Reviews

I think people have a tendency to mistake "predictable" with "foreshadowed". We're so used to modern TV and movie's tendency to have random things happen to propel the plot, that we forget how classic movies used foreshadowing to set up key plot points. Just being something is unpredictable, doesn't make it good, and vice versa.

Damsel sets up practically everything. "Chekhov's gun" is movie element that introduces something that at first seems unimportant, but later plays a key roll in the film. This movie has Chekhov's clothes, lamp, knife, worms, armour etc etc. Without spoilers, in the third act the hero revisits a dozen elements that were previously introduced and it was great to see these elements reintroduced. It means that everything in this movie has purpose and everything is done for a reason.

I'm not saying this film offers a master class in story telling, but I simply want to give it credit where credit's due. It's solid, with great build up and payoff. I loved where the ending was going and it wrapped everything up perfectly.

I feel a special shoutout needs to go to the CGI team as well. Not only is the CGI genuinely great (save maybe one scene) but the "monster" design of the dragon is excellent. We don't even see it until half way through the movie (like any good monster movie) and I just love it. The cat-like body, the dextrous thin tail, the rattling scales, the crown-like mane. It all looks great and is actually memorable.

As for the plot, no it's nothing mind boggling, but it's new enough to be interesting and keep you on your toes. The pacing is fast and it knows when to end. It's an easy recommendation for me for anyone looking for a good time.

Yes I read the books, no I don't care that they changed things. It's simply not a good show.

This was created by David Benioff and DB Weiss, the two who created 4 of the greatest seasons of television and 2 of the worst (Game of Thrones). I didn't know they were in charge until a few episodes in and it really made sense once I found out. In an interview about SE6 of GoT Weiss said that he fought tooth and nail to add a pointless zombie bear scene saying "Damn it, I want a god-damn zombie bear!" He'd fought for several seasons until he was finally greenlit to add it. Why? Because he thought it was cool. No other reason.

It very much shows that the two couldn't help themselves yet again when creating this show. The books have plenty of concrete and fascinating imagery that, to the shows credit, translate very well to the screen. However, so much of the added material is just bad and weighs down the fascinating ideas in the books.

Very very minor spoilers, it's not enough that in one scene everything starts to get destroyed, but then a little girl riding a literal flaming horse bursts through a window with CGI lava pouring in behind her screaming "save meee aaahhhh" which genuinely made me laugh at how bad it was. It's so over the top. Of course that's the scene where my wife walks in and just laughs asking me what the hell I'm watching and it's legitimately embarrassing seeing the absolutely cringe on display.

Not everything is the show's fault, like the katana lady who was edgy and cringe even in the books, and some of the show works like the stunning visuals, but I guess the show's worst enemies were the ones who tried to make this in the first place. You need a mature team to make this series work and we got two hacks most famous for drilling a celebrated series into the dirt. Who could have seen this coming...

It's simply messy, adding aspects to the story to make it more interesting and cool when the (first two) books are already just that. You can change things, I don't mind, but just keep them consistent within the world you're displaying.

I usually like quirky original movies, and there are a lot of individual elements that are great in this film such as the character's, acting, and world, but at its core this film has little to say and is deeply disturbing.

The core premises of this film without giving too much away is that a child's mind resides in a woman's body. The child is maybe 1-2 years old but no older than 5 and the plot is how much this kid has sex with other adult men.

I felt deeply uncomfortable thinking about a toddler discovering sexual organs and having wild sex and masturbating constantly and publicly because they don't know any better. Some people may say "that's not the point of the film" but it's a purposeful and prominent aspect that gets heavy emphasis throughout the entire run-time.

It feel like the writer wanted to tell the cliched story of the naïvety of a child but also wanted to tell a story about how promiscuous women upset insecure men and I think it's wildly inappropriate or just a bad idea in general to mix those two stories together. Wouldn't you think so?

Which is too bad because I liked everything else surrounding the premise. The cast was perfectly cast and Mark Ruffalo's terrible English accent, although distracting, was very fitting for his phoney shallow character and Gondi loved every second of him on screen. The world was rich and realized, every shot was interesting and the music was fantastic, I just wish it didn't all hinge on such a creepy "what if a kid had a lot of sex".

