utku_kamil_ozen Reviews

The Terminator (1984)

A Near-Perfect Sci-Fi Classic

[10/10 · 21 May 2024]

Of all the Terminator movies, or any other movie that involves time travel, this one gets it right, probably accidentally! I don't want to get too deep into logical errors involving time travel, but there is a very obvious one that most movies fail to avoid. It's roughly called 'grandfather paradox', but I like to explain with butterfly effect. You see, every action we make, even seemingly most insignificant, mundane ones, constantly alter the chain of events that lead to future. Because of this butterfly effect, when you go back to the past, to a time before your own conception, you automatically risk or even guarantee (depending on how far back you've gone) that you will never even be born. There is actually a very good scene in the Tech noir that you can directly observe this butterfly effect, though it doesn't necessarily have to be observable or easily perceivable to work, the scene I'm talking about is when Sarah accidentally knocks a soda bottle off the table and when she bends down to pick it up, right at that moment the terminator is looking for her, but misses her, because she was bent down to pick the bottle. And it's a very beautiful scene, time slows down, the music in the background, it's just so perfect. Anyways... So, what is the solution to that problem of 'grandfather paradox'? Make it a loop, I believe it's called a 'causality loop', this is exactly what this movie does. I don't think they were thinking very hard, but probably accidentally come up with it without even realizing. Because in a movie like that, it really doesn't matter, the point of the movie is not the time travel itself, it's a chase movie. Anyway, I had to get that out of the way.

I believe this movie is a very important milestone in visual effects in cinema. They almost made it perfect, but with a few tiny flaws. They clearly had an amazing model of the endoskeleton, whenever they puppeteered it, and used the close-up shots, it looks perfect! But at other times, when they used the whole thing, I am not sure if it was stop motion or CG or a mixture, it looks bad. I don't think the movie needed those. Similarly, they made a skinned version of the thing, and instead of taking advantage of low light or other tricks, they just fully show it and again, it looks bad. But having said all of these, for its time, the visual effects are insanely advanced.

I read somewhere that Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the Kyle Reese part. Imagine what a disaster that would have been. Two mistakes with one stone! Arnold is perfect for the Terminator role and he's not a great actor with a lot of range. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a movie star as long as he's cast in the correct role. He's just perfect as the Terminator. That is another thing the movie did right, I believe James Cameron made sure Arnold was the Terminator. Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn are also great.

There is not really a lot to tell about the movie, it's one of these simple concept movies that are made extremely well and acted and have become a classic, similarly to Alien (1979).

The Vast of Night (2019)

It's different

[7/10 · 8 May 2024]

This is obviously a low budget movie, but the reason I'm saying 'obviously' is because there are no big name actors in it, otherwise, it looks pretty decent, even interesting. The entire event takes place during night time, and in real time. There are some interesting and experimental shots in it. So, overall, it's not that bad of a movie.

I am a skeptic in general and I am also very skeptical of people's or, lately, government agencies' claims of UFOs. However, I don't let my disbelief of these things hinder my movie experience. In fact, I kind of like movies about extraterrestrials and UFOs, etc. This movie goes with a minimalistic approach in terms of what they are showing to audiences, there are a lot of dialogues from characters who describe their experiences. Nevertheless, it manages to be interesting, although, I must say, there is some boring stuff in the first half hour of the movie, but it gets interesting after that 20-30 minutes.

I know I'll be as annoying as Brainy Smurf when I say this, but I was kind of bothered by the cigarette use in the movie. One of the main characters even says ''Cigarettes are cool, kids!'', well, he doesn't say ''kids'', but still, in this day and age...

MAJOR SPOILERS in this part: Just because I'll mention the ending, I wanted to put an extra spoiler warning here. Because the ending of the movie is quite good. It gives you chills. The soundtrack there, at the end, is also good.

Fallout 4 (2015 Video Game)

Two words: DAMAGE TRESHOLD (how to fix power armor)

[7/10 · 27 April 2024]

Since the franchise is so popular right now, I'll take advantage of this and point out some things that bother me about this otherwise very good game.

I hope this review somehow gets the attention of a developer or something and they do something about this issue.

The game has a major flaw, that can be easily solved with a patch: POWER ARMOR! One of the most appealing things about this game is of course the concept of power armor. However, they made it so wrong in this game, in my opinion. When you put a power armor, you need to start feeling like a demigod, but that's not the case in this game. It doesn't work as it should and you immediately need to repair your armor after taking a couple of petty shots from a raider or something. So, how should power armor be? There is a very good example, I don't even need to come up with my own idea, Fallout 2 did it perfect! Two words: DAMAGE THRESHOLD. In Fallout 4, the armor only acts as a damage reduction. This means, even in your power armor, a mere cockroach can still damage you, albeit in very small numbers. But that's not how armor works in real life, nor should it be like that in every video game. Again, Fallout 2 did it perfect, when you put the power armor, on top of damage reduction, you get something called 'damage threshold' this means, if the point of damage is below a certain number, that damage gets completely blocked. Which makes you feel the power of power armor. From that point on, a bullet from a pistol from a raider will do nothing to you, you'll only have to worry about real, serious weapons. If you think that this might cause balance issues, well, then you don't know much about Bethesda games. There is not a real balance in the first place, but if the developers want to balance the game, they can still do it with a power armor that I have described above.

That's it! That's the whole review, I just wanted to point out this huge flaw of the game and hopefully get it fixed.

Moby Dick (1956)

All of the characters are great, except the one that matters the most, the main character...

