Reviews

This movie is enjoyable if you are familiar with the Christian concept of "new man vs old man".

That is, this movie is not "drama" or "sci-fi". It's theosophy. The so called "twins". The Spirit has to destroy the Soul. Adam made in the image of God.

The system, as the twin Sarahs discuss among them, that arbitrarily decides that only one of us can live, is called the Duality.

Duality is a big deal in our days. Movies like 'Doctor Strange and Multiverse of Madness' or music idols like Rihanna are already full force bringing these strange occult doctrines like the "illuminati" into pop culture.

These Dualists - see also 'Duelists' or 'The Last Duel' by Ridley Scott, are engineers. They shape our minds through institutions perfected over thousands of years. They make a copy of us, that looks like us, but is under their power. They are Gods. Mages. Wizzards. Like in Nolan's 'Prestige'.

It got boring real fast, and it was tiring. There is no scene with the world in the future. There were a bunch of "soldiers from the future" with outdated armor and weapons, chasing Ryan Reynolds, who swats them no problem, the fight scenes are just skip skip skip.

Then Ryan Reynolds meets himself as a child and it's just empty scene after empty scene and vapid advice like "be nice to your mom", "don't drink beer until you're 21".

And then the antagonist, the evil mind is a bland auntie sitting around in a cape doing her best to look menacing but she's just boring, pushed into the screen with no introduction, no build up, she looks like a nice lady who went shopping and was abducted by aliens and they're using her body.

And there's "chases".. they're running in a car, from a fighter jet that can hover, walk, tip tope, sneak, dance.. and they talk, talk, talk, oh man.. the whole movie is like 2 hours of talking:

Ryan Reynolds talks to himself as a child.

Ryan Reynolds talks to Zoe Saldana.

Ryan Reynolds talks to his mom.

Ryan Reynolds talks to his pop.

Ryan Reynolds talks to his evil antagonist.

Ryan Reynolds talks to his evil antagonist's left hand, dude with scar.

The fights look just like in Matrix 4, the FX look like in Matrix 4. That strong CG feel of CG environment, CG buildings, CG weapons, CG particle accelerator energy generator, CG jet fighter.

The Last Duel tells the story of God(Matt Damon) and Adam(Adam Driver) two good friends toodle doodling in medieval feudal dark ages lands of tales and fables. Movie gets boring fast, but this review is faster!

God is a man of war, morose, of saturnine inclination, he who kills for a living. That's his hobby.

Adam is handsome and wise, and by his wisdom and understanding he has gained his wealth and amassed gold and silver for his treasury. But his heart grew prod because of this.

Therefore this is what God said: "then you be damned".

Aw come on.. don't tell me you didn't know Holywood means holy wood, shaped with a chisel by the hands of a craftsman. They adorn it with silver and gold and fasten it with hammer and nails, so that it will not totter.

This "Dune movie part 1" is not like the book. The density and depth of imperial machinations and intricacies are scrapped, reduced to video games cut scenes, as if the good stuff would begin when I press "start"..

The movie is mostly characters standing around talking, a couple of choreographed fights and a few computer generated sets briefly seen from a distance so you don't get to realize their lack of inspiration.

No sense of grandeur what so ever.. no world building, no sign of a Galactic Empire and its Emperor, Great Houses and small houses, Space Guild and Bene Gesserit.. it's only dudes and dudesses standing around babbling how the Emperor is gon' do this, the Great Houses gon' do that.. the Bene Gesserit gon' do this and that and more!.. but nothing is shown, just characters sitting, standing, moving from point A to point B, bla bla, next scene!

Then BAM! Chalamet has yet another vision of his chick looking at the camera with the sun glaring behind her so we can't see her good. She watches in slow motion, and Chalamet Omelette watches in the distance also in slow motion. For hours.

The art and designs are 2004 videogames level.. at one point Duke Leto is in armor, turns his head, but can't turn all the way because the armor's collar hits him in the face. There's glimpses of a Guild space potato ship standing near the planet, a few cargo ships taking off and landing, and some tired helicopters and a combine.

