Movie Reviews

Life

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Life
  • IMDb: link

Life movie reviewLife is the exact opposite of Kong: Skull Island. Whereas Kong knew exactly what it was and embraced it, Life is a pretentious wannabe that flails around for far too long before ultimately turning into a cliche and running out of gas long before the credits roll.

Wanting desperately to be a genre-shaking art film which takes the science seriously and has something to say about extraterrestrial life, like the original Alien, instead director Daniel Espinosa‘s (Safe House) movie is a plodding, somber affair with nothing we haven’t seen multiple times before. Very early on, I lost track of number of extended sequences showing off the film’s art design set to ominous classical music. I get it, you guys liked 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately this isn’t the kind of movie you are making here.

Life is a bottle-show monster flick with a small group of people trapped with a creature they can’t understand let alone defeat. By the time Life gets around to throwing the pretension of actual science out the window and becomes a monster movie there’s little the latest tentacle monster can offer in way of surprise, let alone general horror.

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Emma Watson and the Beast

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  • Title: Beauty and the Beast
  • IMDb: link

Beauty and the Beast movie reviewDisney’s new Beauty and the Beast isn’t so much an adaptation of their 1991 animated film as a live-action reproduction of the original. The new film follows the pattern so closely that when it diverges at any point something feels a bit off. In a loving remake, director Bill Condon and his team bring the magic of the original back to the big screen in a way which should please fans.

After the brief interlude which sets up the film’s plot involving the curse, we’re reintroduced to Belle (Emma Watson) and the small French town in which the modern woman sticks out like a sore thumb. Watson’s casting is pure genius. The actress shines, delivering everything the role calls and more (including a singing performance far more impressive than another Emma who just took home an Academy Award). Effortlessly, she brings Belle to life.

As in the first movie, Belle’s father (Kevin Kline) is held captive by the Beast (Dan Stevens). One of the changes to the film is to flesh out Belle and Maurice‘s relationship a bit more, and add in some backstory to fill in for Belle’s missing mother.

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Kong: Skull Island

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  • Title: Kong: Skull Island
  • IMDb: link

Kong: Skull Island movie reviewFar more focused than Peter Jackson’s bloated three-hour mess, Kong: Skull Island is a film with a clear agenda of what it is and what it wants to do. Sadly, King Kong hasn’t had the greatest career in the movies with far more disappointments than successes. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and screenwriters Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, and Derek Connolly strip away much of the Kong story to focus only on the discovery of the giant ape and the mysterious island which is also home to other monstrous beasts the outside world can only imagine.

Piggybacking on a separate government geological survey, a small group from the secret government organization called Monarch heads to the unexplored island hidden behind constant storms. In the peaceful eye of that storm Randa (John Goodman), Brooks (Corey Hawkins), the mostly silent San (Tian Jing), their military escort led by the obsessed Lt. Col. Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), the mercenary-with-a-heart-of-gold guide (Tom Hiddleston), and their anti-war photographer (Brie Larson) discover the impossible. Monsters are real, and chief among them is one very large ape.

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Logan

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  • Title: Logan
  • IMDb: link

Logan movie reviewFinally learning that bigger isn’t always better (see X-Men: Apocalypse and X-Men: The Last Stand), 20th Century Fox has moved away from the super-sized team film. With both Logan and Legion (FX’s new series based around the X-Men character of the same name), the X-Men universe is taking some interesting turns with a darker tone and smaller character-driven stories. Logan may not be as entertaining as Deadpool, but it definitely ranks as one of the better X-Men films (and easily the best of the Wolverine standalone movies).

Set more than a decade in the future, Logan gives us a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) we haven’t seen before. Inspired by Old Man Logan, the Logan we see has aged considerably since the events of Days of Future Past and his healing factor has begun to fail him. In a world where mutants are all but extinct, Logan works as a limousine driver making ends meet and keeping himself, Caliban (Stephen Merchant), and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) out of the limelight. Of course that changes when a young girl (Dafne Keen) with very similar abilities to his own shows up on his doorstep hunted by those who want her dead.

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The Red Turtle

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  • Title: La tortue rouge
  • IMDb: link

“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
—Zhuangzi

The Red Turtle movie reviewIt begins with a man lost at sea in a storm. Shipwrecked on a deserted tropical island, for eighty-minutes without a single word of dialogue being spoken (other than a guttural grunt or two) our nameless protagonist attempts to survive but finds his attempts to escape the island thwarted by a giant red turtle. Initially believing the turtle to be and adversary to be overcome, the increasingly-confused sailor struggles to deal with what his eyes show him and the consequences of his actions as he lives out a life he never thought possible.

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