predestination

 [IMDB]

this one is for you, ranjan.

bard> could you please write a review of the movie predestination in the style of schmolli?

"""

Sure, here is the review of Predestination in the style of Schmolli:

Predestination is a mind-melting sci-fi thriller that will leave your brain in a pretzel. The film follows a temporal agent (Ethan Hawke) who is sent on a mission to stop a terrorist attack. However, the agent soon discovers that the terrorist is himself, and that he is caught in a time loop that he cannot escape.

This film is so schmolling. The plot is twisty and turny, and the themes are deep and philosophical. It's the kind of film that will make you question everything you thought you knew about time travel, identity, and free will.

The acting is top-notch, with Ethan Hawke giving a tour-de-force performance as the temporal agent. Sarah Snook is also excellent as the woman who is caught in the time loop. The supporting cast is also very good, and they all help to bring the film's story to life.

If you're looking for a schmolling sci-fi thriller that will blow your mind, then you need to check out Predestination. It's the kind of film that will stay with you long after you've seen it.

Here are some of the schmollingest things about Predestination:

The time travel plot is so twisty and turny. You'll never be able to guess what's going to happen next.

The themes of identity, determinism, and free will are so deep and philosophical. You'll be thinking about them long after the film is over.

The acting is so good. Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook give two of the best performances of their careers.

The film is so schmolling. It's the kind of film that will make you question everything you thought you knew about time travel, identity, and free will.

Overall, I give Predestination 5 out of 5 schmolls. It's the schmollingest sci-fi thriller I've ever seen.

"""

meanwhile, i give bard's movie review one schmolli.  schmolli does not think any of those things!

for example, since i watched this film, i have thought about it maybe twice, and mostly because i was trying to figure out why ranjan is so obsessed with it. actually, i did have another thought about it, which is that it was cool that one of the things the movie added was that not only was the time agent responsible for their own birth, but also for their death. i am a big fan of full circles. refer back to bard's answer above, you will see no mention whatsoever of full circles.

in case you are wondering, i also asked chatgpt the same question, and it thought i was talking about some guy named dj schmolli. jesus. anyway, chatgpt also thought this was a five out of five movie, i suspect collusion.

the tomorrow war

 [IMDB]

there is a special place in hell reserved for people who make time travel movies that are not about time travel.  it is wedged in between the heresy and anger levels in kind of a cul de sac? the turnoff is easy to miss.  if you see flaming crypts, you have gone too far.

for the life of me, i cannot see why they bothered with the time travel aspect.  there were some things which were supposed to be related, but they either did not go anywhere or were so buried in drek that you would have had to stop rolling your eyes to see them.  for example, the hero starts with damaged relationships with both his father and his (future) kid.  then he fixes them!  yay symmetry!  he fails to catch his (future) daughter, but he does (kind of) catch his father!  yay more symmetry! the first, second, and third acts were all sort of awkward and ugly!  give it up for symmetry!

lest you think that i am criticizing the directing rather than the writing, let me just say that the writing has issues, too. to wit, spend just A GODDAMN MINUTE thinking about time travel and realize that if you have non-trivial time travel at your disposal, as our heroes do, then all your problems are solved because you already know what is going to happen long before it happens.  you know where all the aliens are going to show up first?  great, put all the guns there.  or better, you know how to make a time machine, but it only joins two equidistant points in time?  no problem.  take your knowledge of how to build a time machine back into the past and BUILD ANOTHER ONE YOU IDIOT.  you have all the time you need to figure out this alien thing, and since it is an extinction-level event, maybe let some of the billions of people from the past work on it, too, instead of just throwing them into the meat grinder.  operational security is useless if you are all dead.

let me say a little more about time travel.  say you have a time machine which you can use to communicate to someone, perhaps yourself, 1 day in the past.  and say you have a problem you want to solve.  well the first thing you do is to communicate the problem to your past self.  now your past self has 1 day to work on solving the problem.  you may not find the solution, but now you have the results of 1 day of working on it that you can communicate to yourself in the past.  on the second iteration, past you starts with a 1 day head start and can bring it up to 2 days worth of work.  et cetera.  after enough iterations, you have a solution.  this is why so many time travel stories have the future self communicating a solution rather than a problem to either past selves.  the exceptions are cases where no solution is possible, eg, because the enemy also has time travel at their disposal, or where the film is exploring that initial iterative part, before the solution is found.  think groundhog day.

the handling of time travel was so sloppy, i am not going to bother dinging them for a lack of consideration of issues like temporal stability.  you know what, i am not even going to get into it here, maybe when i review predestination.

the tomorrow war gets one meat grinder.  by the way, you can tell that nobody invents a form of time travel which is widely usable because movies like the tomorrow war exist.

