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miotro
Reviews
Out of Darkness (2022)
Not perfect, but passable.
For those complaining about the cast, the truth goes like this:
The light-skinned mutation in European populations is less than 10,000 years old. Cheddar Man - from Cheddar, UK - is between 9500 and 10,000 years old, and, amazingly, has a living descendant still in Cheddar. And he was black. Not a black person who walked all the way from Africa, but a Western European Hunter-Gatherer, the Homo sapiens population that occupied Europe prior to the migrations from the Pontic Steppe and Anatolia, which make up the better part of modern European genomics.
He was black because his population group was black. His facial features were somewhere intermediate between African and Caucasian, but his genome tells us he was as dark as any person from Africa.
Ötzi the Iceman - who appears to hail from Northern Italy and is about 6000 years younger than Cheddar Man - would have been turned away at the US southern border for being far, far, far too brown.
It takes tens of thousands of years for hominin populations moving into new environments to evolve (not adapt, but evolve) to fit their new location.
I understand that the demolition of long-held beliefs or assumptions is frustrating and sometimes painful. I understand that fully feathered velociraptors - as we now 100% know they were - don't strike the same chord of dread as the Jurassic Park scaly lizardie ones, but scaly lizardie ones are simply innacurate.
The film is FAR from perfect. I was willing to make allowances for the men being very cleanly shaven because it's perfectly common for people of African phenotypes not to have facial hair, but the buzz-cut hairdos was a little too modern for me to easily deploy suspension of disbelief, and the costumes are... comical. If Balenciaga is currently offering something similar, no surprise.
But the only problem with the ethnicity of the actors representing people from 45,000 year ago is that - in all truth - they should have been darker, not lighter, of skin.
Vesper (2022)
Passable Effort
This is what happens when the writer takes great pains to develop, populate, enrich and thicken the world in which they will tell a story - and then have no clue whatsoever about the story they wish to tell within that world. This is what happens when you make the mistake of conflating the world-building folder with the actual narrative.
The good:
We are dropped into a set of lives already in motion in a world that gives me shades of Mieville's Bas Lag crossed with Miyazaki's Naussica of the Valley of the Winds. This is a world built on biotech and it appears that the denizens have been rather sloppy about allowing it to overrun the planet. We see a native biome silently at war with a biome escaped from the lab. At no time does any tedious character present themselves to start in with the "this is this, and that is that, and these are these and those are those, and watch me engage in conversations where I explain this world to people who also inhabit it, so why am I doing this...?" That never happens. Nor is there some insipid intro narrative where the young MC, wise beyond her years, vomits exposition and tells us of the calamities that befell this strange iteration of Earth.
We are spared that, and I was thankful, because it made the entry into the narrative much more exploratory, and allowed me to engage and interpret the things I was seeing in ways that made sense to me rather than contextualized by someone else in ways that only ever end up hokey and overworked.
Vesper is a young woman living with her disabled father in the marginalized areas outside the Citadel. Here, she ekes out a living foraging for food and talking with her father who communicates with her via a hovering drone unit that serves as his only mode of engaging the world outside of his bed, this, a "gift" given to him by the Citadel for his injuries received in a war where he fought for them.
Vesper's uncle lives nearby and is busy having as many children as he can in this world that appears to be dealing with a calorie crisis, so I'm not sure why he's doing that, but it gives him an air of sliminess in that his only interest in Vesper, his niece, is to use her to make even more kids. He's also trying to grow seeds from the Citadel, but these are artificially created and require some sort of key to unlock them into germination. He doesn't have it. I'm not sure what he's feeding his 39(+/-) kids. Gloss, gloss, gloss.
The bad:
Into this bleak vignette crash-lands (literally) a woman named Camelia. She is from the Citadel. Behold her fine apparel as compared to the patchwork rags Vesper wears. Vesper rescues the woman and sees in her a chance for entry into the Citadel where she hopes to secure a job as a biotech scientist. She's got a little garden filled with pretty organisms she has made. But it turns out that Camelia is trying to escape the Citadel. She is a "jug", a quasi-human creature made in a laboratory, but unlike other jugs, she looks completely human and is as intelligent as one. Creation of such a being is a very high crime in the Citadel.
Vesper discovers that Camelia is the key to unlock the seeds through some massive narrative handwavium.
The Citadel comes looking for Camelia because bad meanies no want noble serfs to have unlocked seeds.
Camelia turns herself in rather than have the Citadel continue to chase Vesper.
