Movieweek 8 - The Batman

The Batman (2022) - 7/10

I grew up on the caped crusader, not the brooding Dark Knight but the spandex wearing Adam West style Batman.  In the 80s he had a bit of an identity crisis and along came Alan Moore (The Killing Joke) and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns) and rejuvinated him.

This latest outing follows the excellent Gotham TV series and the Ben Affleck movies recasting the bat with Robert Pattinson.  Pattison does his best and excels in the titular role but as Bruce Wayne he fails to be a convincing troubled young man.  Note to Hollywood, stop writing moody men roles, they aren't appealing and frankly I'm bored of them.

The rest of the cast are utterly convincing and there is some great talent on offer with the likes of John Turturro (Carmine Falcone), Jeffrey Wright (James Gordon) and Colin Farrell who is unrecognizeable as the Penguin.  Zoe Kravitz is a very sultry Catwoman but I couldn't help feel that the story failed her character.  Paul Dano had a good turn but the whole mask thing was a total mistake and is far more appropriate to the Joker.

Overall I can see what they were trying to do and I want to like it, I honestly do, but I feel like this was a misstep rather than a triumph.  How this fits into the DCEU (if that is even a thing anymore) or a trilogy of films heavens knows.  I think that they should go back to the Animated Universe archives and mine the Batman Beyond or Batman of the Future stories.  These I would love to see in live action.

Movieweek 7 - The King's Man and 7 Secret Sisters

The King's Man (2021) - 8/10

Recent sequels have been accused by the MSM critics of including too much fan service in order to get favourable reviews.  However, I see this as giving the audience what they want and The King's Man is a perfect example of this.  Fans of the franchise are treated with respect and get exactly what they want, smart dialogue, world building, a ripsnorting plotline and plenty of great fight choreography.

Transported back in time to the Boer War we are introduced to the Duke of Oxford, his son and General Kitchener.  These are pivotal figures in the run up to World War I and the events which conspire to create the need for the secret organisation we have come to know and love.  The movie is more than just an action movie and it has a lot to say about the bloody business of war and does so with genuine pathos and tenderness.  Above all this is a movie about conflict and emotions, the conflict between a husband's promise to his dying wife and of his duty to King and Country. 

With regards to the cast, any film which stars Ralph Fiennes is worth the admission fee and you will be treated to a masterclass in emotional delivery, ably assisted by Charles Dance and Gemma Arterton, but the real stand out for me was Tom Hollander who managed to play all three royal cousins (King George, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas ) with aplomb.  Rhys Ifans also did a bang up job as Rasputin and I loved how they managed to include the now legendary details of his death (poisoned, shot and drowned).

A great addition to a great franchise.

What Happened to Monday (2019) - 7/10

It seems apt that in my 7th movieweek I should write about seven secret sisters.  

This is a one of those strange movies which has a great premise, a great build up, great characters and acting, but ultimately fails to stick the landing.

Noomie Rapace shows why she is an actress in demand and manages to play septuplet sisters who all have different and distinct characters in this dystopian tale of life in a society struggling to deal with the ravages of overpopulation and dwindling resources.

In a world governed by a One Child policy, Scientist Willem Defoe defies the family planning laws and hides away his seven identical grand daughters (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc).  As adults they take turns to go out each day and play the role of successful banker Karen Settman.  They follow the rules that their grandfather taught them until one day Monday does not come home.

At it's heart this is a thrilling mystery in which we are drip fed tidbits of backstory and flashback which establish just how careful the sisters have been up to the moment when Tuesday must go out into the world and find out what happened to her sister and maintain her cover in full knowledge that their secret might be discovered at any moment.

A tense thriller with a twist in the tale which is well worth the wait.  I certainly didn't see it coming at all and I'm uusally quite good at spotting dropped hints and those contrarian expectation busting reveals.

Unfortunately for this movie, the final act is clumsily handled.  I would still recommend the movie, but it would be much lower down on my list of top 10 dystopian future films.    

Movieweek 6 - Big Bug and Gangs of New York

Big Bug (2022) - 7/10

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is one of my favourite auteur directors so I jumped at the chance to watch his latest movie when it appeared in my Netflix notifications.

