Reviews

Many spoilers ahead.

To begin at the end - it doesn't have one.

What became of the crew in this ? Who knows ? The writers certainly didn't. They set up an intriguing problem, of just the kind to attract the interest of the viewer - and didn't bother setting up a solution. Films are not supposed to be slices of life - they are, as a rule anyway, meant to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This had a beginning and a middle, but not the other thing. Which makes the 1 hour and 49 minutes of its running time - the last 8 minutes are taken up with the end credits - a bit of a waste.

As for the rest of the film, the first hour and a bit was well worth watching, despite the gaping plot-holes (how did the stowaway succeed in stowing away ? The viewer is left to guess the answer to that) and the unlikely psychology (would a crew on a journey to Mars really be so tolerant of a just-discovered stowaway ?). The film begins to go downhill with the B plot, the inevitable question of how to divide oxygen intended for 3 people among 4 people instead.

This is a build-a-bear film, like the Disney Star Wars trilogy - the viewer is granted the dubious privilege of filling in the bits of the story that the writers, for reasons best known to themselves, left blank or unfinished.

I don't think it's an abysmal piece of trash, by any means - such films do exist - but I think 5 stars is about right.

...for after about 20 minutes of this, I fell asleep. I don't think I can have missed much. The film is about one robotic female talking to another robotic female with occasional additions by a piece of AI that has a male voice. There is a Borg cube, and a lot of trippy colours and designs that look like an attempt to copy, or to acknowledge the influence of, Stanley Kubrick's film 2001. My theory is that the two robotic females are in fact robots.

There was an interesting bit at the beginning about a voyage to Mars going disastrously wrong when descent was begun and the ship was destroyed. This mishap is the in-universe reason why the large number of personnel in contact with the Mars flight is cut down to a mere two in 2036, the year of the film. After the two robotic females begin their to and fro, tedium descends, and so, mercifully, does sleep.

There are films that work well with very few actors. This is not one of them.

This film, AKA Spiders 3D, & also Spiders in 3D, but often called Spiders, and released in 2013, begins on (the debris of) a Russian shuttle, & is directed by Tibor Takacs. It should not be confused with a completely different film also called Spiders, released in 2000, which begins on a NASA shuttle, & is directed by Gary Jones. The Gary Jones film was followed by the imaginatively named Spiders 2, unlike the Takacs film, which had no sequel.

The film seems a rather appropriate watch in April 2020.

Eight Legged Freaks this film is not. There is a scientist, but, on the whole, he turns out to be more sensible than the military man he spars with. On the whole.

Also as in ELF, there is a single monster spider, and a large number of much smaller (though very dangerous) ones. The monster surfaces toward the end of the film; its appearance on the scene recalls the arrival of the beetle in Starship Troopers.

The premise is a good one, though maybe it would have been even stronger if it had been explored a bit more. It would not be unfair to describe the Takacs film as somewhat derivative. A lot of its ideas can be found in other films - though I did not find that its similarities to other films spoiled this one.

Not for the first time, I found myself wondering why the infantry seem to be armed with pathetically inadequate weapons.

SPOILERS AHEAD !

Before I discovered TBBT, I watched The Simpsons, zealously. IIRC, I got onto TBBT as a result of episode 6.15, in which Sheldon spoils the last 2 Harry Potter books for Leonard. Four years later, I'm still watching TBBT.

This, unlike some US comedy series, is one that has crossed the Pond well. It could not possibly be mistaken for anything but a US series - the many, many references to US culture guarantee that. In less competent hands, its strongly-defined identity would grate after a while. TBBT never wears out its welcome - the average episode is only 20 minutes long - so it never becomes stale or hackneyed. For a series 279 episodes long, that is no mean achievement. There may be some weak episodes, but if so, I've missed them: I cannot think of a single one that is not full of laughs - even without the laugh track.

The criticisms of TBBT note the difference in tone after the 4th series, when Sheldon gets a girl who is a friend. There is a difference, but not, I think, a deterioration. None of the 4 central characters is replaced, but all develop, in fresh and unforeseeable ways. The series is not a comedy of relationships alone - that aspect of it is deepened & developed, but it never stops being driven by ideas and situations as well. The recurring secondary characters - Stephen Hawking, Wil Wheaton, Barry Kripke, Sheldon's mother, Leonard's mother, Penny's father, to name a few - remain amusing because their comic potential is never exhausted; the comedy in them is milked to a certain point - & no further. This tactful handling of them ensures that there is always some depth in them from which further comedy can be drawn. Other characters are then brought on, allowing the departing characters to be forgotten for a while so that they can be re-introduced without having gone stale from over-use.

In The Simpsons, Bart is eternally a 10-year old, and Maggie never ages beyond young infancy. The characters are all static and fixed in time, because the comedy requires them to be: the lack of character development is needed for the comedy to work. The much-hated Skinner episode shook the story up a bit, by changing the formula - and was disliked as a result. The Simpsons has a sense of the past - it has to, for the episodes about the past lives of Krusty or Sideshow Bob or Mr Burns to work - but the characters are essentially changeless. The resultant predictability is what allows the viewer to settle back and expect a certain kind of humour, which is what the episodes serve up. (Hence, perhaps, the ritual character of the activity known as Watching The Simpsons.) As with TBBT, the humour in The Simpsons is most effective in smallish helpings: the film is long enough to lag now and again.

