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Reviews
Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024)
A great adaptation
As someone who casually watched the original cartoon as a kid and binged the whole show a few years ago, I don't have the obsessive attachment to the cartoon that many fans do. Sure, the overall mood is darker, there's a few clunky lines of exposition, events have been moved around and some character arcs have been altered, but this adaptation still tells a great, heartfelt story with some great CGI and well-choreographed fight scenes. Some may say the story seems rushed, I say they removed the filler from the original show and stuck to its most relevant plot points.
It's an adaptation, not a scene-by-scene recreation. Netflix's Avatar does its own thing, but in my opinion still manages to keep the core heart and messages of the original story.
Skinamarink (2022)
There's an excellent short film in here
But there's also over an hour of sleep-inducing dead air that does nothing to increase tension or atmosphere, at least for me. I am someone who enjoys a slow burn, but even I have my limits. I watched it at night to get into the horror atmosphere and I struggled not to fall asleep throughout the whole thing.
It's a shame, because if you cut out most of that dead air there are moments of pure horror that genuinely freaked me out. Hopefully someone will do a fan edit and cut out over an hour of weird camera angles and the sound of old cartoons playing in the distance because my god there's only so much I could handle...
Don't Worry Darling (2022)
An interesting premise ruined by a shallow script
Don't Worry Darling sets up an interesting premise filled with mystery, but fails to advance the plot in any interesting way. In mystery-box movies like this one you'd expect the layers of the big reveal to be peeled one by one as the protagonist investigates, finds clues and eventually discovers the truth behind it all, but Don't Worry Darling does nothing of the like. Florence's character discovers very early on that something isn't right with her idylic life and spends the next hour and a half of the movie's runtime figuring out that, yes, indeed, something is definitely not right. Nothing more. No clues are given to her or the audience, because the big twist is so shallow that any clue given would've made it far too predictable. Not that it isn't already very predictable. While I saw most of it coming, the few things I didn't predict were shrug-inducing, sometimes bordering on nonsensical.
Florence does an excellent job as always, Chris Pine should've had more screen time, the soundtrack is nice and the setting is beautiful, but the mediocre script keeps this from being the next big sci-fi movie I so badly wanted it to be.
Event Horizon (1997)
The critics got it right
Full of badly-aged CGI, cheap jump scares and a terrible screenplay, Event Horizon is too cheesy and illogical to be taken seriously but takes itself too seriously to earn some B-movie charm. Maybe there's a director's cut that gives us something more shocking than random flashing images of blood-drenched people but by the middle of the movie I was already checking how long I had left. It's a shame, because the premise of the story was pretty good.
The Bubble (2022)
I usually watch movies until the end no matter how bad
But I just couldn't handle any more of this extremelly unfunny mess. People moan about how big budget comedies aren't made anymore. If they're going to be like this, I don't want them. The great actors and fun premise are let down by an awful, unfocussed and unfunny script that goes on for way too long.
The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (2022)
Half way between spoof and thriller
What if Scary Movie also tried to be a scary movie?
This show tries to parody modern thrillers (The Woman in the Window, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train...) but also tries to be a modern thriller itself. The result? Half the reviews on this site thought this was an actual thriller.
It was an entertaining watch, but it could've been a lot funnier. It does have some fun jokes here and there, but they should've gone full on comedy.
Dune (2021)
A beautiful adaptation of an aged story
The first Dune book came out in the 60s. It's said to have inspired classics like the Star Wars franchise and indeed this film does tell the first half of an epic, imaginative story that has been beautifully brought to the screen by Denis Villeneuve.
But adapting such an inspiring piece of fiction has its issues when there's been half a century of media since the publication of the original book, and Dune's story may not have aged as well as, for example, the Lord of the Rings. Stories about chosen ones and prophetic dreams are now clichéd and frowned upon. Game of Thrones set a high bar for political warfare in fantasy worlds and in the 2020s it is hard to root for the aristocratic white family struggling to take sci-fi oil from the sci-fi middle east. It feels especially tone deaf to have a crowd of desert-people cheering at the sight of Timothée Chalamet coming to take over their planet while an arabic-inspired soundtrack blasts from the speakers. I get that that's probably what happens in the book, but the way the film pushes the arabic inspirations of the planet's culture feels like an odd choice.
The fact that this very long film is only the first half of the story doesn't help. The ending is pretty anticlimactic, even though the loud, epic soundtrack would like to convince you otherwise. Perhaps this story would've best been told as a TV series, where you'd only have to wait another week to see how the story continues. But Dune: Part Two hasn't even been greenlight as of right now, so we'll likely have to wait at least a few years to see how this story ends.
That being said, the photography, visual effects and cast were all fantastic in this film. It will most likely appease the fans of the original work and entertain sci-fi fans overall. I will definitely be checking out the second part whenever it releases. I just wish the experience hadn't felt so bittersweet.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
A sad story told in the weirdest of ways
It's a little too long and a little too full of itself, but I was fascinated throughout and overall enjoyed the experience.
That being said, it's one of those "puzzle movies" where nothing makes sense and you're slowly given "pieces" to figure out what it all means. They never explicitly give you the entire picture, though. No character appears to reveal a plot twist or explain what you've just watched. There's no "it was a dream all along" or "that person never existed". You're expected to figure that out on your own, so if you're not in the mood to put your mind to work and try to come up with theories while watching, you'll probably just be angry and confused by the nonsensical randomness of the story.
If, however, you like and are in the mood for one of those movies, this one's pretty good! Some scenes drag on a little too long, some of the dialogue can be quite pretentious and the ending can be a little too "artistic" for some, but I personally enjoyed it.
Tenet (2020)
The "Dark Knight Rises" of Nolan's sci-fi movies
I really wanted to love Tenet. Inception, Interstellar, Memento... I love so many of Nolan's movies and this one promised to be his next great sci-fi blockbuster.
What we get instead is an interesting sci-fi concept wasted in a pretty dull spy thriller. Stolen paintings, super-weapons, arms dealers, plutonium... for the longest time the movie felt like a decaffeinated James Bond movie. An hour in I still wondered when the film was going to turn its focus on it's coolest element (the time-bendy shenanigans from the trailers).
When it does, however, its explanation is muddled in pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo that makes it feel a lot more convoluted than it actually is. Even the set-pieces feel unnecessarily convoluted and not particularly exciting to watch, though that was mainly because I didn't really care for any of the characters.
At least Cobb in Inception or Cooper in Interstellar were relatable human beings with very real problems to overcome. Here, the protagonist doesn't even have a name...
When everything was revealed and the credits rolled, all I could think of was "meh".
The Nun (2018)
Disappointingly typical
The darkest chapter in The Conjuring universe feels more like a catholic spin-off of The Mummy, with cheesy one-liners, ancient tombs and dark magic.
The Nun manages to make a dark and haunted Romanian abbey feel like any other haunted house in a film that would rather spend its bloated budget on CGI and cheap scares rather than set any kind of creepy atmosphere.
The film is an immensely predictable series of jump scares with no tension of any kind. A great horror movie for people who cant handle horror movies and just want a quick thrill. But for the rest of us, a disappointing waste of time.