peterbp

A new, interesting Sci-Fi in the style of 60's technology and style - under the fears of the cold war led the USA to construct and launch a lifeboat to take a bit of humanity to Alpha Centauri. The project was kept secret.

The series are overall done well. The sets and space that the whole thing takes place in are generally alright, though certainly not up to high motion picture standards. The detractors on these reviews are however partially correct: The acting spans from so-so in some places to good in others. Another general problem is that the action and shooting is too fast - that story and action is thrown at us far too rapidly, making the while thing "stuffy". The episodes of ca. 1 hour each are too long; the producers should have broken them down into 30m or 40 minute affairs. Also, there is too crude hinting at the story, which likewise detracts for those of use that are SF buffs.

Overall, it is a good shot at functional SciFi, but with a bunch of errors that the producers should have ironed out before release.

I look forward to Season 2 if it ever hits the wires.

Opened this up without a notion of what it contained, and the opening scenes put me on the edge of my seat (w/ inclinations to stop playback) due to the indications of a major cringe-worthy affair. Oddly enough, it turned out bad, but not THAT bad.

Here's the thing: It's decently casted (Cage of course being the lone big name, and sadly he delivers a performance sub-par his other movies), fairly (if mostly over)-acted, well shot, good choice of locations and good FX... but... on the other hand, what drags this thing down to ground level is that corniness of the plot and script, the odd musical choices, the deep hollowness under the the otherwise OK acting, and its boilerplate predictability. I scratch my head at how they could make this last 2 hours. And that Speed2-esque scene.... I'm sitting here with a frozen shot-eating grin on my face.

I don't mind a flick with a religious theme, as it is can provide a fresh breath of air from a cinematographic space that is increasingly being filled with movies made from the usual overused trope elements. This one however could have been done a lot better. I do wonder who will cringe the most at this movie... the non-believers or the believers. I have a feeling it'll be the latter ones.

Verdict: OK popcorn flick if you can stand the religious stuff. In any case you'll have a good laugh at it after-wards. (Or long-lasting chills up your spine). If the rel stuff is too much, you can justifiably consider this a laughable mess and do a -1 or -2.

(Nicholas Cage will also have the chills up his spine from taking the lead role of this thing.)

Mr. Pitt plays the 3-year war veteran in command of a Sherman tank crew while fighting in the final push into somewhere in Germany. They lost their forward machine gunner in action so they need a replacement, and they are given a typist with no combat experience, who is quickly put into the grinder of the final weeks of the war.

For starters the movie has a very large cast of extras, which gives a solid initial impression of the fighting on the front of a war. Visually, the movie is also very pretty, well shot, good cinematography. The movie has plenty of gruesome deaths which will appeal to the gore crowd.

From there on, its downhill. The acting is not bad, but it is too much; the limited span of the script simply does not bear it. The story told by the script is too thin, like skin stretched over a skeleton with no flash on it.

Most of the scenes in the movie are not 'fleshed out'... they are superficial and barely adds to the flow of the movie. There is no real character development. The change to the movie forward gunner seem artificial and transparent. A lot of the human expression near the end is expletives.

All war movies have both inaccuracies and silliness that occurs throughout the action, but this movie's load of these is not just stretching credibility: It is outright ridiculous! Limited artillery shelling in a village that all seemingly hit right in the town square, numerous shells that manage to glance off tank armour where the tank armour only has a ~1" indentation, and the final whopper of "one tank crew holding off and slaughtering most of an entire Regiment"? Did they really pull off the "Heroic Last Stand To The Death" trope? Yep, they sure did. I feel like this is where the Storm Troopers come in, because they can't hit s___, either! After all those numerous glowing machinegun and cannon shots (which funnily enough are strictly one colour for the Americans and another for the Germans), I'm expecting Darth German to step in at the end, telling Brad Skywalker that he is his long-lost father, the two of them fighting on different sides of the same war.

Oh yeah, the ending was weak - saw it coming a mile away.