Not to mention there was a scene where two literal children watched a man and woman have sex. It was played for laughs and it was funny on its own as a concept because it's so absurd, but it made me wonder why twice now we're focusing on underaged people witnessing or engaging in sex acts.

I can see people being upset and getting defensive because if they liked the film maybe I'm saying they're a bad person or something, I'm not saying that. If you think all these aspects are fine then by all means enjoy the film, but I think it's fair to be critical on something like this and think about why some decisions were made when making this film. Like I said, there is a lot to love and if the premise doesn't bother you then you will love this movie.

I'm not a prude, have as much sex with whoever you want or however you want it, just maybe keep the theme of kids away from it.

I originally saw this maybe 3-4 months ago and it still shows up in my head rent free sometimes. The entire movie is a commentary on the Japanese bureaucracy (there's even a running gag with the protagonists title changing every time they're on screen) while also treating Godzilla like a natural disaster rather than a kaiju.

Without spoilers, at the climax of the movie is a beautiful opera playing over complete and utter destruction. If you don't want to watch this movie, please just watch that scene on YouTube. It's one of the best scenes in recent cinema and it's just awe inspiring. Watching it in the middle of the night blasting on my sound system was WILD!

The CGi is serviceable and there's some bad Engrish and some bad American voice acting, but it doesn't get in the way of the movie and just adds charm if anything.

If you like disaster movies and scientists trying to figure things out, you'll love this movie. Same goes if you like kaiju movies. Don't miss out on this!

It's clear the director just wanted to simply get the story out, which can be perfectly adequate, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

They had the opportunity to ask some difficult and challenging questions to the aggressors and defendants of this story, but they didn't. They even use a clip from another interview where someone does ask those questions, which stuck out to me.

Without spoilers, Steve Cartisano, starts this abusive camp for kids and his entire family defend him vehemently, and not once were they asked any challenging questions. Maybe the director didn't want to scare them off, but you need to do these things if you want to make something that truly sticks out. But instead they took the easy route. They don't even mention the Mormon half of the story which you'll only learn about if you research this more after you watch the documentary.

The average score for this documentary is 6/10. The story itself is very interesting and it's doing all the work. I still recommend this though since it's an interesting story, but anyone could have directed this.

Not to mention it's SO DARK! Even day shots are dark! What is wrong with cinematographers these days?

I did not want to watch this show by its premise or the trailers, until someone I trusted recommended it. Wow am I glad I gave this a shot!

Episode one is genuinely a perfect pilot episode from start to beginning. I'm fact, you can just watch it as a short story and it's fantastic like a (good) Black Mirror episode. If you don't immediately love the show after episode one, then you probably won't enjoy the rest of the show.

My wife and I binged this together over 2 days and had our own theories as to what was going on in the story, which to me illustrates an intriguing mystery when you can have several theories with your own reasoning behind them.

The main character also wants to solve the mystery right away, but they keep running into hurtles which forces them to adapt and fix the problem at hand before moving on. It's a great way to introduce characters and other aspects of the show.

It's puzzling to see others reviews about how the show is slow. If you think this is slow then don't watch GoT, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Soppranos, or The Wire, THOSE are slow!

Give it a watch, you won't regret it. The average score is high on every platform for a reason!

This shows is REALLY trying to be "Adult" but it seems to be the teenage idea of what being adult is. It's fine to have sex, violence, and swearing, in fact I welcome it, but do I really need a scene where the bad guy recites his evil plan while getting pegged and blown at the same time? Why did they write that into the script? Imagine the voice director describing that scene to the actor. It's trying so hard to be adult and edgy that it fails to be either.

You know what scenes are great though? The character scenes! I loved learning about the protagonist's past. There's a particular episode with a puppet show as the backdrop that's simply fantastic because it tells an interesting story with characters all with their own past and their own goals. Seeing them clash while revealing a part of the protagonist we hadn't seen before was exceptional. We also get scenes that grapple with what it means to have honour, and the difference between killing for hate and killing for love. THAT'S what maturity is, not a scene with an octopus pleasuring a woman in a bathtub (two different scenes with this motif) while men jerk it but woah that's so *crazy* and *edgy* man, woah so cool!

