Movie review rant 2019

What is labelled as "trailer 2" for the new Terminator movie is out. Really it's the same trailer with the addition of Sarah saying "I'll be back". I wish they'd let that particular line die.

However there is a bunch of stuff after the trailer showing some making-of-the-movie, and at 1.17 you can see Arnold with part of his head and most of one arm covered (where they will add in CGI metal later), so he's definitely a T-800. (There's also a very brief shot in the first trailer of the T-800 punching the new Terminator underwater). I hope they give a good explanation of his presence...

 
ThylacineAlive said:
Ok so I watched Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with my brother the other day and now I’m going to go on a rant about why this franchise is awful and I hate it. Heavy spoilers for the entire “film” so if you haven’t seen/don’t want to know what happens then look away!

While I’m probably going to dissect certain scenes here and there throughout the film I’m not going to do a scene by scene review of the whole movie as that’d take too long and there are way too many stupid moments for me to even begin to try and point out. However, I will start by breaking down the entire opening scene just so you can all get a feel for the overall tone of the movie and how seriously the makers took the fifth installment of one of the most iconic franchises of all time. The movie starts in the Mosasaurus tank sometime after the events of the first Jurassic World. This here already represents one major flaw with the film that will come up several times: the geography. From maps of the park released during the first film’s marketing, it is clearly shown that this tank was built inland directly next to the main plaza (why they built a tank for an incredibly dangerous predator right at the edge of the main plaza with nothing but a small fence stopping it from jumping out and grabbing living things too close to the edge is beyond me, especially when it does just this at the end of the first movie in order to save the day). Now, the tank is directly next to ocean with nothing separating them but a single wall. Well, a wall with a Mosasaurus-sized gate in it. That’s right, the tank has a giant underwater gate that opens into the open-f*****g-ocean. Back to the scene, we see this gate opened so that a small two-man submarine can enter in order to search for the perfectly intact “Indominus rex” skeleton. We see that said opening of the gate was only possible thanks a single tech-guy plugging his iPad into an outdoor control panel. Back underwater, one of the two men piloting the sub is very clearly nervous but the other one calms him down by saying, “Don’t worry, anything in here would be dead by now,” acknowledging that there’s no way a giant 120ft long predatory reptile could survive unassisted in an enclosed area with no food or filtration for the bare minimum of however long it would take for the skeleton of the “I. rex” to be completely cleaned of flesh. They very easily find the skeleton and proceed to saw off a single rib, attaching it to a floatation device and sending it to the service to be picked up. A helicopter picks up the sample and proceeds to land about a chase scene’s distance away from the tech-guy for literally no reason. The tech-guy then tells the sub to get out so he can close the gate again for some reason. Unfortunately before doing so, the sub gets eaten by the Mosasaurus. We start to hear the Dilophosaurus calls from the first movie coming from the forest in front of the tech-guy. Nervous and frustrated at the lack of response from the sub, he begins to close the gate- a process which appears as a green loading screen given the percentage of how closed the gate is. At this point the pilots and armed guards in the helicopter who never stepped out to guard the tech-guy see something in the forest and start screaming at the tech-guy to return to the chopper so they can leave. Despite the guards screaming and waving their arms around, the tech-guy completely misses the intent of their message and thinks they’re just being impatient. Presumably subverting our expectations of seeing a Dilophosaurus again, the Tyrannosaurus rex steps out of the forest about 10 feet in front of this guy. He screams, unplugs his iPad from the control panel which somehow does not sever the connection, and then manages to not only consistently outrun the animal but also catch up to the chopper which begins to fly away without him. At some point he drops the iPad and the T. rex steps on it, causing the screen to only crack a bit and the loading screen turns red and stops closing the gate at only around 50%. Right before reaching the end of the dock that apparently hangs over the tank for some reason, the tech-guy catches a ladder the chopper dropped for him. The chopper then pauses for some reason, allowing the T. rex to bite onto the end of the ladder and thrash its head violently. This thankfully only causes the chopper to rock lightly back and forth and eventually the ladder tears because dinos have sharp teeth. The chopper begins flying away very low over the tank and everyone starts celebrating their successful escape. The Mosasaurus then jumps out of the water and eats the tech-guy but the ladder is cut even shorter now because sharp teeth so the chopper is fine. Completely unaffected by this, one of the guards calls home base and tells them they’re returning with the “I. rex” sample. The Mosasaurus then swims out into the open ocean. This will never be mentioned again. The title forms out of CGI lava. At this point you may be wondering how the Mosasaurus is still alive. And why they wouldn’t scan the tank first to be certain. Or just send in an unmanned sub. And why wouldn’t they just drop the tiny sub into the tank from above so that no one would ever have to step foot on the island? And how come the gate can only be closed if there’s a constant connection present? And why would anyone ever build a gate that large leading out into the wild? And why- The movie will never answer these questions. This is just the first five minutes of the film and already there’s an endless supply of ignorance and stupidity, and this isn’t even the most ridiculous sequence imo.

