In Defense Of is back! This time, I'm coming to the defense of Joe Dante's underrated sequel to Gremlins. Check it out over on WGTC by hitting the button below!
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Grade: A Directed By: Peyton Reed Release Date: July 6, 2018 Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Pena, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Douglas Life hasn't been easy for Ant-Man. Since we last saw Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) back in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, which saw the heroic ex-con gleefully heading to Germany to help Cap, he's been under house arrest, having had to give up his superhero identity as part of the Sokovia Accords. But when we catch up with him in Ant-Man and the Wasp, he's finally on the home stretch of his two year sentence, mere days away from having the ankle bracelet that has kept him locked up at home removed.
Unfortunately for him, he's called back into action after having an alarming, unexpected dream about his time in the Quantum Realm back in Ant-Man, an event that puts him back into the lives of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), both of whom have been working on a way to get into the Quantum Realm to rescue Hank's long-lost wife, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), and have cut ties with Scott over his having taken the Ant-Man suit to Germany without their permission. As the trio work to solve the mystery of Scott's dream – which may or may not have something to do with Janet – and prep a journey into the Quantum Realm, though, a pair of new threats pop up in their lives: Sleazy criminal Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) and the mysterious Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), two people who want Hank's tech for their own reasons and whose interference in the group's plans may lead to Janet being lost forever. To put it mildly, Ant-Man and the Wasp has very small scale ambitions. Back in 2015, the lighthearted heist movie that was Ant-Man was a refreshing tonal cleanse for the Marvel Cinematic Universe following the more sobering Avengers: Age of Ultron, and so, too, does its sequel serve a similar purpose. Just over two months ago, Avengers: Infinity War embedded itself in pop culture with an ending that reshaped the MCU and left audiences' heads spinning the world over with an incredibly depressing ending that saw Josh Brolin’s Thanos successfully wiping out half of the universe's population, numerous heroes included. As such, the Ant-Man sequel, in all its unapologetically fun glory, arrives at just the right time, easy to dismiss on the surface as inconsequential for not picking up where that film left off or carrying the same kind of stakes but vitally important once you break it down, both for reminding us that this franchise is still meant to be fun and for introducing crucial elements that will come into play in 2019's Avengers 4. In doing so, the Ant-Man sequel wisely sidesteps addressing how the world was affected by Infinity War – something we'll have to wait until next year to see – by turning the clock back a few days before the events of that film, explaining why Scott, Hope, and all the rest were absent from the big, universe-changing event without losing its focus on telling a great story first and foremost, one that uses its smaller scale to weave a tale where family matters most, whether it's Hank and Hope's desperate drive to find Janet or Scott's daughter Cassie's pride that her dad is Ant-Man. Grade: C Directed By: J.A. Bayona Release Date: June 22, 2018 Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall Related: In Defense Of: "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" (1997) Retro Review: "Jurassic World" (2015) Three years after the closure and abandonment of Jurassic World, the fate of the animals left behind on Isla Nublar has become a public concern, as the island's long-dormant volcano has since rumbled back to life, threatening to wipe out the last of the dinosaurs once and for all. After it's decided that no government will step in to rescue them, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who now runs the advocacy organization the Dinosaur Protection Group, is approached by the elderly Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), a man with ties to the late John Hammond and the original Jurassic Park who wants to privately rescue the dinosaurs and relocate them to a new island sanctuary.
