Reviews

The action scenes are good and the tension is high HOWEVER....

The reason for this movie, the deaths in the beginning and why they're chasing the boy and his father is never revealed so what is the point of all of this?

The action is like the sex in a porn movie. The three minutes of talking in the beginning is just an excuse to get to the good parts.

I feel this film fails on a number of levels: 1) It centers on a bunch of characters that I couldn't care about. It wasn't so much about what caused the mortgage crisis but about people who took advantage of the crisis to make money for themselves. I didn't understand what they were doing to accomplish this. They were doing "something" that would make them a lot of money if mortgages failed but I never really understood what that was.

2) The frenetic style of the film was disorienting and distracting.

3) The asides with famous people explaining things was irritating. And the famous people weren't A-list celebrities, it was like these were the best ones that they could get.

4) After being spoon-fed information, I still feel like I didn't understand what they were talking about. (Perhaps I just didn't care.)

5) Perhaps if they included how the mortgage crisis affected real people, that might have helped (they showed ONE family leaving in their car but these folks were renters and could move elsewhere). They didn't ACTUALLY lose their own house.

6) There's a line from an episode of "Frasier" where Roz says, "Throw in a couple of strippers and that still sounds dull". There were a couple of strippers in this movie for NO good reason and it was still dull.

Overall, I found the movie self-indulgent on the director's part ("Hey look ma, I'm a director!") and on the part of the characters. I don't feel I learned anything. And apparently no one involved in the financial world did either.

There's a lot of information thrown at you in the beginning, planet names and bad guy names and goody guy names and names and names and names. Fortunately most of this isn't important. All you need to know is that there's an orb that everyone wants (the old McGuffin thing).

There's a lot of action in this movie and the characters are unique and funny and that's okay but the main story, "Everyone wants this orb" was just really underwhelming to me.

The stuff in the prison wasn't bad and I liked the escape.

Did they need TWO big boss bad guys (Ronan and Thanos)? The conflict with the two sisters was kind of irritating too. Zoe Saldana looked like she just walked off the set of "Avatar" and was playing the same character.

I know a lot of people love the old songs (which were OKAY) but I think the movie's obsession with them was a little distracting. I get it, they remind Quill of his mother, but the tape would have worn out long ago and, truth be told, he'd probably get sick of those songs after 26 years.

Vin Diesel and Glenn Close were both kind of wasted in this.

It wasn't a BAD movie but there was just so much work put into service of a mediocre story. The same complaint I had of "Avatar".

Like some of the other reviewers here, the movie lost me fairly early with the Vikings having Scottish accents (and the kids having American accents). After "Austin Powers" and 800 Shrek movies and "Brave", haven't we gotten over the Scottish accent thing? Is that the ONLY accent that we can hear in animated movies anymore? Also, the dragon with the broken tail. The tail shouldn't have prevented him from getting off the ground. STEERING might have been a problem but not the flying part.

You had the usual animated movie checklist: the wimpy boy who proves himself to the father who doesn't understand him (and to the local townspeople who make fun of him), the scrappy girl, etc.

One cliché after another. I'm tired of seeing the same movie over and over again. I know it's meant for kids and kids grow up to be replaced by other kids who HAVEN'T seen these before, I GET it....

After watching the movie for two hours, I wasn't squirming in my seat waiting for it to end, I was squirming in my seat waiting for something interesting to happen.

If someone goes to the trouble to remake a movie, one would think that something new and interesting would be attempted. But the result was "Giant monsters smashing buildings". Hasn't it been done before? Like a lot?

I went to see this grudgingly, I wasn't paying for the ticket but I just wasn't having fun. Godzilla is expected to save mankind from the MUTO's? Then why does he show up and cause a tsunami that potentially could drown thousands?

If he's the military's Plan B to kill the MUTO's, why are they shooting at him? Does no one at the top speak to the troops?

They transport a warhead on a train (which gets smashed up) and they ultimately strap it to a helicopter. Couldn't they have just transported it by helicopter in the first place?

