Reviews

To start let me get the few issues I have with this film out of the way. First I didn't really like the twist of Talia Al Ghul showing up, she just takes some of the intimidation out of Bane with her stealing the whole pit thing. She also is like, uninteresting, plain as that. Seems like a small thing but this would probably go up to a 10 without it. There were also a few problems with dialogue clearness but I watch movies with subtitles on so it didn't really bother me. Bruce Wayne living is really inconsequential to the movie's quality but I would have preferred it he stayed dead endgame style.

After the last movie the stakes it seemed had been pretty much raised to the max with Joker destroying a #### ton of infrastructure and casting batman off, but this movie tops it in a way that's just so cool to see unfurl, No Man's Land was perhaps the greatest choice the writers could have made when looking for material on which to inspire the final film. It has just the right balance of crazy high consequences and stakes, and realism that these films go for.

Bane serves as a fantastic antagonist, while at first his goofy voice and accent made him laughable to me, and I think that's why the writers introduced the pit, which as an idea is just so cool and and a concept I would never see any more modern superhero film doing.

Overall, probably one of if not the best superhero film I've seen, probably only tied with the first Iron Man. 9.6/10.

First off the premise of the movie is thoroughly confusing, and it's never explained exactly how these 2 continuities are meeting. The movie implies this is a universe where Mystery Inc has always existed within the DC continuity, however this causes a large issue in that if Mystery Inc exists in a world with supers, why do they still stick to the "there is always a reasonable explanation" philosophy? This whole issue ripples through the rest of the movie and causes it to be hard to get any investment.

The best part of the film is the character writing, mostly from Mystery Inc as all the characters are fun and provide a laugh here or there. Batman is alright too but not too interesting. The Riddler was also quite good, I thought it was strange how his plan in the opening was to just take money in a very short sighted and cartoonish way, so the reveal that it was a fake riddler so the real one could disguise himself with the main cast was a great reveal. Only problem is he has minimal motivation for making a super weapon to destroy anything in gotham and I wish they put more thought into that aspect. Aqua-Man was also in the movie for some reason and was completely insufferable, theres this one really tonally off part where he makes a joke out of Jason Todds death to Batman's face, like what the hell.

There are many, many questionable aspects/plot holes in the movie. Like how Batman states the detective team is "secret invite only", yet they let Plastic Man on who has zero qualities as a detective. Or why characters keep having to clarify if Batman is referring to "the REAL batcave?", like, it's not like theres a batcave on every corner what batcave do you think he means! Or how Clayface can fly inexplicably, just to name a few I remember.

So yeah, pretty alright. If it weren't for the impossible premise taking me out of the whole thing it'd probably be a high 6 or low 7 rating. Give it a watch if you don't care about that sort of thing.

Revision Mar 2 2024: After more thought, I still think this movie was a little confused, but a little higher than what I gave it. 8.9 -> 9.1

The Dark Knight is a movie certainly a movie I enjoyed watching, and I can see why someone would rate this 10/10, but it has a few issues keeping me from giving it that high.

Bruce Wayne just doesn't resonate as an interesting protagonist. His personality can be boiled down to "i'm batman' at the end of the day. Normally this would completely destroy a movie but luckily every other character is extremely well written and interesting. The Joker while not my favourite interpretation is a very good antagonist. He has some serious effects on the world and the movie does a good, if not too far in some places job of showing how threatening it is. I really enjoyed how the final confrontation with him was more ideological than physical with his belief of "Anyone can become as evil as him given the right circumstances" being proven wrong when neither boat presses the buttons. However the major issue with this is that Harvey Dent still stays as a villain, and is not redeemed. While I enjoyed the actors performance and personality think Two-Face is one of the best DC villains, I think the movie would be better without him. The themes of the movie get really conflicted if it's both "The Joker is wrong in his beliefs because the boats didn't blow eachother up" AND "The Joker is right because Harvey Dent was corrupted.".

Lego Batman the video game was among my first games, so I realize I may be slightly biased when I give this a 10/10, But that doesn't mean i'm not going to back it up.

To start the soundtrack, which is ripped from the Tim Burton movie gives the game a dynamic soundtrack which adds to the games tone considerably. It gives the perfect balance of wonder, darkness and action while you play the game, and tracks like the loading screen music bring this game to mind whenever I hear it. The rest of the sound design is, well, compressed but that's to be expected of 2008, In my opinion I feel the shoddy audio add to the tone of darkness and wonder.

