd book?) Strong Assassin and the Incredibly Annoying Original Protagonist are having their Buddy Death Talk? I can't recall, and I'm never going back to watch it so I'll never know.

Anyway, there is one scene, one really good scene.

You know what it is.

When they mandolin an entire boat and its personnel using nano-wires.

Now, this is a VERY silly scene. Not because of the science - that's actually right (for a change). Not because of how it plays out - that's actually REALLY good! And very disturbing!

No, it's a very silly scene because it's completely contrived.

There are a bazillion ways they could silently raid that ship and get the drive they want. Because, you know what? Because every armed force on the planet has divisions that are trained in this exact scenario! Covertly infiltrating or rush-raiding confined installations, boats, landed aircraft, you name it, and recovering assets without giving the occupants time to react.

But no. Nano-wires. We MUST use nano-wires.

Anyway, it's a fantastic scene despite its ridiculous justification: and it belongs in something else. Eg. An actual hard-SF thriller. Something about terrorists and future warfare, perhaps.

And then we get to the end and ... it's not the end. Netflix couldn't be bothered making the entirety of the books into one run, and instead make us sit through all that interminable waffle and padding to get nowhere.

Look, I did get some entertainment from this. But only because Fast Forward on Netflix is semi-responsive.

Three Bloated Body Problematic Story is a solid 3 from me.

Perception had silly aspects. It had cop procedural aspects. It had feelgood aspects.

Nevertheless, it was clever. Darn clever. And it ventured into dark territory here and there.

Eric McCormack has proven his range before, with the flippant neurosis of Will in Will and Grace, to the weary, borderline suicidal soldier and leader of Maclaren in Travelers.

In Perception, he got to bounce from the comedic to the very dark in the arc of a single character. And the writers just kept coming back with new and ingenious hallucinations to drive the plot forward.

Rachael Leigh Cook and Kelly Rowan were perfectly fine as foils, but I personally felt that Arjay Smith ran away with his superb character Lewicky and invested him with truly un-foreshadowed depth.

Perception also had some resonances with Elementary, another US series I loved, and I wish it had gotten a similar run.

Great stuff. We need more shows like Perception.

There is nothing really original in the background or overall structure of THE MILL. We've seen the setup before, many times. But hey, the story is boss and, equally, so is the telling of the story.

This is a great little story, and it's well told.

The lead character is annoying, but as things go on you begin to suspect his irritating abrasiveness hides a plot purpose. In fact you begin to suspect lots of things.

And that's good mystery. That's GOOD writing!

We are in the middle of a writing desert, which nobody seems to have an explanation for. We are drowning in boring-recycled-style over any kind of substance.

This makes things like THE MILL a pleasant relief.

If you like the original BLACK MIRROR (when it was good and Charlie Brooker was on fire with his creative control), you'll recognise and like THE MILL. I'm sure of it.

If I could criticise it, it's too long and the ending is too drawn out, but I can't go into details without spoiling it. Nothing wrecks the story.

A solid 7 in my book.

The Brian Eno soundtrack really adds a lot, and I'm grateful to Drake for helping make this return.

I watched it out of order. I did the current (and last) 3 seasons, and quite enjoyed them though there was a lot of 'soap' dialogue I fast-forwarded over.

Then I went back to Summerhouse. The first 2 seasons that started it all. Much raw-er, lower budget, but very well done. I could see where the characters came from and how they had evolved.

Props to all the actors, every performance in both halves (seasons 1 and 2, then 3 through five) were exemplary.

However.

I had to stop watching 'Summerhouse' due to finding out that a stupid, cheap, horror-writer's trick had been employed to elicit audience sympathy. I can't go into details without spoiling, but essentially it's something script-writers should have grown out of by now, and it should not have made final review. Unacceptable, and I'm afraid I couldn't continue. Your stomach may be stronger or your soul smaller. Good luck.

For what I did manage to see, with responsible writing, it was indeed very good.

I feel quite dispirited typing this. I wanted to play LOST EMBER for a long time, and, regardless of any problems, I was happy to pay for and support such an indie effort.

The game is gorgeous, and I'd love to know the Wolf better and her back-story. But in 2019 the devs promised to do something about the camera issues, and ... people today in 2023 are still unable to play the game for more than 20 minutes maximum, if like me they suffer motion sickness effects.

