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Sci-Fi is like pizza: When it's good it's great. And when it's bad it's still pretty good. Rebel Moon is pretty good, but not great.

The plot is obviously derived from Kurosawa's Seven Samauri (see also The Magnificent Seven and A Bug's Life). It also borrows heavily from the 1980 low-budget film Battle Beyond the Stars. And, of course, Star Wars tropes are nearly unavoidable.

In contrast to the unoriginality of the plot, the film is visually beautiful.

The writing is mediocre. The pacing is bad. The acting is stilted--despite there being several great actors (who are poorly utilized). The action sequences are plentiful and terrific. The characters are generally one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs (although the pacifist robot who "goes native" is intriguing).

But hey, this is Netflix, so my expectations weren't terribly high to begin with. If I had paid money to see this (other than the monthly subscription fee I pay anyway) I'd be I bit disappointed. As it stands, I'll probably re-watch Rebel Moon multiple times, mostly for the visuals.

The first episode started off great. Cool monster! Very promising. Subsequent episodes have grown increasingly boring, and the monsters increasingly scarce. You would think that the writers of a show called "Legacy of Monsters" would realize that viewers want to see (wait for it...) ... monsters. Instead we get slow-paced mediocre drama about family and romance and careers and organizational ethics and being a disaffected young adult and everything but... monsters.

Two sullen twenty-somethings looking for their wayward father, helped by an angry hacker girl and a nutty old guy (Kurt Russell) whilst being pursued by an evil organization, interwoven with numerous flashbacks to when the nutty old guy was a not as nutty young guy and had a romance with a brilliant female Japanese scientist whilst hunting monsters (which are talked about but rarely shown). Even those elements could have been done in an interesting and engaging way, but instead it's just boring.

Episode 5: No monsters whatsoever.

Episode 6: 75% of the way through and finally about 12 seconds of Godzilla.

Boring.

This could have been a great series. Well-written, well-acted, laugh-out-loud funny at times, but also a good whodunit story. Good production quality too. An engaging main character in police sargeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box). The factor that drags the series down is the character of Inspector Eddie Redcliffe (played by Madeleine Sami). Although good for a few laughs, the character is so utterly over the top, obnoxious, unlikeable, and in no way believable as a police detective, that her presence constantly derails the flow of the story. The show would have been better off without this character, or with this character having a much smaller role in the story or dialed down several notches. Other characters, such as the obsequious rookie police officer Abby (Nina Oyama) and her smarmy coroner fiance, are delightful.

I had no idea what to expect, but thought I'd watch the first episode to see if it was interesting. After that first episode I decided it was good enough to continue. After a couple more episodes I was hooked and ended up binge watching the entire season over the weekend.

There are a number of things that make this show really good: The acting is terrific and the primary characters are really interesting (and also quite complex). The story is well-written and not predictable at all. Lots of twists.

The thing I most enjoyed is that the story plays with your presuppositions. A core underlying theme of the show is how we tend to misjudge people, and even misjudge ourselves. Maybe the assumptions we make about someone, be they positive or negative, are mistaken. Maybe we sometimes don't even see ourselves accurately. People are messy.

The only reason I didn't give it a 10 is because I think the production could have been a little bit better. Some of the instrumental score music is cheesy (on the other hand, most of the song selections are excellent), and some of the secondary characters were a bit cardboard. Some of the scenarios come across as bit too contrived. And the denouement, although powerful, seems a bit abrupt. But all in all it is very entertaining and satisfying and even thought-provoking.

Half the time I couldn't tell what was going on because the screen was so dark. Even the outside daylight scenes are dark, how did they manage that?! And no, the problem wasn't with our TV (as some reviewers claim). I watch plenty of other shows on the various streaming services without this issue and never encounter anything like this. Someone made a really bad production decision.

I watched the entire series, hoping it would improve as it went along. It didn't. From the bits I could see, I don't think Chris Pratt was a good choice for the lead. He just isn't able convey what the role needed. Seems like he's out of his element. Contrast this with John Krasinski (another actor who got his start in a television comedy) who did excellent acting in the Jack Ryan series, or Jeff Bridges in the fantastic The Old Man. Taylor Kitsch, who has a supporting role in The Terminal List, probably would have been great in the lead. Pratt just isn't very convincing in the role. He looks like he's acting, like he's thinking "What expression should I have on now? How should I speak this line?"