The movie continues three years after the events of JW, where the once dormant volcano on Isla Nublar is now active and threatening to destroy the entire island. The US government is debating whether or not they should save these “endangered species” and asks for the opinion of Jeff “is he crazy or is he acting” Goldblum. Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm is one of the best parts of the original Jurassic Park and the movie pushed hard on the fact that the character was returning, something I was very excited for and couldn’t wait to see just how they utilized him in the story. Malcolm tells the government to let the Dinosaurs die and then promptly disappears. I could go on this sub-rant in a number of places throughout this review but I’m going to get it out of the way now. In this scene a governor names the second island, Isla Sorna, present in the second and third installments of the JP franchise. The marketing of this film even uses footage of the T. rex in San Diego from The Lost World. After Malcolm’s scene ends, the film then goes on pretending that Isla Sorna and the middle two movies never existed. The entire plot rests on Sorna not being an option for the animals to be transferred to, and that nobody knows just how bad of an idea it is to try and bring these creatures to the mainland. Yet they simply ignore that the island exists past namedropping it once, and act as though no one has concerns about bringing giant Dinosaurs into the United States outside of the cost. These movies exist, you have a character from them in your film, you acknowledge they’re canon in your marketing, you namedrop the island the take place on, yet you then act as though they don’t exist and don’t make the entire plot of this film nonsensical. I read somewhere that, in the expanded canon, all the Dinosaurs on Sorna were captured and moved to Nublar for the opening of Jurassic World, but this is utter ********. Sorna was well-established to be vastly greater in size than Nublar and housed many more species than were ever present at Jurassic World according to the film’s official list published during marketing. Additionally, the island was known for being home to at least two packs of Velociraptor and seven individual T. rex whereas all four of the raptors present on Nublar in the new movies were shown as being born and raised there, and there’s only ever been one T. rex on Nublar (as a side note, how long is this animal going to live for? She’s 50 as is and keeps getting in fights with other large dinos). Also, where’s the Spinosaurus then? It’s certainly not the skeleton of one shown in the first movie because I already Googled that and the animal shown in the third film was larger and had a different shaped head. In fact, all the animals in the two JW films look completely different- aka sh*t. This leads me into another sub-rant that I might as well get out of the way now: these movies look awful. It is beyond me how a movie that came out in 1993 can have better special effects in certain scenes than the best of what these new movies have given us. Rewatch the scene from the original where the T. rex chases the Jeep and the scene from the beginning of this movie where the same T. rex chases the tech-guy and tell me which looks better. Both scenes include the same animal, both take place at night, both take place in the rain, both involve an animal running, yet the 1993 version somehow looks more realistic. And the T. rex is the best looking of them all! The new raptor design just looks silly to me and the Gallimimus specifically just look awful. Yeah the raptor design was changed in Jurassic Park III, but for that movie there was an extended canon explanation that Dr. Wu had been experimenting with adding feathers to some of the animals, leading them to look different. And that was one animal, in a change that ended up looking the best out of all the movies. Here we just have all new dino designs just ‘cause. Not to mention their few practical effects look terribly. Remember that scene in the first JW with the Apatosaurus? Well Howard the Duck called and he thinks you look fake as sh*t.

Anyway I’ve already ranted longer than I anticipated and we’re still in the first 10 minutes so I’m going to rush the rest of this. Basically Claire (ginger lady) from the first movie now runs the “Dinosaur Protection Group” and she wants to fund a rescue op to save the dinos from the island because our children shouldn’t have to grow up in a world without Dinosaurs… This is where we’re introduced to two useless side characters whose names I don’t remember and will not bother to look up. The guy is another nerdy tech-guy and the girl is a “paleo-veterinarian” and they also want to save the dinos. Claire gets a call from the “Lockwood Estate” and is invited over, where she meets John Hammond’s secret partner that helped set-up the original park, yet has never been mentioned until now. He tells her that he’s bought a new island called “not Island Sorna” and he wants to move all the dinos there. Here we also meet obvious bad guy, who’s running the operation and is in charge of all of Hammond 2.0’s assets, and Hammond 2.0’s “granddaughter” Maisie, who will be filling the role of the new “child of divorce” in this JP film. Obviously bad guy tells Claire that he can save exactly 11 species but he needs her help to get Owen (Star Lord) from the first movie to track down Blue, the last of the raptors. Claire tracks Owen down to a mountaintop where he is building a cabin all by himself and we discover that they’ve broken up again. Apparently a bad and repeatedly failing relationship getting another new spark is what is supposed to pass as character development in this franchise. Owen rightly tells Claire that the dinos should be allowed to die and that he doesn’t care about Blue. She then reminds him that he raised Blue and that he’s “a good man,” which leads Owen to decide to help.

Owen, Claire, nerdy tech-guy, and p-vet all go to the island where they meet a man who is basically the hunter from The Lost World but with a teeth pulling fetish. They first go to the main plaza, which is exactly where it was in the last film despite everything else being relocated, and there’s a knockoff Brachiosaurus scene of the original JP. They then all go to the command center from the first movie- which is now almost entirely underground and looks out over a grassy cliff instead of the park because plot- and Claire and nerd get the power started, reactivating the tracking system which tells them where all the dinos are. This is bizarre shot because it implies that there are only about two dozen dinos on the whole island, and also does not show the dozens that have- spoiler- already been captured by the hunters. They use this tracking system to find Blue and Owen, p-vet, and the hunters head out to find her. They do quite easily and she does not immediately eat Owen. I can buy that she might recognize him and maybe would hesitate, but she was shown to clearly want to eat him in the first film and due to her decision to aid him in that film, she’s lost her entire pack and sustained serious injuries. She also got shot up by the people Owen was working with in the first movie. There is no reason why she should trust him, and that point only gets more solidified as she gets hurt more and more around him as this film goes on (but of course she becomes even more loyal). Despite this, Owen is about to make a connection with her when one of the hunters shoots her with a tranquilizer dart. The hunters then surround her, causing her to freak out and begin taking her sweet time ripping one of their faces off while everyone else does nothing. While she does this, the man being attacked pulls his gun and shoots her in the stomach, causing her to fall to the ground, dying. Here is where I got mad. In all four movies leading up this point we have watched people fruitlessly fire countless rounds of bullets at these raptors and not once has it done anything other than piss them off. Personally this has been a big criticism of mine of the older films, but I accepted it for what it was. That is how suspension of disbelief works- you tell us the rules of your universe and we accept them, in return we expect that you simply follow your own rules. Now here we are, being shown that a single pistol shot to the gut is all it takes to down a Velociraptor, the coolest and deadliest creature to ever walk the Earth in these films.