"Pacific Rim" was way more entertaining than it had to be because there was an interesting human side to the story. Here we have the checklist of the usual clichés:

1) The fretting wife 2) The guy that no one believes (the father) 3) His son whose job (bomb defusing) is exactly what is needed (but is never ultimately used). 4) Nameless, faceless masses of people being killed

The "it's just a movie" people may quibble with such details but if you're going to make "just a movie", shouldn't it be a good one?

The movie never quite pulled me in. Each scene was presented and then another one was presented. In spite of the events, Solomon doesn't really seem to have a fire in his belly to escape. There's no real depiction of an escalation of frustration or passion in Solomon.

There was also no real indication of time passage either. Twelve years go by, he gets released, his kids are grown. It's almost like for 11 years he looks the same and then when he arrives home, he's got gray hair.

Brad Pitt's role was kind of a Deux Ex Machina. Solomon asks for help and it arrives. There was danger for white people helping slaves but here everything goes fine. Solomon tolerates his situation for years and then he asks someone else for help. He never makes a break for it as you would expect.

The soundtrack was kind of horrible. Kind of like watching TV while someone is running the vacuum cleaner. You needed to focus more when the soundtrack kicked in.

The direction was competent, nothing great. It wasn't like "Hey Mom, look! I'm a director" where the director tries too hard. The acting wasn't bad. Lupita Nyong'o did a good job. I kind of thought Michael Fassbender was a psychopath, how he could ever have owned a plantation escaped me. Chiwetel Ejiofor was okay, nothing great, something was missing.

The spoiler here is that the show is boring. The Kardashians are more interesting and they do NOTHING. The Kardashians are a train wreck and sometimes train wrecks are interesting to watch.

The Lylas are nice looking girls, they appear to be able to sing but the fact that they have a famous brother is the one thing they are hopelessly attached to and what they're also running away from. It's like having a ball and chain attached to your leg. It's always there.

I'm one person who really doesn't even know who Bruno Mars is. I know there's a guy named Bruno Mars and that he sings but I've never heard his music. I only checked out the show because the ads run incessantly.

I don't see this lasting very long. It doesn't deserve to. For that matter, the Kardashians' time is up too.

The story is really kind of all over the place. Everyone's plans seem to hinge on things they can't control or someone else that they don't trust and can't possibly know what their real intentions are.

The admiral: why keep Khan's people alive? To control him? A guy who can transport across light years isn't controllable. His vision to militarize Starfleet doesn't resonate for the audience because we don't know why he wants this nor are we made to care.

Khan: why put his own people into the admiral's warheads? Does he know that the admiral will get the Enterprise to fire them at him on Qo'Nos? Are they supposed to land gently on the surface so he can revive them then? If he has access to them in the first place, revive them and be on your merry way.

The admiral KNOWS Khan put his people in the warheads, I just don't understand what anybody's motives are in this movie.

That nonsense in the beginning with the volcano: why submerge the Enterprise when you don't have to? "They (the natives) saw the Enterprise!" They were going to eventually unless you planned to keep it underwater forever, it has to come up at some time! The scene with Kirk, Spock and Uhura felt real and I actually really liked it and found it touching but Kirk's death was phoned in. Not moving in any way at all like the one from "Wrath of Khan".

If JJ Abrams feels the need to reinvent Star Trek, perhaps he should stop scavenging on the older version's carcass and come up with an original thought. I know he's capable of it.

I started watching this a couple of nights ago on Netflix. I put it off basically because I was asking myself: "What can they possibly do with this?". Hasn't the zombie thing been done a million times before? The answer to "what can they possibly do with this?" is "Nothing". It's exactly what you think it's going to be about. Exactly.

And the most irritating part of this show is that so far most of the episode plots have been this: "Someone is missing and we gotta go get 'em back".

The redneck in Atlanta who cut off his hand. They feel bad about leaving him so they go back. They shoot dead people. And then they lose the Korean kid. Then they get the Korean kid back. Later when they're on the road, they shoot dead people, the little girl runs off. Then they go look for her. Then the others go looking for the ones who went looking for her. They shoot dead people and then the boy is shot. They go looking for a doctor and they shoot dead people. Then they gotta go look for the boy's mom. Then they gotta go look for medical supplies. And........yes, they shoot dead people.

