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

Man of Steel (2013)

SPOILERS BELOW

Original forum post:

I think I'd say it's better than Superman Returns.

The trouble I had with the spectacle (mostly the superfights) was not the amount of it, but that it was all very Transformers-y - disorienting handheld shots of rapid sequences of big things getting destroyed, with untold collateral and property damage but no sense of weight or consequence to it because we're already onto the next thing being smashed up.

Plus the Krypton sequence immediately reminded me of Revenge Of The Sith.

The other problem with the spectacle for me was that the film feels very front-loaded. You get this exhausting Krypton opening rebellion battle then Zod/Jar-El fight then Zod sentencing then planet destruction then you get about a minute before you're into an oil rig disaster sequence. The best part of the film for me was when it calmed down and started doing flashbacks to Jon Kent talking about the decisions Clark will have to make, intercut with Zod broadcasting creepily and Supes deciding to trust humanity and communicate with the military. Unfortunately, it then switches back to a load of boring fights and Superman grimacing a lot while flying into things, the military suddenly turn into cardboard cut-out, gung-ho idiots, and presumably hundreds if not thousands of people getting killed off-camera while we're supposed to give a shit if some Daily Planet intern or random family die.

There were good bits, and they gave it some depth (eg Zod could easily be interpreted as a criticism of US foreign policy) although it gets a bit heavy-handed at times (Clark goes into a church and asks a priest's advice while being framed next to a stained glass window of Christ - the easiest and most pointless of all metaphors!), but I would like to see a more measured director take the next one, someone like Spielberg.

Finally, I totally knew they'd put a Lexcorp sign in there somewhere!

Rating: Fine

Re-watch 2021:

I was far too generous to this movie! I suspect that, much like with Snyder's Dawn Of The Dead and Watchmen adaptations, I was so relived that it wasn't as horrible as it could have been that I gave it a free pass on a lot of stuff. Watching it again now, I realise how bad it actually is.

This movie does not care about humans, and barely feels like it was made by them. There is zero characterisation, and the dialogue is stilted,  didactic and frequently nonsensical. The death of thousands is window-dressing and Clark blithely destroys the entirety of the Kryptonian race while the movie attempts to put emotional weight on the death of an anonymous family or a genocidal monster.

What's more, the action is poorly-directed, and the storytelling is rushed, overloaded and confusing. Perhaps if they had cut the Krypton prologue and the Genesis Machine stuff, focused on a story about Clark deciding whether to trust humanity and have Zod show up to create tension within that framework, this could have been an interesting movie. Or maybe if they'd spent more time with Krypton, developing it as a forboding reflection of humanity.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that there's the occasional nice-looking shot.

Rating:Awful.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

The first 2 mins of the credits were better than anything in the lazy, boring film that preceded them.

Instead of moving from game to game cramming in as many clever references as possible, the film spends most of its time in the candyland game, to the point where it's barely worth them setting it in video games. The characters are all dull, the story's messy and overworked, the references are clumsy and the film's internal logic never really makes sense and often contradicts itself. The whole thing just lacks imagination, it's like a straight-to-DVD Toy Story knock-off.


Rating: Awful

Frankenweenie (2012)

Saw this in 2D and really enjoyed it. Burton's best for a while. It's too long, even at just over 90 mins, and Burton fans may get a little annoyed with yet more allusions to James Whale's Frankenstein films, but it's generally very inventive and entertaining. It's got some relatively dark stuff in there, as well, and it's pretty brave to be in black and white all the way through.
Rating: Good

The Three Musketeers (2011)

Having enjoyed the 3D of Resident Evil Afterlife on the big screen, I hoped it would be similarly well done here. Unfortunately, it was not, instead having the regular problems of dark images and being barely noticeable. After Avatar's highly impressive 3D on the same home-setup, this was very disappointing.

The film itself is a dull, stodgy mess.
Rating: Awful

The Expendables 2 (2012)

Expendables 2 is simply not fun or exciting. The first one was bad, and this one is just more of the same. The action scenes are dull - exploding military vehicles in wide open spaces and interchangeable muscle-men firing weapons - and the fight scenes are shot in dark shadow, which one would assume was done to cover up the older actors' dwindling athleticism if not for the fact that Statham's scenes get the same treatment.

I had hopes that the script might be a little sharper than last time - perhaps Stallone would have the smarts to get a Shane Black type in to polish it up - but unfortunately it's the same maudlin, mundane nonsense as the previous film, full of flat banter, repeated jokes and half-arsed nods towards the characters' old age.

There are ten minutes towards the end where the Expendables franchise grasps at its potential, where the guest behemoths all have a cool moment or two within a big shoot/punchout, but for the most part this film fails just as its predecessor did to escape its inherent problem: almost none of the many leads have any discernible talents as actors or even personas. Perhaps if this film had the balls to kill off Couture, Crews and even Li, plus the brains to get a good director and screenwriter, it could have been the super-team action film everyone was hoping for in the late-eighties with maybe even a bonus smidgen of Wild Bunch pathos. As it is, it feels like a feature-length version of one of those adverts where a long-dead movie star is unwillingly CGed from beyond the grave into a money-grabbing embarrassment made by dullard suits who don't understand the classics they are "homaging".

Rating: Poor.

John Carter (2012)

Terrible film. It's the poor man's Attack Of The Clones, which should tell you all you need to know.
Rating: Bad