State of Play is the story of a reporter (Russell Crowe) trying to investigate the murder of a young girl who was working for an up-and-coming congressman (Ben Affleck). The story is interesting enough, and the plot twists and turns just the right amount to keep you interested, even if you see the twists coming. One word of caution though, the ending isn’t spelled out as clearly as most, and if you don’t pay attention during the movie, you may walk away at the end not sure what happened to who, and who got their comeuppance.
Performances in this one are pretty good all around. The highlight for me was the always fantastic Helen Mirren as Crowe’s boss. She plays a character that is much more in-your-face and hardnosed than she normally does, and it works really well. I’m all for seeing Helen Mirren play a hard ass. I also really liked Ben Affleck’s performance in this one. He went through a rough patch, but it looks like he’s come out alright on the other side with quality performances in this movie, Hollywoodland, and a fantastic turn behind the camera in Gone Baby Gone. I hope he can keep this up, because I like seeing him do well.
Although the acting is great, the biggest issue that I had with this movie was that it wasn’t the original miniseries. I hate typing those words. I know that it makes me sound like an elitist asshole. I don’t mean for it to. I hate the people who are always like “The book was better” or “I prefer to watch Bad News Bears in French, as it was originally intended”. The reason I say that I prefer the miniseries is that it is six hours long. For most people that may turn them off, but I loved that it gave the writers more time to develop the subplots and flesh out relationships between the characters. In the miniseries you felt like you were taking a step by step journey along with an investigative journalist, whereas in this movie I felt like they made a lot of plot jumps without having time to fully justify them. If I didn’t know the story, I feel like I would have constantly been saying “Now, why are we going to this building? How did they know to meet them there?” In order to trim the movie by two-thirds, this version had to eliminate entire characters and plot points. One of the more interesting characters from the original (portrayed by James McAvoy early in his career) is completely missing. I realize that this is necessary to get the movie down to 2 hours, and he was probably the only main character you could cut, but it still was sad to see that character eliminated. At times it felt like you were missing out on some of the key parts of what made the original so good. If you’ve never seen the miniseries, you won't be pining for what you don't know you're missing, but for those fans of the original, you will likely be disappointed at the loss of some of the more subtle character interactions and back story.
Overall, the movie is solid. It has a few strong performances, some nice showings by supporting actors (Jeff Daniels and Jason Bateman in particular), and has a plot that is interesting enough to keep you watching. I think the writers did as good a job as they could to cut a miniseries down to a movie, but the entire affair still seems truncated. I’d buy the movie three drinks at its favorite bar on Capitol Hill, but to anyone who saw this and felt it to be incoherent or lacking, give the miniseries a try. Ugh, I hate myself.
Let’s get this out of the way up front: I’m not a Trekkie. I say this not to try and make myself sound cool, or distance myself from this subset of geek culture, but I say this so that you’ll go easy on me. I’ve never watched the shows, I’ve only see a few of the movies, and my knowledge of Star Trek does not extend beyond Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Picard, and the guy from Reading Rainbow. I likely missed half of the fan-service in this movie, and will probably embarrass myself with at least one or two of the comments I make during this review. Consider this the review for those that are uninitiated to the cult of Star Trek, comments below are not necessarily applicable to those who worship at the altar of the Enterprise.
From a plot perspective, this movie starts out at the beginning of it all, with the birth of Kirk. Things are a bit slow to get going, but the movie does hit its pace mid-way through. I think part of the reason the opening felt slow is that it kept dancing around things. We already know that Kirk is going to join Starfleet, we can skip the back-and-forth will he/won’t he. I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but again, this suffers from what I will call “prequel-itis.” Kirk is not going to die, you know this. At the end of the movie, we’ll end up with the crew as we know it, and things can move forward. I know that practically zero summer action movies actually kill off the main characters, but it does still take away part of the tension. Knowing the fates of these characters, and knowing the locations they will find themselves at the end of the film does rob the ending of some of its punch. This is less a gripe about the movie itself, and more my own personal stance towards the recent influx of prequels, reboots, etc. I’ve said it before, but when you already know the ending of the movie, it becomes much more about the journey than the ending itself. The good news for Star Trek, is that the journey was actually good.