And everything is static and slow, like drool from a bulldog's mouth. At one point there's an attack, the bad guys invade the planet. You'd expect some action, right?

Wrong! The elite Sardaukar troops are slooowly deploying standing, not doing much, just checking... director Villeneuve simply can't do battles.. he can only do dreamy tv commercial snippets.

For me this was a disaster :(

The name of the antagonist - Sator, is the name of Saturn. God of time. Sator wants to kill everybody 'cause he's sick or something, I couldn't care. Every character comes and goes like tin toy soldiers, there's a heist, there's a chase, there's a boss fight, one dude sacrifices himself to save the world, everything cut into precise bits and fit together like a clockwork. Like a clockwork, this movie lacks emotion, humanity, passion. It's busy encoding hermetic symbolism into pop culture artefacts for mass consumption.

Christopher Nolan at this point is Stanley Kubrik 2 returns, he is that preoccupied with infusing his movies with the occult. He abandoned the art of cinema.

Sure, decoding the occult doctrine woven into his riddles pretending to be movies may be interesting, for a while. But his artefacts are cumbersome, clunky, negligent.

Tenet is like Matrix 2 and 3, boring to no end. I skipped through scenes with the function to explain stuff that doesn't even matter. This is a forced lecturing on an occult doctrine against your expectations. You came to see a movie. It is not. It's an occult infestation.

This little sci-fi is the opposite of a Marvul Dizni freak show. This little sci-fi is hardcore. it's sober, quiet, slow, rough tough and grave, wary, martial, mature, deadly. it keeps it real. it doesn't care about your attention defici bla bla disorder!

A teenage girl with no place in the world, crouched in the recesses of a space scaffold in a used future. Working for her prospector father. More of an utility than a partner. Father and daughter fall on a green planet, a wilderness, earth before adam. A machine error sends their space pod off course. They now have to find the path back into heavens.

Get it? This little sci-fi is a little misticle. A future that may be happening tousands of years into our past.

Sophie Thatcher, who plays the young girl, does a good job. I cared about her. Same for Pedro Pascal, a frontiersman, a traveller and a thief and a murderer, who helps Sophia. The strength of this movie is in the world building. Every item, every detail is still recognizable, yet changed, modified, estranged, belonging to a remote version of our culture. From the music that the young girl listens to on her earphones, to the mechanics of the weaponry. Technology developed to the point where planets are mined for precious stones, yet, if something goes wrong with your gear, it'll take a looong time before another soul comes down from the sky. Some have been made captives of the green wilderness. They have evolved a different understanding of reality.

We've seen the homeless people, and there's no fun in that. Chaplin's movies work to a degree, I think, because he played the "innocent prisoner". He did not try to make the life of the poor and the homeless, seem fun.. Chaplin's tramp is not homeless.. He is not one who once had a job and a home, and lost it. He is not devastated, he's not ruined, he's not diseased, he's not crushed, like the homless are. The tramp takes care of his appearance, his clothes are in order, though modest and rumpled and torn. He has a bowtie, a cane, a bowler hat.

Mel Brooks is trying to make the life of the homeless seem fun, and that's just obscene. There's all sorts of contradictions in his movie: the homeless woman his character meets, has a clean skin, not one wrinkle! all teeth in her mouth, make-up on. She a hipster! And then she dances with Mel for like an hour, and then they make love.. like, wtf.. it just doesn't work..

This movie is about Adam, alone in the garden, dying. Eve is sent to keep him company. Then the Snake was in the garden too. Observe the little horn earring he's wearing. In the Bible, the Snake is the father of lies. In this movie, Adam is the lier. Ok. I presume we're suposed to sympathize with Snake, and despise Adam. At the end, they show us Saturn. Saturn is the star of Remphan in the Bible.

This movie, like many other so called sci-fi movies, are media vehicles for propagating religious ideas, like they also do in music. Think of Boney M - Rivers of Babylon. That's coming straight out of the Bible, psalm I donno which number. They're packaging religious doctrines into mass-consumption culture artefacts. That's what makes these movies, that music, stink. They're abominations.