Expectedly, Owen freaks out and rushes towards injured face-less man, leading tooth fairy to shoot him with the dino-tranquilizer. Owen goes down and p-vet randomly pulls a gun on tooth fairy despite no one ever doing anything to her. She tells them that if they kill her or Owen then Blue will die as she’s the only one who can save her, and tooth fairy tells her that if she doesn’t save Blue then he will shoot her. They all then leave and abandon Owen there. Face-less man is never seen again. Meanwhile, the hunters randomly turn on Claire and nerd and lock them inside the command center. Nerd cannot open the door now for some reason but can open a random giant tunnel that leads to elsewhere in the park. Before they can escape through it, however, a Baryonyx shows up and enters the control center. Back in the jungle, a Sinoceratops comically licks Owen’s face, waking him up just in time to see a lava flow approaching him. For added comedy, instead of killing him the tranquilizer has made it so only one of his limbs work at a time, meaning he must flop away from the destructive power of a PS3 game’s highest quality CGI lava. Just before regaining his full motor control, his hand lands in the lava but does nothing. I kid you not, his hand literally goes into a lava flow but this does not even remotely burn his hand and it’s never even acknowledged. Since the hunters decided to execute this operation on the exact day the volcano was erupting, lava is now spilling everywhere including through the roof of the command center in a dripping straight line. Some of this lava falls on the Baryonyx’s head, but this also has no effect on the animal. Cornered, Claire spots a ladder that leads up to the surface literally right next to where they were standing the whole time and escape, making a point to actually trap the Baryonyx inside the burning structure. Even though the entire area around then is covered in lava, slightly up the hill at the forest’s edge there is no lava and Owen runs out followed by a stampede of dinos. All three of them run down the hill and find a Gyrosphere from the first film sitting against a giant log. How did it get here? Who knows. The next minute or so shows all the stampeding dinos crashing into the log around them, slowly chipping away at it. Ignoring that fact that these animals are not indestructible battering rams, it’s miraculous that none of them ever hit the see-through glass ball. Claire and nerd get into the Gyrosphere, but a Carnotaurus shows up from Disney’s 2000 film Dinosaur (since they were not present at the park in the first JW) and rushes at Owen before he can get in. Luckily the T. rex is a small, silent vigilante that can sneak up on other dinos in an open field during a stampede and kills the Carnotaurus for some reason as the entire island behind her explodes.

…

The gyrosphere then tumbles down the hill towards the cliff edge while Owen runs behind it. A pyroclastic flow then engulfs all of them and the dinos but it’s ok because they then just fall off the cliff 200 feet into the ocean below perfectly fine. The gyrosphere then begins to sink, and Owen must swim back to the surface to retrieve a knife (???) so he can stab the glass to death. Our heroes then swim to a shore somewhere and presumably all the dinos drown. Claire then yells out “it was all a lie!” which makes no sense because there was no lie, they did capture all 11 species. This did make me wonder why exactly the bad guys revealed themselves so early, however, considering there was no reason to. The good guys still thought they were all on the same side and the bad guys could have used their help transporting the dinos still, there was no reason to leave them behind or try to kill them. We then see various shots of a bunch of previously captured dinos being loading onto a boat. We also see that the hunters have somehow captured both the T. rex and the Baryonyx despite there being no possible way for this to have happened. We then see tooth fairy stop to admire a Stegosaurus before ripping one of its teeth out for a necklace(?) he’s making so that we know he’s really a bad guy now. As the island explodes, our heroes make a break for the boat, whose capture has conveniently decided to leave the gate open (there’s literally a shot of it falling into the ocean as the boat pulls out and it’s still never closed). They all jump into a truck whose keys have been left in the ignition and is only 40ish feet from the boat and perfectly fits on the boat that has been left behind for some reason. Claire floors it and the boat randomly jumps into the air as she reaches the end of the dock and flies onto the boat with a huge crash. Literally no one who is shown to be standing right there and looking in that direction witnesses this. Since Claire is the only woman here, she throws on the Marvel patented disguise kit of a baseball cap and sunglasses so no one will recognize here. We then have a scene where the Brachiosaurus from earlier runs down the dock as the entire island burns behind her and calls out to the ship as though it’s asking not to be left behind. … Everyone is sad as we watch the animal disappear into a cloud of fire and ash. Isla Nublar, the last remnant of the original film aside from the T. rex has been burned back into the ocean.

Back at dino mansion, obvious bad guy meets with Arnim Zola from Captain America and discusses plans to have Dr. Henry Wu from the first JP and JW create a new dino super solider to sell to idk Hyrda probably but they need Blue the raptor to mother it as she possesses empathy and respect for people that their prototype does not. Ignoring the fact that Blue immediately betrayed and straight up ate multiple people during the events of the first film and barely respected Owen, why the hell do these movies keep trying to sell us on weaponized Dinosaurs? No one liked it in the first film and it makes absolutely no sense, especially if they’ve now made it that regular old bullets can kill them. Later on they’ll describe an Ankylosaurus as a “living tank” but why would you want a large, slow-moving animal you’d have to train, house, feed, and heal when you could buy a real tank that’s actually armored, fits 10 soldiers inside, and has a giant gun on the front of it!? Nonetheless, here we are. Maisie of course hears all of this somehow and even almost gets eaten by the prototype, the “Indoraptor”. Despite obvious bad guy locking her in her roof, picks the lock with the keys that’s left sitting directly outside her door and tells Hammond 2.0, but he tells her to go to bed as she likely misheard and that they’ll discuss it in the morning so that he can get murdered first.

Back on the boat our heroes decided that the hunters are actually hunters and that the dinos are going to be sold at auction despite no one, not even obvious bad guy, ever actually saying this before this point. They then track down p-vet and find Blue hemorrhaging to death. She tells them that she needs to perform an emergency blood transfusion before she can remove the bullet or else Blue will die. Since Blue is the last raptor she needs the blood of another “three-fingered carnivorous biped” so of course Owen and Claire go off to syphon blood from the tranquilized T. rex. It’s hard to pinpoint the most ridiculous aspect of this film, but this is a strong contenders. The scene includes guards finding the door to the cage open but simply shutting it without a worry in the world, Claire riding the T. rex, and the T. rex waking up, causing Owen to jump through her jaws before she shuts them in order to escape. Despite there before aforementioned guards in the area and the second most dangerous animal on the ship being awake and roaring her head off, literally no one comes to investigate and I guess she just goes right back to sleep for the remainder of the boat ride. They then perform the blood transfusion and Blue doesn’t immediately die. P-vet removes the bullet and Blue instantly is fine. Shortly after this, nerd is spotted but mistaken for a ship hand and pulled away to prepare the boat for docking.