The original story in this game takes an unusual but very effective approach with each level acting similarly to a tv show, with each mission focusing on taking down one villain. This is an ideal approach to a Batman adventure as you get to see a large amount of his rouges gallery. Although the placement of these villains can be a tad questionable (fighting Killer Moth as the penultimate boss, really?).

The first chapter is a pretty solid introduction with the main villain being the riddler who makes sense as this incarnation is not too threatening and serves as more of comic relief. Oddly the riddler here has mind control which never made much sense to me but he does need a main ability so whatever. The riddler's narcissism is shown quite well for a game without dialogue with him abandoning his teammates after they've served his goal or forcing Harvey to do everything for him in his fight.

The first level is focused on Clay Face, who for some reason never uses clay powers. The level is a fairly good introduction to the games controls, starting you off on a street with no enemies spawning for a while, so you can get a handle on the controls of multiple things, such as the nearby ladders and grapples. The level continues which each segment requiring you to figure out a new thing starting with an area with flashing bricks and acid, moving to a tipe rope, and silver bricks and bombs. It does a good job at teaching a player with even very rudimentary gaming experience the controls and concepts of the game. The level also features what would be to a new player strange things placed around haphazardly, these being very noticeable helps with a player's understanding later on that these levels are meant to be replayed.

Once you complete mission one you are ejected to the Batcave, this area's soundtrack combined with some of the few friendly NPCs make for a very friendly and comfortable vibe. This makes getting lost in it alot less frustrating than it would be without it in an unnoticeable way.

Once you get to the third level one of this games major problem comes to light; the vehicle missions. Each and every one of them is agonizing to play, but there's not too many of them so the >10 score is barely avoided.

The fourth level in the riddlers story is quite memorable due to just how much stuff is breakable, it's also one of the more atmospheric ones but that's about it. Poison Ivy serves as more of a throwaway character in this as her only real personality trait is "hot". The fifth level is a pretty decent final level to the introductory chapter with the main stand out moment being the two-face fight which shows off his acid immunity by flooding the whole room with it. Two-Face is another character who is characterized quite well through only animations, his stride out and twirling of his duel guns do well to show how above it all he feels.

The second chapter focus on the Penguin as the main antagonist, he is a pretty good progression of the riddler and his plan by trying to take the city hostage. This chapter has perhaps the least to say about it aside from how it has two of the worst boss fights in the game in the boat and killer croc, the first being frustrating and the second being a pushover. It still is fun throughout don't mistake my criticism for distain here.

Skipping over to the third chapter featuring the Joker and his plan to blow up the city, serving as a great raising of stakes for the climax. This chapter starts with a not too notable first mission against the mad hatter whose oddities are portrayed well through his strange mannerisms in his animations.

The second mission is not too good to be honest, it's a bit directionless and has out of place design. It ends with the infamously annoying fight against Harley Quinn who just back flips away with you as you chase her around a small circular room, this fight is unclear and serves to seriously confuse a new player, but it's a very small part of a large package.

One bad vehicle mission after and you're at the mission against Killer Moth who they made the hilarious decision to make act lime a literal moth, being defeated by a light and bottle of bug spray.

The final mission has a slow start but has a serviceability climactic finale with you climbing a large tower to stop joker at the top. The fight against Joker though is not all too interesting as he kinda just sits there and lets other people do the work the whole time (is this a pattern in Batman games?)

Overall the levels all are quite well designed with them having just enough different mechanics to keep you interested over each level, which last about 30 minutes or so. The studs feel satisfying to collect, likewise breaking things has a unique fun to it. One issue is ladders however which are finniky to climb up with them being more of a roadblock to inexperienced players than you think.

Lego Batman also features a villain campaign which has less to say about but is just as and sometimes more fun than the main story. It's clear that the game designers at this point fully understand what makes a level fun with the killer croc stage serving as a tolerable and sometimes mildly fun vehicle stage. The level with Joker and Killer Moth is one of my favourites in the game, no real standout moments in it but a high fun quality throughout.

So, this game is not perfect in pure objective qualitys - but it is a perfect game for me, and certainly one I come back to play each and every year.