Everything gets cranked to 11 just for the shock value. It got to the point where I could predict what edgy thing they'd do next. Oh a bird was set free? It sure would be edgy if it was MURDERED mid flight- oh look, that's exactly what happened.

Without going on too long, I did also want to mention that the voice acting isn't very good from a few characters (not everyone) which stuck out to me, and the audio mixing was pretty terrible for 5.1 (which I imagine most people won't have issues with). Anytime cool music played, it was super quiet and I know it's not an issue on my end because no other show on Netflix has ever had this issue on my setup and switching to 2.0 fixed the issue.

If you read this and think I sound pissy, it's because I am. This show had so much going for it but it just fumbled in trying too hard to be something it never needed to be. I'm excited for the next season though. They've got a good thing going and just a few tweaks can really elevated this show to new heights. Here's hoping they don't double down.

It was hard getting my hands on a copy of this but I'm very glad I did! It's rare to find a filmmaker who knows when something has run its course. This short film was the perfect length and was constantly evolving so as not to make the entire Adobe workflow format a gimmick.

Without spoilers, half of the fun is watching the sappy romance story unfold in the background as our main characters argue on the format of the film. They even manage to fit a little character arc with one of the main characters!

Unfortunately, the length is both a boon and a crux, as it boils down the already refined nature of a feature length film into its absolute bare necessities so there's only so much you can sink your teeth into.

With that said though, I'd absolutely recommend this to pretty much anyone and will definitely be showing this off to my friends and family whenever I can and I sincerely hope this eventually gets picked up by some distributor in the west so more people can see this!

The problem with origin super hero movies is they're all the same on the surface, that's why Spider-Man Homecoming skipped Peter Parker's whole origin story because we've heard it a thousand times, but TMNT isn't quite as popular so they had to go over the basics. As a result, the characters and animation are fun, but the story could have been written by an AI. A sequel should take care of that though. In the next movie, we'll have these fun charters already established and the story can go wherever they want to take it, which is exciting!

Speaking of the characters, they're super fun and acted by actual teenagers! They're pretty annoying but in a "teenaged boys having harmless fun" kinda way which I really vibed with.

I appreciate the animation isn't the simple 3D Pixar animation we've been seeing for the past 2 decades, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say I thought this was the same studio that made the Spider-Verse movies, turns out they're entirely different and unrelated. I enjoy unique art styles, and they try to separate themselves from the Spider-verse films, but it's obvious that some studio exec said "I want a movie like the Spider-Verse movies" and thus we got TMNT Mutant Mayhem. That's not to say the animation is bad or anything, but to me it felt like the movie didn't have an identity. It didn't help having all the pop music needle drops either.

This movie will be incredibly dated in just 10 years with all its modern references, but hey it's fun now and that's all that really matters.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend the movie, but don't hold your breath for anything crazy like the Spider-Verse movies this film was so clearly trying to copy.

I normally wouldn't have watched this on my own but my wife wanted to see this movie. I thought the previous movies were fine so, why not, right?

Broken into 3 parts, the story follows the bad guy, Snow, from the original movies. The story is supposed to be his rise and fall, but it never quite commits to that whole part of his arc until the last third of the movie when the writers remember this movie is a character study.

I wish they only had two "Parts". The three "Parts" didn't follow the typical three act story structure which ended up making the pacing and story feel disjointed. In fact, I forgot there was a part 3 remaining because the big climax happens at the end of part 2 so I was ready to leave the theatre when "PART 3" was displayed on the screen.

