routier

It was great to see a story in the JL/JLU style. It brought back a lot of memories.

The attraction for me was the old-school Legion and the always scary Fatal Five. I loved seeing Star Boy getting some screen time. Yeah, I'm an old guy. Kids these days, they don't understand...

This 2-parter is the nadir of the series.

The basic springboard - that Ultron won, is sound, but almost immediately things stop making sense.

The action sequences are just silly and unbelievable. Because it's animation, they use the live-action characters in way that would be laughable in a live-action movie or series, because to the producers of this show, animation = cartoon = don't take anything seriously, like Bugs Bunny. So we have Hawkeye fighting off an entire horde of Ultron robots, who, fortunately, appear to be as delicate as tinfoil, and very sportingly, one by one, wait their turns to attack him. We have our heroes falling distances that would kill a normal person 5 times over, but our non-powered heroes get up without a scratch and aren't even injured or even sore. It's toon time! Marvel needs to learn from the DC animated movies, which are more realistic than their live-action ones.

The plot. Ah. Thanos randomly appears at exactly the right time, for no reason, right in front of Ultron, for no reason, and Ultron slays him in a second. A bit contrived, perhaps? Oh yes, sir. Clearly, this scene, which made no sense at all, was written just so they could cut straight to Ultron gaining the Infinity Stones & becoming all-powerful. It seems that Thanos now does Home Delivery. To call this lazy writing is generous. The writers have no respect for the audience, and judging from the glowing reviews many have provided, they were correct to take that attitude.

The Watcher. Sigh. The Watcher's speech has been slipping more and more into common American vernacular throughout the series, and now he's at the stage where he says things like "What the Hell?" and "Bit more than that". Jeffrey Wright should be hanging his head in shame. Despite his claims of research, he doesn't "get" the Watcher at all, and has all but ruined the character.

The Watcher also now frequently gets emotional, sometimes pulling faces that would make that infamous mugger, Shatner, wince. (because it's now Bugs Bunny Cartoon) The sight of him indulging in physical combat with Ultron just made me turn my head. This is not the character I have known for 50 years.

The attempt to make the Watcher into an emotional, physical, participating character in these shows was foolish and seems like hubris. I hope Jeffrey Wright had nothing to do with it...

The rest of the episode was peppered with things that didn't make sense or were totally unbelievable. They shoot the legs off the Zola-commandeered Ultron drone, so it can't walk (bullets - and even arrows - can smash super-tough killer robots just fine, apparently - I hope the US military takes note!), so now Natasha has to carry him. Fortunately, the robot, which should weigh maybe 300 pounds, must weigh little more than a lunchbox, because he barely slows her down, and she even manages some acrobatics while ascending the stairs. How? Oh, Audience Disrespect - it's a powerful script weapon. It's a cartoon, right? Don't take it seriously. Anything is possible. Then Hawkeye commits suicide for no reason, which results in a massive fireball explosion, which, luckily for us, doesn't even singe the Widow, but does neatly blow her clear. And so on.

Well, at least the *next* episode, which hilariously brings together characters whose *only* qualification is that they appeared in the previous episodes, was worse. Millions and millions of possibilities in the Multiverse, and the Watcher apparently only knows about the ones he showed us earlier in the series. To say that this demonstrates a lack of imagination is naïve. Lack of respect is what it shows. Lazy, lazy writing is what it shows. And we see you, guys. And we won't forgive you.

The problem is that Americans don't know when they're being pandered to.

This show shows that in spades. To make the show "light-hearted", the characters all start acting like US college freshmen. Same humor, same slang. Especially annoying when the characters aren't American, but African, Asgardian, Russian, space aliens etc. It got worse throughout the season, culminating in the complete farce that was Episode 9, but many Americans just lap it up and don't see a problem. The animation on the faces, with exaggerated mugging, makes it reminiscent of Scooby Do, not the Marvel heroes I have loved for over 50 years

Drunken Thor (the worst example) is an OK concept, but would a 1000-year old Asgardian, with all that experience, act and sound like like a foolish, feckless 18 year old US college freshman? I don't think so.

I love America, and American culture, but sometimes it's just inappropriate to the material.

This is what happens when a special effects director thinks that he's a film-maker.

The special effects and production design were excellent. Unfortunately, they were the only excellent things.

The film's many flaws have been detailed by others. The leaden, unengaging pace, the poor science, the phoned-in acting, the lousy storytelling etc. What was most jarring for me was:

1) the strikingly odd grammar in some of the dialogue & monologues, as if a non-native English speaker had written the script, and it it had gone straight to shooting with no script editing or input by the actors (who must have felt odd saying some of those things). It was just bizarre.