Claire agrees, convincing Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to accompany her so that he can help find and rescue the Velociraptor Blue, the last of her kind, all with the clock ticking on Nublar's destruction. But, of course, not is all as it seems, as the team of mercenaries they meet up with as part of the operation are working towards a different goal, one that sees the dinosaurs being brought back to the mainland to be auctioned off, while Blue herself plays into a plan surrounding a new genetically-engineered hybrid: The Indoraptor, a mix of Indominus rex and Velociraptor DNA whose very existence could usher the world into a whole new realm of change. And so is the setup of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the fifth film in the Jurassic Park franchise that I've been cautiously optimistic about. With Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow having stepped down for its follow-up, only delivering the script for Fallen Kingdom alongside his writing partner Derek Connolly, director J. A. Bayona took the reins, and he's been a huge reason why I've been looking forward to the movie, as he directed the excellent horror film The Orphanage back in 2007, while his 2016 fantasy drama A Monster Calls was one of my favorite movies of that year. Here was the chance for the director to showcase his talent for horror and drama on a scale larger than ever before, and though the trailers leading up to its release weren't anything great, I held out hope that he would deliver something exceeding expectations. That's partially why it pains me so much to say that Fallen Kingdom suffers from an identity crisis. The sequel feels very much like it is made up of two movies, halved directly in the middle, the first movie being the rescue story, the second being a fantasy horror film, both singular ideas that could've carried an entire film all their own that instead get shortchanged because neither gets room to narratively breathe. Even further, because each part doesn't have enough time to get expanded upon, their ultimate impact is diminished; for instance, the destruction of Isla Nublar is a big deal, a monumental event for the Jurassic franchise, yet it being placed halfway through the film just feels incongruent with the fact that there's still an hour-plus left to go of something that becomes tonally different. Grade: B Directed By: Colin Trevorrow Release Date: June 12, 2015 Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio On June 11, 1993, Jurassic Park changed my life. I was just three months shy of my fourth birthday, and my mother took me on opening day because it's all I talked about. I wasn't alive in 1977 to have my world changed by Star Wars, or in 1981 when Indiana Jones became a hero kids all over the world wanted to be. Those movies - and others - played a huge role in my childhood regardless, of course, but they weren't "mine" in the way that kids (and even adults) in '77 or '81 were able to claim by simply being there from the beginning to see them reshape pop culture and grow as a franchise. But in the summer of '93, I got "my" movie.
To say that Jurassic Park matters to me more than any other film would be an understatement. It instilled in me a passion for storytelling, for writing in the hopes that – one day – I could sweep even just one person away on an adventure in the way that this story did for me. As a film and as a franchise, I love it, warts and all, and I spent the next decade consuming everything about it. I devoured Michael Crichton's original book, as well as its 1996 sequel. I played almost every video game I could, whether it be Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues on the original Game Boy, the before-its-time Trespasser on PC, or the addictive park builder that was Operation Genesis. I owned the soundtracks. I wrote stories set in this universe, dreaming of sequel possibilities. I spent time on fan sites in the early 2000s leading up to the release of Jurassic Park III in 2001 and after, though in the years that followed, the franchise dwindled away, as a fourth film went from a sure thing to a pipe dream. It took fourteen years for the series to spawn another entry, the result being, obviously, Jurassic World in 2015. That same year, the Star Wars franchise was making a much-anticipated comeback with The Force Awakens, something I - like the rest of the world - was awaiting with bated breath, but at the end of the day, my highest level of excitement was aimed squarely at the return of the franchise I'd spent nearly a decade and a half hoping to see brought back from extinction, hoping that relative newcomer Colin Trevorrow – tapped to direct with only one feature under his belt, 2012’s Safety Not Guaranteed – would deliver on years of expectation. Seeing it opening night was an overwhelming experience; my packed audience clapped and cheered, while my nostalgia amped up every second of the film, allowing me to get swept away simply because I'd waited so long just to step into this world again. I saw the film two more times in theaters, as well as a number of times since, and through those repeated viewings, I've been able to set my nostalgia aside and see Jurassic World for the imperfect beast it is. In the three years that have passed since its release, I've seen many people attempt to rewrite the film's overwhelming success as a fluke, painting the movie with such hyperbolic labels as "the worst blockbuster ever," and that's fascinating, one reason why – on the eve of the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – I've decided to dive back into the film and break it apart. Grade: A Directed By: Brad Bird Release Date: June 15, 2018 Starring: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Vowell 14 years have passed since The Incredibles was released, but for the titular Parr family, not a day has gone by, as Brad Bird's long-awaited follow-up to his superhero classic picks up right where the first film left off. With the Underminer having revealed himself to the world in the closing moments of The Incredibles, Incredibles 2 kicks off by showing what happened next, with Bob, Helen, Violet, and Dash, as well as Frozone, all suiting up to stop him from robbing the city's bank, a very public clash that has major consequences for the family.
