Orphan Black (2013 - 2024)

WATCH-THROUGH NOTES, SOME SPOILERS:

I'm tempted again to give Orphan Black another go. I've only ever made it a couple of episodes in before.

S1 - I'm enjoying Orphan Black. It's a little schlocky and there are some rum contrivances, but the intrigue is good, Maslany is great, and the supporting characters are all cool as well. Felix still quite annoying but not insurmountable. Just moved onto S2. The 'next episode on's now happen immediately after the last scene instead of giving you a second or two of credits, so it's already worse than S1.

Enjoying S2, though it has definitely slowed down. Instead of introducing new elements it's just giving out a little more info about existing elements. It really needs a Dharma or a Jacob. Currently hoping that Kira turns out to be psychic and that's the new thing. It's still good, though, and one thing I really like about it is how it keeps secondary characters in the mix, giving them interesting ways to stick around but letting them fade into the background for a bit if they need to. You never get the feeling that someone's just being given stuff to do because they're a series regular.

Finished. It did dip a bit after S1 but it really picked up again in S3 by adding in a bunch of new stuff (new sestras! boy clones! weird bug implants!) It did still stumble occasionally (they especially struggled to find stuff to do for the soccer mom clone but I guess couldn't bring themselves to just shuffle her out of focus, and they didn't do anything with the Kira psychic link thing which I called early on) but I felt that it made up for any weak spots with its strengths (intrigue, good writing, good action, and the amazing Maslany).

Also, just amazing how throughout the show every time there was a scene with two clones in it I'd forget that it was one actor playing all of them and then when the next scene started I'd suddenly go 'hang on, that was all one actor and they were all hugging each other and handing stuff to each other, how the fuck?'

Sadly, the final season (5) really crashed. They spent a load of time on that boring-ass island, the revealed big bad was a Slightly Older Than Natural Guy who then turns out to actually just be some rando pretending to be that, which is even less interesting, and they got really lazy with the writing. Like, the amount of people who flipped from good to bad and vice versa over and over thanks to single lines of dialogue was just stupid. I did really like the ending, though - I was hoping for a big Endgame style finale where the 10 or so established clones show up and use their skillsets and stuff, so at first I was disappointed that it boiled down to Sarah, Helena and Art with an assist from Scott and Hell Wizard, even though they did get to do some cool stuff. But then they spent the last twenty minutes of the episode getting all the main clones together to help Sarah deal with her depression and it was just so much more powerful, I was relieved they were smart enough not to go with my cheesy idea!

So, overall, worth watching even though it has its weaknesses.

I also gave the spin-off series a go, which is set thirty years or so in the future, and it's terrible. Really badly-written, weak intrigue. They get a couple of the supporting actors from the main show to turn up for a few scenes each with grey paint in their hair to say "hi, the main characters are too busy to help right now, so they sent me along!", it's so tacky. And it has that issue with legacy sequels where they have to undo the happy ending of the original, in this case at the expense of the original characterisations (granted I haven't watched to the end, but it just feels so unconvincing that Kira would grow up and decide that it's actually fine to make clones and get involved with shadowy corporations just like all those people who tortured her as a kid and killed members of her family).

There was also a sequel audio series with Tatiana Maslany but I won't bother with that. Oh, and a limited series 'side story' comic that they did halfway through the show, that I probably would have read at the correct point if I'd known about it, but I only heard about it after the show so I can't be bothered now.

I could watch an entire spin-off show of Helena beating people up and eating messily then saying stuff in broken English with a Russian accent, though, they should do that.

The Magic Faraway Tree (2026)

Perfectly fine and lovely, for the most part, but not up to Paddington or even Wonka standards. It's got lots of nice design but it's also pretty much standard whimsy without any surprises, they went far too obnoxious with the 'I hate everything I'm not going along with this for the first hour' kid (she's like Sarah + Edmund x 100), and the structure is very odd in that they spend 70% of the runtime in the real world and 30% in the fantasy world, which is the opposite of most of this strand of isekai movies (Labyrinth, Spirited Away etc) for good reason, and quite a lot of time focused on the parents reclaiming their childhood wonder (which is fine, though I can't immediately think of any movie that really has success with this Hook/Drop Dead Fred/100 Acre Wood approach, but again it's a split focus that makes the story feel aimless). There are some half-hearted attempts at villains, but they fall flat.

It's fine, it just needed a lot more of that Gilliam-esque wonder and invention (and ability to penny-pinch - this reportedly made $35m on an $80m budget, so the announced sequels seem less likely now).

