Thor: The Dark World (2013)

I remember when they announced the first Thor movie and wondered how in the hell they were going to get it to work on-screen.  Combing cool fantasy elements, and funny fish-out-of-water moments, Thor was a hit.  Just two years later, we're already on our third film featuring the character.  Sometimes it pays to just keep doing what you're doing.

In a very Lord of the Rings-ish prologue, we learn that long ago Odin's father fought with the Dark Elves, led by Malekith (Christopher Eccleston).  Malekith sought to control the Aether, a weapon of unlimited power, to destroy the Nine Realms and return the universe to darkness.  After being beaten back, the Aether was hidden where nobody would find it, which only means that some puny human is going to accidentally find it one day.

In the present day, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is busy at work trying to bring peace to the Nine Realms after the events of both the first film and The Avengers.  He's regained the respect of his father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), who wants him to take over his throne, but it's clear to all that he longs to reunite with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman).  Personally, I would been all over Sif (Jaimie Alexander), but to each their own.  Jane is investigating weird physical anomalies in London, where she comes in contact with the Aether.  This awakens Malekith and he sets his sights on Asgard to reclaim it.  Thor is forced to turn to the one person he cannot trust for help: his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston).

Unlike the first Thor, much more time is spent in Asgard and you get a longer look at this realm, along with a few others.  It all looks great, and the effects across the board are very good.  There was a nice blend of sci-fi with the fantasy elements, and at times I was reminded of Krull.  I had a problem with the 3D in Thor, so I skipped that this time.  I didn't see anything about the visuals in The Dark World that screamed a need to see this in 3D anyway.

Many of the side characters get extended screen time and their moments to stand out, but I was left wanting much more of them, particularly Sif, Volstagg (Ray Stevenson), and Fandral (Zachary Levi, replacing Josh Dallas).  Heimdall's role was also expanded, but I think you can attribute much of that to the star power of Idris Elba.  Even Thor's Mom, Frigga (Rene Russo) gets in on the action, and she shares some time with Loki giving you a little more insight into their relationship.

The Dark World's story is a little messy and takes a little too long to really get moving.  If you take a look at the IMDB page, you'll see a lot of names involved with the story and screenplay, which is usually a bad sign.  It's not so messy that it's hard to follow or a complete wreck, but it seemed to lack focus and the tone was a little inconsistent.  You could see elements that were borrowed from other films, and I was also a little irritated with the consistent use of illusions to get a character out of danger.

Another weakness is that while there's a distinct villain and we understand what he's after, he wasn't all that interesting or menacing.  Christopher Eccleston as Malekith was completely unrecognizable and spoke in a made up language for most of the film, making his casting a bit of waste.  Much of Malekith's scenes felt really disconnected from the rest of the film.

Where Thor: The Dark World really shines are with any of the action scenes.  Director Alan Taylor's experience with shows like Rome and Game of Thrones served him well.  You're treated to several of these Lord of the Rings-esque fights, complete with illuminating swords, but with lasers and other technology thrown in.  When we get to the final battle, it's very creative and manages to stand apart from the rest.  It finished on a high note and fans should leave feeling satisfied.

The performances are great as well.  Chris Hemsworth has really settled into the role and has ramped up his Thor-iness.  In the first film, it felt like a guy playing dress up a bit, but now he truly feels like Thor.  Thor's relationship with Jane was much more natural, and I think that's due in large part to the improved chemistry between Hemsworth and Natalie Portman.  Finally, Tom Hiddleston knocks it out of the park as Loki.  I've said for a while now that Hiddleston really seems to love playing the role and just chews it up any chance he gets.  If anything, he makes a case for the first Marvel spin-off starring a bad guy.  Come on, Marvel, make it happen.  Loki: God of Mischief should be part of Phase 3.

Much like the first film, there's a good amount of humor sprinkled throughout the film.  Much of this is provided by the puny Earthlings played by Kat Dennings, Stellan Skarsgard and Chris O'Dowd.  Sometimes their antics bordered on being silly, but the film benefit from these moments overall.  There are also a few great Easter eggs, and you'll definitely want to stick until the end of the credits.

Thor: The Dark World isn't likely to win any new fans, but there's enough of the humor and action that made the first work to please existing ones.  While the story is a little messy, the performances and action are a distinct improvement over Thor.  Overall, it's a highly entertaining film, so don't hesitate to check it out this weekend.

3.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

Pacific Rim (2013)

I spent much of my youth watching Godzilla, Ultraman, Voltron, Giant Robo, Mazinger Z and other various Creature Features.  I had tons of these toys, and still own about 10 Godzilla films on DVD at present.  I've long wished for that big budget epic of any of these properties, and no, Roland Emmerich's Godzilla does not count.  I do have hopes for the upcoming Godzilla film though.  You can imagine my excitement when seeing the various trailers and spots for Pacific Rim.  I finally get to see giant robots fight giant creatures in the way I've always dreamed!