The plot itself is boilerplate: Badass but emotionally damaged Special Ops dude goes rogue and takes revenge on bad guys doing bad things, systematically working his way up the chain of villains. You've seen this plot hundreds of times before, just with slight variations on the details. You can easily guess from the outset who the bad guys will be. As a result the requisite betrayals and reveals aren't surprising at all. This series sort of plods along at a slow pace, punctuated by occasional moments of intense violence (that you can't see very well because it's so friggin' dark), never finding the profundity of meaning that it seeks.

Mediocre actiing, unoriginal plot and that intensely annoying, pervading (literal) darkness are one thing, and that make the rating worthy of 5 stars. But something else even more disturbing prompted me to knock it down to 2 stars: The celebration of brutality, mischaracterized as "justice" or even "patriotism." Obviously, in a story like this we know there is going to be violence. The whole underlying ethos of this type of story is of redemption through violence (and we Americans love our myths of redemptive violence). But in The Terminal List we're supposed to cheer as our protagonist tortures one of the bad guys to death in a slow and graphic manner. Not for important information mind you, but just to watch him die in an agonizing and humiliating way. In the final episode our hero methodically murders several federal agents and secret service agents who stand between him and his intended target. These are not henchmen. They're not bad guys. They're law enforcement guys doing their job of protecting the VIP they're assigned to. This celebration of brutality without introspection causes The Terminal List to be not just crappy, but crappy and disturbing.

This could have been a great film. Dinklage is incandescent. The other actors hold their own. The cinematography, sets, costumes, etc. Are all good. Where the film falls apart is each time they break into song. The music is relentlessly mediocre, as is the singing (Glen Hansard excepted). For a story which has as a central element the celebration of eloquence, the lyrics are quite often dumb and stilted. The melodies are lacking. The dancing is paltry. They should not have made this a musical. It is during the non-musical sequences that the film begins to rise above mediocrity; but it sinks again as soon as the next musical number begins. Alas.

This is a Danish film, with English subtitles. Military tough guy Markus (played by tough guy actor Mads Mikklesen) is away from home doing military tough guy things when his wife and daughter are in a train crash. The wife is killed and the daughter traumatized. Markus returns home to grieve and brood. Then it is brought to his attention, by another survivor of the train crash, that it may not have been an accident but instead was a bombing designed to assassinate a witness against an organized crime syndicate. Those, like Markus' wife and daughter, who died or were injured were collateral damage. Markus, aided by group of misfits, vows revenge (and has the weaponry to do it).

This is the classic boilerplate Hollywood revenge trope employed in countless action films. But the makers of Riders of Justice begin subverting that trope in surprising and delightful ways. The film becomes a quirky, sympathetic, and at times very funny exploration of how we're all damaged in different ways and need others to walk with us through our pain and grief, of how the trauma we've experienced may lead us to perceive and do things that we may not even be fully aware of, of how we try with our limited perspective to find patterns and meaning within the enormous web of causality that is existence. Some surprisingly deep stuff, all delivered in an engaging and entertaining fashion (albeit sometimes gritty and dark, as one expects from a Scandinavian film). There's a lot of humanity in this film, something often missing from the action genre. All of the central characters have experienced deep trauma in their lives, which affects how they perceive events, how they react to stress, and how they interact with one another.

The acting is superb. The scene showing Mikklesen's face as he gazes at his wife's body in the morgue is, all by itself, an Oscar worthy performance for what he is able to convey.

Warning: there is action movie style brutality (particularly gun violence, and the requisite sadistic villain from central casting) but the use of violence to solve problems is cast as a misguided option in order to point toward something much more satisfying and transcendent.

It seemed like a good idea: a Tarantino-esque show about an odd-ball, superhero-like band of Nazi hunters. But the show fails at being wittily edgy (ala Tarantino) and is merely crass. Apparently not satisfied with the actual atrocities committed by Nazis, the writers had to create their own over-the-top sadistic atrocities and then film them for us to see. In doing so they turn what the (real) Nazis (really) did into a caricature, and further rob the dignity of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. So the show is not edifying or even entertaining (and certainly not funny). And what's with the fixation of showing nude elderly people?

