Reviews

The Fountain is perhaps one of the most beautiful movies ever made, with an idea which is just as simple as it is difficult. Perhaps due to it it is loved by some and hated by most. And this is the reason why in Hollywood terms this movie was a bomb.

Death is omnipresent in our lives. We try to not think about it, to be reminded of it. We suppress the thoughts of the inevitable. We fear it., we look away when we can. But The Fountain took all these fears and put them right there, in front of our eyes in a beautiful movie which is so difficult to cope with for just so many of us.

The Fountain, in all its beauty, will make it difficult for you not to cry. It will wrench your guts, it will leave you with a head full of emotions for hours or days to come. It might be such a deep spiritual experience, that you start questioning things in your own life. Forgive. Reconcile. Spend more time together. Because beyond death, there is nothing, just darkness and cold.

Yes, the movie, once you realize its concept will truly make you do all those things.

Unfortunately, not everyone will. Some need to watch it several times before understanding what the 3 timelines represent and realize, it is all just one single story.

When I saw the trailer of this film I just thought - for god sake, this will be a really stupid movie. The premise of the moon suddenly changing its orbit because there is an alien being inside its hollow core just was plain dumb.

So while I was not planning to spend my bucks on this literal POS, nor really ever watch it, there came this long transatlantic flight on Austrian airlines which offered very few other recent movies, so I said to myself - lets have a laugh.

And oh boy, this really was horrible. I will not really go and explain the plot. Has been done before and its on Wikipedia for anyone who has not seen the movie and is curious.

But the entire script is just so bad. The premise of people at NASA, Air Force being so dumb is just exaggerated beyond belief. The side plots are not helping the story one bit and are even more stupid - but in reality are product placement for Kaspersky antivirus and Lexus SUV's. Everybody thinks they will be safe in Colorado so everyone tries to get there. Most likely they had time share condos in Aspen and it was their week. Looters try to loot while the moon is falling and they will be dead anyway.

The main plot itself just relies on totally predictable and unexplained events - bad news endangering the mission are immediately followed by an even more unbelievable solution from someone from the main cast.

So the main characters ultimately (despite all the stupidity) reach the core of the moon with an alien mega structure. Here, the scene with the AI which lives in there might remind you of a similar one in the movie Contact. Emmerich just ran out of ideas at this stage of the film and just started stealing them from other movies.

Anyway, the aliens are beaten, the moon returns to its orbit just like nothing ever happened and our main character is now the winner who saved the entire world, rejoices with his son and wife to live a happy life as a hero again. The hero scientist who sacrificed himself to kill the alien swarm now lives with the AI swarm in its virtual reality and will be forced to watch Contact for centuries.

For the humanity we need to hope this movie, which totally bombed at the box office, will be the last one from Emmerich. He is a dinosaur which has no idea what the audience expects. He is trying to sell a Laurel and Harvey slapstick movie to an audience which expects an Interstellar sequel.

The issue with time travel movies is, that sooner than later, you end up in a time paradox. One which would have horrible consequences. Especially, when you travel to the past. Any action, could influence the future and create a paradox.

That is the primary reason, why the premise of this film makes little to no sense.

30 years from now, apparently Aliens are taking over the world and humanity has lost the war. Now, in order to fix it and not create a paradox, they do not want humanity to prepare for the war, but they only want to send recruits to fight in the war. These are sent with little to no training and preparation which leads to their high mortality rate.

Now, you would think that if you have a time machine, you could draft them at a time point in which you have fully trained and better equipped soldiers, but those guys in the future or the writers did not really iron that part out.

The aliens are obviously almost invincible, with only a few vulnerabilities on their neck. Go figure. They run fast, swim, fly/glide but they are fairly well killed by bombs. OH, did I mention that F-22´s are still operational in the year 2050? Who would have thought that!

But back to Chris Pratt. So despite being vetted and cleared to fight in the future, he is assigned to a mission in which he immediately meets his now adult daughter, who is a super specialist trying to figure out how to kill those aliens with a toxin. While she should be guarded as a national treasure, she goes herself on a suicide mission to retrieve an alien queen which holds the key to her research. They manage to extract the queen in a cage (anyone figured out how they got that cage down there through the tiny hole?) and as their helos get destroyed by the hordes of the aliens they manage to escape in a Humvee.

Back at their base she is quick in discovering the toxin, but the male aliens come to rescue the queen in hordes and obviously there is no stopping them. Pratt is about to jump back in time with the toxin to get it manufactured in masses to win the war.

Now, this kind of kicks off the time paradox, but nobody believes him so we are still safe. But honestly, you ever seen a soldier return from the battlefield, holding vital information, the weapon against the future doomsday and nobody cares. When he comes with information about a possible location, to which he is guided by a teenage kid/hobby volcanologist, nobody from the government wants to investigate.

