Star Trek

This is gonna be rather spoilery, so be warned.

"Not your father's Star Trek" is a phrase that's being banded around about the franchise reboot from J.J. Abrams and it's an apt phrase in more than just the fresh faced cast and lens flare heavy lighting.

Let's start with the cast; Chris Pine is brilliant as Kirk, I agree with the general consensus, he should be BIG in the next few years, he can clearly balance the humour and action with a massive on screen charisma, strong possibility he's our next Harrison Ford (Sorry Nathan). Zachary Quinto steps in as younger Spock. I've followed Heroes since season 1 (glutton for punsihment?) and knew he'd be perfect as soon as it was announced, he doesn't disappoint. Karl Urban is also brilliant as Dr Leonard McCoy, while Pine goes to firmly stamp his own mark on the iconic James T. Kirk, Karl Urban happily homages-the-crap out of DeForest Kelley and with great effect. I'll be honest Zoe Saldana, John Cho & Anton Yelchin, as Uhura, Sulu & Chekov respectively, are pretty throwaway, ok Uhura's got some stuff going on with Spock and gives us our initial intro to an adult JTK, but overall, they just feel like they're being given their token screen time. That brings us to Simon Pegg as Montgomery Scott, who doesn't come in until some way through the film and doesn't really do anything except be Simon Pegg putting on an accent, he also gets some terrible "comedic" moments courtesy of his spiny sidekick thing.

Eric Bana chews his way through the film's resident villain, Nero, nothing special, but ok.

The casting refresh is one thing, the look and feel is another and this is where it shone for me, a tad too much lens flare maybe, but the look of the sets, the updated ship design and all the general space stuff was pretty damn cool, more energy, more intense, yet clearly updates on the previous versions as opposed to a total re-imagining. I'm not a Star Trek geek, I'll watch it, but I don't get all fanboy over it, I also preferred the movies (not mentioning TNG ones), but the updates hit the right notes with me.

What also makes this "not your father's Star Trek" is the plot. This is NOT a prequel, they even go to writing-hack level lengths to point this out in the exposition, this is an "alternate reality" [Uhura], so how the crew of the Enterprise comes to be in this film is not how it did for the series.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not getting all worked up over this, as I said, I'm not a Trekkie fanboy, but the film's pitched as an origin story, and while it IS, it's not quite the one I went in, and I expect many others were, expecting. That doesn't take anything away from it, just simply an observation... sorry, not an observation, there was a whole sequence devoted to making sure I damn well knew it.

Without going into the convoluted time travel plot, it basically sets up the new Enterprise crew with Old Spock lending a guiding hand along the way.

What stops this reboot from being amazing then? The comedy, that's what. Once you lose some of the language and maybe the brief "sex" scene, it's basically a kid's film, it's full of one liners, some good, plenty bad and stupid slapstick (see: Simon Pegg in coolant tubes) and set against the backdrop of what should be impending doom for all involved, it all feels like they're having a tad too much fun.

I'm not saying this needs to be all doom and gloom, the original movies all had humour, with The Voyage Home being the prime example of this, but that was in context, the humour in this one felt, for the most part, forced and unnecessary. Kirk's son get's marooned in ST2 and we get Kirk wigging out on a revenge trip, the whole of Vulcan gets wiped out in this one and we get Simon Pegg saying how exciting everything is. A bit of balance is what's needed.

So when it comes down to it, the re-boot shows a lot of potential on all fronts (less slapstick though please), there's already a sequel in the works, it looks like Kurtzman and Orci are lined up to write again, let's hope they move a little away from the Transformers style script and give it a little more meat! They came up with Fringe which I'm loving, so I hope they deliver the goods for Trek.

Star Trek - 7/10

Outlander

This looked AWESOME in the trailer, and overall, it was pretty good, fell slightly short of being truly awesome though.

To sum up the movie in one of those "meets" sentences.. it's Predator meets Alien meets The 13th Warrior, all three of those I love, so this should've been pant wettingly good.

The concept is pretty solid, spaceman (Cavieziel) crashes his spaceship on  medievil Earth, somewhere in Norway, also on his ship is a big-ass-alien-killing-machine of a monster, now said spaceman must team up with (fucking-)Vikings to defeat the thing. Along the way friends are made, love is found and we find out a little bit about our own humanity. (So not enough action then yeah?)

Yeah, not quite enough, the alien or Moorwen as it's called is great, although somewhat distractingly looks like it could've been built from the Godzilla CG model, it's a good approach though, very animalistic yet still conveys a sense of sentience.

