Thoughts of a Raving Maniac

Avengers: Age of Ultron -- Hawkeye, Captain America, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Ultron character posters

2015-05-01T20:55:00.002-07:00

It took Marvel long enough to release higher-res images of these posters, but it's taken even longer for me to get these posts out, so I guess I can't complain. Let's look at what's supposed to pass for Hawkeye in these movies:

As usual, we've got an unnecessarily cluttered outfit (the head of Marvel's costume department must be a huge fan of '90s superhero comics). Would it really be so bad if he wore something that actually looked like a vest that someone might wear in real life? You can see a half-hearted attempt to incorporate the purple from the comics without alienating non-comics readers that think purple is 'gay.'

I swear, he's not gay.

The pose here strikes me as particularly lazy. I'm not sure why they decided these posters should be action scenes without any action. It's not like anyone would want a poster of a superhero fighting something. It would have been so easy to find an effective action pose for any of these characters, but especially so when you have a prop like a bow to play with. It's true that Jeremy Renner's acting ability only goes so far, but I'm sure they could have done better than a bored, slightly confused look offscreen, like he's trying to solve a simple algebra equation.

At least Captain America is showing even the slighted amount of emotion in these posters. You even get a sense of his uprightness and determination in this one. It's not enough to make a good poster, but at this point I have to take what I can get.

On the other hand, we get a better look at whatever the hell is happening on his costume, and it's not good. Cap's comic costume is an uncomplicated design that works both conceptually and visually.

If they were looking for something more subdued, the first thing to do would be not going with a character called freaking 'Captain America.' Failing that, they could have at least stuck with the costume from The Winter Soldier. I have my own complaints about that one, but at least it was better than the new one.

Next up is the Scarlet Witch, doin' one of her spells:

The first thing I notice here is the lack of attacking robots. Instead, we've just got two standing on the building in the back looking around in confusion. They must have been recharging their batteries when everyone else went off to the fighting.

But back to Scarlett. Er, Wanda. Well, she's standing there, which honestly is more of a decent pose than any of these others. She's using her power, doing the Marvel magic finger thing. She's kind of wearing red, I guess. And they got the whole 'gypsy' thing across, thankfully without some of those giant hoop earrings that I'm tempted to rip out of girls' ears whenever I see them (seriously, don't wear those, they do not look good). I wonder what they're going to do about her when she shows up again after this. Is she always going to wear the same clothes? The comics' Scarlet Witch has a great costume, but I don't see it making sense in these movies.

I've been waiting for a goofy Quicksilver poster, and yeah, it's goofy, but I still can't help being disappointed. It's just another boring image with the truncated figure taking up most of the frame. Pietro looks like a huge douche, which is accurate to the comics I guess. His outfit was never that great in the comics, but this looks like some kind of Under Armour shirt that would end up sitting on the rack because nobody would want a shirt with such crappy visual design. I don't like how they've portrayed his speed so far in the trailers, and this poster doesn't change that. Quicksilver isn't the Flash, his speed is usually less exaggerated, but I doubt the movie will match that. On the plus side (if there is one), this is the only poster that features at least some sense of action, with Pietro running away from the robots flying after him. Still crappy.

Our final poster is of our Big Bad, Ultron himself:

Is it another crappy poster? Kind of, yeah, but at least we can see what we're looking at better than we can on any of the others. Forbush forbid that we see his entire body in the frame though. As for his design, he basically looks like the comics' Ultron, except for being made out of CGI instead of adamantium. However, the movies again opted for excessive and unnecessary clutter all over. While his comics body did tend to be a little generic, his head/face design is iconic for a reason:

Because it's awesome.

Is the new head/face better than the old? Well, it gets you facial emotiveness I guess. But personally, I think it's a big step down. It reminds me of the way these movies always have the hero take his mask/helmet off so you can see their face, even if it makes no sense in context. Hell, these posters keep doing the same thing with Iron Man. I this case, I think it could have been really interesting to have a villain who's face was just a blank, emotionless mockery of a human face. Anyone talking to him would have no idea of what he was thinking or what his reaction to things was. If someone was trying to talk him out of his plans, they (and the audience) would be left wondering if their words were getting through, at least until Ultron responded (probably with an energy blast).

Either way, I don't find the movie's Ultron design interesting in the slightest, but at this point I shouldn't be surprised.

I'll let you play The Matching Game on your own. At this point I feel like I know all those duplicating little background robots on a personal level.

Daredevil Season 1 review (spoiler free!)

2015-04-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

Daredevil is the first of what will be at least five Marvel shows being produced by Netflix, all set in the same shared universe as the Marvel Studios movies, as well as their other shows, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter. The show follows attorney Matt Murdock, who was blinded as a child in an accident involving radioactive waste that increased the sharpness of his remaining senses to superhuman levels. Murdock and his law partner Franklin 'Foggy' Nelson struggle to establish their firm while trying to expose Wilson Fisk as the Kingpin of the New York underworld.

Daredevil adheres fairly closely to its source material, with pretty much all the cast members being well chosen for their characters. Charlie Cox makes a great Matt Murdock, convincingly portraying both his blindness and his enhanced senses, and Elden Hanson provides a perfect level of comic relief as Foggy Nelson. Deborah Ann Woll's Karen Page feels a bit less concretely conceived, but doesn't do a bad job. Even the actors that don't resemble their comic counterparts as closely, specifically Vondie Curtis-Hall as reporter Ben Urich and Bob Gunton as Leland Owlsley, surprised me with how well their characters worked in the show.

Scott Glenn as Stick became my favorite character almost as soon as he appeared. His abrasive demeanor and borderline-abusive treatment of Matt immediately altered the entire dynamic of the show and gave a very different feel to his episode. I hope he returns in future seasons.

My only complaint character-wise is that, in an attempt to make him more sympathetic, Vincent D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk, while still well cast, doesn't quite manage to feel like the big villain he is made out to be. He seems to be the head crime lord by default, without actually doing anything to warrant that position, and his speeches about trying to help the city don't make a lot of sense.

Although the focus is on the fight against Fisk, it shifts at times to other adversaries, which tend to be more interesting. In particular, I liked the episodes focusing on the Japanese side of things, which did a perfect job of playing with the supernatural elements associated with those comics without ever bringing in anything overtly supernatural. Once the story narrows everything down to Fisk toward the end, it feels a bit underwhelming compared to what came before.

There are lots of references to both the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as the comics, scattered throughout the series, but thankfully they are handled in a way that keeps them from feeling out of place or distracting. In fact, outside of the show being set in the aftermath of the destruction of New York at the end of Avengers, viewers unfamiliar with the comics or other movies would probably think most of them were just part of the show.

The entire show keeps a serious and realistic tone that fits the story it tells, but the story sometimes feels like it lacks the forward momentum it thinks it has. There are lots of subplots with different characters that don't always go somewhere, but overall things work fairly well.

Things I liked about Daredevil:

The cast is great.

The exploration of Matt Murdock's background and character was very effective.

The tone is perfect.

The show sticks to the comics and doesn't shy away from the more violent aspects of the storyline.

The discussion of the morality of different characters' actions. I can't help wishing there was more of that. Characters would sometimes bring up interesting points that would be forgotten by the end of the scene. It's hard to complain about though, I'm just glad it was there at all.

The biggest and best surprise for me was that there is almost no CGI in the entire show.

Things I didn't like about Daredevil:

The constant push to get Daredevil into his red costume. We already know it's going to happen (they made it the cover image), we don't need every single character to tell him that his black costume is "dumb" or whatever (personally, I preferred the black). It gets worse than that, but I won't spoil it.

There is one particular scene where Matt needs to move across the rooftops quickly, but he keeps executing pointless flips and flashy moves as he goes. It comes out of nowhere and doesn't fit in with his character or the situation. Out of the entire show, this one scene was the only one that really bothered me. It was painful.

Fisk felt like just another criminal to be taken down, not the big ringleader he was supposed to be.

The conclusion of the whole Fisk storyline was a bit anticlimactic. After how long it took to get there, it felt like it needed something more.

Occasional questionable dialog. Especially at the very end of the last episode. Way to blow things at the very end.

One aspect I'm torn on is the fight scenes. I appreciated the fact that they were almost certainly the most realistic fight scenes in a superhero movie or show so far, and the homage to the Oldboy hallway fight in episode two was great. But, in typical modern style, most of the others are shot with the camera too close to clearly see what is going on. It's not as bad as in a Christopher Nolan movie, but it could easily be better.

All in all, the first season of Daredevil is a very promising start for Marvel's Netflix series that also works well as a self-contained story. It definitely starts out stronger than it finishes, with its highest points somewhere in the middle, but the characters and tone are almost perfect. This is about as good a Daredevil show as could be hoped for, and the willingness to approach things from a darker angle appropriate to the character helps elevate it from the movies that try to please everyone.

Avengers: Age of Ultron -- Nick Fury, Thor, and Black Widow character posters

2015-02-27T21:34:00.002-08:00

Marvel must be as impatient as their fanboys, because we already have three new posters for the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron to discuss.

First up is Nick Fury:

Samuel L. Jackson's lack of presence just oozes out of the frame here. I remember how excited I was at the idea of Sam Jackson playing Nick Fury back when the first Iron Man came out, but in most of these movies he feels like he's phoning everything in. Unless it turns out that those Furys were really LMDs, Jackson needs to step up his game. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was an improvement, but this poster makes it look like things are going back to the way they were before. At least he has an excuse for not reacting to the robots in this poster, seeing as how they're about to literally blindside him. (Are blind jokes okay? You know what, I don't care, these posters are asking for it)

None of the posters so far have had great lighting, but this new Thor one is particularly strange. Those shadows on his arm don't feel right. It's like not even diffused light gets under the part of his armor extending past his shoulder, but at the same time, the shadow isn't very dark. It gives me the same feeling I get when I try to see that dress as blue and black. What really bugs me about things like this is that somebody got paid to make it look like that.

At least the people on these posters have looked like actual people so far, but then that just serves to make the backgrounds look that much more fake. This poster reminds me of the obvious green screen shots in the throne room toward the end of Thor: The Dark World.

The fact that this Black Widow poster is easily the best of these so far is sad. It's better than the others because the camera is pulled back a bit, allowing us to actually see what we're looking at, and because her upright posture paralleling the building behind her gives the image at least some sense of composition (accidental, I'm sure). Apart from that and the distracting strangeness of the lone robot standing on the rooftop on the left, it's still a pretty forgettable image.

Okay, let's get to the fun part.

The Matching Game

First, let's look at the robots:

What a mess. I can't be sure about some of those smaller ones on the Black Widow poster, so there might be even more that match. And this is not even comparing them to the earlier posters. Maybe I'll compare all of them once they're all released.

We're not done with the matching game just yet though:

It's hard to tell, but the these buildings from the Thor and Black Widow posters are the same one.

Taking things even farther, the same building appears on the Nick Fury poster--twice!

Sorry for drawing on your face, Samuel L. Jackson. Please don't kill me.

That building on the right edge is also in the same spot on the Black Widow poster. I'm assuming it's part of the same original image as the tall building.

At first, I thought building in the middle with the crumbling corner was also on the Hulk poster, but it appears to have been a case of mistaken identity:

However, this burning police car from the Thor poster--

--does make a cameo appearance in the Black Widow poster, albeit with different flames:

This other car from the Black Widow poster--

--turns up on the Nick Fury poster.

I'm surprised I haven't been able to match any of the flames or smoke/dust clouds yet, but we probably still have several posters to go.

Avengers: Age of Ultron -- Hulk character poster

2015-02-26T19:37:00.000-08:00

Time to take a look at the Green Goliath's Avengers: Age of Ultron poster:

I'd always hoped for a poster of the Hulk's armpit to hang on my wall. Maybe if we're lucky the next one will be the back of Nick Fury's left ear.

I hate the fact that CGI creations like this are the accepted standard in movies now. I remember being surprised at how unimpressive the Hulk looked in the first Avengers, but apparently I shouldn't expect anything more. I know this is just a poster, but I doubt the movie will look any better.

Being that practically half the image is the Hulk's furry pectoral alone, there's not much to discuss here, so let's get straight to

The Matching Game

On the plus side, none of the robots on this poster match each other. We do still have one matching the previous two posters though:

The robot above the Hulk's shoulder is a flipped version of the robot we've seen twice before.

Not too bad with this poster then, right? Not so fast. Take a look at this:

The Hulk himself is the same one from before. At first I thought, "At least they toned down the phantom backlighting on the bottom of his arm." Then I noticed the light hitting his side, which looks like it should be blocked by either his arm or his latissimus dorsi, the muscle stretching from beneath his arm to behind his back. Somebody got paid to put that unnecessary flourish that just makes the poster look more fake.

As disappointing as these posters have been so far, I'm actually more disappointed that none of them have been bad enough to make me laugh yet. I'm holding out for a Quicksilver one, I think that would do the trick, but we'll have to wait and see.

Avengers: Age of Ultron -- Iron Man character poster

2015-02-26T18:36:00.002-08:00

Looks like we're getting individual posters for the major characters in Avengers: Age of Ultron. First up is Iron Man:

Careful observation reveals that Iron Man, demonstrating his formidable intellect, has yet again elected not to wear his helmet in the middle of battle. To be fair, he still doesn't look very concerned about those robots, so maybe they aren't as big a threat as they appeared to be in the trailer. Or maybe Robert Downey, Jr.'s ego is just too big to fit under the helmet anymore.

And what's with the spray-painted Avengers logo at the bottom? It doesn't fit the aesthetic of the movie on any level--they're fighting robots, not inner city hoodlums.

Another uninspired poster from Marvel Studios, but at least it's not overly painful to look at, like the first poster for the movie was. Plus, it gives us another chance to play:

The Matching Game

Even with there only being seven robots on this new poster, there are several that match each other:

Note to Marvel: Adding glowing eyes to some robots does not magically make me not notice that they are still the same robots.

Not only that--all but one of them match robots from the original poster:

At this rate, I expect this Avengers poster to look like a crazy rainbow by the time all the character posters come out.

Avengers: Age of Ultron poster review

2015-02-24T21:21:00.001-08:00

Today, Marvel released a poster for the upcoming film Avengers: Age of Ultron. If you've seen the posters for their earlier movies, you know what to expect, but for everyone else, I advise you to shield your eyes in case of Photoshop overload (click for larger size):

Some would say that ten characters, plus a bunch of attacking robots (at least I think they're attacking; the Avengers seem to be more concerned about other things) is too much for one poster. I would disagree and say it just takes someone with some design sense to make it work. Apparently they don't have anyone like that on staff at Marvel, a company that employs hundreds of people whose job it is to to make effective images of superheroes, including, for example, Avengers comic covers.

Once you get past the poster's terrible overall composition, your eyes move to the individual characters, each of which seems to have their own source of backlighting, even if they are standing right in front of another character. Let's analyze them more closely.

Right up front we have Captain America:

I find it interesting how much Cap has taken the spotlight away from Iron Man, both in the poster and in the general public's eye. It helps to have your most recent solo movies not be total crap, I guess. Cap seems far less concerned about whatever everyone else is looking at, even with the ground apparently exploding right in front of him. I guess he's used to that kind of stuff by now. Why no mask though? Who keeps making these new costumes for him anyway? Why does he even need a costume? Personally, I don't like the weird stuff going on around the star on his chest, or the Avengers logo on his shoulder, but I guess the unnecessary clutter fits with the theme of the poster.

Thor's new costume isn't much better, but then all of his costumes in the movies have been pretty bad so far. They can't seem to find a pattern for his chest piece that doesn't look like an ugly jumble of random shapes. The other thing I notice about him is that the arm holding up his hammer looks kind of weird. It might be just me, but I think they tried to lower his arm to keep it from getting too close to the names across the top of the poster. They should have been focusing on bigger issues.

Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, for example. Why are they standing sideways on a wall? Sure, Wanda has magic powers (at least in the comics, the movies have been afraid of using magic so far), and I guess Pietro could run up the wall with his super speed, but with everything else going on in this poster, raising more questions is the last thing they should be doing here. Guess they had to shove 'em in somewhere. Also, we have yet to see a picture of Quicksilver that does not look ridiculous. What is that pose? Is he trying to crack his back? Granted, everyone felt the same way about Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past and changed their minds when they saw the movie, but I remain skeptical for now.

Next up, we have Iron Man. Cap without a mask I can deal with, but why does Iron Man not have his helmet on? Especially seeing as how he's about to blow a hole through Cap's shoulder, he really should at least keep it on to use the suit's targeting systems.

Visually, the color scheme of the ribs on his suit doesn't work with his placement either. The background is grey/brown and he is standing in front of a dark-suited Black Widow. The grey parts of his suit combine with those elements to confuse his form and needlessly make an already cluttered image even more muddled. It doesn't help that one of the few areas without backlighting on the entire poster is that part of his suit.

The Hulk, on the other hand, is the biggest victim of exaggerated backlighting here. Where is all this light coming from?

The Black Widow has some weird new stuff going on with her suit. Makes sense, I guess, she needs something to elevate her from just another S.H.I.E.L.D. agent to a full-fledged Avenger.

What about Hawkeye, though? He still just looks like some idiot with a bow (I say this as someone who names the comics' Hawkeye as one of their favorite Avengers).

Samuel L. Jackson just looks bored. I guess after being in so many of these movies, he already knew how the poster was going to turn out. There's something strange going on between Fury's shoulder and Hawkeye's quiver too, like they're fighting for which one gets to be in front. Another example of crappy image design.

Then there's the fact that the three of them are strangely shrunken and out of proportion with everyone else. I think the problem is actually that Stark is too big, but maybe they're just teasing us for Ant-Man. In a world where we have five-second teasers for thirty-second teasers, that's not too hard to believe.

I also want to point out that Robert Downey Jr.'s name appears before the title at the bottom, as it did on the posters for the first Avengers:

I'm surprised his ego isn't listed separately.

Now let's play my favorite game when it comes to modern movie posters:

The Matching Game

This is where you try to find the same piece of imagery repeated multiple times on the same poster. Often, it will be altered slightly, but it's usually pretty easy to find copies.

While it's a bit harder to play this game with such a low resolution image (this is all Marvel has put out so far), here is what I found on this poster:

That's at least six elements that repeat themselves, all within the same third of the poster. I even found this piece of debris next to Cap's shield that matches a piece next to Nick Fury. I flipped, rotated, and blurred it just to make sure:

With a higher-res image, I can only expect even more copy-and-paste-ing to be revealed.

Posters used to be used to entice people to see a movie, but I can't imagine someone who didn't already know about this movie wanting to see it based on this poster. In particular, the posters for comic book movies like this feel like a huge missed opportunity to do something interesting. Imagine what someone like Drew Struzan could have done with this. Or how about a poster replicating a comic cover? So many possible options, and this is what they came up with.

Bloodsport (1988)

2014-09-05T21:10:00.002-07:00

Van Damme got blood in my cheese.

If the Cannon logo right at the beginning isn't enough to give it away, Bloodsport is very much an '80s American martial arts movie. In one of his earliest film roles, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Frank Dux (pronounced "dukes"), an American soldier who deserts his post to fight in the Kumite, an illegal, full-contact martial arts tournament. It's supposed to be super-secret, but everyone he comes across seems to know about it.

The first fifteen minutes or so, filled with abysmally bad acting and dialog--holy crap, is it bad--give the impression of a much worse movie than Bloodsport thankfully turns out to be. Van Damme goes AWOL when his superiors find out he wants to go to Hong Kong to fight in the Kumite.

Why would he have told them what he was going there for? He was already going on leave, he could have just made something up. It makes no sense. And the fact that Van Damme is the closest thing to a good actor in this scene is depressing.

While he visits the house of a Japanese couple, we go to a flashback of three kids breaking into the same house years earlier to steal stuff, and the acting gets even worse. I know I exaggerate a lot, but these might actually be the worst child actors I have ever seen. Two of them leave when they hear someone coming (they were talking so loud that they probably would have managed to get caught even if no one was home). The third hoodlum is--you guessed it--young Frank. Actually, he looks nothing like Van Damme, so I wasn't sure it was supposed to be him until he talked (and even then, I had to strain to maintain my suspension of disbelief--young Frank sounds more like a New Yorker with a speech impediment than Van Damme).

Maybe they judged his similarity to Van Damme on his acting ability, or lack of. (That's mean, Van Damme's actually not bad in this movie.)

A Japanese man and his young son come into the room, and find Frank holding a katana that the other kids had dropped instead of just running off with it when they were already holding it. Stupid ass kids can't even rob a place correctly. The son immediately runs over and kicks Frank in the stomach, but the father takes a different approach. He tells Frank, "You cannot get katana sword by stealing. It is very special sword. You must earn it." Frank tells him he wasn't going to steal it and the man swings the sword and cuts off the front of his baseball cap.

That black thing is the front of his cap falling off.

When Frank doesn't flinch, the Japanese man tells him he has fighting spirit and that he won't call the cops if they make a deal. Cut to the Japanese man, Tanaka, convincing Frank's parents to allow him to study "martial science" so he can help train his son.

