roadkill6 Reviews

Seneca (2023)

It's great, but not for everyone.

[8/10 · 31 August 2023]

Seneca the Younger was a fascinating character and this movie is an interesting exploration of that character. I think that historians will be displeased with the liberties that this story takes with truth and historical accuracy, and I suspect that much of the general audience will be lost because of the lack of historical context that this movie provides. I am a fan of Seneca and I enjoyed this, but it definitely isn't a tentpole film.

There is an audience for this film though, and I wish that it had been better promoted in the U. S. and that it had seen a wider release, because John Malkovich, Lilith Stangenberg, Tom Xander, Geraldine Chaplin, and Andrew Koji and several others have delivered excellent performances here. Frankly, John deserves an Oscar for his performance, and, while John, Lilith, Geraldine, and Andrew are all seasoned actors, Tom Xander in particular deserves special credit for taking on and nailing such a complex role.

The cinematography is beautiful, the directing is great, the writing is tight, and the acting is on-point, but the subject is somewhat obscure, and so it is probably never going to be a top-ten film. Perhaps some day Seneca will get the Oppenheimer treatment, but until then, this may be the apogee of Roman history in 21st Century cinema.

The Green Knight (2021)

A Visual Spectacle That Lacks Substance

[3/10 · 31 July 2021]

The original story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a morality tale about a knight who fails a test of honor, but is redeemed in the end. This film is not that story. It starts out well enough, but both Gawain (not a knight in this version) and his story get lost along the way.

The opportunities for character development throughout Gawain's quest are set aside in exchange for visual spectacle and dead-end subplots and the original ending was far more satisfying than this non-ending.

It is beautifully filmed, the acting is superb, and David Lowery deserves a lot of credit for his excellent direction, but the writing falls flat. Storylines are set up and then never concluded, there are a few deus ex machina moments for no particular reason, some of the best parts of the original story were changed (like the Green Knight's insulting challenge to Arthur), and the whole movie suffers as a result.

If you've never read the original story and you just want pretty pictures, a dark and foreboding atmosphere, and closeup shots of Dev Patel (who acted the heck out of this film) looking serious, then this movie will scratch that itch. If, on the other hand, you're expecting to see the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or care at all about plot holes or coherent character arcs, then you might want to give this one a miss.

Maybe this film will inspire someone to make a faithful adaptation of the original story someday.

Army of the Dead (2021)

What if we combined a generic heist movie with a generic zombie movie?

[4/10 · 3 June 2021]

It's a bit ironic that Omari Hardwick's character quotes Joseph Campbell at one point in the film, because this is not a hero's journey story; this is simply Dawn of the Dead meets Ocean's Eleven. On the upside, the cast does a great job and the cinematography is exactly what I expect from a Snyder film; it's very good. There are some serious plot holes though, and it's obvious that realism with regards to weapons, tactics, and government/military policy took a backseat to cool special effects.

So, if you want to enjoy the film, go ahead and suspend that disbelief right now, ignore the warmed-over, clichéd tropes, and just watch the zombie brains splatter.

Zombie movies are great specifically because they have the ability to shine a light on human nature in the darkest of times, and Snyder's Dawn of the Dead did that, but Army of the Dead doesn't. You hope for a twist, a variation on a theme, a revelation, a bit of an "aha" moment, but it never comes. Instead, there are homages to classic films, but they are so on-the-nose that they distract from this film and only serve to make it seem more derivative.

I also couldn't unsee the fact that Tig Notaro was greenscreened in after principal photography was finished. It's distractingly obvious that she was added in, and it's a real shame because she's a good actor and it would have been nice to see her play off of Bautista and the rest of the cast.

I wish this movie was better, but sometimes you roll the dice and it comes up snake-eyes.

Prospect (2018)

A lot of unrealized potential

[3/10 · 25 October 2020]

I think this movie could have been a great series, but less than two hours wasn't enough to develop these characters. There were several plot holes that never got filled here (They have to wear space suits, but tent zippers keep out the alien atmosphere?) but I can always look past that if the story is really good. It was very obvious early on that Ezra (Pedro Pascal) and Cee (Sophie Thatcher) were going to have to team up and I was looking forward to seeing a relationship develop between them (a la True Grit or Léon: The Professional), or an exploration of Pedro Pascal's fatherly character (a la The Road or Kozure Ôkami) but that never really happened.

Nothing ever came of Cee's vague origins or her father's admission that there was something he should have told her. The amputation scene was potentially the biggest character-building scene for Cee, but the scalpel on an electric toothbrush really killed the vibe and her skill with a knife doesn't pay off later.

If we had seen the relationship between Cee and Ezra really develop and there was some internal conflict between one or both of them about the arrangement, then it could have been a good movie, but that never happens and we are left with a disappointing and mostly unfulfilling shootout ending to a mediocre loss-of-innocence story.