2) the re-use of footage throughout - the same computer graphics sequences used over and over, the scenes of the same soldiers doing exactly the same things in the same places supposedly months apart. It just shouted low-budget/don't care. Laughable.

I skipped most of the middle 50 minutes and it made no difference to the story at all.

Not a film to watch for entertainment, though perhaps you could use it to punish a friend.

This was so disappointing. Hard to believe that the laziness and sloppiness has reached this level. Smith has lost the plot and can't even play Silent Bob convincingly any more. (SB used to be mostly neutral-faced and taciturn, now he mugs, grins like an idiot and pops his eyes like a deranged mime) The only sign of the old Smith was Ben Affleck's excellent monologue about passing the torch to your children. In the old movies, that would have been Silent Bob's excellent monologue. In this one, he was worthless. It was embarrassing to watch. And not in a good way.

This is a genius show. I don't know why it's not getting more publicity, especially here in Australia. I'm an Australian, but I usually don't like Australian shows, and I'm not into the crime genre. But this show is different.

The neighbourhoods, the characters, the situations, the dialogue, the laconic matter-of-factness of it all smells so authentic that I can imagine the events happening down the road right now. I lived in Rockdale & Hurstville for 16 years and this stuff is just real.

At the same time, it's funny, intriguing, and exciting. Crime is sometimes a comedy of errors, but it's never nice. You never know what is going to happen next, but when something does happen, it makes perfect sense.

There is one recurring theme, though: actions have consequences.

Looking forward to the next season!

Really dumb and unconvincing.

From the first decision the SGC made when Replicator Carter contacted them, I was muttering "stupid...stupid..". Their gullibility was breathtaking.

They let Replicator Carter, an enemy and an unknown quantity, have access to:

* The Alpha Site - a supposedly top secret location where the SGC and Earth leaders can evacuate to if Earth is invaded. * Sam's brain (how could she allow that, let alone suggest it?) * The SGC's computers * The Disruptor - the *only* weapon effective against the Replicators, the biggest threat this this & other galaxies

The Replicators now have up to date info from Sam's brain, God knows how much info from the SGC's computers, and the complete specs of the Disruptor, as well as a complete countermeasure. Now that they know exactly how it works, no amount of modification (even if any was possible) will be effective.

And at the end of the episode, were there any recriminations? No. They were more concerned that Sam *didn't feel bad* about being incredibly gullible & dooming all life in the Universe.

If Sam were Japanese, she should have committed seppuku.

I've seen more logical episodes of Torchwood, and that's saying something.

This is a fun show. Where did the Norse gods go? As far from Europe as possible, of course - New Zealand! The unlikely premise, and the typical NZ down-to-earth way of dealing with things are a great combination.

This show is hard to classify - sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's dark, sometimes exciting, sometimes intriguing. Various mysteries pop up. Enemies become friends, and friends, enemies. Alliances are made & broken. Everyone has their own agenda.

At the center of all this is Axl, the youngest Johnston brother, just turned 21, feckless, reckless, unassertive and a bit slow on the uptake. Which makes it at first hilarious, then very very interesting when he discovers that he's the greatest Norse god of them all.

This is not a show you can watch 5 minutes or even 1 episode of & make a decision. It'll make no sense to you. You have to watch a few episodes, pick up the storyline & get to know the characters. Then it's worthwhile.

If you like your shows formulaic & predictable, it's definitely not for you. But if you like a character-driven story line with the occasional laugh and supernatural thrill thrown in, it's great. The characters react very naturally, like normal people in an extraordinary situation.

Love it.

The film is just an excuse for a lot of nonsensical eye candy.

And it reinforces the Hollywood stereotype of abusive stepfathers,and 1950s/60s mental institutions (just to overdo the point, this one is for the "Mentally Insane") as unbelievably filthy, abusive prisons run by corrupt sadists.

Even if you can stomach that, since most of the film is Baby Doll's escapist fantasy, she must be either a prescient genius or remarkably well-informed, or both, since she knows all about Japanese demons, World War One hardware, LOTR type fantasy scenarios, mobile chain guns and other weapons and hardware not invented in her time (21st century style headsets for example) and various bits of fantasy hardware including steampunk zombies and Japanese type power armor not envisaged until a over decade later with the iconography of a decade after that. Not to mention Anime combat, 21st century style. Some girl!