Visually this is a sumptuous movie and meticulous attention to detail went into its production and visual effects.  The characters are clearly defined and their motivations and mannerisms well expressed by an excellent cast.  However, the movie falls a bit flat.  This is clearly meant to be a stage play comedic farce in the style of a one room play.  

A cautionary tale of what might happen when an AI takes over the running of our everyday lives, the characters are completely at the mercy of the Yonyx AI which has developed some sort of human hating bug and has decided that humans are a lesser species.  The disturbing human baiting TV Shows increasingly become more brutal and humiliating as the Yonyx tightens its grip.Every attempt they make to escape or to thwart the Yonyx's tyranny only lands them in deeper water making the viewer feel like there is really no hope on the horizon.  

There are some genuinely humerous moments but these are few and far between in what could have been a much tighter piece.  Perhaps this movie suffered from production issues during the pandemic, I don't know, but I hope that Jeunet's next project returns to the form of Amelie, Mic Macs and The Young and Prodigious T.S.Spivet.

Gangs of New York (2002) - 7/10

It's been 20 years since I first saw Gangs of New York and I never really liked it the first time around.  I rarely enjoy fims that have been hyped to high heaven and this Scorcese epic was one of the biggest movies of its day. 

I was impressed by the cinematography from the get-go the sets were huge and complex and yet never drew the focus of attention away from the characters of the story.  The characters are everything to this movie, which, is essentially a tale of a son's revenge against the man who killed his father.   

The cast do an excellent job of portraying these brutal people from a brutal time clawing their way through life trying to make something of themselves.  Many die along the way, but a few become changed by history and opportunity.  This is one of John C Reilly's first "serious" movies and alongside some character acting greats like Brendon Gleason, Daniel Day Lewis and Jim Broadbent he does a great job.  Less convincing are the younger stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz whose portrayals seem so much less intense and captiviating.  Perhaps this is an intentional move on the part of the director as the road of their lives is so much less travelled and they are not world weary or burdened by their pasts.

I did enjoy this movie much more the second time around although I am still left feeling that this was very much a movie which didn't have much of a tale to tell and that there should have been much more interplay between the gangs of New York. 

Movieweek 5 - The House with Gunpowder Milkshake

Hopefully my real life has settled down a bit and I can get on with doing what I love which is watching movies and playing games.

The House (2020) - 6/10

This is an incredibly creepy stop-motion animated film comprising three short stories.  To be absolutely honest took me several attempts to get through the first story as it was so creepy.  The set dressing and animation style is perfect.  It's a blend of Coraline meets Fantastic Mr Fox and there is a good deal of "boil" (when a models hair or fur moves between shots and makes it look like their skin is boiling) which adds to the creepiness of the whole thing. 

The voice cast are a all great British talents, including Mark Heap, Paul Kaye, Stephanie Cole, Helena Bonham-Carter, Miranda Richardson and even Jarvis Cocker.  I'm a big fan of Mark Heap who just manages to deliver his officious lines as Mr.Thomas in a way that hints subtly at something dark, something with menacing undertones. 

I'm not a big fan of creepy movies in general, so I was glad that the second story was much more to my liking.  The central character is a struggling hobbyist property developer trying to renovate and sell the house as a recession begins to bite.  Anthroporphised animals doing human things is stock in trade for animated movies and this one pulls it off extremely well.  It leans hard into the weird rather than creepy and there is a moment that reminded me of the Whoopi Goldberg movie The Telephone which brought a wry smile.  

The third act was even better and definitely an homage to both Wes Anderson's animated work with shades of Studio Ghibli thrown in for good measure.  It was a great way to end what were three very different tales about this mysterious house and the people who live in it. 

There's a gem of an RPG plot in there as well.  It would be very interesting to play a game where the location stays the same but you play different descendents of your character throughout time.  Sort of how they reused the set of Nerva Beacon in the epic Dr Who stories Ark in Space / Revenge of the Cybermen story.   

If you can get past the first act then you will enjoy this.

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

Karen Gillan and Lena Heady team up in this brutal comic book style assassination story.  It feels like it was based on a comic book in the same way as Guns Akimbo or Polar, but this is an original story from the pens of Navot Papushado and Ehud Lavski.