Part 3 takes place in an entirely different area with only 3 of the characters from the first 2 parts. It dealt with the aftermath of the previous two parts and this is where it finally got interesting. Suddenly charters were changing, forwarding their own goals, and cautious around people they once trusted. I genuinely would have enjoyed an entire movie based on the 3rd act alone.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the cringe. There's some melodrama. I wasn't the target audience so take it with a grain of salt, but when the female lead is introduced, she sings at the top of her lungs at the reaping ceremony. You later find out she's a performer, but being introduced to her like this had me literally looking away from the screen in second hand embarrassment. She also sings at the top of her lungs during the climax of the movie during the hunger games which felt a little cheesy.

In act 3 they also start referencing the previous movies A LOT out of nowhere. Within 10 minutes they start randomly singing the "Are you, are you" song from the previous movies, they look in the sky randomly and say "look, Mocking Jays!" And then pick up a random root and go "this root is called Katnis!" - it was bad. Stop that.

Overall though, I had a good time and if you liked the previous movies and read the books, you'll probably enjoy this movie too!

You'll notice in a lot of other reviews people feel the need to mention if they have or haven't watched the animated series this is based on and that's out of necessity, because if you haven't watched the original show then you're missing out of A LOT and the copious fan service will go right over your head.

Ahsoka is the most boring protagonist I've ever seen with about as much charismatic as a cardboard box. I'm not saying you have to crazy jokes or go on a rampage but just look like you're feeling *something*. Every scene with her felt so stoic and slow, I never felt any urgency when she was on screen, even during the fights. The literal robot had more of a personality than Ahsoka, the titular character! Wisdom is a fine trait, but wisdom and what? What else does she bring to the table?

Then you have this antagonists who is genuinely exceptionally interesting. A former Jedi who abandoned both the dark and light side to pursue his own goal based on the ideologies that were formed when the Jedi collapsed? Give me a whole show about that guy! He doesn't see people as enemies, but as obstacles and tools. If you serve his purpose, he'll help you and keep to his word. He helps the bad guys not because he believes in them, but because it aligns with his goals. Fantastic, great, now do something similar with everyone.

Side note, the green Twi'lek is genuinely a bad person. She's given the rank of general and abuses that power anywhere she see's fit, despite the impact it has in others (the people she orders around and puts them in awkward positions) or the impact it has on the people above her giving orders. If this were Star Trek, she'd literally be the suspicious Admiral who comes aboard and starts barking orders to get what she wants and throws protocol out the window. The worst part is she gets away with it in the end and doesn't learn a single thing other than she'll get her way if she rubs shoulders with the right people. Gross.

The story was pretty compelling, despite not knowing who any of the people they kept referring to constantly. Enough so that it got me through the mediocre acting and frustrating protagonists.

I wouldn't recommend this show to anyone unless you're already interested or have watched the animated show.

The Afghanistan War sucked for everyone. There's a lot of movies that romanticize the US military, and this one is no different, but it's not the primary focus.

The story is very simple: Mission gone wrong; gotta get home... but with a little political commentary twist for the 3rd act which brings this movie to a 7 from a 6 from me.

Due to the simple nature of the film, there's a lot of walking. I understand the movie purposely sets up the grind of the wall home, but while watching I found myself saying, "Okay, yeah I get the gist". It'll be great for some, but it didn't quite do it for me.

Another artifact of plot is the lopsided story structure. Without spoilers, there are two stories that take place, once the first objective is achieved, the second one begins, which felt a little start and stop for me, like a young driver first learning to drive stick; we got there in the end but there was a stall at the 2/3 part.

Overall, decent. I probably won't watch it again but it kept my attention all the way through and covered a seldom discussed political aspect of the US-Afghan war.

A movie not 2hrs long? Is that even possible nowadays? Some of these reviews have left me scratching my head; it feels like people throw around "plot hole" without knowing what that actually means. The movie's internal logic is perfect, just because something wasn't explicitly explained to you, doesn't mean it's a plot hole. You don't need midi-chlorians to explain the force, it's magic, and it's story telling.

I went into this movie without knowing a single thing about it other than it's creepy. I have to say, I was thoroughly hooked the entire way through. After every question is an answer, which only begs another question. I've seen tons of horror movies, and this is one of the few that have actually made the hairs on my neck stand. Some of the imagery in this movie will haunt my dreams which stands out to me, since I feel like scary movies nowadays rely too heavily on cheap jump-scares that don't hold weight, but there were things that lingered on screen that were genuinely creepy, things you don't want to look at for long.