Hammond 2.0 calls obvious bad guy into his room, screams at him for betraying him, and then demands that he call the police on himself. Hammond 2.0 is murdered.

Upon arriving at dino mansion for the auction, Owen and Claire are immediately spotted by tooth fairy and thrown into one of the dino holding cells underneath the mansion (oh yeah there’s a secret lab/dino holding facility under the mansion that Hammond 2.0 didn’t know about. I mean they do state that the first dino DNA was extracted and cloned beneath the mansion, but it definitely appears as though the majority of this facility was built much more recently than the 60s at earliest). A bunch of evil rich people arrive from rival companies, the American 1%, and the Russian government and start buying the auctioned dinos for millions a piece. If these things are so valuable idk why no one ever bothered going to the completely unprotected island and getting some themselves but whatever. Obvious bad guy reveals he is obviously the bad guy to Claire and Owen and claims that what he is doing is no different to what they did with the Jurassic World park. Neither Claire nor Owen have any sort of rebuttal to this despite it not being true whatsoever. Bad guy then tells them how there’s no purpose in keeping them alive but then the scene hard cuts to I think Maisie discovering murdered grandpa and then the bad guy is just at the auction again. Zola and bad guy bring out the Indoraptor to preview it but once the Russians start bidding tens of millions they just role with it much to Wu’s dismay. The Indoraptor is so special, by the way, because it has an orange stripe. It is also a smaller version of the I. rex that is programmed to hunt people on command. This is done using the help of a gun whose laser sight locks onto a target, and then the trigger releases a noise that causing the Indoraptor to relentlessly attack the target. I don’t why having a gun that shoots a Murdersaurus hex instead of a bullet when you have to have the victim in a laser sight anyway is better, but it is.

This is now the perfect time to discuss another major criticism of mine with the JW franchise as a whole: the presence of good and bad Dinosaurs. In the original trilogy, none of the dinos were inherently good or bad, they were just animals. The raptors and T. rex never attacked people or other dinos based off of whether they were good or bad, they did it because they’re carnivores and they were either hungry or defending their territory/young. Even the herbivores could be dangerous if you threatened them, such as the Stegosaurus attacking Sarah Harding in The Lost World after she seemingly posed a threat to their young. The only animal that ever seemed to relentlessly hunt the heroes was the Spinosaurus, but even in that movie the raptors only hunted down the heroes because one of them stole their eggs and the Pteranodon attacked because they had chicks to feed. In the JW movies, the herbivores are inherently good and only help the heroes while attacking only the bad guys, and the carnivores are supposedly inherently bad attacking anyone and everyone. We even have carnivores in this movie who are running for their lies from an erupting volcano pausing just to attack the good guys. But even with the carnivores we now have good and bad ones. Blue and the T. rex only ever attack bad guys and bad dinos, and all the other carnivores are just bloodthirsty now. The Indominus rex and Indoraptor are the worst examples of this, going on psychopathic murderous rampages with a major kill-boner for the children of divorce and our other heroes. It’s stupid.

Meanwhile in dino dungeon, Owen and Claire discover that they’re being locked up next to a Stygimoloch, who will apparently head-butt anything upon being whistled at. Owen has the animal smash into the wall between them over and over until it bursts through. Instead of proceeding to maul both Owen and Claire, the animal then responds to the whistle again and head-butts the call door open. I guess the movie forgot that all of these cells were designed to hold Dinosaurs much stronger than a Stygimoloch so this should not have been possible. The animal then runs off until the plot needs her again. Owen and Claire then run into Maisie, who trusts them for some reason despite her seeing Claire with bad guy earlier in the film. They decide they need to stop this auction and Owen puts the Stygimoloch into an elevator, which then opens into the auction room. The animal then goes on a rampage and mauls the entire crowd while Owen beats up all the armed guards in hand-to-hand combat. This is another perfect example of that whole “good & bad dinos” thing. Not going to lie, I was sort of waiting/wanting this movie to go all Cabin in the Woods and release all the dinos on everyone, but it turns out this one animal managed to single-handedly take down the whole operation. All the bidders run out of the mansion and take their already purchased dinos with them. The Stygimoloch then runs out of the mansion and into the woods.

The auction room is now cleared completely, with Own gone as well, leaving the Indoraptor completely alone. Tooth fairy then walks in, sees the animal for the first time, shoots it twice with tranquilizers, and then OPENS THE CAGE DOOR, WALKS IN, AND LEAVES THE DOOR WIDE OPEN SO HE CAN PULL OUT ONE OF ITS TEETH. This stupidity, ladies and gentlemen, is the act that puts the entire finale of the movie into action. The Indoraptor, as it turns out, is faking unconsciousness even raises its tail behind tooth fairy to distract him. It then literally opens its eye, grins, winks at the camera, and then mauls tooth fairy before escaping. It then goes on a murderous rampage, killing Zola and several other bidders who had not all left yet for some reason in the elevator (worth mentioning that the elevator is closed and the only reason this is possible is because the Indoraptor accidentally bumps its tail into the control panel and reopened the doors). There’s then this hallway scene where bad guy runs into Claire, Owen, and Maisie (whom I will refer to as Dream Team from now on) and bad guy informs them that Maisie is a clone of Hammond 2.0’s daughter, who had died in a car accident many years prior. This doesn’t not make sense, and is supposed to explain why he’s not mentioned in the original movie as this caused him and Hammond to have a falling out, but the issue is that this girl is like 8-years-old, 10 max. Idk if they forgot that it’s been 25 years since the first movie came out or something, or if there was supposed to be this twisted story about Hammond 2.0 repeatedly cloning this girl or something, but it’s never explained. And if you haven’t seen this movie yet and are thinking that this came out of nowhere and doesn’t serve the plot whatsoever, you are absolutely correct. Anyway the Indoraptor randomly shows up and start killing random guards so that Dream Team can run away from bad guy.