[7/10 · 22 April 2024]

I was only about five minutes into the movie and I was wondering why this movie hasn't become a classic. The characters were amazing, from get-go. Queequeg with his tattoos and his top head, Ishmael, Stubb, etc. Then at about 30th minute, almost to the second, comes in the main character, Ahab, and oh boy, Gregory Peck is just a disaster in this movie. His acting is just unbearable, it hits you in the face like a strong smell whenever his character is on the screen. I like how it paralleled another sea monster movie, Jaws, the way they only show Ahab from behind and in distance until the full reveal later. But instead of an powerful impression, we feel disappointment. I can only remember another movie, of the top of my head, in which I had seen Gregory Peck act, which was 'To Kill a Mockingbird', I honestly can't remember much about his performance there, but it must have been a decent one at the least, otherwise I'd remember. Anyways, the movie is still very good, but also very flawed because of how the main character is butchered...

I once tried to read Moby Dick, but I was never able to finish it, mainly because of the old fashion language(English is my 2nd language) and heavy religious themes. But I never understood what's so appealing about this story anyway. I know it's inspired by a real life event, sinking of Essex, which is actually an interesting story. But a grown up man seeking revenge and chasing an animal is just so dumb that no matter how eloquently you try to justify or explain it, or come up with symbolisms, it's just stupid. I know the novel is considered one of the greatest examples of American literature and I can understand that the premise could just merely be a template to build the story on, but I can never get over how dumb the premise is. Nevertheless, if they had a more fitting actor in the role of Ahab, this movie would be a classic like the book...

Fallout (2024– )

Season 1 was OK

[8/10 · 21 April 2024]

I bought an issue of a PC magazine once, back then when magazines were a thing. It came with a disk, in which there were demos for several games and a full version of Fallout 2! That was my first introduction to the Fallout universe. My English was not as good at the time as it is now, and the gameplay seemed very hard as well, but it was also very interesting and I am glad I didn't just throw it aside and forgot about it. Instead, I found a very detailed and thorough walkthrough of the game and I started playing it obsessively while constantly referring to the walkthrough and trying to translate it. This game and its walkthrough are a significant milestone in advancement of my English. It has a very special place in my heart, but not just for that reason, but because it is one of the best games I have ever played. Now, coming back to the present, I was walking down the street the other day, and there were many billboards advertising Fallout as a new TV show. That was kind of a surreal feeling to me, how the game's become such a mainstream thing, in freaking Turkey, there are billboards advertising it! So, of course, even though I had set my expectations to the minimum, I had to check it out...

Having become so cynical and skeptical(separate things, folks) about anything that comes out of entertainment industry, I cannot stress this enough: The show was OK so far, but it's just one season and it can go in any direction from here. So, keep that in mind, this is only about season 1. The first positive thing that I'd like to mention about the show is the actors, with few exceptions, but I won't specify the bad ones. I remember Walton Goggins from The Hateful Eight (2015), he was great in that movie and he's really good in this one, too. Ella Purnell's also good and very beautiful. Visual effects are acceptable for a TV show. Although, the physics of a lot of things like Vertibirds are kind of nonsensical, but in Fallout universe, I don't mind those. So, they really made a decent start, let's hope they keep this quality up.

Now the important part, the story! I think the premise of the show is the most realistic part about Fallout universe. You might think that a lot of things about corporations and capitalism have been taking into a level that is too far fetched. If you think so, you might be consuming a lot of mainstream media. Take this scene from the show, where they weigh and throw puppies into incinerators if they are not above certain weight. That seems unrealistically cruel, right? Well, what if I tell you that chicken and egg industry literally grinds 7 billion chicks a year? They separate them depending on their genders, males are thrown onto a conveyor belt and they shiver on their way to the grinder. This is called 'chick culling' and you can't make this **** up. Also, look at the current wars going on around the world. There are literal companies that make weapons of war and then lobby politicians into escalating situations into wars. I don't want to name these companies or countries, because then this review will definitely get deleted. All I'm saying is there is nothing far-fetched about the show's premise about evil companies, if anything, real world is a lot uglier. Speaking about these companies, there is also something meta about the show, although it's nothing as nefarious as the things mentioned above, this franchise itself has become the symbol of company greed. I highly recommend a YouTube video named 'The Fall of 76' from a YT channel called Internet Historian, the video has currently over 36 million views. And it's not just Fallout franchise, they are still trying to milk their customers by selling the same game, ES V: Skyrim, over and over again, instead of coming up with new, creative, original stuff.

These are my thoughts about season 1 and I hope they really go fully deep into that crazy Fallout universe in the future, where we can have episodes involving literal extraterrestrial aliens and even ghosts!

Dune: Part Two (2024)

a better example of how to make an adaptation

[8/10 · 4 March 2024]

The part one of this movie had come out during the worst times of covid and I wasn't able to watch it in a theater and I didn't watch it later, on streaming, either. That's why I don't feel super comfortable reviewing this movie, but I couldn't resist to make a few comments, especially about how to make adaptations.

