Star Wars The Force Awakens

Spoiler Alert: This Review Discusses the movie. 

In the newest addition to the Star Wars universe, we start out with an action scene, and action scenes continue throughout the movie, never letting down. We have stormtroopers and blasters, and fights between ships, and lightsaber battles. The movie takes us from one gripping moment to the next. We have force sensitive characters from Han Solo to Raye to Kylo Ren, able to do the impossible with their minds. We have mind reading, and force chokes. Overall it was quite well done, and worth the wait. 

Throughout the movie the graphics were amazing. Things we could only dream of in the 70s and 80s were a reality. Once again, in keeping with the Star Wars universe, things were epically huge. In one scene, a battle cruiser eclipses a planet, and continues moving as though that were normal. When Han and Chewie find the Millenium Falcon, the ship they were in is so huge it just swallows it hole. Things are just big in Star Wars, and this followed the pattern. 

Fin seems to be following Han's role as the reluctant hero. He spends most of the movie trying to escape, but in the end comes through for his friend when she's in trouble. At least they made him about something other than money, but his story is still familiar. Although the movie largely focused on him, I think the focus for the series is going to be on Raye. This makes me happy because she's a strong central female character.

We're supposed to know that Vader is redeemed because he doesn't kill his son. In a play on that, Ren does kill his father, and seems not to care at all. So now we have a truly evil guy in the movies, but the evil isn't as finessed as it previously was. The lightsaber seems to burn like fire rather than a laser. However he does seem to have a skill no previous character has shown - the ability to read minds. 

Overall I'd give it an A. 

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

This movie started out with a lot more action than the previous one did. We start out rescuing Han from Jabba the Hut, in a plan that clearly relied more on luck than skill. After they all nearly die, we move into a plan to destroy the Death Star Part II. That's right, the Empire built another Death Star, and it didn't bankrupt the galaxy. Which begs willing suspension of disbelief. Apparently the Empire learned something last time, and the shields are external on a moon. This leads to the question of how they are ever going to move the thing if they need to use it, but, clearly the rebel forces needed to be divided in half, so, external power for the shields it is.

So, Darth Vader learns he has a son and 2 years later he saves his life from the emperor, thus somehow negating all the evil things he has done and turning him into a good guy, good enough that he becomes a light-side ghost with Obi-Wan and Yoda, and gets to return to his old body. I don't buy it at all. He's killed far too many people for one action to redeem the character.

This movie had more fun than the previous ones, bringing in Ewoks to hilariously take on the empire's finest with sticks and clubs. So it was a little lighter toned, and I enjoyed that take. It also featured Leia in a slave girl costume killing Jabba the Hut, which I appreciated because I'd kill anyone who made me dress like that, too.

Overall I give it an A+ and I think this was my favorite of the 6 Star Wars movies we've seen to date.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

This is the second installment of the Star Wars series. We start out on an ice planet, where Luke has managed to get captured by a yeti. He proves his faith in the force is strong by getting his lightsaber out of the snow to get himself down from the first of many times Luke is upside down in this episode. Then Han proves himself loyal once again by going to find Luke and saving his life. The show took a while to start going, in other words. 

There are fewer action scenes, but there are a few including one where Luke figures out he has to trip a robot that is shooting at his allies. Then Luke steals the rebellion's ship, and takes off to find Yoda. He finds Yoda, but is a complete jerk to him. Although, lets give R2D2 the real jerk points in this scene. He knows Yoda, but chooses not to say anything to Luke when they find him. So R2D2 lets Luke make a fool of himself, like a jerk. But Luke makes a fool of himself and Yoda tries to refuse to teach him. Ben comes back as a ghost, and convinces Yoda to train Luke, something which they both must regret when Luke takes off at the end of the movie to find his friends instead of finishing his training. 