There are camera adjust settings that remove some of the extraneous camera movement - but not ALL of it. And that's the problem. Any zoom or sway or anything that is not a direct result of user interaction, is going to produce nausea. In my case the nausea is so severe I have to put the game down and walk away.

Devs. I'm not going to take Quell just to play your creation, it's your job to fix things. But the game is old now, and that won't happen. I see there's a VR version of the game out, which would be fantastic, but the same questions have been raised.

Perhaps there'll be an anniversary issue with the camera motion fixed? That would be truly lovely.

As to the game itself, it's a walking simulator, and a very fun one. You run everywhere as a beautiful wolf with a spirit companion, and you can possess other animals (that are all outrageously cute and have individual abilities) to solve particular tasks along the way.

It's not perfect, and it's good that there are online walkthrough videos. You can get stuck in places due to game logic, and have to start from an earlier point to get past them. Also it's often quite difficult to tell where you're supposed to go next. The 'smoke columns' in the game point the way, but often there is more than one and you have to hit them in the right order with little clue as to which way to go.

Still, it's beautiful. I'm glad they made it, and I'll just hope for a fixed edition of it one day. Like I said, I'm glad I paid for it and dont want my money back. It was a cheap price to support clever indie projects.

No idea how this got greenlit or written, even. Charlie is having some kind of war with Netflix and this episode no doubt proved some dire, dire point for him.

It's sad, it's sad, it's just sad. That this is where his fight ended up.

I love Aaron Paul, and it's great to see Josh Harkness again after he played the excellent gunslinger role in the good series of Penny Dreadful. But they deserved better than this abject pile.

The praisers forget. There was ANOTHER completely nonsensical space opera Black Mirror episode, but it was a Masterpiece! USS Callister! Once again the technology made no sense at all, but it didn't matter. Because it had a gripping "What If" storyline, wrapped in dark, dark humour. That's Black Mirror.

This? Silly technology, a silly character environment, and very, VERY silly mcGuffins and plots motivators?

Beyond the Sea just made no sense, and that's it. Oh, and it was about an hour and 20 minutes too long. It was a DailyMotion short, it was not feature material. So apart from being stupid, it was painfully boring.

This is the end of Black Mirror.

May something rise in its place.

SEVERANCE is my current hard SF allegorical go-to, may it reach a solid conclusion!

"Somebody" removes negative reviews, so let's see if this one survives.

This is purely for seasons 1-4 and for Bandersnatch from season 5.

Season 5 was boring and silly. Season 6 is a mixture of terrible episodes and some quite well done episodes that have nothing whatsoever to do with Black Mirror.

Seasons 1 through 4 are masterpieces. Some episodes are better than others, like with any Anthology series. But the good ones are just next-level, even when you have to suspend disbelief sometimes (full nervous system VR systems the size of an M&M - no, not unless everything else is up to the same level of tech!).

It seems that once a series peaks, we just have to accept that that's it, it's done, it will never get up there again. For me the high water marks were CROCODILE, METALHEAD and WHITE BEAR. Though I have to say, I still got back and watch the speech from 15 MILLION MERITS for the thrill of it. It's too good.

4 seasons, 1 special - that's pretty good. Now we need something of equal calibre!

"Somebody" removes negative reviews so I hope this one will just sail through.

I nearly had a panic attack when I saw there was DLC for Outer Wilds, and bought it instantly.

EOTE is extremely clever, just like the main game, and the way they have integrated it is gorgeous.

It's aesthetic is magnificent, and the way the mystery unfolds is worthy of the root game. There is some truly haunting stuff in there, and some tricky and clever mechanisms.

But it's just too hard. Once you penetrate sufficient layers deep to figure out what's going on, and get a grip on the mechanics, the time and other limits start to become very, very tedious.

I ended up watching an 'official' walkthrough just to see what happens, and while I was pleased at how far I'd made it on my own, I was amazed by the tiny clues and convoluted paths one was expected to follow to solve the whole thing. EOTE is much harder than the root game, but ... not in a really enjoyable way. Also, combined with the horror dynamics that have been introduced, it goes from sweetly wonderful to bitterly off-putting rather quickly.

But would I recommend it?