Suspension of disbelief now broken in half. This kid just snuck into the house to rob you, old man, and couldn't even do it right--you don't want your son hanging around with him! The son doesn't even like him--he calls Frank "round eyes." But then we get a goofy, thoroughly unconvincing scene of Frank defending the son from bullies, so of course they become "like brothers."

Flash back to the present, where Tanaka's son is dead, and Tanaka tells Frank a sob story about how he lost his first family in WWII and now he can't pass on his legacy to a son (boo hoo). Frank tells him to continue training him so he can carry on the legacy. Cue training montage, including Van Damme doing the splits, catching fish with his hands, and fighting blindfolded. I wonder if he'll have to use any of those skills later on in the movie? (SPOILER: Yes, he will.)

For a movie with no real character depth, Bloodsport sure lays on some thick backstory, but it's finally time for Frank to head to Hong Kong. Thankfully, we don't get scenes of Frank packing his luggage, getting on a plane, wandering around Hong Kong, etc. Instead, we just cut to Frank on a bus in Hong Kong, where he meets a big, redneck American guy named Ray Jackson drinking a beer and crudely hitting on an Asian chick who is clearly not interested. A little later he challenges Frank to a karate video game match, which Frank wins. Everything seems set up for an antagonistic rivalry between the two, but in the one sort-of surprise in this movie, they quickly become best friends.

Frank and Ray are escorted by a squirrely Chinese guy named Lin to the Kumite. Lin has some pretty funny lines, and the actor knows how to deliver them. The guys signing everyone up for the Kumite want Frank to prove he is a student of Tanaka by demonstrating the 'Dim Mak' death touch, which he does by telling them to select a brick:

Bolo Yeung isn't impressed:

That's right, Bolo is in this movie too. He plays Chong Li, the previous year's victor, infamous for his brutality. He only has a handful of lines and still gets dubbed for some reason. And to all the people claiming Bolo was fifty years old in this movie: Bolo Yeung was born Some Other Name in 1946. Bloodsport came out in 1988. Let me do the math for you: It don't add up.

Frank and Ray come across a female reporter trying to gain information for a story on the Kumite while some other entrants are harassing her. They cannot fight because they will be disqualified from the Kumite. Frank offers them a bet--if he can grab a coin out of the one guy's hand before he can close it, they will go away. If not, they can have the girl. Frank thinks back to catching the fish and snatches the coin, leaving a different one behind.

What if he had failed? What if instead of catching fish like Frank, the other guy trained by trying to keep people from snatching fish out of his hand? You sure are confident in your abilities, Frank.

Even though Frank could have gotten her raped, flirting ensues between Frank and the reporter, and eventually they bang. Not a surprise. What is a surprise for a movie of this type and era, is that the only nudity in the movie is Van Damme's butt. It's still kind of painful the way the 'romance' is shoved in, but at least it doesn't take up too much of the movie.

By the way, in the butt shot you can clearly see the exact point where they said "action." It starts out with Van Damme standing next to a counter with his underwear half off before he pulls them up, but he stands there for a second like he's waiting to do it. I point it out because it's funny that they had him stand there waiting for the shot just so they could have a glimpse of his ass in the movie only to edit it so unconvincingly. Why not have him just lower his underwear and pull them back up, then edit the shot to start with him pulling them up? Or just edit out that half second in the first place? Maybe they did focus tests and people said there wasn't enough ass in the movie so they actually stuck that half second back in. That's why I hate focus groups. People think they know what's best for the movie, but all they really want are more ass shots. But enough about Van Damme's butt.

Forest Whitaker of all people is also in Hong Kong along with some old guy, looking for Frank so they can bring him back to the U.S. Their reason: The Army cannot risk him being injured because they have put so much of their resources into him. They never explain or clarify this to any extant. It's such a lazy and extraneous plot element, I don't even know why it's in the movie. Surely the tournament offered enough action and story. The only thing of value it adds to the movie is the scene where Van Damme outruns them in the streets, taunting them all the way.

Back in the Kumite, which the reporter sneaks into on her own (talking into her '80s tape recorder right in front of everyone), we see lots of fights between people from different backgrounds, with different fighting styles. It's really cool in theory, but only kind of cool in execution. First of all, a lot of the fighters don't have any personality to them. There are actually a lot that do, but for the other fights, it would help if we cared who won. But the real problem is that none of the fights in this movie are remotely convincing. Almost every single move is super-telegraphed, and the opponents will just stand there waiting to be hit (next time you're doubting yourself, just remember: if your reaction time is under two full seconds, you could have made it at least to the final four in the deadliest, most illegal fighting tournament in the world). There are even times that a fighter will get hit and fall in the wrong direction so that their bloody face can pass in front of the camera. Take a look:

Whaaaaat????

Then there are the superfluous rolls that fighters execute at random times to no strategic benefit. There's even a guy that fights with a monkey style that involves him scurrying around on the ground in such a way that he has to tilt his head way back to even see his opponent. It didn't make sense while I was watching it, so it was no surprise to find out that he isn't using any real-life fighting style. The only reason he lasts as long as he does is because his opponents keep throwing punches at normal head level when he is about two feet below that. It's like watching two people who have never touched a video game before going up against each other in a Tekken or Street Fighter. Actually, that still sounds too legit, let's say Bloody Roar II. And the fact that so many of the hits are obviously not connecting even at normal speed is made worse by the fact that so many shots are in slow motion.

At least Bolo's Chong Li makes for a good villain. Of course, Ray is the first to go up against him, and of course he gets destroyed. Movies always gotta be giving the lead a personal stake against the villain. Ray doesn't die though, he just ends up in the hospital.

Long story short, Frank eventually goes up against Chong Li. The movie would have been a lot better if Chong Li was an honest fighter instead of a one-dimensional villain, but during the fight he throws a powder into Frank's eyes. I don't know how it's supposed to work though, because his eyes are still open the whole time. When we see things from his perspective, it's blurred but you can still make out what you're looking at. Van Damme overacts, stumbling all around and making faces all the while.

Oh, and yelling.

It's been a while since he directly called on his training from earlier in the movie, so he finally calms down and remembers that he knows how to fight blindfolded.

As a side note, it's funny the way the reporter and the two guys who were after Frank, all of whom tried to keep him from entering the tournament, are cheering him on from the sidelines, even while he's fighting blind. They act excited and happy, like they are at a real sporting event and not witnessing a potential fight to the death.

If Frank could see, I'm sure he'd regret not letting the reporter get raped.

Frank of course wins the match, forcing Chong Li to say ka-goda.

Frank gets a sword as reward for his troubles, along with a cash prize of...wait, no, that's it. Just a sword.

He goes with reporter girl to give Ray the news in the hospital. And then this exchange occurs:

It's never too late to introduce a gay subplot, apparently.

Van Damme then leans over and kisses him. That's not even a joke, he really kisses him. Not on the lips, maybe, but still.

Anyway.

Forest Whitaker and Old Man are waiting for Frank at the plane to take him back, complaining that he isn't showing. Then he pops out of the plane and says, "Hey." (He says other things too, "You coming or what?" etc.) Then reporter girl shows up. I thought she was going to go with Frank, but I guess she already got what she needed for her story. Bitch.

Before the credits, we get some info on the real Frank W. Dux, the inspiration for the movie, who supposedly "fought 329 matches" and "retired undefeated as the World Heavy Weight Full Contact Kumite Champion."

Not only that:

Impressive, huh? Well, not so much when you do a little research and find out that he is basically the only person who talks about the Kumite and has exactly zero proof to back up any of his claims. Not only is he full of shit, he's pretty full of himself too:

The Kumite may not exist, but Bloodsport does, and despite it's numerous flaws, it remains an enjoyable movie. Van Damme isn't bad, except maybe when he decides to imitate Bruce Lee and make goofy faces and yell:

These are the actual captions from the movie.

He also does the splits about 125 times in this movie:

Van Damme pushes his body to the limit. Meanwhile, Ray practices being a fat buffoon who drinks beer, while also trying to figure out how to use a bed.

The reporter is boring and Forest Whitaker and Old Man don't do anything, but Donald Gibb turns in an energetic performance as Ray Jackson. Ray is a gruff moron with no fighting ability whatsoever, and he still manages to be likable. He's also hugely overconfident.

Seconds later:

Bolo is Bolo.

'Nuff said.

One other thing to mention: The music. Not the score, but the songs in the movie.

It's pure '80s cheeze, goofy power ballads about honor and friendship and shit. Then there's the ending song that just seems to repeat "Kumite" over and over again. That one might get stuck in your head.

Fans of American action movies from the '80s will have probably seen Bloodsport already, but even if you prefer to stick to 'good' martial arts movies, you should give this one a shot. It's not good, true, but enough of it works to make it an entertaining viewing.

I'll leave you with a shot of Van Damme doing the splits while making a face and yelling, right after having punched a guy in the balls.

Enjoy.

Lucy (2014)

2014-08-14T11:36:00.000-07:00

What the hell is this movie?

Lucy begins with Scarlett Johansson in Taiwan. She plays a character named Lucy (I'm going to take this slow, because this movie is whacked out). She says to a guy that is supposed to be her boyfriend that she is a "student." I don't know what language(s) might be spoken over in Taiwan, but based on how she dresses, I'm assuming "student" translates to "prostitute" in at least all of them.

Anyway, her "boyfriend" has to deliver a suspicious locked briefcase to somebody in an office building. He doesn't want to do it himself because they will recognize him, so he forces her to do it instead by handcuffing the briefcase to her wrist and telling her that only the guy in the building has the key. Girls always go for the asshole types.

Actually, wait--the movie starts earlier than that, with a scene of an ape/hominid thing drinking out of a stream in the primeval wilderness. Scarlett Johansson asks me how far humanity has come/what we've made of ourselves/pretentious psuedo-philosophically deep question. The next shots are of skyscrapers and modern cities and the like. I can't tell if I'm supposed to be appalled at what we've done with the world, or impressed that we've come so far. I'm not sure the movie knows either, but we'll get there.

Back to the briefcase scene. Lucy Johansson is pissed, but now she has to go inside, even though she's pretty sure the whole operation is illegal and didn't want to do it even when her boyfriend offered her half of the $1000 he would get for dropping it off. I would have gone straight to the police and dumped the boyfriend's ass, but girls always like the asshole types.

Actually, wait--I'm getting ahead of myself again. While Scarlett Lucy is talking to her boyfriend and he's trying to get her to deliver the briefcase, we briefly cut to a shot of a mouse heading toward a mouse trap. Do you get it? (SPOILER: The trap is the producer's pocket and the mouse is your money.)

Anyway.

She goes up to the reception desk all nervous-like and says she's there to drop off the briefcase. The guy at the desk asks her what her name is and she says "Lucy." Do you get it? (SPOILER: Her name is "Lucy".)

Oh, wait, no, she actually says "Richard." Because "Richard" is the name of her "boyfriend" in this "movie." The guy gives her a look and starts to ask her more questions, like what's in the briefcase, but she doesn't know and just wants to get out of the theater 'cause this movie sucks already--er, I mean, just wants to get rid of the briefcase, 'cause it's chafing her wrist something awful. The guy on the other end of the line tells the receptionist to tell Lucy to wait there. She asks if she can go sit down, but the guy says the other guy said to wait right there. He sounds like an asshole, so she'll probably like him.

Suddenly, her boyfriend, the one who didn't want to be recognized and who has literally been standing right outside the glass doors in plain view this whole time, gets shot. The movie tries to stop us from asking logical questions like "Who shot him?" or "Why did they shoot him?" or "Is the movie going to be this disjointed the entire way through?" (SPOILER: Yes) by distracting us with some armed guys running through the lobby and grabbing Lucy and taking her into the elevator. (I have to mention that the preceding scene is peppered with cutaway shots of cheetahs stalking antelope. That's not some kind of joke, it actually happens. In the movie.)

You've probably seen the trailers for this movie already. You can probably figure out that the briefcase holds bags filled with a blue drug (they keep referring to it as a powder, even though it looks more like aquarium gravel), and that one of them gets implanted in her abdomen, breaks open, and gives her superpowers. You probably also know that it works by allowing her to access the 90% of her brain that according to the movie is just dead weight for normal people (SPOILER: This movie is not remotely based on real life).

What you might not know is that this movie actually manages to make even less sense than the trailers imply. Oldboy from Oldboy plays what passes for the film's villain, the cartoonish drug lord who had the drugs implanted, not only in her, but in three men, to transport the drug (called CPH4) to different countries via commercial plane travel.

Already, I have an infinite number of questions.

-Why did they choose Lucy? They literally just met her--she was just some girl who walked in with the briefcase of CPH4 or whatever, and she clearly was not willing to just go along with things. Doesn't seem like a smart business decision to offer a job to someone you've just met, then hire them even though they say "no." True, she was too stupid to go to the police earlier, but having a briefcase handcuffed to your wrist isn't the same as being cut open and having illegal drugs stuffed into you.

-Why did her boyfriend have the briefcase in the first place? He said he had dropped stuff off there before, but they acted like the CPH4 in the briefcase was all they had. Did he drop off other things before? Pizzas maybe? Why would he be worried about them recognizing him? Wasn't he hired to do that? Maybe he forgot to say 'no mushrooms' the last time and he knows they were pissed, I dunno.

-What were the men in the office doing when they brought Lucy up? We saw some dead/dying people bloodying up the carpet, what was up with that? (I know it's supposed to set a tense atmosphere, but even in context it was more goofy and ridiculous than foreboding.)

-Why did they kill Richard, her boyfriend?

-Why was he dressed like a cowboy? What that supposed to be his disguise? Wouldn't that just make him more conspicuous?

-Did including a cowboy give the movie more international appeal? Are cowboys a big deal in Taiwan?

-What did Lucy ever see in him in the first place? Why do girls always go for the asshole types?

These aren't all plot holes, but they are still important questions.

To make things even more ridiculous, when they give Lucy the code to open the case, they all stand back behind riot shields before she opens it. They say they don't know what Richard might have done to it. Why would they suspect something? He said they'd hired him to drop stuff off before. How did it get into his hands if they don't trust him? Or are they just worried he forgot to say 'no mushrooms' again?

So this movie sounds goofy as hell already, I know, but what makes it really strange is that everything up to this point feels like it was shot in a very thoughtful way. Every shot feels calculated, nothing feels arbitrary. It all looks so pretty and purposeful, if you were to walk in on any of these scenes thinking the reason nothing made sense was because it was already half over, you might accidentally get the impression that you were watching a real movie.

Anyway, Lucy opens the case, and they test the contents by bringing out a dazed, barely conscious guy from a back room and having him snort some of the drugs. They have to slap him a bunch of times to keep him awake. Again, doesn't seem like a good judge, but when he starts laughing they decide it passed the test. That must have been how they reviewed the script.

That's where they ask Lucy if she wants a job, then knock her out when she says "no." When she wakes up, one of the bags of drugs is in her abdomen, and they give her and the other three guys with drugs in them their passports. The other three guys look pretty calm, so I assumed they were willing mules at first, but then they were told that their families would be killed if they went to the police or anything like that. Could they really not find anyone who would be willing to transport the drugs for money? And I still don't see how that threat applies to Lucy, as they don't know anything about her at all.

They lock her up (I guess they're waiting for a plane, I don't know), and her guards start trying to mess with her. She bites one of them, so he starts kicking her in the stomach. They leave her on the floor, and colorful CGI shows us the drugs leaking out of the bag and getting into her system. She starts spasming up the wall and onto the ceiling (that's not some kind of typo, it's literally what happens).

If it feels like this review is jumping around all over the place, it's because this movie is so incoherent that it's impossible to remember exactly what happens when, but either here or at some other completely random point earlier, the movie jumps sideways into a lecture hall filled with the most attentive students I've ever seen. You know those older people you get in a lot of college classes? The ones who make you feel like an asshole because they seem to be paying such close attention to the instructor while you're just sitting there drawing stick figures performing obscene acts on each other in an attempt to stay awake, until you hear them ask a question so stupid you realize they probably don't even know what class they are in in the first place? That's what all the people in this class look like.

The class is being taught by Professor Morgan Freeman (played by actor Morgan Freeman). I can't think of a lazier way of both delivering exposition and trying to legitimize the stupid premise of your movie than by having freaking Morgan Freeman literally tell an audience of morons what the movie is about.

Again, I'm sure you know what the movie is about because Morgan Freeman told you in the trailers, but what he tells his students is that humans can only access 10% of their brains' capacity. He goes so far as to say that dolphins are the only animals that can go farther--up to 20%. I guess that explains those super-advanced cities they keep finding out in the ocean. Oh, wait, no, it's supposed to explain how they can use echolocation. I'm not sure how that applies to other whales, bats, etc. At least he doesn't try to suggest that dolphins figured out how to develop echolocation themselves.

He does, however, go so far as to say, in relation to dolphins naturally developing echolocation and humans inventing sonar: "This is the crucial part of our philosophical reflection we have today. Can we therefore conclude that humans are concerned more with having...than being?" The class gasps as if this is some kind of revelatory or eye-opening suggestion, and unfortunately I can imagine the more brain-dead people in the audience doing the same.

This movie would embarrass even James Cameron in how far it goes with shameless attempts at audience manipulation. Movies as a storytelling form depend on manipulating their audience, yes, but well made movies will do so in such a way that you are unaware that you are being manipulated even while it's happening. Cameron, as an example, doesn't usually succeed at that, especially in his newer films--the elements that Cameron uses to make the audience feel a certain way, elements that would normally be obscured in other movies, are right out in plain sight in things like Avatar.

But at least in Cameron's case, we can tell what we are supposed to feel. It doesn't work--the movie telling you to be scared or angry isn't the same as the movie doing something to make you feel scared or angry--but you can tell what he's going for because he hammers it into your skull. In this movie, even the audience cues don't make any sense. We as the audience are in the same place as the students in the class, listening to Morgan Freeman deliver exposition. As such, assuming the movie had pulled us in like a good movie would do, we should be having the same reaction as his students. But when everything he says is so stupid that it just makes us laugh, the movie becomes even more absurd by blatantly trying to give us the impression that it is "deep," from the opening question about what we've done with life on Earth, to having the class react in such a way to the drivel coming out of Morgan Freeman's mouth. In a parody it might work, but this is supposed to be a real part of the movie.

It should also be noted that while Morgan Freeman is often hired because of the authoritative way he speaks/narrates, a lot of his lines here, including those above, feel awkward, as if they recorded him reading the script for the first time as he wondered whether this would finally be the role he would say 'no' to.

The movie actually cuts to the class a few times, and one of those scenes contains my favorite moment: Morgan Freeman is jabbering on, and there is a shot of a bunch of the students typing furiously on their laptops. What are they typing? Morgan Freeman isn't talking very quickly, and he's not saying much to begin with. It might not sound funny reading about it, but I laughed out loud in the theater.

Nothing Morgan Freeman says ever makes any sense. As the movie goes on, he speculates: What would happen if a person could access more than 10% of their brain's capacity? (Side note: I think the word they mean to use is 'capability'; 'capacity' is how much it could hold, like memory, whereas 'capability' is how much it could do.) Morgan Freeman gives one of his patented Knowing LooksTM and says something about gaining access to and control over one's physical self at 20%. Don't we already have that at our supposed 10%? I think he means absolute control over ourselves down our very cells, but if dolphins are already at 20%...screw it, I don't know.

At that point, a kid raises his hand and asks (in English so broken that I'm not sure the actor had any idea what the words meant), whether there is any scientific evidence behind what he is saying, or if it's all bullshit. I don't know why they would have someone actually ask that in a movie that is clearly pulling everything out of its ass, but I like the fact that Morgan Freeman just kind of says, "Wellllllll, no....." That's where I would have walked out of that class and transferred to a different school.

As if that wasn't enough, he goes on about how nobody believed Darwin at first, and that, "It's up to us to push the rules and laws and go from 'evolution' to 'revolution.'" Everyone in the class laughs, and everyone in the audience groans. I'm not even going to go into that one, but in the spirit of the movie's lack of coherency, let me arbitrarily choose this moment to mention that the Morgan Freeman lecture scenes are particularly infested with stock footage of planes/animals mating and giving birth/storms/random-ass shit.

Morgan Freeman continues, saying that humans would gain control of others at 40%, then control of matter (are people not made of matter in this movie?). He hesitates to go farther, saying that that would be venturing into science fiction, a statement that seems to demonstrate an intense lack of understanding of science as a very concept.

Annnnnnnyway--back to Lucy.

The screen goes to black with a big "20%" in white, and when she recovers from her episode and sits back up in her chair, a series of shots of her sitting really still show us how emotionless she has become. A guard comes in for some sexytime, and she beats him up and takes his gun. She walks out, shoots all the others eating their lunch...and then adds insult to murder by eating all their sandwiches. We're assaulted by jump cuts in the middle of the shot where she drinks a glass of water, another manipulation tactic of sorts to make us automatically think she is drinking a lot. The glass is pretty small, so it ends up being unintentionally funny instead. Also, the scene seems to exist to show us that her metabolism has increased, which makes sense I guess...?...but we never see it referenced again in the entire movie, so I don't know.

There's another moment of unintentional humor when she goes up to two guys outside, shoots one in the leg, and forces the other one to drive her to the hospital. As they are about to drive away, subtitles for the guy who got shot come up on the screen, reading simply, "My leg." Subtitles will show up a lot more in the movie, but that's the first time they've appeared so far. We already saw him get shot, is it really that important that we know exactly what he is saying?