In the Big Reveal, we learn that Darth Vader (which literally means Darth Father in German) is Luke's father. Luke screams, then loses his hand in a fight with Vader.  Vader has many opportunities where he could kill Luke, because Luke is still not good with a lightsaber. But instead he allows him to live and merely disarms him (literally). Vader just found out he is a father, and he wants to give his son the empire to control, but his son doesn't want it. Father of the year material here. 

Overall I give it an A. 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II

My parents took me to see Mockingjay tonight. This is the fourth installment in the Hunger Games series, making the second half of the third book into a movie, a tradition I really am not sure I like. I didn't think it worked for Harry Potter where it got us one really boring 7th movie followed by all the action in the 8th. However, I think it worked for the Hunger Games. If you read the books, you know that much of the revolution was not in the books because it all followed first person from Katniss' thoughts. In a movie about a revolution, that really wouldn't work, and splitting the third book into two movies allowed them to insert a revolution that made things work.

While the previous movie focused on efforts to get Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) away from the capital, this movie focused on the revolution against the capital. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) expresses a surprising amount of independence for a female main character, and heads out with a small group to kill Snow (Donald Sutherland). So that's what the movie is supposed to be about, but in the end we're left hanging as Snow convinces Katniss that someone else was responsible for her sister's death and needs to die more than he does. I'm not entirely convinced on his explanation, but I think it's supposed to be true.

Also, I must confess that I was always on Team Gale (Liam Hemsworth). I knew, after reading the books, that Peeta ends up with Katniss, and they are as happy as people can be after going through what they went through, but it still hurt to see Katniss turn away Gale at the end so coldly. It's not like he killed her sister.

The movie gave me a bit of a fright when the mutts came after them in the sewers but that scene was over soon enough. It made me cry when Katniss threw a temper tantrum over her dead sister. It made me smile when Finnick got married. What it didn't do was make me laugh. It's a little darker than the previous three movies in the series.

Overall I give it an A.

Star Wars : A New Hope

Here we have the story of Luke Skywalker as he meets Obi Wan Kenobi and Leia as well as C3PO and R2D2, and becomes a Jedi - the last of the Jedi. They have an adventure on the Death Star before escaping to the rebel hideout, a feat which is a lot less impressive when you realize they were allowed to escape so they could be followed, as evidenced by a conversation in which one character says to Vader "I'm taking a huge risk here. You'd better be right." And then the Death Star appears right at the rebel base. So basically the first 3/4ths of the movie they didn't do anything really impressive. They just shot at guards who weren't shooting to kill, and Obi Wan committed suicide by Vader.

After Obi Wan's suicide, I think the movie really ignores a vital fact, which is that it is disturbing as hell to suddenly have voices in your head. I mean, as a schizophrenic, I would know. And the very first thing I thought when Obi Wan says "use the force, Luke," to this guy who could hardly fight a droid a minute ago was "HOLY SHIT THERE ARE VOICES IN HIS HEAD AND NOW HE'S GOING TO FREAK OUT!!!!" because in any realistic universe, that's exactly what would have happened in this moment.

So I guess we assume that being a jedi is going to protect Luke's mind from the voice of his dead friend. Or something. And Luke puts his targeting gear away and fires using the force for the first time to destroy the Death Star. This is the first time in the movie something happened that wasn't what the bad guys wanted or expected.

The graphics were amazing for 1977 and still stand up to be considered good today. When you look at the opening scene you are immediately wowed by the size of the ships, and the power obviously belonging to the empire. The Stormtroopers were impressive, and Vader's imposing size and presence on the screen lets you know immediately that this is the bad guy. Although he's only on the screen for 17 minutes, he stays with you throughout the movie. This is how you create a bad guy.

Overall I'll give it a A-, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the series before episode 7 comes out next month.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I rewatched this movie tonight after having seen it opening night in the theaters. I think it got better for a second viewing. This movie started out with an action scene, and almost didn't let down for the rest of the movie. There were a few moments to catch your breath, but then you were almost immediately thrown into another action scene. It was exciting and exhilarating. It had just enough funny moments to keep you on your toes, and I cried when Quicksilver died.

