farchettiensis Reviews

Krampus: The Devil Returns (2016)

So bad it's fun to watch!!!

[3/10 · 3 November 2023]

I love the Krampus franchise! The movies are bad through and through, and the acting is generally so bad! The writing is quite the achievement being this bad!

Yet I hold it close to heart. For me, it's one of those so bad it's good kinda movies. I bing watched them on Prime one day when my girlfriend was asleep. I fell in love with it right away.

This one in particular has one of the worst fight scenes I've ever seen in my life, and some incredible dialogue to make it better. All fight scenes follow this standard, so get ready for some amazing sequences!!

All in all, I definitely recommend this horrible movie!

Color Out of Space (2019)

Nothin' good about it

[4/10 · 14 June 2020]

Not in the slightest Lovecraftian. Cage looks ridiculous. He is simply incapable of nuance. The movie feels like a joke the entire time. It's just pointless, a childish collage.

The Irishman (2019)

Old News

[4/10 · 23 January 2020]

There's nothing fresh here. Growing up, Scorsese's movies were among my favorites. Yet, I feel there's nothing new here, no evolution, no depth. These are the same actors, the same script, the same everything, under different tints. In the case of De Niro, literally, with those unnatural blue eyes.

I feel like Pacino, De Niro, and Scorsese have really given all they could give through their art, their talent. De Niro's acting seems to be no different than it was decades ago; maybe it worked out brilliant a couple of times - Godfather II, Raging Bull, Heat -, but there's really nothing here. Al Pacino's mature characters seem to travel from one movie to the next, as an inter-dimensional traveler, giving out the same performances time after time. I was more impressed, though, by Joe Pesci, whose acting has more nuances. And Scorsese, the ultimate artist (lol), should go to a shrink and get over his obsession with the mafia. I, too, come from an Italian family, but there are other aspects in our parents' culture to be explored, Martin! Seriously, get over it!

This movie was incredibly boring and tedious. I have no problem with slow movies. I've watched Tarkovsky and love some lengthy Asian movies, for example. But this feels like a nightmare in which Scorsese dreams that he's Martin McIrish and his movies are about the Irish.

Skeleton Man (2004 TV Movie)

A masterpiece of poop

[2/10 · 18 September 2019]

I have such fond memories of this movie. My friends and I watched it in one of our horror weekends. It was so insanely bad we had good laughs watching it, and even made a song in tribute to this movie. It's a terrible movie! By all means, do watch it!

Brightburn (2019)

This movie sucks

[4/10 · 2 July 2019]

It sucks really bad, guys. The kiddie is an alien, and starts hurting people. That's the movie in a nutshell for y'all. You're welcome. I love horror movies, but this is not worth the watch. Just avoid it, if you can.

Darkest Hour (2017)

Caricatural and sentimentalist

[4/10 · 26 January 2018]

I wouldn't say I entirely disliked the movie; it was mildly entertaining, I suppose something I could watch on a bored Sunday afternoon. Its greatest merit, the way I see it, was showing Churchill's courage and leadership in this darkest hour and the opposition he was faced with from all sides. The rest seemed to me to be the stuff of caricature and sentimentalism, to the extent that I wondered whether or not I was watching a Spielberg movie, in moments such as the underground scene, and the one in which Churchill takes his secretary to the map room to explain the dire situation in the continent. It is entirely unjustifiable that the movie have spent so many minutes with kitsch sentimental scenes with Churchill's secretary, in the sense of their trivial purpose in the movie. The underground scene is a blow to the suspension of disbelief. It is obvious at several points that the movie wants to pay homage to our current Zeitgeist of equality. At any rate, the story is interesting, but the movie is a cheap version of Spielberg sentimentalism.

It (I) (2017)

An unsurprising let down

[4/10 · 21 September 2017]

Whatever you want to say about your emotional involvement to particular themes, objects, characters in this movie is irrelevant, as are other accidental issues concerning the movie. This movie cashes in on the current retro revival. Of course the new Pennywise is not good; how could it be? They said they wanted to rethink the character, update it, if you like. We live in an age of unbelievable stupidity and lack of originality. Pennywise was updated accordingly, and it is bland. Say what you will about Tim Curry, but the original Pennywise is far better, scarier, more memorable, and had an amazing dark humor. The new Pennywise has CGI and a hygienic visual. **** this new clown. **** this movie. The dialogues with him are unnatural and a bad attempt at being scary while using dark humor, but it fails altogether. It's kitsch and insulting to the intelligence. The only reason I gave it four stars is because the loser's group is kinda OK, though Eddie's mania is a bit over-the- top.

