I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of The Tomorrow War, which is streaming on Amazon Prime this weekend.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: 3 minute review, 3mr, Amazon, chris pratt, review, the escapist, the tomorrow war | Leave a comment »
The Tomorrow War is a mess of a movie.
Rumour has it that Amazon paid $200m to acquire the movie from Paramount Pictures, which has taken the pandemic as an excuse to offload films like The Lovebirds, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Coming 2 America. Blockbuster cinema is still something of a siren call for streaming services, with Paramount famously able to entice Netflix into buying The Cloverfield Paradox as a big post-Superbowl release. However, it’s notable that most major studios would be reluctant to part with a surefire financial hit.
“We need to have grown up conversation about how many deaths are acceptable in an alien invasion.”
The Tomorrow War feels very much like a streaming era blockbuster, something to fire up on television rather than to enjoy in cinemas, something that might be justified as a perk that comes with all the free shipping rather than a movie that is worth the audience’s time and attention (and the price of a ticket) on its own merits. The Tomorrow War is a clumsy misfire of a movie, essentially three different movies awkwardly stitched together with a bloated runtime and no internal coherence.
This would be a problem if any of the individual three movies were good. It’s somehow worse for the fact that all three are awful and are worse in combination.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Amazon, amazon prime, chris mckay, chris pratt, j.k. simmons, non-review review, review, the tomorrow war, time travel | Leave a comment »
Passengers is a super creepy tale of male entitlement.
The movie has an intriguing science-fiction premise. On a sleeper ship intended to ferry passengers to the colony world of Homestead II, a freak accident awakens James Preston. The only problem is that Preston awoke far too early. Preston awoke approximately thirty years into a one-hundred-and-twenty-year voyage. The engineer is now destined to spend the rest of his life as the only waking inhabitant of a gigantic city ship, living and dying completely alone. It is a horrifying thought.
“We need a little space.”
There are suggestions of a powerful science-fiction epic to be found in the film. Jim finds his every physical need has been anticipated. He can live a life of material luxury. He will never want for food or space or activity. He effectively has a gigantic space craft all to himself. And therein lies the rub. Feeling almost like a sadistic episode of The Twilight Zone, Jim grapples with the question of what he will or will not do in order to end his loneliness. In his desperation, Jim makes a horrifying (if entirely understandable) decision.
The biggest problem with Passengers is that it strains too hard to make that decision palatable instead of terrifying. It is a super creepy tale of male entitlement that brushes aside any of this issues in favour of a much more conventional action romance.
Peace in a pod.
Note: Very minor spoilers for Passengers follow. If you know the cast list, you can probably deduce where the movie is going from the opening ten minutes.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: chris pratt, film, Jennifer Lawrence, male entitlement, Movie, non-review review, passengers, review | 11 Comments »
Guardians of the Galaxy hits a few bumps along the way, but it works very well.
The key to this would seem to be James Gunn. Like the best of the Marvel comic adaptations, Guardians of the Galaxy is a film that manages to find its own unique authorial voice amid the cross-pollination of Marvel’s vast cinematic universe. Like Shane Black on Iron Man 3, Kenneth Branagh on Thor or Jon Favreau on Iron Man, James Gunn manages to put his own unique stamp on Guardians of the Galaxy – a film that remains compellingly personal amid the apocalyptic 9/11 imagery.
Lighting the way…
While the film suffers from some of the structural weaknesses that are typical of Marvel’s blockbusters, its strengths come from the director and co-writer. Although set in a vast universe with epic stakes and impossible odds, Guardians of the Galaxy works best when it focuses on its characters, whether the human Peter Quill (with his “outlaw name” Star Lord), the killing machine Drax, the sentient and sensitive tree Groot, the racoon named Rocket or the prodigal daughter named Gamora.
Guardians of the Galaxy is a film that introduces itself to the image of Peter Quill dancing beneath the logo, to the tune of Fooled Around and Fell In Love by Elvin Bishop, playing from a cassette labelled “Awesome Mix, Vol. 1.” That is all you need to know.
Gotta dance…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: chris pratt, cosmic, gamora, groot, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, i am groot, James Gunn, john c. reilly, kree, marvel, non-review review, nova corps, peter quill, review, rocket, rocket raccoon, ronan the accuser, Star Lord, zoe saldana | 4 Comments »
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