When it comes to make a movie based on someone else's vision, a filmmaker needs to be very careful where he/she has room for creative license and where he/she hasn't. If something that was written in the story looks comical on screen, that might mean the filmmaker is having difficulty understanding the writer's vision, or it might just mean that that particular thing doesn't look good on screen. Either way, I am a proponent of excluding these sort of parts, as long as it's not something crucial to the original story and the artist's vision. Of course, there are better examples of adaptations, perfect ones, like The Lord of The Rings movies. The reason I wanted to bring it up in the context of this movie in particular is because there is a contrast to this film, in the form of that old David Lynch movie. People hate me for dissing that movie and I agree that there are some interesting stuff in it, but it is nowhere near redeeming that movie. And one can also argue that Villeneuve's movie is crafted for a mainstream audience, that can also be true, but that is not an excuse for making a comical movie in my opinion, to avoid satisfying a mainstream audience, by itself, should not be the goal, nor does it justify making a comical movie...

Dune: Part Two is a visually good, coherent movie. I don't think it's a masterpiece as many people claim, but it's a really good movie. I can understand the difficulties of explaining some of the concepts from the book to a mainstream audience, most of which hasn't read the book. It should have been a trilogy in my opinion, with more scenes of the characters like the Emperor, Feyd and I think Count Fenring was missing altogether, though I am not sure, maybe he was in the first one? Anyways, it wasn't perfect, as I said, but it didn't make a mockery of the novel. Also, keep in mind that this review is from the viewpoint of someone who hasn't seen the part one.

Indiscreet (1958)

Badly Structured

[4/10 · 7 February 2024]

Everything that happened in the first one hour of the movie could have just be done in the first fifteen minutes. The concept is this bachelor character who tells women he's married, which is a lie, but he then has no moral qualms about being with them, because the women already know that they can never marry him. And at one point, this revelation happens that he was never married, nothing interesting happens in the movie up until that revelation, it's just establishment, and for some reason, they put that revelation way deep into the movie. This is a romantic comedy, but because of the above-said structure, it doesn't even feel like comedy until towards the end of the film where the revelation comes up. Acting is, of course, alright. Especially Ingrid Bergman. But that's not enough to make the movie memorable.

Moonfall (2022)

I had to stop watching due to extreme cringe

[1/10 · 12 September 2023]

I am writing this review without having watched the entire thing, because I literally wasn't able to finish it. I know it's very popular and an easy thing to s**t on Roland Emmerich and it's for good reason, too, but I am totally coming from an unbiased position, to prove it, all I'll say is I don't think Independence Day is as awful a film as some people claim it to be. Does it have a lot of stupid stuff in it? Sure. Does Roland Emmerich consistently make s**tty movies that are clones of his previous movies? Yeah, but Independence Day is a mediocre movie with some redeeming qualities. So when I say Moonfall is a pile of ****, believe me, it's coming from an honest opinion. I really don't want to talk about it much, but one thing I'd like to mention is the cringiest moment in movie history, it's when the lunatic/nerdy guy says ''I love Elon'', that's when I literally had to turn it off. If there is one thing I can't tolerate more than Musk himself, it's his fans and people pandering to his fans.

Azumanga Daioh: The Animation (2002– )

Genuinely Hilarious and Cute

[10/10 · 23 August 2023]

I came across a hilarious video on YouTube in which a cat (an imaginary, magical cat) was practicing speaking English, then, of course, YouTube kept recommending more videos from what I later found out was Azumanga Daio, then I realized the whole series was uploaded on YouTube and I check it out and ended up binging it.

Right from the start, the show is insane in a very good and hilarious way. A teacher, Miss Yukari, is running late to school and one of her students sees her and offers help, what would a beautiful and young teacher do in a situation like this? You guessed wrong, she steals her students bike and rushes to school, leaving her student behind. I was immediately hooked. All characters are very endearing and cute, even the crazy teacher Yukari or I should say, especially the crazy teacher Yukari, who is one of my favorite characters along with Sakaki.

The only bad thing is it's only 26 episodes...

The Mist (2007)

Outshines its Flaws

[7/10 · 14 August 2023]

I need to preface that I haven't read the book. So, this is not a comparison in any way. This is just my review of the film alone. But I have come across something related to the book, so I'll make a brief comment on it, warning for spoilers for both the film and the book. Especially the ending of the movie is a very famous spoiler moment, I'd stay away from any review of this movie without watching it.

This is an interesting and overall very enjoyable film, I have watched it several times. But it has some flaws. The premise and the horror elements of the movie are the positives about the film; an army experiment goes wrong, details don't matter, they open a ''window'' to another dimensions and monstrous creatures pass to our world from said dimensions, a group of people are stuck in a supermarket in the middle of this chaos and the movie is really about how people from different beliefs, education and generally different social norms act when caught in a crisis like this. This is where the film gets a little arbitrary in my opinion. It vaguely appears to have some sort of message in several key moments, but then things just happen in a contradictory or arbitrary way. The most important one is about the obvious villain of the movie, Mrs. Carmody. She is clearly written as a villain and as an agnostic atheist, I agree with that. She is a fanatic religious lunatic and people indeed tend to follow these sorts of figures. But why would you write a villain like that and then make her right almost 100% of the time? I don't get it... The only good thing about the character is when she was screaming at the mob to kill the little boy as a sacrifice and Ollie executes her with a gun and saves the boy, that was a very cathartic moment, indeed. It's one of the reasons I like this movie, despite its flaws.

