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SimonCornelis
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Warcraft (2016)
Pleasantly surprised!
Yesterday, by chance, I saw the new Warcraft movie in the local theater. I have never played any of the Warcraft games (nor any other Blizzard game for that matter), so I wasn't particularly planning on seeing this one on the big screen. Knowing how live-action adaptions of video games (or any other animated media) have a tendency to turn out complete failures, I went in without any expectations. I was however pleasantly surprised! Sadly this movie is getting panned on a lot of platforms, which is a pity since I found this movie to be much better than expected. So I decided it was only right to give this film a positive review from a non-fan.
Fans of the games obviously love this film but it has enough to offer even for people like me who are completely new to the Warcraft universe. Of course if you're expecting to see the next Lord Of The Rings or Game Of Thrones, you'll leave the theater a disappointed viewer, but the charm of this movie is that it doesn't aspire to be the next groundbreaking fantasy epic. It doesn't try to hide it's video game origins either, rather it stays true to it's roots, which works very much to its advantage. Storywise some expected fantasy clichés are present, but at the same time it takes enough unexpected turns to maintain the balance and keep the viewers interested. The characters as well, though having their roots in fantasy stereotypes, have enough complexity to keep them from being caricatures and places them somewhere on the axis in between good and evil rather than at one end or the other. I particularly enjoyed having sympathetic characters on both sides of the fence.
Visually the movie is stunning as well. Blizzard, being notorious for it's high quality cinematics, and Industrial Light & Magic, known for breaking new grounds in VFX, let their expertise shine through abundantly. Although I was initially skeptic of the live-action approach, preferring the movie would have been made completely animated (like their famous cinematics), they pulled off the blend of real actors and mo-cap creatures surprisingly well and all actors involved gave decent performances. The design of the characters and the environments as well is one of the best things about this film, no doubt the merit of Blizzard's renowned team of concept artists.
I've heard complaints about the pacing and editing of the film, but despite the 2 hour run time I didn't feel any problems in this area myself. I am of course not familiar with the lore surrounding Warcraft, so I can't really tell which parts of the greater story were cut or rushed and which ones were dragged. In this regard it might even be an advantage to watch this movie as a newcomer to the series. The ending ties up the story arc pretty well, but leaves enough out in the open for a possible sequel (which I very much hope to see).
If you're not a fan of the games, Warcraft won't blow you off your feet, but it's a very good film nevertheless that does what it set out to do with great style!
Hellsing Ultimate (2006)
Criminally overrated
Before I watched Hellsing Ultimate, it had been recommended to me by multiple people, and with an IMDb rating of 8.5 I had great expectations for this series. Unfortunately it failed to impress me even the slightest bit. How more than 10000 people voted this up to 8.5 is beyond me. I had to force myself to watch until the end. This series is bad on so many levels. The story and plot are weak and predictable. There are no plot holes because the story doesn't even reach enough complexity for plot holes to even occur in the first place! Absurd plot twists come out of nowhere, no build up whatsoever.
The action is extremely repetitive. Every fight Alucard has is the same: Opponent shoots/kills Alucard, Alucard pretends to be dead, Alucard does that stupid laugh, Alucard resurrects and consumes opponent. The dialogue is equally dumb and repetitive. What little story there is to begin with has to be explained word for word by the characters in these long and boring info dumps.
Then there are the characters. Calling them cardboard characters would be a compliment. These characters are paper thin! Most of these characters have literally no backstory at all and serve no purpose in the story. The lucky few that do have some backstory, are composed of nothing but clichés. A police girl becomes an officer because her parents were killed by bad guys. Seriously? That's been done a million times before! Or how Alucard's secret is that he really is Dracula (you know, because Dracula spelled backwards is Alucard). Are the viewers of this series expected to be so unintelligent that they can't even figure out the simplest of anagrams?
But I hear you coming: what it lacks in substance it makes up for in "style"! Well no, not entirely. Sure you can love or hate the graphic style, that's personal taste. For me personally it is one of the few redeeming aspects of this series. The animation on the other hand is average at best. I understand the constrains that a limited production budget can put on the quality of the animation, but there are better and more creative ways of spending a limited budget instead of blowing it all on unnecessary 3D graphics. The character animation was poor: Ping pong loops, too many frame holds, characters that talk without opening their mouth, etc. Never mind any sense of choreography in the fights, it's all flashing lights and no actual fights. Last word of advice: if you're going to do a style over substance project, don't take yourself so seriously.
