Reviews

For fans of: Rampage, the latter Transformers sequels

I really enjoyed the Godzilla from 2014. Gareth Edwards is a great director and he built up suspense and put together scenes carefully and tightly so the whole movie was a very absorbing experience - and the final appearance of Godzilla with his nasty snarling smirk at the end was immensely satisfying. The destruction of the city felt so huge and legitimately terrifying. It wasn't perfect, but an outstanding blockbuster debut and a standout reboot movie.

This sequel is an abomination. Half of this CGI montage is devoted to a lifeless family melodrama that seems to take center stage. Though the daughter is compellingly played by Millie Bobby Brown, her parents are cliche caricatures of real people, motivated in the most asinine way by their emotions about their dead son. The mother "turns bad" and joins an obscure crew of ecoterrorists, the twist clumsily revealed in concert with what seems like a Powerpoint presentation or montage she must have edited herself. The idea is humans are bad, so it's okay for the monsters to kill us all, and this paperthin philosophical choice she makes she regrets almost immediately, when she realizes she only did it... because she was sad.

The father is way worse. Playing the same character he usually does, knock-off George Clooney is a wayward drunk who only wants to reconnect with his family. He ends up taking the lead, intuitively understanding every senseless twist and turn of the movie, ordering around Monarch's top scientists and even the US military - because he is a wolf researcher? What a bunch of bunk.

The monster reveals are definitely cool. But nostalgia-fueled fanboyism must have played a role in how this movie includes them - every single monster on earth comes from nowhere to fight, and almost no meaningful time is devoted to understanding where they came from or what they can do. Only when the plot seems to be spiraling out of control will someone baselessly claim that the monster is, say, clearly the dragon of Oriental lore, or the worshiped beast of a long-lost civlization. This film has no patience at all, and zero devotion to detail. All that matters is that all of them show up.

The fight scenes themselves, again, are sometimes really cool. But each successive visual is interspersed with incoherent sequences of ungrounded, murky shots of these creatures which don't connect to any narrative about who is winning or losing, what the monsters can do, and don't really give justice to the idea that they are much, much larger than the cities they destroy. And they are spliced with aimless scenes of our heroes desperately running around in circles as they effortly evade falling pieces of concrete and hyperlethal levels of radiation - heroes who are, at best, poorly written, and, truly, just extremely annoying cliches.

And the climax of the movie is so flatly handled that I wasn't sure the movie was over until our many monsters have suddenly arrived to swear fealty to our newly badass king lizard Godzilla, after having absorbed nuclear radiation to both heal and... become a thermonuclear weapon? I will never forget the line about Godzilla's "radiation reaching critical mass."

I keep seeing this - "This is what a Godzilla movie is supposed to be." A Godzilla movie shouldn't be bad, is my contention. If you are going to include more than an hour and a half of screen time focused on the human characters, try to give them some kind of depth or realistic motivation so the stakes and the world they live in is worthwhile. I might as well have watched any other corporately produced disaster movie that sucked. Godzilla and the characters from his universe deserve much better.

I will start with the positive aspects of this film, of witch there are few. Mel Gibson is believable, if only because all he had to do was look slightly downcast and beyond that be emotionless. The movie is slightly frightening at times and the scenes in the corn are legitimately scary.

Aside from these small redemptions, this movie is ridiculous. Although the aliens can travel across the universe and make themselves invisible, they are completely incapable of protecting themselves from their weakness, water (?), which covers most of the surface of the planet they are attacking, is the most common part of the beings they plan to harvest, they cannot escape from rooms if they are boarded up, they cannot fight or exert any strength on anything... The list goes on.

Near the end, an alien that is left behind in the house grabs the boy, who is suffering from asthma. Then, in the least effective scene I have seen in any movie, the family all stares in horror at the alien. The father has a religious realization while he is staring... Meanwhile, the alien continues to stand there, not moving, apparently equally appalled as the humans. He makes no attempt to escape, does not harm the boy, and waits a full five minutes, waits until the family realizes that they could hurt the alien with a baseball bat (genius!) to use his poison spray. Why not attack the alien earlier? Why not take the boy and escape? Why didn't the family take the medicine down with them? Why didn't they have weapons with them? Why is this movie so terrible?!?!

The theme of the movie is religious. I can accept that, except that it is badly contrived and makes a ridiculous connection between religion and coincidence. The bizarre tendency for the little girl to leave cups of water out is a blatant setup for the ending, when water is exposed as the aliens' weakness. The boy's asthma was also obviously set up for the poison gas the alien sprays in his nose. And it is apparently miraculous that the main character's wife told him to tell Merril to keep playing baseball. Because she obviously meant that only he, great baseball player that he was, could possibly use a baseball bat to kill an alien. And because they had all of their own bizarre problems or talents (the ability to swing a baseball bat, for example), this means that some divine being is looking out for them. A completely immature and nonsensical interpretation of religion. A clumsy and pathetic attempt to convey this theme. God-awful.

Do not ever watch this movie. It is an insult to science fiction, to movies, to writers, to the audience.

I've always wanted to see Silence of the Lambs and finally got to today. I thought that Hannibal Lector sounded like a really cool character and of course I anticipated excellent film-making with the sort of praise it has received.

I saw it, and I would say that as far as movies like this go, it is excellent. But for cinema in general, Silence is unremarkable and, really, given the hype and awards, ultimately disappointing.

Jodie Foster was good, but she is haunted by the slaughter of a lamb from her childhood? Ridiculous. Anthony Hopkins was great. I think he deserved his award, though his performance is overrated. Not exactly a very complex or hard to portray character...

The story was not particularly exciting. It was fairly clumsy and failed to capture my attention. I was repelled by Buffalo Bill but not interested in his character whatsoever. I watched the movie for the rare encounters with Hannibal Lector, and the search for Buffalo Bill was an uninteresting but necessary backdrop. Also, how on Earth would the FBI bring a SWAT team to a house that is a false tip, that is hundreds of miles away from the killings...? It makes no sense - they completely ignored the evidence and conclusions they had already made. And so, when the so-called thrilling doorbell scene took place, I was not surprised. Of course he's not in Chicago. Ridiculous.

I can honestly say I enjoyed Lector's escape. It was clever and suspenseful (if a bit illogical) and to some degree makes the movie.

And is this movie scary, as has been said? No. Definitely not. The serial killer is creepy, not terrifying. Hannibal is intriguing, but not too scary. I've heard of people not sleeping for days, others having horrific nightmares... I don't understand it.

This movie is worth watching if you like thrillers/serial killer/ kind of movies, but if you go into this film expecting a great piece of cinema, some groundbreaking technique or idea, or a thrilling scene or two as I did, you will be disappointed. A good movie, yes. 23rd on IMDb Top 250? Absolutely not. An 8.7 on IMDb? No.