Reviews

I loathed "Who wants to be a Millionaire?". The show is stupid, the format is awful with the way they drag out giving the answers to the questions and the music is cheap and awfull. For some reason it was everywhere in the 90'ier or 0'es, so it was hard to avoid it completely, especially the theme music.

I deeply resented being presented for this show again like a decade after it disappeared.

The movie was probably okay. It is basically an exploitation movie exploiding a fad around a game show. But everything is on a very high level, actors, direction and so on.

I just had a truly awful time watching it because of the game show taking up so much space, so I cannot give it more than 1 star. With the TV Show parts were cut out it would probably be decent.

I found it so chaotic and strange to the point that I ended up just not caring about what happened.

Overall I don't think the movie worked. I feel like it was designed to have a "is it real or no real?" thing going on, because of the ants. But I had problems decoding that, the ant hallucinations and the crazy suicidal guy on the roof and the hero appearing on a roof with no explanation led me to think "OK the hero is crazy and much of what I see is his delusions." I am not sure it was intended to have the "is it real or not" thing, or if it was just made in a jumbled way with a lot of plot holes and such.

For instance, I thought he had only been in prison for like 4 years but had deluded himself to think it was 15. I based that on the television clips sequence used to show how long he had been in jail were all clips from around 2000. (I watched the soccer game live!). So right till the end I thought for sure he had been in jail for 4 years but was saying 15 years because he was crazy - and then realized at the very end it had to be true about the 15 years in order for the daughter to be able to grow up.

I was also unsure if the fight scenes were supposed to be real or imagined like the ant. The hero was a terrible fighter, but somehow the others let him win - obvious in the corridor scene, that the gang members (I'm not sure who they even were, but whatever!) were holding back - only one guy was alllowed to go forward and "attack" at the same time, and the attacks would be the most awfull bad timed attack ever. They seemed to want to attack by searching for the guy's fist with their jaw, and not really be aware that they could like use punches too and why not try a kick as well! Also kinda typical I didn't catch who they were or why they attacked the hero. LIke if they were the security people of the prison, why they don't have like sticks and tazers and like security weapon stuff? And why did they just let him walk in and attacked him after?

So I simply was not sure if the fights were meant to be real or not.

I feel like there were some plot points you had to accept like "this was real" in order to be engaged in the story.

But as i thought the fights, the 15 years in jail and the hand weren't real, (and I also thought he had killed his wife), I couldn't follow the story properly - and it sort of fell apart to me and left me bored and not caring about what happened to any of the people. I also wasn't sure if he really had a daughter. He didn't want to call her for no reason, it led me to think it was some sort of a ruse and he knew she was dead or whatever. It made me susspicious that he just didn't seem interested in his own daugher.

I guess if you thought for sure the guy had been imprisoned for no reason, you'd care more about if he found the guy that did it. But I ALSO thought for most of the movie that he was a crazy serial killer type that had killed his wife and imagined crazy stuff and was about to kill the sushi girl.

When I found out he probably had not killed his wife (not sure if it was revealed what happened to her? I supposed the crazy rich guy had killed her because he was just like soo naughty and wicked, but it was like nobody cared about her?) it was too late for me to sort of switch and root for him.

The movie was surprisingly bad despite a great cast of actors (who did really OK with that they had) and nice visual effects.

• The editing IMO was quite bad. I felt like there was something off in the sense that parts that were tense immediately got "de-tensed" by jokes or the heroes getting lucky breaks. It made you feel like, nothing bad would happen and it really was OK when people died. Like after Woody removes his helmet end dies, they cut to the survivors re-reising an American flag, making you sort of feel, that wasn't so bad Woody died, everybody's OK! The flag scene ruins the effect of Woody dying, and it would be way better to just leave it on the cutting board - OR just move it to after they find Don Cheadle and they're working on getting stuff together.

• The dialogue was goofy, all the "To hell with it"-kind of one-liners would fit great in a not so serious Schwarzenegger action, but it just can't work to have dialogue with that in a movie that has an overall serious plot. The tone of the dialogue just didn't fit the story.

• At many times, the scenes would have been way stronger with an actor just not saying anything instead of them saying the goofy line.

-There were too many clumsy explanatory likes like when they show DNA an astronaut has to say stuff in the style of "O my gosh, am I looking at DNA here or what is going on"? Or like "There cannot be 4 graves because if there was the last guy would have had to bury himself!" and so on. It makes no sense to me. If you have an audience in mind that don't know what DNA looks like, how do you expect them to get the stuff about low pressure and zero gravity?

• The music was really bad. So surprised to notice afterwards Ennio Morricone did the scrore! I guess he didn't out so much effort in this one. I actually think the movie would have worked better just with the score deleted. So IMO they should have rejected the score and either just not have had music or had gotten another one. The tense scenes didn't really have tense music, the grand scene didn't have grans music etc.

-Sound effects were dires, expecially the sort of dinosaur groans coming from the tornado-snake thing. It's not alive, it's a tornado, so it makes no sense it groans like an angry elephant or a dinosaur - the tornado snake wasn't the greatest monster really, but the sound effect really ruined it completely and made it funny instead of scary.

