Gravity I guess?

Tempy wrote:

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

He's done it

If you can do it in one sitting I’ll be impressed. I’ve done two sittings so far and I’m half an hour in.

I remember looking at the timeline an hour in and being shocked I had only sat through 60 minutes and was half way through. Yet despite that I still feel it needed to be a much longer film, even if I was glad it wasn't.

It feels like it should be 3 hours.

Only cos g is watching it right now.

JUSTICE LEAGUE. There will be spoilers.

So here we are with the latest thrilling instalment from The Poundland Cinematic Universe, and kill me now, because this is the worst one yet.
This is a truly awful film. How bad is this film you ask? It's so bad that it genuinely fails to introduce to the audience just who these main characters actually are that make up the titular Justice League. I shit you not. 
Now I grew up reading Marvel comics, so I don't know a whole lot about the Poundland Universe. I know who Batman is. I know who Superman and Wonder Woman are. Hell, I even know who The Flash is. But wait, who in the blue hell are these other guys? There's some watery twat who I presume is Captain Birdseye, and Black Robot Man who is, well I've watched the film and I still have no fucking idea who he is. Brilliant.

Franchise Building 101. Introduce and establish your protagonists before you have them team up. Not after. Because by the time this train wreck is over, we really don't care who they were.

The story is incomprehensible nonsense. So Superman is dead and some big CGI twat has turned up to claim the Poundland Infinity Stones and destroy the world. This is clearly an every day event on earth now because the sum total that the entire human race takes notice of this guy is the Gotham Police Force mentioning that eight people have been kidnapped, and a family of Russian peasants hiding under a table. That's it. Nobody else on the planet other than The Avengers Justice League even notices any of this happening. That's how much peril there is in this film. Nobody on the planet gives a fuck. So why should we?

Franchise Building 101. Don't make your villain a CGI character, because we don't give a fuck about CGI characters.

Who is this guy? I've never heard of him. He's like Poundland Thanos. We're told that thousands of years ago he tried to conquer the earth, but The Lesbians and the Fish Men kicked his ass and stole his Poundland Infinity Stones. Then he went away, for thousands of years, but now he's back, because, well, actually I have no idea why he's back. Perhaps he was just in the neighbourhood and thought he'd pop in.

Superman is dead though, but then he's alive again. The world also fails to notice this, which is strange, because it's implied that we were all quite upset when he died. Terrible terrible writing. You have a franchise that killed the indestructible son of Krypton then brought him back to life and somehow managed to make that an absolute non-event. This should have been truly earth-shattering stuff but they absolutely blow it by having The Justice League resurrect him in what plays out like a homage to Young Frankenstein, complete with comedy grave digging scene. It's unbelievably bad.

The League unsurprisingly are utterly useless without Superman. The film needs him because these clowns don't have the chops to avoid getting their asses handed to them by CGI Bad Man without him intervening. He's the doomsday bomb. He just shows up at the end and batters fuck out of the bad guy, rendering The Justice League pointless (though they did manage to save that Russian family who were hiding under a table, so I suppose that's something). And then just to add to the bafflement, CGI Bad Man's henchmen all turn on him and drag him away up one of those massive blue pillars of light that you're obliged to have in all of these films, and that's it, he's gone. What the actual fuck?

At the start of the film we're told that in the wake of Superman's death, the bank has foreclosed on the old Kent farm and his mum has had to move to the city because she's got fuck all. You would think maybe that Bruce Wayne, the richest man on the planet would maybe have thrown her a few bucks in the wake of Superman's death, seeing as how her son died whilst fighting alongside him.
It's almost like the film knows this is bullshit, because right at the end there's an exchange between Clark Kent and Wayne where you see them all moving back in to the farm and Kent asks Wayne, how did you get the farm back from the bank anyway, to which Wayne replies, I bought the bank. 
What is this shit? Are you a fucking idiot? You ignored his mother in the wake of his death, but now he's back you're going to splash the cash, but rather than just buy the farm from the bank, you bought the bank to get the farm? Are you shitting me? 
Remember, this guy is meant to be the brains of the outfit.

The stench of reshoots is everywhere, but it's almost like they'd locked down parts of the edit then glued bits onto it. Rather than trying to erase problems with the screenplay, the reshoots just compound them.
From the laughable cgi on Superman's face to the feeble attempts at humour, the film is tonally all over the place, and there's a ridiculous over-reliance on really bad cgi. 
There are long scenes of exposition in the bat cave where you end up feeling embarrassed for the actors, because the dialogue is so poor it genuinely sounds like they're just spitballing lines and making it up as they go along in the absence of a script. This is not helped by the complete absence of any chemistry between anyone in the movie. At times you're left with the overwhelming feeling that they  just filmed every character individually against green screen and then pasted them into the film and that none of these people ever actually met each other in real life.

Nothing makes any sense. We never care about any of these characters. There is no sense of peril at any point in the film. The attempts at humour are risible, and it makes the cardinal sin of just being a really boring film. Now that's quite a feat. 
This is a boring film.
It's a film about a troubled billionaire vigilante who's putting a team together with a Merman, a Greek Goddess, a guy who can run faster than the wind, and a Robot Man, to try and stop a gigantic intergalactic devil monster from wiping out the human race and destroying the world, and they're all saved by an indestructible alien who's been brought back from the dead...and somehow this is all incredibly boring. Now that takes real talent.


I'll leave you with this thought. The last shot of the film is of Clark Kent. He's walking the streets of Metropolis dressed in his classic Clark Kent disguise. Looks like he's maybe off to work. All is right in the world.
It's a shame though that we never get to see the reaction of his co-workers when he shows up at the offices of The Daily Planet though, because Clark Kent was fucking dead and buried at the beginning of this film.

much like The Poundland Cinematic Universe

g.man

Was watching Red Letter Media’s review of Star Trek Beyond, where I assumed they were going to rip it to pieces, cue a half hour of of Mike’s orgasmic gushing about how great it is. I remember being very meh about it when I saw at the cinema, decided to rewatch it and although I don’t think it’s the greatest thing ever, it’s a decent entry in the Trek movie series, certainly far better than Into Darkness.

G, that's the best review of anything I've read in ages. It was worth your misery just so I could appreciate your review.

WorKid wrote:

G, that's the best review of anything I've read in ages. It was worth your misery just so I could appreciate your review.

@JRPC The ridiculous call backs to old Trek in Into Darkness just ruins the movie for me. Perhaps watching Beyond on the small screen makes it work better, but it’s still lovely to look at film.

I adore it when a horror movie opens massively big versus its budget, double so when it's a micro budget - hence why I've studied Blair Witch to death.

Not quite on the same scale, but the $15 million budgeted A Quiet Place with Emily Blunt looks poised to take over $46 million this weekend.