Even passing over all that as a metaphor for... something... what did it mean?

Wookies living on Endor.... If it doesn't make sense, you must acquit!

WARNING: SPOILERS *****************

Visually, a feast, but a leisurely script leads to a muddled climax.

A fan of the original since 1983, I had been looking forward to this for a long time. The trailers & stills looked very promising. Sadly, while it looks good, some questionable decisions have been made, and the film doesn't seem to know what to do or where to go.

Some of the original concepts seem to have been dumbed down for audience acceptance. Programs, formerly living a uniquely digital lifestyle, sipping energy from pools, worshiping users, are now just like regular dudes with funny clothes. They work, sleep, eat, drink, and go to clubs.

Perhaps this dumbing down is why this film poses more questions than it answers.

Why has the digital world taken on analogue characteristics like dust, atmosphere & functionless water?

Why do the digital Recognizers, previously smooth, humming machine menaces, now have exhaust flames & jet engine noise?

Why do light cycles sound like they have gasoline engines?

How can a totalitarian digital society have "homeless" programs (who drink from brown paper bags yet)?

Why do all the programs now leap around and pose exactly like Asian martial artists? Just, why??

How were the Isomorphic algorithms going to change the world?

How was CLU going to conquer the world with a bunch of computer programs who were good at throwing disks?

When young Flynn switched off the server, was the world destroyed? (if so, shouldn't he have waited, since (a) the threat had been stopped, and (b) in case there were still some of those useful ISOs surviving, especially since he (and the audience) have no clue as to how to use them?)

If hours in the digital world were minutes in the real one, and in the real world it's been 20 years, does that mean that old Flynn had been trapped for up to 1200 years? (which might explain why he's channeling The Dude from "The Big Lebowski")

The biggest disappointment for me was the almost complete absence of the title character. By the end of the film, I still wasn't sure where Tron was. I had to read some summaries on the Internet to find out.

I would have preferred it if Tron, in his last act, saved the day. Sadly, when he did (briefly) appear, he was ineffective and pointless.

I was a fan of the original Tron. Original ideas and logic have been dropped for populism & eye candy. The subtle humor & in-jokes are absent. This is a disappointing followup.

I have just started watching this series on DVD. I quite like it!

I'm surprised at the complaints on this page. I have no problems with the acting, the camera-work, the special effects, or the characters. Unlike some reviewers, I find the randomness of the Katie Sackhoff character ("What do you want?" "I don't quite know myself") refreshing & exciting. It makes her scary - she's powerful, but so messed up that she's capable of anything. She's suffering, so she's a sympathetic character. Reminiscent of Roy Baty in Blade Runner. It gives her texture, and stops her being a formula villain.

Many of the complaints here are essentially saying that people didn't like the show because it didn't adhere to any of the tried-and-true US TV show formulas.

I think that was a good thing!

Lastly, I don't understand all the nostalgia for the original 1970s Bionic Woman TV series. Unadventurous & unstimulating; most of the time, it looked like a hair shampoo commercial.

STOP PRESS

I have now seen all 8 episodes. I have revised my opinion! I liked the first 3, then the show went downhill fast - full of illogic, crappy FX & WTF moments. They even did the classic "we have to kill one of the good guys, so let's do in the black guy" routine. Towards the end, it looked like they were flailing around, desperately looking for something to make the show work. Very disappointing.

I wanted to like this show; I really did.

But if the BBC have a script editor working on Torchwood, it certainly doesn't show. The scripts are full of non-sequiturs which are obviously there to advance the plot. "What the...?" moments are frequent.

The most annoying thing is that Torchwood in Cardiff is supposed to be one branch of a professional organisation whose job is to deal with these extraterrestrial things. Yet they consistently act like *complete amateurs*, giving away secrets, endangering each other, disobeying orders, with dismaying regularity. There appear to be no procedures, protocols or rules for anything - they just make everything up on the spot! When a situation arises, there is no rulebook ,and no standard or consistent ways of dealing with it - they go all over the place, usually like idiots, while Jack has fun making arbitrary decisions. And this in a nation-spanning organisation that has supposedly been defending us from alien threats since the 19th century.