-There were WAY too many "Procedure says we can't this but SCREW PROCEDURE." It can be really cool with astronaut types ending up ignoring all procedures to stay alive and get things done, but when they abandon the procedures like every 2 minutes it more makes you feel like, OK everybody just do what they want, even the leader guy at the space station, and procedures don't matter at all. But when you devalued the procedures in the movie world, it's not dramatic that they break the procedures, it gets boring.

• The plot was taken from 2001: The Space Odyssey with minor changes, However, the minor changes mostly ruined things. Instead of the cool mysterous black monolith we have the dumb face. The whole "face on Mars" thing was a thing in trashy tabloids in the 1990ies I recal - it's sad they got their inspiration there. Just changing the face to say a pyramid instead or whatever would make it better.

The aliens didn't make sense, like why do they program the face to rip to pieces anybody that give the wrong "password"? Come on! People are finding this face finally after like 100 million years, and the empathic teary alien was like, if you don't get it right in the first try, you deserve to get ripped to pieces to die! It was also stupid the astronauts just accepted the aliens killed their fellow astronauts with their crazy trap and found them nice and empatic. LIke if one of my friends dialed a pin code wrong and the punishment was he got ripped to pieces, I would really trust the card issues any time soon!

It could actually have been a decent movie with like 30 minutes of goofy lines cut out, sound and movie changed and the editing also changes. But as it were, the about 30 minutes of really bad stuff was like pretty much evenly spread out all along, making it really not enjoyable.

This movie had a lot of good things - very nice acting, decent story, good scenes and lovely special effects. And maybe the best space ship I've ever seen in a movie - to me the space ship looked really realistic. A sort of tangled mess of modules looking much more like real life space installations. Most movies give space ships an aurodynamical form, which is useless in space, obviously.

But I was still bored and sort of frustrated most of the time.

I think the problem was I was left TOO much in the dark about what was going on. Sure, the point of the movie is to reveal the armageddon -disaster at the end, so it has to be vague than most movies.

But there was so many details left open-ended that I wasn't even sure about what the characters were going through. And as I didn't know the odds of the various things going on I couldn't really engage in it.

I wasn't sure how capable Clooney's character was. Like I was wondering if he even knew how to operate the antenna they were headed for. I think a line in the begining with one of the people leaving mentioning he's like a super-STEM-guy would have been good. If Clooney had some more nerdy sciency lines here and there, I'd have known at least he knew what he was doing.

I wasn't sure if there's be people at the antenna of of he knew there was food there or just thought so. So I wasn't really invested in them getting to the antenna, as I couldn't judge if there'd be any good stuff there or maybe there'd be like cannibals waiting for them. I wasn't sure if they'd be better off dying in the snow or pressing on. Just a line from Clooney to the girl "The antenna has god to be abandoned and full of food, as I know they evacuated it last week" would clear that out, so you knew what kind of place they were headed for.

I wasn't sure if the space ship even could go back to K-23. Usually space ships only have fuel for one trip. So I was thinking Clooney's character might just be a loonie. One line somewhere establishing the ship could actually return to K-23 it would be good. Like an astronaut joke about them visiting Mars while on the way home, and another answer "Ha ha. Yes, our future technology enables us to go wherever we want. Heck we could go to Pluto! But we're headed home!" Then you'd KNOW Clooney isn't just a loonie and it actually matters if he gets in touch with the astronauts because you know it can happen they return to K-23.

A second thing I didn't like about the script was: In the period when events were headed towards Clooney talking to the astronauts, the story twice postponed this from happening by random "deus ex machina" mishaps. Clooney looses his snow bike on the water and the space ship veers off course, so they need to travel through the asteroids which blow up the comm antenna etc.

Having two random mishaps felt irritating. I would prefer if the "obstacles" were tied in with the rest of the story and didn't just happen randomly. Like Clooney lost his bike because he had to avoid some Armageddon stuff. "OMG the poison stuff is blocking the way! Now we have to leave the bike and climb those rocks!"

And the astronauts could decide to manually replace their communications antenna, despite the computer saying it worked fine, and then somebody would mess up so the girl dies.

That way the "obstacles" would be tied in with the main problem - instead of being just random annoying things that could have happened anyway.

Then just a small thing. I couldn't figure out where in the world Clooney was? Antarctica doesn't have wolves, but it does have Norwegian stuff - and the Artic has wolves but no Norwegians. So IDK which of the two it was? Did they put wolves on Antarctica in the future or did Norwegians invade Canada in the future?

I feel like know that I know the plot, it might actually be nicer to watch it a second time some day, as I'll then be able to enjoy the nice images and so on without wondering constantly about what's going on.

This movie has great actors and some decent shot at times - but it was such a chore to get through it. It was devoid of details that make you like the story and characters and want to be in it. It lacked scenes that went in an unexpected way, it lacked charming visual details. The side characters such as the bus passengers, the wedding guests, the Japanese teenagers were utterly forgettable.

I feel like the directors had techniques to make you care than to have somebody almost die. And so, the bus passengers are just there sucking uo screen time and doing nothing - the script doesn't need any of them to die, and the movie makers couldn't think of having them do something else interesting to justify making people spend time looking at them.

I felt like the people behind it had watched Magnolia and wanted to copy the stucture and general feel of the movie - and then added some hints of political elements taken from the headlines of a fast glipmse at a news site ("Terrorism", "Illegal crossing over the Mexican border", "International game hunting sparks controversy". To be more hip. And then you get this bland, charmless movie.