WW2 aficionados will shake their heads and pop Kelly's Heroes (for humor) or The Longest Day (for at least somewhat credible portrayal of a notable war action) on instead.

Verdict: Poor. This is Red Tails on the ground. High-budget, lots of eye candy, but poor plot/script, and just silly.

Recommandation: Typical popcorn movie. Worth watching (cinema or rental ONLY) but not worth buying nor remembering.

Disaster movie: The Earth is threatened by a coming apocalypse foretold by the signs of the Zodiac.. or something.

Starting with something good, the flow of the movie is good, and the cameramen avoid many of the mistakes that many other B-movies commit. The scenery of is also very pretty.

Now for the far worse: Since it's a disaster movie, it relies on special effects, as most of this stripe do. Most of these effects are poor to a degree where special effects of mediocre 80's movies are on part with them. Once I burst out laughing because it was so bad.

It's likewise clear that the movie was shot largely in the same spot, giving the impression of someone trying to do an action movie in their back garden. I addition to this, some of the transitions from one location to another are so marked, that they defy belief. Silly! The only significant plus in the grade book of this movie is that the acting performances are good. These actors' delivery is however let down by poor scriptwriting and poor directing; in several scenes the director should have done things markedly different, which would have improved both flow and feel of the movie.

What drags the movie down additionally is the lack of additional cast and stand-ins, which hampers the movie's feel SEVERELY. Its hard to believe that they went ahead and got this movie written, picked locations, filmed and fx'd up, and they didn't spend a bit more and more people in the various locations where it was shot.

I'm guessing that the production budget came from the product placement funds. Such a pity, with a bit more money thrown at it, and more attention to detail, it could have been significantly better. This is not a turkey, but had the acting been worse, it certainly would have been! Oh and lastly, MARTY! Where are we going to get 1.21 Jiggawatts??!

Godzilla (org. "Gojira" in Japanese, which gets corrupted to Godzilla in English by the untrained ear) makes a reappearance as a truly cosmopolitan monster, and not just the bane of Tokyo. I've sure the Japanese are relieved not having their capital city destroyed yet again.

The effects are very good, and this is of course what holds the movie up - with any disaster or monster movie, disbelief must be suspected to enjoy the movie. That being said there are some scenes that are not just dubious and silly, but outright stupid (had me rolling my eyes a couple of times), in various ways, not just what is possible, but what is meaningful or makes military sense. Seriously, do the soldiers really think that a measly assault rifle will do anything whatsoever against a monster the size of a skyscraper?

The acting is overall fair, but superficial, and handicapped by that the scriptwriters didn't do any character development or meaningful interaction with each other. No significant show of emotion is on the big screen, which makes the human part completely forgettable (apart from the opening of the movie, but that stands alone).

Worst of all is Ken Watanabe's part - which is more that of a prop than an actor. He spends a lot of his time just standing around, looking dumbfounded, and not saying a word. Why did the scriptwriters waste his talent such? Why did he agree to taking this role in the first place? Didn't he read the script? The movie wouldn't have lost much if the humans were cut out. Annoyingly, the most we see of the human race here is the brave American military (smirk).

Overall, this is quite watchable for your typical movie night, but also quite forgettable. Only re-watchable for fans of 'ol 'zilla.

Disaster movies are per default pretty pedestrian: "Natural catastrophe cometh our way, watch out! Bad stuff then happens to a lot of people, boo hoo, but fear not! Our heroic guy/gal triumphs in the end despite pretty bad odds". Into The Storm doesn't deviate in this regard; the difference is in the details.

The movie is sprinkled with plenty of good special effects, which is of course the mainstay of this motion picture. The acting is mostly decent, but occasionally wooden (mostly in the beginning). You will as usual have to apply a moderate dose of suspended disbelief to enjoy the movie - the physics of some of the scenes would not hold up to realistic scrutiny.