The kid in me loved Pacific Rim on that front.  It delivers on exactly what it advertised.  However, if you watch Pacific Rim and come away from it thinking it's an awful piece of shit, then I wouldn't be able to disagree with you.  Nearly every other aspect of Pacific Rim is a mess (I'll get to that).  Some of this is a byproduct of the style though.  Pacific Rim is basically a big budget B movie or Midnight Monster Movie.  It's nothing more than a kids film, and it even feels like a toy commercial at times.

If you're hoping this may lead to a influx of more of these films, this is where I think Pacific Rim was a missed opportunity.  It doesn't do anything to transcend the genre.  I don't see many guys that will be able to drag their wives or girlfriends to this.  There just isn't any appeal outside of fathers and sons.  I had hoped that Guillermo del Toro would have tried to reach out to a wider audience, but those looking for a better story or interesting characters won't be able to get past the general cheesiness.

The entire backstory of Pacific Rim is laid out in the opening prologue.  Aliens opens a dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean and begin to send giant monsters, called Kaiju, through it on a regular schedule.  There doesn't seem to be any purpose to it other than to cause destruction.  The monsters progressively become larger and more powerful, so the world's governments put aside their differences and coordinate to build giant robots called Jaegers.  Initially these were controlled by a single pilot, but it's found that the neural load was too much for a single person, so they are operated by pairs of people that have their minds linked together, called "drifting".  This is not to be confused with Tokyo Drifting.

The action picks up several years into the conflict and things aren't looking good for humanity.  The Kaiju are getting stronger and attacking more frequently, and we're running out of Jaegers.  In a last ditch attempt to stop them, the remaining Jaegers are pooled and a plan is formed to close the rift.  Becket (Charlie Hunnam), a former Jaeger pilot that's moved on after the death of this brother is asked to step back into his old Jaeger.  That's pretty much the entire plot.

While I liked that Pacific Rim didn't waste too much time with backstory and throws us right into the action, I also wanted to see more of the early days of the Jaeger program and successes.  There were several generations of Jaegers, but you don't get to see all of them or learn what they improved with each version.  By the time of the events in Pacific Rim, there are only about five Jaegers left.  It would have been awesome to see a large force of these all on screen at once fighting multiple monsters.  I realize the budget of the film might not allowed that, but even a short, wide shot of an early epic battle would have been a sight to behold.

Instead, we're coming into to the story as the Jaegerr program is being shut down due to decreasing effectiveness.  These Jaegers don't last very long in a fight.  Some are so ineffective that it's hard to understand why they ever went this direction in the first place.  Wouldn't it have been more efficient to use the same resources to build up a large arsenal of huge missiles, mines and other weaponry to combat them?  Things that didn't require pilots or could be controlled remotely?  Yeah, I know that's not as fun, and there'd be no movie otherwise.  Forget it.  We came to see giant robots versus giant monsters!

Again, this is the success of Pacific Rim.  The action and special effects are fan-friggin-tastic!  Everything is colorful, the Kaiju and Jaegers all have interesting and unique looks about them.  You get to see robots vs monster action throughout the film, and there are some great, creative fights.  However, this brings me to one of the things that bugged me about Pacific Rim.  There are more than a few times where you can't tell what's going on.  It's not as bad as something like Transformers, but most of these battles occur at night, and in water, and are shot too close.  You never really get to have a good, long look at either the Kaiju or the Jaegers.  With all the design that went into them, it would be nice to be able to appreciate that more.  Just pause on a wide shot for an extra second or two.

As I've mentioned, there's not much to the plot and it's a pretty self-contained story.  There's no attempt to setup or even hint at a sequel or something coming next.  Part of me appreciates that, but when discussing after with my friend, we both thought the movie would have been better if it had been framed similar to how The Princess Bride was told. You could have had a retired Jaeger pilot telling his son or grandson the tale as a bedtime story.  At the end when the kid says something like, "Wow!  That was amazing!"  They could end the film with the pilot saying something like, "Oh yeah?  Well, wait until I tell you about what happened next!"  Then you could pretty much go crazy with anything you want in the sequel.  It doesn't mean they won't make one if it does well enough, but it felt like another missed opportunity to me.

I don't mind the thin plot since I wasn't watching Pacific Rim for that, but I was annoyed by all the various and unnecessary character threads.  This really drug the middle part of the film down, and didn't add anything or made me care about the characters.  Just get to the next fight scene.  Pacific Rim is over two hours long and it shouldn't have been.  There were times I got a little impatient waiting for the action to pick up again.