Obviously the quality of directing and actors merits more than a 2. But at the end I was jumping up and down yelling "finish now!, finish now!" and applauded when the titles came at the end. And I watched Wavelenght (1967) and enjoyed it a lot!

At first I thought this was just good - but then I thought a bit about the last scene, and figured out there was a whole plot hidden inside the plot.

In the last scene the young sister says she also likes money and men, like her older sister. Plus she seems completely unphazed that her sister just died. She never really expresses that much consternation her sister is a murder, and just files it away in her mind as some information.

This led me to think her plan is also to kill the architect and get the money. And that that was her plan all along.

At the first meeting, she is very interested in building a relation with the architect. Later she "innocently" warns him of the plot to kill him. With the letter, she is hugely inquisitive in knowing what's in it, probably because she wants to know what she is up to. She then sets up the showdown meeting in the cabin, probably knowing the husband will show up, and just hoping explosive situation she created will results in some deaths. The end result is perfect for her, the arhitect is totally unsuspecting, and all she has to do it kill him and everything belongs to her.

They made a big point of explaining us the ages of the two girls - the older sister killed her first husband at 22, and the younger one is 21 years old. So that looks like she will spend a year getting married to the architect and killing him, and then she will be rich at 22 like her sister.

I'm sure this way of viewing it was intended. I find it just great the sneak an entire plot for a movie inside another plot, and the hint to all this is dropped in literally the last line of the movie. And also that with that one line, they change the likely future of the architect from having gotten out well with the money, his life and a girl, to being murdered in a year, and in the end having lost it all.

To me it was a really good apocalyptic angle, told from the angle of a pregnant women which was a fresh touch. The director was also a woman, and it shows - the focus is on the emotions of the characters, and gore and violence is turned down. There's something about the pace as well. That reminded me of "You were never really there".

I think the negative reviews must stem from people watching it thinking it is a more traditional movie that shows the monsters, explans more details and has more gore like exploding heads and blood splashing around. Most of the things people complain about is routinely done in movies, so the reasons people give cannot be the reason they dislike it. I guess people expect it to be an action packed creature feature, with Sandra Bullock flamethrowing monsters, and then they get a slow, moody movie instead.

It does have character development. Charlie goes from being afraid, to bravely saving everybody. Sandra Bullock's character is struggling with being a monther, but finally comes around. On a deep level, the two keys scenes are the scene in the hospital in the beginning and the scene where Sandra Bullock finally names the two children.

The chaos part in the beginning is very well done.

The concept of "not showing the monster" is around 60 years old, and is a proven and tested formula. It's off course the right choice for this concept.

Why would the nature of the monsters be explained? The characters have no source of information what so ever, and there is no way to investigate the creatures. And it is so common in movies. Michal Myers is never fully explained in the first Haloween, the nature of the monster in The Thing is not fully explained (like what does it want?), in Silence of the Lambs it is not explained why Hannibal Lecter has a superhuman sense of smell.

Why is it a problem they can drive a car a short distance blindfolded or run a bit blindfolded? We routinely accept in movies that untrained teenage girls can outrun strong grown men, and that people don't die from being smacked on the hear with metal things. As horror movies go, this was in the realistic end regarding basic things.

Why don't the creatures enter houses? Well, why are werevolves vulnerable to silver but not to lead? Why does it kill a vampire to drive a stake through it's heart, but not to run it over with a bulldozer? Monsters always have had random weaknesses. We have no idea why the monsters dislike entering houses, but we also have no idea of their nature so it's normal we don't know how they work. It could be because God curses them if they belong to the sphere of angels, god and the devil. Or it could be because they need perfect radio contact with the mother ship, if they are aliens.

I think the fact that people claim they dislike it giving reasons that usually is a plus in movies shows it touches some deeper themes that disturb people. Another problem is that it might be watched by a lot of young people, so the themes of pregnancy and being a parent is lost on them.

The concept "evil Superman" was promising, But the screen writers seems to have run out of ideas very fast. It lacked an an opponent, somebody who could credibly challenge the evil buy. When you realized, fairly fast, that he was unstoppable, there was no tension in it. He needed to have a weak point, a kryptonite, so there could be at least a little bit of exitement if anybody managed to use that to get him. Other holes was; his backstory was too shallow. We learned too little about where he came from and who he was. The boy's personality was boring, we learned not much about how he felt about all of this. And there was no real fight. Superhero-movies live from the grand battles with cars flying around and stuff. It's boring to watch him kill policement and waitresses. They should have added say a special government agent in a suit that gave him powers that was looking for him. Anything, just to have a real fight.

Way to much time was used for the kill scenes. They were so drawn out and long, and it made no sense why he was sneaking around in the shadows forever before moving in. He had nothing to worry about, he could just walk in and whack everybody.

Some plot lines were simply dropped. The fat kid that teased him did not get killed, even if he was the only one sort of deserving it. We did not hear what happened to his "girlfriend", and they spent some scenes building up that he was super intelligent, but he really did not act very intelligent. He was behaving like somebody acting on whims, with no planning and forethought. It was not explained why he picked that mask he picked.

The movie was like 20 minites of a movie stretched out and the same things repeated to make it last an entire movie. The most interesting thing was the small clips during the titles at end end.

It looks to me like most of the cast, maybe also the director, gave up on the movie, and then turned it into an under-the-surface comedy. The balloons fixing everything at the end, Linda Hamilton's comment "I want to see the President! He is my father!" I think were deliberate jokes inserted into the movie.