With all that said, this movie is very pretty! It's great to see someone use an anamorphic lens with lovely swirly bokeh and not waste any space at the same time. They even used blatant unmotivated lighting and it was exceptionally effective and somehow so natural that most people probably won't have noticed it.

The script is concise too and didn't waste a single scene or shot, yet this film still allows itself to linger and breathe where it needs to.

My only criticism is that the end was exceptionally abrupt, suspiciously so. I'd assume studio interference, or maybe the director just wanted to wrap it up but it definitely felt out of place. Typically in movies, when the antagonist is beaten, you have a few minutes to see the characters readjust to their new life after having gone through a big endeavour. This films ending however felt like if Frodo dropped the ring into Mt Doom and it faded to black when he was picked up by the eagles. I wanted to see more and it simply didn't deliver.

Overall though, a must watch horror film! Unless you're the kind of person who can't wait for the next Conjuring 8 movie, then maybe skip this one.

I'm Canadian, and I think that was a detriment to me (In regards to the play, not in general) This is a very American play for an American audience. That's not to say if you're not American you won't enjoy it, but if you are, you will enjoy it even more so because I had no idea who Alexander Hamilton was or anyone other than the founding fathers mentioned.

As for the music, it was alright. I was a drama kid, I've seen a lot of musicals, and I like hip hop, trap, and rap, so you'd think I'd like this but none of the songs really stuck out to me.

The entire musical is sung, there's almost no spoken dialogue in the entire play, which only serves to overload you with music unfortunately. I would have preferred fewer songs that stuck out with more dramatic dialogue, than more songs and less talking, though that could be a personal preference.

There are a few forced "now the love interest sings" and they were especially boring as they didnt progress the plot or establish anything new other than "I am a woman and I am sad because of a man".

It's not the worst play/musical, but it's certainly not the best. The cast were good, though the men were noticeably worse singers than the woman. The set was fine, nothing revolutionary, but nothing detrimental either.

Overall I can't give it more than a 5/10 for being, dare I say it, kinda mid. I certainly won't remember a thing from this play in a week which is too bad because inwas really looking forward to it with all the hype.

The pacing will take you aback at first; Oppenheimer meets and divorces his wife within 5 minutes, but it's the price to pay to set the context for the two big moments later in the film.

Understandably, it's hard to tell someone's entire life story in 3hrs while also creating enough drama to keep an audience hooked. Nolan chose to tell two stories, which is definitely engaging, but it ends up feeling like there's a first act, but then 2 3rd acts.

There's also more ambitious filmmaking, but it comes off as a little self indulgent, especially with 2 awkward sex scenes posing as "art".

With that said though, Nolan knows how to keep you engaged. There's a literal minute long countdown and I could feel my heart building with each second. Even after 2hrs, I still refused to allow my attention to slip thanks to the engaging cutting between scenes in multiple points in Oppenheimers life and building to a second crescendo.

Last weird technical thing to note: the camera loses focus a lot, especially in the last hour. Clearly they were running at a low aperture on a medium format camera, but that meant even the slightest deviation on the focus was noticeable. I saw tons of shots where someone's ear or nose was in focus but not their eyes, because with such high ape rather you can't be off by a single cm.

Definitly check out the film though, and obviously in IMAX if you can since I saw it in standard cinema and felt like I was missing out on something better.

This movie is Part 1 of 2 and it's never mentioned in any of the ads you'll see online. They did this purposely as people are more likely to pay for a ticket if they think they're getting a full movie which I think people should be more upset about, you were duped by corporate greed (meanwhile the movie has an anti capitalism joke). Defenders will say they knew because they read it somewhere, but most people in the theatre were confused, so most people will have had the same experience I did. Dune did this, and even Attack on Titan did this. This is simply the new norm, getting unfinished movies toted as full ones.