Very stylishly shot, with heavy 50s come 80s pop culture palette this movie leans heavily into dramatic cinematography.  Paul Giamatti is seen once again as a menacing crime boss (I loved his role in Shoot'em Up) and I absolutely loved the Librarian characters played by Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh and Carla Gugino.  In fact I've been a massive fan of Angela Bassett since I first watched the dystopian sci-fi movie Strange Days which has to be one of the best cyberpunk movies of them all.  

This movie is popcorn fare of the highest order, a classic tale of the hitman who hits the wrong man and then gets thrown to the wolves.  Very enjoyable if you are a fan of violent gun movies like Hard Boiled, John Wick or Nobody.  Karen Gillan performs adequately but when she shares the screen with real acting talent she just doesn't dominate the screen.  Intensity is the name of the game here and she just doesn't burn as bright as her co-stars.  Ralph Inneson also does a good turn as Jim Mcalester.

Movieweek 4 - Norwegian Marital Murder , Bicycle Thieves and Revenge

A tough week in which I needed as much distraction as possible.  Thankfully I have a NETFLIX subscription.

The Trip (2021) - 7/10

Aksel Hennie has been one of my favourite Norwegian actors ever since I watched the amazing Max Manus and the stupendous Headhunters.  He is one of the countries bankable stars and crops up from time to time in Hollywood blockbusters like The Cloverfield Paradox or The Martian when there is a need for a scandanavian character.

In this dark comedy he is paired with the equally talented Noomi Rapace as a married couple who are unhappy with the way their marriage and careers have panned out.  Their answer is to kill each other for the insurance money during a planned trip to a cabin in the fjords.  There I said it fjords. 

If you like Cohen brothers style black comedies like Fargo you will like this movie.  It is well put together and pacing is great, there are very few moments when something isn't happening on screen and immediate flashbacks establish the motives and set up for what just happened when new protagonists enter the stage.

This is a Norwegian language film dubbed into English which I think is a mistake as the nuances of Rapace and Hennie's performances are lost in the dubbed dialogue.  I would recommend watching this with subtitles. 

All in all an entertaining 2 hours with stunning scenery and a fun tale of marital strife which would make a great Fiasco playset.    

Riders of Justice (2020) - 7/10

A Danish revenge saga starring Mads Mikkelsen (Fantastic Beasts 3, Casino Royale, Polar) who is always entertaining in his strong silent type roles.  If you haven't seen Polar or Arctic you need to check them out.

Mads is Markus, a hardened soldier who returns from operations in the desert when his wife is killed in a tragic train accident and he needs to look after his daughter Mathilde.  Fellow survivor Otto, a statistics expert, thinks this was deliberate and, after the police dismiss his claims, he assembles a team of hackers and goes full detective to find out who organised the assassination.

The cast are excellent and in particular Andrea Heick Gadeberg who has the difficult job of playing Mathilde, who despite being quite broken herself, is the glue that holds all these broken people together.

The story is double edged as you follow the emotional ups and downs of a bunch of very broken characters whilst they try to keep their covert operation a secret from Mathilde and the police.  Gradually we learn how these characters got to where they are, their bonds, what dark secrets they are witholding and ultimately how they start to begin to heal by living this strange new familial existence.

When they get close to their objective, the tension ramps up considerably.  The final 30 minutes are utterly gripping and you really don't know who is going to survive.  For me the initial 20 minutes were a bit slow, but once Otto and Markus meet for the first time, it really picked up and I was hooked.  Well worth the price of admission.

Movieweek 3 - Spider-men vs Munich

Real life events once again got in the way of my screentime and life appears to be giving me a bit of a punch in the guts at the moment.  However, I did manage to slip in one long awaited movie and a bit of an epic historical espionage thriller. 

Spider-man: No Way Home (2021) - 8/10

I was really looking forward to this latest outing of Tom Holland's Peter Parker and to be fair it was a pretty good movie if you view it through the lens of setting up the Multiverse of Madness story arc.  As a standalone spiderman movie it kind of sucked.  