The casting in this movie was extremely well done. I loved Chris Pine as Kirk. He perfectly pulled off that sort of rogue, confident, upstart who walks the tightrope between being awesome and being an overly cocky douchebag. He also avoids the pitfall of trying to do a Shatner impression. Wouldn’t have worked, smartly avoided. The other cast members, in particular Simon Pegg as Scotty, John Cho as Sulu, and Karl Urban as Bones, all do a great job with what they’re given. Sadly the each end up with fairly little screen time. This movie is clearly about Kirk and Spock. Speaking of, I wasn’t particularly crazy about Quinto’s Spock, but the more I think about it and talk to others about the movie, I think it’s just that I find the character of Spock as pretty lame. When you have a character that can’t display emotion, it makes it difficult for me to appreciate that character, as I typically lean towards “this guy can’t act for shit.” I’m willing to give Quinto the benefit of the doubt here though, as everyone else is so well-done that I can’t imagine that this is anything less than exactly what Abrams was shooting for.
Speaking of Abrams, he does a great job here. This movie really feels unique, but at the same time, faithful. It’s very much a Star Trek movie, but it also loudly echos Abrams and his frequent collaborators (writers Kurtzman and Orci, and producer Lindelhof). This is almost exactly what you’d expect to get when you cross the Abrams-verse with Star Trek. There’s that element of off-kilter science fiction that tries its best to be based in fact, and he even throws in a pretty obvious Alias reference for those who can spot it (Rambaldi device anyone?). As a big fan of his, this sat with me quite nicely, and I’m more than comfortable with him at the helm for the sequel(s). That being said, I know the joke has been made, but seriously, cool it with the lens flares. I get it, it’s the future, it’s bright, it’s shiny. Message received.
Overall, I found the movie enjoyable, if a little slow. Unfortunately, the movie seems to end exactly where you’d expect the plot to really get started. I suppose that’s kind of the point of a prequel though. I will say that watching the ending of this movie got me really excited for what’s to come in the sequel, and I suppose that’s the perfect praise for a movie like this: I’m excited to see what they come up with next. It still leaves me slightly unsatisfied with the plot as a whole though. Maybe I’m just not the prequel type, or maybe I’m not enough of a Trek fan to care, but I really didn’t need to see how each of these characters met or how they didn’t get along at first, but now they do. I would have been content starting the movie right from that point. Yes, you lose a bit of character development, but that’s easy enough to wrangle in once we’re moving. I guess this isn’t particularly Star Trek’s fault. I think I’m just personally fed up with the prequel/reboot genre. We didn’t used to need entire movies for this. What has caused this culture shift? Why can’t we accept that these four people are a crime fighting team? Why do we always need to show you how they met, why they became a team, how their first mission didn’t go so well until they learned to get along, etc. I don’t know what to blame. Was it the success of Batman Begins? Before that? I loved Batman Begins, I don’t mean to take anything away from it, but if that movie is the reason why we have to reboot every single franchise on Earth and give it a grittier, darker origin story, I’m afraid I’m not going to look back on that movie’s cultural impact fondly. Don’t blame Trek for these transgressions, it’s merely a product of the environment movies find themselves in. But suffice to say that where Dark Knight exceed upon Batman Begins, I look for Trek 2 to exceed upon this one.
Even though I’ve clearly got some sand in my underpants surrounding reboots, I’d still buy this movie 4 beers out of any six-pack. I’d probably even pony up for a two extra shots. One shot for the potential of our next drinking excursion, and another for the pitch-perfect joke about “red shirts” - a comedy goldmine even for those with the barest of Trek knowledge.
Did you see the first Transformers? Congratulations, because you just saw the second Transformers. There isn’t a hell of a lot of difference between the two, and all of the faults I had in the first one remained basically unchanged in the second one. Still, that does mean that if you liked the first one, you’ll probably like this movie for all the same reasons.
I don’t mean to come off like some sort of jerk or elitist, but there are a few things I have to get off my chest about this movie, and most of them aren’t good. I always feel bad trashing a movie, because I’m sure that there were hundreds of people that worked really hard in making it, and I don’t like coming in and trying to trash that. So, instead of saying that this is a “bad” movie, I’ll just say that I didn’t like it. Now we’re just talking about a matter of opinion, rather than of fact.