So he does the only thing which you can do in this kind of situation- you go ask dad for help. He and a couple of friends fly to Russia (undetected) poorly equipped immediately discover the location of the alien space ship. To get in, they cause an explosion the US Army would take weeks to prepare. While this would collapse any ice caverns beneath, they still get to a space ship. Without properly scouting the ship, they kill a few of the aliens, which only causes the others to wake up. So they decide to blow up the ship (again, without proper preparation), but realize that one queen got out. So the father-son duo go hunting the queen, which is pissed cause they killed all the other aliens. Ultimately, in a rather hilarious and hardly believable battle they kill her and prevent the war from happening.

We arrived at the time paradox. Without a war, they would never have the toxin. But nobody gives a damn, we are all safe now.

It would be at this stage where most of us would like the time paradox just created to completely destroy the movie and return the time we spent watching this trash. It is just a ripoff of so many movies and has been filmed in so many other movies. This one brings absolutely nothing new. Acting is horrible at times, characters are poorly developed, events are totally predictable. There is no twist, no surprise, no suspense.

If you are a fan of sci-fi movies, go watch something else.

I have to admit, watching The return for the first time, I had mixed feelings.

The first time I have seen it I liked that Lynch is still Lynch, but disliked the at some points weird special effects, which seemed sub par in the current time of endless CGI.

The story felt even weirder than many other Lynch movies, and it is super hard to understand what is going on and at times the user has to endure seemingly endless subplots which lead to nowhere.

I have to say, I have now rewatched The Return about 4 times. It is amazing that even after so many times I am able to find clues how to untangle the mystery of Twin Peaks and actually understand it, or better said, at least try to understand it.

And the best is, crave for more. More of the weirdness, more of the sub par special effect, more of Lynch, more of Dale Cooper and the Twin Peaks clique.

If you did not like The Return when you watched it first time, give it another try and you will be surprised how many things will start making sense.

I have hoped Midnight sky will be a good movie. The cast was good, the trailer looked promising, but that is about where the good things end. All the rest is as story of overpromising and underdelivering. Or, perhaps even worse, it stops making sense.

Clooney did a good job as an actor, showing one of his better performances. And while the other cast looks promising, their acting is subpar. The crew of a sole spaceship returning home shows little to no emotions when they find out that everyone on earth they know is dead, and the planet they hoped to return to is no longer inhabitable. The events on the ship are sometimes fully predictable. Just as Clooney is about to tell them - and us - what really happened down on earth in just 10 days, weird communication blackouts start and a meteor storm, not detected on radar hits the ship destroying the antenna. The next 20 minutes or so are just showing how the crew fixes the damage, only for another meteor storm to hit out of nowhere and killing one of the crew members. Again, the crew shows no emotions past this event.

The incredible stupidity of the plot continues as two of the crewmembers decide to take the shuttle to earth despite the disaster engulfing earth and the warning from humanity´s largest scientist, not only stripping the space ship from one of shuttle landers (talk about no backup), but also leaving the long return trip to the remaining two crew members, which again, showing no emotions start entering the course back to the Jupiter moon. All of this, to the sounds of a horrible soundtrack, which is completely decoupled from the events you see on screen.

It feels like they blew the budget on the relatively good visuals, but had none left to actually consult real scientists. A moon of Jupiter which is large enough to have volcanic activity but till today has avoided detection by any probe we had there. Cataclysmic event on earth and nobody except our main actor thought to send a message to the crew of the spaceship. Meteor storms out of nowhere which we do not know about, spaceships not able to fly without a beacon from earth... The list of bad science in this movie is endless.

Fortunately, despite the super slow pace, the film has an end. You will not really know what happened to earth. Or to the guys which flew down, or to the crew flying back. And you even do not want to know, being just happy that it ended and did not continue for another 30 minutes without any sense.

For years I was hopeful that the original Independence day would get a sequel. Now, for years I am regretting that it ever did.

Overall, it is a dumb movie, made for dumb people. While this sounds like an insult, it is not. The sheer fact that this film tanked at the box office and earned way less than the original means, that humanity has evolved and requires so much more from movies than what was given to us in this film.

The reasons why this film has not lived to its expectation are many. Bad actors, performing poorly is for sure one. But even the best actors would most likely not be able to save the poor script based on which this movie was filmed.

One of the things which kill it, is that the sequel does not move a bit further from its original and builds on the same basics. Earth is unaware that a ship the size of the moon is approaching until it is in your backyard. It lands on earth, with the terran defenses unable to make a dent into it, so they try the same stupid tactics of sending squadrons of fighters which are one by one shot down by the alien fighters. Bomber pilots are unable to destroy the mothership, as the nuclear bombs can not be detonated by them but must be triggered from earth. In the middle of all of this a mom with a newborn baby is rescued from a skyscraper while the mom of one of the fighter pilots falls to certain death. (we knew this would happen the moment the camera cut to the scene).

Earth is yet again at the brink of total destruction, as aliens dig a hole to the earths core. The only hope left is a heroic pilot and a mad scientist. Yes, yet again.

