Doerk Phanix

This is the last X-Men movie to be made under Fox before the merger brings it back into Disney/MCU hands, and... ooh boy.

Things happened to Jean in her childhood that now come back to her as she suddenly gains in power and... heard this before. Yeah you have. It wasn't great then, and now...

I was bored. There were just so many scenes of Jean angsting and people saying 'don't angst'. Now, that is true to the comic, but that doesn't make it good then either. Angst != character development, no matter how much of the former you might have. And as I remembered other X-men movies, we didn't even get the relief of new angst either.

Now previously, this was the third movie, so we already spent two movies with these characters. Now, all we have is whatever parts of Apocalypse you can remember, and most people can't even do that. So while this is seen as one of the key storylines people think they know, jumping straight to it isn't that interesting. Even the Batman movies don't break Batman's back immediately, and Superman isn't just meeting his Doomsday (although that also does happen... A LOT).

This movie doesn't have anything to offer, and takes two hours to not offer it.

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King Gojira

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We are definitely in the zone of the sequel with even more monsters, but well... dammit, it's great! Big monsters fighting! That's what we want. The movie is still attempting to pretend the humans are interesting and there is a plotline involving them, but I seriously didn't care. And the motives for all this are cartoon villain worthy.

And if you want references to Kong, there are plenty of those.

Now, I don't know the Godzilla monster pantheon, but I could at least name the main ones. The movie does feature a fair few, but keeps a tight focus that you aren't overwhelmed with too many CGI beasts... although there is a lot of grey variant CGI on screen. Yes, you can tell who is who, but don't expect lots of colour on screen here.

Frankly, I look forward to the upcoming movie in which Gamera comes to help...

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Wicky Wicky Wick

Gun, gun, gun, gun... gun, gun Gun!

Following on from 2, John Wick is excommunicated and thus on the run from other people hunting him. For some reason, he has a plan that involves him talking to people, but others still want him dead, so he has to deal with them. And there are a lot of people who want him dead.

I can't even recall all the various scenes of fighting. There are a lot of them. I'm going to say this... there are too many. Do I need to watch another moment of John Wick shooting someone or punching someone? I'm good. There is a pretense of a plot going on, so maybe we don't need another few minutes of nameless, faceless mooks being tossed around and taken out.

There are some impressive camera work moments, with some long oners on screen. But then we cut to more people coming in, then more fighting and... it's hard to say "I was bored" in this movie, but somehow I managed to be.

So, a decent enough movie, but could have been trimmed down. And the worse thing? There was more than 15 minutes of trailers/ads before the movie. Is this a new trend? I hope not.

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Detective Peekatyou

I had a Pikachu plush once... it was in the Stats House building. You may be aware of what happened to that. I got another one, which I left behind in our new building over Christmas Break... and never saw it again. Gotta lose 'em all?

Harry is a detective who dies, and his son Tim has to deal with that. And so we have Tim dealing with daddy issues for the entire movie, and there are also pokemon and other things going on, but it's mainly about the missing dad.

I'm not a Poke-fanatic, although I've seen a fair bit of the original anime. This works well to have pokemon all over the place and it's reasonably believable in the pokemon/real people interactions. Mostly. There's a few times where you wonder where the eye line is actually is, and Tim holding air doesn't work, but hey, I brought it.

And then we hit the third act, and we find out what's going on, and... that's when I fell out of the movie. That's a plan a cartoon villain would blush at. And the action is more than a little ridiculous, even taking into account again that this is a cartoon based movie adapting a video game story. Nope, sir, I don't buy it.

I'd be happy if we get more, but there are some limits to what I will put up with.

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Endgarne

No, don't see it, it's horrible! ... oh wait, you've already seen it, and it's great? Okay then.

So Adam Warlock organises the heroes together and throws them at Thanos to distract him, while he and one or two others try to sort out a sneak attack, but Thanos doesn't fall for it. However, he does fall for taking the glove off...

...hang on, I'm thinking of the comic again.

This is the big tie up of everything that has gone before. Everyone is in this, one way or another (and maybe with stock footage rather than anything new shot), so of course this is epic. And it is way more character focused. And humourous. And that line is tricky. They have big emotional scenes between two characters dealing with the after effects of the snap, and then skip to something goofy involving Ant Man.

There is a lot of cover (story-wise) in this movie, which means it really does feel long at times. (So much so I had to go for a pee break around the two hour mark!) This also can make the movie feel rather unbalanced in that we have a lot of big emotional moments... but you know there is still big action sequences coming up which makes it rather lopsided.

No doubt there will be many think pieces coming out of this, the biggest of which is of course: just how much money can Marvel make anyway? There is a limit to the amount of money in the world.

But if you haven't seen it, I will give you this... there is no post-credit scene, so if you need to go, just go.

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Cruisin' 2019

Back in March I went on a two week cruise... and I'm lazy enough to only get around talking about it now. And even then I'm not going to talk about it much. just a picture per place. While the cruise started and ended in Melbourne, it was all about New Zealand. Full photo album here.

Sounds:

Dunedin:

Akaroa:

Wellington:

Gisbourne:

Tauranga: (which they insisted on pronouncing Too-wrong-a)

Auckland: ... okay, no picture of Auckland, but if you want to see how far I traveled:

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Heckboy

It is apparently internet dictate to hate this movie. Ehh... not really.

A bad guy recreates the Blood Queen who will bring about the full potential of Hellboy and end the world. Too simplified? Probably, but there is a lot of scenes, and I don't want to go into them all. And don't worry if you don't know who these characters are, there are backstory flashbacks for everyone to let you know their story. I actually lost count of the number of flashbacks, that's how many there were. But aside from that, this is a traditional movie story of "oncoming big bad we need to fight".

I refer to this movie as "90%". As in, "what about this aspect of the movie?" It's about 90% done. Script? 90%. Acting? 90%. Effects? 90%. This isn't saying that if it was 100%, then this movie is perfect, but it would be a full proper movie then. As it is, it feels like their vision was just outside their grasp of their talent.

I know this movie is being downvoted a lot, and I do wonder how much of it is "not GDT then 0!", but there are issues with this movie on its own. But I do think people are overreacting to "not quite there", possibly too used to finally honed and polished movies. I know I've seen plenty of dreck (looking at you Netflicks movies) that I'm not holding high ideals, but this movie just isn't as bad as everyone is complaining out. It's not great, but it isn't terrible either, not in the way of what a terrible movie usually is.

So if you are going to see this movie, just set your expectations to about "90% of good enough".

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