Reviews

Okay, cards on the table, I'm only about 10 minutes into the first episode, but I was truly blown away by the lack of realism in one of the first scenes. The MC is sitting on a bench, waiting for an emt to check him out, when he spots the bad guy in the crowd. He says more than once, "that's the guy" and then runs after him, but none of the many police officers around follow him or even engage at all, including the cop who was JUST talking to him? And then he gets into a fight with the guy a couple blocks away, and fires his GUN several times, and STILL no cops come rushing over to assist? I mean, there's suspending disbelief and then there's just nonsense, and so far this is falling squarely in the latter category. There should have been at least three cops following him the second he identified the guy.

Full disclosure, I only made it about forty five minutes into the movie before I had to turn it off. It starts off with some poorly written dialogue, and some lazy and hackneyed attempts to make you care about the characters (the main guy has a wife! And oh my, she's pregnant!) which fall extremely flat. That put me on the fence, but I thought, hey, it's a dumb action movie. The dialogue doesn't matter THAT much, right? So I kept watching.

It goes on to tell us that a single arms dealer was able to orchestrate the biggest terrorist attack the world has ever seen - killing several world leaders from the world's most powerful countries, infiltrating pretty much all of London's emergency services, and hacking London's entire electrical grid from a laptop in some warehouse in the middle east - all planned and executed in TWO years - and expects us to just accept it.

Well, I'm sorry, but suspension of disbelief only goes so far. I can believe and magic and space lasers as easily as the next guy, but it HAS to be reasonable within the world it's set in. Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean that you can just write whatever brainless, insane plot you want to without considering realism at all. You still have to ground the plot in SOME reality if you want it to be taken seriously. And as a film that takes place in our reality, I can tell you it was not grounded in the slightest.

I finally turned it off when a motorcycle helmet was able to smash through bullet proof glass that countless bullets could not. I mean, come on. At least put SOME thought into it.

I really wanted to like this show. I had been excited for it since it was announced. I tried to like it throughout the first "season." But on a second viewing, the problems are just more noticable.

My biggest problem with the show is the length. Eight 30-minute episodes, aired weekly? Unheard of. That's why the word "season" appears in quotes earlier - because season one was approximately half a season long. You can either have an 8-episode season with 40-60 minute episodes, or you can have 20-30 minute episodes, but have at least 16 episodes, you can't have it both ways.

My second issue is that there are several scenes and lines that are just so cheesy and unbelievable that they completely break the immersion and the flow of the show for me. These moments are poignantly exemplified in the second episode, where, after a pretty boring and pooly choreographed fight with a giant rhino-like alien, our hero kills the beast with ONE stab to the shoulder with a small, ineffectual knife. This after he had already raked it's entire left flank with flames, which seemed to have no effect whatsoever, implying that this animal is quite tough. Apparently that's not the case, however, since a small incision into its shoulder cand kill it instantly.

That type of laziness in the writing continues to rear its ugly head throughout the show, with clumsy lines such as, "I'm a mandalorian, weapons are part of my religion," which are awkwardly shoved into conversation to seemingly save the creators the effort of working an explanation of mandalorian culture into the narrative naturally. Instead of drawing the show out into a longer, more satisfying and well rounded narrative experience, they tried to force everything into a compact and restrictive 30 minutes episode mark.

And yet, despite this, they still managed to make a lot of the show feel kind of... boring to me? Somehow, it still feels like not very much happens at all in the whole first season. Precious episode time was wasted on unnecessary landscape shots and lingering in moments that did not need the attention, while real narrative progression was left dragging its feet through the little over four hours of actual content "season" one provided.

Now, a lot of that may sound harsh, but I do think this show has potential. With just a bit more attention to detail and focus, it could be great. But season one simply wasn't

At approximately 10 minutes into the film, after the ship was hit by a solar flare, and the crew are being woken out of cryo sleep, one of the pods begins malfunctioning. The crew attempt to pry it open, but are too late, as the inside of the pod is filled with flames. FLAMES.

LOL WHAT?

This instantly shattered the immersion of the movie for me. What kind of cryo pod - something that is DESIGNED to keep people ALIVE would have such a glaring flaw? How could that even happen? The pod gets messed up and therefore it turns into an INCINERATOR? I mean, I know these films require a certain suspension of disbelief, but this is just lazy. Of all the ways a cryp pod could malfunction and end up killing its inhabitant, being filled with FIRE is what they went with? Really? That's not dramatic, that's straight up parody.

I had a very hard time taking the movie seriously after that and it's indicative of all the choices made in this film going forward.

There is a lot about this movie that requires a little bit more suspension of disbelief than your average sci-fi flick. From biologists who have zero interest in biology, to standard scientific and archeological practices being completely ignored by all of the scientists. Many of the actions and motivations of the characters don't seem to fit with who they are supposed to be, and the viewer is frequently left thinking, "why would they do that?"