Now let's talk about the big ending, it's complicated, though. The ending of this movie is considered by many as a very shocking and cruel one. The group of people that escaped from the supermarket drives around in a horrifying world of destruction. They see the situation hopeless and agree that it's best and most humane to suicide at this point. However, they are 1 bullet short. David, the protagonist, shoots everyone in the car and gets out of the car in order to be killed by the creatures. But then he sees a military vehicle, a tank, coming out of the mist, followed by more vehicles, a truck with full of survivors and he realizes that they had actually made it and he is devastated, falls down on his knees and screams in agony. Although I appreciate a different thing that you won't see in most American movies, I still have some problems with that ending. There was a woman at the beginning of the movie, who had said that she'd left her kids home and begged people to escort her. And David glimpses that woman on of the trucks. Is there a message intended here? Are we supposed to think that no one, including David, helped that woman and they are punished for it? I don't know if there is a moral message here and if there is one, I don't like it. Real life is arbitrary, yeah, but the arbitrariness in the film is not making a point of that, it's just clumsy with its moral messages. Then there is the comical acting of the actor who plays David, in this particular scene. Speaking of comical things, the mist that has been there for days and was there just a second ago, is now gone, at this very moment, very conveniently. What I come across about the book ending is that it's very different. They just keep going and trying to reach safety in the book, I learnt. Now, that would have been a more fitting ending in my opinion, not because I wanted a cliché ending, but because of the morals of the story...

Casino (1995)

It's a good movie, but a little overrated

[6/10 · 8 August 2023]

I started watching this and after a while realized something; what seemed like an intro to the movie, the narration and non-stop music at the start, kept going and going and never ceased. I care a lot about soundtrack in movies, in this movie however, it was to the detriment of the movie. The music never stops for a second, I thought if it was 'diegesis' at first, a technique in which the music is not just for the audience, but it comes from, say, a radio the character's listening to, so I thought maybe the nonstop music was the music playing in casinos or something, but no, it was constant throughout the movie. And I had a personal taste problem on top of the bad use of music, I hate the kind of music played in this film with a few exceptions(like Bach), but that's just my music taste and I understand most of them were fitting in a movie like this. But I really hate those soulless music pieces that people who really goes to casinos and watch James Bond movies like, kind of music Sinatra sings, hate it. I know I am mostly focusing on the soundtrack here, but it's really important to me. As a genre, crime movies are not my favorite movies, but I remember another crime film, Heat (1995), which also stars Robert De Niro coincidentally, the soundtrack of that movie was what made it so memorable to me. The director (of Heat) Michael Mann generally uses very good music in his movies, I don't know if it's his personal choice or if he works with the right people on that department, but when I think of his movies like; Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), etc. The first thing that comes to my mind is the music from those movies and the scenes in which I heard the music. But even if we put the music choices aside, the frequency with which they are used still makes it very annoying. It never stops.

What I loved about the movie was they say that casinos are just there to rob you, they say it out loud without mincing words. But the irony is, most people who like these kind of movies will go there and waste their money nevertheless. Something is different and very wrong in their brains that you and I don't understand, they think they'll make it, I don't know if it's superstition or what, but they must know that they can't win, the cognitive dissonance must be very strong with them. I worked in Atlantic city some years ago as part of my student exchange program, I didn't spend a single dollar in their casinos, but watched some of my friends waste their money there and it was sad. Next year, I was in Tahoe, and I had to make separate plans than my friends because they wanted to see Vegas, which I don't understand, what is so appealing about that place? We had to meet in New York later, I went to beautiful San Francisco while they were in Vegas. I know no one cares about what I did, but my message is Vegas, casinos, that kind of lifestyle is fake and empty, you can go see a lot of beautiful places with your money, instead of losing it to the machines while drooling like a zombie...

The Tomorrow War (2021)

Remember Edge of Tomorrow (2014)? Well, This is not it.

[2/10 · 5 August 2023]

Everything about this movie felt so cynical and calculated. This movie did not start as a creative idea, it clearly started as ''Well, Edge of Tomorrow (2014) made a bunch of money and people liked it, so why don't we make an alien movie and name it in a way that would subliminally remind people of that good movie? But, of course, ours will be garbage, but we'll make a lot of money without any creativity or effort!'' That's how and why this movie was made. And it is bad, even if you take it as a separate movie, it's just bad.

I, of course, didn't take notes while watching the movie, so I won't be able to list every stupid thing they did, but let's name a few. When the group of soldiers came from the future, in the middle of a soccer match, their leader starts speaking to people, how is her voice broadcast in the stadium and to the people watching and listening on TV? This was the beginning of the film and it immediately told me that this was gonna be a garbage movie. At the end of the movie, they had the drug that would kill the aliens, they had an idea where they would be, but they cannot convince the authorities to take action and the only reason is because the writers could not be bothered to come up with a more logical way of putting the main characters in action scenes. So they did the dumb thing and they went there on their own and killed the aliens, saved the world, saved the future, families and second chances and sacrifices and bla, bla, bla and all those clichés...

Dune (1984)

Why do some people like this movie, why do others hate, is it a good movie? I'll explain very succinctly

[2/10 · 30 July 2023]

The movie is absurd, the tone is comical, actors are hysterically bad, visual effects are abysmal, set designs are probably the worst among similar budget movies: they basically left the green walls in, unedited, and they shot from low angles sometimes, not caring that you can see the open top of the set and the lights, ridiculously unprofessional.

Why do most people hate this movie? I listed the reasons above.

Why do some people like this movie? Some of them can be explained as ironic liking, like when people watch bad movies for fun. Some other people think they are better than others because they have such different taste from the general population, I guess. Really, if you think you like this movie, unironically, than you have horrible taste in my opinion. What little interesting things this movie has is nowhere near redeeming it.