People keep leaving only to have to be found. Here's a thought: if you're surrounded by walking dead, stay together!!!!! They should change the name of the show from "The Walking Dead" to "Looking for Sh*t and Getting Lost Doing It". And from what I've read on-line, I've seen the best part of the show, Season 1. I'm already into Season 2 (I guess the first season was short, or maybe they all are, not sure.) I've been almost catching myself getting into the show and then it gets irritating again. Someone else leaves. Only to be found again. Oh and by the way, they shoot dead people.

"The Walking Dead" update: after watching 19 episodes this week, I do have to say I like the show. It still p*sses me off when someone feels compelled to leave the group, forcing someone else to go after them. If you and I are ever in a zombie apocalypse, do NOT tell me you have to go back home to check if you left the iron on or some other excuse. I'm not coming after you! :)

Is a rampaging monster the only idea that J.J. Abrams has in his head? "Cloverfield", "Lost" and now "Super 8" features one. "Attention: the big secret in my new movie is the same one I've used over and over again in my other movies!" I didn't think the movie successfully tied together the different threads but my biggest complaint was the monster. If he had never made "Cloverfield", I would have thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I just couldn't get past the thought that I've seen this all before.

I DID think the performances by the kids were really good though. Elle Fanning was just fantastic and I liked her relationship with the boy. I thought Charles got a little annoying saying "Mint" all of the time (it was a little overuse of the slang of the times). I liked seeing the complete Super 8 movie during the credits.

I always like seeing something new; I just can't stand newly packaged old stuff.

If you didn't like The Matrix movies, here's more of the same. Movies involving dreams and alternate realities basically set up a world where anything can happen and there are no rules.

I LIKE rules. If there were rules here, they were very hard to follow and very shortly into the movie, I just didn't care.

Leo's character claims to be the greatest person in the world at delving into people's minds. Then why is he so consistently incompetent at it? His dead wife keeps popping up when she's least welcome, nothing ever goes to plan. The whole plan benefits only Leo, puts everyone else in jeopardy and is built on very shaky ground. Saito says he will fix Leo's problems with one phone call and he's immediately on board? Speaking of the plan, why does implanting a fairly simple idea into another person's head involve blowing everything up in sight? I didn't care about his dead wife. Was she actually dead or did she just die in a dream and is stuck in limbo? I wish *I* was stuck in limbo so I didn't have to think about this movie anymore.

Some notes about the actors: I could rarely understand what Ken Watanabe was saying. Ellen Page still looks like she's ten years old and I just didn't accept her in this role. The other guys were okay but I just wasn't invested into anything they were saying or doing.

As it has been noted in other reviews, what do I care if this guy Fischer's company is bigger than Saito's or not? "Let's go through all of this convoluted nonsense because in the future, something bad MIGHT happen?" There's one method of getting him to break up his company that could have been tried and wasn't: Walk up to him and ask him to break up his company. He didn't seem all that ambitious, he didn't seem to care about his father's company. It would have been worth a shot.

Part of me kept hoping the plane would crash and it would end the necessity of all this.

It's too bad that in a reality where anything can happen, Nolan creates a world where nothing of consequence happens.

I thought the whole point of the story was that they used those Avatars to acclimate with the indigenous people (without them realizing they were dealing with humans). Then when they first go into the forest, they're wearing camouflage and Stanford U T-shirts? Why look like the native people, if you're not going to be dressed like them? The natives obviously know about the "Sky People" and they don't seem surprised that the newcomers are "Sky People" and not the same as themselves.

I also thought it unlikely that the people and the animals of the planet would ALL evolve with those linkage interfaces (pony-tails). Interesting idea, just didn't think it would happen.

If the ruthless military wants the unobtainium (which is a lame name, by the way), stop jerking around and blowing up trees, just kill all of the people and be done with it. If they're gonna drop all of those explosives, it's what they want to see happen anyway, right? Before the scene with the destruction of Hometree, there didn't actually ever seem to be a scene of negotiation for the land. What's the point of the whole Avatar project if not to come to some sort of negotiation? I thought the helicopters looked like Terminator helicopters and I thought those human-control machines looked like the forklift suits in "Aliens".

It was beautiful to watch (and the battle at the end kinda made up for the other stuff) but I was thinking about all of the inconsistencies throughout the movie.

