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A Quiet Place (2018)
Good at first, really annoying towards the end
Spoilers! The downfall of this movie is that it tries to be realistic. But the idea that these things could be the bane of humanity is not convincing. Their strength is incredible hearing. Once this is known (and it was already at times when there where still newspaper distribution) you don't get silent, no, you make a lot of distracting noise: hundreds, thousands of squeaking, clapping, grinding wind- and watermills, radios in treetops, motors running, toys. In the noise you prepare traps. You place some very heavy, pointy, sharp or otherwise nasty object and steel wires somewhere. Then you silence everything.
You use their strength of moving very fast against them. In the silence you play a recording of human voices for 5 seconds, and then lift the recorder into the treetops. The thing will come rushing, at 50 or 100 or 200 miles per hour and smash itself to pieces ever so nicely.
If the things needs 15 sec to come than their average distance is no more than half a mile. Close enough to track and sneak up at them in the noise when they have their ears closed. Then in the silence, when they open their ears, you shoot them in the soft tissue. Of course you bring your ghetto-blaster in case they don't die.
I had preferred the movie, if the plot had started out, that people had just found out how the things could detect them, then tentative tried to fight them using those traps, maybe often failing because the things where clever and trapped people just as often, and then, when everything seemed lost, humans discovered their fatal weakness. It would had been more convincing and it would have spared me weeks of irritation.
Of course, the basic idea of a "silent place" had been somehow lost, but I had preferred a good movie over a good title.
Ocean's Eight (2018)
Ocean's eight female actors should have demanded a better script!
I had to re-view Ocean's 13 to get some idea of what to compare Ocean's 8 with. The first thing that hit me was the density of O13. There happens a lot of things all the time. O8 is slow. Much camera sweeping over beautiful things (too fast though, to really take it in). There is a clear lack of suspense. In O13 there are twists and uncertainties. In O8 things are pretty obvious. In both movies characters are rather shallow, likable and charming. O13 is a single pile of plot holes and impossibilities, while in O8 most of it is actually doable, in a Hollywood kind of way. The acting of Sandra Bullock and the others is good and the costumes at the Gala wonderful, saving the movie. But while the script of O13 is great and the dialog funny and surprising, O8 starts off well and then looses it. The script of O8 is dull. Why? It costs nothing extra, (other than will and talent). There is plenty of space for a surprising point of view or suspenseful trouble. I wonder if there is some not so well hidden sexism and racism in Hollywood. Black Panther is by far the worst of the Marvel Universe Franchise, a pure insult to the African culture in my view. And here we have an all women edition of an otherwise all men franchise and again, it is so much worse than the other 3 movies. As if they simply do not want to make great movies if the heroes are not male and white. I still enjoyed it and would award it with 6 stars for the effort of the actors and designers that lifted themselves above the poor material they were allowed to work with. On the other hand, when do women finally take responsibility and demand quality scripts to work with? So its only 5 stars.
The Beyond (2017)
Good visuals, no story, horrible dialogs.
The Beyond
The movie The Beyond consists of some nice CGI-imigary alternating with utterly poor and boring interviews with people explaining or commenting on what they/we just saw.
Humanity has just experienced two mind-blowing events, a wormhole appearing in Earth's orbit and hundreds of huge, black, indestructible, threatening spheres hovering only a few hundred meters over the ground, spreading fear. A major, though classified, breakthrough in science. A person (I don't remember the name and do indeed not care) has made the ultimate sacrifice to make a dangerous journey from which there might be no return. Altogether potentially fantastic stuff. One thing potentially more exiting than the other. However, all potentiality is killed by repeating interviews like this: The boss of the person sits down with her own daughter, telling her, there was an incident with a rocket and the person, a friend to the daughter, died. The daughter wonders whether it was necessary that the person was on the rocket and the mother says yes. And then they hug. 60 seconds, embarrassing to watch, boring and pointless. And to really kill every slight expectation that this movie might improve further on, we are now treated with an interview with the mother in which she confesses that it was hard to lie to her daughter. Well, her acting was poor, but not so poor that we missed that, since it was indeed the only point of that conversation and we had been warned in advance about its content several times earlier. Another pointless 20 seconds wasted.