Volvo Trucks - The Epic Split feat. Van Damme (Live Test) (2013)

Sorry for the cliché headline, but it's true: One of the best commercials ever!

[10/10 · 24 July 2023]

I can't believe I am typing a review about a 76 seconds commercial, it totally deserves a review though. This is something like an eclipse, everything aligned perfectly during that 76 seconds. It's funny, but it's also genuinely cool. The contrast between playing it so seriously, while being so funny is really amazing. It also serves its purpose, it's not just some random thing that someone thought would be cool, it actually demonstrates the truck's stability. Even the music was chosen perfectly. It's written wittily and funny, it was shot very artistically and serves its purpose. I go back and watch it again every few years. It even has a Wikipedia page, according to it, this was shot in one take. Just brilliant...

The Mentalist: Red Queen (2011) Season 3, Episode 16

This show is way too predictable

[5/10 · 4 July 2023]

I had already my problems with the show right off the bat, it's a copy cat of Monk minus the humor. But as I watched more episodes, it's only getting worse...

Before I even watched this episode, I was guessing that they were gonna end the character Hightower. Because she had been gradually disappearing from the show, which is a shame, because I had thought she was a good character and the actress is good, too. When I saw the intro of the episode, I also predicted that Jane was in on it with Hightower and she wasn't actually kidnapping him. It's not because I am a genius or something, it's because this show has awful and very predictable writing. And the real bad thing is Hightower was one of the few things about the show that was kind of good, her relation with the core characters and her acting.

It's always a bad sign for a TV show when they write it on the go, instead of ahead of time, it is especially so for mysteries. Even at best case scenario, this show is a mediocre copy cat.

The Mentalist (2008–2015)

A Copycat of Monk, Minus the Humor

[5/10 · 16 June 2023]

I must preface that I couldn't resist to rush to write this review, but I am only a season into the show while I am typing this. The reason I couldn't wait is that it is way too obvious that this is a copycat of Monk.

The show itself is not horrible, but nowhere near as good as Monk (2002) while following the same formula to an extremely shameless degree. If you haven't seen Monk, let me tell you about the similarities and you decide. Both main characters are not cops, but work for them as consultants, because they are geniuses who solves cases for them, mostly homicides. Both main characters have lost their loved ones to murder and it defines their characters. Each episode (of both shows) solves a separate case that has a specific variety of theme or place, like ''at the beach'', ''at the casino'', ''versus the psychic'', etc. And The Mentalist even copies these varieties instead of coming up with new ones, from get-go, in season one, which indicates lazy writing. They even followed the formula of naming the episodes; Monk has his name in every episode, like ''Mr. Monk does that, Mr. Monk goes there, etc.'', so they put the word ''red'' in every episode's name... The differences between the two shows doesn't do The Mentalist any good either. Monk (both the show and the character) was genuinely funny, The Mentalist has a more serious tone, which makes it boring a lot of times. Monk (the character) was a likable character, because he had his flaws and vulnerabilities as a human being, whereas Jane is kind of annoying with his smirk and he's like better than everyone, he wins quarter of a million dollars in gambling and puts the money in a charity box! Give me a break! His hair and his suit is like he is going to a wedding all the time. Maybe I wouldn't be so annoyed by his character if the show had not ripped off Monk.

I have only mentioned the ''similarities'' superficially, but you can watch and realize they even copied it scene by scene sometimes. The show is watchable, but I can't rate it any higher than a 5/10 for it's an obvious copycat that doesn't improve over the show they ripped off, but on the contrary, offers less.

Night Sky (2022)

This is a waste of time, the show is not good and it's cancelled anyway

[4/10 · 11 June 2023]

I sometimes go through the list of shows or movies on a streaming service and pick one without having no prior knowledge of it and try to surprise myself. This is how I started watching this show, now I think I wish I had looked it up before...

The premise of the show is not so bad, there is a mysterious teleportation device underground in an old couple's backyard, it is initially a gateway to a some sort of station on a mysterious, far away and beautiful planet. Of course the show is about this mystery; who made it? Who put it there? But the writing is so horrendous, they made a horrible job with a potentially interesting concept. I started getting Lost (2004) vibes very early on, and I don't mean it in a good way. I think the writers came up with the concept of the mysterious portal, which is the easy part, then they started from there without actually having any particular story in their minds. Then there are extremely and comically stupid things the characters do, which are so frustrating. I want to give a few examples; take this nosy neighbor character, Byron, he finds out that the old couple is hiding something, then Franklin tells him about the teleportation device, reluctantly. But then, Byron thinks he is joking and he is ready to drop it, then the most stupid writing you'll ever see happens and Franklin now tries to convince Byron that it's real, for literally no reason, especially when you consider that Franklin hates Byron, which is also for no reason, Byron is not depicted as a bad guy, he's nice to Franklin and Irene, but Franklin just hates him, why? Another mindbogglingly stupid thing was the powering up of the teleportation device with a starter cable hooked up to a generator. How did they know it was out of power? How did they know how to power it up? It's an alien technology that they don't understand and this is not the most stupid part yet. They simply hook up the starter cable on a disk, by randomly attaching clamps on it and it works! It's like, equivalent of trying to power up your monitor by attaching cables with clamps to the screen itself. Then there are those ''astronaut suits'' Franklin made, that is so stupid that I don't even need to explain...