I totally get what they were trying to do with the premise.  Bring back some characters from yesteryear, fan favourites.  It was a neat idea which fell flat in execution.  We have seen this spider-man fight, as a member of The Avengers, much more imposing and dangerous villains than those from his past and they just seemed so provincial.  Moving the focus to helping and not killing them was something new but I just didn't care enough about them to feel empathy towards them.  

Live action Doc Oc was always a talker rather than a doer and whilst I always enjoy seeing Alfred Molina on the screen, this role is really beneath him.  I did like that he accepted his redemption with grace and humility which made him seem like a much more complex character than perhaps his earlier outing gave him credit for.  However, Sandman was always a pretty pathetic character, Electro's alter ego was more interesting than he was and Willem Dafoe's green goblin was only interesting when he went full goblin.

It was nice, but a bit weird, to see the other spider-men, although Toby Macguire is really starting to show his age.  This felt like they were trying to reference Spider-Man into the Spider Verse but in a much less satisfying way.  Each has their own cautionary tale for the MCU spider-man and this was painfully self aware such as referencing the back problems, the "Amazing" prefix etc etc.  I'm not adverse to a dollop of fan service every now and then, but this was really quite heavy handed.

Ultimately the film is a two hour prelude to a quick and largely down beat finale in the last 30 minutes.  I felt quite depressed by the ending and I hope that this will ultimately be resolved in future MCU movies because I truly felt that everyone got a raw deal at the end of this movie.  

Perhaps this is the MCU's defining moment, it's Empire Strikes Back middle film, it just definitely wasn't what I expected of a spider-man movie.

Munich: The Edge of War (2021) - 9/10

Wow, what a movie!!  This is a real tense espionage thriller set against the backdrop of impending war and the Munich peace conference.  Wonderfully cast with the ever classy Jeremy Irons who blows everyone away with his portrayal of Neville Chamberlain, but some creditable performances by some younger faces.  

This movie is based on the best selling book by Robert Harris and is an insight into the year long prelude before the outbreak of WWII which gave the Allies the time to prepare to win.  Chamberlain has been treated quite badly by history, mostly through the benefit of hindsight, and this movie goes someway towards trying to explain the events surrounding the peace conference and the famous piece of paper waving moment which ultimately defined his Prime Ministership.

It's a beautifully crafted movie with perfect pacing and stage craft which is rare from Netflix.  Every moment is engrossing and the viewer feels like they are transported to Autumn 1938 and that they are a fly on the wall at a pivotal moment in history.  The last time I felt like this was when I watched the masterfull Churchill.

This movie manages to pull off the almost impossible, a war movie without any war.  I recommend any real cinefile should put this on their bucketlist immediately.  

Movieweek 2022 - Week 2 - Flying Sharks, a Titanium Girl & some Eternals

I didn't watch as many movies this week as real life events got in the way a little.  I am now back to the grind after the long Christmas break and I had the small issue of finding a new car.  Hopefully my evenings will now be free to relax and watch some movies.

Sky Sharks (2020) - 3/10

Sometimess I say that I watch movies so that you don't have to and that adage has never been truer than in the case of Sky Sharks.  

Having seen the trailer for this movie about a year ago, I was honestly looking forward to seeing this and hoping that it would be another cult classic like Iron Sky, or Dead Snow.  It's not, it's an out and out exploitation movie more like Sharknado but with more sex gags, and not great ones either.

There are precious few moments in the movie which I thought were worthwhile and it seems to lumber from one set piece to another.  The characters are instantly forgettable as they try to end the Nazi Sky Shark threat once and for all but the only way to do that is to sacrifice a plane full of innocent people to lure out the Sharkwaffe.

Not content with having zombie nazis, there's a whole muddled section about zombie vietcong.  It makes precious little sense and should be avoided like the plague.

Titane (2021) - 5/10

Titane is a tough film to watch.  I'm no stranger to violent french films, I loved Doberman, I loved Man Bites Dog and I have watched Irreversible, but Titane just didn't grab me.  

The main character of Alexia is just a little bit too hard to watch in places and I had to take a break (of 2 months) before going back to complete watching it.  This is always a bad sign and either tells me that I am just not in the right mood for this movie or that it is really not a great movie.