Downstairs Wu is emptying the lab of all research, DNA, and incubating eggs when nerd pops back up again and is somehow a lab assistant to Wu now??? P-vet is also there with Blue and the two of them release Blue who starts killing guards while Wu gets dragged out unconscious. Worth mentioning that the only thing keeping Blue locked up was a simple door handle with no lock on it, something the raptors in this franchise are definitely smart enough to open. It’s also very clearly in both Blue’s eyesight and reach so idk why she didn’t escape already and eat p-vet. Regardless, she’s out now and somewhere in her fight she releases explosive gas and her and side quest (nerd and pe-vet) all escape just before the lab explodes. Unfortunately this is now causing toxic gas to spill into the dino dungeon and threatens to kill all the dinos.

I’m getting tired now so the rest of this movie is a run of the mill chase/fight scene with the Indoraptor ruthlessly trying to kill dream team and more specifically Maisie. There are various scenes ripped right out of the original movie where the power is being restored section by section by side quest at a very dangerous moment for dream team, and another where Maisie is in a dumbwaiter and the door gets jammed open like Tim in the kitchen with the raptors. This time, though, she gets it shut and the Indoraptor smashes head first into the wooden wall, which doesn’t even bend despite these animals being shown to be able to decimate fallen trees on the island. Maisie locks herself in her room and the Indoraptor turns into a horror movie monster slowly and creepily sneaking down from the roof, opening the door, and looming over the little girl single claw raised pointing at her (it’s in one of the trailers if you don’t believe me). Owen then bursts in and shoots the Indoraptor several times to no effect. Blue then appears out of thin air and attacks the Indoraptor. Despite being half its size, Blue is winning and throws the Indoraptor out of a window onto the roof, where dream team was trying to escape. Now cornered at the edge of an all glass roof with the Indoraptor lurking towards them (Blue disappeared again), Claire picks up the dino gun (oh she also got impaled by a claw earlier but this has no bearing on her abilities now) and points it at not the ground or in any other direction, but directly at Owen. This causes the Indoraptor to go crazy and lunge for him, missing and crashing through the glass. It catches itself, however, and is climbing back up when Blue jumps in out of nowhere, knocks them both through the roof, rides the Indoraptor down, and lands perfectly on top of its body as it gets impaled by the horns of a Triceratops skull.

Dream team and side quest now meet up and discover that the toxic gas is killing the dinos. In an extremely impulsive move, Claire opens all the pens and the dinos flood into the main corridor yet don’t crush each other. Maisie is being held tightly in p-vet’s arms. Claire now has to decide whether or not to open the main door which will somehow lead to the outside despite this room being very far underground. No one tells her this is a bad idea. Luckily, she decides that that is a bad idea and does not release the dinos. Moments later, however, the doors do open and the camera pans to reveal that Maisie teleported out of p-vet’s arms without anyone noticing. She has now released dozens of Dinosaurs into the continental United States because, “they’re [clones], just like me.”

…

Bad guy somehow hasn’t left the mansion yet but is doing so now with the I. rex rib in hand, hoping to create another Indoraptor at some point in the future. Before he can leave, however, the stampede of dinos rush out around him, killing his few remaining guards and destroying his only car. What follows is another over-the-top death scene that is rivaled in this franchise only by the babysitter death in the firs JW. First we see a Carnotaurus in the background, stalking bad guy who thinks he’s now safe. The T. rex then comes out of absolutely nowhere and bites bad guy. She then drops bad guy, and picks him up again. The Carnotaurus is eager to get in on this action and bites the other half of bad guy, tearing him in half. The T. rex then bops the Carnotaurus on its head, and it drops the lower half of bad guy and runs off. Several Compsognathus rush in to feed on the dropped remains. The T. rex roars victoriously and walks away, crushing the I. rex rub as she goes. At the front of the mansion, our heroes walk out and are greeted by Blue, who fondly touches Owen’s hand before running off into the forest because she wants to be free.

We now have Malcolm returning again for the ending, finishing his speech to congress from earlier. He states starts talking about why bringing dinos to the mainland is a horrible idea. In front of this plays various scenes of Owen and Claire driving off with Maisie who they just kidnapped I guess, the T. rex breaking into a Lion enclosure at a zoo, the Mosasaurus eating a surfer, and Blue running through a desert (another example of changing geography, as the mansion was clearly somewhere in upstate California/Oregon) and stopping at a cliff edge to overlook a suburban neighborhood. We’re left to assume four minutes after the credits started rolling she ate a preschooler. Malcolm says, “Welcome to Jurassic World.” In the mid-credits several Pteranodons fly over Las Vegas. Everyone who loves Jurassic Park cries.

This was supposed to be a rant/review, but I ended up mostly summarizing the story, though to me that seems to be a good enough review in and of itself. All else I'd say is that these new movies are missing the sense of wonder and suspense that the original three had. Whenever the raptors or a T. rex made an appearance, it was a statement and it was intense and magical. Sometimes they wouldn't even show up under halfway through the movie, sometimes the third act in the raptor's case. These movies, however, just cram in as many dinos as they can, as fast as they can. Part of this movie's marketing is that they have more dino species present than any other, but it's at a complete loss to the franchise's continuity and this film's quality. I'd say it's style over substance but it's not, as these films look worse than their predecessors. None of the JP sequels are great, but now they're just terrible and nonsensical. They're pushing out these movies are quickly and seemingly cheaply as possible so they can make more box office and toy sales. It's awful and I hate that I keep going to see these even though I know they'll suck. I think it's only because I, and I think many others, just want to see Dinosaurs be done well on-screen again. But instead of a suspenseful, deep, inspiring science-fiction horror-thriller, they feed us this crap.

So I’ll just leave this here for you, and I hope to hear what you all think. Maybe PM me if you want to discuss spoilers in-depth so not to ruin the film for anyone who genuinely wants to see it?