This episode takes a very different and memorible twist on how it tells its narritive. This episode shoots us all the way back to episode 1, and follows the basic beats of that episode for a little while. But something's off, Adora keeps seeing strange messages that nobody else sees, everyone else execpt for Scorpia

Scorpia is given an unexpected and brief, yet welcome spotlight for the beginning of this episode, being the only person who notices things are off. I only wished she stuck around longer this episode but it's not detrimental to it's score.

As the episode follows things begin to dissapear and the world begins to collapse, as Adora rushes to stop it. More things happen of course but they aren't important to my review, as the quality of this episode comes from this idea they executed.

This concept was pretty unexpected for this show, and was slightly out of place, but makes up for it with just how well the show does it. Is this episode a masterpeice? No, there's nothing bad with it per se, but it's not of overall quality to say that it's in the 9-10 range. This episode is however very memorable, it was a cool idea executed well, and it has, and probably will stick with me for quite a while.

Going in from episode 8 I didn't know how they would pull this off, I assumed that they wouldn't leave the office until the next season and then that would be the main location. But man, did they do an amazing job wrapping up season 1 in just 40 minutes.

The veil of normalcy and secrecy has been slowly pulled away through the show. In this episode the veil is pulled down, shot, burned, dissolved, then thrown into a black hole.

No big shocking moments, no gigantic revelations, and even without that I stayed on the edge of my seat and enthralled the whole time throughly enjoying the ride. And that ending scene where everything ripped away from them is quite a cliffhanger, it will be suffering waiting for the next season, even if I haven't been waiting over a year like everyone else.

"OH MY GOD" "I TOLD YOU"

• Exerpts from my messages when I watched this episode long distance with somebody.

Up to this point the show has been building a confort zone of sorts when it comes to how serious this show gets. Sure characters die, even major ones like Chuck and Nacho, but for each they didn't cross a certain boundary of seriousness/darkness if you catch me.

Chucks death was sad, but you never saw it happen on-screen, leading to it being impersonal in a way. Nachos death was shot and presented in much more of a dramatic than shocking or sad way. But this episode breaks the confort level, it strips Howard down as a character far past the point the audiance wants to see, then has him brutally and suddenly shot in Saul's home breaking the illusion that everything will turn out moreorless ok for the characters.

What else can I say, this episode is amazing.

The greatest episode in an already great show. Revelations are made that hit about as hard for the characters as it does the viewers. This episode features less humour than others thats mostly chalked up to having little time and alot to cover, which it covers flawlessly.

The most memorable scene in this episode for me is when the kids get into Stans office. They are already skeptical of him, and at this point so are the viewers, with both us and them despratly wanting a reasonable explanation for it. Then it happens:

Big newspaper reading "Stan Pines dead" accompanied with a stinger that makes this scene hit REALLY hard. The camera pan up to a grinning ominous photo of Stan which in any other episode would have been the source of some throwaway joke was the icing on the cake. That scene will always stick with me, and it alone boosts this episode up quite some stars.

The rest of the episode is fine, most of it following is towards building the cliffhanger for the end with a few emotional roadbumps along the way, i'm not too much of a fan personally of what the huge twist is so that's why its not a 10, but it's still a really really good episode. 9.4/10 i'd say.

For a show that normally strays away from making the viewers really feel something other than "Woah!" or "That's cool" this episode comes as a very great left turn. Sure in other episodes the characters go through rough places and emotional moments, but none of those are really done in a way to make the viewer feel anything along with it.

This episode's heart comes not in the big main characters interpersonal issues the show mainly focuses on, but on the priorly comedic side character Razz. This character is spotlighted in this episode and it's revealed she lives her life non-chronologicly. This is quite a tragic idea for a character to begin with, but in only 22 minutes the show fully discovers and makes the audiance feel for a character with such a presence.

The music in the end when she finishes the pie which means so much to her, as well as the unique fade to white that you don't see in the rest of the show makes for a really heartfelt scene which made me actually feel emotions for, if i'm being honest, the only time in this entire show.

For me, this was the episode where the show got good. Up to now when I first watched, the show was good, yes, but not in my favorite peices of media. This episode is for me when the show went from say a 7.4 to a 9 (and only climbed from there).

In this episode you see the show get much more serious than prior; up to now, yes, things had consequences and there were dark parts, sure. But Gale was the first likable character who you see die, and not in a dramatic or cool way, a cold, sad, drawn out and painful way that the show hadn't done before. And this would be nothing if not for the way the whole segment is put together, which is also done incredibly well.

In this episode Walter stops taking Half Measures, and after this episode the show certainly does as well.