Being at 20% somehow let's Lucy translate the signs in the hospital that are in Chinese. She heads into a surgery room and shoots the guy on the operating table, telling the doctors they couldn't save him anyway. Apparently, going to 20% automatically makes you a medical expert too.

As absurd as the rest of the movie has been, that's where it really pushes itself over the line. Let's say we can accept that idea that we only use 10% of our brains for the sake of the movie. Let's say we can also accept that nothing relating to the criminals makes any sense because we simply don't know all the information relating to them. Granted, that would still be a problem with the movie not giving us enough information, but let's pretend we can still let it slide. The big logic problem comes when the movie expects us to believe that Lucy simply *knows* how to read Chinese because she can "access more of her brain's capacity." Sure, maybe she could learn it faster and retain it better, but how does she just *know* it? The same goes for interpreting the X-rays/MRIs of the patient. Just because she is more intelligent or perceptive doesn't mean she has the relevant information and knowledge she would need to do those things. Even in the context of the movie, it makes no sense.

Lucy gets on the table and tells the doctors at gunpoint to remove the rest of the drugs from her abdomen. She then asks if they mind that she makes a call on her cell while they work.

She calls her mom, who we only hear (and only in this one scene), but who still manages to compete with some of the students in the lecture hall for being the worst actor in the movie. The entire conversation is again unintentionally funny. Lucy talks about being able to feel everything and remember everything, including the taste of her mother's milk. She starts to tear up and tells her mother that she loves her. She later mentions that she no longer has any emotions, which from how she was acting seems to have been the case already, so having her cry here doesn't make much sense.

We already know the rest of the movie won't make much sense either, so I'll just cover the highlights, such as they are:

-When Lucy gets to Oldboy, she looks into his memory to find out where the other drug mules are going. We see her looking at things from his point of view, but she then seems to use his memories to access the memories of everyone else at the scene in his memory to get different perspectives until she can clearly see the passports. What???

-Lucy contacts a French cop to help her get the rest of the drugs. She needs the rest of the drugs because her body is breaking down--even though she supposedly has complete control over it, and by this point can apparently manipulate electromagnetic waves, and even type on two laptops at once! By the way, while she's using them the laptop screens creatively look like the Matrix screens.

-The first scene with her using a computer had her typing nonstop and windows popping up all over the screen. Not only is it ridiculous because of how advanced of a computer it would have to be to keep up with what she is supposedly doing, but in the same scene she contacts Professor Morgan Freeman and proves herself to him by making herself show up on his TV, phone, computer. The movie is so inconsistent as to how powerful she is at any given moment (she is still supposed to be at 20% here).

-When Lucy sees a news report about her, she makes her hair change so she will look different...but she does it in the middle of a crowded airport. Besides, wouldn't changing her face make more sense? I know this is a movie with a marketable actress, but still.

-While Lucy is on a plane headed for Morgan Freeman's place (typing away on those two laptops) her body finally starts to break down. Again, she seems to have complete control over herself and tons of other superhuman abilities (she's now at 40%). Why can't she figure out a way to stop it? She spits out teeth, then her hand starts dissolving Super Mario Bros.-style, and she rushes into the bathroom. She has a Poltergeist moment in the mirror before scarfing down the rest of the drugs and, uh, turning into light...yeah.

-What if someone else were to breathe in parts of her that dissolved on the plane? Would they gain nonsensical abilities too? She probably dropped a bunch of the drugs on the floor of the bathroom, what if someone got into that? How did Oldboy and the others not know that the drug could do that to people? If he wanted to fix everything, why didn't he just have one of his own men take some of the drug and do it for him? Seriously, what would be the next step of the story? Would we have multiple CPH4 users fighting each other on a cosmic scale?

-Once the other mules are detained, Oldboy sends his men after them. As Lucy's abilities keep increasing, the threat of Oldboy and his men lessens and lessens. Every time Lucy encounters an obstacle, she takes it out really easily. Basically, there is no conflict in the movie. She has to get to the rest of the drugs before she dies, but she can do anything, so of course she's going to get to them.

-In an attempt to pretend there is conflict, this movie contains possibly the most ridiculous car chase in history. It is a one-car chase, where no one is chasing the car. Lucy is racing to get to Oldboy and the drugs once they get them back from the police, so she drives like a maniac through the streets of Paris, causing countless accidents and probably lots of deaths. Why couldn't she just levitate over the traffic? Why couldn't she just disable all the other cars electronically? When the car does gain pursuers in the form of police cars, she makes poles sink down into the sidewalk and reemerge in the middle of the road to stop them. Why? She could just make them stop in place. I don't know, fuck this movie.

-She keeps the French cop around for no logical reason in the context of the movie. At one point he even says something like "Why am I still here?" She has some dumb line about it being so she could remember, but it's really because the audience needs to feel that something is at stake. It's no surprise that the movie does nothing to make us care about French cop guy, but we're supposed to anyway. He is still mortal, so he is someone that Oldboy can get to. There is even a big shootout toward the end between the cops and the bad guys, but we don't care because we know Lucy could stop it in an instant. The fact that she doesn't just stop it makes no sense either.

-The movie as a whole tries to pretend it's an action movie, but again, there is no conflict. Oldboy and his men should know they can't stop her, but they keep trying to anyway. And not even just by shooting her from a distance, but sometimes by trying to fight her hand-to-hand. Why? She could incapacitate them at any time, but she keeps letting them go. Why? She kills all the ones that she encounters after first gaining her abilities, but stops once she gets to Oldboy himself, and let's him go. Why? During the "car chase," she even says to the French cop, "We never really die?" Really? Why should I care then? Fuck this movie.

-Lucy finally gets to Morgan Freeman, who has assembled a small group of scientists. Believe it or don't, the movie manages to become even more pretentious toward the end. She says a bunch of shit that makes even less sense than anything that has come before. It's supposed to sound meaningful and thought provoking, but she basically spouts off random things that don't relate to each other, like "there are no numbers or letters, we created them to give us a reference," or something like that, which is kind of a true statement for once, I guess, but not one that has any deeper meaning. It's like something a stoned 12 year old would say.

-Lucy takes the rest of the CPH4 and hits 70%. I groaned audibly as I wondered how I would make it through the last 30%. Thankfully, the last 30% passes pretty quickly.

-There's a goofy looking dinosaur somewhere in there that looks like it stepped out of a freaking cartoon. I don't know.

-Then she turns into--I shit you not--a fucking computer! I can hear you laughing, but I swear it's the truth! She wants to pass her knowledge on to Morgan Freeman, so she turns into a black, fantasy castle-looking computer with a USB flash drive he can pull out. The drive has stars greenscreened onto it, so you know it's not just a normal flash drive. I'm not kidding, I swear! When he pulls out the flash drive, the computer dissolves into nothing.

-The French cop guy shoots Oldboy (SPOILER) and asks where Lucy went. He gets a message on his phone saying "I AM EVERYWHERE." She says something like, "You've been given life; now you know what to do with it." If she means making completely illogical decisions all of the time, then I guess most of humanity is already on the right path.

THE END

Phew, okay. So that was terrible, but at least it's over.

I've heard of customers at the theater where I work coming out of this movie and saying it was "deep," and "good." I heard about one guy saying it was one of the best scifi movies of the last several years. It really feels like a 2001: A Space Odyssey for dumb people. 2001 was pretentious enough, but at least it was a real movie. This movie even paralleled the beginning of that one with the hominids, and the ending with the Star Child. There was even some stuff that looked like going through the Star Gate before Lucy turns into a computer (that really happens, I swear on your mother's life).

Luc Besson wrote, directed, and even edited this monstrosity. I haven't seen enough of his movies to really make an informed analysis on how this fits into his filmography. I can say that the big hallway shootout toward the end was reminiscent of the shootout toward the end of Leon, aka The Professional, only without any weight to it whatsoever. It's also safe to say that Besson is not gay, looking at all the movies he does with female protagonists, and how he shoots them. After watching this movie, I feel like Scarlett Johansson's face is imprinted on my brain. I think it's in the 90% I don't use, though.

We've already established that this is just another paycheck for Morgan Freeman. Johansson actually puts some effort into this one for some reason, but she just doesn't have what it takes to sell a lot of it. She can cry and act worried, but we never get a sense of it being anything more than acting. At least she doesn't have to do anything for most of the movie because the script conveniently calls for her not to show emotion.

This movie is crap. Yes, the trailers told me it would be, but I expected enjoyable crap. Instead, I found myself board and angry. Even my occasional spurts of laughter were tempered by my anticipation of the movie being over. It's less than 90 minutes long, and I still barely made it through without falling asleep. If you're like me, everything you heard about it made it sound so ridiculous you just had to watch it to see if it was all true. Trust me, it's not worth it. As one of the employees at my theater said, "I saw it for free and still wanted a refund."

Avoid this movie at all costs. If anyone recommends it to you, ask them why they liked it. If they say it's because it was "deep," ask them to elaborate. Knowing what you do after reading this, you're sure to get more enjoyment out of whatever they say to you than you would from actually watching the movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

2014-08-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

The opening of Guardians of the Galaxy is a scene set in 1988 that shows us a boy named Peter Jason Quill dealing with the death of his mother. The scene gives us insight on what will become an important part of his character, but it also helps us by starting the movie in familiar surroundings. When we flash ahead to Quill as an adult, played by Chris Pratt, there is no hesitation in throwing us into a very alien, sci-fi world. Knowing a bit about Quill's background gives us something to hold onto and use as an anchor in all the weirdness. Quill's Walkman serves the same purpose, tying us back to Earth by allowing familiar music to play over an alien landscape.

The fact that the movie isn't afraid to go with sci-fi concepts that are more extreme than we usually see in mainstream movies is great, but if it had jumped right in without any viewer preparation, it could have been disorientating. As it is, some of the early scenes are a bit confusing, with several characters being introduced at the same time without allowing us to get a firm grip on any of them at first. Once the movie gets going, it thankfully transitions between characters and locations more smoothly.

There's no point in going any farther into the specifics of the story because this movie is about the "hows" and not the "whats." It's the characters that push each scene forward and make us want to keep watching. In fact, the only dull scenes in the movie are the plot-based ones focusing on the villains. The heroic characters all have distinct personalities and entertaining interactions, but the villains are bland, undefined action figures.

Although it is something of an ensemble/team movie, Pratt's Quill is unquestionably the main character, and comes out feeling the most rounded out of all of them by far. Bradley Cooper does a surprisingly good job as Rocket, who has a very brotherly relationship with talking tree Groot (adequately voiced by Vin Diesel).

Zoe Saldana's Gamora, an assassin who turns on villain Angry Screaming Man--er, sorry, Ronan the Accuser--could have used some work. She tells us why she switched sides, but we never get a real sense of her feelings behind everything. Her interactions with the others, especially Quill, are fine in themselves, but she feels too trusting and friendly for her background.

In general, the group comes together a bit too quickly. Remember in Star Wars, how Luke had to keep persuading Han to help him, promising to pay him later? Then when they get to Yavin, Han says "so long" and takes off? It's not until the very end, when he shows up again to save Luke from Vader's TIE at the climax of the entire movie that we see his change of heart. No so in Guardians. Sure, the characters argue a lot (resulting in some of the most fun moments in the movie), but the way things play out still isn't quite convincing.

The standout character for me was Dave Bautista's Drax. Looking at him, you wouldn't expect the excellent comedic timing that he brings to the super-serious, completely literal character. It all comes out of the writing though, and there are lots of great exchanges between characters and funny little moments. Some of the jokes aim a little too broadly, and a few of the line deliveries don't quite work like they should, but none of them fall completely flat. The style of humor and overall tone of the movie reminded me of Serenity, which makes sense, with that movie's writer/director Joss Whedon currently being a sort of creative overseer at Marvel.

Guardians of the Galaxy also feels like a throwback to '80s adventure films like Ghostbusters, The Monster Squad, etc, from the songs and how they are used, to the all-pervasive humor, to the story (not to mention all the Star Wars references, from the Han and Chewie relationship between Rocket and Groot, to the straight-out-of-Empire scene with Ronan's Vader talking to Thanos's Emperor via hologram). We don't see space movies with a sense of fun anymore. Hell, we hardly see movies with a sense of fun to them at all.

Director James Gunn achieved a similar tone before, in 2006's Slither, which is a fantastic horror comedy that I recommend to absolutely everybody. It's no surprise that he brings back several cast members from that movie in Guardians, most notably Michael Rooker as Yondu, Quill's abductor/mentor. Gunn's dark sense of humor makes a return as well, giving this movie by far the strongest sense of individual personality of all the Marvel Studios offerings. You can tell this is the movie Gunn really wanted to make, which makes Edgar Wright's departure from Ant-Man all the more disappointing (but we're not going to go into that right now).

If only that sense of fun had carried over to the villains. Ronan looks like he does in the comics, sure, but, as with many of the Marvel Studios villains, he's just a fill-in. We get his motivation, but as with Gamora, telling us something isn't the same as showing us. We know what he wants, but don't get a feel for why he feels so strongly about it. Having him yell a lot isn't enough to create a sense of menace either. The movie tries to show us how much of a badass he is by having him stand up to Thanos, but we don't know anything about Thanos either, so we don't care.

Speaking of Thanos, he barely shows up here, but when he does, he looks terrible. It makes me wonder if they tried to hold off on doing those scenes in case they got leaked, then didn't have enough time to fine tune the CGI (yes, he is all CGI--why, I don't know). Josh Brolin's performance comes out being very disappointing too. He couldn't have had much to work with, but Thanos ends up just being some guy. Even the one shot of him in Avengers gave him a hundred times more personality.

Karen Gillan looks great as blue-skinned Nebula...and that's about all there is to say about her.

Benicio del Toro's Collector isn't quite a villain in this movie, which fits because he is actually interesting, with weird mannerisms and eccentric way of speaking. He doesn't end up being very important unfortunately, but hopefully he'll show up again in the future.

I haven't mentioned anything else about how this movie relates to the other Marvel movies because Guardians of the Galaxy is a different movie for Marvel Studios. Up until now, all of their films (this is their tenth) have tied directly into each other in ways that even the most oblivious of audiences would be able to detect. This one does so in ways that are more tangential, making for much more of a standalone film than any of the others. Apart from the line before the credits, "The Guardians of the Galaxy will return," it doesn't even tease any sequels. Anyone who didn't watch any of the other Marvel movies could watch this one and not even realize it had anything to do with them. Instead of approaching this movie from its standpoint within the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe as they are calling it, it makes more sense to look at it as simply a space adventure movie. Yes, the movie is part of that same universe, yes, the characters are taken directly from the comics (although a lot of their specific attributes and characteristics aren't quite the same), and yes, most of the background elements come from the comics too, but the story is original to the movie and many of those background elements are only there because they happen to fit what the story requires. That isn't to say that the movie doesn't feel respectful to the source material, or that the movie doesn't fit into that universe, it just feels like its own thing.

That may be a disappointing aspect of it for people who are looking for something to push the overall MCU farther, but it makes the movie itself work much better. Guardians tells a complete, satisfying story that doesn't feel compromised to fit in with anything else or to leave room for sequels or spinoffs.

At the same time, the movie is a part of the MCU, and while it doesn't seem to affect things too much on a story level (despite the brief appearances by Thanos), it does extend the boundaries of the universe in other ways. Through Thor, we've encountered aliens and other planets, but this movie goes all-out, giving us many different races, several different planets, an explanation for the Infinity Stones, and even the introduction of the Celestials. It really feels like a whole new universe in a lot of ways. Apart from Quill himself, there is almost nothing related to Earth at all.

Even in the comics, the cosmic side of things tends to be somewhat separate from the Earth stuff. You don't usually see earthbound characters like Spider-Man or Iron Fist dealing with godlike superbeings in space. Characters like the Fantastic Four do overlap, but when you pick up a cosmic comic, you expect a distinctly different set of characters, like the Silver Surfer (currently at Fox, unfortunately), Nova, Quasar, etc. It's a different part of the universe, and it makes sense that not everything comes back to Earth.

Either way, this movie opens up a lot of new doors for types of characters that would have seemed out of place popping up in an Iron Man or Captain America. It's the first time Marvel has tried to do something outside of traditional superheroes, and Gunn's attachment to the sequel has me very excited for what comes next.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

2014-06-13T12:07:00.002-07:00

Edge of Tomorrow is a sci-fi film based on a Japanese novel called All You Need Is Kill, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. I haven't read the book, but I did see the movie, and it was surprisingly good.

Invading aliens have taken over much of Europe. Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, sent to the frontline in France, where the fighting (reminiscent of the beach landing from Saving Private Ryan) doesn't go in the direction everyone had hoped. With everyone dying around him, Cage...also dies. The difference is he wakes back up, finding himself stuck in a time loop, repeating the previous day over again until he dies, then repeating the previous day over again until he dies, then repeating the previous day over again until he dies, etc.

Everything I knew about this movie made me not want to watch it. I'm generally not a fan of Tom Cruise. The mechanized suits looked like a lame attempt to shove something resembling robots into the movie. The poster said it was directed by the guy who made Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The movie as a whole looked like a dumb, generic action movie.

But, just like Oblivion (2013) turned out to be much better than the trailers implied, this was actually quite a good movie.

First of all, and most importantly, as it is the focus of more than half of the movie, the time loop aspect was handled very well. To be clear, Cage is in control of himself the entire time, he just keeps waking up in the same place at the same original time. Also, the aliens are inadvertently responsible for the loop, this isn't one of those movies where it just randomly happens.

Usually, a big studio movie like this would dumb things down so much that they didn't even make sense anymore. But much of this movie actually involved the characters using logic to find ways to exploit the time loop. It also did a great job of keeping thing from getting tedious when we are seeing the same events over and over, while at the same time showing Cage's frustration at having to keep going through it.

I was afraid there would be times when I would say "why would X say/do the exact same thing every time if Cage changed what he did up to that point?" Well, that did happen, but it wasn't bad enough to bother me too much. Cage planning intricate moves during the battle he keeps re-experiencing based on knowing what is going to happen wouldn't work, because every little thing he did differently each time would influence everyone around him in increasingly dramatic ripples. Before he even got to the battle, everyone would be doing everything differently, so the idea that he knows exactly when to sidestep to avoid getting killed once he gets there obviously doesn't hold up. But everything dealing with that is minor enough that, while I would have preferred they handled things more realistically, it didn't detract from the movie too much, and it made for some interesting situations.

It helps that, while unfortunately ignoring logic in that aspect of the time loop, the movie does explore many other interesting angles. This is a movie that will make you think--not in the sense of trying to figure out what is happening, but in an imagination-sparking way. There are so many directions the story could have gone in, and it satisfies in all the directions it does go in. It also exploits the fact that Cage knows what people are going to do, and that he knows he will just wake up again if he dies, to great humorous effect. It was a much funnier movie than I expected.

As I stated before, I'm not usually a fan of Tom Cruise, but I actually liked him here. Right from the beginning, I liked that they made his character kind of a dick. But what made it work was that he didn't phone it in like a lot of actors do in movies like this. He played a character, and maintained that character throughout the movie. Granted, there wasn't a lot for him to do on a character front once the movie really got going, because the focus was just stopping the aliens. But there were enough little moments showing how his character is not the typical brave, ultra-competent hero of most action movies. He's not just a dick, he's kind of a coward too.

Emily Blunt plays Rita Vrataski, a legendary, seemingly indestructible soldier. It's not spoiling anything to say that the reason for her reputation is that she previously experienced a time loop of her own, so she knew exactly what to do to survive an earlier big fight, and she now has tons of experience fighting the aliens. When Cage finds this out, he keeps going to her, first to find a way to get rid of the loop, then to find out how to use it to prevent everyone from being killed by the aliens.

I've only seen Blunt in a few movies, never playing a badass, but she totally pulls it off here. I love the fact that the main character is kind of an ass, and what would normally be a more stereotypical action hero character is a woman (and much more convincing than one played by Angelina Jolie). The relationship between the two of them is very entertaining, and thankfully isn't a forced romance.

The mech suits actually felt practical in the movie, and were just another interesting element to the story. Before the time loop came in, the military angle, mech suits, and deployment/dropship scenes gave me a strong Starship Troopers vibe (the book, not the movie), which is cool. In print, I'm a big fan of military science fiction, but this is the only movie in the sub-genre that I've liked since Aliens, which was itself heavily influenced by Starship Troopers.

The aliens are interesting at first because of how they move and fight, but once you get a good look at them, their actual design is very disappointing. They look far too similar to Earth creatures and simply aren't interesting visually. They use projectile weapons, although we only actually see them firing them in a couple of shots, but I also would have liked to have seen them use some kind of ships or vehicles during combat. I suppose it is true that they probably couldn't have brought any with them based on how they arrive, but it would have been easy to come up with a solution to that problem story-wise. It doesn't make a ton of sense that their main tactic is to fight up close.

There isn't much to say about the technical aspects of the movie. Apart from some of the action toward the end, everything is shot pretty clearly and competently. There are a couple of long shots of the repeating battle that are visually interesting but distract from the flow of the movie when everything else is focused on Cage. The only time I noticed the music it was a bit groanworthy, but otherwise completely inconspicuous.