To the hell with this movie, the "critics" (paid buffoons with an exaggerated sense of self-importance), but most of all with the public, who feeds and incentives bad cinema because they are too lazy to think, and cling to cheap emotional attachments.

Screw y'all.

Annabelle: Creation (2017)

A good surprise

[7/10 · 20 September 2017]

Having seen the first Annabelle movie, I was rather hopeless for this one. No person who takes cinema seriously should waste time with the first movie, that's all there is to it.

This one is on a different category, and one cannot but admire the ingenuity of working a poorly conceived story into an actual decent movie.

Being obsessed with horror movies, I'm rather bored by writers' lack of inventiveness, and Annabelle is hardly an exception. I guess the Catholic Church does have a use for movie makers, after all. But I cannot but help feeling tired when I see the same symbols being evoked to elicit fear: Beelzebub, inverted crosses, the hour of the devil mocking the trinity, evil nuns, and so on.

There is merit to this movie's story, which is to provide an actual explanation to the whole thing. And the denouement is patiently held back from viewers for the better part of the movie. For me, this is what this movie does best, despite the typical American lack of subtlety - they just cannot resist the temptation of explaining in clear and unambiguous words what has happened.

Anyways, it's hardly original, but it is pretty decent.

Dunkirk (2017)

Not a movie I'd expect to watch in 2017

[10/10 · 10 August 2017]

There were few films I saw in life in relation to which I thought nothing should be added or removed. I can't decide which is the best movie I have ever seen, and maybe this is just a foolish question. However, I think no movie had never left me with such a clear impression of being a complete work of art as has Dunkirk. I had not watched any of Nolan's prior movies, nor am I familiar with his conceptions of art and beyond. As I left the theater, it didn't seem to matter.

No rating other than 10 would do justice to this movie. This is truly a work of a art. The structure of the movie is brilliant and it's absolutely fundamental to understanding its symbolism. If you miss it, you will not have understood what this movie is about.

I overhead some folks saying it's just another war movie, that is does not provide sufficient emotional attachment to characters, that, all in all, it's a passable, lukewarm sort of movie. It's none of that. Not by a long shot.

Sadly, we've been conditioned by Hollywood to have our hands held by directors and screenplay writers, who abuse narrative and strip cinema of its poetic potential, of its ability to speak and communicate through the poetic discourse, through the magic of images, of camera-work, of subtle symbolism.

We have been led to think that artificial emotiveness, abuse of dialogue and plain narrative, is the normal standard. We've been taught that Spielberg's obvious approach is the golden standard. That, in order to connect with a character, we must learn of his grieving family back at home, that we must see funerals, or be told "beautiful" stories his/her, and so on and so forth.

Dunkirk demonstrates this need not be true. It demonstrates the power of cinema as a unique form of art. It asserts values, it asserts a philosophy, a conception of life, of art, of beauty, of virtue. I wonder if this is the reason why it has received backlash from a significant portion of our nihilist Western society?

"It's just another WWII movie." It's not. I'd chance saying the war is but its setting, its backdrop - and a powerful one, like I had rarely seen on the screens. My interpretation about this movie is that it is about individuals, about individual choices. But it's about human life, too, and hard choices we make. It's a manifesto against nihilism. It purports to show, the way I see it, that the seemingly random actions of individual matter, regardless of their scale. It's the opposite of the Coen brother's philosophy in movies such as No Country for Old Man.

For these reasons, this was not a movie I expected to see. Not in 2017. Not when movies are either so offensively dumb or communicate a philosophy of nihilism or, alternatively, of a romanticized form of determinism, as in Moonlight (2016), or even a pedantic rehearsal of the artsy sort.

This is an authentic, beautiful work of art, and I'm grateful for it, because it tells me that there still is authentic art and beauty. That we have choices. Choices to make beautiful and genuine works of art such as this.

The Evil Within (I) (2017)

Surprisingly good

[8/10 · 18 July 2017]

Found it at random, and decided to give it a watch, as the storyline picked my attention. Being a horror movie veteran, I know ratings are not trustworthy, so I tend to ignore them (I'd think that there may be at least 2 points of error in the ratings in horror movies).