Yes of course, but if you're a fan of the stunning, astounding original game you're already aware of EOTE, you don't need me. This review is largely for Annapurna to read. They reached too far, but in the wrong direction, I feel.

Buy it, check it out, but be prepared that unless you have limitless time you are probably going to give up on it at some point, even if you doggedly made it through all of Outer Wilds by yourself.

The thing with Flanagan is weird.

His movies are often rather good. Absentia is one of my fave low budget SF/F dark stories. Hush is a great thriller.

But his series are dreadful. I hated The Yawning Of Hill House and couldn't get through one ep of his later efforts.

He seems to be strictly a short-arc capable runner, and unable to see longer ones through.

Midnight Club, though, strung me along. For some reason, the characters really *were* enough this time to make it interesting. I had flashbacks to the series 'Rectify', which was as slow as molasses but completely fascinating.

But then ... that ending, or lack of it. It's just more of the same.

Feeling a bit ill actually, after watching this through.

Like the handful of other real reviewers here, I'm fighting the tide of AMC's PR department and their deluge of paid fakes and false removals.

Total attempts to post and repost so far: 19.

Obviously I'm on some kind of filter list now.

AMC - I won't stop. Give up! :)

As for the show...

Better Call Saul is now a pile of meaningless drivel. It has long since failed to deliver on its original promise, and really, nobody knows what the heck it IS trying to deliver now. This episode, Rock and a Hard Place, was just the final straw. A massive storm in a teacup. Characters we are supposed to know, just doing random things somewhat related to their Breaking Bad versions. And other background characters, that we never cared about, given centre stage.

It's not completely awful, in terms of at least one interesting event per episode, but there is no longer any cohesion. There is no need to keep watching, there is nothing to produce that desire in the viewer.

Rock and a Hard Place was not an earned moment. The sad and blank looks of the characters kind of reflected how I felt about the whole thing.

And it's hard to suspend disbelief, now, regarding the actors ageing. If the story had been completely riveting, if it had been an un-put-downable script, if it had been something that just could not be missed, then nobody would have cared about minor inconsistencies and the passage of time. Including the giant passages between tiny seasons, during which we all moved on to more interesting shows.

It's too late to fix Better Call Saul. I've stoppped watching. I can no longer force myself to keep on with it. It has well and truly managed to find a shark and jump it, way out in the dunes of the desert.

Actually I'm glad I got so many chances to resubmit this review as, in the interim, NETFLIX's series OZARK dropped the ball badly in its final season. 'FLIX and AMC need to take a good long look at themselves. They're both trying to be HBO, and that is SO not a compliment.

I think this is one of the best computer games ever written.

It is not without its bugs and foibles and can be enormously frustrating at times - that's what the forums are for! But you cannot help but keep coming back to it and back to it, pushing through. It's a puzzle library in a museum in an interdimensional anomaly in a beautiful little pocket universe.

Yes ... it's just so damn beautiful!

And they have given you the most fun spaceship ever to pilot around this place. I presume the experience is still wonderful on PC, but on a games console the tactile loveliness of controlling that little vessel with triggers and sticks is addictive.

And Andrew Prahlow's haunting soundtrack complements the rest of the team's huge, masterful, stylistic achievement.

Watch out for the ending! It packs a serious emotional punch!

Ps. I'm currently playing Echoes Of The Eye, the (so far) only DLC available for Outer Wilds. It is every bit as good as the main story!

I don't know who these types are that are calling this show 'Inaccurate'. They certainly don't work with software!

I'm just bowled over by the accuracy. The whole setup, and the tech, is completely believable and obviously researched. Simon Pegg's influence? (Probably not, he's not a producer on this.)

The physical metaphors with corridors and walls and doors are essential, and I'm quite enjoying them - laypeople have NO idea what it looks like going through dense code. Especially slogging through code that's written by somebody else, let alone an adversary. This visual storytelling mechanism greatly eases things.

Also the portrayals of high-functioning Autism are, finally, actually right on the money.

But I'm only two or three episodes in, and I fear it is going to dissolve into mush. None of the characters are very likeable, but perhaps that's deliberate. The mains all ooze upper-class UK elitism, and the lead character trots out her religion whenever it suits her.

We'll see.