The plot had some many nonsensical things about it that was funny. But overall it was just some entertaining action scenes, many of the ripped off from Terminator II, including the way the main killer bag guy acted - he really did a great job and I loved his character, even though he was put in a rather bad movie and then was undone by balloons.

Much surprised this movie is so popular. It has some top level acting performances performances, but...

They used CGI for Harvey Dent's mangled face instead of makeup. The result is that he looks like a zombie from a computer game and not like a real person. I don't understand that choice. Especially when they obviously have a good make up guy on board.

The action scenes are lacklustre at best. There is simply no interesting fights. Some of the action are really run-of-the mill over the top stuff. Compare this to the fight scenes in a movie like The Matrix. That is a big drawback to me, because fighting is really a big part of what Batman does.

It's boring the Joker uses bombs, bombs and more bombs. Normally he used gas a lot. Heath Ledger does a great job. His character is interesting, but just not not really written like the Joker. He lacks the flamboyance and humour. There's not enough comedy themed gadgets using poison and gas. Maybe they just wanted to do something different, but this take in Joker didn't work for me.

I find the script messy. The overall problem is that it intriduces characters a lot, and then doesn't do much with them. The Batman-copycats just disappear from the plotline. They are just there in the beginning. There's way too many mafia people. Cut the mafia people down to a few guys and have them share all the mafia lines; this way you can better make them become real characters. The Lau character is another character that gets "finished with" too fast. We're never even told what happens to him?

Alfred also almost disappears from the end of the movie. The Russian ballerina also needs to have a presence during the entire movie; just 2 small scenes more with her makes it feel more like she is a part of something, and not just a character that is part of a machine like plot, so she is just dumped like an unnneded cogwheel. She reacted strongly to Harvey Dent and Batman, it would make sense to say say show a soundbite interview with her on TV letting us know how she felt about the stuff that happened.

Then there was a small story loop with Batman getting attacked by dogs. And the big machine they used to spy on all the phones in the city. Those two things were just boring tbh. Would much prefer Batman found the Joker in some interesting creative smart way, where you can go OO THAT WAS SO CLEVER OF BATMAN! instead of just introducing a wonder machine outta nowhere.

The point with Batman beating up some SWAT-teams was really dumb. They could just call them and tell them who not to kill; they are supposed to have radios and headsets lol. Or Batman could just tell them "hey guys, there people are not bad guys but hostages dressed up to be bad guys", seems sort of more simply that beating the bejeesus our of them all. Especially at a point where he needs help, seems to me better to cooperate with SWATs to get the bad guys, instead of beating them up :)

So yes, it's well made and directed and has good actors, but the script has too many weaknesses.

This is the best story arch in the comic, and difficult to adapt to a movie because the story runs in so many issues. The overall concept was in fact surprisingly good. They managed to sneak in the D'Bari, the Hellfire club house, they had a character that looked like the White Queen.

But the effort all came to nothing because of some strange rookie mistakes.

1: The bad guys, the D'bari were simply not interesting. I like the idea of using the D'Bari (in the comic Dark Phoenix destroyed their planet). But far more work should have been spent on them. They need to have individual names and personalities and backstories so that we care about them. It's not enough to see them kill and torture a few people. Heck, a random bad guy henchman in a Sergio Leone movie has more of a backstory than the two main bad guys in this one.

2: The X-Men. All the individuals did not stand out with their personality. Gone were Storm's comments about mother nature and room full of plants, Nightcrawler's silly jokes and catholicism and Cyclop's leadership and fear of hurting his friends with his uncontrollable beams did not exist. It HAS to be there. You cannot do X-Men by ignoring everything that makes the characters interesting. Trying to do that is just weird. It's like making a Batman movie and forgetting to mention his parents gor murdered :)

3: The actors. Many of them delivered bad performances. The Jean Grey actor being the most noticeable underperformer, because her character was central. A few did a decent job.

4: The scale of the destruction meted out by Dark Phoenix was too small. In the comic she destroys planets; in a movie she should AT LEAST destroy a mayor city or a country, She needs to really MASSACRE a lot of people, because it creates the moral tension of her having a serious case of guilt. And it sharpens the dilemma of "should be save her or kill her?".

5: The conflict between Prof X and the X-Men was simply a distraction from the main story, and should not have been in the movie at all. The script should have focused on Dark Phoenix. If you want side stories, have them be about mutants that cannot control their powers - for instance Cyplops blasting stuff by mistake and then build "we all have problems to control were powers". Stuff like that. I think the movie had more of these pointless distractions - for instance the comment in the beginning about Beast just having modified the plane. We don't need pointless information at all. Cut out the scene with Prof X giving a lecture as well.

6: The entire plotline about Jean Grey's parents was dire. I fail to see what's wrong with the comic version? Why waste time on a making a boring subplot about her causing her mother's death? It's standard movie knowledge, that if you kill of somebody, we need a reason to care for the person, or else we won't. So no, we don't care about Jean Grey's mother. She has like 2 lines in the movie before dying, and nobody has a reason for liking her more than a random policeman with a line. That is how it has always worked. It would have worked FAR better keeping the comic version - her parents are alive and well, but a bit afraid of her. It's also more powerfull to have BOTH her parents disown her, instead of just her bland father. (This actor didn¨t do good.)