It turned out to be quite a surprise. At first, it won't look like a big deal. One of the characters may come across as a little tiring and the acting may seem to be going a bit over the top. Although I did not find acting brilliant, it was good overall, and my first impressions dispelled. I believe that, rather than acting, it was the bad text written for a couple of scenes that caused me discomfort.

At any rate, the movie is quite dark and it grew on me. The disturbing dreams, which seems to interweave with reality, gradually throwing a fragile person out of balance, and the quite unusual narrative. The way the move progresses fascinated me; it's dark, disturbing, and verisimilar. The character plunges further into a path he can longer emerge from; he is no longer himself, but is a captive in his own body. The symbolism used pleased me.

The disturbing characters that sprang as the movie neared it's conclusion were fascinating. From one point, I was confused as to whether it was a dream of the characters, an other-worldly dimension, or simply a quite disturbing reality.

My sole disappointment was the writer felt he should he resort to Christian clichés to describe evil ("legion"). I wish writers were more creative in this respect. If they can't find words to describe evil, they should not use words. After all, that's one advantage of movies.

VooDoo (2017)

Worthless

[3/10 · 26 May 2017]

A vulgar, poorly made, poorly executed, poorly conceived, sort of first person horror movie. It beats me why it has received some incomprehensibly high ratings. My suppositions are that the heavy imagery and portrait of "hell" has generated shock among viewers, who have appreciated the prolonged and dense succession of scenes in such environment; my other guess is that some movies inherently receive higher ratings due to some element that does not concern the movie's content itself. For example, if a movie imitates iconic, consecrated, forms of horror, rendering homages, it usually predispose viewers who appreciate these references to rate them higher than they actually deserve. That is clearly the case with The House of the Devil (2009), an absolutely mediocre movie which imitates 80's, early 90's horror, giving it an aura of cult; it is also the case of The Void (2016).

Having said that, my view is that VooDoo is very bad movie. I am a horror movie veteran; I don't mind gore, heavy imagery, as I see them as instruments (among many others) to elicit typical horror emotions/responses. The problem is the artificial use of instruments: this happens if the instrument is an end in itself. You replace plot, drama, acting, for cheap instruments to elicit responses that cannot otherwise be provoked due to the general mediocrity of the movie. The skillful use of soundtrack in horror movies can contribute enormously to its quality; however, if it is used for the sake of cheap scares, it becomes and end in itself and artificial resource. In VooDoo, this is the case with the second part of the movie.

The movie has no proper unity. The two clearly distinguishable parts of the movie are almost independent. The build-up is too long, as is too long, or simply inapt, the scenes that take place in the otherworldly dimension. This may have been on purpose, an attempt to portrait a state of continuous despair/suffering. The elements that compose this movie (mystery, horror, shock, gore, tension, drama) are not properly distributed.

The portrait of the evil entities is quite laughable. If you don't have the resources to transform your vision into reality, it is better to be subtle. Also, the prolonged exposition to the entities makes evident their shlock make-up.

On the other hand, this movie simply does not make any sense. It is not proportional (such a response to the victim does not make sense in any level; it is not plausible, if you like). Voodoo, mind you, is an African religion. Yet, the entities, their way of acting, the environment, evoke the stereotypical Christian views of evil. One may argue that voodoo was modified in America. However, it is still immensely incoherent.

In sum, I do not recommend the movie. I usually have a high tolerance for horror movies, being my favorite genre of movies. But I cannot recommend this movie on any level. It is a bad movie on the whole, and it is a bad, unimaginative, horror movie. I never cease to be amazed at writers' lack of imagination in portraying evil. 3/10, and I think this is rather generous. Very amateurish.

Sinister 2 (2015)

A mediocre spin-off, this a different breed of movie than the first one

[4/10 · 12 May 2017]

To be brief, I will say that this is a different breed of movie than its prequel. Mediocre at best, while the level of violence seems to have increased, this a terrible horror flick and a bad movie. The drama is centered around a family conflict - a mother who has run away from her violent husband in order to protect her children. The husband is relentless is his pursuit for his children. Meanwhile, the vulnerable mother meets former sheriff deputy "so and so", with whom she develops a connection of a sort.