The CGI was surprisingly well handled. Usually, big movies like this end up looking like cartoons (I'm looking at you, Godzilla). While the all-CG creatures still don't look great, and there are a few shots toward the end with a clearly CG Tom Cruise, this isn't one of those movies where you stop caring about what's happening because none of it feels real. For the most part, Edge of Tomorrow holds to a sense of realism and keeps things believable. It also shows a pleasing restraint when it comes to how the camera is used in the big action scenes. When everything is CGI, filmmakers all too often break the film's hold over the viewer by suddenly making the camera do ridiculous things that don't add anything to the movie and yank you right out of it. This movie thankfully retains the same style used in all the other scenes.

Once the time loop came in, the movie became very engaging and thought provoking, but of course it couldn't last forever or I would still be there in the theater watching it. It was interesting how, once Cage was out of the loop (which we realize when it happens), the tension heightened. He had died so many times already, but death not being the end, there was nothing to really worry about. But once he's out, he only has one more chance to get things right. And after seeing him die so many times, we know how easily it could happen, and it feels like he could die again at any moment.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't maintain its level of engagement after that point. The story goes from the characters trying to figure out how to use the time loop to stop the aliens to just the characters trying to stop the aliens. Since we're still following characters we have grown to like, the movie should still be interesting, but the tension it built up is quickly diminished by action scenes that are too over the top compared to what's come before, and a shift from character focus to plot focus. The aliens were always more of a background threat up to this point, with the time loop itself being the problem the characters needed to solve and manipulate. The aliens don't have anything in the way of personality, so it's much less interesting when everything about the story starts to revolve around the characters reacting to the aliens instead of reacting to each other. It would be going to far too say the movie falls apart, but it does lose its momentum.

As if that weren't bad enough, the ending is by far the worst aspect of the movie. I won't give it away, but I will say that it doesn't make any sense. At first I thought maybe I just missed something, but from talking to people about it and reading people's reactions online, it seems it was exactly what I thought. I've read explanations that could make sense, but all of them involve people bringing in information that wasn't in the movie to find a way to explain it. The ending doesn't make sense based on what is in the movie. Even worse, the way it plays out suggests so many preferable directions they could have chosen.

And then the end credits play over an absolutely terrible song choice.

Apart from some minor things, the ending is the only thing keeping me from loving this movie. Even so, everything that did work was so good that I still highly recommend this movie. I would compare it to Inception in many ways. Both are action movies with plots dependent on the rules of a sci-fi scenario. Both explore different aspects of their scenarios in intriguing ways that make you think about what else would be possible within those scenarios. Both aggravatingly break the rules they have set up at some point, but everything else works so well that that doesn't become a dealbreaker like it would in most movies.

It's a shame that good, standalone scifi movies like this and Oblivion get overshadowed by sequels to big franchises that almost inevitably end up disappointing. If you like science fiction that doesn't pander, do yourself a favor and check this one out.

Godzilla (2014)

2014-05-16T13:58:00.001-07:00

Imagine if Steven Spielberg directed a Godzilla movie and you're halfway toward imagining the Legendary Godzilla.

After some cool opening credits with music that sounds like a throwback to 1950s sci-fi movies (in a good way), the opening scenes of the movie feel straight out of the '90s, when the prototypes of the huge blockbusters we have today were coming out. For one thing, there are multiple shots lifted straight from Jurassic Park. More broadly, back then, even in bad movies like Independence Day, there was an attempt to establish a feel for the world of the movie, so that when the big events happen they feel impactful, and that's what the early scenes in this movie feel like. That holds on even after the first 'action' scene, where the nuclear power plant in Japan that Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) work at gets destroyed.

The official explanation is that it was an earthquake, but Joe has been monitoring seismic readings and knows there was something else behind it. Of course, no one believes him.

The only other people who know it wasn't an earthquake are Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and his assistant Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins). Before the incident at the plant, they investigated a cave in the Philippines, where they found the fossilized skeleton of a huge creature, as well as a pair of egg pods, one of which had hatched.

We then flash ahead 15 years to Joe's grown son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who travels to Japan when Joe is arrested for trespassing in the quarantined area around the destroyed plant. Even after telling his father he thinks he's crazy, Ford agrees to go in with him for some reason, and this time the both of them get captured.

It turns out the area is not radioactive like it's supposed to be, and an organization called Monarch, which Dr. Serizawa works for, is studying a weird cocoon thing where the plant used to be.

This is where the movie starts to fall apart.

Why do they let the Brodys see the cocoon? They bring in Joe because he used to work there and might know something, but what happens when they let them go? How are they going to keep it covered up? It doesn't seem like they were going to kill them or anything. Maybe they just thought no one would believe them? I don't know.

Anyway, the cocoon hatches and a giant bug pops out and starts destroying everything. Right away, the monster action is underwhelming. It just feels like any other generic CGI-filled movie. The only thing it really gets right is not having the monster move so fast that it loses its sense of scale.

Joe dies from injuries sustained in the attack, and Dr. Serizawa talks to Ford to find out what his father knew. He tells Ford about what the creature is...and, oh boy, is it a ridiculous explanation.

Apparently, millions of years ago, there existed gigantic creatures that fed on radiation. One of them was awakened by the first nuclear submarine back in the '50s and rose from the depths of the ocean. They called it Gojira for some reason (they randomly switch to calling it Godzilla after a while), and tried to kill it with nuclear bombs, but it didn't work. For some reason, Serizawa thinks Godzilla will come to kill the other creature. Something about nature restoring balance and order. He makes up so much stuff up that I wonder if he isn't related to Dr. Hayashida from The Return of Godzilla.

Okay...why have none of the remains of any of these other creatures ever been discovered? There aren't any notable dead areas of prehistory where we haven't found the remains of things from the time. When exactly where these creatures supposed to have lived? Did they naturally grow so huge, or was the radiation to blame? That question is less crucial, but they just gloss over everything and don't actually explain any of it. Even if it was the radiation, does that mean there were 300-foot creatures stomping all around millions of years ago? The MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that hatched from the cocoon creates EMPs, seemingly at will from what we see later. How do the MUTOs know to use them at strategic moments? Why does Serizawa think Godzilla will try to kill the MUTO exactly? If the MUTO is so hungry for radiation, why isn't Godzilla? The nuclear sub is what woke him up in the first place. Is it because of all the bombs they used on him? Did they sate his hunger? Did they make him stronger?

Serizawa learns that Joe discovered the creature was communicating with something else, and they realize the first pod they dissected and left in a nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada is going to hatch.

How do they know it's that pod and not another one somewhere else? Or for that matter, that the MUTO is even calling out specifically for that creature? Couldn't it just be calling out to try to find another one? How does it know about that one? How could they have studied the pod and not realize that it could still hatch? How is it still alive? How are any of these creatures still alive? Are they literally the same creatures that were alive millions of years ago? Like, the same individual Godzilla was walking around back then? Or have there been other Godzillas reproducing over the years at the bottom of the ocean? What has Godzilla/the Godzillas at the bottom of the ocean been getting radiation from to survive? They say the MUTOs were preserved somehow, but they were in the same chamber as the fossilized skeleton. How does that work? If these creatures are so hard to kill, why aren't there others still around? How did they evolve to be the way they are in the first place? And if they lived on radiation, how exactly did they consume it? Later we see the MUTOs literally swallowing nuclear missiles--did they just eat lots of radioactive rocks in the past?

The first MUTO heads to Honolulu, where of course Ford just happens to be, and the train he's on just happens to get attacked by the MUTO. Godzilla shows up, creating that tsunami you saw in the trailers. We see via news footage that the two of them fought and then headed east, and here my disappointment only mounted. We only see brief glimpses of the fight, but already it feels goofy compared to the relatively realistic tone set by the rest of the movie. They just look like a couple of CGI cartoon animals flailing around.

Meanwhile, Dr. Serizawa arrives at the nuclear disposal facility with a bunch of soldiers. They go inside and open the door to the chamber that held the pod...only to see that the creature has already torn its way out through the wall.

How did they not notice that already? When they open the door, there is a helicopter looking in from the other side of the hole. Wouldn't they have radioed and said, "Hey, uh, the MOFO or whatever already broke out and is heading for Las Vegas." One of the soldier guys even steps out and looks with binoculars and sees the creature walking away. How did they not notice that already? The guy shouldn't even have needed the binoculars, the creature was huge. The way he almost swung the binoculars past it as he looked made me laugh too.

"How did they not notice that already?" was definitely the thought that went through my head the most times during this movie.

Spielberg will often have characters do certain things to maximize the tension in a scene, even if their actions don't make sense logically. Like in Jurassic Park, when Dr. Grant and the kid are scrambling down the tree with the car falling after them. The car isn't that wide--it would be easier and faster to just move sideways out of its path, but where's the tension in that? He sacrifices logic in favor of creating suspense. It doesn't bother people that like to turn their brains off while watching a movie, but it pulls me right out and destroys the integrity of the movie for me.

This movie did something similar, where characters would suddenly realize something they should have noticed way either, sacrificing logic in favor of creating an impactful revelation. It happens at least six hundred times in the movie:

-When Serizawa and the soldiers realize the second MUTO has already broken out.

-When the soldiers notice the submarine on the slope above them in the jungle.

-When the soldiers notice all the burning wreckage going by in the river.

-When the soldiers realize they are standing right next to the leg of one of the MUTOs.

-When Godzilla pops up behind the second MUTO at the end.

-Etc.

They determine that the second MUTO is a female and that the two of them will meet up in San Francisco for some lovin.' Actually, this is an assumption they make, and while it is a logical one, it doesn't really make sense for them to automatically take it as fact and base all their plans around it.

Either way, they plan to lure the MUTOs away with a nuclear warhead and detonate it 20 miles off shore in hopes of killing both them and Godzilla. No thought is given to damage by fallout. Serizawa doesn't believe it will work (more flashbacks to Hayashida and his denouncement of the cadmium missiles in The Return of Godzilla). He wants them to just let Godzilla fix things. Normally in movies like this, when the military doesn't listen to the person who actually knows what they are talking about, you feel like the military comes off as stupid and deserving to have their plans fail. But here, nothing Serizawa says makes any sense.

Why does he think Godzilla will save them? How is letting three giant kaiju duke things out in the middle of a massive city a good idea? Why wouldn't he think Godzilla would just go after all the nuclear stuff himself after killing the MUTOs? If they are all just giant animals, why does he regard one as good and the others as bad? Serizawa must be related to Hayashida to be able to figure out so much from so little.

Ford goes with the soldiers transporting the nuke (by train, because the creatures can radiate EMPs), but of course one of the MUTOs ends up in their path and steals the nuke. There is some more Jurassic Park homage here with the soldiers trying to avoid being seen by the MUTO by not moving.

If the entire point of the nuke is to lure the MUTOs, why move it on a path that will go right next to one? Surely they could have flown it around the EMP's sphere of influence and then armed it? This movie should have been titled Godzilla vs. Logic.

Eventually, Godzilla fights the MUTOs in San Francisco while Ford parachutes in with a team to disarm the stolen nuke, which is now in a MUTO nest. It turns out to be damaged and they can't disarm it, so they have to transport it (on foot) to a boat to get it as far offshore as possible before it explodes. First, Ford blows up the nest. Why Ford? Because he's the main character.

The earlier question about how the creatures consume radiation is relevant here too. They find the nuclear bomb in the middle of the nest, surrounded by eggs. We've seen the MUTOs eat bombs, but how were the babies going to eat it? Do they just need to be near it? If the bombs are releasing enough radiation to keep them alive and attract them in the first place, are all the characters who came in contact with them going to suffer radiation poisoning? Realistically, that question also applies to the creature finding the nuclear plant at the start, and even Godzilla seeking out nuclear reactors in the Heisei and Millennium series--are the monsters that sensitive to radiation, or are these movies really a commentary on the lack of radiation shielding in reactors in Japan? They were using Geiger counters in the cave at the beginning, does that mean the creatures themselves are radioactive? Is everybody who was in the path of these monsters going to be sick/dead in the sequel?

While the queen goes to investigate the explosion at the nest, Godzilla kills the male MUTO, but a building falls on him, incapacitating him.

I haven't mentioned Ford's wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen). That's because she doesn't really matter to this movie. She is a nurse (in San Francisco of course). We see her talking to Ford on the phone occasionally, we see her cry, we see her send their son off to safety (he ends up on the Golden Gate bridge right as Godzilla gets there of course). And when the building falls on Godzilla, we see her get buried in the rubble. Make no mistake, that might sound important, but its really not.

After face-to-face moments with both Godzilla and the surviving MUTO that echo the '98 Godzilla (the last thing anyone wants to hear), Ford gets to a boat with the nuke, but the female MUTO comes after it. After another face-to-face moment with her (really?), Godzilla pops up literally out of nowhere and kills the MUTO (just like the T. rex at the end of Jurassic Park somehow popping up without any of the characters noticing he was there).

Godzilla stumbles back to shore and collapses. Ford is airlifted out and the bomb goes off offshore. Elle turns up alive (just like that damn kid at the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, although her survival isn't as aggravating as that) and is reunited with Ford and their son.

Everyone seems to think Godzilla is dead (even though he seemed perfectly fine when he killed the second MUTO), but he gets up and swims away.

The End.

The movie disappoints on every major front.

Story-wise, the movie just makes stuff up as it goes along whether it makes sense or not. The explanations for everything probably wouldn't bother me if they weren't trying for such a sense of realism, but it just made for unintentional laughs. It was over the top, like a parody of monster movies. Then there is the way the characters just happen to be in the way of the monsters all the time. The attempt to have some of the characters be important doesn't really work either. Joe didn't know anything Dr. Serizawa shouldn't have figured out already, and once the second pod hatched and Dr. Serizawa told everyone about Godzilla, he didn't know anything more than anyone else either. They were only tangentially important to explaining what was happening, and their explanations usually made no sense anyway. Ford always manages to be in the midst of the monster stuff, but he doesn't have much of an impact on what's happening with the monsters themselves.

The movie started out promising character-wise. The first fifteen to twenty minutes felt like genuine character development, and the actors did a good job with it. But once the monsters showed up, all that got tossed out the window. Ford is always just kind of there, even when stuff is happening, his wife has nothing to do, Dr. Serizawa just looks dazed and mumbles incoherent nonsense about Godzilla (that scene where he pulls out his father's watch...goes nowhere), his assistant has no point in the entire movie. At least they didn't make Admiral Stenz the stereotypical moron authority figure, but he gets nothing more to do than give a face to the military.

It doesn't help that, despite Ford being the main character and being involved in pretty much every major action scene, the focus often shifts for those scenes to children (or even a dog) that are not actual characters in the movie. The idea behind it isn't a bad one--putting us in the place of a child is a good way to emphasize the enormity of the situation and the helplessness of what it would be like to be there. But those children aren't in the movie for more than a few minutes and so get no development of their own, and we already have main characters in the same situations. If the movie is going to go to the trouble of finding some excuse for the characters to be there, why not focus on them and give them something to do?

Monster-wise, there is nothing interesting here. Obviously, discussing monster designs largely comes down to personal opinion and preference, but to me, the MUTO designs are completely forgettable. It looked like they wanted them to be like giant bugs, but at the same time not just giant bugs, so they gave them spindly, bug-like legs, but with a layer of skin over everything, and with more reptilian heads. They felt to me like more bug-like versions of the Cloverfield monster, and the design of the monster in that movie was already not very interesting. It didn't help that they had no personality to them. They were just creatures going after food. They didn't have any particularly interesting ways of attacking either, basically just prodding at Godzilla over and over.

Godzilla's design isn't much better. Many people have complained that he is too fat, and I would have to agree. I would add that his eyes are too small, and I'm not a fan of his elephant feet. I would have liked an animal that large to have splayed toes to better spread out his weight.

His breath effect was disappointing too. The introduction of it was interesting, but when he used it the first time, it didn't really seem have an effect on the MUTO. Changing it from a beam was an odd choice too. I never thought I would actually see Godzilla breathe fire in a movie. It took away from the sense of power that comes with a beam that makes things explode.

And although Serizawa sets Godzilla up as an "alpha predator," and some of the scenes with him try to set him up as some kind of badass, he really doesn't seem much more powerful than the MUTOs. It kind of undercuts what they are trying to do when Godzilla keeps getting knocked around like a small child being tossed back and forth by a pair of bullies.

This is a minor complaint, but Godzilla's roar is exactly the same one you hear in all the trailers. I thought maybe they were saving something closer to the original roar for the movie, but nope. Not that it sounds bad, but it lacks the iconic quality of the original.

Speaking of sound, there was a notable lack of impact to the sound in the movie as a whole. Giant monsters, exploding missiles, falling buildings--these things should be loud and impressive, not things you might not even realize are there if you happen to look down at your popcorn while they are on the screen. Part of this is the fault of having characters not notice things until they are right in front of their faces (it really takes you out of the movie and makes you say "what???" when something that should have been making sounds for the entire scene doesn't start until halfway through). But even when there are explosions and monsters fighting all across the screen, you start to wonder if maybe the acoustics in this world just don't work the same way as ours.

As mentioned earlier, the music started out promising during the opening credits. However, if it had continued in the same '50s style, it wouldn't have been appropriate, and sure enough it changed once the movie got going. Early on, it had a very Bernard Herrmann feel, calling to mind his Mysterious Island score in particular (very cool). But as the movie continued, it kept shifting into different styles, giving a very inconsistent feel and not always fitting what was happening. Sometimes it was still cool, even if it didn't fit, but the awful not-quite-fanfare that played when Godzilla defeated the second MUTO gave me flashbacks to the painful Avengers score, especially the terrible fanfare that accompanies the shot of all of the characters standing in a circle toward the end. At other times it feels like it tries to do what The Dark Knight did, which is to push racing, energetic music through scenes where nothing exciting is happening to give the impression of non-stop action and momentum. I find this extremely annoying, but, unfortunately, that tactic does seem to work on many casual filmgoers. Personally, I would also have liked the classic Godzilla theme somewhere, but it's nowhere to be found.

The persistent, pushing music leads us to what is by far the biggest problem with the movie: once Godzilla shows up, the movie is a flat line. Usually movies like this will build up to monster fights, then have story advancement as they build to the next one. The movement of the story is the build up, with the monster action as the payoff to what is happening. This movie just keeps pushing forward.

Even if Godzilla isn't always there, the MUTOs are, and scenes that are supposed to be big action scenes just feel like more of the same. When something big happens, like the fight in Hawaii, there is no time taken to explore the consequences of it. The movie just moves on to the next thing. If events have no consequences, then there is no reason to care about the events in the first place. The effect of actions is what drives a story forward and motivates the characters, but in this movie the effects of the monster destruction are never felt.

The movie even gave them a free chance to fix this when Elle was buried in the debris. If she had died, the story would have benefited from it, showing that the monsters are actually affecting things and giving her character a real function in the story other than simply being a reason for Ford to volunteer to go with the team into San Francisco (so he can get back to her). It also would have given Ford a bit more to deal with as a character.

Plus, we had already seen several other children reunited with their parents. Elle dying could have acted as a counterpoint to that, showing that things don't always turn out so well. Seeing such massive disaster scenes where no one seems to die not only makes them feel inconsequential, it feels thoughtless in a world where disasters seem to happen all the time. Instead, they have Elle survive, which adds nothing to the story because she never mattered anyway.

But even after all that, the movie still had an out. If the monster fights were well executed, the movie could at least have still been entertaining. But the fights weren't interesting either. The only two action beats that stuck out as potentially memorable were Godzilla slamming the first MUTO with his tail and using his breath on the second one at the end. But the first one just felt like another part of the fight, not the finishing move it was supposed to be. The second one could have been cool if I wasn't distracted by how stupid it was that Godzilla showed up so suddenly and wondering why he didn't just do that earlier.

Everything else about the monster fights just made me groan. In a movie striving for realism, seeing the monsters fighting like cartoons doesn't work. I half expected to see Godzilla doing somersaults and using karate moves. It was painful.

The trailers teased a serious, realistic take on a kaiju movie, but what we got was a movie that wasn't sure what its own tone was, veering from realistic at the start to moments of pure cheese. It's not as bad as the previous American attempt at a Godzilla movie, and not as bad as some of the Japanese ones, but this new Godzilla is certainly not one that I'll look back on with fond memories.

The Return of Godzilla / Godzilla 1985 (1984)

2014-05-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

Before the ten year break between Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) and the Legendary Godzilla (2014), the longest period that audiences had to wait between Godzilla movies was nine years, from 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla to 1984's The Return of Godzilla, released in Japan as simply Gojira.

By the '70s, Godzilla had come far from where he started in 1954. Originally a dark harbinger of destruction, Godzilla had gradually transformed into a superhero defending Earth from kaiju controlled by invading aliens, fighting pollution in the form of smog monster Hedorah, and even teaching kids to defend themselves from bullies. Although Toho Studios tried to reverse the trend a little in the mid-seventies, Terror of Mechagodzilla pulled in another low box office number, cementing the fact of Godzilla's waining popularity and ending the original series of Godzilla films.