In a unexpected twist (blink blink) the scientist with the help of a friendly alien intelligence comes up with a plan, while the pilot flies around in a stolen alien craft at his will. Obviously, the alien queen, instead of sending her massive armies to destroy the alien intelligence or continuing to drill for the core, leaves the safety of the mother ship and goes on a personal vendetta mission, only to attack a school bus full of kids. With a queen this stupid, its only a matter of time until the heroic pilot kills her after some physics and logic defying moves.

Earth is saved, and so is the rest of the brain cells of the viewers. With a bit of luck, this horrible movie will end the Independence day series, or at least postpones the next sequel until a time, where script writers catch up with the intelligence of the audience.

Amongst all disaster movies I have seen in the last 2 decades, this will get a prominent spot. But one which puts this movie really into the top position of the most dumb movies ever seen. Yes, this movie has managed to actually beat 2012. I even find The Core as a way better movie than this one, which is a complete waste of time.

For one - the movie is absolutely unbelievable. Hell, even Sharknado seems like a scientifically researched movie against this. And while in every single disaster movie you know from the beginning, that a disaster will strike, you still can incorporate some twists, some unpredictable and entertaining storyline into the movie. Clearly, this was not the case in San Andreas - the disastrous disaster movie.

But lets go step by step - opening scene - a girl drives in her car and does all the stupid things you should not do while driving. The only surprising thing is that her crash happens only on the 3rd time she does some stupidity. But from the first second you knew she will crash. Our hero - The Rock - immediately comes to the rescue while her heavy American built SUV is being held above an abyss by one tiny winy tree branch which would hardly hold an adult American person. But with some totally unbelievable airmanship, our hero positions his chopper in a way to rescue this poor girl in the last second.

And then things go on like this - totally predictable - disaster strikes and in the last second our heroes manage to save themself or be saved by Dwayne. The amazing thing is that everybody else is totally dumb and despite super strong earthquake, the folks in San Francisco head down to the bay to be rescued - like no one ever heard of a tsunami, which would be so obvious with a 9+ earthquake. But guess this is not elementary knowledge to anyone around. And while buildings around keep collapsing like the architects would never even consider risk of an earthquake in SanFran, you see how Dwayne actually keeps stealing cars, boats just in order to save his two kids. And totally unpredictable - despite not having a way to contact them, he manages to find them. Better said - the kids use a laser pointer to signal him, but he and his wife took almost 2 minutes to actually look around and notice them, because yes, its so important to discuss - hey darling, whats this, oh, a green dot, lets pretend we are cats and try to catch it. Every normal person would virtually immediately turn around and look for the source.

But considering how stupid everybody around acts, the viewer of this movie should not be surprised about that. And neither should be about the typical dumb ending of the movie - because - nothing is more important after a huge disaster, than to raise the US flag onto the collapsed Golden gate bridge - I mean - you guys have them always handy so that they can get raised immediately after disaster strikes?

So, the real issue of this movie is, that there is never any suspense. There is never any association of the viewers with the poorly developed characters. The storyline is absolutely not entertaining and forgettable, CGI effects are nothing to write back home about. So unless you really want to torture yourself, just simply ignore this movie and watch something else

Going to theaters in the recent years was a pain. Not physical, but emotional, or intellectual. What Hollywood was serving us was either some kind of dumbing down movie or a miserable attempt in creating a prequel or sequel of some old and successful movie. With a few exceptions the recent years have not brought any new epic stories, emotions or acting performances to us. But in years where the dream factory in Hollywood runs out of ideas and serves us movies with a vampire killing Abe Lincoln, you can not really expect great cinema. Yet, you can find it from a very unusual source.

French cinema is quite respected in Europe, but mainly for popular movies from the last century, which are still very high on the pedestal of fame. But one can hardly remember any fabulous french movies from the last decade. Intouchables is a movie which for another generation will put french cinema back where it belongs.

At first view the plot is full of clichés - rich vs poor, white vs black etc. Americans would depict the movie as not politically correct, racist, but it is actually the absolute opposite. Although Phillipe is rich, white and disabled, he is still only a human. He wants to be treated as such and finds exactly this in the poor, black Driss from the Parisian suburbs. Race or wealth do not play a role in their relationship. Driss delivers a few jokes about Phillipes disability, but they are never meant to hurt or insult, but to make Phillipe laugh and enjoy life as it is.

The film builds up an amazingly rich atmosphere around this uneven relationship. Acting is one of the best I have seen in years, both in the funny as well as sad scenes. Francois Cluzet in some of the scenes delivers a performance beyond capabilities of most actors and reminded me of Dustin Hoffmans performance in Rain man. His acting in final scene in which Phillipe meets Eleonore has been brilliant and delivered one of the most powerful movie experiences ever. While the audience has laughed for the biggest part of the movie, no one was able to leave the cinema without tears after this final scene.

There is only one thing which is negative about this movie. It is the fact that not enough people, especially in the US will see it in its original form. The reluctance to show non English spoken movies in US theaters will rob you of this gem. However given the success of this movie worldwide I am afraid that Hollywood will sooner or later make a remake of this movie, will make it politically correct and rob it of all the emotions and beauty of the original.