When I came out of AVATAR I had a nice free feeling that I wasn’t even gonna write a review of it. I figured what it excels at is self-evident and what it fails at isn’t really worth dwelling on, and every motherfucker with a computer already wrote way too much about this thing anyway so what’s the point? I wouldn’t have much to say.
Then a couple days later I had written this behemoth. Hopefully there are one or two things here that haven’t been said before. (more…)
Here’s my TERMINATOR SALVATION review. Sorry it took me a few days – everybody else on the internet has already reviewed it two or three times each and moved on with their lives. I figured I ought to go the extra mile so my review includes an optional soundtrack:
(note: I'm not really gonna pussyfoot around the spoilers in this one, so beware)
I got so much trouble on my mind. I refuse to lose my hope for McG. I had this fantasy – what if McG made an undeniably great TERMINATOR movie, and everybody who ever talked shit about him had to eat crow? They’d be so unprepared to admit they liked a McG movie that their minds would pop like balloons. It would be like reading in the newspaper that a squirrel had built a working rocket ship – just completely out of left field. They wouldn’t know what to do. “Well, his name makes me uncomfortable, but TERMINATOR SALVATION changed my life.” “You know, I went back and gave CHARLIE’S ANGELS FULL THROTTLE another look, it turns out it was ahead of its time. There was no way to really know back then that it was good, only Vern ever understood it, but now it works.”
Well, that ain’t happening. SALVATION doesn’t seem to be winning anybody over and even to the McG/McG-curious it’s somewhat of a disappointment. The sad part is that it really has some slices of that great sci-fi action movie I was holding out hope for. I absolutely love many aspects of it. It quickly draws you into this post-apocalyptic California and the war being waged there. Christian Bale as John Connor has a badass introduction landing his helicopter on a Terminator and shooting into its skull – the camera gives him a classic pan-up-from-the-feet hero shot as someone on a radio somewhere buzzes “Connor is on the ground!” There he is, this guy we’ve been hearing about since 1984, not yet the leader but he’s going into battle followed by 52 brothers, bruised, battered and scarred but hard. (more…)
I’ve been sort of looking forward to this new STARSHIP TROOPERS, and if you got a problem with that too bad because I’ve gotten enough “are you gonna review Starship Troopers 3?” emails to know that we can take you. Ed Neumeier takes over as director this time, which means the satirical tone remains since this is the guy who wrote all three STARSHIP TROOPERS as well as ROBOCOP. And, uh, ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID. I didn’t know that, I just found that out on IMDB. Hmmm. I had not considered watching that one. This changes everything. This could be the big one.
If you saw STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION you may or may not remember that it was pretty different from the first one. They scaled it down for DTV, making it into mostly a one-location siege kind of story and incorporating smaller bugs that implant themselves in people’s brains or something. The good part is it was directed by the effects legend Phil Tippett so it ended up having the best effects I’ve seen in a DTV movie.
For part 3 they got somebody else doing the effects (pretty crappy) but the story is much more in line with the first one. It expands on the mythology and themes of the STARSHIP TROOPERS universe in a somewhat charmingly cheap-ass DTV sort of way. A lightly grizzled Casper Van Dien returns as Johnny Rico “the hero of Planet P,” now a colonel and still following orders to bravely kill the shit out of swarms of giant alien bugs who threaten freedom and liberty and all that. The war goes on and has escalated a little bit because there is a new piece of bug technology, a sort of bug grenade that’s like a huge pill bug that gets tossed into your trench, opens up and shoots out electricity. I like that. Not that much of a threat to the humans though, at least compared to their new Q-Bomb, which can crack a planet in half. (more…)
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