Riddick (2013)

Similar set-up as Pitch Black - Riddick and a load of bounty hunters trapped on a planet with a horde of alien beasts - except it takes most of the movie to get to that point. Katee Sackhoff is a Vasquez-type pretty much there to get leered over and either punch the leerer in the face or turn straight for him if he's a murderous convict who spies on her taking showers. She also gets one boob out for one shot, which is bizarre.

I didn't think Pitch Black was anything special really, and actually enjoyed Chronicles more as at least it was interesting (although not exactly good). It's a shame they reverted back to the PB model for this film and largely jettisoned the Necromongers/Underverse stuff. I know they had a smaller budget for this film, but they still could have carried on with that plot in a less epic way. This just feels like an uninventive, unmemorable straight-to-DVD movie.
Rating: Bad

Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

This film is really confused, which iirc was a problem with the first one. It flips between a Watchmen-type "weirdoes in home-made costumes getting the shit kicked out of them" thing and a Mystery Men cartoonish nonsense, but all the while with a pretty mean-spirited feel to it. Also, a lot of the time it wants to be a little character drama and the rest of the time an epic superhero movie, but it's not very good at either. The worst crime of all, though, is it's pretty dull. It spends nearly all the film setting up character motivations and barely has a plot, it's like the first half hour of a Spider-Man movie stretched out to feature-length with a dash of Spider-Man 2's "I don't WANNA be a superhero any more".

Jim Carrey's great in it though.
Rating: Bad

Elysium (2013)

A big mess. Not awful, just frustrating. No characters, just ciphers and walking plot-devices, lots of cliches, plot-holes, clumsy exposition and sledgehammer one-percent themes, and it felt more like a music-video director's first film than the sophomore effort of the District 9 guy. And as much as I love Sharlto Copley, his character is just another of those District 9 nameless saffer dickhead mercenaries.

I felt a big misstep was showing Elysium before they actually got there - it was so dull and broad. Wish the film had spent more time on Earth building that world and having Elysium as some unreachable paradise.
Rating: Fine

Pacific Rim (2013)

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

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