If I had one complaint about this movie it is that the team didn't really work together as a team. They were still a group of individuals and you see them fighting each other more than anything else culminating in the scene where Thor ensures the creation of Vision. There's no communication there. No team. It's frankly amazing they get anything done. I'm hopeful that future incarnations of the Avengers will fix this problem by not having Tony and Thor as a part of the team, and also through the training they seem to have instituted at the end of this movie. However, Civil War is supposed to have a feeling of friend turning against friend, and I don't think we're going to get that because I don't get the feeling that these characters are friends. I get the feeling that they work together for necessity's sake. When Cap and Iron Man fight, I'm not going to take it as good friends fighting each other because they show no evidence of that friendship in this movie, starting from Cap's comment, "language" to Tony.

Another thing was that Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were included and brought back to HQ and made a part of these discussions. They just finished torturing the team, and although vague mention is made of Hawkeye not trusting them, the rest of the team just continues on as though they were supposed to be there. And by the end of the movie Hawkeye is giving Scarlet Witch a lecture on how if she walks out the door to fight, she's an Avenger. In the end they leave her protecting the doomsday switch. That's a lot of trust for someone who was just engaged in torturing you and fighting for your enemies.

These did not really detract from the fact that Marvel has turned out another spectacular movie, and one which is in the running for my favorite film of the year. I give it an A.

Fantastic 4

Unlike many geeks, I've really enjoyed the X-Men movies, put out by Fox. Therefore, I wasn't expecting Fantastic 4 to be terrible. I wasn't going to see it opening night, but my husband really wanted to go, so we went. You guys, this was the first time I've ever seen an audience actively booing at the end of the movie. Now admittedly, the booing might have had more to do with the fact that there was no stinger at the end of a comic book movie, since we all waited through all of the credits for one. But still, if people had enjoyed the movie I don't think they'd boo it that soon afterwards.

Through most of the film I was bored. I mean, origin stories, right? It was just these kids building something, and there was no suspense because you knew the thing had to work for them to get their powers. Building this thing took up literally 1/2 of the movie. Then they build it, and an accident gives them powers, and they spend the next 1/3rd of the movie either running from the government or working for the government. Finally, the writers realized we might like to see the team fight and become a team, so that comes out of nowhere.

Now let me take a moment and be a geek on you, but, this is Dr Doom's costume:

This really doesn't do justice to how bad it was. I mean by the time he showed up it was torn to shreds and looked like it was barely sticking to him. For those who don't know, this is Dr Doom in the comic books:

Kind of bad-ass right? 

I don't understand why Fox decided to get rid of pretty much the one awesome thing about this franchise. Then, I guess because they needed some kind of drama, Ben (Jamie Bell) blames Reed (Miles Teller) for his having become ugly. This never happens in the comic books. Ben always accepts his own responsibility for what happened to him, even though Reed blames himself. It was mischaracterizations such as this that really angered my husband, and caused him to hate the movie. 

For myself, I was never a Fantastic 4 fan. I didn't read the comics. The movie did an adequate job of explaining who each of the characters was, even if that was because they were so dramatically changing the story line that they had to do so. But the thing is I wasn't really entertained by the movie. I was bored through most of it. Even the final battle wasn't very exciting. 

Overall I give it a D. 

Ant Man

How do you do an origin story without doing an origin story? Marvel promised us no more origin stories, but this sure resembled one - without being the boring story you already know the ending of that so many origin stories are. Sure, it told us the origin of the current generation's Ant Man. It also gave us a yellow jacket and a wasp that are sure to make appearances in the next edition of this story.

The movie starts out on Scott Lang's (Paul Rudd) last day in prison for a burglary; we start out uncertain who exactly the good guy and who the bad guy is. It soon becomes clear in a scene where Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily) and Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) are trying to invent a new shrinking suit using cute baby lambs as test subjects. She comments, "weren't we using mice?" and he asks, "what's the difference?" indicating that he has long since lost any qualities that were moral that he may have had in the beginning of their research.