This plot is almost independent of the Bughul subplot. It's almost an excuse rather than a genuine plot. Therefore, most of the movie feels artificial; emotions are not genuine.

The first movie had the excellent acting of the protagonist (and the movie pretty much centers around him), whereas this one has a goofy former deputy and a troupe of cruel ghost-children. In general, it's not just the acting that has gone down a notch, but the very denouement of such an artificial, extremely clichéd plot made the acting feel much worse than it really was.

For me, besides the attempt to create faux emotions, using violence as an instrument to shock, rather than a good story, one of the worst things of this movie was that it was effectively "dumbed down". It abused of the characters to communicate the entire mystery of the Bughul entity. With no mystery, there is no horror. This is why they had to recur to more violence, increased apparitions of supernatural figures (remember in the first movie when you hardly ever saw the Bughul?) to create reactions you can't create by doing a good, intelligent movie.

There's nothing "dark" and disturbing in this movie. The word "disturbing" is what comes to my mind when I think of the first movie; not for this one, in spite of the use of some similar resources. I'm horror movie veteran, so I'm not easily shocked by gore. I don't mind the clever use of film-making resources to create an atmosphere, to elicit emotional responses, and so on. But, if that's all there is to it, then there really isn't much at all.

The movie is watchable. It's not a good horror movie; it doesn't have any of the attributes of a good horror movie. It's a poor excuse for a sequel. 4/10.

The Devil's Candy (2015)

Disturbing

[8/10 · 25 April 2017]

This movie is tense, disturbing, with some heavy imagery, gripping, and has great acting. It's not so much scary as it's disturbing - different things, the way I see it. Watching it was an intense experience. There's some lack of imagination in the underlying plot, in portraying evil and how it acts through people, but I guess that this would be asking too much of an already good movie. It lacks subtlety in key moments. Decisive scenes where the main theme of the movie are discussed are presented hurried way; they aren't properly explored. To be fair, this shouldn't be generalized, though. But I do feel the focus ended up being too much on the unfolding of the actions - a classic goal to goal rather aspect to aspect sort of thing.

The scarcity of good horror genre movies is really saddening, few artists are willing to delve into the nature of fascinating subjects such as evil and fear, but I'd say this movie is one of the good ones and I definitely recommend it.

The Interview (II) (2014)

Not funny, terrible Franco performance, overrated

[2/10 · 30 March 2017]

If it didn't have James Franco in it, maybe it'd be slightly funny. Franco's character is a grotesque caricature and makes it impossible to suspend disbelief. Seth is solid, and scenes without Franco are decent, but the movie isn't funny. If you're happy about this movie ridiculing the dictator, congrats, but this doesn't make it a good movie.

2/10 - didn't have one genuine laugh and lost all respect for James Franco.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Entertainment for a bored afternoon, lacks depth and imagination

[5/10 · 25 December 2016]

Entertaining, but ultimately retains the patterns seen in the previous movie. The lack of imagination of these new SW's movie is unbelievable. I can't overstate how tired I'm of people saying what a SW experience ought to be, that the fans will be pleased, which is just utter rubbish. I shan't waste my energy saying what others have already pointed, such as the fact that SW has become a juvenile franchise - the reason thereof is of no importance to evaluating the movie itself, so I don't care - other than pointing the pathetic portrait of the Empire, or of the Dark Side, really.

The greatest feat of this movie is to show how plenty of resources and direction of the movie itself can be used to get the worst, or just plain mediocrity, of the actors. No acting can be complimented; nothing is impressive or new. The plot is as dull as it can be.

G. Lucas is no Tolkien, let's be honest, but we all tended to forgive incoherencies and the sheer incompleteness and apparent laziness of the wonderful universe he brought to life. It holds still great potential. There's no sign that Disney will explore it. If anything can be said at all, is that one has to learn how be detached, lest one will be disappointed with such insulting pieces of garbage.

I heard some chatter before watching, such as one about the diversity of the cast, but I couldn't care less about that, it's 2017, this is getting old, who cares; I guess Disney should be more concerned with the making of actual good movies rather than "shocking" people.

I gave it a 5, because it provided decent entertainment. It's probably a fair, if harsh, a rating. With its pockets full, hopefully Disney will gradually make less horrid SW movies each time, this one is better than Force Awakens. There is still hope - pun intended.