As I get older, there are two things that can derail a movie for me: extreme excess (i.e. too much) and poorly-explained plot points (i.e. too little).

I liked the movie quite a bit, I thought the actors were great (Bones and Scotty especially) and the action scenes were exciting.

I was concerned when I saw the Romulan ship at the beginning, it wasn't just big, it was the biggest, meanest, pointiest, sharpest, least cuddly ship that ever existed. When I see something like this, I get worried because I think the whole movie is going to be like this, i.e. overblown and excessive to the nth degree. Peter Jackson's "King Kong" was like that and I hated it.

Fortunately, the movie DIDN'T proceed along those lines, it didn't just rely totally on just being excessive. For the first time, we get to meet the characters that we've known for 40 years and it was fun to see them as younger people.

The plot point that I found poorly explained was when older Spock shows up. He tells us about an attempt to help the Romulans that results in the destruction of their planet (causing Spock and Nero's ship to be pulled back in time, thereby starting everything that we've already seen). I didn't understand any of the red matter/black hole stuff. Spock's explanation was raced through, quickly dashed-off and felt shoehorned. If I were able to rewind it and hear it again, that would have been helpful.

The divergences from the Star Trek universe that we've always known bothered me too. Uhura and Spock making out so much. Traditionally Spock was conflicted about his dual nature, he was always trying to keep his emotions in check. Here he's a light switch: completely logical one minute, completely emotional the next. Just because the Romulans went back in time and changed Kirk's life, there's no reason it would necessarily have any affects on Spock. The other things that bothered me were Vulcan being destroyed and Spock's mother dying. If they don't fix these things in the next movie, I'm going to be very cross. :) Repeated viewings might fix a lot of the problems I had with the movie. But if the audience doesn't understand the story you're trying to tell the first time, it's probably not the audience's fault.

Update (11/18/09): I watched this again last night and I DID like it better than the first time (I was able to follow the story better without any pre-conceptions) however what bothered me the first time still bothers me now.

Spock Prime's actions with the red matter didn't cause Romulus's destruction, couldn't have prevented it and were completely unnecessary. The script requires him to release the red matter so he and Nero can go back in time but Nero's need for revenge is completely baseless since Spock didn't cause Romulus's destruction.

Young Spock's behavior with Uhura is just completely out-of-character. In TOS, Spock's emotional outbursts were lapses of logic not an integrated part of his personality. His behavior would not be affected whatsoever by Nero going back in time and changing Kirk's life.

If Spock Prime was close enough to witness the destruction of Vulcan from Delta Vega, wouldn't that outpost be sucked in by the singularity too? It was all too convenient that Spock, Kirk and Scotty would have all been on the same outpost at the same time. I doubt that Young Spock would have jettisoned Kirk onto that moon anyway.

The problem the first time was that these thoughts were preventing me from seeing other nuances that were good. On second viewing, it was an imperfect story told well.

This wasn't just a crazy neighbor movie, you could tell some thought went into it, that the "bad guy" wasn't just a bad guy and the "good guys" weren't perfect. Everyone in the movie was human, they all carried baggage not necessarily visible to anybody else, which is true of all us. I was reminded of Sam Jackson's recent excellent movie "Black Snake Moan" where he played another multi-faceted guy who was inherently decent but flawed.

Towards the end, after Sam (Abel) confesses what his driving force is to his neighbor (a lowering of personal boundaries that I found surprising), I would have thought some conflict would have been resolved, that some of his anger would have dissipated and the movie could have taken a more positive direction but I guess none of us changes that fast. The encroaching fire served as metaphor for the inevitable messy resolution to come.

Sam is always interesting to watch, he elevates any movie he's in (even "Changing Lanes", a movie where he's also butting heads with another man and it gets out of hand. I wasn't crazy about that movie though. I thought the escalation of events was totally unrealistic).

I didn't think "Lakeview Terrace" could have ended any other way than it did, I was just hoping that it would.

This episode does have it's annoyances, the Galileo's mission seems poorly-timed (the Enterprise is delivering medical supplies to a planet that needs them and this side trip is questionable to me), it's something that just could have waited. The commissioner is a serious P.I.T.A. but what redeems him is that he IS right.