What does that mean as a viewing experience? Well, the pacing is incredibly awkward, and there are three antagonists, one who disappears halfway through the movie to make room for the second, and one who is introduced in the last 5 minutes. The next movie will have 3 antagonists to overcome.

This movie has a climax, but you don't know it's the climax because you expect the climax to be beating the main antagonist who, again, leaves in the second act. If you knew ahead of time, that would probably have made for a better viewing experience, but again, they purposely withheld that information from advertising to increase the chances of you paying them to see this movie.

In terms of the writing, it's decent, but every single serious moment in the movie is undercut by a joke, and the climax is kind of cringe. Without spoilers, someone asks who Miles is and he says his name. It is, ironically, the same climax as the SpongeBob Movie when SpongeBob says "I'm not a kid, I'm a goofy goober-ROCK". It's clunky, and unsatisfying.

It's hard to rate this movie because I want to rate it as a whole, but it's not, it's Part 1, so do I rate it as half a movie? If so, it's fine I guess? But half a movie wouldn't be paced this way with awkward character moments and story arcs. I guess we'll wait for the second movie which is rumoured to already be complete and they're just waiting until 2024 to release it to get as much money as possible.

I wanted to love this movie so hard, but as it went on I kept getting confused by the runtime and thinking "how are they going to wrap this all up in the short amount of time left?". They don't, and that sucked.

Samuel Jackson has completely checked out. He barely moves and looks bored out of his mind. He has one scene where he kinda tries, but even then he couldn't be bothered to stand and sits down the entire scene WHILE a fight it ongoing in the room.

The writing is awful. Every scene is characters dumping exposition at each other. "Theyre getting bombs" "To frame these other people?""Yes, and then everyone will think these other people did it" "Oh no, that means there could be a war!" It comes off as dialogue made to be easier translatable, if that makes sense.

The bad guys are shapeshifters who can steal memories, do something interesting with that! They're really just going to use their abilities to frame people? Why not slowly infiltrate the upper echelons of society? How about the more people's minds they take over, the more they start to regret attacking humanity and turn on their own kind because they start to empathize with peoples deep inner thoughts and experiences? There's so much they can do with this premise and they chose the path of least resistance. Hell, Deep Space Nine had the entire Domion War against shapeshifters where they tricked a species to think they were Gods because of their ability to take on any form and then made them addicted to a drug so they couldn't betray them, THAT'S creative.

If you were looking for another miracle like Andor, don't bother with this. Disney plays it way too safe to make anything interesting.

I wanted to love this movie, but there's not much to love. They throw in an annoying Olaf ripoff who brings nothing to the film. Donkey was at least voiced by a comedian and while I love Harvey Guillen, this wasn't the role for him (or probably anyone honestly).

The villain is pretty cool, though he has one standout scene and is then reduced to a background chatter showing up every 20 minutes to remind you he exists. They muddy the water with 2 other groups of villains, one of which is just evil for the sake of being evil.

All in all, it's fine. It's no Shrek 2, but perhaps those standards are too high to hold this up to.

Though not without its flaws (and not quite the follow up we wanted) it's hard to ignore the cultural significance this film had. After 10 years of slowly building a massive ensemble of unique characters, it all culminated into an action packed, fun, adventure with actual stakes and a fantastic ending.

Every franchise, Including Disney themselves, have been trying and failing to capture a glimpse of the success that Marvel's Avengers accomplished, and I think that says something to the immense difficulty of pulling something like this off.

No scene dragged, and everyone got the exact amount of screen time that they needed.

Even if we wanted something like this again, it would take years just to develop. Hopefully we see it again someday.

No lightsabers, no force, no ATSTs, no jedi or sith, and no stormtroopers for the first half of the show. It's amazing that Star Wars released something without being inundated with constant "REMEMBER THIS?!"

The side plots were more engaging than the main plot. I'd like to rate this higher, but I just wish Cassian wasn't in this. The writers didn't know what to do with him. He randomly gets throw around between different plots while the more interesting story and politics happen with the better written characters.

No cringe dialogue, and the writing and setting are actually taken seriously.

Still a great show nonetheless!