7 More Reviews... Including The Latest Terminator Movie!

Best thing: Tricking mafia thugs into being eaten by a giant flying monster.
Worst thing: Slow pacing and expecting me to care about a singer/wannabe-hoodlum who can't sing (yes we are forced to watch a performance). Also his "I'm so stressed and that makes me hit my girlfriend" routine, which would make me disinclined to engage with the character anyway, isn't helped by the stilted dialogue from both him and the girlfriend.

A large bird-like creature is supposedly terrorising a modern city.

It's a really dumb premise, the film isn't paced all that well and the central monster is barely seen.

Yet the actors work really hard to sell us on the material. There are actually a number of points where I was pulled into a scene in spite of everything.

John Carradine's charm really helps, so it's annoying that most of the film involves a screw-up getaway driver wannabe. The actor playing this role is distinctly lacking in subtlety (though I really don't think the script helped).

Overall this felt like it had a remarkable amount of potential considering how utterly stupid the basic ideas appeared to be. The idea of an Aztec god/monster terrorising a modern city has more power than you might expect.

Q is an interesting film but, on balance, I wouldn't say it was a particularly good film. I can't say I regret seeing it, mind you.

C-

Best thing: Awesome depiction of time travel with a mixture of strangely timeless effects work and wonderful iconic designs (particularly for the time machine itself and for the fearsome Morlocks)

Worst thing: Betrays the central moral of HG Wells' original story with some potentially worrying consequences.

This old classic sci-fi film is pretty well paced (and I certainly felt it was better paced than the old movie of War Of The Worlds) and it features some very engaging characters, especially the charming protagonist.

The third act takes some liberties with the story which helpfully add to the action, but annoyingly negate the conclusion of the HG Wells short story.

Spoilers for the original short story:
In HG Wells story there are two races of humans that have developed by the future. One is descended from the upper classes and the other descended from the lower classes. One has lost all necessity to adapt, while the other has adapted to being kept in the dark out of sight. The result is that the upper classes are now food for the lower classes. In the movie the time travel actively destroys the lower classes to save the upper classes. He has no cautionary tale to send to modern day humanity about the need for a more equitable society in the film. The film lacks HG Wells cynicism and satire.

Still, the film remains fun and visually engaging, but HG Wells' original story had a more powerful meaning while the story in the film feels rather slight.

B-

Best thing: Interviews with a Kaiju fighting shape-shifting man, becoming apathetic about his fledgling career.

Worst thing: The actual fight scenes depicted with terrible 3D animation.

While there are many powerful scenes about the background of the kaiju-fighting hero Big Man Japan and while the comedy works quite well in places, it's never really enough to make for an entertaining movie. The movie's heart is in the right place, but in the end I found this more weird than funny and was never properly able to suspend disbelief.

D-

Best thing: A very compelling premise gradually revealed and unfurling into a wider mystery.

Worst thing: Rather too long spent at a pagan bacchanal. Also the protagonist isn't terribly relateable.

Seconds involves a secret company who offer an opportunity to rich people who want a second chance at a happy life.

The initial set-up is brilliant and the ending is brilliant. Yet I found the film dragged in the middle and that the romance elements were a bit unconvincing. The most annoying scene for me involved a bacchanal where everyone gets naked and stomps grapes. It's a symbolic and arty scene and yet I found it entirely unnecessary.

This is very clever sci-fi and mostly a very effective exploration of its speculative ideas.

B+

Best thing: Zombie gas as fuel and psychic zombie-control powers. Some definite original ideas are brought to the zombie genre here.

Worst thing: A lack any depth of personality from the characters.

An Australian zombie movie with humour, action scenes and some pretty twisted lab experiment scenes.

Still, the ending of "Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead" felt like it was setting us up for an exciting sequel and I couldn't help but feel that we could have reached that stage earlier and had a more compelling third act as a result.