This is an entirely different situation to that of movies like Fight Club and the TV Show Squid Game which I actively avoided thanks to the trailers.  However, having watched both, I can understand why I reacted negatively to the marketing.  

Titane should be right up my alley but the central premise to the film, that psycopathic murderer Alexia has been knocked up by an automobile, is a bit too far fetched for a movie which takes itself very seriously.  SFter a killing spree, she then runs away and gets taken in by a fireman who lost his son.  The relationship between Alexia and Vincent is a strange one full of confused sexual tension and paternal grief. 

There is a good amount of body horror in this movie and well done to whoever did the prostetics work and practical effects as they were flawless and utterly convincing.  It reminded me somewhat of the Tetsuo movies which were an awesome blend of cyberpunk and film noir with a similarly transhumanist motif running through them.  However, they are much simpler films which don't try to tell multiple stories full of complex human emotions.

Definitely one of the oddest films that I have seen in the last ten years.

Eternals (2021) - 4/10

The MCU lumbers on like a juggernaught in this latest release from the house of mouse and we are starting to to run out of really compelling stories to tell it seems.  Full disclosure, I am not a hardcore superhero movie fan and I prefer the way that DC Animated Universe treats the properties of Batman, The Justice League, Superman and Justice League Dark to the live action Marvel universe.

The Eternals promised a lot with its huge cast of A-List talent and I am so glad that Hollywood has recognised Gemma Chan as an actress who can headline a movie.  But, and it is as big bit, this movie had pacing problems from the beginning.  It chose to ponderously establish the emotional baggage that many of the characters had saddled themselves with over the course of 7,000 years spent watching over humanity and waiting for the Emergence.   

The real story was of them gradually wiping out the deviants until none remain.  Instead, against a backdrop of the fall of Tenoctitlan, we have Salma Hayak (Ajak) nonchalantly declare that the last deviant was dead.  Like a 60s supergroup, the band breaks up and they each go their seperate ways, but we don't get any montage of what they do with temselves in the intervening 500 years.  

This was a great opportunity to do some B-Roll of characters lives intertwined with famous pivotal historical events but instead we go straight into a Bollywood dance number so jarring that it rips you right out of the movie.  We don't really understand why, because in the few scenes that Kingo was in, there was literally no character development.  I cared much more about his valet than I did about him.  This is a big flaw in the build up of the movie because we struggle to bridge the gap between the Eternals as they were and what they have become.  We have little to no reference to what they have witnessed, the wars they have seen, the things they have done to hide their presence from humans as they openly live as literal Gods among men.

We then jet off to some desert hovel in Australia where Gilgamesh is living in relative squalor looking after Thena where Sersi is told by Arishem the Prime Celestial, the earth shattering truth (quite literally) behind their mission.  This was another wasted opportunity to dump some Celestials lore whihc would have driven Marvel fans wild.  For example, how many celestials are there?, who are they?, how long do they live? why do they need more celestials? what functions do they perform? what are their powers? why is Tiamut important? If celestials are so powerful why can't Arishem (The Judge) wipe out all the Deviants in a snap of his fingers?  Seems like Celestials are just a plot convenience to me.

From this point on you would think that the story would really pick up pace as we now know that there is a ticking clock.  As Tiamut's emergence draws near why aren't we seeing more of these global earthquakes and scenes of minor Deviants ravaging metropoli? 

Some of these characters were hard to love as in the case of Druig, and others you just felt were nothing more than an artists preliminary sketch (Makkari).  When we catch up with Druig he has become some sort of religious cult leader in the Amazonian jungle, controlling his followers with his mind.  This is not at all creepy behaviour and makes him really endearing to the viewer (irony).

There was precious little to like about some of the characters who clearly have been playing some background role in the evolution of humanity and then "check out" when the going gets tough.  The scene of Phastos in the ashes of Hiroshima was particularly trite and cliche without any other WWII scenes.  

What was Druig, a character who clearly had the deepest connection and concern for humanity doing while war raged across the globe?  It would have been great to see a character reading a newspaper about the exploits of Captain America fighting the Nazis.  It's as if this movie operates within an MCU vacuum, the story is selectively blind and deaf to what is going on in the world around it. 