The humans on the other hand could do with some work, a good mix of accents doesn't help, some of the acting and dialogue leaves a fair bit of room for improvement and all the mushyness, while within the scope of the plot, does slow the pace down a tad much for what I feel it should've been.

There's some nice touches though and all in all it was an enjoyable film.

Outlander - 7/10

The Fall

I was intrigued in this from the moment I saw the trailer ages ago, partly because it looked visually incredible, partly because the actual story seemed interesting and partly because I hated The Cell.

The film does look amazing, he colours are out of this world, every now and again the framing's just a tad too 'stylised' for my tastes, Tarsem does follow themes here and there, certain stuff he's almost fetishistic about (see: slo-mo horses in desert), visually, everything about the film is an icing coated treat.

Story wise, it's not bad, it's a guy in a hospital telling a story to a little girl. The story reflects the events of the real world and it's pretty dark and emotional, and this is primarily sold by the performances of the little girl and the injured guy interacting with her, which is nothing short of charming and totally engaging.

It's a beautiful tale, not perfect, but a great watch.

The Fall - 8/10

Kingdom of Heaven

I like Ridley Scott, he's one of my favourite directors, however he's well off his game with this one.

It didn't exactly get a good reception when it came out and i've now seen why, although I picked up the Special Edition for £3, thinking it was the Director's Cut, it's not, so technically I still need to see that as it's supposed to be better, although KoH is long enough as it is, so I'm not sure whether I can be bothered to watch it all over again, but with more!

Funnily enough, I don't buy Orlando Bloom as a hero knight, one minute he's a blacksmith in a muddy village, the next he's an expert military strategist?!?! With great motivational skills?!? No sorry, he's a cock. Eva Green's a waste of space in the movie, which seems to be a trend she's following, Jeremy Irons is always good value, but under used and it seems good ol' Liam Neeson still can't escape Qui-Gon.

I also spent the movie wondering who was playing the kings as he kept sounding like James Woods but a weedy James Woods... it's Edward Norton, so I was close.

The movie is on a massive scale, but isn't really that impressive, it also doesn't make a lot of sense, let's hope Nottingham will be Ridley back on form.


Kingdom of Heaven - 4/10

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

It took me a while to come around to the fact that Hellboy is actually pretty good in both the movie, which I saw first, and then the comics. Now I'm a pretty big fan of both.

So I was pretty stoked at the news of a movie sequel, until I saw the trailer that is, then a big wave of 'Meh' washed over me as I watched all the bright golds and heavy Del Toro touch unfold on screen.

The first movie's story was mostly lifted from the comics, not entirely, but a lot of the elements and basic points were from the stories in the comics. AFAIK, this was a completely original story thought up by Guillermo Del Toro, and it shows.

I really liked Pan's Labyrinth, but full on Guillermo, I don't feel works for Hellboy. The comics are more shadowy and minimalist, whereas Guillermo does like his "Fantasy Gold" (expect to see a very Gold hued Hobbit). The whole Golden (there it is again) Army thing was a bit of a let down, a non event really, there was a load of slapstick comedy that felt a touch out of place, don't get me wrong, Hellboy is supposed to be funny, but I think this went too far in the wrong direction and overall it seemed a bit jumpy and rushed plot wise.

Back to the looks, but characters in this case, Hellboy seems to have lost weight, which in certain scenes puts his head out of proportion to his body, Abe's gone VERY blue and stripy, and Johann Krauss, well I wasn't totally disappointed, he was a lot better than I thought, look fine, voice ok (Seth MacFarlane was a bit of a concern when he was announced), attitude, not so much, felt a bit more uptight than he is in the comics, but maybe I need to re-read.

I don't know how it will lead into a sequel, if they're gonna do one, but we'll have to wait and see, if they do make a sequel, hopefully it'll be darker and introduce Roger ;)


Hellboy II: The Golden Army - 6/10

Quantum of Solace

For the second outing for Daniel Craig as Bond, they've given us an odd mix of Bond, Bourne and a film with very little plot or character arc.

QoS is all about the action, it's simply a ride, a number of set pieces strung together. The opening car sequence is great btw. They're really trying hard to fuse old-school 60's Bond with 00's Bourne, and they're doing it in a really jarring fashion in this one.

With Casino Royale, they did the 'reboot' thing and did it pretty well, Bond was more hardcore, rough around the edges and basically brutal, yet he was still Bond. The film around hi, though, was more standard action thriller.