Xbox.

I haven't played enough of SE5 yet to form a complete opinion on the game.

I'll just say the environments are nice, but what have you done to the controls, Rebellion? SE4's controls were the height of perfection in sniper/commando games. Why did you fiddle with them? Why did you remove things? Why did you add confusing things like the 'temporary weapon' system?

The new controls are not as atrocious as Zombie Army 4's awful layout, but it's like you looked at some abomination like Sniper Ghost Warrior and went "Yeah! Let's get some of that unusable interface stuff going over here!". Tool workbenches? Seriously? Sniper Elite is not that sort of game and was mercifully free of that tiresome mechanic ... until now.

And the other thing it was mercifully free of was diversity tick-boxing. OMG. It's a WW2 simulator, not a fantasy game. Can you kindly remove the african-scottish french resistance fighter (and gawd knows what else you've added that I haven't come across yet - asian-polish wermacht troops, perhaps?)

I'm on Xbox so it will never be fixed. Hopefully some mods will come out for the PC version, particularly now it IS possible to synthesize a character actor's voice down to the inflexion without a bazillion dollars in fees.

I own all the Sniper Elite games and DLC (except for SE 1 but who cares). Really not sure about 5. I'll probably warm to it. I hope so.

There were some great moments. The cast were all fantastic. The characters were deep, mostly.

But, sigh, you forgot to write a story. And therefore basically the whole thing is worthless.

NETFLIX. You strike again.

Starting at 5 stars here. Every time this review gets removed I remove 1 star.

This series failed, it just missed its opportunity completely. There were some good moments, but we all got strung along thinking it was going somewhere. Breaking Bad, is where we thought it was going.

I have no idea where we are, or what we're doing, parked out here in the desert. Episode 3 of season 6 , 'Rock and a Hard Place', was NOT a good episode. It was, however, a good point to take a deep breath, and as a viewer consider whether to bother going on.

HOW did we get to SIX seasons with NOTHING happening? HOW?

AMC, I thought 'Turn' was your only, and biggest, turkey. I never thought you'd do THIS to Bob Odenkirk and a fine cast.

Apart from being nearly unplayable on XBox due to the game's incredible slowness, it suffers in general from a few very bad game design decisions on the part of the makers.

Nobody says it out loud, but Sea Of Thieves is all about boarding ships, and that's it. It can also be gamed numerous ways at the expense of smaller crews and so bigger crews just server hop grinding and destroying everyone else's fun. For what? I have no idea.

You can spend hours collecting and travelling ... and somebody will take it from you. Because "pirate game". It stops being fun quite quickly.

For anyone wondering what to concentrate on - vessel boarding. It's the central mechanic of the entire thing. Everything else is secondary.

Oh and there is no motion-sickness compensation, so expect to get quite ill playing it if you are susceptible.

It's pretty. Though for some reason they really wanted to make Unreal 4 look like Unity.

Wow, this review got removed! There must be a serious PR push behind this piece of garbage! Let's just fix that now, since I keep records of all my posts ... Oh! I spotted a typo too!

I know this is part of a wider series of stories but I don't care. I don't care. Really, I cannot express how much I don't care. (I tried watching POWER as well, a while back, and made it to ep 2 expecting it to ramp up ... and it ramped down.)

Is this MEANT to be as slow as tar dripping down a toilet bowl and sound like it was written by a TV-babysitter 14 year old bemused by their sudden new urges?

I feel sorry for Sikora, he was so good in OZARK (a properly written, actual, real TV crime series).

In the best traditions of Sniper Elite V2 you have NO CHANCE of sneaking around maps. You have to kill all the enemies, then go hunting for what you came for. Over and over, rinse, repeat.

The game is also ridiculously 'fiddly', the controller mechanics are truly awful and trying to figure out what you're carrying and what to use never gets easier. It's as though EA intended that you play the game through 10 times while they drop 'hints', but THE GAME ITSELF IS JUST NOT THAT INTERESTING!!

They do seem to have put a huge amount of content into it. I gave up through the first story as I could not maintain my interest in the face of the sheer trauma of simply trying to play the game. They needed to play test it for many more hours than it got, and listen to the feedback.

It looks very pretty, especially for 2016, but so what? Modern engines all do great surface rendering with advanced light behaviour, and all the big game shops have a legion of slave designers.

