2018-03-04

spectral

[IMDB]

the first half of this movie--i am using the term loosely--is a blatant ripoff of aliens.  they even stole the panicked first contact and flight in an armoured truck scene. the second half fell down hard as the writer struggled to provide an explanation for the phenomenon, and the resolution was pure bullshit. i figure that somebody told them they were ripping off aliens, so they rewrote the second half of the movie to be a completely different thing. i imagine a writer waving a sheaf of papers in the director's face, screaming "SEE? NOT ALIENS!" before stomping off to continue work on their new script for a movie called "prism", a film which is strangely reminiscent of cube.

man, remember cube? too gory for me, but i enjoyed it nonetheless. hypercube was utter nonsense, but i really liked where they went with cube zero.

anyway, of all the things i can think of to do with a plentiful weapons research budget, none of them include creating autonomous, nondiscriminating killing machines. even if this was a thing you were planning to airdrop onto a planet you did not have any interest in inhabiting, it just seems likely to result in, i dunno, EXTINCTION? how about a nice gun or something?

spectral gets one nice gun or something. i ripped off my own review to come up with that.

mute

[IMDB]

mute is the kind of movie that tells you within the first half hour that you should cut your losses and run.  not even, like, watch the rest on fast-forward. just shut it off and do something else with your life.  take up yoga or learn how to do pushups correctly or go shopping for an endloader.  something.  anything.  flip a baby.

i guess i am refusing to talk about this movie, so let us talk about something else.  ever think about what it would be like to live in a slightly futuristic world, where you are prevented from speaking by an old injury that you could get fixed except your mom said no?

yeah, me either.

mute gets one eye-rolling obvious realization that you can rub graphite on a notepad to see what was written on the top sheet, except that only works well when you do it right away and the notepad has not been used for anything other than that top sheet and also the top sheet is still there.