When Toho decided to bring Godzilla back for his 30th anniversary, they settled on doing it with a direct sequel to the original movie, ignoring all the previous sequels and returning to a darker, more realistic tone.

The Return of Godzilla begins with shots of a volcano erupting, before cutting to a ship, the Yahata-maru, being tossed around by a violent storm. As if that weren't enough for the crew to deal with, the island they are passing by starts to break apart in bright flashes of light. It could almost be another volcanic eruption if not for the familiar roar that comes with it.

A reporter named Goro Maki comes across the derelict ship some time later and decides to investigate. In a scene reminiscent of the sequence in The Thing where they go to the Norwegian base, he finds the crew dead and seemingly drained of blood.

Unfortunately, he doesn't find particularly good special effects to go with the bodies.

More exploring turns up a live crew member, but before Goro can bring him to consciousness, he is attacked by a giant bug. Later we learn that it is a sea louse, mutated from living off of Godzilla. It's called Shockirus, although they never actually call it that in the movie itself.

The Shockirus effects are a little better, but the puppet is too stiff and the way it jumps/flies around is kind of goofy. You can see a harpoon sticking through it in this shot.

Goro is saved by the surviving crew member, Hiroshi Okumura, who tells him about the monster he saw destroy the island before the two of them are picked up by a helicopter (did Goro just abandon the boat he came in...?).

Okumura tries to tell people about what happened, but the only one who listens to him is Professor Makoto Hayashida. Goro wants to print the story, but the Japanese Prime Minister is aware of what's happening and orders that any information about Godzilla be kept secret to avoid panic. The public is told the Yahata-maru is still missing and Goro's rescue is hidden. It sounds like a typical plot element for a monster movie, but it kind of makes sense here. There's no reason to believe Godzilla will attack Japan, and being that this is during the Cold War, news about a monster that is essentially a walking nuclear weapon could create some big problems.

Goro visits Prof. Hayashida, whose parents were killed by Godzilla in 1954, leading him to devote himself to studying the monster. Goro recognizes Hayashida's assistant from a photo Okumura had on the boat (and that Goro now has, for no logical reason but to have audiences see the photo again to make the connection). Hayashida tells him that the girl, Naoko, is Okumura's sister. She hasn't been told about her brother being found because of the news embargo, so Goro decides to tell her. With her perfectly round head/hair, big, round eyes, and sharp nose, she looks like she stepped right out of an anime:

Meanwhile, a Soviet nuclear sub in the north Pacific fires torpedoes at an unknown target that they assume is an American submarine. Of course that doesn't stop it, and it rams the submarine, causing it to explode. By the way, the sub is captained by a guy who looks like Jay from Half in the Bag:

The Japanese Prime Minister is notified that the Soviets blame it on the Americans. With nuclear war imminent, the Prime Minister lifts the blackout and officially announces that Godzilla was responsible, with a photo from a Japanese plane to prove it. Okumura is also there at the press conference, and after talking about what happened declares that he wants revenge on Godzilla, which is pretty goofy.

There's a brief scene where Naoko sees a photo of her and her brother in the paper and voices her displeasure to Goro, who she thinks just wanted the scoop (a subplot that disappears after this scene), before we cut to the Godzilla Emergency Countermeasures Headquarters.

The first lines there are from a guy standing in front of a map, saying "We will attack Godzilla with everything available until we defeat it! That is all I have to say," before taking a seat. What a good plan. Thankfully, the rest of them are a little more intelligent, and continue to discuss the issue of whether they can deal with Godzilla's "death ray" and actually beat him. They reveal the existence of the Super-X attack craft designed to protect the capital. The plan is to load it with cadmium missiles to use against Godzilla, "as cadmium is used in the seal of a nuclear reactor." Looking up cadmium's usage in nuclear reactors, I'm skeptical that it would work the way they use it, but they seem pretty confident about it, and I'm not a scientist. Either way, it's a cool idea.

We cut back to Prof. Hayashida, looking at the photo the plane took of Godzilla:

Hayashida sure is perceptive.

Looking at that photo, he determines that Godzilla is 80 meters tall. How he figured that out when there is nothing to judge scale from is beyond me, but like I said, I'm not a scientist.

Hayashida states for the first time in a Godzilla movie that Godzilla feeds on nuclear radiation, and that he will return to Japan to feed. There was no indication of this in the first movie, nor has there been any reason to believe it is the case so far in this one. I'm starting to think Hayashida faked his degree.

The search for Godzilla goes on in the ocean all around Japan, but somehow they don't find him until he walks right up to a nuclear power plant. Even the guard on patrol only notices him when the ground splits open right in front of him, by which point Godzilla is already looming over him:

I hope that guy got fired.

We get the stock shots of people in the plant rushing everywhere and answering phones:

We then get the laziest excuse ever for why Godzilla was not noticed earlier:

I hope that guy got fired too.

These shots don't make sense because the footage on the screen was clearly just footage shot for the movie that they stuck up on there. There's a shot were the camera glides along sideways at almost ground level, which wouldn't be possible if someone was there filming it in real life.

Hayashida somehow arrives at the scene in a helicopter immediately, with Goro and Okumura, who has a thermal imaging camera with a directional microphone.

There's a goofy shot of some guys "falling" off a collapsing catwalk in the plant:

Followed by a close up of one of them falling in slow motion, because why not:

Godzilla tears his way in to the reactor core and starts absorbing the radiation:

He gets distracted by a flock of terribly animated birds flying by, and wanders after them, back into the ocean:

When they get back to Hayashida Bioscience Institute (which is itself on the 20th floor of a larger building--I really don't think Hayashida is a real scientist), Hayashida proves he is a real scientist by analyzing the thermal imaging footage of Godzilla:

He must be a scientist if he can get that from just a blue splotch, right? But even though we have the Japanese Einstein in the room, it's Okumura who realizes that the birds drew Godzilla away, something even children in the audience figured out the first time around.

And in the photo Goro took, the birds are just painted in:

What is it with this movie and not being able to just point a camera at some real birds?

Hayashida still tries to tie it in with his whole magnetism idea and sends Okumura off to visit his geologist friend, Minami, at Mount Mihara, which gives us a pointless little scene of Minami checking out the volcano. It is worth noting that Minami is played by Hiroshi Koizumi, who starred in many previous Godzilla movies, beginning with Godzilla Raids Again way back in 1955. Even after this, he turned up again in Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. in 2003. Gotta admire his dedication to the series.

Minami and Hayashida present a plan to the government to lure Godzilla to the volcano and force-erupt it. Another veteran Godzilla actor, Yoshifumi Tajima, probably best known for playing one of the villains in Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) shows up here as part of the cabinet.

While American monster movies tend to portray authority figures as ignorant, overconfident fools who ignore the people who actually know what they are talking about, Japanese kaiju movies generally go the opposite way, and this is no exception. Instead of saying "No monster can beat our army!" the Prime Minister makes sure to cover all his bases. He orders the military to be ready, but also tells Hayashida and Minami to go ahead and prepare their plan.

The Soviets and Americans send envoys to Japan to discuss the issue with the Prime Minister, and they both tell him straight up that they want to nuke Godzilla. The Soviet guy says "Nothing else will save Japan," and the American guy reaches halfway across the room to point at him and say, "He's right!" It's also funny because the American guy is not a great actor, and because the Soviet guy has such a blatantly villainous air about him.

He even makes it clear that he doesn't actually care about what happens to Japan by saying that Godzilla's next target will be a Soviet missile base, and the Soviets "have no intention to wait to be destroyed!"

The cabinet members debate things amongst themselves, and both sides have legitimate stances. A nuclear bomb would cause lots of destruction and fallout, but it could be relatively controlled and people could be evacuated beforehand. But there would be no way to predict whether the damage caused by Godzilla would be as bad, or if the bomb would even work on him.

In the end, the Prime Minister decides against it, and the Soviet and American envoys voice their displeasure. The Soviet guy basically yells a lot and says that Godzilla already sank one of their subs so they should have the right to kill him, and the American guy says, "This is no time to be discussing principles!" The Prime Minister calmly refutes him and says he will not accede to their wishes because letting them use nuclear weapons would make them a viable option in the future again, obviously something that would rather be avoided.

If it seems like I'm going on about the political stuff, it's because this movie treats it seriously and presents things in a realistic way. One of the best aspects of this movie is that it actually gives gravity to the concept of a giant monster in our world, where most movies just skip past that.

Anyway, we cut to American and Soviet satellites with nuclear missiles on them. It's a strange editing choice, because we then go back to the Prime Minister telling his advisors that the American and Soviet leaders finally understood when he asked them to think about what it would be like if Godzilla were in their country and they had to order a nuclear strike that would kill their own people.

Seems like they should have left those shots of the satellites out, especially since the next scene is "Soviet Political Operative Colonel Kashirin" looking all suspicious as he gets out of a car and boards a Soviet freighter. He rolls his eyes about a hundred times as he tells one of the men on the boat that "The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided not to use nuclear weapons!" while punching buttons on a panel that, through a crosscut with a shot of the Soviet satellite, we know controls the missile launches. Why not just introduce the satellites here?

A helicopter pilot spots Godzilla's dorsal spines heading toward Tokyo Bay, leading to a mercifully brief evacuation/panic montage. Goro and the others haven't shown up for a while, so we get a short scene with Hayashida scribbling something in a notebook as Goro asks if the cadmium will be effective. Hayashida says, "Godzilla is like a living reactor. I don't think it will work." At least he didn't try to make up a bunch of stuff this time.

The military sets up explosives around the volcano and we get the prerequisite military forces preparation scene as they set up tanks and missile launchers along Tokyo Bay. They have helicopters using sonar to search for Godzilla, but I guess good observational skills aren't a big thing in Japan, because this happens:

A bunch of jets appear out of nowhere and fire on Godzilla, and he zaps a couple of them with his beam. There's explosions, and smoke, and water splashing...and we see that the Soviet ship is still there in the bay, sitting right next to the action. What??? It makes no sense, but it does give us a cool shot from the boat:

Godzilla submerges, causing a huge wave that knocks the boat into the pier and--oh, no!--damages the missile control panel. As if that weren't bad enough, Soviet Political Operative Colonel Kashirin is knocked unconscious!

Godzilla reemerges closer to shore and is absolutely bombarded by the military. There are missiles flying everywhere, huge explosions in the water, everything is obscured by smoke. Even the sound effects keep cutting each other off, there's so much going on.

And after the smoke clears...Godzilla is still standing. There's a really cool shot where the camera does a quick zoom into Godzilla's eye as he snarls angrily. We'll talk a little more about the American version later, but one thing I actually like better about it is that they added a sound effect for the zoom that fits so perfectly that it seems to be missing something without it.

The soldiers cower and back away (why are there so many soldiers just standing around with rifles anyway--what the hell were they gonna do?), but Godzilla sweeps the area with his atomic ray and, in about ten seconds, wipes out the entire force arrayed against him. The scene as a whole doesn't last long, but the intensity of it makes it one of my favorite Godzilla vs. military scenes.

Back on the Russian ship, Soviet Political Operative Colonel Kashirin recovers and tries to get to the controls--but gets fried by an explosion before he can get there.

Godzilla comes ashore and shoots down a helicopter, somehow starting a chain reaction of explosions down a car-crowded highway that literally creates as much, if not more, destruction as when Godzilla used his beam on the army. I hope Japan doesn't still build their cars entirely out of extremely explosive materials.

Then a train comes by (apparently no one on board heard about a giant radioactive dinosaur approaching the area) and the panicked conductors break it to a stop right in front of Godzilla. You can guess what happens next:

The acting from the extras in this movie is top notch.

The districts in Godzilla's path are ordered to evacuate, but of course one guy sticks around to steal food. Actually, we'll see later that there are still tons of people in the area, so I'm not sure how this works. It's also not clear if he was a vagrant beforehand, or if he just saw an opportunity and took it. Either way, he pops up here for some reason. There's even a moment where Godzilla looks down at him and roars before moving on. I don't know.

Godzilla passes by the building Hayashida, Goro and Naoko are in, and they test out the lure they created for Godzilla. It seems to work, but Godzilla gets distracted by laser cannons and slams the building with his tail. The lasers draw Godzilla away, but now the elevators aren't working and emergency shutters have come down in front of the stairs (?), so they're trapped in the building.

As a side note, I'm not sure why they thought testing the lure while Godzilla was only a few feet away was a good idea. What would have happened if the lasers hadn't drawn his attention? Proving the lure worked only to have Godzilla tear the building down wouldn't have been very beneficial. And wouldn't they have wanted to make sure it worked from a longer distance anyway? They're trying to lure Godzilla away from the city off to a volcano on an island, not to the Burger King down the street. I wouldn't trust Hayashida with being able to tie his own shoes at this point.

The Super-X finally gets launched, and as it heads for the area, they try to use the lasers to control Godzilla, but people still keep getting crushed. This is one of the few movies where we actually see people running away while buildings are coming down right next to them.

When the Super-X arrives, it launches flares above Godzilla, causing him to look up and roar, which in turn allows the Super-X to shoot the cadmium shells into his mouth. The effects of the cadmium are pretty much instantaneous. Godzilla starts to move sluggishly and we hear his heartbeat slowing. So much for Hayashida's expertise.

Unfortunately, right at that moment, a missile launches from the Soviet satellite, and Soviet Political Operative Colonel Kashirin isn't around to stop it anymore. The Soviets immediately notify the Japanese that the missile was accidentally launched and will hit in thirty minutes. What I want to know is why the missile was aimed at Tokyo. Were the Soviets just that sure that that was where Godzilla would show up? Actually, they keep saying "the missile will strike Godzilla." Is it some kind of super-smart missile that knows to target Godzilla specifically?

Godzilla fires his beam at the Super-X, but it has no effect and he succumbs to the cadmium, collapsing into a building. A massive mob of people immediately starts crowding in, only being held back by officers in riot gear. How they knew to deploy exactly there is also something I'd like to know.

Hayashida sees that Godzilla has been incapacitated, but still insists that they have to get the lure to Mt. Mihara. There is another evacuation (are all Japanese as stubborn as Hayashida and these Tokyoites?) as America launches a missile of their own to intercept the Soviet one before it hits.

Okumura returns from Mt. Mihara in a helicopter. They rescue the professor from the building and get the lure, but leave Goro and Naoko to fend for themselves. It's not really clear why. They say they 'have to hurry' and something about strong winds, but it would still make more sense to just pull them out.

I really like Naoko's response to everything. As she applies first aid to an injury Goro sustained to his arm while trying to open one of the shutters, she says, "The professor is confident of the Americans, but the missile is still heading for us. Godzilla will wake up soon, and the helicopter may not make it to the island in time. Maybe we're all going to die." Goro tries to comfort her, but doesn't seem to believe his own words when he says they won't die. Normally these kind of movies don't get so serious, and I appreciate this one for trying to maintain a realistic tone.

The American missile succeeds in destroying the Soviet missile (I wonder how this movie did in the USSR), knocking out power in the area and turning the night sky a flickering red.

The Super-X starts having difficulties, just as lightning starts flashing, striking Godzilla and reviving him. The stupid crowd finally decides to get the hell out when Godzilla comes lumbering toward them.

The desperate Super-X crew, now out of cadmium shots, fly the vehicle around behind a building, but Godzilla blasts right through it. They unload on him with missiles and lasers, but Godzilla just keeps coming. He manages to damage the Super-X by blasting it while it's missile bays are open, forcing it to land. Then he drops a huge building on it, and that's the end of the Super-X.

Meanwhile, Goro and Naoko manage to get past a destroyed stairwell by shimmying down a fire hose they tie to a railing. That weird maybe-homeless guy shows up again to hold it steady as they climb down. I really don't know why he is in this movie.

Goro and Naoko run off safely, but for some reason Godzilla targets the maybe-homeless guy, and...well...we get this slow-motion shot (I swear I'm not making this shit up, this is not photoshopped or edited):

I guess Godzilla kills him...? We don't actually see what happens, but Godzilla then goes after Goro and Naoko. I don't know why he's focusing on these individual people when there was a huge crowd here just a minute ago. At the last second though, Godzilla responds to the lure 'Prof.' Hayashida set up at Mt. Mihara and starts to leave.

The movie wraps up pretty quickly. Godzilla makes his way to the volcano and they set off the explosives. When he tumbles into the volcano, we see his shadow fall in after him, being cast on the side of the crater. It's a really cool effect. Actually, it looks like he purposely jumps into the volcano. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but it feels like it might be. I'm not sure what that says about Godzilla either, but I like it because it implies that there's more to the monster than we understand, that he knows what he is doing and is doing it for some kind of purpose. Then again, maybe I'm full of it, I don't know. But if Hayashida can pull stuff out of his ass, I can too. I should go to Japan and get my Scientist Degree.

Interspersed with the shots of Godzilla in the volcano, we see the Prime Minister and Hayashida looking on reverently. The Prime Minister even looks like he's about to break out in tears. The moving music here also gives things a melancholy feel, as if we should feel bad for what is being done to Godzilla. It might sound ridiculous, but it really works. At least until the credits roll and we get to the (admittedly catchy) song "Goodbye Godzilla" and English lyrics like "Take care now Godzilla, my old friend."

The End.

This is an interesting entry in the Godzilla series. Obviously, most of the movies don't try so hard (or at all) to be serious. And even though there are some goofy things, occasional weird editing and effects that don't always work, the movie pulls it off. It's not as dark as the original, but it does feel like a fitting sequel.

Like the original movie, this one has clear themes underlying everything. The first one wasn't overly subtle, but this movie shoves it right in your face. At one point, Hayashida straight up says: "I think he's a monster created by man. Humans don't think about the monsters… Godzilla is a living nuclear weapon, capable of mass destruction." Later, he says, "Godzilla is a warning. I just want to send it home." It's pretty heavy handed, but I can't help liking it when Godzilla is treated as something more than just a giant animal.

As for Godzilla himself, this is something of a mixed bag. We get an unusual amount of lip action from Godzilla here, and I don't mean between him and Mothra like in your fan fictions, you pervert. I mean he snarls a lot, showing off some especially long and pointed teeth. The close ups can be a little stiff, and from the side Godzilla has a strangely shaped head, but overall these shots are very effective. You can really feel Godzilla's rage coming through.

Unfortunately, these shots of the 'cybot Godzilla,' a 16-foot (!) robot built for the movie, don't match the suit Godzilla at all. The suit used in this movie feels very stiff, especially in the face. Godzilla's eyes have a dumb zombie look to them, and he looks too chunky overall, like they had a design that they meant to refine and just never got around to it. It's not a bad look per se, but it feels too generic and lacks detail. It's the suit's stiffness and lack of emotive ability that makes it a big disappointment in a movie that strives for a realistic tone. It just always looks like a suit.

He looks like a chubby dope.

There are a few shots where we see more of the cybot Godzilla from about the waist up. The shots right after the Super-X uses the cadmium don't look bad because Godzilla is barely moving, but there is one shot in particular when the jets are shooting him that looks ridiculous, with the cybot's arms jerking up and down. It makes me think of the giant robot Kong they built for the 1976 King Kong and ended up using only briefly because it looked like shit. At least the close ups look pretty good.

Ken Tanaka (Goro) with the cybot Godzilla

The cybot was gigantic, but they still built a life-sized Godzilla foot too. The shots of the foot almost never look good. It's just too hard to work with something that big. If they just dropped it they'd probably damage it, so every time he steps it looks like he's trying to be gentle and not hurt anyone. Either that, or the foot will kind of hover as it knocks into cars or buildings. It was a cool idea, but it didn't really work out.

His beam is a little disappointing too. There's not much detail to it, it's just matted-in blue. And it curves the way it does in some of the older movies, like Destroy All Monsters, which I never understood.

The human actors do a good job overall, especially Ken Tanaka as Goro. In particular, the scene where Okumura arrives in the helicopter when the others are trapped in the building and they pull Hayashida out all feels very genuine. And I appreciate that they didn't try to push a romance between Naoko and Goro. The problem is that most of them aren't given a lot to do. By the end of the movie, you don't really care what's happening to the characters, you just want to see what happens to Godzilla.

Going back to the effects, the Super-X is a very simple design that works because it feels practical. The same goes for the mobile lasers they use to direct Godzilla, even if the optical effect of the lasers themselves isn't great. For that matter, none of the optical effects are all that good, including the lightning, the red sky and Godzilla's ray. They don't look terrible, but there's not much detail to any of them, and they end up feeling cheap.

Some of the miniatures, like the laser cannons, sometimes don't fare super well just because of how the camera is used, but generally things don't stick out as looking fake. In particular, the buildings feel much more like real buildings here than they usually do.

As I mentioned, the Shockirus doesn't quite work, but the idea behind it is great. It also calls back to the trilobite discovered in one of Godzilla's footprints in the original movie. Unfortunately, they never come up again in any of the later movies (Cloverfield had it's own take on parasites living on a larger monster though).

Akira Ifukube's classic Godzilla music is nowhere to be found here, but Reijiro Koroku's score is a good fit. It feels much more like a horror movie score than anything we've heard in a Godzilla movie up to this point, and helps to separate this movie from the increasingly child-oriented sequels of the '60s and '70s. It's also much more orchestral than typical scores for kaiju movies and can be very moving when it needs to be.

