Reviews

Clearly a lot of people liked this, but to me it came across as just an attempt to distract the audience with a barrage of senseless images. Kung Fu Hustle pulled this off in 2004, but I don't think it's possible to get away with that a second time. Also, Kung Fu Hustle culminated in a pretty decent martial arts sequence. I won't see this one again, if I can avoid it. It was cool, though, to see Short Round back on the screen!

Similar to Letter for The King, this show really pulled me in in the early episodes, but left me wanting toward the end. The performances are strong and it is filmed in a way that creates a very engaging, folklorish mood. However, they really should have limited the cast of Arthurian characters to Merlin, Nimue, and Uther. The other characters (Arthur, Morgana, Lancelot, etc...) could still have been in there, but should have been given different names, not connected with established Arthurian legends. Those characters bear no resemblance to their legendary counterparts, so nothing resonated by giving them recognizable names.

Also, I feel they should have stayed focused on the mystic elements that were teased in the early episodes, rather than on the persecution of the Fey. Persecution of supernatural minorities is a tired theme in fiction, and I don't see why show creators would ever pursue it in this day and age. Don't they realize we've had our fill of that idea from 20 years of X-Men movies? I was much more interested to find out what was behind the blood storm shown at the beginning of the story, and Merlin's history with the sword. All of that got pushed aside mid-way through the season, however, and I doubt they will ever get back to it again.

I was really enjoying the series until about episode 5. The story, characters, and visual backdrop really draw you in, and I think most of the young actors gave fine performances in spite of what some other reviews are saying. The problem, though, is that the writers decided to throw in a bunch of plot twists in the 3rd act. The attempted twists do not work and send their story straight to hell, adding it to the growing list of failed plot subversions which now include the likes of Last Jedi and Game of Thrones, S8. Screen writers need to get off the plot twist bandwagon that they all seem to have jumped on since Game of Thrones made it a thing. Somebody needs to remind them that most of the time, plot twists do not work and are a dangerous thing to attempt, because if done poorly they merely undermine the good elements that a story has built up.

Having read the book, I was greatly disappointed by the movie. The key appeal of the book, which I think the film makers misunderstood, is not simply the general concept of a virtual reality Internet and all the flexibility it offers. It was the idea of all the pleasures and nostalgiac pop-culture interests from a persons childhood co-existing in a common universe: Star Wars, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, etc... all within reach of each other and interacting. To make that work, you needed the 1980s nostalgia element from the novel, which the movie almost completely threw away.

However, there were some things the movie did better than the book - the reason I didn't just give it a 1-star rating. First, the movie spends more time in the real world, outside the OASIS, and offered more of a resolution to plot threads going on there, for example the fate of the villain. Also, Tye Sheridan was charismatic in the lead, and created a more sympathetic hero in Wade than the book version. In the book, we don't see much indication that Wade develops any appreciation of the real world or the dangers of getting over-immersed in the OASIS. In the movie, however, Wade eventually does learn to see this, which I think was a big improvement to the character.

So to sum up, if you could combine the good from the book with that from the movie, you might have the perfect story. I won't ever understand why the film makers made such a drastic departure from the 80s nostalgia themes of the novel. I guess it was out of a concern that the original story targets too narrow a demographic. It's true that only GenXers will appreciate the majority of the references, some of which are pretty obscure. However, that didn't hurt the success of the book, so I don't see why it was an issue in its film adaptation.

Like many, I didn't think it was possible to do a Han Solo story convincingly without Harrison Ford. But watching Alden Ehrenreich, I couldn't help thinking that everything he said and everything he did felt exactly like a Han Solo kind of move. The function of the character in the original trilogy was to strike a comedic contrast against the dark background of the Empire's rule, and the writers here understood exactly how to recreate that. Too bad we know what's waiting for Han down the road ...

Part of the problem, I suppose is that both Smallville and the Christopher Reeve era Superman stories painted Krypton as a high and mysterious civilization far removed from our own. Coming from that, a viewer hopes a show called "Krypton" will transport you to a very different world from ours. But instead, this Krypton feels a lot like Earth. They have bars and drinking and gambling. Their weapons look like ours. They swear like us. They even have a guy wander in off the streets from Detroit.

The show doesn't really transport you to another time, either, as you would imagine in a story about Superman's ancestors. Thanks to the writers' injudicious use of time travel, elements from present-day Superman interact freely with his grandfather. I read somewhere that the showrunners weren't intending this to be a prequel. Well, this isn't, and that's too bad, because I think the truly interesting story possibilities lay in that.

I give this a 6 because the backdrop of the upper city of Kandor was well done visually. Also, the concept of the House of El as a disgraced, almost extinct family, was pretty interesting, even though not much is done with that after episode 1.

I really don't get all the hate. This series was great. Talented cast, dramatically nuanced. I binged it in one day. Yes, there were some slip-ups in the Greek antiquity research (e.g., it's Artemis, not Diana), but you'd have to be atrociously nitpicky to obsess over that. In case it matters, I am not ignorant of the classics- read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. I'm quite happy with how the Trojan War was represented. The various elements of the mythology were tied together in a very well thought-out script.