Not long after, they're approached by Winston Deavor, the owner of the massive corporation known as DEVTECH, with an offer: He wants to help supers across the globe get back into the public's good graces with their help, with Helen chosen to be the public face of the charge as Elastigirl. While Bob is left to stay at home and watch the kids, including their youngest, Jack-Jack, who is developing a multitude of powers all his own, Helen faces off against the mysterious Screenslaver, a dangerous new foe with the ability to brainwash people and an agenda that has Helen - and all the other supers - squarely in their sights. The Incredibles is one of my absolute favorite Pixar films, and thus I've been really looking forward to another adventure with these characters. It's been a long time coming, and now that it's here, I can safely say it's been worth the wait, though my only major complaint about it – which I’ll get to in a moment – is big enough to deflate my elation just a bit, keeping the sequel from fully hitting the bar its predecessor set back in 2004. Unsurprisingly, everything that made the first film so enjoyable still holds true here. The visuals look more stunning than ever, whether it's in the creative action setpieces or the retro aesthetic that continues to fill every corner of this universe. Michael Giacchino's evocative throwback of a score is still infectious. And, of course, the cast is solid, the film featuring great performances from returning actors like Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Vowell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Bird himself as Edna Mode, to newcomers like Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Sophia Bush, and Huck Milner, who takes over as Dash from the first film's Spencer Fox. Taken all together, Incredibles 2 completely feels like an effortless return to the world of the first film, and that’s a comforting feeling that more than works in the sequel’s favor. Grade: A Directed By: Ari Aster Release Date: June 8, 2018 Starring: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Gabriel Byrne Ari Aster's Hereditary isn't the type of horror movie that rewards impatience. It has its moments of in-your-face terror, but it's less interested in keeping its audience on a rollercoaster ride of overt chills and thrills than it is in methodically cranking up the tension bit by bit, slowly nudging both its characters and its viewers towards the edge of a cliff over which awaits the open maw of insanity.
The film starts quietly, taking us to the wake for the mother of Annie Graham. As we come to learn, Annie and her mother had a troubled history together, one tainted by the presence of mental illness that affected Annie's mother, her late father, and her brother, who had long ago committed suicide. Though Annie attempts to cope with her loss, unsure of exactly whether to feel remorse or relief over the death of her overbearing parent, it's from this event that tragedy swiftly descends upon her family, which consists of her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), son Peter (Alex Wolff), and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), sending them all down a path that shatters their bond to pieces. To say where the film goes following its opening minutes would be to give away the surprises that rest at Hereditary's core, as it takes great strides to use our expectations going into the film of what it could be against us. A character sees what could very well be a ghost early in the film, but the film posits the idea that the vision could be in their head, while Charlie's odd behavior is paired with the unique look of young actress Milly Shapiro to play into the "creepy child" trope that we've seen unfold in countless horror movies before, but it's not so cut and dry. There's an active subversion at play throughout the film's first act that's coated with a fine layer of surrealism. The more we discover about Annie, about her mother, and about the mental illness running in the family, the more the film asks us to question what's real and what's not in the film, situating Annie - and even the children - as potentially unreliable narrators through which we're seeing this world. When someone begins to lose their grip on sanity, looking into their reflection only to see it smiling back at them, we're left to wonder if their mind is being lost to the effects of something psychological - schizophrenia, perhaps - or if there is something more sinister at play, blurring the line between the genealogical and the spiritual. Grade: B Directed By: Ben Howling & Yolanda Ramke Release Date: May 18, 2018 Starring: Martin Freeman, Simone Landers, Anthony Hayes, Susie Porter Back in 2013, Australian filmmakers Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke unleashed their short film Cargo, an engaging, seven-minute piece set in a world ravaged by zombies. In it, a father is bitten by his recently-turned wife after he wakes up in the aftermath of a car crash in the middle of nowhere and is forced to head out on foot to find someone out there in the world who can protect his baby daughter before he himself turns in a matter of hours. It's a simple yet effective concept, and with the release of the duo's feature-length version of their story, also titled Cargo, they have taken the opportunity to dig their heels in and expand upon the emotional angle their short was only able to scratch the surface of.