That's not to say if the characters were interesting or their development was done well it wouldn't have been appreciated though.  They behave in ways that make no sense or have no motivation behind.  There's another Jaeger pilot that absolutely hates Becket for no real reason.  They're working together to stop the apocalypse (oh, and we'll get to the "cancelling the apocalypse" thing), so you'd think they'd have some kind of bond or camaraderie.  There's a pair of scientists played by Charlie Day and Burn (Burn?) Gorman, that were meant as comic relief, but their antics and behavior were plain silly.  I did enjoy Charlie Day though, but that's probably due to more to being a fan of his in general.  Ron Perlman has a small role as this ridiculous black market seller of Kaiju parts that I couldn't help but laugh at, but not in a good way.  There's a lot of unintentional humor, and I didn't seem to be alone in laughing at the film.  At least this will make for a great Rifftrax.

The characters are so one-dimensional that many of them aren't even referred by name.  Even Charlie Hunnam's character is only mentioned by his last name, and he only ever referred to his brother as "my brother".  When the credits rolled, we were surprised to see they were named Raleigh and Yancy.  This also gave us a laugh, because aren't these girls names?  Why go through the trouble of coming up with unusual names for your characters if you don't bother using them?  Anyway...

Nearly everything about the plot is telegraphed.  It's every action cliche you can imagine.  There's even a young, aspiring Jaeger pilot, Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), who is the best candidate to be Becket's partner, but Idris Elba won't let her.  There's a relationship between the two of them that's undeveloped as well, but the whole thing seemed like a pointless conflict and build up, as we all know she's going to end up in a Jaeger at some point.  Many parts of the film very melodramatic.

The dialog is pretty terrible, and it's not just that it's awful, but it's how it's delivered.  Characters shout for no reason.  Charlie Hunnam had a constant sneer even when he didn't have a reason to be angry.  Idris Elba at one point says, "don't let my calm demeanor fool you", yet he was one of the guys shouting most of his dialog.  I didn't find him calm.  Everyone seemed to be way overdoing it and it felt very cartoonish.  Maybe that's what Guillermo del Toro was going for with all the overacting and melodrama, to evoke those kinds of shows and cartoons that are silly and overdone.  I was just a little disappointed to see someone like Idris Elba made to look like an average actor.  If this was your first experience with him, you'd wonder what the big deal was.  You could say that about almost everyone in the film though.

Regarding all the shouting, I'm not sure if this was a problem with the film's sound mix or the theater I saw it in, but a lot of the dialog had an echo which also made it hard to make out.  Much of the dialog I couldn't understand because it was drowned out by other noise in the film.

Now it's time to "Cancel the Apocalypse".  I'm really getting tired of the trope of the dramatic, motivational speech that happens just before the climax.  It's unnecessary most of the time, but in an effort to not sound like all other speeches, they say things that aren't very natural.  In Pacific Rim, Idris Elba is forced to deliver an uninspired speech where he says, "Today, we cancel the apocalypse!"  If they make Pacific Rim 2, is someone going to say, "Tonight, we reschedule the Doomsday to a date to be determined later!"  Please let this happen.  My friend was starting to comment about the length of the film, and was unsure how much time we had left, so I said, "Well, he hasn't cancelled the apocalypse yet, so we still have a ways to go."  Then when the scene finally started, I sat up and said, "Oh sweet, he's about to cancel the apocalypse!"  It's a good thing the theater was mostly empty.  Lastly, I thought it was funny that you hear someone say in the film that it was a good speech.  It wasn't.

Pacific Rim is light on story, cheesy, over-acted, and terribly written.  You might think then that I hated it, but you're wrong!  It's still very entertaining and a lot of fun.  It absolutely delivers on the giant robots vs. monsters mayhem that was advertised.  The kid in me was delighted by what I saw, but still came away a little disappointed that it could have been more.  If you don't want anything beyond some mindless and great looking action, or are someone like me that needs your Godzilla fix, then it's definitely worth a matinee.

3 (out of 5) Death Stars

Prometheus (2012) - Movie Review

When are humans going to learn that if you're going to explore outer space, then you should bring an army along just in case?

I was talking to a friend the other day when he questioned what all the hype was about Prometheus, and I said, "It's return of Ridley Scott to the Alien franchise and it has a sick cast.  What's not to like!"  After seeing Prometheus, I'm afraid my friend was right about the hype.  It's not that Prometheus is a bad movie, but I think it's an example of what happens when everyone's expectations are set too high.

While I'm going to try to stay away from spoilers, I am going to start this one off on a bit of a rant.  The problem is this: nearly the entire story, including the climax, is spoiled in the trailers.  This has to stop!  You can watch the 2-3 minute trailers online and you've pretty much seen the entire plot of Prometheus.  Granted, lots of movies do this, but so much of this movie is telegraphed by the trailer that there's little suspense to anything that happens.