To be fair and balanced, I'll just mention that the participation of the Greek gods in this adaptation slightly detracted from it for me. I think Helen of Troy (2003) took a better route by subduing their presence. I also liked Rufus Sewell a bit better as Agamemnon, although it's a bit of hard comparison, because Rufus Sewell had a straight-up evil Agamemnon to play while Johnny Harris was given a very different version of the character to interpret here. See it! Judge for yourselves!

As others have said, the movie suffers from weaknesses in the writing and and an under-ambitious plot, but the imaginative depiction of Wakanda, combined with Chadwick Boseman's charisma in the lead makes the whole thing pretty enjoyable all the same. Overall, I liked Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War, liked him throughout this movie, and came out of the theater looking forward to seeing more of the character in Infinity Wars.

My main gripe would be that the conflict motivation in the story is highly under-used. The premise is pretty interesting, that Black Panther's home country of Wakanda is as big a technological power as Asgaard, but has been concealing this throughout history and likewise has been remaining neutral in world conflicts, even though their technology could have been a powerful force, for example, against black oppression throughout the ages.

It takes very little imagination to see the widespread political outrage that this could cause if it leaked out, with potentially thousands of people and powerful radical enemy organizations trying to take control of that technology from T'Challa. Instead, the writers decided to limit the antagonistic forces to basically just one disgruntled guy. As a result, the movie comes off as a bit of a knock-off of the first Thor movie, except that here it's Killmonger instead of Loki who threatens a one-man coup of the kingdom.

Anyway, still enjoyable, as I said, but I will always regret what the movie could have been

As others have been saying, the movie has some significant flaws, and those need to be acknowledged first. The excess use of campy comedy is a big one, completely at odds in tone with the considerable slaughter that occurs throughout the movie with Hela's conquest of Aasgaard. That's not even to mention that it's supposed to be about Ragnarok, an apocalyptic event in Thor mythology. It's also a bit grating that Thor and Loki are buddies again. Apparently, even in spite of the destruction and death that Loki inflicted on New York in Avengers (2012), it's time to let bygones be bygones. Worst of all, I think, is that while Thor ought to be in Aasgaard dealing with, well, Ragnarok, he spends most of the time in captivity on another planet with the Hulk, all so that the writers can once again showcase superheros battling each other, as if we didn't get enough of that in Civil War, Avengers I and II, and Batman vs. Superman.

Still, I did enjoy the movie. Much of the humor was really good, and the writers did manage to come up with a story in which Thor faced some serious challenges, ones that don't get solved with his trusty hammer. His adventures on Sakaar also reminded me nostalgically of Flash Gordon (1980), though I think that did belong in a different movie. All in all, I wish they would dial it back with campy humor already, but I did come out of the theater entertained, and I am certainly glad they didn't go super-dark, like Logan.

As others have said, the performances by Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart are very strong and the film evokes a powerful dark mood. If it were therefore not the sequel to many previous more upbeat movies, this movie would have worked very well as a standalone drama.

Because it is part of long-running franchise, however, it comes across as painfully incongruous with previous X-Men movies. At the outset of the movie, we see that Logan has descended once again into misery, so all of the gains made in "The Wolverine" are lost. Once again also, mutants are on the edge of extinction, so all gains made in "Days Of Future Past" are lost (and less than 10 years later, to add to the bewilderment). Basically, it looks like some writer liked the idea of rebooting the mutant doomsday concept of DOFP and taking it in a bleaker direction.

I'm sorry, but while excellent acting is something I like in a movie, a good story is at least as important, and to make a good story, you can't render previous entries in the franchise completely pointless. The fact that this happens in the final Wolverine outing, with no opportunity to recover is, of course, all the more heartbreaking. I was surprised when DOFP managed a decent recovery from the mistakes made by X-Men:Last Stand, but not as surprised as I was to see those same mistakes repeated here!

Like other reviewers, I grew up on the original MacGyver in the 80s and so can't help but compare it to its ancestor. Unlike what others have been saying, though, I don't think the acting is so bad. The writing is a little cliché, but forgivable if the intended audience is in the age group 10-12. Mainly, though, there is very little of what made the original 80s show unique. There is also very little to make it stand out among more recent TV series. It's basically Mission Impossible meets CSI - one more show about a hot-shot team of do-gooders. Again, it's fine for a pre-teen audience who have never seen these things before, but for people looking for nostalgic connections to the original show, there's not much there.

Other reviewers have mourned various elements of MacGyver '85 that were sacrificed - their idea of the vital elements of the original MacGyver concept that the "re-imaginers" just didn't seem to get. For me, the main mistake in MacGyver 2016 is that he is the full-time leader of this crack government team. The original MacGyver (in his best seasons) was a loner, not a leader. He free-lanced for the government, as opposed to being your run-of-the-mill full-time government operative a la James Bond. He also had a nicely mysterious background. You didn't really know much about how he developed his technical skills and ingenuity. Eventually, the original show made the mistake of giving him a back story, but you found out that his skills came as much from his grandfather as from studying science in school. In MacGyver 2016, conversely, we learn from the get-go that his talents come from ... where else ... MIT, the fountain of all scientific genius. Now that I think about it in fact, I don't think there's been a tech-oriented TV character since the original MacGyver who didn't at least take a class or two at MIT.

Anyway, I might stick with this for a few more episodes to see if it matures, but so far, it doesn't look like it's headed that way.