In the new Cargo, Martin Freeman plays Andy, the husband of Kay (Susie Porter) and father of baby Rosie, the trio living in a houseboat in the Australian Outback, surviving by staying on the move and away from setting foot on land, where they run the risk of encountering what are, essentially, zombies. After a series of events that sees the family forced to abandon their home in search of a hospital, Andy eventually winds up all alone with baby Rosie, he himself having been bitten and left with only 48 hours to find somewhere safe for Rosie before he succumbs to his new infection. Where his journey leads him is for the audience to discover along with him, but Cargo does a solid job of conveying both his geographical isolation and ever-growing despair as his clock winds down. Every new person that Andy encounters is a potential someone that can take Rosie for him, but it's never an easy call to make, as each experience is tempered by the realities of the world around them or the personalities of the people he'd be leaving his heart with. For what kindness and generosity he is met with, he also encounters the worst of mankind, from racism and greed to absolute despair, with the option of suicide even put on the table the worse his condition gets. Andy's path through Cargo isn't an adventure, one where he desperately and heroically fights off the undead, nor is it a horror movie as its superficial genre coating would suggest, as the zombies themselves are relatively unimportant to the narrative at hand. Instead, it is a survival drama that uses its post-apocalyptic setting as a canvass on which to paint a story about finding even a drop of hope in a world that seems to have lost it and of the power of decency. Andy isn't without faults - in fact, the entire situation he finds himself in is predicated on a little white lie he tells his wife early in the film - but he's a kind person who refuses to give up, and the casting of Martin Freeman is a stroke of genius, the always-great actor imbuing the character with his natural charm in a way that makes Andy feel genuine, less a generic, eternally-optimistic hero and more someone struggling to hold himself together underneath the surface because he knows there's far more at stake if he gives even an iota of himself away to hopelessness. Grade: B Directed By: Ron Howard Release Date: May 25, 2018 Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover I've seen Solo, the second entry in the Star Wars Story anthology series following 2016's Rogue One, twice now, and I've had to sit on my thoughts about it. I've been a Star Wars fan my whole life, having grown up on the original trilogy and lived through the prequel era of 1999 to 2005, so this new era of films that kicked off with The Force Awakens back in 2015 has been an interesting thing to watch unfold. As everyone knows, Disney acquired Lucasfilm - and, thus, the Star Wars franchise - a number of years ago, and Solo marks the fourth film to come out of said acquisition.
Up until Rogue One, Star Wars films had always been part of one saga, Episodes I through VII, so there was a lot of cautious optimism surround Rogue One, as it was the first time we were getting a Star Wars film on the big screen that didn't have a Skywalker front and center. Fortunately, though it wasn't perfect, Rogue One was a pretty solid film, and its success demonstrated that the appetite was there for more cinematic stories out of the massive Star Wars universe, as the sheer open-ended nature of it is one big sandbox in which tales could be spun out of any time or place. So it's a little disappointing, then, that the second anthology film decided to play it unnecessarily safe, telling the origin story of everyone's favorite scoundrel with a heart of gold, Han Solo. There's a reason that the character is iconic and as inseparable in the eyes of pop culture from the series as he is to Harrison Ford, and in the original trilogy, we watched him grow from selfish smuggler to selfless hero; that is, all that needed to be said about his character and his arc was done, even before he was brought back for a send-off in The Force Awakens, and the idea of exploring his past felt redundant. After all, we'd already seen what exploring an iconic character's past in this franchise could negatively expose with child Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, so the idea of that happening all over again was - to put it mildly - a little disheartening. But Solo happened anyway, and it wasn't an easy production, as original directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired deep into filming, with Ron Howard brought in to salvage the picture, giving us the final product that hit theaters on May 25th. These very public production woes didn't help perception of the film, either, especially when it was hard to view the film as necessary. That said, it's finally here, necessity be damned, and there's only one question to be asked: Is it good? Grade: A Directed By: Joe & Anthony Russo Release Date: April 27, 2018 Starring: Everyone. Related Reviews: Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Black Panther (2018) Note: Considering how highly-anticipated this movie is, I've done my best to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible, more so than any review I've done in the past, hence why I don't get too in-depth with specifics.
After nearly two and a half hours of eliciting cheers, applause, gasps, and cries of horror from a packed theater, Avengers: Infinity War ended in stunned, shell-shocked silence. The decade-long culmination of a journey that began back in 2008, Infinity War feels just as much a definitive end of an era as it does the beginning of something entirely brand new. In the grand scheme of things, the events and consequences that occur in it will be further explored in next year's fourth Avengers film, a fact that may leave some unfulfilled knowing that they have to wait a year for the second half of this tale to arrive, but on a smaller scale, Infinity War is a complete, satisfying story all its own if you're willing to approach it a little differently. It brings together a decade's worth of plot threads and characters together, from the usual roster of Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy to separate players like Doctor Strange and Black Panther to a slew of other major and minor supporting faces who have popped up over the years, and does so with incredible ease. Many of these characters have never interacted on screen together, and much of the fun in this film stems from seeing certain personalities come together for the first time, like how the egos of Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) clash or how two damaged characters like