Overall, an interesting movie that unfortunately somewhat drops the ball where Godzilla himself is concerned, but still rises above the majority by choosing a serious tone and sticking to it. Along with its follow up, Godzilla vs. Biollante, this movie handles Godzilla in a far more realistic way than we are used to, and largely pulls it off.

This movie was brought to U.S. theaters as Godzilla 1985, but of course it wasn't quite the same movie. The entire thing was chopped up and reedited, and new scenes were inserted, with Raymond Burr reprising his role as reporter Steve Martin from the American version of the original movie. Those scenes are terribly written and often terribly acted, adding a level of unintentional humor. Characters will say things that make no sense and, unlike the clever reediting of the original, none of the characters end up having anything to do with what happens in the Japanese version. I do like that Martin talks even more about Godzilla being a force of nature though. He is utterly convinced that there is nothing we can do to stop Godzilla, but doesn't actually offer any beneficial information. The fact that a Dr. Pepper machine seems to stand at every corner of the Pentagon is also worth mentioning.

Unfortunately, the Japanese version of The Return of Godzilla was never released stateside, and even the American version isn't on DVD, so you might have to go out of your way for it, but if you're looking for a serious approach to a Godzilla movie, I recommend checking this one out. (UPDATE: The Return of Godzilla is being released on DVD and Blu-ray September 2016 .)

Showcase Presents: Martian Manhunter, Vol. 1

2014-03-11T18:30:00.003-07:00

Showcase Presents: Martian Manhunter, Vol. 1 collects the Detective Comics Martian Manhunter stories from his first appearance in #225 (Nov 1955) to #304 (Jun 1962), as well as a story from Batman #78 (Aug-Sept 1953) called "The Manhunter From Mars!" which featured Batman and Robin teaming up with a bad martian to capture a good one. The Martians in that story don't have much in common with the Martian Manhunter though. It seems like they just threw it in because they thought more people would buy a book with Batman in it.

The first Martian Manhunter story has "world-famous scientist" Dr. Erdel create a "robot brain" to explore new frontiers in science. Despite being the one who built it, he somehow doesn't know what it will actually do, so he is startled when:

Not just his thoughts but his worrrrds. Wait, what?

Dr. Erdel can't send him back because it would take time to "reverse the thinking plot of the brain." The Martian, J'onn Jonzz, takes the fact that he is indefinitely stuck on an alien planet pretty well, and immediately assumes human form. It's too much for Dr. Erdel though, who promptly has a heart attack and dies. J'onn J'onzz sets out to explore his new home and finds that:

I guess the "Great Evolution" must not have been permanent, because Martian criminals make multiple appearances throughout these stories.

J'onzz decides that while he is stranded on Earth, he might as well do what he can to fight crime. Walking into a police precinct, he is seemingly hired immediately, and begins his career posing as the human detective, "John Jones."

The plot holes, gaps in logic, and skipping directly from one plot point to the next are pretty typical for the stories in this volume. It's to be expected when the stories are only six pages long for the majority of the book. About two-thirds of the way through, they gain a page, then jump up to twelve pages for the last few, but by then the formula is set. All the stories except the Batman one are written by Jack Miller and illustrated by Joe Certa.

A typical story will involve either John Jones tracking a criminal, or investigating something else that inevitably leads to the discovery of a criminal scheme of some kind. He then uses completely ridiculous tactics to dispatch the evildoers. As with the Superman books, a lot of story ideas are repeated here, like Jones losing his powers, or humans gaining Martian powers. In fact, there are two stories involving a comet passing between Earth and Mars cutting off Jones's powers. The first says the comet "travels between Earth and Mars, once each century, for a full 24 hours," and the second describes an "annual two-hour period," while just eight months passed between the stories in real life.

Speaking of inconsistency, among J'onzz's powers are flight, invisibility, intangibility, shape-shifting, "Martian vision" (which let's him see through objects, among other things), and countless other abilities that change depending on the requirements of the story. He is particularly fond of tunneling underground to get ahead of others without them seeing him. Sometimes he can simply will himself from one place to another, which raises the question, "Why can't he just will himself back to Mars?" Early on, he can even control matter around him through sheer willpower, which seems like it should also provide a way back to Mars if J'onzz would just stop to think about it. Among his most absurd of powers is his super-breath:

The only thing that might beat that out is his "Martian angle vision," a power that only pops up once, makes no sense, and is pointless anyway because he can already see through walls:

Initially, he can only use his powers when invisible, which means no one is even aware of the existence of a Martian on Earth for a large portion of the book. However, Jones does go from visible to invisible and back right in front of people all the time:

I love the fact that he just doesn't care if people are around to see, or how he'll use his ability to walk through walls to capture criminals and just leave them baffled as to how he did it.

It isn't until a criminal Martian arrives and begins wreaking havoc that J'onzz is himself revealed:

The bad Martian's name is B'rett. In another story, J'onn's brother, T'omm, shows up. I like to think his parents were named D'add and M'omm.

It's probably not a coincidence that this story came out shortly before the first appearance of the Justice League of America. It would have been weird having J'onn J'onzz have to be invisible all the time while working with the rest of the team. As usual for individual characters' stories of the time however, there are no references to the League whatsoever.

On the writing side, there isn't a lot of characterization here. J'onn J'onzz occasionally bemoans his fate and longs to return to his home world, but if anything, he has even less character than typical superheroes of the time. The same goes for his superior, Captain Harding, who appears in almost every story.

There is one other character that makes return appearances: Diane Meade, the police commissioner's daughter, who just happens to have a thing for Jones. She first shows up fairly early on, but doesn't become a recurring character until later, and proves to be J'onn J'onzz's unintentional nemesis. In fact, her debut is in a story called "John Jones' Female Nemesis," and her next appearance is called "John Jones' Pesky Partner."

Here she is trying to beat another policewoman to a medal:

What a bitch, right? But it gets even better:

That is just golden.

Her being around only makes Jones have to be extra careful to keep his powers hidden, but of course she eventually tries to prove her suspicions that he is the Manhunter from Mars. It seems to me it would actually be easier for Jones to simply reveal himself to the public, but '50s-early '60s DC comics aren't known for breaking tradition (or for logic). Luckily, Jones's powers can cover for pretty much anything, no matter how ridiculous:

You may have noticed the reference to fire as a Martian weakness. Before reading these comics, I thought that was a lame weakness, because of course fire would be harmful. It would be like saying Spider-Man's weakness is being shot in the face. But it's a lot more than that--even lighting a match is enough to send J'onzz into sweating, shuddering paroxysms of fear. Hell, look at this:

On the art side, things are serviceable. There's probably more detail put into the backgrounds than these stories deserve, but characters floating in front of blank white space would be boring to look at. As you can see from the panels above, Joe Certa's style is somewhat cartoony, which fits with the goofy nature of the stories. He has a tendency to give characters huge chins when drawn from the side, which is a bit strange.

J'onzz's Martian appearance changes gradually over the course of the book. Early on, he has a more alien, almost ape-like, face:

Later, he, and any other Martians that appear in the stories, become more human looking, as seen on the cover.

At this point, I'm going to introduce a new section to these reviews, called:

Monster watch

Being that I am obsessed with monsters and dinosaurs, here I will showcase any creatures that appear in these books.

Unfortunately, there's not much to talk about in this case. We do get a story where J'onn J'onzz gets sucked into another dimension and comes across this rhinosaurus-thing:

Later in the same story, we have a pack of dinosaurs:

And that's it for the cool stuff. Elsewhere, uh…there's these "Martian mandrills," struttin' their stuff like they own the place:

And another story gives us these robot replications of Martian creatures:

And to avoid too much disappointment in the first entry of Monster Watch, here's J'onn J'onzz beating up a lion. Doesn't quite fit in with those others, but I'll take what I can get:

Hopefully next time's Monster Watch'll be better.

While there is quite a bit of goofiness to be found in this book, it doesn't compare to the Superman volumes, and with nothing historically important outside of the Martian's first appearance, there's really no other reason to recommend it. Unless you're a die-hard Martian Manhunter fan for some reason, you won't get anything more out of this one than a few laughs.

Showcase Presents: Supergirl, Vol. 1

2014-02-17T23:30:00.000-08:00

Showcase Presents: Supergirl, Vol. 1 reprints the character's initial installments in her ongoing series within Action Comics, as well as her earliest appearances in various other concurrent titles. Included are stories from Action Comics #252 (May 1959) through #282 (Nov 1961), Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #40 (Oct 1959), #46 (Jul 1960) and #51 (Mar 1961), Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #14 (Jan 1960), Superboy #80 (Apr 1960), and Superman #139 (Aug 1960), #140 (Oct 1960) and #144 (Apr 1961), as well as the earlier Superman #123 (Aug 1958), which presented a story involving a "Girl of Steel" named "Super-Girl" conjured up by Jimmy Olsen using a "magic totem," whose hairstyle is curiously completely different on the cover than in the actual story:

I won't spoil why she never makes another appearance after that issue, but she doesn't. The story was used to gauge reader interest in stories about a female counterpart to Superman, and 9 months later, Supergirl was born. It should be noted that that story, as well as several others in this volume, also appear in the Showcase Presents: Superman volumes.

First, a brief intro on the character: Supergirl is Superman's teenage cousin Kara.

How can that be, you ask? Krypton exploded when Kal-El was but a babe, did it not? How can it be that Kara is a teenager, while Kal-El is fully grown? What be this filth?! I shall read not one blasphemous word farther! Such garbage be not for the likes of me! 'Tis naught but a load of shit!

Well, calm down. Despite DC having a tradition of blatantly disregarding continuity, this seeming inconsistency is indeed rectified, albeit in typically absurd DC Silver Age style:

However, like other pieces of the planet outflung by the explosion, the chunk turns to Kryptonite. Luckily, Zor-El has a rolled up sheet of lead in his lab (for some reason), that they (somehow) use to cover the entire area, blocking out the harmful radiations.

Meanwhile, Zor-El sticks it to his unnamed wife, resulting in the birth of Kara. When a meteorite swarm destroys the lead barrier, exposing the deadly Kryptonite, the now teenage Kara is sent off in a rocket to Earth, where she and her parents had previously observed Superman via "Super-Space Telescope" (a normal telescope wasn't good enough, I guess).

Superman decides she needs to keep her powers secret until she gets enough practice with them, and that she will live in an orphanage. I know it wasn't intentional, but a lot of the time it seems like Superman is cruelly taunting Supergirl. He brags to her, "In my youth in Smallville, I was honored as Superboy!" and says "You too can gain fame as Super-Girl [sic], the girl of steel!" But then he tells her she has to wait to use her powers in public until he says it's okay, and that she has to live in an orphanage instead of living with him. Then he goes on and makes her do something that makes no sense:

If she's not allowed to let anyone see her using her powers anyway, what in hell is the point of her wearing a wig? Did she not look like an Earth girl to him before? And doesn't he think it would increase the chances of people suspecting something about her if she always had to be worrying about her wig?

She chooses the name Linda Lee, and Superman muses, "Lana Lang was my girl friend when I was Superboy, and Lois Lane replaced her when I became Superman! By sheer coincidence, she picked the initials…L.L.!" As I mentioned in my review of Showcase Presents: Superman, Vol. 2, the pattern with the initials "L.L." is directly addressed often, but never explained.

Superman then sets her up in Midvale Orphanage, explaining to them that she "lost her parents in a big disaster that wiped out her whole community."

From there, the stories involve Linda getting into lots of situations that require her to use her powers in secret, while still changing into her Supergirl outfit when she does so for no particular reason. She often has adventures in the past or future, where she "doesn't have to hide her powers." Of course not hiding her powers makes no sense for the past, as she finds out:

Not that she learns anything from that, judging by later stories. Here she is helping to commit genocide:

I'm kidding, she doesn't actually kill anybody.

Her arch-nemesis is Getting Adopted, and she often has to come up with ridiculous ways to avoid it, such as:

So not only does she have to live in an orphanage, but she can't even get adopted because people might find out who she is. And of course she also has to deal with other kids at the orphanage suspecting who she is. My favorite scene comes when she tries to throw off suspicion at one point:

I don't know if even Superman could have pulled that much craziness off. The whole turning-coal-into-a-diamond thing does come up all the time in both these stories and the Superman ones though.

Partway through, Linda gets a robot of herself that hides in a tree near the orphanage and comes out to take her place when she has to go off to use her powers elsewhere. That seems like it would only cause more problems, but whatever.

Apart from Linda and Superman, there are a few other recurring characters, none of them people at the orphanage oddly enough.

First up is Streaky, the Super Cat, who gets powers from, depending on the story, either the radiations or the fumes given off by X-Kryptonite, a variation of Kryptonite accidentally created by Supergirl when she was experimenting to find an antidote. His powers are only temporary, but he keeps managing to find the piece of X-Kryptonite that Supergirl "super-tossed" into the woods. Neither she nor Streaky realize that that is the source of his powers, despite him getting powers over and over. I will also note here that the thought-voices given to Streaky and other animals, like Krypto, are usually painful to read.

Next, there's Jerro, the mer-boy from Atlantis.

There isn't much to say about him, other than that he has a fish tail for legs.

There are a few adventures with the Legion of Super-Heroes here, one of which introduces another love interest for Supergirl in the form of Brainiac 5.

He actually only shows up once in this volume, but it's worth noting as his first appearance.

Supergirl has one more "boy friend" here: Dick Wilson, the boy from the orphanage who suspected her identity in those panels with the diamond silliness above. He only shows up that one time at the orphanage though. She doesn't see him again until both of them are adopted (I'll get to her adoption in a bit), when his name is now Dick Malverne.

There's nothing to say about Dick either. These are some boring characters. Just look at that panel, they even look the same.

Throughout the book, Supergirl's introduction to the world keeps getting teased, but something always comes up to stop it. It's pretty frustrating to be honest. The best instance is when Supergirl loses her memory due to red Kryptonite and exposes herself in Smallville. Superman goes to extreme lengths to keep his "secret emergency weapon" a secret:

Finally, Superman decides it's time to reveal her existence to the world, and…she loses her powers. It turns out that an evil scientist living in the bottle city of Kandor named Lesla-Lar, who just happens to look exactly like Linda (and also has the initials "L.L."), stole her powers:

She then takes Linda's place and strikes up a deal with Lex Luthor, leaving Linda in Kandor thinking she is Lesla-Lar (if my 'L' key still works at the end of this review, I'll be surprised). It doesn't make a lot of sense and goes on way too long, but that's actually part of what's interesting about it.

Until then, almost all DC superhero stories were one-and-done tales with no permanent effect on future stories. Apart from some 2-part Superman stories in Action Comics, this is the first instance I know of from the era where a story continued across multiple issues. If only it had been a better story. In fact, it doesn't even feel like an ongoing story so much as a temporary change in the status quo. Instead of Linda going back to the orphanage at the end of each story, she goes to her room in her foster parents' home (Superman lets her get adopted after she loses her powers), while Lesla-Lar schemes and points:

After treading water for what feels like forever, the situation is resolved via an unsatisfying deus ex machina, because why should we expect anything more?

There is another particularly interesting story here called "Mighty Maid!" but I already covered it in my review of Showcase Presents: Superman, Vol. 2, so I won't talk about it again.

The stories are written by Otto Binder and Jerry Siegel, with Siegel eventually taking over as the sole writer of the Action Comics Supergirl segments. As usual for the time, there is no discernible difference in their writing styles.

Jim Mooney is the artist for all the Supergirl stories from Action Comics. I'm used to his later work in Amazing Spider-Man at Marvel in the '60s, and his style here is recognizable . He seems to use more blacks and shadows than most artists at DC at the time and avoids the stiffness of artists like Wayne Boring. I would guess he was put on these stories because he can draw pretty girls. I don't really have any complaints with his work, but he does reuse some of the same stock images/positions a lot, like the aforementioned Lesla-Lar evil pointing:

There's also Linda on her bed:

Despite a couple of important issues, this volume just isn't that interesting on the whole. And as those particular issues are also included in the Superman and Legion of Super-Heroes volumes anyway, I'd say that this book, while demonstrating a sign of changes in storytelling to come, ends up being pretty skippable.

Them! (1954)

2014-02-02T00:47:00.000-08:00

A series of mysterious events in New Mexico, including several deaths, is investigated by the local police and the FBI, eventually leading to the discovery of a nest of giant ants, mutated by atomic bomb tests.

I like the fact that this movie starts out as a mystery, even though the poster and trailer give everything away. It's still interesting from the beginning, although they drag it out too much once the requisite scientist is called in, who of course already knows what is behind everything but won't tell anyone until he is 'absolutely sure.'

At the beginning, we have a little girl who is found wandering in the desert in a state of mute shock (Aliens, anyone?). The investigating cops find a destroyed trailer home and a weird print in the sand nearby, then a wrecked store, its owner dead and later found to have "enough formic acid in him to kill twenty men".

The cops hear a weird sound--almost like a squeaky siren, with what sounds like bird sounds behind it--and the one left behind to guard the store is killed by something strong enough to take four bullets from his gun and still get away.

The FBI send in agent Robert Graham (James Arness, the title character in The Thing [1951]), and a cast of the print found by the cops attracts the attention of an entomologist (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter (Joan Weldon, who, in a pleasant surprise, is also a scientist, and not the typical woman-in-peril or love interest).

The scientist uses the smell of formic acid to bring the little girl out of her stupor, causing her to begin screaming "THEM! THEM!" over and over. (Inexplicably, they leave right after that instead of trying to get her to tell what she saw--maybe because they couldn't stand her screaming?)

"THEM!! THEM!!!!" "We heard you the first time, now SHUT UP!!!"

When the dead cop's former partner and Agent Graham accompany the scientists to the location of the print, they hear the weird sound again. This time, a giant ant pops up from over a ridge. The elder entomologist tells them to go for the annentae, which slows the ant down long enough for it to be pumped full of bullets from a machine gun.

Whatever happened to 'short, controlled bursts'?

From there, the team track down the nest and destroy it, but discover that a pair of newborn queens have escaped and must search out the new colonies before more queens are born.

The acting, above-average for this type of film, and foreboding atmosphere make what could be a boring start interesting. The visual of the strong winds blowing across the desert gives those scenes a uniquely eerie quality. Unfortunately, apart from a tiny scene with the second nest, which ends up being no more than a footnote, the film drags after the destruction of the first nest and doesn't really pick up again until the very end. It just takes too long to find the last nest.

The investigative techniques of the FBI agent in trying to find the new nest don't make a lot of sense either. He interrogates people who have been arrested/received speeding tickets recently with the hope that their actions may have been a result of seeing giant ants...yeah... I suppose it's true that he didn't have any leads to go on, but I would think physically going out and searching for them would be the best course of action, right? But hey, I'm not an FBI agent, so what do I know?

[Insert Wilhelm Scream here.]

At least the ants are cool, surprising for a giant bug movie of the time--or ever, really. It probably helped that this was actually the first movie about giant bugs, as well as one of the first movies to blame nuclear weapons for attacks by monsters (I believe the first was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms from 1953).

The film was actually nominated for a Special Effects Oscar. The full size ant puppets are mostly effective, although they are a little stiff, and sometimes look like they have pupils for some reason. It's the way they are shot that really makes them work; you see just enough to know what is happening without the camera lingering on the ants long enough for you to pick out any bad movements or physical imperfections.

Burning the egg chamber. Aliens, anyone?

The scenes with flamethrowers being used against them are just plain awesome. I was not at all expecting that real flamethrowers would be employed, much less that they would actually burn the ant puppets.

Interestingly, the film was originally to be in color and 3-D, but problems with the 3-D cameras led to the producers abandoning the idea and trying to ape the success of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms by making everything (except the title card) black and white; it must have worked--Them! was supposedly Warner Bros.' highest grossing film that year.

Soldiers in a dark tunnel under attack by giant bugs that seem to appear out of nowhere--seriously, it's just like Aliens.

Despite losing some steam in the middle and having a pretty standard '50s monster story, the cool ant effects, realistic/serious tone, above average acting, and good direction/camerawork make this one of the best movies of its type.

Showcase Presents: Superman, Vol. 2

2014-02-01T23:26:00.001-08:00

Showcase Presents: Superman, Vol. 2 moves into the early '60s, collecting Superman #134 (Jan 1960) through #145 (May 1961) and the Superman stories from Action Comics #258 (Nov 1959) through #275 (Apr 1961). Many of the covers for the Action Comics issues in this volume feature Supergirl, but only the stories focusing on Superman are included here.

For the most part, this feels like more of the same from vol. 1. The stories are still really goofy, with basically the same rotating writers--Jerry Siegel, Jerry Coleman, Otto Binder, Robert Bernstein, and Bill Finger--and artists--Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, Kurt Schaffenberger, and Curt Swan--telling stories involving time travel or Superman trying to keep his secret identity a secret. There are a few new trends in this volume though.

For one thing, although most of the stories are still isolated and have nothing to do with each other, there is more of a sense of continuity here overall, with more stories that carry over into subsequent issues, and with characters that were introduced in the previous volume being followed up on with surprising regularity.