IMDB should have a section called "Occult Religious Propaganda Movies", and be honest about it: -dudes, here occult religious propaganda for your kids: we have Thor, Odin, Batman, Lightningman, Beastman, Scarletwhorewoman, Gamorrah and StarofRemphan-Lord, your kids gonna love it!

There's 6 stories in this movie. The first story is about a cartoony dude who dies, then his transparent replica rises up into the sky, silly wings on his back and lyre in his hands. The last story is about two dudes and one dudesse, who are terified by uncertainty as they reach the end of their journey. Final destination two.

The first story is mocking those who are certain. The last story is the uncertainty principle from the other movie made by the Coen bros - "A Serious Man". So this movie is the popularisation of the "what happens to us after we die?" Nobody knows, but some can make monies out of it. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Nobody knows, but Jesus. Nobody knows, the troubles I've seen. -Hey, she's a bass!

The story is a metaphor for something bigger. But just what kind of metaphor, that's for us to figure out. The more accesssible cyphers for me, are marxism and freudianism. The heroine - la pianiste, is the exploited class / death pulse, and the dude who wants her, is the oppressor class / life pulse. H. Marcuse formulates a simple idea: the exploited are dehumanized, their development is distorted by the pressure applied to them, the masters' effort of turning them into.. something unlike them. The same theme is found in Alien, where the crew of a ship are corrupted into an alien slime. It's a "social commentary", heh..

Thus, the idea is, that the children of the exploited are reared into becoming performing robots, graded by the gatekeepers called "teachers". It may seem normal to many of us, to be graded by a teacher. But that's because we ourselves are twisted. We are blinded, we don't know what is sane. A sane man does not live to be graded, marked by a stranger who claims authority over him. A child does not grow sane, when placed under the authority of someone who doesn't care about him, but does it for money, to buy food and shelter, as they gaze into the abyss lying in wait at their right. A child needs to learn from someone who cares for him at a spiritual, emotional, affective level.

And this is what La Pianiste might be. A portrait of the twisted perverted gatekeeper class, the butlers of the masters, the overseers of the massas, the hounds of the princes of the abyss. They are innoculated by the masters with a grim directive: destroy the souls of the children of the slaves. Dehumanize them. Turn them into machines. Systematic destruction of the spirit - the piano teacher does not and can not figure out how to break free from that which corrupts her but also keeps her.. not alive.. but not dead... She has been thoroughly conditioned to "love" this mechanism, this tower of madness, governing her - mother. She is not allowed to have emotions, affection, spirit. Observe that the crew of the ship in the Alien movie is also guverned by "mother" - the computer of the corporation.

Then, one of the princes of the abyss falls in love with the piano teacher. He discovers that she is sick, perverted, twisted, and so on. We hope - those of us who still think this is a story about a dude and a piano teacher falling in love - that he will fix her, make her see the light, redeem her or something. Needles to say, I hope, his "love" for her is lust for penetration. He don't lovez her, kek.

This movie commits two big mistakes: 1. no good climax 2. no good villain

And then it feels like they didn't want to spend money on backgrounds, and on character development.

The movie's story and visuals are minimal. It's a post-apocalyptic world, but instead of showing elaborate city ruins, it shows dirt. The few ruins that we get to see, are covered in dirt. No post apocalyptic world building, nope. Watch this cardboard "rebel hangar" propped up on a patch of dirt instead! Very little is happening in the beginning, and that is ok, I can live with that as an introduction, allows me to focus on Tom Cruise's character. But that works only if you're going to give me a lot more of substantial stuff later on! Nope. Seems that the makers of this movie got no budget left. Tom Cruise ate it!