I must go a bit back on that thing about suspending disbelief, since some of the scenes are so silly, that it brought anywhere from a smirk to outright laughs to me.

A detraction from the experience is that in some of the more wind-blown scenes, I was unable to make out what the actors were saying/screaming to each other. I'm unsure whether this was intended or due to bad sound mixing, though it would certainly be realistic considering how much noise strong winds make.

Overall, it was surprisingly okay for something I expected to be poor, based on the expectations of numerous disaster scripts seen in the past. (But it is neither a 2012 nor a Day After Tomorrow, knock such expectations straight out of your head!) Recommended for a passable but entertaining movie night. Is it worth watching again later? Perhaps once.

This movie may be one of the best over the last couple of years. It is well shot, with crisp, colourful scenes and gorgeous mountainous landscapes that amply serve to show that Afghanistan is far more than a mostly flat dust-bowl like Rambo III portrayed it as. Good sound quality, with plus points for the solid thuds that storm rifles deliver instead of the pea-shooter sounds that far too many war and actions movies of the past have given these weapons of war. The movie even packs in a few good "shock" moments that genuinely had me jump out of my seat - thats a rare one for me.

There are many harsh criticisms of this movie here on IMDb, most of them giving it a 1/10. I do not believe that such a rating is in any way justified, and that that is the result of personal opinions coming in the way of sound judgment. Some criticisms are however worth mentioning: Primarily that, while the movie is hardly a case of "the American Supermen return home in Glorious Victory after mowing down hundreds of Afghan savages", it did annoy me that every shot that the SEALS landed on the Afghans had them go down just like that (without even using the classic trope of "bad buy took a bullet and looks dead, while reaching for gun right next to him..."), while the protagonists of the movie takes loads of punishment by the way of bullets that tear into them, RPGs raining down on them and shell shocking them, rolling down cliffs and getting everything from scraped to concussions. And no, it's certainly not like some claim that they merrily jog and fight on after taking so much punishment, but you do have to suspend disbelief when watching a movie like this. If not, almost every war movie ever must be bombed down to low grades based on the impossibility of whatever the actors in it do.

Another objection is that the movie is the usual USA-Patriotic-GungHo stuff. I disagree with this. While I certainly agree that it can easily be INTERPRETED to be the usual of this tripe (and it is an honest question: Can Americans at all make non-patriotic war movies?) the patriotism seems low-key in this. The intro with the footage of ultra-though SEAL training is claimed to be an advertisement for the US elite forces. I disagree. I saw it as a simple intro to how tough material a soldier than ends up in the elite ranks, has to be made of; it is a decent atmosphere-setting intro. Also, how patriotic is it to see a country's soldiers cut to shreds, or go down in a blazing inferno? Or do we have to justify that interpretation by claiming the "glorious death" angle with the heroes interred in Arlington with all the other dead heroes, while entirely neglecting their gruesome deaths? Come on! The last objection I'll mention here is that the movie is at odds with both the written story of the survivor, AND of the events as they likely occurred. I do not deny this at all. However, this is not a war documentary; it is a story told though an action-packed lens. Again, it means that to make an effective tale, artistic freedoms must be used. The scriptwriter and director does that here. This should come as a surprise to no-one.

All in all, it is a good movie, but far from perfect. Very watchable, and recommended, unless you can't stomach anything that can be even slightly be interpreted to be army/patriotic propaganda.

And if you must ask, I'm not at all a flag-waving American rooting for its heroes.

Horror and gore: Decent acting. Good cinematography. Decent surroundings and sets. Script as can be expected from its genre, which means run of the mill "surprises", shock, and screaming, peppered with gore and ickyness.

This one starts as a slow-paced guys' excursion to a tropical island, and, via some nasty flesh-eating virus infection, ends up as an unintentionally comic splatter movie, which at points reminded me of Braindead, though it is nowhere up that the standards of that classic. Not much more to be said without spoiling the experience.

It's still good entertainment, though. Worth watching on a night with the guys, though at all not memorable.