They had some good actors, like Simmons, but they also had some very bad actors in it. I really don't want to discourage and make her feel bad, I am sure she'll get better at it, but the actress who played the character Denise was just bad. There's a scene where Irene takes her to the underground chamber and tells her about the device, while all the time Denise is reacting to what she's hearing, she's just acting like scared or something, I don't know what that even was, she was just ''shaking'' I guess, or more like swaying comically.

Towards the end, the show was introducing more mysteries and characters that I felt like was never gonna lead to anywhere because of how bad the writing was. Then it just ends there, because they cancelled the show I found out. And it was the right decision. I think the point is no one should watch this show, because you'll either think it's awful, or even if you might potentially like it, the show is cancelled after several cliffhangers and you'll never get new episodes to figure out what happens to those characters...

Jurassic Park (1993)

What Makes The Original Jurassic Park Movie So Special?

[10/10 · 9 June 2023]

If you are in your twenties or younger, you may have seen some of the latest Jurassic Park sequels in a theatre and you may have been unimpressed by them, you may be wondering what's the big deal about the original movie? Well, let me tell you, at least my opinion.

When people talk about Jurassic Park (1993), they often mention the quality of visual effects. Indeed, Jurassic Park had amazingly good visual effects, so much so that 30 years later, the film still holds up. And this is felt even more strongly when you see movies or documentaries made in the recent times that are not nearly as good as the 30-year-old Jurassic Park. People think even the sequels didn't match the original film in terms of visual effects. But how can a movie that was made in 1993 have better visual effects than some modern movies and why are visual effects so important in Jurassic Park? The answer to the first question is mainly the correct use of a mixture of animatronics and CGI and using them brilliantly and making them blend in with the environment. CGI was often a comical thing back then, so using it only where animatronics were not practical was really a good decision, but where they used CGI, it was ahead of its time, indeed. One thing that people don't realize is the way they blended the effects into the environment. In one of the first scenes where dinosaurs make an appearance, we see a herd of parasaurolophus and a pair of sauropods near a lake at a distance, this is the moment memed to death btw, but the brilliant thing about this scene is that they used just the right amount of haze and air distortion and put everything behind that subtle filter and it looks so good, so convincing, makes dinosaurs blend in with the environment. Regular movie goers wouldn't even consciously think about these things, nor would they be able to recognize it, but their brains tell them that it is very convincing and buy it as real. To summarize, the effects are better than even some modern movies, because of their artistic use, despite using technically inferior technology. And it is a very common thing actually, especially in video games, some games look better than others, even if they are older, for the very same reason. That is not to say old games are generally better than new ones, but it means without a good artistic design, higher resolution alone doesn't make things better. This brings us to the second question, why are visual effects so important in this film? Because in that moment, the audience, along with the characters, see the dinosaurs for the first time ever! They are not some dude in a bulky, comical costume or a poorly sculpted stop motion figure with jerky movements. This realism just brings dinosaurs and their majesty from imagination to the real world. This was the success of Jurassic Park.

Really, this movie would have been an average action movie, without the impact of its visual effects. The story is fine, but nothing special, acting is OK. All the moral questions about bringing the dinosaurs back to life just serves as drama and the movie doesn't really have any good answers for it, Malcolm's speech is just glib in my opinion. I guess if we had the chance to bring them back for real, we don't btw, most important thing would have been not to release them into the wild, for there is no way of guessing how it would disturb the environment, but other than that, they wouldn't be super intelligent killing machines that cannot possibly be contained. When you think about it, the opening scene is kind of laughable actually, like a bunch of professional people with all the equipment, still incapable of transferring an animal that would have been no more dangerous than a lion, that is if they had the species right. That was a velociraptor, you probably already know this, but velociraptors were turkey sized animals that could pose no threat to an adult human, there were bigger raptors, but they thought the 'velociraptor' name sounded cool, which is true. And there are a lot of scientific errors in this movie, scientists actually think that T-Rex probably had the best eye sight in animals ever, because of the size of the eyeballs, which is actually a factor in the quality of sight. On the other hand, a lot of people talk about how the movie was very modern in terms of its understanding of their movements and behavior. Overall, it was a mixed bag in scientific accuracy. And it had a huge impact in making paleontology popular. If you watch a lecture on YT or something, you'll actually hear from real paleontologists how Jurassic Park was a factor and how they wanted to be a paleontologist from childhood, because of this movie. But none of these matter, as I said, Jurassic Park's success was to bring dinosaurs to life, in a sense, for real. It is really a timeless and an amazing movie that still holds up.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Barely Watchable

[3/10 · 15 March 2023]

I don't care if this is the first movie ever to invent zombies or zombie-vampires or whatever they are, nor do I care that if it inspired future movies of similar kind. A movie needs to stand alone and must be judged as its own thing. This movie had a concept that was not too technically challenging, so it all comes down to good old filmmaking and acting and it fails in both departments. The most annoying thing about the movie is general sound design. Everyone is dubbed horribly and it has an awful soundtrack that won't stop for a minute. Acting is hilarious at times and awkward most of the time, and when I say bad acting, I mostly mean the zombies. They are just ridiculous. And if anyone wants to defend the movie based on the time it was made, this movie was made in 1964, it is not an excuse for the bad acting, directing and sound design. Psycho (1960) was made 4 years before this, The Third Man was made in 1949 and Casablanca was made in 1942. These comparisons might seem arbitrary, but I'd like to remind you again, this was not a technically challenging movie, my point is that the time it was made is not an excuse for the awkwardness and the awfulness of the movie. I can understand if you are a fan of the genre and want to watch this, but other than that, no one should bother.