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016)

Excellent through and through

[10/10 · 3 December 2016]

Why this movie is being rated low is beyond me. Reviews on Metacritc state you might get lost watching the movie. That it's only for fans. That it's not a good movie in itself, but the best FF movie. What a load of ****. I'm not a die-hard fan of FF, having played only FF8, and at no point I found myself wondering what I was watching. That is the first point, you can understand perfectly what's going on, provided that your IQ is not too low, as seems to be the case with "professional" reviewers. The animation is simply brilliant, it's so realistic that you find yourself wondering whether it's a movie or an animation, and all the characters are well-writing, so much so that you get attached to them and feel it when they happen to, well, die. The voice acting is great, too, and well-suited. The main characters are great, and the writing and the plot in general are top-notch, complex, not a black-n'-white American world view. At last, the combat is astounding.

This is, in sum, a beautiful, touching movie. Just ignore the "professional" reviewers and people mimicking them, just look at the insanely high rates they give to games and movies. They were probably just paid well enough and biased because it's "movie-game", a seemingly-inferior category of movie.

Crimson Peak (2015)

Mediocre, quasi-artistic, if you like, but ultimately tedious and uninteresting

[4/10 · 17 August 2016]

One thing I came to learn using IMDb is that horror movies have a tremendous deviation in their rates, so what's valid for other genres certainly isn't for this one. From 4.0 to 4.49, there's a good probability that the film is actually bad and probably not worth watching, but maybe not entirely bad, and you may actually be surprised. From 4.5 to 4.99, you may still get shabby productions, predictable plots and so forth, the likelihood grows that it's a good horror movie. From 5 onward, the probability increases, and I'd give a shot to most movies with this rating. Probably this is because horror movies cause strong emotions in some people who then feel dissatisfied with their experience. These people shouldn't even rate this movies. For movies like Crimson Peak, I think it's quite the opposite. Because it has mainstream elements, romance, interesting, though dull, historical reconstruction, and a famous director, this draws a wider audience which appreciate these extraneous, or secondary, elements, causing the rate to go up. The deviation moves the rate higher. My guess is that horror movie fans will dislike the movie, but it may be more accessible to a wider audience.

There's not much interesting in this movie. The story seems to have no obvious wholes in it, but it's uninteresting. There are no genuine scares, though it tries hard to. You can see all of them coming, even their angles, and the creatures are very boring. I have no problem with clichés. I'm much more interested in their interpretation and presentation. If you tell an old story in an interesting way, I think it's always valid. If you make a horror movie and you play down its main element, which is horror, and pay more attention to the subordinate elements, it won't be a good movie. The best I can say about the movie is that it feels like a whole; it's not a sloppy work, but it's simply dull and insipid. I give it 4 out of 10 and would not recommend it if you have a choice. A very forgettable flick, I think it may please those who are into this sort of blend between horror and romance, and the historical reconstruction, but it gets boring soon.

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)

Unoriginal, silly/goofy, and implausible

[3/10 · 8 January 2016]

People's response to this movie has been, at times, emotional. It would seem that this was the point, since the movie added essentially zero to the saga, the universe. I won't give any spoilers, but there isn't much of a plot, it really seems more like an excuse to draw different audiences and make it a big hit. It worked, apparently.

The classic soundtrack, the trailers showing the old characters and some quick action scenes, I think, really thrills old fans or simply people who enjoy the universe.

To attract the new generation, I guess they went with this cheap, silly sort of humor. It seems that every 5 minutes or so we get a pun or a slapstick joke. For a while, you get some good laughs, but it gets old really soon, since it's just cheap, self-referential, and just plain goofy. When one of the main characters mocks the Force, that was one of the lowest points of the movie for me. It became so clearly a joke, that whatever remainder of the suspension of disbelief (you know, for a moment you decide to agree that what you're watching is coherent with its own rules, so you accept absurdities that clearly are not possible in the 'real' world) was dispelled, and I just suffered through the rest of the movie.

