By the time I watched this movie, I had heard so much hype surrounding it and so many good reviews that the movie had an uphill battle to climb. This movie has crushed all pandemic records and proved that if you focus on presenting a good story and making a good movie, people will go to watch it (yes, I’m specifically referring to Marvel under the Disney umbrella, whose products have left a lot to be desired of late and they seem to have lost their way).
Spoilers ahead, so be warned. What this movie had in abundance was a nostalgia factor, bringing back almost every Spiderman villain from the previous iteration of Spiderman movies. They skipped Venom so as not to confuse people with the current Venom and Rhino, who was just lame. Having Doctor Strange in this movie also worked. My favorite part of the movie was not just bringing back the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield to fill their previous roles as Spiderman, but when the three Spider Men worked together to thwart the movie’s villains.
I’m not sure that I was actually anticipating a good movie, given the subpar releases that were Matrix 2 and 3, but I was expecting more than the illogical, convoluted, and often times dull movie that was Matrix Resurrections. There was only one compelling scene in the entire movie. In this movie, Neo is back in the Matrix, resuming his old computer generated life, but this time he’s a software developer who created this incredible, ground breaking game called The Matrix. They are making a new version of the game twenty years later, and one of the team members working on the game said that the first Matrix was so incredibly revolutionary and mind bending. They should never have made the second and third versions of the game, and now the company they work for (Warner Brothers) is going to make a new version of the game, so they might as well take part in it. That basically sums up the real life aspects of this movie. The second and third movies should never have been made, and this last one is basically a poorly crafted money grab.
The action scenes and the special effects are remarkably worse than the original even though the technology of movie making has increased so much in that time. So many aspects of the plot don’t make any sense. Some of these include the whole reinsertion of Neo and Trinity back into the Matrix. They both died in the third movie. Dead is dead. You can’t reanimate a human corpse, even if you are sophisticated, self-aware AI. The humans now work with machines for inexplicable reasons, and are perfectly fine with most of the human raced enslaved in pods. Agent Smith’s role in this movie was never defined. He seemed to do things for the sake of doing things. Oh, and apparently Keanu Reeves deplorable acting skills haven’t shown any signs of improvement over the last couple of decades since the first movie.
I had never read any of the Dune books nor had I seen any previous movie adaptations, so the story was completely new to me. I think because of that I was missing something by watching the movie. There was much that was unexplained that would be known by someone who read the books, but was lacking for someone without any previous knowledge of the story. Which is strange, given that the movie was overly long. There was certainly plenty of opportunity to fill in the Dune novice.
This movie was a mixed bag. There was some really slow and dull stretches of the movie, mixed in between parts that were either intriguing or were good action scenes. Instead of building to a crescendo, the movie waxed and wane. Just when I would start to lose interest during a slow part, something would happen that would keep me going. Overall, the story presented was interesting. There was good action and good effects. The world building was pretty good, but it could also be a snooze fest. I think the movie would have been better served had it been about a half hour shorter and had a better pace.
Much like the second Lord of the Rings movie, Dune just kind of ends with no resolution. I feel as if a movie should have some level of resolution, even if it’s part of a series. Overall, I would give the movie a slight thumbs up, but in this case, my thumb would only be pointing slightly upward—maybe like a thirty degree angle. And while I will watch the next movie in the series, I won’t be running out to the theater on opening weekend.
As far as novels of the apocalypse go (or perhaps the coming of an apocalypse), Snow definitely stands out. I had never read an apocalyptic horror novel where the bringers of doom come in the snow. Typically, I think of snow as serene and peaceful (at least when it first lays and hasn’t turned brown). Not this snow. In this novel, some sort of creatures or entities in the snow take possession of human bodies and kill everyone in their path. Whether these snow creatures are some type of aliens or supernatural entities, it is never revealed, but whatever they are, it certainly makes me think about snow in a whole new light.
When a flight is grounded, Todd Curry and three others foolishly decide to drive through a Midwest snowstorm to their destination. They reach a stranded hitchhiker who leads them to a town that has been under attack by these snow entities. After that, it’s a desperate fight for survival as they find other survivors and attempt to live through the night and escape this town, not knowing if this has spread to other towns.
Besides the innovative concept of the horror in this novel, it was also well written and laced with tension. The main protagonist is easily relatable. He is a flawed person who is desperate to make up for past mistakes and be with his son for Christmas. Any father can understand how that would drive someone to do foolish things, like drive through a massive snowstorm. The horror elements were strong, and overall this was an enjoyable novel.
When you’re on the twentieth installment (slight exaggeration) of a movie franchise, I’m not exactly expecting a masterpiece. I expect the movie to be cheesy and formulaic, but I don’t expect it to be a complete and utter trainwreck, yet Halloween Kills was just that. Cheesy and stupid doesn’t begin to describe this movie. It was at a whole another level of idiocy.
All of the survivors of the previous Halloween movies (besides the one that didn’t actually involve Michael Meyers) have banded together in Michael’s home town of Haddonfield. The lust to kill Michael Meyers has spread through Haddonfield like wildfire. Now, I would think that you might want to flee this unstoppable maniacal killer, but not Haddonfield. Instead they are driven into this insane frenzy to the point where they kill an innocent person. I’m not even sure what the point of this movie was. The most ridiculous part of a silly, pointless movie is near the end when Laurie Strode and Deputy Frank Hawkins reflect on how unstoppable Michael Meyers before he escapes an impossible situation and unleashes seven kinds of hell on his opposition. Perhaps even more ridiculous is that they rewrote the ending of the original Halloween in this movie.
If you are tempted to watch this movie, please don’t. It’s just not worth it.