...but fell flat on its face.

With a decent budget, plenty of locations to film, a somewhat large cast, decent combat scenes and cinematography, it should make for a good flick.

Instead, it is gutted by tedious, standard dialogue, poorly executed. Too much chatter, barely a hint of emotion in it, all of it stuffed together in chunks that just can't jabber squeezed into it without any breaks and pauses.

Oh yeah, the plot? Like a bone with a few pathetic strips of meat on it.

Movie might have worked if the acting and speech was top-notch (think Pulp Fiction), but with this standard of acting... forget it!

John Q. Archibald: Illinois auto worker, husband and father. Down on his luck; the plant is cutting the shifts, so he is on a 20 hour week, and with the wife working in a cafeteria, making ends meet is tough; John's car is reposessed by the bank because he is behind on the payments. (not enough for both rent and car)

From bad to worse as his son, during a junior league baseball game gets a heart attack, and is rushed off to the emergency room.

Fast forward: The kid is admitted, and diagnosed with an enlarged heart, and a terminally dropping blood pressure; to survive, he needs a heart transplant. An this is what the movie is about: It's gotta be paid.

This is also where the downturn of the movie starts because the plot and characters abruptly turn cardboard at this spot. The hospital cardiac surgeon (using overly complex medical terms that make no sense whatsoever to a layman, in a way i strongly doubt no medical doctor would do) and the hospital director who does a good job of acting like a complete bitch with only her sights on the money in face of a pair of parents that have just had a death sentence on their only child, all while sitting in a fabulous and exquisitely designed and decorated hospital board room.

Denzel Washignton is a great actor, have no doubts about that, but if you've seen his other performances (fx. Manchurian Candidate, Pelican Brief, Crimson Tide etc.) you know his mannerisms and style of acting, and while he does a very good attempt at being the desperate father here, he overplays his role in a way that spoils it and adds unreality to the impression.

The predicament in short: JQ thinks he has "Major Medical" aka PPO, but he doesn't, because his employment is part-time. He ends up counting dollars, from where he can get it; church collection, garage sale of anything worth anything in the house (fridge, colour TV...). And there it goes - the obvious fact is that they just can't make it happen.

Cardboard character time: JQ's wife goes hysterical and tells him to DO SOMETHING to save the son. So he does it, and takes a pistol to the emergency room of the Hope Memorial Hospital (which could be any of the 7 in central Chicago, anyway.).

The latter half of the movie is not much worth going into detail, because it is boilerplate hostage situation in the context of the movie; a bit of chitchat about the nasty HMO's paying doctors not to check for illness, drama between the hostages, and once in a while the continually death clock of the dying son's lowered blood pressure.

Hostage negotiator comes in, starts taking, police chief comes in, makes it abundantly clear that he is only there for show and because it's election year, and, you can guess the rest.

It's stuff you've seen before, done better, all of it. A particularly bothersome foolishness of the movie is that the kid, with terminally low blood pressure and barely hanging on to consciousness (if at all), has no trouble talking to his father (though in a whisper voice) in fully formed sentences that you expect from an adult, not from an intubated kid on the verge of death! This is emotional pornography of a particularly poor sort.

Long story short, it ends good, yada yada yada. Absolute run of the mill drama with nothing worthy of note apart from the political message, which comes here: YOU NEED UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE It's not me telling you this, it's the movie telling it to you.. no, it's screaming it at you; it's like having a billboard with HUGE LETTER SHOVED IN YOUR FACE telling you.

What spoils this motion picture isn't as much the standardized plot and dialogue, or the overly melodramatical acting, no, it is the almost constant overtones of a political piece.