We also had a female main character and a black man playing a stormtrooper deserter. I couldn't care less about any of that, I only care if the character is well played, I think this sort of 'polemic' is getting old, but I suppose it still makes blogs, sites and papers say how brave the filmmakers are, which is preposterous to me. It's 2016, to paraphrase Justin Trudeau, this sort of thing shouldn't surprise anyone. As significant portions of the population, it's only natural that they should be in movies (it is statistically correct) , whereas once mostly white people played most characters (overrepresented). But performance is still the criteria. I enjoyed Daisy Ridley's work, but Mr. Boyega's was too over-the-top and too goofy to be believable - maybe he is not to blame, it's the crappy character he had to play.

I think that Adam Driver as the villain of this movie is just an incomprehensible choice. His teenage, Jon Snow sort of looks, just doesn't go with what you would expect of one of the main agents of the remnants the Empire. A teenager with daddy issues, trouble to control his emotions, and outbursts of anger hardly make for a memorable villain. He is another joke. Maybe Disney hoped he would be a sort of Jon Snow ladies would drool over?

This reflects the downgrading of the cast. While there were bets, some more and some less successful in the previous movies, there were other characters that made up hugely for the others' mediocre performances. Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, from the old Hammer movies, are examples of the sort. While Anakin was a similar sort of revolted teenager, and we could have been provided with greater nuance of emotions and background, he was far more believable and even had some great moments and lines. With this new movie, it feels a lot like a massive downgrading of the cast, as well as non plausible changes in the old characters, as I mentioned with Chewie, but also with Lea, aka General Organa. Harrison Ford is... well, Harrison Ford. I think it's pretty good, the problem is that he cannot save his character from festival goofiness and bad writing he has to confront with.

Finally, a word about the plot itself. This movie isn't very plausible and its revamp of old themes is so absurdly shameless and pathetic you can see it in every dimension of it (the hysterical commander of the First Order is another joke). Clearly, little thought is given to Star Wars as a universe, with creatures, planets and a history of its own. Disney had already said it would not follow the alternative universe created, so you'd think that they'd have an interesting alternative, but that's not the case at all. We have no answers, no background, no nothing. We know as little about the Resistance, the former rebels, as in the original trilogy. If back in the days that was understandable due to its constraints, it's not forgivable now as an almost universally well known franchise. Of the restored Republic, and its relations to the Resistance (for one, why wouldn't the Resistance join it? Isn't that what happens in several post-conflict situations?), we know nothing, and apparently that doesn't matter. Plus, there's little that is coherent in the movie - if you ask the whys and the hows, that is, if you think, the movie will not be an enjoyable experience.

I've heard many people saying that this is a movie to the old fans. It certainly is not. It may be framed to look this way, to look sort of reverential, but it's a shameless piece of garbage, goofy, unoriginal, terribly written, a joke, in one word. Some of the people who watched the old movies have enjoyed it, but their response has mainly been emotional: they surrender when they hear the glorious soundtrack, the enhanced effects, the old actors. If people just want to be entertained, then what can you say? Then you not only have an unconditional suspension of disbelief, but also of reason. It may work for some people, but I think that entertaining does not necessarily mean a moment when you put your brain aside and laugh, because you're a light-spirited person, not a grumpy one like me. Plus, Cinema is an art, and you aspire to greater things than just having a good laugh and surrendering to emotions. The tradeoffs are not so absolute, as some people present them to us.

Fallout 4 (2015 Video Game)

Downsizing of the franchise, simplified, enjoyable, yet forgettable

[2/10 · 14 December 2015]