The problem with this approach is that it ultimately dehumanises the Eternals as characters.  If they can comfortably sit back and spectate as the the Nazi onslaught kills 15 to 20 million people across Europe, how are we expected to empathise with them when they get upset at the killing of 130 to 226 thousand people at the end of the war?  We needed those historical reference points to establish the character's gradual descent into disillusionment, anger and guilt.

This was handled much better in the movie Highlander (1986) in just a couple of flashbacks we learn how Connor Mcleod stumbled through history doing what little he can as an immortal without any flashy superpowers. 

Eternals could have been a good movie but it suffered from terribly poor storytelling, too many characters and laborious exposition.          

Movieweek 2022 - Week 1 - A Matrix of Saints, Settlers, Aliens and Ghostbusters

In a new series of regular posts I write about the movies I watched this week.  They could be new or they could be old but I'll watch it and in the interests of keeping these reviews spoiler free I'll white out any neat plot devices or story beats which I find worthy of a follow up in.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) - 6/10

For some the Matrix was the movie that turned them on, for me it was always a bit so-so and intenionally obtuse.  However, I will concede that it was ground breaking in its visual style and special effects, so much so that the whole movie industry became singularly obsessed with creating a signature special effect for each new movie.  

When bollywood made its own Terminator movie (Enthiran) you knew that the game was up, CGI had indeed made all things possible whether we wanted it or not.  TMR actually self references this in its own script then proceeds to ignore the irony and go ahead and create a new bullet time effect.

Watching the Matrix Resurrections felt, for me, like watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and not in a good way.  It looked like the Matrix, and had all the story beats of the Matrix, but ultimately it was a hollow shell of the original.  I enjoyed seeing some of my favourite characters return, like The Merovingian, but he was like the movie, a ghost of his former self.

I really hope that the Wachowski's can finally put the franchise to bed with this 4th installment and move on to making new stories.  If not we might just see The Matrix 5: Dead Man Walking. 

The Many Saints of Newark (2021) - 7/10

I confess to having only watched Sopranos in clip form on Youtube despite it starring one of my favourite wiseguys Stephen Van Zant.  Had I known that this was the Tony Soprano origin story I might have passed up on the opportunity and I'm glad I didn't.

The movie focuses on the crew which influenced Tony Soprano's early life and what made him turn to a life of crime.  Ray Liotta does double duty playing the Moltisanti twins, one of which has been imprisoned for murder and become a jail house philosopher and self confessed jazz nut. 

A special mention goes to Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, who does a great turn as a teenage Tony Soprano.  I also loved the expert portrayal of Silvio Dante by James Magaro.  He manages to recreate some of the physicality of Stephen Van Zant which resonated with me.

This was a genuinely interesting tale set inthe 1960s and early 70s at the height mob and is interwoven with the story of the civil rights movement and the Newark riots of 1967. 

This was a genuinely engrossing story of youthful potential corrupted by the failings in the adults and "the life" that swirls around him.

Settlers (2021) - 5/10

I had no expectations going into this and I'm kind of glad that I didn't.  Let me go through the good points first.  The art direction was fantastic despite what was clearly a small budget.  

I've read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" Trilogy which details the massive undertaking that terraforming will be and so was surprised to see people walking around without vac suits.  The location looked like a NASA briefing and I half expected the cast to stumble upon some half buried mars rover at any moment.  Clearly the location scouts had done their homework and this went some way to helping me suspend my disbelief regarding the whole terraforming thing.  I was so glad when they revealed the reason and understood why this hadn't happened earlier as it becomes a huge plot point for the whole story going forward.

The cast were great.  It's nice to see Johnny Lee Miller on screen again and Brooklyn Prince, the young actress who played Remmy, was fantastic.  Sofia Boutella did a great job in a tough role, enough to have me tracking down a copy of Prisoners of the Ghostland.  Ismael Cruz Cordova made a very convincing and mysterious bad guy and it will be interesting to see how he manages in the upcoming Lord of the Rings TV show..