~Thylo
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Heh, I just watched the Kill Count video for Fallen Kingdom. It looks utterly ridiculous. I refuse to watch the movie itself, but I almost want to just to see how bad it is (like I did with last year's The Predator and regretted it).

 
Chlidonias said:
Heh, I just watched the Kill Count video for Fallen Kingdom. It looks utterly ridiculous. I refuse to watch the movie itself, but I almost want to just to see how bad it is (like I did with last year's The Predator and regretted it).

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His first mistake is referring to this movie as a horror film instead of a comedy :p

I think he missed a lot of the glaring mistakes throughout the film such as the mosasaur tank changing locations, but he also pointed out some stuff I never caught onto such as the prices for the animals being so low and the hallways changing from having the Indoraptor at the end to the dumbwaiter. I think you should watch it eventually just for how stupid it is. I promise you it's dumber than this video makes it sound. I will say I appreciated the increased use of practical effects.

~Thylo
 
A double hitter of reviews to come, but over the weekend I watched a couple of films I haven't seen for a while so here' they are to get started with.

Thor (2011) - I caught this on TV yesterday and I enjoyed it more than I thought, unfortunately it's still not a patch on the sequels. A good introduction to the character but a very "meh" Marvel movie. Oh yeah, and the eyebrows can never be unseen! ;)

The Imitation Game (2014) - Absolutely brilliant film, I forgot just how much I enjoyed it hen it came out. If I re-jig my top 10 then this film will probably get a place. Benedict Cumberbatch is compelling as the tortured maths genius Alan Turing during WWII, struggling with his secret homosexuality and also with trying to win the war. A very poignant ending, this film deserved to sweep the board at The Oscars, just a shame The Theory Of Everything came out the same year.

And now new releases.

Detective Pikachu (2019) - A someone who has never been a fan of Pokemon I went into this film with a sense of "God, this is going to be awful!" sort of feeling. Having watched the trailer before leaving the house I was still unconvinced... And it wasn't awful, not great but acceptable.
If (like me) Pokemon mean nothing to you then that doesn't matter as it's a fairly straightforward buddy cop movie that just happens to have Pokemon in it. Ryan Reynolds as the voice of Pikachu is really off putting tough, especially after his stint playing Deadpool.
I think this has been reviewed in-thread already but I just wanted to throw in my 2 pence worth as a none-fan of the source material. 5/10

Not a film but an Amazon mini-series, Good Omens (2019) is a work of genius with Hollywood quality effects and an absolutely brilliant cast of A-listers and lesser known actors. Based on the novel of the same name by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman it follows the events leading up to Armageddon with catastrophe and misunderstandings around every corner.
David Tennant excels as the demon Crowley, whilst Michael Sheen does a fairly good straight man as the angel Aziraphale as they both try to influence the "Anti-Christ" whilst maintaining their secret friendship and trying not to get into trouble with their respective head offices.
The cast is great, a special mention for the 4 young kids who get to steal the show in a few key moments, and all can act to a fairly decent level. Not always the case with child actors.
I'd recommend this to anyone, not just fans of the book. And the start of episode 3 is probably the highlight, you don't even get the opening credits until 35(ish) minutes in. 10/10 no debate from me.
 
Brum said:
Thor (2011) - I caught this on TV yesterday and I enjoyed it more than I thought, unfortunately it's still not a patch on the sequels. A good introduction to the character but a very "meh" Marvel movie. Oh yeah, and the eyebrows can never be unseen! ;)
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I had to google "Thor eyebrows" to see what you were talking about, but now I know why I thought he looked so much better in the later movies!
 
Chlidonias said:
I had to google "Thor eyebrows" to see what you were talking about, but now I know why I thought he looked so much better in the later movies!
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Once you've noticed them you'll never be able to not notice them. I've probably ruined that film for anyone who never spotted it before, my apologies.
 
Brum said:
Not a film but an Amazon mini-series, Good Omens (2019) is a work of genius with Hollywood quality effects and an absolutely brilliant cast of A-listers and lesser known actors. Based on the novel of the same name by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman it follows the events leading up to Armageddon with catastrophe and misunderstandings around every corner.
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I really enjoyed this too :) it didn't completely live up to my hopes, naturally, but it was never going to given the fact it is based on one of my favourite books of all time and has been in development hell for 20 years now!
 
TeaLovingDave said:
I really enjoyed this too :) it didn't completely live up to my hopes, naturally, but it was never going to given the fact it is based on one of my favourite books of all time and has been in development hell for 20 years now!
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The book is brilliant, one of my favourites as well, but the changes made didn't detract from the series in my opinion. The addition of Gabriel was great, Jon Hamm clearly loved playing him and, as I said earlier, the whole opening sequence of episode three was truly great. A shame Terry Gilliam never got to do his version and even more of a shame that Terry Pratchett never got to see this get made, but I'm glad that we got to see this version in the end. :)

Bring on the Ankh Morpork City Watch series... ;)
 
Another long weekend of house-sitting, so more movies on Netflix (I don't have a tv so I only watch Netflix when places other than home).


Escape Plan
Stallone and Schwarzenegger get together to plan an escape from a boat-based high-security prison. I did a review of this three years ago (here: Movie review rant 2016) so I won't bother re-doing it, but in brief it is quite adequate and a good way to pass a couple of hours.


Land of the Lost
This was really dumb. Unfortunately I have a problem where once I start watching a movie I almost always have to continue to the end, possibly in the hope that it will magically become better. This movie did not. Released in 2009, it is based on an old tv series of the same name. I'm not sure if we got it in New Zealand - I don't remember it at all - but I googled it and the plot for the series was (surprisingly) exactly the same as that in the movie. Probably they should have changed it, because the plot was stupid. Will Ferrell is good in some movies and not so much in others. This was one of those others. The whole thing was unfunny, tiresome, and boring. I would recommend avoiding this one.


