Fwash, Aaa-aah!

I'm gonna say it...  despite all the controversy and such... I found this a fun film! And a better send off to the Synder-verse than it deserved.

In that classic story line that seems to dominate Barry's origin now, back in the past his mother was killed and his father sent to prison. So what else to do but go back in time and change that? And see a lot of badly CGI'd people around you at the same time. Like, it takes time for effects and they put the effort in, but that was really bad CGI there... Anyway, as you expect, changing the timeline has some problematic results, and so Barry encounters previous movies and sees others that never happened, until he has to accept that he is the biggest monster of them all.

Having complained about the CGI I will compliment that they did really well with compositing Ezra in both his places. It sold me all the time, and I was looking for discrepancies! (A common one is eye-lines not actually acknowledging that the other person is the same height, but didn't pick up on any problems there.) That would have been a lot of work so well done on all concerned for getting that right.

Michael Keaton as Batman... moderate success. He just looked old and over it, so when his action scenes happened, you could tell it was more stuntman than birdman. And I did have a hard time buying Sasha Calle as Kara. Yes, she was a more beaten up version, but... it really felt like "we don't have Superman, but perhaps you won't notice".

And yes, I laughed at the alternative versions. I hope we were supposed to, because they were injokes galore, so I got them!

But, as I said, overall I enjoyed the story. I thought it was well done, without introducing random villains for moments that would have had them had this been a TV series (Hello CW Flash... who sadly didn't get a reciprocal appearance...), but now that people have had their final cameos, let's move on to other pastures.

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Honour Amoung Thievus

It took me a little, this wasn't top of my list, but yeah, I did get around to seeing the D&D movie.

It's a DND adventure, but where someone is telling you their idea, and it's never as much fun as playing it yourself. Chris Pine gets a party together, gets captured, then has to get another party together to get payback on the first party he got together. And in doing so, encounter a lot of DND references.

And I got them. Displacer beast, yep, meteor storm, okay, different classes, of course. But this isn't an entirely faithful depiction of an adventure, as battles are not done in initiative order, instead one person can act like they have tons of action points. One at a time might make for a more boring battle, or you could take it as a challenge to show off properly! Or just have standard fighting, I guess we can put up with that too.

But my main complaint is the thieves side. Why do we always have to focus on the disreputable people? When Star Wars put out its recent RPG, it started with the scoundrels. And so when this rpg reboots, we go into the conmen side of things. Where's the heroes actually fighting evil? Now, fine, the PCs are murder hobos, but that's not the story we tell others. Just seems like a miss to get into the good vs evil easy story, and no doubt if there are more of these movies, they'll be all about Chris Pine, and so we're going to stay on the ignominious side.

Anyway, aside from complaining, yes, I did enjoy this, even if I thought there could have been better aspects.

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Cross the Spdr-vrs

I saw Part One last night... it is definitely a Part One.

Hmm.. there is a lot of this movie that hasn't been revealed in the majority of the trailers I've seen. There are definitely things I can mention that are right at the start of the movie, but I know people, and they will complain, and since I have seen this long before most people, I'm just gonna say nothing.

This is certainly a progression of Miles' story, and there was far more connection to the first movie that I was expecting. But this story does get really meta. I don't see the average movie goer getting a lot of this story, it expects you to know a lot about Spider-Man history. Now, a lot of us do, but the average movie goer? I'm not so sure. (Not that I'm the best barometer of that, as I do know more than most people do.)

[Which also means I got some of the really deep cuts they threw in there. And enjoyed them!]

Good performances throughout, and the animation styles are fitting.. although there were a few sequences I really wasn't sure what they were doing with the backgrounds.

I'm not entirely sure I recommend this ahead of waiting for Part 2 to come out, but at over two hours it's not going to be a quick rewatch before that happens.

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