desertsailor Reviews

The Marvels (2023)

A hot mess

[3/10 · 21 March 2024]

A hot mess with flashes of being ok. The writers, director, producer, whoever the heck was in charge made the enormous mistake of assuming that everybody had watched all the Marvel stuff streaming on Disney. Otherwise you wouldn't have the foggiest idea who some of these people were. I'd watched some, but not all, and still had trouble keeping track. Carol's destruction of the Intelligence Supreme got explained eventually, but wasn't clear until 2/3 of the way through the picture. The movie kept switching tone from being serious to having some pretty funny bits. Herding cats, indeed. All three main characters deserved a better movie than this. Very, very, disappointing.

Shadow and Bone (2021–2023)

Generally good, but....

[8/10 · 1 April 2023]

Ok, no books ever survive intact into movie or tv presentations. Shadow and Bone, the show, does a lot of mixing up of various parts of Bardugo's books, and generally I'm ok with that. The series captures most of the characters pretty well, the Crows being particularly well done. The main story line pretty much parallels the books with some additions and subtractions along the way to make it fit as a tv series. While I would occasionally get annoyed, I figured I'd roll with it. Until the end of season two, specifically episode 8, when things went seriously off track. I understand that Bardugo's end of the fold was simply way too long and complicated to bring to the screen. What is really annoying is the abandonment of exactly who Mal and Alina were, and their fate and character in the books. Talk about 180 off course! Particularly the very last sequence- utterly out of character. If there is a third season I won't watch it. I think the show runners would be a lot better off doing a Crows spinoff. There are plenty of story lines left to explore in those books.

1899 (2022)

Well, that was a hot mess

[1/10 · 21 November 2022]

The only reason I finished this thing was to see how it turned out. The trip involved a lot of mostly side stories consuming gigantic amounts of CGI programming, and largely without rhyme or reason. Backstory filler on various characters, contributing very little towards forwarding the overall story. Except for a few characters (Anton Lesser, Emily Beecham) Most of the dialog is dubbed, and for a fair amount of it the voice provider might have been reading the phone book. The actors were at least trying but what they were saying didn't much match the emotional context of what was going on. Even Beecham persisted in whispering her lines, particularly in the last two episodes by which time I didn't too much care what she was saying anyway. There was a good story in there somewhere, but overcome by a lot of unnecessary thrashing about on the vessel set. All in all, Shakespeare summed it up: "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (MacBeth, act 5)

World on Fire (2019–2023)

Overall good with a couple of bigish mistakes

[8/10 · 17 July 2022]

Thus far enjoying the story. Some effort to cover home front activities as well as combat are appreciated. Two fairly serious gaffes did bother me. At one point Grzegorz Tomaszeski and his pal are walking away from Warsaw. Not too long thereafter they run into a British Army unit, and the Grzegorz winds up at Dunkirk. That's 1400 kilometers on foot and they would have to walk across all of Germany in the process. Exceedingly unlikely. The other problem is less obvious, but did make me wonder. Tom Bennett, on HMS Exeter is shown loading shells, by hand, into the turret mechanism which is, I am pretty sure, supposed to be one of the main turrets for Exeters 8" guns. The only problem is that those shells weigh 256 pounds and Tom is not going to be slinging them around by hand. The next smallest weapons on Exeter were 4" AAA guns which would not have had anything like the turret structure shown. I suspect that sequence was filmed on HMS Belfast with its 6" main armament shells weighing only 112 bounds which makes handling by hand possible. This last bit will only be obvious to serious geeks like me, but them as knows will notice. I really like Julia Brown and her character, and Sean Bean, Helen Hunt, and Lesley Manville all demonstrate excellent acting chops.

The Northman (2022)

Yeh... but

[5/10 · 28 June 2022]

Icelandic landscape, first rate cast, what could go wrong? A lot as it turns out, starting with the forced fake Nordic(?) Russian(?) accents. More than a little purple prose in the screen writing, and something very close to a re-run of Hamlet in the plot line. Although given Shakespeare it is possible that he borrowed the plot line from the Nordic saga, assuming he had access to a translation somewhere. I'll let more knowledgeable folks than I explore that aspect of it. All in all I was hoping for a better movie.

