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konidias
Reviews
The Misfits (2021)
Bad writing, bad acting... and it's just a propaganda film
I got to the point in the film where they landed in Abu Dhabi, and it was so painfully obvious that the film was trying to sell us on how opulent and luxurious Abu Dhabi was.
I paused the video and looked it up. Yep. Funded by a UAE production company.
Suddenly all the showing of flashy cars and women made sense. It's catering to the gross obscene wealth lovers, and that's pretty much it. Not gonna support the rich paying to make themselves look cool. Also apparently it's propaganda in other ways.
Overall the start was tolerable, if not cheesy... and the Nick Cannon narration is completely unnecessary and bad.
But once they landed the plane... that was it for me. Just showing tons of sports cars, exotic animals being leashed, women being oogled... and we're supposed to be impressed and in awe. Sorry, not impressed. It feels like some rich oil baron teenager made a movie to try to impress people and show off.
All the actors should be ashamed of agreeing to be in this movie. They probably got a massive paycheck and didn't think twice. I can see Nick Cannon doing this, but Pierce Brosnan? Yikes.
The Titan (2018)
Their goal makes no sense...
Where this movie suffers most is that the goal of humanity doesn't make a single bit of sense.
So the premise is the Earth is becoming overpopulated at a rapid rate, and will soon no longer be inhabitable. Instead of trying to fix that problem (population control, planting trees or something), and instead of trying to colonize Mars.. or heck, even live on a space station... the brilliant idea is to genetically modify human beings so they can survive on Titan.
This... is bonkers. It's approached in a way initially where it seems these scientists and volunteers think that modifying a human body to be able to breath nitrogen and survive severe cold temperatures and insane conditions wouldn't have any like... physical change in appearance or changes to a person mentally or emotionally.
But obviously if you stop and think about it for two seconds, you'd realize modifying someone to that extreme would leave them barely human. Not exactly an outlandish conclusion to come to.
Yet people seem shocked when the test subjects eventually transform into smooth alien creatures and no longer communicate verbally or whatever.
So I mean like... this outcome was pretty much the expectation... and the guy ends up going to Titan and surviving there. I'm just kind of baffled. Like what is the point? Is the plan now for the rest of humanity to go through hundreds of painful injections, slowly transforming themselves into weird alien creatures? Is the plan for a large percentage of those people to die from side effects or go violent?
Then whoever survives gets to go live on Titan... a bleak and desolate wasteland that is 10x worse than whatever the current Earth's situation happens to be. Yippee, can't wait to be a fishman and live in a constant storm on a moon with no animals and plants on it.
One has to wonder... what were these genetically modified humans supposed to eat? If they modified humans to where they don't *need* to eat... then... doesn't that solve the problem on Earth? The movie states that some large percentage of the Earth's population would die of starvation in the near future. So like... maybe just genetically modify humans to need to eat less, or not at all? Problem solved. Nobody has to leave the planet.
The movie is just ridiculous, the plot is clunky and doesn't make sense... and at the end I'm not sure what or who I'm supposed to be rooting for. It sure doesn't feel like the problem on Earth was solved.
Marauders (2016)
I had to skip through it
I couldn't even sit through the entire movie. As others have mentioned, the plot is abysmal and far too convoluted. It's not a situation where someone is going to be like "well, if you just really get invested in it and pay attention, the plot is good!".
No, it's just a mess. One thing that bugs me a lot about this movie is how they dangle who the Marauders are over your head for pretty much the entire runtime. I'm just sitting there looking at every character thinking "okay is it him? is it this guy? is it that guy? okay it's definitely him. no wait now it's him" Trying to figure out who the ringleader is and what his motivations are. This might be fun in a sort of "whodunit" sort of situation, but honestly it just feels like they insulted the viewers the whole movie by holding out.
When it's finally revealed who the marauders are, I don't even care anymore. The leader is of course... one of the guys you probably think it's going to be out of the 3-4 guys they focus on. Wow, amazing. Then the whole thing wraps up and I'm left sitting there like... why did I even bother seeing what the ending was about?
I definitely had to skip through about 40% of the movie and honestly I didn't miss anything.
I give it two stars only for the decent bank robbery scenes... but to say they are "good heists" is a bit too forgiving. They are... I mean... functional and a bit flashy but it's not like they are super clever or interesting. It's just nice camera work and makes you feel on edge.
I can't even call this a "heist" movie because I've come to expect heist movies to deliver really interesting and well thought out heists... and these heists are more like "4 highly trained soldiers storm a bank, shoot some people, everyone in the bank pretty much complies and then the robbers take off with the money. the end"
Replicas (2018)
This movie could have been good
The premise in itself isn't terrible but the execution just isn't great. First off... they bit off a bit more than they could chew by having him revive his entire family. This movie could be cool if like... you know... it was just him and his wife... and she died in the accident and he had to revive her.
The problem is having to account for 4 human being's just suddenly disappearing for weeks. Oh the kids are now home schooled? Sure. What excuse did he make for his wife missing from work again? Did nobody else in the world know who Zoe was? Like what happens when the school asks the wife what happened to her youngest daughter? You can't just erase a human from existence even if they are just a child. They don't have like... other family that knows about her? No cousins? Uncles? Aunts? Neighbors?