Mind you that assigning a score depends on one's parameters. Old gamers, familiar either to the genre or to the franchise, will most likely not enjoy the game, or at least find it to be a retrocession. Newcomers might not mind much of the absence of depth, lore, memorable characters and plot. Considering Bethesda had 4 years to develop this game, the game frustrates quite often. Things I enjoyed about F4: there were marginal improvements on the graphics, they are better, but hardly ''next-gen''. The shooting system has improved, too. It feels more realistic. Power armor (an advanced kind of armor) is more plausible, and has a particular feel to it. There is a greater variety of possibilities of modifying your weapons, and armor. The crafting system is better, but it's a shame they have left ammunition crafting out. The game does, on the other hand, feel smoother and more modern. Things I haven't enjoyed about F4: pretty much everything else. The game seems to have been deliberately wrapped up in a wonderful, magical, envelope. Worry not! A few minutes into the game, and all the magic disappears, and you're introduced into a clichéd plot, which is in the best of Bethesda's grand tradition of linear plots and choices which bear little or no influence in the outcome. Take the new settlement system. If you want to work on them, be prepared to waste huge amounts of time. Unlike New Vegas, in which every interaction seemed to have a consequence for the world in some way, this has none. So, basically you waste your time on a insipid system, and that is all for nothing, except your own imagination of how that might shape the Wastelands. So, Bethesda seems to have carefully crafted aspects of the game which were certain to draw everyone's attention, packaged them carefully, made promotional videos, events with highly selected aspects of the game (which looked bright, modern, different)... but seems to have put so little time and effort in what makes Fallout such a wonderful franchise. I think Fallout has a unique formula of open-world, rpg, action. Everyone knows it's not a pure RPG, but Bethesda has really made it this time: RPG is so thin in this game, that you can safely say that formula changed. It's a huge disappointment. Not only you don't have much stake in what's going on, except in a very linear fashion, but your character is as forgettable as it can be. Oh, the dialogue system, you'd think that, having invested so much in voice acting, they'd something better, but it's the opposite: it's the worst dialogue system of the franchise, and shows a true regression. -Factions are hardly memorable. If you don't want to go New Vegas, that's fine, but F4 has really done bad at this. -Companions follow in the same line, and are another great disappointment. -Bethesda has also decided to scrap the old skill/perk/special system, streamlining it (to put it mildly), simplifying it, to the result of losing the enjoyment of building your own character. It's more like you can be everything, now. -XP system is just another reflex of the overall tone of this game: it rewards quantity, not quality. Kill legendary enemies, kill bugs, it's all the same. -The world... maybe it is bigger than the previous ones, but it doesn't feel so. It followed F3's tradition of ''islands'': there's little connection between places. You may find that some of these places are worlds in themselves. In some cases, this would nice, and even plausible, considering the isolation induced the hostile environment. But expect no background, nothing significant about them, no lore. It's fragmented, there a few NPCs, most of which you won't remember a few moments afterwards, anyway. There was a nice feel in the previous game to finding these exquisite places, with weird people, strange stories (remember F3, you'd find a republic up in the middle of nowhere, or strange folks who venerated a tree). Fallout 4 is just a generic game, and you can expect but vestiges of the uniqueness of the franchise. The scale of it just outdated at its point, and one would be willing overlook this, if the game offered a rich plot, which it does not.

All in all, Fallout 4 is a game that carries the franchise name, but is really more of a generic action, open-world shooter. It has lost much of its identity, its uniqueness, it has changed the formula, and made it a forgettable, unmemorable game, with a scale and an engine that are not compatible with the year 2015 and the time they took to develop it. In short, the game lost much of what it stood for. Bethesda has a very poor take on the Fallout world, added nothing to the franchise, took several steps back, while offering marginal improvements in some cases, replacement and simplification in most others, removing every tiny bit of complexity, stake the player might have, depth, and lore. It's obviously aimed at massification, and probably all the complaints about the game won't be heard, due to the asymmetric marketing campaign by Bethesda (we can't compete with their money), which selects shiny aspects of the gameplay and the world, and offers trivialities, which divert the masses' attention from its issues, and Bethesda's complete lack of creativeness, innovation, and boldness. I don't mind changes, but these are for worse.

I gave it 5 out of 10 because it's a big world, in terms of how much time you can spend running around it, though each place individually is uninteresting and for the most part implausible, and you can have fun exploring it, doing unmemorable, linear quests, shooting stuff, but still fun. As I said before, many people won't notice nothing of what I said. Hopefully, in the future, developers will understand that they can make a lot of money doing games that people will never forget about. Sadly, this is not the case.

Constantine (2014–2015)

Hard to get through

[2/10 · 30 November 2014]

Found it hard to get through even the first episode. I honestly don't know if there is any compliment to be made at all. Acting is sometimes average, but the main character is definitely over-the-top. It has absolutely nothing to do with the original character, but even if you don't care about that, it's just plain bad.

The script is terrible, presumably written for teens. If they aren't too demanding, maybe this pathetic attempt at making money will succeed for a while.

I don't even consider this series 'average', that's why I gave it a 3. I can't figure would anyone give it a 7, except if you don't give much thought to it. It may be one of the worst series I've watched in a while.

Find something else to do. There plenty of good movies, series, to watch. Read a book. Go outside. Don't watch this. Don't do this to yourself. Seriously. It's so bad it's offensive.