To begin with, my biggest grievance with this movie is that there are no characters. Rather than develop the characters we met in the first movie, the real “stars” of this movie are the Transformers. I suppose that makes sense, as that’s the title of the movie (and they were the stars of the cartoon), but I still find it difficult to watch a movie that is largely comprised of CGI characters. Technology has continued to advance and make these digital effects look more lifelike, but as humans I think we have difficulty relating to non-human characters appearing in life-like settings. The rule doesn’t apply to animated films where everything is animated, but grafting these things into real life is still jarring. It didn’t work with Jar-Jar (see the pun I just set up there?), and it still doesn’t work here. The rule is not exclusive, and there are exceptions. Gollum from Lord of the Rings is a great example of a CGI character that actually worked, but those are definitely the exception rather than the rule. Even then, I’m of the opinion that Gollum only worked because it was a digital interpretation of Andy Serkis. Through Serkis, we were able to see Gollum interact with the other actors on the screen. In Transformers however, they’re all robots. We’re simply stuck watching one CGI character interact with other CGI characters. This left me feeling a little flat, as I didn’t feel connected to any of them. Additionally, as all these characters are undeveloped and built almost exclusively in the gray color palette, you will never have any idea what is going on in fight scenes. You never know if the good guy is winning or not, because you just keep seeing a gray robot getting punched by another gray robot and you have no idea who that is. Also, I realize they were trying to give the robots a sense of larger-than-life scale, but pull the freaking camera back. Please. These things aren’t real and you can frame the shot however you want, so give them a bit more room to work in the frame. That would have gone a long way to helping me at least try and keep track of who’s winning and who’s losing. When I give up even trying to follow the fights in a movie that is basically nothing but one large fight, you really limit my ability to enjoy the movie.
The few humans that do populate the film do a mixed job. I personally like Shia LaBeouf quite a bit, and he was in typical Shia-form here. Megan Fox is no Meryl Streep, but she isn’t as bad an actress as everyone makes her out to be (also, she’s easy on the eyes). She definitely gets the short end of the stick here, as her character didn’t really feel integral to the plot. They clearly kept her character in the movie solely because Megan Fox is hot, and they know that will sell tickets. My least favorite character in the flick was the “roommate” character that was supposed to live with LaBeouf’s character. While the actor playing the roommate didn’t do a bad job, this character was pretty distracting because he keeps dropping in and out of the movie with no rhyme or reason, whenever they need a third person in the scene. It happens so often that I guarantee you that at least twice in this movie you will forget the character exists and then exclaim “He’s still here?” when he pops up mid-battle to find himself in need of saving.
From a plot perspective, some of the things that take place are downright ridiculous. First of all, the Transformers are supposed to be “secret” and the people of Earth don’t know about them, yet they enter the movie by skydiving from a plane into downtown Shanghai? Yeah, pretty sure someone is going to see that. The movie also suffers from allowing the locations to drive the plot. These cool locales never feel like we arrived there organically. Instead it felt written backwards like “What has to happen to get the Transformers to the Pyramids?” On top of this we had some comedic moments that left me feeling so awkward that I almost had to turn away from the screen. These moments were so awkward, that I checked the writing credits to see if Ricky Gervais was involved in the project. The problem here is that when Gervias creates these awkward moments, he is legitimately trying to create something that is funny. Unfortunately, it seems like this movie was legitimately trying to elicit laughs. These moments stood out in stark contrast to how seriously the movie wants itself to be taken, and largely fell flat. Very flat. Case in point: The ridiculous “ghetto” robots that talked in ethnic slang. I realize they were meant to be the comic relief. However they were such a ridiculous stereotype, and so stunningly racist, that I could not believe these characters were written seriously.
I think my biggest problem with this movie is that it screamed laziness. They didn’t even bother to try and make this movie seem coherent. The plot just jumped from point to point with very little explanation, and I constantly kept forgetting where we were and how we got there. My favorite example comes about half-way through when the main characters head to Washington DC to visit the Air and Space Museum. Without giving anything away, let’s just suffice it to say that at some point, they demolish a wall of this building, and walk outside. By itself, that’s not too terrible, however my problem with the scene is that when they walk outside, they are suddenly in New Mexico! The film makes absolutely no mention of this. Perhaps I am hyper-sensitive to this scene as a DC resident, but I don’t think it takes a degree in geography to realize that walking out the back door of a building in the DC suburbs does not put you smack dab in the middle of a mountainous desert. To add insult to injury, once they are in New Mexico, the camera does one of those “spin around the main character” moves and you can see that there is not a single building in sight. Not only did they try and play off a cross-country filming location swap, but they then have the audacity to clearly show you that there are no buildings anywhere near where the characters are now standing. In a movie that is 90% CGI, couldn’t we have thrown a building in there somewhere? It’s just that kind of half-assed attitude towards trying to make this movie flow that drove me nuts as I watched it. I wasn’t stupid enough to try and dig for plot holes and continuity errors in a Transformers movie, but when they are so blatant and ridiculous that you can’t help but trip over them, it seems unfair to pretend like I didn’t notice.