I won't go into the political jabbering here, but I will throw a brief comment on the subject; the US medical system certainly has its flaws, but making a otherwise tear-laden family drama into a political propaganda delivery system is unbelievably cheap, and not helped by actual political figures being included (probably why most good movies use generic political figures, such as US Presidents not being named, but just being 'Mr. President' etc.); as mentioned above, just before JQ gets his car reposessed, George Bush is on the tube (looking somewhat indifferent to the plight of working poor Americans), and after the movie ends, lots of footage of protesters carrying "free healthcare" etc etc. slogan signs are shown, and none other than Hillary Clinton is displayed prominently as the Universal Healthcare savior of sorts. (If you *must* ask , I care not for either of mentioned politicians or their parties. There, i said it.).

Another reviewer said that this is the writer's "letter to the editor" on his disagreements with US healthcare. On consideration, he is absolutely right; this isn't drama as much as it is a political propaganda piece that uses a deep and true contemporary problem in US society as a launchpad, and on considering that, I feel nauseous I've spent my time watching this garbage, so blatantly exploiting the human misery of an actual, real problem for some with such an obvious goal.

Summarizing: Polished and great cast, but bland from the standard plot, acting and dialogue, and destroyed by the political payload it carries.

Additionally, I noticed that most of the negative comments on this movie has been rated down a lot, while positive commentary is almost uniformly rated up. Why is that?

This movie is totally out of tune with the first and second ones, which respectively were fantastic and good. From the brutal approach to movie action of the former ones (thanks to Bruckheimer), this one has scratched most of this off (no more social realism of the first and no more really bad guys of the second) and replaced it with superficial layer of humor and Murphy's funny faces, which really aren't funny when you've seen them before in his stand up comedy shows or The Nutty Professor.

The old actors (Rosewood and Serge) are embarrassing parodies of their earlier roles, and I do mean embarrassing. The rest of the cast acts in the way I've come to describe as "polished but poor".

This movie tries to be a family movie, and it doesn't work at all. Plus, it gives the series a bad legacy in the process.

I'm sorry i watched it. Avoid.

Pros:

+No superficial Hollywood polish.

+Courageous concept.

+Very scary to imagine yourself in the same situation.

Cons:

-Plot is too thin to carry a movie of even shortened length. SHould have been half length of what it is, and it might have been better.

-Ending is overly open and fizzes out in a way that makes you think that it was a fluke that the screen turns black and the scroll-text appears, even though I admit it is a difficult task to add a 'punch' to this kind of motion picture.

My feeling after watching this movie can be summarized thus:

"Huh......"

Buy it for your girlfriend if you can find it at a one-dollar shop. Else just leave it.

On seeing this one again, I had some vague memories of seeing a miserably bad movie, but this isn't it (I probably mentally confused with 'Speed 2'; also, the female eye candy in this flick is better than Sandra Bullock).

The plot of this is same-old-same-old yuck-yuck monster movie (think SOS Poseidon + Leviathan + Aliens and mix in some humor), but scenery, acting and execution is good enough to make it quite entertaining, and the corniness of the plot actually turns to a plus for entertainment value.

I'd definitely recommend it, also because it has Australians in it :)

Note, I only saw approximately the last half of this movie, so feel free to take my review with whatever grain of salt you deem appropriate, that being said, seeing what I saw was more than enough to make me quite convinced that a one-star rating for this is enough.

In short, it's a dismal-plot slaughter of the wonderful precursor (NL Christmas Vacation) with Chevy Chase, only it doesn't have Chevy Chase in it, and it takes place in a generic tropical island, essentially with no connection to Christmas at all.

Ol' Chevy probably didn't want in because the plot is that devoid of actual fun, instead they got the screwy Cousin Eddie, who, again, was great in the original, but in this he is just over the top, and an extremely poor basis for any movie considering the plot and acting. The attempts at humor are generic to a degree where even contemporary television comedy trumps it, and considering that this is supposed to be comedy, I doubt I need to say more.

This is not to be seen for its qualities, for it has none, but for it's failings and again, how Hollywood is spilling it's life's blood of the past in the pursuit of a quick buck.