Cannot believe it. A Netflix driven series where they actually employed writers and gave it a proper story. They DO exist, they're just rare. I don't care that they had to lean on a Podcast (again) to get material worth following right through - it was a successful venture.

Ok it's not the most original story, but hey: it's fantasy. Fantasies are NOT original.

What it IS, is rather good.

Deserves more credit but it doesn't have the Marvel or HBO hype machines behind it so it will just hover in the "Oh what's that?" part of the menu forever.

This piece of dross is floating around 8.3. Somebody paid a lot, and I mean a lot, of money to make that happen. Try watching it, then imagine you're being paid 10 cents a review to say nice things about it. Now imagine you're on review .... say, around about 40 or 41. How's that clinging to life going for you?

The girl who turned up, "Alice" or whatever her name actually was, and her association with the smoking woman outside group therapy. That entire plot line just disappeared into nowhere, ACTUALLY disappeared! We could work out what was going on by inference, but it was still lazy.

Ditto the guy who committed suicide. Yes, yes, we get it, the obsession drove him crazy but come on. You can only leave so many un-tied threads before you don't have a tapestry anymore, you have a ball of twine that's going to end up in the bin.

The tacked-on ending. WHY, oh WHY must film makers do this?? I just ignored it. Once James had solved the mystery, him driving off in the car was enough of an ending, and there was still some beautiful ambiguity left behind for the audience's mind to work with.

Anyway, I still liked Broadcast Signal Intrusion a lot! It kept my attention after I expected it not to.

Do more and better, team!

So people who are controlled by the internet just use made-up terms willy nilly to disguise their ignorance. Complete twads dialled out "yassification" en masse to attack the excellent DON'T LOOK UP, as though that term will mean anything in 5 minutes' time (I actually saw some idiot say "Simp" the other day - it stopped meaning anything after 5 minutes nearly a decade ago!!).

And one of those terms is "Canned laughter", a thing they obviously know nothing about but love repeating.

This show is (sadly now, WAS, thanks to the insanity at Netflix) filmed in front of a live audience.

There are interviews with both Elizabeth Ho and Kathy Bates where they talk about the experience of being in front of a live audience (In Ms Bates' case, for the first time in 25 years!).

Learn how to use a search engine. I recommend DuckDuckGo.

Oh and the show? OMG it's funny. I used to smoke weed years ago but grew out of it. I find it slows me down too much, and I don't think people pay enough attention to the paranoia and mental health effects.

Then again there are people who it really helps. And if you can use it recreationally without getting addicted? Go for it!

As an ex-stoner there is alot I can relate to in this series, but you don't need to be one to get it. The characters are hilarious, and the way they set everything up.

I agree that Dank & Dabby really do need their own real-world youtube show!

Enjoy!

And Gabriel Byrne once again proves to be the Kiss of Death indicator.

There are lots of very talented and ingenious Science Fiction writers out there in the modern world.

But studios don't seem to want to hire them.

Quick summary: Bait & Switch. A tiny bit of Science Fiction action happens across the first 2 episodes. Then after that it's all solid talk, personal issues, annoying characters and padding, with cliff-hanger endings as a cheap mechanism to try and keep viewers.

It's almost as silly as Spielberg's abomination, but it has no pizazz at all and is tedious as grey sludge.

I hear that the UK mini series is even worse!

I had to give up around the final chapters. LIMBO stopped being fun.

The difficulty spikes, combined with the laggy controls (XBox One), just made LIMBO unplayable in the end.

Too often, you find yourself one part trying to solve the puzzle, but several parts simply trying to make the character repeat an action it did ONCE.

Five identical manouvers will get you five different behaviours.

It will bump things and ruin elaborate setups. It will fail to grab things. It will slide off a surface that it was perfectly happy sticking to the (dozenth) iteration before.

I just don't have the time. My hat goes off to those who obviously do!

All that said, LIMBO is gorgeous, atmospheric and original. You can see it as the prototype for INSIDE.

I have played INSIDE right through, and though it has a couple of difficulty spikes of its own, its controls work almost perfectly. The timing is 99% down to you, versus about 70% for LIMBO.

Glad I gave LIMBO a try though.