Wyrmwood has  lot of characters to balance and in the end most of them felt rather thinly written. Even Leon Burchill's very funny aboriginal character is more funny than a genuine personality. At certain stages in the film, characters sacrifice themselves to save others, but the characters didn't appear to have really bonded enough to make those scenes work.

A lot of the humour didn't land for me. The action didn't always feel like it was filmed in the best way, with quick cuts making those sequences hard to follow. Still there's a lot of excitement, a lot of cool ideas and overall there's enough here to make it worthy of a recommendation.

B-

Best thing: Great character interactions and humour. Also awesome timeless effects from Ray Harryhausen.

Worst thing: A bit of a rushed ending.

It's interesting that this film pre-dates the moon landings. That was such an iconic moment in history so it's rather quaint that we start with this alternative version of the event at the start of the movie.

And what do the astronauts find on the moon? A small Union Jack flag and a note from the prior visitors. And it turns out that one of those named has been claiming to have visited the moon and ridiculed for it for many decades.

The first half of this film is excellent. The characters are clearly defined and have great chemistry. Their interactions are very funny. Also the Harryhausen effects are brilliant, long before we go into space. The effects involving the anti-gravity material the scientist develops are very impressive.

In the second half, the aliens on the moon look petty cool. Also there's a cool concept that the aliens shove members of their species into suspended animation whenever they aren't needed. But the plot seems to lose direction once our protagonists meet the aliens. The film even pulls out The War Of The Worlds ending because they didn't want to use the ending from the book.

Nevertheless I loved the first half so much and even in the second half and all the way to the eventual ending, there's a delightful comic tone. I had a great time.

I haven't read the novel so perhaps I'd be less impressed if I knew how far it was deviating from HG Wells original message. However, this is so much fun that I can't imagine my opinion changing all that much.

B+

Best thing: Kyle Reece in a one on one fight with the original terminator was probably my favourite part, though I also loved the nano-bot effects of the new terminator.

Worst thing: John Connor. It's tough enough trying to portray the indispensable military leader and saviour of mankind. But it's even harder to then explain why he would be fighting against his own ideals. In the end, the film doesn't even try to deal with this. The entire explanation is "he's insane" and that is a real pity since that is the entire central premise of the film being given short shrift.

I think I feel the same way about this as a lot of people felt about Jurassic World. Plenty of people thought that was a wonderful tribute to everything that was great about the Jurassic Park movies. Personally I thought Jurassic World was boring and stupid and the decision to neuter the velociraptors absolutely turned me against that film.

Terminator Genisys is a mash up of events and ideas from the other terminator movies. The liquid metal terminator, the reprogrammed model 101, Kyle Reece, badass Sarah Connor. It's all here.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is brilliant, reprising his dad-machine role from T2 with a bit of the psychology knowledge from T3. Even as early as T2 there has been a comedic side to Arnie's terminator and this film really runs with that. The main protagonists being arrested and interviewed was very funny to me and JK Simmons' inclusion as an outsider watching from the sidelines is genius.

Jai Courtney is not remotely the train wreck that he's been made out to be. (And I'll also note that he was better than Bruce Willis in the horrifyingly bad 5th Die Hard movie.) Heck, Michael Biehn's performance in the first film is not all that great anyway. Jai Courtney is dealing with a film with a very different tone and being a misery guts growling, grunting panting and wheezing through every scene would not have worked, even if it would have been closer to Biehn's original performance.

Now admittedly the horror tone is lost here. So, like with the velociraptors in Jurassic World, if you think toning that down is a deal breaker you are not going to like this. Personally I don't mind Terminator Genisys just being fun without being terrifying.

I really do wish the plot was more compelling though. Why do the protagonists want to travel forward in time anyway? It felt like the backstory about Sarah Connor's childhood raised by a terminator and her attitude towards her destiny was much deeper and more interesting than the central story of stopping Skynet... again.

It's not the best terminator movie and, missing the horror roots of the series, it couldn't be. It is, however, a lot of fun and a much better end to this franchise than Terminator Salvation would have been. I had a great time.

B+