I just finished watching Logan and--oh my God--what a dismal, dreary, dreadful and dumb bit of cinematic nihilism that was. Brutally and graphically and disturbingly violent too.

All those tremendous adventures the X-Men had in years past? All the times they defeated evil villains? The camaraderie, the sense of family--of a home for misfit mutant kids? The risks and victories and sacrifices? Yeah, it was all ultimately meaningless.

I can understand if they felt they needed to kill off the old X-Men but they did so in such a way as to make every previous X-Men movie and story appear to have been a foolish exercise in futility. A miserable and lonely future awaits, addled and alcoholic, only to be relieved by violent death. Yay.

This could have been an uplifting homage to the ideal of what the X-Men were. But Hugh & Patrick & Co. apparently decided they would rather go out with a sad whimper instead of a celebratory bang.

There is something deeply unsettling about sitting in a movie theater surrounded by people who are laughing as, on screen, heads are exploding, limbs are being hacked off and a princess rewards her rescuer with anal sex. The film starts out on a promising and engaging note as we follow the recruitment and training of the protagonist. But then, at about the midway point, things get terribly weird and weirdly terrible. This is not just movie violence but violence-porn, violence for laughs, violence that glories in being shocking and over the top. The movie itself, in terms of film-craft, is disposable and forgettable. But what sticks with me is a nagging feeling that what I've just watched--in the guise of a movie purportedly about a refined British spy agency--is a marker of the decline of Western civilization. Kingsman is the Roman circus for the 21st century, and every bit as brutal and pointless.

'As It Is In Heaven' is, without a doubt, the best Swedish movie I've ever seen. OK, it might be the *only* Swedish movie I've ever seen, but it is really, really good. It is a very mature and spiritual film (by mature I mean "grown up", not explicit), which manages to be both heartbreaking (in the way very beautiful things tend to be) and heartwarming. It also manages to be inspiring and thought-provoking without preaching or manipulating. The movie unfolds slowly and with great subtlety. At first I wasn't sure if I'd like it. By the end I was captivated and moved. You will think about this film long after you've watched it.

The central character, Daniel, lived as a child in a small village where he was constantly bullied. He eventually moved away and grew up to become a world famous symphony conductor. Emotionally isolated, driven and passionate--always seeking for a perfection in music which he could not attain--Daniel destroys his health and is forced to retire.

He returns, with no particular plans, to the sparse village where he lived as a child, and ends up becoming conductor of the local church choir. Over time, as Daniel and the choir rehearse, subtle but amazing things begin to occur. The choir-members, though they've lived as neighbors in the village for years, begin to experience true community--perhaps for the first time. Daniel discovers, as a gift rather than an achievement, the thing he had wrecked his life searching for: Love. Not just romantic love, but love given and received in the context of community. Community with people who, it turns out, are just as broken as he is. Within this context the music he always dreamed of--"music that will open the heart"--emerges. And the music is beautiful.

Some in the village struggle with what this emerging community will cost them; particularly those who would use fear or violence to hold others close to them. These antagonists are met, not with violence in return, but with grace. This film does not succumb to the myth of redemptive violence, as so many of our stories tend to do. Rather, those who rely on imposing their will upon others though fear and violence are exposed as fearful and desperate themselves. They are regarded with compassion.

At the climax of the film, the choir enters an international competition, but to everyone's surprise (including their own) they transcend mere competition and bring instead an even greater level of community. This is the message of "As It Is In Heaven": Letting go of fear and of what we hold over others and what others hold over us; being honest; accepting one-another and experiencing true community. Truth. Forgiveness. Mercy. Compassion. Grace. Love. Here on earth, as it is in heaven.

Well I just got home from seeing Avatar (in 3D!). It was an entertaining film, but it was also so much less than it could have been. Visually and technologically it was superb. The plot, however, was derivative and hackneyed. Overall, it was the movie equivalent of a Pop-Tart: colorful and yummy but lacking real substance.

But hey, sometimes I like a good Pop-Tart.