I can't help but compare Oblivion to 'Mad Max Fury Road'. 'Fury Road' is a post apocalyptic world too, but it has cars and a car worship religion and dudes employing a car related jargon, there's explosions, huge storms, rocky passages, cities in the distance, whence come strange characters with at least a not-boring appearance. Oblivion is just monotonous dirt. The world in Mad Max Fury Road affects the story thoroughly. I can feel the characters trapped inside their world. In Oblivion, the world is made irrelevant, employed only to execute the car chase, I mean, flying vehicle chase.. Twice is Tom Cruise's character chased by boring spherical machines with guns, and of course, robots are dumb, he-he. They don't get him, and I already knew that, because then the story would end, because the movie is about Tom Cruise. So Oblivion is "Tom Cruise and dirt".

There's many other faults to this movie, but talking about it would be more substantial than the movie itself. So let's jump to the conclusion. The no good climax is that it has Morgan Freeman in it. And that's a nono.

District 9 is a true Sci-fi movie, and a refreshing one. Human race making contact with an Alien race is a classic theme, but this movie explores it from new angle and brings new depth to it, and does that on a superior level.

Altho the beginning is discouraging and shaky - documentary style looking like a student exercise, and i have to say my first attempt to watching District 9 ended right there, soon it gets on its feet and takes you on a great ride.

The Aliens in District 9 do arrive, but remain stationed aboard their spaceship, suspended enigmatically above Johannesburg city, South Africa. They do not try to contact us or attack us, and don't seem to be enterprising anything at all. When we finally approach their ship and make contact, we find their society disintegrated into a horde of brutalized individuals only interested in eating and breeding. Their legacy is great - artifacts that our corporations would be happy to have, but it responds only to alien DNA. Cramped inside a camp called District 9 in the vicinity of their spaceship still up in the sky, the aliens go on with their despicable way of life for decades, multiplying into millions, finally becoming too much of a nuisance, so they are about to be relocated.

This is a refreshing premise. I have to really concentrate to remember a "sci-fi" whose aliens do not try to destroy us in any way they can, eat our brains, mate with our sexy lead actresses or vandalize our landmarks running them over with their spaceships, and what not.

In District 9, our (unintentional) hero is the average guy, Wikus, a civil servant, married with the daughter of his Boss, working for this corporation in charge with the aliens, and he is commissioned to relocate them. He has to descend amidst the filth and misery of the Alien camp, and get out of there with the job done, while he is filmed for the world to see the corporation is humane.

While so many movies out there - not only sci-fies - have the hero emotionally changed after experiencing the suffering of the weak, District 9 cleverly explores the possibilities a sci-fi offers: at the end of the day, acquitted of his duty, Wikus remains emotionally untouched by the realities of the camp, but he is changing physically, a process that will alienate him from his own, turning him into a prized artifact, hunted by the very corporation he worked for a day before.

All Wikus wants is to return to the comfort of his former life, happy in the arms of his wife, and complex depths of the relation "individual vs society" unfold, as his salvation can only come from an alien - Christopher, father of a son, who wants to save his own people, but whose only hope is Wikus, who has to deliver him a much needed artifact the humans hold.

Everything now accelerates into an action movie, shot almost as a first person shooter game, and this part does feel like Half-Life game put on film, which i consider an achievement. We experience the alien weaponry in action, and when they're unleashed against the corporation's military commandos, they look and behave otherworldly, devastating in both their effect and screen presence. The sci-fi inventory is completed with an awesome Bio-Mech, the interior of an alien shuttle cabin, and the corporation xeno labs facility, while all the intense fighting taking place stays hardcore, avoiding gratuitous explosions, and throwing a lot of blood and gibs at the camera.

By the last part of the film, the unending hunt for Wikus and Christopher the alien is becoming dreary, but the director saves it just in time, reaching a conclusion, documentary style again, disappointing, but the closing scene saves the last impression of the film, in a fresh new way.

PS. Director Neill Blomkamp seems very daring and promising technically, but what he does looks more like playing with winning recipes from other genres: I've recognized "The Passion of the Christ" and "Half-Life", they kept me entertained, but inbetween them there was little speaking of a style of his own.