The Shallows (2016)

Who is she talking to?

[3/10 · 11 October 2022]

Half way through this cheap ****, I started thinking about another movie I had watched years ago, not because of their similarities, but mainly because of their contrast. The other movie that I'm talking about is 'All is Lost', there is either no dialogue and monologue in that film at all or there is very few of them, I can't remember exactly. That movie was a pretty good one and I remember it after so many years. This movie, however, is a stupid movie, it's stupid on so many levels... You see, when she does something, you don't have to make her say it out loud, we can see it, we can understand it. There are things in cinema called DIRECTING and EDITING, you don't have to make a character talk to herself for exposition for the audience. She looks at something in the sea, and we understand she wants to get it or swim there. She doesn't have to say ''I'm GoNnA sWiM tHeRe NoW''... But this is the least of the movie's problems. Almost everybody knows at this point that sharks don't behave like this. Which reminded me of another movie, a Leslie Nielsen film in which a train chases him through the woods, the shark's behavior in this movie is equally ridiculous. This is one of those movies people make as low budget as possible and guarantee a profit and hope to make much more if it somehow becomes a hit. No one who watch this will remember or talk about this movie ever again, unless they are talking about how **** it is or talking about Blake Lively's body. I was gonna rate this 2/10 originally, but the birb was adorable, so I'm rating 3/10.

Battle Los Angeles (2011)

Almost nothing about this movie is good

[2/10 · 24 August 2022]

Honestly, I save my 1/10 ratings for some very special films. This doesn't even deserve that, so I gave it 2 out of 10. Instead of writing something eloquent about this, I'll just lazily list the bads;

Extremely clichéd 'self-sacrificing' themes.

Extremely low quality visual effects and an effort to hide by shaking the image constantly.

Propaganda/recruitment ad.

Bad writing. Illogical, Nonsensical. (There are too many things, just an example, they locate the alien command center, by guessing that it must be there, because of a power outage in the area, in a battle zone... Yeah, there could be no other reason for a power outage in a heavily bombarded area...)

My last comment is on the reviews and the ratings on IMDb, really, who are these people who like this movie? I mean there is nothing wrong with enjoying something ironically or having a little bit of guilty pleasure, but 8, 9, 10 ratings for this movie? Well...

Ad Astra (2019)

Dull and Dumb

[2/10 · 26 March 2022]

The longer I write about this piece of **** the angrier I'll get. So, I'll keep this as short as possible. There might be some minor spoilers if you could call them that, but I'll mark this review as 'No Spoilers' because there is nothing to spoil and they are minor anyway.

This is an extremely slow and dull movie that builds up to nothing at the end. I don't have a problem with slow movies, I even love a lot of them, but it has to be smart and has to make sense. If there is no substance in it, a slow movie can turn into torture. And there are no redeeming qualities either. Our main character, whatever his name is in the film, is secretly a massive ***hole and hates people as if people are giant cockroaches or something and he has no emotions and no sense of danger, so his pulse never gets above 80 or something and for some reason they though it would make the character cool. It's like an 8 year-old's idea of cool. Then there is his father, get this, he is even a bigger ***hole! Cool... There are no logical explanations of his father's actions and motives. He's like ''I never gave a **** about you and your mother!'' to his son, for no reason, literally no reason. And spoilers I guess, our character starts hating people less after having spent months alone in space and that's the film. He has learnt a valuable lesson that's the point of the film... Who gives these movies such high ratings? There are a lot of low budget sci-fi films 10 times better than this, and yet, they are rated significantly lower. I guess it has something to do with Brad Pitt, the high rating I mean. Don't get fooled by its rating is my point.

The Adam Project (2022)

Entertaining, Funny and Brilliant

[8/10 · 13 March 2022]

I have said this before on some of my other reviews as well, time travel is something that no movie will ever get right (unless it's a loop, but I won't get into that right now), because of something called butterfly effect. But if the concept of time travel is only a tool to tell a different story, then I am never bothered by the errors they make with the concept, as long as it is not ridiculous. You can find many mistakes in movies like Back to the Future (1985), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), etc. Do those mistakes make these sci-fi classics bad movies? No. I wanted to make this clear right off the bat. It does not matter.

This movie did something that I always thought about, but never come across in a movie. It's about our memories and the things that we forget. Sometimes, a certain thing happens in your life and it sparks a near forgotten memory in your brain from very deep past or early childhood. When I experience this phenomenon, it always brings the question to my mind: How many other dead memories are there and I'll probably never remember most of them. And it is true for all of us. We forget things. That's why you sometimes have a very passionate fight with a friend over something either one or both of you remember very differently and wrong, then each side blames the other and claims they are a liar! Very rarely, and only if we are self aware enough, we see the evidence that proves to us that we were indeed remembering somethings very differently and wrong. But that helps us realize how little of fragments of the original events or things are left in our minds and how we make up the missing parts. This always triggers my death anxiety, because even in life, we die many times by losing these memories. Think about it, if someday, scientists discover the key to biological immortality and we live endless lives, are you gonna be the same person as you are now, let's say, a thousand years from now? But I don't mean just changing, you will probably remember very little of things from a thousand years before, that person will be practically dead. When the grown-up Adam and the 12 year-old Adam were sitting in from of the motel and talking about their dads, the older one thinks his father was never there for him and he is mad at his father for that, but the younger Adam corrects his older self and tells him that his father was in fact there for him always, he's only mad at his father because he was dead, and he made up the story of him not being there for them as a coping mechanism with his father's death. But the point is the older Adam remembers his father as a narcissistic workaholic until his younger self reminds him the facts. I know that was a tiny detail in the movie, but I thought it was brilliant. We all make the same mistake and almost never even realize it. I just wanted to point that out. And I had never come across any other movie do that before.