We get plenty of action, starting from a prison fight and ending in a knock-down-drag-out brawl between Ant Man and Yellow Jacket, who clearly has the superior suit. Ant Man can get small, but he has no weapons other than super-strength, which makes him more relatable, and less like the monster that his daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson) assumes Yellow Jacket is. It also means he has to rely on his wits, not his suit, in my mind making him more enjoyable than Iron Man.

Although it is not a comedy, the movie is laugh-out-loud funny. I can't even begin to count the number of times the entire theater erupted into laughter. My favorite of these was when Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) pulls out his keychain tank and tells his daughter, "it's not a keychain," before riding a tank through the wall of the building.

The movie plays with our notions of good and evil. In the end, criminal Scott Lang is clearly the good guy, but what about Hank Pym? He was determined to keep the suit out of the hands of the highest bidder, in this case Hydra. This is certainly a good cause. But at the same time, when his wife died, he sent his daughter off to boarding school, and he abandoned his protege, both major failings as a person. In addition, he picked a thief and escaped convict to wear his suit, essentially picking someone society and he felt was expendable. If the mission went south, he wouldn't care about the person who he killed.

Also I was so excited for the second stinger, I think I literally squeed. Stay through the whole credits. It's worth it.

This movie is a contender for my favorite movie of the year. I give it an A+.

Earth To Echo

Earth to Echo is something resembling a coming of age story with a sci-fi background. These kids, who have always been nobodies help an alien to assemble a spaceship and take off. Along the way they run into the usual assortment of characters that make their lives more difficult. Stereotypically, all the adults are bad guys who want to stop the alien from leaving Earth. These adults chase down the kids, and want to use their rapport with the alien to make it trust them before they can shut it down. Having all the adults be negative characters really rubbed me the wrong way, and I couldn't enjoy the movie.

The worst thing about this movie is that it was shot Blair Witch style with video cameras being a part of the scene, and when the characters run, the video cameras run and bounce all over the place. It really left me feeling nauseous. My stomach and eyes are still upset.  One of the characters is obsessed with getting a video that will go youtube-viral, and the others comment on this obsession and the presence of video cameras a few times.

Another major problem is that I was bored. The characters seemed to be saying things that kids say. Nothing seemed particularly out of character, but a lot of the dialog was just boring. For instance, as shown in the clip at the top of this review, one of the characters scares another by jumping on his shoulders. The boy responds by jumping and saying, "you'll give me a heart attack one day," which strikes me as the most stereotypical response you could possibly have at that moment and seems wasted in a film.

I think they tried to put suspense into the film by having the adult character try to stop them from building a spaceship but it didn't really work. At no point in the film did I wonder whether this spaceship was going to be built. Clearly they just had to get there through a lot of banter and boring writing.

Overall I give it a C-. At least it tried.

Terminator Genisys

I was going to skip this movie. My husband wanted to see it, so I reluctantly went. I have not seen any of the previous movies in the series. This is one of those experiences I am very glad to have been wrong about. I loved this movie.

We start out in a post-apocalyptic world in which machines are destroying humans, but there is only one hope left. I started thinking of Days of Future Past at this point, and the comparison isn't too far off. Basically, what happens is that one guy is sent back into the past to protect the mother of the character who provides humanity's salvation. Apparently we're operating under the assumption that while the robot can change history drastically the human will not and will just restore the timeline. The humans in the original timeline, most notably Sarah (Emilia Clarke)  don't agree with this assumption, and believe that they can stop SkyNet from coming online by blowing it up.

In a major plot hole I could drive their stolen school bus through, Kyle (Jai Courtney) just happens to know that some unexplained thing has happened to change the date of Genesys from 1997 to 2017. With very little explanation, the characters change their plan and go to 2017, which, surprise! just happens to be when the SkyNet/Genisys system is supposed to come online in the new timeline.

