Looks great, great design, CG feels very solid (the monsters more than the robots), 3D's effective.
Fights are easy to follow, but it is intentionally imperfect and misframed a lot of the time, which I liked. And they were generally interesting and exciting - the monsters keep doing new scary stuff, the robots keep pulling cool new tricks.
The plot is a draggy collection of cliches, and the accents are incredibly bad (Idris Elba manages to do a bad English accent), but I'd deffo recommend seeing this on the big screen in 3D.
Rating: Good
Tuesday 23 July 2013
Friday 19 July 2013
The World's End (2013)
I enjoyed the first half but found it got more uninventive and/or clumsy as it went on.
On a second viewing months later, while it has loads of great stuff in it and I did perhaps enjoy it a little more, I still think it doesn't quite stand up to the first two.
I've realised that they maybe could have solved a lot of them at the writing stage by merging Steve and Andy characters. This would give Nick Frost more to do and allow Gary (or at least his addiction) to be the villain of the piece (until the end anyway) without taking it over. It would also cut the pre-Newton Haven stuff down, give more time to develop the other three characters plus maybe show stuff like Marsan's 'empty' being mulched. They also probably could have done with cutting out the last pub brawl, or doing something different with it.
It's one of those films where watching the extras you see how much thought has been put into the themes, character dynamics and backstories and it's frustrating that a lot of it, even implied, doesn't come through in the actual film - or perhaps that there's so much of it that all gets given a little bit of space but not enough to take onboard. So in TWE, even though there's maybe a line of dialogue each about the underlying issues that Steve and Andy have with Gary (the obvious ones are "stole the girl he fancies" and "legged it after the car crash" but the deeper ones are stuff like "stopped him from being the alpha male at school by always outshining him just enough" and "disappointed him by turning out not to be the legend that he'd been idolising"), I never took them onboard because there's just so much going on the whole time. I heard the lines of dialogue but never really absorbed that stuff. Compare that to Shaun and Ed in SOTD or Nicholas and Danny in HF, where the whole film revolves around their changing friendship. Taking Steve out could solve that.
Rating: Good
On a second viewing months later, while it has loads of great stuff in it and I did perhaps enjoy it a little more, I still think it doesn't quite stand up to the first two.
I've realised that they maybe could have solved a lot of them at the writing stage by merging Steve and Andy characters. This would give Nick Frost more to do and allow Gary (or at least his addiction) to be the villain of the piece (until the end anyway) without taking it over. It would also cut the pre-Newton Haven stuff down, give more time to develop the other three characters plus maybe show stuff like Marsan's 'empty' being mulched. They also probably could have done with cutting out the last pub brawl, or doing something different with it.
It's one of those films where watching the extras you see how much thought has been put into the themes, character dynamics and backstories and it's frustrating that a lot of it, even implied, doesn't come through in the actual film - or perhaps that there's so much of it that all gets given a little bit of space but not enough to take onboard. So in TWE, even though there's maybe a line of dialogue each about the underlying issues that Steve and Andy have with Gary (the obvious ones are "stole the girl he fancies" and "legged it after the car crash" but the deeper ones are stuff like "stopped him from being the alpha male at school by always outshining him just enough" and "disappointed him by turning out not to be the legend that he'd been idolising"), I never took them onboard because there's just so much going on the whole time. I heard the lines of dialogue but never really absorbed that stuff. Compare that to Shaun and Ed in SOTD or Nicholas and Danny in HF, where the whole film revolves around their changing friendship. Taking Steve out could solve that.
Rating: Good
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)