I think I'll watch the original before the upcoming Christmas season just to try to regain my childhood innocence, from a lost time when motion pictures were more than just high-budget, but mindless, garbage.

If you popped this disc into the player expecting a post-90's style, souped-up western (as I did), you'll be surprised, most likely in a bad way.

In short and without spoilers, this movie is a cross between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with a touch of Indiana Jones, set in a Western environment. Calling it a Western movie is a serious misnomer, as it doesn't contain any significant amount of the good 'ol Western elements (hard boiled cowboys/lawmen/mavericks on the western frontier, men with dark pasts going up against each other in battles on gun skill. nuh-uh).

The most impressive thing about the movie is the computer generated effects (WHAT! IN A WESTERN?! - exactly my point...), but unless you are a PC game aficionado, that won't be memorable at all, just odd.

If you are over age of 40, and not an old hippie, I'd advice you to stay away from this movie.

In short: This is about an ex-husband (played by Sheen) who goes bananas after a divorce and starts taking it out on his neighbouring family. Trouble is not with the plot or the general acting as such, but with Sheen - he just isn't good at acting your stereotypical psycho, with the needed attitude to be obsessive, menacing, violent, and with historical and biblical anecdotes thrown in for good measure.

This could have been "Falling Down 2", but Charlie Sheen is unfortunately out of his league, and spoils the alchemy of a movie that might otherwise have been a worthwhile watch. Instead, it is utterly forgettable.

As others have made clear already, this movie is an obvious "Fantastic Voyage" wannabe - the plot is a altered knockoff of the concept of the source of inspiration. However, the screenwriter didn't bother to give anything other than the mandatory similarities between the two any real attention.

Apart from the plot, what is wrong with this movie? In short, everything; props, effects, the cast and their acting (in a very polished way, if that makes any sense).

All this is NOT compensated by throwing Lance Henriksen in, which despite his solid rep as a star actor (with the added fact that he in his age has acquired distinct Clint Eastwood-ish AND Malcolm McDowell-ish looks, which isn't a bad thing to claim you have :), only makes the whole thing seem even more pathetic, as his role is more or less entirely to

1) blow off the occasional eye-rollingly lame line 2) to sit and look comically befuddled by the "voyage" that is eventually undertaken. 3) try to abate the comically poor acting of the rest of the cast

Also, inspiration seems to have been gathered from the series "Millenium" as well. Perhaps LH was comically touched by the unreality of being suckered into starring in a flick as poorly written and executed by this.

I had slightly higher expectations for AVP2 than the first AVP movie (which was almost fair according to my standards), after having talked about this one with an acquaintance.

However, I'm very disappointed. This piece of garbage makes the first one look like one of "those classics" you remember fondly. If 20th Century Fox wanted to utterly soil the reputation of the Alien and Predator movies, which shone in their own ways, THIS is the way to do it.

I could proceed to write a lengthy and in-depth review of this .... thing, but there is no need to, because on further consideration, there IS no depth to this. Want the plot explained, fast and hard? Here goes (I decided not to mark this as being spoilers):

"Teenage slasher movie with sci-fi monsters thrown in", oh and American military for good measure. That's it - all you need to know. Really.

Go ahead and vote me down for writing an unhelpful review (if you do so, also be so kind to obligate yourself to actually go and buy this pathetic excuse for a movie, and then watch it - *all* of it. Then let it dawn on you that you just wasted your money and the 90 proverbial minutes of your life that you won't get back. THEN, you can come and write a review here, sharing your anguish and loathing.)

Is there a reason for watching this movie, at all?

Yes, actually there is. Or, rather, three.

1) A cute blond chick. 2) A genuinely disgusting scene in the maternity ward of the hospital, which makes my minds eye spring back to the first time i saw Alien on TV. 3) Yet another example of how low the American movie industry will sink for a quick buck, even if they have to bloodlet their grandparents in the process.

Points 1 and 2 each earn the move 1/2 a star.

(NB: This comment has also been posted elsewhere.)