The movie is built around Loris, the character played by Roberto Benigni. who delivers his best performance. He is 100% believable in this role. The movie has almost all classic ingredients of a great comedy and they work.

Roberto Benigni's character captures that facet of most of us men at some point in our lives. A lazy and not so well organized guy, far from hansom looking, who'd like to have a lot of women and money, but is not yet successful with either, improvising plans and schemes to get them fast and easy, getting himself in trouble instead, and plunging into more trouble the more he tries to sort things out.

Eventually the police is after him (the police surveying tape is hilarious), and as goofy as Benigni's character is, the police match him with style. They dispatch a bait to unleash the monster within, and Loris has to go great lengths to avoid unleashing that monster =))

Watch this movie in Italian with subtitles, don't let some lousy dubbing spoil your experience.

There are no rules in film-making, only sins. And the Cardinal sin is dullness. - Frank Capra

"The man from earth" is 7 people mainly listening to 1 guy as he tells them bits of story of his life. They sit in a room for the entire duration of the movie (87 minutes). They are all teachers. and their approach on that 1 guy's story is that of a mediocre 16 year old kid. They are all dull and so is the room. Their acting is also dull, and so is the technical aspect of the "movie" - dull image, dull camera moves, dull lighting, dull sound, dull costumes, etc. There was no directing that i noticed.

This "movie" is so badly made from start to finish. The characters are a mess... suffice to say, all those intellectuals with scientific education went hysterical, blown away and shaken by what that one guy tells them without bringing any solid proof (even refusing to bring one when asked).

Supposedly, those bits of the story of the life of that 1 guy should entertain me as i sit through 87 minutes of dullness, like i never read belletristic or sci-fi books.

There aren't many good sci-fi movies out there but..

This is not a movie.

Imagine going to a museum and instead of getting to look at the mask of Tutankhamun, you get a screening of 8 guys describing to you Tutankhamon's mask in a dull manner, one of them threatening to kill another with a gun at a random point of the lecture.

Imagine going to a store to buy 1 kilo of oranges, and instead having 8 clerks handing you a bottle of water, 100 grams of sugar, a couple of vitamin C tablets, and lots of dry orange peels, telling you "that's the essence of the orange dude, that's the essence, it's awesome, you should have a revelation"...

This movie begins with an ordinary funeral... and it insists so hard on this ordinary funeral feel that i lost interest within 5 minutes of watching, and started skipping scenes. It seems to me whoever made this movie is afflicted to the extent of becoming trapped in a permanent morbid trance, unable to contemplate anything else but death and destruction. Well, I ain't one of the dark kids from Southpark, I want a movie that within 10 minutes gets me well into an interesting story, I won't sit and watch 10 minutes of nothing but preparations for a funeral.. My grandma on her last years was fascinated by funerals, perhaps she might have enjoyed this "movie".

This movie is so low in quality and shallow... but it's funny hah!

There was a story with three little pigs, each one building a house for himself, one pig built his house of hay, second one made it out of sticks, and the last one made it with bricks; then a wolf tested the quality of their houses haha... Well, this movie is like the house made of hay.

The beginning of the movie is quite funny, we are presented the premises - people with high IQ fail to reproduce, while people with lower IQ multiply in great numbers "for generations and few seemed to notice", and a perfect mediocre army librarian was about to "unknowingly change the course of human history" by participating as a guinea pig in an army experiment with "human hibernation"...

And that is all. The rest of the movie is a mess. It starts crumbling as soon as the librarian is put into the "hibernation pod" and the military base is demolished as a result of a "massive scandal". Whoever made this "Idiocracy" lacks expertise in making movies. As an example of how poorly constructed this movie is, we are told that 500 years from now people in US will be very stupid, yet they still drive cars, have batteries and electricity and television and stuff; how can stupid people manufacture cars or produce electricity and store it into batteries, we are not given any clue.

Ironically, this "Idiocracy" movie is trying to sell itself by pointing the finger at what its creators consider to be superficiality and lack of quality of other media products and things and stuff.

But it's funny, oh my god it grows on you.