The setup for Prometheus starts with two scientists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), who find an old cave painting that has a set of markings that matches the same set found in paintings from many unrelated civilizations.  They determine these markings are a star cluster, which they analyze and find that there is a planet they suspect that can support life.

Weyland Industries funds an expedition to the planet to see what they find and maybe get some answers to the origins of life on Earth.  While in transit, you're introduced to David (Michael Fassbender), an android, which is clear by the very fact that he's not in cryo-sleep like everyone else.  Plus, they introduce him to the crew as an android the first chance they get.  This felt odd to me as in Alien the reveal of the android was a surprise to the crew.  David is easily the most interesting character in the movie and Fassbender does a great job with the role.  From the very beginning, you're already curious about what's going on in that computer brain of his.

They arrive at the planet and find ancient buildings and remains that are thousands of years old.  Something bad happened there, but they don't know what yet.  Just as they start to explore, another pet peeve of mine happens.  Why is it always the role of the 'egghead'-scientist character to not want weapons on the mission?  As a smart person, don't you understand that when going into an unknown, it's probably not a bad idea to be prepared for all contingencies?  Of course, they don't take weapons and then later there's always a need for them.  It bugged me a little more this time around, because you don't know what you're going to run into on an alien world.

There's a whole lot of 'what is that?' and 'who are they?' in the movie.  One of the strengths of Prometheus is that this did feel like a true sci-fi film.  The setup and early part of the movie really had me.  When they talk about the Engineers (the famous Space Jockey from the first Alien) and life on Earth, you're genuinely interested in seeing how it all plays out.  What are they going to discover?

However, once the more action/horror elements start, I started to lose interest, as those earlier sci-fi aspects of the film fell by the wayside.  That's the main problem.  Prometheus sets up all these questions and then doesn't answer very many of them.  I left Prometheus still knowing very little about the back story of this universe.  They do setup a sequel, and I actually hope it gets made because maybe that will answer many of the questions left unanswered.

The ironic thing is that there was a line in the movie about being disappointed when meeting your creator and finding out 'why'.  That's how I think a lot are going to feel about this movie: disappointed.

Prometheus does have a great cast, but the characters aren't developed very well and it seems like a waste, as their talents are underused.  For the second straight week, Charlize Theron stars as a bad guy, but this time around it's more of a muted performance where there is doubt about what her true motivations are.  This could have been a more interesting character, but they didn't develop her.  Tom Hardy-lookalike, Logan Marshall-Green, plays his character with a unusually abrasive attitude, especially towards Fassbender's David.  It's never a good idea to be needlessly mean to the outwardly nice, but morally ambiguous android, right?  That won't turn out bad for him at all.

The story focuses on Noomi Rapace's Shaw and I thought she did a good job.  While the comparisons to Sigourney Weaver's Ripley are natural, she doesn't demonstrate the same strength or toughness as Ripley.  Shaw is a scientist, where Ripley seems like a natural leader from the very beginning.  Idris Elba seemed like the only character that had any real personality, but he's not in it that much or given much to do.  I didn't even realize Guy Pearce was in this, as they put him some really awful old man makeup.  I don't understand why they did this, rather than just cast an older actor.  I like Pearce, but he didn't bring anything to the role that made you think only he could have played it.  Fassbender comes out if this looking the best.

The script by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof doesn't develop the story elements it sets up or gives you enough to care about the characters or make them all that interesting.  If you're a Lost fan, as I am, the disappointing payoff may not be a surprise to you considering Lindelof's involvement.  There were just too many thing in the story that didn't add up to me.

I'm glad Ridley Scott is back to the Alien universe he introduced us to back in the 70's.  He really did get the sci-fi aspects down and the movie's visual style is fantastic.  It is a gorgeous movie to look at.  The visuals alone are almost worth the price of admission.  I did see it in IMAX, which helped, but I didn't think the 3D did much for it.

There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not this is an Alien prequel or just set in the same universe.  It's definitely not a direct prequel to Alien.  I'd call it Alien's uncle.  I think it's better to go into this as a standalone film.  I tried to do that, but still felt it lacking.  However, there's a tacked on ending that kind of undercuts their assertion that this isn't another Alien film.

In the end, Prometheus has a lot of interesting ideas that aren't fully realized.  It's a visually stunning movie and has a few interesting performances, especially from Michael Fassbender, but it ultimately left me disappointed and a little cold.  Maybe on a second viewing once it hits Blu-Ray I might get more out of it.  If you're dying to see this, do a matinee and skip the 3D.  Otherwise, it's a rental.

3 (out of 5) Death Stars