Wow. That probably came out a little hate-filled. I don’t mean to be so hard on a mindless action flick, but you could almost feel parts of this movie going “Oh, who cares. Just do whatever and these idiots will pay to see it anyway.” You want to know the sad part? They’re right. No matter how bad Transformers 2 was, when Transformers 3 finally does come out (as we all know it will) people are still going to see it, and it’s still going to make money hand-over-fist. That noise you hear is the sound of a million different independent actors and directors re-evaluating their life goals.
I’d probably only buy this movie one drink, and even then it’s just going to be an excuse to hang out with Shia LaBeouf. If he wanted to bring the robots along, I’d definitely be ordering drinks on their tab.
I decided to go into this movie with my expectations near rock bottom. I expected a mindless, big budget, over the top summer movie. We had an agreement. As long as the thing kept moving, entertained me, and didn’t try and take itself too seriously, I would overlook gaping plot holes and a litany of other ridiculous goings on.
G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra serves as an origin story. Not for the Joes, which has already been created by the start of the movie, but for (as the titled suggests) the Cobra. This prequel-type plot line does, as I’ve mentioned in other reviews, take away much of tension in the film’s plot. Cobra Commander probably isn’t going to die in this one, as the film is called “Rise of the Cobra”. I also just spoiled the movie’s ending for you, at the end of this movie, Cobra will have risen (but you probably guessed that already). I say this because it puts you in the right frame of mind for this movie; it is clearly more about the journey than the destination.
The plot itself is decent enough to keep you entertained, but if you’ve ever watched an action movie like this before, you’re going to see all the twists coming from a mile away. My initial reaction was “Well, a kid would probably enjoy this,” but then I got to thinking about the value of nostalgia. I’m not sure if this movie was directed a kids. Kids today aren’t really familiar with the G.I. Joe series, and so probably weren’t draw to this movie at the outset. This puts us in a weird middle ground, because the movie playing largely upon your nostalgia, but they make a few major changes to series’ (for lack of a better word) “cannon” to make the flick a bit more palatable to the general population. These changes probably won’t sit well with any Joe die-hards, so we’ve eliminated the nostalgia factor. Personally, I loved the cartoon, but I wasn’t ever really obsessed. I never read any of the G.I. Joe comics either, so none of the changes really got me too up in arms. Other than the uber-nerd Joe devotee, most of you will probably be willing to roll with the punches.
In a previous review, I complained that Terminator Salvation suffered from too many in-jokes and series references. However, here I found that that was one of the movie’s biggest strengths. Whereas T4 wanted to be taken seriously, GI Joe knows how ridiculous it is. Director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) has a lot of fun with the fan-service and references to the series, and it all fits in rather nicely. It gives the movie such a light-hearted vibe, that you become much more willing to overlook its flaws and just come along for the ride. That being said, I was extremely disappointed that there wasn’t a single reference to either “pork chop sandwiches” or “Mr. Body Massage Machine”. That was prime territory for a shout-out. Then again, bringing internet humor into franchises like this typically falls flat (See: X-3’s Juggernaut jokes), so I can forgive them passing on the reference.
From a character perspective, most of the roles were cast relatively well. Marlon Wayans hits the right notes as the obligatory comic relief, and Channing Tatum seems to be having fun with the release of this role (a welcome change from staring in moving about street fighting or Nicholas Sparks). This movie also features two redheaded chicks. Bonus points for that. From a character development standpoint, some of the characters are given much more backstory than others, all told in “Lost”-style flashbacks as the story progresses. A number of the characters get no story at all though, so I’m going to assume that they are saving something for the inevitable sequel. Still, it felt odd to focus so heavily on some characters while leaving other major characters entirely untouched.
As I said, this movie was definitely intended as prep for potential sequels. However, assuming the rest of the series maintains the easy-going popcorn-movie nature of the first one, I’d probably be down for the ride. I won’t shell out the $10 to see it in theaters, but it makes for some quality lazy Sunday morning fare.
After a hard day of fighting Cobra, I’d buy this movie 3 drinks as a way of saying thank you for taking something fun and enjoyable and not trying to reboot it into a dark, serious, war film. I might even throw in an extra beer if they promised to re-design the Cobra Commander’s outfit before the sequel, it’s just not cool.