However, what an absolutely depressing tale.  It reminded me of Z for Zacariah which I also found beautiful to look at but utterly depressing.  The pacing was slow and drawn out, probably intentional, as the plot unfolds at a snails pace.  The tragedy in the tale largely happens off camera giving you this anoying sense of uncertainty about what is actually going on and the the story seems to be going nowhere until the final twenty minutes or so.

I'm not saying that every sci-fi movie needs to be an action epic but this was just too slow for my liking.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) - 7/10

I was cruising the Netflix and stumbled across one I hadn't seen in a couple of years.  The most expensive film in European cinematic history and another collaboration of Luc Besson and Jean-Claude Mézierès based on the popular Valerian and Laureline graphic novel series by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières.  This movie is a visually spectacle, let down only slightly by an odd plot and wooden acting from Dehane, Delevinge and Rihanna.

There are so many cool ideas running through the movie which more than make up for the ones that fall flat on their face.  Big Market in particular is a cornucopia of visuals and plot hooks with a few Besson easter eggs thrown in there.  The trans dimensional nature of the whole setting is something genuinely fresh and new.  I loved the magnetic chaser balls, the strange alien kid "Da", the gun which splits its barrel.  The pearls are cool and I especially love the dying soul wave idea which could be a great plot hook for any RPG.  Give me more please.

There is an outside chance that we will see a sequel at some point in the future (according to Luc Besson) as this was very well received by fans and despite it not being a commercial success Besson does have the ability to make a great film.

In the meantime try to find the 2007 anime series Time Jam: Valerian and Laureline which in my humble opinion is well worth a watch if you enjoy a good space opera. 

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) - 9/10

When I saw the early trailer of Ecto-1 under a dusty tarp, I hoped that this would be the Ghostbusters movie that we were all waiting for.  After a long wait I am glad to say it is and it is well worth that wait.

Whilst the movie undoubtedly reverberates with echoes of the past, it breaths new life into the franchise with new characters and new possibilities.  The story revolves around the central figure of Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), a wannabe scientist as she uncovers the truth about her Grandfather's past following his sudden death.  Her down at heel family are evicted and move to Summerville, Illinois to attend to the estate of a man they barely knew in the hope that this will lead to a change in their fortunes.

It's a story of self belief and adventure and very much reminds me of another classic, The Goonies, in that the heroes are misfits and social failures who are just trying to get to the bottom of a mystery.  In a world gone mad we need stories like this to take our minds off what is going on outside our own windows.

The cast and director deliver a nigh perfect blend of action, adventure, humour, tension and pathos with every story beat.  A complete antidote to 2016's unfunny, synical, confused and pathetic reboot.  Jason Reitman gets what Ghostbusters is about.  It's not a comedy, it's a spooky adventure with comedic moments and not a contest in who can get the biggest laugh or the wittiest punchline.  It's not about slapstick, fart gags or puking.  There's a story, a plot, real jeopardy for the characters and not just an assortment of gag sequences which when stretched out together fill out the runtime.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (there's a good reason why they chose that title) is also an homage to legendary comic actor and writer Harold Ramis.  In his portrayal as The Ghost Farmer, Bob Gunton treats his memory with respect and reverance, a perfect way to honour a comedy legend.  The Ghostbusters family are almost fully reunited (with the noted exception of Rick Moranis) with Annie Potts reprising her role as Janine Melnitz and Sigourney Weaver returning in a post credits sequence with Bill Murray.

Paul Rudd does a fantastic job as does Carrie Coon as the "responsible adults" and the unwitting new Gatekeeper and Keymaster of Zuul.  The return of Gozer as the supernatural vilain of the piece adds the motif of unfinished business and adds an extra layer of backstory with the wonderful if brief role of Ivo Shandor (J K Simmons).  Noticeably no-one gets slimed in this movie and there is no rerpise for Slimer, instead we get a new character called muncher who looks like a blue tardigrade.  If there is a criticism to be had of this movie it is the lack of ghosts.  Something I hope they will rectify in the near future with whatever is trying to escape the failing containment unit in the dilapidated firehouse.      

I am so glad that they made this movie and gave the fans what they wanted, a real ghostbusters movie.