Reviews

The building is an amazing architectural masterpiece denoting the technological achievements of modern society. The staff are some of the most friendly people you could find to work there.

But enough about the Sphere; let's talk about "Postcards from Earth." I had received a small and brief warning this movie was going to have an agenda and a "message" prior to attending (at a $99 admission price tag), but I had no idea how heavy handed it was going to be in beating the average viewer over the brow with it's:

"Mother-Earth-is-dying-and-humans-are-to-blame" message.

To elaborate, the film posits emphatically that Humans came into existence the same way spores, mold and fungi originated. Eventually, these anthropomorphic group of spores called humans figured out many means and methods to destroy their "mother," so the spores (humans) build rockets to leave their "mother" and find other planets to settle that I can only assume that if there is a sequel, their descendants will figure out a way to destroy.

Ugh.

The movie would have been better without all the meaningless narration that literally states (multiple times) that religion and churches were built to worship and celebrate the earth... whaaaaatttt...?

I kid you not.

So, I guess futuristic spaceship AI (it'll make sense if you make the mistake of paying to see this) is capable of lying. It doesn't matter if you're religious, agnostic or an atheist, everyone knows we spores didn't build churches and monuments to "celebrate earth."

Anyway, the solution in the end is to just find another planet and terraform it like earth...so, I guess we shouldn't care??? Kind of muddled and confusing.

I enjoy Aronofsky movies, but this is akin to getting the biggest player contract on a baseball team, because he hits doubles and triples so well, but he strikes out the entire season.

I hope they bring (Sphere management) in something less heavy handed and laced with propaganda in the future. Yes, yes, it's pretty and most of the sound (minus the blathering narration and obnoxious crescendo music) is great, but if I want to watch pretty pics on a big screen and not worry about story, I will stay home.

This is a weirdly complicated film. I wish I could say that was meant to be a compliment, but I found myself trying to figure out where all the pieces fit as the story unraveled.

The basic premise seems simple enough and the jokes in the first 30 minutes were pretty funny, but then you introduce "real world" characters into the movie after the first act (as shown in the trailer) and it seems to lose its way. Add to that an oversimplification of the male predicament and expected role in society set against an attempt at a nuanced view of the female's expected role and you're left with...mush?

Again, it has some decent satire one moment, but then also attempts to show heart the next. One example is how Ken discovers masculinity, but the way a 10 Year old boy might (trucks and horses), yet Barbie sometimes spouts off a simpleton's take on Camus or Neitzche. Honestly, at some points, there's a weird existential dread that flows out of her mouth, but Ken is kind of a moron.

Anyone who views men and women like this in real life might have a hard time maintaining long term, meaningful relationships and should probably seek therapy.

I wanted to like this more than I could.

The first hour of this movie was fantastic, crazy...even amazing! The characters were consistent like the first one, the story moved nicely and the animation, while way more frenetic than the first one, was engaging.

The second hour, the movie starts to fold in on itself so much that it goes from "cool references to all the weirdness that is Spider-Man" to "look how meta we are with this." It becomes too much in my opinion. Additionally, the plot point that Miles is basically the most special of all Spider-Man's of all time when we spent 40 years in pop culture with another guy is so forced and strained. I don't like when a story becomes the story about the story, but that's what this movie did and it's a trap that might be its undoing.

It's so tropey to have Miles be welcomed in by all the spider people and think he's found a home only to realize they're trying to trap him so the most special male figure in his life can die...so then what? He can have a canon event? Like what??? He's already freaking Spider-Man. Captain Stacy's death had less impact on him than Gwen's. I mean it doesn't even make sense. Gwen's dad retires in her universe, so she can still be spider Gwen?

This is what happens when creators start focusing too much on the characters in the story and not the story the characters are in. Too bad, because the first movie is a solid 10. This one goes from a 9 in the first hour to a 5 in the second hour, so I averaged it out.

Finally, I didn't pay $50 to see this movie with my family to have a corrupt hashtag "covertly" placed on the screen to stare at. It was so obvious and "Buy Large Mansions" should not have gotten any screen time in this movie.

This movie tried to be too many things at the same time: superhero, horror, supernatural thriller and on. Instead, it falls flat and is dead on arrival (yes, I used the phrase DOA deliberately here in re: the first 10 minutes).

I'm familiar with Sam Raimi's style even outside his great Spider-Man movies, but I don't think that his style was this movie's only drawback. What we have here is a movie that struggles to decide what it wants to be and then never fully commits to any one thing, so you're left miffed in a middling mess of mediocre meandering.

The struggle Wanda goes through is revisited after the uneven Wandavision series we all watched on Disney+, but to me the conflict is tiresome. We get it, you will do anything to get to your boys, even if they exist in another universe, which is never really explained as to whether the father in that universe (presumably Vision) is a biological male capable of procreating offspring. Well, for that matter dads don't matter in the movie, because Billy and Tommy don't have a dad and America doesn't have one either. Sheesh.

The big reveals of some major characters' (one Fantastic character and the other is Uncanny) stunt casting make you go: Yes! This is why I came and then Sam undoes it all in less than 20 minutes telling you that in the multiverse, nothing really matters.

Lots allusions to child sacrifice and the occult. At one point literal demons from Hell show up to actually "help" our hero. Da fuq???

I still give it the mediocre grade it deserves because some of the acting is quite good, though I sensed the Fantastic cameo was phoning it in...strangely. I also love ironic endings and when Stephen gets out of the way and lets the real protagonist shine (yes, Dr. Strange is sidelined "multi"ple times in his own movie), which is the charisma-less America Chavez, we get a weirdly ironic ending that leads to Wanda's long, irrational quest to save her boys coming to a close.

Honestly, very few people would've been more excited than me at the prospect of when this show is coming out. As someone who had read many of the original issues, even at the time that they were published, when I was a kid. The concept of "what if?" always intrigued me and stimulated the imagination.

As I said in another review, the great thing about the original books was that they were usually grounded in some sort of character decision or connection to the current reality that had existed in the Marvel universe. What we are treated to here instead, is an attempt to fit what appear to be disconnected realities into a framework that was going to force the finale of the first season that couldn't be avoided. I don't want to spoil everything, but I will say that bringing together all of these multiverse characters after telling disconnected stories felt so forced and contrived that it wasn't even enjoyable. It was like watching one of those "pitch meeting" videos where you're thinking for yourself: "oh, of course now the zombies have to show up."

I just don't think that these guys really understand what the whole point of a what if storytelling concepts should've been. Not everything has to take directly back into the building of the multiverse for some bigger pay off at the box office.