Bizarro shows up every few issues, usually with a recap of his previous appearances each time. Bizarro world, populated by Bizarro Supermen and Bizarro Loises is created here, and we get the first Bizarro offspring, as well as a Bizarro Supergirl and the revelation that the Bizarros are susceptible to blue Kryptonite.

Lori Lemaris, Superman's mermaid love interest from Atlantis pops up a lot too, and she gets a new love interest of her own in Ronal, a merman from another planet.

Titano, Luthor, and Mr. Mxyzptlk also make more frequent appearances in this volume. Red Kryptonite, which has unpredictable effects on Kryptonians, seems to pop up in every other story.

Speaking of stories reusing elements over and over, a somewhat strange recurring story idea is that of other characters that look like Superman. They inevitably end up being suspected as Superman's secret identity, or posing as him. I could accept it happening once, and the idea of Lois suspecting someone other than Clark of being Superman is interesting, but it just ends up being another go-to plot device.

Another recurring plot is that of other characters trying to make Superman fall in love with Lois. We get Lois's sister Lucy Lane, Supergirl, and even Krypto giving it a shot, but my favorite is the one with Lori Lemaris, which gives us these great moments:

Then there were a ton of stories here that involved dream sequences, or where the entire story turned out to be a dream. That happened a couple of times in vol. 1, but it happens all the time here. Ironically, the stories that don't turn out to really happen are often more interesting than the 'real' ones, at least until you find out they didn't happen.

In particular, there is a story near the beginning of the volume called "The Revenge of Luthor!" It starts with Superman encountering a red Kryptonite meteor. The red Kryptonite causes Superboy (Superman's younger self) to appear in the present. In the process of proving to each other that they are who they claim to be, Superboy makes some "dumb boners," while Superman is uncharacteristically short-tempered.

Eventually, Luthor finds out, and captures Lois, Lana Lang, and Superboy.

I have no words.

He sets up a trap where Superman has to choose one of two lead doors to open. Behind one door is a Kryptonite meteor, which will kill him. If he opens the other door, Luthor will let him go, but kill Superboy with the meteor.

Yes, super-ventriloquism is really one of his powers in these stories.

So what does he do?

I cannot accurately convey how angry I was when I read those last two panels without killing lots of things. The story had been surprisingly engaging up to that point--in fact I remember thinking as I was reading that it was by far the most engaging Superman story I'd read so far. Then at the end it dissolves into a big middle finger pointed right at the reader.

It's so frustrating. So many of the stories already back Superman into a seemingly inescapable corner, only to have him pull a ridiculously far fetched solution out of his ass at the last second--why couldn't this one have done that?

The dream stories tend to go one of two ways. The first involves a concept so ridiculous that it would never actually get explored in the comics of the time, like what it would be like for Lois to be married to Superman, or to have Superman elected President, both stories from vol. 1. The other type of dream stories explore ideas that are sometimes actually interesting, but would be too 'extreme' to have them actually take place, like the one where Superman accidentally goes to the future and finds that he has been forgotten now that Supergirl has grown into Superwoman, or the one where he accidentally blows up the Earth (!), both from this volume.

One of my favorite stories here kind of straddles the line of did-it-or-didn't-it-really-happen? It's called "When Superman Lost His Powers!" and begins with Clark, Lois, Jimmy, and even Perry White exploring an ancient Aztec Tomb for an article. Clark finds an inscription saying "Whoever enters the king's tomb is doomed to spend two days in a world so dangerous that no one has ever returned from it." Of course, what happens is:

I swear, if Superman would just let Lois die instead of saving her all the time, he'd only have half as many problems to worry about.

They all wake up in a strange world filled with strange creatures. First, they get attacked by a giant bee:

Superman basically loses his shit upon finding out he has no powers in this world:

They then encounter a giant spider:

Lois is referring to the spider being excited by the color purple for some reason.

Then a dragon:

Sigh…where do I even start? How can Superman hear the ultrasonic signal if you are not on Earth, Jimmy? And if you thought it would work, why haven't you activated it already? If I were Perry, I'd've fired your ass right then and there. Meanwhile, Clark struggles to contain his panic.

The next thing they encounter is Lois being a stone bitch:

Jimmy tries to summon Superman with his watch but "Superman must be on some mission in outer space, where the signal doesn't reach." I hope you never escape this world, Jimmy.

When they leave (where are they going anyway?), Clark changes to Superman, then goes to absolutely ridiculous lengths to make the others think he still has powers.

That leads to:

Later, we get:

Then, when Superman fights a giant eel:

Dig those crazy fish indeed. Because the mere fact that I was in another dimension wouldn't be enough to convince me not to eat anything there. Not so Jimmy.

Finally, when the 48 hours are up:

The whole time they were in that other world, Lois never stopped being a snoopy bitch:

When they get out:

Check out the creepy expression on Superman's face.

I really hope one of these volumes has a story where Lois is kidnapped by someone who thinks she knows who Superman is, and is tortured to death. Even if it's just an imaginary story. That would be really nice.

There is another story worth mentioning here, where Lois does suffer a lot of emotional harm. Not as good as flat out death, but I'll take what I can get. It's called "Mighty Maid":

At least Perry realizes Lois's feelings aren't worth caring about.

One of the first panels has Clark thinking, "Knowing Lois as I do, I'll bet she's in the thick of trouble, right now!" He's not wrong, of course, but before he can get to her, a super-powered chick calling herself Mighty Maid shows up to save her. She then immediately starts hitting on Superman, hardcore:

They go around together for a while:

"His eyes are beautiful!" What is this, a romance comic?

Somehow, this happens:

No, I didn't skip a panel there.

Things progress to the point that they start making out for passing helicopters:

Above Milwaukee…?

Eventually, they announce that they are permanently leaving for the fourth-dimensional world that Mighty Maid comes from to get married. What are surely some of the greatest Lois Lane panels of all time follow:

But then, after they supposedly leave for the fourth dimensional world:

Why is Supergirl wearing her costume under her other costume? And that last line has to be one of the greatest Superman lines in history. This story is on a roll!

Superman explains that the whole thing was a ruse to make angry aliens think he had left so they wouldn't attack Earth. I don't believe that for a second, but Supergirl seems to buy it.

Then the story ends with:

Look at Superman's expression in the second panel...

I like how Lois's attempted suicide is passed off as "accidentally" falling off a building. Then again, it is Lois we're talking about, maybe that's really what happened. Also, look at how pleased with himself Superman looks in that last panel.

So Superman's plan to avert an alien attack just conveniently happened to involve making out with his underage cousin, huh? Even though it didn't have to, at all.

He explained that the aliens couldn't sense him when he was underwater. All he'd have had to do was say "I'm leaving forever for another dimension" and stay underwater until they left. Which I guess is what he did. But all the falling in love with his cousin stuff and all the intense emotional pain caused to Lois were completely extraneous. I'm not even going to bother trying to find an explanation for the "His eyes are beautiful!" line.

There is one final story that really stuck out to me in this volume, but I won't get into it too much. It's called "Superman's Return to Krypton!" and it's a "3-Part Novel," meaning it took up an entire Superman issue. It involves Superman accidentally traveling into the past and becoming stranded on Krypton, without Earth's yellow sun around to give him his powers. While there, he befriends his parents, gets a job as an actor, and falls in love with his costar, Lyla Lerrol (the fact that Superman's love interests always seem to have the initials 'L.L.' comes up a lot, but is never explained, at least not here). Of course, Superman ends up leaving the planet before it explodes:

That silent panel alone would set this story apart, but the entire thing is unusually well-plotted and genuinely moving, making this probably the best Superman story in either of the first two volumes.

As I said, this volume is basically more of the same as the first, but the minor differences make a big difference by the time you finish. There were very few stories in the previous volume that would pull you in at all, but, believe it or not, there were quite a few moments in this one that made me pause and think.

That said, there are obviously still tons of goofy moments. I could honestly go through every story, but I'll sign off with some of my favorites:

All Monsters Attack / Godzilla's Revenge (1969)

2014-01-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

All Monsters Attack is the tenth movie in the Godzilla series. Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla (not to mention Rodan, Mothra, Destroy All Monsters, and a host of other kaiju, or giant monster, movies), returned to direct this one. I just wish I could say it was as good as some of those others.

Besides that trailer being misleading as a whole, half those shots aren't even in the movie.

The film follows Ichiro, an annoying young boy troubled by the least intimidating gang of bullies you've ever seen. They don't even push him around that much, they mostly just tell him what to do. For example, early on there is a guy painting on a billboard, and the bullies tell Ichiro to honk the horn on the guy's motorcycle that is sitting nearby. He refuses and runs away like a wimp. Also, he refers to the main bully by the monster name of "Gabara."

It's hard to even tell which ones are the bullies. Ichiro is in the solid blue and Gabara in the red.

Ichiro's parents are both always working, often leaving him to come home from school to an empty apartment. As a way of escaping the unpleasant real world, he imagines himself traveling to Monster Island.

Pictured: The power of imagination!

That, or the effects of powerful hallucinogens.

That's right--this movie takes place in the 'real world' and all the monster scenes only exist in an annoying kid's imagination. There he encounters Godzilla, his son Minilla, and lots of stock footage from other Godzilla movies.

Ichiro talks to Minilla and learns that he has his own Gabara, a blue ogre-like creature that knocks him around just because. Godzilla doesn't help him because he wants his son to learn to defend himself.

Fat chance of that happening anytime soon.

Normally I deride child abandonment, but you can't blame Godzilla for not wanting to hang around his son--Minilla is probably the stupidest monster out of all these movies, and definitely the most annoying. He constantly squeaks like a pig being raped, and his only offensive ability (other than making all living things want to die just by being around) is to emit radioactive smoke rings:

I feel you, Godzilla.

In between talking to Minilla and watching him get his ass handed to him by Gabara--

--the two of them witness clips of Godzilla battling other monsters taken straight from Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster and Son of Godzilla. Of course, no one calls attention to the fact that Godzilla's appearance changes with each next fight.

You get Godzilla vs. Kamacuras:

Godzilla vs. Kumonga:

Godzilla vs. Ebirah:

Godzilla vs. jets (humans trying to invade Monster Island, Minilla says):

Even Godzilla vs. the giant condor from Sea Monster--they were really stretching to pad out this movie:

There are also brief shots of Manda, Anguirus, and Gorosaurus taken from Destroy All Monsters and King Kong Escapes.

Back in the real world, we keep hearing about a pair of bank robbers that have evaded the police and are thought to be hiding out in the area. Ichiro at one point goes exploring in an old dilapidated building and finds a wallet. If you can figure out who it belongs to, you are too smart for this movie.

The robbers of course don't want anybody to see the wallet and find out where they are, so naturally they follow Ichiro and kidnap him, taking him back to the abandoned building. So what does he do? He dreams his way back to Monster Island. It seemed to me that there were bigger things to worry about than whether Minilla (or 'Minya,' if you watch the English dub) ever got away from Gabara. Then again, Ichiro can't even imagine fights that he didn't already see in earlier Godzilla movies, so he's clearly not the brightest kid.

Eventually, with Ichiro's help, Minilla beats Gabara.

I'm still trying to figure out how.

This finally helps Godzilla overcome his embarrassment of his son (the hidden character arc of this movie), and he shows up to tell Minilla that he isn't a complete failure after all. But Gabara, understandably pissed at being shown up by such a little @#*$&, makes the mistake of getting back up and attacking Godzilla, and we finally get some new monster action.

Gabara puts up a good fight with his electric hands, but Godzilla shows him who's boss.

Meanwhile, one of the robbers has gone out to steal a car so that they can make their getaway. Ichiro takes advantage of the situation to set up some traps in the building for the robbers (did he see Home Alone too?). When they come after him, he uses what he learned from Godzilla and Minilla to fight back (a robber with a knife is paralleled with Gabara through quick cuts, the spray from a fire extinguisher is paralleled with Minilla finally breathing a full-on atomic beam, etc.) and of course they end up getting captured. Happy ending, right? The movie can finally be over?

Hold on a sec--what about the bullies?

Well, the next time he encounters them Ichiro finally decides not to back down, resulting in the most awkward fight ever put on screen. The two of them grab at each other's shirts and spin around in a series of weird speed up--pause--speed up--pause strobe images that would make even Zack Snyder say "what the hell?" until finally Gabara falls to the ground, crying like a wuss over his hurt elbow. Happy ending, right? The movie can finally be over?

For some reason, the movie keeps going for one more little bit. Remember that guy painting the billboard from near the start? Well, he's still there, with his motorcycle still sitting nearby. Ichiro, proving that just because he was a victim of bullies doesn't mean he didn't deserve it in the first place, goes over and starts honking the horn on the motorcycle like they wanted him to earlier. The guy painting the billboard starts yelling at the little shit to get away and ends up falling to the ground, nearly drowning himself in paint. The bullies start to laugh and Ichiro runs off, telling his father, who is a train conductor or something, and whose train just happens to be passing by, to apologize on his behalf. I like to think the billboard painter didn't accept the apology and went on to brutally murder Ichiro, but the movie ends there. It's just as well--even with a running time of under 70 minutes, this movie couldn't have ended soon enough.

Okay, let's look at what does work with this movie. The Japanese version starts with a weird theme song called March of the Monsters that fits the movie pretty well:

The American version however, begins with a version of a piece called Crime Fiction, by Ervin Jereb, a totally bitchin' theme that doesn't fit the movie at all:

The rest of the music isn't bad either. It's much lighter than most Godzilla movies, reflecting this entry's kid-centeredness, but it's still pretty cool. Here's a sample:

Toho's special effects director, Eiji Tsuburaya, who had worked on all their monster movies up to this point, was ill during production on All Monsters Attack, leaving Honda to direct the new effects scenes as well. He didn't do a bad job, but Tsuburaya's absence may have been a reason for reusing so much footage from other movies.

As far as the monsters go, the Godzilla suit used for the new footage is the same one created for Destroy All Monsters, and it still looks good here (unless you listen to my dad, who described him as looking like Cookie Monster).

A quick Google search produced this image, so he clearly isn't the only one who sees it.

Gabara is a bit more divisive among fans. He's so weird that you probably decide whether you like him or not as soon as you see him.

I guess it makes sense that he is as weird as he is since he was thought up by a kid as weird as Ishiro, but we'll get to that in a moment. Personally, I like Gabara quite a bit. Other than King Kong and the Frankenstein monsters, he's the only monster in the Tohoverse I can think of that is bipedal and doesn't have a tail of any kind. His strange humanoid form, evil visage, electricity powers, and mocking, laugh-like roar win him my approval.

The model work in this movie is restricted to just some areas of Monster Island. Most people probably think that landscape stuff is really easy to do--just toss some fake plants around--but there is a lot more to it than that, and there are no issues with it here.

There is one other sort-of-major character I didn't mention before because he doesn't really matter, but he did get a laugh from me at one point, so in the spirit of this movie being all over the place I'll introduce him here. An old guy named Shinpei, who designs toys and is a friend of the family, lives in an apartment next to Ishiro's. He kind of acts as a surrogate parent for Ishiro, feeding him and putting up with his bullshit and whatnot.

Anyway, I mentioned the thieves stealing a car, right? Well, Shinpei finds the car parked outside the abandoned building and looks at it closely, saying "I've seen this car somewhere. Where is it?" Then he jerks up and says "Wait! This is my car!" That leads to the thieves being located by the police.

That's it for the good. Now for the bad. I recommend ordering a pizza or something, because this is going to take a while.

I already talked a little about Minilla. For those wondering, his name in Japanese is Minira, as in 'mini' 'ra,' 'ra' being a common suffix for monster names, including Gojira. So Mini-ra is a mini Gojira. Obviously, it doesn't work so well with Mini-lla in English, but that's what we're stuck with.

Go die, you piece of shit.

Minilla is annoying and stupid enough in the Japanese version, with his permanent dumbass grin and general insipidness, his voice sounding like a muffled woman, as if they wanted you to know it was somebody in a shitty costume, in case you couldn't tell. Whatever. But the English dub gives him a dopey voice that sounds like a stoned version of Barney, as if they wanted you to know it was a shitty movie, in case you couldn't tell. Seriously, it'll make you want to kill everything. I'm not even going to try to find a clip because I don't want to be responsible for setting someone off on a murder spree.

As if Minilla wasn't bad enough, he's the perfect monster for Ichiro to imagine as his double on Monster Island, meaning Ichiro is just as bad.

Go die, you piece of shit.

This is but one of millions of cases where producers mistakenly assume that kids want stories with kid characters, or other cutesy characters, like comic relief animals. You see it in superhero sidekicks (you don't read Batman for Robin), '80s cartoons (how I hated Snarf in Thundercats), etc. Imagine a movie focusing on the most grating of those unnecessarily-shoved in characters (Snarf probably comes close) and you have All Monsters Attack.

Our lead is a doofus-faced runt who wears the shortest shorts legally available, not to mention being a total pussy. To be honest, I didn't think he was the worst of actors, part of it is just the character he is playing, but that doesn't make him any less annoying. Just seeing his face makes me want to punch my computer. All he does is mope around, feeling sorry for himself. Plus, he's extremely disrespectful, like when he disparages Shinpei's toy inventions, or the weird scene where he jumps on a car that is for sale.

He kinda bounces up and down in that position for a while…yeah...

When the guy selling it comes out to tell him to stop yanking on the door handle or he'll break it, Ichiro says the car is "already broken," and goes on to mess with the antenna. If the guy didn't make him go away, I bet he would have shattered all the windows and slashed the tires.

And then there's the ending, where he almost kills the billboard painter. I get the message about standing up to bullies, but it seems that Ichiro just ends up joining them.

Another big problem with this movie is the blatant use of stock footage. This wasn't the first movie to do this (Monster Zero reused footage from Rodan), but when three-fourths of the non-Minilla monster scenes are lifted straight from other movies, it's a little much. Unfortunately, this movie signaled a shift in the series in the use of stock footage, going hand in hand with a lower budget.

Then there is the whole 'real world' part of it. Again, no one wants to see a monster movie where the monsters don't really exist. Honda does a good job of setting the real world apart from the world of the other movies, but that doesn't mean he makes it interesting. The movie is about a kid that is by himself all the time, and that means it's kind of boring.

The story doesn't help. I don't have a problem with the message being promoted here, but it isn't handled very well, and the movie, short as it is, is just too long for the content. It ends up dragging. Even the monster scenes are inherently less interesting when you know they aren't really happening.

Finally, we have the odd title: All Monsters Attack. All the monsters do seem to attack Godzilla in randomly strung together scenes, I guess that much is true, but it's still very misleading. The American one isn't any better: Godzilla's Revenge? While it's an awesome title in abstract, not only is the movie not about Godzilla, but he doesn't get revenge on anyone.

All right, this review has gone on longer than this movie deserves. Is it a bad movie? Well, technically, not really. It coherently tells a complete story. But that story isn't very interesting at all, and the movie ends up failing on every front.

As a Godzilla movie: None of the monsters actually exist, so the events of the movie don't actually continue the series, and we've already seen most of the monster footage before. Gabara is arguably interesting, but feels wasted here, and Minilla is the real monster star, which is the last thing a Godzilla fan ever wants to hear.

As a kids' movie: I saw this movie as a kid, and it bored the hell out of me. I did like that I could just fast-forward to the Monster Island stuff and watch Godzilla fight one threat after another in rapid succession, but I still hated the fact that all the monster stuff was in a kid's head. Plus, I had seen the movies most of that footage was from already. Other than that, I thought it was one of the most boring movies ever and didn't understand why it was even made.

As a movie for adults: There is absolutely nothing here. I could see misguided parents thinking it would be a good movie for kids to learn a lesson from, but if they actually watched it I think they'd change their minds.

I disagree with those that say this is the worst Godzilla movie, but it's definitely near the bottom. It doesn't make me angry the way some of the others do (it's no Godzilla vs. Megalon, at least I can say that), but it's still a big, disappointing waste of time. I strongly recommend skipping this one.

I want to leave on a relative high note though, so here's another shot of Minilla getting electrocuted:

Showcase Presents: Challengers of the Unknown, Vol. 1

2014-01-13T21:19:00.003-08:00

Vol. 1 of Showcase Presents: Challengers of the Unknown collects the earliest appearances of the Challengers in Showcase #6 (Jan/Feb 1957), #7 (Mar/Apr 1957), #11 (Nov/Dec 1957), #12 (Jan/Feb 1957), and Challengers of the Unknown #1 (Apr/May 1958) through #17 (Dec 1960/Jan 1961).

Four men--fearless jet pilot Ace Morgan, master skin diver Prof Haley, circus daredevil Red Ryan, and Olympic wrestling champion Rocky Davis--miraculously survive a plane crash. Realizing that they are "living on borrowed time" and that they no longer fear the unknown, they decide to band together to investigate strange events and battle deadly menaces from beyond the scope of normal human knowledge as the Challengers of the Unknown!

If that synopsis sounds interesting to you, then it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll enjoy this volume. Rampaging robots, giant monsters, alien invaders, super-powered villains--they're all here.

The Showcase issues each contain one story, written by Dave Wood and drawn by Jack Kirby, while the Challengers issues are drawn by Kirby (notably inked by Wally Wood for a few issues) and written or co-written by Kirby with Wood or Ed Herron, until Kirby's departure after issue #8. The writing duties then alternate between Herron and Arnold Drake for the remainder, with Bob Brown as artist.