Rating: acceptable whimsy

Toy Story 5 (2026)

I still think Toy Story is great, 2 has good bits but is overall just about okay and introduces mawkishness that the tone can't support, 3 is rubbish. 4 I reviewed on here, basically it's a mess and still cursed with mawk overload.

But I really enjoyed Toy Story 5! It's my second favourite, I reckon.

It starts off slow and fervently techphobic, but it really picks up over the first half hour, and the anti-tech stance inverts itself by the end, with the toys standing in for the techphobic writers and realising that actually kids have to grow up sometime and tech can be good for them, it just needs to be monitored because it has a lot more potential to do damage than a ragdoll or action figure.

More generally, this is the one where they just decide to have fun again and, rather than this having to be about something, letting it just be another fun escapade that the gang get into. It also makes the smart decision to focus a bit more on a specific issue the kid is having, which works really well in a very Inside Out kind of way.

I will admit, they do still have some What it Means To Be A Toy stuff in there and try to pull on our heartstrings with a sad toy, all of which is still as jarring as it was in Toy Story 2 and is going over beats that are very familiar by now. But the rest of the story is a little stronger than TS2 and it doesn't do a sad ballad so it nudges ahead for me.

Rating: just good solid fun, the second best Toy Story

Street Fighter (2026)

SPOILERS BELOW

I found this movie quite frustrating.

A big part of that, which I don't think was the fault of the movie itself, was that it was really dark the whole way through. Like, Game Of Thrones final battle dark. I don't know if it was because of Cineworld cheaping out on their bulbs or getting some HDR setting wrong, or if the movie is supposed to look like that. I'd be very surprised if it were the latter because it was massively distracting and worked directly against the movie's two big strengths, the bright colourful design and the fight scenes. Maybe it's something to do with movies now designing the cinematography to work best on streaming or fit with Netflix's demands or something, I dunno. But watching the wonderful (except for the usual eyeroll-worthy nomenclat) Sneak Peek Teaser trailer on my telly I don't have the same issue.

It was exacerbated by the movie's fluid, close-up camera moves, which I do sometimes find annoying in action movies but I think would have worked well here if not for the lighting, though it's hard to say for sure.

The other part of it, though, is all the movie's fault - the story is overloaded and it goes surprisingly far into the dour territory of the new Mortal Kombat movies, with demon powers and temptation and tragic backstories and all that. This really needed to be an exploitation throwback with a very simple story and lots of fun characters. It sometimes hits that and it's great, but there's just too much going on. The most egregious moment was at the end where the goodies are all packed in a car listening to Alanis Morrisette on their way to confront Bison and then the movie just ENDS. All the story energy wasted on some demon dude whom I (as an admittedly casual fan) have never heard of and who wasn't very interesting. He was also the cause of most of the clutter, clashing with Bison's Psycho Power scheme and junking up Ryu and Ken's backstories. If they'd stripped that guy out of the script I think it would have instantly made this movie a couple of points out of ten better. Turning the brightness up, another two points. So, this could have been a 9/10 but it came out as a 5/10.

Rating: should have been a Desperado or a Scott Pilgrim but it came out as a Mortal Kombat 2021. A real shame.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025)

It felt energetic and tightly constructed at first, but it quickly descended into a loose collection of unoriginal bits and pieces. Very shallow in a 'wacky for the sake of being wacky' way.

Rating: messy and shallow

Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

It's not funny, the cel-shaded 3D toons look ugly as sin throughout and as much as I tried it's impossible to squint past, the director has no idea how to stage Looney Tunes style comedy or even Naked Gun style comedy, and it doesn't work from a character or story perspective either. A John Grisham-style legal thriller with toons has a lot of potential (Roger Rabbit did a fantastic job with 'Chinatown with toons', after all), but this movie doesn't have the smarts to pull it off. There are a few genuinely good or funny ideas in there, but I can count them on one (human) hand.

Rating: rubbish

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

It's probably the Marvel movie that has felt most like a single comic book issue to me. Quite often they feel like movies that have had their structure compromised by series arc stuff, but here it didn't really feel like they were bothered about having a movie structure at all. Much longer than it needed to be, moving from action scenes to long slow character bits just when you expect it to be ramping up. They also spend a bunch of time dealing with weird previous plot developments (and yes also setting up future stuff).
This might all sound like outright criticism, but it was perfectly enjoyable, lots of cool action and fun moments, and actually I kind of preferred it to something like Iron Man 2 where it's mostly a movie but it keeps on falling over. That said, I didn't prefer it to the ones where they actually get a movie right like Iron Man 1 or Thor Ragnarok, and I doubt I'll ever bother watching it again. But then, I suppose a lot of people don't go back and re-read all their individual comic book issues either!

Rating: solid middle chapter