Rocket Racoon (Bradley Cooper) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) form an unlikely bond. Despite its huge cast, Infinity War gives everyone a moment to shine, however regulated to the background some longtime characters are forced to be, and the wealth of new combinations that allow for characters to spend time out of their comfort zone in the company of others they know nothing about provides for an experience that feels entirely fresh. That said, for all the heroes that show up throughout the film, Infinity War isn't their movie. Sure, Avengers may be in the title, and a handful of characters get to go through their own arcs, which is particularly great for characters like Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch, Paul Bettany's Vision, and Zoe Saldana's Gamora, all of whom finally get to take the spotlight in ways heretofore unseen, but at the end of the day, what Infinity War is for most of them is simply an event, the result of which is something that they - like us - will have to deal with next year. Instead, the one character whose film this truly is is the big bad at its core, Josh Brolin's imposing Thanos, a villain who has been on the periphery of the MCU ever since making his first appearance halfway through the end credits of The Avengers. For all the heroes, the threat of Thanos is a storm they're attempting to weather and quell before it gets any worse, but for Thanos, Infinity War is an experience, and that's how directors Joe and Anthony Russo, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and everyone else involved wisely frame the film. If you're somehow at a loss right now - "Who is Thanos? Why are the Avengers and the Guardians crossing paths? What's going on?" you may be asking - here's a quick recap: Thanos, the most powerful being in the universe, believes in the idea of balance. After seeing his home planet destroyed due to overpopulation that decimated his world's finite resources, Thanos dedicated himself to “saving” others across space from the same fate, wiping out a clean fifty percent of populations at random so that worlds could have new starts and become paradises, one in which children would no longer starve and where cultures could flourish. In seeking to balance out the universe, his eyes have also been set on collecting the Infinity Stones, six items of power - five of which have been introduced in past films - that, when brought together, could give Thanos dominion over aspects of time, space, reality, and more, and the strength to merely snap his fingers and wipe out half the universe. Grade: A Directed By: Ron Underwood Release Date: January 19, 1990 Starring: Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross, Finn Carter, Reba McEntire Where do I begin in talking about Tremors, the 1990 horror-comedy movie about giant, subterranean worm monsters called graboids terrorizing the quiet, barely-populated town of Perfection, Nevada? For starters, it's a movie that I've seen countless times throughout my life, and I have fond memories of many evenings watching it on the USA Network or The Sci-Fi Channel, spellbound by its goofy charm in a way that has ensured that it'll always have a special place in my heart. Yet for nearly three decades, I'd never had the pleasure of seeing it on the big screen, surrounded by other people; that is, until last week.
Now, before I get into both that experience and the movie proper, I have to acknowledge something straight out of the gate, which is the fact that Tremors, despite being almost thirty years old, launched an entire franchise that is still going to this day. In 1996, it received its first sequel, Tremors 2: Aftershocks, a direct-to-video film that I've seen just as many, if not more, times than its predecessor. It's an underrated and underappreciated gem, one that I'll hopefully cover on here one day, and the one-two punch of Tremors and Tremors 2 in the '90s ultimately gave way to Tremors 3: Back to Perfection in 2001, the short-lived Tremors: The Series in 2003, Tremors 4: The Legend Begins in 2004, and Tremors 5: Bloodlines in 2015. And that's still not the end of it, as another sequel, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, is arriving later this year, while a second TV series is being developed with Kevin Bacon set to lead, the actor returning to the franchise for the first time since appearing in the original film. It is, quite simply, stunning that the Tremors franchise has lasted this long, and though the subsequent films that followed Tremors 2 stumbled in quality, in my opinion, they've mostly gotten by purely on their charm, taking the original film's cue in being self-aware enough to not take the goofy premise at their core too seriously. I say all of this because it is important to note that outside of the first film, the Tremors franchise has been relegated entirely to the small screen, and when I had the opportunity to finally see Tremors on the big screen last week, I was pleasantly surprised that the house was nearly packed, with an audience turnout that was evenly balanced across all ages. Before the film even began, I was able to hear an elderly couple talking about how they had seen the film back when it had first been released, a woman my age excitedly telling her partner how she, like me, had grown up watching the Tremors movies on TV, and a father convincing his young children that they were going to have a blast. And throughout the course of the film, it was easy to see just how deeply Tremors has resonated with the people who came out to see it for the hundredth time and how effective it still is for people experiencing it for their first, as every well-placed joke had everyone laughing, every clever reveal garnered an audible "Oh, no!" from several people, and every big, crowd-pleasing moment, like the show-stopping rec room scene or the moment when we learn whether graboids can fly or not, earned applause. Grade: C Directed By: Roar Uthaug Release Date: March 16, 2018 Starring: Alicia Vikander, Walton Goggins, Dominic West, Daniel Wu Nearly 22 years have gone by since the world was first introduced to Lara Croft in the video game Tomb Raider, and the British archaeologist - then gaming's female answer to Indiana Jones - has long since become a gaming icon, backed by a legacy of ups and downs that have led to where we are today, with the arrival of Roar Uthaug's Tomb Raider. The new film takes its inspiration from 2013's critically-acclaimed Tomb Raider, a game that served to wipe the slate clean of two decades' worth of franchise baggage in order to give Lara – and fans – a fresh start in an origin story that showcased a young, inexperienced version of the character discovering who she's destined to become.