Vesper casts the seeds to the wind when she climes this tower made of garbage (seriously) put together by people who - for reasons no one understands - become "pilgrims", shrouding themselves in habits and making sleds to collect trash.
And that's the end.
The setting and the atmosphere kept me interested. The acting is solid and very competent. The low-key apparent slow-burn also kept me interested. But, ffs, slow-burn contains TWO (2) elements, the slow and the burn. I stayed for the slow and then the burn never showed up. As a narrative, it's more of a vignette or a very long flash fiction. I didn't understand where this narrative was going until it apparently went nowhere and then the credits rolled.
If you're into fanfiction, there's plenty of fodder here and nothing but territory to cover since the original canon offers nearly no story at all. As the pilot to a Netflix show, sure, but as a stand-alone effort, nope.
The Dustwalker (2019)
The cinematography was good, but other than that...
There simply wasn't a story, no narrative to speak of. Australian cinema has produced some great Science Fiction films in the last few years. This just wasn't one of them.
Hellboy (2019)
I liked it, but I understand why most did not...
No spoilers here, folks. I'll keep it simple. The first two films in this franchise were never going to take home Oscars either, so why anyone expected this one to be different is beyond me. I actually really like Deputy Chief Dadbod. It was the one part I was looking forward to, and that part I enjoyed.
The cinematography and CGI, tho... Jeez.
If those had been on point, I think people would have enjoyed it more, but the whole film was so... starkly daytime! No thought at all was put into the post-production to tone it back, deepen it up, and give it that feel of a dark graphic novel, which the first two films delivered in spades. This was like The Addams Family dressed in suburban "Richard & Helen" attire, driving a Chevy Malibu, living in a 3 bedroom ranch-style in a cookie-cutter subdivision.
It was just... off.
Serenity (2019)
Excellent, but not for the literal-minded.
It's been a solid decade now where I've watched the engagement of both film and books become more and more militantly literal. Metaphor is lost on modern audiences, and the idiosyncratic charm of magic realism has become pearls before swine.
Great movie, but you have to be willing to tip your head under the water.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019)
Loved it.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
PLEASE NOTE: This film requires a minimum of one (1) medium sized, unopened box of tissues.
Not kidding. Make sure to have it before you hit play.
The lead, Maxwell Simba (how awesome is THAT name?!) who plays William Kamkwamba (this is a true story, btw) will 100% own you by the end of the film. I expect a good performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor (who also directed), and he certainly delivers, but this kid Maxwell Simba is something else. Incredibly invested for such a new face. Someone to watch for in future endeavors.
Long story short: An ingenious young man saves his village from tragic disaster using a bicycle frame, a bicycle sidewall dynamo, and dogged perseverance. Next time you're having trouble "adulting", please watch this film and get some perspective.
Watch it - it's beautiful - but get ready for some heavy moments.
The Predator (2018)
Satisfaction is about correct expectations
Is it going to take home any Oscars? No, of course not, and neither were any of its predecessors. Just get your head on right about what it's going to be and you'll enjoy it. The prior iterations in the franchise already burned through the same schtick a number of times, so yeah, this one has a very different tone, a different color, a different engagement. It's fun. What's so wrong with that? Even the second ALIEN film, the one with all the soldiers, knew that trying to recapture the once-in-a-lifetime magic of the first film was an exercise in futility, so they went a completely different direction, and it was awesome. This film is kinda' like that. It's not the same-old same-old, and I'm as picky as they come, but I very much enjoyed this fun take on an aging franchise.
Kin (2018)
Really wanted to like this...
Descent cast, interesting initial idea and plot device, well shot, doesn't look or feel cheap in any way, but... It 100% feels like a "franchise set-up" and nothing more. I get that any franchise needs an initial film to set the tone and general idea of what's going on, but that initial film still needs to deliver some kind of satisfying story, and this film just didn't deliver in that aspect.
5th Passenger (2017)
Sweet Cthulhu, take me.
The surprising thing with this film is the number of actors whom I recognize from other projects and know to be perfectly competent actors, so the utterly abysmal acting is hard to account for. If you stick with it you'll see cameos from across the spectrum of the Star Trek franchise (regulars and notable one-timers), and the plot itself feels like a rejected Star Trek script rescued from the bin, and if this had been a fan-made film to which these actors were lending their faces for the sake of their fans (wouldn't be the first time), then I could understand and would be more than willing to forgive the amateur nature of the production, directing... everything. But that doesn't seem to be the case.