Escape from New York
Not sure why I think this, but I consider this a sister film to the original Mad Max. They came out roughly the same time, so there was a similar cultural context, at least when the final rewrites and filing occurred. Also crazy to note that the depiction of vector graphics as Snake flies into New York was done with black lights and tape; no computers used.
Revisions
A section of Tokyo is sent 300 years into the future, but for Special Reasons™. A decent shonen isekai story with a protagonist that unashamedly, outright states he needs to help people—literally, in the first scene of the first episode. A few really stock characters (hot solider woman from the future, slutty sadistic villain, unusually sadistic young child villain, vanilla deuteragonist), but fortunately they don’t detract much from the story.
Granblue Fantasy
A skyship adventuring series, based on a video game. My daughter informed me some of the character designs weren’t that good, which isn’t something I would pick up on (she was annoyed that a fantasy world protagonist basically wears a blue hoodie with some armor thrown on top of it). I do like the idea that some of the villains the team comes across weren’t there to be defeated physically. but consoled or assuaged.
A Beautiful Mind
Not sci-fi, but pretty close, since the whole drive of the movie is if you don’t know if the guy’s imagining his top secret work or not. My neighbor’s father is portrayed in the film as one of John Nash’s academic colleagues. He’s the smoky guy in the red sweater, in the bar scene.
Invasion Planet Earth
I don’t know how I watched this all the way through, but I’m glad I didn’t remember a lot of it.
Avatar
Pocahontas in space; the quintessential blue alien movie. It got popular because of the near-perfect visual effects, not because of the predictable story: there are obvious parallels between what happened on Pandora and American military involvement in the Middle East. There is a hardnosed, weightlifting commanding officer with an Alabaman accent that you can tell is the surprise villain from a mile away.
Big Trouble in Little China
I never thought an ancient gang war in modern times, involving weather-based Chinese gods could be so humorous. This would’ve been a good movie even without Kurt Russell’s humor; I’ve read a few reviews that said, though he was the star to draw audiences, he was really a sidekick in the plot’s mechanics. Good looks and charisma can go a long way.
Watchmen
The original superhero deconstruction story. This adaptation was done quite well but there were some complaints that it was too long, even though it follows nearly scene-for-scene with the comic. I guess it goes to show that two different mediums require two different approaches. The only thing really left out was the Tales of the Black Freighter embedded narrative, to provide more context to the film’s primary narrative arc.
X2: X-Men United
This felt like the same story as the first movie, but with maybe a few new characters. I don’t care at all about “representation,” but to be honest, it was good to see a Christian depicted realistically and not as a corny villain or plot device. But what’s the deal with psychics in these movies? It’s too difficult to depict the struggle they have in using their powers; it’s more suited for the literary world. I know we’re supposed to lend our imagination to the internal head-battle but usually they just end up looking constipated, and I find myself just thinking they need to take some Advil and relax a bit.
X-Men: First Class
The X-Men origin story, way back in the 1960s. This felt like when the franchise was really hitting its stride; the installments before this feel a little dated by now (see the X2 review above). It just has that feel of a story taken a bit more seriously, whereas the previous film, The Last Stand, was almost there. Thankfully there weren’t too many bellbottom or LSD jokes.
2 Comments
I grew up with an older version of Marvel comics, and I didn’t really like much of it then. I like it less now, because what little redeeming value it had was replaced with things I don’t like at all. That said, the one thing I tolerate most is Logan/Wolverine. The rest serve only to annoy me. I’ve never seen Avatar all the way through. The graphics are stunning; the story stinks a little, and the obsessions of the author wear on my nerves. I felt that Escape from New York had potential, but it just failed in execution. The Little China story was just comedy with some adventure thrown in. I’m actually interested in A Beautiful Mind, in part because I’ve watched that business of things disappearing from the public record more than once. The US military does it way too often. Finally, that Invasion Planet Earth is free to watch from several sources tells me all I need to know about how bad it is.
A Beautiful Mind is a good story, regardless of the real life parallel. I have no opinion one way or another on whether Nash (in real life) was schizo, or if he “knew too much,” was going to sing, and had to be discredited. Either explanation is possible.
I started to get into the X-Men comics a bit in the early/mid nineties, because the cartoon had started up, and it had a more mature storyline than a lot of things you see on Saturday mornings.