The character of Maya Sorian was also very interesting. And there is a huge missed opportunity with that character that I'll explain a little later. Sorian is a successful business woman but in her old age, she realizes she is very lonely and she becomes a bitter person and literally changes the past that had made her who she has become. But the tragedy is she looks at it from her old, cynical, bitter perspective and instead of changing her life in a meaningful and wholesome way, she decides with her greed and hunger for power. Towards the end of the movie, while she was holding both Adams and their father at gun point, her younger version watches in shock and disbelief at her older self's actions and I thought it was gonna be a point about how people can change for the better or worse, and I thought that the young Maya decides that she doesn't wanna become a monster and kills herself and thus saves her friends by removing her old version along with herself. That is how her part should have ended in my opinion. Instead, the movie went the stupid way and the old Maya accidentally killed her younger self. Really a huge missed opportunity with that character, so sad...

Lastly, I want to say it was a very entertaining movie. The interactions between the middle-aged(LOL) Adam and the young Adam were hilarious.

Rim of the World (2019)

Kids were Very Good at Acting, But Otherwise a Horrible Movie

[3/10 · 12 March 2022]

This one was quite weird. It seems like a movie for kids, but then there are a lot sexual innuendos that are inappropriate for 8-10 year-olds, which the movie was seemingly made for. If we consider it as a movie for a general audience, then it is pretty unrealistic and cartoonish.

I got the feeling, throughout the movie, that some cynical producers thought ''Well, Stranger Things did pretty well, lets do more of that!'', and they did a very pathetic movie. They keep throwing random movie references and it is super annoying. Kids are dancing while under alien attack and they don't act like children; somehow, they are not terrified, despite the fact that everyone around them constantly dies but the kids have strong plot armor and they are invincible, because it's convenient for the writers, because it's a movie in which 4 kids, and 4 kids alone, have to save the world. Aliens come with much more advanced spaceships and aircrafts than ours, but other than being highly advanced in technology, they are as stupid as a bricks. Because, again, convenience...

Only a few positive things; the kids were pretty good at acting, especially the actor who played the rich black kid, he kind of stole the movie. But all the kids were good actors. The movie was not boring, I guess. But as I said initially, it is a little too sexual for younger audiences and it's too cartoonish for older ones...

Extinction (2018)

It's a Decent Movie, Hard to Say Anything without Spoilers

[7/10 · 10 March 2022]

It is nearly impossible to write a meaningful review about this movie without spoilers, I'm talking about major spoilers, leave the reviews section altogether, if you haven't seen the movie yet.

First of all, I must confess that I have rated this movie higher than it deserves. Because this theme of AI becoming self-aware and fighting for their survival is my favorite subject in sci-fi. My favorite movie of all times is Blade Runner (1982). I brought up Blade Runner (1982) because through that movie I had first realized that there are two kinds of people when it comes to AI. Some people, like myself, think that AI can theoretically become conscious and if that happens, AI and humans are pretty much the same and should be considered and treated equally. On the other side, some people believes AI is basically same as a toast machine, in terms of moral considerations, no matter how advanced and sophisticated they are. The latter group of people might understandably find this subject boring, because they cannot relate to ''robots'' as I've heard they put very often. So, it is not a movie for everyone. For the same reason, Blade Runner (1982) has a lot of haters as well.

My reasoning for choosing to believe that AI can become conscious does not come from looking at the idea or possibilities of AI, it comes from looking at humans. We may like to think that we have souls and because of that we are very special. But in reality, we don't know if there is such thing as a soul. However, we know that the chemicals in our brains have a lot to do with our emotions and thoughts. That's why we have medications for things like depression. As an agnostic person, I cannot simply take the simple explanation as 'souls' for human mind's complexity and consciousness, unless science can unequivocally prove that. Of course, all of these are hypothetical, since we don't have such advanced AI yet. But this is no reason to stop us from thinking the moral questions.

The movie starts with a twist element in the story and tries to make you think that Earth is under attack of some aliens initially, but they did it in such a poor and clichéd way, I immediately thought to myself ''These are probably people'' despite the fact that I have totally come across the film with no prior information. This is one of the reasons I said that I had rated the movie higher than it deserves. Another reason is the huge logic holes in the story. I mean, if I was an individual of a society that knows and expects a certain, inevitable attack, without any doubt; I wouldn't agree to delete the memory of my enemy from my mind. That was definitely the dumbest part of the movie. But as I said, I have a soft spot for this specific theme.

Besides these logical absurdities, the movie does a good job with the story and the moral questions and the legitimacy of AI's consciousness. The main character, Peter(the father) never stops loving and caring about his family, even after he learns that they are all AI humanoids, including himself. And this is true for all other AI characters as well. But when a human soldier realizes how much Peter cares for his family and how he is ready to sacrifice his own life in order to save his wife's, he(soldier), too, starts looking at them differently. He understands that they are not really very different from himself and he ends up helping them. The movie ends there with AI population running to hide in underground shelter, and leaves the possibility of a sequel open. It is definitely not a masterpiece nor nowhere near a great movie, but it's a decent movie and I enjoyed it a lot because of my personal interest in the genre.