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Reviews
Manifest (2018)
Lazy writing as a plot device
This series is the answer to the question "What would happen, if the screenwriters didn't bother with story and motivation, but just straight-up told the characters where to go and what to do?"
I have endured the whole four seasons of this masterpiece to have the right to write a scathing review with a clean conscience.
There's some good and bad acting, there's some pretty bad CGI. But the writing in this is abysmal. I have not seen writing this bad in Asylum productions. There's nothing to compare it to.
Characters that are borderline saints, walk on water and heal with their touch in the beginning of an episode, may bathe in blood and skin puppies by its end. Or vice versa. Without explanation or justification. Characters that were supposed to be written "complex" end up being just plain deranged, certifiably insane. Things happen for no reason, just pop into existence out of the blue.
The only redeeming quality of this piece is the series finale. It is even worse than everything else. It is so unabashedly, in-you-face, boldly bad, that it's actually sort of good.
This is definitely the worst show I have seen in my life, and I've seen quite some TV.
Invasion (2021)
Trash of a Sci-Fi
I have watched two seasons of this. And oh boy do I want my time back.
The whole central plot point, the single central nail on which the whole plot hangs is that the aliens can be beat by a dozen teenagers by blowing the aliens' heads with the mind waves. They literally do the Sheldon Cooper's fingers-on-temples thing.
A star-faring, space-rupturing, gravity-manipulating hivemind civilization with almost planet-size warships and infinite supply of invincible, unstoppable, unquestioning drones for an army is stopped by a dozen of teenagers, because they got the power to blow up the enemies' heads with their thoughts.
I mean, there's lazy writing, and then there's this.
And the attempts to weave a story out of smaller secondary stories are just as bad.
There is some good acting in this, there are some decent VFX, but none of it is worth this drivel of a script.
We Need to Talk About A.I. (2020)
Mildly entertaining, but misguided and frustrating
It was an amazing idea to slice and dice the thoughts of smart people into an insane salad, dress it with some insights from random quacks as deep as a tea spoon, then serve it as a "documentary".
How did Cameron deserve a right to have an opinion about the A.I.? By making a movie with a robot in it?
He also made a movie with a ship in it - well, now, let's ask his opinion on naval architecture and the problems of modern hydrodynamic engineering.
Instead of letting the smart people express their smart thoughts precisely and at length, the movie rips their words out of context and rearranges them to fit some weird alarmist narrative.
The four stars are specifically for Roman Yampolskiy, Sam Harris, Max Tegmark and Jurgen Schmidhuber.