Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 44

The Boy and the Heron

In World War II Japan, a boy is guided by an annoying heron into a mysterious alternate reality, to find his father’s new wife and aunt.

The heron wasn’t really annoying, except in the first few scenes, where he’s lightly terrorizing and gangstalking Mahito and taking dumps on his windowsill. After they become allies, he becomes more comic relief.

Anyways, this is supposedly Hiyao Miyazaki’s last film, and I really wanted to like it, but it felt like all the parts didn’t connect in the way it usually does with his movies. And when they do, it’s kind of like, “so what?” What’s the big deal that <SPOILER> Himi was Hisako from the past? Why the different name, and wouldn’t Mahito kind of recognize her? </SPOILER> The standard mysterious world elements were there, but there posed in such a way that didn’t require some kind of explanation. With Spirited Away, you didn’t need to know Chihiro’s parents became pigs because eating the spirits’ food was forbidden; they ate like pigs in the first place, not to mention the food wasn’t theirs in the first place, so the curse made some sort of sense. Mahito wasn’t terribly likeable, either. You felt bad for him, but you didn’t really care about him the way you did with Chihiro.

It’s been said this is a personal film for Miyazaki, so I’m guessing he just did what he wanted to do with Heron. That’s fine. The guy definitely earned the right to do that a few times over.

John Wick

An ex-assassin seeks revenge on his former boss, whose son killed the dog his ailing wife had arranged to send him after her death.

Maybe it’s the sequels that played up the gun-fu aspect, but I didn’t see a whole lot of it here. That’s okay. The story isn’t compelling enough for me to watch the sequels, so I’ll just assume they have that fun stuff all throughout them.

Opening scene was a pretty good in media res: Wick lightly crashes his SUV in an abandoned industrial park, stumbles out of it, badly injured, and watches a video of him and his significant other at a beach. Will this take place before or during or after the actual story? What lead up to all of this? Is he gonna live through it?

This suffered badly from the “why don’t they just shoot him” ailment from which so many of these movies suffer. Viggo, the mafia boss, captures John after the church fire scene, has him tied up in a chair and whatnot. Of course they need to have a conversation, after Viggo spends the previous time in the movie telling everyone how dangerous John is. And then—good!—he has his men try to murder him, by putting a bag over his head? Just shoot him and be done with it. You’ve got a dozen guns between all of your and you chose suffocation? Of course the protagonist is gonna get out of that one.

San Andreas

As the west coast is ravaged by earthquakes, a helicopter pilot attempts to rescue his ex-wife and daughter.

The Rock/Dwayne Johnson isn’t a good actor—even I can tell that—but he does have really good screen presence. He plays the same character in every movie, but there’s really only a few people in the world that can deliver the same package. So the movie has that.

The beginning I will admit had a decent subversion of expectations. A girl is driving her car up the side of a mountain, with a cliff and a dangerous drop to her right. She’s texting a whole lot. Is she gonna wreck the car? No, she doesn’t. She reaches into the backseat and struggles to get something out of her bag. Now she’s gonna wreck. No, again. Kaboom! There’s a rock slide, and it knocks her off the cliff. Though for different reasons, it reminded me of the uniquely-shot car chase scene from the really bad Power Rangers reboot movie.

The amateurish situation where a perpetrator trains a gun on someone within arm’s reach of a trained weaponry-type of person, what I mentioned with the Maze Runner review I did, is thankfully treated how it should’ve been. A thug tries to hold up The Rock’s character’s car, sticking a gun right in his face, and The Rock easily disarms the guy. Good job. The Rock’s character was ex-military, so it makes sense he would know what to do there.

The Rock is a well-meaning Disappeared Dad, and the longsuffering ex-wife and goody two-shoes daughter have a jagoff husband/step-dad. You already know that’s going to end. Speaking of endings, I easily predicted the “we rebuild” line at the end. I actually said it out loud a few minutes before falling asleep; somehow I made it to the end.

Rampage

Two scientists track down a trio of animals infected with an experimental mutagenic drug that has made them big and angry.

The Rock playing The Rock. I suppose this is technically a video game movie, but there’s little resemblance to the original game, which I played a ton of when it was only in the arcades. The game was also remade based on the movie, which kind of annoys me because it makes a telephone game of the lore. Not that there was a lot of backstory to begin with, but the monsters in the original game did have origins that were ignored in the movie.