If you want gratuitous violence on repeat, go ahead, you'll love this, but if you are looking for anything deeper, avoid at all cost.
The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Still the best of the bunch!
So I finally got around to seeing the 7th movie in the immensely successful Fast & Furious franchise. I am a big fan of the entire franchise, and even though the latest part (Furious 7) currently gets the highest ratings out of all, the 1st is still my favorite. It has a certain charm that all the sequels lack. As a movie on it's own, much has been said before: The story is rather shallow, it has plot holes-a-plenty and the dialogue makes you cringe, but if you like fast cars and action, you'll most likely enjoy this movie. Nothing new there. But I would like to point out why for me the original The Fast & The Furious is still the highlight of the franchise.
First of all, next to being a movie buff, I'm also very much a car guy, and from that point of view I can appreciate The Fast & The Furious' efforts to try and portray genuine car culture. An aspect that for me has really been missing from the later additions in the franchise. Admittedly for the car-tuning community this movie probably did more bad than good, and car enthusiasts love to rip on all the technical mistakes in this movie, but compared to the later F&F movies, this one actually does quite alright. For example, when Dom (Vin Diesel) shifts his car (a Mazda RX7) into gear at the start of the first race we get to see an elaborate CGI sequence that takes us through the entire drive train of the car. It's a fancy gimmick at first, but re-watching this sequence some time ago I noticed that the engine of the car didn't have pistons. Instead it has rotors. The filmmakers actually took the time to research the fact that RX7's are powered by rotary engines rather than your standard piston engine. We don't see this kind of attention to detail in the later movies and for all it's technical mistakes the 1st Fast & Furious also gets it right in many places.
But even apart from these technicalities, The Fast & The Furious has got more redeeming qualities. I find that the original Fast & Furious has the most believable characters compared to the other installments in the franchise. Here we have a group of high-school drop-outs, who grew up together doing their car-thing. They're clearly a close-knit group of friends (a family) kept together by Vin Diesel's leader/father figure. In this context Diesel's character and the entire "I got family" thing makes sense. This isn't so much the case in the later movies (especially 5, 6 and 7), where Dominic becomes this stuck-in-the-past guy going on and on about his so called "family" who are actually just a group of loosely associated characters that come together on occasion and then go their separate ways again. Don't get me wrong, the all-star ensemble is fun in the action-blockbuster franchise F&F has become now, but below the surface the original still provides most of the drive behind the characters 6 movies later.
In a similar way The Fast & The Furious has the best "bad guys" from the series as well. I always found Johnny Tran and his gang much more intriguing than any of the other bad boys in the sequels. In every other F&F film the crew rises up against some mafia figure (Verone, Braga, Reyes, etc.) who is evil for the sake of being evil, and who's ultimate downfall is always underestimating this crew of street racers because, you know, they're just street racers, right? It gets rather formulaic. Johnny Tran on the other hand isn't this ultimate bad guy. In fact his actions are rather well motivated. He's not even looking for trouble, like he says: "You stay away, I stay away. Everybody stays happy". But then this Torreto guy shows up in his turf again, some guy steals his engines, his whole family gets raided by the police, and to top it off he wins a pink slip fair and square, but the guy drives off. So he's righteously angry and retaliates. Johnny Tran has a reason to be the bad guy, unlike those in later installments.
Further more the dialogue is actually one thing that I like about this movie. For better or worse, this movie has become one of the most quoted movies among my friends and family. Like many have pointed out before, the dialogue (especially the tech-talk) isn't the best written, but unintentionally this also adds to the believability of the characters. Go to any car meeting and you're bound to hear guys talking like they know all about cars and engines, while in fact they don't. Just like Dom's infamous victory speech. A lot about this movie is all show and no go, but that's also very much the "tuning" scene it tries to portray, in such a way that by now this movie often feels like a time-document, an homage almost, to the ridiculous car-mod culture in those days.
Lastly I think The Fast & The Furious deserves a an extra credit for the original score by Brian Transeau (BT). He perfectly captures the atmosphere of the film with his scoring, particularly taking influence from his groundbreaking debut album "Ima". The later films lack this quality especially whenever "Ludacris" is involved and the entire soundtrack is full of cheesy pop-rap/club music that really doesn't fit the style of the movies at all.
So there you have it, 8/10 for the original Fast & Furious film. Well deserved and still the best of the bunch!