I’ve heard it said a number of times now that we, as a society, are running out of ideas. If you don’t believe it, just look at the last few years of summer blockbusters. How many movies can you name that weren’t sequels, based on a book, adaptations of a comic, or a re-boot of a long-running franchise? How many of the big-budget studio releases have been an original, untested concept? From a business perspective, I get it, it makes sense. Sequels (and their ilk) come with a built-in audience, prey on our desire to see “the continuing adventures of…..”, and are almost guaranteed to meet or exceed the original film in terms of box office revenue regardless of quality (See: Spiderman 2, 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, 3)
It is with that in mind that I sit down to write my review of Terminator Salvation. Our fourth time back to the well for the Terminator franchise, and the second outing sans original creative force James Cameron. This time, we ended up with internet whipping-boy McG behind the camera, but that is counter-balanced with the surprising choice of Christian Bale stepping into the role of series hero John Conner. These two creative forces are at odds in my brain, and I was entirely unsure what to expect on this ride.
I won’t bore you with details of the plot, as they are practically irrelevant. As with any series that dips it’s toe into the murky waters of time travel, the plot is filled with contradictions to the previous films and also has to walk the line of “well, I know nothing bad can happen to this character since he hasn’t yet done the one thing we all know that he is going to do in the future” which zaps of the film of much of its dramatic tension. Most scenes typically feel like little more than directional material to get you to the next action set piece. Then again, if you’re watching Terminator 4 for the script, perhaps you had best take an Advil and go lie down.
From an acting perspective, Bale does a serviceable job as Connor, but it certainly isn’t his best role. That being said, the character goes through almost zero development. Whether this created a scenario where Bale didn’t have enough to sink his teeth into, or whether he just gave up and is going through the motions, I don’t know (we all know there was some tension on the set and Bale was frustrated with parts of this film’s production). To be honest, I have no idea why he took this movie. Bale is an actor I greatly admire, I think he makes fantastic choices as to what roles he takes, and I feel like I’ve liked him in every role he’s inhabited. I figured that having the Batman role sewn up gave him the box office cred and studio clout to do whatever the hell he wanted to. I’m not sure why he’d try and take on a role in a 3rd sequel with a character this tame. I had him pegged as more of an Ed Norton type actor, where he would pop up to do a big studio picture every once and a while in order to get the pull to make whatever he wanted. Perhaps there was some sort of studio politics at play here we are unaware of.
Whatever disappointment I felt with the character of John Connor, was redeemed in Sam Worthington’s portrayal of Marcus. This was my first experience with Worthington, as I hadn’t seen Avatar at the time I checked this movie out. Needless to say, I was impressed. I thought Worthington did a great job of giving the character a little bit of depth in the face of some of the stupid situations the plot found him in. In fact, I would name Marcus as the main character of the film, as I felt he was the driver of much of the plot, and he went through the stages of character development that I kept expecting from John Connor, but never got. I realize that Worthington is about to be the guy who is in every single action movie coming out in the next two years, but so far, I like him. I’ll be interested to see what he does next and what roles he takes to flesh out his ability as an actor.
From a direction standpoint, I’m torn. I thought McG did a decent enough job with the action elements of the film, but the film really lacked the intelligence of the Cameron films. I realize that the word “intelligence” may be a bit strong, but Cameron definitely had a message with his films. There was also a subtlety to the elements of humor and characterization that have been missing in these last two films. I realize that to compare this movie to T1 and T2 (movies that considered by many to be groundbreaking sci-fi films) is a bit unfair, but the film invites that comparison on multiple occasions. I want to tell you that “this film would have been viewed in a more positive light if it wasn’t trying to be a sequel to Terminator” but I don’t think that’s possible. This film constantly beats you over the head with references to the previous films and little winks to camera. For me this did nothing more than put cracks in the fourth-wall with all these little in-jokes. While I appreciate these references and fan-service in most settings, it also sets up a scenario where you are constantly reminded that these movies are not as good as the original movies. It almost felt like a YouTube parody in that this movie was made by people who were fans of the original, not the creators of the original. Having characters in your Terminator movie run around and say things like “Come mit me if you want to lib” is only going to make me wish it was Arnie that was saying it. Sadly, I doubt this is the end for the Terminator franchise, I just hope they end up doing something new and exciting with it, as opposed to just beating it into the ground and tarnishing the value of this once-great franchise.
If I were to bump into this movie at a bar, I’d buy it two drinks. One for Worthington, and one for Bale (if only so that I could ask him “Why?”)