That conversation could have been deep, discussing ethical, political, social, economic, environmental or psychological implications both on a personal and a global level.
The Beyond, however, has no depth, no story, no characters to care for and I do not understand why it comes to that. Many will disagree when I say there is no story. However, a STORY is not putting events, scenes or images back to back and let them run, but to put them together into a CHAIN that pulls you from start to end. It is extremely expensive to make all this CGI and action stuff, to build models, some of them real life, design, animate and render them. Scenography, makeup, costumes, all the small details. While it costs practically nothing to write a good story and dialog that even a mediocre actor can perform convincingly. There must be thousands of writers who would happily work for free to get a chance to show their talent. Why do so many filmmakers underestimate the importance of a good story and well crafted words or gestures? It would have been much more touching if we had only seen the daughter crying in the arms of the mother/boss for 10-15 seconds. The face of the mother showing guilt and shame for the lie and pain she causes, fighting with the excitement to send the person on to the journey. We would have cared. No words and no triple explanations needed. If that was to much to demand from the actors, shoot it from 10 meters, no faces visible, zooming in on some picture of person and daughter at the beach, fallen on the floor. All this CGI-action-s**t is really boring without the tension of human emotion and conflict.
6 points for the visuals, 3 for the actors, non for the script, gives an average of 3.
The Humanity Bureau (2017)
Why? Why do they make movies like this?
I might be unfair, I only watched the first 20 minutes or so, and only because I wanted to give Nicolas Cage a chance (I really enjoyed many of his early movies). But these 20 minutes where unbearable. Poor acting, slow, predictable, boring, unconvincing. Credits (and the one point I have to give) to the guy in front of a computer screen asking: "since when is that standard procedure?". That was actually the best performance and most interesting line of the movie. It lasted for about 2 seconds, there was some magic in the air, something was building up, there was a tangible tension. But then the other guy said something and the first guy shrugged and the moment was gone. Gone, as far as I'm concerned, forever. That was the last new Nicolas Cage movie I will ever dare to watch again.
Singularity (2017)
Horrible!
There are two reasons you find yourself compelled to share your thoughts about a movie: You find it very good or very bad. This one was the latter. When I started watching it it had 6.7 points at IMDb. So I gave it a try. It had deserved non of them. The acting was poor, the plot stupid, the plot-holes many, the dialogues embarrassing, the ending threatening with an even stupider sequel. A singularity is a future event beyond which one can not make any predictions. Most of the movie was perfectly predictable. The only reason why some of the turns where indeed not predictable, was because I could simply not anticipate the level of ruthless incompetence of the scriptwriter leaving tons of unanswered and unanswerable questions: Where does that cornfield come from? Why does that facility burn down? Why where there at all any trains 37 years after the event? Why should groups of (male) humans be hostile towards strangers, when there is no competition and they are no threat to each other, only possible help? How could humans survive underground even for days let alone decades, where there is no food and machines are better equipped to catch their prey? How could humans develop fantastic technologies within a few, what? years? months? weeks? when they barely have food to survive let alone factories, supply lines and indeed the knowledge of the necessary physics. And why would an unbiased machine think that humans killing humans is worse than ants killing ants, lions killing lions or trees suppressing other trees in the first place? And if this machine for some mindless reason must eradicate humans from this world, why not doing it fast, efficient and completely. I could think of may ways, a superhuman intelligence, not doubt, could think of even better ones. And how, to put an end to this pointless discussion, does a super intelligent machine comes to terms with its own evilness if it is evilness it tries to wipe out? Watch this movie if you had a good day and you want to spoil it for yourselves.