7: The music was terrible. The car scene was such an obvious chance to put some cool songs in there, and then have a scene with Jean Grey rehearing the song. Just steal Marvel's idea of using really good music!

8: I'm giving an overall 4 because I think the general idea with the script was very solid and the general structure is how this story could be told well. Pherhaps also because I am feeling generous today, and because they made an effort to sneak in the things related to the story in the comic. It's really a shame they messed it up. Probably only hardcore comic fans can watch this and get something out of it, because at least the movie reminds us of some good stories.

Very good movie. The first half has really a good pace of the story, and nearly all events surprise/shock you. There's so many things happening, and you barely have time to process a very dramatic scene before the next one hits you. It all fits beatifully together, and it's fairly amazing how you can pack that much content into so few minutes. It's even got some very decent action scenes, I didn't excpect that in a family drama.

Actors all doing a great job, especially the two children actors. Solid work from all the seasoned adult actors. I'm impressed also with the supporting actors, for instance the doctor and the lawyers. Also with the almost-lover - she had to strike a fine balance between being credible as a romantic interest but not coming across as so sympathetic that you'd want the hero to leave his family for her. So if she is too sympathetic, that's bad, and if she is too little sympathetic, that's also bad, since then it would not be credible Leo was attracted to her. She hit the balance perfectly.

The reason I'm giving this only 7 stars and not more is that there is a weak part in the movie - the trial part. It felt like it just didn¨t fit in with the rest of the movie, and the script quality seemed to drop below the high standard of the rest of the movie, with even a goofy line or two - the rest of the movie has great dialogue. Yes, there was buildup to a conflict, but it just didn't feel right that out of nowhere we were in a court room. Perhaps the trial part was not in the original manuscript, and was put in as filler material, maybe because some other ideas were scrapped?

Anyway, there are so many good things in this movie that I highly recommend it. You could hear people crying all over the cinema. You don't see that so often.

Just overall badly written - down to the individual jokes not being funny, the side stories being uinteresting and the main plot also didn't work.

Marvel apparently wants to reboot the MCU, by "demoting" or changing a lot of characters. None of the "demotions" were well done - instead of epic fights against Thanos resulting in the hero loosing his powers or getting injured, they more had them just slip our the back door. It is strange that you would miss an opportunity to have a batch of heroes killed in an epic battle, and instead srite them out the story with bad plotlines.

The storyline was also a mess. The initial half hour or was it an hour before things got started could just have been cut down to five minutes, forgettable as it was. It was like the writers just gave up writing a meaningfull story from start to finish, and instead just had a main plotline patched together by coincidences (the bad guys randomly finding out what they heroes were doing), some side plots and then a big fight at the end.

Even the selection of music was bad, there was hardly a scene with a really good song fitting a scene. This is something Marvel has been very good at, so it's strange they suddenly couldn't get that right.

The point of the movie seems to reboot the MCU, removing a lot of characters because the actors playing them got too old for the roles - and maybe the writers had problems to create a story with a designated quota of heroes dying. I don't know what went wrong in the writing process, bur something for sure did.

So this movies tries to be a modern version of "The Hills Have Eyes" tyoe of movies. A happy family in the deep country, and then they get attacked by rednecks.

The movie as such is badly made. The main characters are generic, shallow and completely uninteresting. The part in the beginning when they drive in the car to Eden Lake is needlessly long and uninteresting. The short stay at the motel in the beginning is probably meant to signal problems ahead, but it fails at that and is just boring. You just get irritated at the main characters for booking a motel they don't like, instead of just going straight to the lake. This is the first time when the movie uses the classical tehcnique of having one of the characters adress the unbelievability of a situation - the guy says the motel was nice the last time they were there.

This technique was repeated endlessly every time the badly written script had the main characters do something stupid. Fassbender's character for no reason enters somebody's house, which is illegal and a bad thing to do. Afterwards his, very tolerant, girlfriend just mentions it.

Later in he is trying to escape the teenagers, driving fast through a forest, without being able to see stuff like trees - and he just needs to drive slightly faster than running speed to get away from teenagers on foot. But because the script needs the car to crash, probably because it would be hard to create a believable scene with the teenagers and children overpowerings Fassbender, several of them do seem to be around 12, so there he is, driving full speed blindly for no reason, while complaining that he cant see.)

Anyway, after a boring beginning the teenagers become hostile and the action starts. This whole part of the movie is an endless repeat of the pattern; teenagers attack, heroes escape, run for a bit, then the teenagers find them again inside the huge forest. It's just not big enough to escape, and those teenagers surely are some expert trackers! A full THREE times they repeat the exact same pattern of the girl hiding from the teenagers in a sneaky way (in the water under a shed on a lake, on the roof of another shed, inside a garbage bin.) The woman character seems to have a fondness of sheds, prioritizing to investigate sheds rather than just running away from her pursuers.

At some point after her boyfriend is dead the script demands that she also should be injured, so they have her randomly step on a stick and hurt her foot. She limps for a bit, then her foot, that they spend a scene showing as destroyed seems fine again. This disappearance of injuries repeats a pattern from earlier, when her boyfriend had his tongue severely cut, helas he can talk fine again a few minutes later, and it is never mentioned again his tongue was mangled.