The War of the Worlds (2019)

I really wanted to like this

[3/10 · 27 April 2022]

Three part series. Eleanor Tomlinson. Robert Carlyle. Recent enough that there should be good CGI. Maybe we'll finally get a well done Thunder Child sequence. Well, the RN does get to get in some hits, but no Thunder Child. There was so much else wrong with this. The first episode was ok, although how the artillery lads scored a hit on the round thing without increasing the elevation of the gun bothered me. Things went down hill from there. The writers insisted on adding on a lot of 21st century editorializing, and the story started drifting further and further from the original. By the third episode it was a total mess. The whole post-apocalyptic add on was definitely not Wells, and was largely pointless. Oh well.

I did notice one thing. Maybe it is purely coincidental but the small crystalline things(?) coming out of the ground in episode three reminded me of the rather larger ones on Mars in the 1980 tv adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Starring Rock Hudson, no less.

Cosmic Sin (2021)

Cosmic waste of time

[1/10 · 10 September 2021]

Where to begin? Sloppy writing. Amateurish CGI in spots, a mostly incomprehensible ending, phone in performances.... skip it, folks, look for something better.

IO (2019)

Kind of intriguing

[7/10 · 5 April 2021]

Ok, no slam bang constant action for those with short attention spans. Slow moving, but moving in its own way. There's some wonky science that you kind of have to ignore, but the movie is really about two people dealing with an impossible situation, not monsters from outer space, or mutant creatures on earth.

The Midnight Sky (2020)

Beautifully done mess

[2/10 · 25 December 2020]

It was beautifully photographed and framed. And points to George Clooney for willing to be a grumpy, old, not very handsome guy. That being said it was confusing because, among other things, the guy playing young Augustine was not very convincing as young George Clooney. Took me a while to figure out what was going on there. The inside of the Aether looked, in places, like the inside of the TARDIS a couple of iterations ago. All that kind of lacy structural work. They started out with a crew of five, and two of them are going to fly it back to Jupiter? This is an *everybody dies* movie for sure. I really wanted to like the film, but other than killing a couple of hours, it was really not worth the hype. I'm *very* happy I saw it on Netflix and didn't pop for a movie theater.

Spies of Warsaw (2013)

Yes, it is slow, but...

[8/10 · 23 April 2013]

Sorry, lots of whining about how slow the pace of the series is. If you have read the source novels you should know that Alan Furst takes his time. They're all about mood, and ambiguity, shadows, and wheels within wheels. I think the series, while not great, catches, visually, a lot of Furst's writing, and ambiguity. If you are expecting Skyfall, don't bother. If you are willing to let the thing roll at it's own pace, it is well done. My review is generally positive despite BBC America's decision to do the thing in four parts in On Demand, with an endless series of exceptionally low rent commercials that break the mood considerably. Several years later: I got to see a full length version without commercials- a huge improvement over the wretched BBC America version. As mentioned, if you are familiar with the novel, it is a more than credible job. David Tennant is always excellent, a pre-Torchwood Burn Gorman, several other familiar faces. Well worth watching on Amazon.

V for Vendetta (2005)

Unexpectedly excellent

[8/10 · 3 April 2006]

Probably some spoiler in here.

I went expecting the usual masked hero chop socky sort of thing- the trailers looked interesting and it was a rainy day. As the guy I went with observed on the way out: "Who expected character development and ethical issues?" In short the film pretty much knocked my socks off. The film was far more nuanced and complex than I had been expecting. Hugo Weaving was great- if unseen, and Natalie Portman has more than made up for that last Star Wars film. Fans of the movie 1984 will appreciate the visuals involving John Hurt, and even Benny Hill gets a nod. And poor Tim Piggot-Smith still has to play a bad guy....

There are a few lapses in logic, but overall this was an excellent flick...