With QoS, Bond is less Bond and the film around him is more Bond. (?!) Okay, here Bond seems to quip less (so he's pissed off about Vespa, whatever), in fact he says less, he's all moody and quiet, however, we do get a Goldfinger homage, and a bit of a stab at a villain's lair towards the end. You can definitely tell that they were trying to hark back to some of the classic stylings of the older Bond films.

So QoS, all icing and no cake (I like that!), weak ending, weak villain, shite villain's plot, weak henchman and a weak (of character) Bond. The action's gone a little too Bourne, getting too close and scrappy, we need to stand back a bit with Bond, Casino Royale got it about right on that score (see B&W toilet fight and the staircase sequence), however I'm hoping this is going somewhere.

QoS is a direct sequel from CR, and they're were rumblings of a trilogy at least, so we can only hope that with the third part of this story, with Quantum coming more into play, we have a massive end sequence resulting in Bond infiltrating an enormous underground lair or similar, fighting his way through before right before it looks like he's gonna lose it Felix turns up with the cavalry, C'MON!

Quantum of Solace - 6/10

Wall*E

Pixar started out by giving inanimate objects life, such as in the iconic short Luxo Jr. Now although robots are not exactly inanimate, an interesting decision was made to not give them human voices as is done in most other films using robot characters.

Although at first this seemed a bit odd, I (along with many other people) thought that if anyone could pull that off, it would be Pixar.

And pull it off they do. The characters a engaging, charming and far more captivating than those of Cars for instance.

It's still not up to the standards of Toy Story, but I thought it was a bloody good film.

Wall*E - 8/10

Mission: Impossible III

I've been waiting to see this for AGES, I enjoyed the first one, the second was utter pants, but with M:I-III, J.J. Abrams is a the helm, so that's gotta be promising!!

For the most part it is. It certainly ups the ante from number 2 (both films take a very different tack from the original Brian De Palma outing), and it's a hell of a ride through most of the film, throw in some, 'here's how they actually do that' bits and Philip Seymour Hoffman and it's top notch. Simon Pegg was pretty funny, although did seem a little out of place among it all (still can't see him as Scotty, but that's not far off now).

It was also my first look at Billy Crudup and while he was pretty good, I'm not entirely sure how he's gonna come across as Dr. Manhatten in Watchmen.

But anyway, the plot has a couple of interesting twisty turns in it and as I say, it's a pretty good ride for the most part, but I was HIGHLY let down by the ending, something I wasn't expecting and I can only hope that Lost doesn't fall foul of it, if he has the reigns for the finale.

Mission: Impossible III - 6/10

Enchanted

Finally persuaded the girlfriend to watch this with me (how much of that sentence is wrong?), mainly thanks to Blockbuster's current deal on renting family movies for 50p! Bonanza!

The film starts off animated before a series of events transports the characters to the real world, this is where the film takes off, using the 'fish out of water' device, the Disney characters stumble around the real world, occasionally breaking into song (or not as the case my be).

At first I found Giselle to be incredibly INCREDIBLY annoying, thankfully, things were toned down a tad and I made it through!

It's funny, charming and inventive. Even the girlfriend liked it.


Enchanted - 7/10

Stargate: The Ark of Truth

Compared to Continuum, this is just plain pants.

This plays much more like an elongated SG1 episode, rather than a feature, it looks like it too, very "TV" and for the most part...dull.

It's lightened up only by (again) Ben Browder and, the chemistry between him and Amanda Tapping's Lt. Col. Carter.

You also need to know more of the back story, as explained in prior episodes, to fully appreciate the plot in this one. Didn't enjoy it as much as Continuum.

Stargate: The Ark of Truth - 5/10

Stargate: Continuum

I've been getting into the Stargate series recently (SG1 and Atlantis), mainly because there's no Lost, Heroes, Dexter, BSG etc etc (although Generation Kill..CHEERS!) on at the mo, and as such decided to check out the feature length SG1 movies.

First one I watched was this one, the most recent Stargate: Continuum, throwing in a bit of time travel shenanigans, one Baal goes back and buggers up the start of the Earth based Stargate program, fortunately though three of SG1 make it through to the new timeline and after a bit of stuff, proceed to make things right.

The main thing, apart from appearing to actually have slightly higher production values than the series, is that it was actually pretty entertaining! Ben Browder is very entertaining as Col. Mitchell (would like to see him do something new now), Beau Bridges short appearance is nothing short of amazing, and Richard Dean Anderson is old and fat.

It deals with the time travel problems pretty well, and overall gives you a pretty good ride. It's not entirely stand alone, it does sit within the Stargate timeline and universe and as such references previous episodes, which I haven't seen as they're all over the place on Sky, but it's not essential to know this stuff to enjoy it.