thor: ragnarok

[IMDB]

thor: ragnarok lets you know in the first minute what kind of movie it is going to be: lighthearted romp with epic CG fights and banter.  it basically delivers on this promise, and the result is just fine.  but, you know, *just* fine.  i made the mistake of watching this movie back-to-back with black panther, and as a result, i found myself feeling like this one could have tried harder to mean something.  burning asgard to the ground while remarking that asgard is the people, not the place...it really just smells like an excuse to punt a bunch of asgardians and misc gladiator aliens towards earth.

but i dunno, i guess what i am doing here is complaining that thor was thor.  of course he was thor.  that is, like, his job.  i might as well complain about an 80s action movie that featured bad one-liners.

so ok, that was some negative stuff.  on the positive side, i was really impressed with the level of fun that they crammed into this movie.  comparing the atmosphere to the first two thor movies, i find that ragnarok came across much truer to the idea that thor is an ale-swigging viking god, but i cannot decide whether to be impressed that it is so or to be annoyed that this version of thor is so very different from the thor that has appeared in all the other MCU films.  maybe both.

thor: ragnarok gets three exploding hammers.  and here is another complaint: the impact of that moment was completely ruined by its inclusion in every single trailer they put out.

i am number four

[IMDB]

you know what this picture needs?  more anguished teenagers with superpowers.

why do teenagers always get the superpowers?  i think this world needs more middle aged people getting superpowers.  do you have any idea the kind of damage i could do with, say, spiderman's repertoire?  or even just super strength (plus the amount of invulnerability it would take to not crush yourself with your super strength?)  i assure you, i would neither rob banks nor throw rocks in the air.  or just give me teleportation.  oh man.  i would trade some really significant things for teleportation.  and again, i promise not to rob any banks, so far as you know.

having superpowers would be pretty awkward in real life, though.  at least, if you stick to the simplistic black and white morality of your typical hollywood superpowered shitshow.  consider, for a moment, that you have been given superpowers somehow.  what do you do?  according to movie logic, the only thing you *can* do, if you want to be labeled as Good, is to spend every waking moment using your superpower to save people from whatever.  anything else is labeled as Bad in some way, whether it be villainous (using your superpower to rob banks) or merely a character flaw (refusing to use your superpower to do an objectively good thing.)  if you are an ordinary person, then, getting superpowers is ruinous.

let me give you an example.  say you are an average person, with friends and family, a job (volunteer work counts!) of some kind, hobbies and interests, all that jazz.  then suddenly one day you are standing outside a burning building when you discover you can teleport, and you use your new superpower to save all the people from the burning building.  good job.

but now what?  do you use your newfound teleportation to get to work?  go grocery shopping?  that is convenient, sure, but only benefits you, which technically makes you selfish.  also, what are you doing going to work or shopping for groceries?  surely there a disaster somewhere you could be averting?  or if no disasters, perhaps you could be giving "rides" to other people who need to get from point A to point B, but lack the resources to do so?  that makes you selfish *and* lazy.  or say you hear there is a terrorist with a nuke at city hall.  now, you could choose to teleport in there, grab the terrorist and the nuke, then teleport somewhere else, but what if you are scared?  you are not immune to nukes, right?  selfish, lazy, and cowardly.  or say you realize after teleporting in that the nuke will detonate in 1 second. do you choose to teleport away to save yourself, or take the nuke with you so you save city hall?  selfish, lazy, cowardly, *and* chooses not to Do The Right Thing.

that is bad enough, but also consider that none of those decisions are clear-cut.  it does not take much cleverness to rationalize it either way...and you can be assured that reasonable-sounding people will rationalize it *both* ways.  which means that no matter how hard you try to be Good, somebody will find fault.  so earlier, when you went grocery shopping because how can you do anything if you never eat, and somebody died in an avalanche while you were in the produce aisle, there are a bunch of people who will write angry letters, protest, throw rotten fruit at you, and file lawsuits.

this is the real reason superheroes usually wear masks.  so nobody knows who to sue.  and this also gets at why so many superheroes still have jobs and go grocery shopping.  they do not get paid for superheroing because everybody expects you to Do The Right Thing for free.  virtue is its own reward, right?  but virtue does not buy groceries or put a roof over your head.  also note that if you choose to work longer hours to afford a nicer place to live or better quality food, or even, god forbid, some spending money for your hobbies, the fraction of people who say you are selfish is going to go way up.

so there is really no winning.  you can either choose to make yourself miserable while maximizing the amount of Good you do while being criticized for inadequacy despite your best efforts, or you can choose to be selfish, greedy, cowardly, etc.  they solve this conundrum in most movies by only showing you the parts where the superheros are saving people, training to save people, or recovering from damages received while saving people.

i am number four gets one fake dog.  the only reason you might want to wade through this sea of shit is because you cannot get enough of superpowers.  some people might find a media experience about a continually-expanding set of superpowers to be cathartic, but if you are smart, it is just depressing.

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.