However, leaving aside the many and frequent breaks from immersion this film offers, the real problems are revealed to be deeper, and the biggest one becomes apparent: it had no real direction. From the get go, the plot seemed to meander around, absently playing with a few ideas that it never really fleshed out, and asking big questions it never actually answered. This lack of direction compounds as the film reaches its climax, and causes it to fall quite short. Moments that should have been impactful and emotional where instead tepid and unmoving. The issue, I believe, is that the plot was never fully fleshed out to begin with. They started with this vague analogy of Prometheus giving humanity fire, representing the 'engineers' creating mankind, and it never really evolves beyond that half-hearted metaphor. What we're left with is a movie thats not really about anything in the broader sense. The entire plot could be summed up with this: some people go to an alien world to find ancient aliens, they find one and it kills all of them except one, who then decides to go to the alien home world, the end. And reading that, you've essentially already seen Prometheus. Truly, the only important moments in the entire film were those last few, where Dr. Shaw makes that fateful decision. You almost didn't even need the rest of the movie.

Overall, it's a meandering, directionless mess of a movie that doesn't answer any of the questions it asks. But I suppose if you need something to kill a few hours, you could do worse.

From the trailer, I was expecting a compelling drama, with a subtly, and intrigue. The line "They are among us and they have plans." was in my head for days.

Then, I watched the first episode. Within ten minutes, I knew I had to revise my expectations. This wasn't an intelligent drama, it was a Tarantino movie. Okay, I can work with that. Not what I was hoping for, but Inglorious Basterds as always a satisfying watch.

Now I'm at the end of the second episode, and I'm left feeling... empty. The humor just isn't there, nor are the satisfying scenes of gruesome deaths for our favorite villains. Instead, we have brutal scenes of the holocaust, the senseless slaughter of Jewish families. We have horror stories from the camps, and the deep pain and sadness of those moments. But there's no balancing of the scales. There are some moments of bland humor, some Tarantino-eqsue splash screens. But the justice, the sense of chaos... missing entirely.

The second episode sees the hunters track down and interrogate a nazi in his recording studio. And after a dramatic and unhappy faux-trial, we seem them torture him for information. They blow his ear drums out, which has a certain ironic justice to it in theory, but we don't feel it in the scene. Instead, we see Jonah squirm and balk, and try to stop them. Instead of the righteous justice dolled out by the Basterds, we are asked to empathize with this Nazi. And it ends up just feeling awful from every side. We hate what he's done, we hate who he is, but now, we even have to hate when he is delivered justice.

Maybe it gets better. I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath.

Before I say anything, I would just like to point out to those people saying that those who rate this movie low went into the movie with their minds already made up - I hadn't read a single review of this movie before I saw it. I had zero preconceived notions. It was just a bad movie.

The one saving grace this film has is its excellent visuals. It seems like the choreographers, set designers, and visual effects teams were the only people working on this movie who had any idea what they were trying to do.

Interspersed between the many scenes that had me rolling my eyes, groaning internally, or just outright laughing at their absurdity, there were actually quite a few scenes that, at least visually, were extremely well done. What stood out to me the most was the scene when Rey was meeting Palpatine for the first time, and his half living corpse descended to meet her on its giant spider-like, robotic life support system. It was a moment of spookiness that went far beyond anything we've seen from star wars before.

However, visuals aside, The Rise of Skywalker was, on the whole, a huge let down. Between simply rehashing the same old story, to literally just reusing the age old villain, this movie felt like they just plugged their new characters into the old Star Wars Formula and then sent it off without looking at it. The plot is muddled and uninspired, the writing is often more cringey than anything, and the amount of deus ex machina that happens is outstanding.

It's very clear that they didn't really know what direction that wanted to go in by the fact that we're thrown into this new palatine plot right at the start of the movie completely out of nowhere. There was not even a single hint in the prior films that there was some big, unknown baddy pulling the strings behind the scenes, and then all of the sudden, Palpatine! It felt like we missed an entire movie between The Last Jedi and the opening crawl of Rise of Skywalker. And yet, somehow, by the end of the movie, it was dragging so much I couldn't wait for it to finally end.

All of the little things aside, though, the final nail in the coffin for me was in the last 30 minutes. You can maybe guess what I'm talking about - the kiss between Rey and Keylo. Apart from their entire connection making absolutely ZERO sense, this terrible choice was the ONE THING I was hoping against hope, ever since the first movie, that they wouldn't do. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, there is absolutely no reason that there would be any romantic, or even platonic bond between these two characters, and yet they decided to canonize it anyway. Absolutely atrocious story telling, does major damage to Rey's character as a whole, and, not to mention, flies directly in the face of abuse survivors. I personally know several people who were deeply upset by this decision, and were brought to tears by it. Deeply disgraceful choice to make in 2019.

It truly amazes me that they can't seem to get star wars movies right. It's such a vast and interesting universe, with such a huge catalogue of potential Extended Universe stories they could explore. And yet, they just keep beating this old, dead horse to pieces over and over and over.

I really can't possibly comprehend what they were thinking with this finale, other than just "lets get this over with." From completely erasing seasons of character development with Jaime, to abruptly ending the whole "winter is coming" arc with a quick, anticlimactic death for the Night King, and then randomly giving Bran the crown for seemingly no reason at all, without anyone else really even trying to get it, the writers have delivered possibly the worst send off to this show that they possibly could have.

They spent the first 7 seasons carefully building up to what should have been some truly amazing climaxes, only to abandon pretty much everything in the final season. Honestly, most of this season, especially the final episode, could easily have been written by a sophomore in high school.

There are not words enough in the english language to describe what a bad job they did sending off this show.