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Awix (3310 KP) rated Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017) in Movies

Feb 13, 2018 (Updated Mar 7, 2018)

Now, there's nothing wrong in principle with doing an animated Godzilla movie; most of the problems with this one arise from the fact it is largely unrecognisable as such.

Earth is abandoned due to excessive growth in the giant monster population; timey-wimey plot device means the survivors return twenty years later and find thousands of years have gone past and the place has reverted to a primeval state; the ecology is now distinctly Godzillaesque. Has their technology improved to the point where they can stand a chance against the Big G himself?

Reasonable, if somewhat convoluted premise is torpedoed by a persistent mood of nihilistic misery and absence of likeable human characters; Godzilla is largely absent, and mostly passive when he does appear. You want to see Godzilla demolishing Tokyo and fighting other monsters, not mooching about in a jungle, anyway. A good way of catching up on recent tropes in mainstream SF (this is just a nice way of saying the film is rather derivative), some interesting designs, but on the whole this is hard work to watch. English subtitles seem to have been written using Google Translate, which only adds to the essentially frustrating nature of the experience.

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated The Darkest Hour (2011) in Movies

Jun 2, 2018 (Updated Jun 2, 2018)

The Darkest Hour (2011)

2011 | Action, Horror, Mystery

5.0

(4 Ratings)

Movie Rating

Ferociously generic hot-young-things-are-chased-by-high-concept-monsters movie. (Winston Churchill does not appear, by the way.) Various American, Australian and Swedish characters bump into each other in a Moscow nightclub, hit it off (or not), then find the evening takes a bit of a turn when aliens made of invisible electricity arrive and start eating people. Lots of sneaking about and tension; it's not that difficult to guess who the aliens are going to chow down on before the end of the film, and in what order.

I suppose it looks okay, and many members of the cast have gone on to marginally better things (remakes of Judge Dredd and Robocop, plus TV work for Marvel), but the whole thing seems to be actively trying to be as forgettable as possible. The film's big innovation - the Moscow setting - ends up contributing nothing to the film, really; actual Russian characters are kept peripheral. Ultimately just a very, very bland film: Olivia Thirlby deserves some kind of mention for actually making you care slightly about her character. Apart from that this is the kind of SF film that brings science fiction into disrepute. And science. And quite probably fiction, come to that.

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Kevin Wilson (179 KP) rated Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) in Movies

Jul 14, 2018

Unique characters (2 more)

Great cast

Another great tim burton style

Predicatable (0 more)

Great movie, rather unique

This was a great Tim Burton movie. I do believe it is underrated, I've heard many bad things about this movie mainly being told it's boring but its far from it.

Each character is very unique and sometimes kinda creepy and there were some very interesting parts of the story I found very very interested, more specific the loops.

The cast was great but was surprised not to see Helana Boham Carter playing the lead. I've not heard anything about a sequel but I really hope it happens with the cast returning and maybe add a few new characters (I'm yet to read the books).

It was shot really well, you can see Tim Burton all over it and the CGI was pretty good. I loved the design of the monsters. I would have loved more and it is missing something that I can't quite put my finger on.

However, I could see myself going back and watching this again and that is the sign of a good movie. It was predictable and it's not going on my list of the greatest movies ever but it did not disappoint me.

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Freaks (1932) in Movies

Feb 29, 2020 (Updated Feb 29, 2020)

Freaks (1932)

1932 | Drama, Horror

8.2

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating

Tod Browning's notorious horror movie remains problematic and uncomfortable to watch nearly a century on from its release. The plot is much more the stuff of a melodrama than a traditional horror movie: a vain and greedy trapeze artist and her lover plot to murder a gullible man enamoured of her for his fortune. What makes the film so queasily memorable is the fact that many of the characters are sideshow 'freaks' of different kinds.

Severely hampered by the fact that many of the cast aren't professional actors, and it shows; also by the fact that several of them don't have English as a first language (some of the dialogue is so heavily accented to be unintelligible). The existing version of the film is fairly thin on plot, too. There is strange tension between the script, which takes pains to make clear that the deformed characters are people, not monsters, and the way that the camera voyeuristically dwells on their physical abnormalities - it's there again in the climax, where the trapeze artist clearly deserves some kind of retribution, but the sequence of the 'freaks' closing in on her is deeply disturbing. A uniquely unsettling movie, and perhaps that's for the best.