Stargate: Continuum - 8/10

Batman: Gotham Knight

An interesting one this, what is essentially an animated prologue to The Dark Knight (no spoilers in it afaik), there's several short stories, all slightly different styles, all slightly different animation/art styles, but all with a common thread.

The animation is pretty Anime-esque, slightly heightened from Batman: The Animated Series (which stands as one of the best cartoons out there), the stories are written by various writers including David S. Goyer, Josh Olsen and Brian Azzarello.

While it's good, it doesn't quite have the tension or action levels to compete with the movie versions, not that it's trying to 'compete' per se, that was a bad choice of words, but it struggled to keep me totally engaged at times.

Essentially though it's pretty well done and a nice bridge between Begins and TDK.

Batman: Gotham Knight - 7/10

Batman Begins

After Mr. Schumacher officially killed the Batman franchise, along came David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan to give the series a good solid kick up the arse.

David had previously given us the Blade films and Mr Nolan had made it big with Memento. Things were looking interesting, despite many people thinking there was no way they could top the Tim Burton films, but look, they did!

By steering away from the more fantastic side of the Batman stories and focussing on (or tweaking to) reality based ideas he gave us a more believeable, grounded and hardcore Batman. He also delved into the origin story, something that hadn't really been done anywhere before. The existing story being, Bruce sees parent's killed, grows up becomes Batman. Not terribly detailed. Various stories eluded to training and such and Nolan goes all out on showing Bruce Wayne's transition to Batman and indeed where he get's those wonderful toys.

He also gives us (an underused) Scarecrow and a clever Ra's Ah Ghul (I've probably spelt that wrong, I may check later), who unfortunatly ends up being a bit of a Qui Gon Jin (probably spelt that wrong too), for the first part of the film.

We also get Christian Bale as BW/Batman, and apart from Bale's American accent, he's pretty much perfect as a Year One Batman, being that he's unhinged an' all ;)

The film's bloody good, a little slow, but then it IS an origin story, and they're always a little slow because they've got to cover that initial ground before the meaty action starts. Although to be fair, Mr. Nolan does a good job of giving us some action in the lead up before the suit comes out.

Now this is clearly a re-watch for me, I saw this in the cinema when it came out, but as pretty much everyone on the planet is aware, The Dark Knight is pretty close now (July 25th in the UK) and I'm damn sure I'll be trotting up to the IMAX for this one!!! Anyway, I thought that Begins was due a re-watch to refresh my memory and attempt to satisfy the hunger that's going to eat me up for around another month yet!


Batman Begins - 9/10

Jumper

A lot of people have totally slated this film, partly because it's got Hayden "NOOOOOOOOOO!"*Christensen in it, and partly because apparently, it's rubbish.

So, what's the background? Well it's an adaptation from a book (which apparently a lot of people like), it's scripted by David S. Goyer (Dark City, Blade, Batman Begins), Jim Uhls (Fight Club) and Simon Kinberg (XXX 2...DOH!) and it's directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), so based on those bits, you should expect a pretty good film yes??

Well let's say it's an okay film, it's not great, old Annie can't really keep it up as far as leading man is concerned, it's got a really weak end in my view, it's left wide open for a sequel, but that doesn't mean you can't have a strong ending, for a first film (which should potentially stand alone as well) it shouldn't be a cross between an origin story and The Two Towers.

Samuel L. J is his usual self, this time with funky white hair, Jamie Bell is great but needs to be let off the leash a little more, Rachel Bilson is YAWN and the mish mash of story elements is a bit of a let down (especially from Goyer).

There's simply not enough jeopardy in the film, pretty much throughout David (HC) is supposed to be being hunted by SLJ's Roland, however apart from a bit of squinting he seems to be pretty much taking it in his stride, which when you look at how they're trying to define the character...doesn't work.

Overall it's reasonably entertaining, just feels like there should be more to it.

Jumper - 6/10

*(Yes I know he didn't do the voice, but he was in the suit and pretty bad out of it)

The Warriors

Had this hanging around for a while (must give it back to Simon!!), finally watched it and...

It's not bad, oddly enough! Fair do's it's not the greatest film ever made, but overall it works pretty well.

It is a tad disjointed but then, it's The Warriors having to make their way back home to Coney Island, but having to pass through various other gang's turf.

During the opening scenes, you get a selection of the various gangs from the New York area (apparently), I could immediatly see that Joel Schumacher watched this film before making Batman Forever and Batman & Robin!!