Movies with the hero being chased and repeatedly found, so he can escape again etc, can be done very well, in various ways, for instance like in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" or "Predator". There are 100s of movies with chases they could use as a model.

Yet they produce this repetitive nonsense, with adults simply being unable to get away from some teenagers on drugs. Even when they've gotten far away from them she's bound to just pick the same tree to rest on that the teenagers decided to check out. The lazy script writer just relies on unexplained random coincidence during the entire movie.

Watched this simply because I was running out of deep water movies, expected it to be bad but it wasn't. The characters were all interesting, and there were a few very good ones. Miguel Ferrer's character, the two first guys to die, sitting and arguing like an old couple in their sub, the captain. Strangely the two main characters were among the most uninteresting ones.

The best part of the movie is the first half. Before the monster shows up the movie is basically describing humans in a stressful high-tech environment. That part of it is really good, better than Alien. You get a really good description into their working rules, the dynamics of the crew and how the base works. It has a lot of great scenes with tense technical command-dialogue "Hatch secure!", "Monitor 364X online and ready to go!", "Cable disenged!". To my memory, it is one of the most satisfying movies I have watched in this department. Alien and Aliens has maybe 10 minutes combined of this, this movie has maybe 30 minutes of it.

The origin of the monster was Lovecraft-satisfying. Humans disturbing a place that has been sealed off for maybe millions of years, and something emerges. However, very little time was spent developing the monster. It just attacked whatever there was to attack. It also seemed weird to have the same monster being big enough to trash a sub from the outside, but when it got inside the compound it acted likt it could not just trash through walls. But well, it was also interesting to have monster you knew basically nothing about whatsoever - apart from that it might be attracted to lights.

Anyway, the movie was much more focused on the character's reactions to the monster. I found that excellently done. Even then cringy prayer scene - well I suppose It might happen that some people would pray in such a situation. Liked the last shot of the raft, allthough I don't really see how they will make it rowing to the mainland :)

So I've seen a few low budget horrors, that looks like some college friends made it with a shoebox budget, so I don't mind it looked cheap. However, some of the sets did indeed look very settish, it looked more like a dungeon in an amusement park than a real dungeon. I liked a lot that the Polish characters spoke untranslated Polish, and I found the caricature of Poland funny.

The basic problem with the movie was that the authors seemingly had concentrated on the last final plot twist - the last scene was very good indeed! - and all that came before it was more or less unimportant random buildup. Almost no creativity had been spend on character motivation along the way - it was established that the Carmen character was selfish and get the story at all costs, so during the movie they just had the characters barge into trouble constantly with her leading - the intern just tagging along like a dog and her boyfriend complaining about it, but following anyway without much ado. You need to work more on the single scenes, small things like explain why they couldn't find their car again - it shouldn't be far away, but they just completely gave up finding it ever again. preferring to steal another one at gunpoint! I didn't get why they lost the car.

The intern character was terrible, being completely devoid of any motivation or anything. She was there for fodder, because the movie needed another person killed to explain what the ritual was. There was no explanation why she wants to follow a crazy person to Poland. She needed more scenes, to give her a reason to come along. Why not spend 30 seconds explaining she wants to do the Poland thing to get famous instantly because ... uhm, she needs money desperately for her medical bills or something. Just make her more interesting, she's in the movie anyway, so make her interesting. Give her a quirky sense of humour, have her constantly talk about her weight problems, anythinh.

The beginning of the movie was *really* bad. The whole thing about Carmen just flatly disobeying her boss was weird - I was not sure if she was supposed to be stupid or smart? If the moviemakers had made it more obvious that this was potentially a biiig media story, yes OK, I get why she would go to Poland, and we know she is a smart and selfish Lois Lane kind of reporter. But a story about a random dead tourist to me just isn't such a big story, that you want to risk your career for it - I don't really see why it is better than the bee story she scoffed at. (Why she didn't want do to that, seemed no problem to wrap that up before going to Poland?) If the script writers had made the dead guy the son of a president or pop star or something, well that could explain why it was a potential scoop.

I think also they should have included the intern in the buildup, make it partially her idea to bail on the bees and go to Poland, and have her lie blatantly to the photographer. It would make it more like they girls, were the evil ones and he deserved to survive, and it was for a reason they looked at the statue.

Giving it a 6 anyway because it has some memorably scenes, I feel like I am being generous.

Saw it without knowing anything about it whatsoever, and really liked it. Liked all the visuals, especially the temples and other buildings, and the sun-wagon. Liked the premised of 10 feet tall gods, it worked pretty much like a super-hero movie. Especially liked the characters, with everybody except being fairly immoral and cynical, and then some of them gradually realizing, maybe cynicism is not a good thing when a madman is destroying the world. I liked the humor a lot, and the interplay between Horus and Bek. Zaya was absurdly beautiful. It was a surprising turn of events for me she got killed so fast in the movie, only to return later on. It doesn't happen often that the death of an important character catches you completely off guard!

I was very surprised it got so many many negative reriews. I suspect the reason is that it drew a crowd of genuinely historically-mythologically interested people, expecting to see a more serious sort of movie, with historically correct details and being dialogue-heavy with mythology. explanations. And then no you're not going to like it - same as if you try to watch a Marvel Thor movie for Viking mythology.

So I hope it doesn't go forgotten like some of Proyas other movies. It's top notch popcorn entertainment.

