My Hero Academia, Season 4
This represented a little bit of a departure from previous seasons, because the big battle came early on, and someone actually died. There’s a decent pop rock song in the filler storyline of the school talent show. But really, the soap opera of MHA continues as soap operas do: you already know what you’re going to get, it’s just more plot. Already there’s a season five out, and I’m kinda getting burnt out on all of it. There’s nothing wrong with the story itself necessarily, unless you count a do-gooder protagonist crying all the time. There’re enough likeable characters to distract from that, but it seems four seasons is the limit in this case.
Alien Nation
Weird-head alien refugees have sort of integrated with human society, but not to one rough racist (xeno-ist?) cop isn’t havin’ it. This feel almost like it should’ve been a Verhoven flick (Robocop, Starship Troopers), but it kinda stopped short of going all the way there. The aliens get plastered on sour milk. Heh.
Bicentennial Man
Robin Williams playing Robin Williams, the misunderstood weirdo with a heart of gold, in a robot suit. This felt more endearing that some of his other roles, but maybe it appealed to me more because of the sci-fi setting, so there’s precursors of what A.I. would be a few years later. In terms of the sci-fi aspect of it, it was done pretty well; it was closer to pure sci-fi than a lot of other things that get labeled as such, but are really just futuristic action or military movies.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Documentary proof (I kid) that the 1969 Apollo 11 mission wasn’t faked, but enacted for much different reasons. A lot of things happened in Chicago instead on New York City. I don’t remember much about it because it’s Bayformers. It wasn’t as good as The Last Knight, which wasn’t well-received at large, so that should tell you something.
Dr. Stone, Season 1
What a great premise: a chemist (?) is reanimated a few thousand years after a cosmological event turns everyone to stone. He eventually settles with a tribe of people who emerged before he did, and he goes about recreating (from memory, obviously), all of the modern technology he was familiar with, but starting basically at the stone age. What’s great is that the writers (it was a manga, originally) went into some good detail about how every piece of something is made, so you really get a sense of everything that goes into making things.
A Christmas Carol (2009)
A decent portrayal that stays faithful to the Dickens text, although this felt a little too dark. Dickens’ story was more felt more lighthearted to me, despite Scrooge emotional arc.
Johnny Mnemonic
A cyber-courier who smuggles information in his brain, at the cost of memories, has to remove a big file before it kills him. I’m old enough to remember when dealing with limited storage, like complicated Photoshop source files, onto a disk was such a pain to work around, which I think played into the fears unwieldly file sizes in the plot. Writable CDs made it better, but it sucked until the rewritable ones came along. You youngins don’t know how good you have it, with your cloud storage and wifi. There’s an fun little emulator of what I think is a CD-ROM “website” that promoted the movie.
Moontrap: Target Earth
Ouch. Here’s the full-length ouch if you want to subject yourself to it..
Psycho-Pass, Seasons 3 and 4
I feel like the Psycho-pass writers are doing the worldbuilding right. The first few seasons focused on the Sybil System and how crime coefficients work, where seasons three and four are basically cyber-punk crime dramas operating under the exposition of the first two. These two seasons deserve a few rewatches because world-building to me is easy to pick up on, but there can a lot of moving parts in a futuristic crime story that can be missed.
Attack on Titan, The Final Season (Part 1)
Another series that the original manga writers are doing very right, and this, the final season, it feels like story is veering strongly away from shonen territory and getting very seinen-like in its complexity. The implications of what seemed like a smaller, self-contained story of Paradis defending against the Titans blew way up into Ymir’s bloodline and the political machinations with using the various Titan powers. A mediocre story would’ve stuck with the Titans and trying to defeat them, maybe there would be a traitor high up in the Paradis political structure that Eren would have to deal with (although lots of turncoating happened in the actual story as well). The slow reveal of the mysterious nature of the world’s history starts to come to a head here.