What makes things worse for our 'heroes' is that all the other gangs (and the police) are specifically out to get them, thus, some bad fight choreography and "kung-fu-cos-it's-hip" scenes must crop up with some more of the craaaazzzyy street gangs.

Apparently there's a remake on the cards, I'm hoping that a certain original cast members could return and in some cases, a big name may work quite well!?

The Warriors - 7/10

Horton Hears a Who!

To be honest, I didn't think this was going to be any good, CGI movies that aren't from Pixar, generally inspire that knee jerk reaction.

I was wrong, a bit slow in places with a bit of a heavy handed message, but overall a really entertaining and heartwarming movie.

On the CG front, it's a bit of and odd one, it opens with a pretty much photo-realistic shot of rain drops on a leaf, then becomes very cartoony, ditching any sort of realism on any elements. No while I have absolutely no problem with this, after all it's an animated family film, it just made me wonder why they bothered at the start, maybe just to show that they could??

At the other end of the scale is a brilliant Anime segment in the midst of Horton's trek.

So, all in all an unexpectedly great animated movie!

Horton Hears a Who! - 8/10

10,000 BC

Ug. UgUg. Ug. etc etc. Well not quite, but it's getting there.

10,000 BC from Roland Emmerich, the man who brought you such classics as The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day and Universal Soldier! It starts REALLY badly, sooo very bad, terrible acting, really ropey CG and I almost considered turning it off, but no, I was strong and I stuck with it.

It does get better, once the real story kicks in and their on their way to rescue their tribe members, but overall it's a less than impressive big-dumb-movie, barely keeping the interest levels up. Enjoy.

10,000 BC - 3/10

Six-String Samurai

Randomly watched this at a friends house earlier tonight and WOW I was totally blown away, Six-String is AMAZING!

It's a proper low-budget film, pretty much think Mad Max + El Mariachi, has a mix of clearly-low-budget-shots and some amazing ones!

We're basically following a Buddy Holly/Ronin type character (called Buddy) as he treks across the desert to get to Lost (Las) Vegas in a Post-Apocalyptic future (past?) to become the new King of Rock and Roll and stop Heavy Metal from taking over.

Yes it's that odd, yet brilliant. I've gotta get myself a copy!

Six-String Samurai - 8/10

Rambo

GOOD-FUCKING-GOD!

I mean really?!?!?

The film starts with some, actually pretty harrowing, news footage and images telling you how fucked up Burma is at the moment, then we see some (dramatised) footage of some Burmese people exploding, then we're straight into good ol' John catching snakes, although he's not exactly employee of the month on that as you find out.

Along come some do-gooders wanting to get up-river and into Burma to..well.. do good. John however thinks that may not be so wise.

Funnily enough he's on the money with that and the rest of the film is a rescue mission.

Back to "GOOD-FUCKING-GOD!!", to bring in a Spinal Tap analogy here, on the gore and blowing bits off people scale if Saving Private Ryan and Starship Troopers et al are a 10 on the dial, then Rambo is the special amp that goes up to 11, because Jesus! it was fucking horrible! I mean really nasty, I'd love to know what Eli Roth thinks of it, cos this pisses on his efforts.

And it's so full on, you hit a point in the film and it's relentless, I'm guessing if you saw this in the cinema you must've been washing blood out of your hair for days afterwards!! I was literally blown away (no pun intended) by the scale of the violence, to the point that it's more "car-crash" violence, you know you shouldn't look, but you can't help it.

IMDb reckons it's 91mins, it feels about 20, it doesn't hang around, little bit of Rambo not doing much and setting up the "story" then people start dying. It's ridiculous, or at least it feels it, but it's a bloody good watch and, IMO, far better than the boring mess that was Rocky Balboa. (which I've just discovered I watched but didn't blog! damn! I keep doing that)

Rambo - 7/10

The Invincible Iron Man

If the Iron Man film was a cartoon, set in China and not as good, then it would be pretty close to this.

For a part it follows a very similar plot line, indeed even some scenes are pretty close to the movie, I'm going to hazard a guess that they're common across the origin story variations in the comics too. But then there's this whole other super natural thing with a Chinese Mandarin and his elemental warriors, wait, that's it!...

If the Iron Man film, was a cartoon, set in China, not as good and basically Iron Man meets Big Trouble in Little China, then it would be pretty close to this. (Although Big Trouble.. is better ;)

I'm guessing seeing the movie before this didn't help, but then I've only watched this because of seeing the movie and I probably won't go out of my way to watch any more Iron Man stuff until Iron Man 2.

If you're into Iron Man, then it's probably worth a watch, casual viewers, maybe not so much.

The Invincible Iron Man - 5/10