The script for Uthaug's film, delivered by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons, follows a similar path, with Alicia Vikander stepping into Lara's boots, her characterization far from the gun-toting, globe-trotting superheroine that Lara had been for years following her introduction (and how she was presented the first time Hollywood attempted to bring Lara to the big screen with Angelina Jolie's two outings in 2001 and 2003.) In this interpretation of the character, Lara Croft lives a life getting by as a bike courier several years on from the disappearance of her father, Richard Croft, but after events unfold that lead to her discovering a clue as to where her father may be, she finds herself traveling to Hong Kong. From there, she hooks up with a ship captain named Lu Ren, played by Daniel Wu, whose father also went missing with Richard when the two men set sail into the Devil's Sea, a dangerous expanse of ocean home to the island of Yamatai. It is there that Richard believed he would find the tomb of Himiko, a queen who may or may not have had supernatural powers, and for the sake of answers about whether or not their fathers are alive, the two head off together to find Yamatai. Now, before I go any further, I have to make a quick comparison to the 2013 game that the film attempts to emulate. That game picks up with Lara and a roster of allies already aboard a similar ship, and it's not long before Lara is stranded on an island and thrust into action. Understandably, the film attempts to turn back the clock a bit in an effort to relay Lara's story chronologically without having to heavily rely upon flashbacks in its own narrative to explain how and why she’s on a ship, but in doing so, the film stumbles right out of the gate with languid, almost interminable pacing, its first act and a chunk of its second weighted down so heavily by needless moments like an extended bike chase sequence that feel more like wheel-spinning than necessity. We're shown important things about Lara's character, like the fact that she practices fighting - something that comes into play later in the film - but it's couched in filler that slows everything to a crawl on its way to get to where the game picks up, wasting nearly half the film before the ball gets rolling. Grade: B Directed By: Steven Spielberg Release Date: March 29, 2018 Starring: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller, Lena Waithe, Mark Rylance The year is 2045. Five years have passed since the death of James Halliday, the man responsible for the creation of OASIS, a virtual reality world designed for everyone in the real world to escape to, take part in, and become anyone and anything they want to be. Since Halliday's death, a number of players have been chasing an Easter egg at the heart of a game he designed requiring players to obtain three keys hidden somewhere within the OASIS, among them being the young Wade Watts (Tyler Sheridan), known in the OASIS as Parzival, a mysterious female player known as Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), and Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the CEO of a shady organization called IOI, the ultimate prize for finding the Easter egg being granted complete control of the OASIS. When Watts becomes the first person to find a key, the race is on to follow the clues hidden in Halliday's past and across the pop culture he was obsessed with to keep the OASIS from falling into IOI's hands.
On the surface, Ready Player One seems like a film designed for someone like me. It references a staggering amount of films, television shows, games, and so on from the '80s, '90s, and beyond from beginning to end that have been a part of my life, proudly wearing its influences on its sleeve, and it's directed by none other than the man responsible for a lot of those very influences, Steven Spielberg, my favorite director of all time. In fact, it's easy to argue that no other director could've been able to tackle a project like this in the first place, as Spielberg's decades-long status and pull in Hollywood undoubtedly played a hand in getting the rights cleared from all the various studios and so on to give us a movie that features the chestburster from Alien emerging from a Mortal Kombat character's chest and the DeLorean from Back to the Future racing around a battlefield as the Iron Giant fights Mechagodzilla. Unfortunately, though, there's a spark missing. Unlike, say, the Harry Potter films or The Dark Tower that I've reviewed before, I haven't read the book by Ernest Cline that Ready Player One is based on, so I won't be analyzing how his novel and its adaptation compare, but I would hope that the novel has more meat on its bones than this. Despite Spielberg being in the saddle, Ready Player One feels as though it was made by someone with a love of the era he reigned in