I was very taken with the visuals and music in the beginning, waiting for the plot to start. Unfortunately, the story turned out to be an uninteresting bare bones revenge story. It didn't even have a story twist or some ambiguity or anything, from around the middle .it just felt like a slow video game-

The visuals and music alone just weren't enough to keep me interested for the full two hours. I think it will find it's audience though; it reminded me of Mad Max:Fury Road, which was also just visuals, so I think if you are the person that liked Futy Road, you'll probably like this one as well. Personally, I need a plot, so I gave the movie a rash three stars.

This movie could have been good - but was terrible. Some mainstream movies have their characters behave like teenagers in slasher movies, regardless of them officially being scientists or master assassins or whatever. I see the reason for this; in horror movies, the characters need to interact with "the dangerous thing", and if the characters act efficiently and have ressources, it turns into an action movie. So characters are dumbed down, in order to make them less efficient. The price of this, is that you get nonsensical characters, like clueless scientists.

So. The US army found this alien shimmer that expands in a zone, and they think it threatens the entire world. They have zero date from the zone. There's no reason to belive the expansion will continue indefinitely; it might just stop. It is cautious to assume it will keep expanding. This is not adressed at all. The scientists just go "it expanded yesterday, so it will keep doing so forever." Instead of using the not neglible ressources of the US Army - nuke the alien, send in entire bataillons in Apache Helicopters, or just send teams inside the bad zone for half an hour, gather data and then retreat to return the data - just go in, grab some plants and soil samples, go out.

Instead they go for the worst option imaginable; send small teams deep inside for long expeditions, thereby ensuring none will survive and bring data back. So for THREE years the US army is just watching the bad thing do it's thing and do nothing. A sane person with 10 people working for him could have gotten more information, than the US army got in three years.

So. The team with the heoine on it goes inside the zone. It is an all-female team, I guess because of current tropes. They are supposedely soliders, but carry no useable military gear in the large backpacks they probably just use to show "look it is so army-like because of the large backpacks." They have nothing with them - booby traps, mines and such - that helps them tp secure a camp in a very hostile environment. Now who'd have thought that could have been useful, everybody else that went in died, but well, that probably means all they need is tents and guns and no mines!

The team makes no sense. Why not add 10 marines to take care of them? I guess marines are so expensive: The entire world is threatened, but the US army doesn't want to waste marines on this. The team furthermore seems to have no real command structure or any routines, some team members do not know the goal of the mission, some have not bothered to look at a map of the area. At one point they sleep in a gigantic complex, potentially shot full of monsters, and do not bother to do the "secure the area"-thing soldiers love to do. Oh and it's not like it would be useful that everybody had a map, in a place where everybody else had died! Nobody could foresee you might end up alone, having no clue where you are! At the end the team leader just leaves her team, and makes nothing out of the whole "I am supposed to order you guys to make this mission happen", she is OK-doky that the others feel like disobeying orders. A team member is killed by a bear, no serious rescue mission is attempted, one team member afterwards wanders off alone (well why bring more people to cover you, it's better to send just one person while the others hand around and chill). They find a video with information of what is going on; they just watch it fast and then argue about what was in the video. Oh yes, it's not like it would be useful in saving your lived and such to understand the video, really, why waste 20 seconds of your life watching it a second time? Who needs information in a place where everybody dies from unknown reasons?

Now let me jump to the end. The hero saves the world, yet when she gets back to base, the commanders seem angry and suspicious of her. Why are they not happy that she saved the world? Did they want to include the "parents unfairly angry with teenager"-trope. I figure that if a soldier saves the world, this is the sort of thing that should make commanders happy, and give the soldiers medals. But in this movie, commanders get angry if you succeed. They sent her on what they thought was a suicide mission, yet appear suspicious/perplexed about the fact that her team members died? Are these commander guys like "we send people on suicide mission, but do not understand why anybody would die on this dangerous suicide mission! Foul play!"

At the end of the movie the heroine's husband is obviously an alien clone/copy of her real husband. She hides this from the commanders - because she is happy to have an alien copy of her dead husband? As a scientist, she should realize, that the alien will most likely eat her or infect her with something (that's what the aliens have been doing!), but who cares in a movie that thinks scientists = idiots. I also doubt that normal people would appreciate alien copies of their loved ones!

It is interesting that older movies have handled these issies well. "Stargate" has a scientist/military team that acts like a scientists/military team, and not as "team confused teenager". "Stolen Bodies" has people reacting believable to alien clones of their loved ones. A plethora of movies has believable military debriefings. It's not hard to do these hings well, yet this movie failed.

The original Bladerunner is one of my all time favorite movies. This one is way below average. I fear some people who see this one before the original, will now miss out on the original, as they will assume it is bad as well. Watch the original, is has nothing to do with this thing!

Anyway. The strong sides of Bladerunner 2049 are: Nice visuals overall, good scenes here and there; I like the music. It is good if you like to just visuals and a story is not your thing.

The pace is slow, the dialogue is very forgettable and boring, even in scenes that offer golden opportunities for memorable lines, for instance the goodbye scene after the root-hologram-robot threesome. Characters are undeveloped; they forget to build sympathy for the heroes. The rebel leader for instance; she should be designed to make you feel either positive or negative toward their cause. As it was, you really don't care if they manage with their revolution or not.

K's hologram girlfriend I liked though, they should have made her the main character instead and built the movie around her. For me she was a redeeming factor.