In TBBT, by contrast, there is a strong sense of the past. Not only does time pass, but the characters constantly show awareness of the past, and comment in detail upon it. Times change - and so do the characters. They are not static. All members of the main quartet have well-defined narrative arcs. Raj begins by being unable to speak to women. Once he is used to speaking to them, he develops his party animal tendencies. And after that, he gets a dog. And after that, he has trouble settling for a single girlfriend, while also having to navigate his parents' break-up.

Raj is more developed than Apu in The Simpsons - Apu is perfect for The Simpsons, because that series is not naturalistic, but a cartoon. The naturalistic medium of TBBT requires characters of greater depth and complexity, which results in giving us, not just Raj, but his relations, his dog, his family, and his associates. The Simpsons gives us Apu's wife & their many children & his brother - and that is it. This naturalism of the medium is, I think, why there is a shift in the tone of the series: as time passes, people change, so their relations to the world about them change. The past from which the characters come, has effects on what they are in the present, and moulds what they will be in the future. Cartoon characters can afford to be one-note characters, in a way that would be impossible in the everyday world. Krusty's relationship to his father shows him to be the same Krusty we are familiar with already - the lack of development of character is basic to the fun of the episode.

The narrative arc that shows us the relationship between Sheldon and Amy is humour of a very different kind. The form is that of a relationship comedy, but the spirit is that of TBBT. Without their relationship, there would be no clashes between Amy and Stuart, no tiara for Amy, no scenes of Amy trying on hideous dresses, no opportunity for Sheldon to be monumentally insensitive to his girlfriend, no Amy's parents, no Amy for Sheldon to cold-shoulder in favour of activities he finds more enjoyable, no Council of Ladies, no Amy for Penny and Bernardette to hurt without meaning to, no Amy to pick holes in Raiders of the Lost Ark, no Amy to write atrocious romantic fan-fics, no Girls' Night Out for Sheldon to invite himself to. For these reasons & others, Amy, or someone indistinguishable from her, is needed for the series to develop. Her presence does it a power of good.

There are much worse films available, but however generous one might try to be, one cannot really score this offering very high. It does not have the craziness of Six-headed Shark Attack, nor the ingenuity & novelty of a genuinely good film like The Man From Earth. It is faithful to its genre: nowhere near as much as fun as Megalodon, Hydra, or Piranhaconda, but not insultingly dull or witless either.

There is some gore and several deaths. Most of the characters were either flat, or unsympathetic. The titular birds were highly visible. They would not have been out of place in a Doug McClure film.

It was not involving, let alone gripping, but tolerable, the kind of film one can watch with half an eye, use as wallpaper while doing other things, and dip into now and again whenever anything interesting seemed to be happening, without much risk of missing anything important while not attending to it.

The very last scene could be used as a sequel hook - but a sequel to this seems unlikely, as the film showed little of the inventiveness, energy, and skill in plotting that good sequels seem to be built on.

...somewhat let down by the presence of two appalling brats, both of whom, most regrettably, survived. Worse yet, so did the atrocious John Hammond, who in a just world would have become a Dilophosaurusburger.

I gave Jurassic Park eight stars out of 10 because the story, though not original, is a strong one, well told, with a good mixture of talk and action. The lighting is often a weakness in films set during the night - but not here, where everything was always as clearly visible as it needed to be.

I liked it. It was suspenseful, and did not drag. It was not realistic, but neither is Die Hard - John Mclaine would have been dead, if Hans Gruber had been a real terrorist - so the unrealism of the explosive decompression cannot fairly be held against it. The initial premise is not realistic. It was, like all films of this kind, a fantasy, using just enough details from real life to give its fantasy the appearance of a grounding in reality. It was meant to entertain, and at that it succeeded. I would like to have known what happened to some of the characters, but, one can't have everything.

...it was fun to watch. Undemanding, pretty forgettable - I thought 3 was 2, before I watched a review of it. There is a lot of tomato ketchup in this one. The opening scenes remind me of the pursuit near the end of Tarantula. 6/10 seems fair.

Much, much, much more ridiculous even than Battleship, from 2012. This is sort of the marine equivalent of Olympus Has Fallen, but with aliens instead of White House Staff, and one of the main sub-plots is that the POTUS has to be rescued from the sea. Absurd, spectacular, and watchable.

The mini-series fully deserves 10 stars. The framing device - Gulliver comes back from sea, tells a wild tale of his experiences, is committed to an asylum, tells further wild tales on further occasions, and is finally vindicated - has no foundation in the book, but neither does it alter the substance of the tales Swift wrote. Another major change is in the ending.

Unlike so many adaptations, the film tells of all four of Gulliver's voyages - it is not limited to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. The first and second are altered by having Gulliver's voyage from Lilliliput end, not in rescue by an English ship, but in landfall on the Brobdingnagian coast. It is implied that the two lands are a considerable distance apart, but the book has Lilliput and its enemy Blefuscu lie in the Indian Ocean, whereas Brobdingnag is a peninsula off the coast of Alaska. The deviation is an intelligent piece of adaptation, and typical of the care taken by the adaptors to make a film of the book, rather than of something rather distantly based on it.

Special props to Warwick Davis, who turned in a thoroughly convincing performance as Gulliver's dwarf tormentor at the Brobdingnagian court, and to Tom Sturridge: that Gulliver has a son is sort of implied, since the book says he has children.

Ted Danson made the part of Gulliver his own. He inhabited it as thoroughly as Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett have inhabited that of Sherlock Holmes.