Prizem

Visuals are great, but it can't hold up an overall subpar movie. Fine for kids and families but leaves originality at the door.

It does fit together some fine lore to bring us up to speed with what we know from the original movie. How it does it is rehash story elements, themes and plenty of conveniences to forcibly make the pieces fit into the original. It has similar flaire to Solo where it's just fine and uninterestingly shows or tells us where things come from in this fanfiction. Sometimes it's best to leave things a mystery if the progenitor is unceremoniously bland.

The music is fine but doesn't have the same force of fun or majesty as the original score. They're kind of just there like Moana 2's music. Not bad, but certainly not memorable.

The 3D glasses also did nothing. It felt like just a regular movie instead of them trying to do anything with with 3D.

The worst part IMO was no James Earl Jones in the actual movie. I know he's sadly passed, but they've brought back voices from other people before. If they didn't want to synthesize, they could've used unused clips or even just reused a voice clip from previous Lion King works. I can't get behind a movie called Mufasa without Mufasa's actual iconic voice somewhere in the movie.

Feels like a made for TV movie, and probably worth a watch on Disney+. But not really one I'd recommend for theatres or purchase.

Godzilla x Kong really learned from the past movies and made a smash hit with this one!

I spent some time the past week catching up with Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs Kong. Those were decent in their own respects, but the first suffered from too much dialogue and human reaction shots while the second had a sort of haphazard story strung through to make the matchup happen.

In this latest installment of the Monster Verse, we get just enough story to push our humans and monsters along into an increasingly grand and interesting adventure that keeps on delighting at every turn! We get to see new discoveries about monster background and legends naturally without it being spoonfed. And we get So Much Action! There are a variety of monster fights left and right and each battle makes sense in their own context. They're really fun to behold and they do a great job mixing things up to keep you guessing as to what will happen next.

I went in not expecting much based on the past ones, and even a bit hesitant thinking it was mostly going to be about Kong and relatives based on the trailer. But it generously exceeded my expectations and I'm glad to have gone on the ride! I feel like Transformers could learn a lot from this team on how to make giant things fight in a really fun and interesting way.

I would say, don't think too much about where we're going or how we got here. Go with the monster flow and you'll have a great time with this one!