What bothers me most is how everyone is coming down on Spock, calling him a machine, calling him unfeeling. Some of Spock's decisions ARE questionable but HE'S TRYING TO SAVE EVERYONE'S LIFE AND THEY'RE BUSTING HIS CHOPS. The scene that REALLY irritates me is when Boma pops his head in and says that they're ready for services for Latimer (a crewman who was speared in the back). Spock responds that they're working against the clock. I was like "Really! Are funeral services REALLY the priority at the moment?". Let's take a week off and sit shiva for our fallen comrade. If you're in a burning house, this isn't the time to go around and hang sheets over all the mirrors.

Boma takes the same stance when they need to leave Gaetano's body behind. "Not without a burial...". If I were Spock, I would say "We're taking off Mr. Boma. You snooze, you lose".

I didn't hate the movie, the idea of a blind superhero was quite intriguing (and the scene where he "sees" Jennifer Garner in the rain was quite beautiful) but all of the main characters behaved as if they were schoolchildren acting in a play. Ben and Jen's first real encounter is on the street and her first instinct is to engage him in martial arts? Really? Why? Because she knows martial arts and everyone who knows martial arts gets into a fight every chance they get? (I thought they tried to avoid fights whenever possible. At least that's what Mr. Miyagi taught me.) Michael Clarke Duncan wasn't a bad guy but an actor's idea of a bad guy. He might as well have had a sign around his neck that said "I'm just playin'".

All scenes were like that. Either they worked really well or they didn't work.

In the beginning of "Wild Hogs", after the initial scene of them riding motorcycles and meeting up, there are four scenes, each one introducing the four main characters. Not one of these scenes was funny. They were unfunny scenes meant to be mistaken for funny ones.

It's difficult to say why an unfunny scene isn't working: the writing, the delivery, timing, but there's one unmistakable test to know that it isn't. You're not laughing.

Tim Allen's a dentist and the big joke is that the saliva sucking tube is really powerful. Martin Lawrence goes back to work for the firm and The Firm turns out to be waste disposal, John Travolta is arguing with some guy on the phone and it turns out to be the kid who rakes his leaves and William H. Macy is the nerd who inadvertently brings up porn on his laptop in the coffee shop.

It's painful and a little depressing to see talented people doing such bad work. Think of any big movie star who ends up doing Grade Z horror movies at the end of their career. Only these guys are at the top of their game and they should have held out for something better.

The concept of this movie sounds great, that's why I rented it in the first place, but you have to have a good script to start off with. You could really make a well-written movie about anything but if you don't have a good script it doesn't matter how many times the guys fall on their face.

A friend of mine recommended this movie and I watched grudgingly. I'm not into heavy metal music and it didn't appear to me that this movie was either.

It's not like a rock opera where the music is written for the story and helps move it along. The music basically plays in the background, heavy metal songs (I guess) intermixed with boilerplate Muzak background music. The music made no impression on me, bad or good, because it was just kind of "there", droning in the background.

As sci-fi, the stories weren't terribly interesting or well-written either. Instead of coming up with one interesting, well-written story, let's come up with five or six vignettes that aren't terribly creative (the cab driver one was OKAY), let's throw in some bare breasts (which was really the only time my interest was sparked) and profanity and maybe no one will notice the stories aren't that well-written. Throughout, I kept feeling like I had walked into the middle of a movie.

The animation is crude (understandably so for 1981; maybe it looked better back then).

I think I understand why the movie was regarded so highly (at least at the time). "It's an animated movie that breaks all of the rules." The filmmakers should have still adhered to the rules of good film-making instead of settling for mediocrity.

The main problem I had with this movie, was that we see battle after battle of machines fighting machines and with the exception of a few instances, we don't really know which side any given machine is on. I couldn't get emotionally involved with a lot of these fight scenes (and I found the story of that cube and its importance kind of incomprehensible or maybe I just didn't care). In a movie like this, the plot is just an excuse to show cars and trucks morphing back and forth into robots. I think it TRIED to be more than what it ended up being but the movie was just too long, taking it's good sweet time getting to the point and ended up being really rather pointless.