The show was at its worst with the "Cyberwoman" episode, which was just awful and ridiculous from start to finish. That useless twerp Ianto, entirely for his own selfish reasons, (1) compromised Torchwood's security, (2) lied to his colleagues, (3) wiped records to cover his tracks, (4) endangered the entire world by reviving a cyberman, (5) got a famous scientist and an innocent woman killed, (6) when discovered, held a gun to his boss' head & threatened to kill him, and, (7) when generously given a chance to redeem himself by setting things right, failed the bloody test! And not only is he still working for Torchwood and not dead (I would have shot the little weasel - or at least wiped his mind), but we are *supposed to sympathise with him* because of his emotional pain! Aaagh! Give me a break! The show was at its best with "They Keep Killing Suzie", which actually had a clever, believable plot which kept you guessing right to the end, well executed. True, it had minor, frustrating flaws: despite being part of a much larger organisation, when they got locked in their own base, our Torchwood heroes didn't call any of the other Torchwood branches around the UK, as you would expect, but the local police, so we could have a bit of humour. And apparently, the Internet does not exist for the either the police or Torchwood to look up ISBN numbers - you have to leaf through physical books, like it's 1980 for something. But it was still streets ahead of the other episodes.

And, of course, like most British shows these days (including Doctor Who), it also has to be a soap opera. Sigh. It *is* possible to include people's personal lives in the plot - high-quality US shows do it all the time. But the BBC can't do it without making it Coronation Street.

Compare this show to that professional, gritty, believable, superbly done 6-part series from 1998, ULTRAVIOLET, which had a more limited version of Torchwood's theme, but had none of its problems. It is possible, folks.

Torchwood. Sigh. If these guys are Earth's defence against alien threats, God help us all!

While I applaud the historical authenticity of the film - the situations, sets, costumes, language & cultural characterizations were excellent - I found it to be an incoherent mess which started out chaotically and by mid-film, had become very slow, completely boring & pointless.

After a brief promising start (and excellent work by Christopher Plummer), the film starts jumping all over the place with no sense of time or space. If this was an attempt at conveying the chaos & uncertainty of a strange situation in a strange land, it succeeded, but it was, in my opinion, lousy storytelling. Looked like the editor was on PCP. Or something.

While it was interesting to hear the native dialog in the proper tongue, after Smith learns the language and could presumably understand them, it would have been nice if we've been treated the same. Subtitling, while appropriately absent at first, should have been used more often later. Often, it was just too difficult to tell what was going on. And it's not very interesting to hear long exchanges of dialog when the actions give you no clue as to what's happening.

Colin Farrell was wasted. He spent 90% of the film with one expression on his face - looking very worried. One gets the impression that director Terrence Malick said, "look very worried, Colin", and left it at that. In the first 30 minutes of the film, he had perhaps 8 lines of dialog. In fact, in the rest of the film, he didn't say much more.

Q'Orianka Kilcher was a joy to behold, and conveyed innocence, vulnerability & childish playfulness beautifully, but how many times can you watch her gesticulating at the sun & walking through fields? Malick apparently couldn't get enough of it.

The portrayal of the military actions was laughable. As a 17th century historical re-enactor, I was cheered when I saw them form up with pike & musket (if somewhat shambolically) to face the "naturals" outside the fort. But after presenting a wall of pikes, and sending one line of musketeers forwards to fire (with none in reserve for the second volley - which is basic stuff in this era), instead of getting the musketeers to retire & reload whilst the pikes covered the front, for some reason everyone suddenly ran forward in all directions, and got done over as they deserved to do for being so stupid. For Pete's sake! If you're going to run all over the place, it defeats the purpose of having a formation in the first place. Duh.

I guess I'm not a fan of Malick's films. I thought The Thin Red Line one of the worst war (or war-setting) films I have ever seen. In that one, we had similar military nonsense - the Japanese, deadly crack shots who never miss at a distance of 2 miles, apparently cannot hit a single one of dozens of Americans running at them from 30 yards away. Maybe they weren't trained that way. When there was no shooting, everyone just whined.

But back to The New World. It may be art (it's obviously intended to be, since it's not entertainment), and it's certainly a film, but it doesn't do a good job of telling a story.

Children's fantasy drama / SF series about a trio of children who become caught up in an adventure linked to local sacred Aboriginal cave paintings about the "Wandjina" - the people from the sky.

The children see some strange things: One striking scene shows a mysterious hooded figure hunting kangaroos with a rod that strikes them down silently at a distance. The local Aborigines know about these people - they are the Wandjina, the people from the sky who visited long ago, in the Dreamtime. What becomes apparent is that not only are they real, they have not all left.

A suspenseful series with a satisfying conclusion.

The same behind the scenes people were responsible for 1965's serial "The Stranger".

NOTE: The Wandjina do exist in real Australian Aboriginal legends, and have since been featured in "Chariots of the Gods?" & many other books/shows.