This movie was really about two things: car chases and explosions. I mean, that's what you really want when you have an action movie, right? This movie provided a chase scene with a school bus, and car accidents when the time traveling bubble arrives. It also provides the right amount of humor to lighten the tension just enough. I'm not saying it was a funny movie but it definitely made me laugh on a few occasions.

The special effects were well done, and not over done, but some of the characters were a little hard to tell apart with face blindness being a factor. Kyle and John (Jason Clarke) look enough alike to be a little confusing.

You did not need a lot of background information to watch and enjoy this movie. Although my husband tells me there were moments that were meant for the fans, the story made sense without having seen any of the 1980s material.

Overall I give it an A.

Timeline

I was excited that this movie was made, because I really enjoyed the book. When my husband told me there had been a movie made of it, I didn't know how I had managed to miss it. I was excited to watch.

This movie started out poorly, with a man running through the forest, and winding up in the dessert, dying, accompanied by scary music. We come to find out that he's a time traveller, but we never get an explanation for why he wound up in the dessert when our other time travellers all wind up back in the lab.

It is really over-acted. They also start out by killing a whole bunch of characters right at the beginning. I guess this is a good time to do it because it saved me from starting to care about the dead characters. However, it did seem over done, and by the time the movie was halfway over, I couldn't care about any of the characters because they'd killed too many of them.

Some of the actors looked too much alike and it was hard to tell them apart. It was also, therefore, hard to care about them. By the time the movie was halfway over, I was looking at my watch waiting for it to end, and looking online for someone to chat with through the rest of it.

Michael Crichton, the author of Timeline, wrote in Jurassic Park, "just because scientists can, does that mean they should," or something along those lines. I feel like this movie was another excuse to say the same line, and that really all of Crichton's work falls along these lines. Just because scientists can invent time travel doesn't mean that they should. As a part of the larger body of works, this fails because it becomes cliche.

The movie did do a semi-good job explaining itself if you hadn't read the book, which is good because I think most people didn't read this book. However, it failed to give plausible explanations for anything that happened. I think that may have been a flaw in the book, too.

I'm trying hard to find a redeeming quality about the movie, but I really can't. I give it an F.

Jurassic World

Circumstances behind seeing this movie
My husband and I went to the theater on opening night to see this movie. We both knew it wasn't going to be great going in, but it was going to be an excuse to watch dinosaurs, and I have always loved dinosaurs. I watched the original 22 years ago when I was 11, and loved the first one so much that I read and re-read the book several times. So basically I was excited even though I knew it wasn't going to be a great movie
The movie
I went in thinking this movie wasn't going to be great, and I got what I expected. There were blatant attempts to shoe-horn in a reason to care about the characters, such as a conversation between the two kids (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) about their parents getting a divorce. I guess they wanted to make it a little tragic or something. It really didn't work, and at no point during the movie did I really care the two kids got eaten by dinosaurs. With regard to other characters, including the aunt, (Bryce Dallas Howard) I was actively cheering the dinosaurs to eat the corporate whore. There was really only one character I didn't want to get eaten, and that was the character, Owen, played by Chris Pratt.
The masterful suspense from the original movie's raptor chase was sadly lacking in this one. It tried to scare you with jump scenes and a chase scene, but it wasn't done nearly as well as the 1993 version. Partially this might have to do with my lack of caring about the characters, but it also had to do with the pacing of the movie, and the fact that the actors were trying too hard to put suspense where there just wasn't any.
The redeeming value in this movie comes from the entertainment of a giant lizard smackdown when a velociraptor and t-rex team up against the genetic mutant that should be more powerful than both of them. The end was predictable as soon as you saw where it was - up against the water with the ledge broken. They attempted to make you jump here, but really it was so predictable that, well, I didn't even jump. As predictable as the end was, it was worth it to see giant dinosaurs beating on each other.
Overall, dinosaurs are cool, and they really made the movie - which is fortunate because the human actors weren't carrying it themselves. But you know what? When they make a sequel, we'll be there on opening night to watch it.
I give it a solid B.
Also, check out this image by Georgia Aquarium having fun with one of the scenes from the movie