Like if it was just the wife missing for a few weeks he could cover that up pretty easily. Oh she had a bad illness and needed to recover. Then write off her lack of memory to her just sleeping through it or something.
But he doesn't even bother to think about how he's going to erase this child from the house... all the family photos, sure he trashed those... but isn't his wife going to wonder why there's all these empty spots where pictures were clearly hanging on the walls? The kids clearly have social media... did he scour all of their social media and the internet for any mention of Zoe or photos she might be tagged in or exist in? I doubt it.
So sure, we can just say he figured he'd have to tell them eventually. I can almost look past all of that, but then the movie just gets really dumb as it continues. The whole reveal that the company knew all along, and that they are "evil" and then the ridiculous hitmen wearing sunglasses and ponytails feels like it's straight out of a Disney Channel Original Movie.
I was honestly hoping the movie would go in a more interesting direction with the wife and kids... Like they hinted at something not being quite "right" when they first woke up. The boy was absentmindedly making messes... they were ingesting a ton of food, the wife had a moment while running where she didn't feel "right".
That could have snowballed as they progressively got worse... Maybe the son just starts losing control of his body or something. Maybe the wife becomes mentally unstable. I was kind of hoping she'd lose it and try to kill herself like the original robot did when it figured out it wasn't real. I dunno... anything would have been better than the direction of "the company is bad and now we have to run!"
The ending was even goofier with him and his family magically being safe now on a beach somewhere... somehow the wife totally remembers the completely deleted child she once had... I guess he did some magic with their brains to un-delete memories? What happened to the evil boss? He got cloned and now is reprogrammed I'm assuming to assist in making... money for some reason? I guess the family gets some of that money to live or whatever, but... didn't the evil boss say they'd send more people after him? What happened to that?
The movie ends like everything is great, and all plot holes have been wrapped up, but it just leaves me asking way more questions.
I wanted to see more aspects of... realizing you're a clone... realizing you died, all of that. The wife's performance after coming back was so odd... It's like someone told her to act like an emotionless robot. She would still be like... emotional right? After her whole talk about him crossing the line with a robot she was just like "oh you cloned me and the kids and we died? Well... I'm mad but hey, who can stay mad at you, Keanu?"
Higher Power (2018)
It's what you'd expect from a VFX artist directed movie
The dialogue and acting is really... really bad. Let me just get that out of the way first. The visual effects work is really well done, but that is to be expected when a VFX artist was the one directing it. This movie feels more like a VFX artist's idea of "this would be cool to do effects for" than a really well fleshed out movie.
Just the fact that the first 9 minutes of this movie is bloated with exposition and opening credits is enough to know this movie is really pretentious and thinking it's higher concept than it really is. The opening is reminiscent of The Matrix opening, with character's voicing over some tech-y opening screens... but then it just drowns itself in techno screens and VFX opening credits until you're bored out of your mind and just want the movie to be over already.
The lead actor for this movie is definitely an "average Joe" in every sense of the word... and honestly the whole reasoning behind why he's the "chosen one" is pretty dumb. Not to mention his reaction to the entire ordeal is so not in character for anyone who actually had god-like powers bestowed upon him. He seems more like he's just confused the whole time instead of first being surprised and afraid, and then learning to use the powers and have fun with it.
I think anyone who was given immense power like this would surely find it terrifying at first and then quickly realize how cool it is and just revel in it a bit. Nope, not this guy. He is just confused the whole time and really angry.
The other guy... the scientist dude I don't even know his name... he has so much boring dialogue throughout the movie, and is somehow able to follow our "hero" around via microphones, security cameras, drone cameras, etc... as if he's watching the movie with us. It gets to the point where he's seeing shots as we see them, which would cameramen to be literally following the protagonist around. It's a bit unbelievable.
I think the weak point overall is the story itself. The whole way they go about giving this guy power is silly. Why force him into all of this? Why not at least first just ask the guy if he wants god like abilities? He's already pretty much at the end of his rope, so why not just give him the ability? Oh, because he needs to be "angry" like the Hulk or something, to really unlock his potential. Okay, but this could still be done differently instead of just wiring him up with an earpiece and barking orders at him.
Finally the premise of a blast of radiation wiping us out is actually plausible... but the reality is that we would have zero time to detect it, and we'd be wiped out before we even knew what hit us. Not only did they detect this ray of energy coming towards Earth ahead of time, but they had enough time for the boyfriend to shoot the daughter, and for the father to get super emotional, and all of that before the beam even hits. That would be an unprecedented amount of "heads up" time for this type of event to happen. We can barely get a few seconds notice when an earthquake is going to hit.
The movie just isn't very well made. You can tell it's low budget... not by the VFX but by everything else. This type of movie could be really well done with better writing, better actors, and an overall better plot. So in the end, great concept but terrible execution. All 3 stars I'm rating this movie go solely to the neat VFX.