As usual for the time, the characters don't get much in the way of personality. Ace is the leader, just because. Red sometimes comes across as less mature than the rest. Rocky is the muscle, although none of them shy away from the more violent jobs. And Prof is…Prof. Basically, they're all the same, just with different backgrounds. Even then, their areas of expertise rarely have any effect on the events of the story.

The Challengers are joined in about every other story by June Robbins (whose name changes to June Walker for a few issues before changing back) beginning with their second appearance in Showcase #7, where they name her an honorary member after she helps them defeat runaway robot Ultivac. She doesn't have much character either, although it's worth noting that she is just as useful a member of the team as any of the others (the time being what it was, they still tell her to stay behind sometimes, although of course she doesn't listen).

The stories tend to be pretty similar, with either the Challengers investigating a report of, or encountering themselves, a weird creature or phenomenon of some kind. Sometimes it'll be a criminal having gained some strange power or stolen something that could potentially be very dangerous. Often, there is more to things than there initially appears to be, like a monster turning out to be a missing scientist who took an experimental formula, or what seems to be a threatening character turning out to be a friendly one that helps against bad ones. One of the stories introduces Multi-Man, who would go on to fight the Justice League.

Almost all the stories stand entirely alone, and there aren't any that really stand out as particularly good or interesting. They did get a bit less exciting to me toward the end after the initial interest of the concept had worn off.

The art is a different story. I'm normally not the biggest Jack Kirby fan, but I always like it when he draws weird creatures, and there are a lot of those here. There was also one sequence he drew here that struck me as particularly effective:

I love the creepy shot of Ultivac looking in the window, and you can really feel the energy when his giant hand punches through the wall. One thing Kirby was really good at was creating a sense of scale, and these panels really showcase that. It's more than just drawing something big next to something small--there's the sense of perspective in the panel where it reaches in, and in the last panel there is a sense of movement that matches the difference in scale between the hand and the smaller figures. The hand feels like it's drawing back without any concern for the minuscule people trying to stop it while the guy on the left is putting all his strength into trying to pry it open. I also love the scientist flailing his arms in abject panic. It's great.

Here's another effective example of scale:

And a similar panel by Bob Brown that just doesn't have the same impact:

This is not to say that the Bob Brown issues are bad. He is nowhere near as dynamic as Kirby, but I didn't like his issues any less. In fact, here are some panels where he does pull off scale in an effective way:

While we're at it, and since I love monsters (if you've come this far, you probably do too), let's look at some of the other creatures that can be found in this volume.

From one of the Wally Wood-inked issues:

A Cthulhu-esque creature:

One of the weirdest things I've ever seen, could've walked in from Ultraman:

And finally, tentacle-limbed aliens riding bat-winged, spotted horses with Monoclonius heads:

Other than the creatures, there isn't much to talk about with the art unless you are a Jack Kirby or Wally Wood fan. Wood's inks look great here, and Jack Kirby is Jack Kirby.

There is one other thing to point out about the Challengers.

Anyone familiar with the Fantastic Four would immediately notice that Prof looks like Reed Richards and Rocky Davis looks like pre-Thing Ben Grimm. Red Ryan could even stand in for Johnny Storm. It seems that Kirby barely changed the designs when he co-created the Fantastic Four a few years later. Even their solid purple uniforms would essentially become the FF's blue uniforms, and the FF were originally more explorers into new frontiers of science than traditional superheroes--just like the Challengers. There was even an issue in this volume from after Kirby left where Red kept picking on Rocky (a suggestion of introducing more personality to the characters that didn't end up going anywhere). I wonder if Kirby saw that before he and Stan Lee established the Thing/Human Torch rivalry.

If you think a cross between early Fantastic Four and Jonny Quest sounds like fun or you just like weird creatures, check this one out.

Showcase Presents: Superman, Vol. 1

2014-01-10T11:37:00.001-08:00

Showcase Presents: Superman, Vol. 1 contains Superman #122 (July 1958) through #133 (Nov 1959) and the Superman stories from Action Comics #241 (June 1958) through #257 (Oct 1959).

Each Superman issue during this period featured three unrelated stories, often by different writers and artists, while each Action Comics issue had one Superman story, of similar length to the ones in Superman. As usual for stories of the time, there is very little sense of continuity here.

Among the writers are Jerry Coleman, Otto Binder, Bill Finger, and Jerry Siegel. If you asked me to determine who wrote what just by reading the story, I couldn't. Just about every story has at least one moment that makes you laugh and say "what where they thinking?" I especially enjoy the dialogue given to children (Young Kal-El: "Robot throw ball too hard! Me can't catch it…OWWW!").

Superman has never been the most realistic character, but the stories in this volume take things to a ridiculous level of goofiness. This book is packed to overflowing with moments that made me laugh and say "Whaaat?" From Superman being turned into a humanoid lion to his becoming an "old duffer" with a long, indestructible beard, there is no shortage of crazy stories here. In one story, he plays a trick on Lois by showing her his 'true' face:

What happened to "beauty is only skin deep," Lois?

There's a good one where there is a "day when every father must accompany his son to school--dressed in a costume he wore when he performed a heroic deed." One kid's father decides to go dressed as Superman, and of course ends up being mistaken for the real thing by a group of crooks. As if that weren't enough, Clark Kent is taken hostage and must use his powers to make the crooks think the father is the real Superman until he can find a way to get away unseen. There isn't enough I could say to emphasize how ridiculous this story is, so here are a few panels:

"Winters fainted so realistically, he knocked himself out." Haha, okay. But if that crocodile isn't real, why does it react when the Superman dummy is thrown into the pool? And the pool is filled with real acid!? This museum really cares about authenticity.

A favorite moment comes when Clark is trying to get a good story out of a boring assignment:

Of course, no one looks back later and says, "Hey, Old Bongo is out cold/dead. What happened?"

Here's another good one:

And out of all the women on the planet, this is the one that catches Superman's eye...

The art cycles between Curt Swan, Al Plastino, Wayne Boring, and, for the Lois Lane-centered stories, Kurt Schaffenberger, and, despite how much DC did at the time to make sure their characters were always drawn the same way, they all have pretty distinct styles.

Schaffenberger stands out in terms of the quality of his art. He actually manages to make me like Lois and excels at facial and body expressions. Curt Swan is also really good. Al Plastino isn't bad, but has a more cartoony style than the others.

Wayne Boring is the only one I would maybe describe as bad in certain ways. His storytelling and background work is fine, but his figures are very stiff and often awkwardly postured. Then there's the fact that, although Plastino does it also, he seems to reuse the same Superman positions a lot, as well as the same faces for background characters. He also draws people from a particular angle all the time, where they are seen from the side, facing slightly away from the camera. Chances are they will have the same expression too. That said, it makes those stories funnier for me, so I don't mind him cutting corners like that.

See those two kids at the opposite bottom corners? That's what I'm talking about.

In terms of historical significance, some big characters make their debuts in this volume. Brainiac, Metallo, adult Bizarro and Bizarro Lois (the Superboy Bizarro came first), Lori Lemaris, Titano, Supergirl, and even the bottle city of Kandor all first showed up in these issues, making it a must-read for big Superman fans.

This book is highly recommended to Superman fans and anyone who likes the Silver Age at its goofiest.

Showcase Presents: Blackhawk, Vol. 1

2014-01-04T13:18:00.001-08:00

Showcase Presents: Blackhawk, Vol. 1, collects Blackhawk #108-127 (Jan 1957-Aug 1958), the first 20 issues to be published by DC comics after acquiring the title from Quality Comics.

For the uninitiated, Blackhawk is the leader of the Blackhawks, a former WWII fighter squadron that now battles criminals and weird menaces around the world. Most of the seven members are from different countries, and, this being the '50s, are not much more than stereotypes.

As with most titles of the period, each issue of Blackhawk features three unrelated stories. There is next to no sense of continuity here apart from occasionally recurring villains like Killer Shark. This reprint volume usually lists the writers as 'unknown,' with the art by Dick Dillin.

There isn't much to talk about in the way of writing. The stories, despite sometimes involving such crazy concepts as a giant hand attacking Blackhawk Island or Blackhawk gaining superpowers, are often predictable and usually feel like they drag along. This is largely due to the fact that, outside of their accents and appearances, all the Blackhawks are basically the same. Characters keep repeating the other characters' names when they talk to them, presumably to help the reader remember who is who. It helps with characters like Stanislaus, who hardly gets any screen time, probably because he doesn't have as distinctive of an accent as most of the others, but everyone else is such a ridiculous stereotype that it would be impossible to mix them up.

Who could Chop-Chop be but the 3-foot-tall Asian guy? Who else would the German guy who says 'der,' 'vot,' and 'iss' instead of 'the,' 'what,' and 'is,' be but Hendrickson? Then there's Andre, the Frenchman who says 'ees' and 'ze' instead of 'is' and 'the.' Yes, it's pretty embarrassing. My favorite was Olaf, the musclebound Swede with the huge chin who often exclaims "Yumpin' yiminy!" and seems to replace random words with 'ban,' as in "I ban go outside," or "I ban hungry. I ban make a sandwich."

My favorite story was the one where the Blackhawks encountered female versions of themselves, also from different countries and with different accents.

Offensive to the max!

The art by Dick Dillin is a little more interesting, only because of the depictions of some of the weirder stuff the team encounters. There are lots of robots, advanced weapons, and occasionally even aliens for them to deal with. Other than that, the art isn't bad, but it is a bit static, with even action scenes usually being presented flat and straight on. Again, it doesn't help that we are looking at the same uninteresting characters the whole time.

Super-science!

As a fan of such things as Jonny Quest, where a group of characters investigate strange occurrences and battle international criminals and weird menaces, I expected to like this more than I did. Most of the right elements are there, it just needed better characters and not to focus so much on their accents. I don't plan on revisiting this volume any time soon, if ever, and I can't really recommend it to anyone else.

Showcase Presents: Superman Family, Vol. 1

2014-01-04T12:06:00.002-08:00

Superman Family, Vol. 1, collects the first 22 issues of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen (Sept-Oct 1954 through Aug 1957), and the Lois Lane-centric Showcase #9 (Jul-Aug 1957), as well as the first Lois Lane solo story from 1944's Superman #28. These issues are from way before DC had any audience in mind other than young children, so that should give an idea of what to expect here.

Each issue contains 3 stand alone stories, almost all written by Otto Binder, with no sense of continuity between them, even within in the same issue. Despite Jimmy Olsen being the focus of his own comic according to the title, Superman plays a key role in every single story here. Often Jimmy will be trying to get a scoop on a story or capture criminals himself, with Superman having to rescue him once he gets into trouble. The Lois Lane stories involve Lois trying to prove Superman loves her, or having a dream about what it would be like to be married to Superman.

All the stories here are pretty goofy to varying degrees, sometimes involving time travel by Jimmy or Superman with no questions given to possible consequences, or often having Jimmy gaining temporary superpowers. A lot of the earlier ones make attempts at humor that don't really work…at all…but there is so much inherent humor in the stories being told that you don't need more. In a way, the writing is simplistic, with characters doing something just because the story needed it to happen to move along, or making far-fetched assumptions that turn out to be true for the same reason. A lot of the stories have the same basic structure as well. At the same time, there is a lot of creativity here in terms of the solutions to problems, even if they tend to be completely ridiculous.

An example of something happening just because, AND someone making an assumption that just happens to work out.

NOT an example of one of the more creative solutions to a problem.

All the Jimmy Olsen stories are illustrated by Curt Swan. Swan was a relatively dynamic artist for the time in terms of his figures. Rather than reusing the same postures over and over like Superman-artist Wayne Boring tended to do, every Swan drawing feels fresh and original. When his characters are reacting to something, you can tell what they are feeling just by looking at them. He also puts much more detail into his backgrounds than is strictly required for stories like this. In terms of layouts and storytelling, however, he is pretty straightforward, just giving you what you need to know what's happening. There is also a noticeable change in the art from the early issues to the later ones. The figures get cleaner and start looking more consistent as the book goes on, but the backgrounds become somewhat less interesting.

1954--Rougher figures, interesting backgrounds

1957--Cleaner figures, backgrounds are still interesting and detailed, but don't feel quite as developed

These stories are fun, but entirely forgettable. If you are looking for something with lasting impact on any of the characters, this is not where you are going to find it. There aren't even any Superman villains here. Unless you are a huge Superman fan, a Silver Age fan, or someone who finds unintentionally goofy comics funny, I'd recommend skipping this one.

Carrie (1974)

2013-04-11T19:49:00.001-07:00

by Stephen King

A harassed teenage girl uses her newly-discovered telekinesis to get revenge on those who have wronged her.

Carrie is an interesting novel among King's works for the way it has a very clear and solid line from start to finish. Unlike the way many of his later stories take their time getting to the finish, this one has a natural and steady progression to it. You don't have to see the movie or know the story beforehand--it's clear right from the start what is going to happen.

Carietta White is a chunky, awkward girl, victimized by her classmates. The very first scene in the book is the famous one wherein Carrie, totally unaware of the very concept of the menstrual cycle, experiences her first period in the shower room at her high school. Naturally, she is terrified and confused by what is happening. Her peers react by laughing and taunting her, throwing sanitary napkins at her and chanting "PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iod!"

As if things at school weren't bad enough, Carrie's mother is crazy with a capital CRAZY. Margaret White shuns the world, locks her daughter in a closet and forces her to pray anytime she does something wrong, and neglects to teach her anything about puberty, because sex is a SIN.

There are a couple of bright spots though, in the persons of classmate Sue Snell and gym teacher Miss Desjardin. Both initially treat Carrie with the same general sense of disdain that the others do. Sue laughs along with everyone else, and Miss Desjardin yells at Carrie when she comes in and sees her bleeding in the shower. It isn't until Carrie completely breaks down that they realize how callous they are being. Neither of them register the evidence of Carrie's unique abilities, a softball bat rack falling over and a lightbulb flashing out, her TK unconsciously activated by stress and strong emotions.

As the novel progresses, Carrie gradually gains control over her power. Sue, feeling bad as she realizes how she has acted, decides to do what she can to make up for it, asking her popular boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the upcoming prom. And Miss Desjardin does what she can to punish the other girls for their behavior, but it only pushes one of the girls, a real bitch named Chris Hargensen, to seek revenge on Carrie via public humiliation.

We want to see things work out for Carrie. No one else knows how bad her life really is. She doesn't want anything selfish, she just wants to be treated as just another student, another person. And with Sue's efforts, sometimes it almost looks like things will work out. But King doesn't hide where things are going, which only makes the moments of happiness leading up to the crowning of the Prom King and Queen all the more tragic.

The plot is simple and straightforward. King doesn't pause to explore every minor side character the way he seems to in later books.With the exception of a couple of (enjoyable) scenes between Chris Hargensen's father and the principal that could have been excised without notice, everything is either character development for the main players, documents/excerpts from fictional books that hint at how things will turn out, or story that pushes directly toward the inevitable climax. The book is divided into two main parts--'Blood Sport' and 'Prom Night'--followed by a short third part titled 'Wreckage.' 'Prom Night' is more than half the book, which shows how direct the path to the end really is. Having a predictable plot would usually be a negative aspect of a novel, but King uses it to his advantage here.

Once the climax does come, the book takes a turn. It's no longer about feeling for Carrie the way we did before. We still feel bad about her and what she's doing, feeling that she's justified in a way and knowing that it's wrong at the same time, but the emotional connection we had with her has diminished. Now it's more about the spectacle of Carrie destroying the town, which, while maybe the thing that draws people in in the first place, is not what made us stick around this far. The tension that was built up before as we dreaded seeing things fall apart for Carrie is gone. King seems to have realized this would be the case, keeping Sue away from the Prom so she would still be around to give the readers a more sympathetic viewpoint, but things just go on too long at this point. We start to see the destruction of the town from other minor characters' points of view, but all the explosions and deaths are a poor substitute for the emotional conflict we had before. In fact, it feels almost disrespectful to Carrie herself to be getting enjoyment out of her rampage. The novel doesn't fall apart by any means, but it does become less interesting.

King's first published novel actually displays a much stronger progression of plot than many of his later ones. It's the only one I can think of having read that makes major use throughout of fictional police reports and books written afterward about the incidents involved. Other novels of his do include such things, but none that I've read utilize them to anywhere near the extent that this one does.

A fairly brisk and satisfying read, Carrie makes a good debut for King, but it doesn't hold a candle to some of his better works.

One final note I will make is that this is one of the rare cases where I feel that the filmed version improves on the source material. Brian De Palma's adaptation is nearly perfect to me, capturing and even amplifying the tension from the book as the film builds to the Prom crowning scene. It also brings more attention to the deaths of some of the characters, where the book sometimes seems to brush past them. Other things are changed (Carrie is skinny instead of chunky, John Travolta's Billy Nolan is far less evil than the book's, etc.), but most of the changes are insignificant details, and the bigger ones serve to improve things for the film version.

[REC] 3: Genesis (2012)

2013-04-09T20:23:00.001-07:00

Directed by Paco Plaza

SPOILERS for people who haven't seen [REC] 1 and 2.

Newlyweds Koldo and Clara search for each other after their wedding is crashed by demon-possessed zombies.

At first, this looks like the natural next step in the [REC] series. The first two took place in the same building, and right from the start, this one has a different location, with a larger cast and scale. For the first twenty minutes, it's what you would expect--footage from cameras recording the wedding and hints that someone may be 'infected,' all with a realistic tone. It's a little slow, but after seeing the first two you're expecting things to get crazy, and sure enough, they do: suddenly there are people running around screaming, blood flying, all that good stuff.

And the movie...goes in a different direction.

The first two movies were directed by Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, but this time Plaza goes solo, with Balaguero working on part 4, which probably helps explain the changes.

Knowing that fans of the first two (excellent) [REC] movies tend to dislike, or even hate this one didn't reduce my anticipation for seeing it. I went in knowing the found-footage angle is almost entirely abandoned after that first twenty minutes and that there was a substantial amount of humor in this one.

I was expecting something like the changeover from The Evil Dead to Evil Dead 2. A combination of horror and humor in the vein of The Monster Squad, Slither, or Ghostbusters, something that could be described as a comedy (as I have seen this movie described). While I would have loved a straight continuation of the series, I was open to something like that.

But that's not what this is. Yes, there is humor, but it never comes to the forefront. The movie would be better compared to Tremors or They Live; there are funny things in it, but no real flat-out jokes. Things like Koldo wearing a suit of armor and carrying a shield to protect himself from the infected, or Clara using a chainsaw to cut her dress so she can run faster. The closest thing to an outright joke is a guy who goes to the wedding dressed as 'SpongeJohn SquarePants' because of a copyright dispute, who then has to run around in a sponge costume. Either way, these are certainly not things that fit in with the previous movies.

Once the film switches away from found-footage, we do get a few Evil Dead-style tilted camera angles that felt out of place to me, even given the context of this movie, but after that none of the humor bothered me. Yes, I would have preferred continuing with the scary, serious, claustrophobic atmosphere of the first two, but that didn't mean the change in tone was necessarily bad. You still feel for the characters (well, the main two, at least), and that's what really matters, right?

Unfortunately, the movie has other problems. Side characters get their own little moments, only to either die or disappear the next second. The movie in general seems to set things up that don't really go anywhere, like subplots without any kind of resolution. The second movie revealed that the 'infected' were possessed by demons, and this movie at times seems to be heading for a deeper revelation about that and what's behind it all, but by the end we haven't learned anything new.

Do the differences between this one and its predecessors make it as unwatchable as some claim? No. Certainly, it is a disappointment after the greatness of the first two. But that doesn't mean it's a bad movie. Unfortunately, I wouldn't call it a particularly good one either. Hopefully Balaguero proves with the next one that he was behind the high quality of the first two.

As of this posting, [REC] 3: Genesis is streaming on Netflix.

The real Hawkeye

2012-07-16T13:31:00.001-07:00

As Game of Thrones writer/creator George R. R. Martin noted in his review of The Avengers, the movie was mostly great, but one of the big issues we both had was that the character of Hawkeye got a bit shafted (ooh, my blog's first pun).

Hawkeye fans like myself were hoping for some of the tension that shows up between him and Captain America in the early Avengers comics.

(Avengers #28, May 1966)

Instead we got a rather bland and undefined Jeremy Renner.

Just...whatever...

For now I'll just be hoping we get a more interesting Hawkeye in future films. Seeing him sporting his trademark mask might be a little too much to hope for though.

On a related note, I found an interesting article detailing the supposed world-greatest-archer's lack of good technique in the movie. Check it out.

Cyclops is a dick

2012-05-24T10:02:00.003-07:00

Superman isn't the only superhero capable of superdickery:

(The X-Men #26, Nov. 1966)

C'mon, Cyclops--did being a dick really save you that much time over just going around him? By the way, superdickery.com was definitely a partial inspiration for starting these scans, so be sure to check out the site if you're into this kind of thing (no affiliation).

Oh, and Cyke gets his ass kicked on the next page:

I like to think the guard came over and kicked him in the back of the head while he was unconscious.