trying to make a Spielberg movie but missing the mark, as odd a thing that may be to say. Spielberg has always excelled, in my opinion, at making the characters that populate his films in the action/adventure realm relatable, and that's something that has made most of them timeless and worth revisiting again and again as a result. We enjoy the man versus nature element of Jaws, the serial pulp of the Indiana Jones series, or how life finds a way in Jurassic Park, but those films have earned their staying power because spending time with characters like Chief Brody, Hooper, Quint, Indy, and Ian Malcolm is akin to revisiting old friends. And that's not to mention the type of inner wonder Spielberg has had an uncanny ability to tap into that bridges the gap between childlike innocence and the realities of adulthood and all that we forget when we grow up that gives films like E.T., A.I., or even the underrated Hook big, beating hearts. Say what you will about Spielberg's sentimentality, but no one else delivers it with such tangible sincerity, which is why Spielberg's works and the characters that reside in them have resonated with so many people for decades. Grade: A Directed By: Ryan Coogler Release Date: February 16, 2018 Starring: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong'o Related Reviews: Thor: Ragnarok (2017) It's hard to believe that nearly ten years have passed since the release of Iron Man, which marked the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but here we are. After making his debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa, aka the Black Panther, has finally gotten a film of his own, the eighteenth entry in the MCU - let that sink in for a moment - that proves, once again, that this massive, groundbreaking franchise is far from running out of steam after all these years. At this point, it's almost impossible to not be aware of the hype that has surrounded this movie, especially in recent months as its arrival has drawn closer. Compared to last year's releases - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor: Ragnarok - Black Panther is facing a wave of expectations as something more than just another high note in the MCU; it's a cultural event, and an important one to be celebrated at that. And though the Ryan Coogler-directed film makes some missteps, which I'll get into in a bit, I personally couldn't be happier to say that Black Panther is a winner, through and through, setting up a solo franchise with a massive, tantalizing future ahead of it that never sacrifices making itself a solid piece of entertainment in the process of doing so. Black Panther isn't a film about chasing Infinity Stones. It's not a film about fighting aliens and robots and saving the world. It's not a film where anyone cares about what the Avengers are up to. This is a film about a boy becoming a man, a man becoming a king, and a king finding not just who he wants to become but his place, and the place of his own people, in a much larger world. It's a tale of family, of the line between holding dear to tradition or letting go to embrace a future, and of sins of the past coming home to roost. It's a film that picks up only a week after the events of Civil War to keep putting T'Challa through the fire so that he can become who he is destined to be, both as a leader of Wakanda and as a permanent fixture in the world he's now irrevocably a part of it. As you'll remember from Civil War, T'Challa's father King T'Chaka (John Kani) was killed early in the film, his death thrusting upon T'Challa a mountain of responsibility that only pushed him down a path of vengeance, but by the end of it, he learned to not let that narrow-minded focus consume him, a lesson that colors in his actions throughout Black Panther. His ascendancy to the throne is not a straight path, however, as he's challenged by forces internal and external, and the meat of the film's narrative is devoted to T'Challa fighting for and proving both to himself and to the people of Wakanda that he truly deserves to be their king. Grade: A Directed By: James Franco Release Date: December 1, 2017 Starring: James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, Ari Graynor I'm going to keep this simple. James Franco's The Disaster Artist is one of my favorite movies of 2017. An adaptation of Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell's book, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, its story chronicles the real-life events surrounding how Sestero met Tommy Wiseau, the tipsy-turny friendship that followed, and, of course, the eventual production of Wiseau's The Room, a film so bad that it's managed to sidestep simply fading into obscurity and transcend into something of legend, a curiosity among a legion of fans who still turn out in droves to attend screenings and know every line of dialogue by heart.