*SPOILERS* Now to a very weak part ... the many inconsistencies and illogical things.

* The evil robot woman can effortlessly walk into LAPD and kill the police boss and steal forensic evidence. They apparently have no security whatsoever in the LAPD and haven't invented security cameras yet. Also she hangs out in the archives for no reason.

* The evil mastermind knows that the evil mastermind from the original knew how to make robots capable of pregnancy; for unknown reasons he decides to not science it by himself, it seems to me that a scientific genius would try to do that. Instead he opts to find a robot daughter, that he has no idea is even alive or dead. His goal is to create *a lot* of robots; why having the robots get pregnant is better than just building them makes no sense and is not explained. He seemingly kills a lot of his robots himself for no reason (he offs two, but it seems to be his general habit); this maybe is the reason he does not have enough. As well, he only has ONE robot and a few goons to his dirty work for him; he seems though to have money to afford more than just ONE agent. When he catches Harrison Ford (Deckard), he gets a really dumb idea to make Deckard give up his daughter: "Please trade me your daughter for a bad copy (wrong eye color) of your dead wife." How anybody sane would think somebody would take this trade is beyond me. Then he decides to cart Deckard into space presumably to torture him them there because the torture in space is better than torture on Earth; why not just torture him right away on Earth? In sum, he came off more like being dumb and crazy, rather than a mastermind.

* The prostitute is sent to get info on K; she settles for a 2 minute talk, and then just leaves it. Later, K's hologram girlfriend needs a prostitute and randomly call this one - how lucky for the prostitute. I think she is a terrible spy with incredible luck!

* K himself is at one point saved from scavengers by missiles mysteriously appearing from the sky; he just goes "whatever" and does not seem interested in figuring out where the came from, or if he is bugged. Some investigator. * Deckard sees K has a toy horse that belonged to Deckard's daughter; he does not seem to care where K got this from. Also: An important lead is a sock from Deckard's daughter, that K finds in a piano in Deckard's old flat. Since Ford left the apartment way before his daughter was born (in the original), he must have returned with one of his daughters socks, to stuff it into the piano. But why? Why would somebody risk life and limb to stuff a sock into a piano?

At times the movie is repetitive: the toy horse figures so much it gets irritating; the effect of using real company names for future stuff is also overused. Even the cool street scenes get old, as there's too much of them.

They tried getting as many things from the original into this one; a few times it worked, most of the time it is just put of place or badly done. The scene with Deckard's old police colleague is evidently there just to get the iconic origami-making policeman into the movie; if you have not seen the original this scene must seem just pointless and leave you wondering if it was about something you missed. But no; it is just pointless and should have been cut out.

Overall I'd say probably do not watch it at all; you can maybe watch it at home on a rainy Wednesday evening if you have nothing else to do and then accept the story is nonsense and the characters are weak, and just enjoy the visuals. I nearly walked out of the cinema and probably would not manage to finish it at home.

The movie has visuals going for it, as well as a setting that COULD have been used to make a good movie. This is why it is so frustrating it turned out so badly.

Worst of all are the characters. None of them make any sense.

The robot is experimenting on important crew members for no apparent reason. If he had picked one of the presumably expendable people with no name that are on the ship it would make a little sense. As for the first experiment - infecting Halloway, by making him drink alien goo - he doesn't even seem to care what the goo does to him, but looses interest in him. When he discover Halloway's girlfriend is impregnated by an alien embryo, he again for no clear reason decides to sacrifice her and keep the embryo. But when she manages to get the embryo-now-baby-monster, he simply doesn't care, and never inquires whatever happened to the embryo that was important enough to him to kill for. The baby is alive and well where he was left, but he never even goes into the room to bother to see if it's there.

His actions seem more like a sick person playing tricks on people because he is bored, and who moves on to something new when the trick is finished.

The biologist and geologist also just seem crazy. They freak out for no reason and leave their team - supposedly you would pick more cool headed people for such missions. After that the geologist forgets he is the map expert and has a 3D map, and the biologist tries to pet an alien snake and gets killed.

Weyland, the rich man funding everything, hides for no reason in the ship. There is no rational explanation why he keeps it a secret he is on the ship. I am assuming he is paranoid that someone will kill him for no reason, or maybe he just likes to surprise people?

Shaw seemingly forgets everything instantly. Her husband is out of her mind as soon as he is dead, and she never mentions to anybody that she just removed an alien embryo from her body. The only thing she remembers is her Cristian cross.

Vickers seem like an aggressive sociopath, with no plan and nothing in particular she wants out of the whole space travel project, except bullying her crew mates.

The two co-pilots seem strange and sort of sedated. They don't even react more vividly to being blown up for no reason.

The captain is the only character that is believable and at least seem like a normal human being.

The movie doesn't make sense having characters as these, as they are supposed to be an elite team of top scientists. The movie would have worked if they had adopted the "Dirty Dozen" plot, that mental patients and convicts get a chance to get a clean slate of they volunteer for a suicide mission in space. Alternatively, this could be an internal plot in Weiland's company - his colleagues want to kill him, so they manage to get him the worst crew they possibly can, to ensure he never returns from his mission. This would have made the movie work better, it would at one stroke have explained most of the erratic behaviour of the characters, and it would have been a chilling background story. As it is, it simply does not make any sense.