Movie Reviews - new films reviewed

The sequel to a movie based on toy robots. Directed by Michael Bay.
There are two categories of people out there – those who will be thrilled by that pitch, and those who will be annoyed and fear the worst.

If you belong to the first category, then no matter what, you will like this movie. It has giant and tiny robots, good robots and bad robots, and they are cracking jokes and battling each other almost non-stop for 150 minutes. And Shia LaBeouf and Optimus Prime are saving the world! And it has the foxy Megan Fox who twists her body into the most unlikely poses (just as in Transformers) to radiate as much G-rated sexiness as possible. And it has this Danny-guy (Josh Duhamel) from Las Vegas (now we know what he does when he is summoned for special ops!). Did i mention the explosions yet? There are lots of them.

But if you belong to the 2nd category, oh dear, you are well advised to fear Transformers (the movie, not the robots). The plot is as thin as it is negligible, the dialogues are awful, much of the acting sub-standard, the jokes are lame, and the robot fights are not much more than blurs of shapes and colors, photographed with hectic camera movements and jump cuts. And the film seems to last forever. The only excuses to be caught watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen are hottie Megan Fox and John Turturro (who suffers from a bad script and bad directing).

Verdict: For fanboys only!

Cal McAffrey (Russel Crowe), an old-fashioned journalist, and Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), his blogger-colleague, are investigating for a story about a double murder. They discover the murders are linked to the death of Sonia Baker (Maria Thayer), a staff member – and lover – of congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) who is an old friend of McAffrey. Collins is leading an investigation against PointCorp, a defense contractor providing mercenaries, security and training in “advanced interrogation” for the Pentagon and the police, and Sonia was his lead researcher in this hearings. Billions of dollars are at stake, and everybody who is poking his nose to deep into the case is risking his life.

State of Play is as old-fashioned as it’s lead Cal McAffrey – which means it comes with a solid plot, characterisation and suspense instead of wobbly-cams and explosions. There is some violence and action, but not for the sake of it but because it is part of the story. The script is sharp, thought-out, highly relevant and gives the actors something to work with.
Not your blockbuster movie of the week, but so much the better!

State of Play movie trailer

After three Terminator films and three Terminators sent to the past (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Patrick, Kristanna Loken) to kill John Connor’s mother/John Connor/John Connor’s lieutenants we finally see more than just glimpses of the future where the Terminators came from.
But it seems to be quite a different future from the one we and John Connor (Christian Bale) have expected, and not only because there is a new kind of Terminator around – a cyborg with a human heart and brain (Sam Worthington). John Connor seems not to be the leader of the human resistance, there are much less killer-machines around than we know from Kyle Reese’s (Anton Yelchin in Terminator Salvation) memories of the future, and even though we have seen the bombs fall in Terminator 3 – Rise of the Machines the future is not the burnt and radioactive hell it is supposed to be.

But while both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day were groundbreaking films and T-3 was at least trying to continue the saga, Terminator Salvation is a different beast. It’s obvious that the script has been doctored with more than once too often, the movie can’t decide if it’s a John-Connor-story or a Marcus-Wright-story, and it’s full of gaping plot-holes a submarine could maneuver through. It’s not even a Terminator-story like the first three films which centered on the fight merciless machine vs. man, while Terminator Salvation is more a war-movie than the SF-Horror of it’s predecessors, and the references to the previous films (”I’ll be back”, legless crawling Terminator, molten steel, etc) are not really helpful.
And it’s symptomatic that the best ten minutes of Salvation are starring a digitally created Arnold-Schwarzenegger-style T-800.
Of course, another “Terminator-travels-to-the-past-to-kill-John-Connor”-film would have been overly redundant, but maybe it would have been better to let the Terminator-series rest in peace instead of continuing it with this Episode-I-like disappointment.

Terminator Salvation Movie Trailer

The next Dan Brown mystery thriller after The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons again tells of an adventure by Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). This time, it seems an ancient enemy of the catholic church – the Illuminati – have returned with the plan to destroy the Vatican with antimatter stolen from the CERN facilities in Geneva. Accompanied by Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) from CERN, Langdon must find and follow the Path of Illumination to save four preferiti (the most promising candidates in the ongoing election of a new pope) and to uncover the Illuminati before the antimatter-bomb destroys the Vatican and possibly a big part of Rome.

Angels & Demons suffers from the same problems as The Da Vinci Code – it is much too talky, Tom Hanks solves mysteries that have been kept hidden for centuries within minutes, and the posse scurries from church to museum, from museum to ancient monument, from puzzle to puzzle in a race against time to tick off locations and events from the book within the 138 minutes running-time. What’s missing is the feeling of the weight of the centuries, the depth of ancient mysteries and conspiracies, the monstrous scope of the events – instead Angels & Demons falls flat and is at most two-dimensional.
Just like in The Da Vinci Code the best moments are the last minutes, when the talking stops for a couple of minutes and Ron Howard seems to remember one of the vital rules of moviemaking: Show, don’t tell. Nice soundtrack by Hans Zimmer in those moments though – when you like a mix of the sacral and the bombastic.
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Angels & Demons Movie Trailer

Rebooting franchises has become fashionable (see Superman, Batman, James Bond), and if there was another big franchise in dire need of a reboot, it was Star Trek. And reboot it did J. J. Abrams – with a bang.
Arguably the best of the big screen-appearance of every geek’s favorite starship Enterprise, Abrams’ Star Trek should replace Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as number one on most fans’ top list. Abrams had to walk a fine line between modernizing the ailing franchise and preserving the spirit of Star Trek (and keeping the fanboys happy), and the same challenge was faced by the actors and the production design.
Not an easy task, but mission accomplished: The bridge of the Enterprise has finally arrived in the 21st century (or the 23rd if you want), but the engine rooms still look more like an oil refinery or the engine room of a steamboat than that of a starship (maybe somebody has seen Galaxy Quest there), and even the uniforms of the original TV series have been preserved but updated to a modern, non-cheesy look.
The same successful makeover has been applied to the crew of the Enterprise, and the script containes lots of nods to the original series: The first Captain of the Enterprise in Star Trek is a certain Captain Pike, Kirk (Chris Pine) still has got an affection for exotic women and an aversion against regulations, Spock (Zachary Quinto) his conflict between logic and emotion, Bones (Karl Urban) is still grumpy but resourceful, Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) seem to be born for maneuvring the Enterprise but have the opportunity to show some additional qualities, and Scotty (Simon Pegg) is both comic relief and technical genius. And Uhura (Zoe Saldana) still wears the Star Fleet’s mini-skirt (with style!), but a point is made of the fact that she is a highly qualified officer and not just a switchboard operator with a fancy title.
The only weak point of Star Trek is the not so original plot and the absence of a philosophical background, but that’s outweighed by the pacing and action superior to any other of the Star Trek movies and the successful re-introduction of the original Enterprise crew – with the clever ploy that Star Trek is now taking place in an alternate timeline, allowing further modernisations and deviances from the original series – and a continuation of the franchise into directions where no man has gone before.

Star Trek Movie Trailer