The Room is an anomaly, one whose infamous production is just as fascinating to hear retold as cracking open the enigma that is Wiseau is, and Franco and writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber are all acutely aware of this. The Disaster Artist could have easily been made for a very specific crowd, pandering solely to fans who have seen The Room or treating the whole thing as a joke, but those involved ensure that everybody feels welcome here. You need not have seen The Room or know anything about Wiseau going in to appreciate what's on display in The Disaster Artist, though certainly lacking that knowledge will make one wonder how such a story and human being can actually exist, and that's what helps make the whole endeavor more successful than it had any right to be. This is a story about dreamers. In 1998, a teenage Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) watched Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) drop an off-putting bomb of a performance on their acting class only to ask him afterwards to perform a scene with him. From there, the two develop a friendship that brings them to Los Angeles to chase their dreams of making it big. It doesn't take long for things to start falling into place in Greg's life, getting an agent and a girlfriend and putting his nose to the grindstone, but for Wiseau, with his indiscernible accent and generally weird behavior, nothing goes right. In time, though, Greg learns how rough Hollywood can be, and when both men are at their lowest, Wiseau takes to heart an idea Greg throws out: To take charge of their own fate by making a movie of their own. And thus The Room was born, the production of which tests the limits of the two men's friendship and the sanity of everyone else who gets sucked into its orbit. To be fair, The Disaster Artist tiptoes around some of the darker aspects of the story its telling for the sake of being a little more optimistic, more often than not backing away completely from diving into truly strange territory. When Greg met Wiseau, for instance, Greg was 19, while Wiseau - clearly far older - always claims to be Greg's age. Wiseau calls Greg "Babyface" and convinces him to move to Los Angeles with him, and while this concerning issue is touched upon through Greg's mother (played by Megan Mullally) desperately trying to talk Greg out of uprooting his life on the insistence of a strange man he'd only just met, it's never really played up again as anything more than a peculiar joke. Wiseau gets jealous of Greg's successes and often reacts like something akin to a scorned lover, such as when Greg decides to move out to be with girlfriend, but whether it's because Wiseau is simply overly-attached and envious or because of something far deeper is left up to the viewer rather than attempting to provide any concrete explanation. Grade: C Directed By: Zack Snyder Release Date: November 17, 2017 Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller Related Reviews: Suicide Squad (2016), Wonder Woman (2017) If there's one point I want to emphasize about Justice League right off the bat, it's that it's a film that falls victim to squandered potential, not just its own but everything that has come before it. This is now the fifth entry in the DC Extended Universe - Warner Bros. and DC's own cinematic universe akin to what Disney and Marvel Studios' have been cultivating since 2008 - and yet it feels like it's constantly wrestling with the legacy of its predecessors and what it wants to be on its own merits, all to its own detriment. Like The Avengers back in 2012, Justice League is meant to serve as a milestone event, one that brings characters and plot threads together for the first time in order to kick the door open to a bigger, brighter future, but unlike The Avengers, which had the benefit of a solid foundation with films like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger, Justice League has been built on a rocky one. To be honest, I enjoyed 2013's Man of Steel, our introduction to Henry Cavill as our modern Superman, and even though it had its faults, there was nothing that couldn't be corrected going forward. Instead, what followed was Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016, a film whose few high points (Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Ben Affleck as Batman, for example) couldn't overcome the fact that, to me, the film was an interminable slog, a film that failed to truly live up to or even want to celebrate the fact that it was the first time in cinema history we had DC's Holy Trinity on the big screen. It was, quite simply, a misfire, and coupled with Suicide Squad later in the year, this budding universe stumbled right out of the gate. Fortunately, Wonder Woman proved there was hope earlier this year, which made me think that maybe, just maybe, Justice League stood a chance at learning from how and why that film clicked with people the world over and Batman v Superman didn't. Unavoidably, Justice League has to pick up where Batman v Superman left off, with Superman dead and Batman and Wonder Woman ready to honor his memory by keeping up the good fight. Nowadays, Batman is investigating the emergence of alien scouts known as Parademons, who have come to earth looking for Mother Boxes, three objects that, when put together, wield boundless power that can destroy worlds. The Parademons are searching for them on behalf of Steppenwolf, an alien being who once controlled the Mother Boxes but lost them thousands of years earlier in a conflict with the people of Earth and is now ready to recollect them and try decimating the planet again following the death of Earth's Kryptonian protector. As Steppenwolf begins to achieve his goal of collecting the objects, Batman and Wonder Woman reunite to put together a team in order to stop him, bringing together The Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) in the hopes that they alone can stand between Steppenwolf and victory in a world without Superman. Considering its status as a big team-up event that fans have been waiting decades to see happen, it's hard not to draw immediate comparisons to The Avengers for the sake of highlighting why Justice League both works and doesn't work. On a narrative level, on a character level, and even on a thematic level, The Avengers earned its team-up. By 2012, we'd spent time with Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk and Thor and Captain America individually; we knew their quirks, their personalities, and their backstories to the point that The Avengers could start rolling straight out of the gate. We'd seen what the Tesseract - the "weapon" of the film - was capable of in The First Avenger that when it showed up in The Avengers, there was a quantifiable danger surrounding it. And, of course, we'd spent time with the film's villain, Loki, in Thor, whose return in The Avengers carried with it real weight for both what we knew he was capable of and for the personal connection he had to the team via his brother. To put it simply, all of this added up gave The Avengers real stakes; these were characters we'd come to know and love coming together to face a threat we could invest in to protect a world that had sucked us in over the course of several movies. |
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