CHiPs
This 2017 movie was also based on an old tv series, about two motorbike cops in the California Highway Patrol (the CHiPs of the title). It was very popular in the late-70s to early-80s, running for six seasons. I guess you could classify it as a light-hearted action-drama (a typical style for most of the popular series of that era). There have been a lot of 70s/80s tv shows remade as movies - it saves Hollywood writers thinking up new ideas - and they usually turn them into full comedies no matter what the original intent of the series. This CHiPs movie does the same although it's not particularly funny for a comedy. On the other hand there's not really enough action for it to be an action movie, and if there was any drama I missed it. And the amount of nudity in it means it isn't for kids either. It's okay for passing time, but I wouldn't watch it again.

This video shows the opening title sequence of the tv series - in the late 70s all the tv shows had music like this. It was a great time to be alive.



Miami Vice
Third movie based on a tv series (from the mid- to late-80s this time). I never really got into the tv series - I objected to Crockett having an alligator tied up on his boat - but I thought I'd watch the movie. The tv series stuck to straight action-drama without the fun bits to keep things light, and surprisingly this 2006 movie does the same. Unfortunately that just makes it really grim and boring. If you know the sort of dead-serious action movies that Jamie Foxx does - like that. Even Colin Farrell as Crockett couldn't lighten it up.

Here's the title sequence for the tv series (very mid-80s music), with absolutely nothing about the show being given away by the stock footage used.



Pee-Wee's Big Holiday
I didn't even know that Pee-Wee Herman was still a thing! I thought he was in prison or dead or something like that. But there he was, having a holiday, in 2016 (!!), so I watched it. Joe Manganiello was a main character, playing himself. He looks familiar, I googled him, and I vaguely know him from here and there (mainly random episodes from different tv shows). The movie is a typical Pee-Wee movie. Once again, it's okay for passing time but I wouldn't watch it again.


Dinosaur Island
The worst of the bunch. I did watch some good movies (they are below) but I also watched some real stinkers. Like this one. It's made for kids but still, the acting was awful, the dialogue was awful, the plot was awful, the CGI was awful. I did like that the dinosaurs had feathers though - the raptors looked like cassowaries and the T. rex looked like a giant multi-coloured chicken.


The Hitman's Bodyguard
I have a strange relationship with Ryan Reynolds. I thought he was fine in Two Guys and a Girl (on tv) but I don't see the attraction of him as a movie star. He is smarmy and repugnant. And yet there are movies I like him in, like Deadpool obviously, but also certain movies like this one where he works really well alongside Samuel L Jackson. This is a 2017 movie, and unlike all the ones above I would recommend it (if you like action comedy movies). It has Salma Hayek in it too, here and there.

Here's the trailer, although it gives a warped impression of what the movie is actually about:


Seven Psychopaths
I'm not sure how to describe this 2012 movie. It's sort of all over the place. It's trying to be stylish while also trying to be a comedy of sorts, and it's pretty violent. Colin Farrell is a writer, trying to create a movie script to go with the title he has thought of, "Seven Psychopaths". Turns out his best friend (Sam Rockwell) is a psychopath, as is his friend (Christopher Walken), and they all run into trouble with another psychopath (Woody Harrelson). Olga Kurylenko is in it too, very briefly (only enough time to die, really).

Trailer below. (Just... if you're trying that hard to make your trailer quirky then you have failed your mission; also, 2, the Olga Kurylenko scene in the trailer is almost her entire appearance in the movie)



Polar
I really liked this one. It was released at the start of this year and has had - shall we say - mixed reviews (currently it has a 21% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, for instance). I watched the Cinema Sins video for it a little while ago and it seemed like a weird movie, but that's because he was doing his usual thing of taking scenes out of context in order to sin them for no reason. Mads Mikkelsen plays a near-to-retirement assassin who has been targeted by the assassin organisation in order to gain his retirement fund (it reverts to the company if the assassin dies after retirement). The movie kind of reminded me of John Wick but whereas John Wick is deliberately stylish in a "realistic" way, Polar is deliberately stylish in a very "graphic novel" way. You might say it is self-conciously stylish, which isn't a good thing in my book because it feels forced, and it does jump about in tone a lot as if two or three different movies were just spliced together. A lot of stuff in the plot made no sense if looked at logically - many elements are there purely because "it looks cool" - and Mads' character basically becomes a Terminator at the end. However, I definitely 100% recommend this movie.

Trailer below (it has an owl in it!):


Train to Busan
By far the best movie I watched out of all of the above. The only horror movies I like are zombie movies and this South Korean one from 2016 is totally awesome. The premise is simple: a zombie outbreak occurs, an infected girl escapes onto a train bound for Busan, and then the zombification begins. Part of the fun of zombie movies is wondering who will survive to the end. The two main characters, opening the movie, are a small child and her inattentive workaholic father who are travelling to see the girl's mother in Busan on her birthday. Then there is the pregnant lady and her husband; the boyfriend and girlfriend (not really seen much in the trailer, but the girl is played by Sohee who used to be a K-Pop star); a homeless man; the two old ladies. Who will survive and who will become a zombie?

Trailer below (that scene of the zombie horde forming a tail behind the departing train was neat):
 
John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum

I watched the first and second John Wick movies last Friday, back to back. It's funny seeing the same goons in both movies. I saw a video at some point (I think it was the Honest Trailers for the first John Wick) where the directors were saying that they had limited numbers of stuntmen so they used the same people repeatedly but in descending stages of hairiness (from full beard and hair through to fully bald and clean-shaven) to disguise it, and that you can basically tell the order they shot the action scenes by how bearded or otherwise the goons are. So in the second movie you see the same guys as were used in the first movie, portraying different goons all over again.

Today I went and saw the third movie in the saga, subtitled "Parabellum".

I thought the first John Wick was amazing - I rated it nine out of ten when I wrote a little review of it on one of these movie rant threads. It was tightly focussed and knew exactly what it was. The second movie was also pretty fantastic but moved somewhat away from a plausibly-realistic scenario to one where you needed to suspend your logic circuits a bit. The third movie goes even deeper into the assassin world and it just becomes stupid.