This movie wasn’t good, but I thought the prologue was well-done. There was a disaster on a space station conducting experiments, and the only surviving crew member had to escape, but her boss (Claire) on Earth would only unlock the door to the escape ship thing if the scientist brought back the mutagen they were testing. Not realistic at all—whoever the mission commander was back on Earth would have thrown Claire out the window if she suggested something like that—but it was a good way to set up how much of a psychopath the main (human) villain was, what the mutagen could do, and how it got to Earth in the first place.

Claire proved to be too boneheaded rather than villainous to me. She wanted to cover up the space station disaster—which is impossible, first off, and by the time she thinks of the solution, the reputation damage would have already been done—and use the mutated animals for bioweapons research, by attracting the three very destructive monsters into the middle of downtown Chicago with her noisemaker thing at the top of Willis Tower. She’s just asking for another PR disaster. The noisemaker that only they can hear was a good idea, but I would have her put it in the middle of nowhere to make her less incurably stupid. But, the disaster has to happen in a city, based on the game and because all these movies have to end up in a city to give the special effects people something to destroy. There’s probably a way for the writers to get them into the city for all of that to happen, but that requires some creativity. That’s too much to ask of some creative people.

The original game’s monsters were actually human, who mutated for three different reasons. It was goofy and not really serious in the first place, and it would’ve been better if the movie had less grittiness and more lightheartedness to it. But, as always, these are the days in entertainment where everything has to be edgy and dark.

Monstrous

A woman takes her young son to rural California to escape her abusive ex-husband, only to encounter an unusual danger in their new house.

This got a lot of bad reviews, I think because people expected more gore and less psychological suspense. It definitely delivered on the tension, although it would’ve felt better as a short film, or introducing something else in the plot to make the runtime not feel as padded.

A lot of reviewers said they noticed the twist early on. I’ll admit that I didn’t, because I generally don’t have that kind of of analytical attention when I watch a movie (maybe I should?), but I got the feeling there was something amiss with the mom’s fashion sense. In that regard, I at least caught onto the twist.

I’m not too perceptive on what’s bad acting, or who’s really a consistently good actor or not, but Christina Ricci felt perfect as the flawed good mom type. She’s attractive but there’s an unconventional aura about her that hints at a troubling depth.

The Sky Crawlers

On an alternate-history World War II-era Earth, a pilot reassigned to a new base and slowly realizes the mystery of the eternally-young Kildren pilots.

All the Mamoru Oshii trademarks are here: 2D/3D animation, philosophical monologues out of nowhere, unexpected but important shots of scenery and mise en scène, women with black bob haircuts. I knew the entire plot was going to be a big mystery box in the scene right after the prologue, when Kannami lands. He mentions that the mechanic seemed familiar to him. Her response of “that’s nice” is appropriate in retrospect. It’s also telling that the hangar dog got excited when the plane landed, because he sensed something familiar to him, despite Kannami being the “new” pilot.

Similar little quirks in the character interactions keep happening in subsequent scenes so the slow unraveling is a little hard to ignore. I got annoyed that Kannami was such a boring protagonist while being surrounded by characters much more invested in what’s going on. You might be forgiven in thinking he’s just getting adjusted to his new life, which in reality he was doing, but there was a good reason for it.

Narratively, I might have put in an undercover character, like a doctor or some medical officer, that would oversee what was going on with the “new” pilots to make sure they didn’t go too haywire. It would’ve been appropriate to have an overseer to preserve continuity in-universe without getting too involved; I wouldn’t want this character to completely explain the Kildren, because the whole point is that their situation is ambiguous. The audience isn’t quite clear, just as the Kildren themselves aren’t totally clear about the repeating cycle of their military service. None of the pilots have the complete story; they more or less end up ignoring the mystery yet incompletely putting the pieces together as they go. It makes me think this movie is really a study on PTSD, but I don’t know enough about it to really say.

Earth to Echo

Three friends hanging out for the last time before they all move, are led to an alien presence in their hometown.

E.T. meets The Goonies. I liked most of this; it was a bit like Super 8, but not as good and not as scary, and they even copied the spaceship-assembly-in-midair scene at the end.

I can understand why the shaky-cam/”found footage” gets annoying after a while, but it fit the boys’ general dynamic, and most of the time their acting felt genuine. It feels like this movie fills a hole that isn’t usually filled. A lot of pre-teen and early teen movies are “unisex” or more aimed towards girls. There’s not a lot that just star teenage boys getting into some innocent trouble without getting too saccharine about it.

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Note: I was going to watch Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire, but I don’t have Netflix anymore, and it wasn’t showing in theaters around me. Despite how good the trailers were, it got middling-to-bad reviews so I don’t think I’ll dedicate any time to re-subscribing to Netflix just to watch it.