As I watched, I had a nagging feeling that it all seemed vaguely familiar. Then it hit me: Ferngully! This is Ferngully for grownups! Although visually the film was in 3D, from a plot standpoint the characters were very two dimensional: The military guys are (with two exceptions) all stereotypical thugs. The scientists are all thoughtful and benevolent. The corporate guy is greedy and crass. The Na'vi (natives) are noble savages. All of the characters fit into simple and cartoon-like categories, so we know who to cheer for and who to boo at. The ending wraps up everything nice and neat and tidy for us.

The theological world of the noble Na'vi is one of insipid new-agey pantheism, which seemed to have been cribbed from Disney's 'Pocahontas'. The plants and animals and trees and Na'vi are all interconnected in an environmentally-friendly web of eco-consciousness. Or something like that. I half expected to hear Elton John singing "The Circle of Life." On the other hand, religion didn't even appear to be on the radar screen of the human characters. The concept of a personal, transcendent deity was nowhere in sight.

The MacGuffin of the film is a rare and valuable mineral called--I kid you not--"unobtainium." Other than being described as the motivator for the human's rapacious conquest of the Na'vi planet, it is given no further explanation. Why do the humans need unobtainium so badly? I assumed that, at some point, it would come into play--perhaps to provide a key twist or revelation--but it turned out to be nothing more than an element to drive the plot.

The most disappointing thing about Avatar was that Cameron relied on the tried and true mechanism of having the characters use violence to resolve the film's conflicts. Walter Wink, in his fantastic book 'The Powers That Be' calls this "the myth of redemptive violence." I was hoping for something more profound and thought-provoking, but ultimately it came down to guns and knives and rockets and arrows and grenades and spears and big explosions and various people dying in entertaining ways. Some have said that Avatar carries an anti-war message, yet it is war that was presented as the only solution to the conflict between the Na'vi and the humans. The underdog Na'vi win the battle, the humans go home, end of story. Of course, if they make a sequel and it follows the history of the American Indians (upon which the Na'vi are obviously based) the humans will just return with a larger army and finish the job. It would have been so much more interesting if the enlightened Na'vi and their spiritually intelligent planet could have come up with a more creative and redemptive way to teach us naughty humans a lesson.

So there you have it: Ferngully meets Pocahontas, but with more weaponry and a much bigger budget.

A movie with a very similar plot line, but better written and with a more satisfying ending, is the lovely animated film 'Battle for Terra'. If you liked Avatar, go rent 'Battle for Terra'.

Walter Wink ruined movies for me. Ever since reading Wink's book 'The Powers That Be' and having my eyes opened to what he calls 'the myth of redemptive violence', I find it hard to watch certain films. It seems that a great many films (particularly action/adventure and sci-fi--you know, the ones that kids watch) perpetuate this pervasive concept that problems are best solved by violence. Even the 'Christian' Narnia films were built around this idea.

So I was intrigued while browsing through the shelves of schlock at the local video store when I came across an animated sci-fi movie called 'Battle for Terra'. Here's the description, from the back jacket of the DVD case:

"When the peaceful inhabitants of the beautiful planet Terra come under attack from the last surviving members of humanity adrift in an aging spaceship, the stage is set for an all-out war between the two for control of the planet. But will an unlikely friendship between a rebellious young Terrian and an injured human pilot somehow convince their leaders that war is not the answer?"

I brought it home and watched it with my wife. The animation is absolutely lovely. The film makers created a visually beautiful world and an intriguing alien culture on Terra. Some big-name actors lent their voices to the characters. It was especially amusing to recognize James Garner's voice croaking out from the mouth of the aged Terrian leader.

I would classify the film as "anime-lite." It is not as deep and angst-ridden as most Japanese anime that I've seen, and certainly not as graphic. Although a bit formulaic in developing the characters and their relationships to one another, it moves along quickly and keeps the viewer engaged. And, again, the animation is lovely.

Despite containing scenes of aerial battle, the film does a good job of showing the futility of war. One is heartbroken as bombs fall on the exquisite Terrian cities. However, the ending is hopeful and the message that rises up out of the destruction is that friendship, understanding, cooperation and self-sacrifice are superior to fear, aggression and violence. As the Garner-voiced Terrian elder says at the denouement of the film, "There is always an alternative."