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Reviews
Silent Hill: Ascension (2023)
Pretty embarrassing.
I just watched the first hour long "episode", and leaving the pricing and monetization aside, this is pretty abysmal.
Writing and delivery are awful across the board, and on the tech side, it looks like an old ps3 game. Characters are stiff and awkward, like wobbly puppets not fully interacting with each other.
And then there's the story... So far this "story" is a choppy disconnected mess that intersperses silent hill looking horror monsters into two main narratives for no discernible reason.
Scenes go by with little connection, no sense of place or overarching plot. Maybe it'll get better, but its so disjointed as it is, that It's hard to imagine it recovering achieving any level of cohesion. As a side note the series doesn't even credit a single writer in its credits. But honestly, if you told me this is written by AI, I wouldn't doubt it.
Finally, so far there is no reason why this is in any way related to the SILENT HILL franchise either. Its all just stylistic window dressing.
So if you want to watch something terribly dull, this is for you.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
Worse than bad.
In this hopefully final mess of an Indiana Jones, a tired Harrison ford does his best to seem excited to go on a chain of macguffin chases with barely any justification.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge does what she can with an underwritten, nonsensical character. And provides the brief moments of fun the movie musters.
And really, this isn't a movie. It's a sequence of very boring overlong CG heavy car chases, plagued with unnecessary characters, convenient plot twists. For how much action is in display, there really are almost no thrills here.
None of the fun creativity of the original trilogy is present here(aside from a single mildly interesting tomb puzzle), and its instead replaced by winks and nods to old indy. Did you know he doesn't like snakes!? Did you know that INSECTS!?
It all finishes with one of the most cartoony, embarassing final act and a mawkishly sentimental conclusion.
As awful as Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was (and it is truly awful), It at least took some chances. This one instead is happy with quoting decades old movies and remaining stubbornly unimportant.
Atonement (2007)
Some highs, many lows.
I was very interested in watching this movie, I like the cast, and I had previously enjoyed the director's take on Pride and Prejudice.
Sadly this is one beautifully shot disappointment.
From the start, the conceits that make the events unfold seemed fancyful and contrived.
The "wrong letter" being sent, and then being surprisingly available as evidence, the perfunctory and almost non-existent character interactions, it all feels detached, ficticious and staged.
Adding to that, the poetic, dreamlike camerawork, furthers this disconnection, who are these characters? We never know their real conflicts or motivations, we just see events. So as viewers, we are forced to ponder but expected to empathize with almost no reason to.
Even the main titular romance that we are supposed to care about is underdeveloped (if it is developed at all), was it the class struggle? Why had they grown seemingly cold to each other? Were they just lustful or actually in love?
We are never told.
Maybe this is intentional, as by the end we learn all the narrative is possibly just Briony's version of the events, and she is an unreliable narrator that doesn't want to adorn the narrative with fancyful embellishments. But this fails in two levels: firstly, as a novel and as a movie, theres a cold shallowness to it, It would be a very bland novel. And secondly it feels disingenuous because the movie is FILLED with flights of fancy and embellishments.
So we move down a list of very unsubtle scenes that barely functionally connect the narrative threads without really ever saying anything purposeful (the scene where the rapist marries his victim and Briony refuses to speak up comes across as a blunt and nearly ridiculous allegory for the movie itself).
Some moments however did connect with me. Scenes such as the french soldier dying, or even when briony slips away in the middle of the night to write, paint a little more characterization and actual textures to this world and characters. But these are few and far between.
And finally there is the epilogue, or the twist.
In some ways this is a clever turn that makes a lot of the movie's more poetic aspirations more significant. If this really is Briony's perspective, it makes sense that shes focused on specific moments that are meaningful to her even if they dont give the audience the answers.
However it also is a slap in the face, as it basically is a twist on the old cliche of "it was all a dream".
Moreover it is hard to swallow that she fails to include any significant moments of conflict or characterization, which would most likely be pivotal and crucial if she was to tell the story earnestly.
It comes as a weak, arrogant excuse to call it attonement, and to justify her silence as saying honesty would have helped no one. Because then why does she feel the need to be honest now?
And lets not forget, she's even lying in her absolution, to give them the life they should have had? Who? They died for her actions and she still shys away of accepting the full responsibility.
Even more offensively to me, the movie presents her as some sort of tragic figure, trying to do something nice for the people she hurt now that she's dying. But it all rings fake, egotistical and hollow.
Attonement there is none.
Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)
Intriguing premise, great setup, disappointing resolution.
I was sold on this movie the first hour. And then the movie did all it could do unsell me on it.
It's sad that though Chris Hemsworth performance is solid, his character really deflates all the interesting plot lines the movie had set up.
A real missed opportunity.
El laberinto del fauno (2006)
Extremely disappointing movie that intends to shock but ends up being puerile.
I was hoping to like Pan's labyrinth, Since in general I have great appreciation for Del Toro's stylistic approach, and I had heard that this particular movie was a dark fairytale with a riveting historical background.
Sadly, none of it really hit for me. The movie feels disingenuous throughout. It presents a fantasy world which is never more than an excuse, and which lacks any real mythology. And it presents a reality that is more of a caricature than a fairy tale.
By the end of the labyrinth, it was evident that there was no labyrinth. The very direct purpose is to bluntly sell the a simplistic political narrative under the guise of a child's vision.
The biggest problem for me was that the fairytale aspects of the movie seem tacked on, and most "fantasy" scenes don't seem to have any reason to them. This fantastical world is never developed or explored upon. Particularly, the whole Banquet hand-eyed monster (which seem's directly from silent hill), as awesome as it looks, appears to be present solely for shock value. Which is a constant that extends through a lot of the more gruesome moments of the story.
It seems that there is an intent to be art-house, but beneath that initial impression, Violence is gratuitous and juvenile, characters are laughably one-sided and ridiculous (good are good, bad are bad, and cautious are traitors).
So yeah, to me it was extremely disappointing, Seems like most of the ratings respond more to the effectiveness of it's shock value. While the simplistic fable of a political message is ignored.
However, on my analysis this movie not nearly as profound as it hopes to be.