There are some brilliant set-pieces still, most notably the scene where Halle Berry and her assassin-alsations join John Wick to take out a veritable horde of bad guys in Casablanca. Another scene where Wick is having to take on armour-wearing goons using guns which cannot pierce the armour is also fun.

But then there is the absurd swords-on-motorbikes chase scene, and the ridiculous ending.

There are also a lot of extended fight scenes which just become boring, which was never an issue in the first two movies, and movie-fight cliches have made an unwelcome appearance. This is particularly noticeable near the start where a couple of times Wick is being pursued by five or six guys in a group, and yet when the fighting happens they only appear one at a time - and where more than one opponent is visible the extra ones are clearly bobbing about on the outside waiting for their cue to enter. And, even though they obviously all have guns, they still come at him with knives! He's John Wick for Pete's sake!!

The two guys from The Raid are in the movie too, and it really feels like cameo material. Especially distracting was the bizarre turn the movie takes when it brings in Zero, a quipping John-Wick-fan-boy assassin, who seems to have been dropped in from a Ryan Reynolds movie.

I reckon this might have been a great movie if it was a stand-alone movie, but coming after parts one and two it is a severe let-down. I don't know that I'll be bothered to see the fourth movie at the theatre if it gets made (they've announced a release date of 2021). But I guess I'm in the minority because it has made tonnes of money and critics are raving about it (89% on Rotten Tomatoes!).
 
Chlidonias said:
Escape Plan
Stallone and Schwarzenegger get together to plan an escape from a boat-based high-security prison. I did a review of this three years ago (here: Movie review rant 2016) so I won't bother re-doing it, but in brief it is quite adequate and a good way to pass a couple of hours.
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Weirdly, a trailer just came out today for a sequel to Escape Plan...



EDIT: huh, after posting that I scrolled through the comments under the video and found out that this is actually the third Escape Plan! Apparently the second movie (subtitled Hades) came out last year, straight to DVD, and grossed 16 million against the 20 million production budget. It got theatrical releases in Russia and China. (That was all from Wikipedia).

The third movie (the one with the trailer above) is also straight to DVD, but will be released theatrically in Russia this month. I wonder how much money this one is going to lose, and why they would even bother.
 
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Game Night (2018) is a bit of an oddball comedy with a hint of mystery, and it's a high quality film to boot. The film follows a group of friends who enjoy a weekly game night (surprise! :p) as they play for a chance to win a sports car, rather than just playing for fun as they normally would. The game is one of those murder mystery things with a proper cast, but unfortunately it gets mixed up with a real gang land situation, and lots of misunderstandings and comedic hilarity ensue. Jason Bateman leads a relatively low scale cast, and they appear to have had a lot of fun filming it. The film is a great romp, well worth watching if you get the chance. 7/10

And now a newer release. Dumbo (2019) is an abomination, an insult to the legacy of the original, a further descent into blandness for Tim Burton, and it p*ssed all over a big chunk of my formative years! Now that's off my chest I shall continue... This film is over long, underwhelming, wastes a pretty good cast, and really makes a balls up of the Pink Elephants scene, which is now charming rather than terrifying.
As far as I'm concerned the film should be close to over when Dumbo learns to fly, but what's this? He's flying around the ring and there's still an hour left? Hmmm, taking liberties there but as long as the rest of the film is good then okay... Wait, what? What the Hell is this crap, the mouse isn't even talking...?
Jesus Christ, this film was a chore to sit through. absolutely awful, and not helped by Colin Farrell's attempt at an American accent. Danny DeVito and Michael Keaton do try and make it watchable but even they can't pull this mess above mediocrity.
The film even failed on the kid-friendly scale as my daughter bailed after half an hour, in fact the only person in my house who enjoyed it was my mother, who (philistine that she is!) doesn't like the original.
To end on a positive, Dumbo may be the cutest animated elephant in the history of animated elephants, but that still doesn't help overall. 2/10
 
Brum said:

And now a newer release. Dumbo (2019) is an abomination, an insult to the legacy of the original, a further descent into blandness for Tim Burton, and it p*ssed all over a big chunk of my formative years! Now that's off my chest I shall continue... This film is over long, underwhelming, wastes a pretty good cast, and really makes a balls up of the Pink Elephants scene, which is now charming rather than terrifying.
As far as I'm concerned the film should be close to over when Dumbo learns to fly, but what's this? He's flying around the ring and there's still an hour left? Hmmm, taking liberties there but as long as the rest of the film is good then okay... Wait, what? What the Hell is this crap, the mouse isn't even talking...?
Jesus Christ, this film was a chore to sit through. absolutely awful, and not helped by Colin Farrell's attempt at an American accent. Danny DeVito and Michael Keaton do try and make it watchable but even they can't pull this mess above mediocrity.
The film even failed on the kid-friendly scale as my daughter bailed after half an hour, in fact the only person in my house who enjoyed it was my mother, who (philistine that she is!) doesn't like the original.
To end on a positive, Dumbo may be the cutest animated elephant in the history of animated elephants, but that still doesn't help overall. 2/10
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At least there aren't any racist stereotypes in this one.
 
NVP said:
At least there aren't any racist stereotypes in this one.
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Granted that's a bonus, and in this day and age you'd expect them to learn from their mistakes. But removing racial stereotypes is one thing, removing everything else that genuinely did make the original great is just a step too far!
 
Brum said:
Granted that's a bonus, and in this day and age you'd expect them to learn from their mistakes. But removing racial stereotypes is one thing, removing everything else that genuinely did make the original great is just a step too far!
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True. And admittedly, getting rid of the crows was a double-edged sword since it also meant cutting the best song in the original: When I See an Elephant Fly.
 
Anyone bothered to go watch Dark Phoenix yet? I personally can't even be bothered to watch it when it comes to TV, it looks absolutely terrible. And Sophie Turner as Jean Grey/Phoenix? No thanks.
 
Go see Yesterday. Good film
And can I just say I'm thankful that...
...it didn't end with him waking up and finding out it was all just a dream. I freaking hate endings like that.
 
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